A Thinking Reed

  • The right profile

    I heartily recomment the new documentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten. I saw it yesterday afternoon and loved it. The live footage of the Clash is electrifying and worth the price of admission alone. But even if you’re not a big Clash fan (and if not, well, what’s wrong with you?), the movie is…

  • Go, NPR!

    One of the annoying things about the recent debate over waterboarding has been the media’s tendency to refer to it as “simulated drowning.” This is inaccurate and gives a distorted view of what the process involves. Having water poured into your lungs is not a simulation. So, I was gratified to hear Nina Totenberg on…

  • Who owns Goldwater?

    With all the buzz about the conservative movement being on the verge of breaking apart, it’s interesting to contrast the present with the career of Barry Goldwater, who managed to unite libertarians, traditionalists, and foreign policy hawks. Recently even liberals have been looking back fondly (if with rose-colored glasses) on the tolerant libertarain Goldwater who…

  • Friday metal (pt. 2) – infectious groovin’ edition

    Whew – that black metal stuff gives me the creeps! How ’bout something a little more lighthearted? Anyone remember the 1990s Suicidal Tendencies side project Infectious Grooves? The lineup: Mike Muir (ST frontman), Adam Siegel (former guitarist for defunct metal/punk fusion band Excel), Robert Trujillo (ex-ST, ex-Ozzy and current Metallica bassist) and Stephen Perkins (former…

  • Friday metal (pt. 1) – black metal edition

    “Black” metal is not really to my taste, but friend of this blog and brother-in-law extraordinaire Josh sent me a link to this article on Norwegian black metallers Enslaved from, of all places, the New York Times. The whole Scandanavian black metal scene has seen some pretty creepy stuff, actually. Church burnings, murder and suicide…

  • Alison on sin, wrath and the “deathlessness” of God

    I’ve been reading James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes, and he has an interesting take on the relation between forgiveness, sin, and the wrath of God. Alison, as readers may know, is a follower of Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic violence and uses it as a key to understand…

  • Wednesday punk – Refused, “New Noise”

    Just for fun, here’s the Swedish punk band Refused from their nearly flawless 1998 album The Shape of Punk to Come: Between this and the death metal, you have to ask: what are the Swedes of all people so pissed off about?

  • The evangelical crack-up: not all it’s cracked up to be

    An honest-to-goodness evangelical pours some cold water on David Kirkpatrick’s NY Times Magazine piece on the splintering of political evangelicalism. (via Jeremy) I’ve seen a number of outlets assume that evangelical dissatisfaction with Bush and the GOP must be dissatisfaction from the Left. While younger evangelicals may indeed have a newfound concern for issues like…

  • Moneybags Paul

    Ron Paul raised $4.2 million in Internet contributions in a 24-hour period yesterday as part of a concerted fundraising campaign. Wow! Paul’s total deposed Mitt Romney as the single-day fundraising record holder in the Republican presidential field. When it comes to sums amassed in one day, Paul now ranks only behind Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton,…

  • Worse than Gonzales?

    Via Gaius, John Nichols says that Mukasey is just that. And it’s not just the waterboarding issue, bad as that is, but his general perspective on executive power and privilege: “Mukasey Is (Much) Worse Than Gonzales.” Makes one long for the halcyon days of John Ashcroft.