Category: Religion

Vaticanology

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So, Pope Benedict XVI has now issued a tepid statement saying that gay male prostitutes might be able to use condoms, under certain special circumstances, because there is no possibility of procreation:

The Vatican today rushed out a “clarification” of the pope’s remarks on the use of condoms, reported in a book to be published this week, insisting he had “not reformed or changed the [Roman Catholic] church’s teaching”.

But the statement made clear that Pope Benedict XVI was prepared to consider the use of condoms in certain, limited circumstances.

And now we are seeing the walk-back from this, so I am uncertain if this is a real initiative, or one of those cases a game of academic what-if-ing is taken as something more.

So, it’s either significant, or it isn’t.

Oklamoma, Where the Dumb Comes Sweeping Down the Plains

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So, someone decides to ban “Sharia Law,” in Oklahoma, which will almost certainly be overturned, someone already has a claim that it invalidates his will in violation of the First Amendment, but the constitutional amendment, which intends to, “prohibit state courts from considering international law or Islamic law when deciding cases,” also has the effect of banning the 10 commandments:

[U of OK Law Professor Joseph] Thai said the ballot measure “raises thorny church-state problems as well” and could even affect a state judge’s ability to consider the Ten Commandments.

“The Ten Commandments, of course, is international law. It did not originate in Oklahoma or the United States,” Thai said.

Morons.

Both the politicians who place demagoguery above observing their oaths of office, and the voters who pulled the lever for this crap.

Wasp

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Here is the windup


And here is the unforced error

For those of you who don’t know, Wasp is a book by Eric Frank Russell. It’s conceit is that a man is sent to infiltrate and subvert a planet held by the enemy.

Rather than conventional methods of espionage, like sabotage, the goal of the agents is to engender over-reactions from the authorities which would have them weakening themselves, much like a driver distracted by a wasp can kill himself and his passengers by driving into a bridge abutment.

Well, in the Kentucky Senate Race, Democrat Jack Conway ran an ad against Randroid nut job Republican Rand Paul bringing up his involvement in an anti-religious group at Baylor, and his frat hazing style “kidnapping” of a coed who he made to bow down to the “Aqua Buddha.”

I cannot claim to have a deep understanding of the politics, or the religiosity, of Kentucky, so I cannot speak to the direct effects of the advertisement (1st video), but I can speak to the secondary effects of the ad (2nd video) and it ain’t pretty.

Rand Paul is acting like a complete bitch, and his bit at the end where he huffily declares that he won’t shake hands at the end of the debate.

I’m with Theda Skocpol on the nervous Nellies who are wringing their hands over this:

One reason that Dems do not seem to be able to play hardball — in a viciously hardball political world — is that Dems often lack conviction or the will to be eloquently honest (for example, on taxes). But an equal problem is that when someone does play hardball, the rest of the prissy liberal Mugwumps tut-tut them about it.

The professional losing class can go Cheney themselves.

Honestly, I don’t care about Rand Paul’s religion. My guess is that his protestations of religion are a less than honest, since his idol Ayn Rand loathed religion, but politically, the important bit of electoral politics here here is that Rand Paul seriously lost his sh%$ on camera, and that was the real success of this ad.

BTW, if you wanted to use a cinematic reference rather than a literary reference, I would suggest that Jack Conway just Gaslighted Rand Paul.

And Sarah Laughed*

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The first woman scribed Torah written in modern times has been completed. At the siyum (completion ceremony), my brother sounded the shofar.

Cool.

*Parshas Vayera in Genesis: 9 They said to him, “Where is your wife Sarah?” And he replied, “There, in the tent.” 10 Then one said, “I will return to you next year, and your wife Sarah shall have a son!” Sarah was listening at the entrance of the tent, which was behind him. 11 Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years; Sarah had stopped having the periods of women. 12 And Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment—with my husband so old?” 13 Then the Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, saying, ‘Shall I in truth bear a child, old as I am?’ 14 Is anything too wondrous for the Lord? I will return to you at the time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.”

In the Annals of the Repulsive……

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They are just off of I-88, in case you want to leave a flaming bag of sh%$ on the town hall doorstep

The town of Sidney, New York has earned a special place in the annals of perfidity.

There is a small community of Muslims on a farm in this town of 5,993.

They also have a small cemetary, which was approved by the town council a few years ago, but after what appears to be years of harassment from the authorities, town supervisor Bob McCarthy wants a court order to force the bodies to be exhumed and removed from the property.

It is people like Bob McCarthy who make me despair for the future of America.

That sound you her is Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville spinning in his grave.

Number 7 on he List of Things That I Really Did Not Want to Know

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Ewwwww! Both the Pill and the Smile

It appears that members of the Orthodox Jewish community in Williamsburg, New York are using anal caffeine suppositories to deal with withdrawal from go juice:

Jews throughout Williamsburg snapped up caffeine suppositories today, hours before the start of the Yom Kippur fast that would deprive them of the jolt — and hunger suppression — that coffee typically provides.

The day-long fast is the centerpiece of the holiest day on the Jewish calendar — but some religious Jews see a Talmudic loophole that allows them to ingest their daily dose of caffeine, albeit through a different orifice.

“It helps — you know, it’s hard to concentrate when you’re fasting and also addicted to caffeine,” said Baruch Herzfeld, an Orthodox Jew who owns a bike store in Williamsburg. “Some take it before sundown, but most take it throughout their fasting. These guys love a good loophole.”

You know, tapering off over the few weeks before is both more in keeping with the spirit Halacha.*

*Jewish Law.

Great Googly Moogly!

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There was a guy in Amarillo who wanted to burn a Koran on September 11, but a skater dude took the book away from him. No big deal I guess.

Induhvidual in question, one David Grisham, is a lone crazy, though, seeing as how he is from Texas, he’s not quite so lonely: Texas breeds this sort of Nutjob, see Koresh, David, and the Republican Party of Texas.

What does distinguish this guy from your run of the mill crazy is his day job, he guards a a nuclear weapons plant:

According to George Schwarz, the editor and publisher of the Amarillo Independent, Grisham is an armed guard at the B&W Pantax plutonium plant, north of Amarillo, Texas.

The Pantex plant describes its mission as “maintaining the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile. The facility is managed and operated by B&W Pantex for the U.S. Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration.”

The Wiki callse Pantex, “America’s only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility.”

It’s a good thing that Timothy McVeigh didn’t know this guy, or his bomb wouldn’t have been a bunch of fertilizer.

Un-Dirtyword-believable.

Offline for 3 Days

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It’s Rosh Hashanah starting this evening, so between this and the Shabbos* following I am offline until Saturday evening, though I have queued stuff various non time-sensitive stuff up, so scroll down.

Note that this notice will stay at the top of the blog until Saturday evening.

*The Jewish Sabbath, which runs from Friday evening through Saturday Sundown.

Matt Taibbi has a Point

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I would have invoked Der Stürmer, and encouraged invocations of Godwin’s law, but Matt Taibbi is right, Fox News, and their fellow travellers are much closer to Radio Rwanda than they are to Julius Streicher’s oervre:

A lot of Tea Party anger is driven by real local issues — where I live in central Jersey, for instance, there are a lot of pissed-off white people crowing over a nutty state supreme court case in which a Central American drunk driver got off because cops didn’t explain the consequences of refusing a breathalyzer in his native Spanish. But without the constant reinforcement of national 24-hour media, which has taken these isolated cases and presented them as a coast-to-coast massive conspiracy, the rage over stories like this would never reach the levels we’re seeing.

In fact if you follow Fox News and the Limbaugh/Hannity afternoon radio crew, this summer’s blowout has almost seemed like an intentional echo of the notorious Radio Rwanda broadcasts “warning” Hutus that they were about to be attacked and killed by conspiring Tutsis, broadcasts that led to massacres of Tutsis by Hutus acting in “self-defense.” A sample of some of the stuff we’ve seen and heard on the air this year:

  • On July 12, Glenn Beck implied that the Obama government was going to aid the New Black Panther Party in starting a race war, with the ultimate aim of killing white babies. “They want a race war. We must be peaceful people. They are going to poke, and poke, and poke, and our government is going to stand by and let them do it.” He also said that “we must take the role of Martin Luther King, because I do not believe that Martin Luther King believed in, ‘Kill all white babies.'”
  • CNN contributor and Redstate.com writer Erick Erickson, on the Panther mess: “Republican candidates nationwide should seize on this issue. The Democrats are giving a pass to radicals who advocate killing white kids in the name of racial justice and who try to block voters from the polls.”
  • On July 6, the Washington Times columnist J. Christian Adams wrote an editorial insisting that “top [Obama] appointees have allowed and even encouraged race-based enforcement as either tacit or open policy,” marking one of what would become many assertions by commentators that the Obama administration was no longer interested in protecting the rights of white people. “The Bush Civil Rights Division was willing to protect all Americans from racial discrimination,” Adams wrote. “During the Obama years, the Holder years, only some Americans will be protected.”
  • July 12: Rush Limbaugh says Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder “protect and represent” the New Black Panther party.
  • July 28: Rush says Supreme Court decision on 1070 strips Arizonans of their rights to defend themselves against an “invasion”: “I guess the judge is saying it’s not in the public interest for Arizona to try to defend itself from an invasion. I don’t know how you look at this with any sort of common sense and come to the ruling this woman came to.” That same day, Rush says this: “Muslim terrorists are going to have a field day in Arizona. You cannot ask them where they’re from. You cannot even act like we know where they’re from. You cannot ask them for their papers. We can ask you for yours. Not them.”
  • July 29: The Washington Times asks “Should Arizona Secede?” and says the Supreme Court “is unilaterally disarming the people of Arizona in the face of a dangerous enemy” with the aim of creating a “socialist superstate.” The paper writes: “The choice is becoming starkly apparent: devolution or dissolution.”
  • July 29, Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy continues the Radio Rwanda theme, saying, “If the feds won’t protect the people and Governor Brewer can’t protect her citizens, what are the people of Arizona supposed to do?”
There’s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer’s media hate-fest is different than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites. They’re telling these people that their government is illegitimate and criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution.

(emphasis mine)

There are some deeply evil people out there who are looking to leverage bigotry, racism, and fear for their own profit and power.

Taibbi calls for a boycott, saying that he’d, “Like to see at least one firm get blown out of business as a consequence of financially supporting the network that is telling America that its black president wants to kill white babies,” but he misses a part of the dynamic with his call to action: It isn’t that Fox News, and probably the rest of the media outlets, are driven by cynical economic or political goals, it’s that many of them, are bed wetting cowards like Roger Ailes, and they truly live their lives in terror.

As to the politicians stoking this matter, it’s pretty clear that they (Newt) are looking at this through the prism of political advantage though.

I won’t muse on the mental processes of Sarah Palin, that way lies me huddled on the floor, covered in mayonnaise, and gibbering, “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

Deep Thought

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If you are a, “whacko, my parents are first cousins, X-Files wannabe, black helicopter, tinfoil hat wearing, stupid, dim-witted, thinks pro wrestling is real,” lunatic,* as well as a raving bigot, it’s probably not a good idea to allow yourself to be interviewed by a The Daily Show correspondent:

*Sorry, I think that I just channeled the comedian Denis Leary.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?!?

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First, I hear news that some guy flipped out and allegedly stabbed, Ahmed Sharif, a cabbie in New York because the drive was Muslim, and now we discover that this guy worked for a multicultural organization promoting peace and tolerance:

As you’ve seen in our earlier reports, we have what appears to be a straight-up hate crime, in which an NYC cabbie picks up a fare, passenger asks him if he’s Muslim and then stabs him in the neck. The NYPD says Michael Enright, 21, is going to be charged with 2nd degree attempted murder and a hate crime. (See the statement from the victim here.)

Only then things get a little weird. Enright is not who you’d expect. He’s a film student who’d recently been either volunteering for or employed by Intersection International, a multifaith and multicultural effort which seeks to promote justice and peace. And the group has very publicly come out in favor of the Cordoba House project, what opponents call the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

Needless to say, that’s a bit difficult to figure.

This is just freaky, and I just don’t get it, though reports indicate that a significant amount of alcohol was involved.

But if you are talking about this tomorrow, note that the “New York cabbie” has a name, Ahmed Sharif, and remember his name.

I Cannot Belive that I am Saying this, But

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Ron Paul has seized the moral high ground.

He has come out foursquare in favor of the building at 51 park:

Is the controversy over building a mosque near ground zero a grand distraction or a grand opportunity? Or is it, once again, grandiose demagoguery?

It has been said, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” Are we not overly preoccupied with this controversy, now being used in various ways by grandstanding politicians? It looks to me like the politicians are “fiddling while the economy burns.”

The debate should have provided the conservative defenders of property rights with a perfect example of how the right to own property also protects the 1st Amendment rights of assembly and religion by supporting the building of the mosque.

Instead, we hear lip service given to the property rights position while demanding that the need to be “sensitive” requires an all-out assault on the building of a mosque, several blocks from “ground zero.”

You can go and read the rest, but he’s right, and sticking to his principles, and, for once, refreshingly free of “the crazy”.

In doing so, he is publicly disagreeing with his son, who is in a relatively tight Senate race, and so is showing a lot more guts, with a lot more at stake, than jellyfish like Harry Reid or (to my great sorrow) Howard Dean.

The Anti-Defamation League Had Jumped the Shark

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This is one big shark that he jumped.
With Frikken Lasers!

Specifically, Abraham Foxman has now vaulted over C. Megalodon*.

There are now credible allegations that Foxman lobbied against an interfaith trip to Auschwitz:

Earlier this month, several imams joined U.S. officials to visit the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps, a trip which resulted in the clerics issuing a statement condemning anti-Semitism and vowing “to make real the commitment of ‘never again.'”

The eight Muslim-American clerics were joined by Hannah Rosenthal, the presidential special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, and a handful of other officials from the Obama, Bush and Reagan administrations.

But according to Politico, “Organizers of the trip say they were dismayed that the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman lobbied U.S. officials against participating.”

I hope the Abraham Foxman has a serious mental or neurological problem, because otherwise, he is just a pathetic bigot, and dementia is preferable to that.

*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.