united states

Chris Knight's avatar

…and my anger and disbelief at what I am watching right now in this country, just won’t let me be as mercurial a wordsmith as some have alleged me to be.

So I’m going to relent to brute-force attack.

Regarding how President Obama is trying to force Catholic hospitals and other institutions to fund birth control, against that faith’s beliefs and teachings:

If this isn’t a situation that demands civil disobedience and even flagrant lawbreaking against the government, then I don’t know what possibly WOULD be!

I try my best not to judge the spiritual state of another. For the first time, I am inclined to be compelled to wonder about that of Barack Obama. How can anyone of conscience even conceive of mandating such a thing?...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Working on a few things behind the scenes, but felt like posting something tonight. And that’s when I discovered that YouTube is hosting Threads.

Sure, why not.

I first saw this movie in July of 1986 but it wasn’t until I was in college a long time later that I found out the title. We were visiting family in Florida and playing a game of Monopoly in our motel room with my cousins and we thought we’d put some TV on. It was a PBS station showing… some very dark and gritty film about nuclear war in England.

I was 12 years old. I soon lost all interest in Monopoly and became transfixed to this film. The image of the young woman chewing through her newborn baby’s umbilical cord is something that has haunted me to this day.

Threads originally aired on BBC Two in Great Britain in September ...

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Immediately following his death in 1799 at the age of 67, a plan was proposed to reanimate the corpse of George Washington.

The strange but true tale of raising up the first President of the United States as one of the undead is found on IO9.com’s Secret History feature. It’s long been known that Washington likely died from waaaay too much bleeding at the hands of physicians who were trying to treat the great man’s case of sore throat. Back in the day it was prevailing wisdom that one of the primary causes of illness was “bad blood”. Get a flu or fever or something and the village doctor would come over with his bloodlettin’ instruments (or in some cases, live leeches) and commence to draining the precious red vino of life from your veins. And that’s what happened to poor George, who probably would have survived the ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

In recent days I have been mulling over a notion for two related bits of possible legislation, and I would like to submit them for discussion.

It seems to me that there are some people in this land who refuse to acknowledge the right of others to seek after and call out to God as best they can, in sincere and dignified manner. I do not believe that the Founding Fathers possibly had “freedom of speech” or “freedom of expression” in mind when such individuals take drastic action to interfere with and even deprive their fellow citizens of coming together for purposes of solace and worship. In more polite days, such individuals would have been run out of town on a rail, if not outright shot for the publick good. But since the constabulary frowns on that sort of thing lately…

First, I would like to suggest the Racketeering Against ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

I am officially coining a new word: “urinocracy”.

It’s the best term that I can come up with to describe what this country has become, after observing what is going on with the Republican primaries this election season. Then it occurred to me that this really is what the United States has devolved into.

What is a “urinocracy”?

Urinocracy (noun): Government of, by, for and determined by adults who engage in pissing matches with each other.

Seriously: Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney? Are either of these two grown men showing us the maturity needed for the most powerful job in the world?...

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So it’s coming out that a bunch of Republicans, including senators Orrin Hatch and Mitch McConnell, are expressing concern about President Obama making recess appointments when the Senate was not in session. Former U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese is saying that Obama is committing “a breathtaking violation of the separation of powers.”

Oh please…

The Justice Department headed by Eric Holder is defending the appointments as legal. Y’know, just like the Justice Department under President George W. Bush defended his firing of the United States attorneys as being legal. Just like John Yoo went out of his way to argue why his boss Bush should be given powers of a dictator in everything but name. Just like Samuel Alito sought to increase the power of the President by means of redefining so-called “signing statements”.

But now the shoe is on the other foot. It’s a Democrat in ...

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Found this curious lil’ article by one Richard Thornton at Examiner.com, as it was cited a number of times throughout this past day. If there’s anything of merit to this thesis, there exists the possibility that the Maya civilization once stretched from the Yucatan as far north as Blairsville, Georgia!

From the article…

Archaeological zone 9UN367 at Track Rock Gap, near Georgia’s highest mountain, Brasstown Bald, is a half mile (800 m) square and rises 700 feet (213 m) in elevation up a steep mountainside. Visible are at least 154 stone masonry walls for agricultural terraces, plus evidence of a sophisticated irrigation system and ruins of several other stone structures. Much more may be hidden underground. It is possibly the site of the fabled city of Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto failed to find in 1540, and certainly one of the most important archaeological discoveries in recent times.

...
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I hate to say “I told you so” buuuuuuut…

For quite a long time now and most recently five days ago, I have argued that going to war in Iraq would have disastrous long-term consequences and chief among those is that without a “strongman” to hold that country together, Iraq will tear itself apart into sectarian strife. The classic model for my thesis is Yugoslavia: a “nation” that much like Iraq was cobbled together from leftover realms in the aftermath of World War I. And just as Marshal Tito kept the various factions like the Croats, the Bosnians, the Serbs etc. from killing each other, so did Saddam Hussein put a lid on the Sunnis, the Shiites, the Kurds and everyone else from destroying Iraq from within.

That’s NOT any justification for Saddam Hussein, mind you. The man was an evil bastard. It’s just the peculiar dynamic of ...

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On this day, the Iraq War has officially drawn to a close. It began in March of 2003, lasting nearly nine years (more than twice as long as the United States took to fight and win World War II across both the Pacific and European theaters).

The Iraq war cost our own country nearly one trillion dollars. It also cost the lives of more than 4,500 American military personnel and more than 100,000 Iraqis (many of whom were innocent civilians not attached to Saddam Hussein’s army).

Now… can anyone finally tell me why it is that we went to war in Iraq in the first place? “Enforcing sanctions” won’t cut it. We lost too many lives and wasted way too much money on this fiasco. What has come of it? An Iraq which will sooner than later tear itself apart across ethnic and religious lines (specifically Sunni, Shiite and ...

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