This opinion piece by Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, eloquently outlines what I think has been the biggest single blunder of the West, in its relationship with Russia, since the end of the First Cold War in 1989: the expansion of NATO to the doorstep of Russia.
This expansion championed by the Clinton administration in the late 1990s, tweaked a long held, and after the Nazi invasion of 1941 which resulted in 20 million Soviet deaths, an easily understood paranoia of Russians to perceived encroachment from the West.
That, despite protest from Moscow, the USA and Europe pushed NATO into former Soviet and Warsaw Pact states bordering Russia, was an act of hubris that is now reaping the blowback that everyone should have expected.
This is not to excuse Putin, who owns his own despicable place in history, but it has provided him with an all too Trumpian looking nationalist fig leaf to justify his tantrum smackdown of Ukraine, for daring to want to leave his putrid umbrella of influence.
ps. In light of Putin’s own fascistic behavior at home and in invading Ukraine, it’s ironic that he claims to be doing it to ‘deNazify’ Ukraine; which unlike Russia, at least has the seeds of a democratic future…
In its 4th week, the record breaking US government shutdown is affecting millions of people who rely on the government for their survival, seems far from a resolution, and for what?
This shutdown was instigated by Trump when the Democrats refused to cave to his ludicrous demand for $5.7B to build his Mexican wall, which he promised Mexico would pay for. Apart from the fact that this money would only build a fraction of his wall, most observers question whether it would be effective at all, given that most contraband comes through border road entry points anyway, or via drones, planes, cannons and tunnels. Worse, Trump has fired up over this dispute that surely comes nowhere close to justifying the catastrophic harm he is causing.
I wondered why someone as cunning as Trump would resort to this issue as his first protracted confrontation, his potential Alamo? What’s in it for him? The first obvious answer is that it fires up his core ‘Build the Wall’ base of support. It also provides a huge distraction from the many flashpoints bursting around him. But, surely there’s got to be more to it than that?
With the Mueller investigation of Russia and Trump wrapping up soon, and with several bombshell revelations soon to follow, Trump must be able to read the tea leaves: he’s in for a very torrid time.
Now back to the shutdown… Trump has been openly flirting with the idea of declaring a ‘National Emergency’ which he says he could use to divert money from the military and FEMA to fund his wall. Whether he actually does declare an emergency on this occasion, I think is moot. I don’t think he will. But by keeping the idea of a declared emergency bubbling in the public consciousness for weeks, Trump is softening Americans to the very notion that such an emergency could be readily called.
Why would Trump be so keen to have the possibility of a ‘National Emergency’ handy in his back pocket? Because such an NE declaration gives him access to unprecedented and potentially almost dictatorial powers, at least in the short term. And as I’m sure he knows, the congressional review of such powers has rarely been exercised and would be very difficult to curtail. With his army of partisan judicial appointments, it’s also likely that at least some courts could be found to support him.
Trump’s rabid base has already been indoctrinated to the view that CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times are the “enemy of the people”, so they are prepared for a barrage of negative press against their hero from that quarter of the media. As well, the Republicans in Congress have already proved to be completely spineless and without a shred of principle or decency, as they have fallen in behind Trump. So, we cannot expect much in the way of resistance from them. And while the Democrats do now control the House of Representatives, critically, after the mid-term elections where they lost Senate seats, they now have next to no influence in that more powerful chamber. It’s the Senate that will ultimately determine Trumps fate and that body is now Trumps happy spitoon.
So, back to Trump’s ‘Emergency’. Trump has always seemed to operate behind a wall of obfuscation, misdirection, fantasy, invention and created chaos. It wouldn’t take much for Trump to concoct a cyber war or even a hot war with Iran to justify ‘controls over the internet’, including search (just Google ‘idiot’ and select the images tab: the first 12 images are of Trump). Already, Trump has reportedly ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for military strikes on Iran. It also wouldn’t take much for Trump to bury adverse reports like Mueller’s, or even an impeachment, under the cover of a ‘National Emergency’. And, if you think war with Iran is far fetched, remember the concocted intelligence that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
When the real push from the Democrats and the media comes, don’t expect Trump to put his nation first and consider the consequences of his actions, do expect him to chuck everything, including the kitchen sink to defend himself.
This is the darkest day for Britain since the Second World War and a day that also marks the beginning of the end of the UK.
What a scared, narrow minded, backwards little country England has become? There are millions of people who don’t look like Boris Johnson who will be waking up in England today shit scared of the mobs that will now feel that their neo-fascist inclinations have been vindicated. Not everyone who voted for ‘Brexit’ is a football hooligan but you can bet the house that every single one of those neo-nazi thugs voted with Boris and his band of extremists. Within 3 months (unless in the interim, he becomes the most reviled man in the Britain), Boris Johnson will be hoping to be the prime minister of the UK. This was always his objective, and what a self-serving and miserable objective that was. Boris will be well pleased with himself but his reckless indifference to the welfare of his fellow citizens, most of whom do not have his intelligence, knowledge, political judgement or privileged Etonian background, is gobsmacking in its audacity.
So craven is this lust for power, I think many would suggest, it’s a safe bet that if David Cameron had supported ‘Brexit’, Boris would have led the campaign to stay.
Scotland, who overwhelmingly supported the vote to stay in the EU, will surely now vote to leave the UK and to remain in the EU, before the final English exit from Europe within the next 2 years.
Northern Ireland also voted heavily to remain in the EU so it’s very likely that there’ll be a renewed push for Irish unification and continued EU membership (as part of Ireland). As part of Europe the border between the north and the rest of Ireland, had become nebulous and increasingly unimportant with residents freely crossing north and south. With ‘Brexit’, Britain will have only one land border between itself and Europe and that will be the contentious border in Northern Ireland. The reinstatement of formal border controls between the two parts of Ireland (one British, the other, Europe), will only heighten the separation and open old wounds and renew tension and troubles. Northern Ireland, Deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness (Sinn Féin) has already called for an Irish unity vote. It’s hard to imagine that the Good Friday accord, that ended the violence in Northern Ireland, won’t be severely tested, with the fury this vote will unleash in Belfast.
And apart from the turmoil that this vote and the disintegration of the UK will bring to Britons, there’s also the inevitable retribution from Germany and France that will follow this vote. As an example to the rest of Europe, they will be relentless in punishing Britain for ‘Brexit’. They will ensure that there’s no business-as-usual in trade and access to the EU. Doors will close, phone calls will go unanswered and a big chunk of Britain’s biggest industry, financial services, will move to Dublin and Frankfurt.
When the dust finally settles on this calamity, England will shrink into real obscurity. Sooner than might otherwise have happened, Britain, as we know it, will cease to exist and in all probability, will have a doubtful hold on its UN P5 place, and with it the last vestige of its hollow imperial greatness. What a great price Britain will pay for Boris Johnson’s hissy fit vanity project. And what a great price they will bear for David Cameron’s lack of leadership and courage to face down the call for this referendum in the first place.
There are clear moments in history when leadership failure has had catastrophic consequence: one when Neville Chamberlain arrived back in London waving his capitulation to Adolph Hitler and proclaiming he’d achieved “Peace for our time”, months before Hitler invaded Poland; and another when David Cameron secured his place as prime minister by agreeing to this referendum but at the cost of the very country he so desperately wanted to rule.
With this cataclysmic vote, the march towards a new neo-fascist rise in Europe now seems almost unstoppable. Hungary and Poland already have Eurosceptic far right governments with neo-fascist undertones. France’s own far right National Front, who are also campaigning to leave the EU, is already the second largest party in that country. Even Denmark, a former poster child for progressive social and economic values, has lurched troublingly to the right under its new radical hard-right prime minister and, has distanced itself from the European project.
Only a few years ago the European Union was controversially awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with the citation: “for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”. That hope for: that peace; that reconciliation; that democracy; and that human rights is now in tatters.
This is an incredible piece of analysis that really blows the fluff and bubble off the Bernie Sanders / Trump scare campaign. I’m an ardent supporter of Bernie because he strikes me as someone who has walked the walk for more than 50 years with unimpeachable service to humanity. He also talks about a new compact with Americans that amounts to a FDR style ‘New Deal’ but writ so much larger. His campaign also promises much in the way of example for the rest of the world.
This is a long read but I promise you it’s worth it.
I started seeing it a few weeks ago, when Daily Kos told its contributors that after March 15th, they were no longer allowed to robustly criticize Hillary Clinton from the left. As Donald Trump continues to win, win, and win some more, it has only intensified. First they asked Bernie Sanders supporters to unite behind Clinton. Now they’re accusing Sanders supporters of being privileged if they resist. And from there, it’s just a small step to calling Sanders’ people enablers of racism, sexism, or even fascism. If you haven’t seen these arguments yet, you will soon. The arguments being peddled are very poorly constructed. They rely on a mix of fear and bias toward the near.
Well, a few days ago I saw a report that Slovakia, with its far right government, were going to take in a couple of hundred Syrian refugees. But they would only accept Christians. At the time I thought, what sort of warped, bigoted sense of humanity allows them to think that’s somehow OK? Today I got my answer… I heard Tony Abbott’s colleagues, Eric Abetz, George Christensen and Cory Bernardi say that Christians are the most persecuted people in the world and so Australia would take in 12,000 Syrian Christian refugees. I think these comments reveal the dark entrenched prejudice that exists within the Liberal Party against those who are not pious Christians like themselves. To deflect the obvious howls of derision that this announcement would surely deserve, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop added the fig leaf, saying we’d take in a few other ‘persecuted minorities’, such as Yazidis and Druze as well.
Every ethnic and religious group in Syria is persecuted by another group; no group is safe in that bombed out ruin of a country. So what Abetz and co are effectively saying is that they’d offer non-Muslim Syrians a lifeboat and basically let the rest drown.
So, even when Tony Abbott thinks he’s revealing his compassionate side by doing something good for humanity (apart from exporting the dirty little black rock, that is), he still somehow manages to turn it to his radical right wing Christian ideological agenda and cover his gesture in a big steaming turd.
They say you can be judged by the company you keep. President Barack Obama has chosen to take a stand for the criminals that Bradley Manning bravely exposed and to stay silent while this whistleblower is persecuted for causing embarrassment and discomfort to his administration.
Pfc. Bradley Manning
Check out the Iraq Collateral Murder Video that started it all:
• Watch the video:
To claim that Manning’s leaks have given aid to ‘the enemy’ because some of his leaked info was found in Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, is ridiculous. If they’d found a New York Times article with a photo of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, would they accuse the ‘Times of ‘aiding the enemy’ by providing Osama with that targeting information? Nothing that Manning allegedly released through WikiLeaks, The Guardian, The Washington Post and The New York Times, has been shown to have caused any real harm to anyone but it has revealed the duplicity of the USA’s actions in the world. For causing this dent to US pride and prestige, Bradley Manning is to pay with the loss of his liberty for a very long time.
I read Manning’s hour-long statement to the court at his pre-trial hearing at the end of February and cried. This young man is only 25 and has sacrificed the rest of his life for this.
Daniel Ellsberg** exposed the Johnson and Nixon Administration’s Vietnam War lies, was vilified but is now recognised as a genuine hero. Similarly, Bradley Manning will go down in history for bravely risking death by daring to expose the lies and criminal behavior of the US military (the Collateral Murder Video and the Iraq and Afghan War logs) and shining a light on the murky dealings of the US State Department with the Cablegate exposure. On the other hand, Barack Obama’s legacy will always be stained by this cruel and vindictive response to Manning’s incredibly brave, ethical act. As Daniel Ellsberg, himself pointed out: “I’m sure that President Obama would have sought a life sentence in my case”.
• Please watch this moving video and share this post if you can:
The featured celebrities involved in the project are:
Actor, Maggie Gyllenhaal; Pink Floyd legend, Roger Waters; Oscar winning director of Platoon, Oliver Stone; revered Vietnam War whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg; legendary talk show host and political activist, Phil Donahue; President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner; Pulitzer Prize winning author, Alice Walker (The Color Purple); legendary RATM and Audioslave guitarist and activist, Tom Morello; Rolling Stone journalist, Matt Taibbi; actor, Peter Sarsgaard; human rights activist and scholar, Angela Davis; music icon, Moby; artist, Molly Crabapple; environmentalist and founder of Peaceful Uprising, Tim DeChristopher; West Point graduate, Lt. Dan Choi; the famous (and arrested) Occupy Wall Street activist, retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard; the ever controversial, Russell Brand; award winning American investigative journalist, Allan Nairn; Pulitzer Prize winning political journalist, Chris Hedges; actor, Wallace Shawn; novelist and political commentator, Adhaf Soueif; and Iraq War veteran of Bravo Company 2-16, Josh Stieber, who was seen on the ground in the Collateral Murder Video and was so incensed by what he’d seen that he renounced his support for President Bush, became a conscientious objector and campaigned against the Iraq war.
**Daniel Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 with crimes carrying a possible 115 year sentence. The charges were dismissed in 1973 following revelations of illegal phone taps by the FBI.
My son Toby said, “Funny how this story isn’t given any coverage. It’s one of the biggest stories of our generation.”.
I agree… But in an age of expedience, it’s hard to measure effective journalism when the important issues of our time are things like… Kanye and Kim naming their new daughter, North West.
Letterman telling it like it is.
Yea, I know… where was I.
I didn’t get to see this 2012 clip until it was posted by a friend on Facebook.
I remember when Gasland came out and it was said by industry types in Australia, that coal seam gas would be extracted in a different and much safer way than that depicted in the film. Well guess what, that was just spin; the Frackers are doing it in exactly the same dangerous way. Even taking a benign view of Fracking in Australia, it still involves the waste of vast quantities of precious groundwater just to produce the gas. This groundwater depletion for coal seam gas production has by itself, made the extraction of water for human consumption and agriculture much more difficult.
The past informs the future and that tells us that no industrial process is without risk, it’s just a matter of deciding how much you’re willing to lose. No matter how safe offshore drilling was said to be, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico still happened. No matter how safe nuclear power plants are, according to proponents of nuclear power, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster still happened.
Whereas Fracking elsewhere in the world might contaminate one of many aquifers, in Australia, Fracking contamination anywhere in Queensland and northern New South Wales would destroy the world’s greatest aquifer, The Great Artesian Basin.
“The Great Artesian Basin provides the only reliable source of freshwater through much of inland Australia. The basin is the largest and deepest artesian basin in the world, stretching over a total of 1,700,000 square kilometres.” (Wikipedia).
• Also see here for a map of the Great Artesian Basin.
The Qld and NSW governments need the Fracking tax cash so in this age of short-termism, they’re prepared to give Australia’s Frackers the benefit of the doubt right up to the point when Australia’s Great Artesian Basin is totally fracked. When that inevitably happens, they’ll squeal: “it was a terrible accident” or “the company responsible will be held to account”. But by then it’ll be too late and as inland towns, livestock and crops die, who will hold our politicians to account. In the meantime, some chemical contamination of the groundwater, as a consequence of Fracking, is inevitable. It’ll just be a matter of ‘authorities’ determining how much carcinogenic water we’re prepared to tolerate.
So good on Letterman for having his rant but he forgot to mention we elect governments to prevent this sort of economic rape, so wherever it’s happening, there’s a fracking government watching.
From now on, I think I’ll replace the ‘u’ with ‘ra’ and use frack, frackers, fracking instead. Hey, it’s PG enough to use round kids and you never know it might become a byword for this evil industry.
Blows your mind eh. It’s obscene the amount of latitude, deference and aspirational support we give to this evil aspect of Capitalism. How is this level of outrageous greed possible when more than a billion humans live on less than $2 a day and at least another billion live in grinding poverty. It’s hard to imagine that any of the 1% have any ethical values when you know just how obese their wallets are.
I imagine this 1% also see terrorism emanating from the impoverished and uneducated 3rd world, as an attack on freedom or the Capitalist system (or maybe just an attack on western conspicuous gluttony to you and me); or perhaps more cynically, just the blowback cost of doing their egregious business. Oh, and they cleverly get taxpayers to pay the bill for this cost with huge increases in anti-terrorism budgets at the CIA, Homeland Security and the FBI, while slashing spending on prosecuting these same Wall Street criminals… Nice work, K Street.
Unfortunately, this video puts it more coherently than the well meaning but incomprehensibly disparate Occupy Movement ever did (apart from the ‘We are the 99%” slogan that is) … Pity… Had hopeful visions of another Bastille Day back then (with less pitchforks and muskets and more placards and bullhorns).
While Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Ted Turner are divesting their huge wealth, doing great and much needed work in the 3rd world, what are the rest of the grotesquely wealthy doing? Oxfam recently reported that, “The world’s 100 richest people earned a stunning total of $240 billion in 2012 – enough money to end extreme poverty worldwide four times over.”. This group also represents only a minuscule number of the 1% worst wealth hoarders. The World Institute for Development Economics Research at the United Nations, released a report in 2006 that indicated that the richest 1% of adults in the world owned a staggering 40% of the planet’s wealth, while the top 10% wallowed in a full 85% of global assets. On the other hand, the bottom 50% of the world’s adult population could only account for a tiny 1% of the world’s wealth. In the last 6 years, which included the GFC, this calamitous situation has got even worse. According to Oxfam’s 2012 report, “The richest 1 percent has increased its income by 60 percent in the last 20 years with the financial crisis accelerating rather than slowing the process,”.
Here’s an idea for somewhere to start… Just shutting off tax havens that enable the wealthy (and corporations) to avoid their obligations to pay tax, would raise $189bn in additional tax revenues, according to Oxfam, and that’s more than enough to end extreme poverty in the world.
Thanks to Shaun C. for sharing the video (I know the video went viral a while back but…).
A few days ago, the Louisiana legislature rejected Senate Bill 26 which sought to repeal the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act which allows for creationism to be taught as valid science in schools. Two previous attempts at repeal in 2011 and 2012 also failed.
As a high school student in 2011, Zack Kopplin started the repeal campaign with the support of 78 Nobel laureate scientists. He said at the time that he kept hoping that either an adult or an organisation would take up the issue. Dismayed that no one did, he took up the cause himself, even testifying before the state Senate. He is now a Rice University student and is still pushing ahead with this campaign.
Zack Kopplin (image: billmoyers.com)
In his most recent testimony, Kopplin was quoted by the Associated Press (May 1, 2013) saying, “This law is about going back into the Dark Ages, not moving forward into the 21st Century.” He added, “Louisiana students deserve to be taught sound science and that means the theory of evolution, not creationism.”
For me, one of the disturbing aspects of this issue is the support of likely Republican presidential hopeful, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal for the creationist cause.
Last month, in an interview with NBC, Jindal said,
“I’ve got no problem if a school board, a local school board, says we want to teach our kids about creationism, that people, some people, have these beliefs as well, let’s teach them about ‘intelligent design’…What are we scared of?”
What we are scared of, is that the USA still exercises a critical influence in the world, so to have a person like Jindal as a potential leader of that country is frightening for the future of science and education.
For about half the last century, the USA led the world in academic excellence and scientific discovery. Then along came the religious nutters in the form of creationists who support the teaching of intelligent design as science, to help Americans find their way back to the 15th century. When I ask myself why news like Louisiana’s rejection of SB 26, makes me seethe with anger, I answer… It’s because the hubris of these closed minded politicians and the nutters they represent, causes millions of kids to be taught lies. They are sanctimonious bloody child abusers. These kids who don’t know better, rely on their teachers to safeguard their future and help them become fully functioning adults. Instead, by allowing the teaching of creationism and intelligent design as legitimate science, they’re raising a generation of kids who wont have the choice to become geologists, paleontologists, physicists, cosmologists, astronomers, anthropologists or biologists. You can’t teach the scientific method alongside creationism or intelligent design because they are incompatible. Creationism and intelligent design which is supernatural pseudo-science, cannot survive the scrutiny of the scientific method which requires that theory withstand all evidence. Creationism and intelligent design requires only that selective evidence support theory, while ignoring all evidence to the contrary. In other words, Creationists make the evidence fit the theory, not the other way round.
All natural science disciplines have provided us with overwhelming evidence that the world and the universe are billions of years old, so again they are incompatible with creationism and intelligent design which posits that dinosaurs co-existed with humans less than 10,000 years ago. All these scientific disciplines also require an understanding of the interwoven and independently verifiable history of our planet and universe not the untestable supernatural pseudo-science of creationism and intelligent design.
When you’re looking for oil, it helps if you have an understanding about the process that transforms dead organisms into liquid oil over millions of years. It helps if you know how tectonic plates have moved over millions of years so you’ve got an idea where to look. It also helps if you can identify rock stratification that has occurred over millions of years. So, if you’re a creationist who wants a job in Petroleum geology, forget it because there’s nothing in creationism or Intelligent design that will help you find oil, you need real science for that. If you’re developing new medicines, it helps if you have an understanding about how pathogens evolve and for that you need real science like evolution not creationism or intelligent design.
Louisiana is not isolated in its support of creationist pseudo-science. The rise of secular rationalism has seen Christian fundamentalists fight back with a strategy designed to circumvent the ‘separation of church and state’ by insidiously introducing this intelligent design crap-science into schools. This program is backed by the cleverly named Discovery Institute (remind you of anything? perhaps the Discovery Channel), a Seattle based right-wing Christian, Creationist lobby group, thinly disguised as a ‘think tank’. This pernicious organisation’s stated goal is to Teach the Controversy and create an aura of doubt around evolution. Its purpose seems to be to undermine the long established scientific method, which requires science theory be based on measurable and verifiable evidence, unlike the supernatural intelligent design pseudo-science which is not empirical science.
Indoctrinating kids with creationism disguised as legitimate science is the kind of blatant distortion of truth, dressed up as fact that was a hallmark of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. That’s why it makes me so f***ing angry.
More:
• Here is an excerpt from Kopplin’s 2013 Louisiana Senate testimony: Claude Bouchard, the former Director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, calls the LSEA “anti-science” legislation whose intent is to diminish the role of science in elementary and secondary schools when teachers discuss with their students such hot topics as evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.”
Dr. Bouchard says that the LSEA has economic consequences. “If you are an employer in a high tech industry, in the biotechnology sector or in a business that depends heavily on science, would you prefer to hire a graduate from a state where the legislature has in a sense declared that the laws of chemistry, physics or biology can be suspended?”
Because The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology pulled a prescheduled convention from New Orleans in response to the passage of the LSEA, the repeal of this law is important to our state’s tourism industry.
According to Steve Perry, the President of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, the LSEA “is a poor symbol of our state’s actual commitment to being on the cutting edge of modern science. And, it has a damaging impact on our bringing hundreds of millions of dollars of major international meetings and conventions in medical and basic sciences.”
Perry says “It is such an embarrassing, antiquated law to have on the books when we are making such transformational new investments in biotechnology, gene therapy, and neurosciences. With our entire country voicing the need for more investments in the teaching of science and mathematics, here we are re-living the kind of discussion the Catholic Church must have had with Galileo.”
• Creationist Science Committee Chair seeks to sideline Peer Review:
U.S. Congressman Lamar Smith (image : U.S. House of Representatives)
The creationist agenda has been boosted by the appointment of creationist, Texas Republican Congressman Rep. Lamar Smith, as chairman of the House Science Committee (truly ironic, given his anti-science agenda). Smith has proposed legislation, the High Quality Research Act, which implicitly provides for political judgments on research merit and could allow climate change deniers and creationists to weigh in on possible applications of research projects. Chairman Smith is pushing for the stripping of the peer-review requirement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant process and substituting a new set of politically motivated funding criteria that is significantly less transparent and not reviewed by independent experts (ie. scientists). The funding criteria also seeks to diminish the role of research that independently verifies experimental results, a result that wouldn’t displease climate change skeptics and the scrutiny averse creationists.
More links:
See Bill Moyers’ excellent April 2013 interview with Zack Kopplin (who knew that 46% of Americans believe God created the Universe and the Earth less than 10,000 years ago… scary):
Check out Kopplin’s 2011 testimony in support of repeal of the Creationist Law here:
Also see the complete Louisiana Senate 2013 hearings here (Kopplin’s testimony begins after about 80% has elapsed – look for SB 26 on screen):
• Louisiana Senate SB 26 hearings.
I think allowing creationism to be taught as legitimate science in schools is dangerous, because it doesn’t require the application of the scientific method and it therefore undermines and devalues rigorous science. Am I right?
Ted Cruz, the 42 year old Texas Senator and a likely 2016 GOP candidate for president, recently addressed the Republican Party’s Silver Elephant Dinner in South Carolina. According to Politico, “He brought the crowd to its feet by denouncing the administration for cracking down on proselytizing in the armed forces.”
Cruz was quoted saying, "The United States government has no authority to tell any American, in the military or not, that he or she cannot share their faith with others,” Cruz said, exclaiming: “You know, there comes a point where you just can’t make this stuff up!"
What The Pentagon is cracking down on is not people who pray but people who aggressively proselytize, particularly in sensitive zones like Afghanistan. Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen said in a statement. “The Department makes reasonable accommodations for all religions and celebrates the religious diversity of our service members.”
“Service members can share their faith (evangelize), but must not force unwanted, intrusive attempts to convert others of any faith or no faith to one’s beliefs (proselytization),” Christensen added.
Cultural sensitivity would suggest against a unit of the US military, headed for Afghanistan, changing its nickname from the “Werewolves” to the “Crusaders”, complete with the medieval red cross, crusader shield insignia and a crusader knight as its mascot. But the VMFA-122 USMC fighter squadron’s new commander, Lt. Col. Wade Wiegel, was determined to do just that. Equally, going into battle in Afghanistan with your “Jesus rifle” complete with the Biblical references: John 8:12 and Second Corinthians 4:6, etched into its scope, would seem arrogant and just plain stupid. But, there are Christian soldiers who were incensed by The Pentagon’s directive to scrape them off. There are many in the military who welcome the comparison with the holy wars of the past that pitted 11th century Christian Crusader Knights against Muslim warriors in almost two centuries of merciless bloodthirsty conflict in Palestine. That The Pentagon is attempting to wipe out this influence seems only sensible in a region where ‘death from the sky’ drone strikes make the locals hypersensitive and where self-righteous, Bible carrying, western Christian soldiers are not particularly welcome.
Deep within the military, though, there is also the pernicious impact of unit commanders and other senior ranks, pointedly inviting their subordinates to attend Bible classes and prayer groups. When such Bible study and prayer groups grow from small informal gatherings into large, exclusive and influential cliques then The Pentagon is right to worry about unit cohesion and freedom from religious exclusion and conflict. It’s easy to see why a minority of non religious or non Christian lower ranks might liken this type of ‘invitation’ to a subtle form of intimidation, coercion or bullying.
So when a likely GOP candidate for president decides it’s important to make a stand against The Pentagon crackdown on aggressive Christian proselytizing, he’s also making a stand for intimidation of non-religious and non-Christian minorities while also holding up the standard of the murderous medieval Christian Crusaders for the US Military.
It beggars belief that Americans just don’t get why they are so despised in the middle-east, but someone like Senator Ted Cruz goes a long way to illustrating why.
If you’re a Christian from a majority Christian country put yourself in a different space for a moment and imagine you’re a Christian from a Muslim majority country and you’re being constantly harangued by Muslims urging you to abandon your infidel ways and worship the one true god, Allah.
So, how do you feel about the possibility of aggressive Muslim proselytizing then… Not so comfortable is it?
So, why do Christians do it to non-believers and non-Christians?
Zak From Downunder 