The Best Baseball Player! The Best!

MSNBC host Joy Reid, Donald Trump -- (MSNBC screenshots).

MSNBC host Joy Reid, Donald Trump — (MSNBC screenshots).

Oh, that photo! I’m by no means a sportsball person, but that doesn’t look like a pitch, more like a convulsion. Joy Reid had a fun time reporting on the “best baseball player in New York State when I was young”, and his avoidance of tossing out the first pitch of the season. I expect any “scheduling conflict” has to do with the Tiny Tyrant spending yet another weekend golfing or off to Florida or whatever, at taxpayer expense.

The AM Joy host explained that there is a long tradition of presidents tossing out the first pitch while making the point that Trump had previously said at one time he was the best baseball player in the state of New York.

“Baseball season officially kicks off today, followed by a dozen match-ups on Monday. including the home opener for the Washington Nationals, the team that asked Donald Trump to throw out the ceremonial first pitch,” Reid began. “It’s tradition, after all. Every sitting president has thrown a first pitch at least one major league baseball game since President William Howard Taft threw out the first ball for the Washington Senators in 1910.”

“Trump declined on Tuesday to step up to the mound because of, quote, ‘scheduling issues,’ ” she continued. “But we can’t help to wonder if that’s the real reason why, especially because Trump actually played baseball.”

Noting a 2014 interview in which Trump boasted, “I was the best baseball player in New York when I was young,” Reid an eyebrow before comparing him to youthful contemporaries Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Yogi Berra of the New York Yankees.

Full story here.

Sunday Facepalm: Jesus’s Nets of Neo-Porn.

Then-Bishop Vincenzo Paglia appears in an "erotic" net in his cathedral mural clutching another semi-nude man.

Then-Bishop Vincenzo Paglia appears in an “erotic” net in his cathedral mural clutching another semi-nude man.

A mural in a cathedral-church has gotten much attention, of the “blasphemous, disgusting, and demonic” kind. It is deliberately erotic, which is what has so many uptight knickers in a knot. Why, you can even sort of see Jesus’s tarse, oh no! Naturally, this isn’t just about the mural, it’s about Paglia’s oh-so-debased nature in designing a sex-ed class which was decried as “thoroughly immoral,” “entirely inappropriate,” and “quite tragic.”

Personally, I don’t see a problem with depicting people in a body-based manner, we are our bodies after all. When it comes to Christian thought, the idea is that while people might strive to overcome their carnal nature, this doesn’t happen until after death, and you get to heaven or wherever, yada, yada. In that sense, the mural would be accurate. Anyroad, this is being dragged into the limelight again, because Paglia has been promoted in the church.

Paglia commissioned homosexual Argentinean Ricardo Cinalli to paint the cathedral mural in 2007. It depicts Jesus carrying nets to heaven filled with naked and semi-nude homosexuals, transsexuals, prostitutes, and drug dealers, jumbled together in erotic interactions.

[…]

Dr. Ward questioned Paglia’s recent appointments to influential posts within the Vatican given his artistic sensibilities.

“Given that Archbishop Paglia is in the net of erotic figures going to heaven, and given that he discussed every detail with the painter, the question has to be asked by parents worldwide why was this man put in charge of a prototype of sex education aimed at Catholic children throughout the world?” he said.

“Catholic parents must look at the scale of evil [that has infiltrated the Church at the highest levels]. They have to wake up to what is going on: It’s a moral nuclear wasteland,” he added.

Christine Vollmer, president of the Latin American Alliance for the Family as well as a founding member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, called the mural “disgusting.”

[…]

Wilson said it is “incomprehensible” that Pope Francis appointed Paglia not only as head of the Academy for Life but also as the Grand Chancellor of the Saint John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family. She also called it “scandalous” that he was selected to oversee the launching of the Vatican sex-education course for teens, a course that she said is “repulsive and destructive to the innocence of children” as well as “contrary to the true teachings of the Catholic Church.”

[…]

Catholic artist and author Michael D. O’Brien criticized the mural for giving the viewer the “false message” that “all sexual activity, regardless of how depraved, is blessed by God.”

You can read much more here.

Republican Love, Orwell Style.

nothing-to-hide-cut

Mr. Tweet has made another appearance, this time touting the “love and strength” in the republican party. All I can think about are the Ministries.

Anybody (especially Fake News media) who thinks that Repeal & Replace of ObamaCare is dead does not know the love and strength in R party!

Talks on Repealing and Replacing ObamaCare are, and have been, going on, and will continue until such time as a deal is hopefully struck.

Sweet Zombie Jesus, it’s painful to type those out. Once again, note that Donnie uses his personal account, not the POTUS account. Anyroad, upon seeing the latest from Mr. Tweet, all I could think about, again, was Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, specifically, some of the ministries:

The Ministry of Love (or Miniluv in Newspeak) serves as Oceania’s interior ministry. It enforces loyalty to Big Brother through fear, buttressed through a massive apparatus of security and repression, as well as systematic brainwashing. The Ministry of Love building has no windows and is surrounded by barbed wire entanglements, steel doors, hidden machine-gun nests, and guards armed with “jointed truncheons”. Referred to as “the place where there is no darkness”, its interior lights are never turned off. It is arguably the most powerful ministry, controlling the will of the population. The Thought Police are a part of Miniluv.

The Ministry of Love, like the other ministries, is misnamed, since it is largely responsible for the practice and infliction of misery, fear, suffering and torture. In a sense, however, the name is apt, since its ultimate purpose is to instill love of Big Brother—the only form of love permitted in Oceania—in the minds of thoughtcriminals as part of the process of reverting them to orthodox thought. This is typical of the language of Newspeak, in which words and names frequently contain both an idea and its opposite; the orthodox party member is nonetheless able to resolve these contradictions through the disciplined use of doublethink.

The Ministry of Truth is the propaganda ministry. As with the other ministries in the novel, the name Ministry of Truth is a misnomer because in reality it serves the opposite: it is responsible for any necessary falsification of historical events.

As well as administering truth, the ministry spreads a new language amongst the populace called Newspeak, in which, for example, “truth” is understood to mean statements like 2 + 2 = 5 when the situation warrants. In keeping with the concept of doublethink, the ministry is thus aptly named in that it creates/manufactures “truth” in the Newspeak sense of the word. The book describes the doctoring of historical records to show a government-approved version of events.

In Newspeak, the ministry is known as Minitrue.

The Ministry of Plenty (in Newspeak, Miniplenty) is in control of Oceania’s planned economy. It oversees rationing of food, supplies, and goods. As told in Goldstein’s book, the economy of Oceania is very important, and it’s necessary to have the public continually create useless and synthetic supplies or weapons for use in the war, while they have no access to the means of production. This is the central theme of Oceania’s idea that a poor, ignorant populace is easier to rule over than a wealthy, well-informed one. Telescreens often make reports on how Big Brother has been able to increase economic production, even when production has actually gone down (see § Ministry of Truth).

The Ministry hands out statistics which are “nonsense”. When Winston is adjusting some Ministry of Plenty’s figures, he explains this:

But actually, he thought as he readjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of time you were expected to make them up out of your head.

I’m also reminded of this particular quote, from chapter 3:

The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy — everything.

We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science.

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

Via Raw Story.

Wrap My Hijab!

Mona Haydar, a Syrian Muslim-American poet and activist, released her first-ever single and rap music video in honor of the world’s first-ever Muslim Women’s Day on Mar 27 … all while she’s pregnant.

Given the current rise of Islamophobia around the world, Haydar wanted to fight the hate. And what better way to do that than with music?

“This song is a party,” Haydar wrote in a Facebook post.

After the song went live, some people began shaming Haydar and the other hijabis in the video for having fun, as they sing and dance away.

“So even if you hate it – I still wrap my hijab!” the lyrics say in anticipation of the hateful remarks.

But, Haydar did not let the hate ruin the moment, and instead kept on celebrating.

You can read more here. I think it’s a grand song!