Messengers of god

I have a question for the religious people in the studio audience: don't you get tired of people saying that they've heard something directly from god, and then telling you exactly what god wants you to do?

Such pronouncements become increasingly common around elections, because apparently god is deeply interested in the details of American politics.  Unfortunately, though, his track record is pretty shabby, given that he told Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, and Ted Cruz that they were all going to get the Republican nomination and float their way into the presidency, and it sort of didn't work out that way.  I've was half expecting every time one of those guys got knocked out of the race to hear a booming voice from the heavens saying, "Ha!  Psych!"

But it didn't happen, more's the pity.

Now, though, we've got two people who are claiming that they are channeling the deity's political views.  The first is, unsurprisingly, Glenn Beck, who has said that he was anointed by god to warn us about what will happen if Donald Trump is elected, thus ushering in the apocalypse:

I can only do what I'm supposed to do, what I feel the Lord has commanded me to do and that is tell the truth.  He has commanded me to do my own homework.  He has commanded me to never compromise on what you truly believe ...  As I started to say in 2004, privately at least, there is a warning in Ezekiel that in those days there will be a watchman on the tower and at the gates.  That means all of us, in our own way, are watchmen on the gates, in your own life.  And if you see trouble coming, you are supposed to warn the people and, if you don't, the blood of everyone who could have heard the warning and could have done something, that blood is on your hands. 

This audience is the only hope because you are the only audience that is truly been prepared for these things at this time.  You will be our republic's last line of defense.  So what do I do?  People are telling me, 'At least just shut up.'  I can't.  I can't.  You condemn me if I continue to warn, but God condemns me if I fail to warn.

You may recall that a while back he had a war of words with Trump himself, claiming that Trump wasn't a "true conservative."  He spoke directly to the election on his Facebook page:

History shows a strong man can and always does rise.  Someone who will say "I will restore order."  Do you remember me warning of top down, bottom up and inside out?  I believe this is that moment.

Trump is that strong man.

So at least that's one thing that Beck and I can agree on, not that I needed a deity to point it out; all the good done for the world by "political strongmen."

Speaking of shabby track records.

Beck, however, is not the only person who thinks that he has a direct pipeline to heaven's political wing.  Lance Wallnau, over at Charisma News, has received a message from god that is the exact opposite of what Beck did.  he believes that Trump is the Chosen One, and in fact will drive out evil spirits once he's elected:

I believe I've heard God... 

There is a spirit assigned to destroy America.  The strategy is laid bare if you read the 51-page democratic platform.  It's the manifesto Hillary is expected to enforce when she is president.  They call this revolution a "reset!"  Read it for yourself.  Under Hillary, America will undergo the final phase of Obama's radical socialist cultural transformation with astonishing speed. Just one man stands in its path... 

With 15 candidates running, and many of them strong Christians, it didn't seem likely that Mr. Trump, the business man outsider, would go very far.  But I heard the Lord say something: "Donald Trump is a wrecking ball to the spirit of political correctness."  That was the first word I heard about him.  Immediately I began to wonder what God was doing... 

As I traveled to Trump Towers I wondered, how far will this wrecking ball go?  Why would God choose Trump when so many true conservatives and Christians were already running?  Is he an interruption to God's plan or is the battle for America changing in a way we haven't caught up with?...  By putting America first and building a people movement, Donald Trump becomes a wild card that messes up the elite globalists' insider game.  Whatever you bow to on the way up the mountain controls you at the top.

Is it just me, or is it a little odd that the evangelicals are embracing a three-times-married serial philanderer who values money and power over anything else?  This is especially puzzling considering Wallnau's last statement about "whatever you bow to on the way up the mountain controls you at the top."  How can he reconcile this with Jesus's statements about it being "easier than a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven?"  And "give away everything you have to the poor, and follow me?"  And "blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth?"  And "take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions?"

Okay, I'll admit that there may be a lot I don't understand, here.  Being an atheist myself, maybe I just don't get how the true believers think.  But it does strike me as a little dangerous to listen to people who tell you that they speak with god's voice.  After all, it pays to consider how often those people will tell you that what god just said happens to agree perfectly with what they already believed.

Odd coincidence, that.

Keep on truckin'

Remember last summer, when the "Jade Helm" training exercise in Texas got a whole bunch of conspiracy theorists stirred up about how the military (acting under Obama's orders, of course) was about to take out the governor of Texas and institute martial law, complete with guillotining of innocent civilians?

And most importantly, how none of that happened?

Well, here we go again.

A couple of days ago, a guy named Jeff Stern was on a highway near Lexington, Virginia, and noted the presence of several military vehicles labeled "UN" on the road with him.  He took pictures, and posted them to his Facebook page along with the caption, "Can't begin to tell you how many of these I passed today on 81 near Lexington VA.  Interesting times ahead!"

And with that, we're off to the races.

[image from a Facebook screen grab]

Posts began popping up all over with many and varied hypotheses about what was going on with the trucks.  One claimed that these were trucks containing troops intended as peacekeepers during the Republican and Democratic Conventions, scheduled for later this month; another that it was the first sign of martial law being declared; a third said that they were heading south to put down an upcoming armed insurrection that was going to declare Texas to be an independent country; a fourth, predictably, that President Obama is up to something, probably in cahoots with his Muslim buddies; and the fifth and most popular one, that this was the precursor to an invasion by a coalition from the United Nations that was so completely sneaky and top secret that they rode around on an interstate highway in trucks labeled "UN."  

So naturally, every conspiracy theory site in the entire world was buzzing with what this could all be about.  And if you ever want to truly despair of the future of the human race, go to a conspiracy theory site and read the comments.  Because remember the fundamental rule of the internet: the comments section is always weirder, stupider, and crazier than the article to which they're appended.  Here, that sets the bar pretty high.  Take, for example, the following comment on the site Hidden Americans:

Nothing should surprise you as the Obama administration has almost revoked our constitution with the help of congress and the supreme courts [sic] insane decisions.  We can't be surprised at anything that is going down.  We are not going to be surprised if somehow this election is cancelled and Obama declares marshall [sic] law.

I thought Marshall Law had something to do with rebuilding Western Europe after World War II.  But I could be remembering wrong.

Fortunately, while the conspiracy theorists were busy having multiple orgasms over the latest Black Ops, a few people with some degree of common sense did some digging and found out what was really happening.  And it turned out to be... boring.  The actual story was broken in The Blaze, because the only thing that would make this whole thing more ridiculous is having a news site run by Glenn Beck be the voice of reason and common sense:

The U.N., an international organization that does not have authorities in the United States, was simply having their trucks manufactured in Virginia at Alpine Armoring, Inc, an international supplier and manufacturer of armored vehicles. 

A representative from Alpine confirmed to The Blaze that the vehicles were, in fact, purchased by the U.N. and were being delivered to a nearby port for use outside the United States. 

When the photos first made headlines, one person who commented on a post by Facebook user Jeff Stern, who shared the images, said, “These are manufactured in Danville. Thats why you saw them in VA. They were being delivered.”

Which, of course, had exactly zero effect on the conspiracy theorists, who immediately began to leap all over the story in The Blaze, claiming that it was TOO martial law, dammit.  Here are just a few of the comments I read before my prefrontal cortex cried "uncle:"

• ANY UN vehicle in the US is illegal AND a legitimate TARGET.  NO UN “resolution” SUPER-CEDES the US Constitution….
• Lock and Load, this is why the 2nd amendment exist
• the ones for our neighborhoods are unmarked.
• Sure, they were just manufactured in the U.S. and are being sent overseas.  Yeah, that’s the ticket and if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor and Benghazi was caused by some stupid video that a Jew produced.  When the anti-Christ takes over America, it will be like taking candy from a baby.

And then, there's my favorite one:

• Like they would tell you they are prepositioning equipment to seize control. lol They don’t even need to preposition just put in a large order and then drop the troops in them and take over.

I wonder how you "preposition equipment?"  "Of the tank, by the tank, for the tank...?"

So yeah.  I have to keep telling myself that the people who post these things are the loud, insane minority.  Because if I start focusing too hard on the fact that these people vote, I end up curled up in a fetal position under my desk for the rest of the day.

In any case, there you have it; this summer's answer to "Jade Helm."  Which will result in nothing, just as Jade Helm did -- no martial law, no executions, no overthrowing of state governments, no troops storming in and taking over small-town America.  In fact, the only thing Jade Helm seemed to accomplish was giving Alex Jones something to rant about for six months, which is probably what will happen again here.  But because the conspiracy theorists never seem to remember that they have a batting average that is so close to zero as to make no difference, the next time some odd-looking vehicle is spotted in Minnesota or somewhere, we'll start all over again from the beginning.

Because conspiracy theories are the gifts that keep on giving.

Jones vs. Beck vs. reality

It's always amusing when two conspiracy theorists go for each other rather than spending their time calling the rest of us sheeple.

This time it is Glenn Beck and the fortunately inimitable Alex Jones, who have come to verbal blows -- no physical ones yet, at least that I am aware of -- over the presidential race.

First, we had Beck throwing down the gauntlet when he reacted angrily to political commentator Matt Drudge photoshopping Marco Rubio to look like a midget.  "I don't know what the hell has happened to Matt Drudge," Beck said.  "Ever since he started hanging out with Alex Jones, he's gone to this weird conspiratorial place where you can't even trust the news coming from him any more."

Notwithstanding that Beck himself is a complete fruit loop who appeared in a Huffington Post article three years ago entitled "The Top 9 Glenn Beck Conspiracy Theories," which featured such gems as:

• Obama advisor Cass Sunstein is a Nazi who is going to create a "Second Bill of Rights," so we all need to buy guns right away.
• Don't use Google, because They are watching everything you do and you'll end up getting arrested.
• The Entertainment Industry Foundation -- presumably including honorary board member Rupert Murdoch -- are "Maoists" who are taking over all media to push a communist agenda.
• President Obama is going to release Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, currently in prison for his involvement in 9/11, as a way of appeasing his Muslim friends in Egypt.
• The Department of Education, through a secret protocol called "System X," is deploying sensors in chairs in public school classrooms -- and also portable MRI machines -- as a way of collecting information on students for thought control.

Have you noticed a commonality between all of these?  Besides the fact that in order to believe any of them, you'd have to have a quarter pound of Laffy Taffy where the rest of us have a brain?

That's right: none of them actually happened.

But Glenn Beck is too smart to let a little thing like a zero batting average discourage him.  So he has now accused Matt Drudge of taking his marching orders from Alex Jones to discredit Beck's favorite presidential candidates (Rubio and Cruz).

And far be it from Alex Jones to take that lying down.  Especially given that he thinks that Donald Trump represents the Second Coming of Christ at the very least.  So he responded with a diatribe that even by his standards is pretty extreme.  Here's an excerpt:

The cult leader, Glenn Beck, he is now an official religious cult leader.  He’s the false prophet and his messiah is Ted Cruz...  Beck is a cynical, twisted, weirdo who will end up destroying himself. He is an egomaniac, super-narcissist, probably psychotic, in my view, and he’s insane and wants to be a cult leader. 

Moses has returned, you didn’t know?  The two prophets of Revelation, it’s Ted Cruz and Glenn Beck, you didn’t know?  He says it’s a priesthood he’s starting.  Oh yeah?  Oh really?  The liberal, hardcore shock jock that was hired right before 9/11 and gotten ready to come out to be the synthetic Alex Jones?  I’ve been told that by the executives involved where they sat — and he’s an actor — and watched weeks of my videos and shows and said, "Take this and mix it with Oprah." That’s what I was told by the executives that used to run his operation.  He’s a mixture of Oprah Winfrey and Alex Jones, all in a big, weird doughboy’s body.  A cult leader.  A Nellie high priest.  Scared to death, by the way, dozens of security people.

So I guess that told Beck a thing or two.

Me, I find the whole thing hilarious, given that my contention is that they're both a few fries short of a Happy Meal.  After all, do the adjectives Jones used to describe Beck -- egocentric, super-narcissist, probably psychotic -- sound like anyone else you can think of?

Hello, Pot?  This is the kettle...

So anyway.  While the rest of us sit back with a bowl of popcorn to watch the hilarity, two of the conspiracy world's inadvertent comic geniuses do their best to tear each other limb from limb.  Like I said: fine with me.  The more time they spend doing that, the less time they'll have to try to convince anyone else.

Justice denied

Because we clearly needed something to make American politics even weirder and more contentious, five days ago Antonin Scalia decided to die suddenly on the day of a Republican presidential debate.

Of course, it wasn't only the candidates who responded with pithy, and at times completely inexplicable, commentary on the legacy of Justice Scalia and the future of the Supreme Court.  But Ted Cruz was certainly one of the first, wasting no time in urging his colleagues in the Senate to block any nominee President Obama brings forward to replace Scalia.  This move set off shrill commentary from both sides of the political spectrum, often from people who apparently consider themselves constitutional law scholars even though they have never read anything longer than the message inside a fortune cookie, and all of which ended up bouncing around on Facebook and Twitter for days.

Then things got crazier still.  Despite the fact that Scalia was 79, overweight, had high blood pressure and a history of heart problems, and had recently been told that he was too weak to undergo rotator cuff surgery, many people decided that there was no way a man that healthy could die suddenly of natural causes.  The conspiracy theories began to multiply like mushrooms after a rainstorm, particularly when it was announced that Scalia would not be autopsied given that his doctor was comfortable signing a death certificate citing natural causes without it.

And of course, leading the way was none other than Donald Trump, who claimed that Scalia was smothered in his sleep.

"They say they found a pillow on his face," Trump said, on Michael Savage's radio show Savage Nation, "which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow."  Because any Black Ops hit man who was trying to murder a public official and make it look like death from natural causes would clearly be so stupid that he would leave the murder weapon sitting right on the victim's face.

John Poindexter, owner of the Cibolo Creek Ranch in Shafter, Texas, where Scalia died, tried to clarify.  "I think enough disclosures were made and what I said precisely was accurate.  He had a pillow over his head, not over his face as some have been saying.  The pillow was against the headboard and over his head when he was discovered.  He looked like someone who had had a restful night's sleep.  There was no evidence of anything else."

Of course, that only made things look more suspicious.  Alex Jones had an "emergency transmission" on his Facebook site, asking whether Scalia was murdered, but apparently not knowing enough about the situation to realize that the Justice's first name was "Antonin," not "Anthony."  Despite this, he said that Scalia wasn't going to be the last murder of a prominent conservative, and suggested that Texas Governor Greg Abbott might be next:

Scalia walked into the perfect bear trap...  Maybe they’ll find the governor with a pillow over his face, maybe that’s the new thing.  All of these conservatives that are fighting back that are real conservatives, they are all being found with pillows over their faces...  This is it.  This is the final assault.  This is the beginning of the final war.

Then, because apparently Alex Jones was lonely being the only clinically insane person commenting on the situation, we had this:

Can I get some agreement here, from both my conservative and liberal readers, that Michele Bachmann really needs to get back on her meds?

But if you think that's as weird as it gets, you really don't get how deeply crazy some Americans are.  Extremely evangelical pastor Rick Wiles decided to weigh in, and he said that Scalia was clearly murdered by President Obama, possibly with his bare hands.  How did he reach this conclusion?

Numerology, of course.

The 13th was the 44th day of 2016.  Obama is the 44th president of the United States, so you have this numerology thing taking place. 

The man who killed Justice Scalia deliberately left the pillow on his face as a message to everybody else: 'Don’t mess with us, we can murder a justice and get away with it...'  Officials in Washington are all terrified.  Deep down they know, the regime murdered a justice…  This is the way a dictatorial, fascist, police state regime takes control of a nation.  Barack Obama is the most lawless president we have ever had in the history of this great country, but his lawlessness is a catalyst to wake up the sleeping giant.

But no episode of Insanity On Parade would be complete without a contribution from Glenn Beck, and I'm happy to say that he doesn't disappoint.  Beck lays the death of Justice Scalia at the feet of god himself, and said that god had a purpose in offing Scalia when he did: to incite Americans to vote for Ted Cruz.

On Beck's weekly radio show, his co-host Pat Gray lamented the Justice's untimely death.  "I couldn't help but wonder, why?" Gray said.  "Why now?  Why did you have to take Antonin now?"  And Beck, as always, was ready to address the question with his usual realistic approach.

Pat, I think I have an answer for you on that. 

The lord is saying, I just woke the American people up.  I took them out of the game show moment and woke enough of them up to say, 'Look how close your liberty is to being lost.'  The Constitution is hanging by a thread.  That thread has just been cut.  And the only way that we survive now is if we have a true constitutionalist as president.

Beck was immediately taken to task by Christians who questioned his view that god would knock off someone merely to make a point with the survivors, even though in the bible god does that sort of thing every other page.  But Beck shares with Donald Trump the personal motto, "Death Before Backing Down," and responded thusly:

(P)erhaps God allowed Scalia to die at this time to wake America up to how close we are to the loss of our freedom.  I happen to believe in divine providence.  Americans historically have.  Maybe you do not.  That is your choice and I do not mock you for not.  Why mock me for believing in a traditional view of God? 

Fall to your knees and pray to God to reveal to you what the hour is.  This is your last call, America!  Stand with the man I believe was raised for this hour, Ted Cruz!

So anyway.  I don't think we've nearly seen the last of the wild theories surrounding Scalia's death.  After all, it's over fifty years since Kennedy was killed, and people are still arguing about that one -- and in that case, there was no doubt that it was a murder.  The whole thing makes me vaguely embarrassed to admit that I'm an American when I go overseas, you know?  Not that I'm not proud of my country or unpatriotic or any of that sort of thing, but because we do seem to have way more than our fair share of extremely loud lunatics.  I'd rather not have to spend my time convincing the people I meet while traveling that no, I don't support Donald Trump, that yes, I do think the world is more than 6,000 years old, and that no, I have no idea why the Kardashians are still in the news.  And the fact that we apparently can't accept that a 79 year old man with a weak heart couldn't die of natural causes in his sleep without some kind of evil conspiracy being involved makes me want to polish up my Norwegian so I can claim I'm only visiting the United States on a work visa.

Prediction failure

I'm going to make a radical suggestion, here.

If you make a prediction, and what you are predicting fails to materialize, there is something fundamentally wrong with your model of how things work.

That's the way it goes in science, you know?  Scientists build theories -- models of how a system operates -- then use those theories to generate predictions.  If experimental data proves to be inconsistent with the theory's predictions, then it's time to revise the theory, or else trash it entirely.

It's a pretty elegant system, and not really that hard to understand.  So why is this so antithetical to the way a great many people think?  Because just recently, there are a group of people who have had their predictions fail, over and over, and all it seems to do is make them louder in defending it the next go-round.

Let's start with the whackjobs who thought that the military exercise Jade Helm 15 was a thinly-veiled cover for a end run by the federal government that would result in a takeover of Texas, the declaration of martial law, the widespread confiscation of guns, and the execution of citizens who objected.  The conspiracy wingnuts who believed this went so far as to hold rallies, demand public meetings in which explanations were demanded from military leaders, and send out armed monitors to keep track of what the troops were doing out there in the desert.

And then... and then... none of that stuff happened.  Jade Helm ended on September 14, Texas is still Texas, no martial law has been declared, Americans are as heavily armed as ever, and the government's stockpile of guillotines is still unused.  I wonder if we can get a refund on them?  I bet they kept the styrofoam packaging.

But are any of the militiamen types who were running about thumping their chests in June standing up, red-faced, and saying, "Wow, I guess we were wrong.  What goobers we are."?  Not that I've heard.

Then we have the ever-entertaining Glenn Beck, who has been claiming for years that the End Times are starting.  Every time something awful happens -- which, admittedly, is pretty much every day, global conditions being what they are -- Beck says, "This is it!  We're in for it now!"  And then... the world doesn't end.

Kind of anticlimactic, that.

About a month ago, Beck said the following on his weekly radio show:

What's coming is God saying, right now, to us, 'Please don't, please stand up, please!  Please stand up and choose me.  Please choose me.  If you don't, I can't protect you anymore.  Don't you see what is happening in the world?  Don't you see what's coming your way?  I want to protect you!  If you don't choose me, I can't!  We've made a deal: I'm your God, you're my people; if you reject me as your God and you pick other gods, I can't take you as my people any more.'

"This is not the run of the mill time anymore.  This is not 'it's coming' anymore.  This is it, gang.  This is it.  This is everything I've warned about, everything that I've worried about and I think it's going to happen so damn fast it'll take your breath away.  When it starts to go, you're just going to be 'what?'  Remember when I said at some point evil will just take off its mask and say, 'Raar'? It's going to happen.  Soon.

And what happened was more or less: nothing.  No calamities, no horrific events taking our breath away, and no evil going "Raar."  Just your ordinary stuff that has happened all along.  But does Beck say, "Hmmmm.... maybe I really don't have a direct pipeline to god?"

Of course not.  He just revises his prediction.  "Okay, maybe not soon soon," he basically said, on his show this week.  "But still soon.  You'll see."  Now he's saying the stuff he has been predicting was imminent for the past five years is all gonna happen in 2016.  "I'm terrible at timing," he said, as if that didn't somehow call into question his entire worldview.

Jeremiah Dictating His Prophecies to Baruch (Gustave Doré, 1866) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons

Then we had messianic rabbi Jonathan Cahn, who last year predicted that "the Shemitah" -- a cataclysmic event that will usher in the days of the messiah -- would occur on September 13, and would manifest as a massive stock market crash and resultant economic collapse.  But last Sunday came and went with no cataclysm, which was pointed out to Rabbi Cahn by Pat Robertson on The 700 Club.

Man, it's kind of sad when you're so loony that Pat Robertson calls you out.

Cahn immediately went into backpedal mode:

Nothing has to happen.  You can't put god in a box or he'll get out of it.  The stock market wasn't open on Sunday, so you can't have a crash.  But what's happening with the Shemitah is, there are several templates in the book about how the different ones have come in the past forty or fifty years.  This one has... two of them have had a crash on Elul 29 [the Jewish calendar date that corresponded to September 13], but this one has a different pattern, and that's what this has done.  This is called the pattern of this [sic].  When the Shemitah has happened in the last cycles, what has happened is that in the days before the last day, the stock market, which has been ascending, the Shemitah changes that direction, and it starts to descend.  That has happened in this one as well.  It started in the summer...  It has followed the major pattern.  And this time is called the Shemitah's wake, and sometimes you have the worst crashes occur then, so we'll see what happens.  

Bad things will happen!  Maybe on the date I said, but if not then, they'll happen either before or after that!  Like the stock market going up and then going down!  Because that never happens unless it's ordained by god!

People complain when the weather forecasters get it wrong occasionally.  These bozos, on the other hand, can have a zero batting average, and they continue to get television interviews and have weekly radio shows.

I don't get it.  I mean, I know that the folks who made the predictions themselves are interested in face-saving -- but why don't their followers go, "Whoa.  These people are crazy."?  Instead, every time some new apocalyptic nutjob pops up, spouting prognostications of doom, there are large groups who simply follow along, baaing softly, seeming not to notice that such forecasts have been wrong every single time.

It may be the only undertaking in which a zero success rate doesn't have any effect whatsoever.

Okay, maybe I'm being overly optimistic to expect that people would apply the principles of scientific theories to beliefs that are fundamentally unscientific.  But you'd think that human nature -- which, as far as I've observed, carries with it a dislike for being duped -- would kick in at some point, and the conspiracy theories and apocalyptic prophecies would not gain traction any more.

Never seems to happen, though.  

But it'll happen in 2016!  On February 10!  You'll see!  The whole human race will abandon superstition, and the days of goofy counterfactual beliefs will be over!  Thus sayeth the prophecies!

Cross my heart and hope to die.

Love wins

I'm sure that most of you know by now that in a landmark 5-4 decision, the United States Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal across the nation.

When I got up this morning, I noticed a few things that bear mention.

• The world still exists.
• God did not smite America.  No meteorites, no volcanic eruptions, no earthquakes.  Nothing.
• My marriage to Carol has continued, unaltered, since yesterday.
• Texas pastor Rick Scarborough has yet to set himself on fire.
• The bible-thumpers who threatened to move to Canada are still here.

I find the last-mentioned especially amusing, given that Canada legalized same-sex marriage in 2005.  If you people are looking for a place to move, a country where religion trumps the rule of law, homosexuality is a punishable offense, and everyone is expected to run their lives by the precepts of a holy book, I think Syria or Iraq might fit the bill better than Canada.

What gets me most about all of these people is that they're not just content to live their lives by their own religious precepts; they expect everyone else to follow those precepts, too.  Not satisfied with simply practicing their own religion to the best of their ability, they demand that the entire country has to do so as well.

It's not that hard.  If you want to marry someone of the same gender, do so.  If you don't, then don't.  

End of story.

Or would be, except for the likes of Glenn Beck, who thinks that giving people rights they've been denied amounts to persecuting everyone else.  Beck, who really needs to up the dosage on his anti-psychotic meds, had the following to say:

Persecution is coming. If this goes through, persecution is coming.  I mean serious prosecution.  Mark my words. …  If gay marriage goes through the Supreme Court and gay marriage becomes fine and they can put teeth in it, so now they can go after the churches, 50 percent of our churches will fall away, meaning the congregations.  Within five years, the congregations, 50 percent of the congregants will fall away from their church because they won’t be able to take the persecution.

Further, he says that there are tens of thousands of ministers who are going to face martyrdom because of the decision:

The number in the Black Robe Regiment [a group of conservative Christians Beck likes to talk about] is about 70,000 now.  The number that I think will walk through a wall of fire, you know, and possible death, is anywhere between 17,000 and 10,000.  That is an extraordinary number of people that are willing to lay it all down on the table and willing to go to jail or go to death because they serve God and not man.

Because that's likely.  I think the Black Robe Regiment is going to be pretty frustrated over the next few months, wandering around looking in vain for someone to kill them:

[member of the Black Robe Regiment shows up at a gay couple's wedding reception] 

Black Robe dude:  "Aha!  Here we go!"  (throws his arms open)  "Go ahead!  Oppress me, torture me, and kill me!  I'm ready to die!" 

Guy at wedding reception (puzzled):  "Why would I do that?  This is a celebration.  Here, have some cake." 

Black Robe dude (triumphantly):  "I thought so.  This cake is poisoned, isn't it?" 

Guy at wedding reception:  "No, sorry.  It's lemon cake with rainbow frosting."  (takes a bite)  "See? Delicious."

Black Robe dude:  "So you're not going to murder me for my beliefs?" 

Guy at wedding reception:  "Nope." 

Black Robe dude:  "Rats."  (slinks off, looking for persecution elsewhere)

Beck, of course, wasn't the only one.  Franklin Graham, Billy Graham's less compassionate son, was grim yesterday evening.  "I pray God will spare America from His judgment," Graham said.  "Though, by our actions as a nation, we give Him less and less reason to do so."

Mike Huckabee, of course, was considerably more verbose in his reaction, not to mention considerably less coherent:

The Supreme Court has spoken with a very divided voice on something only the Supreme Being can do-redefine marriage.  I will not acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch. We must resist and reject judicial tyranny, not retreat. 

This ruling is not about marriage equality, it's about marriage redefinition.  This irrational, unconstitutional rejection of the expressed will of the people in over 30 states will prove to be one of the court's most disastrous decisions, and they have had many.  The only outcome worse than this flawed, failed decision would be for the President and Congress, two co-equal branches of government, to surrender in the face of this out-of-control act of unconstitutional, judicial tyranny. 

The Supreme Court can no more repeal the laws of nature and nature's God on marriage than it can the law of gravity.  Under our Constitution, the court cannot write a law, even though some cowardly politicians will wave the white flag and accept it without realizing that they are failing their sworn duty to reject abuses from the court.  If accepted by Congress and this President, this decision will be a serious blow to religious liberty, which is the heart of the First Amendment.

Right.  Because that's what the Supreme Court is supposed to be doing; passing "god's law."

But no one was more butthurt than Justice Antonin Scalia, who said in his dissent, "Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms?" he wrote.  "And if intimacy is, one would think that Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage.  Ask the nearest hippie."

And the result was not what Scalia hoped, which was for people to sit up and amazement and say, "Good heavens, you're right!"  Instead, #AskTheNearestHippie has become a trending hashtag on Twitter, along with a brilliant new Twitter account to follow... @TheNearestHippie.

Because, Justice Scalia, mocking a ridiculous statement is a freedom.  It's called freedom of speech.

But despite all of this, the lion's share of the responses I saw yesterday were positive.  Facebook positively erupted in rainbows.  Even a conservative buddy of mine posted, "Let gays get married.  Let the rednecks have their guns.  Let atheists be atheists, and let Christians be Christians.  Because America is about freedom.  Freedom to live how you please, and be happy with your life.  So smoke a bowl, shoot your guns, cuss a lot, praise Jesus, and wish those two fellas next door a happy honeymoon."

To which I responded, "Amen, brother."

So there you are.  The law of the land.  And to my LGBT friends and their allies who have fought this battle for decades, I can only say:

Congratulations.  Love won.

Battle of the wingnuts

Today, in the "More the Merrier" department, we have a story that involves Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Cliven Bundy, Gandhi, Jesse Ventura, President Obama, and tangentially, Natural News.  How can we go wrong?

The whole thing started a year ago, when Beck called Jones out on his media outlet The Blaze for acting like he was batshit crazy, and yet calling himself a "sane conservative."  Beck was especially incensed by liberal commentator Piers Morgan's interviewing Jones on the topic of gun control, and thereby making it look like Jones was the face of conservatism.  "Unsurprisingly, Jones made a fool of himself," Beck wrote, "giving the left the poster boy for their attempts to paint every logical conservative as an extremist nut job."

Well, Jones wasn't going to stand for that kind of talk, and this started a game of loony one-upmanship to see who could launch the wildest attack against the other.  Things really took off with the Cliven Bundy standoff this spring, in which Beck (surprisingly) took a stand against Bundy and his "sovereign citizen" wackos, and Jones blew up.  He called Beck a "Judas goat" (whatever the fuck that is) for not supporting Bundy's fight against the United States government, and later, referred to Beck as a "Benedict Arnold."

This led Beck to state, "I'm not going to respond to Alex Jones any more... he has his platform, and people who listen to him, and that's fine."

But the battle was far from over.  With Jones, the battle is never over.  So dear readers, pop yourself some popcorn, and sit back, cause shit's about to get real.

This week, Jones released what he calls a "huge story."  Not only is Beck a "Judas goat" and a "Benedict Arnold," he's... get ready...

... working for President Obama.

*gasp of horror*

Here's the introduction to the video:

David Knight joins Alex to discuss the accusation Glenn Beck recently made claiming that Alex is dangerous.  Beck claims Alex knowingly edited Cliven Bundy’s statements and wants a violent revolution to occur.  Any occasional listener to the show can testify to, Alex is neither about a violent revolution nor was he covering up Bundy’s remarks. 

After all the attacks that Beck launches towards Alex and Infowars.com its [sic] becoming very obvious that Beck isn’t taking the queues [sic] from the SPLC or other groups like that, He’s writing the talking points.  Evidence thus far is suggesting that Glenn Beck IS a white house [sic] operative!

Right.  Glenn Beck is a White House operative.  The man who, just this summer, said that President Obama was "about to snap and start rounding up conservatives and putting them into death camps."

But the real fun starts in the video itself, which I strongly recommend all of you watch (it's on the link above).  I will warn you against drinking anything while watching it, though, and be forewarned that I will not be held responsible for any damage to your computer that might occur if you fail to heed these words.

In case you don't have the time or inclination to watch what amounts to sixteen minutes of an insane man going "Woogie woogie woogie woogie pfthththptptptptptpt," I present to you some highlights:

"This isn't about Beck, this is about what's going to happen when the globalists blow up another Oklahoma City building and try to start a new war...  I do not want to hear that I want a violent revolution so that when the feds blow up another Oklahoma City, I get the blame." 

"I don't attack Glenn Beck when he says horrible things about me.  I mean, he said I have sex with Charlie Sheen in showers, folks." 

"What'll happen?  Well, Alex Jones has been arrested, and Ron Paul just died of a stroke, wink wink, and I think it's normal that he died of a stroke, he was old, and Rand Paul just was in a car wreck, his back's broken, and Alex Jones was in a shootout with cops, and they took him out." 

"This guy, this guy probably meets with Obama!" 

"We wouldn't cover this if it was just Glenn Beck saying this, but he's saying White House talking points, Media Matters talking points that he originated.  So for anyone who's trained in tracking PsyOps and stuff, now it all clicked for me.  Why he says I want him arrested and put in a camp.  He said that a week and a half ago, we played the bizarre clip.  Why he says I want violence, why he says InfoWars wants violence.  Why we were covering up the racism of Cliven Bundy.  We were there in hours and uncovered it, the way it was spun is terrible.  We're all about fighting racism, here."

But if you like inadvertent humor, the best moment came about twelve minutes in, when Jones and his pal David Knight were discussing a quote that Knight had used:  "First they assassinate your character, and then they assassinate you."  Knight said he thought the quote originated with Jesse Ventura.

"No," Jones said.  "Actually, I think it was Gandhi."

Yup.  Easy to see how you could get Jesse "The Body" Ventura confused with Mohandas Gandhi.  Understandable mistake.

Oh, and for the record, neither Ventura nor Gandhi ever said any such thing, as far as I can find.

So that's the latest salvo between Beck and Jones, each one seeing who can out-wacko whom.

But I haven't shown you the Natural News tie-in, yet!  Just this week, as if on cue, we had a repost over at the wonderful subreddit r/conspiratard of a "Sheeple Quiz" written by Mike Adams, who may be in hot contention with Beck and Jones for who is the biggest nutjob.  You must take a look at it.  (Important warning: every time you answer "B," your name gets boosted higher on the list of people who are being considered for FEMA death camps.)

So there you have it.  Today's dip in the deep end.  Myself, I'm waiting for Beck's rebuttal, which should be epic.  However he says that he's not going to talk about Alex Jones any more, I can't imagine him taking this lying down.  I mean, having sex in the shower with Charlie Sheen is one thing, but insinuations of meeting with President Obama are just crossing the line.

Glenn Beck, liberal indoctrination, and public schools

It's nice when your intuition is right, every once in a while.

Last week, Glenn Beck's media outlet The Blaze reported on a story out of Jacksonville, Florida.  The upshot of it was that a parent of a child who attends Cedar Hills Elementary School was "furious" to find the following note amongst his child's school work:

The father was horrified about the apparent liberal indoctrination going on here, so he checked with other parents of kids in the same class, and found that those children, too, had written the sentence down on a piece of paper.

So the dad contacted The Blaze, and the story broke.  Soon the district and the teacher who was identified as responsible, Cheryl Sabb, were receiving threats.  It flew around the internet, especially on Facebook -- a posting of it I saw had garnered over 14,000 hits, and comments such as, "I HATE those goddamn liberal public schools.  We should shut them all down," and "That teacher should be fired tomorrow, and so should the administrators who let this happen."

Anyhow, I read this, and the entire time I was thinking, "This can't be right."  Most of us teachers simply don't have time to proselytize even if we had the inclination.  And in a fourth-grade class?  Something seemed wrong here.  But as befits my stance as a skeptic, I wasn't just going to write a post and say, "Hey, this doesn't feel right to me" when I didn't have any evidence to support my point.

Lo and behold, though, I was right.  The firestorm of controversy that was generated by the story led to an investigation, and the upshot of it was that damn near the entire story reported in The Blaze was flat-out wrong.

The identified teacher, Cheryl Sabb, had nothing to do with it.  The note was part of a civics lesson on constitutional rights given to a class by a local attorney, who had instructed the children to write the sentence on a piece of paper -- and then state their opinion as to whether they agreed or disagreed with it, and craft an argument supporting their viewpoint.

Several things about this debacle appall me.  One is that no one in the chain of communication in the original story -- the father, the reporter who was contacted, the editor who approved the story for publication -- thought to do the one thing that seems ridiculously obvious to me, which is: call the teacher and find out for sure what happened.  Even the kid was apparently too dumb to understand the point of the assignment -- the whole thing could have been avoided if the kid had simply said, "No, dad, that's not what the lesson was about."  And then, The Blaze published a "followup" (it's linked at the top of the page for the original story) instead of doing what they should have done, which is publishing a retraction.  Isn't that what responsible news sources do when they screw up royally?

Oh, wait.  We're talking about The Blaze.  Never mind.

And of course, the damage is done.  Hardly anyone is circulating the actual correct information; this allows the people who hate public schools, who think they're little Liberal Indoctrination Camps, to go on living in their fantasy world.  Glenn Beck and his cronies at The Blaze have nothing to gain by retracting the story; they've long been virulently against public education, and if the reputation of the public school system was damaged by their false reporting, so much the better.

It leads me to wonder how much longer public schools will be able to survive.  Between funding cuts, increasing mandates from state agencies (including adding more worthless standardized tests), and external attacks on teachers, it's a wonder any college student in his or her right mind would choose to go into teaching.  I'm nearing the end of an (all things considered) happy career as a secondary-level science teacher, but if I were in college now, I wouldn't even consider teaching as an option.  It's a hard enough job to do well at the best of times, but with the recent changes, it's becoming next to impossible.  Some school districts can't find qualified applicants for job openings, leading them to eliminate positions, bump up class sizes, and (in some cases) hire uncertified individuals to teach children.  The result: quality goes down, criticisms increase, schools receive more pressure to change, and the whole thing goes into an ever-faster downward spiral.

I fear that the ultimate result will be the demolition of the entire system.

Which I'm sure that Glenn Beck would applaud.  But I hope he realizes what he's asking for.  Public schooling in the United States, for all of its flaws, has been an amazingly successful social experiment.  It started from the standpoint that (1) a general, broad-based education is good for everyone, and (2) all children should have the opportunity to learn, both of which ran counter to the earlier idea that only rich kids needed to be educated, and that the lower social and economic tiers were irredeemably stupid in any case.  And I would argue that our society has benefited tremendously from this experiment -- the amount of creative talent wasted in earlier centuries by the decision not to offer education to most of the boys and almost all of the girls is one of the tragedies of our past.

Any regular reader of this blog knows that I am no apologist for the Department of Education; I think that many of their decisions, apropos of the oversight of the school system, are downright destructive.  But the way to effect change here is not to tear down the edifice itself.  It's to use what we've learned about successful pedagogy from the people who know -- the teachers -- to guide policy, to improve the system from the inside out.

But that's not what Glenn Beck et al. want to do.  Their continual lobbing of verbal bombs at the school system has, as its aim, breaking the power of unions and remodeling teaching on conservative principles.  (Recall that the actual, verbatim stance of the Texas Republican party is that they "oppose the teaching of higher-order thinking skills, values clarification, (and) critical thinking... which have the purpose of challenging students' fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.")  And judging by the reactions I saw to the civics lesson in Jacksonville, Beck and his followers are succeeding.

I just hope that I'll be retired before the entire system collapses.

Bargain basement miracles

You know, the quality of miracles has really gone down, of late.

Back in biblical days, god really knew how to conjure up a miracle, didn't he?  Consider the following:

• God makes Balaam's donkey talk (Numbers 22:21-31)
• Jesus feeds "a great multitude" with five loaves and two fish (Matthew 14:13-21)
• Joshua makes the Earth stop rotating so he can finish a very important battle (Joshua 10:13)
• Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead (John 11:1-44)
• Moses parts the Red Sea and drowns lots of Egyptians (Exodus 14:1-30)
• God smites the crap out of Sodom and Gomorrah, and turns Lot's wife into a pillar of salt for having second thoughts (Genesis 19:24-26)
• God makes the entire Syrian army go blind, and then cures them all a few minutes later (2Kings 6:18-20)

And so on.  That's just a few.  And I think I am not alone in saying that any one of these -- not all, mind you but one -- would be sufficient to convince me that I really should reconsider my stance as an atheist.

But these days?  Yesterday, on Glenn Beck's website The Blaze, Billy Hallowell posted a piece called "3 Real-Life 'Miracles' That Took Place on the Set of The Bible."  Most of you have probably heard about the Mark Burnett/Roma Downey production that dramatizes the stories of biblical times, which debuted on March 3 and which has received critical acclaim (most of the critics I read acclaimed, "Meh").  But now Hallowell -- and others -- have put forth a stunning statement: that there were some genuine miracles that occurred during filming, miracles that not only prove god's existence, but show that he is 100% in favor of Burnett & Downey's film.

So, what are these miracles?  Hallowell tells us all about them:

1)  When they were filming the scene where Jesus is talking to Nicodemus about the Holy Spirit, the "wind literally picked up on its own."
2)  Burnett and Downey had hired a "snake wrangler" to round up any poisonous snakes that might be in the set area and potentially threaten cast or crew.  Before they were going to film the crucifixion scene, the "snake wrangler" found 48 snakes.
3)  During the filming of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, an "irreplaceable" piece of Jesus' costume came loose and floated away.  It was later found and returned by a kid who lived nearby.

And I'm thinking: that's the best you can do?  The wind "picking up on its own?"  (Because apparently under normal circumstances, the wind only blows when it's encouraged to.)  Some snakes... in a freakin' desert?  A kid returning a prop when everybody in a hundred-mile radius knew there was a movie being filmed?

As miracles go, those aren't exactly Grade-A quality, you know what I mean?  They're more "KMart Blue-Light Special."

You have to wonder, with all of the increasing disdain for religion you see in Western society, why god is insisting on playing coy with us.  It's a bit like the UFO cadre who believe that crop circles are aliens trying to communicate with us, and prove to a doubting populace that extraterrestrials are real.  You'd think, being super-intelligent aliens and all, that deciding to land in Times Square would occur to them as, on the whole, a more convincing alternative.  Likewise, if god really is invested in proving to humanity that he exists, the wind blowing is just not doing it for me.

Okay, yeah, I know the biblical passage about god being the "still, small voice" (1Kings 19:11-13).  But you know, that just won't wash.  God was sure as hell not a "still, small voice" when he smote 50,070 people for looking at the Ark of the Covenant (1Samuel 6:19).  So, what's going on, here?

Now, mind you, I'm not saying that god smiting fifty-thousand-odd people day after tomorrow would be a good thing.  That's a whole city's worth of people, for pete's sake, and there are no cities that have no redeeming features, even if you include Newark.  But some of the less smiteful miracles would sure do a lot to convince us doubters.

In any case, Hallowell's article ends with the line, "What do you think — mere coincidences or evidence of God’s intervention? You decide."

Okay, thanks, I will.  And my decision is: coincidences.  And in the case of the wind, it was: the wind.  If those are what pass for miracles these days, all I can say is that heaven's Quality Control Department sure is slacking.

An atheist who wouldn't vote for atheists?

A news story today has me puzzled, but being that it appeared in Glenn Beck's online news source The Blaze, perhaps that's not to be wondered at.

In this story, S. E. Cupp, a commentator who writes for The Blaze, states for the record (in an interview with MSNBC) that she is an atheist -- but then says that she wouldn't vote for one.

Cupp was describing her support for Mitt Romney, and was asked if she would still vote for Mitt Romney if he were an atheist.  "No," she said.  "Because he would have no chance."

Well, okay, I guess that falls into the "don't bother voting for someone who is clearly going to lose anyway," department, which I suppose I can understand.  But then Cupp went further:

"And you know what?" she said. "I would never vote for an atheist president. Ever. Because I do not think that someone who represents 5 to 10 percent of the population should be representing and thinking that everyone else in the world is crazy, but me."

Well, I'm an atheist, and I don't exactly thing that "everyone else in the world is crazy but me."  I think that the religious view of the world is unsupported by the available evidence, which isn't exactly the same thing, is it?  For me, I'm perfectly willing to have a religious president -- unless part of his/her religion requires proselytizing of unbelievers (which, of course, a lot of them do).  I would like to think that the opposite would be true -- that a qualified atheist would, in the eyes of the religious, be fine, unless (s)he were foisting atheism upon the rest of the world.

Cupp continued, "The other part of it — I like that there is a check, OK? That there‘s a person in the office that doesn’t think he’s bigger than the state.  I like religion being a check and knowing that my president goes home every night addressing someone above him and not thinking all the power resides right here… Atheists don’t have that."

Again... atheists don't think the power resides with them.  I think Cupp may be confusing "atheism" with "megalomania."  And honestly, what she accuses atheists of is exactly why the idea of an extremely devout president gives me pause -- it's because the extremely devout think they're in touch with a bigger power that is above them, and they know what that power wants them to do.  It's the certainty that always makes me shudder, the starry-eyed statement "I'm doing god's will."

All of this makes me wonder how well Cupp understands what atheism actually is.  The darker side of my brain wonders if she actually is telling the truth about being an atheist; frankly, it's hard for me to see Glenn Beck hiring an atheist as one of his personal spokesmen.   But even if she is an atheist, she's not a very clear-thinking one -- which, as I said, should come as no surprise given who she works for.