Ian Malcolm: God creates dinosaurs; God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man; man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.1Call the header image “God-blum” because it calls to mind the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Ellie Sattler: Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth.
— Jurassic Park2Uvular hates this movie. Save your typing. He does not care. He walked out of a 99-cent showing of this movie back in the day. He, above all, hates how this movie singlehandedly changed the meaning “raptor” from bird of prey to some CGI abomination of a sauropod and Torontonian cager. He refuses to watch any sequels to this movie. But an apt quote remains and apt quote.
Your increasingly monomaniacal Weekend Politics Thread host devotes yet one more essay to galloping theocracy in the United States. Because.
On July 19, 2018, the House of Representatives voted to rescind the Johnson Amendment, which since the mid-1950s has threatened religious organization with loss of tax-exempt status if they engaged directly in electoral politics. On a continuum of secular-to-secularist governments, delivering this Mike Pence wish list item would place the United States much closer to Vatican City than China, more Turkish than Danish or more Austrian than Australian. Expect blasphemy and apostasy laws next.
Because you know who has the authority to jail citizens for failing to bend the knee, perform ritual ablutions, and such and so forth? Russia.
In what historians will no doubt record as a complete and unintentional coincidence, the U.S. Treasury Department on July 17, 2018, declared that political action committees no longer faced the requirement to fully disclose the identities of all contributors. Guess what happened on July 16?
Indictments accusing Russian national Mariia Butina of funneling money from one of Vladimir Putin’s favorite oligarchs to the National Rifle Association went public. And guess what that means?
In light of every other thing now known about the Trump campaign’s ongoing conspiracy with Russian intelligence officers, the Trump Organization’s continued total dependence on fees from laundering Russian cash, and the strange-bedfellows alliance of basically single religion Israel and increasingly Orthodox Russia over settling matters in Syria that went so far as having Netanyahu urge Trump to meet Trump out of earshot to cut nefarious deals, it means something. Dammit!
Actually, like any ranting lunatic worth his internet domain registration fee,3Lookit all them pretty weblinks. Uvular has drawn a conclusion other nuts will appreciate. He sees this ending not with us kissing the Ring of the Fisherman, but with us kissing our asses goodbye. Never forget that the endgame for the Dominionists and millennialists who put George W. Bush and Donald Trump into the White House amounts to the literal endgame of triggering biblical Armageddon.
Until that happens, enjoy the totally Christlike rollback of civil rights past the 13th Amendment, the subjugation of women, the brutalization of immigrants, and the gaslighting of reality itself.
Rock in America while you still can, Politicados. Pause only long enough to comment below.
