1. Eshet Chayil:
She’s immune to the horror stories by now. While it’s the first time I’ve ever heard such an awful story, she hears them on a regular basis. The youngest caller this year, she tells me, was only 11.
2. Christopher Skinner has a fascinating review and overview of The Wife of Jesus: Ancient Texts and Modern Scandals, by Anthony Le Donne. And Peter Enns has an interview with Le Donne. The key here is that Le Donne’s answer to the question “Did Jesus have a wife?” is far less important than what he makes of the meaning of the question, and how he goes about addressing it. Here, via Enns, is Le Donne on the subject of Mary Magdalene:
The legacy of Mary Magdalene is a key thread in my book. The “wife of Jesus,” in many ways, is a construct that we’ve invented in the last decade, a cultural symbol that has emerged quite recently in our collective imagination.
This development provides an interesting mirror for the Christianized West — Magdalene’s legacy illustrates much more about us than it reveals about her as a historical figure. Mary’s 2000-year evolution from disciple, to obscurity, to prostitute, to royalty, to girlfriend, to wife reflects our sexual fascinations at almost every turn.
Unfortunately, our imaginations have not been kind to Mary.
3. “The Wilhelm.”
4. Josh Marshall directs our attention to something called the “Patriot Survival Plan,” which he describes as “the ur-document that brings together so much of today’s neo-gold-buggism, Prepperism, paranoia about Obama’s impending martial law, gun hoarding, the coming descent into urban warfare, food shortages and crazed mobs of dark people.”
He’s not wrong. This is transparent hucksterism. Fear makes people vulnerable. That vulnerability makes them targets for scammers like this. Getting fleeced by such scammers makes them even more financially insecure and thus more fearful and more vulnerable. Lather, lather, lather. Repeat.
5. Broadband Internet access in America is slower than in Europe and Asia, but on the other hand it is also much more expensive.
So if you’re reading this in America, you’re having to put up with a sluggishness that readers in other countries don’t have to deal with, and you’re paying a lot for the privilege.
The cooperative monopoly between Comcast and Verizon in my area is lucrative because customers don’t have any other options to keep them honest. If other options are ever permitted to arise, though, the biggest challenge for Comcast and Verizon won’t be trying to compete with newer technology, it will be their having to compete while saddled with decades of ill will from their former customers. No one likes them because there’s no reason anyone should. Overcharging for lousy service because you can is not a long-term plan for instilling customer loyalty.
6. Michael Schaffer takes aim at some fish in a barrel: “What if Politico had covered the Civil War?”
NEW BATTLEGROUND POLL: Lincoln’s negatives are “through the roof” in Va., N.C., S.C., Ga., Miss., Ala., Louisiana, Ark., Tenn. PLAY-BOOK TRUTH BOMB: Lincoln is not going to improve these numbers if he refuses to press the flesh. A playbooker telegraphs: “I don’t know what happened to the gregarious guy we saw in 1860. Jeff Davis hasn’t been invited to the White House for cocktails once since Abe became president!”
7. Two things that transcend the particularities of culture, language and religion: 1) The liberating spirit of Bob Marley’s music; and 2) Ridiculous attempts to restrict the agency of women through arbitrary pseudo-religious claptrap that has nothing to do with the actual religion in question.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In