Guerilla-style spiritual warfare.

Self-styled “prophet” Mark Taylor is at it again, this time loaded with all kinds of war vernacular, made to appeal to asshole christians. This time, it’s the, um, tactic of stealth prayer, which is rather like the texting version of prayer. Shorthand prayer, mumbled here, there, and everywhere. Christians seem to be under the impressing this idiocy works, and stealth prayer is often combined with war terms, like bombing and bombers. Or one could say its often combined with the vocabulary of terrorism.

Taylor revealed that God had recently given him a prayer that allows him to “jam the enemy’s radar” so that the prayer campaign being waged by his team of spiritual warriors cannot be detected while they repent on behalf off all the states that voted for Hillary Clinton in the last election.

“We want to ambush the enemy,” he said. “We’re trying to do guerilla-style spiritual warfare.”

Y’know, there are actual wars going on, if you want to be a patriot warrior so badly, Mr. Taylor. Perhaps you should pitch your idea to the pentagon, and they could send you and your crack team of prayer bombers to a strategic place in an ongoing war zone. Best to be where the action is, right? You’d get cool costumes and everything!

Trump’s election was the result of a national prayer and repentance effort, Taylor said,

Oh the fuck it was. It was the result of meddling in the election by interested parties, you dipshit doucheweasel.

but now God has given him a “blueprint” to guide the effort to remove the demonic “territorial spirits” that control all the states that voted for Clinton.

I really have to wonder if idiots like Mr. Taylor think the blue/red business means that actual states voted, or that every single inhabitant of any given state voted exactly the same way.

“If you want to know the territories where you can go after the enemy, get the electoral map,” he said, explaining that the states that voted for Trump in 2016 had repented but those that went for Clinton had not and are therefore still being controlled by demonic spirits.

Uh huh. Going by that, I’m safe from you idiots because I live in a red state. That did not stop me from voting blue. Bluuuuue.

“This is not about Republican or Democrat,” Taylor claimed, “this is about globalism versus patriotism, it’s about stopping the New World Order, this is about stopping the Enemy’s timeline. That’s why the Enemy is so angry right now, because his timeline has been stopped. God is saying, ‘No, I’m denying the Enemy’s timeline and we’re going by my timeline.’ And right now, it’s time for us to push back the Enemy through this generational repentance on the land, on the people and you will see, as we push the Enemy back, the Gospel will go forth.”

Repentance on the land, eh? Here’s a thought, Mr. Taylor: how about you dumbfucks repent enough to get the hell out of Turtle Island, and give it back to its rightful people? I’m good with that one.

“The blue zones represent depressed areas, the red zones represent the blood of Jesus,” he concluded. “So what we want to do is take those depressed areas, so to speak, and turn them into the blood of Christ.”

:Snort: Boy, do you ever have that one wrong. It’s most of the red states which are seriously depressed economically, and in most other ways, too. Living in a lake of blood sounds messy. And sticky. I’ll pass.

Via RWW.

The Comfort of Cover.

A depiction of a 15th-century bed. Public Domain.

Blankets, sheets. Most people have trouble sleeping without them. I have a love/hate thing for them outside of the winter months, when I can’t pile enough of them on.

[…] Blankets are common, but not universal, to humans during sleep, at least in the modern day. But historically, the effort involved in weaving large sheets put blankets at much too high a price point for most to afford. From the linen bedsheets of Egypt around 3500 B.C. to wool sheets during the Roman empire straight through to cotton in medieval Europe, bed coverings were for the wealthy.

By the Early Modern period in Europe, which followed the Middle Ages, production had increased enough so that more middle-class people could afford bedding, though not easily. “The bed, throughout Western Europe at this time, was the most expensive item in the house,” says Roger Ekirch, a historian at Virginia Tech who has written extensively about sleep. “It was the first major item that a newly married couple, if they had the wherewithal, would invest in.” The bed and bedding could make up about a third of the total value of an entire household’s possessions, which explains why bedsheets frequently showed up in wills.

In place of blankets and sheets, other sources of heat were common at night, usually from multiple people sharing a bed, or often livestock.

You can read all about this fascinating need shared by most people, and the reasons why, at Atlas Obscura.

Destination Earth.

Destination Earth.

A not so charming Petroleum propaganda piece from 1956.

Produced at the height of the Cold War, and made at the behest of the American Petroleum Institute (still the biggest lobby for the U.S. oil and gas industry), this great little promotional film from John Sutherland Studios champions not only the wonders of oil as might be expected, but also free-market capitalism. The surprisingly humorous cartoon tells the story of how the suspiciously Stalin-like leader of Mars, named Ogg, sends a rather calamity-prone citizen to Earth to find a better power source for his poorly-running “state limousine”. The exploring Martian, of course, lands in the United States and soon discovers the many and myriad delights of petroleum, and that, in contrast to his home planet, competition between companies is rife. His take-home lesson (and one drilled into the viewer on numerous occasions) is that “competing for the customer’s dollar” is key to the success of the oil industry and, of course, the thriving country as a whole. Delivering the news to Ogg back on Mars, the leader replies defiantly that “competition is downright un-Martian”, but the ordinary Martians are not to be deterred and soon rise up to overthrow Ogg and set up a thriving oil industry (and capitalist culture) of their own — the short ending with the slogan “destination unlimited” writ proudly across the screen.

I have no doubt that if someone were to show this to the Tiny Tyrant, he’d be enthralled, and probably want to meet with Martians right away. Via The Public Domain, and the video can be downloaded at archive.org.

Albert Janzen.

© Albert Janzen.

© Albert Janzen.

I know there will be at least one person who sees these, and thinks to themselves, “oh c’mon, anyone could do that!” The truth is not anyone can do that, and while it might look simple and easy to do, it isn’t. Go ahead, get some paper, grab a ballpoint pen or marker, and go for it.

I love all these pieces, and yes, I have tried this sort of thing before, I don’t have the knack. My attempts are a mess.

After studying Philosophy and Mathematics in Berlin, London and Amsterdam, he decided to follow his artistic path while he discovered his love for the line. In 2015 Albert won the Luxembourg Art Prize 2015 whilst finishing his Masters in Logic at the University of Amsterdam. Inspired by the autonomous work of Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter and Zao Wou-Ki, Janzen’s line drawings represent themselves as an independent entity. The lines are very simple and basic, so various patterns can be constructed. The ultimate simplicity of the line manifests its independent aesthetics. Albert draws lines not to make simple drawings, but to draw lines that create art by themselves. The shapes and patterns occurring in Janzen’s drawings have no other purpose than to reveal the movements of lines.

You can see more of Albert Janzen’s work at iGNANT, or his website.

Oh, The Irony.

Ryan Roy, a former Pizzeria Uno cook who was fired for attending a white nationalist rally (Screen cap).

Ryan Roy, the charmin’ gent pictured above, was outed as a participant in the nazi mess in Charlottesville. He was identified by activists who don’t think nazis marching around is a great idea, and his employers (a South Burlington Pizzeria Uno), to their credit, promptly fired him. Naturally, Mr. Roy is being incredibly whiny about it all. Perhaps you shouldn’t choose asshole nazi as a lifestyle, given that it has consequences. Unfortunately, the massive overload of irony doesn’t seem to have impacted Mr. Roy at all. My head, on the other hand, feels right caved in.

In an interview with the Free Press, Roy decried the liberal activists who got him fired from his job and alleged they weren’t tolerant of his belief that white Americans should have their own country that is separate from all racial minorities.

Oh, well, open a beer, Mr. Roy, I’m a liberal who is happy to support you wanting your own country – get the fuck out of this one, and find one. I’ll drink to your good riddance. It’s my understanding that there are often islands for sale. Perhaps you could start there, and I’m sure in no time you could have Whitesylvania or whatever.

“I think it kind of just proves my point, proves a lot of what I think, not that I needed further proof,” Roy said. “I think it’s group think.”

Oh, rats below. You were the one in a large group, carrying torches, and chanting “blood and soil” and “Jews won’t replace us”, and you want to accuse others of group think.

Roy freely admitted to attending the rally, which he said was designed to advocate turning the United States back into a “white” country.

“Obviously I would advocate for racial separation and racial nationalism or repatriation or even a return to — our country was a white country up until the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act,” he said.

“Our country”.  You can fuck right off, Mr. Roy. This isn’t your fucking country, and it most certainly was not white when you colonial thieves showed up and starting slaughtering everything in sight. You want white? Fine, march yourself off and find a place you can be deliriously white. It will not be this country, who has no use for fucking nazis.

Via Raw Story.

Oh, That Evil Science!

Members of the National Socialist Movement (Neo-Nazis) during a 2010 march to the Phoenix Federal building (John Kittelsrud/Flickr).

Do you remember when asshole extraordinaire, Craig Cobb got genetically tested? He’s the nazi who tried to set up NaziTown here in nDakota. Mr. Cobb wasn’t terribly pleased with his results, only 86% European. Ooops. He immediately dismissed the remaining 14% as “statistical noise”, and ran to Stormfront to dispute the results. Stormfront’s heyday was quite a number of years back, but it’s still populated with scads of delusional white people, many of whom have turned to genetic testing to affirm their whiteness. That evil science though, it just doesn’t care about a nazi’s sensibilities, and the results have had some interesting results.

With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, there’s a trend of white nationalists using these services to prove their racial identity, and then using online forums to discuss the results.

But like Cobb, many are disappointed to find out that their ancestry is not as “white” as they’d hoped. In a new study, sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years’ worth of posts on Stormfront to see how members dealt with the news.

It’s striking, they say, that white nationalists would post these results online at all. After all, as Panofsky put it, “they will basically say if you want to be a member of Stormfront you have to be 100 percent white European, not Jewish.”

But instead of rejecting members who get contrary results, Donovan said, the conversations are “overwhelmingly” focused on helping the person to rethink the validity of the genetic test. And some of those critiques – while emerging from deep-seated racism – are close to scientists’ own qualms about commercial genetic ancestry testing.

[…]

The team winnowed their results down to 70 discussion threads in which 153 users posted their genetic ancestry test results, with over 3,000 individual posts.

About a third of the people posting their results were pleased with what they found. “Pretty damn pure blood,” said a user with the username Sloth. But the majority didn’t find themselves in that situation. Instead, the community often helped them reject the test, or argue with its results.

Some rejected the tests entirely, saying that an individual’s knowledge about his or her own genealogy is better than whatever a genetic test can reveal. “They will talk about the mirror test,” said Panofsky, who is a sociologist of science at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. “They will say things like, ‘If you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you, that’s a problem; if you don’t, you’re fine.'” Others, he said, responded to unwanted genetic results by saying that those kinds of tests don’t matter if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist. Yet others tried to discredit the genetic tests as a Jewish conspiracy “that is trying to confuse true white Americans about their ancestry,” Panofsky said.

[…]

For the study authors, what was most interesting was to watch this online community negotiating its own boundaries, rethinking who counts as “white.” That involved plenty of contradictions. They saw people excluded for their genetic test results, often in very nasty (and unquotable) ways, but that tended to happen for newer members of the anonymous online community, Panofsky said, and not so much for longtime, trusted members. Others were told that they could remain part of white nationalist groups, in spite of the ancestry they revealed, as long as they didn’t “mate,” or only had children with certain ethnic groups. Still others used these test results to put forth a twisted notion of diversity, one “that allows them to say, ‘No, we’re really diverse and we don’t need non-white people to have a diverse society,'” said Panofsky.

It really wouldn’t take much for the ranks of wannabe nazis to implode. The full story is here.

Michele Bachmann, Pastor to United Nations.

Screengrab.

The Jefferson Gathering, a group of fanatical, conservative christians who have a lock on a good portion of Congress, have decided in their compleat lack of wisdom to “appoint” Michele Bachmann as the new pastor to The United Nations. I imagine this is basically more the ‘aimed prayer’ crap they have going now, or at least I hope so. I can’t imagine Ms. Bachmann being welcomed with open arms by the UN, especially in light of her feelings about that organisation.

The Jefferson Gathering, a project of right-wing pastor Jim Garlow’s Skyline Church through which Pastor Dan Cummings regularly preaches to members of Congress in an effort to drive Satan out of the Capitol.

Last weekend, Garlow announced to his congregation that Skyline will be expanding its prayer efforts to the United Nations with a ministry that will be led by former Rep. Michele Bachmann.

“What if you wanted to disciple all nations and you wanted to reach the whole world?” Garlow asked during his Sunday service. “So God did you a favor, he simply arranged so all the world came to one place at one time so you could reach them all at once. What would you call it? You’d call it the United Nations and that would be the most economical way that you could possible reach the leaders.”

Yabbut y’all think the UN is evil, but you’re gonna go with goddidit?

After discussing the assistance he had received in establishing this ministry from the Religious Right group C-Fam and revealing that Fox News reporter Jon Decker will be working pro bono as its communications director, Garlow proudly introduced “Skyline’s new pastor to the United Nations, Michele Bachmann.”

Bachmann was thrilled by her new mission and told the congregation that this “audacious step” was needed now more than ever.

I rather doubt this is limelight enough for Ms. Bachmann, but I’m sure she’ll maneuver it into something better, perhaps a spot at Fox.

“I don’t know a darker, more deceived place on earth than the U.N.,” she said. “Because as we saw at the Tower of Babel, that’s probably the last time when we saw all the nations of the earth come together in a moment of deception … Their goal has been from the very beginning, the creation of a one-world order; but not a one-world order under the umbrella of the Holy Spirit, a man’s attempt at a one-world order that only brings about chaos, confusion, deception, delusion, pain. And that’s where, rather than cursing the darkness, Skyline Church is about to light a candle.”

Ummmm, did I miss something? “As we saw at the Tower of Babel”? No, no one saw such a thing, for good reason, too. Oh, the spectre of the ecumenical church again! Gad, that was the big bogeyman back in my Jesus Freak days, and that was a long time back. I often wonder how these assholes tread such a fine mental line – they must be all enthusiastic about the apocalypse nonsense, and try to help Jehovah pull that one off, while at the same time, they want to be seen as the only people holding back Jehovah’s will in regard to the terrible apocalypse. Lots of chaos, confusion, deception, and delusion there, to be sure. It will be interesting to see if Ms. Bachmann reaches a point where she thinks it is her right to barge into a UN session and start preaching.

RWW has the story, and video.

Word Wednesday.

Incantation

 
Noun: a use of spells or verbal charms spoken or sung as a part of a ritual of magic; also: a written or recited formula of words designed to produce a particular effect.

Incantational – adjective.

Incantatory – adjective.

[Origin: Middle English incantacioun, from Middle French incantation, from Late Latin incantation-, incantatio, from Latin incantare to enchant.]

(14th Century)

“It seems to me that the menu lies close to the heart of the human impulse to order, to beauty, to pattern. It draws on the original chthonic upwelling that underlies all art. A menu can embody the anthropology of a culture or the psychology of the individual; it can be a biography, a cultural history, a lexicon; it speaks to the sociology, psychology, and biology of its creator and its audience, and of course to their geographical location; it can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a shaping, a manifestation, a talisman, an injunction, a memory, a fantasy, a consolation, an allusion, an illusion, an evasion, an assertion, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark.” – The Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester.

Book Note: In all my decades of reading, I’ve read a great many books which could be described as creepy. The Debt to Pleasure is, hands down, the creepiest damn book I have ever read. It’s a compelling read, in spite of the fact that the main character is one without a single redeeming feature. This book gets into your head, and leaves a rather disturbing taste in the brain.