For The Stupid, This Is Just Another Attack On Their Idol

For the rest of us, the following is not only a summation of Trump's duplicity over his efforts to extort the Ukrainians for personal political advantage, but also an indictment of his spineless defenders and the willingness of his slavish devotees to entirely suspend disbelief:

I want to take a moment to talk about logic and facts. Because the president and his defenders have tried to confuse and muddy the waters. So we’re going to help you out: pic.twitter.com/9Sda2qEb0y

— Ana Cabrera (@AnaCabrera) November 10, 2019

My Gorge Rises - Part 2

Earlier in the week, I posted about Paula White, the evangelical minister who has risen to become Donald Trump's chief fluffer spiritual adviser. Yet it is interesting, though hardly surprising, to glean some facts about this insane lady's past, a past that is as sordid as one might expect about someone so intent on exalting both herself and the United States' current unhinged Commander-in-Chief.

Andrea Jefferson writes tellingly about this poseur:

She’s frequently introduced and identified as “Dr. Paula White” despite not having a college or seminary degree of any kind. No degrees…not even an undergraduate degree from college.

What could have been an inspiring story about someone pulling herself out of a very bad background proves less than inspiring, the more one reads about White:

According to Orlando Weekly, “Her mother was an alcoholic and her father committed suicide. Living for a time in a trailer, she was the victim of childhood physical and sexual abuse. As a teen, she says, she was promiscuous, became a single mother and, as a young adult, was bulimic. Years later, she was addicted to prescription medication; her teenage son was addicted to crack, and an adult stepdaughter died of brain cancer. If, through the love and power of Christ, White tells her followers, she has been able to break through these “generational curses,” so can they.”

The rub comes in how she has achieved her success, on the backs of her largely low-to-middle-income adherents:

Newsweek reported that White asked congregants to donate as much as a month’s salary to her. “Every time we give, something supernatural happens,” a third reporter saw White tell worshippers who she had asked to donate as much as “a tenth of your gross income.” She once apparently wrote in a fundraising email that donating to her church “will get God’s attention.”

I'm not sure about God, but Pastor Paula has certainly benefited from that mantra:

White reportedly owns “several Mercedes”; a Bentley was once photographed in her garage; she and her husband once owned a private jet; she lived in a $2.2 million Tampa mansion. And yet her first church—Without Walls—went bankrupt in 2014 after defaulting on a reported $29 million in loans.

Her journey to this mountain of material prosperity, which, in addition to the mansion includes two homes in Trump properties in New York City, has not been, as they say, without controversy:

Shortly after being saved at the age of 18, Paula Furr left her first husband and ran off with Randy White, her Maryland church’s pastor, who was at the time married with three young children – a fact she does not include in her redemption testimony.

At the height of their popularity, Paula and Randy White reported generating $40 million a year from her broadcast ministry and their Without Walls International Church in Tampa. The racially diverse congregation, in two locations, claimed a membership of 28,000, with the co-pastors taking together between $600,000 and $1.5 million a year in compensation.

White was also once the subject of a sensational tabloid exposé in the National Enquirer that linked her with fellow (and separated but still married) televangelist Benny Hinn in a romantic tryst in a five-star Rome hotel. Hinn, another prosperity gospel proponent, was registered in the presidential suite under the biblically suggestive name “David Solomon.” White denied the affair, but Hinn later acknowledged an “inappropriate relationship.”

How White wormed her way into the White House is a story with no real surprises, and one you can read about in the link provided at the top of this post.

As for me, my gorge has risen to a dangerous level, so I shall conclude this post and leave you to draw your own conclusions about the religious right, their cognitive abilities, and which master they truly serve.

"The Right Side Of History"

That's how New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern describes her government's landmark climate legislation, which commits the country to zero carbon emissions by 2050. The bill passed 119 to one:

Climate change minister James Shaw said the bill, which commits New Zealand to keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees, provided a framework for the island country of nearly 5 million to adapt too, and prepare for the climate emergency.

“We’ve led the world before in nuclear disarmament and in votes for women, now we are leading again.” Shaw said.

“Climate change is the defining long-term issue of our generation that successive governments have failed to address. Today we take a significant step forward in our plan to reduce New Zealand’s emissions.”

Prime minister Jacinda Ardern told MPs New Zealand was on the “right side of history”. She said: “I absolutely believe and continue to stand by the statement that climate change is the biggest challenge of our time.

What a shame that bipartisan co-operation has become the exception rather than the rule. Clearly, the world needs more New Zealand.

If You Want Another Reason To Be Pessimistic ....

This is unspeakably depressing.

Most Americans — 65 per cent, according to PRRI — may now find Trump's behaviour undignified and damaging to the presidency, but not white evangelicals. They are, in fact, the only religious group in the survey to disagree.

There are only two reasonable explanations for this. Trump is the white evangelicals' version of V.I. Lenin's useful idiot, a character who is helping achieve their apocalyptic fever dreams, but who will perish along with the rest of us as the faithful perch in the clouds. Or the white evangelical version of Christianity is a darker, uglier thing than the smiles and the welcoming hugs and the blessings would have you believe.

White evangelicals, for example, are in general keenly alert to Trump's white nationalist, nativist leanings. When he orders families separated at the southern border, most white evangelicals are right there with him.

When he proposes removing protections from transgender people, surely among the most vulnerable of us, they're A-OK.

When he invites children visiting the White House to help build his border wall with their own personalized bricks, his loyal white evangelicals are right there with him.

The 17 women who have publicly accused him of sexual misconduct are just shrugged off as leftist harlots. The senior officials who have spoken out against his abuses of power or investigated him are just the infidel Deep State.

Still not sufficiently despondent? Then watch the following:

A Sophisticated Scam That Almost Ensnared Me

I think we are all familiar with the garden-variety scams that are endemic on today's Internet. Sometimes it is a Nigerian prince or princess offering to send us millions to safeguard; other times it is an alert from Canada Revenue Agency that we will be arrested immediately for taxes owing unless we purchase and send iTune cards, or, conversely, we are in for a big windfall due to a recalculation of our tax return; my personal favourite, however, is notification that my PayPal account has been frozen due to irregularities that require a wealth of personal information to unlock.

Happily, most of us have sufficient wherewithal to smell the fraud immediately.

But the scammers are getting more sophisticated.

Recently, I was on the receiving end of one that, initially, I thought was legitimate for a very good reason. It contained an exchange my cousin and I had had about the recent election results, and it appeared to be from his email account. It was, as you will see, a strange request from his wife, who sometimes uses his email address.

I have stripped out any identifying information and changed the name of my cousin and his wife, but here is how it went, with additional commentary from me at specific points:

Hi Lorne, I have to agree with you regarding the outcome, and was also disappointed with the Greens 🥬 showing. I guess baby steps are to be expected. I do think that as we get more young people involved and interested in politics and their futures, that those numbers will go up. Looking forward to Friday as well to discuss more. Cheers, Rob

Sent from my iPhone

As you can see, the previously-mentioned exchange is part of the email, but it was followed by this:

I am sorry for bothering you with this mail, I need to get an Google Play gift cards for my Niece, Its her birthday but i can't do this now because I'm currently traveling and i tried purchasing online but unfortunately no luck with that.Can you get it from any store around you? I'll pay back as soon as i am back. Kindly let me know if you can handle this.

Await your soonest response.

Best regards

Grace

Intrigued, and with no suspicions at this point, I responded:

Hi Grace,

I got your email; what is the favour you are asking?

Lorne

I am sorry for bothering you with this mail, I need to get an Google Play gift cards for my Niece, Its her birthday but i can't do this now because I'm currently traveling and i tried purchasing online but unfortunately no luck with that.Can you get it from any store around you? I'll pay back as soon as i am back. Kindly let me know if you can handle this.

Await your soonest response.

Best regards

Grace

Well, my suspicions were immediately aroused for two reasons: one, Grace has no nieces, although I did entertain the possibility that she was speaking figuratively about someone in her family that she feels like an aunt towards. The second suspicious assertion was that she couldn't get the cards online. A quick internet check showed that such cards are easily obtainable online. Still, I was not entirely certain this was bogus, so I sent the following reply:

No problem, Grace. I will look at a grocery store nearby that I think stacks them. What denomination do you want?

To which she replied:

Thank you very much. Total amount needed is $200 ($100 denomination) from any store around you and I need you to scratch the back of the card to reveal the pin, then take a snap shot of the back

showing the pin and have them sent to me.


Once again thanks and God bless.

At this point I was almost certain this was a scam (it was unlikely she was travelling, since we were having lunch with them in two days), so I called my cousin to advise him that I thought his email had been hacked. However, I decided to string the scammer along for a while to waste his/her time. I started by not replying to the above email,. After a short time, I got this:

We're (sic) you able to purchase the card yet?

I received that message a second time within a couple of hours, at which point I wrote the following:

Would you like me to pick up a birthday card for her when I go to the store to get the Google Cards?

The response was a tad curt:

Just pick up the Google Cards, i need you to scratch the back of the card to reveal the pin, then take a snap shot of the back showing the pin and have them sent to me on here

Once again thanks and God bless.

Having more fun than I have had for a while, I decided to sound like a doddering old fool:

I don't have a Smartphone to take the pictures, So I have to go to the store to buy film for my camera.

Lorne

That netted this response:

Good morning,

I need you to scratch the back of the card to reveal the pin and write it out

Await your soonest response

Finally, I wrote what I knew would terminate this blossoming online relationship:

I am a little concerned about Internet security when it comes to sending sensitive information. May I call you with the numbers?

The scammer knew there was nothing more to do, and so sent me this:

Never mind keep the card for your [non-existent] grandchild.

The game was over, but I learned never to be too complacent about being able to detect Internet fraud. What bothers me now is that I have subsequently sent two messages to my cousin using his email address, and he has received neither. In the event that my email was compromised, I changed my password, but beyond that, I am at a loss. If anyone has any suggestions or insights, I'd be happy to receive them.

My Gorge Rises

May your constitution prove stronger than mine. If God is ever in the mood for smiting someone, I've got the perfect candidate:

How totally not shocking that Paula White, Trump's official spiritual advisor, is just like him: a lying, narcissistic shakedown charlatan who uses radical, right-wing, fake Christianity to con gullible people to get attention, money, and power. pic.twitter.com/9naBxUmJK7

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) November 5, 2019

This Is How It's Done!

North American 'leaders', take heed.

Thanks to Alex Himelfarb for retweeting this:

Two inspiring minutes https://t.co/9JclWqc5Eu

— alex himelfarb (@alexhimelfarb) November 4, 2019