|Christmas Options (updated 11/9/08)

You have at least 3 options for how to approach gifts during the upcoming Christmas season:

1. Buy nothing
--Buy Nothing Christmas '08 (related: Buy Nothing Day)
--Advent Conspiracy (also at Imago Dei)

2. Buy from an NGO gift catalogue
--ADRA
--World Vision
--Heifer International

3. Buy stuff for me (listed by alpha order within each category, more-or-less)

Music
--All Rebel Rockers (Michael Franti)
--Deconstruction (Justin McRoberts)
--Fight with Tools (Flobots)

Magazines
--Geez
--Prism
--Sojourners
--Third Way
--yes!

Films
--A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict
--The Corporation
--The Future of Food (2-disc special edition)
--The Ordinary Radicals
--War Made Easy

Books
--And You Call Yourself a Christian (Lupton)
--Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire (Walsh & Keesmat)
--Disruptive Religion (Smith)
--For the Beauty of the Earth (Bouma-Prediger)
--I am Not a Social Activist (Sider)
--I Pledge Allegiance (Phillips & Tsatalbasidis)
--Jesus Wants to Save Christians (Bell & Golden)
--Just Peacemaking (Stassen)
--The Peacemaking Remnant
--The Poverty and Justice Bible
--Seventh-day Adventists in Time of War (Wilcox)
--Simply Christian (Wright)
--Waging Nonviolent Struggle (Sharp, etc.)
--War is a Force That Give Us Meaning (Hedges)

4. BONUS

Get together with some friends, do some singing, eat some figgy pudding, shovel someone's sidewalk, and cuddle up to watch What Would Jesus Buy? from Netflix. I guess this is getting close to #1.

4.2. BONUS

Or get me a shirt from 1844. Ha! (Thanks for the heads-up, Barber Banter)

|Taxi to the Dark Side

We finally watched Taxi to the Dark Side, the last film on my list of 5 War-on Terror documentaries I've wanted to see.

While the other four (and others like War Made Easy) were disturbing, this one was especially intense because it focused on the interrogation techniques and patterns of abuse from Afghanistan to Iraq. The film loosely follows the story of a young Afghan, Dilawar, who was the 2nd prisoner to die in the Bagram facilities in a week.

At the Academy Awards, I heard director Alex Gibney say this in his acceptance speech: "This is dedicated to two people who are no longer with us, Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi driver, and my father, a navy interrogator who urged me to make this film because of his fury about what was being done to the rule of law. Let’s hope we can turn this country around, move away from the dark side and back to the light" (copied from Wikipedia).

Unsolved mysteries:

(1) How a man, the president, who claims to be a Christian can advocate for extreme interrogation techniques (aka torture). WWJD?

(2) How the United States can spurn the Geneva Conventions (ICRC info).

(3) How the U.S. can reject Habeas Corpus.

|Analysis of Words and Diet

Jon Stewart's team is so good. Check out this clip comparing two of Bush's bigger crisis speeches.

Also, today I came across an interesting analysis of eating locally. I wrote about it at AEA.

In conclusion we watched War Made Easy last night.