which in no way resembles "spiritual warfare" & bree's brand of magic, i am sure.

That reminds me of one of my most treasured posessions, a little booklet called "Mystery 666". It explains how the masons, jews, communists and international bankers are ALL IN IT TOGETHER. There are instructive diagrams.

Don't forget about the Templars and Bavarian Illuminati.

...Oh. Right.

This is also an oblique approach to stripping the 'enemy' of their name, and taking them one step closer to (perceived) inhumanity, isn't it? At least, I think that's what's going on there. It's sickening. These guys are way out on the fringe, right?

(I suppose that does explain all the senior moments....)

Also it gives all the Prayer Warriors a specific time to pray and set up their spiritual shield properly, depending upon what zone in the Bible Belt they're located in.

In part, I guess, it's the flipside of the same internettery that gives us a chance to get our messages out, past the entrenched dead hand of the corporate news media. But they're spouting craziness that the aforesaid media seem happy enough to repeat.

Just how much lunacy do you have to deploy to be heard in the modern USA?

I wonder if the curses come back every night and that's why they need to be released again each morning. Maybe they're cute and fluffy like kitties! Or maybe I'm just trying to make this better in my head...

Yes.

Which is a pity for a number of reasons, including the fact that "Barack" and "Hussein" are actually both really good names, meaning "blessed" and "handsome/good" respectively. As the Wikipedia page on the given name Barack notes, it means exactly the same thing as "Benedict". And it's certainly not Sen. Obama's parents' fault that the name Hussein would remind a lot of people of an Iraqi dictator who didn't come to power until their son was 18 years old.

I'm pretty sure this happens in America, too.

If you haven't watched the video of Sarah Palin being blessed against witches by the African witch-hunter, I'd suggest all of you do so. It falls squarely within this magical understanding of Christianity not as a religion to guide ones life and values, but as a source of supernatural power to be manipulated.

> Don't forget about the Templars and Bavarian Illuminati.

Oops. I actually did forget catholics. They're part of it too. And the Bilderbergers - though I can forgive anyone who decides they're a mysterious world controlling cabal, because what else would you call them?

Title: "Nary Spell"

(The Baen collection is on several of their CDs, and a quick google shows copies online. According to the CD I have, that's apparently legitimate.)

All those stories are rooted in that folk-magic tradition, darkness and light.

Perhaps 3 AM is significant because at that moment, you can cast the correct runes over your television and point your satellite dish towards Jerusalem, that is when you can tune in to the 666 Club. Where with an appropriate offering to Baal (a blood sacrifice will do, but apparently he prefers cash), he'll send you a do-it-yourself Find the Antichrist kit.

I used to participate in GEnie's SFRT, and I have a Kung Fu Panda shrine. Does that count, or do I need to try harder than that?

Huh? Isn't Palin the one who believe in witchcraft? IIRC, there's a video of her getting "anti-witch" blessings from an African preacher...

Oh, right. The crazies, projecting again.

That sounds like my normal wakeup time. No wizard I'm such a wizard of programming.

Wallah Wallah Washington! Saskatoon Saskatchewan!
Shazam!
Kimota!

All of this black-magic-powerful-demons-your-God-is-fighting-my-God stuff seems so profoundly anti-Christian to me.

Not in Kansas Anymore: A Curious Tale of How Magic Is Transforming America is probably relevant. It's about traditional (back to the Puritans) and current American magic.

I can just see the scene as an older woman approaches Obama's Secret Service people.

"Are you the police?"
"No, ma'am. We're musicians."

Also, it's a pity the name of Bree should have fallen into such disrepute.

(My favorite was when I saw some people try to faith-heal a tractor. I'm still not sure how they expected the tractor to "accept the Glory of God" — doesn't the "faith" in "faith healing" refer to the faith of the one being healed?)

Of course, that's a load of hooey, but you'd be amazed how many people out there believe it.

visited Obama’s home village

Does she mean Honolulu, Hawaii?

Bree Keyton said the current Christian President was forced by our government (!) to “create” an office for Odinga (to make “peace”) so he was made the Prime Minister (!) to make peace between the Christians and Odinga’s Muslim religion!

All of which is balderdash. Raila Odinga--the Kenyan presidential candidate in 2007--is an Anglican, not a Muslim. And Mwai Kibaki--the president of Kenya--is a Roman Catholic, which would not count as "Christian" (i.e., Protestant Christian) for Bree.

Bree K. said Odinga has made a pact with satan.

And I say that there is a three-legged dragon in her basement. Both statements are equally nonsensical.

when Obama visited his tribe in ‘06 and as late as Jan. ‘08

The only tribe Barack Obama belongs to is the tribe of Americans. Besides, he was busy sitting in Congress and running for president from 2006 to 2008. And his father died in 1982, so I don't think he'd be visiting his old village.

So, basically, this is just another lie.

All Islam loves and worships Obama.

And here I thought that the point of Islam was the worship of Allah...that is, GOD.

Anglicans don't count as "Christian" for people like that, either . . . all those bells-and-incense liturgical denominations look alike to them.

It looks like neither side has a clean record- apparently, both sides prepared, trained, and instructed their supporters (and in the government's case, the security forces) to fight it out after the election- but thanks to the crazyness in the US election campaign this year, now many American right-wingers (and even centrists) buy into the simplified partisan "evil opposition thugs do horrible things because they lost an election" version of the events. Aside from the short-term purpose of making people in the USA scared of riots, in the long term it might well contribute to the dumbing down of US foreign policy.

I don’t believe this chit went anywhere near Kenya, or has spoken to any Muslims.

Now that's the point where I'm not following you. Do you think that fundies can only believe crazy things about places where they haven't been? Is that description of Kenya really crazier than some fundie descriptions of the USA? I can well imagine US Evangelical missionaries going to Kenya, being horrified by the folk magic practised by some people and the support for that horrible atheomuslimosocialist Osama something, and then interpreting it according to their worldview. And they might get their views of Kenyan politics spoonfed by anti-Odinga partisans. For all I know, some Kenyan Christian fundamentalists might even believe things very much like the stuff in the letter. (Please correct me on this if you know more about Kenya than I do, though.)

dlbowman76 @19: I thought that Christianity was traditionally supposed to be extremely hostile to mysticism and animism.

Yes- that's the reason why the people behind this letter try to smear Obama by linking him to it.

Irene Delse @24: The people behind this don't see believing in magic as the problem- they believe in magic themselves. It's just that they see it as something evil.

I wrote this before I had read Tracy's post at 39. Ok, so I guess even crazy people in Kenya would leave out the part about Odinga being a Muslim.

The Luo are no more Arab than the Gikuyu** (the ethnic group of Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki).

*No prizes for guessing her sympathies in the current elections.

**Ob. Personal note: My one published monograph was edited by a Gikuyu, Wanjiku Ngugi, the daughter of Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thi'ongo.

Sincerely,
Barliman Butterbur

The Warrior of Light. (That's apparently Bree's incantations in the background).

Don't miss the last 10 seconds.

I've been trying to work on a post about thinking that people on the Right are stupid. One of the things that has bothered me most about this election, and the last two as well, is that left-wing intellectuals are demonized by those on the right, while we tend to classify right-wing conservatives as ignorant (but we can change them!).

Somehow, being liberal has come to be characterized as immoral, as a rejection of all things right. To be liberal is to embrace all forms of kink, to want to redistribute nice, hard-working white people's money to the lazy brown people who will just spend it on drugs and HD TVs that the nice white people can't afford, and to undermine our army what is fighting the ebil baby-killing tearists. But being conservative is equally characterized as being racist, sexist, pro-fat-cat at the expense of one's own family, superstitious, anti-society, and ... almost, but not quite, fascist. And worse -- fascists who live in the country, don't go to the dentist, and are so iggerant they don't know better.

Kind of. At lest those are the generalizations that pop into my head before the second cup of tea.

But that really does piss me off. I can't do anything about the people who demonize me except live a life that shows I'm not a demon -- or at least that I practice the tolerance and support for the constitution that I preach. And I can continue to point out that there are plenty of very intelligent, well-educated conservatives. They aren't conservative because they are stupid or gullible -- they have another value system. I don't agree with it, but unfortunately, my understanding of first amendment rights tells me they have a right to disagree on fundamental things.

And then Teresa posts something like this, and I am tested, because ... it's really hard to fight the idea that there are a lot of stupid and ignorant people out there who are easily captured by the fearmongers so that they can be used to destroy the things I believe in.

It's a funny thing when beliefs clash. Noodling around in the back of my historian's mind is that we are heading into something akin to the Wars of Religion. For many of us, our guiding beliefs are grounded in the principles of modern liberalism as expressed in the US Constitution. But it's almost as if the threats to those beliefs by conservative Christians have turned our love for liberalism into less a separate set of principles and more into a quasi-religion. think that plays very well into the world view of most of these conservative Christian (including the really not very good Christians who believe in folk magic a la Bree Kenyon), who want to see the world as involved in a struggle between Dark and Light, heading towards the eventual Apocalypse where they will be the winners.

As I said, these thoughts are barely starting to coalesce in the back of my mind. (and I realise that, if I were grading this, I'd be pointing out the big 'left thesis about a mile back' bit)

But it seems to me that we all might be missing the real points of contention here. I'm honestly not sure we're all playing in the same reality here, let alone on the same field with the same rules. In that way, I think that those on the liberal side may well be the true conservatives, and ones who are simply unable to recognize that we are up against a paradigm shift ...maybe?

Wool is the worsted of the lot, but even it is corduroy to him.

Seventeenth-century European Catholics believed in all sorts of Dark Powers working to make their lives miserable, and used all sorts of folk-magic amulets and charms and what-not to ward them off. The Puritans, being good Calvinists, believed that the amulets and charms were idolatrous and off-limits to Christians, but they still believed in the Dark Powers. This anxiety over demonic influence was one of the (15,000 or so) factors feeding into the witch hysteria.

Once you've edited the post, it should update on the LJ feed the next time LJ polls the RSS feed, which is generally within half an hour or so.

I want to make a high-sounding statement about how they have been left behind by society and if there were enough opportunity for them they would not be as they are, but that would be preaching to the choir. The thing is, they have begun to scare me, and I never thought I would say that.

Well, if the majority of them are US citizens eligible and registered to vote, that's kind of game over, don't you think? Unless you're calling for some sort of election fraud...

It is refreshing to have a very feminine lady wielding a heavy sword.

*eyebrow lift*

It's not just my imagination/relative youth, is it? This really is the craziest damn election in living memory, isn't it?

Those beliefs can and often do coexist with a belief in the need for a civil society that fosters religious freedom. They don't have to be destructive to public life. (Well, hunting down and killing witches is always bad. But not praying at them really hard in the privacy of your own living room - that's only bad to the extent that it might lead to other actions.)

It's the hate and fear underneath that's the problem, not the supernatural beliefs.

Saw a book in the craft section of Barnes and Noble the other day that is all about how to draw your own hex signs. I was tempted to pick it up, because such symbol systems fascinate me.

All of this black-magic-powerful-demons-your-God-is-fighting-my-God stuff seems so profoundly anti-Christian to me.

It's called Manichaean paranoia. Wikipedia has an OK, if brief, article on it, but if you don't want to trust Wikipedia (not an unreasonable idea :) I'm sure there's other stuff out there.

She was 87 when she died. Epic fail.

I want to make a high-sounding statement about how they have been left behind by society and if there were enough opportunity for them they would not be as they are, but that would be preaching to the choir.

I guess many of them have successfull middle class lifes.

Steve Taylor, 3: If you think "Mystery 666" is wacky, go do a search on Amazon for "National Sunday Law." That's a fine bit of crazy.

Nix 14: why on earth would Obama need to contact someone else...for permission to contact his *own cousin*?

Channels, silly!

dlbowman, 38: Obama has 5 letters, Arnold has 6. But that only reinforces your point.

TNH, 55: Tawdry, even.

Serge @65: They'll cotton on that weave all got to show up to improve the fabric of our society.

(goes back to tuning DIY Antichrist Detector...)

“Bree has ministered to the residents at Highlands Maternity Home and we have seen lives impacted for the Kingdom of God. We are thankful for the pro-life message...”
Rev. Robert Michaels, Highlands Maternity Home

Those poor pregnant women, now suffering from impacted babies, the horror, the horror!

dlbowman76 Barack Hussein Obama has EIGHTEEN letters

So does Ronald Wilson Reagan, and it has them in the right distribution. Also, it'a an anagram of Insane Anglo Warlord. Which also proves that the Episcopal Church is really a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pepsicola, or vice versa, or something.

Any two things can be dubiously connected, even without outright making shit up like these morons. And for any connection, however dubious, there will be someone stupid enough to believe it.*

*Sounds like an epsilon-delta proof that can be refuted easily with recourse to the fact that there IS a lower limit to human stupidity (debatable whether it's "too stupid to remember to breathe" or "so stupid it creates a singularity that sucks the person into Bizarro World"); I would point out, however, that the level of stupidity known as "will believe ANYTHING" is above the outright-existence-failure level.

This election is being fought on all the astral planes.

Traditional media and the blogosphere both serve as huge amplifiers of interesting weirdness, taking very rare events and very weird people, and raising them to prominence. That's entertaining and informative, but it's also an opportunity to deeply fool yourself about what reality looks like. Especially when the focus is used to find people who are weird along some disturbing or scary lines, or along lines that support some broader worldview you want to promote.

As a Wiccan, I'd like to point that I am ENTIRELY representative of America!

Gay, Wiccan, Liberal/Socialist, fannish, theremin-owning, ADHD-having, head-shaving chocolatier, that's me. What could BE more typically American?

I particularly like how, in Keyton's website, the word "pray" appears to replace the word "think." As in "If you have not yet become a partner, pray about becoming one." Which explains a bunch.

There are people who have a different value system from mine. And then there are the fruitbats. Yikes.

I particularly like how, in Keyton's website, the word "pray" appears to replace the word "think." As in "If you have not yet become a partner, pray about becoming one." Which explains a bunch.

There are people who have a different value system from mine. And then there are the fruitbats. Yikes.

Thanks. That's a bunch of good points.

Gay, Wiccan, Liberal/Socialist, fannish, theremin-owning, ADHD-having, head-shaving chocolatier, that's me. What could BE more typically American?

I dunno... (Eddie Izzard voice) Do you have a flag?

Scientific world models -- where you start asking what you're doing when you do that, and how much of it -- have great explanatory power but less predictive power. (Much more scope, but at a personal level that's not really relevant.)

The real advantage on a personal level to the scientific world model approach is that it's robust under change; no matter who is in the White House or what the definition of marriage is, F=ma, you can't push on a rope, many more are born than can possibly live, and deeper layers are older. It's easy to have personal difficulties fitting some aspect of change into your actual world view, but the core stable things generally are core stable things.

I think there is also a way in which religion and science really are fundamentally opposed; most religions consider error to be inherently bad in some way. (And the particular strain of syncretist christian right in question considers error to result in eternal damnation, so they're terrified of it.) In science, error is something you don't want, but which will always be with you; in one sense, it has to be measure (we got 3.312, OK, what are the error bars on that?) and in another sense must be acknowledged because that's what you do; new information, new results, better instruments, will over time expose lots of what you currently consider correct as being wrong.

I think this terror of error, combined with the rapid pace of social change (which really "wildly improved communications"), drives a lot of the anxiety; combined with a remarkable factual ignorance, and of course you get weird magical approaches insecurity management.

http://www.grubshack.com/essays/satanic.html

http://www.grubshack.com/essays/satanic2.html

http://www.grubshack.com/essays/satanic3.html

*at least if it is noticed, I left a bilingual pun recently that attracted no comment.

†preposterous, I know.

Jo Walton #30: One of my professors and I actually agreed yesterday that Barack Obama needs his own chanson de geste. He may have Saracen ancestry, but he's a true Christian ready to fight the unbeliever!

(In case the tone I'm using doesn't come through, my tongue is firmly in my cheek.)

Barking mad? This is surely near the terminus of the line Barking is merely one station upon? Someone with the right map could possibly find it; it's far beyond me.

*tries to retain faith in the 'betterability' of humanity* Also, fwuffy kittens; and a pony. Sigh.

Perhaps we should have a design competition to make a flag so that we can claim the continent?

See? Typically American.

I've also pointed out to people that when Iran went nuts under the Ayatollah, Iraq was our ally in that conflict. And they look at me as if I'd lost my mind. I swear, the Republicans' greatest achievement is to have reduced the public's attention span to a limit of "what happened last week".

ADM, #51: There is no internal contradiction between "there are plenty of intelligent, educated conservatives who simply have a different worldview from mine" and "there are a lot of ignorant, gullible people out there who are easy prey for the fear-mongers". It was John Stuart Mill who said, "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives."

We face here the same problem that we have when discussing Christianity -- how to distinguish between the rational and irrational wings, so that we don't offend potential allies by seeming to tar the entire group with one brush. So what we need is a political equivalent to "Avengelical Christianists," something which will make it clear that we're not talking about all conservatives but only the barking-mad variety. Suggestions welcomed.

Carrie, #64: Google "Manichean heresy" and you get lots of results, of which this seemed fairly comprehensive.

The short form, as I understand it, is that Satan is God's equal (this is what makes it a heresy) and there is an eternal struggle between the forces of Good and Evil, to which individuals contribute by their actions. It's an extremely pagan worldview at root, and it's the basis of the entire Avenglical Christianist movement.

albatross, #79: Good point. We need to remember that people this nuts are well out beyond the third standard distribution and can't really affect the bell curve.

Graydon, #87: I love the phrase "terror of error," not least because it reminds me of one of my favorite choral pieces, a set of (I believe) Dorothy Parker cynical ruminations on love. One part goes:
Bill was ill.
In his delirium, he talked about Miriam.
This was an error, as his wife was a terror
Known as Joan.

Also, by the same argument, all Presbyterians are fans of Britney Spears.

The whole collection is fascinating reading, and you can find it here.

As for magic becoming a strong component of U.S. fundamental Christianity I saw it happen in my own family. First there came this belief in "Guardian Angels." Now, in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, to believe in such a thing as a Guardian Angel would bring down the wrath of the pastor, at the very least, and a long, grave, severe doctrinal talking to. At the very best this could only be interpreted as Catholicism, and at worst, well there was no end to the evils of paganism.

Then came the endless drought of the '80s. Pastors from these very same churches led their congregations to the parched fields, carrying a silver basin of water. They prayed, they all threw drops of water into the air and upon the ground, begging for rain. It was chant and ritual, unlike anything I was ever brought up with. I happened to be home visiting and I was there at one of these services.

Partly I attribute to what happened in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod is a falling off of interest in becoming a minister among those of the generation before and then my own. Among other things, the strongholds for this brand of protestant churches were these very small rural community churches, and as the younger generations left home, they had to close. They couldn't even find a pastor to call or serve. So those who enrolled in the seminaries were not of the highest intellectual capacities. And often, from what I saw on visits home and experiences, they were also emotionally disturbed with various personality disorders, if only borderline. The last pastor that my home congregation was able to call had to be sent away to a mental institution. He was only a couple years older than I was.

Anyway, I throw this out, just as part of the grist.

Love, C.

Wouldn't do to lose all those purls of wisdom.

But, yes, we definitely need a flag of some sort. How else are you all going to recognise which armed jet-powered zeppelin is ours?

...I've said too much.

Meanwhile, his son and heir, Abdullah, is losing even more of his hair as his father's ally goes killabout in Syria.

I have no grievances with (b).

Pun away.

Barking tube station is at the end of the Hammersmith and City line*, but if you're on the District line you can keep going to Upminster.

If you're on the train, you can go all the way out to Shoeburyness. Wikipedia page on the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway notes that a siding there links to the Ministry of Defence site at Pig's Bay.

"The religious right, gone pig's bay mad"

That sounds pretty crazy alright.

* Which has driven me mad

The singularity may be nigh...

Giggles, tho' for Debra @41 saying "Anglicans don't count as "Christian" for people like that, either . . . all those bells-and-incense liturgical denominations look alike to them." Great image of the reaction of the 'Jensenist' Sydney Anglicans to that description.

Mind you, I wasn't around for the 1852-1856-1860 sequence, which got way too colorful. The Whigs fell apart in 1852, beginning the process of redistributing themselves to other parties, including the American (a.k.a. Native American a.k.a. Know Nothing) party, the Constitutional Union party, and the nascent Republican party. Biggest loss: the Whigs' emblematic animal, the raccoon, which would have enlivened all those subsequent elephant-and-donkey cartoons.

The 1856 election was a heated affair. The Republicans campaigned against "the slave power" in advance of the market. The Know-Nothings insisted that immigration, not slavery, was the biggest threat to America. The Democrats declined to re-nominate their sitting president, Franklin Pierce, and went with James Buchanan instead. Buchanan artfully dodged the tougher questions, denounced the Republicans as dangerous radicals, and won. Epic fail: Buchanan was a disastrously ineffectual president when secession threatened. Hey, cool: Buchanan was the closest we've ever had to an out-of-the-closet president. No loss: the Know-Nothings' party color: bright orange.

Onward, then, to the 1860 election, which was the real circus act. South Carolina had just seceded. The Democrats split into the Democratic and the Southern Democratic parties. The Constitutional Union party had amalgamated itself out of the more conservative ex-Whigs, plus the remnants of the Know-Nothings. Meanwhile, the Republicans had been thriftily incorporating a lot of other small parties and factions. It was a four-way race, with strongly regionalized voting. No one got a majority of the popular vote. The Republicans won a clear majority of the electoral vote. Stephen Douglas, candidate of the (Northern) Democratic party, came in second on popular votes and a nearly invisible fourth on electoral votes.

Here's a useful map of voting patterns in 1860. If you hover over the names of the parties, you'll see how they did on a state-by-state basis. Upshot: the Republicans had a solid grasp of the difference between popular votes and electoral votes, and had realized they didn't need the South to win.

My favorite cartoon of the candidates: "THE POLITICAL QUADRILLE. Music by Dred Scott." (An alternate version of the same image.) The fiddler, Dred Scott, was the subject of the SCOTUS decision that the government couldn't prohibit slavery in the territories.

Going clockwise, starting at upper left, is John C. Breckinridge of the Southern Democratic party. He's dancing with James Buchanan, who's drawn as a goat because his nickname was "Buck". Buchanan had openly assisted Breckinridge's run for the presidency.

At upper right is Abraham Lincoln, Republican nominee, dancing with a negress. It's a reference to the Republicans' abolitionist platform. It may also be a reference to Lincoln's remark that the fact that he didn't want to own a black woman as a slave didn't mean he wanted to take one as his wife.

At lower right is John Bell of the Constitutional Union party, dancing with an Indian brave. It's an allusion to the Native American party roots of the Constitutional Unionists. (After they finished filming the cartoon, the Indian went back to his regular day job working as a figurehead for Stephen Douglas's supporters' political machine.)

At lower left is Stephen Douglas, (Northern) Democratic candidate, dancing with a rough-looking Irish immigrant who's wearing a cross around his neck. It identifies Douglas with his supposed constituency of scary urban nonwhite immigrants who practice an alien religion (i.e., the Irish). During the campaign, rumors circulated that Douglas had dangerous Catholic sympathies.

Some good reasons to not be freaked out by the weirdness of this election: (1.) Our society has collectively developed a fair degree of immunity to the ghost-written campaign biography. (2.) We no longer have Wide Awakes, nor any other official paramilitary organizations affiliated with parties and election campaigns. (3.) These days, William Henry Harrison's campaign organizers would never get away with the stuff they pulled in 1840. That campaign was a landmark for dumbed-down tactics: sloganeering ("Tippecanoe and Tyler too"), gimmicks like keeping the ball rolling, and the famous log cabin and hard cider campaign that sold a Virginia Patrician as a working-class American farmer. Naturally, they were also at pains to depict the incumbent Martin Van Buren, a genuinely self-made man, as an effete hothouse bloom who'd been at pains to deck out the White House in such expensive trifles as "artificial French silk flowers" (a phrase I've always found excessively memorable). Nixon's Checkers speech has nothing on Charles Ogle's Gold Spoon Oration [see also] [and]. Van Buren was as a deer in the headlights. (4.) Smart people are faster at figuring out what you can do with the internet.

I don't know; the hex sign thing is Amish, no? You'd think the fundies would cautiously approve of the Amish.

Oh, no. Because a pink armed jet-powered zeppelin would just be ridiculous.

That's all I can say. The thing that scares me most about this election is that through Palin we're beginning to see a greater validation and acceptance of the extreme religious right. I'm not so worried about a McCain victory this election as I am about a Palin for president campaign on the next one.

I see why it sticks in your head.

Sylvia Van Buren?

A pink armed propeller-powered zeppelin, on the other hand...

He was deeply in love with at least, if not two, scions of the southern slaveholding oligarchy.

Love, C.

I just want one, 'kay? Never mind why.

Does it have to be a Bree stake? Can't you, you know, get a stake and bring it to a priest?

In the unlikely event that you can't track down one who would do it for you, I can ping my Bay Area priest network and see if anyone knows anyone of the right temperament...

No no, it has to be one of Bree's specially blessed ones. I'm pretty sure there's a vampire nest in the vacant house (a recent foreclosure, like so many in my neighborhood) down the street.

"Pinging Father Howard, Father Fine, Father Howard!"

dlbowman76@116: It's far too early to reference Mornington Crescent!

Barking to Gravesend isn't a valid move unless you've accumulated enough Knid to bring Southeast Trains into play.

Have you ever *been* to Gravesend? Brings back awful memories of the toilet roll factory, that does...

To my fellow Californians: Dianne Feinstein has just made a powerful ad supporting No on 8. It will be on TV tonight. Please go to your phone and call her local office with words of praise and thanks. The folks who want 8 to pass are going to bombard her with negative calls; we need to let her know she did the right thing.

Sorry, sorry. Back to barking madwomen...

Among other things, we used to attend the Newman Center in Berkeley in the late 80's and early 90's. You'd have to have done a heck of a lot more than bring in a stake for blessing to get some of the guys there to even blink. (I gather they've had a bit of a shake-up since then.)

-----
* This is how my firmly atheist husband and I managed a Catholic wedding...Father Pat, bless him, let us do some rewriting of the vows so we each only promised what we believed.

Constance@106: Interesting, isn't it, that NONE of the writings mention the years and years that B. Hussein spent at the madrassa, being indoctrinated into terror. This can only mean one thing: they're all conspiring with Obama to cover it up! Damn liberal media is even more powerful than we thought.

Why yes, I have. On Thursday nights it's a bit of a ghost town.

A Worldcon, except for people involved in running the world instead of people involved in SF.

Briefly crossing tracks (which I believe is a Robertson Shift, since it's a Tuesday and it's snowing) one of the most entertaining comedy hate preachers I've seen in ages was riding the Number 257 bus to Stratford and declaring, in his best Sonorous Tones(OMT) that "if you follow Abraham you are following Satan. If you follow Islam you are following Satan. If you follow the Pope you are following Satan." In an area with this many signs in Polish and Urdu, the poor fellow was on a hiding to nothing, but I suspect he believed that the act of preaching was magic in itself, regardless of any effect it might have.

Try a Morrison Transfer instead; it'll get you to the same place, albeit facing the wrong way and tuppence out of pocket.

-----
* Actually, since we put the clocks back within the last fortnight, especially not on a Tuesday.

Many people commute from much further out that Gravesend - there are probably a few people who commute into London from northern *France* now the high speed rail line is open. They're buying a fleet of Japanese bullet trains for Kent commuters that will use the high-speed rail line.

A lot of long-distance commuters tend do paperwork or write reports on their laptops on the train, so the commute forms part of the working day.

Where will I put my face... probably Highbury and Islington. And I've already been there twice today, having gone bookshop-winnowing.

If you jump on the 1712 from Charing Cross it's standing room only to Tonbridge, all the seats full until you get to Ashford. (I live and work in East Kent, but in the past have had regular meetings in London. No matter how we timed afternoon meetings I was on a packed train to get home.)

Barking is on the wrong side of the Thames for Gravesend, but you can catch the train to Tilbury and then get the ferry.

What truly worries me is the people without organic brain damage who take her ramblings seriously as inspired prophecy.

Tim Hall @ 136: I was trying to avoid bringing in Kingsbridge Road, but I fear you leave me no choice. This can only lead to tragedy as someone will undoubtedly wish to play the A Train.

Seriously, though: Slate has a real article about Obama's Kenyan relatives (including Obinga who is not a near relative but is, as a fellow member of the Luo tribe, sort of a distant cousin. Religion is not really mentioned at all except that "Mama Sarah" (Obama's paternal grandmother) says, "We are leaving everything to God. We know it's been a long wait, and, God willing, we hope that everything is going to be OK."

Now, if you're a Christian or Jew or Muslim, supposedly you believe that there is only one God, which is why they're called "monotheistic" religions. But some folks apparently haven't got the message.

>> Steve Taylor @16:
And the Bilderbergers - though I can forgive anyone who decides they're a mysterious world controlling cabal, because what else would you call them?

> A Worldcon, except for people involved in running the world instead of people involved in SF.

Shades of R.A.Lafferty's _Primary Eduction of the Camiroi_, where the World Government course involves governing an actual world. Though not one of the major ones of course.

It All Happened on the 11.20 from Hainault to Redhill via Horsham and Reigate, Calling at Carshalton Beeches, Malmesbury, Tooting Bec, and Croydon West
(An upper-class drawing room. An elderly man lies dead on the floor. Enter Jasmina and John.)
JASMINA: Anyway, John, you can catch the 11.30 from Hornchurch and be in Basingstoke by one o'clock, oh, and there's a buffet car and… es corpse) Daddy!
JOHN: My hat! Sir Horace.
JASMINA: Has he…been…?
JOHN: Yes, after breakfast. But that doesn't matter now; he's dead.
JASMINA: Oh poor daddy.
JOHN: Looks like I won't be catching the 11.30 now.
JASMINA: On no John you mustn't miss your train
JOHN: How could I think of catching a train when I should be here helping you?
JASMINA: Oh, John, thank you... anyway you could always catch the 9.30 tomorrow – it goes via Caterham and Chipstead.
JOHN: Or the 9.45's even better.
JASMINA: Oh, but you have to change at Lambs Green.
JOHN: Yes, but there's only a seven-minute wait now.
JASMINA: Oh, yes, of course, I'd forgotten it was Friday. (looks at corpse) Oh, who could have done this?
(Enter Lady Partridge.)
LADY PARTRIDGE: Oh, do hurry Sir Horace, your train leaves in twenty-eight minutes, and if you miss the 10.15 you won't catch the 3.45 which means…(sees corpse) oh!
JOHN: I'm afraid Sir Horace won't be catching the 10.15, Lady Partridge.
LADY PARTRIDGE: Has he…been…?
JASMINA: Yes, after breakfast.
JOHN: Lady Partridge, I'm afraid you can cancel his seat reservation.
LADY PARTRIDGE: Oh, and it was back to the engine - fourth coach along so that he could see the gradient signs outside Swanborough.
JOHN: Not anymore Lady Partridge. The line's been closed.
LADY PARTRIDGE: Closed?! Not Swanborough.
JOHN: Yes, I'm afraid so.
(Enter Inspector Davis.)
INSPECTOR: All right, nobody move. I'm Inspector Davis of Scotland Yard.
JOHN: My word, you were here quickly, Inspector.
INSPECTOR: Yeah, I got the 8.55 Pullman Express from King's Cross and missed that bit around Hornchurch.
LADY PARTRIDGE: It's a very good train.
(Others agree. Tony runs in through the French windows. He wears white flannels and boater and is jolly upper-class.)
TONY: Hello, everyone!
ALL: Tony!
TONY: Where's Daddy? (seeing him) Oh, golly! Has he…been…?
ALL: Yes, after breakfast.
TONY: Then…he won't be needing his reservation on the 10.15.
JOHN: Exactly.
TONY: And I suppose as his eldest son it must go to me. (he starts toward the corpse's coat pockets)
INSPECTOR: Just a minute, Tony. There's a small matter of…murder.
TONY: Oh, but surely he simply shot himself and then hid the gun.
LADY PARTRIDGE: How could anyone shoot himself and then hide the gun without first canceling his reservation?
TONY (after a nervous laugh) Well, I must dash or I'll be late for the 10.15.
INSPECTOR: I suggest you murdered your father for his seat reservation.
TONY: I may have had the motive, inspector, but I could not have done it, for I have only just arrived from Gillingham on the 8.13 and here's my restaurant car ticket to prove it. (he produces a restaurant car ticket and presents it to the Inspector)
JASMINA: But the 8.13 from Gillingham doesn't have a restaurant car.
JOHN: It's a standing buffet only.
TONY: Ah, did I say the 8.13? I meant the 7.58 stopping train.
LADY PARTRIDGE: But the 7.58 stopping train arrived at Swindon at 8.19 owing to annual point maintenance at Wisborough Junction.
JOHN: So how did you make the connection with the 8.13, which left six minutes earlier?
TONY: Oh, er, simple! I caught the 7.16 Football Special arriving at Swindon at 8.09.
JASMINA: But the 7.16 Football Special only stops at Swindon on alternate Saturdays.
LADY PARTRIDGE: Yes. Surely you mean the holidaymaker special.
TONY: Oh, yes! How daft of me. Of course, I came on the Holidaymaker Special calling at Bedford, Colmworth, Fen Dinon, Sutton, Wallington and Gillingham.
INSPECTOR (puts a hand on Tony's shoulder): That's Sundays only!
TONY (after brief pause): Damn. All right! I confess. I did it. I killed him for his reservation. (escapes Inspector's grip and heads for door) But you won't take me alive! I'm going to throw myself under the 10.12 from Reading.
JOHN: Don't be a fool, Tony. Don't do it. The 10.12 has the narrow traction bogies. You wouldn't stand a chance!
TONY: Exactly!
(Jarring chord. curtain falls as characters freeze, Tony at the door, John holding Jasmina, Lady Partridge sitting on couch, Sir Horace dead on the floor, and Inspector at the French doors stage back.)

Dave, #122: Palin as the 2012 candidate? Oh please, don't throw me in that briar patch! That would be the Republican equivalent of Hillary Clinton on the ticket -- the candidate with so much baggage as to be completely unelectable.

Frankly, I do expect her to try... and I also expect her to tank hard within the first few primaries, probably before Super Tuesday. And that will be the end of her national political career, although she'll doubtless move on to make a very good living on the lecture circuit.

Raphael, #145: *snork*

Sam, abi, et al: I think this is the strangest game of online Fizzbin I've ever had the pleasure to witness.

There's actually a live person with a name attached to this bit of hysteria? I'm used to seeing that kind of crap as Nth-generation e-mail forwards originated by God-only-knows somewhere on the Internet. You (and Snopes.com) never seem to be able to pin down the people mentioned in the tale--or if they do, said people don't ever remember saying any such thing.

So what does Snopes say about this one?

Apparently this sort of thing is a favorite pastime... ;)

My own favorite BARKING is the church once known as "All Hallows Barking." I get wonderful mental pictures of a vast crowd of saints, all barking.....

It's the stuff of really, really, really, really, really bad fantasy that ought to have never made it into a slush pile, much less....

Ack. Gack. Eeek. Groan. Whine. Wimper. Wheeze. Etc.

Please, somebody fix phase space and rotate them BACK into the purely imaginary plane, PLEASE!!!!!

* She got that tag among my circle of friends after someone showed me a Weekly World News article describing "20 signs that someone you know may be a SPACE ALIEN in disguise!" and she fit over half of them.

Hey, I vaguely remember that article! I seem to recall that I fit a lot of them myself at the time. I was pleased.

Please, somebody fix phase space and rotate them BACK into the purely imaginary plane, PLEASE!!!!!

Just put a quaternion and ask for Operator J.

As Spiderman's uncle probably wouldn't have said, "With great fear comes great paranoia." And it's pretty obvious that even 7 years after 9/11 many people in the US (and the UK, too, I expect, given some of the security initiatives that the voters are not objecting to) are still terrified of the terrorists coming to their homes and killing them. When you're that afraid, sometimes any expedient, no matter how unsavory or outlandish, may seem acceptable if you can tell yourself that it will work against the enemy. And this is so perfect an example: it's actually magical thinking!

But snarking, as much fun as it is, may not be the best response to these people. They are sick, sick with fear, and they need professional help instead of sleazy authoritarians who pander to their fear as a means of getting and holding power. And for all that there are not many of them, and that they really are fruitbats who aren't capable of doing much themselves, they help maintain the air of fear, uncertainty, and doubt in which we find ourselves this century.

I can only hope that Obama becomes President and by his example and his actions defuses some of the fear, so that these people can go back to less dangerous fears, like the Knights Templar, or the Illuminati.

What I think she's going to become is the leader of the wingnut faction, and is likely to make life interesting for some years to come. Hard to say how long she'll last. She's not stupid or weak--malicious and fanatical, yes, but malicious fanatics sometimes do well in US politics.

mjfgates @124:

There's an artificial France? Where do they keep it?

(Unrelated to any of the above: I thought nested <em> toggled between italic and roman. Doesn't seem to work here; not sure if that's the blog software or Safari that's doing it wrong.)

If you catch the right train, it's been possible for a while to get from London to Leeds or vice versa, 200 miles, in under 2 hours; you just know there were some crazy bastards doing that.

President Bartlet's timeline is one of the better ones, and it's pretty well documented, too.

(Unrelated to any of the above: I thought nested toggled between italic and roman. Doesn't seem to work here; not sure if that's the blog software or Safari that's doing it wrong.)

Um, I'm not sure there are any formal "toggles" in HTML. IIRC, the display of any such tags, especially in combination (which is what you seem to be talking about) is basically an implementation decision for the renderer. This despite the emergence of "usual conventions" (and "usual assumptions" based on the tag names) -- but consider the plight of a character-mode browser such as lynx.

No, that does not remotely pass for normal in Atlanta. It might pass for normal among groups of Bulldog fans*, but not in an office. She was grossly overrating Atlanta's status, but we do have more dignity than that.

*I've seen them bark, but never in an inappropriate venue. And hey, what's a football game for if you can't make a fool of yourself?

geekosaur @ 174: Given their general size, I've always thought of bats as flying mice. Of course, thinking of rats and bats leads me invevitably to this book.

To quote Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain...

"Dignity. Always dignity."

This whole conversation makes me think of PJ O'Roarke's line (I forget which book this was in) that the Jamaican fruit bat looked like a colonel in the rat air force.

Steve #16:
Bildeburgers? But I've never even heard of the-
Damn, those guys are good.

As the Scotland squad always say... (sigh)

I think they can't affect much in the normal additive things like participation in markets or voting. They can in single-person-high-impact stuff like assassination and terrorism--my sense is that nearly all terrorism and assassinations and mass-shootings and such are events where a single way-out-on-the-tails person has a huge impact. So are new inventions, starting world-improving businesses, writing books, life-changing volunteering sorts of activities (say, going off to build schools in Kenya for a couple years), etc. I don't think this is skewed toward bad effects, though probably people soaked in crazy evil ideas are more likely to do evil than good. But many a person with very odd ideas cranks out excellent software or does beautiful math or feeds a lot of hungry people in the soup kitchen he runs. Those things let a small number of extreme outliers have a big impact, in ways that voting or purchasing decisions mostly don't.

Of course, coming to political power is another way that a way-out-on-the-tails person affects the world. Everyone who comes anywhere close to national level political power is a serious outlier. In fact, I suspect that this is more true as we've become more of a meritocratic society--folks like W or Al Gore or Teddy Kennedy are probably less unusual people in some sense than folks like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or Sarah Palin, because it's much harder to come to national prominence from nothing than from a wealthy, well-connected family. (Though Palin was more selected from a moderately high-profile position, so it will be interesting to see whether she can maintain a place in national politics over time.)

Which brings up an interesting and totally OT question: when did author's bios on the back cover or the inside back sleeve stop having a first sentence of the form, "Taddeo Jarusek O'Neill was born in a bus while crossing the border between East Assyristan and West Assyristan."?

I find it unbelievable too.

Without in any way, shape, or form endorsing the overall fruitbattery, I should point out that that statement, at its heart, well, is kinda true.

US strategist to help Kenya presidential challenger

"NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya's top presidential challenger has brought in an American political strategist, tarred by a prostitution scandal, to help defeat President Mwai Kibaki in a December 27 poll, his campaign said on Wednesday.

"As opposition candidates kicked off their official campaigns, Raila Odinga, who has a narrow lead in opinion polls, said American pollster Dick Morris had joined his team.

"'He is working as a consultant, but he is doing it pro bono. He is not charging Mr. Odinga,' said Odinga spokeswoman Rose Lukalo."

There's even video. Dick Morris really gets around.

I got this.

WTF?

It's not normal for most Atlanta offices, even during football season. Now here in Athens, however ...

In the spirit of the upcoming Georgia-Florida game, the even-popular "pack of dogs maul gator" photo.

Re the Railway Timetable Sketch: Swindon and a Partridge? Shades of my favorite post-Sixties rock trio, XTC!

As for the batshit religious fanatics, the NYT online has a book review about America in the pre-war decades of the 19th century -- the Andrew Jackson years, more or less -- and religious wingnuts were rife. Mesmerism! Phrenology! And the early days of Mormonism. (Apologies to any offended current believers in all this; the olden times were more primitive.)

The Politics issue of the New Yorker, earlier in October, had a frightening/funny article on how dangerous it could be to vote in America back in those days. I recommend it.

Coming from a very strong background in mainstream (Catholic & Lutheran) Christian education, one of the most striking things to me about Mormonism is how very far from the Christian mainstream it went within a single generation.

It's as though the differences between Catholicism and Lutheranism, or Lutheranism and Calvinism, are step-wise Darwinian mutations; but the change from Protestantism to Mormonism is an X-Men mutation, a total transforming leap.

Cycling back to my original comment up-thread, I believe Joseph Smith's early career and the very earliest stages of Mormonism likely fits more closely into that same American folk-magic tradition which includes scrying for visions, invoking angels, weird apocrypha, etc. A number of anti-Mormon writers said so at the time.

This is probably why the church Elders were so ready to accept the infamous Salamander letter forgery as authentic.

Much of that American folk magic seems to be garbled and translated versions of German magical traditions, which in turn were garbled debasements of various Renaissance books on ritual magic and occult theory. (It's a multi-generation game of Telephone!)

- Clifton, babbling as usual

I used to think that the demise of the threaded newsreaders in the fall of USENET was wholly a bad thing, but perhaps not.

Yes indeed. It's striking how little of conventional Christian theology was in the mix, given that the first generation of Mormons were all converts from Christianity, and lived in an area (the "Burnt-Over District") rife with Christian preaching.

To me, Mormon theology & storytelling is about as closely (or distantly) related to Christian theology as Muslim stories & theology are to the Jewish & Christian beliefs Muhammed acknowledged as forerunners. But Muhammed knew about Judaism and Christianity second-hand, he wasn't raised in a Jewish/Christian milieu. Joseph Smith *was* raised in an ostensibly Christian culture, but he diverged much further than the various preachers of the Protestant Reformation or even most of the early Christian "heresies".

Much of that American folk magic seems to be garbled and translated versions of German magical traditions

German rather than English or Scottish? Do you know of a good book on the topic?

All that is from a story in Newsday this morning. The US Senate page on how vacancies hasn't been updated since 2003, and isn't useful here.

Recently, we found this site - sacred-texts.com

It includes a book I'd heard about but never found, Pow-Wows, or The Long Lost Friend, a collection of mysterious and invaluable Arts and Remedies. It is a collection of Pennsylvania Dutch (i.e. German) folk magic from the 1820's. It's superficially Christian. The link to this book is http://www.sacred-texts.com/ame/pow/index.htm

People have been performing magic in the name of Jesus for a long time. This does not make it part of Christianity.

How do you suppose they feel about the hundreds of thousands of their Lord and Master's namesakes around the Latin world?

IIRC there's some influence from even further back: medieval stories based on misunderstandings of classical events and people. For instance the fascinating idea that Virgil was a Christian magician*.

* Avram Davidson based a couple of good books on this idea.

Naming your magic books as authored by legendary figures has an ancient and ignoble tradition.

For instance, the Fourth Book of Moses from the same hexerei tradition, or the Lemegeton of King Solomon (I'm not sure when it actually dates to, but probably late Renaissance) which contains of course absolutely nothing relevant to anything believed at the time of Solomon. Going back to late classic times, there were various Greek hermetic manuscripts which purported to be authored by the Egyptian god Thoth, a.k.a Hermes Trismegistus, but which probably were mostly written in the first few centurires A.D.

I don't know who the Sumerians found to misattribute their books of magic to.

My guess would be the Mother Goddess of Çatal Hüyük.

A local TV station interviewed Dole on this ad yesterday, and she defended every word of it. When they spoke with Hagan, she said she was "livid" over it and intended to have an attorney file an injunction to try and get it from being aired. Oh btw, Hagan's an elder in her church and teaches Sunday school classes.

The ad ran immediately after that portion of the news program, ironically enough.

Chorus of angels, parting of the heavens, giant hand descending and pointing directly at Elizabeth Dole, thundering voice declaring "THOU ART ENDORSED BY THE LORD THY GOD."

I am reminded of J.C. Squire's epigram regarding the beginning of the Great War:

God heard the embattled nations sing and shout:
Gott strafe Engeland! God save the King!
God this, God that, and God the other thing.
"My God!" said God, "I've got my work cut out."

Chorus of angels, parting of the heavens, giant hand descending and pointing directly at Elizabeth Dole, thundering voice declaring "THOU ART ENDORSED BY THE LORD THY GOD."

NOW WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

-- I'm averting my eyes, O Lord.

WELL, KNOCK IT OFF!

-- Yes, Lord.

If you haven't seen Pharyngula (“Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal”) at ScienceBlogs, or like me been mostly driven away by the conflict, this might be a nice place to try. There's also a mention of the Dole/Hagan contretemps.

The punning subthread looks familiar...

I browse subjects at Pharyngula (I admit my eyes will glaze over when it goes into detail on fruit fly biology — though I wouldn't dismiss the value of same), but rarely read comment threads through to the end.

Here, I feel compelled to at least browse all active comment threads. It helps* that there is UI on the front page to help track current comments.

* Maybe 'enables' is the proper word, considering the facilitation of the compulsion.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/10/wheres_charlton_heston_when_yo.php

Of course, all right thinking people know that if a couple named María and José with a baby named Jesús are sleeping in someone's garage, they need to be deported, pronto. What other lesson could possibly be taken from the New Testament?

Go Move Shift (The Moving On Song)

by Ewan McCall

Born in the middle of the afternoon,
In a horsedrawn carriage on the old A5
The big twelve wheeler shook my bed,
You can't stay here the policeman said,

You'd better get born in some place else,
Move along, get along, move along, get along,
Go, Move, Shift.

Born on the common by a building site,
Where the ground was rutted by the trail of wheels,
The local Christian said to me,
You'll lower the price of property,
You'd....

Born at potato picking time,
In an old grown tent by a tatie field,
The farmer said the work's all done,
It's time that you was moving on,
You'd...

Born at the back of a Hawthorne hedge,
Where the Blackheath frost lay on the ground,
No eastern kings came bearing gifts,
Instead the order came to shift,
You'd...

The eastern sky was full of stars,
But one shone brighter than the rest,
The wise men came so stern and strict,
And brought the order to evict.
You'd...

Wagon, tent, or trailer born,
Last month, last year or in far off days,
Born here or a thousand miles away,
There's always men nearby who'll say,
You'd...

Ever seen Don's Siegel 1945 film Star in the Night?

On Christmas Eve somewhere in the US southwest, three cowboys are riding through the desert night with items they purchased at a general store. They see a bright light just above the horizon and decide to find out where the it is coming from. The light turns out to be a newly installed light, in the shape of a large star, at the Star Auto Court. The auto court's owner, Nick, doesn't believe there is much good left in the world. He complains that people wish each other 'Merry Christmas,' then look out only for themselves the rest of the year. His customers get the brunt of his rudeness, but have no other choice of lodging nearby. A young couple, Jose and Maria Santos, arrives hoping to get lodging. There are no cabins available, so they must settle for a small shed to sleep in. When the lodgers find out about Maria's medical condition, Nick learns that there is still goodness in the world.

William R Moses?
Moses Gunn?

Moses supposes his toes are roses,
But Moses supposes erroneously,
Moses he knowes his toeses aren't roses
As Moses supposes his toeses to be.

Gunn & Moses?

Welcome to the desert
Now that you are free
Now that you have walked away
And parted the Red Sea.
You saved the tribes of Israel
And raised your sheperd's staff
They follow you, but watch out, boy
They'll make a golden calf.

In the desert
Welcome to the desert
Watch it bring you to your
sha na na na na na na na
knees, knees
I wanna watch you pray

(etc)

Boggle! I can only repeat one of the early comments in the thread - "Biblical Fail!" I mean, I'm neither a Christian nor a Jew, but I know the Bible better than those "Christians" apparently do.

MOAR Mornington Crescent and/or fabric puns PLZ. kthx.

I don't really think the German folk magic/religion can have much to do with early Mormonism, because the Burned-Over District was most settled by immigrants from New England and, I'm guessing, from the "borders" region of the British Isles. In Albion's Seed (always the first stop for analyzing American culture) there's some discussion of the magical practices of the Border culture, but not IIRC about the "roll your own" quality, the degree to which movements like Mormonism could be detached from Christian tradition.

It's also surprising to me how divergent Mormonism (etc) could be from the teaching of the First Great Awakening, especially given how many immigrants to the region were from New England. I happen to have read a lot of Jonathan Edwards, and he's solidly inside Christian tradition in a way Joseph Smith et al. were not.

Does that make me a full spectrum grayscale magician, between poetry here on Making Light, and black magic involved with software testing on stuff that the customers like enough to keep buying more of?!

#210 Clifton
The invoking of Solomon goes back further than the Renaissance, to pre-Islamic traditions picked up by Muslims, and also strains of such things in esoteric Judaism.

That software stuff is way beyond black magic, even farther than ultraviolet or soft x-ray magic. And testing is even farther out. I mean really, sticking pins in data structures?

http://wonkette.com/403979/more-photos-videos-from-yesterdays-sacrilege-wall-street-bull-prayer

Synopsis: The 700 Club organized a day of prayer for the economy, and decided to pray before the Wall St. bull statue, complete with laying on hands. I'm pretty sure the Bible has some pretty specific things to say about praying to metallic cow effigies...

I swear I can spell. I just can't type.

O HAI
I UPGRADED UR GEOCENTRIC MODEL

INVIZIBLE PRIMUM MOBILE!!!!

How about

IN UR COSMOS
EATIN YR GALAXIES

?

Behold LOLTHULHU.

MY DREAMZ IZ POIZND. OH NOES.

Not to worry; professional cosmologists occasionally make the same mistake. E.g., the abstract of
this 1995 paper:

"... and singularities in spatially inhomogeneous cosmololgies are discussed."

It wasn't a typo, it was a prophecy...

No, you can't be sick, you can't have messed up your life, it can't be because you cheated, stole, or slacked off at work....

I reckon real Christians think these folks are nuts like real Wicca think those who claim to be "under spiritual attack" are nuts.