UPDATED: Unfiltered Hatred

I don't feel completely right posting this video in which a hatred-spewing 'Christian' pastor, Stephen L. Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church, offers his evaluation of the Orlando massacre. However, we cannot turn away from such evil ranters; their malignity only grows if left unchallenged and not held to account.

I will warn you, though. It is not easy listening to such obscenity:



UPDATE: Anderson's hateful screed, I see, has been taken down by for violating YouTube's policy on hate speech. If you want to read some of what this despicable pastor said, you can do so here.

In A World Where Truth Mattered

....this might be significant. Unfortunately, the more Donald Trump lies, the more popular he seems to become with his acolytes, who laud him for his 'authenticity'. Too bad so many Americans seem to have slipped into a parallel universe.

Collective Amnesia

In the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks, it seems that the world is about to embark on even greater military intervention in the Middle East, intervention that will undoubtedly be aided and abetted by a fog of amnesia about recent history.

While I do not consider myself particularly well-versed in international politics, especially as it pertains to the Middle East, it hardly takes a Ph.D to know that every time an outside force enters the region, disaster ensues. Consider, for example, the Soviet Union's failed incursion into Afghanistan in the 1980's, which essentially gave birth to Al Queda thanks to the U.S. arming of the mujahideen. That the Soviets found the country uncontainable in no way deterred U.S. adventurism there, which only made the world's situation much more precarious.

But U.S. aggression in Afghanistan was merely prologue to even greater disaster in Iraq. Indeed, writer Oliver Willis suggests that George Bush's inept decisions led directly to the creation of ISIS:

1. The decision to invade Iraq, which had been contained by the no-fly zone created by the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations and unable to threaten its neighbors or the West, created a power vacuum in the Middle East which had been filled by Saddam Hussein until the invasion in March o 2003.

2. The Bush administration believed it could install Ahmed Chalabi – part of the public relations campaign to sell the Iraq War to America – as leader of the new government, but he had been outside of the country so long they never accepted him. He was viewed as a “western stooge.”

3. Almost all of the leaders of ISIS have connections to the former Iraqi government, mostly coming from the military of the Saddam Hussein regime.

4. Paul Bremer, who was the appointed head of Iraq by the Bush administration, passed the de-Baathification law which sent Iraqi army members into the populace, eventually becoming insurgents and terrorists:

The de-Baathification law promulgated by L.­ Paul Bremer, Iraq’s American ruler in 2003, has long been identified as one of the contributors to the original insurgency. At a stroke, 400,000 members of the defeated Iraqi army were barred from government employment, denied pensions — and also allowed to keep their guns.

5. ISIS leaders’ training as part of Hussein’s regime gave them the knowledge they’ve needed to be deadly:

Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group.

Some might admit that "mistakes were made," but no one seems to want to take any lessons from those mistakes.

There are now calls for long-term and intensive military build-ups in the fight against ISIS:

Some also speak of a much more aggressive military option. Experts say it would require 150,000 U.S. troops, could last decades and cost trillions.

An enthusiastic Thomas Donelly of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute is calling for such an implementation in Syria and Iraq:

It would take “more years of heavy combat than we’ve seen before” and “decades,” to properly re-integrate alienated Sunni populations that have sometimes backed Islamic State. The initial stage would cost more than $1 trillion over several years, he estimates, and 150,000 troops.

“Anything less than military engagement is likely to be useless,” Donnelly said. “It’s a war.”

Justin Trudeau has mounted the world stage as an emblem of soft power. We can only hope that he manages to keep his head as so many others in the 'civilized' world are losing theirs as they frantically beat the war drums, the reverberations of which are likely to grow louder and louder over the next weeks and months.

Burn, Baby, Burn

Click hear to learn about pastor Rick Scarborough's plan to defend 'traditional marriage.'

Would it be wrong of me to offer this 'man of God' some waterproof matches?

Continuing With A Theme

We are frequently told that Islam is a religion of compassion and love; there are those who find that a risible assertion, given the jihadism embraced by so many terrorists.

Somehow, however, many forms of Christianity get a free pass when it comes to their own acts of terror and promotion of hatred. I offer in evidence two clips of the Pastor Stephen L. Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. In the first clip, the man of God calls for the death of Barrack Obama. Some might interpret it as a terrorist threat:



Similarly, this god-fearing man tells us that death is the only fate worthy of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner as he offers up this moving prayer for the celebrity transgendered former athlete:

“I’m going to pray that he dies and goes to Hell. Are you serious? Look, I have nothing but hate — when I see a man dressed up as a woman, who has mutilated his body to become a woman, and say ‘Hey, look at me everybody. Look at me kids!’ I mean, the kids in America today — 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 10 years old are seeing this freak and having their minds perverted and ruined permanently. Listen to me, I hate him with a perfect hatred. I have no love — NO LOVE — for this Bruce freak. I hope he dies today. I hope he dies and goes to Hell. He’s disgusting, he’s filthy, he’s reprobate. I would pray all these prayers in Psalm 69. I would pray all this in Psalm 69 and 129 toward him.”

“You evil, filthy animal that’s destroying the morals of our country,” Anderson said as his rant continued. “DIE!”

VIEWER CAUTION: I suggest you only watch a small part of the second video, unless you have an unusually high tolerance for lunatic hate speech.

Now Here's An Unsettling Revelation

Apparently molestation runs rampant in the homes of the Christian Right:



Could there be something wrong in their theology?

Fox Apologizes?

Surely the end is nigh.



In case you have the interest and the stomach, this is what the apologies were all about:

Giving The Devil His Due

I sometimes worry that I do not give sufficient coverage to my favourite crazed evangelical, Pat Robertson. A quick review of this year's posts shows that I offered a mere nine stories on God's anointed one during 2014. In the interests of staying on the 'right' side of God, or at least the smiting version so favoured by the Rev. Pat, I will end 2014 with this year's tenth post.

The good folks at Addicting Info and RightWing Watch offer the following video of Rev. Robertson's predictions for this past year. It is apparently his practice to 'go up into the mountains' (perhaps for line-of-sight communications with Yahweh?) to get the word about how each year will unfold. I suspect that Robertson's god is Republican, given what He predicted; then again, He might have simply been having a bit of sport with the increasingly addled evangelical; of course, another possibility is that the transmission lines were impeded by the archenemy of us all, the Great Deceiver.

In any case, I shall leave it to you to assess Robertson's prognostications. For a cheat cheat evaluation, you can always click here.

Parsing Darren Wilson And Robert McCullough

As indicated in my previous post, there are very legitimate reasons to believe that prosecutor Robert McCullough purposely failed to secure a grand jury indictment against Michael Brown's killer, Officer Darren Wilson.

In the following video, provided by Addicting Info, legal commentator and former prosecutor Nancy Grace eviscerates both McCullough's performance and Wilson's testimony:

In Which Pat Robertson Makes Even Less Sense Than Usual

I'm completely stumped by this one from my favorite crazed evangelical:

Imagine If Our Politicians Had This Kind Of Honesty And Integrity

The Irish Senator and internationally recognized human rights activist, David Norris, delivered an eminently powerful speech concerning Gaza in the Irish Parliament on, July, 31st. In his speech Norris criticizes human rights violations of Israel carried out with the support of the United States and complacency of the international community.

Said Norris:

“I am not anti-Israeli, I am not anti-Semitic. I supported the state of Israel. In the forty years I have known the state of Israel and sometimes had a home there I’ve seen it completely changed. It changed from a left-wing socially directed country, to an extreme right-wing regime, that is behaving in the most criminal fashion and defying the world. Using – unscrupulously using – the Holocaust to justify what they are doing and it is time that rag was torn away from them.”

The video of his speech follows. Can you imagine any of our politicians speaking so forthrightly and with such impassioned integrity?



H/t Addictinginfo

How Not To Answer A Question

Texas Governor Rick Perry provides an expert technique lesson in the following video:

A Friday Evening Reflection

Hmmm. I can think of some who might resist this perspective:

“God reveals himself not as one who stands above and who dominates the universe, but as He who lowers himself. It means that to be like Him, we do not have to place ourselves above the others, but come down, come down and serve them, become small among the small, and poor among the poor.”

- Pope Francis, December 2013

The Affluenza Judge Seems To Have A Double Standard

Now why does this not surprise me?