Samantha Bee of The Daily Show exposes how public school teachers are living high off the hog at the expense of taxpayers.
Mano Singham
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Samantha Bee of The Daily Show exposes how public school teachers are living high off the hog at the expense of taxpayers.
There have been some interesting developments concerning Bradley Manning. Amnesty International has called for people to protest his treatment. Other groups are organizing demonstrations nationwide, the first one on Sunday, March 20 outside the military brig in Quantico, VA where Manning is being abused.
Then State Department spokesperson P. J. Crowley, whom I have lambasted many times here for his hypocritical statements when it comes to the torture of foreigners or the attacks on WikiLeaks, told a small group at MIT in response to a question that the way Manning was being treated was “ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid.” He later clarified that that was his own opinion, not that of the State Department, but he still is to be commended for voicing at least some criticism, even if it was not nearly as strong as I would have wished.
The same cannot be said for Obama. He was later asked about Manning’s treatment at a press conference and said, “With respect to Private Manning, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are.”
Really? He actually asked the Pentagon about it and was told everything was fine so now he’s happy? Glenn Greenwald is appropriately sarcastic about Obama’s response:
Oh, that’s very reassuring — and such a very thorough and diligent effort by the President to ensure that detainees under his command aren’t being abused. He asked the Pentagon and they said everything was great — what more is there to know? Everyone knows that on questions of whether the military is abusing detainees, the authoritative source is . . . the military. You just ask them if they’re doing anything improper, and once they tell you that they’re not, that’s the end of the matter.
I have no doubt that George Bush asked the DoD whether everything was being run professionally at Guantanamo and they assured him that they were. Perhaps the reason there haven’t been any Wall Street prosecutions is because Obama asked Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein if there was any fraud and those banking executives assured the President that there wasn’t.
Just when I think my opinion of Obama cannot sink any lower, he proves me wrong.
But I am hoping that the increased publicity over Manning will lead to him being at least treated better.
In an article titled Why evangelicals hate Jesus, Phil Zuckerman says:
White Evangelical Christians are the group least likely to support politicians or policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus. It is perhaps one of the strangest, most dumb-founding ironies in contemporary American culture. Evangelical Christians, who most fiercely proclaim to have a personal relationship with Christ, who most confidently declare their belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, who go to church on a regular basis, pray daily, listen to Christian music, and place God and His Only Begotten Son at the center of their lives, are simultaneously the very people most likely to reject his teachings and despise his radical message.
In the case of Ray Davis, the acting head of the CIA in Pakistan now in jail for gunning down two men in a busy street in Lahore, the US government claims that he has diplomatic immunity and thus should not have to face prosecution. There is some controversy over whether the diplomatic status was conferred on Davis only after the killings, which would make it dubious.
A former CIA agent who worked in Laos during the Vietnam war says that the use of diplomatic immunity for spies is quite routine and reveals how this works:
[Read more…]
Cartoonist Mark Fiore tells you how.
A British university scientist who is also an imam of his mosque received death threats for saying in a lecture that Darwin’s theory of evolution is consistent with Islam.
Masjid Tawhid is a prominent mosque which also runs one of the country’s largest sharia courts, the Islamic Sharia Council. In January, Dr Hasan delivered a lecture there detailing why he felt the theory of evolution and Islam were compatible – a position that is not unusual among many Islamic scholars with scientific backgrounds. But the lecture was interrupted by men he described as “fanatics” who distributed leaflets claiming that “Darwin is blasphemy”.
“One man came up to me during the lecture and said ‘You are an apostate and should be killed’,” Dr Hasan told The Independent.
You would think that he would leave such an intolerant mosque and join another but such is the hold that religion has on people that he preferred to apologize and say he was wrong.
Instead his father, Suhaib, head of the mosque’s committee of trustees, posted a notice on his behalf expressing regret over his comments. “I seek Allah’s forgiveness for my mistakes and apologise for any offence caused,” the statement read.
…
“I want to go back – I’ve been going to the mosque for 25 years. It is my favourite mosque in London, and I have been active in the community for a long time. I hope my positive contribution will outweigh their feelings towards me.”
(via Machines Like Us)
It is interesting to note how often the phrase “according to cables released by WikiLeaks…” appears in US news reports these days, even as the US media try to portray WikiLeaks as some kind of rogue outfit. This is because WikiLeaks is simultaneously showing up the major US media as being really lousy journalists while providing them with invaluable information that enables them to do their jobs better. It must be really sticking in their craw to have to give WikiLeaks credit.
There is no question in my mind that WikiLeaks has done us all a huge service.
(For previous posts in this series, see here.)
Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman in a long article titled Why the gods are not winning point out that the percentage of Christians worldwide is declining, that of Hindus is stagnant even as the proportion of people in its homeland India is rising, and the proportion of Buddhists is on a steady decline.
The only growth area is Islam but even here the picture is not optimistic for religion.
One Great Faith has risen from one eighth to one fifth of the globe in a hundred years, and is projected to rise to one quarter by 2050. Islam. But education and the vote have little to do with it. Generally impoverished and poorly educated, most Muslims live in nations where democracy is minimalist or absent. Nor are many infidels converting to Allah. Longman was correct on one point; Islam is growing because Muslims are literally having lots of unprotected sex.
The authors conclude that “The absence of a grand revival of Christ, Allah and Vishnu worship via democratic free choice brings us to a point, as important as it is little appreciated — the chronic inability of religion to recruit new adherents on a consistent, global basis.”
The numbers of people choosing to adopt religion is declining while the number leaving it is increasing. Paul and Zuckerman point out that religion has declined rapidly in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan and signs that religion in those countries is on life-support are everywhere. “Churches are being converted into libraries, laundromats and pubs. Those who disbelieve in deities typically make up large portions of the population, according to some surveys they make up the majority of citizens in Scandinavia, France and Japan. Evolution is accepted by the majority in all secular nations, up to four in five in some.”
It is this fact that is most dangerous for religion because it shows that “religion is dangerously vulnerable to modernity, that secularism and disbelief do best in nations that are the most democratic, educated and prosperous.” As societies become more modern, and we see this happening everywhere, people give up religion. The trend towards modernity cannot be reversed and one should expect to see the decline of religion along with it. That is the key point.
But what about the supposed rise in religion in the ‘new Europe’, the countries of the former Soviet bloc? The authors argue that religions in those countries seem more nationalistic than devout. “Just a quarter of Russians absolutely believe in God, the portion who say that religion is important in their lives are down in the teens, and irreligion may be continuing to rise in very atheistic eastern Germany and the Czech Republic. Even in Poland, the one eastern bloc nation in which religion played an important role in overturning atheistic communism, just one third consider religion to be very important in their lives, and faith is declining towards the old European norm. It turns out that the “new” Europe is not turning out particularly godly.”
The one bright spot for religion is the developing world but even here it is tenuous as modernity takes root. “Mass devotion remains strong in most of the 2nd and 3rd world, but even there there is theistic concern. South of our border a quarter to over half the population describe religion as only somewhat important in their lives. Rather than becoming more patriarchal as democracy and education expand, Mexico is liberalizing as progressive forces successfully push laws favoring abortion and gay rights to the vexation of the Roman and evangelical churches. There is even trouble for Islam in its own realm. A third of Turks think religion is not highly important in their lives, and Iranian urban youth have been highly secularized in reaction to the inept corruption of the Mullahs. In Asia 40% of the citizens of booming South Korea don’t believe in God, and only a quarter (most evangelical Christians) identify themselves as strongly religious.”
Even in America, the outlier among modern societies that still seems to be holding on to religion, the trend is away from religion and what seems to be driving it is that belief in the literal truth of the Bible is decreasing. “What has changed is how people view the Bible. In the 1970s nearly four in ten took the testaments literally, just a little over one in ten thought it was a mixture of history, fables, and legends, a three to one ratio in favor of the Biblical view. Since then a persistent trend has seen literalism decline to between a quarter and a third of the population, and skeptics have doubled to nearly one in five. If the trend continues the fableists will equal and then surpass the literalists in a couple of decades.”
Next: Religion and insecurity