What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

Title: “The Last Days of Jesus: His Life and Times”

Author: Bill O’Reilly

Rank: 10

Blurb: “Two thousand years ago, Jesus walked across Galilee; everywhere he traveled he gained followers. His contemporaries are familiar historical figures: Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus, Herod the Great, Pontius Pilate. It was an era of oppression, when every man, woman, and child answered to the brutal rule of Rome. In this world, Jesus lived, and in this volatile political and historical context, Jesus died — and changed the world forever.”

Review: “My grandson loves to read and has just been baptized. He is a teenager and big into history of all kinds. He learns a lot from the books by O’Reilly.”

Customers Also Bought: “RectiCare Anorectal Cream”

Footnote: Actually, Paul changed the world forever. Or Constantine. We don’t tend to credit sand for pearls.

The Last Days of Jesus [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

31 Comments

Hey Mr. Oh’Really, the Boudica and her broadsword want to talk with you.

I want another meltdown. Someone, probably on MSNBC, needs to do 15 minutes on every wrong thing that’s ever come out of his mouth. Sure, you could fill a season of television with all of them, but just pick the best ones. Let him destroy a set. I need this.

Hope the Holy Ghost writers make good bank.

TJ/ Because roller coaster.

Off topic, but when are we not: I gave a talk yesterday to a group of artists on global warming and the arts community, my thesis being that the enviro community has done a crappy job of communicating the problem and solutions to people on the street, and maybe they can do better. During the Q and A period, one privileged young snot spoke up and said that posters are not art. My friend who runs this outfit: https://www.politicalgraphics.org/home.html would smack him upside the head.

@Dodgerblue: the enviro community has done a crappy job of communicating the problem

I think you’re stuck with that.

Read “Team of Rivals” recently. In that telling, Abolitionists were considered crackpots, and Lincoln resisted issuing the Emancipation Proclamation until he felt he had no alternative. He would have been happy with something less, but the South was recalcitrant beyond reason.

So, congratulations: You’re William Lloyd Garrison.

Beyond that, you’re faced with the problem that Americans can’t see beyond their noses, and they’ll deny what they see until it’s too late — until we’re well beyond the tipping point, and the consequences have already set in. It’s not just Fox News and the Extraction Combine — you’re asking folks to change how they live, and they’re going to resist that because the problem isn’t apparent.

Solution? Pick off what you can. The computing industry is slowly evolving into better materials use and better server-farm energy management. There’s a blue tub in my driveway for dumping recyclables. Water/soil conservation districts know what they’re up against, since they were created in the wake of the Dust Bowl.

You’re also Sisyphus, after all. You’re just gonna have to keep pushing that boulder up the hill.

@nojo: that vasectomy in ’97 keeps looking better and better … I would feel horrible subjecting a child to what’s coming.

@blogenfreude: Oh, and global population has increased from 3 billion in 1960 to 7.1 billion today. We need to be more than twice as efficient with our energy use — and everything else — just to stay in place.

@nojo: The Chinese want to live like we do. We should tell them that’s wrong?

Case in point: fracking. Polluted water, aquifer exhaustion, earthquakes, for chrissake — and still folks are denying the consequences.

Part of that is Fox/Energy, of course, but the folks it affects pales to the number of folks it benefits — and the folks it benefits aren’t gonna listen to that Envirofascist crap if their home HVAC bills are at stake. We’re already throwing fellow citizens overboard, but heck, we’ve been doing that since 1981. It’s the American Way.

@Dodgerblue: If we hadn’t (somewhat) solved our smog problems in the 1960s, I don’t know that we’d be able to do it now. LA could easily be Beijing, but for an historical hiccup.

@nojo: I’ve given talks in Beijing about how CA has (mostly) cleaned up its air while maintaining GDP grown far in excess of the US national average. Maybe somebody will listen.

Re fracking, most of the activity now in CA is in SW Kern County, in the Temblor Range. And why does the Temblor Range have that name? Because just west of those hills is the fucking SAN ANDREAS FAULT. What could go wrong?

@Dodgerblue: Heck, that’s easy: All you do is create an electronics industry that exports all its pollution-causing manufacturing to… uh…

@Dodgerblue: Got it. The solution isn’t Art, but Memes. Have Ed Begley do a segment with Zach Galifianakis.

@nojo: I’ve met Ed Begley Jr. a couple of times. Nice guy, not as wacky as you may think.

@Dodgerblue:
Gene Hackman’s version of Lex Luthor was right. So where’s Otisburg? I’m guessing somewhere in the Inland Empire.

But seriously, sigh. That is “really” “well” “thought” out.

@nojo:
I’d bless the (acid) rains down in Africa.

Wait. What does this have to do with musical theatre?

@Benedick: Sondheim better grab it before Philip Glass does something monstrous.

@nojo: Mr Sondheim can’t get anything produced.

@Benedick: Put some snow in it. I hear that’s popular.

Mickey Rooney died today. Who was his first wife, and what did she famously say about a later husband?

@Dodgerblue: Ooh, I think I know! Was it Ava Gardner and the thing about Frank Sinatra being ninety-something pounds but it was all cock? Either way, gotta love that quote.

@mellbell: Man, my generation is really the worse off for not knowing things like that.

@mellbell: Well, as a 49-state baby, Mickey Rooney (and his wives) was already an unknown reference in Mad for me.

I know it as Ava Gardner re Sinatra when he visited her during the filming of Mogambo. And she said it to the British Viceroy who asked her what she saw in such a scrawny pipsqueak? To which she replied, “He may only be a 120lbs. But 110 of it is cock.”

I thought Mickey Rooney had died ten years ago. My bad.

@mellbell: It was Ava Gardner, and Benedick has the story as I’ve heard it.

@SanFranLefty: We finally took a game from your boys last night. Jeez.

@Dodgerblue: Yeah, I was starting to get embarrassed for the Dodgers by Sunday afternoon.

Meanwhile, speaking of enviro messaging, how about the fact that Bloomberg finally noticed that global corporations have to pay major surcharges to expats breathing stinquey air? That article was posted by one of my most conservative friends, currently living overseas in an Asian country, with the comment that never in a million years would he want to live in Beijing.

P.S. You’re going to rock tomorrow. Just make sure to drop “stinque” at least twice in oral arguments. And yes, I’ll be streaming.

@SanFranLefty: I think I went down 3-0. Judge Smith has a theory of the law that is plain stupid.

@SanFranLefty: As in: Is it just me or does it stinque in here?

Pardon my stinque.

M’lud, that question is a stinquer.

And such as.

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