American Christianity is a Low Light Environment

Many thanks to Jonathan for forwarding this little bit of AmeriChrist, Inc. strangeness:

A military contractor that provides rifle scopes to the military has apparently been inscribing Bible verse citations on the side of the scope. The Trijicon ACOG gunsight is the product of a company with an evangelical Christian founder, which has been quietly integrating bible verses into it's scopes for years. A secular humanist military organization got grumpy about this, which I'm sure will result in a Stern Letter being sent to the company by a mid-level acquisitions specialist.

Reading through the verses, I found myself thinking...hmmm. Are these the most appropriate verses for a scope? Pretty much all of them have to do with "light" as a keyword, which is unsurprising. The ACOG is a light-collecting scope. The verses selected are like little magical Bible talismans, selected to get the divine assist in gathering in photons.

So we get, among other things, John 8:12 used. Because you know, the light of Jesus Christ is intended to aid target acquisition in low-light environments. Or 2 Corinthians 4:6. Because nothing beats the light of the glory of God for helping you put a 5.56 mm round through the skull of that potential hostile skulking around the perimeter at dusk.

I think, though, this whole "light as a Bible search keyword" thing is a bit limiting. Go for the gusto! There are so many more...meaty verses one could use, particularly in context. Like, say, DT32:42. Or 2KG9:24. Or PS7:13. That's some kick-butt Bible, Marine! Hoooah!

I suppose you do have to be careful, though. You wouldn't want to inadvertently mess with the heads of the troops by slapping LK6:38 on there. Or MT5:39. Or MK12:31. The Bible can be really dangerous to the morale and focus of our warfighters if you aren't careful about censoring certain passages. Particularly those passages that get to the subversively unpatriotic and radically unsupportive-of-our-troops core of what Jesus of Nazareth taught.

Better to keep away from all of those pesky passages that seem to imply that the business of efficiently dispatching human beings in low light environments might not quite mesh with what Jesus had in mind.

Yet Another Reason for Us To Hate Canada

The American far right just hates Canada.

Canada is, if current rhetoric on the right here is to be believed, as much a threat to freedom as Nazis or Maoists or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We know this because their nationalized health care system...or anything like it...is a sure sign of a nation that has utterly given up all personal liberties. You can see it in their relative lack of stress, and their easier pace of life, and the slow thoughtfulness of their media. It's an alien world.

I hear some of them may even speak French.

While Canada trundles along genially, we are, as a nation, headed for insolvency. Neither of the American political parties are willing to take anything other than the most feeble ritual pats at our endlessly growing national debt. At some point, our vast credit as a nation will run out. It may not happen soon, but it will happen, as surely as a month-long drunken bender eventually ends with you waking up in a pool of unidentifiable fluid next to a snoring Samoan woman in a New Orleans flophouse. Not that I'm speaking from personal experience. No sir.

No country has ever done what we're doing, spending vastly more than we commit to the national treasury for decades, and not suffered catastrophic economic collapse. Not once in the history of humankind.

It's going to be bad.

Yet on Veteran's Day, as I was contemplating America's coming financial apocalypse, I realized there's another reason for the American Right to fear Canadian influence. What would happen to America financially, wondered I, if we didn't just think about having a similar health care system?

What if the military of the United States of America was the same size as the Canadian military?

We share similar land masses. Neither nation has hostile neighbors. Though we fret endlessly about energy security, our Canadian brethren don't seem to have any trouble gassing up their Ford F-150s. They innovate. They have a solid business community. They brew good beer. They seem to be doing fine.

We'd still have a decent little army, one more than capable of defending the homeland. To that small professional army, we'd add in the 80,000,000 American gun owners. You NRA members would be willing to use your guns to defend American soil against tyranny, right? That's what you keep telling us the Second Amendment is for, after all. You keep waving Old Glory around and telling us that gun ownership is a sign of your patriotism. It's why you have the Director's Cut of Red Dawn in your media cabinet. So...I'm calling you on it. You are now eight thousand divisions of Light Infantry Reserves. Hoooah! Wooolver-EEEEns!

We're also a democracy, the beacon of freedom and tolerance in the world. If that's true, we should have friends. Allies. Don't we? Those folks North of the border would help us out if things got rough. As would the Brits.

And if that wasn't enough and things got real ugly, we've got enough leftover Cold War ICBMs to slag pretty much anybody. Ain't nobody gonna mess with us. So...why not? Let's downsize.

What would the effect of a Canada-sized military be on our national treasury? The net effect of that decision would be to save the United States taxpayer over $550,000,000,000 a year.

That's a chunk of change, almost real money, but it's only a small downpayment on the debt, which stands at $11,000,000,000,000 and rising. We'd have to make it a pretty much permanent change to have any effect. But if we did, in my lifetime, we'd be back in the black.

It'd work. And the world would be no more dangerous. America would be equally safe. I mean, why not?

It's not like America is addicted to that military deficit spending, eh?

Pesky, pesky Canadians!