”NO Lawful Status” pink drivers licenses for immigrants? It shames me to report that my state government (North Carolina) is about to do this. But it is. Details here and here. I hope you will share this message and speak up against this plan. Email the Governor here.
Part 1 — Concerning the impending change in popes: The level and intricacy of maneuver, plots, schemes, conivings, chicanery and competing conspiracies within the upper circles of the RC church are beyond anything that Dan “Da Vinci Code” Brown or Marvel Comix could imagine. So us outside small fry can only speculate, and wait for … Continue reading The Pope Resigns . . . Two Reactions
arly Friends lacked a Testimony on Equality with the outside world because, to speak plainly, they (the Friends) were quite sure that those outside were NOT their equals.
A striking example of this is found deep in the famous 1660 Letter to King Charles II, from Fox and a dozen or so other leading Quakers — the one which announced what we now call the “Peace Testimony.”
In a part of the letter which does not get quoted on meeting house wall posters, Fox & Co. explain to the king, “for your soul’s good,” why he should avoid persecuting the Quakers. It was not merely because they were peaceable folk, innocent of plotting his overthrow; but more important, because to do so would mean he was fooling with “the babes of Christ, which he [Christ] hath in his hand, which he [Christ] cares for as the apple of his eye; neither seek to destroy the heritage of God . . . .”
And here we have early Quaker theology in a nutshell: Friends were God’s chosen people, “the apple of his eye.” In the Bible, the counterpart is referred to as a “royal seed.” Maybe the Friends were not destined to rule the world outwardly, sitting on actual thrones; but surely they were commissioned to show it the true way to what the Lord had in mind, and they needed to be able to do the Lord’s work unhampered.
So were Quakers “equal” to other humans, even the king? Not hardly; none of this lot came anywhere near their level as “the heritage of God.”
For despite Jessica Chastain’s fine acting, this mute moment framed and underscored her character’s essential emptiness. Maya has already told another female agent, who asked lightly about her plans to party after the mission, that she has no history, no family, no friends or personal life — in the film not even a last name, no emotional range, and evidently no professional ambition beyond the decade-long, monomaniac drive to wreak lethal revenge on the architect of September 11.
In the end, while OBL may be dead, her life too, it appears, has been all-but consumed in the process. There is evidently a real CIA agent behind her character; and both embody a shameful, emptying time in our history.
Many Americans can no doubt still identify with Maya’s payback obsession. And under director Kathryn Bigelow’s sure hand, the film’s driving pace and vivid visuals make this process easier while the story unreels. Yet for me the film’s emotional frame came to feel increasingly dated, even obsolete. And I believe I’m not alone in that sense.
After all, it’s 2013, and while Osama Bin Laden is dead (and General Motors is alive), by now more and more of us are beginning to realize that even so, America has lost the two reflexive wars our panicked leaders unleashed on Iraq and Afghanistan after the Twin Towers attacks. And besides these major strategic defeats; beyond the trillions of dollars wasted, tens of thousands killed, and millions made refugees — in the process we also threw away many of our rights at home, and values essential to our moral standing in the world. Was this really the only way to deal with the horror of the September attacks?
A CIA front company, Aero Contractors, ran “torture taxi” flights out of the Johnston County airport in North Carolina for years. The flights crossed there Atlantic, picked up prisoners from Iraq, Afghanistan and other places, and took them to secret prisons, Guantanamo, and other torture sites overseas. (This is not a rumor; the New York … Continue reading Cleaning Up Torture In North Carolina