Month: October 2005

Here are my top ten favorite books. I never tried to pick ten books before. It’s pretty hard to do. It’s especially tough for me because I have such varied interests. As a result my list has fiction, historical, philosophical, psychological, and political books.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace “The greatest American novel.”	When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight Over Christ’s Divinity in the Last Days of Rome by Richard E. Rubenstein “The most exciting Ancient History book ever written. And one of the most informative and important things you could ever read to better understand Christian theology.”
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky “The best Russian novel of all-time. Prince Myshkin is a redeemer that I can believe in.”	Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche “The best introduction into Nietzsche’s thinking for the non-philosopher. Accessible and straight forward, it suffers from little of his later grandiosity.”

Bush promised to bring American style democracy to Afghanistan, he has succeeded!

Voting Fraud Is Found in Afghanistan’s Election

KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 2 – Election officials and observers said today that with 80 percent of the ballots counted in Afghanistan’s national and provincial elections, they had found significant incidents of fraud.

Whole districts have come under suspicion for ballot box stuffing and proxy voting, said Peter Erben, the chief international electoral officer in charge of Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections. He said that ballot boxes from 4 percent of the country’s 26,000 polling stations – about 1,000 stations – had been set aside to be investigated for fraud and other irregularities.

The European Union observer mission said the reports of fraud and possible intimidation of voters were “worrying,” In a statement, the mission said, “While these phenomena do not appear to be nationwide, they are a cause for concern.”

There are lots of things to be done.

One of the first things to do — is to learn more about it.

The Christian Right is one of the most successful political movements in American history. Yet people’s level of literacy about the subject is often, well, shockingly low. The Christian Right is the dominant faction in the GOP. There are reasons for that. But few seem to know what those reasons are. If we are going to have intelligent conversations about all this, let alone be able to have coherent discussions about what to do, we need to have more people who share a common base of knowledge and the language necessary to have meaningful conversations. After many years, I know that useful knowledge and conversation in this area can be hard to come by.  

Let me tell you a story.

Once, in a time and place that now seems as remote and unfathomable as any long-lost Atlantis, I trained as a medieval musicologist. A rigorous and thorough preparation for a life very different than mine. That’s not the story. But that distant far-off place is where I learned this story, by reading the lines and what lies between them.

There certainly hasn’t been much written about it in the mainstream media, but an article posted on Military.Com’s web site suggests that the Bush Administration is charging full speed ahead with plans to dismantle the Veteran’s administration.

“What VA?” the article quotes a chuckling Senator’s aide as saying in a conversation that suggested that the VA is being dismantled. “By the time this administration is done there won’t be a VA.”

So why would the Bush administration want to dismantle the VA? The article suggests three reasons: