The election of Donald Trump has sent shockwaves through the souls of compassionate, humane people across the country and the world. Horror that a candidate who ran on a platform of open bigotry, threats against immigrants and Muslims, and blatant misogyny will soon be president is now sinking in. Trump appointed a white nationalist, Steve Bannon, as chief White House strategist — which was promptly celebrated by the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan. Bannon and other possible extremist Trump appointees, such as John Bolton, a neocon who believes the U.S. should “bomb Iran,” and the authoritarian Rudy Giuliani, are now receiving much deserved public scrutiny.
The incoming vice president, Mike Pence, has not elicited the same reaction, instead often painted as the reasonable adult on the ticket, a “counterbalance” to Trump and a “bridge to the establishment.” However, there is every reason to regard him as, if anything, even more terrifying than the president-elect.
Pence’s ascent to the second most powerful position in the U.S. government is a tremendous coup for the radical religious right. Pence — and his fellow Christian supremacist militants — would not have been able to win the White House on their own. For them, Donald Trump was a godsend. “This may not be our preferred candidate, but that doesn’t mean it may not be God’s candidate to do something that we don’t see,” said David Barton, a prominent Christian-right activist and president of Wall Builders, an organization dedicated to making the U.S. government enforce “biblical values.” In June, Barton prophesied: “We may look back in a few years and say, ‘Wow, [Trump] really did some things that none of us expected.’”
Trump is a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors. With Republican control of the House and Senate and the prospect of dramatically and decisively tilting the balance of the Supreme Court to the far right, the incoming administration will have a real shot at bringing the fire and brimstone of the second coming to Washington.
“The enemy, to them, is secularism. They want a God-led government. That’s the only legitimate government,” contends Jeff Sharlet, author of two books on the radical religious right, including “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.” “So when they speak of business, they’re speaking not of something separate from God, but they’re speaking of what, in Mike Pence’s circles, would be called biblical capitalism, the idea that this economic system is God-ordained.”
One of Trump’s sons, Don Jr., reportedly said that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy, while Trump would focus on the vague mission of “Making America Great Again.” Trump’s campaign subsequently claimed the story was “made up,” though Trump has consistently denied saying things he is on record as saying, so who knows? In any case, the implications of a Pence vice presidency are vast. Pence combines the most horrid aspects of Dick Cheney’s worldview with a belief that Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” novels are not fiction, but an omniscient crystal ball.
While Trump has flip-flopped on a variety of issues, Pence has been a reliable stalwart throughout his public life in the cause of Christian jihad.
How the GOP foisted Pence on Trump is undoubtedly a fascinating story that hopefully will some day be revealed. Obviously, Pence gave Trump badly needed credibility with evangelical voters and the GOP establishment, but Pence’s selection portends a governing apocalypse. While Trump has flip-flopped on a variety of issues, from abortion to immigration to war and health care, Pence has been a reliable stalwart throughout his public life in the cause of Christian jihad — never wavering in his commitment to America-First militarism, the criminalizing of abortion, and utter hatred for gay people (unless they go into conversion therapy “to change their sexual behavior,” which Pence has suggested the government pay for).
He supported making the Patriot Act permanent and wants to ban the burning of the U.S. flag. Pence does not believe federal law enforcement agencies should have to get a FISA warrant to conduct domestic surveillance and voted against requiring any warrant for domestic wiretapping. As governor of Indiana, he did quietly sign a bill to limit the use of Stingray devices by local law enforcement, though it was during the early stages of the Snowden revelations and the public concern about government surveillance was intense.
Pence supported giving retroactive immunity to telecom companies implicated in warrantless surveillance. He does not want congressional oversight of CIA interrogations — which Trump believes should include waterboarding and other torture “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” Pence has paid lip service to the illegality of torture but said that “enhanced interrogation” has saved lives. He has characterized relationship-building, non-coercive interrogation strategies as “Oprah Winfrey methods.” Pence is against whistleblower protections that would prohibit retaliation for reporting crimes or misdeeds. In 2002, the ACLU gave him a 7 percent rating on civil rights.
He wants the U.S. to resume the practice of holding new prisoners at Guantánamo Bay or, as Trump put it, they plan “to fill it up.” Pence also supports expanded use of the military tribunal system.
Pence has claimed that he wants to “economically isolate” Iran rather than engage in a military attack. But should Israel decide to conduct pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, he said in 2010, “if the world knows nothing else, let the world know this: that America will stand with Israel.” He supported a failed legislative effort to make it U.S. policy “to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force.” Both in rhetoric and policy, Pence has compared “radical Islam” to the “evil empire of the Soviet Union” and said that he and Trump will “name the enemy” and “marshal the resources of our nation and our allies to hunt them down and destroy them before they threaten us.”
“We’ll see Roe v. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs,” Pence promised.
As has been widely reported, as governor of Indiana, Pence signed a law requiring fetal tissue from abortions to be buried or cremated, making his state one of the most medieval in its approach to reproductive rights. The fetus burial law, which Pence claimed would “ensure the dignified final treatment of the unborn,” was suspended at the 11th hour by a federal judge, who said it was likely unconstitutional. Pence has been at the forefront of the movement to defund Planned Parenthood. “We’ll see Roe v. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs,” Pence promised. He has long sought to have 14th Amendment protections applied to fetuses, arguing that they should be declared persons. In Congress, Pence voted to criminally punish doctors who performed late-term abortions, except in cases where the woman’s life was in danger. A doctor who “kills a human fetus” faces up to two years in prison, according to that law.
Pence opposed efforts to widen hate crimes laws to include attacks on LGBT people. He tried to block federal funding of HIV treatments unless they came with a requirement to advocate against gay relationships. Pence opposes non-straight people serving in the military. “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service because the presence of homosexuals in the ranks weakens unit cohesion,” he said.
Pence believes “the only truly safe sex … is no sex” and once (falsely) claimed on CNN that “condoms are a very, very poor protection against sexually transmitted diseases.”
Pence supports the “wall” Trump has said he will build, believes in self-deportation, and has staked out one of the most virulent positions against the U.S. taking in refugees from Syria. In defending a proposed ban on Syrian refugees entering Indiana, Pence said it was necessary to “ensure the safety and security of all Hoosiers.” He has advocated for greater militarization of the so-called war on drugs, including escalated military patrols. Pence denounced activists and others protesting recent police killings of unarmed African-Americans, charging they “seize upon tragedy in the wake of police action shootings.” He said he found it offensive to “use a broad brush to accuse law enforcement of implicit bias or institutional racism and that really has got to stop.” He has said that “police officers are the best of us.”
Pence is a strong supporter of stop-and-frisk programs, which in New York were used overwhelmingly against people of color. “It’s on a sound constitutional footing,” said Pence, who added that he wanted the practice expanded nationwide. “Stop-and-frisk literally saved lives in New York City when it was implemented, and it’s been implemented in cities around the country.”
One interesting difference between Pence and Trump centers on the First Amendment. Trump has made clear he believes in waging war against a free press and has encouraged hostility toward journalists covering his campaign. While in Congress, Pence was a major force behind trying to get a federal shield law to protect journalists’ rights to maintain confidential sources. A former radio talk show host, Pence said he was inspired to act by the case of then-New York Times reporter Judy Miller, who was imprisoned for refusing to answer questions about her sources during the scandal over the outing of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. No such law was ever passed and the bill provided wide latitude to nullify the protections of journalists in national security situations.
When he joined the ticket with Trump last summer, Pence claimed they were internally reviewing the campaign policy on the treatment of journalists covering Trump events. If anything, the situation worsened as the campaign moved forward.
On health care, Pence is now on board with repealing the Affordable Care Act, though as governor he did embrace the law in a pretty bold act of hypocrisy. He also supported denying non-emergency care for people who cannot afford a Medicare co-payment and opposed expanding the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Pence is what might be termed “climate change curious,” though earlier in his political career, he wrote an essay in which he asserted, “Global warming is a myth. The global warming treaty is a disaster. There, I said it.” More recently, Pence has kind of acknowledged the fact-based nature of human action contributing to climate change but opposes ending any of the industrial, governmental, or corporate practices responsible. He has consistently advocated withdrawing from climate change agreements and treaties. Pence has an impressively atrocious record on environmental issues and a slavish devotion to big energy and big oil companies.
He opposed government assistance to U.S. workers who lost their jobs because of free trade agreements and has supported every neoliberal trade program since his time in public office. Pence was a loud proponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership until he joined Trump on the ticket, and now he claims to be pondering the “wisdom” of the agreement.
Donald Trump and Mike Pence sit together during an event at the Pastors Leadership Conference at New Spirit Revival Center on Sept. 21, 2016, in Cleveland, Ohio.
Photo: Evan Vucci/AP
Pence opposed imposing restrictions on no-bid contracting, which may help explain his close relationship to Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater. In December 2007, three months after Blackwater operatives gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, Pence and his Republican Study Committee, which served “the purpose of advancing a conservative social and economic agenda in the House of Representatives,” organized a gathering to welcome Prince to Washington. But their relationship is not just forged in wars. Prince and his mother, Elsa, have been among the top funders of scores of anti-gay-marriage ballot initiatives across the country and have played a key role in financing efforts to criminalize abortion.
Prince has long given money to Pence’s political campaigns, and toward the end of the presidential election, he contributed $100,000 to the pro-Trump/Pence Super PAC Make America Number 1. Prince’s mother kicked in another $50,000. Ironically, Erik Prince — who portrays himself as a mix between Indiana Jones, Rambo, Captain America, and Pope Benedict — is now working with the Chinese government through his latest “private security” firm.
Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, participates in a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Oct. 2, 2007, in Washington, D.C.
Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Erik Prince’s father, Edgar, built up a very successful manufacturing business in Holland, Michigan, and became one of the premier bankrollers of what came to be known as the radical religious right. They gave Gary Bauer the seed money to start the Family Research Council and poured money into James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. “Ed Prince was not an empire builder. He was a Kingdom builder,” Bauer recalled soon after the elder Prince’s death. “For him, personal success took a back seat to spreading the Gospel and fighting for the moral restoration of our society.” Erik Prince’s sister Betsy married Dick DeVos, whose father, Richard, founded the multilevel marketing firm Amway and went on to own the Orlando Magic basketball team. The two families merged together like the monarchies of old Europe and swiftly emerged as platinum-level contributors to far-right Christian causes and political figures.
The Prince and DeVos families gave the seed money for what came to be known as the Republican Revolution when Newt Gingrich became House speaker in 1994 on a far-right platform known as the Contract with America. The Prince and DeVos clans also invested heavily in a scheme developed by Dobson to engage in back-door lobbying activities by forming “prayer warrior” networks of people who would call politicians to advocate for Dobson’s religious and political agenda. Instead of lobbying, which the organization would have been prohibited from doing because of its tax and legal status, they would claim they were “praying” for particular policies.
The Princes consistently poured money into criminalizing abortion, privatizing education, blocking gay rights, and other right-wing causes centered around their interpretation of Christianity. The family, especially Erik, was very close to Richard Nixon’s “hatchet man,” Watergate conspirator Charles “Chuck” Colson. The author of Nixon’s enemies list, Colson was the first person sentenced in the Watergate scandal, after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in the investigation of the dirty tricks campaign against Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. Colson became a born-again Christian before going to prison, and after his release, he started the Prison Fellowship, which sought to convert prisoners to Christianity to counter what Colson saw as the Islamic menace in U.S. prisons. Erik Prince funded this as well and went on prison visits with Colson.
“There’s a coalescing idea that somehow, obviously, God is doing something with Trump.”
All of these figures, bankrolled by the Prince family, are the ideological and theological ascendants of Mike Pence, who called Colson “a dear friend and mentor.” Colson and his allies viewed the administration of Bill Clinton as a secular “regime” and openly contemplated a faith-based revolution. In the early ’90s, Colson teamed up with conservative evangelical minister-turned-Catholic priest Richard Neuhaus and others to build a unified movement. That work ultimately led in 1994 to the controversial document “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.” (Note: I wrote extensively about this in my book “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” and drew heavily on that for this story.) Pence has described himself as “a born-again, evangelical Catholic.”
The ECT manifesto declared:
The century now drawing to a close has been the greatest century of missionary expansion in Christian history. We pray and we believe that this expansion has prepared the way for yet greater missionary endeavor in the first century of the Third Millennium. The two communities in world Christianity that are most evangelistically assertive and most rapidly growing are Evangelicals and Catholics.
The signatories called for a unification of these religions in a common missionary cause, that “all people will come to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.” They asserted that religion is “privileged and foundational in our legal order” and spelled out the need to defend “the moral truths of our constitutional order.” The document was most passionate in its opposition to abortion, calling abortion on demand “a massive attack on the dignity, rights, and needs of women. Abortion is the leading edge of an encroaching culture of death.” It also called for “moral education” in schools, advocating for educational institutions “that transmit to coming generations our cultural heritage, which is inseparable from the formative influence of religion, especially Judaism and Christianity.”
The ECT signers, according to author Damon Linker — who worked for Neuhaus for years — “had not only forged a historic theological and political alliance. They had also provided a vision of America’s religious and political future. It would be a religious future in which upholding theological orthodoxy and moral traditionalism overrode doctrinal disagreements. And it would be a political future in which the most orthodox and traditionalist Christians set the public tone and policy agenda for the nation.”
In November 1996 — the month Clinton crushed Bob Dole and won re-election — an organ of what Linker termed the theoconservative movement, Richard Neuhaus’s journal First Things, published a “symposium” titled “The End of Democracy?” Acknowledging that it might be viewed as “irresponsibly provocative and even alarmist,” the symposium bluntly questioned “whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.” A series of essays raised the prospect of a major confrontation between the church and the “regime,” at times seeming to predict a civil-war scenario or Christian insurrection against the government, exploring possibilities “ranging from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution.”
Chuck Colson authored one of the five major essays in the issue, as did the extremist judge Robert Bork, whom Reagan had tried unsuccessfully to appoint to the Supreme Court in 1987. Colson’s essay was titled “Kingdoms in Conflict.” “Events in America may have reached the point where the only political action believers can take is some kind of direct, extra-political confrontation of the judicially controlled regime,” Colson wrote, adding that a “showdown between church and state may be inevitable. This is not something for which Christians should hope. But it is something for which they need to prepare.”
Dobson said the essays “laid an indisputable case for the illegitimacy of the regime now passing itself off as a democracy,” adding, “I stand in a long tradition of Christians who believe that rulers may forfeit their divine mandate when they systematically contravene the divine moral law. … We may rapidly be approaching the sort of Rubicon that our spiritual forebears faced: Choose Caesar or God. I take no pleasure in this prospect; I pray against it. But it is worth noting that such times have historically been rejuvenating for the faith.”
Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump’s grasp of the bible is certainly not up to the standards of Pence and the religious zealots behind him. “Two Corinthians 3:17, that’s the whole ballgame,” Trump declared — in the same way he spits out “Make America Great Again” — in front of an audience at an evangelical college on the campaign trail. People laughed. At him. It is Second Corinthians.
Perhaps that episode is telling. The radical religious right doesn’t need to save Trump’s soul. As they saw in the campaign, Trump has staked out a hateful agenda — one that tracks quite well with the crusades of Pence and his fellow apostles. Even if elements of Trump’s vile rhetoric and his various threats were a psychotic form of performance art, or mere opportunistic political strategy, as some suggest, they have set the stage for the pursuit of a civilizational war that poses a dire threat to vulnerable populations throughout the world. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and a slew of prominent Democrats have publicly said that Americans should give Trump a chance. With Mike Pence seated at the right hand of the father, running foreign and domestic policy, they will do so at their peril.
Christian jihad? Really? It’s articles like these that make me want to cancel my twitter account.
Wondering who Jesus ever turned away?
The question seems to be rather or not the home-grown fundamentalist extremists present a greater threat to a peaceful and orderly world than those already established; a plurality of the responses to this thoughtful article…..are not.
As Usual,
EA
Awesome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiY64lco_cg
“Christian jihad”? What on earth is that supposed to be?
Jihad: a war against unbelievers.
And here you thought that was just a “them over there” kind of thing. Pence wanting to introduce discrimination, informed by his religion, into the writ of our laws? That’s religious supremacy. That’s intolerance at its worst. That’s jihad.
Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald are pro-abortion terrorists, apologists for Islam, who advocate genocide of Christians. They are enemies of democracy.
I don’t know what to say to that other than:
Oh baloney.
Hello my human brother. I don’t understand why people have so much hate in their heart’s why can’t they just try love for once in there life. There’s good, bad, ugly and pretty in all of The human race. We are all humans, we bleed red, we have feelings and emotions like anyone else. There’s a purpose and a reason we was placed on the planet we call Earth if it was meant for us to be separated on the basics of skin color we could have been placed on a planet in a galaxy far far away never to be found because there’s billions and billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone and outside of this galaxy there’s trillions of more galaxies it just comes to show how Grand the creator of this universe is and how diverse the creator of this universe is because if it was truly meant for us to be separated we could have been separated we are all human beings and we will all die if its young old or middle-aged its bound to happen but why would you want to go to your death bed with Hate in Your Heart not knowing what happens after death. I love you my human brother or sister no matter your skin color can you say the same? Remember hate comes from the Devil and Racism=Hate. “To all the racist people I urge you to try love for once in your life” ????
Hello, my human brothers and sisters. I want to make one thing clear. No human being can be a true christian and also be a racist/ supremacist. You can’t be both make your mind up. For God’s word says at 1 John If someone says, “I love God,” but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we cannot see? As another translation brings out you can’t love God and yet hate your neighbor’s God is Unseen you don’t know what God looks like but yet you hate other human beings on the basis of skin color. THE ALMIGHTY CREATOR OF THIS Universe is pure love and he accepts any person or nation that fears him. Wake up people racism is from Satan the devil. There is good, bad ugly, and pretty in all the human race. I love you all no matter your skin color can you say the same?
Christian Supremacist? What ridiculous hype. It must be the epitome of the reprobate mind when someone who has no trouble with the practice of vacuuming babies from their mothers’ wombs calls a Christian, who respects the sanctity of life, a supremacist!
Yes, we call introducing legislature, informed by religious tenets, that institutionalizes discrimination, supremacy. All men are created equal, bub, whether you like it or not. Our constitution advocates tolerance, not intolerance. If you spend a little time reading our founding fathers, many of them Deists, they spent a lot of time warning us about religious, particularly Christian, infringement on the separations of church and state. This article continues that spirit.
Interesting backstory, I’m sorry to have missed the histories behind Barry Soetoro, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and Huma Abedin. I’m sure you gave each due diligence and exposed all that needed exposing.
They have. Go read the past 12 months of Intercept reporting about all of those people. From what I’ve gathered, the Intercept is dedicated to exposing how those with disproportionate power and influence use that power and how they take our agency away in the process. They document these abuses across nations, political parties and corporations. To imply they are partisan is disingenuous or otherwise ill informed.
And yes, they have opinions too. When these powers, such as Pence’s march towards a government with theocratic values, endanger equal rights or have conflicts of interest, they’ll rightly call them out as abuses. So many comments in here about government having a moral compass… so journalism should have one too. We’re better for the Intercept.
Try learning to use Google so that you don’t embarrass yourself quite so much.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/studentid.asp
This is good journalism except for terms like “vile” and “hateful” and the endless demonizing of the Christian right. I’m familiar with the movement and that movement that is gathered around Neuhaus is not, in my view toxic. They believe, rightly, that we are in the midst of a spiritual crisis and have lost our moorings not just in our Christian origins but in Western civilization itself. My disagreement with these reactionaries is that they believe, and I do not, that we can go “back” to certainty. Their interpretation of Christianity is simplistic and primitive but also smells of a hankering after sanity.
The liberal elite culture rests on very little at this point in history. People in the liberal class Scahill included just do not understand that most humans require a philosophical/metaphysical framework for their lives you can’t say this of that is moral if you don’t have any solid basis for that set of moral assertions and the rightists know this and therefore will always have dedicated followers while the “left” never gets anywhere because they assume that good and bad is based on what exactly? On nothing. Until wek on the cultural left, can find some philosophical basis for our assertions we will drift around moving from one meme to another until we ourselves become as narrow minded as the right and we are well along that path already.
Oh you poor poor porcelain doll.
How stupid are you? You’re conflating liberalism, which is a political ideology with nihilism, a philosophical doctrine that rejects all religious and moral principles (i.e. life in meaningless).
We don’t think life is meaningless, we just have a different set of principles, and in actuality, the majority of us are religious.
You sir are obviously a bigot toward Christians. Christians follow Jesus Christ who can makes all men free. Christ removes the stains of hate and black sin that causes men to hate others. For you to label Mr. Pence as a supremacist without any facts to back up your statement makes you judgmental. There is a saying among Christians when you point the finger at someone that is different, there are three fingers pointing back at yourself, or as Jesus said judge not lest you be judged, or even better let the one without sin cast the first stone. If you are perfect, then I guess you can keep casting stones.
Christ did have one absolute law. It was “Love one another”.
He also spoke out about treating poor people with dignity, yet the brand of Christianity that Donson, Prince and Pemve are so far removed from that it’s unrecognizable.
Pence says that he doesn’t want the government to help people who have lost their jobs, so how are those people going to be able to feed themselves and their children?
Falwell said that AIDS was Gods punishment and talked Reagan into abstinence only programs in lieu of treatment while thousands of children died because HIV had gotten into the blood supply. How very Christian of him.
If you left your bubble for a moment, you’d see that this is a whole article about facts that he’s a supremacist. You might agree with Pence, and that’s fine. Many, though, would say that introducing a Christian informed intolerance of LGTB into law is supremacy.
So many people live outside your bubble, and you’re not going to force them into it.
Right on , Roger . The evangelical extremists are a problem but I doubt if the VP will make that much worse .
The irony is that THE REAL THREAT is the so-called neo-conservatives ( code name for extreme Zionist Israel Firsters ) that have already caused 15 years of brutal bloody war in the Middle East .
GOOD; about time; all the ‘diversity’ that contributed to the country; the one of the ‘founders’, Mohammed Washington; or Achmed Burr….
“Pence’s ascent to the second most powerful position in the U.S. government”?
Sorry to be blunt, but that is nonsense. The Vice President has very little real power.
Agree, and even the POTUS has little power. This is being blown completely out of proportion with reality.
You may want to start paying attention.
You may want to pay attention.
Really ? I guess you didn’t see what Dick Cheney was up to.
Folks, you’re ignoring recent history. Gore in the 90s was a strong, active, influential VP. The Cheney/Bush Administration was – at least in the first 4 years – run by Cheney. And Joe Biden’s one condition – when Obama asked him to be VP in 2008 – was that, when any major decision is made, the last person to talk to Obama, is Biden. I would maintain that that’s exactly what has happened in many cases; the Syria debacle alone has Biden’s fingerprints all over it. Now, with Trump, you not only have a bigot/racist/corrupt businessman/etc. etc.; you have someone who is 100% ignorant of all government issues at all levels. I think just from the fact Pence, who is an experienced Congressman and Governor, has replaced Christi, is clear that he is now the Administrator in Chief of the nascent Trump Administration; with Bannon being in charge of ideology, propaganda, directing attacks on the rest of America, the media, and minorities, etc.
Curious. Jeremy Scahill, you ended with: “With Mike Pence seated at the right hand of the father, running foreign and domestic policy, they will do so at their peril.” I immediately thought “Godfather” – but Trump? Yes. I agree. His rise to planetary power as a reality show star and casino owner, is just too scary to already! And you are correct, sir. O & H & Bill & the (corporate) DNC is gone. Good Riddance. But not for long.
There are moles that will stay dug in, same as with the Repubs – both duopoly parties’ oligarchs own politicians who will double down with more planet-killing horrors to come. Both corporate duopoly dynasties have ignorantly brought our Earth to its brink with half the wildlife already gone – and in just a century! We the People are experiencing 1,000-year events every other year, currently. Flood waters, droughts, rampant wars and diseases continue spreading, while the nuclear waste and reactor problems of 450+ nuclear powerplants waits like Damocles’ sword. Another 150 or so nuclear propulsion systems, worldwide – all producing the most toxic poisons ever known before, to boil water. But I digress. Thanks Jeremy for due diligence in tracking these fools.
Think you nailed this one.
I really love you Jeremy Scahill…. but a christian supremacist? Really? The quality of your journalism has decreased drastically over the past few years (since the intercept) … While you are still an amazing journalist but increasingly I feel like it would be better for the world if you started writing/talking less and perhaps taking off your clothes a little more…. Just saying
People in this country are so brainwashed that they don’t realize that Christian supremacy is already here. “In god we trust”? The word “god” inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance? Xmas a national holiday? Etc.
On the plus side, if they push it too far, this may be the very thing we in the left have needed to finally convince our more optimistic and delusional brothers that the right can’t and shouldn’t be reasoned with. Dominionists, idiots who believe in Sky Fairies, the religious right – these aren’t fellow Americans or even humans. They are human-shaped tumors who stand in the way of science, progress, and human reason. Trotsky was right: you don’t reason with fascists, you introduce their heads to the pavement.
The cancer of conservatism has festered too long because we on the left have foolishly assumed these vermin have anything worth saying. If they push it far enough my hope is the left will rise up and spill the putrid blood of these vermin. When the last of the cockroaches sputters his last, fevered, blood flecked prayers to his nonexistent God before passing into oblivion, then maybe the world can finally move forward.
>>> When the last of the cockroaches sputters his last, fevered, blood flecked prayers to his nonexistent God before passing into oblivion, then maybe the world can finally move forward. <<<
I hope so, too….
I need a daily dose of adenochrome.
Any volunteers?
Maybe you could get Mr. Pence to share his surplus of adenochrome, since he appears to be exhibiting the triggering of ” psychotic reactions such as thought disorder, derealization, and euphoria” as denoted at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenochrome
Need to ask the Podesta Brothers. They are the Dons for the Eastern USA.
Walt Disney is Don for the Western USA.
Wow Zach. Thanks for telling us what you really believe! Such love and tolerance!
One way street I guess.
You science freaks surely scare me, remind me of Hitler and the holocaust, good thing your kind are a minority and the majority of Americans don’t buy into your crap!
Zack, you are so full of vitriol, yourself and other contaminants. You are so far from reality that you couldn’t see it with a telescope. Do you actually consider yourself to be a rational person? Your level of hatred sounds like Hitler’s contempt for Jewish people – prejudice, based upon stereotypical ignorance.
Oh, look! Godwin’s law. Well, that didn’t take. Take your false equivalences and blow them out your ass.
Jeremy Scahill, read Zack’s comment, along with all the others like it, and then ask yourself again who the supremacists are.
You have serious psychological issues, Zack. That, or you’re a right-wing troll.
Thank You.
PS. Speaking of Dobson… please review this on you-tube if ya get the chance, (National Day of Prayer Unconstitutional (Part I)) They really like Ted Cruz, but as you noted… Trump was their Trojan horse. Remember what Cruz said about Trump & NY’ers morals during the debate. They tried with Sarah Palin… remember? See Sarah’s book tour at C&L’s and her visits with the Grahams in North Carolina… Her transport was compliments of Samaritans Purse jet. Thanks again (Fundies will be Fundies). :)
Sarah Palin arrived in North Carolina Sunday by way of Asheville. She was slated to have a much-touted dinner with Franklin Graham and his father Billy. While this is a video made by a fan (so pardon the drippiness) it does provide a good view of the plane she arrived on…and the call number. You may also see some “interesting” dynamics at play:
http://crooksandliars.com/scarce/sarah-palin-being-jetted-around-evangelical
Note where Jeff Sharlet reviewed all those boxes…”Billy Graham Center” (The center differs from the newly opened Billy Graham Library located in Charlotte, North Carolina) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Graham_Center
My comments were not duplicates .I didn’t say Jeremy writer of this article should keep his evil writings about Donald Trump.If You whoever made the claim “You already Said that”didn’t like what I said them deny my comment space. I am not surprised by any one of you liars who want to control a person’s free speech. So congratulation for identifying yourself for the person you are,but What you did by excluding my comments want change the truth of my comments know that.Yes?
Donald Trump Mike Pence is like a Nehemiah and an Ezra in America like these two men in Old Testament was to disobedient Israel. Jermey writer of the article would be wise to keep his mouth from speaking evil lies against men: called ,appointed , anointed by God to build a wall of safety around his people punish evil people who try to slander defeat his work through them. Yes when you don’t have all,of the facts in a divine story being told to this broken country.Jeremy best to keep quiet say nothing harmful.
Ellen is the perfect example of why we shouldn’t be trying to reason with those on the right. You cannot reason with these things because they only look human.
>>> Ellen is the perfect example of why we shouldn’t be trying to reason with those on the right. You cannot reason with these things because they only look human. <<<
Spoken like a true alien extraterrestrial .
I always get a kick out of extensive bouts of hyperventilation. This is just another in a long list of amazingly longwinded and subjectively superficial analysis leading to long repetitious hand wringing sessions.
Thanks Jeremy for providing a welcome although brief window of levity in an otherwise serious drudge through the rest of a tedious work day. I got a laugh, many actually, at the tenuousness of your interlinking of the entire array of progressive ideological monsters and mr Pence. Congrats, that’s truly hard to do. Not especially valuable, or more importantly actionable.
But thanks, anyway. It was illuminating and will be referenced endlessly in the meme manufacturing industry that is left wing echo chamber media.
I too think of this article as a long bout of hyperventilation. Unfortunately, I can’t be amused by the fact that people of good will, will be less able to think and communicate with Pence because they’ve been scared by this article.
The first problem with it is that “supremacist” is not defined. So I see one person writing that we’ve already got Christian supremacy in this country because our coins have “In God We Trust” on them!
“Christian jihad”??? Congratulations, by equating all of Christianity with bloody conquest and subjugation by radical Muslims, you are now guilty of the same atrocity that Trump is in equating all of Islam with terrorists.
With that, I’m out. This website used to be so unbiased. I appreciated that Democrats and Republicans got the same level of accountability and scrutiny, and that there were very few wild, unfounded claims. Leave the exaggerating and ridiculous hyperbole to the realm of CNN and Fox News, where those without independent thought go to be told what to believe. The Intercept’s readers are smart enough not to need to wade through the cesspool of your butt-hurt temper tantrum to try to find the actual facts about what actually makes Pence a bad guy. The Intercept is better than this… at least, it used to be.
I’m failing to see where he equates ALL of Christianity to anything at all.
This is a piece documenting the Vice President-elect’s zealotry and power brokering among other zealots to worm a Christian theocratic agenda into the laws of the land. I’m guessing you didn’t like the pairing of “Christian” and “supremacy”, as though somehow that’s a concept beyond imagination. And if it’s “jihad” you object to, defined as “a war or struggle against unbelievers,” I fail to see how Pence’s actions in government aren’t exactly that. Talk about “butt-hurt”.
For the rest of us worried about the separation of church and state, Scahill’s piece is a welcome warning. The founding fathers spoke at length about the dangers of religious, and particularly Christian, supremacy to the integrity of our government. If that wall between church and state is compromised, we have a climate where Christian tenets become our mandate, making the possibility of a modern Crusade or Inquisition entirely possible. Tell me there’s a false equivalency to “jihad” there.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
If Christians didn’t commit bloody conquest, you wouldn’t be living here. Get a clue!
Uh. Great argument.
Took me a moment to realize the facetiousness, sorry.
Hopefully a little less time, maybe, than it took those high school cheerleaders, who recently held up the sign “hey Indians, get ready for a trail of tears,” to realize why that was maybe poor taste.
You do realize you are reaching very far to satisfy your ignorance – that the progressive economy killing morons lost. – my statement is not reaching, look at the statements of the brain washed kids running these protests. Things like undocumented immigrants have a net plus – – what the hell are they being taught, that is not only false it is very very false. It is a net minus and not even close. Get over yourself.
All those kids, minorities and women brainwashed that “all men are created equal.” The nerve!
You’re all haters. People hate what they don’t understand. Try reading the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John just once.
Yeah, sure. Jebus said — believe in me and my daddy or we’ll send you to hell that we created. There’s enough hate in the gospels for everyone.
I’ll tell you what you and other Christians don’t understand: Religious texts like the Bible were meant for monks in monasteries, not for public consumption. It’s quite clear the great harm that releasing the Bible to the masses has done. In short, the vast majority of the Bible (aside from the lineage and health directions) is FIGURATIVE, not literal.
Convincing huge numbers of people to take this stuff literally and then act on it has done immense and irreparable harm to our planet and to indigenous people and their culture. I know religion gives some people comfort, but it’s not even close to being worth it considering all the harm it’s done.
And BTW, monotheism like Christianity and Islam is the worst type of religion.
>>> Religious texts like the Bible were meant for monks in monasteries, not for public consumption. It’s quite clear the great harm that releasing the Bible to the masses has done.<<<
Obviously, its even worse to allow try to teach someone like you to even read and write English.
I think I'll run for office and make the official US Language == Latin. I'll pass another law that prohibits non-government officials from learning Latin. I'll write all laws in Latin.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Cool.
You will be a happy slave. I'll tell you everything I think you need to know… like how often to stroke my EGO.
I don’t see where the U.S. Constitution empowers the vice president to do anything but break ties in the Senate unless something happens to the president. Is there even a vice presidential oath of office? I can’t recall ever having seen a vice president being sworn in. Also, the president takes an oath to “faithfully execute the office.” Can a president delegate the duties of the office to the vice president?
Wow, tell the truth about Christians and they really come out of the woodwork. The number of Christian-defending comments here is rather alarming. I mean, if this were FOX or something I’d understand, but here?
Actually, you don’t know what the truth is. And, most Christains don’t, either.
How the hell would you know what I don’t know? What an idiotic comment, you must be a Christian.
Truth Seeker Jeff D,what truth do you know? Do you know,have you spoken to most Christians?
If your answer is No and I am pretty sure it has to be .
You will have to admit you have not spoken to most Christians .Yes? So you must also admit you cannot know how much or little most Christians know. Yes No? This is the truth : John 3:16.
Roman;
Rom 3:23,
5:12-20
6:23 and
10:9,10.
1st John 1:8,9. read if when you have time .
You will find the truth you seek.
>>> You will find the truth you seek. <<
I already did. Psychopaths rule the world.
Watch the movie, "Ravenous."
That'll open your eyes as to the meaning of the Last Supper.
;)
Jeff D ,how could you possibly know how much,or how little other Christians know about truth?
If you really are a truth seeker .Read:John 3:16;Romans 3:23; 5:12-20 ;Rom 10:9,10 and 1st John 1:8,9.
If you still think you know what’s in another man’s heart, don’t bother to read learn truth.
The scripture say God ,and the man only know what is in his/her heart. Yes?So Jeff D admit the truth shame the devil.
With all due respect, brain appears nowhere in the buy-bull. Though thoughts were believed to come from the “Heart” an organ that pumps blood. On a related mater emotions were thought to be located in the kidneys. As “I was pricked in my reins” fyi
Wanna really get a pretty good understanding of reality???
If you have Netflix, watch:
Ravenous.
Black Comedy but shocking conclusion. It’s actually on the money.
What “truth about Christians” would that be???
I almost did not want to but then decided to respond to Truth Seeker’s posts of an image of the Hindu Goddess Kali which is wrongly described as depicting a human sacrifice.
The image is of the powerful Hindu Goddess Kali, worshipped as the destroyer of evil and as a personification of female power. Hindu mythology is full of allegorical myths describing Gods, Demons, Humans, animals and nature. Goddess Kali is depicted in these myths as having slain an evil demon king and the image shows her victorious. In other images, Kali is depicted as standing on top of her male consort, the powerful Hindu God Shiva.
Hindu mythology with all its paganism and gory stuff is consumed by Hindus as allegorical myths and not as conduct to be copied literally by humans. Death and time are also depicted allegorically in Hinduism. For example, there is a God of death.
There might be myths of human sacrifice in Hinduism, but these are also allegorical.
Hinduism is a complex religion with many gods, many stories and there is no central text like the Bible or the Quran that sets out God’s word.
Hindus traditionally believe that all paths to God are valid. Therefore, Hindus have no problem going to a Church or a Muslim shrine or a Sikh temple. As a commenter here stated, all religions deserve respect. Understanding a religion and a culture takes effort.
Hinduism gives one the freedom to pick and choose from its complexity and detail which orthodox Islam, Christianity and Judaism do not. I was born within Hindu culture. If I want to pray to God, then I cannot relate to Christ or Allah. But invoking a Hindu Goddess is what I am culturally engrained towards.
For those interested, look at these depictions of Kali https://www.google.co.in/search?q=goddess+kali&rlz=1C1CHZL_enIN708IN708&espv=2&biw=1093&bih=530&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwin-7Ca_a7QAhVJLI8KHSxyAxEQ_AUIBigB
Here are some extracts about Kali from Wikipedia:
K?l? (/?k??li/; Sanskrit: ????), also known as K?lik? (Sanskrit: ??????), is a Hindu goddess. Kali is one of the ten Mahavidyas, a list which combines Sakta and Buddhist goddesses.[1]
Kali’s earliest appearance is that of a destroyer principally of evil forces. She is the goddess of one of the four subcategories of the Kulam?rga, a category of tantric Saivism.[2] Over time, she has been worshipped by devotional movements and tantric sects variously as the Divine Mother, Mother of the Universe, Adi Shakti, or Adi Parashakti.[3][4][5] Shakta Hindu and Tantric sects additionally worship her as the ultimate reality or Brahman.[6] She is also seen as divine protector and the one who bestows moksha, or liberation.[3] Kali is often portrayed standing or dancing on her consort, the Hindu god Shiva, who lies calm and prostrate beneath her. Kali is worshipped by Hindus throughout India.[7]
K?l? is the feminine form of k?lam (“black, dark coloured”).[8] K?l? also shares the meaning of “time”, “one who is time” or “the fullness of time” with the masculine noun “k?la”—and by extension, time as “that which brings all things to life or an end.” Other names include K?lar?tri (“the night of death” or “the night of destruction”), and K?lik? (“the black one”).[9]
The homonymous k?la, “appointed time”, which depending on context can mean “death”, is distinct from k?la “black”, but became associated through popular etymology. The association is seen in a passage from the Mah?bh?rata, depicting a female figure who carries away the spirits of slain warriors and animals. She is called k?lar?tri (which Thomas Coburn, a historian of Sanskrit Goddess literature, translates as “night of death”) and also k?l? (which, as Coburn notes, can be read here either as a proper name or as a description “the black one”).[9] K?l? is also the feminine form of K?la, an epithet of Shiva, and thus the consort of Shiva.[10]”
“Kali is portrayed mostly in two forms: the popular four-armed form and the ten-armed Mahakali form. In both of her forms, she is described as being black in colour but is most often depicted as blue in popular Indian art. Her eyes are described as red with intoxication, and in absolute rage, her hair is shown disheveled, small fangs sometimes protrude out of her mouth, and her tongue is lolling. She is often shown naked or just wearing a skirt made of human arms and a garland of human heads. She is also accompanied by serpents and a jackal while standing on the calm and prostrate Shiva, usually right foot forward to symbolize the more popular Dakshinamarga or right-handed path, as opposed to the more infamous and transgressive Vamamarga or left-handed path.[17]
In the ten-armed form of Mahakali she is depicted as shining like a blue stone. She has ten faces, ten feet, and three eyes for each head. She has ornaments decked on all her limbs. There is no association with Shiva.[18]
The Kalika Purana describes Kali as possessing a soothing dark complexion, as perfectly beautiful, riding a lion, four-armed, holding a sword and blue lotuses, her hair unrestrained, body firm and youthful.[19]
In spite of her seemingly terrible form, Kali Ma is often considered the kindest and most loving of all the Hindu goddesses, as she is regarded by her devotees as the Mother of the whole Universe. And because of her terrible form, she is also often seen as a great protector.”
“Classic depictions of Kali share several features, as follows:
Kali’s most common four armed iconographic image shows each hand carrying variously a sword, a trishul (trident), a severed head, and a bowl or skull-cup (kapala) catching the blood of the severed head.
Two of these hands (usually the left) are holding a sword and a severed head. The sword signifies divine knowledge and the human head signifies human ego which must be slain by divine knowledge in order to attain moksha. The other two hands (usually the right) are in the abhaya (fearlessness) and varada (blessing) mudras, which means her initiated devotees (or anyone worshipping her with a true heart) will be saved as she will guide them here and in the hereafter.[22]
She has a garland consisting of human heads, variously enumerated at 108 (an auspicious number in Hinduism and the number of countable beads on a japa mala or rosary for repetition of mantras) or 51, which represents Varnamala or the Garland of letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, Devanagari. Hindus believe Sanskrit is a language of dynamism, and each of these letters represents a form of energy, or a form of Kali. Therefore, she is generally seen as the mother of language, and all mantras.[23]
She is often depicted naked which symbolizes her being beyond the covering of Maya since she is pure (nirguna) being-consciousness-bliss and far above prakriti. She is shown as very dark as she is brahman in its supreme unmanifest state. She has no permanent qualities—she will continue to exist even when the universe ends. It is therefore believed that the concepts of color, light, good, bad do not apply to her[24]”
Seema…
I didn’t build or dream or imagine that damn thing up…. Someone in your country built it. It’s a very expensive statute/diorama.
Someone in ancient India, Iran, or Pakistan did.
Cannibalism and an Abortion and child sacrifice. Right out of the Vedic Texts.
In fact, it’s a matter of global knowledge that human, including child, sacrifice is still performed in India.
Let’s not go there.
Wanna talk about the Sun and Global Warning? Obvious.
I am sure you did not dream up that image. I have no idea where it is from. All I am saying is if it is an image of the Goddess Kali, then you misunderstand it.
Kali has nothing to do with Cannibalism, abortion or child sacrifice.
Please point to a passage from a Vedic text that says so.
Human sacrifice or child sacrifice is not “practiced” in India as a Hindu religion practice. There might be individual cases of human sacrifice or cannibalism anywhere in the world by persons not in their right senses and justified for any number of weird reasons. But killing people to please some God is murder in India just as it is in the US.
To understand the allegorical symbolism of Kali depictions the following links might help.
http://www.ancient.eu/Kali/
http://www.theshivaexperience.com/goddess-kali-stand-on-lord-shiva/
http://hinduism.about.com/od/hindugoddesses/a/makali.htm
http://www.goddess.ws/kali.html
https://www.thebuddhagarden.com/kali-hindu-goddess.html
https://journeyingtothegoddess.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/goddess-kali/
I am sure you did not dream up that image. I have no idea where it is from. All I am saying is if it is an image of the Goddess Kali, then you misunderstand it.
Kali has nothing to do with Cannibalism, abortion or child sacrifice.
Please point to a passage from a Vedic text that says so.
Human sacrifice or child sacrifice is not “practiced” in India as a Hindu religion practice. There might be individual cases of human sacrifice or cannibalism anywhere in the world by persons not in their right senses and justified for any number of weird reasons. But killing people to please some God is murder in India just as it is in the US.
To understand the allegorical symbolism of Kali depictions the following links might help.
Re-posting this without the links. For the links, please google yourself, there are any number of websites explaining the symbolism of Goddess Kali.
Seema… there’s a sucker born every minute. Some fish bite the bait to be eaten by a fisherman… but, some fish eat the fisherman.
Here’s a brief article from Glenn Greenwald’s old stomping ground…
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/05/india.theobserver
Such criminally insane shit happens everywhere in stray incidents … does not mean it is mainstream or socially condoned or accepted.
See http://listverse.com/2014/03/17/10-contemporary-cases-of-human-sacrifice/
http://www.rense.com/ufo6/humsac.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse
http://time.com/3973573/satanism-american-history/
[[[ Such criminally insane shit happens everywhere in stray incidents … does not mean it is mainstream or socially condoned or accepted.]]]
That’s why the psychopathic mind(s) who start these cults create a lot of bs to confuse and/or con their victims…. until it’s too late.
The mystical allegory DISGUISES the deeds to prevent discovery by the captured/enslaved victims… and the ultimate blowback where the victims organize and wipe out the predatory top tier of the hierarchy.
The beginning of that article is so ignorant that I immediately stopped reading. There appear to be many on the left who, while rightfully disdaining religion, are also anti-spiritual or at least totally ignorant about spirituality. Glenn unfortunately seems to be one of those if this article is any indication. The “abominable goddess”? Gimme a break! How about abominable Christians marauding around the world committing genocide and destroying cultures and our planet.
Jeff … believe it or not…. I actually agree with you on that.
>>> The beginning of that article is so ignorant that I immediately stopped reading. <<<
You stopped reading because it didn't jive with your version of 'truth'. The article describes a true story of human child sacrifice in India in 2006.
Eyes Wide Shut
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/05/india.theobserver
[[[ But killing people to please some God is murder in India just as it is in the US. To understand the allegorical symbolism of Kali depictions the following links might help. ]]]
Seema…. shit like this is performed by sadistic, criminally insane psychopaths. In ancient cultures (and even today), these types individuals need a stead supply of willing victims (and they know these acts are taboo). So, over the centuries, these psychos would literally invent mystical stories to con their victims into believing it was thier duty to become a meal for the high priest.
They take advantage of weak minds and desperate people… especially illiterates and superstitious.
“these psychos would literally invent mystical stories to con their victims into believing it was thier duty to become a meal for the high priest.”
I think you need a crash course immersion in Hindu culture and religion. Hindu religious myths are not what you are describing them as.
[[[ I think you need a crash course immersion in Hindu culture and religion. Hindu religious myths are not what you are describing them as.]]]
From the Christian religion…. we all know about the story about the Crucifixion of Jesus. “This is my body… this is my blood… eat!”….
However, Jesus’ example actually meant… Eat yourself. Long story so I wont digress.
HINDU IMMERSION: The Disciple Thomas was the first disciple to be killed/sacrificed after Jesus. Did you know that? His “mission” as a “missionary/apostle” was to Hindu/India. Thomas was “sacrificed” by a Brahman of the Hindu.
>>> Thomas was “sacrificed” by a Brahman of the Hindu. <<<
ps… Why was he "sacrificed"??? Cuz he pissed off the Brahman. How? He basically told the Brahman (and the Brahman's wife) to stop eating people.
Paraphrased… but, I get to the heart of the matter rather bluntly.
ps… the Brahma are the “eaters”…. and the devadasi and/or adasi castes are the ‘willing victims’ who are sold on the ‘willingness to be a victim.
The Brahma who perform these feasts, such as the Horse Sacrifice (which lasts for months), are ancient and brutal psychopaths.
Like John Podesta said, “It’s better to be on this end of the fork.”
pss…
Where did they get the idea to write/create the movie Indiana Jones … Temple of Doom??
I don’t think I’m the only one who knows the answer to that one.
ppss….
Aztecs in North America did it, too. I’m not sure about the Central/South American Maya.
pss…
Please please don’t ontain your knowledge of Hindu religion and culture from the Indiana Jones movie.
I would recommend a year long sojourn in India or start going to some Hindu temples in the US just for fun and talk to some Hindu people.
This is wikipedia on the Indiana Jones misrepresentation of Hinduism:
“The film’s depiction of Hindus caused controversy in India, and brought it to the attention of the country’s censors, who placed a temporary ban on it.[5] The depiction of the goddess Kali as a representative of the underworld and evil was met with much criticism, as she is almost exclusively depicted as a goddess of change and empowerment (Shakti), meaning that while she does destroy, she almost always does so in order to effect positive change. The depiction of Indian cuisine was also criticized, as dishes such as baby snakes, eyeball soup, beetles and chilled monkey brains are not actual Indian foods. Shashi Tharoor has condemned the film and has criticised numerous parts of the film as offensive and factually inaccurate.[6] Yvette Rosser has criticized the film for contributing to negative stereotypes of Indians in Western society, writing “[it] seems to have been taken as a valid portrayal of India by many teachers, since a large number of students surveyed complained that teachers referred to the eating of monkey brains.”[7]”
>>> Please please don’t ontain your knowledge of Hindu religion and culture from the Indiana Jones movie. <<<
I don't. I used it as a simple, common, 'popular' example. Don't forget that British Officers also ate at the dinner table, too.
And, i don't know if you know it or not… but in synopsis…
Several thousands of years ago… it was "Vedic"
A few thousand years ago,… BECAUSE of the hedonistic brutality, the Hindu sect was formed in retaliation to the brutality of the Vedic Brahma… (in essence, they created a new power structure to eat instead of be eaten)
And then, after several hundred years… the Hindu brutality forced the creation of Buddhism.
In each case of the new order, I equate to the Reformation of the Catholic Church that occurred in about 1500AD.
Being a very old religion, Hinduism has had its fair share of horrific social practices, most of which are outlawed and no longer socially accepted. The reform of Hinduism continues even today.
Hinduism has had many reformers, and three religions have resulted from reform movements within Hinduism – Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism.
On the rest of your comment, I laughed.
But that said, much as I would like to, I don’t really have the time or bandwidth to disabuse you of your mistaken opinions about Hinduism and especially long-distance over the Intercept Comments section. I only hope you make some nice Hindu friends, visit India, or Hindu temples etc and learn more about a lot of very positive things and ideas within Hinduism.
I am far far from being a Hindu chauvinist. In fact I am constructed as a person who automatically rejects ritualism of any kind. But I am quite happy at being born within a Hindu family and Hindu culture as I find that it emancipates me. I am free to choose my religious beliefs in a way that Christians and Muslims are not. Hinduism allows you to believe whatever you want.
I’m ending this conversation here and good luck on learning more about Hindu and Indian culture.
>>> I’m ending this conversation here and good luck on learning more about Hindu and Indian culture. <<<
OK… Covering thousands of years across hundreds of thousands of square miles is a nightmare waiting to happen.
HOWEVER: I'll say this: The WORLD is ruled by Psychopaths… and they have many tools of the trade … and religion (under any label) is one of those tools.
Want heaven on earth? Kill all the psychopaths. Intra-species predators.
They are all the same.
In my study of religion and very partial reading of the Bhagavad Gita decades ago I concluded that the main message of Hinduism is that life is a game and we should enjoy it. Krisna always seemed to be partying after all.
Modern Hindus, on the other hand, have become like Christians in that they’ve totally lost their way regarding the true meaning of the Hindu teachings. Instead what we now get is totally intolerant assholes who are overly serious, the exact opposite of what the Bhagavad Gita teaches. (Not that I would blame anyone for resisting invading Muslims or Christians, but again, Hinduism teaches not to take life so seriously.)
>>> Instead what we now get is totally intolerant assholes who are overly serious, the exact opposite of what the Bhagavad Gita teaches.<<<
We could argue semantics… but I wont….
Bottom line: IT **** IS **** a serious game to the psychopathic cannibal. His goal is to make his victim not care if he/she is eaten.
Hence, your version of the scenario describes the psyche of the brainwashed victim.
The cannibal says, "LUNCHTIME!"
>>> main message of Hinduism is that life is a game <<<
Life is a GAME OF CHESS to the KING sitting behind a chessboard moving the pieces around the board.
Life is NOT a game to the pieces on the board — it's life and death… and you are either a pawn or an officer.
CHESS is from India. And the Queen is a whore …. she runs all over the board to get her way. I call it a Jezebelian Game. The King has virtually NO POWER… but, he sure can kill a lot of pawns.
I’m not trying to be insulting, but I don’t know any other way to say this: you are clearly incapable of understanding this stuff.
Wanna play a game of chess in real life?
“Geeta Saar (Essence of the Geeta)
(English)
WHATEVER HAPPENED WAS GOOD
WHATEVER IS HAPPENING IS GOOD
WHATEVER WILL HAPPEN WILL ALSO BE GOOD
WHAT HAVE YOU PARTED WITH THAT MAKES YOU CRY ?
WHAT DID YOU BRING WITH YOU THAT YOU HAVE LOST ?
WHAT DID YOU CREATE WHICH IS NOW DESTROYED ?
WHAT YOU HAVE TAKEN, YOU HAVE TAKEN ONLY FROM HERE.
WHAT WAS GIVEN WAS GIVEN ONLY FROM HERE.
WHAT IS YOURS TODAY, WAS SOMEONE ELSE’S YESTERDAY, WILL BE SOMEONE ELSE’S TOMORROW.
CHANGE IS THE LAW OF THE UNIVERSE”
For me the above is the essence of the Gita. It sounds much better in Hindi than in the literal translation above.
It is a message of detachment. But life is not seen as a meaningless game. One must do what one has to without fear or attachment. And doing good and what is right is what one must try to do.
Don’t take yourself too seriously. Your ego, your possessions, your achievements, your attachments etc., are all transient. But do what is right and good.
I didn’t say it was meaningless or that the Bhagavad Gita says so. I agree with the rest of what you said in your response.
EVERYTHING IS GOOD.
I call it, “Blowing Sunshine up someones ass.”
Translating this message into Christian concepts – It is God’s will. The teachings in the Book of Job. etc.
Book of Job is one of my favorites….
In fact, his Hillary-Clinton type wife started it all
LOL.
The Hindu Gita Saar message on everything is good, and on acceptance and detachment is similar to the Book of Job message, when Job refuses to curse God and accepts God’s plan for his life.
“Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return: the Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” “Shall we receive good from God and shall we not receive evil?”
… repeat …
Book of Job is one of my favorites….
In fact, his Hillary-Clinton type wife started it all for Job
2:7 So went Satan forth from the presence of the LORD, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown. 2:8 And he took him a potsherd to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the ashes.
2:9 Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die. 2:10 But he said unto her, Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips
Job’s whore wife cursed him. AND, in fact, she may have given him an STD.
LOL.
The image that Truth Seeker posted is not of Goddess Kali. It is of a fringe deity Periyachi worshiped by a small minority in India. And according to the articles below, she is no longer popular in India.
In any case, her myth seems to be about saving children and not child sacrifice. She is worshiped by pregnant women and new mothers who seek her protective blessings for their new-born.
see http://www.phenomenalplace.com/2014/01/periyachi-amman-worlds-most-fearsome.html
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periyachi
As I’ve been saying all along, all these other Republicans are worse than Trump. Pence is an absolute nightmare, basically the worst type of human there is. But not far behind him are Rubio and Cruz.
Meanwhile, many leftists have been and still are freaking out about Trump because of the mean-spirited crap that comes out of his unfiltered mouth, even though his policies — or what we can deduce would be his policies — are not as bad as these other guys’. One thing that a lot of people on the left don’t seem to get is that all of these assholes are racist, misogynist, etc., they just have the sense, self-control, and training not to say it in public.
I realize that someone in Trump’s position making hateful comments will actually cause real harm just by empowering and/or encouraging attacks on people. But to ignore all the other evils including those of Clinton — who’s responsible for how many thousands of deaths and the destruction of an entire society in Libya alone — is thoroughly disgusting.
Fundamental Christainity is a well established terrorist organization with centuries of practice of oppressing non-believers evidenced by the genocide brought by the christain missionaries with their God ordained right to steal the land of native inhabitants of the Americas and kill them under their divine christain supremacist ideology and thus God given right to plunder and murder and exploit. And even further evidenced of Christain terrorism in non other then their justification for the Alantic slave trade; the ensalvement of the native inhabitants of the African continent then creating the chattel slavery business treating African natives as subhuman livestock using the bible for justifying centuries of brutal inhumane oppression against a whole race of people to profit wholly and deny any human and civil rights for centuries. Christain fundamentals are the biggest hypocrites saying abortion is the culture of death when Christianity’s brutal history and present glorification of war and war mongering and predatory capitalism killing and displacing people worldwide in endless war for profit.
There is no caring empathetic christain wanting to protect the planet for future generations because they blindly believe apocalyptic bullshit from their psycho pastors of death!
It is mass psychosis of biblical proportions in the fundamental christain movement. THIS is what the founding fathers feared so much they wrote separation of church and state in our country’s founding document. They knew how fucked up the christain zealots got in Europe. It’s history repeating itself . Watch out for the new Inquisition coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Time to fight for Truth, not christain lies!
The funny part is is that so many religious folks are anti-science. This is hilarious because Jesus said we’d need to build the afterlife ourselves, so with the religious folks in no position to complete the task, it was left up to those of us with a desire to learn more than talking snakes from a con man.
Whats next for these people a return of public crucifixions? I got an idea how about Pence goes first!
I think the Podesta Brothers should go first…
With Hillary mounted on the cross in the middle,…
And one Podesta on each side.
What a garbage article full of hatred and fear mongering. NOTHING’S going to change. Grow up.
I am by no means a political scientist. I consistently said during the republican primaries, that of the 17 initial candidates for the republican nomination,that although I would not trust Donald Trump to run my country, he was the republican candidate whom I could listen too with out getting sick to my stomach. At the top of my list of most deplorable republican candidtes was Ted ( make America Cuban Cruze). Although Ted Mike Pence didn’t not run during the republican primaries I put at the top of my deplorable list with Ted Cruze. The only other Republican prinary candidates that I did not particularly find deplorable were Chris Christi and Joh Kasick. The only solace that I can cling too at this time is that Donald Trump doesn’t appear to be particularly ideological, which is something that President Obama seems to concur with. But when ever I think of Mike Pence I can’t help but think of a remark that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez said in 2006when addressing the United Nations in NEWYORK CITY a day after president George W Bush addressed the same assembly. He said ” Yesterday the devil was here on this podium addressing you all and I can still smell his sulfur”
In Jesus’ name, we prey
Quite possibly the best and most painfully truthful homonym ever.
Quite possibly the best and most painfully true homonym ever.
In either version, quite so.
Pence’s moral jibber-jabber is immoral. Those who pursue power to punish their scriptural opponents — even if just as a campaign tactic — deserve contempt.
Might be better to see how the incoming administration, who won the election, performs rather that to spew out yiur negativity and prejudicing your readers to prejudge themselves. We are all Americans so let’s hold the negative comments till there is concrete issues to discuss – oh let’s ignore the Clinton’s litany of crimes etc!!!
I think all religions are vain and sad psychological crutches, but the use of the word “jihad” to connote war against other religions is actually inaccurate, and you could be offending many Muslims by using it in this context.
Jihad: A Misunderstood Concept from Islam – What Jihad is, and is not
What a total moronic story. Omg watch out for the big bad Christian.
“What a total moronic story. Omg watch out for the big bad Christian.”
That the Founding Fathers came up with the Separation of Church and State should tell you what they thought of organized religion.
The fact that you invoke the founding fathers in your lie about the separation of church and state shows your abject ignorance of the founding fathers. There is no such thing as the separation of church and state, according to the writings of the founding fathers. Their writings clearly state they intended it as a separation of church FROM the state. Read what they meant by that was they didn’t want an official state religion, such as The Church of England was at that time where taxes paid minister’s salaries. They were devout Christians and prayed at every meeting and wrote that God in heaven was moving His hand upon this fledgling land.
If you want separation of God from the state, rewrite the Constitution and then strike the words of the founding fathers on the subject from their own writings. The public schools are doing it already. This author is doing his best by lying through his pen about everything he can. His hatred of God and everyone who believes in God is very apparent.
Perhaps yours is too? Don’t be ashamed in your beliefs, but misconstruing the intent of the founding fathers only destroys your credibility.
Indeed: ““The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” (John Adams)
Founding Fathers: We Are Not a Christian Nation
You say, “The founding fathers could not be clearer on this point: God has no role in Government”
George Washington (founding father) declares to a joint session of Congress that God, “presides in the councils of nations” that means He holds the position of authority in the leadership of a nation! See below for the broader context.
After being sworn-in, George Washington delivered this nation’s first “Inaugural Address” to a joint session of Congress.
In it, Washington declared:
“It would be peculiarly improper to omit, in this first official act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect. No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States.”
“We are not a Christian nation.” Wow, right out of the Obama playbook. We aren’t a Christian nation now but we were at its founding.
Similar to Martin Luther? That religion is great but keeping the government and church as separate institutions is a good idea? Like Madison said?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the separation to protect church from state?
All should know that the Democrats are on the same corrupt side as the GOP, really:
After Pence Meeting, Biden Says He’s Not Worried About Policies Being Dismantled
Mike Pence is the vanguard of American Fascism that Chris Hedges has been warning us about. Discount him at your peril.
“…….Discount him at your peril……..”
Thanks Barbara. I’m discounting him.
You can discount him at 10 cents on the dollar unless Trump dies. If Trump were shrewd, he’d already be grooming a much younger successor, but Trump seems to live in the moment.
I once knew a stunner named Barbara Smith.
Exactly how many pence is Pence worth?
Seeing how this is a thread whose main topic is Mike Pence, I thought I would break from the majority of commentary and share a rather insightful, fact laden blog article about Pence:
On The Fence with Pence
By George W. Hoeltje
Excerpt:
http://www.lakenewsonline.com/blogs/20160720/on-fence-with-pence
You didn’t think the Republican Ticket was going to let Trump occupy the Oval Office without some form of influence, right?
IMHO, draining the swamp of corruption would be my top priority. Once the corruption is significantly reduced, a significantly different outcome will result.
In the end, a very net-positive outcome. We were doomed for sure if the Criminals remained at the helm.
Why drain the swamp when you are at the top of the food chain?
I would never expect an alligator or crocodile to want to drain the swamp it depends upon, fer sher! Pence depends on the swamp.
Your a wise man Larry
>>> Pence depends on the swamp <<<
So does Hillary/Bill/DNC/Johnson/Obama….
That's why the swamp is getting bigger. From the Florida Everglades… to the bayou in Louisiana… to the ghettos of Chicago, Harlem, LA, Oakland, etc… to the dredges of Africa and the Middle East and Central Asia… to the slaves in India, China, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam… etc.
Cuz his real estate isn’t worth shit unless the bottom of the food chain is happy.
These are the men that wear uniforms and carry guns while wearing a Trump Flag.
Do you really believe that Trump caters to those on the bottom of the food chain?
http://streeteasy.com/building/trump-tower
>>> Do you really believe that Trump caters to those on the bottom of the food chain? <<<
Nope. But they do burn from the ground up….
LOL
I keep checking my email.
I wonder if I made the cut?
Is there a class I can take, or something.
Does anybody know how many pence Pence is worth?
He’s not worth a farthing.
Isn’t this the same author, Jeremy Scahill, that wrote all that nonsense about Blackwater that ended up being patently untrue. Right back on Princes nuts again huh? I guess anything to sell an article, though?
Same Guy. All true though, maybe you should read it. Everything is noted. You can research it all.
The only thing certain about Prince is that he’s a mercenary.
He’s a whore.
He’ll always go to the highest bidder. To make sure of it, Delta Force would eliminate him and his crew in 24 hours.
Prince knows that his survival means he has to kiss whatever ass is in the Oval Office.
Oh, you’ve met him? I mean, I have but I suppose it’s just easier to read Salon, Intercept and the Huffington Post.
I didn’t see any of them in New Orleans when people were dying after Katrina. Blackwater and Prince were (for free I might add).
How exactly is he a whore? You realize he hasn’t worked in or on behalf of the US government since 2010. He sold all shares of Blackwater (XE). It’s PUBLIC information.
BTW, those same Delta Force guys you talk about, they’re were the EXACT same guys that Prince employed. They actually didn’t have much of a choice because liberal agendas that have run the VA into the ground and minimized the military.
Look, just grab your crayons and cardboard papers and run out into the streets. Maybe protest your free college, free birth control, free medical benefits, free social services and $15 minimum wage and let the grownups do the big boy work of figuring a way of paying for it.
https://www.publicintegrity.org/2010/07/17/2609/despite-allegations-no-prosecutions-war-zone-sex-trafficking
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-isenberg/blackwater-uses-the-fraud_b_461639.html
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/03/24/prince-of-blackwater-gop-private-mercs-under-investigation-by-doh/
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-blackwater-world-order/
>>> How exactly is he a whore? <<<
GD you're dumb.
All mercenaries are whores. Mercenaries are hired killers just like a Mafioso hit man.
Mercenaries will work for anyone for the right price.
Killing and Chaos as a business model.
Only a dumbass would trust a mercenary beyond a simple paycheck.
Well, actually, a mercenary is a professional soldier hired to serve in a foreign army and since all of BW’s contracts were either US State Department, CIA, or DoD, he and his people aren’t mercenaries. This is basic stuff.
Now, on the flip side, Hillary could be seen as a mercenary as she took ACTUAL money from foreign governments and the expense of US interests.
I’ve left a link since research doesn’t seem to be your strong suit…
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/mercenary
>>> Well, actually, a mercenary is a professional soldier hired to serve in a foreign army and since all of BW’s contracts were either US State Department, CIA, or DoD, he and his people aren’t mercenaries. <<<
US State Dept, CIA, and DoD do not need mercs. They can conscript.
ILLEGAL ops DO need mercs.
So… if you really think the USG is the only customer, … you are naive.
In the old days, they were called "privateers"… aka Pirates.
KingDavid was not the nicest guy, true but you donot have 13 or more children to raise, your wifes do not wear long dresses and cover their hair– that would sorta cramp the lifestyle you are NOT WILLING TO GIVE UP,
GET THE FREAL HERE,
Nothing illegitimate about Russia’s annexation of Crimea – according to Putin:
“…….Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree to withdraw Russia from the International Criminal Court (ICC), which prosecutes war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity…….Russia in 2000 signed the Rome treaty which established the Hague-based court, but never ratified it…….Putin’s decree, published on the Kremlin’s website on Wednesday, comes a day after the UN General Assembly’s human rights committee approved a resolution condemning Russia’s “temporary occupation of Crimea”, and blamed Moscow for rights abuses and discrimination against some Crimean residents, such as Tatars………Peskov also dismissed the ICC’s accusations of an “armed conflict” in Crimea, arguing that Crimea joined Russia after a legitimate popular vote…….”
The vote by the people of Crimea was at least as legitimate as the vote in 2014 re-electing Assad to another term…….
Well, let’s note that the U.S. never ratified that Treaty and that ‘w’ refused to support the ICC. Naturally, ‘w’ did not deem it worthwhile to agree to bring to justice the perpetrators of the worst crimes known to humankind – war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
The response to the Trump-Pence team must be really aggressive. That means actually a socialist, not a liberal response. Only a class-based, anti-capitalist, anti-religious mass movement will be strong enough to smash these people. To oppose ‘ideology’ you actually need an ‘ideology’ – not some mishmash of feelings and political positions as most of the liberal/left has. Time to get tough and get even.
>> To oppose ‘ideology’ you actually need an ‘ideology’ – not some mishmash of feelings and political positions as most of the liberal/left has. Time to get tough and get even. <<
I hope you're prepared to take a round in the chest.
Yeah. good luck. Those “capitalist” and “religious” people voted him in. What do you think were willing to do to make sure our vote counts? for an example, see Truth seeker comment below.
And, if that doesn’t work….
I’ll break out my fork and steak knife and eat them like Podesta’s.
All threads here are rather stale, but since this is at the top of the pages at the moment:
Chuck Schumer was unanimously elected Senate minority leader, this morning.
Great. This “hope and change” thing is hard to break.
It seems hard to believe that the Senate still voted Schumer Senate minority leader after the article in the (influential) Intercept:
“…….Schumer voted for the Patriot Act in 2001, and sponsored its predecessor, the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. During a Senate hearing, Schumer explained that “it’s easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used. But when you’re in the foxhole, it’s a very different deal.” In certain cases, he said, “most senators” would say “do what you have to do……”
Immoral.
Looks like America has found its answer to ISIS – Mike Pence, who wants to bring Sharia Law to the “Land of the Free”. He and “radical Islam” both worship the angry, vengeful demon god of the ancient Hebrews, who could only be appeased by the spilling of blood.
Incidentally, II Corinthians 3:17, attributed to the apostle Paul, in the New Testament, reads as follows:
“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” (New International Version, 1973)
Now, what was Paul’s definition of “Spirit”?
Hint: You won’t find the answer in Mike Pence’s Bible!
Hahah…yeah and Obama’s a raging muslim, too….and the Moon is made of cheese.
This article is on par with the garbage spewed out before the election. All the hate speech and rioting and bad behavior has been from the “good and kind” left. All the bad people have risen from labor parties, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin all rose from leftest labor parties. The only right leaning dictatorships have come from the middle east Arab countries. All us bad people peaceably assembled, did not riot, did not write hate articles like this and have welcomed everyone who came, even those who hired by the left to cause problems. Yet you continue to attack and call us hateful, bigots and racists because we don’t agree with you. Perhaps a longer look at yourself is in order…..unless you want to blame your hate speech on us too.
Scahill documenting the details of Pence’s obvious march towards a Christian theocratic agenda is hardly hate speech and certainly not garbage. You might agree with Pence’s point of view, and that’s fine. For the rest of us, all us folks who thought we were included in the “all” from “all men are created equal”, it’s a very welcome heads up that the Vice President-elect might not have everyone’s best interests and well being in mind.
It may well be that you’re offended by the use of the word “supremacy” to describe the insensitive, divisive, righteous and exclusive policies of the Christian right, but that’s what it is. Pointing that out doesn’t make Scahill’s piece “hate speech”. Shame on the left for advocating inclusive policies!
This was written to be inclusive? I am Libertarian, and there is nothing here inclusive except for hate spewing out to anybody who would believe this garbage on the left. I DO NOT LIKE PENCE, I HAVE LIVED UNDER HIM IN INDIANA, but this article is garbage, rubbish and hate speech.
No, Bob. The reference to inclusive is regarding left-leaning policy. Big difference between left leaning vs. right leaning policy is:
– the left generally advocates policies that observe the spirit of “all men are created equal” and seek to be inclusive of cultural differences by making sure the playing field is level.
– the right generally seeks to govern through paternalistic prohibition, exclusion and exploiting cultural differences. You people can’t marry. You people can’t use this bathroom. You women should do this or that with your bodies. You people don’t look like me so we have the right to invade your privacy via stop and frisk or eavesdropping on your digital life.
Regarding the article being hate speech? How is a warning about Pence’s theocratic agenda hate speech? Please, really, I’d like to know what exactly about the article you find so offensive. My guess is that you’re Christian and, being so, might be in a bubble that doesn’t allow you to see how terrifying a warning is about Christian influence on the separation of church and state. The founding fathers warned us about it extensively. If Scahill pointing out Pence’s power brokering to write Christian preference and tenets into law is hate… well, I’m going to warn you:
Don’t read any viewpoints on the subject of church and state authored by John Adams. Or George Washington. Or Thomas Jefferson. Or Thomas Paine (definitely don’t read Paine). Or James Madison.
“Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” – James Madison
“There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.” – Thomas Jefferson
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half of the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.” – Thomas Paine
So you whole article is preaching tolerance and based on not tolerating his supposed intolerance. But for someone who has not even been in the office of Vice President you have judged him intolerant and are not tolerating his point of view or that of a great many Americans that put him there on the sole fact that they do not agree with you? And because of that you are not tolerant them or him? Am I getting this right? Were not GREAT many of founding fathers Christians? Did they not rise to occasion and see past their mortality for the better of the fledgling nation. Perhaps Pense could do the same. I don’t know, but with a little tolerance, who knows?
To a degree, I can most definitely agree with you. I have most certainly judged Mike Pence for pushing his homophobic views into policy, effectively spitting in the face of “all men are created equal.” His homophobic stance is informed by his religion, and that’s fine for him and the choices he makes in his own life, but that has no business in legislation that affects the lives of others. That’s institutionalizing bias against groups of people he knows nothing about. So you’re right, I absolutely don’t tolerate making intolerance law. I tolerate Mike Pence because he’s a human being with certain inalienable rights. That’s the law of our land.
Many founding fathers were Deists, actually, not subscribing to the dogma attached to organized religion. Yes, there were a few Christians, and yes, the few that were there found it in themselves to understand that coexistence requires that we can agree to disagree, and that our laws should reflect that without penalizing one group for another’s discriminatory beliefs.
Why talk about Pence’s “Christian jihad?” Jihad is a form of striving within Islam, usually against one’s own lower self. A secondary meaning is the one applied by some Middle Eastern groups. Christians don’t and can’t make jihad. They make crusades. Were you trying to say Pence is a crusader for what he believes?
The article Pedinska has quoted below speaks to the reality that many Americans face. We have these intellectually held beliefs but when the rubber hits the road we have to make real life decisions that are a complicated mess of value ranking systems.
Humans guide their decisions based on core desires that are filtered through their perspectives and values.
Perspectives are intellectually held beliefs (Abortion is good/bad, Immigration is good/bad, Gays are good/bad, Freedom is good/bad)
Values are how we rank those things in order of importance. Someone might feel that freedom is the highest virtue, therefore anything that challenges freedom is bad regardless of our previously help perspectives.
For Example: A person might feel that Freedom (Capital “F”) is the highest value and also that immigration is good. But they also believe that immigrants take jobs from hard working Americans. If they conclude that this limits the income potential and thereby the Freedom of Americans, then immigration is “actually bad” but the person will still say that they believe immigration is good.
Cognitive Dissonance tells us that eventually this person will either lower Freedom off of its highest value place, or that they will begin to believe that immigration is bad.
Trump and Pence are products of this same way of thinking.
Trump’s highest value is “Trump Winning” whereas Pence’s is “Christian Nationalism”
Anything that conflicts with these values MUST be labeled as “bad” for them to maintain these perspectives. Once you understand someones’ top values you can predict with remarkable prescience their decision making structure.
I have to admit I stopped reading when this article called our new VP part of the “radical religious right”. Does he suggest we will see some suicide bombers after Sunday school?
Couldn’t agree more. But never underestimate the hard lefts nasty tactics to deminize anyone that doesn’t fit into their “tolerant bucket.”
Never underestimate the righties nasty tactics to demonize anyone who doesn’t obey their commands. righties lie when they say they are in favor of freedom and liberty.
You don’t think seeking to impose an agenda where church and state are basically synonymous isn’t radical?
You may very well agree with Pence’s views. To you they’re not radical. Great. Fine.
Christian theocracy? Not in my country. The nauseating righteousness that these policies reflect, discriminating and disenfranchising anyone not in step with the Christian world view, IS radical and DOES need to be checked. All us “others” aren’t going anywhere, as much as some Christians would like to believe they can be “wished away”.
Thank you for reassuring me that the country will return to the Constitution.
Hey dumbass, our country was founded as a “GOD lead country”. Why do you think we’ve been the most successful democracy ever? It’s because we have a moral foundation. Only recently are we beginning to fail. That’s because people like you want to remove that foundation and belief.
If ever “supremacy” needed a definition, you’re comment is basically it.
And your fantasy that it’s a “GOD lead country?” I guess folks that read and interpret the bible, of which there are countless interpretations, just can’t help themselves from “interpreting” historical account and national documents. The phrase “under God” wasn’t added to the pledge until 1954. “The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” – John Adams. You go ahead and read your Christian websites that say otherwise.
And if a GOD lead country means enforcing the Christian world view by force, well, isn’t that counter to Jesus’ mandate that love of Christ should be given willingly?
I’d suppose in your view a moral foundation is the eradication of any other or opposing world view? Or is that called Crusade? Oh, wait, Inquisition? May as well be Jihad.
au contraire … founding fathers were agnostic if not all together atheist… for the love of “christ”, do a bit of research Ken!
Trump sucks. Never should’ve been elected. That said, so does categorically associating groups that don’t belong together. Remember “Radical Islamic Terrorist” and how Obama and Clinton refused to say it? That is no different than throwing a phrase like Christian Supremacist around. There is a large percentage of Christians who are just as frustrated by this outcome and who are fighting for human rights that you are now dismissing and discrediting. Your labeling is no different than the right’s mischaracterization of the Muslim community.
He’s not categorically associating groups that don’t belong together. He’s saying that Mike Pence is a Christian Supremacist and has all the earmarks of marching towards a Christian theocratic agenda.
It may well be that you’re offended by the use of the word “supremacy.” No, not all Christians are inherent supremacists (although some might argue with me there), but the righteous imposition of a Christian world view in government policy whether people like it or not? What do you call it?
And not all leftists are inherent ideological supremacists (although most would argue with me there). Lighten up Francis. Using a belief system to guide decision making is perfectly valid. EVERYONE does it. Nobody is trying to turn the US government into a theocracy, other than the fanatical church of liberalism. That Obama/Pelois/Reid attempted for the last 8 years. Which failed spectacularly and has wrought Trump upon us. Blame yourselves.
Actually, I very much do blame HRC and the DNC for blatant hijacking of the electorate, and dismissal of the success of populist candidates, including Trump, as referendum on the establishment. No, I don’t agree with a lot of what Obama has done during his tenure, but at least the guy is a true diplomat and has respect for the office and his peers.
If you don’t think anyone is trying to push a theocratic agenda, you’ve got to be joking. If you can’t see that you must sitting in the bubble. Explain to me how the LGTB community doesn’t figure into the “all men are created equal” part of the Declaration of Independence? I don’t really see any reason at all to “lighten up” with regard to threats on equal rights.
And generalizing “leftists” and “liberalism” as boogeyman terms that pretty just mean “the enemy”? Please. Yes, it’s true, nearly any group can be ideological supremacists. That said, using a belief system to guide decision making is one thing. Using it to force the rest of us into submission to religious tenets? Our founding fathers wrote and warned extensively on the issue of separations between church and state, with particular attention on Christianity.
It seems Obama is finally delivering on his promise to bring about Change. Get into office, fail to deliver any promises, get ousted by the KKK, who also used to be Democrats by the way… Civil war could be in the offing.
What person in Washington is likely to want to work for Trump since he’s so toxic?
Normally, you try to lure one or two persons from across the aisle as an olive branch to make good with the other side. However, Trump blasted BOTH sides in this election.
This transition process of how many persons turn him down should be interesting to watch. — Galactus-36215
I agree it will be interesting…and informative. I came across another article addressing this yesterday that you, and others, might find interesting.
The Case Against Serving
https://www.justsecurity.org/34404/case-serving-trump/
Not sure why the italics failed for the second paragraph at the top. It should all have been emphasized as a quotation of Galactus’ comment from further down the thread. :-s
Pedinska, please check your email.
Is the echo chamber finished and ready for the grand opening?
Thanks Pedinska. I enjoyed reading it. It draws some of the same thought processes I go through when deciding which companies to work for.
ie….work = support. As such, there are some companies I will absolutely not work for such as a tobacco companies or other undesirable companies I don’t care for; especially ones doing business with In-Q-Tel for example.
Thanks again for posting it.
“Trump has staked out a hateful agenda . . . .”
No. I disagree. He has set a Nationalist agenda which is in opposition to the Globalist agenda. Take another look at that election map, blue on the edges and solid red right across the heartland of the country (whence comes Pence).
Trump: “Americanism not Globalism will be our credo.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nge0NnTEnCI
“…in the cause of Christian jihad.”
Nope, Christians are not committing jihad. They aren’t running over hundreds of people with huge trucks or shooting up hundreds more in a concert. The fact that this author would liken people such as Mike Pence to that is disgusting.
While legislation seeking to eradicate the separation of church and state is a lot cleaner, ultimately it has the same effect. A Christian theocracy? Once it becomes law, it becomes a mandate, which then authorizes and legitimizes crap like the Crusades and Inquisition.
And that’s disgusting.
The plot thickens. *That’s quite a list of strange anomalies, Scahill. The political marriage of a hardcore Christian Jihadi and a born again Club 51 ‘pussy grabber’. .. does make for strange bedfellows!
Still, I think it will take a real miracle for the rubber to meet the road. I give this marriage about 6 months before the Pope has to issue an annulment. *assuming Trump & Pence can make it to the inauguration and say their vows.
This is the kind of nonsense that got Trump elected. Funny how you liberals cry and throw a tantrum if someone says something about a Muslim or a group of Muslims. If someone were to call a woman a foul word or phrase, they are labeled as racist, sexist, all the ist’s they can think of. Yet the author, can cast blata
We are so glad you moved too, now shut the hell up.
I just want to say to any Americans who deny climate change, love their guns, believe in creationism or usually votes Republican – please stay home. The rest of the developed world – Canada, the U.K., Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, and all the Scandinavian countries – don’t want you – either as tourists or, when your country falls apart, as settlers. You are ignorant, narrow-minded and arrogant and give the rest of your countrymen a bad name.
You people are morons. Get over it. The Founding Fathers were Christian and this Country was founded for the same! There’s nothing militant about Christianity. They don’t force you follow their religion or kill you, they may not agree with homosexuality but they don’t kill you for it. You people have been so brainwashed you don’t recognize Communism while it’s staring you right in the face. You’re far to young to have seen and remember the ravages of that ideology and you purposely were denied an education about it & knowledge of how to recognize it.
You also have no idea what it’s like to live in a truly free society that has sovereignty. This Government has neglected it’s borders for so long that anyone under 30 thinks it’s “racist” to protect our borders & control who’s coming and going. NewsFlash: It’s not racist, it’s common sense and it’s how it was for 200 yrs until Bush came along! All we’re doing is reverting back to the system that kept us safe & created prosperity.
Soros was a Nazi collaborator, the political left has been taken over by Communists and the ONLY way to show you what a true prosperous society is, is to bring it back! Note: One of the hallmarks of Communism is no middle class, look at what the freaking Clinton family did to the middle class!
Get over yourselves, Donald Trump & Mike Pence are more American than apple pie, don’t like it? Tough shit. We didn’t like the Islamist commie who’s nearly destroyed this Country either, we dealt with it.
<>
After reading the climate change deniers posts and noting their names as people whose opinions I can treat as too ignorant, too intellectually lazy or just flat out too stupid to bother entertaining I read down further and noticed that these paragons of anti-intellectualism are in fact the majority of commenters here on this and many other articles.
I am so glad I moved from the US 8 years ago, I could see the dumbing down in full swing then but I never anticipated how truly willfully ignaorant my fellow countrymen would become in such a short period of time.
Ah, the Schadenfreude I will experience when the first climate change caused disaster occurs after Trump, et.al. are in power and he refuses to send Federal disaster $ because it’s too expensive (or whatever excuse they come up with). Unfortunately, of course, it will be greatly tempered by the suffering of those who don’t deserve this electoral debacle.
My first instinct and thought when Reagan was elected was to leave the country. Unfortunately, I had no friends in Europe at the time and had no idea how to move there. Now I’m too old to leave (and my wife certainly won’t), but the U.S. would be way down on my list if I were to choose from birth which country to live in.
Global Cooling is what the government tried to peddle when I was a lil girl in school, when they couldn’t get enough money flowing on that one they went with Global Warming when scientists were screaming the whole time it was FALSE DATA taken out of Context, they changed the name to Climate Change. These Corrupt people will do ANYTHING to BRAINWASH the people.
That was the beginning of climate research, and as it always is with science the hypothesis was modified to fit the facts.
Once enough data came in it became obvious that they had started observing during an artificially cool period, ice cores and other data from more sophisticated satellite systems has provided far more than enough evidence since then to prove that we are in fact causing catastrophic climate change as a result of our actions.
Denying it at this point in time is akin to standing on a rail line facing an oncoming train with your eyes closed and fingers in your ears yelling “lalalalala…” to avoid dealing with the obvious.
It is like claiming the Earth is flat, only much more deadly and destructive in the end.
This does not convince me of anything.
There is a community of Climate Change propagandists who shame climate change skeptics. Why should we believe. Give us the science, and the political context, etc.
It would appear that you are not capable of understanding the solid science that has already been provided to you, why waste more time trying to educate turnips?
Good Sir, Can you be kind enough to give me a link to the solid science. Apparently, no one thought of providing it to me.
Here is a website that may help.
Google.com
Type in “books about climate science.” Then hit “enter.”
I hope you find this helpful.
I took your advice and found these 12 books recommended by CNN. But none look like pure unadulterated science. http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/19/opinions/sutter-2-degrees-book-club/
Am I correct in assuming that the original climate science is in the IPCC reports headed by the disgraced Indian?
I would also like to read some books questioning the climate science before I make up my mind.
I found the following links more useful as a starting point.
https://judithcurry.com/2015/09/20/new-book-doubt-and-certainty-in-climate-science/
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Ch01ClimatePolicy.pdf
http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/
I think climate science is full of disputed claims and is far from being proved or accepted as incontrovertible science. There is an attempt to manufacture a political consensus on something that is scientifically controversial.
I also think human nuclear activities and extraction of minerals and oil are more dangerous to our planet than burning fuel. On water rise, I think that the sum total of water on our earth and its constituents will mostly remain a constant. If a beach is submerged then space will be created elsewhere. I do not think we are in any danger of not having sufficient land for humans to live on. Of course there might be dislocation and political consequences of such dislocation.
And here is the kind of problem I anticipate encountering in climate science books – page of the book at http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Ch01ClimatePolicy.pdf states the following:
“More than 3 billion years ago, the first photosynthetic organisms began emitting oxygen, at that time just a byproduct, and to them a toxic one at that.”
Now where does the author get this information from?
My point being that the frontiers of science whether in physics, biology or in astrophysics, or astronomy or evolution are all ultimately blind-points.
What I learnt about the universe and our solar system in school is not only outdated but the new science keeps changing every day.
I am not anti-science. But a lot of science at the frontiers is full of unproven assumptions.
>>> I am not anti-science. But a lot of science at the frontiers is full of unproven assumptions. <<<
In the beginning, there was the Sun.
Light.
You can't have photosynthesis without the Sun.
I the beginning, there was Light… and Heat.
Always has… Always will.
Global Warming comes from both Light and Heat — the Sun.
ps… Light that causes Heating is called Light from the radio frequency spectrum known as Infrared
“Global Warming comes from both Light and Heat — the Sun.”
How many blankets are we adding to the planet?
Do you realize that commercial oyster production in the Puget Sound region can only occur when juvenile shellfish are raised in tanks with controlled pH? They used to dump the juveniles in the water decades ago but now the water is too acid from excess CO2 dissolved; it eats the calcium carbonate shells and kills the tiny oysters.
The CO2 is from pollution.
I’ve been all over the state of Washington.
pH is not “warming” (aka heat)
pH is chemistry.
“I am not anti-science”
But I do believe you are ‘anti-math’. After all, math is also non-conclusive.
Just ask any accountant when you ask, what’s 2+2? He’ll say, what do you want it to be?
Do you also deny the sky is blue?
“Just ask any [economist,] when you ask, what’s 2+2? He’ll say, what do you want it to be?”
h/t Macroman
Accountant works better for me. ;) no worries.
I’ve found Wikipedia to be an outstanding beginner’s resource for almost any topic. It gives a layman’s synopsis of very complicated and difficult subjects while providing specific textual resources for further investigation.
If you want to know more about The Great Oxygenation Event two and a half billion years ago, the Wikileaks entry is a good place to start.
The GOE is a rather unconstroversial explanation for the cataclysmic evolution of life on earth.
As your reading progresses (if you indeed read more about it) the evolution of oxygen breathing creatures after the GOE itself had effects.
Certain lifeforms won, others lost.
A similar process occurs today.
If you’re not sufficiently frightened by CO2, then you might also read about methane clathrates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate) and the current unchecked spew of methane into the atmosphere.
I glanced at the wikipedia entry for the Great Oxygenation Event and looked at http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/earth/earth_timeline/first_life
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(09)01189-0?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982209011890%3Fshowall%3Dtrue&cc=y=
http://web.gps.caltech.edu/~als/research-articles/2009/sessions_et_al_2009.pdf
And the more I read, the more I think how much of this science is based upon assumptions.
Please don’t mistake me as a proponent of creationism, or something similar. I am not even Christian and in phases of my life have been atheistic and agnostic.
But truthfully, we know very little if anything about how and when and indeed why life emerged on this planet.
We do not know what the earth looked like 3 billion years ago or 10 billion years ago and we certainly do not know how much oxygen the earth’s atmosphere had 10 billion years ago.
The statement below from the scientific publication in the third link again shows the assumptions that a lot of frontier Science is based on.
“On the early Earth, atmospheric O2 would initially have been very low, probably <1025 of the present atmospheric level". – what is the scientific basis for this statement?
“On water rise, I think that the sum total of water on our earth and its constituents will mostly remain a constant. If a beach is submerged then space will be created elsewhere. I do not think we are in any danger of not having sufficient land for humans to live on. Of course there might be dislocation and political consequences of such dislocation.”
This is not true, because of 2 reasons:
a) water exists in not only as a liquid, but also as a solid. The amount of water currently contained within the polar ice caps and glaciers will need a lot more space than it takes now, because it is above the current water level and significantly heaped. New space might well be created in the Antarctic area, after if emerges from below the future water level. This process, know as isostatic movement, happens at a snails pace and will take thousands if not millions of years.
b) water’s density changes with temperature. Not much, but even a 0,1% density decrease, resulting in a 0,1% volume increase would contribute to a rise by ~30 meters on it’s own. This is my own calculation, very simplified calculation, based on the average depth of the oceans(3,700 m) and the fact that they span 70% of the earth(and presumably will cover slightly more with an increased level). It’s averaged down to 30 meters because they will grow in size, taking over parts of continents !
Just to continue with this unscientific method of thinking – Won’t more water evaporate also? And vast regions presently inhabitable like Canada, Siberia, etc will become more livable if they get warmer.
>>> Won’t more water evaporate also? And vast regions presently inhabitable like Canada, Siberia, etc will become more livable if they get warmer. <<<
I've said it before… so I'll say it again… There's not a damn thing you can do about anything.
Any and All heating and cooling of the Earth is a direct result of the Earth's orbit around the sun.
This orbit varies… It's not perfect… it's more like an unbalanced top (toy). It deviates and correct… deviates and corrects… And, it's disturbed by other galactic events as well. We could be even be thrown out of orbit … or the Earth could even be slowed down… which would cause us to move closer, permanently.
When the water starts moving shorelines, inward…. then worry about it… if you live on that shoreline.
Have you heard of an entire community — like the entire Gulf Coast… moving their beachfront houses inland, yet???
If not, don't worry about it. Nothing you can do about it.
I'd be more concerned about a collision with an asteroid or a comet. They'll destroy everything on the planet. Nothing you can do about it, either.
ps…
RE: Asteroids and comets…
There’s an entire network of observatories around the world that discovers and tracks the trajectories of asteroids in our visible solar system.
In fact, a long time friend of mine tracks them along with a group of other individuals on a constant basis. I’ve even gone with him on several occasions.
A couple years ago, a very large asteroid passed between the Earth and the Moon. Serious alarm bells were going off about that… and rightfully so.
The result of that “near miss”??? Intense meteor shower. And, even reported damages in certain parts of the world.
Was there anything anyone could do? NOPE. Put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye. That’s about it.
It would also appear that you are too stupid to understand the difference between science and arrogant opinions.
Time to move to one of the off world colonies from Bladerunner!
In 1970 there was a commercial of an American Indian paddling a canoe, seeing all the pollution. A single tear in one eye was the closing image. Along come the EPA, which began slowing down the pollution. It is game over and pollution has won
This is the problem with public education and no child Left behind. You people aren’t forced to pass classes like History.
Are you not aware that this planet has experienced many extreme, moderate and minor warning and cooling cycles. We have had several ice ages and periods when most of the earth was tropical.
There are deserts where there was once seas and seas where there was once forests.
In actuality the period of stable climate allowing humans to prosper is an anomaly. We are far overdue for a rapid climate change.
Are you also not aware that those history books, aka Earth Science, were based on developing science and observation of the time? And that in the period they were written NOTHING like what we’ve been seeing had ever been seen before? And that since those books were written a new history in earth science is being written right now that has a completely different trajectory than observed history? Not all books written are like the bible, expected to be above history as the one truth. Science, however, is iterative.
Sure, if you were in an apartment building and heard the fire alarm sounding, you could sit unmoving and declare that because you can’t see the fire, nothing’s really happening. You could dismiss the alarm as truly signaling danger, and in your righteousness even leave your fingers uncrossed. What climate skeptics are doing is dismissing it for everyone in the building. A pretty big alarm is sounding… doesn’t it make sense to heed a warning?
You think because the world is “overdue for a rapid climate change” that it’s just trying to make up for lost time by accelerating faster beyond any observed history? That’s a pretty big gamble, bub.
I don’t believe in the climate change propaganda either. Till date, no one has convinced me on why I should believe this BS. And my own thinking tells me this is nothing but an imperial tool.
So if Trump doesn’t believe it, it makes me think he is smart and confident enough not to subscribe to received propaganda unless convinced.
Let people on this board think why do they say they believe the climate change establishment wisdom. Is it because they simply accept what they are told by the establishment. How many have looked at the science in detail and are convinced?
Seema… it’s BS touted by Another Friend of Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.
Who? Al Gore… the unemployed Presidential Candidate and VP.
WHERE DOES THE EARTH’S HEAT COME FROM???? THE SUN
THE WORLD IS COVERED WITH 70% OF WHAT???? WATER
THE EARTH ROTATES AROUND A SLIGHTLY WOBBLY AXIS IN A SLIGHTLY ELIPTICAL ORBIT THAT CHANGES EVERY SO MANY ORBITS…
THE REASON WE HAVE AN ATMOSPHERE WITH WARM AIR ??? DISTANCE FROM SUN HEATS WATER …
EQUALS CLIMATE.
Not a damn thing you can do about it. However, you can make sure you don’t cut down too many trees or clog the rivers with sewer shit.
This exercise below seems worthwhile even though the author simply wants us to start with an acceptance of the climate change propaganda and then work to disprove it. Why not first prove it to us?
See http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2016/11/11/donald-trump-says-climate-change-is-a-hoax-lets-discuss/#ea8fa201d50c Let’s Discuss Climate Change In Donald Trump’s America; Trolls Welcome
>>> This exercise below seems worthwhile even though the author simply wants us to start with an acceptance of the climate change propaganda and then work to disprove it. Why not first prove it to us? <<<
Seema…. Please, reread my post about Heat from The Sun.
"Global Warming."
Don't need to prove or disprove what I say…. IT'S OBVIOUS. You see, there is no money to be made when you can't con people.
There's an old saying that applies…
There's a sucker born every minute.
You obviously haven’t even bothered to read any research articles. You are obviously ignorant of how to find and read research. Either you don’t have a college education and never learned how to find such information or you didn’t really pay attention when you were in college. There are many very good science news websites out there. I’m not going to post a link to one. That way you can’t say I’m trying to propagandize you. You can go find one or several yourself and evaluate them on your own. The news articles include references to the original research articles. You can then find and read the research yourself and learn how they came to their conclusions if you are smart enough and educated enough to figure it out. That’s how its done! Trump is no scientist and I would bet he has no idea how to read and comprehend research either.
No worries, I plan to start with Judith Curry’s blog and book at https://judithcurry.com/2015/09/20/new-book-doubt-and-certainty-in-climate-science/
The book that seems an ideal place to start to read about climate science is by Alan Longhurst titled Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science and is free to read at https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/longhurst-print.pdf
It comes highly recommended by Judith Curry.
And no one will convince you, obviously. There’s no link that anyone could give you that’s:
1) going to make you understand it. My guess is that you’re not equipped. That’s not an insult, it’s just that you’re probably not educated in the fashion that allows you to read scientific journals and texts. Not many of us are. You might be quite smart, I just have a hard time believing you’ve delved into many truly scientific publications beyond this particular issue. So, rather than heed a warning, you’re likely just going to listen and agree with any alternate point of view that puts their dissent in layman’s terms.
2) going to convince you of something you’re very obviously unwilling to be convinced on. Your tone is completely dismissive and defensive, not two traits very complementary of an open mind.
That the earth is warming far more rapidly than in any time in observable history, and that the cause is ever increasing amounts of CO2 creating a blanket, as someone else above put it, that traps heat… well, is that really so ludicrous? No, you can’t see the CO2, but alarms are sounding and observable symptoms are happening. Yeah, you can sit in your house while the fire alarm goes off and cross your fingers that it’s a false one, but damn if that isn’t a pretty big gamble.
From what I’ve read, it sounds like Curry just advocates not completely dismissing and discounting climate skeptics, but generally agrees with scientific consensus. Sure, healthy dialogue is important. Willfully disregarding a warning that could help mitigate risk and is actually achievable with updated technology? Does that really make sense?
1. About 97% of climatologists say that global warming/climate change is real and that humans are causing it. So case closed as far as scientific consensus.
2. The basic science on this is very simple: some gases, like carbon dioxide and methane — known as “greenhouse gases” — trap heat inside our atmosphere. In the natural cycle, the oceans absorb carbon dioxide (the most prevalent of these gases, though not the most powerful one). When humans emit unnaturally massive amounts of these gases as they’ve been doing since the beginning of the industrial age, the oceans can no longer absorb enough carbon dioxide — the other greenhouse gases like methane are just emitted into our atmosphere — and the atmosphere begins heating up, wreaking havoc in climate and causing what is known as “climate change.” When glaciers and polar ice melt, it causes even more global warming/climate change, because the white ice reflects heat back into space, and because there are massive amounts of greenhouse gases below some of melting ice. This is called a “feedback loop.” If we get too far into this loop, there will be nothing humans can do to stop it, even if they were to immediately stop their unnatural emissions of all greenhouse gases.
There’s not much to this, but very brainwashed Americans lead the world in climate change deniers. The only ones who say that climate change doesn’t exist or who say it’s not caused by humans are people working on behalf of the fossil fuel industries.
I explain it very simply further down the page…. look for the word “climate”
WHERE DOES THE EARTH’S HEAT COME FROM???? THE SUN
THE WORLD IS COVERED WITH 70% OF WHAT???? WATER
THE EARTH ROTATES AROUND A SLIGHTLY WOBBLY AXIS IN A SLIGHTLY ELIPTICAL ORBIT THAT ****ALTERS DISTANCE*** EVERY ORBIT…
THE REASON WE HAVE AN ATMOSPHERE WITH WARM AIR ??? DISTANCE FROM SUN THAT HEATS WATER … CLOSER = HOTTER ; FARTHER = COOLER; ANGLE = ABSORPTION
EQUALS CLIMATE.
This is basic mathematics.
Not a damn thing you can do about it. However, you can make sure you don’t cut down too many trees or clog the rivers with sewer shit.
I think maybe you ought to go back to 3d grade. The angle of the sun hitting the Earth is a far bigger factor in heating than the slight differences in distance. The Earth is actually a little closer to the sun in winter in the northern hemisphere than in summer. Sheesh, what do schools teach anymore?
>>> I think maybe you ought to go back to 3d grade. The angle of the sun hitting the Earth is a far bigger factor in heating than the slight differences in distance. The Earth is actually a little closer to the sun in winter in the northern hemisphere than in summer. Sheesh, what do schools teach anymore?<<<
Surface temperature in sunlight of
Mercury : 700 K (NO ATMOSPHERE)
Venus: 724 K
Earth: 287 K
Mars: 293 K
Jupiter: -165 K
Gravity Esc vel M.O.V Axial Ascend Peri- Equilib Surface Press Atmospheric
Name (g) (km/s) (km/s) incl Oblate node helion (K) (K) (atm) Composition
——— ——- ——- —— —— —— —— —— ——- ——- —— ———–
Mercury 0.378 4.44 47.87 0 48.35 77.44 449 440 0 —
Venus 0.907 10.36 35.02 177.36 76.72 131.56 328 730 93 CO2, N2
Earth 1.000 11.19 29.79 23.45 .00335 354.90 102.83 279 287 1 N2, O2, Ar
Mars 0.377 5.03 24.13 25.19 .00519 49.60 335.99 226 218 0.007 CO2, N2, Ar
Jupiter 2.364 59.5 13.06 3.13 .06481 100.47 15.63 122 120 (x) H2, He
Saturn 0.916 35.5 9.66 26.73 .1076 113.71 92.80 90 88 H2, He
Uranus 0.889 21.3 6.80 97.86 .030 74.06 176.29 64 59 H2, He, CH4
Neptune 1.125 23.5 5.44 29.60 .026 131.81 1.95 51 48 H2, He, CH4
Pluto 0.067 1.3 4.74 122.52 110.42 224.59 44 37 1e-5 N2, CH4, CO
DISTANCES
Mercury 57 million km
Venus 108 million km
Earth 150 million km
Mars 228 million km
Jupiter 779 million km
Saturn 1.43 billion km
Uranus 2.88 billion km
Neptune 4.50 billion km
Pluto 5.91 billion km
Calculate path losses for light wavelength microwave spectrum.
Any good RF/Antenna engineering book will have the formulas for you.
BTW, I'm also a licensed ham.
ps… correction: Mars 218… not 293.
Note that we have O2 in our atmosphere because of the oceans.
ps… Min Max Avg distance of Earth…
Earth:
Closest: 147 million km / 91 million miles (.98 AU)
Farthest: 152 million km / 94 million miles (1.01 AU)
Average: 150 million km / 93 million miles (1 AU)
http://www.universetoday.com/15462/how-far-are-the-planets-from-the-sun/
NASA probably has more accurate numbers, but I figure you are smart enough to look them up yourself.
; )
I’m from Indianapolis, lived here my whole life. Pence would never have been re-elected here, even as red a state as it is, and there are still PENCE MUST GO signs all over downtown.
He’s far scarier than Trump. I have a friend in the south who was asking about him during the election. I describe Pence as a Nazi wearing a Boy Scout uniform.
Terms like “Supremacist”, “Christian jihad”, “medieval” and such like make this article sound like propaganda….. The author seems to make use of a liberal amount inflammatory words to attack what he doesn’t agree with. Is he not doing the same thing he is criticizes his opposition for – rhetoric?
“…other possible extremist Trump appointees, such as John Bolton, a neocon who believes the U.S. should “bomb Iran,” and the authoritarian Rudy Giuliani, are now receiving much deserved public scrutiny.”
Exactly. Where were you Jeremy? Where was The Intercept? I remember your boss, Glenn Grenwald, stating during the general election that it was important for journalists not to be distracted by Trump, and to keep investigating Hillary Clinton. Everywhere I looked, there were plenty of stories about emails and the Clinton Foundation, with almost nothing on Trump, his surrogates and their many hypocrisies, scandals and conflicts of interest. Well done. You and your colleagues at The Intercept own this mess as much as any Democrat voter who stayed home.
Uh, I saw plenty of stories about real Trump scandals, though some of them sadly never gained traction, such as the Telegraph’s documenting his campaign’s willingness to take foreign donors.
I also saw plenty of fake stories, like blaming Russia for the email leaks- though to be fair, the Intercept was skeptical.
Perhaps you should either look for a wider array of sources or stop being so defensive over your favored candidate. (And if you are a Correct The Record troll, you need to find a job with a better boss.)
I had a very strong suspicion befote I read this article and you mention Erik Prince. That seals the deal. I think with Trump you now have a Fascist Theocratic Plutocracy and what better way to spread your agenda. I wonder if Trump is sick or the republicans are hoping he will lose the fraud case or sued again which would pave the way morally to impeach him?
Look at it this way: Hillary said she liked Trump’s kids during the debate.
(Maybe she wanted to have sex with them?)
You can judge a man by his fruit, right?
Trump is better than a Hillary White House.
Bill, Hillary, and Obama turned the White House into the American Whore House.
And yet Melania is the only one taking her clothes off for money….morons
And that’s worse than the hell house that Raygun and the Bushes turned the white house into?
trump will turn the white house into a whole lower level of hell than either Raygun and the Bushes dared to do. I hope you plan on increasing your taxes to defend yourself from terrorists because that’s what you are going to need to do. American wouldn’t be so hated if it weren’t for people like yourself. Look in the mirror if you want to know why 9-11 happened.
This country was doomed after Eisenhower.
Cuban Missile Crisis of 62 happened cuz bankers and Rockefeller minion mining companies were being forced to pay gross production taxes to Castro on nickel mined out of Cuba.
JFK was whacked cuz bankers and Rockefeller minions wanted to steal all Americans silver coinage and replace it with cupronickel… and also reduce all Americans to slavery with that 97% paycut in 1965 after installing Johnson.
The Oil Crisis and OPEC situation of 73 happened because of the oil mining contracts required the exchange of American Gold or Silver for Arab Black Gold. American now buys oil with paper dollars.
Afghanistan conspiracy started in 1973 when Rockefeller sent Nixon to China.
9-11 happened because of the desire of the same despots to use the blood of American Soldiers to secure mining operations for COPPER reserves known to exist in Afghan (the largest known reserves of copper in the entire world — est value $3 Trillion).
What are your coins made out of?
Beware of the moneychangers.
Afghan
This is the most prejudiced article I’ve ever read! Absolute garbage! It’s attacks like this that caused Trump to get elected. God forbid someone is a Christian! You can be anything you want these days and it’s ok, but don’t be a Christian or you’re fair game! Keep throwing out labels like extreme, radical, militant to describe us… You are helping our cause!
Pence is way worse than Trump in many ways (religious fanatic who wants to force Christianity down everyone’s throat, support of mainstream Republican ideas like trade agreements and use of the military for U.S. economic benefit, etc.). So is the Republican establishment. In fact, the latter hates Trump because he’s not conservative enough (and secondarily because he says aloud what they think but don’t say in public, thereby embarrassing them).
I seldom trust when a writer makes up a new term for someone or something, such as Christian Supremacist. It’s usually a sign that the writer can’t make a solid case and has to move the goal posts with an entirely new definition.
In any case, watching Trump I believe it’s far more likely that Pence will moderate to Trump’s views not the other way around. Trump is not antagonistic toward gays and has been pro-choice his entire life. But he has been grinding career politicians to bits. Pence influencing Trump strikes me as so much less unlikely as to be outlandish.
>>> Christian Supremacist <<<
It is a term of art created by someone suffering from a deep-seated guilt or inferiority complex.
What kind of tabloid trash is this? Christian supremacist militants?? You are one twisted fuck. You think people actually buy this? This site is complete garbage!
Great drama and I liked how you added so much to the simple facts. Perhaps DEFCON 3 to 5 after Trump’s election told the world, once again, Trump no want war, just like eh said on Combs and Hannity about Iraq. Trump’s a lover, not a fighter. What better way to keep Trump on the straight and narrow than his V.P.? You libs all sound the same, like chicken. Perhaps babies will at least get a pain killer before being killed. You know ripped apart little by little hurts. 2 ladies I met had terrible doctors as they lived through the abortion process, too bad. Maybe Tinder will have to slow down now that the children in their 20s and 30s realize sex makes babies and not just STDs.
“The incoming vice president, Mike Pence, has not elicited the same reaction, instead often painted as the reasonable adult on the ticket, a “counterbalance” to Trump and a “bridge to the establishment.””
I remember the same nonsense being spouted about Dick Cheney, how he was the adult in the room,a steadying influence, the guy with “gravitas”. We know how that turned out, this will likely be worse, maybe much worse.
Total left wing bullcrap,. This is why the Democrats lost the elections.
Good for Mike Pence, he will be a great leader in the Executive Branch. Like General George S. Patton Jr. Said, ” hold them by the nose and in the ass, like crap though a Christmas Goose”.
This is probably the most bigoted piece on bigotry I have ever read. The language used to described Christians appears as hateful to me as anything I have read. More subtle just as effective as if a Klan member called used the “N” Word. I don’t expect you agree. I just wanted to hopefully respectfully point out that you like us Christians can be as Pious or self righteous. Just because someone doesn’t believe in God or think He isn’t important doesn’t mean theyes can’t be judgmental. It felt that way to me and I just wanted you to know how your article came across to me, hoping that You would appreciate that it is valid to have a different point of view.
This I found out from MSM:
Hillary sees herself as a Christian warrior. She carries a bible at all times, reads it, underlines it, acts on it, and is guided by it.
Her Methodist faith defines her and is her only permanent ideological position. Everything else is for sale.
Do you think Hillary could be defined as a Christian supremacist?
[[ Do you think Hillary could be defined as a Christian supremacist? ]]
NOPE. She’s a bona fide psychopathic killer like Charles Manson. Some people saw Manson as Jesus too… and he did too.
Manson got into group sex, homosexuality, and murder (including Rosemary Baby stuff… who was also related to Polanski… the dude who created Rosemary’s Baby. He also start Helter Skelter race war.
Hillary is Manson’s sister. Same MO. Including Podesta…. the weak link cannibal.
Helter Skelter is currently in progress in city streets across the country.
ps…
Hillary is a whore.. Chelsea isn’t even Bill’s offspring. She’s from the Webster Hubble gene pool. She looks like Webster, too.
Bill fathered a mulatto kid with a black prostitute. Then, to this very day, he and Hillary have ignored his existence to an extreme.
His name is Danney Williams… he even looks like a black Bill Clinton.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex8wWNa0Yg8
Since that time, Bill brags about dobbing over 2000 women. Monica Lewinski was used to wet his cigars (use your imagination)…
Does it get any worse than that? Yes,… add a pedophile sex slave trafficking ring being managed thru Hillary’s State Dept.
Deep caca! Then, add the pornstar wannabe by the name of Obama to the mix. His daddy was a porno writer and actor.
It’s going to take divine intervention of some sorts to drain this swamp.
Danney Williams should sue Bill Clinton to get a paternity test. Apparently he wants to.
Wow, full of lies aren’t you? No wonder you are still seeking truth.
craigsummers v craigsummers:
– showing how he feels when the White Christians win. . .
– showing how he feels when they don’t.
Nice how you compare the election of a “white” Christian in a democracy to the election of “people of color” from an internationally recognized terrorist organization in Gaza. This is hardly a racial issue, Doc, but God love you for trying. You quote part of my reply to you in 2014. Here is the rest of it:
CraigSummers ? DocHollywood
July 19 2014, 8:30 p.m.
“……..Cute Doc.
Yes, Hamas was elected to power, but Hamas has never allowed that power to be challenged (since the elections in 2005). It’s one thing to be elected, it’s another to allow elections to challenge your leadership. That hasn’t happened – and that’s my point. Hitler also was elected and we all know what happened. The election of Hamas was simply bad for the Palestinians. Period
Along those lines, however, the Palestinian people freely elected a terrorist organization to power – one that opposes the existence of a Jewish state. They voted for that option. So the Palestinians have no one to blame but themselves for the current state of affairs in Gaza. They chose continuous struggle against Israel. They chose continuous war against Israel. They chose the racist charter of Hamas which calls for the return of Israel to Islamic Holy Land – an absolute non starter for peace.
By choosing Hamas, they chose the organization most likely to kidnap and murder Israeli teens leading to the bloodshed today. The Palestinians chose continuous war. How did they respond? With white flags trying to get out of the war zone – created by Hamas.
If the US tried to get rid of Hamas, then more power to our government because the election of Hamas has been a disaster for the Palestinians. That’s responsible leadership by the new “unity” government: Hamas praised the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers who were murdered. The “unity” government failed badly and the Palestinians paid for it. And they will continue to pay as long as Hamas is in power (and supported by Iran who pays the bills).
Thanks Doc. As always, its been a pleasure…….”
Thanks Doc. As always, its been a pleasure.
That’s an old problem. *I’m instructing craig to examine the character of Dr. Stockman in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and report back asap.
*It’s a noble thought, but someone who tries to rationalize bigotry by assigning the label of terrorism to one group and democracy to another that is so much more violent won’t understand it.
I just read your fine article. I saved it in my Religious Freedom Restoration Act file. It shows how the Religion of Secularism is fighting the evil Cooperate Christians. It certainly looks like the Corporate Fascists won and the Corporate Marxist lost this time. The Twin Party system is working perfectly. And once again the Bankers won. I am so thankful to God, the real one and not Pence’s God, that I don’t pay any Income Taxes or have the Mark of the Beast aka Social Security Number linked to me. There are still a few freedom lovers in the USA. But not many. As Jefferson wrote, “God will not be mocked.” Pence’s type of hate is Satanic. Hillary’s type of hate is Satanic. What fun to watch these twin evils fight each other. I look forward to God’s victory.
Thanks again for the fine article exposing this evil man’s evil agenda.
I believe that you are pretty much on the Mark with your assessment of Mike Pence. In fact, if I were Trump I would be worried. This scenario is akin to another aging President, Ronald Reagan, who after being yoked to George HW Bush, nearly met an untimely death at the hands of a Bush family acquaintance, John Hinkley Jr., who was the son of a multi-millionaire Texas oilman and President and Chairman of the independent oil and gas exploration firm Vanderbilt Energy Corporation. It was only hours after the assassination attempt that VP Bush shut down the investigation of Hinckley with the declaration that he was a deranged lone assassin:
In the case of a president’s untimely death, the United States presidential line of succession would dictate that the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, would become Pence’s VP. In spite of waning republican support for Speaker Ryan, Pence has came out in his support to remain in the position of Speaker. House republicans relented and gave Ryan their unanimous support.
Somehow I believe this parody tweet speaks a great truth:
“U.S. Dept. of Fear ?@FearDept 14h14 hours ago
A President-elect can’t just tell us what the foreign policy will be. It’s never worked that way as JFK would be able to explain if alive.”
Donald vigorously opposed to Election Rigging in his speeches.
Will he do something about that for future elections and
– Make Democracy Great Again –
Well, it’s too late to worry about it now.
So, don’t worry, be happy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo4OnQpwjkc
“Christians” like Pence the Repugnant haven’t the slightest idea of the historical Jesus and, were he to appear among them today, they’d crucify his Commie-revolutionary ass in a holy heartbeat.
And if he really were one of the triune manifestations of the God they claim to worship, they would all be in deep theological shit, com Judgment Day:
Doug, please keep checking your email.
When I comment online I don’t often get reactions (and some tend to be negative), but there was one which I loved and remember years later. After the first Bush bailout attempt failed, I was very happy that Wall Street would not get bailed out for what they had done. Being of religious upbringing (and one which tends to be somewhat unconventional), I decided to quote a biblical text:
James 5:1-6 (Authorized/King James Version)
1 Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.
2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.
3 Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.
4 Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.
5 Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.
6 Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.
While I was disappointed about the bailout passing, and even more disappointed at the effects of the bailout, I was pleased with one response. Someone using the handle of “Godless Communist” responded with a simple, “AMEN!!!!!!!!”
I’m pretty sure a spokesman for the Trump campaign just said yesterday she was offended that someone would even ask that she would work with someone who was a racist or sexist. I find it interesting that people make brash statements about republicans like they are all racist and ignorant. I would go so far to say I doubt anyone could give a valid argument as to why Pence and the President elect are racist and/or sexist. Any takers?
Thats not the bottom line though. What really matters is who in retrospect would have done more damage to our country, Dump or Killary?
Who writes this crap?
Well, I gotta say that when I watched Mr. Pence during the vice-presidential debates he scared the living cr** out of me. He was very calm, and quiet, with a continual half-smile (or was that a smirk?) His brand of quiet is the scary kind. Not the reassuring kind of quiet you feel in the presence of a person who is compassionate and completely present to you. No, his kind of quiet was the calculating and self-righteous kind. I have no desire to give this guy a chance, cause I have “Christian” relatives like him who belief their way is THE way- case closed.
Your such a biggot case closed!
I think you mean you’re and I also think you’re talking to a mirror.
Go look in a mirror if you want to see a bigot.
landlocked was just pointing out observable facts.
Ok, so the facts he pointed out are ugly.
And that gets your feathers in a ruffle?
So why’d you vote for Trump then if you don’t like ugly?
What a hit job. Rhetoric…
Readings this article was like pulling teeth. What a waste of my time. And liberals say Christians are intolerant. To anybody who hasn’t this, please don’t waste your time. It’s full of hate, lies and ignorance. Boy, that felt good.
Liberals are the ultimate hypocrites
Even if elements of Trump’s vile rhetoric and his various threats were a psychotic form of performance art, or mere opportunistic political strategy, as some suggest, they have set the stage for the pursuit of a civilizational war that poses a dire threat to vulnerable populations throughout the world. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and a slew of prominent Democrats have publicly said that Americans should give Trump a chance.
It’s reading that that reminds me how right it is not to read the filthy quotes spewed forth from right wing supremacist morons.
He’s not a Christian acting he way he does. He clearly is not reading the bible. All of them that spread hate in Christ name will have to answer for their acts
It’s not only crazy Republicans wearing tinfoil hats anymore… Crazy Democrat media is donning their tinfoil helmets.
I normally enjoy The Intercept, but this author’s article was humorous at best and plain childish at worst. It really does outline, and even color the author’s misguided, seemingly deep-seated, and irrational phobia of Christians.
What should have been an article about politics ended up being a personal and wrathful attack on Christians in general. No mention of any other religion leads me to believe that the author just doesn’t seem to really understand anything about Christianity or politics. It’s a nice essay, though.
Well we just had a radical extreme Muslim in the White House so let’s give a Christian a chance. Maybe he won’t sign hundreds of executive orders and kill innocent American minors at Muslim weddings oversees! Oh and let’s not forget dividing our country like we have never seen since the 60’s.
My God. How can you still believe that our president is Muslim? And he’s radical but trump has not divided the country? What world are you living in?
Trump’s a Christian? Lol
Give him Pence at least.
Presbyterian
Donald Trump is a Presbyterian? Who Knew?
I, myself, was born Catholic… but, within a short while, studied as Presbyterian myself.
But, I’ll go even further and say, don’t let that fool you.
I gone way beyond what most people would think my studies have included.
Long and short of it… a question to you: At the Resurrection, there were only two of the twelve disciples that actually “got it.”
Who were they???
I’m going to have to go with John or Paul. Or possibly Ringo.
Nope… Sorry… Try again. Both are wrong. (Paul wasn’t even a disciple)
But Ringo was?
Come on, Maisie… You know I ignored Ringo. Why would I want to focus on the ridiculous to deflect from the real answer to one of the most, if not THE most, serious question anyone has ever asked you in your life.
The article was about Pence.
Somehow I thought that those who still believe in that stinkin’ pile of dogsh*t wouldn’t find their way to TI. I was wrong.
GO AWAY, moron!
Come on Gert you know it’s true.
I’m still here Gertard. Besides you know it’s true!
They’re overrunning the site and won’t be stopping. The decent people from Glenn Greenwald’s readership/commentariat have long been melting away due to a combination of commenting software and other issues in comments. I was the last hold out trying to prevent it from completely descending into garbage, but the resources and policies necessary for that are not going to occur.
Some of us are looking into starting a separate site for discussing the articles here, and possibly other matters, where gross bigotry and obsessive cranks (both of which destroy quality) won’t be around. We want back a feeling of community where there was always a range of disagreement but not this…volume of extreme that works against any ability to develop community conversation.
Under this new reality we need places where we can congregate with other rational and morally enlightened others to decided what the hell to do, and how to organize and survive.
>>> Under this new reality we need places where we can congregate with other rational and morally enlightened others to decided what the hell to do, and how to organize and survive.<<
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXOwNOf2QXY
Oh Mona don’t go! Please don’t go to your safe space and weep we need you here to agitate and hate! Please stay oh Mona please stay your intellect and wisdom can only be seen through a progressive prism! So at last I beg you Mona dont go to a separate site where will our community be without your words so contrite?
Under this new reality we need places where we can congregate with other rational and morally enlightened others to decided what the hell to do, and how to organize and survive.
This sentence really made me laugh. Thank you Mona. (I’m a new commentator by the way.) I do feel bad for you though having looked below.
“I was the last hold out trying to prevent it from completely descending into garbage”
An amazing discovery: Behold a person more narcissistic than Trump!
Indeed.
There was a site a few years ago. Does it still exist?
shorter -Mona-:
‘Hey everyone, I’m rational and morally enlightened and you are not!!!
Come on, gang, let’s take our ball and go!!!’
The most malicious commenter, yet again, gets her comeuppance so she falls on her keyboard for all to see. Fucking hilarious.
Don’t let the screen hit you in the ass on the way out.
>>> Under this new reality we need places where we can congregate with other rational and morally enlightened others to decided what the hell to do, and how to organize and survive. <<<
Have you tried the Temple of Set?
Give*it*a*rest* already. Obviously low- information voters have found their way to this web-site.
You mean the same low info voter that voted out the criminal and corrupt clintons?
Yes, and also people like you as well.
Many people from around the world think a lot of Americans are idiots. Your comment gives them a reason.
“THE ELECTION OF Donald Trump has sent shockwaves through the souls of compassionate, humane people across the country and the world.”
What a doozy of an opening sentence. If Scahill ever loses his gig or wants to change careers, I see him as a writer of popular pulp fiction. “It was a dark and stormy night and the purple prose and hyperboles were gathering…”
I agree! What one sided extremist prose. I almost laughed, but it really isn’t funny to call Christians “vicious” because you don’t like the results of an election.
My father taught me two most important things.
The first most important lesson he taught me was with words. When I was in the car with him one day repeating the lesson that my sweet first grade Nun had taught me… “The Catholic Church is the one true church”…he surprisingly stopped me in my tracts both forcefully and adamantly correcting me saying, “Oh No, your religion is no better than any other man’s religion”…In an instant I imagined he and the men he flew with on WWII bomber missions not caring about differences in the religion, but only being concerned with helping each other to get safely home.
The second most important lesson he taught me was with silence. As he never ever spoke to me about the War. And I never asked as it was obvious he did not want to talk about it. All I learned about his war experiences were what I found of his war pictures and medals hidden away in the attic. It took a while for me to get over the likes of close to a couple of decades of “John Wayne” type war propaganda, but once I did see through it his silence spoke to me in priceless volumes.
Hey so, I just googled “Christian supremacist” and the only things that came up were this article and Pence. Make sure you get extra credit for that in your AP journalism course. I’ll be watching – you’ve got quite a future!
Jeebus this is scary as hell. And the thing with the HIV drugs. He gives a choice to die or to go through anti-gay programming. How monstrous is that?
He has been creating a hell on earth for people in Indiana these past few years.
Yep….but always voted into office. Don’t you just hate democracy?
How long before Pence gets caught in some public bathroom doing a male prostitute? The sky fairy will be pissed. Eternal damnation or death by bonga bonga.
The biigg problem with this stereotyping of a Christian leader, Jeremy, is that this note is too ridiculous to take it seriously.
It is a shame for you, because you would love that this guy became a “Christian Jihad” so you can show the intolerance that he has.
Election is over, get over it
On January 12, 2015, Jeremy Scahill wrote an article and provided Awlaki a forum to spew his propaganda (grievances against the west). This has always been a favorite line with the Intercept – the west and Israel are the cause of terrorism:
“……….Awlaki told Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye in an interview for Al Jazeera a few weeks after the attempted attack: “I support what Umar Farouk has done after I have been seeing my brothers being killed in Palestine for more than sixty years, and others being killed in Iraq and in Afghanistan. And in my tribe too, U.S. missiles have killed” women and “children, so do not ask me if al-Qaeda has killed or blown up a U.S. civil[ian] jet after all this. The 300 Americans are nothing comparing to the thousands of Muslims who have been killed.”…..”
The article was published five days after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris claimed by al-Qaeda. On January 9th, a Jewish market was targeted and four Jews were murdered. The attack on the Kosher market was only mentioned in an update by Scahill. The Intercept (as far as I know) never reported on the targeted Jewish store. The Intercept has never written an article (as far as I know) on the collective punishment of Jews for the actions of Israel. The targeting of the Kosher grocery store was a classic case of collective punishment, but by repeating the propaganda of Awlaki three days after an attack directed at Jews, it became as crystal clear how the Intercept (and Scahill) view the collective punishment of Jews.
This is one of the worst articles I’ve ever seen of fear and hate-mongering against Christians. The whacky left is getting more unhinged by the day, and frankly reveal themselves by articles such as this to be nothing less than bigots and haters of the first rank.
Nice smear piece – facts mixed in with generous hyperbole. It sounds really alarming if you don’t think about it too hard. I am not a Pence fanboy, but you can make anybody into the devil if you take this article’s approach.
Hilarious work of fiction. I’d be a little scared if you actually believed this.
I love God and despise the evils of organized religion. I’m reading black water and it is so hard to read and ordinary people can’t accept the facts you present because it is so terrifying . I knew a Jewish historian who taught me a lot about mass psychology and fascism and the dangers of that happening here because we’ve had that element in our government for many years so I am terrified. I’ve already been tortured and am finally in a good place but I have a disability and so do my children and I just want to leave but I have no way of leaving. I really fear what it’s going to take for the public to see what’s really happening. History does not give me hope in this situation. We really need you , bless your heart and those you love.
Donald J Trump is President Unless he dies in office he will continue that position for the, God willing, next eight or ten years, Or if we’re really fortunate, ten to twelve years. It isn’t necessary to close your eyes or to even pray . But, and it’s a big but if you ask if He’s (God) real, reveal this to you, you’ll be amazed at the outcome. What’s to lose?
All this is incredibly disturbing, as the co-opting of American politics with something calling itself Christian but unrecognisable to me as such. I feel sick.
But you need to stop repeating this nonsense about it being wrong to say “Two Corinthians” as though it is evidence of Trump’s laughable ignorance of Christianity (of which there is no shortage of evidence). Apart from being completely irrelevant to the substance of the faith, I’m an Anglican vicar and I can assure you “Two Corinthians” is standard nomenclature in many Christian circles – in fact in my experience it is the more commonly used version. Nothing to talk about there.
I shudder to think what we’d be in for if something happened to Trump. As despicable as Trump is, Pence as president would make Trump look like a far-left liberal. These are frightening times for everyone except the chosen few.
He is not a Christian. He is a worker of The Fallen Angel Lying Bastard Satan. In whom ass God Elected will take name and kick dragon. God is in Control. Although we long suffer, the Trumpets are sounding. Behold The King of kings and The Lord of lords. Not some homo murdering adultery Catholic claiming Ceasar Borgio whom the world thinks is savior. Google it! Workers of iniquity they are.
No such thing as “Christian jihad.” If you mean “holy war” then use those words.
Any American that doesn’t realize that we have just experienced a radical Evangelical coup of our Government is sadly insane. We now have NO checks and balances. Evangelical President, Vice President, Congress and soon the Supreme Court. Perfect scenario for a dictatorship. If you haven’t read about the 3rd Reich’s rise to power in the 1930’s you know nothing about how it was the same radical right wing evangelicals that put him him power. One good thing. The evangelicals have shown what a bigoted, racist, sexist, hateful, evil god they worship even though they have thrown him over for Mammon under the High Priesthood of Herr Trump. I’m sorry, but strongly believe the 4th Reich is very near and every NON-Evangelical person in America should fear for their lives.
DO YOU PROMISE?
Thank you for grinding up babies while they’re in their mothers womb and sucking out their human remains with a tube….thank you for redefining the definition of marriage that has been the same for millenia no matter what people group or place in the world one traveled to…thank you for dressing up in your frilly little girly dress when you feel feminine and insisting that you get to pee next to my daughter in the girls bathroom when you have a penis…thank you for not standing when the national anthem is played…thank you for burning the American flag and insisting that it’s your right to do so but calling me names when I say it’s wrong. Thank you for suing me when I conscientiously object on grounds of faith to doing business with you…thank you for all the things you’ve done to get men like Donald Trump and Mike Pence elected to the highest office. Now maybe they can figure out a way for us to all live freely.
I believe that babies in the womb are just that. So I get that part. But I believe that if a Christian is actively pursuing restraints and hardships on people because of their lifestyle choices, then they are judging them and deeming them guilty….But that is completely contrary to not only the Bible’s teachings, (“Don’t judge others, because you might be judged”. ) And Jesus Christ was a friend to all he encountered including an unmarried woman living with a man (who had already been married numerous times), tax collectors who were liars and cheated people of their money, a prostitue and so on. So they are hypocrites. If they were TRUE followers of Christ, the only thing they would be trying to reach the LBGT community with would be Love and the truth about Jesus Christ. Period.
I was gay all through high school and I had Christian friends all through high school. It wasn’t until college that I learned about Christ. I asked my friends from high school why they never explained to me that being gay was a sin according to the bible and they said, “We didn’t want to offend you.” And I ask you “Kkrso” is my soul worth nothing to you if you are not willing to offend me in order to potentially save me?
There’s no such thing as a baby in the womb. It’s called a fetus and it’s part of the woman’s body until it’s born.
Mr. Scahill
You wrote in an Intercept article last week (“RECKONING WITH A TRUMP PRESIDENCY AND THE ELITE DEMOCRATS WHO HELPED DELIVER IT”; 11-12-2016):
“……..so when we talk about Mike Pence……..We need to be clear: Mike Pence is a Christian supremacist. He is as radical of a Christian as Mullah Mohammed Omar was radical in his interpretation of Islam as head of the Taliban. This is a guy whose primary view of himself in the world is as a Christian warrior……..motivated by an idea that Christianity needs to be saved and needs to govern the world. And that has so many frightening consequences when you have someone that powerful, that dedicated to a religious supremacist agenda. I don’t think we’ve seen someone as much of a zealot for Christianity – his warped version of Christianity — as Mike Pence, the incoming VP……..”
That’s ridiculous of course. The radical left might be better described as the “loony” left. The extreme left commonly makes bigoted comments about the Christian right, but this is so over the top as to make you look foolish. Hopefully the Taliban are far more radical compared to moderate Islam – or we should begin deportation tomorrow! Taliban treatment of women, gays and minorities is well chronicled (in war and in government). Punishments included lopping off body parts, stoning to death for various crimes and death for blasphemy. Women were forced out of teaching when the Taliban took power leaving children without any education. Under Mullah Omar, the Taliban committed massacres directed at civilian populations which have gone on throughout the duration of the war. According to Wikipedia:
“……According to a 55-page report by the United Nations, the Taliban, while trying to consolidate control over northern and western Afghanistan, committed systematic massacres against civilians. UN officials stated that there had been “15 massacres” between 1996 and 2001. They also said, that “[t]hese have been highly systematic and they all lead back to the [Taliban] Ministry of Defense or to Mullah Omar himself….. In 1998, the United Nations accused the Taliban of denying emergency food by the UN’s World Food Programme to 160,000 hungry and starving people “for political and military reasons”.……. The Taliban were condemned internationally for their brutal repression of women…….. On Wednesday, the Taleban ordered the execution of three men for sodomy in the southern town of Kandahar, southern Afghanistan. They were ordered to be buried alive under a pile of stones and a wall was pushed on top of them by a tank…..Their lives were to be spared if they survived for 30 minutes and were still alive when the stones were removed…….”
Needless to say, this is seventh century justice. Because Mike Pence supported typical Christian conservative causes such as opposition to abortion, the defense of Marriage Act (and others) hardly makes Pence a Christian Taliban. Being anti-abortion is certainly much different than supporting stoning to death of people for various reasons. I am not certain that Pence supports the death penalty for gays, or cutting off limbs for theft and so on. I doubt he would support the death penalty for blasphemy – or naming his dog, Muhammad. Maybe you have some really radical legislation introduced by Pence which proves he is a member of the Christian Taliban. He served in the House of Representatives for 12 years, but I doubt it. The inference is ridiculous, but par for the course for the extreme left.
I think most of what is written here is rubbish but who knows. Trump is an amoral huckster and he used those skills to become POTUS. The fools who took his bluster seriously will be disappointed; no doubt he is an Atheist or at least, an Agnostic but that’s the worst thing you can be in the land of righteous hypocrisy. Obama was very little like what he was foolishly believed to be by his supporters; he was and is a corporate lawyer and he had very little management experience when he was elected and his presidency has been a failed effort. Remember, he used to be against Gay Marriage and only came around when hollyhood made it the thing to do. Trump is the first POTUS since FDR who is independently wealthy and he owes very few favors to the establishment, especially the media/hollyhood; he can and may be his own man. I forget the VP who said the position was not worth spit but assuming Trump lives, I would not worry about Pence, he will be used as second banana to run errands. Trump in business expected and got results and with a little luck he will not have to compromise as much as most. If you are concerned with racism, sexism etc., you just may be pleased; he has always promoted women and if he carries out the policy of ending free trade and illegal immigration and rebuilding the inner cities and allowing black kids to get a decent education, he may be the best President for the Black working class since LBJ. As to climate change; nothing serious has been or will be done until a major catastrophe overtakes us and it’s likely too late now anyhow. Hillary would have been another failed Obama without the class and she may have started a serious war; thankfully we will never know.
“[…] If you are concerned with racism, sexism etc., you just may be pleased; he has always promoted women […]
Unlikely. Partisans care little about actual behavior. They passionately care only about signaling their utterly fictitious virtues to other like-minded partisans who eagerly respond with grooming behavior. Everyone in the tribe goes home with a trophy!
Elections are government sponsored performance festivals (most like a pig-calling contest) which reliably draw second-rate talent during obligatory seasons of intense political “messaging” which rains down on the public like a swarm of locusts every four years. The only winners are establishment pols, lawyers, TV networks and other political agents. Everyone else looses. By design. (The system definitely is NOT “broken”!)
The dedicated echo chambers visited by faithful partisans resonate for months with noise like British footballers in a perpetual grudge match where mayhem and murder may be uncommon but are not unknown.
Just when the most intensely vile echos have finally died down, the whole karmic cycle cranks up anew. Democracy!
FINALLY, Get this Country back on track. Cry me a freakin river. You think I cried when we had obama for 8 years? Freaking obama bowing to other leaders. Please Democrats leave this country and go to some island, that way no one will offend your precious feelings. Crush the LGBT BLAH BLAH BLAH Community, PROTECT FAMILY!!!! Consider yourselves lucky hillary didnt win, because all you do is rally through streets crying about Trump winning but if hillary won, We (the silent majority) would be taking all you cry baby dems out and take our Country back. A country originally founded on laws that do not seem to exist anymore. Consider yourselves lucky showdowns arent a legal way of solving problems.
LOL!!!!…. Seriously…..HAHA! The only Kabal is that of Hillary, Obama and The overlord of all things evil and wrong with this country…. George Soros! This article is more of the propaganda peddled by the billionaire globalist. At least half of the country is AWAKE lol.
I always like how people think god isn’t doing a good enough job on being god…like the world is going all wrong because god stepped back from the plate just so they could butt in, fudge a few of god’s rules on just how to treat people in general, and then everything will be perfect
I really didn’t want Trump as President but there was no way I would ever vote for a murderous, elitist pathological liar like Clinton and her sex addict husband. However I must say that I am thoroughly enjoying watching liberals having complete meltdowns and soiling themselves in fear. Maybe they will have complete psychological breaks and we can round them up and institutionalize them.
Point of this article is well-taken, but calling Pence a militant and a jihadist and so on is lazy and needlessly hyperbolic. Pence and his ilk haven’t taken up arms—they’re more akin to the Muslim Brotherhood than ISIS.
IF his PAC (Principles Exalt a Nation) added the initials “C.E” (as in biblical references) the new acronym would be ” P.E.N.C.E ” – are we witnessing his “ascension” ?
Or it could be Principles Exalt a Nation In Spirituality (PENIS), which would bring new atmosphere to the stiffening of holy resolve as well as the coming of the Lord.
My Momma done told me that youse bysekshuals all got evil durty minds.
(That’s funny, Maisie.)
Why, thank you, Doug! I found myself hoping it wasn’t too irreverent, and then hoping that it was.
“Mine eyes have seen the glory. . .”
Thanks for making me laugh Maisie!
Unless you’re referring to the Church of England, or maybe the Catholic Encyclopedia, C.E. is a specifically non-Biblical term. It is the abbreviation for “Common Era,” used in place of the long-accepted (in predominately-Christian culture) AD (anno Domini, “year of Our Lord”).
Whenever I think “Church of England” I’m reminded of that line of Hitchens’, “a religion founded on the family values of Henry VIII.”
I’m Jewish born-again believer in the Lord Jesus Christ or what religious people call a Messianic Jew although I do not like that term. I did not vote for Donald Trump however I do think as corny as it sounds we need to give him a chance. I have a couple of disabilities and I am on what the government calls entitlements and if the Republican party has what they say its way is I could be homeless with the new legislation as I have no family. My salvation comes from Jesus finished work on the cross. I am crazy wild madly in love with Jesus Christ. In the Bible Jesus almost never said anything about politics. He said these two things Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. And the pilot he said you would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above. I have only voted into election Cycles in the 60 years of my life. In the Bible the Lord says that he puts in power those that he would put in power and he takes out of power those who would have out of power. I believe that voting for me personally is a sin because it is not my business the governments of this world. My business is to keep my eyes on Jesus Christ through prayer through his word through contemplating his presence in my life. I am so sorry I voted I’ve only voted in one of their election cycle ever in my life. Everybody that I know that shares my faith most of them voted for Donald Trump. I was not allowed to share my political views and less they were Pro Republican. Just because people call themselves Christian and just because they hate minorities and gays and creative people doesn’t mean they actually have a relationship with Jesus Christ. Only the Lord knows who belongs to him and who does not. The so-called religious right Mike Pence James Dobson Focus on the Family all that stuff and all those type of organizations the Lord himself did not have a family the Apostle Paul was never married and did not have a family John the Baptist never married and never had a family following Jesus Christ has nothing to do with family values. Following Jesus Christ means that I am an alien in this world waiting for my master to come for me. To sum it up I am born again and saved and read the Bible everyday. It is my intention never to vote again but to put my confidence in the Kingdom of Heaven which is the true government that I answer to which I shall be in after the Lord takes me away from this life. Earth is temporary Heaven is forever. All this mumbo-jumbo garbage going on down here on Earth the trick is to persevere and keep my eyes on Jesus regardless of RV chatter that the world throws at me. I am a Jesus Freak I play guitar I love rock and roll music and abstract art I do not own any weapons of any kind I have never owned any weapons. My weapon is the word of God the holy scriptures I hear a lot of talk lately about God Guns and patriotism show me where that is in the Bible if anybody could show me a verse that lynx God Guns and patriotism using those words in the Bible I will send you a check for $100. That’s a man’s ways are pleasing in his sight he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him. I did not vote for Hillary either. I will never vote again it cost me too much emotional stress I think it would be much better to sing a song of praise to God on My Guitar God already has chosen the next president for 2020 just like God put Barack Obama in power and just let God put Donald Trump and Power it says in Romans chapter 9 that God raised feral up to display God’s power and that God would be magnified and glorified Romans chapter 9 read it that means God put Hitler and where he wanted him and he also put Mother Teresa where he wanted her God is in control this is his ball game the sooner you realize that the more glory god gets in the less we do May the name of the Lord Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit be glorified forever and ever to the glory of God the father in the name of Jesus Christ may the Lord richly bless all of you with joy peace contentment well-being mercy and Grace your brother Harris
What this emphasizes more than anything is that the battle for the soul of America is largely a battle for the soul of Christianity, or what is passed off for it. This is, obviously, not the Christianity of Pope Francis, let alone a more liberal congregation. And while of course much of the dispute may be a mere projection of worldly differences into the pulpit, we should not minimize that there is a deeper religious wellspring than any modern politics. Jesus is the one who said “let he who is without sin cast the first stone”, and never executed a man. He praised the virtue of Samaritans and fulfilled the prayers of centurions. Christianity has a right, a history, a duty to be a better religion than this.
I feel like you took a few lines from a good film and put your own stuff in between
The Pope is a sexist homophobe despite his media derived star power. Seen any Female Priests lately? How about Practicing Homosexuals accepted in the RC Church. Birth control or abortion; don’t hold yer breath. People are such fools; constantly believing the hype over the actions.
Mr. Scahill
“…….Pence’s ascent to the second most powerful position in the U.S. government is a tremendous coup for the radical religious right. Pence — and his fellow Christian supremacist militants……. Trump is a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors…….. “The enemy, to them, is secularism. They want a God-led government. That’s the only legitimate government,” contends Jeff Sharlet, author of two books on the radical religious right……. but Pence’s selection portends a governing apocalypse…..”
That’s hilarious! You are the co-founder of the Intercept which is sponsored by a multi-billionaire – and you are now (finally) singing the alarm about Pence? Pence was selected by Trump as his running mate in July. You had 3-4 months to warn everyone in the world of the extremist philosophy of the “Christian Supremacist” VP nominee – yet you chose to ignore the story which you so passionately have written – until one week AFTER the election. Guess what, Mr. Scahill. Trump and Pence were already elected! Did you ever think when you were writing this article that you might be a little late?
How many people would kill for a position to influence public opinion on a Presidential election – before the election? You ignored the story about Pence – plain and simple – until it was too late. It’s not like you had to do a huge amount of research since you bragged about writing a book which covered the subject matter of this article. How concerned could you really be, Mr. Scahill? Did you ever endorse Hillary, or write an article (before the election) imploring people to vote for HRC despite her (pro-Israel, pro-corporate, pro-Wall Street) deficiencies as a candidate in the face of such a threat to the world? Jesus, Mr. Scahill – a “Christian Supremacist” is now the Vice President of the United States of America. The Christian Caliphate is now a reality!
Ignore this copy. I thought I lost the first post.
Vacuous.
I admit, my response is a bit vacuous. Still, you would think that if the world was at stake, you might want to let everyone know BEFORE the elections. It’s a bit like warning everyone about global warning AFTER the ice caps have melted. The article was a little over the top anyway.
Thanks.
The author conveniently omitted prefixes in the first paragraph. Illegal (immigrants) and radical (Muslims). A spin called journalism.
Mr. Scahill
“…….Pence’s ascent to the second most powerful position in the U.S. government is a tremendous coup for the radical religious right. Pence — and his fellow Christian supremacist militants……. Trump is a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors…….. “The enemy, to them, is secularism. They want a God-led government. That’s the only legitimate government,” contends Jeff Sharlet, author of two books on the radical religious right……. but Pence’s selection portends a governing apocalypse…..”
That’s hilarious. You are the co-founder of the Intercept which is sponsored by a multi-billionaire – and you are now (finally) singing the alarm about Pence? Pence was selected by Trump as his running mate in July. You had 3-4 months to warn everyone in the world of the extremist philosophy of the “Christian Supremacist” VP nominee – yet you chose to ignore the story which you so passionately have written – until one week AFTER the election. Guess what, Mr. Scahill. Trump and Pence were already elected! Did you ever think when you were writing this article that you might be a little late?
How many people would kill for a position to influence public opinion on a Presidential election – before the election? You ignored the story about Pence – plain and simple – until it was too late. It’s not like you had to do a huge amount of research since you bragged about writing a book which included the subject material of this article. How concerned could you really be, Mr. Scahill? Did you ever endorse Hillary, or write an article before the election imploring people to vote for HRC despite her (pro-Israel, pro-corporate, pro-Wall Street) deficiencies as a candidate in the face of such a threat to the world? Jesus, Mr. Scahill – a “Christian Supremacist” is now the Vice President of the United States of America. The Christian caliphate is now a reality!
Thanks for the info. Looks like Trump may not have been such a bad idea after all. Despite the tone of the article and clear bias the other direction, Pence looks like a nice leader to be in charge for a change.
And speaking of Jeff Sharlet, lets also recall that Hillary belonged to her own right wing dominionist cult for at least 25 years, as was thoroughly documented in his book “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power” as well as numerous liberal blogs and MSM articles.
perhaps that’s where she derived her irrepressible desire to bring about the end of the world by drawing Russia into a nuclear confrontation, as she appeared so determined to accomplish.
But can an uptight christian supremacist VP really learn to share the White House with a swinging godless hedonist President? I guess we’ll find out…
Mr. Scahill is deluded (or maybe reads the New York Times too much) if he really believes Trump campaigned on a platform of “open bigotry, threats against immigrants and Muslims, and blatant misogyny.” Enforcing immigration laws is good for immigrants and non-immigrants alike. 42% of women and 27% of Latino voters cast their ballot for Trump.
There’s no point commenting on the rest of the article, because it’s all in the same pointless negative spirit. Mr. Scahill has little regard for truth, less for constructive social discourse.
W R F ed!
As one reads all this, it has been going and building up to today’s political reality and where we stand today; sadly for many it is not the way for us, and yet for many years it was not the way for many of them; irony here is payback,republicans have been pissed off since the New Deal deals and the Supreme Court decisions of the 50’s and 60’s… and now for the first time in a very long time they are going to be dictating policy, sadly for many years to come, for the rest of us….
[[[republicans have been pissed off since the New Deal deals and the Supreme Court decisions of the 50’s and 60’s… and now for the first time in a very long time they are going to be dictating policy, sadly for many years to come, for the rest of us…. ]]]
Tax rates in the Bible are 10% (aka tithe).
Tax rates in the Bible as SLAVERY (20% under Pharoah in Egypt… Genesis 46 to the end of Genesis)
Tax Rates under New Deal USGovt for the last 70 years — 25% to 97%. (FYI, The “New Deal” became the “New Slavery”)
Which do you prefer? The 13th Amendment says that slavery is VOLUNTARY.
Have you read this?
You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.
Geezus…. You gonna quote the NIV to me???? It’s the most corrupt edition on the planet.
Financed in part by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Try the Geneva Bible instead. The KJV used the Tynsdale NT… and James ordered the redo of the OT *because* of the Geneva.
The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 5:
~From the 1599 Geneva Bible
That’s an example of DEFIANCE.
Think about it.
Defiance? Of what? These verses are from the Sermon on the Mount, from the section thereof in which Jesus delineates some differences between the old teaching (covenant, testament) and the new.
The essential messages of these verses are not to resist evil with evil and not to seek revenge, to submit to small injuries for the sake of peace, not to “take the law into one’s hands” and to be charitable.
Maybe some of the fire-and-brimstone “Christians” who are actually Paulists, or wacked-out snake handlers obsessed with the vengeful God of so much of the Old Testament can come up with an interpretation that involves defiance, but it would certainly not be consistent to the words ascribed to Jesus.
>>> Defiance? Of what? These verses are from the Sermon on the Mount, from the section thereof in which Jesus delineates some differences between the old teaching (covenant, testament) and the new. <<<
The Establishment of the Jewish Hierarchy — who was also enslaved by the Romans to do their bidding.
Jesus was working in a political minefield… he knew everything was "wrong"… but he had to figure out how to get the message across without anyone being able to say…. "SEE… MR CAESAR… HE'S PROMOTING OPEN REBELLION" … LIKE THE DNC RIOTERS.
He wasn't. To translate more distinctly, that section (as addressed to the specific target audience) was… "they can take everything you have… but, don't let them take your soul."
When it comes to soul-stealing… that's an entirely different subject.
First. The translation made no difference in the clear core content of the message. So you act as though you know a lot about the NT but that was an error discrediting your claim. Also the idea that the sermon on the mount was about defiance is wrongheaded. It is about the transformative power of love. It is the idea that the goal of the spirit in a confrontation is to change an oppressor, to open the heart and mind of a bully to the humanity and courage of those being abused and to let them see the power of the spirit in those who are free from fear and hate.
Your ” Look dumbasses…” interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount is obviously your own egotistical desire to be proven right and insult those who don’t share your private version of Christianity. Jesus taught his disciples to share food, to heal the sick and enter homes that welcome your good news. Instead you come into a community interested in an outsider investigate form of journalism and insult people and when they don’t receive your message or express interest, instead of moving on you hammer down in belligerent arguments.
You are full of nutty unproven ideas like Obama is a Muslim. Or Hillary worships Minerva. You say taxes should be 10% or they aren’t Biblical. Where is this Biblical paradise? I personally would be fine with 10% because there would be no empire at that rate, but there would be a lot of spending cuts. Let’s see anyone win the vote promising to abolish social security and Medicare.
So far I think your effect among Intercept commenters is to confirm that Pence represents the worst possible theocratic Jihadism: violent, presenting conspiracy theories as facts, insulting other commenters, and twisting the teachings of Jesus to deny their obvious meaning.
[[[ So far I think your effect among Intercept commenters is to confirm that Pence represents the worst possible theocratic Jihadism: violent, presenting conspiracy theories as facts, insulting other commenters, and twisting the teachings of Jesus to deny their obvious meaning. ]]]
If it’s so obvious, then why are we on the brink of WW III and/or Civil War???
The rest of your post is just more evidence supporting the obvious answer to my previous question.
I’ll say it again…. “dumbass.” God (by whatever name) had to suffer a gory, excruciating torture session and horrific crucifixion (you suffocate to death) of his only son (and thus himself and his Posterity)… because his companion-wannabees are dumbasses. They can’t see the light.
Until you figure it out, that’s YOUR destiny, too.
[[[ These verses are from the Sermon on the Mount, from the section thereof in which Jesus delineates some differences between the old teaching (covenant, testament) and the new. ]]]
First, let me translate the SOTM and the purpose of Jesus for you….
Basically, it can be summarized as follows… “Look dumbasses… I’ve been telling you all along the right way to do things… but you are to f’n stupid to figure it out. I guess I’ll have to inhabit a living being in the flesh… and show your sorry asses. Then, lets see how long it takes you to NOT figure it out. I’ll give you a lot of time… but, in the end, I’ll just have to let you kill each other off. Then, I’ll say… SEE, I TOLD YOU SO. IT’S ABOUT TIME!”
Period.
ps…
BTW, did you know that Book/Chapter/Section is
MY GOLD STANDARD to determine whether I’m dealing with a sociopath or psychopath???
See,… *I* already know how YOU interpret/understand it.
Why? Cuz you are a typical sociopath or psychopath… depending on how and why you present yourself.
I know a few church ministers that are that way, too.
No, the quote is from the nrsv. I would never quote from the niv, for the reason you mentioned.
So do you really do this stuff Jesus asked his followers to do? You turn the other cheek? You don’t refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you?
>>> So do you really do this stuff Jesus asked his followers to do? You turn the other cheek? You don’t refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you?<<<
I really do my best, to.
In modern day parlance… I guess you could say,… "Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice… Shame on me."
Ps… here’s a better one for you…. in addition to what I already said…
Rev 22
[18] For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:
[19] And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.
[20] He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
So I guess you’d best remember Matthew 5 in case you ever come across someone wanting to borrow some cash :)
Borrow…. or Covet — aka con me out of??
ps… borrow or covet???
Proverbs 22:7King James Version (KJV)
7 The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.
Did Jesus say, “Do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you, unless they are covetous”? No, that would be adding to scripture, and therefore adding to your own misery (according to your interpretation of Revelation, which I don’t really agree with, btw) Your responsibility, according to Jesus, is to give to the beggar regardless.
Nice that you’re back to the KJV, stickler for accuracy that you are
>>> Nice that you’re back to the KJV, stickler for accuracy that you are <<<
Tyndale is actually older than the Geneva by about 40 years… (KJV)…
Regardless,… KJV NT and Geneva are *almost* identical. That's where you've got to look at both the Geneva, the Tyndale (KJV NT), and the closest original Aramaic side by side.
BUT, FOR PURPOSES OF MY POST, I SEARCHED THE INTERNET AND IMMEDIATELY GOT THE KJV.
Bite me.
>>> Your responsibility, according to Jesus, is to give to the beggar regardless. <<<
I see you as a beggar. A sociopath at the least.
Teach a man to fish… feed him for a lifetime. Give a man a fish… you feed his sociopathy for a day.
wow.. i heard about the bury-the-fetus thing… but reading this artible i learned that i didn t even know half of what this lunatic was up to and believes in…
This is America, where there is categorical separation of Church and State. Traditionalism is supposed to assert and not deny this (“The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”- John Adams). I have no idea why grown people want to seriously believe fairy tales about wizards walking on water and coming back from the dead as holy zombies, but such nonsense has absolutely no place in politics. I strongly suspect stuffy religion bores the hell out of Trump, and I can’t see him putting very much conviction into Christian supremacy since he sees himself as a playboy.
Thomas Jefferson:
Then, and in that case, you’ll like this:
HILLARY CLINTON WORSHIPS MINERVA.
QADDAFI WAS DISMEMBERED BY THE “GLOBAL COMMUNITY” IN THE NAME OF THE GLOBAL RELIGION OF MINERVA.
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/5680
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05791990 Date: 12/31/2015
RELEASE IN
PART B5
From: H
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2011 3:04 PM
To: ‘sullivanjj@state.gov’
Subject: Re: Latest
Ok–and Minerva agrees.
From: Sullivan, Jacob J [mailto:SullivanJJ@state.gov]
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2011 02:44 PM
To: H
Subject: Latest
Do you think the last paragraph violates the owl/minerva rule?
They are fine with the last paragraph.
STATEMENT BY SECRETARY CLINTON
Holding the Qaddafi Government Accountable
The United States strongly condemns the ongoing violence and human rights violations committed by the government of Libya against its own people. As President Obama said, these actions violate international norms and every standard of common decency. They must stop.
We are moving quickly on a series of steps to hold the Libyan government accountable for its violation of human rights and to mobilize a strong response from the international community.
Religion is just a tool of social control and a means of garnering votes. Many so-called “Christian” political leaders aren’t even religious. George W. Bush would regularly mock his religious supporters behind their backs.
How incredibly cynical and manipulative of them! I don’t doubt you’re right, and this seems to be just one more way one “side” of the united duopoly (Democrat/Republican) pretends to distinguish itself from the other when in fact they’re ultimately servants of the same ruling class. Both sides pursue ungodly corporatism, militarism and imperialism, but the Republicans do it with reactionary pseudo-spiritual pomposity while the Democrats get the same results with an appearance of martyred reluctance and fake piety. Interestingly both seem to promote a God who resembles the surveillance state, voyeuristically watching and judging the people until it becomes time to punish righteously.
[[[ Religion is just a tool of social control and a means of garnering votes. Many so-called “Christian” political leaders aren’t even religious.]]]
Got news for you: Government by psychopaths is a means of social control and garnering votes too… it’s just another religion.
PROOF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZsVP2WoE9E
“Progressivism” = “Communism”
Welcome to My Nightmare — Alice Cooper
I don’t guess there are a lot of “votes” “garnered” or otherwise exchanged in DPRK.
Ooh! Scary!
“Do anything you want with me — roas’ me, hang me, skin me, drown me — but please, Br’er Fox, don’t fling me in dat Commie brier-patch!”
All social issues are weapons of political control and distraction, most often used to whitewash massive theft.
The U.S.is probably the most religious of all developed countries. My European friends freak out when they come here and see all the churches, for example, and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area where we have a much lower percentage than the rest of the country. If you think that our phony separation between church and state will save us from assholes like pence, you’re in for a rude awakening.
I don’t mind Christian superstitions. Kind of humorous, really.
I do mind people trying to force their superstitions on me.
[[[ I don’t mind Christian superstitions. Kind of humorous, really.
I do mind people trying to force their superstitions on me. ]]]
Tax rates in the Bible are 10% (aka tithe).
Tax rates in the Bible as SLAVERY (20% under Pharoah in Egypt… Genesis 46 to the end of Genesis)
Tax Rates under New Deal USGovt for the last 70 years — 25% to 97%. (FYI, The “New Deal” became the “New Slavery”)
Which do you prefer?
Ditto with the cynicism, weirdo
I resent the use of such inflammatory language when describing Christians, in what I feel is an effort to demonize Christianity.
God will be the judge ultimately and we will all have to accept or reject His plan of salvation. I therefore find that it is quite the responsible thing to do, to follow His instruction, His Word, His Son.
So it is not out of hatred that we try to live by Gods word, but out of an abundance of caution and love for God, ourselves and mankind as a whole.
The easiest thing for me to do would be to just blend in and not make any waves but that’s selfish. Christ suffered a Roman crucifiction for His stand for God and against the sin of mankind. If that isn’t love then I don’t know what is.
[[[ I resent the use of such inflammatory language when describing Christians, in what I feel is an effort to demonize Christianity. Christ suffered a Roman crucifiction for His stand for God and against the sin of mankind. If that isn’t love then I don’t know what is. ]]]
Look at it this way.
The Democrats built FEMA camps for those who you have described.
Now, those you have described are now in charge of Democrat’s FEMA camps.
That’s why they are scared shitless and rioting in the streets.
I see Mr. Scahill is still on the trail of ze blackwater. They should have a banner couple of years.
I’m a total progressive and deeply skeptical about Pence as VP. But I could not get past the introduction and particularly the sentence: “Trump is a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors.” I am pretty sick of reading stuff like this.
I don’t mind bias per se, but I want facts and I don’t want to sift through vitriol to get them. Suppose it is all 100% true. Can I share this article with someone on the other side to change their opinion? No way. People tend not to listen when they are being screamed at. Personally, I thought that being more inclusive and less alienating was a lesson that the Left should learn from this past election.
I like The Intercept and I get news here that I just don’t see in other outlets. But this is reinforcing the echo chamber on this website and the Left in general. You can see from other comments here that people are turned off by this. I’ll probably try to read the article again later when I have more patience. I really do want to know more about Pence. But for now I’m just going to leave it.
i am not going to live under christian oppression any more than i would live under muslim oppression. Keep you religion OUT of my life. Plenty of us are willing to revolt in.order to to keep religion in its place. This country is SECULAR and its going to.stay that way.
It does feel a bit like a Monty Python sketch, doesn’t it? On matters of expanding war-fronts, drone murder, whistleblowers and domestic mass-surveillance – President Obama’s been much worse than anyone thought possible. Now, combining Trump’s torture “and hell of a lot worse,” Christian supremacists and the give him a chancers – could all make for a realty version of Monty Python’s “Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition” series. Too interesting times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WJXHY2OXGE
this article is complete garbage. the hate, bigotry and racism and all the other labels the left likes to use against those who don’t share their views. is exactly what the progleft engages in. and it’s why repubs won. until they figure that out they’ll keep losing. America is tired of the lefts insults and the biased media.
Pence and his faith will be powerless to halt the following: Once Dr. Trump forces big American multi-nationals to return home the trillions they have hidden offshore — valueless profits made off successive QEs — the US Greenback will collapse because there is way too much cash floating around the USA to make it worthwhile, and the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP) will be the world’s economic super power. That’s the outcome of endlessly printing dollars that are backed by nothing other than hope. The UK and Europe will likely suffer the same fate — provided the EU survives next year’s elections in member countries.
shhhhhhhh. do you hear that? it sounds like a giant flushing terlet.
they could instead print dollars backed by hope and change. we saw how much further that went.
Donald Trump is not young.
i’m gonna pray real hard for his health.
1 spanish inquisition was more than enuf for this small planet.
What made you think he was Christian?
I really think that Pence should take that bible he carries and shove it up his ass.
I read the whole article and I am generally aligned with your viewpoints. But I will not stand next to bad journalism. Why are you giving us Pence’s 2002 ACLU rating? That was 3 elections ago…if his rating rose in the last 14 years, that should be part of the story…
After reading the all of the Anti-Trump posts, I’ve come to this conclusion:
The Intercept is run by and read by conspiracy theorists.
Anti-Trump? We’re not so much “anti-Trump” as we are just regular sane people. The Trump thing just kinda flows from that naturally. Anyone who can’t see that is already lost.
I’m sane. I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that Hillary would have brought the world to a catastrophic end.
Maybe you can see this:
HILLARY CLINTON WORSHIPS MINERVA.
QADDAFI WAS DISMEMBERED BY THE “GLOBAL COMMUNITY” IN THE NAME OF THE GLOBAL RELIGION OF MINERVA.
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/5680
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05791990 Date: 12/31/2015
RELEASE IN
PART B5
From: H
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2011 3:04 PM
To: ‘sullivanjj@state.gov’
Subject: Re: Latest
Ok–and Minerva agrees.
From: Sullivan, Jacob J [mailto:SullivanJJ@state.gov]
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2011 02:44 PM
To: H
Subject: Latest
Do you think the last paragraph violates the owl/minerva rule?
They are fine with the last paragraph.
STATEMENT BY SECRETARY CLINTON
Holding the Qaddafi Government Accountable
The United States strongly condemns the ongoing violence and human rights violations committed by the government of Libya against its own people. As President Obama said, these actions violate international norms and every standard of common decency. They must stop.
We are moving quickly on a series of steps to hold the Libyan government accountable for its violation of human rights and to mobilize a strong response from the international community.
“I’m sane. I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that Hillary would have brought the world to a catastrophic end.”
The second sentence kind of disproves the first. While Neoliberal policies suck and generally disenfranchise the electorate, it (she) is hardly a world ending catalyst. Really, the Neoliberal agenda simply seeks to keep every part of the system and its beneficiaries in perpetual, secure stasis. A statement of the nature you made, and generally make throughout your posts, really just kind of reveals a mentality where someone, some website, television or radio content, told you Hillary is the opponent and therefore be considered the right hand of Armageddon.
Seriously, dude, she’s just bad policy and that’s kind of the extent of it. And this article? Scahill does a bang up job listing evidence of this guy’s designs for USA as Christian Theocracy, and the tone suggests it might not be good for all the rest previously created equal… but that’s something one has to arrive at themselves.
I thought a truth seeker was one that actively goes into the world listening, learning, refraining from judgement and generally keeping an open mind. Active, engaged debate encouraged, of course. The gist I get from your posts suggests a mind that’s already made its decisions about the state of things. Truth vs. Meme, maybe it’s just all in the eyes of the beholder.
Article sure paints a scary picture of a world where Trump dies in office. Trump is like the Predator. Take him down, and through Pence, he’ll take the country with him. It worked for Bush.
Why didn’t the Clinton campaign highlight this aspect of the Trump-Pence ticket? Especially during the VP debate, where all Tim Kaine talked about was Donald Trump, making Pence appear to be the good cop on their ticket.
An interesting predicament for liberal supporters of Israel— NPI’s Richard Spencer discusses white supremacist Samuel Dickson:
“Dickson challenges racial nationalists to begin working towards the birth of a new kind of social and political order—a White Ethno-State on the North American continent, a project analogous to the creation of Israel in the first half of the 20th century.”
Ouch! So I either have to agree with this Nazi shit or denounce Israel? The time is coming for people to be honest about what they believe in.
“I’m sane.” But not quite the sharpest tool in the shed.
Don’t be so hard on yourself.
Christian, is this a joke. There is nothing christian about this man. A Christian man would have no part of Trump or his team that is full with racism and hate. A man who divided our America. A Christian man would have stepped down. I am a Christian woman and because of my faith alone and what I was taught by the bible and home, I would never vote for a person like Trump. But you call yourself A Christian. You are an embarrassment to the Christian world. If you are Christian you would take a step back and realize that the bible states, we would put a man in charge who will bring hate into our world and divide the union of our country, he would make our Allies Enemies and our Enemies Allies. Sound familiar. U are now part of this destruction. Pray its not true.
TRUMP is the best president Christians could hope for. All these accusations of racism and bigotry are BS.
You’re confusing what Christ said and did with actual Christians. Christianity is evil as hell and Pence is the ultimate Christian.
What a bunch of whiny losers. If the VP was a muslim would you call him the most powerful islamic supremacist? Nah because that would be muh racism and muh islamophobia. Stupid hypocrites. GOD BLESS President TRUMP and VP Pence!
The reason we have to take the religious Right’s nonsense seriously – aside from one of them actually being the new VP – is the obscene amount of money they have. We have a predominantly conservative Congress thanks to the Koch Brothers’ money.
The police, military, and often the courts protect these people’s interests.
By what means can ordinary citizens oppose this?
You forgot the democratic candidates and the protesters being funded by Soros, hypocrite.
“the obscene amount of money they have. We have a predominantly conservative Congress thanks to the Koch Brothers’ money.
The police, military, and often the courts protect these people’s interests.”
“By what means can ordinary citizens oppose this?”
How about a few articles or series about this topic?
You have a predominantly conservative congress because of Barak Obama.
You mean Christian WHITE Supremacist
Typical race baiting liberal. What has Pence done that’s racist?
White supremacist, male supremacist, adulterated belief system supremacist….clearly someone who forgot the earth is round and we all pretty much walk evenly upon it
I appreciate the thoroughness of this article, but I think the term ‘Christian Jihad’ is inaccurate here. In my mind, there are many separate things wrong with Pence, and they can’t all be subsumed under the category of ‘Christian Jihad.’ His pro-war, pro-surveillance, pro-police state stances have much in common with the centrist democrats—with Clinton herself, for example—who are certainly not ‘Christian radicals.’ Secondly, it is important to recall that, no matter how risible their views might be to those who don’t share them, they have sought to acquire power through a lawful electoral process, and thereafter to exercise that power through largely lawful means (and regardless of the constitutionality of the, e.g., Patriot Act, which is abhorrent, it is still law): I hardly see how it is a Holy War, then; the aims and persons around Pence look to me more like an interest group. Granting that Pence is a zealot, I don’t see how zealotry as such makes him anomalous, or even ‘religious’—there are zealots on all sides, always. It strikes me as sensationalist (although inadvertently so, I imagine) to emphasize Pence’s religion like this—that, more than anything, the article’s focus on Pence’s faith is a way of galvanizing those who were anti-establishment liberals during the Bush years but have settled into complacency under Obama, in this case by raising up the specter a resurgent, early-aughts ‘Christian Fundamentalism,’ which seems genuinely beside the point in terms of the specific dangers in front of us. I worry it is an unnecessary, prejudicial, implicitly categorical rejection of what is presently a very (ideologically/theologically) diverse group of folks (politically active Christian Evangelicals), and therefore will merely exacerbate the divide between liberals and those Trump voters who lack ideological commitments—especially, commitments that would otherwise bind them to an increasingly fascist Trumpism—which I think is a large portion of his voters. (I already worry it is a serious error to reject all Trump supporters outright.) Conflating Trumpism with any form of Christianity (aside from, very specifically, the Christian Identity Movement) is both inaccurate and will serve to alienate potential allies against Trump and his administration, thereby empowering Trump in the process.
Why isn’t Obama thoroughly and demonstrably denouncing Donald Trump’s words and deeds? Why isn’t Obama pointing out to the people of the world that he disagrees with xenophobia, bigotry, misogyny, and religious fundamentalism?
Martin Luther King, Jr., in his famous essay “Three Ways of Meeting Opression,” states the following:
“Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. Religion reminds every man that he is his brother’s keeper. To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right. It is a way of allowing his conscience to fall asleep. At this moment the oppressed fails to be his brother’s keeper. So acquiescence — while often the easier way — is not the moral way. It is the way of the coward.”
Is Obama’s silence on Trump’s ideas as bad as those very ideas? Is Obama essentially condoning Trump’s hate? Is Obama, through inaction, basically saying that he agrees with Trump’s ideas?
The answer seems self-evident.
The alternative is to deny democracy.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a plutocracy. Which will be further strengthened by Obama’s willingness to tacitly approve Trump’s message.
You seem to assume that politicians, on average, *aren’t* misogynistic, bigoted xenophobes.
Also, Donald Trump certainly isn’t a religious fundamentalist…he’s probably an atheist.
same reason why he didn’t denounce Bush/Cheney/Clinton’s deeds, and why he elevated Reagan’s. cuz he stands for those self same deeds.
Elwood… How would you create everlasting peace on earth?
Written by a squirming atheist, who is shaking like a leaf because he didn’t get his favourite candidate. If an atheist had been elected, he would be singing praises. Jeremy is just another one of the violent anti-Trump protesters, who uses his tongue to lash out like a sword.
Or an islamic supremacist. Atheists always make excuses for them.
Well Mr. Scahill, I generally really appreciate your work. I think you are very fine investigative journalist.
Having said that, and I don’t dispute any of the positions you’ve documented VP elect Pence has taken over his political career, or his affiliation and funding by certain funders.
Having said that, I’m a little surprised you have so little faith in the American people that you think there is some way Mike Pence actually could implement his agenda (long term), and are engaging in this sort of fear mongering and hyperbole.
Do you think any attempts at forced conversion of Americans is going to work? Do you think the evangelical Christian “demographic” (age and overall numbers) is growing instead of declining in this nation? If so prove it.
Do you not think that the pushback against some of his wackier beliefs, notwithstanding the election of Trump, will be that weak given our nation’s culture, history (paranoia re: any government regardless of ideology), institutions and public sentiment?
Look nobody is trying to minimize the threat people like Pence present, but please don’t overhype it.
Simple fact is almost 50% of the American people didn’t vote for either candidate. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and those voters were younger. Now I’m not sure how America might look if that 50% ever feel inclined to be motivated and participate in American politics in whatever way, but I’d be real shocked if a majority are all hard core Pencesque loony evangelical Christians. The vast majority of evangelical loonies vote in every single election in this country and have for a very long time. They are regionally centered and don’t constitute a majority in this country. And if you think the global Catholic Church is going to join in that sort of lunacy I think you are wrong. At least not with this Pope.
And if Pence or Trump tries to overreach in such a manifest way as to attempt to topple the secular institutions and principles this nation was founded upon, or ever tried to instigate mass violence to those ends, well then maybe that scab will have to be picked off again in this country, and we’ll have a fight on our hands. That would be horrific and terribly destructive, but I’m banking on one of two things: 1) the institutional strength of America, and 2) that there are more than enough Americans to put down such an attempt if Pence tries it.
Trump is no evangelical end-timer or religious loony. He may be a lot of things, but his Presidential legacy is now on the line. And all his business dealings and those of his family. And he may be a bit of a megalomaniac, but he’s never struck me as a fundy Christian loony, and he likes being rich not a religious demagogue.
But whatever, I will sacrifice my last dollar and last drop of blood before I will ever live in a theocracy of Mike Pence or any other’s creation. And I’d bet both that enough of my fellow Americans would join me in doing likewise.
America is getting more pluralistic and more diverse, and so are its religious beliefs. Anybody, and I mean any politician who tries to change that reality through force or law I think is in for a very rude awakening and are in for a very big surprise when they attempt to conquer the West Coast of the United States of America (with its population and resources) with their religious idiocy. And if they try I say let them bring it and see what happens.
>>> America is getting more pluralistic and more diverse, and so are its religious beliefs. <<<
How's this for a current religious abortion???
http://www.sickchirpse.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Human-Sacrifice-India-Kali-Statue-670×472.jpg
Please feel free to ignore me sir or madam.
Really not sure you or I have anything meaningful to discuss that would be productive for anyone in this threads.
Thank you for your consideration. You are free to your opinions of course, but unless you have documented proof to refute some factual assertion I’ve made then please feel free to ignore my posts.
Thanks in advance.
>>> You are free to your opinions of course, but unless you have documented proof to refute some factual assertion I’ve made then please feel free to ignore my posts. <<<
I just gave you the documentation.
That's a real statue from an historical area not too far from the Taj Mahal.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-34409637
A reputable source. Imported to America with the British East India Company (you know,… the one that imposed the tea tax in Boston?)
Sweet pic – looks like a Monday afternoon at Neverland Ranch!
Podesta’s gggggggggggggggggggggggreat-grandfather.
To put this more simply: fuck Mike Pence or any religious fundamentalist whacko who attempts to yoke me or my fellow Americans into his/her theocratic lunacy. My nation is far from perfect and has some horrible sins on its collective soul, but if someone like Pence tries that shit 10s if not 100s of millions of us will go down fighting against him and his fellow travelers. And I mean fighting as in physically resisting through force of arms. This is a big nation with a lot of diverse people. And there is no nation America’s size in the world with the exception of Pakistan that could be considered a theocracy. I think there are very reassuring reasons why that is. And even Pakistan isn’t like Saudi Arabia or the other gulf monarchies.
So I’m not particularly concerned about Mike Pence turning America into Biblestania anytime soon or in my lifetime or anybody else’s for that matter.
How about some Vedic/Hindi/Yoga??
http://www.sickchirpse.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Human-Sacrifice-India-Kali-Statue-670×472.jpg
Thanks for a good straightforward reply. Agreed.
We need to keep it simple.
Do you want all the woen in your family to have 11 to 17 pregnancies in a lifetime?
Do lgtb people as mush in taxes as everyone else or get a discount in taxes = their lesser rights?
Do not care who is in the next toilet? Kids are 30-40% abused by someone in THEIR FAMILY AND 90% by someone they know and trust well– priest. Public facilities are relatively safe from people– but maybe not germs!
Ditto, women are killed by a family member, spouse or intimate relation over 60+% of time.
Xian– answer me this, what kind of god would kill nis child.
Gotaa a few more, stopping here.
Believe me, the incoming Republican administration is going to have enough on their plate to keep them occupied without this sort of foolishness. Making ‘America Great Again’ is about as far from a theocracy as one can get for most Americans. Pence’s propensity for jamming his beliefs down America’s throat will be DOA. Thanks for playing, Mike.
I’ll join you!!!
Hahahaha
The American people just voted in Donald Trump as president.
Or … gasp! … is that why you have such faith?
@ Milton
About 50% of the eligible voters in America voted. That means the Trump/Pence platform had about 25% of the American public’s support.
After all these years I never expected this sort of fear from you or lack of understanding about what just happened.
If you honestly believe Pence and Trump are going to attempt to turn this entire country into a theocracy via the powers of the federal government, I’d say you’re as loony as Pence. The judiciary alone is not filled with a bunch of Roy Moore’s, and even with the power of appointing the next couple Trump still has to go through all three of Roberts, Kennedy, and probably Thomas to get there and they be ideologues, but I’ve never seen them flagrantly throw the First Amendment out the window.
So sorry we’ll have to agree to disagree again.
Obviously we live in different countries.
The one I live in saw torture approved and condoned by both parties. While more, um, strident Americans “NO MUSLIMS” signs in front of mosques.
The country I live in now executes people based upon secret “evidence” with missiles from the sky as if lightning bolts thrown by some vengeful god. Both parties approve.
The country I live in still captures and imprisons people indefinitely without evidence or trial.
The country I live in allows its police force to kill citizens of the wrong hue with impunity — indeed, holding large rallies in support of the murders and murderers.
The country I live holds more people in jail per capita than any other country on earth. These people are disproportionately of non-white heritage and almost exclusively impoverished.
The country I live in has just elected a man know for giggling over sexual assaults, a man who’s determined to overturn various court decision like Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges.
The country I live allows private corporations to poison its lakes and rivers. air and seas, destroy the bedrock and foul the aquifers with carcenogens. Even national parks aren’t exempt.
The country I live in allows companies to kill citizens with defective products while public institutions that might have restrained these companies are condemned, defunded, and dismantled.
And all this BEFORE the taking of the presidential oath by a known cheat, fraud, liar and conman aided and abetted by his pious henchman advocating medieval and biblical science.
I could go on, but frankly it’s too goddamned depressing.
Whatever country you live in, let me know because I’ll move there.
The country I live in is already a fucking nightmare and it’s about to get much, much worse.
And, oh yeah, before I forget, global warming, perpetual war, an impending roundup of 11 million Mexicans, billionaires subverting justice and rationality to further enrich themselves and Russian agents subverting American institutions and traditions.
I won’t apologize for being so disagreeable because I have the feeling that if a person doesn’t say what he/she thinks– that if you don’t oppose these evils with all your soul when you’re alive — then that person will be even less vocal after they’re dead.
Despite the good Germans remaining silent, they died along with the Nazis.
I’ve never remained silent, and don’t plan to in the future.
But if you can’t see that all the things your rail against were a function of the “bipartisan consensus” that Glenn and I are always talking about on the “big things”, then get prepared to rage at the dying of the light.
Your hopeless drivel is starting to annoy me. I live in Oregon and you are free to move here as you see fit.
Like I said, not sure what part of only 25% of eligible voters just elected the Orange Shitgibbon you don’t understand, or that the 50% who didn’t vote aren’t beyond being reached and motivated, but democracy is fucking messy and sometimes you take one step forward and 3 steps back.
If the people who fought the civil rights movement (for a lot of decades before it brought actual legislative fruit) had had your mentality it would never have ultimately bore fruit. That’s reality in a democracy. Reformation/counterreformation; revolution/counterrevolution.
Stop being depressed and look for opportunities to fight. They are out there.
What is it with people? Trump blames the Mexicans and the Muslims. GG blames Clinton and Democrats for Trump and Republicans winning the election and now you blame me for your annoyance.
Geesh. No wonder you think it’s all a mess.
One reason it’s a mess is because people refuse to accept their own role in this or that event.
Let me offer more of my “drivel” as you flail to explain your annoyance.
In democracy, people have different values, different interests, different perspectives and different aspirations. Instead of flapping in response to your attempts to warn me, I’ll tell you what I think (MY thoughts).
When Trump declares,
This statement immediately and absolutely disqualifies Trump in MY opinion. Anyone who would knowing and intentionally inflict suffering upon a helpless individual (and in this case often innocent individuals as we have seen) demonstrates moral corruption. This is what makes Trump unfit.
A man’s duty is to protect and shelter the weak, not to apply grotesque suffering upon them. Whether it’s kicking a cowering dog or beating a man chained to the wall, the darkest souls always want to blame the victim for their own cruelty. This display of displaced hostility — this sickness — runs through virtually every belligerent thing Trump has said in the last year.
This is very definition of evil in MY opinion. It depresses and angers me that others don’t see this so clearly. You want me to fight?
This is my fight: to unequivocally and absolutely denounce those who vow to make suffer (or who exploit for wealth or power) the weakness of others.
This is the heart of all civil rights and the most sacred meaning of the US Constitution. The strength of the government is to succor and assist the weak from the depredations of the powerful.
I wish you didn’t think this was my drivel, but as I say, I’m responsible for my words and hopefully I haven’t caused you to suffer for my sake.
to rrheard:
I’ll make a prediction that Pence will make some political posturing about hard religious right proposals knowing full well they will not go anywhere. Yes he likes being wealthy more than the next savior of Christianity. He will keep his base and keep his money.
Thanks, rr. Saved me a bunch of typing and I would have had to work hard to say it as well.
Too bad Pence’s parents didn’t follow his prescription for having sex… or rather not having sex.
I strongly suspect that if Pence, et.al. are able to pass even a fraction of their agenda that they will indeed have a civil war on their hands, just not the one they expected.
Good thing that atheists get all the abortions, huh? It keeps the world from having too many Darwins or Stalins. Shame that TRUMP will ban it.
So who says the U.S. doesn’t have their own home-grown jihadis, radicalized by the Evangelicals.
This article uses an unload-everything-you’ve-got approach which is not compelling.
Think deal. Unreligious Trump owes something to Pence for getting out Christian votes. Trump’s line on Roe v. Wade indicates that the debt will be paid with a firmly anti-choice SCOTUS pick.
Thank you again Jeremy for pulling together all this research. That their followers are so well-armed is really scary.
here is an interesting tidbit.
It seems that when you run the most divisive campaign based on hate, etc….it seems that people might not want to work for you.
Ben Carson is reportedly turning down a position in a Trump Administration.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/republican-ben-carson-opts-against-job-trump-cabinet-163852548.html?ref=gs
This brings us a REALLY good question. What person in Washington is likely to want to work for Trump since he’s so toxic?
Normally, you try to lure one or two persons from across the aisle as an olive branch to make good with the other side. However, Trump blasted BOTH sides in this election.
This transition process of how many persons turn him down should be interesting to watch.
This is very disturbing. Just wish this had been published before the election so more people could see it. And, no, I didn’t vote for trump/pence.
Glad you expanded on this after listening to your conversation with Glenn and Betsy. Scary days ahead.
Welcome back Inquisition!
We missed you.
I thought you’d died and gone to hell along with Tomas de Torquemada. Yet here you are, up and as perky as an Inquisitor with a hot fire and a branding iron.
When you have a moment, I’ll catch you up on the last 600 years.
Short version … LOTS of SIN.
Fortunately we have men like Mike Pence fighting for the Unenlightenment. (I’ll explain it to you later.)
This article really reads as “A million reasons why Mike Pence is an idiot.” The sheer ignorance one has to have to take seriously the stupid shit he believes is astounding.
>>>> This article really reads as “A million reasons why Mike Pence is an idiot.” The sheer ignorance one has to have to take seriously the stupid shit he believes is astounding <<<
Here's Bill and Hillary and Podesta at a pizza party in the Age of Enlightenment….
http://www.sickchirpse.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Human-Sacrifice-India-Kali-Statue-670×472.jpg
[[[ As has been widely reported, as governor of Indiana, Pence signed a law requiring fetal tissue from abortions to be buried or cremated, making his state one of the most medieval in its approach to reproductive rights. The fetus burial law, which Pence claimed would “ensure the dignified final treatment of the unborn,” was suspended at the 11th hour by a federal judge, who said it was likely unconstitutional. ]]]
NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YOU CAN’T BURN THE PIZZA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Didn’t think I’d ever see propaganda from you Scahill. You call Bannon a white nationalist because he is anti-globalism and his skin is white, while you are well aware that your readers will assume this means he is a white supremacist
“…Wall Builders, an organization dedicated to making the U.S. government enforce “biblical values.”
In other words, the dreaded sharia law; only home grown.
Pence is Trump’s Cheney. He is there to make anyone thinking of impeaching Trump think twice because the replacement might actually be worse.
No “might” about it; Pence would be way worse than Trump.