I get a chuckle out of the silliness that state representatives will go to to keep from addressing the problems within its borders……this one is from Alabama…..
It seems that these guys are afraid of yoga…..why?
They think it will help spread Hinduism in the state.
Seriously!
Legislation that would have allowed yoga to be taught in Alabama public schools died in committee Wednesday, stalling a years-long battle by one state legislator to bring the practice back.
Bill AL HB246 was put forth by Alabama State Rep. Jeremy Gray, who wrote that bringing yoga back to school would be voluntary. It sought to overturn a ban on the practice in Alabama schools in place since 1993.
Lawmakers in Alabama’s state Senate voted on the proposal and decided against it, effectively endorsing the existing ban. Gray can attempt to pass the measure again later, but it is a significant setback.
Where have we heard of the “Thought Police” before?
You may have had to read a book to get that answer.
It looks like the Chinese are detaining people before they commit the crime…..
The watch towers, double-locked doors, and video surveillance in the Chinese camps are there “to prevent escapes.” Uighurs and other minorities held inside are scored on how well they speak the dominant Mandarin language and follow strict rules on everything down to bathing and using the toilet, scores that determine if they can leave, the AP reports. “Manner education” is mandatory, but “vocational skills improvement” is offered only after a year in the camps. Voluntary job training is the reason the Chinese government has given for detaining more than a million ethnic minorities, most of them Muslims. But a classified blueprint leaked to the media shows the camps are instead precisely what former detainees have described: Forced ideological and behavioral re-education centers run in secret.
The classified documents lay out the Chinese government’s deliberate strategy to lock up ethnic minorities even before they commit a crime, to rewire their thoughts and the language they speak. The papers also show how Beijing is pioneering a new form of social control using data and artificial intelligence. Drawing on data collected by mass surveillance technology, computers issued the names of tens of thousands of people for interrogation or detention in just one week. Experts say the documents spell out a vast system that targets, surveils, and grades entire ethnicities to forcibly assimilate and subdue them—especially Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim Turkic minority of more than 10 million people with their own language and culture. Click for the full article.
Back in the Dark Ages of our foreign policy (pre-2017) the president would issue a condemnation of such blatant violations of a person’s rights…..but those days are GONE…..I mean Trump will not come out in support in of the democracy protests in Hong Kong and has threatened to veto a bill passed in a bi-partisan move that condemns the Chinese government for the iron fist crack down.
So he will allow the mistreatment of a Muslim minority but will come out for a Christian minority in Iraq…..what a bone head hypocrite.
Nothing more heinous than playing games with people’s lives….and we Americans know how that works.
Have you ever read Fahrenheit 451? How watched the movie…both original and the cheap re-make?
No?
It is about a future society that does not like people that read…..
Set in the twenty-fourth century, Fahrenheit 451 introduces a new world in which control of the masses by the media, overpopulation, and censorship has taken over the general population. The individual is not accepted and the intellectual is considered an outlaw. Television has replaced the common perception of family. The fireman is now seen as a flamethrower, a destroyer of books rather than an insurance against fire. Books are considered evil because they make people question and think. The people live in a world with no reminders of history or appreciation of the past; the population receives the present from television.
Ray Bradbury introduces this new world through the character Guy Montag, the protagonist, during a short time in his life.
This story ties in well with something else I read…….
Book burning is not a thing of the past, at least not in Poland, where Catholic priests recently burned books they believe to be sacrilegious. Among the tomes that went up in flames were Harry Potter books, thanks to concerns about witchcraft and sorcery. The evangelical SMS From Heaven Foundation posted pictures of the event on Facebook, along with Bible verses including one reading, “Burn the images of their gods” and another explaining, “Many of those who had practiced magic collected their books and burned them in front of everyone.”
Also burned, per AFP and the Guardian: a Hello Kitty umbrella, books from the Twilight series, and a Hindu religious figurine. The group’s post has gone viral, and the BBC quotes some unsupportive comments left on it, including one noting, “I have not met anyone yet who would rape, murder and steal in the name of Harry Potter. In the name of the Bible, yes.” Other comments were supportive, like one suggesting, “Get rid of everything that does not please God and see how your life will change.”
Seriously?
It is the 21st century….this from a religion that spends more money protecting pedophiles but they do not want children reading fiction…this is pathetic and just another reason I do not like organized religion in any shape or style.
The garden awaits….the perfect time of the year…..cool sunny weather with a bit of rain sprinkled in (pun intended)….. I shall enjoy for as long as I can for the stifling heat of Summer is not far away……MoMo is getting her exercise…….she is a tan blur as she goes galloping past…….kids!
I grew up in the South and the Southern Baptist tradition…..no I was not a member of that bunch….my grandfather always told me to never turn my back to a Baptist or a knife will be the result.
I also remember in the 1980s when the “Religious Right” rose with Reagan and became the “moral compass” of the GOP…..and ever since the GOP has pretended to hold the “moral high” ground because of the support from the Southern Baptist pulpits.
And then Trump was elected and their “moral high ground” and the Baptist found themselves wallowing in the slime and muck of sexual issues…plus turning blind eyes to sexual abuse and assault in the name of Jesus (personally thought….a bunch of assholes that need to burn)
I bring all this up because of something I recently read……
In all, since 1998, roughly 380 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers have faced allegations of sexual misconduct, the newspapers found. That includes those who were convicted, credibly accused and successfully sued, and those who confessed or resigned. More of them worked in Texas than in any other state.
They left behind more than 700 victims, many of them shunned by their churches, left to themselves to rebuild their lives. Some were urged to forgive their abusers or to get abortions.
About 220 offenders have been convicted or took plea deals, and dozens of cases are pending. They were pastors. Ministers. Youth pastors. Sunday school teachers. Deacons. Church volunteers.
Journalists in the two newsrooms spent more than six months reviewing thousands of pages of court, prison and police records and conducting hundreds of interviews. They built a database of former leaders in Southern Baptist churches who have been convicted of sex crimes.
The investigation reveals that:
• At least 35 church pastors, employees and volunteers who exhibited predatory behavior were still able to find jobs at churches during the past two decades. In some cases, church leaders apparently failed to alert law enforcement about complaints or to warn other congregations about allegations of misconduct.
• Several past presidents and prominent leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention are among those criticized by victims for concealing or mishandling abuse complaints within their own churches or seminaries.
• Some registered sex offenders returned to the pulpit. Others remain there, including a Houston preacher who sexually assaulted a teenager and now is the principal officer of a Houston nonprofit that works with student organizations, federal records show. Its name: Touching the Future Today Inc.
• Many of the victims were adolescents who were molested, sent explicit photos or texts, exposed to pornography, photographed nude, or repeatedly raped by youth pastors. Some victims as young as 3 were molested or raped inside pastors’ studies and Sunday school classrooms. A few were adults — women and men who sought pastoral guidance and instead say they were seduced or sexually assaulted.
This is a disgusting lot. Granted not all are of this ilk but if you turn a blind eye to this abuse then you are part of that problem
This is just another reason why I continue to say that these religious types have lost any claim to the “moral high ground”….
I do not mind a religious person….but live by what you preach or shut the fuck up. PERIOD!
Then some say that the rise of Trump came from ex-churchgoers that had lost faith in the government…..
If you’ve ever been to a Donald Trump rally, you’ll notice it doesn’t match the impression left by the media coverage of the president’s base.
Anger, for instance, isn’t the prevailing mood. Hopefulness is more characteristic. But there’s more. There’s something about these rallies that goes beyond politics, and his harshest critics have found it fearful. “Trump has harnessed the kind of emotional intensity from his base that is more typical of a religious revival meeting than a political rally,” liberal religion scholar Reza Aslan wrote, “complete with ritualized communal chants.”
This isn’t unprecedented. At Barack Obama’s 2008 rallies, fans fainted, and those blessed with an Obama handshake pondered never washing that hand again. Obama was more than a politician. He was nearly a religious figure for his base. Something similar is going on with Trump.
The world and the country wait on pins and needles about the outcome of the investigations into Trump and his corrupt organization……will he be impeached……would that mean Pence would ascent to the throne of power?
Personally, I would rather see a corrupt ineffective president than him to depart and give the power to a Christian Sharia advocate……Mike Pence….he is a Dominionist……surely you can remember the days when Musims would make the US live under Sharia Law….total BS but there is a chance that a Christian form of Sharia could be looming…..
Say huh?
Those involved in what’s become a major component of the evangelical right in the United States call themselves “dominionists.” They follow “dominion theology.” Pointing to the Bible, they emphasize that in it God gave humans “dominion” over the natural world and life in it. This, they believe, gives them license to exploit the earth. Further, the “dominionists” have expanded this to justify theocratic rule of society.
It is an evangelical segment that Donald Trump has sought to attract. They constitute a significant portion of his so-called “base.”
Pence is a theocrat……religion is religion and politics is politics and nether the two should be intertwined.
The truth is that Pence is not a person we want in control….
Pence’s timing was even worse than his thesis. He delivered his address an hour after the U.S. Central Command announced the deaths of four U.S. personnel in Syria, an incident for which ISIS claimed responsibility. While the press widely noted the jarring discrepancy between his remarks and the fatal attack, it was silent about the strangeness of the country’s second highest elected official, a person with his own national security staff, blithely going on with such comments after the military had already tweeted to the world about the deadly attack.
Was he not accompanied to the speech venue by a member of his national security staff, or at least an aide capable of surfing the news sites on a cell phone for breaking stories that might affect the prepared remarks? Or was Pence actually informed about the Syria news and mechanically went ahead with the speech anyway? Either way, he doesn’t sound like the leader we need to manage a potential Cuban missile crisis.
Another discordant note: it was not as if Pence were haranguing a group of local notables in a Shriner’s hall in Muscatine, Iowa. In that sort of venue he could probably get away with saying more or less anything. Instead, it was an address to the Global Chiefs of Mission conference at the State Department—a foreign policy-savvy audience at a facility equipped for secure communication with all the nodes of the national command structure. That he thought he could pull the wool over their eyes with cheap talk of victory is one of those ineffable mysteries of faith.
I could do some retro review of a Clint Eastwood movie from the 70s but personally they were all pretty sucky movies…..the old “Spaghetti Westerns” with the weird sounding guns and the bad music.
Awhile back one of my closing thoughts was about the Congress finally making lynching a hate crime…….after 200attempts and finally a success……my post on the situation……https://lobotero.com/2018/12/20/closing-thought-20dec18/
I bring this up because there are some that want to alter the law on lynchings…..and as one might expect it is some religious sorts that want the change….
The U.S. Senate last month unanimously passed a bill that would explicitly make lynching a federal crime. Not everyone, however, is pleased with passage of the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act.
Liberty Counsel, an evangelical nonprofit that opposes gay rights, and its chairman, Mat Staver, are taking issue with the bill’s inclusion of LGBTQ people.
“The old saying is once that camel gets the nose in the tent, you can’t stop them from coming the rest of the way in,” Staver said in an interview with conservative Christian news outlet OneNewsNow. “This is a way to slip it in under a so-called anti-lynching bill, and to then to sort of circle the wagon and then go for the juggler [sic] at some time in the future.”
Staver told OneNewsNow that his organization, which has been labeled an anti-LGBTQ “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is lobbying lawmakers in the House to have them remove the bill’s “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” language before taking a vote.
(NBC News)
Not a fine example of Christian love, huh?
This is why I dislike most Christians……they are the most hypocritical of people…..plus they are usually conservative and that is just boring.
The cooler weather did not last too long…it is back up to 80 today….oh goody….more sweat to look forward to…..
AS we prepare to go to your local polling station there is a story that has not gotten the attention it deserves…it is religious babble from a theocrat wannabe…….
A Washington state lawmaker who moonlights as a wannabe theocrat has stumbled into FBI scrutiny over a how-to guide he wrote on killing non-believers and establishing a Christian theocracy.
Five-term Washington state Rep. Matt Shea has been circulating a manual for holy war in the United States, the Seattle Times reported.
The four-page document, titled “Biblical Basis for War,” goes point-by-point over how a Christian theocratic movement could – and should – exterminate its opposition in a battle to win a hypothetical holy war.
At the outset, Shea’s holy army would issue terms of surrender to its enemies. The demands include “stop all abortions,” “no same-sex marriage,” “no idolatry or occultism,” “no communism,” and “must obey Biblical law.”
If the rest of the country refuses to “yield” to these terms, the document advocates a final solution: “kill all males.”
Most of the document veers into the absurd.
Under “Things for a Holy Army,” Shea remembers to include “Circumcision/Saved,” after Sacrifice/Worship/Prayer.
talkingpointsmemo.com)
Sounds like someone who should be in the good graces of our second in command…..Pence who himself is a theocrat waiting to assume power……a sickening bunch as there ever was…..people like these toads should be held up for ridicule and disgust by a normal society.
I do not write much on the China situation for I do not dwell in the Asia for much time. But I would like to rectify that oversight on my part.
These are the biggest stories that I found while researching on the world wide web…….
Something Christians need to know….
China’s government is ratcheting up a crackdown on Christian congregations, destroying crosses, burning Bibles, shutting churches, and ordering followers to sign papers renouncing their faith, according to pastors and a group that monitors religion in China. The campaign corresponds with a drive to “Sinicize” religion by demanding loyalty to the atheist Communist Party. Bob Fu of the US-based group China Aid said that the recent closure of churches in Henan province and a prominent house church in Beijing is a “significant escalation” and that the “international community should be alarmed and outraged for this blatant violation of freedom of religion and belief.” Under President Xi Jinping, believers are seeing freedoms shrink dramatically even amid a religious revival. Activists say Xi is waging the most severe suppression of Christianity since religious freedom was written into the constitution in 1982.
Fu also provided video of piles of burning Bibles and forms stating that the signatories had renounced their Christian faith. He said that marked the first time since Mao’s radical 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution that Christians had been compelled to make such declarations, under pain of expulsion from school and loss of welfare benefits. Chinese law requires believers to worship only in congregations registered with the authorities, but many millions belong to so-called underground or house churches. In Beijing, the Zion church was shut on Sunday by around 60 government workers, said Ezra Jin Mingri, the church’s pastor. Zion is known as the largest house church in Beijing, with six branches. The officials declared the gatherings illegal and sealed off church properties, Jin said. “Churches will continue to develop. Blocking the sites will only intensify conflicts,” Jin told the AP.
There is more religious news coming out of China……
President Trump has been quick to go after China on trade issues, but the New York Times reports his administration is poised to penalize Beijing on a human rights issue for perhaps the first time. The administration is considering sanctions in response to China’s crackdown on minority Muslims, specifically ethnic Uighurs, in the name of national security.
The AP reports an estimated 1 million Uighurs and other Muslims have been detained in interment camps in Xinjiang province for indoctrination by the officially atheist government, and their plight is a cause of growing international concern. Human Rights Watch, for example, declared in a report over the weekend “that the human rights violations in Xinjiang today are of a scope and scale not seen in China since the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.”
Dear Leader going to put Muslims first (for a change)…..fascinating.
The US seems to be always have “war games” with this country or that….and now the 2 main opponents to US foreign policy have teamed up…….
Russia launched a massive military exercise on Tuesday, its biggest since the Cold War, reports the BBC. That alone would be enough to make headlines, but another twist has cinched it: China is taking part in the war games as well—the first time Russia has invited any country beyond its former Soviet satellites, notes the Wall Street Journal. The bulk of the troops taking part in the five-day drills in eastern Russia near the Chinese border are Russian: 300,000 vs. about 3,200 from China. Mongolia also sent a small contingent. The stories note that the joint military exercise is taking place as both nations’ relations with NATO in general and the US in particular have soured of late.
“The exercise is an opportunity to prepare for a range of large-scale war and crisis scenarios,” an analyst at the think tank Rand Corp. tells the Journal. “The focus is on the Pacific theater for contingencies, in North Korea, for example. But the capabilities tested could apply to a conflict with the West.” This is China’s largest such exercise outside its own borders, reports the AP. The first day coincided with a visit to Russia by Chinese President Xi Jinping. “We’re obviously aware of it, we’re watching it closely,” said Army Col. Rob Manning, a Pentagon spokesman. “We’re aware of Russia’s right to sovereignty and to exercise in order to ensure their readiness.”
These are stories that the American news outlets will not offer up to its listeners…..so chuq has made it his duty to give this type of info to my readers.
Before I start with the meat of this post……they say that blondes make up about 8% of the population and it looks like most of them work for FOX News…….so a comment made by an anchor on FOX makes perfect sense…..
Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt asserted on Thursday that America is “great” because it “defeated communist Japan.”
“We want to know what you think,” Earhardt said. “We defeated communist Japan, radical Islamists. We ask our men and our women to go overseas to fight for our country and sacrifice so much for this great country so that we can be the land of the free, the land of the brave.”
(FOX News)
Have you ever read an article that made you say to yourself….”No Sh*t”!…after reading?
Well the other day I found one that was a big No Sh*t for me…..
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a “defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the annals of the state of Israel” when the Knesset enacted earlier this month a basic law (having constitutional status in Israel) making the right of national self-determination “unique to the Jewish people” and not applicable to all citizens. The law further enshrined religiously based discrimination, including a clause that points to priority for Jewish-only communities by declaring “the development of Jewish settlement as a national value” and promising “to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.”
The law has been a subject of much controversy in Israel. It passed the Knesset by the narrow margin of sixty-two to fifty-five. Opponents argue that it constitutes a step away from democracy. But this was one more item on the agenda of the ruling right-wing coalition that, given the rightward move in Israeli politics in recent years, the coalition was able to push through.
Activist such as myself have been saying this for decades and few were listening……now the world is starting to see what I and others having been harping…Israel has NEVER been this shining democracy of the Middle East.
Of course Israel does not subscribe to these rights…….
Most people even if they are not a history buff will know of the 1st Crusade and the adventurism into the Holy Land in the name of Christ…..but that was not the only Crusade to try and expel the Muslim usurpers from the “Holy Land”…..
There were a couple of minor Crusades after the First….the Crusade of the Faint Hearted 1101…the Venetian Crusade and then we come to the Second Crusade of 1147…..but what happened after 1150?
Then came the Third Crusade…….
1187 saw the crusader kingdoms reach their low point. The crusaders fought amongst themselves, while at the same time Saladin was unifying large parts of the Muslim world, eventually coming to surround the crusaders. Despite this, the crusaders failed to observe their truce with Saladin, and eventually Saladin decided on war. In June 1187 he invaded Palestine. Guy of Lusignan, king of Jerusalem, was able to raise an army of almost equal size to Saladins’, but it was badly led, and the crusaders suffered a decisive defeat at the battle of Hattin (4 July 1187). Guy was captured, while the most able Crusader leader, Raymond of Tripoli, died of his wounds after the battle. The aftermath of the defeat saw the effective end of all but a tiny remnant of the crusader kingdoms. With their garrisons lost, Saladin was able to capture most cities, including Tiberias, Acre and Ascalon. Only at Tyre, where a combination of strong defences, and the arrival of Conrad of Montferrat with fresh troops thwarted Saladin. From Tyre, he moved on Jerusalem, which surrendered to him on 2 October 1187. News of the loss of Jerusalem broke on a stunned Europe, where moves were soon in hand for a fresh crusade, the Third. However, for the moment those crusaders left in Palestine has to survive.
Then there was the 4th Crusade to recapture the lost city of Jerusalem from the Muslims……
The Fourth Crusade was actually conceived in 1199 at a jousting tournament held by Thibaut, Count of Champagne, at Ecry-sur-Aisne in northern France. There, in a sudden wave of mass emotion, the assembled knights and barons fell to their knees weeping for the captive Holy Land. They swore solemn oaths to go as armed pilgrims to wrest it from the infidels. In the months that followed, the crusade took form in a series of feudal assemblies headed by Count Thibaut; Baldwin, Count of Flanders; and Louis, Count of Blois. Rather than wear out their army by a long land march through hostile territory, the leaders decided to reach Egypt by sea. A delegation of six trusted knights went to Venice, the leading seafaring city of Western Europe, to arrange for passage. One of those envoys, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne, later wrote a chronicle of the expedition.
The 4th failed to do what it intended to do…….which was pretty much every Crusade’s fate for 1200 on……time wasted, people dead and resources squandered all in the name of religion……some things never change.
Not to worry there were 6 more Crusades before 1291….after that year there were 6 more crusades until 1481…..
It seems that a Crusade was a popular past time in the Middle Ages.
