Well, this NYT piece on Obama raises the uncomfortable proposition that Obama's minister of choice is a total whackjob. Fine. After eight years of Bush II I'm quite used to our Presidents having worrisome crazies as spirtual advisers/influencers.

What does bother me is Obama's friend's embrace of Afrocentrism, a subject that is as much junk history as Bush's friend's creationist views are junk science.

Anyway, I guess I'm just really fed up with the Christian crap among our country's candidates.

I worry that this book may turn out to be nothing more than conservative movement propaganda, but nevertheless, if Asa and I had a book club, this would probably be on the list.

Modern liberals have invested a great deal in the notion that America was founded as a secular state, with religion relegated to the private sphere. David Gelernter argues that America is not secular at all, but a powerful religious idea--indeed, a religion in its own right.

This talk of America-as-religion, got me thinking about how the ancient Hebrews slowly evolved their faith over the centuries before Christ so that Yahweh emerged as not just a god, or the "God of Israel," but *the* God; all other gods were false. America has evolved a similar view with regards to its government.

According to the myth of Nature's Nation, capitalism and democracy are the only "natural," and therefore legitimate, economic and political systems. Foremost in Kennedy's mind when he committed the nation to landing an American on the moon by the end of the 1960's was the necessity to demonstrate to the Soviet Union and to the world, that democracy was the right government and capitalism was the right economic system.

The above quotation is taken from a great blog entry on the Apollo Program vis-a-vis Manifest Destiny.

So says Georgia town. And for quite some time, to boot. They do have some exceptions to this law, but I still don't like the idea of the government telling me I *have* to own a gun anymore than the idea of the government telling me I *can't* own a gun.

The city's trying to make a developer set aside 25% of its new units for low-income (i.e. rich people in any other city in America). Anyway, the developer's taking the city to court. There are a lot of things going on here that bug me. (What follows are my own non-professional opinions, observations obviously)

1. The city (thanks in part to our bought-and-sold, idiot mayor -- see: Century City developments) is much too quick to ok new housing developments and far too slow to ok any sort of freeway or mass transits projects. This is because housing and even mixed-use office/housing developments represent a tax base. They pay out millions. Roads, bike trails, train tracks on the other hand, those cost money. So what are we left with? More housing, yes. But not the infrastructure to support it. Which leads to more sprawl (be it horizontal or vertical) and more pollution and a lower quality of life.

2. The city forcing developers to set aside low-income units is the state interfereing in the market. And this usually drives up real estate prices (as developers charge more for what's left to off-set market losses), not to mention squeezes out smalltime, independent landowners who are stuck singlehandedly subsidizing tenants when dwellings are priced artificially low. In turn, this makes it harder for landowners to build or buy, which in turns means the only people building apartments/condos are massive real estate developers.

Jeez, I just confused myself. Maybe I should stop.