The Tory Party

Tales of Mere Existence

Films and Comics by Lev

I gotta start making tiny movies like this. Seriously. I got no excuse.

Your Daily Obama - Fighting Terrorism

(Reprinted without permission, and without commentary.)

“Osama bin Laden understands that he cannot defeat or even incapacitate the United States in a conventional war. What he and his allies can do is inflict enough pain to provoke a reaction of the sort we’ve seen in Iraq — a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country, which in turn spurs on insurgencies based on religious sentiment and nationalist pride, which in turn necessitates a lengthy and difficult U.S. occupation, which in turn leads to an escalating death toll on the part of U.S. troops and the local civilian population. All of this fans anti-American sentiment among Muslims, increases the pool of potential terrorist recruits, and prompts the American public to question not only the war but also those policies that project us into the Islamic world in the first place.

That’s the plan for winning a war from a cave, and so far, at least, we are playing to script. To change that script, we’ll need to make sure that any exercise of American military power helps rather than hinders our broader goals: to incapacitate the destructive potential of terrorist networks and win this global battle of ideas.”

- Barack Obama, “The Audacity of Hope”, p. 308

Next time: “What does this mean in practical terms?”

Song of Solomon/Bernini Mashup

Um. I don’t really know what this is about. I was going for a more sophisticated concept, but this ended up like something out of a naughtier Harriet Carter catalog:

And I put this on a poster at Zazzle for printing. You know — for that niche Bible/Greek mythology/Renaissance market.

Somewhere Kate Bush is happy and doesn’t know why.

Your Daily Obama - Faith

(Reprinted without permission from The Audacity of Hope. Presented with no commentary, because Obama speaks for himself, which is nice.)

The story of Abraham and Isaac offers a simple but powerful example… Of course, we know the happy ending… And yet it is fair to say that if any of us saw a twenty-first-century Abraham raising the knife on the roof of his apartment building, we would call the police; we would wrestle him down; even if we saw him lower the knife at the last minute, we would expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away and charge Abraham with child abuse. We would do so because God doesn’t reveal Himself or His angels to all of us in a single moment. We do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experience may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that are possible for all of us to know, understanding that a part of what we know to be true — as individuals of communities of faith — will be true for us alone


Finally, any reconciliation between faith and democratic pluralism requires some sense of proportion. This is not entirely foreign to religious doctrine; even those who claim the Bible’s inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, based on a sense that some passages — the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ’s divinity — are central to Christan faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life. The American people intuitively understand this, which is why the majority of Catholics practice birth control and some of those opposed to gay marriage nevertheless are opposed to a constitutional amendment banning it. Religious leadership need not accept such wisdom in couseling their flocks, but they should recognize this wisdom in their politics.

- Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, pp. 220 - 221

Warning - Male Gaze

Heh heh. This was commissioned by Stephan Zielinski, science-fiction author, photographer, and fellow zombie-enthusiast, as he sought a caveat for his photographs of this year’s Dyke Festival in San Francisco.

Good times. Good ti-i-i-i-i-imes.