Did you know that the first shopping day after Thanksgiving was known as “Black Friday?” Neither did I!
 
Apparently “Black Friday” is so named because it’s the first day of the year that retailers can recoup enough from their sales to put their balance sheets into the black. As opposed to “in the red” which is bookkeeping jargon for running at a loss, which is what retailers do for the rest of the year, apparently.
 
Boy did this sound like malarkey.

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In 1933 someone set fire to the Reichstag, the historic German Parliament Building. Hitler seized on the occasion to incite in the German population a fear of terrorists and foreign agents, and trumped up his case for the preemptive invasion of Eastern Europe.
 
To prevent further acts of terrorism, Hitler curtailed civil rights and created the first concentration camp at Dachau. Predating the extermination camps by a half dozen years, Dachau began as an internment camp for political foes and other “enemies of the state.” Many Germans felt that the Reichstag fire was a Nazi deception, set deliberately to further Nazi goals.

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So some rich Christians are trying to work their way around Jesus’ admonition about Christian wealth. “Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
 
Apparently some Christian scholars have been saying that the “eye of the needle” was the name of a gate in Jerusalem, a particularly thorny entrance through which it was not the easiest task to coax a recalcitrant camel. Interesting. So that is what Jesus was saying. Well.

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I should say that I had never watched a veteran’s parade, I think. Wasn’t it supposed to be a parade of veterans? This was a parade of mostly active duty soldiers and soldiers-to-be. It was very disturbing.

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Before the Guernica that became Fallujah,
 
before our use of chemical weapons in Fallujah,

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Have you seen the 60-second TV spot by Chemistri called “Party Crashers?” A vulgar Cadillac STS drives into a ballroom where other performance sedans are dancing a well choreographed eighteenth century Gavotte. They’re opening their doors to each other in gracefull salutes when the Caddie interrupts, and barges to center. The music changes to Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” and the other cars are forced out of the way.
 
Reprinted from Subvertize.com