World News Korner

Courtesy of TPM:

A Democratic congressman from Nevada said in a letter this week that his constituents have reported the armed militia supporting rancher Cliven Bundy have set up checkpoints to verify the residency of anybody passing through.

Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV), who represents the area, sent the letter Sunday to Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie, asking him to investigate.

"I am writing to bring your attention to the ongoing situation in northeastern Clark County which has caused many of my constituents to fear for their safety," Horsford wrote. Residents in the area "have expressed concern over the continual presence of multiple out-of-state, armed militia groups that have remained in the community" since Bundy's dispute with the Bureau of Land Management came to a boil.

The militia, as reported by Horsford's constituents, "have set up checkpoints where residents are required to prove they live in the area before being allowed to pass," the letter said.

So can somebody please explain to me how these so-called "patriotic Americans" can circumvent the law and set themselves up as some third world military faction, treating citizens of this country as if they have no rights?

Not only that but some of these thugs have gone so far as to threaten one of our Senators:

Horsford's concerns come at the same time the U.S. Capitol Police confirmed they are looking into threatening statements made against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

A police spokesman declined to give further details Monday, citing an ongoing investigation, but Reid has been an outspoken critic of Bundy.

THIS is the country that the NRA foresees. A nation where the power is held by those who are heavily armed, and willing to kill. Not by officers of the law.

Where legality is determined by the last man standing, and those seeking justice are pinned down by a hail of bullets.

Update: Here is more info on the checkpoints.

There is no way that this ends well.

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Palin: "If I were in charge..."

Stewart: "All I can say there is thank God that is a hypothetical."

Palin: "They would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists."

Stewart: "Where is that speech even appropriate? At an Al Qaeda recruitment how-to video workshop? At the yearly gathering of the Dummolos?"

Stewart goes on to mock Palin for several more minutes, which he concluded in this segment, during which Stewart also went after Wayne LaPierre, Rick Santorum, and the NRA in general for promoting gun violence as a remedy for all kinds of perceived ills, including government overreach, Obamacare, public education, Benghazi, Fast and Furious, etc.. etc., etc..

Ultimately Stewart's point was that as crazy as Palin's remarks seemed, at the NRA convention she was speaking to a crazed choir who agreed with, and parroted her every opinion.

And that is by far the most troubling thing about all of this. Not that Sarah Palin says crazy things, but that there are so many others who find what she says perfectly reasonable.



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Courtesy of the New York Times:

Belinda Padilla does not pick up unknown calls anymore, not since someone posted her cellphone number on an online forum for gun enthusiasts. A few fuming-mad voice mail messages and heavy breathers were all it took.

Then someone snapped pictures of the address where she has a P.O. box and put those online, too. In a crude, cartoonish scrawl, this person drew an arrow to the blurred image of a woman passing through the photo frame. “Belinda?” the person wrote. “Is that you?”

Her offense? Trying to market and sell a new .22-caliber handgun that uses a radio frequency-enabled stopwatch to identify the authorized user so no one else can fire it. Ms. Padilla and the manufacturer she works for, Armatix, intended to make the weapon the first “smart gun” for sale in the United States.

But shortly after Armatix went public with its plans to start selling in Southern California, Ms. Padilla, a fast-talking, hard-charging Beverly Hills businesswoman who leads the company’s fledgling American division, encountered the same uproar that has stopped gun control advocates, Congress, President Obama and lawmakers across the country as they seek to pass tougher laws and promote new technologies they contend will lead to fewer firearms deaths.

“Right now, unfortunately, these organizations that are scaring everybody have the power,” Ms. Padilla said. “All we’re doing is providing extra levels of safety to your individual right to bear arms. And if you don’t want our gun, don’t buy it. It’s not for everyone.”

Of course that was no good enough for the gun nuts, nor the NRA who said this:

The National Rifle Association, in an article published on the blog of its political arm, wrote that “smart guns,” a term it mocks as a misnomer, have the potential “to mesh with the anti-gunner’s agenda, opening the door to a ban on all guns that do not possess the government-required technology.”

Yes, of course science is always the enemy for those who traffic in people's ignorance.

Now if right about now you are suffering from some vague form of deja vu, don't worry you are not crazy.

Something about this technology has surfaced before on this blog, when Sarah Palin completely misunderstood it and took to Facebook to condemn "identifying bracelets." And then challenged Attorney General Eric Holder thusly:

Eric, you can replace my identifying bracelets with your government marker when you pry them off my cold, dead wrists.

And, Eric, "You don't want to go there, buddy."

- Sarah Palin

And that just about sums of the intellectual argument against this new technology, which even a child would recognize as potentially saving millions of American lives.

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Courtesy of Salon:

Religion relies on social consent to perpetuate itself. It’s a bad idea, and can’t stand up on its own. But it can, and does, perpetuate itself through social consent. It perpetuates itself through dogma saying that asking questions about religion is sinful, and that trusting religion without evidence is virtuous. It perpetuates itself through dogma saying that joy and meaning and morality can only be found in religion, and that leaving religion will automatically result in a desperate, amoral, pointless life. It perpetuates itself through religious communities and support systems that make believing in religion — or pretending to believe in religion — a necessity to function and indeed survive. It perpetuates itself through parents and other authority figures teaching it to children, whose brains are hard-wired to believe what they’re told.

Religion relies on social consent to perpetuate itself. But the simple act of coming out as an atheist denies it this consent. Even if atheists never debate believers or try to persuade them out of their beliefs; even if all we ever do is say out loud, “Actually, I’m an atheist,” we’re still denying our consent. And that throws a monkey wrench into religion’s engine.

There’s a reason that rates of atheism have been going up as use of the Internet goes up. (According to the MIT Technology Review, the dramatic drop in religious affiliation in the U.S. since 1990 is closely mirrored by the increase in Internet use — and while correlation certainly doesn’t prove causation, this analysis factors out pretty much every other possible causation.) The Internet has created a massive worldwide forum for atheists to argue about religion, to give evidence against religion, to ask for evidence and arguments supporting religion and point out how ridiculously weak they are. But the Internet has also created a massive, worldwide forum for atheists to simply, you know, exist.

What’s more, this denial of consent has a snowball effect. As more atheists come out of the closet, more people will question religion and eventually leave it. And as they leave religion and come out about their atheism, another wave of people will question and abandon religion … and so on, and so on, and so on.

It’s easy to ignore one person saying that the emperor has no clothes. It’s a lot harder to ignore 10 people saying it — and it’s harder still to ignore a hundred, or a thousand.

So if you want to ignore the emperor’s nakedness, it’s not enough to just ignore it. You have to get other people to shut up about it. If you want religion to keep perpetuating itself, you have to get people to go along with it. You have to get people to fake it.

You have to get people to lie.

Very true indeed. In fact I have seen this same thing happen right here on this blog.

Usually it arrives in a form similar to this:

"Gyphen I really enjoy your reporting on Sarah Palin (That bitch!) but I really wish you would stop attacking religion. I am sure that you realize that many of your visitors are religious, and it just makes us very uncomfortable. If you don't stop we will be forced to stop coming here every day."

If you think about this it is really quite arrogant of them. Especially since I started the Immoral Minority to talk about politics, current affairs, and, yes, religion.

It would be tantamount to going to somebody's house and saying, "I loved the casserole, and your house is quite lovely, but please stop talking about your children, or I will never come here again."

However as this article so eloquently explains, it is not that it bothers certain people that I talk about it here so much, as it is that they are afraid others are listening.

And of course, they are.

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If image does not enlarge click here.

If you want to see a Christian's head explode go ahead and tell them that religions evolved one from another.



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Courtesy of The Week:

After this weekend, it's probably safe to say that Sarah Palin is done. Like Jesse Ventura or Ross Perot, she may show up every once in a while to hurl red meat or use stunt cameos to remind us a little of her awkward charms. But recent events seem to confirm that she is an Obama-era novelty politician — and not much else.

First she gave a speech to the NRA in which she joked that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists, offending people who otherwise make up her base. Next, Robert Costa reported on the ever-smaller crowds that have been greeting Palin in Iowa:

"When Palin took the stage at the Hy-Vee Conference Center under a banner that read "Heels On, Gloves Off" on Sunday at an event for Senate candidate Joni Ernst, the ballroom was half-full, with a couple hundred attendees scattered in clumps." [Washington Post]

If the politically engaged seem bored with Obama, they have all but forgotten Sarah Barracuda, the manqué of anti-Obama populism.

Well of course this was what I was saying just this morning. I guess I just did not expect the MSM to agree with me quite so soon.

But are we right?

Well according to The Week, yes:

We may have finally reached a tipping point: Conservatives, it seems, are finally safe to criticize Sarah Palin (without fear of being written out of the movement, that is).

As is the case with tipping points, accretion tends to go mostly unnoticed until the dam finally breaks. And it seems to have broken a bit this week, with two coinciding stories. First, there was the Washington Post story by Robert Costa (formerly of the conservative National Review), which labeled Palin "a diminished figure in the Republican Party." That story included a quote from popular conservative blogger and talk radio host Erick Erickson, who conceded, "She has some pull with the base, but it has fallen a little bit."

That hardly makes her sound like a powerhouse. This is not to suggest conservatives are uniformly turning against Palin, but it is to suggest that she can no longer count on conservative opinion leaders being cowed into silent support of her antics, for fear of angering their (and her) base.

And as if to make that point, here is what a religious writer had to say about her recent brouhaha:

Like many from a similar Christian tradition, Palin sees herself as a warrior for God, engaged in spiritual warfare to save America from evil and to keep America Christian. But in joking that torture was like a baptism, Palin revealed her view of evangelization as an act of force, not love, and her view of salvation as something one imposes on irredeemable enemies, who further prove their lesser worth by protesting and resisting it. Get it? It just shows how the Muslims can't even see how something "so cool" is actually good for them.

No wonder many conservative Christians are aghast. But even setting aside the underlying meaning of Palin's torture "joke," her speech, once again, exposes a rift between traditional or orthodox (and politically active) Christian conservatives and the charismatic and Pentecostal movement of which Palin is a part. (I hesitate to say that Palin "represents" it because she more represents a Palin brand, although by virtue of her public profile she does in a way represent it.) In Palin's mind, she's engaged in spiritual warfare with spiritual enemies. She believes herself to be acting out God's will. She believes her prayer warriors will protect her. She believes in the spiritual gifts of revelation and prophecy, which for many charismatic and Pentecostal believers are real phenomena, but are easily manipulated by religious charlatans, and when translated to the political stage are dangerously inflammatory.

Palin has taken this religious tradition in which she grew up, and manipulated it to maximum effect in political settings. When she used "Allah" in place of "God" to denote her disdain for what she perceives as the savagery of Muslims (a theme repeated in her waterboarding remarks), or when she had hands laid on her to cast out witchcraft, or when she on numerous occasions declared herself to be acting out God's will or plan for her or for the country, Palin is manipulating a religious tradition to draw attention to herself.

For her fellow conservatives, this time she might have gone too far.

There have been a number of times in the past few years where I was all but certain that Palin's career had finally wheezed out its final breath, only to see her pop up again with a new show, or new book, or new support from some other fringe group.

However this time there is definitely something different in the wind.

All I know is that I am getting out my Wizard of Oz soundtrack, just in case the time has finally come to play the song that all of us know will be echoing across the Matanuska Valley on the day that the Wasilla Wendigo finally bites the dust.

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Courtesy of Mother Jones:

For years, advocates of stricter gun laws have rallied at the barricades of the National Rifle Association's annual meeting. But this year, as the gun lobby convenes in Indianapolis, there's a new posse in town. They're mothers, they're survivors of gun violence, and some of them are both. And they're dead set on disarming the NRA of its outsize political power.

They operate as Everytown for Gun Safety, a new organization combining the grassroots group Moms Demand Action, launched after the Sandy Hook massacre, and Michael Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns. At a press conference in a packed downtown hotel conference room on Friday, the group unveiled a forceful new report and political ad.

The NRA may have money, and political power at their disposal, but as every son knows all too well, nothing stands long against the power of mom.

I look forward to watching how the NRA tries to respond to this.

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