There’s nothing quite as fluid as borders, and Medievalists has some videos to vividly bring that home.
Via Medievalists.
You can see videos of the history of South Asia, East Asia, the Mongol Empire, and the Middle East at Medievalists.
Cecil the lion gained fame after he was killed by Safari Club International member Walter Palmer during an illegal hunt in Zimbabwe. Paula French/ZUMA.
Just the other day, I posted about Amerikka doing its best to reach shithole country status. Naturally, no matter how great a country truly is, there’s always the fucking idiot contingent who moans that they have higher taxes, so bad. I would be more than happy to pay taxes which went to the common good, that’s the point of taxes. Here in Ustates, taxes rarely go to the common good. They certainly don’t under the current regime. Taxes end up in the pockets of the obscenely wealthy and corrupt. Today brings you a fine example of where tax dollars in this shithole go.
The Trump administration has launched a commission at the Interior Department to promote big-game trophy hunting and the “economic benefits that result from US citizens traveling to foreign nations to engage in hunting.” The council, which will cost taxpayers $250,000 a year, is charged with making recommendations to Secretary Ryan Zinke about removing barriers to importing trophy hunting animals—such as the recently overturned ban on elephant and lion trophies from some countries—and relaxing legal restrictions on hunting and importing endangered species.
Anyone impressed by this? Anyone happy about having their pocket picked for this utterly immoral, corrupt bullshit? Wait, it gets worse.
The members of the International Wildlife Conservation Council, which is holding its first meeting Friday, include a reality-TV safari hunting guide, a former beauty queen, gun industry representatives, members and affiliates of a controversial trophy hunting group, and a veterinarian associated with an exotic animal breeding facility in Florida that sells endangered animals to roadside zoos.
“It’s really embarrassing,” says Masha Kalinina, the international trade policy specialist for the wildlife department at the Humane Society International. “I just question the qualifications of each and every one of these people. Notably missing from this trophy hunting council are legitimate representatives of the conservation community with proper scientific credentials and a record of successful conservation programs, along with wildlife law enforcement experts and biologists who have no financial stake in promoting trophy hunting.”
The council’s charter calls hunting “an enhancement to foreign wildlife conservation and survival.” Along with pushing to relax imports of trophy animals, it will also review the way the US complies with an international treaty designed to protect endangered plants and animals that guides regulation of the exotic animal trade. But the membership of the council seems heavily weighted toward people who think the best way to conserve wildlife is to kill it.
Indeed, the country’s largest trophy-hunting lobby seems to have an outsized role on the council. Of the 16 IWCC members, at least 10 have an affiliation with Safari Club International, which represents wealthy big-game hunters who often tangle with the Fish and Wildlife Service over permits to import of game trophies from overseas, particularly for endangered species. The advocacy group, with 50,000 members, frequently lobbies Congress and federal agencies to fight environmental regulations. It sued to overturn the Obama-era ban on importing elephant and lion trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia. The Trump administration ended the ban earlier this month, despite the president’s earlier objections and comments that elephant hunting is a “horror show.”
Those members include Walter Palmer, the Minnesota dentist and asshole extraordinaire who killed Cecil the Lion.
The principal deputy director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Greg Sheehan, who is effectively running the agency in the absence of a congressionally confirmed director, oversees the IWCC. He is an SCI member and attended the group’s convention in Las Vegas last month when it awarded its “professional hunter of the year” honors to a South African man who has been fined for leading hunts of endangered black rhinos.
It gets much worse from there. It’s a sickening read, and its symptomatic of the rot spreading out like gangrene from the current regime to poison everything. Those people who want to point to higher taxes in other countries, countries which provide healthcare, free education, and many other benefits to their citizens, you need to shut the fuck up when tax dollars here go to such evil, corrupt enterprise.
Mother Jones has the full story, with all the relevant links, and you can read about all the members of this “council”.
Esplanade Park in Helsinki. Finland, is the happiest country in the world, according to the newest World Happiness Report. Credit Martti Kainulainen/Lehtikuva, via Associated Press.
According to The World Happiness Report, Ustates has plummeted to 18th on the list. If you really want to be happy and feel secure, you need to go Nordic. Finland made the top of the list.
Finland was ranked number one on the World Happiness Report, compiled by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. The country was joined by other Scandinavian nations—Norway, Denmark, and Iceland—in the top four, followed by Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, and Australia.
All these nations are based on strong social welfare structures, and look, people are happy! Looks like that evil socialism has a lot going for it. Turns out that when people feel secure, they tend to be happier and much more laidback.
“I think there really is a deep and very unsettling signal coming through that U.S. society is in many ways under profound stress, even though the economy by traditional measures is doing fine,” Jeffrey D. Sachs, an editor of the report, told the New York Times. “The trends are not good, and the comparative position of the U.S. relative to other high-income countries is nothing short of alarming.”
The drop followed President Donald Trump’s first year in office, during which the majority of Americans reported disapproval of the country’s top elected official, and hundreds of thousands protested his regressive policies on immigration, women’s reproductive rights, and gun control—as well as widespread concerns that the president is blatantly profiting off his position in public office.
The past year also saw reports of America’s widening wealth gap, with the average upper middle-class household holding 75 times more wealth than low-income families.
While other countries have focused on social welfare of all their citizens, Ustates has been in the process of removing rights and the very last shreds of social programs. We’re in the middle of dismantling education, nazis are running rampant all over the place, and you never know when you might be walking into a nightmare massacre. Sounds like a shithole to me.
The World Happiness Report ranks countries according to per capita GDP, social support, life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and corruption levels.
Going by that alone, seems Ustates should be at the bottom of the list.
Life expectancy in the U.S. dropped for the second year in a row in 2017, with researchers suggesting that the opioid addiction epidemic and inequality are related to the decline.
I expect no health care has a lot to do with that one, along with a hefty percentage of the population living in food deserts and being unable to eat well.
Reigning political ideologies in the highest-ranking nations contrast sharply with that of the U.S., noted the researchers.
The countries in the top 10 tend to “believe that what makes people happy is solid social support systems, good public services, and even paying a significant amount in taxes for that,” said Sachs.
Yep. I’m more than happy to pay taxes, when they are used for the common good. That’s supposed to be the bloody point of taxes.
Every top-ranking country also ensures that every citizen has access to free or affordable healthcare, while millions of Americans remain uninsured despite the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
Oh, there it is. Yep, other countries seem to have all figured out that having healthy citizens is to their benefit. That strikes me as simple common sense, but not here in Amerikka, no. I’m quite surprised we ended up as high as 18. Now I can’t get this song outta my head:
Via RawStory.
Dutch Sheets speaks at his Turnaround: Appeal to Heaven event at the Trump International Hotel in February 2018. (Screenshot via livestream).
Oh, all the self-styled prophets are “prophesying” and praying. RWW has the full coverage, which is quite lengthy, here are some highlights:
A new era in American and human history began at the end of last week, according to self-described apostles and prophets who gathered on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. … Sheets said he had never seen such intense spiritual warfare over the nation, saying the battle was not about Trump but about “whether the devastation caused by 50 years of anti-Christian activity will be reversed or, God forbid, continue.” He said then, “The antichrist forces are almost rabid in their anger over the potential loss of progress.”
[…]
Now, according to conference leaders, it’s time for the church to move from pleading with God to ruling with him—and with Trump, who one speaker described as “the father of this nation.” A speaker from Northern Ireland, Rose Sambrook of Rhema Restoration Ministries, proudly claimed Trump as one of her own. “Your president is a Celt,” she said. “That’s why he’s wild!” She said Trump has the “seeds of revival” in his DNA because his great aunts prayed for five months for revival to come to the island of Lewis decades ago.
[…]
Jacobs told attendees God had spoken to her at a Miami gathering of thousands of pastors from 60 nations, giving her the word “basta!”—Spanish for “enough!” “We’re here to say ‘basta’” she shouted at the Trump hotel, adding, “Enough of God’s people being attacked! Enough of the photographers and the bakers having to close their shops! Enough of our loss of our religious freedoms! Basta!”
Ummm, I thought everyone was supposed to hate immigrants and speak nothin’ but Amerikkan.
Tim Sheets, Dutch’s brother and apparently an expert on angels, led a prayer on Friday night that God would break “the collusion of hell in our government”:
And Lord, I hear you say tonight, ‘Disregard the fake collusion, and come against the real collusion, and the real colluder.’ We bind the kingdom of darkness and we ask that the strategy of our king and his angel princes that assist us now, would come against the collusion of darkness into our government, that would come against the collusion of darkness into our media, and in the name of Jesus we declare, this Ekklesia declares tonight, that the collusion of hell in its diabolical schemes, to those that are bent in iniquity, will be bound in Jesus name.
[…]
Dutch Sheets also prayed that Trump “would accomplish everything Almighty God sent you into that house to do, regardless of who likes it or who doesn’t.” He also predicted that Trump will have “a visitation from heaven” that gives him “an intimate knowledge of Jesus Christ.” Sheets had a warning for those who resist Trump or who want to turn the nation away from its Judeo-Christian roots:
You will fail! … The Ekklesia will take you out. The outpouring of Holy Spirit will take you out. Angels will take you out. You are no match for any of the above. You are no match for father, son, Holy Ghost, or his family or his angel armies. You are no match for his word. You are no match for his prophetic decrees …. So we push you back. And we say your finest hour has come and gone, and the church now rises to the place that he has called us to walk in …. We now rise up and I call that new order into the earth.
Gad, I’m queasy all over. I really have no problem with people who want to roll the clock back a couple of eras, but you can’t be doing it in the middle of an established society. Please, do some real estate shopping and go set up your little kingdom, far from the rest of us. It’s what Jehovah wants. Really.
RWW has the full story and video, all of which require a rather strong stomach.
A dude by the name of Ben Shapiro is all manner of upset about people being excited about Black Panther. Naturally, he misses the point, by a whole damn universe. Most of his screeth* seems to be a lament over the lack of gratefulness being displayed in this excitement. Black people should be grateful, dammit, for all the great and wonderful things white people have done for them! On your knees, slaves! Oh, er…stop being so excited! I’m not going to be able to get everything in, it’s a fairly long screeth, so full of wypipo gone wrong that it’s extremely difficult to take, and that’s a serious understatement. Shapiro is one of those fucking idiots who make you ache for the ability to reach through your screen and smack him into last Sunday. And I’ll just add that I’m over the top excited about Black Panther m’self, but I can hardly share in the excitement born of such outstanding representation, because I’m not black. That said, I don’t have any problems understanding The Excitement.
“Everyone in the media is talking about the most important thing that has ever happened in the history of humanity, or at least since Caitlyn Jenner became a woman—a transgender woman—and that, of course, is the release of ‘Black Panther’. It is so deeply important,” Shapiro said, mockingly.
No, not one single person is talking about the movie as if it were the most important thing ever in the history of humanity, you sniveling dipshit. Black Panther is deeply important – look at how damn long it’s taken to get a mainstream movie comprised of a mostly black cast, especially when no one is able to say that tokenism has gone out of Hollywood.
“We’ve heard it’s deeply important to millions of black Americans, who after all were not liberated from slavery 200 years ago and liberated by the civil rights movement with federal legislation, have not been gradually restored to what always should have been full civil rights in the United States. None of that has mattered up till they made a Marvel movie about a superhero who is black in a country filled with black people. ‘Blade’ was not enough. ‘Catwoman’ with Halle Berry, no. OK, Wakanda is where it is,” Shapiro said.
He continued sarcastically, “This is the most important moment in black American history, not Martin Luther King, not Frederick Douglass, not the Civil War, not the end of Jim Crow, none of that, not Brown vs. Board—the most important thing is that Chadwick Boseman puts claws on his hands and a mask on his face and runs around jumping off cars in CGI fashion—deeply, deeply important. Black children everywhere will now believe that they too can be superheroes who jump off cars in fictional countries.”
Oh my. Hey, sniveling dipshit! You left a little something out – all those things? They wouldn’t have been necessary if white people deciding that forcibly kidnapping people and putting them into slavery hadn’t been done in the first place. You don’t get fucking points for taking centuries to correct your massive mistakes. As for the the movies Blade and Catwoman, you wouldn’t have noticed that outside the main characters, most of the cast was comprised of white people. That’s because you expect to see white people, as far as you’re concerned, that’s only right and proper. What a fucking surprise that people of colour would like to see themselves reflected in the same way, and not always have to settle for tokenism.
“We heard this about Barack Obama when he was elected, too. ‘Now that Obama has been president, black Americans will feel like they too can be presidents. It’s a transformative moment.’ Yet, all we hear now is that America is deeply racist and that black people are still systemically discriminated against and that black people are still victims in America society. So, it turns out it didn’t mean anything,” Shapiro said.
Yes, it was a transformative moment. Just like the portraits too, because generations of children to come will be able to read about a black president, and they will see black people represented in the sea of white in the white house. (White, white everywhere.) Having such transformative moments in regard to representation and the hope of future achievement is not a magic fucking wand, you wannabe Voldemort. Whitemort? Yeah, I’ll go with that one. It does not magically erase systemic racism, localised bigotry, or victimisation. Those are still with us, and unfortunately, with the Tiny Tyrant, we’re seeing a vicious, cancerous rise in hatred. The difference such transformative moments make cannot be accurately estimated; they represent hope, strength, and change. They represent inclusion and acceptance, and you just have to try and take that away, by demeaning black people in every way your tiny, atrophied brain can come up with. You aren’t worth spitting on, Mr. Shapiro.
“Sorry to break it to you folks, Wakanda is not a real place,” Shapiro said. “It does not exist.”
Well, thank you ever so much for that whitesplaination, Mr. Shapiro. I’m ever so sure that not one black person could possibly figure that one out minus your help. What a flaming doucheweasel.
You can read the whole thing, and watch video at RWW.
*Screeth: screed + froth.
This won’t be my first time ranting about ostomy bags. They are badly designed, with little thought, and they are spectacularly ugly. You have 3 colour choices: beige and clear, beige all the way, or beige and white. Let’s not pretend people are this ugly ass shade of beige, they aren’t. Medical supply companies are apparently still on the colonial system too: one shade fits all. It doesn’t. Why in the fuckety fuck don’t they make them in colours? People who are using these things have gone through a big change in their life, they aren’t dead, and many of us refuse to start walking about in ugly ass smocks or shirts 2 sizes too big to try and hide them, and we happen to like colour. A range of solid colours would be good. Good in every way, because colours are cheerful, and they tend to make people feel better. It’s not enough I get to deal with a colostomy, I have to deal with deadly ugly and depressing too? No, I refuse. I also refuse to be complicit in helping medical supply companies keep the stigma of such procedures alive and well. Who in the fuck wouldn’t be trying to cover up that level of ugly? So…
© C. Ford.
enter Sharpie Markers. :D A couple of the bags are gessoed, a couple are not. The markers need a small amount of dry time, after that, they’re golden, no smears. This is all quick and dirty, nothing fantastic, but it’s not deadly beige. Fuck beige, I never want to see it again. It should be struck off the official colour list. These are, of course, my out and about bags. I can’t be arsed to do this for when I’m just working at home, but when I do have to go out, I’ll feel much better about them. If you’re stuck with a deadly ugly beige medical appliance which is fabric, Sharpie makes a lovely range of fabric markers, and there’s a whole lot of fabric paint out there too, all of it stable and washable! I say it’s time for a full on revolt against the standard, racist, ugly ass beige medical supply sticks everyone with. Fuck that noise. Fuck cancer, too.
And a huge shout out to Sharpie for some great products!
Paul Nehlen, screengrab.
RWW has an extensive story about Paul Nehlen, an unapologetic nazi who is running again in an attempt to unseat Paul Ryan. Nehlen is intent on shoving the Overton Window as far right as possible, to ‘sanitize’ and normalise white supremacy and nationalism. Just a bit here, because the article is fair long, and rich with links.
Paul Nehlen, who is running again to unseat Speaker of the House Paul Ryan in Wisconsin, told Breitbart radio host Curt Schilling today that he is using his campaign and fiery social media presence to force discourse in the Republican Party further to the right—in his case, toward the white nationalist worldview of the alt-right.
This morning, Nehlen joined Schilling to talk about campaigning for failed Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore in Alabama and his upcoming 2018 campaign in Wisconsin.
“There’s a lot of followers out there, there’s a lot of people out there, that look up to me and I take that seriously,” Nehlen said. “But you know, people like you who are out there every day—you wake up every morning and you work hard, you get your message out, it’s imperative that you realize, ‘Hey, there’s a bunch of people out there like me, who aren’t going to give up.’ And if we’re all moving forward in the same direction, moving that Overton Window to the right, and saying, ‘Hey, this fake news media, that doesn’t work us, that doesn’t scare us’—you know, I’m standing up for people’s free speech, lawful speech.”
Mmm. Odd how that standing up for people’s free, lawful speech only has to do with things you approve of, while you’re oddly silent in other cases, along with the rest of the freeze peach brigade. Unfortunately, the Overton Window has already been shoved considerably to the right, as we all get more accustomed to seeing and hearing white! white! white! everywhere. We really can’t afford to let this happen, but it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
Earlier this year, Nehlen retweeted photos that celebrated the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Nehlen was also a major proponent of “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory and told the Associated Press in August that he still believed it to be true. Earlier this month, Nehlen told columnist John Podhoretz on Twitter to “do us all a favor” and “eat a bullet.”
Last week, as first documented by the blog Angry White Men, Nehlen appeared on and praised the hosts of “Fash the Nation,” an anti-Semitic podcast popular in alt-right circles, and celebrated that “the red pills are being shot at people like with bump fire stocks.”(Taking a “red pill,” a reference to a scene in the sci-fi film “The Matrix,” is alt-right shorthand for embracing the movement’s views and bump stocks are the type of weapon modification that enabled the mass shooter in Las Vegas to achieve near-automatic fire). Nehlen also appeared on “Fash the Nation” last year, calling for an end to birthright citizenship.
Recently, Nehlen has pushed even harder to the right and dropped any attempt to conceal his affiliations with the furthest fringes of the Right.
It would be really nice is someone like Nehlen could simply be dismissed as ‘lunatic fringe’ without a hope of gaining support. Unfortunately, that’s not the case any longer. While people like this might not be winning yet, the call is too close for comfort. There’s no comfort at all to be had in the fact that it’s someone like Paul Ryan who does win, because while Ryan might not embrace nazism, he’s an awful sociopath, bent on eliminating poverty by eliminating all those icky poor people.
The Heartland Institute is still busy, somewhat behind the scenes, in their quest to mold the constitution to their desires, none of which are good.
The Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank that promotes free-market ideology and denounces climate-change “alarmism,” published an interview this week with Neal Schuerer, an advocate for a “convention of states” to propose a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. The BBA effort is one of several active right-wing campaigns to convene a convention under Article V of the Constitution in order to limit the powers of the federal government. Under Article V, if 34 states submit calls for a convention to propose constitutional amendments on a given topic, Congress must call a convention of states.
[…]
Proponents of a convention to promote a balanced budget amendment have been sparring in recent years with an even more aggressive effort that aims to dramatically limit the jurisdiction and power of the federal government, replacing our current constitutional order with one focused on states’ rights. That effort is backed by Religious Right leaders, including Alliance Defending Freedom’s Mike Farris, Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver, Christian-nation “historian” David Barton and anti-marriage-equality activist Robert George.
Just like our evangelical government, this too is serious business, and needs to be known about and taken seriously. Now that all the christians slavering over end times have gotten their Idiot King to make the Jerusalem move, they are feeling powerful and unstoppable. And they just might be, given that the Tiny Tyrant cannot say no to them, and most people being blissfully unaware of what they are doing.
Schuerer himself calls the BBA a “first step”:
A balanced budget amendment to the Constitution is the first step in reining in an all-powerful, all-consuming central bureaucratic government that our founding document attempted to guard against.
We as citizens of the United States have the right and duty to bring about responsible reform to our founding document, reflecting the values of the people and the nature of free and independent states. We know what needs to be done. All we need is the courage to just do it.
It’s important to realize that this is not about constitution reform and dragging that moldy document into the current century; this is about making it even more regressive. These are people who want the power and right to oppress and prosecute all those people they have problems with, which amounts to most people.
Schuerer says his group Campaign Constitution is working with the Heartland Institute’s Center for Constitutional Reform to “bring all the competing interests together.” And he talks about how close his group’s effort is to reaching the threshold of 34 states:
The Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force entered the 2017 state legislative year with great expectations, following the Trump election and the number of Republican governors and legislature majorities growing.
Twenty-eight states had active applications, with the goal of adding four to the number—Arizona, Idaho, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—bringing the number of active applications to 32.
Arizona and Wyoming approved the BBA application resolution. Maryland, New Mexico, and Nevada rescinded applications, making a net loss of one and bringing the number of active applications to 27. Recently, Wisconsin approved the BBA application, returning the total to 28.
Moving into 2018, there is very little margin. Idaho, Kentucky, and South Carolina are a must, bringing us to 31 active applications.
Montana will likely join in when it gets that close, to 32. Minnesota and Virginia are tough calls because of internal political disagreements on the issue of an Article V amendment convention. Washington state and Maine are anyone’s guess.
That brings the Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force and the national Article V movement to 32 states by the end of 2018.
Now would be the time to get very worried, and to try and find ways to counter these evil assholes who are intent on making things much, much worse. Every day, we get closer to the Theocalypse.
Via RWW.
(Screenshot/4Chan.org).
All us lefties are going to start foaming at the mouth, wilt, and just give up in the face of It’s Okay To Be White. Odd, but I don’t feel a swoon coming one, and my monocle is unpopped.
In right-wing internet message boards, users are encouraging one another to print and hang posters that state simply “It’s OK to be white” with the goal of exposing what they claim is anti-white racism in liberal communities and on college campuses.
Creators of the signs were first inspired by a news report that police were investigating fliers hung at Boston College that depicted Uncle Sam and the text, “I want you to love who you are” and “Don’t apologize for being white.” Reporters noted that the signs were posted near the planned location of an anti-racism rally on campus.
Earlier this week, 4chan users called on one another to hang fliers in their own communities with a more succinct spin on the Boston signs, making the statement “It’s Okay To Be White” in large easy-to-read font with no other context. One post detailing the plan explained the goal was to make liberals go “completely berserk” and ruin their credibility, marking a “massive victory for the right in the culture war.” [The linked post actually says media will go berserk.]
The campaign also urges participants to use adhesives that are non-permanent in order to avoid violating any laws and to conceal the signs’ connections to “racists or the alt-right.” One campaign graphic reads: “The simplicity is the point. It’s working.”
Right-wing YouTube creators have also taken notice, including Infowars editor-in-chief Paul Joseph Watson and white nationalist Paul Ramsey. Alt-right video bloggers James Allsup and Nick Fuentes even launched their own spin-off of the signs that read “Make your ancestors proud. Never feel guilty for who you are,” and solicited donations to produce and distribute their posters.
Oooh, be proud of your ancestors! Okay, I am. Funny how my pride amounts to “you stupid Indians, shut up! Pipelines are good!” and the like. That’s the problem with white pride, it excludes everyone else. Of course, exclusion is what white colonial pride is all about: “white people masters, everyone else, lay down to be trodden on.” This little campaign is hardly different from all the other shite supremacy, so it’s not a shock, it’s not even a surprise. White people being suuuuuper assholes simply has zero shock value.
There is no greater element of American strength – there is no greater force for peace in this world – than the U.S’ nuclear arsenal. pic.twitter.com/To6ZvIjvbY
— Vice President Pence (@VP) October 27, 2017
@VP: The Airmen of Minot Air Force Base & your fellow Americans serving across the globe have volunteered to defend our freedom & way of life.
@VP: There is no greater element of American strength – there is no greater force for peace in this world – than the U.S’ nuclear arsenal.
Oh, look who was a few hours away from me, Puppet Pence. He was waxing eloquent about the greatest force for peace in the world – nuclear weapons. Golly, and here I thought you were a godbotherer extraordinaire, Mr. Pence. Isn’t that psychopathic Jehovah supposed to be the greatest force for peace insanity, war, and slaughter? Oooh, I think Jehovah’s gonna getcha for that one.
Via Twitter.
Tillerson says Trump wants diplomacy in North Korea: "Diplomatic efforts will continue until the first bomb drops" https://t.co/TuRBJ51eeJ
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) October 15, 2017
“Tillerson says Trump wants diplomacy in North Korea: “Diplomatic efforts will continue until the first bomb drops””
Uh…is that supposed to be comforting? Reassuring? Because I’m not finding that warm and fuzzy in any way. Fuuuuuuck.
Bryan Fischer has come up with a novel case for being pro-death penalty: hey, good for the environment!
While making what he claimed was a biblical case for the death penalty on his radio program yesterday, Bryan Fischer said that executing criminals is something that environmentalists should support because that is the only process through which the land can be cleansed of “pollution.”
Citing Numbers 35, Fischer declared that “the land is polluted and defiled by murder; when innocent blood is shed, the land is polluted.”
As per usual with christians, one verse is selected while ignoring the larger context. Numbers 35 is all about building cities, and how murderers can flee to said cities and find refuge, until they are properly judged for their act and the revenger (nearest kin to the murdered person) is allowed to kill them. There’s a whole lot about how only the revenger can be the one to administer capital punishment. Basically, this is a chapter detailing the rules and manners of being bloodthirsty, and where you are allowed to spill blood, and where you aren’t. Miss Manners for killers.
Also, Mr. Fischer doesn’t seem to be overly concerned by the difference between literal and figurative. One particular definition of pollution does not automatically apply to the other definitions. I’d urge you to look at a dictionary, could be right helpful.
“If you’re an environmentalist and you care about the pollution of the land of the United States of America, then you want to see murder stopped and you want to see murder avenged,” Fischer said. “You want to see justice done in the case of murder because Moses says in verse 33, ‘No atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it except by the blood of the one who shed it.’ So if we want to see our land cleansed from the pollution of the shedding of innocent blood, it’s not just enough to lock people up for the rest of their lives.”
Well, if all it takes to clean up the environment is to condemn all those who have spilled blood, that’s an outright condemnation of every human on the planet, given our constant wars and all; not one society has ever stood up and said “nope, we refuse. no war.” Going by biblical standards, just being unhappy with wars isn’t enough, so we all need to die. Granted, that would do wonders for the environment. Let’s agree that’s not a great solution though, especially as you wouldn’t be able to get everyone on board with that idea.
If you’re going to stick with Numbers, then only the closest kin of those murdered can carry out executions, and those executions must be done in specific cities, at specific times. Good luck with that one, Mr. Fischer. If you want to insist on this spilt blood is the worst pollution ever, and you believe in Jehovah, then your target is clear: kill that fucking god of yours, because as killers go, it would be one of the worst.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve recommended Drunk With Blood by Steve Wells, but if you haven’t read it, please do. If you’re a christian, don’t be afraid of it, nothing but bible in it (KJV too), with a bit of clarifying commentary. What it will do is drive home the sheer awfulness of this god, the absolute lack of consistency anywhere in the bible, and the sheer delight this fiendish creation of a god takes in being a bloodthirsty psychopath with all the restraint of sugar-loaded toddler.
Via RWW.
