The Dish

It can lead to what the Brits elegantly refer to as "cock-ups."

Christianists, according to this site, are now on the verge of marketing a video game that places thirteen-year-olds as warriors in the End-Times. Yep: now teens can wage war and practise murdering infidels on a computer, befopre they have to do the real thing after the Rapture. Here’s the site for Left Behind games (from which the graphic above is taken). Money quote:

This game immerses children in present-day New York City – 500 square blocks, stretching from Wall Street to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the United Nations headquarters, and Harlem. The game rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian. The game also offers players the opportunity to switch sides and fight for the army of the AntiChrist, releasing cloven-hoofed demons who feast on conservative Christians and their panicked proselytes (who taste a lot like Christian).

I’m not sure who the AntiChrist will be. Maybe the designers are waiting to find out who becomes the Democratic party nominee.

(Graphic: courtesy of the Left Behind Games site.)

Cathy Young notices some academic double-standards.

Well, not so great. The signal, like a cell-phone signal, went wobbly a little before Philly and has been dodgy ever since. Now it’s back. I guess country-wide broadband access is enough to ask – but traveling at the same time? We’re not quite there yet. That’s especially true since the electricity keeps going off in the train-car at random moments, requiring the connection to reboot. Still, I’m posting this chugging toward NYC in the quiet car. So don’t give up yet.

A Jewish reader writes:

In principle, I could not agree with you more about the alarming intolerance that many Christianists display.  Indeed, I chuckled and silently cheered (like many others) as you took down Pat Robertson for his grandiose leg-pressing dreams.  And yet, at the same time I find myself in quite a bind on days like today, when I turn on the television and see that very same Pat Robertson passionately pleading with his constituency to donate to impoverished Jews in Israel.  As a Russian Jew and a strong supporter of Israel’s right to exist in safety and peace, it blows my mind that I have to turn in desperation to the Bible Network in order to find any support of the Jewish state or acknowledgment of the lack of moral equivalency between terrorism and self-defense; while most other media outlets have as their favorite pastime the portrayal of Israel as some Goliath state seeking to destroy all in its midst (the #1 threat to world peace, if you remember), the only solid support for the Jewish people in Israel comes from the very people whom I detest for their intolerance on other fronts.

This reality puts me in a rather uncomfortable spot. Because, the fact is, I cannot help but be grateful to Christianists like Pat Robertson for their support for the cause most important to me.   Their hatred of gays has to go on the back burner (despite how important that cause is to me as well), because what is going on in Israel seems to be much more a matter of life and death.  Perhaps when the rest of the world gains some sense and stops trying to deligitimize the Jewish state at every opportunity, I will be able to break from my uncomfortable allegiance with the Christianists. But in a world gone mad, it seems only fitting that such mad allegiances should exist.

Just wait for the rapture … and such alliances may not seem so sensible.

"You’ve got to tell the people in Washington not to nominate Hillary. It would do so much damage to the Missouri Democratic Party. I disagree with the way she’s going to the right, but my biggest problem with it is that it’s not working. People don’t believe she’s a moderate," – Nora Walcott, outgoing executive director of the Greene County, Missouri, Democrats.

(Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty)

"These gays wanted to lay flowers at the grave of the unknown warrior. This is a provocation. It is desecration of a sacred place. These gays go there, and openly go up to the monument. It is a contamination. People burst through and of course they beat them up," – the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, whose cops prevented a peaceful gay pride march in Moscow last weekend. My own blog-coverage of the melee as it unfurled last Saturday can be found here. Meanwhile, in Romania …

I guess we all get our cheap thrills somewhere, but my latest one is blogging on the Acela train to NYC. I’m doing an event tonight at the 92d Street Y, with my old friend, Dan Savage, and Erica Jong, orgasm pro. Usually, I’d read a book or the Economist. But I just got my new MacBook Pro and a Kycera router with Verizon wireless that lets me blog anywhere in America. Not too expensive, as the Knights who say "Ni" might say. And here we are. My first transit blog-post. All aboard!

I pass along the following pieces of grim news simply out of a duty to notice them. A reader told me today that he could no longer read the blog because it was so depressing. I try and cheer it up with funny links, videos, the windows series, and so on. But the news from the great struggle of our time is currently pretty grim. We have the worst rioting in Afghanistan since the liberation; we have news of possibly the worst American atrocity of the war in Haditha; we have Anbar province going backwards not forwards in Iraq; we have basic infrastructure in Iraq deteriorating; we have a massive hunger-strike at Gitmo; and we have a collapse of morale at home. There are ways to hope; and there is a case for patience. But this blog, unlike some others, is not into denial.

(Photo: Haditha, last November, by Lucian Read/WPN.)

"This is a district we should never lose. It’s the stink of Cunningham, and the Bush problem," – a "longtime Republican operative" on the special election for the district once represented by Randy "Duke" Cunningham.