Sunday Facepalm.

Screengrab.

It seems that Jim Bakker thinks he has the most awesome superpower of electing presidents, and that’s why he ended up in prison. Yep. Nothing at all to do with the fraud and tax evasion. Besides, back in the day, people like Tammy Fay better than you, Jim.

“The church elected Ronald Reagan,” Bakker said. “And one of the reasons—I have been told by so many people in high places—one of the main reasons they put me in prison is they thought I was going to get with Pat Robertson and endorse Pat Robertson for president. They said, ‘Jim Bakker elects presidents, we must destroy him.’”

I would happily eat one of my hats with a tasty sauce if one person on this planet besides Jim himself had ever said “Jim Bakker elects presidents, we must destroy him.” As for Pat Robertson’s “run”, I was there for that one. He didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. You were arrested, convicted, and sent to prison because you’re a greedy asshole of a criminal, Jim, and not much has changed.  The egos on these lunatic christians, unbelievable. Nothing but a raw craving for power.

The whole thing is at RWW.

Behind the Iron Curtain part 9 – Shops and Services

These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give perfect and objective evaluation of anything, but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.

After the WW2 the regime, under the lead of Stalin, had no thought of anything other than preparing for WW3. So after communists took power in a de-facto putsch in 1948, they invested all effort into re-building heavy industries and nothing else. And, at direct order from Stalin, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic refused any offers of help from USA and their western allies.

This was, as many other things, idiocy of first water. The economy as a whole was doing relatively well, with people being employed in the heavy industries. The main support of the communist party, the labourers, were making good money. The problem was they had nothing to spend it on. There was barely enough food to buy and nearly no luxury or comfort items, because light industries were deemed secondary and therefore not important and no effort was made to restore them after the war. And the iron curtain prevented importing goods in any meaningful amounts.

But people do not work like that, they want not only to barely survive on bread and water, they want savoury things, shiny things and pretty things too. Just feeding them enough so they do not starve is not enough. Hard work has to be rewarded with something more tangible than a pat on the shoulder and a word about how you contribute to the common good.

The regimes way to deal with the situation was to artificially devaluate the currency and thus effectively steal people’s money in 1953. It was touted as a final blow to the exploiters, the last remaining self-employed artisans and land owners, but the hardest hit was on the labourers. Before they had money but nothing to spend them on, but they had a hope of spending it someday. Now they had nothing.

Riots ensued that were drowned in blood. The propaganda tried to spin those riots as a work of infiltrators and foreign agents provocateurs, but it did not work. The regime has lost the trust of its main supporting class – the labourers. And it never regained it.

In reaction to this, some effort was made to provide people with things they want. It was succesful enough to prevent further riots, but not enough to regain the trust of people.

At the time of my life the situation was not as dire as it was in the fifties, but it was still pretty glum. Buying something was very difficult, even if you had the money for it. Not only luxury items like colour TVs were difficult to obtain, but even many ordinary items, like materials to do house repairs. For cars there were waiting lists.

This has led to a few main things.

One day when I was visiting my aunt in Pilsen we went shopping in a big shopping center. A huge shopping mall with half-empty shelves that nevertheless to me seemed full because I knew nothing better. My aunt saw the shopkeeper to sell a lipstick to a woman who was apparently her acquaintance and she wanted to buy the lipstick too. The retailer told her there aren’t any, to which my aunt replied, rather angrily, “Do not lie to me, I saw you to put the whole box under the counter”. This was my first meeting the concept of “under the counter goods”. Those were items that were so rare, that shopkeepers actually kept them hidden from the general public in order to either keep them for themselves or for their closest friends. If one wanted bananas or oranges, without a relative in the shop it was difficult to get either.

At another time and place I was talking with a friend of mine from school about a little experiment I wanted to do and I sighed, “I need magnets, but no shop around here sells them.” to which his incredulous reply was “Why don’t you steal them simply from school?”. To which I, equally incredulously, replied “I do not need them as much as to steal them!”. This was my first encounter of the concept “who does not steal from the state, steals from their own family”. For honest people it was nigh impossible to obtain some even quite ordinary goods, because they either never reached the public counters or were quickly sold out when they did. So it was quite common thing to steal for example building materials from public spaces. Who did not steal, did not prosper. Part of the reason why our house fell in such serious disrepair was that my parents did not steal.∗

But not only goods were hard to come by. Labour was difficult to get too. Need a house repaired or built? You better had a friend who is a builder. Not only would he be able to steal the materials you need, but he might also be able to make a lot of the work at the time when he is supposed to work for his employer. This in combination with previously mentioned slacking has exacerbated the labour shortage that was an ever-present theme. “There is not enough people” was the commonest explanation for why nothing works as it should be and work does not get done on time. You need some minor house repairs? You better do them yourself. If you cannot do them yourself, you are in bad luck, because “There is not enough people”.

For those who had occasionally got their hands on foreign currency, like German Marks, or US Dollars, or special secondary currency called “Bony”, there were specialised shops called “Tuzex” where imported western goods could be bought. These were highly sought after and a sign of social status. Jeans and Lego for example could not be bought anywhere else. But the regime did its best to prevent ordinary people from getting their hands on these currencies, they were reserved for the elite. So of course black market emerged. The proprietors were called “Vekslák” (probably from german “wechseln” – exchange) and were the official villains for the regime, by encouraging people in the following their base instinct to follow their own good instead of sacrificing it on the altar of the common good.

The iron curtain in this regard demonstrated where extreme isolationism, protectionism and one-sided economy leads – corruption and criminality. A lesson worthy of remembering,  yet nobody seems to remember it.

∗ Since my mother was a head of local food shop and my father was a factory foreman, people had difficulty to believe that they did not use their positions to enrich herself. There were rumours about us only pretending to be poor and how we have a car hidden i the garden shed and loads of money stashed away. After the fall of the iron curtain my parents were frequently asked why they do not start their own business or invest money. Nobody believed them for years when they said that they are not rich.

But they did use their positions to get some advantage. We always had some of the scarce goods. One of such goods were canned tangerines, those were so rare that actual fights broke out when they got into the shop. So when we wanted to buy color TV, my mother bought a whole box of canned tangerines  in order to sell them to the electronics shop keeper in the district main town who in turn held the TV under the counter for a few weeks until my parents could organize transport.

I succumbed to the peer pressure and I stole a piece of steel from school when I first wanted to make a knife. The knife was never made, because I have hidden the steel bar in a drawer and never used it. It gnawed at my conscience. I failed to internalize the imperative “who does not steal from the state, steals from their own family”.

 

Demonization and Ridicule and Mockery, Oh My!

Detail of Satan from Hans Memling's Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation (c. 1485).

Detail of Satan from Hans Memling’s Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation (c. 1485). Source.

This little snippet from Paul “Advanced Luciferian Beings” McGuire caught my eye in his latest screeth, in which he takes issue with people mocking his lunatic nonsense. It’s exactly like what Hitler did to Jewish people, donchaknow? He ends with this:

“Demonization and ridicule and mockery is an essential component in a mind-control brainwashing process that gives you the cultural license to destroy, kill your enemies simply because they may believe in the Constitution and the biblical God,” McGuire warned. “So you are looking for a moral license to kill them and you are looking for an immoral narrative that gives you the fake legality to destroy them and massacre them.”

That’s rather the plan of the religious reich, is it not? You want to force everyone else, regardless of belief, to adhere to your lunatic beliefs and ideals. You want to strip women of their autonomy, make sure only white, male, lunatic christian assholes run everything, and force every single person to conform to christian straightness. You want your hate and fear to rule. The rest of us want acceptance and inclusion, and are not afraid to treat all people as people, with full human rights. We want all people to be taken care of, able to provide a roof and food; a good education for all, and we don’t find diversity all terrifyingly scary. And I have absolutely no interest in tearing children from their parents arms, or stripping them of icons which are meaningful to them. But you’re in favour of all that. When I saw this photo, the first thought was “concentration camps. Now we’re doing concentration camps.” I have zero interest in putting anyone in a camp, let alone killing them. I’d be happy if you’d all just shut the fuck up, and get on with your lives. You and the rest of the religious reich would institute the Inquisition in a heartbeat if you could. Being blinded and driven by hatred and fear is no way to live, Mr. McGuire, and yes, I will keep mocking and ridiculing you, because that is exactly what you have earned. I think I’ll stick to my side, thanks.

The whole screeth is at RWW.

Luciferian Advanced Beings and Pharaoh-God Kings!

Paul McGuire, a lunatic lost in conspiracies is at it again, still flogging away on the whole Pharaoh God Kings business, but with added Luciferian Advanced Beings! Ooooh.

“The unprecedented attacks against President Trump and his administration are something that we’ve never seen before in all of human history,” he said. “These unprecedented attacks on Donald Trump are part of the greatest spiritual battle in the history of mankind.”

Sigh. Investigation does not equal attack. I always find it interesting that so many christians are adept at self-brainwashing, but that is part and parcel of Abrahamaic religions. It really wasn’t long ago that we had an actual president, who came under vicious attacks for eight long years. Not long ago at all, but it does feel a lifetime. The religious reich conveniently forgets all that, and happily acts as though no previous president ever was attacked, no. Just the Tiny Tyrant. If the narcissistic asshole sitting in the white house wasn’t a criminal, there wouldn’t be an investigation. That’s how these things work.

“The physical battles that we see in our world and nation right now are a direct manifestation of the spiritual battles going on in the invisible realm,” McGuire added. “There are people very high up in what is called the globalist occult or globalist Luciferian rulership system, and this rulership system consists of what used to be called the Pharaoh-God Kings, it’s what Aldous Huxley called ‘The Scientific Dictatorship,’ and these are advanced beings who know how to tap into supernatural multidimensional power and integrate it with science, technology, and economics.”

It’s interesting, the determination to keep hold of all the old bugbears, while trying to put a modern spin on them. Oh yeah, it’s Lucifer and Pharaoh God Kings, but with Science, Supernatural Multidimensional Power, technology, and economics! Got to try and make it interesting, I suppose. There’s a problem with the whole Lucifer business though – there is no Lucifer in the bible. Lucifer is yet another bad translation in the KJV. There is Hêlêl ben Šāḥar, that would be your bad guy. Granted, that’s a bit more of a mouthful than Lucifer, but practice makes perfect! As for Aldous Huxley and “the scientific dictatorship”, he never said that. That didn’t stop someone from plastering all over the net, unfortunately.

“They are people at the highest level of the pyramidic organizational structure in which the highest ranking officers, if you will, of the New World Order and Mystery Babylon are ruling the earth through an organizational structure that looks like the pyramid on the back of the U.S. dollar,” he stated. “And they control the world because they understand that the true control of the world is done through supernatural mechanisms.”

“Mystery Babylon”? What in the fuck is that? A pyramid. Hmmm. I haven’t noticed any gigantic pyramids anywhere. Perhaps I’m just not looking hard enough. Or maybe it’s in the earth’s core. Who the hell knows. Okay, so they know control is managed through supernatural ooogaboooga. What happened to Jehovah then? That’s supposed to be his demesne, is it not? How about that lazy, ineffectual god do something for a change. Light a bush on fire, something.

Via RWW.

Dead Soldiers Woulda Loved Me!!1!

Happy Memorial Day! Those who died for our great country would be very happy and proud at how well our country is doing today. Best economy in decades, lowest unemployment numbers for Blacks and Hispanics EVER (& women in 18years), rebuilding our Military and so much more. Nice!

In contrast:

We can never truly repay the debt we owe our fallen heroes. But we can remember them, honor their sacrifice, and affirm in our own lives those enduring ideals of justice, equality, and opportunity for which generations of Americans have given that last full measure of devotion.

Via Rawstory.

Behind the Iron Curtain part 8 – Work vs. Employment

These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give perfect and objective evaluation of anything, but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.

In the Czechoslovak Socialist republic everyone had a right to work. That is, everyone was entitled to be employed and make wages that guaranteed you shall be able to live off of them.

That sounds good on paper, but it did not work out so well in praxis.

First problem was that whilst there was some possibility of improving your income through work if you were a good worker and happened to be paid not per hour but per manufactured piece (or mined tonnage etc.), this was very strongly discouraged. The norms were still being evaluated and re-evaluated so if people worked too hard and earned too much, they would be re-adjusted so their income falls. This has led to peer pressure against too “hardworking” people to keep their heads down and not exceed the norms too much. Some minimal income was guaranteed, wo why work too much? If you do, you will have to keep working hard but you will not get more, so why bother? That was the general consensus among the populace. Nobody feared unemployment or not making enough money, and everyone knew that their chances at making more are abysmal, so people generally skived off of work left right and center. In trying not to get anyone too rich, the regime only succeeded to keep everyone poor (with exceptions, on that later).

Since It was not possible to keep an eye on everyone everywhere, the supervisors often did not even try. Greater care was taken to make the numbers look good on paper than to do good work, since it was easier. There were of course companies and individuals that did a good job. Some such companies were kept as the forefront for the regime and occasionally some random worker who exceeded the plan was paraded around as a PR stunt. I saw a discussion with one such worker on TV towards the end of the regime where the reality of this state of affairs was mentioned – that a lot of produced pieces was junk that once written into the glowing reports went not to the shops, but on the scrap pile. This was huge problem that has caused a lot of economical damage to the regime and has led to significant waste of resources.

Another problem was that it actively discouraged improvement and development. In the town where I live there was a small factory that has manufactured computer monitors. Our class was one day on an excursion in there and one moment stuck in mind. It was when the foreman was showing us a piece of new equipment, an automatic soldering table that was capable of soldering all components on a circuit board in one go in a bath of molten tin. He said “but we cannot use it too much, because otherwise we would not have work for all the women in soldering department”. To which our teacher, a bit zealous communist, replied with a sneer “but some capitalist would lave to have it so they could lay off those women”. The foreman looked baffled and not to pleased with this comment, but did not reply. As a child I could not put my finger on exactly where the problem lies with this reasoning, but it felt wrong. We were taught that advances in technology are a good thing, and making work for people easier is a good thing, but here people had to do manually work in an environment full of poisonous fumes even though the work could be done by a machine? It did not feel right. Well we need to keep those buggy whips manufacturers employed…

From that stems the fourth problem. A lot of work done was “work for work’s sake”. Not only was employment guaranteed, but unemployment was illegal. In order to achieve the nearly 100% employment, even with a lot of people skiving off and not working their best as a rule, there was an awful lot of busy but ultimately pointless jobs around. I remember how my brother finished his machinist’s education and went all giddy to his first job. He was actually looking forward to it. He came home all downcast and disappointed after his first day – he was given a stack of notebooks, a pencil and a ruler and he had to draw lines in the notebooks. Completely pointless task, but the factory – coincidentally the same one as in previous example – just did not have anything better for him to do.

Fourth problem was the widespread corruption. Most jobs that required higher education (like a physician, or a teacher) were assigned centrally so that availability of some services is evenly distributed. Not a completely bad idea since distributing these works purely on market basis means that countryside is without schools and doctors. However the implementation was deeply problematic, since party membership and family histories were a part of the consideration for who gets assigned where. So the countryside was sometimes stuck with teachers or doctors who were sent there as a form of punishment for not being subservient to the regime enough – and that was better option than those being sent there for mediocrity or incompetence. And the good spots were reserved for the competent – and, more importantly, the well-connected.

All in all this has led to the regime not progressing economically too much and average people were not particularly well-off. It tried to hide this behind the iron curtain, but some people did manage to visit western countries and word of mouth spread their experiences. And when the iron curtain fell, we could go and see for our selves the reality.

Oooer, A Psy-Op Blender! Wait…

Wow, Coach Dave is on one hell of a trip. His latest lunatic screeth is quite long, and so full of batshit, it’s hard to know where to begin. What’s all the fuss? The latest royal wedding – it’s a major psy-op to enforce the worst of the worst: the blending of white people with :gasp: people of colour!

Daubenmire, who has declared that he is “proud to be white” because “white, heterosexual, Christian” men represent America’s only hope for survival, has fretted about the threat of white genocide, and has fumed that interracial marriage weakened this nation “because multiculturalism is spiritual AIDS [that] has brought an infection into what was once a great Christian American culture,” said that the marriage of Prince Harry to a woman of “mixed blood” is an attempt to corrupt the pure bloodline of House of Windsor.

Yes, Coach Dave is a fully paid up member of the White Patriarchal Assholes™. He’s also astonishingly dense, as we shall see.

“Let me just lay it out there, because most people won’t say it because they don’t want to sound racist,” Daubenmire said while wearing a literal tinfoil hat. “Prince Harry’s wife is half-black. Now, wait a minute. That ain’t that royal bloodline lineage there, is it fellas? Isn’t there a little bit of mixed blood coming in there?”

Pretty much everyone on the planet has a someone in the woodpile who comes as a bit of a surprise. Now royalty everywhere does have a perturbing history of inbreeding in an attempt to keep things within the right class, but I’d happily bet there are some right interestin’ people in those bloodlines. Royalty has also spent a lot of time breeding like out of control bunnies, and there was seldom much concern about all those babes born on the wrong side of the blanket, and there were a fucktonne of them, too. History, Coach Dave. Try learning some.

“Did you see who performed the service?” he said. “Was it the Bishop of Canterbury or some official WASPy guy? Was it? Did I miss something? Or did we see the ultimate—umm, how do I say this?—a blending of the races; one new world order, one-world government, the blending of the [races] in the House of Windsor coming together for the first time.”

Bishop Curry is the ultimate blending of the races? How on earth do you figure that one, Dave? It’s not as if Bishop Curry was getting married to Harry. You might be unaware, Dave, but there have been people of colour in England for a very long time. A really long time. There have even been people of colour at the royal court, going waaaaaaaaaay back. I did hear that Bishop Curry preached about love, and I rather expect that’s what got under your skin. As for the whole new world order blahblahblah blending of races in the House of Windsor, uhhhh, it was one wedding. I don’t think it even qualified as a herald to all that nonsense.

Daubenmire insisted that since Prince Harry is sixth from the throne and very unlikely to ever become King of England, he was allowed to marry Meghan Markle in order to send a message endorsing mixed race relationships.

Oh, all that idiocy has been downgraded to an endorsement now. Gotcha. Who the hell knows who is going to end up on the throne? I can’t be arsed to care. As it stands, Elizabeth might live to be two hundred years old, given her death grip on that throne. People aren’t influenced by this kind of thing as much as you seem to think, Dave. For most people, it’s a matter of falling in love, and skin colour doesn’t enter into it.

“I’m going to tell you something, if there was any chance that Harry was ever going to be King of England, do you think they really would have let him just choose any woman he wanted?” Daubenmire said. “Of course not. So what’s the message that is being sent to us? … Is it a psy op that now, all of a sudden, sixth to the throne, he ain’t never going to be king, now it’s okay for the crown to be diverse?”

Yes, I expect Harry would have been allowed to marry who he wanted to marry. Even royalty has to make concessions to the current reality. If there was an obstacle, Harry could always choose to abdicate, it’s been done before. No, it is not a “psy-op”. Harry is not “all of a sudden” sixth in line. As for the crown being diverse, yeah, it’s just fine. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be.

RWW has the full story and video.

Hey, Better Than Pharaoh!

Screengrab. Man looks like he was unwrapped after a a few decades of mummification. Yeah, I know, but still…

Here’s a somewhat novel defense of the Tiny Tyrant – he’s better than Pharaoh. Yep. Naturally, the first question springs to mind: um, which Pharaoh would we be talking about? There were a bunch of them.

“Throughout biblical history, God continually raises up imperfect leaders,” he said. “In the days of the Pharaoh of Egypt—let’s not be Pollyannish here—anything that is inappropriate for young children, it was far worse in the king of Babylon’s time and the Pharaoh. When they partied, they partied and they didn’t even have an X-rated label because anything went.”

Uhhh, X-rated kinda means anything goes, and that’s not even touching on the absolute idiocy of trying to paste that over various Egyptian dynasties. I don’t think it a terribly wise focus either, given the Tiny Tyrant’s penchant for nasty partying. All throughout history, pretty much  everything was worse for children, so I’m afraid that’s not much of a winner either. This is also a display of complete ignorance about Egyptian history, which in many aspects, was highly civilised, with a whole lot of very smart people running things.

“Donald Trump, like so many other leaders in the Old Testament, was raised up by God not because he was perfect,” McGuire added. “Other men in the Bible were pagan kings, in fact, they made the people worship them as gods. God has a historical record from Genesis to Revelation, over and over again, God says in his word, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ He chooses who he will raise up and put down.”

Monarchy, regardless of where it’s taken place, has always been considered to be of divine origin and choice. Nothing new there. The ancient Egyptians had gods, you know, and they took them pretty damn seriously. Just like you do. That means god[s] first, monarch second. Most monarchs were quite smart enough to play up their various god[s], and simply relied on their authority as ruler to keep people in obeisance, and being fodder for wars often fought over…god[s]. “Thus saith the lord”. Yeah, there was a lot of that, and a lot of what Jehovah said was hideous, psychopathic bullshit. So fucking what? I could walk around every day saying “Thus saith Caine”, and writing “Thus saith Caine”. Wouldn’t mean a thing, except perhaps as an announcement I had decided to be an obnoxious ass.

“He put Trump into office for a reprieve,” he continued, “because our Founding Fathers, the pilgrims and Puritans, entered into a holy covenant with Almighty God, based on Deuteronomy 28. It’s an everlasting covenant. That’s why America is great. So here we have a man, a billionaire, and they don’t like him because they can’t control him. He isn’t a lapdog for Pharaoh’s new world order.”

Oh FFS, what a stew of crap. Yeah, Deuteronomy 28 is interesting. 28:14 begins:

And thou shalt not go aside from any of the words which I command thee this day, to the right hand, or to the left, to go after other gods to serve them. (Emphasis mine. Heh.)

That’s followed by an astonishing amount of curses, truly horrible shit, from petty infliction of hemorrhoids to family doing the worst things to you. Oh, and I guess you fellows haven’t heard, but all the pharaohs are dead. Long dead. As for the Tiny Tyrant, he cant control himself, in any sense of the word. That’s why he can’t run any business successfully, and resorts to cons and grifting.

RWW has the full story.

Scott Lively: The Voice For Authentic Conservative Homosexuals.

All around repugnant, immoral, evil person, Scott Lively has a new shtick in his bid for governor of Massachusetts: he’s going to be the voice of all those nice, properly closeted, quiet, conservative queers, who understand that heterosexuality must remain dominant. Mr. Lively is doing his damnedest to come across as reasonable and tolerant. Not at all the same Scott Lively who once called for the execution of all queer folk, no, no. If you want to read his glurgetastic appeal to “authentic conservative homosexuals”, you can do that at Lively on “Gays”. If you’ve eaten today, you might want to wait a while. In the meantime:

“One of my goals here in this campaign is I want to establish sort of a profile of what an authentic conservative homosexual looks like,” Lively said, quickly making clear that this should not be construed to mean that he would consider “ever endorsing homosexuality, because it’s something condemned by God.”

Lively asserted that “authentically conservative” gay voters are nothing like “the gay progressives,” because the former place “an emphasis on personal privacy instead of gay pride parades cramming it down everybody’s throats.”

Lively said that gay rights activists today are part of a “radical cultural Marxist warfare” movement whereas the founders of the fight for gay rights were simply seeking “the right to be left alone,” which is something he is willing to support because “we should respect people’s right to be wrong, because in God’s perfect timing, he works with every person.”

This is a truly astonishing pile of shit. I don’t believe for one second that Lively has at all softened his views on queer people, he has been utterly virulent in his hate and condemnation of them for decades. He really wants that governorship though, and he’s obviously more than willing to lie his arse off in order to obtain said office. I sincerely hope the people of Massachusetts show Mr. Lively the curb.

Lively declared that as long as gay conservatives “agree that mainstream society should be—and must be—heterosexual,” then society should be willing to accommodate them, especially when faced with the threat that the “gay cultural supremacy being driven by the hard-left progressives” is creating an environment in which “the natural family may actually be facing extinction.”

That is not going to happen. If anything, climate change will get us first, but people are not going to stop breeding. The majority of people on this planet are hetero, and most of them either want or end up with children, and there’s a fucktonne of people on this planet.

“If the concept of male and female complementarity actually becomes criminalized, and that’s where this is headed,” Lively warned, “we’re going to face some really serious problems.”

No, that is NOT where we are headed, you melodramatic asshole. Some people are now learning about gender, and coming to understand it properly, and expanding on the rigid gender definitions which have defined, and often devastated generations of people. That’s not a threat to hetros in any way whatsoever. Family has become a much larger umbrella, to embrace all manner of configurations, and in many cases, extended families are coming back, which is a good thing, because there’s a lot of support in that. There are a whole lot of children out there who are in desperate need of homes, and assholes like you, Mr. Lively, would stop queer folk from providing those homes. It’s good to remember that you don’t actually care about any people outside of evangelical fringe, and all you want is the power to oppress.

RWW has the full story.

Wearing a MAGA hat is like being openly gay in 1950! Really!!1!

Gavin McInnes, leader of the Proud Boys, has decided that wearing a MAGA hat in New York City is the worst of the worst, persecution wise.

“Here in New York City, wearing a MAGA hat is like being openly gay in 1950, and I’m not exaggerating,” McInnes said on Tuesday’s episode of his CRTV program. “You will get your ass beat, you will not last at a bar in Harlem—we try it all the time and get booted out. There’s many bars that say, ‘You cannot openly be here.’ If you go into a bar wearing a MAGA hat, people start getting uncomfortable. The bartender will ask you to leave politely and people will yell at you on the street and spit on you.”

Perhaps you shouldn’t be trying to push your way into Harlem bars, idiot. There’s one big difference between quietly minding your own business and getting hassled and going looking to get hassled. And of course you’re exaggerating – just what would you know about anyone being openly gay in the 1950s? Or anyone closeted and living in constant fear of being outed? Shoving your way  into Harlem bars while sporting arrogant whiteness with a stupid cap on is in no way equivalent.

It must have occurred to the rather dim Mr. McInnes that associating himself and his cadre of idiots with gay men might be a bit off agenda, so he closed with this incredibly offensive tidbit:

“You’re treating us like pedophiles,” he added.

Because of course, you can’t mention gay men without making an association with pedophiles. For that alone, I’d certainly consider spitting on you, Mr. McInnes.

RWW has the story and video.

Alternative Bullshit.

Fool’s World Map: ‘Stultorum Infinitus est Nemerus’ G201:1/43. Source.

I was reading a post at Pharyngula about the “Intellectual Dark Web” idiots, and came to an abrupt halt over these sentences:

There is also an irritating but genuine grain of truth deep beneath the layers of whining. Campus leftists and their allies in the media are often no more open to alternative perspectives than the New Republic white male elite of two decades ago; they can behave badly too.

This was my comment in response:

I came to a screeching halt in front of this disgusting apologia. The rest isn’t worth my time. This is utter bullshit, there’s no “irritating, genuine grain of truth” there at all. “Alternative Views” is nuspeak for the same old evil bigotry and discrimination that people keep trying to resurrect. Sticking an “alt” in front of these old chestnuts doesn’t change a fucking thing. I can’t even say just how much I’ve come to loathe the word alternate, thanks to all the immoral, evil, toxic assholes embracing it, as if it heralded new ideas. All the whining is because people recognize their crap for what it is, and they aren’t interested in hearing it, or providing a venue for it. It’s about damned time, too.

Let them fucking whine, but don’t be trying to sell their shit as some sterling truth that’s truly new. Farrell should be smacked for writing such idiocy.

This is an ask, an ask to consider their brave, “new” views, which are exactly the same as the very old views, which place almost all people firmly in the inferior camp for one reason or another. It’s pushing the colonial mindset with its genocidal bigotry, the same old fucking bullshit people have been fighting against for much of history. There are always more smug bigots than there are thinking, accepting people, because bigotry is easy. We all live within frameworks of institutional and systemic racism of some sort, here in Ustates, it is the framework, and has been from the start. Just getting some people to even see that framework is a serious, brain-breaking chore. That framework makes it very easy to slide into bigotry, it’s a very comfortable fit for many people, and some of them just insist on justifying their “alternative, radical” views. Those views are not alt-anything, they are as old as the hills, and firmly status quo mainstream. They are not radical, they stink of the banality of evil.

These are people who are waving the Persecution Banner, while pulling down obscene amounts of money, most of it from bigoted fans who are stuffed full of aggrieved entitlement. These are people who are so damn desperate for power, they will say anything, and do anything for a chance at real power. I suspect at least some of them are laughing their arses off on the way to the bank every month, but this does not make them less harmful. They embrace obscurantism while smiling and claiming “science” backs them up. They want to be seen as great leaders, carrying the one and only torch of knowledge, only they understand enlightenment, and that enlightenment is in silencing and oppressing those deemed inferior, dismissing the hordes of the great unwashed with a faint wave of a hand. Bring up the days of the gentry to them, and you’d no doubt hear a chorus of wistful sighs.

It’s all bullshit. It’s not even alternative bullshit, just the same old centuries long song. There is not one alternate thing about it, not one truly new view, not even a hint of originality. These are people who long for the bad old days, and cry at every opportunity because they can’t have that.

Bullshit. Piles and piles of bullshit.

Be Best? More Like Be Plagiarising.

The logo for “Be Best” allegedly designed by Melania Trump herself (image courtesy the White House).

The logo for “Be Best” allegedly designed by Melania Trump herself (image courtesy the White House).

As logos go, we’ve all certainly seen better. Much better. This is astonishingly simplistic, with minimal attraction to it. There’s no bite, nothing to sink teeth and tongue into at all. Mrs. Trump wanted something which would appeal to children, but my first thought was that sprogs of all ages would simply dismiss this as vague and boring. This, um, logo, brand, whatever it is wouldn’t have taken 5 minutes in photoshop. You could simply go to DaFont,* type in “Be Best” and look at it in thousands of different fonts, and you’d probably come up with something better.

Graphic designers the world over probably groaned at the news that First Lady of the United States Melania Trump designed the logo for her new “Be Best” initiative, which New York Times journalist Julie Davis reports came about because the First Lady likes “clean lines” and “wanted something that would appeal to children.”

The logo is part of a campaign aimed at “encouraging children to BE BEST in their individual paths, while also teaching them the importance of social, emotional, and physical health.” Cue eye roll.

[…]

Let’s remember that FLOTUS has an originality problem, so it seems only fitting that the Be Best pamphlet is an almost exact copy of a document published by the Federal Trade Commission in January 2014 — h/t @RMac18. Of course, this isn’t the first time she’s cribbed from the Obama administration, or even the second. Perhaps we’ll soon discover that she copied this logo, too.

You can read more at Hyperallergic, and vote in their poll about “Be Best”.

*I went back to DaFont, switched to cartoon fonts, and decided on Good Morning by imagex. I am in no way a graphic artist, and have zero skills in that regard, but a few minutes mousing in photoshop resulted in this:

I know which one would have attracted my attention as a sprog.

The Most Powerful Prayer!!1!

Lance Wallnau is urging people to unleash the most POWERFUL prayer there is: appealing to Jehovah’s reputation. Yep. This is all about how good ol’ Jehovah is gonna look.

“The most powerful prayer is a prayer that appeals to the Lord’s reputation,” Wallnau said. “Here is what I’m telling to the Lord right now, I’m saying, ‘What will they say when a man who makes the embassy move to Jerusalem as your capital is so unjustly beaten up and removed from office? What will they say about the God of Israel honoring those that honor Him? What will they say about this man who, just today, authorized the relaunching of the entire Bush-era faith initiative … More prayer in the White House than any president has had in 50 years, what will they say, Lord, about you when your enemies are mocking the weakness of your people?’”

“What will they say if he cannot be preserved from his enemies railroading him out of town?” Wallnau asked, calling on the “God of Israel [to] rouse from your slumber” on behalf of Trump and “act in such a way that even your enemies will be silenced.”

It would appear that Jehovah is still napping, not giving a tiny, godly fart about what’s happening, so it’s the last resort appeal of “what will the neighbors say!?” Now Lance did cite a passage from Exodus, where Moses appealed to Jehovah’s vanity with “What will the Egyptians say?”:

32:12 Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people.

I have to say, that sort of thing doesn’t seem to work at all anymore, I guess that nap is just too good. Honestly, this makes me laugh, because I just can’t imagine wanting any part of such a vain, weak little twerp of a god who is so easily manipulated.  Herne the Hunted is a much better god in comparison to Jehovah, at least he has dignity.

The full thing is at RWW.