Thursday--

Our media has covered Paris in nauseating detail, most of it for dramatic effect and very little truly informative. Every so often someone, in the blogosphere because the media pundits are pretty much clueless, has an interesting take and tries to put the carnage into some kind of meaningful context. Today Tom Englehardt has done a good job on that score. All my adult life I have heard it said that "America needs an enemy." I don't know who said it first but it appears that we have found the perfect enemy in "terrorism." It can't be tied to specific and identifiable people in specific and identifiable territories. Anyone anywhere can be a "terrorist" so the treat is eternal. Given Englehardt's observations perhaps we should come to the same conclusion the computer did in War Games: the only winning move is to not play.

And here is an illustration of Englehardt's point about the elimination of the gray areas. This is Us vs. Them at its most black and white.

Morford has a good post about America's real religion as opposed to the fake religiosity of our Repthuglican candidates who think we should close mosques or admit only Christian refugees. It is a religion I left a long time ago.

So "the religion of consumption has proven unfulfilling." Evidently, people are still buying but not the things that drive the profits of the big retailers. We aren't buying "stuff" but are buying the big ticket items and "experiences." We aren't buying those either.