The Dish

"There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds," – Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Wiki-bio here.

A message from P. Diddy and South Park for election day. (Some obscenities, so don’t click if you don’t appreciate naughty words.)

Another actual reader review:

I was raised in an Irish-Catholic New Deal family, was an undergraduate member of SDS in the 60s and am the least likely fan of your new book; I like adventure. And I am in the middle of reading your excellent book. Imagine my surprise as I was wading through chapter 2 on the fundamentalist psyche and realized it was the best damn description of Christian, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalisms I have ever encountered. 

I appreciate your clarity, honesty and dedication to humane values. I have been searching for a wide ranging but common sense grounded analysis of what makes fundamentalism tick. You have taken that clock apart and put it back together. While I will mostly likely never agree with conservative politics ( I was, for more than 20 years, a legal services attorney ), you have restored my basic faith in the generic decency of most people, regardless of their political allegiance and shaken my view of conservatives as irredeemable right wing reactionaries.

This parody of the kind of ads the GOP has been running this campaign is too good to miss. Enjoy:

Helsinki, Finland, dusk.

"I think one of the biggest dangers here is solitude. Someone has to be there to interrogate and investigate every aspect of our lives," – Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler, on James Dobson’s radio show, on lessons from the Haggard affair.

I figure you’ve heard enough from me on the issues in this campaign; and there is some propriety in allowing these civilly sacred hours of voting to pass in silence. (Pssst: VOTE DEMOCRAT!). But my policy has always been to report news – real news – as soon as I get it. So if I get any access to exit polls early, I will pass the data along to you. The caveat, of course, is that these are exit polls. They may not be accurate. They weren’t in 2004. But they are data, and as long as you can judge them with the right mix of interest and contempt (think of watching the O’Reilly factor as an analogy), then take them for what they’re worth. Here’s a handy guide to the exit polls. Stay tuned.

From Czeslaw Milosz‘s "On Angels":

"I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draw near
another one
do what you can."

An abridgment of A.R. Ammons‘ "Corson’s Inlet," found in his collected poems:

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
    the surf

                    rounded a naked headland
                    and returned
    along the inlet shore:

… there is serenity:

        no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan,
or thought:
no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept:
terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities
of escape open: no route shut, except in
   the sudden loss of all routes:

       I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will
not run to that easy victory:
       still around the looser, wider forces work:
       I will try
     to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening
scope, but enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
       that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.