Don’t Use the Bible to Justify Lawmaking, But If You Do, Get Your Bible Right

Isn’t it nice to know that the House Agricultural Committee has time for bible studies?

In moving this year’s farm bill out of committee and to the House proper, they apparently found time for some in-depth theological debate. The Barre Montpelier Times Argus has the most entertaining summary (as well as a really fun name), so let’s roll a quote from their story:

Cutting the food stamp program was hotly debated, with members quoting the Bible to support keeping the food stamp program at the current level or cutting it.

Rep. Juan C. Vargas, D-Calif., who opposes the cuts, began the thread by quoting a biblical passage from the 25th chapter of the Book of Matthew.

“I’m a Christian, and this chapter talks about how you treat the least among us,” said Vargas, adding that he would not support a bill that made such deep cuts to the anti-hunger program.

But K. Michael Conaway, a Texas Republican, countered that argument.

“I take umbrage to that,” he said. “I take Matthew 25 to mean me as an individual, not the U.S. government.”

Rep. Stephen Fincher, R-Tenn., then quoted a verse from the 26th chapter of Matthew, saying the “poor will always be with us” in his defense of cuts to the food stamps program.

According to NBC News, Mr. Fincher was not done there, and went on to dig deeper into the New Testament:

Republican Congressman Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, who supports cuts to the program, had his own Bible verse from the Book of Thessalonians to quote back to Vargas: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat,” he said.

So, first off, that is a lot of Jesus in our nation’s halls of governance, and all of you shut up, including you the Democrat from California that started this whole mess.

But if you are going to legislate based on what the invisible man in the sky told you to do (stop that), at least study the damn book.

2-Thessalonians-Chapter-1-2“The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat” is a weird translation of part of 2 Thessalonians 3:10, which reads in full (King James Version here) “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”

This comes in a series of instructions specific to the christian community Paul had established in Thessalonica, detailing how to organize their fellowship. It’s essentially early Christian micromanagement: “Hey, if your guys are slacking off, tell them no more lunch break.”

What it is not is any sort of statement on how Christians are to treat other people, whether in their personal lives or through the apparatus of any state they might finagle control of. (It was also a big favorite of Lenin’s, who quoted it in The State and Revolution in 1917, and a part of the 1936 Soviet Constitution, which makes its presence in the mouth of a Tennessee Republican just that much weirder.)

But hey, if he really believes his misinterpretation of a text with dubious authorship to be the true word of God, at least Mr. Fincher is living by his principles, right?

Well, no, turns out Mr. Fincher has taken millions of dollars in farm subsidies over the years, which is pretty much the exact definition of getting paid to not work.

So he’s not just bad at Jesus, he’s even bad at his own, made-up, not-at-all-in-the-Bible version of Jesus. That being the case, maybe he could stop with the Jesus thing altogether and just do his damn job?

2013
05/23
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
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“Boring” Isn’t a Genre (But You Can Get It on the Radio)

npr_logoPublic radio is kind of a weird beast around here.

You’ve got your ultra-local, low-powered hippie options, of course, which are forever getting into intricate spats with the local government, the coverage of which makes up most of those stations’ programming. And I presume you can get yelled at about how Jesus is going to kill you with an AR-15 for ‘bortioning babies when you masturbate if you tune into the AM talk shows, which why would you?

But the actual, state-wide, publicly-funded radio seems to be an experiment in how many different shades of “bland” you can find.

And the variety is impressive! The public radio is billed a “classical and news” station around here, but that’s been spun out into all sorts of things that are neither.

NPR shows like Radiolab and Planet Money, for example, are not really news so much as an exercise in aural microblogging — Twitter for the blind. But we get them during commuter rush, on the theory that people who drive cars a lot…I don’t actually have a theory. The shows aren’t anything that could be confused with relevant coverage of contemporary events, though.

And then there’s the jazz hours (several of them).

Those are the ones that really get me. I mean, I can see the theory here — these are both things that nerdy old white dudes sometimes get into as hobbies. A classical music fan looks about the same as a radio jazz fan, under the soft lights of a well-funded concert hall.

But there really aren’t a whole lot of technical similarities between the genres. Somewhere along the line someone clearly made the call that we could wedge an hour of slow jazz in here and there in between the classical stuff, but can you imagine how weird it would be in reverse? I don’t know of a single jazz program that would turn around and say “and now, for something a little different, here’s some Beethoven for the next hour.”

That would be really weird. It’s really weird the other way around, too.

It’s too bad the funding and interest doesn’t exist to get all these things their own radio station, because mixing all the different flavors of “soothingly boring” manages to keep the boring while ruining everyone’s soothing.

Oh well. I suppose private, pop radio only has 40 songs at a time. And at that point I might as well just listen to Pandora, HEYO!

2013
05/22
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
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Wait, Who Am I Today?

Mystery-PersonOne of the interesting things about doing a lot of commercial writing is that you can amass an enormous portfolio without ever getting a byline.

That’s not to say my name’s not on anything out there — if you Google around a bit, you’ll find plenty of “Geoffrey Cubbage” writings, all the way back a couple of articles I wrote for a roleplaying magazine in high school — but for the most part I am an anonymous contributor.

All well and good, so long as you don’t feel the need for artistic fulfillment. I would rather have my name on a paycheck than an article, generally speaking, so being the faceless voice behind websites suits me just fine as long as the money keeps rolling in.

But it does raise the interesting problem that somewhere, at some point along the line, you have to have a named account, just to get into the backstage of a website and muck around, and a lot of the time it has to be one based on your real name or e-mail address if you want to get paid.

I have lots of those now. I think my current count is up to eight, in fact, about half of which are some variation on my first and last name.

And yes, they all have different passwords.

It’s getting to the point where poor Google Chrome can’t even keep track of who I am on any given day. Big-G Geoffrey? Little-g geoffrey? Gcubbage, cubbageg; Geoffrey Cubbage? All different writers for different employers and websites.

The predictable result is mis-posting. I’ve mostly managed to avoid it, but I did briefly end up — on this account, the one that I use for MA101 — as an admin on a website selling erotic fantasy e-books. Whoops.

Not that there’s anything wrong with selling erotic fantasy e-books. I mean, there’s a reason I was getting an admin account there, folks. But I wear a different hat for that one, mostly because the payment route is slightly different and I gotta do what I can to keep this stuff straight. The IRS is already unhappy with me this year (the feeling is mutual).

So who am I, again, today? Whoever it is, don’t worry if you don’t like him. I can be someone else in a minute.

2013
05/21
CATEGORY
Personal Life
Writing Life
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Poetry in Stillness

baby-squirrelA baby squirrel came and sat on my foot today, as I was reading my Wall Street Journal in a coffee shop garden, and if that makes my life sound idyllic that’s because it is and you should be jealous.

He was a tiny chap, still with the big head and undersized body that says “d’awwww!” rather than the grossly swollen body and pin-like head that says “gimme Twinkie no wrapper ya fuggin’ palooka,” and he perched on my topsider for a good minute or two while we watched each other over the rim of my coffee cup.

Then I finally gave into temptation and moved to take a picture with my cell phone. Off he scampered, before I could even open my mouth to say “Siri: How to avoid scaring baby squirrels?”

I thought there might be a lesson in there somewhere.

Then I realized that it’s the internet, and if I want a picture of a baby squirrel to go with my article about a baby squirrel I can just go grab it from a stock photo collection, by which I mean Google’s image search.

I expect to receive my job offer from The Huffington Post any day now. Which I will turn down, because my current life involves squirrels in coffee house gardens, and click-baiting with sideboobs seven days a week does not.

So that was my morning. How was yours?

2013
05/20
CATEGORY
Personal Life
10 comments

“Never Read the Comments” Finally Comes to MA101

Well, it was a good three-year run or so.

Apart from obvious and occasionally poetic spam, the comments here at MA101 have not needed much moderation. About a year ago I let them go completely open, rather than reading them and approving them one by one, and up until today I hadn’t had any problem commenters.

I’m still leaving things open, but I was sad to see someone really flying off the handle today, to the point that I had to go ahead and boot them. I guess all these years later “The Top 10 Most Absolutely Overrated Books You’ve Probably Had to Read” still arouses strong feelings.

Too strong, in some cases. I don’t have a comments policy here at MA101 because we’re all too intelligent for something like that, but to be clear: if you’re just posting insults directed at other commenters, I’m probably going to trash your comments. And if they’re really foully racist or sexist, I’m definitely going to trash your comments.

Now be good, all of you, and don’t make me turn admin approval back on. That shit gets tedious.

2013
05/17
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
Personal Life
1 comment

Fuzzy Pony Filler: Beer Pony

I’m on the road today, so here’s some fuzzy pony filler for you, courtesy of a friend and former co-worker who encourages my pony obsession shamelessly:

fuzzy-beer-pony

Does she know me, or what? Not just a fuzzy pony, but a fuzzy pony surrounded by attractive women — and in case you didn’t recognize the logo on their shirts, they’re from a bar in Chicago called Fatpour, which makes this a fuzzy beer pony.

Some cursory Googling tells me that the pony is not, alas, a regular staple of the bar, but was only there for a special event. Still and all, beer pony. If life gets much better than that, I don’t want to know about it.

2013
05/16
CATEGORY
Fuzzy Ponies
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My Little Pony: Jailbait is Magic

Equestria_Girls_May_6_2013_movie_posterI’ve always thought it was a little sad that the brony phenomenon happened to a Hasbro property.

A smaller toy company might have had more reason to try and interact with a wholly-unexpected fanbase, and it could have gone interesting places.

Hasbro never really needed to do that.

The reality is that most My Little Pony toys aren’t going to fans of the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, be they twenty-something males or tweeny girls. The toys are going to shoppers who put the pretty pink pony in the cart at Toys “R” Us because it’s pretty, and pink, and a pony, and it’s the pretty pink pony that Toys “R” Us has on the shelves.

And the volume of those shoppers is staggering. Even a really big internet fan base — like the one Friendship is Magic stumbled into — is a drop in the bucket compared to retail toy shoppers nationwide.

So you can color me unsurprised that the toy company is pivoting aggressively away from their adult fanbase with their new spinoff movie My Little Pony: Equestria Girls.

Equestria Girls takes the main cast of the TV show Friendship is Magic and sends them through the looking glass (literally) to a world where they’re all human(oid) teenage girls.

That has the interesting effect of taking characters that were pretty clearly self-sufficient adults, insofar as their pony world defined such things, and turning them into emphatically non-adult personalities.

And yes, it means that all the My Little Pony porn out there — and there’s quite a bit of it — just became child porn. I predict a massive scramble to remove any steamy fanfics featuring the “mane six” characters from brony websites, at least among the authors with good sense.

Because Twilight Sparkle might have been a grad student with a job at the library when you shipped her hot and steamy with Princess Celestia, but as of June 16th she’s jailbait.

Let the redactions begin!

But to all the bronies out there who view this as a “slap in the face,” and there are lots of you — you’re right. It is. Hasbro would like you to go away and stop making their ossified business model more complicated with your weird demographic anomaly so they can go back to pushing generic plastic ponies onto the shelves at Toys “R” Us.

Cheer up. You’ll always have the first Equestria Girls video, from before all this happened:

2013
05/15
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
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