As you can see this blog has been slowly dying lately. Too busy with other projects, work, etc. The bad news it that it is only going to get worse, as I am starting my studies at Oklahoma City University School of Law in less than a month.


So, it is time for a change. Here's the battle plan..


1. The Law/Politics blog will continue on at www.jmbzine.com. However, my focus will primarily be in writing for my fellow law students, and other folks interested in the law. I'll comment on cases and issues that we talk about in class, and will probably even post my class outlines here.


I may still talk some about politics (especially as it relates to what I'm studying), but most of my political discussion will be on the Oklahoma Green Party Discussion list instead of on this site.


2. If I continue the culture blog, it will likely move to www.exitzine.com. More likely, I will quit that blog but will continue writing about culture, music, art, etc through the reviews and articles I write @ EXITzine.


3. Random blog will probably die unless I change my mind.


That's all of the news now. If you're an old friend or just want to say howdy please email me at jmb@jmbzine.com.

The world will be saved by Beauty. - Robert Waldrop on www.bettertimesinfo.org

Thanks to Kimberly, I've discovered Fleming & John. It is some of the best and funnest pop music (in the best sense of the word) that I've heard in some time. I highly recommend it.


BTW, their last and best CD is available for only $2 (!) at www.usedcduniverse.com.

If you live in the OKC area and are an artist, you are invited to the first ever "Artists' Gathering" at Shekinah Fellowship Church on SW 104th near Santa Fe, from 10 a.m.-1 p.m. on Saturday, June 15th. Bring your paints, pencils, or other supplies, or you can chip in $5-10 to use the community's supplies. For more info, contact me at jmb@jmbzine.com.

Ok, I lied. I'll do headlines sometimes. When I feel like it.

• The Psalters - If you're going to be @ C-stone, you gotta be there.
  

  BTW, their website is better than crack. Here's one choice excerpt...
  

  Covey© training© morning® seminar©®™
  yes the kettle is on the stove and the water is boiling. Stick your face up close, don’t be shy, breathe the steam sick child…. blow that snot out your nose and neck, clear the chasms, loosen the lungs ---you got some yellin to do you’re a psalter and spring is coming.
  

  So grab that kettle, throw the boiling water out on that greasy floor before you, mop the path straight to your door and with kettle still in hand WALK!!! OUT SIDE!!! nomadic troubadour cry out with clangin kettle , sweepin safety-first salesmen aside with that mcworld maulin muddywater mop puny pilgrim go proclaim with due fear and trembling:
  

  “coffee aint enough for the comin mourning you cluster bombin, video gamin, bling bling baggin, black gold lobbyin, mega mart mackin, propaganda pimpin, lazy ass lollygaggin sleepers! Wake up, wake up, walk with me….for the kettle is on the stove, and the water is boiling like a ‘screaming brittle siren’”
  

  then, after a brief respite, get off your steeples post haste, self-righteous vagabonds, and listen for a minute. We got work to do™®©

NY Times : Boxers, Briefs, Mochas


NY Times: Risking limbs for height, and Success, in China

• God refloods Middle East
  

• MSNBC: GM adds plant to focus on fuel cells
  

• Austin Chronicle: Keeping the peace --- Round one of trying to establish a new city noise ordinance for Austin music
  

• Austin Chronicle: Hey Kids! Free Comics! --- a story on National Free Comics Day

Well folks, as you can see I'm having a horrible time keeping this thing updated. Part of the problem is that I'm stressing too much on topical headers and the like. So, to simply things I'm scrubbing them. I'll keep the three topical blogs (culture, politics & law, and random) but within those you won't see anymore headlines. Sorry for the change, but this will help me to just post stuff on the fly instead of waiting for me to get several stories for each category.

I've been giving my earlier review of Fight Club some more thought. There is one thing I did not mention that I should have in the review...


What I found most offensive about Fight Club was how human beings are portrayed. There is nothing ennobling about humans in this movie. Man is shown to be an animalistic fighting machine with no heart and nobility, and woman is shown to be nothing more than a sexual object who is shown pity from time to time.


Man and woman are so much more than this. Human beings are made in the Image of God and contrary to Durgin are special. Each of us is unique and intricate and beautiful.


I will say this about Fight Club. The one good thing about it is that it has made me see the clear contrast between the nobility of being a man made in God's Image and the degrade state of being a man who has renounced his noblity.


Which while I'm on the subject of nobility... if you have a chance look for the May/June issue of HM Magazine. This theme was explored in depth by my friend Jason Dodd. I forgot the title of the story (I'll post it here later.), but he makes the point that the essential element of redeemed humanity is nobility.

Today on the Oklahoma Green party email discussin list there has been much talk as to whether Tolkien's great work Lord of the Rings is racist or not. One person said that Tolkien was racist in his depictions of the Orcs as being an evil race with an inferior culture, etc. but the majority opinion on the list is that this notion is absurdly ridiculous, and the real confrontation was less about race and more about the struggles between a nature based agrarian multi-ethnic civilization against a mechanistic evil civilization.


Anyway in the course of the discussion someone said that the issues of Tolkien and race were discussed in an


What I found interesting in the article was this excerpt...


The best response comes from Tolkien himself. After Hitler came to power, but prior to World War II, the German government officially requested, through Tolkien’s publisher, that he establish his racial purity so they could authorize a translation of The Hobbit (the prequel of "The Lord of the Rings").


The Oxford don, struggling financially to support his family, could have used the income from Third Reich sales. Instead, though Tolkien is a Germanic name, he took the opportunity to remind the Nazis of the ludicrous pretension of racial purity.


"Thank you for your letter.... I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend," he wrote. "I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are inquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people...."

Continuing on my reviews of videos watched lately...

• Fight Club - A disturbing movie. Elements of it were compelling (most notably Edward Norton's acting) but overall it was really dumb idea masked behind what seems on first glance to be new insights on social psychology.
  

  Here are my objections to it...
  

  1. Its portrayal of men
  

  First, are men really so oppressed by our society? I don't think so. Certainly there are some men who have identity issues (or maybe we all do) but the answer is not beating the living daylights out of strangers. The answer is true masculinity as shown by true men, most notably Christ.
  

  Sure, men need challanges to be happy. Men judge themselves by what they do (a gross generalization I know, but I'll go with it anyway as I think there's more truth to it than not). Maybe a good fight might provide some feelings of self-worth, but it is a very false impression.
  

  2. The pornographic nature of the violence
  

  I say pornographic in that the violence was often not contextual, not artistic, and served no purpose but appealing to the lowest common denominator.
  

  I've seen movies that were extremely violent (I.e. The Matrix) that did not offend me, BUT those movies had a strong sense of some kind of morality to the violence, or in other words a reason that the heroes used violence.
  

  I didn't see that in Fight Club. It was simply violence for the sake of violence. I find that extremely offensive.
  

  3. The mysogeny
  

  I was repulsed by the msyoginist views of the movie. I'm not offended by the portrayal of kinky sex per say, but I was bothered by the way it showed the relationship between the guy and the girl, especially he told her to "shut up" when they were engaging in sex acts. I was also disturbed that the new "revolution" was a purely male endeavor which seemed to imply that the women were simply a means to gratification at best. I also want to know what in the h**l was that 1/2 sec. porno clip of frontal nudity at the end of the movie?! What was that? It was not contextual in any way to the plot of the movie and seemed to be there purely to offend any female members of the audience who haven't walked out yet.
  

  4. The Big Picture
  

  The movie seemed to advance the idea that an anarchist descruction of our debt-based society was a good thing, and that the main character was ok now that he had his evil personality killed, even though the entire financial world was being destroyed.
  

  I (likely more than most folks) hate credit card companies that enslave people in debt, and would love to see the day when corporate America doesn't destroy peoples lives like they do today.
  

  However, the answer is not violence. The answer is acting in a civil society through laws. Like it or not, even the evil institutions of credit card companies employ real human beings. These are people who are made in the image of God. They are not expendable for "project Mayhem" and contrary to what the movie portrayed there is always collateral damage (aka civilian casualities).
  

  For all of these reasons, I wholeheartedly denounce Fight Club. It is one of the worst movies I have seen in my life.

Movies & TV

• MSNBC:'Ally McBeal' to end Fox run
  

• Well I bought a VCR a few weeks ago and have been watching more movies than I ought to. Here are my notes on two of my recent purchases and rentals... (I'll add more later)
  
  • Dazed and Confused - Ok, I've seen this one about 20 times, but when I saw it for sale I had to buy. This is a classic film shot in Austin, directed by Richard Linklater (maker of Slacker and the new movie that I can't remember the title of.
    

  • Traffic - Incredible movie. A brutally realistic view of the effects of drugs and the drug war. Very fair-handed in showing that the bad guys in both the drug trafficing and law enforcement camps. I also was amazed that they got Oklahoma Senator Don Nickles to appear in the movie!
  
  

• Here are my musical recommendations for the week:
  
  • Rusted Root
    
  • Steve Earle
    
  • Yonder Mountain String Band
    
  
  

• Progressive.org: An interview with Ani DiFranco
  

  Here are some interesting excerpts from the interview...
  

  Q: You have a line in that song about "blood pouring off the pulpit." You're talking about the hypocrisy of the religious right, aren't you?
  

  DiFranco: It's such a basic, huge, looming hypocrisy. People who are so concerned about the unborn, quote unquote, and the life of a zygote, and yet they're willing to kill human beings, and completely, often, disregard the lives of actual children. There are many children existing on the planet already who could use that kind of love and dedication--as opposed to a bit of blood and tissue, which I think is a misfocusing of that kind of concern. And again, a lot of the people, of course, who are so staunchly against abortion rights are just fine with the military or the death penalty. The hypocrisy can be very high with some of those folks.
  

  I totally dig what she is saying here. I differ with her some since I am a pro-life Christian . . . but I'm pro-life and pro-peace all of the time. I don't understand the thought processes of Christians who are opposed to abortion but yet support violence in other areas such as the death penalty and war.
  

  Q: On Up, Up, Up, Up, Up, Up (1998), you have another religious reference. You say, "God's work isn't done by God. It's done by people." What are you driving at there?
  

  DiFranco: Well, I'm not a religious person myself. I'm an atheist. I think religion serves a lot of different purposes in people's lives, and I can recognize the value of that, you know, the value of ceremony, the value of community, or even just having a forum to get together and talk about ideas, about morals--that's a cool concept. But then, of course, institutional religions are so problematic.
  

  And that line from the song, anyway, is how unfortunate it is to assign responsibility to the higher up for justice amongst people. My spirituality tends to be more in the vein of, if there is a God it exists within us, and the responsibility for justice is on our shoulders. What if we just looked to each other in this way? What if the steeples didn't all point up? What if they all pointed at us, and we had to care for each other in the way that we expect God to care for us? I'm much more interested in that.
  

  Her remarks here remind me a lot of what I read in the book "Living a Jewish Life". That book (and maybe Ani to the extent that an atheist can) emphasize a practical spirituality that is rooted in this world and is committed to social justice.
  

  Q: What about your feelings about patriotism? On Not a Pretty Girl (1995), you say, "I am a patriot." And in " 'Tis of Thee," the first song on Up, Up, Up, Up, Up, Up, you sing about patriotism with a twist.
  

  DiFranco: It's very much a love song for this country, my country. Mark Twain had a wonderful quote, "Loyalty to the country always; loyalty to the government when it deserves it." That's an essential distinction that I find very compelling. Because what is America? You can look at it and say it's the government. You can look at it from all different angles. One way of looking at it is this incredible land and all its splendor. And the people, and all of the cultures, and all of the creativity and the beauty that comes out of that. I have endless love and pride for all of that. And then there's the evil monolith of America that I fucking have to travel around the world and make excuses for.
  

  This song " 'Tis of Thee," I often wonder what people hear when I'm singing the chorus because different people, different characters appear. [The chorus goes, in part: "We'll never live long enough to undo everything they've done to you."
  

  That part says it all. I'll have to use that Mark Twain quote myself, the next time someone accuses me of being unpatriotic.

• Chosun Journal-Veritas
  

• Desirringgod.org: Do Jews have a divine right in the promised land?
  

• CS Monitor: Papal summit on a church crisis
  

• MSNBC: Sex and the church, A case for change

• NY Times: Genetically, Bison Don't Measure Up to Frontier Ancestors
  

• MoJo: Sex in space
  

• NY Times: Offshore harvest of wind is proposed for Cape Cod --- Reading this story, I am convinced that Oklahoma needs to get on board with wind-power generation. The wind is so strong, especially in the western half of the state and would have much less of an environmental impact than so-called clean plants.
  

  For instance, Duke Energy (or whoever they sold the plant to, I forgot how the deal works out) runs a natural gas powered power plant in Newcastle next to the South Canadian River. They claim that it is a "clean" plant, but if that is true then why is there yellow smoke coming out of it? And why are the folks who live by complaining of increased respiratory ailments? Something fishy is going on here.
  

  Anway, the point is why don't we install giant wind turbines instead? We got tons of wind. Why not use it?

• Village Voice: New Skool Versus Old School in Greenwich Village --- Street Hassle
  

• CS Monitor: It's all in the provinces --- Last month's census figures indicate Canadians are moving to provinces that have more jobs and services.
  

• NY Times: A Push to Preserve Reno's Landmarks as Divorce Capital
  

• Austin Chronicle: Day Trips
  

• NewsOK.com: Family comes together for big powwow --- This story talks about the Fredericksburg (TX) Intertribal Pow Wow, a celebration of the unbroken 1847 peace treaty between the German settlers of Fredericksburg and the Comanche Nation.
  

• The Fred Harvey Collection of historic Oklahoma photographs

• Pixy-led.com is a very nifty blog authored by a girl with a f*** it all attitude. I think what I really like about her blog and website is that she is so passionate about the things she digs. (namely with marine aquaria) Now aquariums might not be my thing, but it is refreshing to find someone who is actually willing to admit they like something in this era of apathy.
  

• Wilwheaton.net - a blog by the actor who played Westly Crusher from Star Trek Next Generation (Thanks to AJY for sending me this link.
  

• Ernie the Attorney : Searching for Truth & Justice (in an unjust world) - an excellent blog by a practicing attorney. Very well done.
  

• MSNBC: Business pros flock to Weblogs --- Popular online diaries create new form of journalism

Spirituality

• NY Times: Pope summons American Cardinals to discuss abuse - I am glad that the Vatican is taking this situation seriously. It is time that the Roman Catholic church stand up against evil committed by a very, very, very tiny minority of priests, and stand up for their faith, traditions, and for the many, many, many priests who are faithful to their vows and serve their congregations tirelessly.
  

  Frankly, I am growing weary of the constant jokes about Catholics. I am not Catholic but there is so much in that faith tradition that I admire and respect. It disgusts me that hating/denigrating Catholics seems to be the last form of "acceptable" bigotry in America today.
  

• MSNBC: Catholics want embattled bishops out --- 70% in poll think bishops who ignored abuse should quit
  
  Thirty-two percent of the Catholics said that their faith in bishops and cardinals had been shaken by the scandals, and 15 percent said the incidents had diminished their faith in their religion.
  
  “One out of seven Catholics in this nationwide poll ... said their faith has been shaken and they might leave the church,” said Maurice Carroll, director of the polling institute at the Hamden, Conn., university.
  

  I agree that the Bishops who concealed abuse must resign, and I think that Bishop (or is it a Cardinal? I forget.) of Boston should resign ASAP. He is doing more damage than good by remaining.

  
  

• MSNBC: New species of whale discovered - Stories like this one make me stand in awe of God's great creativity, that is incredibly diverse that we are still finding new species of animals!

Today while editing on Dmoz.org I found The Minco Community website. Minco is my Dad's hometown and is where my Grandpa Branum ran "Branum's Variety Store" for 40 years, and later my parents for a few years until Wal-mart came to town. Anyway, the Minco website is really nice! I look forward to seeing how it grows in the years to come.

• “THE BIBLE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE” BY: DR. K.A. TWUM-BAAH - a thoughtful sermon on the importance of social justice in the Christian faith
  

• USCatholic.org: Do American flags belong in Catholic churches?
  

• If you're looking for some interesting music, do a search for "Puffy Ami Yumi" with your favorite filesharing program. Puffy Ami Yumi is a musical collaboration consisting of two super-cute Japanese girls, Ami and Yumi. PAY plays many differnent styles of music, but the best I've heard thus far are lounge (Look for "Lemon Kid") and swing ("Boogie Woogie #5" is killer.)
  

  Also, if you have Dish Network, they are playing a PAY video for "Boogie Woogie #5" on World Link TV
  

• NY Times: Off of Bourbon Street, a Jubilant Revival --- a mouth-wateringly interesting story on the recent upsurge in New Orleans resteraunts

Portrait of a Carthusian, 1446
Petrus Christus (Netherlandish, active by 1444, died 1475/76)
The Jules Bache Collection, 1949 (49.7.19)

From: The Metropolitan Museum of New York
posted by J.M. Branum at 12:51 PM | link

• A introductory tract on Quakerism

More content to be added soon.
posted by J.M. Branum at 10:12 PM | link