WFMU's Beware of the Blog shares some links to Jan Svankmajer's Food Trilogy of videos. "If you've got the stomach for a heavy dose of gastronomic surrealism, here is Czech animator Jan Svankmajer three part movie called Food (Jidlo). Svankmajer made it in 1992, employing his trademark stop motion techniques with human actors and clay prosthetics."

The Los Angeles Times takes a look and a taste of KFC's Famous Bowl and proclaims it "...the gustatory equivalent of composting."

Instructions for the gastronomically challenged: How to Make a Sandwich, as explained by Dr. Alex Dodge.

Modern Drunkard Magazine presents us with some helpful tips on how to develop your Drunkard Communication Skills in Say It Loud, Say It Plowed.

In keeping with the drinking theme, here's an ad from Craigslist: Let Me Get Drunk In Your House.

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Conservative Anger Grows Over Bush's Foreign Policy
By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post

At a moment when his conservative coalition is already under strain over domestic policy, President Bush is facing a new and swiftly building backlash on the right over his handling of foreign affairs.

Conservative intellectuals and commentators who once lauded Bush for what they saw as a willingness to aggressively confront threats and advance U.S. interests said in interviews that they perceive timidity and confusion about long-standing problems including Iran and North Korea, as well as urgent new ones such as the latest crisis between Israel and Hezbollah.

"It is Topic A of every single conversation," said Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that has had strong influence in staffing the administration and shaping its ideas. "I don't have a friend in the administration, on Capitol Hill or any part of the conservative foreign policy establishment who is not beside themselves with fury at the administration."

Conservatives complain that the United States is hunkered down in Iraq without enough troops or a strategy to crush the insurgency. They see autocrats in Egypt and Russia cracking down on dissenters with scant comment from Washington, North Korea firing missiles without consequence, and Iran playing for time to develop nuclear weapons while the Bush administration engages in fruitless diplomacy with European allies. They believe that a perception that the administration is weak and without options is emboldening Syria and Iran and the Hezbollah radicals they help sponsor in Lebanon.

Most of the most scathing critiques of the administration from erstwhile supporters are being expressed within think tanks and in journals and op-ed pages followed by a foreign policy elite in Washington and New York.

But the Bush White House has always paid special attention to the conversation in these conservative circles.

Conservative Anger Grows Over Bush's Foreign Policy is continued here

Hands Off the Net
Congress wisely resists the urge to regulate cyberspace.
By Brian C. Anderson
City Journal

It’s a good thing that Congress seems to recognize—for now—that regulating the Internet is an acute danger to free political speech in America. Thanks primarily to Republican efforts, both the House and (narrowly) the Senate have fought back a push to establish in law the principle of “network neutrality,” a roster of whose supporters—from Hillary Clinton, MoveOn.org, and the New York Times editorial board on the left to the Christian Coalition on the right—includes some of the nation’s leading advocates for government regulation of the media.

What ignited the controversy is the possibility that the information bits that make up Internet traffic will no longer enjoy first-come, first-serve treatment, as has generally been the case until now. Freed up by recent Supreme Court and FCC rulings, broadband firms want to manage more actively the data pulsing through their conduits—their cables, fiber optics, phone lines, or wireless connections—offering, for instance, new ultra-fast delivery for sites willing to pay extra, just as FedEx accelerates delivery of packages for a fee. They might offer as well their own additional services, such as online video or telephony, as part of the package.

These changes, critics claim, will wreck the Internet. From an open commons where surfers can access all sites on egalitarian terms, the Net will become a world of “walled gardens,” where “broadband barons” favor certain content (their own) and impede sites unwilling to pay high fees or selling competitors’ products or supporting controversial political views. To stop this, the reformers, organized in a “Save the Internet” campaign, wanted Congress to force Internet providers like Verizon not to “discriminate among different types of traffic based on the traffic’s source, destination, or content,” in the words of Net theorist David Isenberg.

In truth, however, mandated net neutrality is completely unnecessary.

Hands Off the Net is continued here

American Petrocracy
Among the shifting rationales for the war in Iraq, the most plausible motive may be the least discussed: access to oil.
By Kevin Phillips
The American Conservative

Few lies have wound up injuring Americans more—in everything from automobile gas tanks and winter heating bills to diminished U.S. global standing—than a rarely revisited three-year-old fib-fest involving George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair. Since World War I, history is clear: the British and Americans have been pre-occupied with only one thing in Iraq—oil. Yet in 2003, as their troops again disembarked, the pretense was all about good and evil, democracy and freedom. The disastrous outcome of the unacknowledged Middle Eastern mission, the struggle for petroleum, has rarely been discussed.

In part, that’s because a credulous press has swallowed an extraordinary fraud. Speaking on behalf of George W. Bush, then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer insisted in February 2003, “If this had anything to do with oil, the position of the United States would be to lift the sanctions so the oil could flow. This is not about that. This is about saving lives by protecting the American people.” In November 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had likewise declared, “it has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.” On the other side of the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told Parliament in early 2003, “Let me deal with the conspiracy theory that this has something to do with oil. There is no way whatever that if oil were the issue, it wouldn’t be simpler to cut a deal with Saddam Hussein.”

Horse manure. In the run-up to war, from Alberta to Texas, oilmen gossiped about the centrality of oil. Meetings of petroleum geologists buzzed about the so-called “peak oil” forecast that a dangerous top in global production was only a decade or two away. Specialized publications guesstimated how much taking over Iraqi oil could mean for profits and Exxon and Chevron. Polls of ordinary citizens from Europe to Latin America and the Mideast produced similar findings: people thought the invasion was about oil.

The Gulf War in 1991 certainly had been.

American Petrocracy is continued here

Efraim Community

From the site:

Who are we and what do we stand for?

In order to exclude any misunderstanding, we will first let you know who we are not and what we do not stand for!

We are no sect!

In no way we deviate from the faith in the Only God, the Father of Jesus Christ, as He tells us in His Word, the Bible!

So who are we then?

We are people who have used the opportunity which God offers to join the Bride of Jesus Christ! The Bride of Jesus Christ is the very highest group God is ever going to create and those who want to belong to it will reach the supreme glory. Lasting forever and never fading or decreasing.

You cannot compare His Bride with any other religious grouping.

We are allowed to understand God's will and the mysteries that God has hidden in the Bible, more than anybody.

The July photo archive is here

The June photo archive is here

The Fiction Corner is here