The Venerable Glynn Cardy, Vicar of St. Matthew-in-the-city an Anglican parish in Aukland, New Zealand, is undoubtedly a happy camper this holiday season, having attracted round the world news coverage to the “Progressive” statement made by the above billboard he erected in his city’s downtown just in time for Christmas.

The Guardian (Manchester, UK) reports that within five hours of the billboard’s appearance, someone actually connected with Christianity was seen attempting to paint over the billboard.

In the characteristically triumphant and self-congratulatory manner of leftists like himself who have infiltrated their way into roles representing a faith they actually despise, Glynn Cardy dismisses conventional Christianity as fundamentalism and its religious message as “mush.”

To make the news at Christmas it seems a priest just needs to question the literalness of a virgin giving birth. Many in society mistakenly think that to challenge literalism is to challenge the norms of Christianity. What progressive interpretations try to do however is remove the supernatural obfuscation and delve into the deeper spiritual truth of this festival.

Christian fundamentalism believes a supernatural male God who lived above sent his sperm into the womb of the virgin Mary. Although there were a series of miraculous events surrounding Jesus’ birth – like wandering stars and angelic choirs – the real miracle was his death and literal resurrection 33 years later. The importance of this literal resurrection is the belief that it was a cosmic transaction whereby the male God embraced humanity only after being satiated by Jesus’ innocent blood.

The Christmas billboard on a local fundamentalist church sums up this thesis. It reads: “Jesus born 2 die 4 u!” His birth was just an h’orderve (sic) before the main Calvary course.

No doubt on Christmas Eve when papers print the messages of Church leaders a few of them will serve up this fundamentalist thesis wrapped in a nice story.

Progressive Christianity believes the Christmas stories are fictitious accounts designed to introduce the radical nature of the adult Jesus. They contrast the Lord and Saviour Caesar with the anomaly of a new ‘lord’ and ‘saviour’ born illegitimate in a squalid barn. At Bethlehem low-life shepherds and heathen travelers are welcome while the powerful and the priests aren’t. The stories introduce the topsy-turvy way of God, where the outsiders are invited in and the insiders ushered out.

Progressive Christianity doesn’t overlook Jesus’ life and rush to his death. Rather it sees the radical hospitality he offered to the poor, the despised, women, children, and the sick, and says: ‘this is the essence of God’. His death was a consequence of the offensive nature of that hospitality and his resurrection a symbolic vindication.

The Christmas billboard outside St Matthew-in-the-City lampoons literalism and invites people to think again about what a miracle is. Is the miracle a male God sending forth his divine sperm, or is the miracle that God is and always has been among the poor?

Mr. Cardy claims to be lampooning literalism, but he is obviously really using a coarse image to mock and deride the central articles of faith of Christianity, as part of an ongoing project in which Christian beliefs are systematically replaced by those of a 19th century heresy called Marxism.

The Wall Street Journal reports on an interesting feat of technical ingenuity by the enemy.

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights. Still, the intercepts could give America’s enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under U.S. surveillance.

Piltdown Man, a case of scientific fraud now in the process of being eclipsed

Russia’s Institute of Economic Analysis has issued a report (21 pages in Russian) by N.A. Pivovarova, titled Is There Warming? The Case of Russia, whose explosive conclusions were summarized by the news agency Rionovosta.

On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century. …

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

Steve McIntyre, at Climate Audit, highlights the Russian report by quoting a pertinent Climategate email:

An email from Jones to Mann in March 2004 stated:

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.

Hat tip to Ice Cap via James Delingpole at the Telegraph.

Peanut worm (Sipunculida) — Sipunculid worm jelly (土笋冻) is a delicacy in the town of Xiamen in Fujian province of China. Above: Sipinculus nudus

Jeremy Alban Dorman, in the Telegraph, reminisces about his gustatory adventures in the further reaches of Chinese dining.

While in China, I often felt I was rather like William Buckland, the 19th-century naturalist, who was noted, among other eccentricities, for attempting to eat his way through the entire animal kingdom. There seemed to be nothing the Chinese wouldn’t ingest. I never came across stir-fried sponge, though I won’t eliminate the possibility of there being a sponge restaurant somewhere in Guangdong province. All other members of major, or in the case of the sipunculids, minor, animal phyla find themselves on to Chinese menus, occasionally unwanted, of course, like the nematodes I once discovered wriggling on top of a bowl of noodles.

Over my years in China I added jellyfish, sea cucumber, silk worm pupae, cicada, scorpion, frog, snake, turtle and, I am ashamed to say, dog, as well as the sipunculids, to my list of new gustatory experiences. I also tried various odd parts of vertebrates that we wouldn’t normally eat such as bull’s aorta, pig’s lungs, pigs’ feet tendons and chickens’ feet.

The Chinese place extraordinary value on some foods which we consider worthless, like the unfortunate sharks’ fins, and sea cucumbers, which can sell for up to four hundred pounds per half kilo, yet have no taste and little nutritional value at all. I was so impressed by the demand for these humble marine vacuum cleaners that I made vague plans to begin farming them in east Africa. Perhaps fortunately, no-one else considered it a worthwhile endeavour, so I became a teacher instead.

The Chinese appear to derive more pleasure from the texture of their food than the actual taste. An army colonel I once taught told me that he loved nothing more than to munch on a plate of ducks’ beaks while having his evening beer. A shop near my last apartment sold nothing but ducks’ beaks, necks and feet and assorted internal organs – a sort of duck spare part shop. Similarly I was once taken to a fish-head restaurant. The head is considered to be by far the best part of the fish, and I got a sudden vision of fishermen filleting their catch on the way home from sea, tossing the heads and vertebrae into their baskets, and hurling the juicy fillets to the gulls.

Some Chinese dishes are remarkable for the sheer incongruity of their ingredients. A Sichuan dish I once tried consisted of eel, tripe, blood pudding, bean sprouts and noodles – any possible taste was obliterated by the hundreds of burning chillies. Another unlikely concoction I tried only once was baby squid fried with green peppers and pig’s heart. A Shandong speciality is made up of pork pieces (mostly bone), fish pieces (likewise), seaweed and chickens’ heads.

Trying to replicate such dishes in one’s own kitchen, should one wish to, is always doomed to failure. I well remember my first encounter with a packet of jellyfish. I chose the particular brand because the instructions were written in English, of sorts.

“It is nutritional foods of you and dainty dish of perfect daily”, it read helpfully. “Stir-fry is put jellyfish in boiler when added meat, shallot, ginger, garlic and stir-fried”. I followed the instructions, and not surprisingly, the jellyfish turned into water and evaporated.

The sipunculids, by the way, tasted only of soy sauce and ginger. I have since become a vegetarian.

Arhur Herman, in Commentary, describes the left’s 35 year old war on the CIA, the agency’s discrediting during the Nixon years, its emasculation by Jimmy Carter, revival under Ronald Reagan, and renewed paralysis under William Clinton leading to 9/11. Herman warns that the liberal obsession with destroying American Intelligence capabilities is really an expression of its own self-destructive impulses.

When your own outfit is trying to put you in jail, it’s time to go.” Those are the words of Robert Baer, once a CIA operative in the Middle East, describing the days in 1995 when he found himself under investigation by the Clinton administration, the FBI, and the CIA’s own inspector general. Baer’s crime? Daring to talk to Iraqi dissidents who were plotting to assassinate Saddam Hussein.

CIA officers in 2009 who are living with a Sword of Damocles hovering over their heads—in the form of a special prosecutor appointed by Barack Obama’s attorney general in August to probe allegations of torture during interrogations of al-Qaeda members and other suspects—now know how Baer felt. In September, every living former director of Central Intelligence (except Robert Gates, the current defense secretary) signed a letter to President Obama asking him to halt the special-prosecutor proceedings for the sake of the future of the agency. The president did not respond. …

The appointment of a special prosecutor is just one of a series of administration attacks on the CIA. …

This assault on the CIA might seem strange considering that just two years ago, Democrats and the media were expressing outrage over the Bush administration’s alleged “outing” of a supposedly covert operative named Valerie Plame. A special prosecutor was then tasked with finding out who had been so “un-American” (as Senator John Kerry termed it) as to leak the name of a CIA employee. Now we have a special prosecutor who may not only “out” CIA interrogators but also work hard to throw them into prison.

So what if the 2004 Inspector General’s Report explicitly states that the waterboarding and other fully authorized techniques used on al-Qaeda detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were effective and yielded valuable, actionable information that may have saved thousands of lives? Never mind that when Justice Department career lawyers scrutinized the Inspector General’s Report in 2006 looking for evidence of wrongdoing worthy of prosecution, they could find none. The argument that the United States and those in the government’s employ behaved in reprehensible ways in the aftermath of 9/11 deserving of legal sanction has become standard issue among Democrats and liberals, and when a Democratic liberal ascended to the White House, it was no longer an argument. It is now policy.

In all this, Obama and the Democrats are not just attempting to delegitimize the conduct of the past eight years. They are also reverting to type. For the past 35 years, American liberals have attacked and vilified the CIA with a fervency that borders on holy war.

Read the whole thing.

The Washington Times reports that Eric Holder’s Justice Department is again roadblocking federal efforts to investigate incidents of voter intimidation in Philadelphia during the 2008 presidential election by Black Panthers costumed as security guards and brandishing billy clubs.

The systematic efforts by the Obama Administration to protect their own partisans from prosecution are outrageous and have every possibility of developing into a serious scandal capable of inflicting major harm on a presidency already in serious trouble.

The Justice Department has told the federal attorneys who filed a civil complaint against the New Black Panther Party for disrupting a Philadelphia polling place last year not to cooperate with an investigation of the incident by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The commission last week subpoenaed at least two Justice Department lawyers and sought documents from the department to explain why the complaint was dismissed just as a federal judge was about to punish the New Black Panther Party and three of its members for intimidating voters.

In the Spectator, epidemiologist Paul Reiter debunks the “malaria spreading because of Global Warming” meme popularized by Al Gore, and explains how the repetition in print of empty assertions by small groups of activists can effectively promote complete falsehoods into established fact.

Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, was a masterpiece. Like an elder brother to all humanity, he patiently explained the familiar litany of disasters — droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level rise and the rest — spiced with heartrending personal stories: his baby son’s near-fatal accident, the agony of losing a sister to lung cancer. It was a science lecture crafted by Hollywood. …

In his serious voice, Mr Gore presented a nifty animation, a band of little mosquitoes fluttering their way up the slopes of a snow-capped mountain, and he repeated the old line: Nairobi used to be ‘above the mosquito line, the limit at which mosquitoes can survive, but now…’ Those little mosquitoes kept climbing.

The truth? Nairobi means ‘the place of cool waters’ in the Masai language. The town grew up around a camp, set up in 1899 during the construction of a railway, the famous ‘Lunatic Express’. There certainly was water there — and mosquitoes. From the start, the place was plagued with malaria, so much so that a few years later doctors tried to have the whole town moved to a healthier place. By 1927, the disease had become such a plague in the ‘White Highlands’ that £40,000 (equivalent to about £350,000 today) was earmarked for malaria control. The authorities understood the root of the problem: forest clearance had created the perfect breeding places for mosquitoes. The disease was present as high as 2,500m above sea level; the mosquitoes were observed at 3,000m. And Nairobi? 1,680m.

These details are not science. They require no study. They are history. But for activists, they are an inconvenient truth, so they ignore them. Even if Mr Gore is innocent, his advisers are not. They have been spouting the same nonsense for more than a decade. As scientists, we have repeatedly challenged them in the scientific press, at meetings and in news articles, and we have been ignored.

In 2004, nine of us published an appeal in the Lancet: ‘Malaria and climate change: a call for accuracy’. Clearly, Mr Gore didn’t read it. In 2000, I protested when Scientific American published a major article loaded with the usual misrepresentations. And when I watched his animated mosquitoes, his snow-capped mountain was oddly familiar. It took a few moments to click: the images were virtually identical to those in the magazine. The author of the article, Dr Paul Epstein, features high in Gore’s credits.

Dr Epstein is a member of a small band dedicated to a cause. And their work gains legitimacy, not by scholarship, but by repetition. While they publish their work in highly regarded journals, they don’t write research papers but opinion pieces and reviews, with little or no reference to the mainstream of science. The same claims, the same names; only the order of authors change. I have counted 48 separate pieces by just eight activists. They are myth-makers. And all have been lead authors and/or contributory authors of the prestigious IPCC assessment reports.

Take their contention, for example, that as a result of climate change, tropical diseases will move to temperate regions and malaria will come to Britain. If they bothered to learn about the subject, they would know that in a period climatologists call the Little Ice Age, when Charles II held ice parties on the Thames, malaria — ‘the ague’ — was rampant in the Essex marshes, on a par even with regions in Africa today. In the 18th century, the great systematist Linnaeus wrote his doctorate on malaria in central Sweden. In 1922-23 a massive epidemic swept the Soviet Union as far north as Archangel, on the Arctic circle, killing an estimated 600,000 people. And malaria was only eliminated from the Soviet Union and large areas of Europe in the 1950s, after the advent of DDT. So it’s hardly a tropical disease. And yet when we put this information under the noses of the activists it is ignored: ours is the inconvenient truth.

Large Tub of Kool Aid, Jonestown, Guyana, 1978

Bryon York wonders aloud why Congressional democrats continue to pursue efforts to ram through a health care bill with aggregated poll numbers showing a 53-to-38% negative public approval. They must realize that they are going to pay a price at the polls in 2010, so why are they so bent upon political suicide?

I put the question to a Democratic strategist who asked to remain anonymous. Yes, Democrats certainly understand that voters don’t like the current bills, he told me, and they are fully aware they will probably pay a price next year. But they have found a way to view going ahead anyway as the logical thing to do, at least in their eyes.

You have to look at the issue from three different Democratic perspectives: the House of Representatives, the White House and the Senate.

“In the House, the view of [California Rep. Henry] Waxman and [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi is that we’ve waited two generations to get health care passed, and the 20 or 40 members of Congress who are going to lose their seats as a result are transitional players at best,” he said. “This is something the party has wanted since Franklin Roosevelt.” In this view, losses are just the price of doing something great and historic. (The strategist also noted that it’s easy for Waxman and Pelosi to say that, since they come from safely liberal districts.)

“At the White House, the picture is slightly different,” he continued. “Their view is, ‘We’re all in on this, totally committed, and we don’t have to run for re-election next year. There will never be a better time to do it than now.'”

“And in the Senate, they look at the most vulnerable Democrats — like [Christopher] Dodd and [Majority Leader Harry] Reid — and say those vulnerabilities will probably not change whether health care reform passes or fails. So in that view, if they pass reform, Democrats will lose the same number of seats they were going to lose before.”

All those scenarios have a certain logic (even if the Senate calculation undercounts the number of potentially vulnerable Democrats). But each scenario is premised on passing an unpopular bill that hurts the party. Even if there’s a strategic rationale for doing it, why are Democrats dead-set on hurting themselves?

“Because they think they know what’s best for the public,” the strategist said. “They think the facts are being distorted and the public’s being told a story that is not entirely true, and that they are in Congress to be leaders. And they are going to make the decision because Goddammit, it’s good for the public.”

Of course, going forward has turned out to be harder than many Democrats thought. And now, with various proposals lying wrecked along the road, the true believers are practicing what the strategist calls “principled damage control.”

But still, does it make sense? In the end, perhaps the most compelling explanation for Democratic behavior is that they are simply in too deep to do anything else. “Once you’ve gone this far, what is the cost of failure?” asks the strategist.

At that point — Republicans will love this — he compared congressional Democrats with robbers who have passed the point of no return in deciding to hold up a bank. Whatever they do, they’re guilty of something. “They’re in the bank, they’ve got their guns out. They can run outside with no money, or they can stick it out, go through the gunfight, and get away with the money.”

That’s it. Democrats are all in. They’re going through with it. Even if it kills them.

Conservatives are mean-spirited, while liberals are nice, warm and fuzzy, we’re always being told.

Except I’ve noticed personally that, when they don’t get their way, or when somebody actually dares to disagree with them, liberals can be not very nice at all.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut is the most recent victim of liberal wrath for standing in the way of Obamacare by his opposition to Medicare expansion.

Ezra Klein is a herbivorous California liberal who wouldn’t threaten a jihadi with a caterpillar to save Los Angeles, but come between Ezra and the bright socialist tomorrow, and watch out!

Ezra Klein yesterday practically accused Lieberman of genocide.

Lieberman was invited to participate in the process that led to the Medicare buy-in. His opposition would have killed it before liberals invested in the idea. Instead, he skipped the meetings and is forcing liberals to give up yet another compromise. Each time he does that, he increases the chances of the bill’s failure that much more. And if there’s a policy rationale here, it’s not apparent to me, or to others who’ve interviewed him. At this point, Lieberman seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals. That is to say, he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.

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FireDogLake’s Petition demanding Mrs. Lieberman be fired

The left is not stopping with attacking Joe Lieberman himself this time.

Hollywood producer Jane Hamsher, proprietress of the far left blog FireDogLake, is going after Senator Liberman’s wife Hadassah, running a petition urging the Susan G. Komen for the Cure breast cancer foundation to fire Mrs. Lieberman from her post of Global Ambassador.

According to Comrade Hamsher, Mrs. Lieberman’s earlier career as a lobbyist, in which she represented pharmaceutical and insurance companies, should disqualify her from representing an organization opposing cancer, since her former professional ties might prevent her from entering wholeheartedly into the revolutionary struggle between corporations and consumers.

Besides, Hamsher charges, Mrs. Lieberman and her husband are working on the same side, the side of the evil capitalist oppressors. Hadassah Lieberman must be punished.

3:06 video

Big Hollywood jokes:

What’s the difference between the Mafia and a Hollywood Leftist? …the Mafia doesn’t go after your family.

A question in the form of a parable by the late Robert Nozick.

Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you.

Hat tip to William Laffer.

Another really bad game camera photo accompanied by an unpersuasive narrative of skepticism and reluctant public release. This time from Minnesota, a long, long way from the original theoretical range of the imaginary North American elusive and unknown large primate.

I don’t think it requires any apparatus more complicated than the eye to recognize the posture of a man underneath what is obviously a suit.

Bemidji Pioneer:

Tim Kedrowski and his sons, Peter and Casey, say they aren’t pushovers for Bigfoot stories. But a frame on a game trail camera set up on their hunting land north of Remer, Minn. has left them wondering.

“To us, it’s very hard because we lean toward the skeptical type,” Kedrowski said in a telephone interview from his Rice, Minn., home.

But after checking with neighbors and any other hunters who might have been walking through the dense woods at 7:20 p.m. on the rainy night of Oct. 24, he said they couldn’t imagine what else the image could be. Tim said he considered ideas from a bear to a bow hunter in a fuzzy suit. But the arm and hand couldn’t be a bear’s, or its upright gait. And there is no evidence in the photo of a bow or flashlight a hunter might be using to track a wounded deer. …

Casey Kedrowski said he and his brother had gone out to the family’s hunting shack prior to deer season to bring in firewood and make other preparations. They set up a game trail camera to see what might be wandering around their property.

Casey said he and his brother were the only people who knew where the camera was located. They took the camera down when deer season started, and a couple of weeks later checked on what they had caught.

When they came to the picture of the long-armed creature walking upright, Casey said, “We just looked at each other. Each of us thought we were playing a trick on each other.”

When they determined that neither of them had pulled a prank on the other, they checked to see if anyone had been in the area that night. Tim said the only neighbors were two elderly hunters in their own shack, neither of whom matched the size and appearance of the creature caught on camera.

However, he said, when he asked the men about the night the camera clicked on the mystery, they said they had gone out about 2 a.m. to use the outhouse and had heard strange squealing noises. Tim said he asked them to show him the direction of the sounds. They pointed to the area where the camera had been, although they had no idea of its location.

Tim said he just released the photo and permission for its publication last weekend.

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Examiner.com thinks the same way I do.

The photo itself is unconvincing and displays many of the attributes associated with previous “man in an ape suit” photos and YouTube videos. Note the lack of articulation on the back of the legs where the thigh meets the knee and continues to the calf. The “fur” has the draped appearance of a pant leg – not the musculature of a wild animal. The hands have the rubbery look of an ape from a 1930s Bela Lugosi B-movie. Notably, the face of the “creature” is blocked by a small tree, conveniently obscuring any facial details, the most difficult part of a costume to fake effectively.

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Cryptomundo’s posting.

Hat tip to Good Morning, Silicon Valley.

Tired of those lame renditions of sacharine holiday songs blaring over the loudspeakers in every supermarket and mall? Jess Ruffner-Booth (who blogs about her own sighthounds at DemonPuppy), served up three Cthulhu carols to put one in a completely different kind of holiday spirit.

DEATH TO THE WORLD 2:05 video

Death to the world!

Cthulhu’s time has come.

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IT’S THE MOST HORRIBLE TIME OF THE YEAR 1:20 video

With the nights getting longer,

It’s the most horrible time of the year.

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IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE FISHMEN 1:40 video

It’s beginning to look a lot like fishmen

He looks just like me!

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And, when I looked, I found lots more:

I SAW MOMMY KISSING YOG SOTHOTH 1:19 video

AWAY IN A MADHOUSE 1:14 video

AWAKE YE SCARY GREAT OLD ONES 1:28 video

CAROL OF THE OLD ONES 1:11 video

I’M DREAMING OF A DEAD CITY 3:24 video

O COME ALL YE OLD ONES 1:36 video

MI-GO WE HAVE HEARD ON HIGH 1:16 video

FREDDIE THE RED-BRAINED MI-GO 1:25 video

HAVE YOURSELF A SCARY LITTLE SOLSTICE 2:30 video

THE CULTIST SONG 2:44 video

O CTHULHU 3:22 video

SILENT NIGHT, BLASPHEMOUS NIGHT 2:11 video

Not Xmas, but still, we have to link a few good ones from A Shoggoth on the Roof:

IF I WERE A DEEP ONE 4:34 video

BYAKHEE BYAKHEE 3:47 video

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In case something slimier and more amorphous than Santa should come creeping down your chimney, you’ll want to be prepared with alternative-to-yourself refreshments.

BellyTimber offers a Cthulhu Xmas cookie recipe and templates(!).

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.