The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

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The Heretic's Bible - Genesis 8: The earth gets dry

After forty days, God, sealed the wellsprings of the deep and the floodgates of heaven. Then he created a wind that caused the floodwaters to gradually subside.

Commentary: Where did the floodwaters subside to?

After seven months, the boat ran aground on a mountain. After ten months, the mountain peaks became visible.

Commentary: What exactly did the lions eat for ten months? Just wondering…

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The Heretic's Bible - Genesis 7: The earth gets wet

God tells Noah to bring the animals again, but this time he specified seven pairs of each clean species and one pair of each unclean species.

Commentary: The Great Rabbi Ezekiel Bezekiel wrote,

The Lord in his infinite foresight commanded Noah to bring seven pairs of each clean animal so that he might earn the Lord’s blessing by offering the additional pairs as holy sacrifices to His mercy.”

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Umbrella Warfare in Tiananmen Square

At least they're not using tanks this time...

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The Heretic's Bible - Genesis 6: God gets pissed (again)

The “sons of God” thought that human women were hot, so they took the ones that they wanted. The offspring (God’s grandchildren) were mighty giants. Meanwhile, God decided that humans were living too long, so he cut their maximum life spans to 120.

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The Heretic's Bible - Genesis 5: Lifespans of the old and pious

This chapter is just a list of Seth’s descendents and their spirited competition to see who could live the longest. I will spare the reader its boringness except to say that the consensus winner was Methuselah, who died at the ripe age of 969. However, supporters of Methuselah’s father, Enoch, dispute the result. God transported Enoch directly to paradise while he was a still young lad of 365, so technically, he didn’t die. The Great Rabbi Ezekiel Bezekiel exhibits Solomon-like wisdom in his proposed resolution:

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Roland Burris - Here to Stay

Once again, Illinois State Senators are calling for our good friend Roland Burris to exit stage left. One imagines a Dem Party master of ceremonies furiously giving the neck slash signal to end dear Roland's dance routine, but he just keeps twirling away and starts to remove items of clothing.

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Taliban Attack: Why Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)?

When I read about yesterday's Taliban attack on the provincial headquarters of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), I raised my eyebrows. Why the ISI? It's not an easy target, and in fact the attack was repelled by guards. Nor would a successful attack have been an effective way to create instability. The ISI is not filled with sympathetic targets whose deaths would arouse the nation.

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CouchSurfing 2.0

You might think of couchsurfing as the exploitation of your friends' living room furniture. That is so old school. Welcome to couchsurfing 2.0, where you can travel the world via the living room furniture of complete strangers. The CouchSurfing Project is a social networking site where you can offer your home to travelers and take advantage of the couches, guest beds, and floor spaces of others when you travel. It was launched in 2004 and now has more than a million members in 232 countries.

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History Lesson

I took a walking tour of Westminster, London the other day. It was just drizzly enough to make you open an umbrella and at least windy enough to invert the umbrella once opened. English weather likes to tease visitors. The moment you think it's about to pour, it changes it's mind and goes all sunny. But as soon as you're ready to declare the rain past, it grays up and drizzles all over again.

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News From the Future: Last U.S. Forces Leave Iraq

May 13, 2029

Twenty-six years after invading Iraq, the United States closed its military bases and evacuated the last American soldiers from Iraqi soil.

In an address to soldiers at Fort Bragg, President George Prescott Bush praised the U.S. military for accomplishing the mission that his uncle, former President George W. Bush, had set before them in 2003.

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Biography

Michael Wolraich is a non-fiction writer in New York City. He co-founded dagblog and has contributed  to the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, New York Magazine, CNN.com, TalkingPointsMemo.com, Reuters, and Pando Daily.

Books:

Wolraich is also the computer genius who maintains dagblog's state-of-the-art software, but he denies responsibility for technical glitches and advises users to "quit sniveling." In his spare time, Wolraich raises peach mold and performs live impressions of the law of gravity.

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