Honorable Mention: Blessed are the wind-blown embers.

Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: Let us start with a fitting quote from yesterday’s LA Times article:

A wind-blown ember can be opportunistic, slipping through tiny breaches in the homes.

Opportunistic indeed! These little sparks of red hot justice were busy at work last weekend, crawling into vents, falling between cracks and carrying the mission from house to house, palm tree to palm tree. In a matter of days, 1,000 homes burned down in half a dozen different fires spread around Southern California. All weekend long, ash fell out of the sky and a cloud of smoke blocked out the sun, casting the whole of Southern California in the crimson red hues of Armageddon.

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Yo ho ho ho time in Somalia! What’s the bestest present kids dream of in faraway Puntland, where piracy is more than a Disney marketing gimmick? A supertanker, that’s what. A Saudi supertanker is the ultimate in stuffed stockings: 100 million gallons of pure crude.

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Daniel Craig working on his stance.

The ultimate proof that movies these days are rotten: Quantum of Solace is breaking records at the box office. It’s not the public’s fault; people want to see something move onscreen and they’ll take what they can get. Right now Q of S is the only game in town.

It’s not absolutely terrible, Q of S, but you forget it as you cross the lobby to the theater exit. That’s par for the course with James Bond films, you might say; nobody really remembers Bond films with Pierce Brosnan or Timothy Dalton or Roger Moore. It’s embarrassing to be still clinging to the vivid cultural recollection of the great Connery/ Bond films of the 1960s. But then Casino Royale and Daniel Craig cruelly raised our hopes again. He’s fantastic, we all agree, even with those ears. He spends almost all of Q of S looking as if he were hewn from the living rock. It’s hypnotic, and thank God for it, because the rest of the film’s pretty much a wash-out.

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Today I’ll finally keep my promise and tell you about my favorite book on the Horn of Africa. Remember a couple columns back, I promised to tell you about a great book on the Ethiopian/Somali wars? Of course I promised to post my book report “tomorrow,” and it’s weeks later. Hey, “tomorrow” is a flexible concept, like “manana.”

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Listen:

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The Accused: Raymond “Chuck” Foster, Imperial Wizard of the KKK

Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: Normally a sad nitwit like Raymond “Chuck” Foster wouldn’t even be worthy of the attention of the eXiled Inquisition Team, but now that he’s managed to put the tattered remnants of the Ku Klux Klan back in the news, we thought we’d give him a look. He’s the fellow who killed Cynthia Lynch, an even sadder nitwit he’d recruited, because she tried to bail on the Klan initiation rites halfway through. The theory is, she felt a sudden wave of homesickness for Tulsa, Oklahoma. If this seems impossible, keep in mind that she was in backwoods Louisiana at the time. When you’re in backwoods Louisiana, Tulsa must seem like the center of civilization, practically the shining city on the hill politicians are always going on about.

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What George W. Bush loved best about his job was being a war president. Playing war, that is, as opposed to making war like a grown-up. Remember him strutting onto that carrier in his little flight jacket? You never saw Eisenhower, a real general, playing out his martial fantasies this way. You can take the drink out of the drunk, but you can’t take the swagger out of a fool. (more…)

Mormon Baptismal Font: plenty of room for everybody.

Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: We have to admire the sheer chutzpah of the Mormons. Whereas we struggle with faulty humankind, inquisiting people, torturing them, trying to shove them toward the true faith, the Mormons have worked out a way to avoid so much heavy lifting. They take care of things after death. Dead people, y’see, are so agreeable. No backtalk. If you tell a dead guy he’s now a by-god upstanding member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, you won’t get any argument.

Of course, such a bold approach to gathering souls is bound to involve a lot of blowback from the older religions. Especially the Jews—you know how they are. For decades now Jewish leaders have been trying to get the Mormons to stop baptizing their dead relatives, especially the victims of the Holocaust. As Ernest Michel, honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, points out in The New York Times, “They suffered enough.”
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Laurent Nkunda: War Nerd Hero

If you ever want to find a real hero, here’s one way to recognize him: the TV news will be making him into a monster 24/7. Today’s monster hero is the Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda, the leader of the “rebel” forces that are supposedly “closing in” on Goma in Eastern Congo.

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We all know in the backs of our minds that Barack Obama’s incredible victory will eventually be followed by disappointment. But does it have to come so soon, and hit so hard? The answer will be yes, if Lawrence Summers is named treasury secretary in the president-elect’s cabinet, as many observers believe will be the case. Summers was one of the key architects of our financial crisis–hiring him to fix the economy makes as much sense as appointing Paul Wolfowitz to oversee the Iraq withdrawal. And when you look at the trail of economic destruction Summers left behind in other crisis-stricken countries who sought his advice in the past, then “terror” might be a more appropriate word than “disappointment.” (more…)