Some end of the world tips from a man who claims that God saved him from a car wreck and back pain, personally, in 1990 and now he wants to share his bounty with all of us. Because the end is nigh.
In a Q and A in the Washington Post’s “On Faith” column, famed evolutionary biologist and outspoken smart person, Dr. Richard Dawkins ridiculed Texas governor and GOP theocrat Richard Perry in a manner both highbrow and low-ball simultaneously. I found it most satisfying:
There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party (I disavow the ridiculous ‘GOP’ nickname, because the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt has lately forfeited all claim to be considered ‘grand’) is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.
***
A politician’s attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry’s and the Tea Party’s pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked. Except that a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.
Nope, but you might become the Republican nominee for President of the United States. Funny how it works that way…
Just yards from the ancient Temple Mount, site of the Islamic Dome of the Rock, Glenn Beck told a sparse crowd: “We are leaving the age of manmade miracles of spacecraft, and we are entering the age of the miracles of God.”
God, apparently is getting tired of Beck’s shtick, himself, because he offered the former Fox News personality absolutely no help whatsoever in getting asses into seats yesterday: According to eye-witness, Israeli writer Ami Kaufman, Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Courage” religious rally in Jerusalem yesterday was a total bomb, with around just 1000 people attending. With such a small number, you’d have to wonder how many of these folks were “ironic” attendees? Surely a number of Israeli hipsters, eager to point and laugh at a pudgy, paranoiac, self-important, delusional American Moron Mormon with a messiah/martyr complex sporting a yarmulke, would turn out for this, right?
If this happened in Los Angeles, hey, I’d have gone to see the Glenn Beck show myself, so if you factor the ironic attendees out, does the indifference seen towards him in the Holy Land foretell curtains for Beck’s cultural cachet even with American idiots? I mean, getting 10,000 Christian evangelicals to show up to a Glenn Beck rally in Jerusalem a year ago would have been like shooting fish in a barrel. Box office boffo. Still, Beck should do well in Texas next week. But we’ll see, won’t we?
Via Politics USA
If you are looking for one word to sum up how Glenn Beck went from drawing 3 million viewers nightly on Fox News to seeing his audience plummet and Fox severing ties with him, that word would be dull. By believing his own hype while taking himself too seriously, Glenn Beck bored his fans into leaving him. After his Restoring Honor rally bombed last year, it was the height of self-delusion for him to think that thousands would follow him to Israel.
Glenn Beck was fine when he was the conservative rodeo clown providing a nightly dose of entertainment to the blue hairs that make up the Fox News audience, but his program became too dark, too paranoid, too religious, and too stuck on one paranoid conspiracy theory note to maintain its appeal.
Yossi Sarid seemed to speak for many Israelis who weren’t thrilled with having Beck’s circus in their country either, “Beck, Hagee and their swarm are anti-Semites, who are not even aware of their anti-Semitism and the extent of its ugliness. Or maybe they are. In recent years this anti-Semitism has not been directed mainly against Jews, for they have found the Arab substitute for it. Now they are using the Arabs to scare Israel and the Muslims to scare the world. And the white, Aryan lion will devour them and their undercover envoys such as Barack Hussein. The visit ended yesterday, the circus is folding its tent and moving elsewhere. Let’s pray it will not return soon. Mr. Beck, don’t come back. We’re not short of dangerous wackos here.”
The turnout for Restoring Courage proved one thing. Glenn Beck needed the platform of Fox News more than Fox News ever needed Beck. The media platform to push his dark wares is gone now, and for most of America it is out of sight out of mind as it relates to Glenn Beck.
Below, Beck talks about what a terrific guy (and leader) he is and mentions, all casual-like, the death threats that have been made against him. The pathology on display here is impressive even by Beck’s high standards.
Over at Talking Points Memo they’ve got the summary of a very interesting new academic study done recently at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “Cultures of the Tea Party,” as the study is titled, uses polling data, and interviews with Tea party supporters at a gathering held in the state to provide a snapshot of the overall cultural attitudes of the movement.
The findings, represented on Monday at the American Sociological Association, purport that the defining attitudes of the Tea party sympathizers are “Authoritarianism, ontological insecurity (fear of change), libertarianism and nativism.” From TPM:
The study used polling of North Carolina and Tennessee, conducted by Public Policy Polling (D) in the Summer of 2010, and determined the cultural dispositions by measuring the responses of tea partiers to set questions. After PPP surveyed over 2,000 voters who were sympathetic to the Tea Party, researchers then reinterviewed almost 600 in the fall of 2010. Those interviews included everything from personality based queries like “Would you say it is more important that a child obeys his parents, or that he is responsible for his own actions?” to more political ones, like “Do you think immigrants who came into this country illegally but pay taxes and have not been arrested should be given the opportunity to become permanent legal residents?” The study also incudes interviews and short responses with ten participants at a Tea Party rally in Washington, NC.
“American voters sympathetic to the Tea Party movement reflect four primary cultural and political beliefs more than other voters do: authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration,” a statement accompanying the report reads, as the findings themselves point out a few disconnects between the what self-described members of the Tea Party say and their actual policy stances.
The report quotes one Tea Party activist as saying, “We don’t want the big government that’s taking over everything we worked so hard for…the government’s becoming too powerful… we want to take back what our Constitution said. You read the Constitution. Those values - that’s what we stand for,” but that sentiment is not reflected in the polling data from the surveys. From the report:
In our follow-up poll, 84% of those positive towards the TPM [Tea Party members] said the Constitution should be interpreted “as the Founders intended,” compared to only 34% of other respondents. Other respondents were also three times more likely not to have an opinion on the issue, highlighting the salience of the question for TPM supporters. Support for Constitutional principles is not absolute. TPM supporters were twice as likely than others to favor a constitutional amendment banning flag burning; many also support efforts to overturn citizenship as defined by the Fourteenth Amendment. That TPM supporters simultaneously want to honor the founders’ Constitution and alter that same document highlights the political flexibility of the cultural symbols they draw on.
The TPM supporters’ inconsistent views of the Constitution suggests that their nostalgic embrace of the document is animated more by a network of cultural associations than a thorough commitment to the original text. In fact, such inconsistencies around policy, whether on the right or left, highlight what many sociologists see as the growing importance of culture in political life. The Constitution - and Tea Party more generally - take on heightened symbolic value and come to represent a ‘way of life’ or a “world view” rather than a specific set of laws or policy positions.
This reminds me a lot of Canadian psychology professor Bob Altemeyer’s long-term study of cultural attitudes of conservatives, The Authoritarians, which is online in pdf format. Altemeyer’s studies reveal rightwing double standards, inconsistent beliefs, willful ignorance, misrepresentation of historical and scientific facts and bizarre justifications. It, too, is absolutely worth reading.
Quoting Altemeyer:
The second reason I can offer for reading what follows is that it is not chock full of opinions, but experimental evidence. Liberals have stereotypes about conservatives, and conservatives have stereotypes about liberals. Moderates have stereotypes about both. Anyone who has watched, or been a liberal arguing with a conservative (or vice versa) knows that personal opinion and rhetoric can be had a penny a pound. But arguing never seems to get anywhere. Whereas if you set up a fair and square experiment in which people can act nobly, fairly, and with integrity, and you find that most of one group does, and most of another group does not, that’s a fact, not an opinion. And if you keep finding the same thing experiment after experiment, and other people do too, then that’s a body of facts that demands attention.3 Some people, we have seen to our dismay, don’t care a hoot what scientific investigation reveals; but most people do. If the data were fairly gathered and we let them do the talking, we should be on a higher plane than the current, “Sez you!”
The comments thread at TPM is worth reading. I suspect that our thread here will be lively also!
Meet Kanon Tipton, pint-sized preacher. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this short video clip from last night’s National Geographic special is worth a million.
Still only a pre-schooler, Kanon Tipton takes the pulpit at his family’s church and like a seasoned evangelist fervently preaches the gospel, mopping his forehead, shouting, waving his arms, the congregation hanging on his every word. But he’s just 4-years-old. NGC’s Pint-Sized Preachers goes inside the controversial world of child evangelists to follow two rising-stars and one established child minister as they spread God’s word and bring congregations to their feet.
Obviously this kid is just parroting religious gibberish—he’s not really saying anything particular here. It’s just Southern-fried pulpit word-salad. I have no idea why these people seem to think they’re getting something out of it.
Then again, it’s the same shit adult Pentecostals preach. Pretty much EXACTLY the same thing.
Thank you, Kevin Smith!
And here everyone thought “Birtherism” had died out. Not so fast, there’s a new kid on the block(head): meet soon to be discharged Air Force staff sergeant Daryn Moran (yes, that’s his real name, this is not some anti-teabagger jibe).
Moran read on the Internet that Obama’s longform birth certificate is a forgery, so he’s decided to a) make a ridiculous YouTube video about it and b) chat with the “Uncle Ruckus” of the conservative wingnut blogsphere, “Dr.” James David Manning and c) go AWOL to protest Obama’s treachery. (Except apparently he lied about that last part.)
Via the AirForce Times:
Moran appeared to believe he was AWOL and thought arrest would be imminent.
“His birth certificate is a proven forgery. I will also not support any other military person who turns a blind eye to this fact,” he wrote on The Blaze, a conservative website founded by former Fox News personality Glenn Beck. “It’s simple. Arrest B. Obama or arrest me.”
In an audio report posted on BirtherReport.com, Moran said he previously served in the Marine Corps, left on good terms and joined the Air Force in the months following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In a follow-up email posted Tuesday on BirtherReport.com and attributed to Moran, the NCO wrote a discharge is imminent and “basically paperwork.”
He wrote in a letter posted Aug. 15 on The Post & Email website that he was a “high priority” for being discharged after meeting with mental-health evaluators. Moran wrote on The Blaze that he would soon receive an “administrative and honorable discharge for a ‘personality disorder’” because he told his leadership that homosexuality is a sin.
He wrote a letter to BirtherReport.com the following day that his discharge was “basically paperwork.”
His first sergeant “passed on the advice to refrain from more internet activity,” Moran wrote. “She knows I cannot do that, because I want to end this crisis. For my family, and for the Constitution and my country, and for B. Obama”
He said he tried to resign several times from the Air Force, but his first sergeant wouldn’t allow it. Moran also said he was removed from his position after a coworker complained that he asked a doctor in his unit about her Muslim faith.
“My conscience is violated,” he said. “I feel like I’m supporting the flag of whatever those Islamic countries are and the rainbow flag and not the red, white and blue. That’s not the kind of people I want to be associated with.”
Here’s the aforementioned YouTube video and it’s every bit as tragic as you might suspect. This idiot is… just an idiot. That’s all you can say about him. He’s an inconsequential twit practically guaranteeing that he’ll never hold a job again. It’s one thing to post pictures of yourself with a lampshade on your head on Facebook, quite another to do this. Who would do a Google search on Mr. Moran and think “This is the bloke I’m gonna hire”?
Good luck in life, Daryn, you’re going to fucking need it as dumb as you are, pal. His wife probably wants to strangle this fool.
If you enjoy listening to crazy people who aren’t very intelligent talking nonsense, this is a classic of sorts…
But it just gets worse, here’s the Uncle Ruckus “Dr.” James David Manning interview that Moran did. Oh my! Towards the end, he advocates that all the birthers and Christians move to Texas and live under the constitution and not, of course, under Obama’s Islamic tyranny and shariah law and stuff.
Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips is such a fucking idiot that I have, on more than one occasion, wondered if he was some sort of long-fuse “Yes Men” prank designed to embarrass and disgust current or would-be Teabaggers from having anything to do with the dying-off political movement. Just Google his name, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of examples of completely unintelligent, ill-informed, ignorant and just plain stupid things he’s said. Judson is a small-town jackass who puffs his chest out and says dumb shit like only land owners should be allowed to vote. What does he add to the conversation besides a hefty dollop of DUMB?
Here’s just the most recent example of what a complete buffoon this man is. Via Raw Story:
At a Wisconsin rally on Saturday, Judson Phillips, CEO of “Tea Party Nation”, one of the many tea party splinter groups, claimed that “the left” has “killed a billion people in the last century”.
According to Politico, Phillips and other speakers heated up the rhetoric around Tuesday’s historic recall elections, with one speaker referring to Democrats as terrorists who struck at a Republican “Ground Zero”. Vince Shmuki, leader of another tea party group, the Ozaukee Patriots said, “This is ground zero. You remember what the term ground zero means? We have been attacked.”
Earlier this week, Judson Phillips compared protesters who opposed Governor Scott Walker to Nazi storm troopers. On Saturday, he said, “I detest and despise everything the Left stands for. How anybody can endorse and embrace an ideology that has killed a billion people in the last century is beyond me.”
See what I mean? If Judson did not exist, it would be in the interests of the Democrats to “invent” him. If they weren’t so lame, the Democrats, I’d have added “and maybe they have” but this is Democrats we’re talking about.
Phillips made this statement at a sparsely-attended rally to support Republican State Senator Alberta Darling, who is in the fight of her political life trying to hold onto her seat against Democratic Representative Sandy Pasch. When they were making the speakers list for the rally, you have to wonder what the selection process criteria was that they decided to INVITE (and probably pay the travel and hotel costs) for a complete idiot like Judson Phillips. How is inviting a fool to say crazy shit that is then ridiculed all over the media and blogsphere in any way helpful to their cause?
Unless it IS helpful to their cause, of course, which is just too frightening to contemplate.
Below, Phillips makes a complete and utter fool of himself on Hardball with Chris Matthews when he decided to flap his lips about the Gabrielle Giffords murder attempt just after the shooting in Tucson. How dumb would you have to be to follow this goofball?
Looks like crazy eyes has some young fans. Fortunately these two enthusiasts for conservative politics can’t vote…
A young Christian couple in South Carolina believe they have found the face of Jesus in a Wal-Mart receipt:
Jacob Simmons and his fiancee, Gentry Lee Sutherland, said they bought some pictures from Walmart on Sunday, June 12.
The following Wednesday, the couple had just come home from a church service when Simmons spotted the receipt on the floor of Sutherland’s apartment. He says the receipt had changed.
“I was leaving the kitchen and I just looked on the floor, and it was like it was looking at me,” Simmons said.
A dark gray mark on the receipt seems to show two eyes, a nose and a mouth in a thickly bearded face.
“Then the more you look at it, the more it looked like Jesus, and it was just shocking, breathtaking,” Simmons said.
The couple said the image seemed to answer a question they had just been asked at church.
“We had a message on knowing God, abiding in him,” Sutherland said. “(The preacher asked) ‘If you know God, would you recognize him if you saw him?’”
Good question.
I don’t know… to me this looks EXACTLY like the homeless guy who lives behind the liquor store around the corner. Or Charles Manson. I also see Harry Dean Stanton, but I see him everywhere (and yes, I’m on medication for that).
Bristol Palin, 20, the CEO of BSMP, a lobbying, public relations and political consulting services firm, discusses her memoirs, Not Afraid of Life: My Journey So Far on CBN.
What has Bristol Palin done in her life except get pregnant, go on Dancing With the Stars and have some ill-advised plastic surgery? Seems like that would merit more a magazine article than an entire book...
And who would buy Not Afraid of Life: My Journey So Far and actually READ it? Someone who “reads” and who is literate, isn’t going to give a rat’s ass about a book by a 20-year-old idiot. No wonder the publishing industry is in the doldrums: They’re publishing books specifically targeted to PEOPLE WHO DO NOT READ. That seems like a good idea.
Then again, what do I know?
“How do you explain the viciousness and the bias of the liberal media against you and your family?
Um, how’s about ‘cos they’re pathologically shameless snowbilly grifters transparently desperate for the public’s attention and being able to “capitalize” on their rapidly ending moment in the sun?
The more pertinent question to ask is why the rightwing media builds up someone like Bristol Palin in the first place? She’s an odd role model for the Christian Broadcasting Network to push, that’s for sure. This interview is ridiculous, especially towards the end. That interviewer is a real pro, too. She acts like she can’t believe she’s in the presence of such an important celebrity. Then again, in the world of CBN, Bristol Palin kinda IS a big celebrity. This video says so much about America, don’t you think?
Via Joe.My.God.
Rep. Michele Bachmann delivers a kooky and meandering entreaty to the Lord her God during the Family Research Council’s 2009 “Prayercast” event to thwart passage of healthcare reform legislation. GOD DOESN’T WANT EVERYONE TO HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE, HIPPIE!
Towards the end, when Lou Engle starts talking it gets truly spooky. I wish they were all wearing hooded robes like monks in that part (in my mind, they were wearing them).
Engle, if his name doesn’t ring a bell, is the asshat who traveled to Uganda to help promote the so-called “Kill the Gays” law there. He’s been called “the unofficial prayer leader of the Republican Party,” a distinction I for one feel he richly deserves!
Via Right Wing Watch
Tea Party Nation brainiac Rich Swier (also an activist with the anti-Muslim group ACT! For America) thinks bullying is actually GOOD for gay kids.
After a Florida group, Gulf Coast Gives, announced that they were intending to raise funds to bring wrestler Hudson Taylor—a brave and outspoken heterosexual advocate for gay rights, somewhat of a rarity in the sports world—to the state, Swier sent a poorly-thought out missive to Tea Party Nation members comparing homosexuality to drug addiction and calling concerns over LGBT bullying a “sham.” Via Right Wing Watch:
Gulf Coast Gives is working to raise funds to bring homosexual activist Hudson Taylor to Sarasota, FL. According to their website:
“77% of all bullying victims are picked on due to sexual orientation, gender identity, or the perception of either. LGBT youth are up to five times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight counterparts. ALSO Out Youth is the only LGBT youth organization serving both Sarasota and Manatee Counties, providing advocacy, leadership, support, and outreach since 1992. Please support ALSO in bringing Hudson Taylor to Sarasota. Hudson, an outstanding athlete, is a committed LGBT advocate and founder of Athlete Ally.”
The problem is the entire bullying campaign is a sham created by radical gay activist Kevin Jennings. Jennings is the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN). As MassResistance.org reports, “The homosexual movement in the public schools has always been based on lies and deception. But until the mid-1990s, they were still having difficulty getting into the schools. Then they found the key to their huge success—what they call ‘re-framing the issue’”.
…This is not bullying. It is peer pressure and is healthy. There are many bad behaviors such as smoking, under age drinking and drug abuse that are behaviors that cannot be condoned. Homosexuality falls into this category. Homosexuality is simply bad behavior that youth see as such and rightly pressure their peers to stop it. In Sarasota County over 70% of all HIV/AIDS cases are due to male sex with males.
I agree with Gulf Coast Gives that “LGBT youth are up to five times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight counterparts”. Homosexuality, like drugs, harms young people if they experement [sic] with it. That is the greatest tragedy.
It would be pointless to add anything snarky to a statement this lacking in sophistication and intelligence. Rich Swier is obviously a goddamned buffoon, but I must say, I do eagerly await news of his dalliances with rent boys to come to light, don’t you?
Looks to me like yet another case of a lady who doth protest too much.As with all the most outspoken “Christianist” homophobes, with Rich Swier, probably all we have to do is wait…
Swier is such a low-life that he even posted his essay on the Gulf Coast Gives fundraising page! If you want to donate to a good cause—and annoy this flaming asshole in the process—you can visit the Gulf Coast Gives website here and contribute to the fund to bring Hudson Taylor to Sarasota.
At least I think that’s what he’s trying to say?
Hesher preacher Damon Thompson really knows how to bring the Christian stupid doesn’t he?
And the way the audience just buys into his story as if it is in any way plausible, is… just… pitiful and depwessing. I can only imagine what people from outside the US think when they see shit like this! No wonder the rest of the world thinks we’re a nation of idiots… We are a nation of idiots.
Hey Damon, I’ve got a challenge for you, buddy: If this story is true—if you aren’t a liar, in other words—can you physically produce this lady with the born again Christian DNA?
If the Holy Spirit can perform such a miraculous feat, then why are you holding out on the proof that could potentially convert millions and millions of people to Christianity? Where is she, dude?
Or are you and the Holy Spirit trying to protect an admitted criminal?
WHAT is the moral of this story, preacher man?
Damon? Hello, Damon?
Via Cynical C
Yet another depressing post from me this morning, but what are you gonna do?
Tuesday afternoon an Oregon jury found Timothy and Rebecca Wyland guilty of criminal mistreatment for denying medical care to their baby daughter, Alayna. The couple now faces up to five years in prison.
The jury deliberated a little over an hour, and was unanimous in their verdict.
Authorities filed charges against the Wylands after an abnormal and deforming buildup of blood vessels in the child’s left eye was left untreated. The buildup, known as a hemangioma, would have left Alayna blind in the left eye if untreated.
While the Wylands prayed over Alayna, anointed her with oil and used other spiritual rituals endorsed by their church, they failed to seek medical attention for their daughter’s obvious ailment. From January to June of 2010 the couple did nothing while their daughter’s condition deteriorated.
The Wyland’s are members of the Followers of Christ Church located in Oregon City. The church is notorious for prohibiting members from seeking medical attention, favoring prayer over medical treatment. The consequences of church doctrine have been tragic: the preventable deaths of numerous children.
Defense attorneys for the parents tried to argue the couple was the victim of religious persecution - an argument the jury was definitely not buying.
Good for this jury, obviously. This is appalling and reckless stupidity. People this dumb and superstitious should not be allowed to procreate.
Other children of families belonging to the Followers of Christ Church, the church the Wylands attend, have died. The Wylands were the third couple in 24 months to be prosecuted for failing to provide medial treatment for their children.
Last months’s legislation in the Oregon state Senate ending legal protection for parents who practice religious faith healing was directly due to the cases related to the Followers of Christ Church.
Oregon jury convicts faith healing parents (Portland Humanist)
