Bullfinches, from Charly. The female finally stayed long enough for photos! They remind me of Grosbeaks, and with good reason, same family. Click for full size!
© Charly, all rights reserved.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Bullfinches, from Charly. The female finally stayed long enough for photos! They remind me of Grosbeaks, and with good reason, same family. Click for full size!
© Charly, all rights reserved.
Right Wing Watch has in in-depth, disturbing look at the rise of Traditionalist International, or, the three way love affair going on between White Supremacists, the Religious Right, and Russia, or more specifically, Putin. From the Introduction:
Following the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, two American contingents appeared to stand ascendant in the U.S.: white nationalists and the Religious Right. The former, ideological descendants of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow-era legislators, would like to return white supremacy to both state and federal law—or, barring that, break off part of the U.S. to form a white ethno-state wholesale. The latter, meanwhile, would allow Christian fundamentalism to become the U.S.’s de jure national religion, with attendant legislation targeting LGBT and minority religious communities alike. Both white nationalists and the Religious Right tossed vociferous support behind Trump’s candidacy during the recent presidential election, and both contingents thrilled at Trump’s unexpected victory, as well as the authoritarian bent he’s quickly brought to the executive branch.
However, Trump is not the sole leader that both of these cohorts vocally support. Indeed, for America’s white nationalists and for many within the Religious Right, there is only one country, and one leader, worth emulating. Rather than model their goals solely on a glorified Confederate past or lavish praise only on defeated fascist regimes in Europe, the figureheads of America’s far-right have found a new lodestar in Moscow.
From much later in the article:
While white nationalists continue to pile praise on Putin’s policies, so too has the U.S.’s Religious Right heaped approval on Moscow. Indeed, at some point over the past few years, Russia stopped being one of the primary importers of legislation inspired by the American Religious Right, and has instead begun exporting both rhetorical support and model legislation for social conservatives throughout the world. “We’ve seen an interesting crystallization in Putin’s third term of this kind of … nationalizing the culture wars—in part an American export—and then re-exporting them,” said Christopher Stroop, a postdoctoral scholar with the University of South Florida, who has researched Russia’s links with the American Religious Right. “Russia has begun explicitly branding itself as leader of the global right.”
As Stroop found, ties between Moscow and the U.S. Religious Right predate Putin’s presidency. In a 2016 article for Political Research Associates, Stroop traced the burgeoning links among “right-wing fellow travelers” in Russia and the U.S. to the initial days of post-Soviet independence.
Which president is the lion of Christianity, the defender of Christian values, the president that’s calling his nation back to embracing its identity as a nation founded on Christian values? Those, ladies and gentlemen, are quotes from Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia. -Bryan Fischer, Oct. 2013, praising Putin’s piety.
The whole article is well worth reading, even if it is barely palatable. Recommended Reading.
Lou Engle speaking at POTUS Shield Heartbeat Ohio conference, March 10, 2017.
A whole lot of Christians, and much of Christianity is ineffably daft, you only need to read the bible to confirm it, or listen to people like Lou Engle, who seems to have a bit of trouble differentiating between the book of myths and the Lord of the Rings series by Tolkien. Ah well, they’re close enough, right? If you don’t know, imprecatory prayer is a specific type of prayer – basically, it’s asking ol’ Jehovah to go full court psycho on someone you don’t like, or view as an enemy. Psalms is stuffed full of ugly, gruesome imprecatory prayers, like so:
Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth … let them be as cut in pieces. … The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. Psalm 58:6-10
Okay, onto the ineffable batshit daftness of Engle, who has set his sights on federal judges.
Dominionist Lou Engle, taking part in multi-day Ohio gathering of the Religious Right group POTUS Shield called on Friday for God to “sweep away” Supreme Court justices and federal judges who would uphold Roe v. Wade, suggesting that God could do so by converting them or killing them.
POTUS Shield is an operation launched by self-proclaimed apostles and prophets, many affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation, to pray for the Trump administration. The group is holding a multi-day prayer rally at Frank Amedia’s Touch Heaven Ministries Church in Canfield, Ohio, this week. Amedia was a prominentsupporter of Donald Trump, who campaigned at a worship event alongside Amedia, and for a time served as the Trump campaign’s volunteer “liaison of Christian policy.” On Friday morning, Lou Engle took the microphone and began to talk about abortion and the federal courts.
Engle said that during a recent five-day fast, he had a dream about women gathering to hear the book of Esther taught. Someone in the dream said that there are two words in the book of Esther that mean “Nazgul,” which Engle stated is the name of “the Witch King” of the ringwraiths in the Lord of the Rings, the “most powerful being of darkness and death” who could be killed by no man, but who is defeated by the King’s daughter as she proclaimed, “I am no man.” Engle said the dream means that God is raising up an Esther movement of conservative women. “We decree it,” shouted Engle. “The voice of Esther is coming to take out the Nazgul, the principalities of witchcraft and death that demand bloodshed for the fueling of the agenda of darkness.”
My first thought is that perhaps a five day fast is a day or two too much for Mr. Engle. Not that I altogether believe he did one in the first place. A number of christians have interesting rules when it comes to fasting, rules which allow drinks other than water, and certain foodstuffs. That said, telling your congregants you did a five day fast lends some sort of holy credence to your declarations, no matter how utterly batshit they may be, and there’s a load of guano in that, uh, dream. It’s interesting how often references to Tolkien come up in christian batshittery, it’s easy to get the idea they’d love to co-opt it into the bible somehow. Okay, so, conservative anti-choice women are going to…what, start murdering judges, or medical personnel, or women who might be coming out of a clinic? Hard to tell exactly who they think is responsible for the ‘bloodshed’ (abortion) fueling the agenda of darkness.
It’s always an agenda to these people, everyone has an agenda except them.
“God sweep away the judges,” Engle prayed. “Sweep away the Nazgul, the Haman spirit of death. We decree, God, the sweeping of the Supreme Court.”
Oh. Judges it is, then! Odd, calling imprecation down on the Supreme Court, as most of the justices are conservatives asses. I guess it doesn’t matter, Jehovah had better curse someone, so why not them? Will Jehovah understand the desired target? I don’t recall there being a godly message wherein Jehovah talked about reading Tolkien. Oh, the Haman business? Haman is the antagonist in the Esther story.
As we noted earlier this week, Engle called for a three-day Esther Fast to protect Trump from witchcraft; he said women around the world are praying for the reversal of Roe v. Wade and asking God, “pull down these Hamans, remove ‘em, either—” and there he stopped mid-sentence to make a point to those who might be squeamish about his rhetoric:
There’s video at the main link.
I tell you, the church can’t be humanistic right now. I feel this in my spirit. We’re so concerned about these Hamans that we’re not concerned about the millions of babies! I say that we believe that Donald Trump, President Trump, is a Jehu as well as a Cyrus. And I’ve been praying, ‘remove the house of Ahab.’ “We need to begin to pray to sweep away the House of Ahab,” Engle said.
Jehovah commanded Jehu to perform a series of mass murders, killing all of Ahab’s relatives who had ever pissed against a wall. 2 Kings 9:6-8 / 2 Kings 10:30 / 2 Chronicles 22:7 – but, Jehovah also condemned the genocide: Hosea 1:4.
“We declare that you are the God of the reversal of Haman’s decrees,” he said. “We declare the reversal of the decree of ’73, Roe v Wade … We declare the reversal of Roe v. Wade. The powers of Nazgul, witchcraft and death are being reversed now over this nation.”
At this point, there’s a whole lot about Engle going on about how Jehovah destroyed the Politburo. After that, Engle and Amedia get back on track, talking in particular about Justice Sotomayer, who they seem to find particularly problematic:
It turns out that both Amedia and Engle have been praying specifically for Justice Sonia Sotomayor to have “an encounter with the living God” so “that she would see things from the mind of Christ, no longer from darkness, but from light, and that she would judge from light.” Engle, who said (wrongly) that Sotomayor’s name means “greater salvation,” prayed that God would “invade her with a dream” and return her to her Catholic roots. “Give us that soul, Lord,” he prayed.
At one point Engle said, “no one wants anybody to die” and that he prays that they get converted, but that when God starts to work he raises up kings and brings them down. Said Amedia, “He can haunt them in the middle of the night.” Amedia talked about his own dream, in which a broom went up one side of the Supreme Court and down the other, but this was not just a house-cleaning broom, but a broom “that brings destruction.”
“The Lord showed me the entire federal court system was getting shook and cleaned,” said Amedia, praising legislation designed to break up the 9th circuit–which he called a “fruitcake court”—and create a new circuit court whose judges Trump would get to appoint.
Amedia said there are 110 federal court vacancies on the federal courts, enough, Engle said, to create “the possibility of shifting the justice system for years.”
Right, they don’t want anyone to die, they are just praying that Jehovah kills them. There’s more blather, then the ending:
It’s not just judges who Engle thinks are asking for God’s judgment. Engle had a warning for “those who are funding anarchy.” God is slow to anger, Engle said, but when His time comes, He will “seize the initiative.”
So, not just judges. Everyone, be sure to listen for Jehovah knockin’ at your door. Sure it will happen right away. Or it might be a Ringwraith, who knows?
Via RWW.
Protesters gather outside of the White House. CREDIT: Natasha Geiling.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Mni wiconi—”water is life”—appear to be empty words to the federal government, but they now constitute a battle cry for Native nations as they rise together in the U.S. capital today to voice their discontent with the Trump administration’s policies regarding indigenous rights and power.
[…]
Organizers also want the public to know that this gathering is not just about the Dakota Access Pipeline, even though it now serves as the symbol of all that’s wrong with the government-to-government relationship that tribes and the federal government are supposedly involved in. Tribes point to the Trump administration’s fast-track actions on the pipeline sans meaningful consultation and environmental review serving as the tipping point for Indian country by making a mockery of free, prior and informed consent—the right of every other sovereign nation in the world. They hope to make the point that the federal government, in going forward with the pipeline against the tribes’ wishes, abdicated its role as trustee to protect the tribes’ rights and resources, and violated their sovereignty and self-determination.
Full Story at ICMN. Think Progress also covers this story.
Tipis on the National Mall, near the White House, as water protectors gather for a march advocating for indigenous rights and a halt to environmental destruction. Kandi Mossett/Facebook.
“The Standing Rock movement is bigger than one tribe,” the Standing Rock Sioux said. “It has evolved into a powerful global phenomenon highlighting the necessity to respect Indigenous Nations and their right to protect their homelands, environment and future generations. We are asking our Native relatives from across Turtle Island to rise with us.”
There is No O’odham Word for Wall.
TUCSON, ARIZONA—The Tohono O’odham Nation Executive Branch is firm on their stance against a border wall being built.
“[It’s] not going to happen,” said Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Edward Manual. “It is not feasible to put a wall on the Tohono O’odham Nation…it is going to cost way too much money, way more than they are projecting.”
TON Chairman Manuel went on to say, “It is going to cut off our people, our members that come [from Mexico] and use our services. Not only that we have ceremonies in Mexico that many of our members attend. Members also make pilgrimages to Mexico and a border wall would cut that off as well.”
This Is My Body. A figure stands in the middle of the image with arms outstretched. A red headband covers the forehead and long, loosely braided dark hair, parted in the middle. White streams down the face, and the eyes are red and swollen. The body has a bleeding wound on its side, a hole in each palm, and three rubber bullet wounds. Dark figures with riot gear border the figure to the right, while water from a vehicle cannon shoots down at the figure. (Art done by Joann Lee Kim).
Joann Lee Kim has a stunning body of work, do yourself a favour and wander over for a long look. I came across Ms. Kim’s work at The Establishment, specifically an article by Dae Shik Kim Hawkins Jr., about the days when 500 ministers descended on the NoDapl camp. I was there for that, and talked to several of the ministers. The ones I spoke with all seemed rather dazed and overcome by everything happening at the camps. The particular perspective of the article is an interesting one, and quite important, I think: Christianity Is Co-opting The Justice Movement. It’s an excellent article. Solidarity is more important than ever, as is making sure that solidarity is intersectional and inclusive. When it comes to christian involvement in major social justice fights, particularly indigenous ones, it is very important that attention is seriously paid to the colonial roots and colonial mindset which still rules most peoples’ thinking and actions, especially those of churches.
Have a read, highly recommended. And when you’re done, have a look around at the rest of The Establishment, a lot of good writing going on there.
Photo: Miha Fras. Image via.
Photo: Miha Fras. Image via.
Four-and-a-half liters of blood, slowly collected over eight months into a unique type of battery, powers this sound installation from Russian-based artist ::vtol::, a.k.a., Dmitry Morozov. The piece, called Until I Die, was on show at the Kapelica gallery, Ljubljana in December 2016, with documentation recently released online.
The artwork uses Morozov’s blood to generate electricity, using electrolyte liquid and metals (copper and aluminum) with varying oxidation rates as power sources. This powers an electronic synth module, creating generative sound compositions which play from a speaker.
The installation features five “blood” batteries which are made up of 11 containers of the artist’s blood diluted with distilled water—and preservatives added—to make seven liters in total.
On his website ::vtol:: notes that the installation, both in visual aesthetics and its methodology, nods to the electrochemical experiments of the 18th and 19th century, particularly scientists Luigi Galvani, discoverer of animal electricity, and Alessandro Volta, inventor of the electrical battery.
“Two mutually reinforcing concepts form the central premise of the project. The first one is my desire to create a technobiological hybrid device after several years of fruitful but exhausting work. This device would be something that is in all but name me, that uses my vitality to create electronic sounds,” explains Morozov on his website. He continues: “Another crucial component of the installation is the generation of electricity: this is the cornerstone of my creative work. The fact that my body’s most important fluid can animate a device designed as an extension of myself beyond my body is also very significant.”
You can see more images at The Creators Project. A visually stunning project, to say the least, with significant and profound observations about humanity.
I’ve never seen the show (or read the books), but I know most everyone else on the planet has, so here’s their opening teaser. If you head over to the Creators Project, you can also view their FB special:
A crew on Facebook Live placed a solid chunk of ice containing the release date on a pedestal next to a flamethrower. “Type ‘FIRE’ in the comments to reveal the #GoTS7 premiere date,” they instructed fans, and with each new comment they blasted the ice with fire. At the end of the 11-minute video, the date was revealed…
There’s more at the link!
Yasuhati a voice-sensitive game by Japanese developers Freedom Crow, is really hard to play if you’re not trained in the art of controlling your pipes. Pitch, tone, and volume all seem to factor into its audio-based gameplay, but a layperson like me winds up in the pit more often than not. Whether this is due to a lack of training—or a lack of commitment—is up for debate. After all, the description suggests that you can win by, “shouting, screaming, and even groaning in different degrees.” Performance artists like Kim Boem, known for his 2012 performance Yellow Scream, or Marina Abramoviç, who replicated Edvard Munch’s The Scream with her own vocal chords, would excel.
For me, playing the game isn’t nearly as entertaining as watching the scattered demo videos which have popped up on the internet. A Japanese voice actress, whose control over her vocal chords is mesmerizing in and of itself, kills it playing the game in the video above. (Turn your speakers down.)
I love it when she groans and says “can’t you die faster.” You can read more, and watch more videos of people happily making all manner of noises at their phones, which is what phones are for, right? :D
Dark-eyed Junco, click for full size.
© C. Ford.
Truth made up of lies by blogs.ubc.ca.
The Labor Department on Friday released a strong jobs report showing the US economy added 235,000 jobs in February. During his White House press briefing later in the day, Spicer was asked about Trump’s previous claims that positive job reports under the Obama administration were “phony or totally fiction.”
“I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote them very clearly. They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now,” Spicer replied, prompting laughter from reporters in the room.
“I know it was delivered as a laugh line from Sean and got laughter in the room from reporters — I’m not so sure all of America will laugh at that,” CNN political director David Chalian said afterward.
“It is an admission of blatant hypocrisy,” he continued. “I mean, it’s like the most traditional politician thing you could do — which is not Donald Trump’s brand necessarily — to say that when it is not in my favor I’m going to say this, and when it is in my favor, I’m going to say that. That is the thing about politicians most people in the country don’t like. So I don’t know it is necessarily a joke. It is a total admission of blatant hypocrisy.”
I often speak of the implicit and explicit terror in the normalisation of the current regime. The press reacting with laughter to an open admission of lying? That’s not good, it’s not good at all. There should have been silence, followed by disgusted outrage. Fortunately, not everyone is asleep or busy digging into their pretense that everything is okay.
“Spicer’s breezy dismissal of the question was a tacit admission that Trump had indeed lied when he trashed good employment news during the administration of his predecessor Barack Obama,” Jon Levine wrote at Mediaite. “If the fourth estate treats future administration falsehoods as a joke, they will become the fake news which they have so often been accused.”
The question being, are Mr. Levine’s fellow journalists going to pay attention, or will they simply continue to treat lies as nothing more than a momentary gaffe? I realize that it cannot be easy to deal with the sheer volume of lies which tumble out of Regime HQ, however, that is in no way an excuse to start treating them as no big deal. There is a strong ripple of unease, that too many members of the fourth estate have succumbed to the temptation to treat our unpresident as a small sprog, who is simply being naughty and mischievous. One good sign was a woke reaction by many of the Twitterati.
@MSNBC This administration is an abusive relationship with the American psyche. Everything is bad in life until they tell you it’s good.
*
@MSNBC Real funny–everyone accepting that our President is a serial liar & does so when it fits his own view of alt-reality. Ha-Ha-Ha.
*
Sean Spicer jokes jobs numbers “may have been phony” before but are real now. Press laughs. Lying is now embedded.
*
Cause everything un-Trump is “fake” and “phony” but everything Trump is “true & awesome sauce” This is just frightening.
The full story is here.
Members of the National Socialist Movement (Neo-Nazis) during a 2010 march to the Phoenix Federal building (John Kittelsrud/Flickr).
White supremacists are outraged after a couple was sentenced to 20 years in prison for displaying a Confederate flag and making “terroristic threats” to black people who were attending a child’s birthday party in Georgia in 2015.
The defendants, Jose Torres and Kayla Norton, who were convicted last month, also “pulled out a shotgun and threatened to kill people at [the] party, including children,” according to Douglas County District Attorney Brian Fortner.
White supremacist groups have responded to the sentencing online in Facebook posts and petitions in protest of the conviction, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reports. James Oliver, a member of the country’s largest neo-Nazi organization, the National Socialist Movement (NSM), made a video over the weekend about the sentencing, though it appears to have been removed. The NSM is rooted in the original American Nazi Party.
According to SPLC’s report, Oliver argued in his video, “20 years for f*cking freedom of speech … for name calling … some high school, middle school, kindergarten bullsh*t.” Oliver was reportedly joined in the video by former Klansmen John Girton, who said, “Not one negro was harmed. However, one of them did get their feelings hurt by the use of the n-word.”
I just don’t have words. It’s a rare thing to see justice done anymore, especially when the victims are not white.
White supremacists also threatened Douglas Circuit Judge William Beau McClain, and circulated a petition demanding that the conviction “be overturned or at least reduced dramatically.” A Facebook user named Branden Young commented on Girton’s post, writing, “Something needs [to be] done about judges like this.”
Right. So now it’s time to threaten and harass anyone who does see justice done. And maybe worse than that. People often speculate that current events may devolve into a civil war here in uStates, but I think that’s the wrong way to look at things. We’re already in the middle of a war.
Full story here.
Marco Rullkoetter/Getty.
Before Gamergate, Larry, the Google software engineer, was “a standard Democrat straight-voting person,” as he puts it. But reading about the movement in the tech press and on pro-Gamergate websites “did highlight some of the inconsistencies and hypocrisies with positions on the left,” he says. A comment in a Gamergate thread led Larry to the Unz Review, a website run by Palo Alto tech entrepreneur and former GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz. There, Larry says he was exposed to treatises on “human biological diversity” expounding on the supposed cognitive differences between intellectually superior and inferior races.
Human biological diversity has also gained currency in the Valley through computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. Starting in 2007, in series of blog posts often cited by alt-right followers, Yarvin laid out a political philosophy known as neoreaction or the “Dark Enlightenment.” Combining a technocratic sensibility with reactionary political thought, neoreaction rejects Enlightenment concepts—such as democracy and equality of the races and sexes—and instead advocates something much closer to authoritarianism. Yarvin believes government would work much better if run like a tech company and helmed by an all-powerful CEO president. He spoke admiringly Napoleon, whom he considers to be “kind of the Steve Jobs of France.”
Yarvin’s blog combines dorky programmer lingo with dense references to obscure, proto-fascist political texts. “When I started blogging 10 years ago, the availability of completely unorthodox written content [online] was mostly confined to the pre-1923 corpus, which Google did such a nice job scanning,” Yarvin told me in an email. He believes that software programmers are attracted to his writings because they “are always looking for something to do with their restless, fidgety brains. Especially if it’s weird and doesn’t involve dealing with physical humans.”
Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who reportedly gave Trump more than $1 million during the campaign and was an adviser on Trump’s transition team, has circled neoreactionary ideas. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote on the Cato Institute’s blog in 2009, adding that women and “welfare beneficiaries” have through their voting habits “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron” (He clarified two weeks later that he supports women’s suffrage and redirected blame for the supposed demise of democracy on “unelected technocratic agencies.”)
That’s just part of an in-depth article on all the dyed-in-wool bigots infesting the tech sector. I’m sure this wouldn’t come as news to anyone who works in the industry, and certainly not news to women and people of colour. Recommended Reading.
Wikimedia. Click for full size.
Steve Rosenfeld has a good article up at Raw Story, about the insidiousness of the new, so-called healthcare plan. Definitely recommended, just a bit here:
It’s important to note what Republicans are not talking about. While their messaging is emphasizing premium increases under Obamacare and how the program’s insurance exchanges are suffering from lack of competition, the GOP is not discussing who is making undue profits in American health care. Nor are they discussing the simplest reform that would address the maladies they cite, allowing Obamacare states to create interstate pools where risk and costs could be shared among greater numbers of people and insurers.
While the politics of the Obamacare repeal effort are only beginning, what’s clear is its GOP sponsors are tinkering with the rules governing one-sixth of the economy in a manner that appears to be a giant transfer of wealth upward. These Republicans can talk about “free markets” and “individual choice” all they like, but there’s a better phrase for it: class warfare.
Republicans are poised to unleash a wave of health insecurity and economic hardship on poor, working- and middle-class Americans, as well as on the nation’s system of medical providers, public health institutions and social safety nets. On social insurance listservs and discussion forums Wednesday, there was a debate about what to call the GOP bill: The Deplorable Care Act? The Unaffordable Care Act? Trumpcare? The I Don’t Care Act? No matter what one chooses, this is class warfare and it will be painful.
If you aren’t rich, you’re going to find yourself getting poorer, and constantly caught between a rock and a hard place, none of which concerns the Regime in the least. All that matters to them is that the rich get richer, and the most basic of rights be reassigned to privileges available only to those who can pay for them. Go have a read!
