Roller coaster time!

Wait, wait, that last post was just too cheerful and optimistic. We can’t have that! So now that you’re feeling all happy about a peaceful response to oppression, let me bring you down to earth with this site, My Duty to Speak, in which military personnel recount their personal tales of getting raped while serving their country. That description is enough that I don’t have to say, “trigger warning”, right?

(via Bateman on rape in the military. Also pretty intense. OK, just don’t read any of this article or anything it links to. Go back to the dance video. Although…dancing won’t fix this problem.)

This is a real thing?

I am blown away by this ad from the American Life League, a fanatically Catholic organization dedicated to opposing contraception, abortion, and euthanasia.

Suffering is a grace-filled opportunity to participate in the passion of Jesus Christ. Euthanasia selfishly steals that opportunity.

Suffering is a grace-filled opportunity to participate in the passion of Jesus Christ. Euthanasia selfishly steals that opportunity.

They do realize that “passion of Jesus Christ” is a euphemism for prolonged torture, right? “Hey, grandma, we love you so much, we’ve decided to hire a couple of thugs to whip you within an inch of your life, and then to strangle you slowly.”

Maybe this would be a good excuse if you had a couple of Catholic relatives who you really, really hated. I don’t know anyone I’d want to “grace” with that kind of opportunity.

Where a rational conversation about guns ought to start

The newspaper of record reflected the disease last night. They had an article about the man killed over texting during the previews at a movie that included this ridiculous paragraph.

The killing underscored the increased debate about when to use smartphones in public. In October, the singer Madonna was spotted texting during the Lincoln Center premiere of “12 Years a Slave.” That led Tim League, chief executive of Alama Drafthouse, a Texas-based chain of boutique cinemas, to post on Twitter that she was banned from watching movies at his theater.

No, it did not underscore that debate. It underscored the debate over whether we should continue to allow armed assholes to wander the streets freely. You know, that real issue that no one in America, including the New York Times, wants to deal with, because the proponents of armed assholery like to kill you if you disagree with them.

(By the way, if you go read that article now, you’ll discover that it has been cleansed of that astonishingly stupid paragraph.)

It’s about time the US had a rational discussion about gun control, though. It’s way past due, and the weird aversion to changing the way we manage guns has to be overcome. So here are my suggestions for a start.

  • Repeal the second amendment. All right, we don’t actually have a mechanism to strip that sucker out of there, but we can override it with a new amendment. Face it, the second amendment stinks: it’s an 18th century relic, it’s ambiguously worded (it’s about militias, people), and somehow stupid Americans have it fixed in their brains that the Constitution is sacred magic — all they have to do is shout, “Second amendment!” and we’re supposed to dissolve into accommodating bits of gelatin before them. We can criticize and revise the Constitution, you know; if you revere the Founding Fathers, you should at least still recognize that they thought an informed citizenry was important. You’re supposed to think, not just follow rules.

  • Regulate gun ownership. Regulate the heck out of it. I live in a state where all liquor sales, even of wine and beer, have to be made through state-licensed stores — but I can order a freaking AR-15 through reddit. This is absurd. End all the loopholes, including the gun show provisions. All gun sales must be made through strictly licensed dealers, with extensive background checks, and all gun sales must be made in person with photo ID and a permanent record made. Make gun ownership public: anyone and everyone can look up who owns guns and where the guns are.

    If you are a responsible gun owner who needs the tool for hunting deer, this should be no burden at all on you. I’m very suspicious of people who insist that their possession of a deadly weapon must be secret and untraceable, and that they must be allowed to buy it from the skeevy guy operating out of a trailer.

  • You have no right to carry a gun in any public place. No more concealed carry permits. No more “stand your ground” laws. Only authorized agents of the law should be carrying weapons in public, and even there, not all of them should be armed, and those who are, should be clearly and obviously armed. You’re packing heat in a movie theater? Fuck, WHY??.

  • End the “gun collector” excuse. I don’t believe the pretense that you’re merely building a historical archive, that you’re simply gathering Americana of note. Collect bottles or hubcaps, instead. If you must insist that you’re creating a museum, OK…then you won’t object if every weapon in your collection is thoroughly and irreversibly modified to be non-functional: firing pins removed, solid plugs placed in the barrel, mechanisms locked in place with a nice glop of super-glue. If you have religious reasaons that they must be functional, go collect old hand grenades and undetonated bombs. You’ll expunge yourself from the population soon enough.

    We have no problem recognizing that if you have a bale of marijuana in your garage you’re in the business of dealing, not just recreationally consuming, drugs. If you’re accumulating an arsenal of deadly weapons, this isn’t for your personal enjoyment any more, you’re up to nefarious purposes.

  • No more “self defense” excuse. The only people we need to defend ourselves from are the jerks who carry guns. And guns are a lousy instrument for self-defense — they’re indiscriminate and irreversible, they tend to punch holes in objects and people that we didn’t intend to punch holes in, and there are no take-backs after you punch a hole in someone by mistake.

    You want to defend yourself? Take a martial arts course. Too unathletic to do that, like me? Support your local police and have a phone by your bedside.

  • Change the culture. You may think you’re a macho stud when you swagger down the street with a pistol at your hip, but the rest of us think you’re a pathetic asshole who is not just stupid, but a real danger to others. The rest of us have to get that message across to the NRA membership.

    There are very few legitimate uses for guns by general citizens — hunting, target shooting — and none of those require assault rifles, secrecy, or huge stockpiles of guns and ammo. If you actually have a practical use for the gun as a tool, I can respect that and have no problem with it, just like people who have a use for a tractor. But you know, it’s a tool with a specific purpose, and the nitwits who want to extend that purpose to being a constant presence in our lives are overcompensating losers.

Now, cue the stupid people declaring their love of guns in the comments, and accusing me of being a commie. I’ll prime your anger by telling you right off the bat that if you love guns, you are a sick, pathetic, twisted dingbat, and I won’t care about your arguments.

‘Corrective rape’ aimed at ‘curing’ lesbians

All right, I have to stop reading world news first thing in the morning. What did I encounter today? A crisis in South Africa — there is an epidemic of really stupid men who believe the way to ‘cure’ lesbians is gang rape.

"If we want to finish lesbians and gays they must be forcefully raped," says one, grinning at the camera. "A man must go back to his manhood. Women must be women. She must be ready and willing to have sex."

"They must be raped so that their gay and lesbian behaviour can come out," adds another.

The third raises his voice, points two fingers at his temple and concludes: "This gay and lesbian thing must end. I say bang bang bang!"

If I were a woman, those men would turn me into a lesbian, I think. Also, no illusions here: this isn’t about converting women to heterosexuality. It’s about intimidation and power. Some of the events in the story are about women being executed after the rape.

Dick Cheney is simply an awful human being

Incurious, unempathetic, soulless dead-eyed bug. That’s our former vice president, who had a heart transplant and doesn’t really care much about who the donor was.

When I came out from under the anesthetic after the transplant, I was euphoric.  I’d had–I’d been given the gift of additional lives, additional years of life.  For the family of the donor, they’d just been [through] some terrible tragedy, they’d lost a family member.  Can’t tell why, obviously, when you don’t know the details, but the way I think of it from a psychological standpoint is that it’s my new heart, not someone else’s old heart. And I always thank the donor, generically thank donors for the gift that I’ve been given, but I don’t spend time wondering who had it, what they’d done, what kind of person.

Generic thank yous, generic bombing, generic military-industrial complex spending. He’s just an empty generic human being, I guess.

I’m just wondering if the family of the donor can ask for it back. It’s obvious he’s not using it.

Who deserves honor?

Today is the day when nations around the world pause to celebrate their most colossal failures, the events that killed the greatest numbers of their citizens, that broke and crippled their men after they’d been intentionally trained to dehumanize other human beings. We love to take our young people, especially our young men and boys, and grind them up in bloody battles, and then once a year we remind ourselves of what we do, and we congratulate people for it. Dulce et decorum est pro fucking patria mori and all that.

Meanwhile, our veterans hospitals are crumbling (and desperately needed) and we talk about more wars with Iran or whoever crossed us most recently, and doesn’t have nuclear weapons with which to smack us back. But we’ll go to all the effort of saying “Thanks, gramps” to people who suffered in terror and terrified other sufferers right back. All so a few people can get richer, and so politicians can thump their chests and claim to be braver than other politicians.

I think the only way to honor veterans of war is to make sure there are no more veterans. They are not heroes, but victims. There is nothing brave or heroic about picking up a gun and threatening to kill someone for a matter of principle, or even worse, because someone else is ordering you to do so — and the repercussions of celebrating violence tear our society apart.

For example, four women in Dallas met for their state chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America — a quiet lunch in a local restaurant. Texas gun advocates got word of the meeting, and gathered in the parking lot outside.

violentmen

Brave heroes, all. In what world could such a gathering, intending to intimidate unarmed mothers, occur without the men involved withering in shame and guilt? Our world, obviously, where righteous terror with weapons in hand is celebrated. Perhaps these men will meet again in years to come, to remember the honor of being among the heroes who drew their weapons in the parking lot of the Blue Mesa Grill in 2013.

Just like right now, we honor those who carried arms against the young men of other countries, where right now, citizens honor those who carried arms to resist our young men. When are we going to wake up and realize that this is all madness, that it’s not a point of pride to be trained to kill, that we gain nothing and lose all when we settle disagreements with threats of lethal force.

How can we stop? Perhaps it would help to celebrate the right heroes.

I was horrified by this story of the Nazi scientific enterprise. The Nazi regime killed millions, members of despised ethnic groups, gays, and political dissidents, and some of their bodies were appropriated by the science establishment for medical studies. As the article reveals, sometimes scientists would go out to the prisons and mark certain individuals as desirable for their research; one, for instance, wanted to study the effects of stress on the menstrual cycle, so young women in a state of terror for their lives were particularly desirable (these are the studies our Republicans now cite when they want to claim that raped women don’t get pregnant!). It’s a terrible tale of scientists closing their eyes to the consequences of their work, and worse, actively participating in murder.

It tells of a young couple, Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen, who worked for the resistance against the Nazis, were caught and executed, he by hanging, she by the guillotine, and their bodies ended up on the anatomy table. Charlotte Pommer, a medical school graduate working as an assistant in the Institute of Anatomy, walked in to the lab to work and recognized the bodies waiting for her.

“I was paralyzed,” Pommer later wrote of the sight of the bodies. “I could hardly perform my task as an assistant to Professor Stieve, who did his scientific study as always with the greatest diligence. I could barely follow.”

Pommer was 28. Libertas Schulze-Boysen was 29 when she died. In her last letter to her mother, she said she’d asked for her body to go to her family. “Don’t fret about things that possibly could have been done, this or the other,” she wrote. “If you can, bury me in a beautiful place amid sunny nature.”

Pommer stopped working for Stieve—and left the field of anatomy—because of what she saw that day in his laboratory. She went on to help resist the Nazis herself, by hiding the child of a man who participated in the “July Plot” to assassinate Hitler in 1944. In the spring of 1945, just before the war’s end, Pommer was herself sent to prison.

So on this Veterans Day, I choose to honor the conscientious objectors and the Charlotte Pommers of the world, rather than the participants in war. They are the real heroes, the ones who made the greatest sacrifices to better humanity.

Meanwhile, look at what the media find important today: the poppy on Google UK’s search page isn’t big enough. But Bing puts a big photo of a poppy on their search page. Jesus fuck, millions dead in wasteful war and the big issue today is whether a photo of a flower is big enough to honor them properly.

I’ll tell you the answer: no, it isn’t.

What happened to “never again”?

In a horrific excerpt from a book about the life of conflict in Israel, Max Blumenthal talks about the attitude of young soldiers in the Israeli army. They are taking trophy photos of dead Palestinians. They are gloating about how they like to beat “Palestinian wetbacks”. They are murdering people. And they are arrogant and sanctimonious in their absolute certainty that they are in the right and that they must dehumanize the enemy.

What really brought me up short, though, was this one ex-army woman who is extremely jingoistic, and who has been busily uploading trophy photos and captioning them.

“DDDEATHHH to ARABSSSSSS.”

Beside the next photo, Abergil wrote: “Fuck you, stinking Arabs!!!”

And then: “C’MON LET’S MAKE AN ARAB SHOAH NOWWWWW!!!!!!!!”

She wants to make an Arab … Shoah? She wants to commit genocide? I always have taken the lesson of the Holocaust as that we should never again allow a nation to commit mass murder in the name of race superiority or ethnic cleansing — that the act was a horror and a crime against humanity, no matter who the targets are. It is a moral abomination, and it doesn’t become acceptable if the victims are Jews, Romany, gay, Serbs, Croats, Hutu, Tutsi, American Indian, or Palestinian.

What are they teaching in Israel?

I blame David Futrelle. And maybe the Jews.

So I was reading Manboobz, which is usually about as low on the referenced depravity scale as I can go, and I ended up clicking on a link in an article which led me to…Stormfront. They were all outraged that some pick up artist was swarthy, yet he was chasing after beautiful pure European white women. That article was appalling enough, but it linked to something about the Neandertals, which is a subject I find interesting, and I clicked on that, and whoomp, down the rabbit hole I went.

I had discovered the bizarre pseudoscientific and profoundly anti-semitic world of Michael Bradley.

There are many things that you will find offensive at that link: the hideous Geocities style page layout, the incoherent rambling content of the text, the stupidity of the arguments, the goddamn racism, so be warned. It’s not my fault if he wrecks your brain or induces nausea.

Plowing through the wall-of-text interspersed with ads begging you to buy his revolutionary books ($49.95 for an e-book this badly written? No thanks), his message is fairly simple and wrong. He thinks there are two kinds of human, with some interbreeding between them: one kind are the tall browed, lean and handsome Cro Magnon people who are scattered around the lowland areas of the globe; the others are short, stocky, hairy people with receding foreheads who arose in the highlands of an area he calls the “Toxic Lozenge”.

This other contending subspecies originated in what I call the “Toxic Lozenge”, a narrow elongated area extending from the Rift Valley lakes of Tanzania, Kenya and southern Ethiopia to the northern Caucasus Mountains. This Toxic Lozenge therefore encompasses the geographic epicentres of both Homo habilis and later Neanderthal development. This Toxic Lozenge is also the original homeland of the Hamitic languages and the later seemingly related Semitic ones.

In case you didn’t get the hint, these Toxic Lozenge residents were descendants of Neandertals, and are the modern Jews and other Semitic people.

Physically, this subspecies is characterized by very great nasal development, extreme hairiness in males, long torsos and short legs, extremely high numerical and spatial intelligence, very little visual artistic ability, a low level of emotional stability, fanatical monotheism, anti-feminism and a predisposition to control, enslave or exterminate “ordinary humanity”. There is some fairly recent anthropological evidence (1990-1991, see “Homo Georgicus” on Wikipedia), coming from the Caucasus Republic of Georgia, that this subspecies may derive from Homo habilis, through the Neanderthals and on to modern living representatives.

However, not all anthropologists agree that Homo habilis should be considered fully “human” as that term is rather loosely defined, but was possibly an aberrant offshoot of either Homo or Australopithecus (see Esau’s Empire I on this website).

That is, people deriving from this Toxic Lozenge in ancient times may not be exactly human and certainly seem to be incompatible with the values and attitudes of “ordinary humanity”. However, recent historical migrants into the Toxic Lozenge represent mostly ordinary African humanity.

Much more important than physical traits, the aggression of this subspecies is responsible for its expansion from its original Toxic Lozenge both east and west to inhabit most of the “Middle East” (especially mountainous regions) and even parts of Europe, western India and northern and eastern Africa, imposing its religious and social values. In short, the people of this Toxic Lozenge have gradually driven a wedge of perhaps “not-quite-human” genes and culture between the ordinary humanity of the West and the ordinary humanity of the Far East. And this wedge has been inexorably expanded by well-known historical events from 5600 BC to the present. Despite the incessant propaganda and disinformation promulgated by this subspecies, adherence to Judaism, Judeo-Christianity and Judeo-Islam are the symptomatic indications of its biological expansion and/or cultural influence.

Oh, look. He’s in favor of some flavor of feminism, and he’s against monotheism, and he later announces that he’s a humanist. He’s one of us! (Cue projectile vomiting and blinding tears.) The othering of Jews as not quite human and on a mission to enslave “ordinary humanity” is a bit off-putting, isn’t it?

You might be wondering what his evidence for this remarkable thesis might be. Well, there are the pictures:

neandertals

That’s supposed to be a picture of rampaging Jews erupting out of their homeland in the Toxic Lozenge. It might be a little more persuasive if it weren’t a painting by Frank Frazetta that was used to illustrate some sword-and-sorcery fantasy novel.

What about the scientific evidence? He’s not a fan of Svante Paabo, who sequenced the Neandertal genome and determined that Europeans and Asians have a small infusion of Neandertal genes, on the order of about 4%. Paabo is misinterpreting the data, he thinks. Try to follow this logic:

Anyway, that’s the worldwide “Paabo spin” on Neanderthal DNA in modern humans and, looked at this way, “1 to 4 percent” doesn’t amount to much. Figures don’t lie but liars figure.

On June 5, 2010 the world’s population was estimated to be 6.8-billion-plus people (United States Census Bureau, Wikipedia). One percent of that is roughly 68-million and change. Four percent works out to about 278-million people. Odd, isn’t it, that this is about the population of the Middle East, according to my Bloomsbury Pocket Atlas? And this is the geographic homeland of the Semitic peoples, the present Judeo-Islamic Arabs and the Jews. Work it out for yourself using any good atlas.

With good maps and atlases there is a way of looking at this “1 to 4 percent” of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans that makes a great deal of historical sense. What if this Neanderthal DNA is concentrated in the Caucasus Middle East, where this 2010 study admits that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons (or “Early Modern Humans”) met and interbred? Surely it is reasonable to suppose that the main concentration of the world’s surviving Neanderthal DNA must be in this area, discounting very modern migrations of some people by railway, steamship and aircraft transportation, and that Neanderthal DNA decreases rapidly as distance from the Caucasus centre of interbreeding increases?

You see, Paabo was reporting an average admixture, but if you just assume that all the Neandertals are living in the Middle East, and no Neandertal genes are anywhere else, then you get the same average! As you read further, you discover that this flawed calculation is gradually assumed to be proof of Bradley’s thesis.

And it gets crazier and crazier, and the font gets bigger.

Basically, I estimate that about seventy percent of the present crisis on this planet can be fairly attributed to the machinations of Neanderthal-Semitic elements of the human population against the Cro-Magnon majority of the human population.

And then…9/11 was a Jewish plot! Obamacare! Hillary Rodham Clinton climbing to the presidency via her Jewish constituency! Jews control Hollywood! Fascism…it isn’t so bad!

It is time for the non-Semitic peoples of the world to come together in a multi-racial alliance under one banner in order to severely limit Semitic activities before they put an end to us and everything else on the planet. I offer the following banner, emblem and symbol. However, I will warn everyone that it may well be too late.

The symbol is a flag with a swastika on it. He thinks he’s too old to run this movement, but he has a suggestion for a charismatic person who could: Mel Gibson.

Then…Roswell — we’re part of a cosmic war! ATLANTIS!!! Aaaah! Argle-bargle! Mene tekel upharsin! Ëa ëa! Blaaarfh!

I think I need to lie down. Or get drunk. It’s always something, someone who has to show how low and stupid and vile humans can get.

I am so tempted to visit Fargo Grand Forks next week

I’ve been informed that there will be a lecture at UND next Tuesday. I might be able to find time to dart up and come right back home that night…it’s only about a two hour drive.

BoysFlyer

I’ve heard of Boys before. It’s going to be ugly. There he is, not only attacking atheism, but doing so as a young earth creationist who rejects evolution. But also because Boys had his moment of infamy about 5 years ago. Anyone else remember this? He’s the guy who urged Bush to nuke Mecca and Medina.

Do we sit on our fat bottoms, wring our hands, and wait for Muslim terrorists to strike? What good will that do? What good will result in doing nothing until one or two major cities are in rubble? My suggestion is take offensive action. The only possible way I can see that we might, I say might, escape another Muslim attack upon our nation is for President Bush to issue the following declaration to the world:

“My fellow Americans, as your President my primary responsibility is to protect and defend the U.S. I am not interested in world opinion or in playing games at the UN. Our intelligence reveals that Muslim terrorists are planning to hit us again; furthermore, terrorist leaders have promised that our cities will be in ruins. I believe them so I have been authorized by the Congress to make the following promise: Within 24 hours following an attack upon the U.S., our Air Force will bomb Mecca and Medina into the “Stone Age.” Innocent Saudi Arabian civilians will have 24 hours from the attack on us to flee the two cities that will be razed.

“Let no one be deceived as to our motive. We don’t want to harm any person nor do we desire any territory, and there is no reason for anyone to be killed—as long as there is no attack against our nation. This decision was made to protect U.S. citizens; however, if there is a choice between us and them, it will be them who die. Moreover, Muslim leaders will be the ones who pull the trigger on their own people. If Muslim leaders want to destroy their two holy cities, then they will do so by attacking us. We will respond in 24 hours. May God protect and bless America.”

Stupid to the point of evil, that’s Don Boys. And he’s being sponsored by Baptist Campus Ministries, which claims to be bringing “honor and glory to the Lord Jesus Christ through Bible-based thoughts, words, and actions”.

Honor and glory.

Fuck your honor and glory, Christians.

My New Atheist agenda is to murder fewer people, not more.