yallerdawg
yallerdawg's Journal'Atomic Blonde' premieres tonight on HBO!
If you want to see Charlize Theron "fight like a girl" this would be the wrong damn movie! 
Gritty, hard and very "Daniel Craig-y Bond-like."
I'm watching it - again!!! 
"March For Our Lives" in Alabama. Yes, that's right. Alabama!
State Capitol, Montgomery
As of March 24, 2018 (not counting suicides)
Yes. March for our lives.http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
McConnell files cloture on omnibus, setting up first vote at 1 a.m. Saturday
The Dotard is scheduled to leave for Mar-a-Lago Friday. The government shuts down at midnight.Will he stay and sign the bill, will he sign it and cut out in the middle of the night, or will the gutless coward stay at the White House Saturday and greet 500,000 marchers?
Source: The Hill, by Jordain Carney
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is teeing up the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill approved earlier Thursday by the House to stave off a possible government shutdown that would begin at midnight Friday.
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Republicans have made it clear they want to vote Thursday, allowing lawmakers to leave for a two-week recess as scheduled.
But in order to do that, McConnell needs the consent of every senator — including GOP Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.).
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Read it all at: http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/379834-mcconnell-files-cloture-on-omnibus-setting-up-first-vote-at-1-am-Saturday
What could Rand be thinking?
"Show Biz Kids" came on my car radio last night - serious flashback!
Rick Derringer on guitar!
So Christianity is no longer the norm? Going underground will do it good
Young people rejecting religion is not bad news for Christianity: the faith needs to embrace its weirdness and mysterySource: The Guardian, by Paul Ormerod
It’s quite a statement. “Christianity as a default, as a norm, is gone, and probably gone for good,” said Prof Stephen Bullivant this week, in response to figures showing widespread rejection of Christianity among Europe’s young people. He adds a slender caveat: “Or at least for the next 100 years.”
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At the risk of sounding in denial, this may not be entirely bad news for Christianity. Arguably one of the most toxic developments in the history of the faith was its shift from being a radical political and spiritual movement to allowing itself to be co-opted by forces of oppression and militarism. Becoming a default or norm effectively drained it of much of its energy.
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And those of an older generation hopeful that spurning religion means rejecting irrationality may be taken aback by a supposed recent renaissance in, of all things, astrology, along with what Lucie Greene of marketing firm J Walter Thompson calls a “reframing of new age practices, very much geared toward a millennial and young Gen X quotient”. One theory is that many young people shun the more arid extremes of rationalism, where everything is numbered and quantified, and all life and culture is squashed and processed into data. Maybe empiricism has had its day. And as the sociologist Linda Woodhead has noted of young Britons with no religion, relatively few describe themselves as atheist.
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In the past few decades, some parts of the church that tend to reject the trappings of religion have tried desperately to appear “normal”. But for a generation that prizes authenticity, maybe that’s just a turn-off. Rather than being just a slightly rubbish version of the rest of the world, with slightly rubbish coffee and slightly rubbish music, maybe it needs to embrace its difference, its strangeness, its weirdness, its mystery. Christianity as a norm, gone for good? Maybe that’s good news for everyone.
Read it all at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/22/christianity-norm-underground-mystery
What evangelicals looked like before they entered the political fray
Source: WaPo, by Gregory Alan Thornbury
President Jimmy Carter and Larry Norman stand together during a White House event celebrating gospel music in September 1979. (Don Riggott/Larry Norman Estate)
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Perhaps the high watermark of the Jesus Movement was “Explo ’72” in Dallas at the Cotton Bowl, where over 100,000 teenagers — dubbed “Jesus Freaks” by the media — crowded into the stadium to hear the evangelist Billy Graham preach and to listen to their favorite Christian musicians perform, chief among them being Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, the black gospel singer Andraé Crouch and Norman. Time magazine ran a cover story on the phenomenon as a leading national news item, calling Norman “the top solo artist in his field.” Life did the same and expressed fascination with this non-free-love, peace-loving and drug-free version of the hippies. Soon, Graham himself would feel burned by getting too close to Richard Nixon and naively defending the president before the truth about Watergate was known. From that point onward, the nation’s most famous preacher shied away from political jockeying, and generally stuck close to his core message, which was basically, “God loves you. Jesus died for you.”
Evangelicals had a social conscience too, though, in the 1970s, and, for a brief moment, showed promise as a group of people who now had positions of leadership in America. Newsweek dubbed 1976, “The Year of the Evangelical.” Jimmy Carter, a Baptist Sunday school teacher, professed a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” and was elected president. Graham broadcast his nationally televised “crusades,” held in packed-out stadiums, and was a guest on “The Dick Cavett Show.” Author Francis Schaeffer was so popular with college students that purportedly even rock stars like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page were reading his books. By 1979, Bob Dylan made headlines by claiming he had become a “born again” follower of Jesus. The newly converted Dylan began attending church at the Vineyard fellowship, a Bible study that began, appropriately enough, in Norman’s living room.
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Carter and Norman called upon evangelical churches to do something about poverty and protested institutional racism — messages they carried nationally but also in white conservative churches in particular. But when Carter’s presidency faltered, Ronald Reagan found a different cadre of Christians with whom to share common cause and rock the vote. The relatively apolitical Graham was overshadowed by new voices in the “Moral Majority.” Television evangelists such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson gained ascendance. Fundamentalist preachers such as Jimmy Swaggart and James Robison then began to have the ear of the White House, and both reviled Christian rock music in public — with Swaggart famously calling Norman’s music “spiritual fornication.”
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Within Christian circles, Hollywood, rock and roll and anything that sounded “liberal” were now the enemy in the minds of the televangelists and their legions of followers. The culture wars proceeded apace, and they kept the faithful mobilized. Subsequent evangelicals didn’t get contracts with secular record labels, as Norman once did. And if they did manage to do so, they stayed silent about their religious views. So increasingly evangelicals doubled down on building their own record companies, publishing houses, and increasingly, their own subculture. And the only time they poked their heads above their own wall was to hand out a voter’s guide or endorse a political candidate. By the time University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter coined the term “culture wars” in 1991, the die had been cast. No longer could evangelicals be a part of the cultural mainstream, and eventually they would come to be known in the mind’s eye of the public as little more than the Republican Party, now Donald Trump’s party, for the foreseeable future.
Read it all at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/03/20/what-evangelicals-looked-like-before-they-entered-the-political-fray/
Historian Michael Beschloss reminds us:
https://twitter.com/BeschlossDC"NO COLLUSION"
"13 hardened Democrats"
"WITCH HUNT"
Known by the company you keep
Faith-Based 'I Can Only Imagine' Soars With $17.1 Million Launch
Source: Variety, by Dave McNary
Recent estimates for “I Can Only Imagine” had been in the $2 million-$8 million range. It rang up the top per-site average by far among this weekend’s wide release movies with $10,476, and it notched an A+ CinemaScore among patrons.
More at: http://variety.com/2018/film/news/i-can-only-imagine-box-office-faith-based-film-1202729700/
Film Review: ‘I Can Only Imagine’
The Population Bomb Has Been Defused
Many of us grew up with and heard for decades how the inevitable overpopulation of our planet would kill us all.Then, something else happened.
The lesson here? Buck up, kids! "Something else" is never predicted, but quite often happens!
Source: Bloomberg, by Noah Smith
In 1968, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb,” warning that unchecked population growth would lead to mass starvation in the 1970s. He was just as wrong as Malthus. Global population did surge, but food production managed to keep up.
But it’s looking like the dire predictions of Malthus and Ehrlich will never come to pass. Unlike other animals, humanity has voluntarily limited its reproduction. The population bomb has probably been defused.
Read it all at: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-16/decline-in-world-fertility-rates-lowers-risks-of-mass-starvation
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