World News Korner

The above image is courtesy of Brancy's blog, on which there is a link to a Breitbart article that then links to an article from The Courant, a local Hartford, Connecticut paper that reported how shocked Connecticut politicians were that fun owners were resisting a new law requiring residents to register their military styled weapons:

Everyone knew there would be some gun owners flouting the law that legislators hurriedly passed last April, requiring residents to register all military-style rifles with state police by Dec. 31.

But few thought the figures would be this bad.

By the end of 2013, state police had received 47,916 applications for assault weapons certificates, Lt. Paul Vance said. An additional 2,100 that were incomplete could still come in.

That 50,000 figure could be as little as 15 percent of the rifles classified as assault weapons owned by Connecticut residents, according to estimates by people in the industry, including the Newtown-based National Shooting Sports Foundation. No one has anything close to definitive figures, but the most conservative estimates place the number of unregistered assault weapons well above 50,000, and perhaps as high as 350,000.

And that means as of Jan. 1, Connecticut has very likely created tens of thousands of newly minted criminals — perhaps 100,000 people, almost certainly at least 20,000 — who have broken no other laws. By owning unregistered guns defined as assault weapons, all of them are committing Class D felonies.

"I honestly thought from my own standpoint that the vast majority would register," said Sen. Tony Guglielmo, R-Stafford, the ranking GOP senator on the legislature's public safety committee. "If you pass laws that people have no respect for and they don't follow them, then you have a real problem."

Of course the Breibart article takes the side of the assault rifle owning scofflaws, while encouraging citizens in other states to follow suit, and by linking to it one would assume that Bristol is in full agreement that these people should not be required to let the police know that they own these weapons.

Which of course begs the question as to WHY anybody would be so fearful of allowing the government to know how many military style weapons are in their possession.

I mean we are not talking about simply owning a handgun for personal protection, which is ground zero for the NRA, nor is this even about restricting access to these high powered weapons. It is only about allowing the police to know who purchased which weapon, so that if it is used in a criminal manner they can trace it back to its source and perhaps put a bad guy behind bars.

If you are simply planning to use the weapon for target practice, or display it in your gun case so your fellow Cro-Magnon buddies know how manly you are, there should be no problem with registering the weapon just like you do your car, dog, and marriage.

The reason for that is also behind much of the NRA driven fervor to buy more and more guns. And THAT is the idea that the government is working on a plan to repeal the 2nd Amendment, and even more conspiratorial than that is the belief that Obama is, at some point, going to declare martial law, and that the only hope to fight against that is heavily armed citizens ready to fight back with unregistered weaponry.

In the old days this would have been considered the very fringe of the fringe of the conservative movement, but with the help of Sarah Palin, talk radio, and NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre this is now considered a reasonable concern for millions of gun owners in this country.

It is insane, and the flames of that insanity are fanned by Right Wing blogs like Breitbart, Sarah Palin, and now Palin's hateful little parrot Bristol.

You know there was a time when being a conservative meant respecting, and following the law. They actively called for more laws, more law enforcement, and longer prison sentences for those who would break the law.

Today they are the ones promoting lawlessness, calling for open revolt, and nurturing distrust of the government.

What could possibly have happened to change their point of view so dramatically?

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One of my favorite segments on the Daily Show is "Back in Black" and I don't think Lewis has ever been quite as on the mark as he was during this bit.

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Courtesy of Yes Magazine:

To truly understand how we came to believe our educational system is broken, we need a history lesson. Rewind to 1980—when Milton Friedman, the high priest of laissez-faire economics, partnered with PBS to produce a ten-part television series called Free to Choose. He devoted one episode to the idea of school vouchers, a plan to allow families what amounted to publicly funded scholarships so their children could leave the public schools and attend private ones.

You could make a strong argument that the current campaign against public schools started with that single TV episode. To make the case for vouchers, free-market conservatives, corporate strategists, and opportunistic politicians looked for any way to build a myth that public schools were failing, that teachers (and of course their unions) were at fault, and that the cure was vouchers and privatization.

Jonathan Kozol, the author and tireless advocate for public schools, called vouchers the “single worst, most dangerous idea to have entered education discourse in my adult life.”

Armed with Friedman’s ideas, President Reagan began calling for vouchers. In 1983, his National Commission on Excellence in Education issued “A Nation At Risk,” a report that declared, “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

It also said, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

For a document that’s had such lasting impact, “A Nation At Risk” is remarkably free of facts and solid data. Not so the Sandia Report, a little-known follow-up study commissioned by Admiral James Watkins, Reagan’s secretary of energy; it discovered that the falling test scores which caused such an uproar were really a matter of an expansion in the number of students taking the tests. In truth, standardized-test scores were going up for every economic and ethnic segment of students—it’s just that, as more and more students began taking these tests over the 20-year period of the study, this more representative sample of America’s youth better reflected the true national average. It wasn’t a teacher problem. It was a statistical misread.

The government never officially released the Sandia Report. It languished in peer-review purgatory until the Journal of Educational Research published it in 1993. Despite its hyperbole (or perhaps because of it), “A Nation At Risk” became a timely cudgel for the larger privatization movement. With Reagan and Friedman, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist, preaching that salvation would come once most government services were turned over to private entrepreneurs, the privatizers began proselytizing to get government out of everything from the post office to the public schools.

Corporations recognized privatization as a euphemism for profits. “Our schools are failing” became the slogan for those who wanted public-treasury vouchers to move money into private schools. These cries continue today.

There is very little that angers me as much as listening to people bad mouth teachers.

When I was struggling in school with behavioral problems and lack of motivation, the intervention of teachers saved my life. That is a debt I will spend a life time repaying.

In my day teachers were on par with firefighters in public trust and admiration, and today they are vilified at every turn by those who want to undermine our education system, destroy teacher's unions, and sabotage secular education.

By the way it is no surprise that all of this happened on Regan's watch. In fact it appears likely it was all part of his plan to return America back to its "Christian roots." Even if those did not really exist in the first place.

This from Salon:

(Frank) Schaeffer himself developed the theme in his most influential call to action, “A Christian Manifesto,” a 1981 book that (Jerry) Falwell described as “probably the most important piece of literature in America today.” As in his other recent works, Schaeffer stressed the inevitability of an authoritarian takeover if Bible-believing Christians remained indifferent to politics and failed to take a stand. He believed that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 might represent a window of opportunity to reassert Christian values. But he also warned that the power of relativistic secular humanism was so strong in the government, in the courts, and in the schools that it soon might be necessary for Christians to resist through civil disobedience—and even with violence—much as the United States had resisted British tyranny at the time of the American Revolution. Christianity and secular humanism, he emphasized, were opposites. “These two world views stand as totals in complete antithesis to each other,” he declared. “It is not too strong to say that we are at war, and there are no neutral parties in the struggle.”

It is no secret that many of the applications for charter schools are submitted by religious groups hoping to insert Christianity into the daily lesson plans of their students. (We have already seen that on display in Texas charter schools.)

The scariest thing in the world for a group that relies on ignorance and reliance on faith, is a fully funded public education system that teaches critical thinking skills and confidence in logic.

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Ask yourself honestly, how long do you think it would take a Florida jury to give this guy the death penalty?




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If that had been a full grown moose this poor guy would be a stain on the snow right about now.

Though I have read about many fatal encounters, I have been lucky enough to only have a handful of close calls in my life and no actual stomping.

The closest I came was accidentally blocking the only exit of a back yard and being charged by a bull moose and then chased all the way back to my car.

Update: I originally was told this was Alaska, but it turns out to be in Maine.

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Son Cody Coots, pictured on the far left.

Courtesy of TMZ:

Bite me once shame on you ... the new pastor in the "Snake Salvation" church will NOT accept medical treatment today if he's bitten by the rattlesnake that killed his father exactly one week ago.

Cody Coots tells TMZ ... he will indeed handle the deadly snake during the afternoon Kentucky service. What's more, he says there will be NO anti-venom meds on hand in case the snake attacks again.

And ... if he's bitten and paramedics rush to the church, he'll send them away ... just like his dad Jamie Coots did.

Cody tells TMZ, "I will lay right there and say to everyone, it's God's will. It's good enough to live by, and good enough to die by."

You know it is going to be increasing hard for these simple minded yokels to deny the teachings of Charles Darwin if they are going to keep receiving his awards.

You know you have to admire a Christian faith that has its own expiration date baked right into its religious practices. Perhaps the only thing that would be faster is a faith based on the belief that God will negate the laws of gravity for the true believers, and whose congregation meets on the edge of a cliff every Sunday.

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Courtesy of Mother Jones:

Kansas set off a national firestorm last week when the GOP-controlled House passed a bill that would have allowed anyone to refuse to do business with same-sex couples by citing religious beliefs. The bill, which covered both private businesses and individuals, including government employees, would have barred same-sex couples from suing anyone who denies them food service, hotel rooms, social services, adoption rights, or employment—as long as the person denying the service said he or she had a religious objection to homosexuality. As of this week, the legislation was dead in the Senate. But the Kansas bill is not a one-off effort.

Republicans lawmakers and a network of conservative religious groups has been pushing similar bills in other states, essentially forging a national campaign that, critics say, would legalize discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Republicans in Idaho, Oregon, South Dakota, and Tennessee recently introduced provisions that mimic the Kansas legislation. And Arizona, Hawaii, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Mississippi have introduced broader "religious freedom" bills with a unique provision that would also allow people to deny services or employment to LGBT Americans, legal experts say.

"This is a concerted campaign that the religious Right has been hinting at for a couple of years now," says Evan Hurst, associate director of Truth Wins Out, a Chicago-based nonprofit that promotes gay rights. "The fact that they're doing it Jim Crow-style is remarkable, considering the fact that one would think the GOP would like to be electable among people under 50 sometime in the near future."

The article goes on to give examples from Idaho, to South Dakota, to Tennessee of states that have introduced bills that would allow businesses to refuse service to anybody whose lifestyle insulted their religious beliefs.

Which by the way was one of the arguments used during the Jim Crow era to refuse service to blacks and to prevent interracial marriages.

So let me address the elephant in the room.

I get quite a lot of negative feedback for my promotion of secular ideals and my attacks on religion. And I understand why it might upset certain people.

However what everybody has to recognize is that ALL of these recent attacks on our human rights and personal freedoms are the result of religion.

What other reason is ever given for denying women access to abortion? The belief that it is against God's wishes.

What other reason is given for keeping gays from getting married? That it is against the teachings of the Bible.

What other reason is given for the attacks on science that we have seen lately? The fact that Evolution disproves the Genesis account of creation and the evidence that man can destroy the climate on the planet that religious people believe God provided to his people.

That is pretty much it in a nutshell.

So please tell me how to fight against all of this WITHOUT attacking it at its source.

Religion played a very important part in the development of mankind on this planet, there is no real argument against that. However today, in my opinion, that benefit is greatly reduced, and the negative impact seems to be growing exponentially.

So forgive me if I step on a few of your toes, but the battle is bigger than you.

And what we are fighting for is bigger than any one religion, or any one religion's god.

We are fighting for our very futures. And the future of our children. And our children's children.

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