Via Bookslut, I found this interview with Frank Peretti, a Christian horror novelist (strangely, that’s not meant the way I’d normally read it) about his new novel, Monster, which is about Bigfoot and evolution. Hmm, you say. Whatever could he possibly want to say about a big topic like evolution?

“My goal is to make them think about evolution,” he said. “Evolution as a philosophy makes monsters out of all us. It removes all that makes us human – morals, virtue, love, honor, self-sacrifice. All those become illusory. I’m trying to raise some questions. Who is the real monster here? I do it through a monster story.”

So, because he doesn’t understand something, he makes a horror story out of it.

American Christians—and this is overwhelmingly an American problem—are determined to be loud and proud about their ignorance. I don’t get it. Whatever happened to being interested in finding out about stuff? No no, might upset us a little; let’s crawl into our hidey-holes.

Sigh.

To: Time

I can only assume with your choice of Ann Coulter as the cover at the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing that you are either woefully stupid or want to up sales by pandering to the right-wing extremists that Ms. Coulter appeals to. Stupid or venal: which is it? In either case, you shouldn’t be running a newsmagazine.

“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”
–Ann Coulter as quoted in the New York Observer, Aug. 20, 2002

“RE: McVeigh quote. Of course I regret it. I should have added, ‘after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.'”

–Ann Coulter, from an interview with Right Wing News

Via Ezra Klein, I found this post on the future of globalization. Emptywheel brings up a point I’ve wondered about for a long time, knowing that the end of Big Oil is approaching:

Here we were, burning up jet fuel so we could arrange to ship goods all the way around the world to a bunch of people, an entire country, who can’t or won’t pay their debts. But the words kept streaming by. THIS FLIGHT CAN’T GO ON ANY LONGER. GET OFF THE PLANE, IT’S GOING TO CRASH, the newspaper headlines might as well have said.

I’ll leave the business end of the discussion to Emptywheel. Here’s my thing: Oil is just going to get rarer and harder to get from here on out. Yeah, hybrids are the wave of the future, but Americans demand “performance” (read: high speeds) so coming hybrids aren’t particularly fuel-efficient. But eventually it’ll hurt enough and we can all move to bikes or buses or whatever. Fine.

I’m wondering about the big machines. The trucks. The planes. The cargo ships. What are they going to run on? Is there some plan afoot to find an alternative fuel for the jumbo jets? I don’t think they run on electricity. Or are my kids doomed to see Paris only from the pictures on TV? How are we going to export and import goods around the world if the cargo fleets are sidelined?

I don’t have any answers for this. Just something I’ve been wondering about.