Can they talk about the serpent in the Garden of Eden?
by digby
Evidently, some people are “triggered” by discussions of evolution:
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"what digby sez..."
Month: April 2014
From the “it could be worse” files
by digby
I think we’ve established that America is no paradise. But there are places that are worse. A lot worse:
A court in eastern Pakistan has sentenced a Christian couple to death for sending a blasphemous text message insulting to the Prophet Mohammed, their lawyer said Saturday.
Judge Mian Amir Habib handed the death sentence to Shafqat Emmanuel and Shagufta Kausar in a jail in the town of Toba Tek Singh on Friday, defence lawyer Nadeem Hassan told AFP.
Prosecution department officials confirmed the sentence.
The impoverished couple, who are in their forties, have three children and live in the town of Gojra, which has a history of violence against Christians, Hassan said.
Both denied the charges, Hassan said, adding that they would appeal the sentence.
Maulvi Mohammad Hussain, the prayer leader at a local mosque in Gojra, lodged a complaint against couple on July 21 last year for sending him a text message which he said was insulting to the Prophet Mohammed.
Hussain accused the husband of sending the message from his wife’s cellphone.
However, defence lawyer Hassan said that the text originated from a cellphone which the couple had lost some time before the incident, so they could not have sent the message.
Now that’s a very direct attack on religious liberty. Having to fill out a form declaring that your religion prohibits you from following a certain law should probably go by another label. Religious inconvenience maybe? It just isn’t in the same realm.
And, by the way, the defense in the Pakistani case says this is really all about some personal score settling. Which means it probably has nothing to do with religion at all. It’s about people being assholes. As usual.
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Vigilante America
by digby
There seems to be a growing problem with a vigilante, witch hunt mentality in America. We see it on social media all the time where characters are routinely assassinated and reputations are destroyed, often as a result of misunderstandings that are seized upon and mindlessly fed until a frenzy results that has little relationship with the alleged original sin. And needless to say, we have the horrifying cases of paranoid men looking for trouble and shooting down innocent black teen-agers in a misguided attempt at “keeping order.”
Police in the US city of Detroit are searching for attackers that severely beat a man when he stopped to check on a 10-year-old boy he had mistakenly knocked down with his car on Wednesday afternoon.
54-year-old tree trimmer Steve Utash remains in a critical condition at St John Hospital and Medical Centre, Detroit, where his family are keeping a vigil, according to the Detroit Free Press.
He was not at fault when he accidentally hit David Harris, said Detroit police Sergeant Michael Woody.
“A preliminary investigation shows the kid stepped off the curb in front of him,” Woody said. “No way he could have stopped in time.”
Security footage seen by CBS Detroit from a petrol station near the scene, shows Harris run into oncoming traffic and being hit by Utash’s pickup truck.
The tree trimmer then stops to check on the boy, and is set on by the attackers.
David’s godfather, James Duston Jr., told the newspaper that the boy is also still in hospital after he suffered abrasions on his knee, swelling on his lip, and is having problems with one of his feet. He is expected to recover from his injuries.
Utash’s daughter, 20-year-old Felicia Utash, said her father does not have health insurance and the family plans to set up a fund-raiser to cover his hospital bill.
Marked and unmarked police officers are now searching for the culprits around the Morang and Balfour areas where the accident occurred.
The boy’s uncle, 21-year-old Desmond Key, witnessed the event and said that he and his friends were on their way to the local shop when they saw the boy being hit by Utash’s pickup truck.
One of the alleged culprits then raced back to David’s home and alerted the family to the accident.
“I heard that he ran out in the street,” Key said. “When I showed up my nephew was on the ground screaming.”
Utash was then being beaten in the driveway of a petrol station by around six or seven attackers, said Key.
“The guy [Utash] definitely was trying to fight back, but it was too many guys,” Key said. “When he finally had enough of trying to fight back he just fell to the ground. When he fell to the ground they kicked him a couple of times and then they left him alone.”
“We don’t know those people that did that to that guy. Our main focus is on David,” he said. “We weren’t cheering it on. We weren’t rooting for it.”
What in the hell is happening to us?
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Torture advocate o’ the week
by digby
I just watched Bill Maher from last night. He had a guest on by the name of Carrie Sheffield a right wing writer and political analyst. She is a very lovely looking young lady. But she thinks torture may be called for and believes that “terrorists” don’t deserve the same rights as other people, so we need to keep the prisoners in Guantanamo locked up forever, which isn’t so lovely. When Alex Wagner tried to explain that some of the prisoners in Guantanamo weren’t terrorists, she was unmoved. Just FYI, Carrie Sheffield is a very observant Mormon. I don’t know where torture is sanctioned in the Bible, but I’ll be sure to look it up.
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Who you calling a liar?
by digby
I’m listening to Wayne “Trapper John” Rogers on a Fox News show called “Cashin’ In” right now as he screams incoherently that President Obama should be impeached. Because he listened to Jeremiah Wright and Van Jones. Oh and Eric Holder should be impeached too. That’s their Saturday financial show, by the way, which is ostensibly not political. Oh, and Obamacare is nothing but lies, lies lies in case you were wondering.
Meanwhile, in case you were wondering what the next round of real lies about Obamacare is going to be, here it is:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has engaged in an aggressive messaging and lobbying campaign to delay and potentially repeal a mandate in the ACA for businesses to provide health insurance benefits to their employees.
This campaign is based on exaggerated claims and misinformation.
About 55 percent of Americans who have health insurance receive their benefits through an employer. Drafters of the ACA looked to take advantage of this widely utilized option to further expand health care coverage. Included in the law was a requirement that businesses with 50 employees or more offer affordable health insurance coverage to their employee or potentially face a penalty.
U.S. Chamber President and CEO Tom Donohue claims, “[T]he law actually jeopardizes existing jobs by changing the definition of full-time work from 40 hours to 30 hours, adding insult to injury for American workers. [This change gives] some employers little choice but to reduce employees’ hours to avoid the requirement to provide coverage.”
This is, of course, bullshit. But that won’t stop them.
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Money never sleeps
by digby
Kathy Geier has a nice piece up about the latest book that has the chattering class all excited, Michael Lewis’. She writes:
Lewis is making headlines by charging that “[t]he United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism, is rigged.” High-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to rip off investors by “front-running” trades: taking advantage of advance knowledge of an order for their own gain. Front-running can be enormously profitable, and though it’s illegal, it’s difficult to detect. In short, in the words of Janet Maslin, who reviewed Lewis’s book for the New York Times, high-frequency trading has opened up “immense new opportunities for skimming, kickbacks, secret fees and opacity.”
None of this is new, however. In recent years, everyone from finance journalists to finance bloggers to Nobel Prize-winning economists have warned about the serious problems with high-frequency trading. Besides being a rip-off for investors, these trading practices also increase the vulnerability of financial markets to systemic risk. This is why the parade of notables vying for the Captain Reynault Memorial Award and declaring themselves shocked (shocked!) at corrupt practices within the high-frequency trading sector is mystifying, to say the least. For example, Maslin, describing what she deems Flash Boys’s “shock value,” claims the book is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
I don’t know. It usually takes decades for this sort of thing to penetrate the elite consciousness so this may actually be happening at warp speed.
But Geier’s larger point is about the book itself which seems to portray some kind of Wall Street battle between the white hats and the black hats replete with a hero who says,“It feels like I’m an expert in something that badly needs to be changed. I think there’s only a few people in the world who can do anything about this. If I don’t do something right now—me, Brad Katsuyama—there’s no one to call.”
That’s the least believable quote I’ve heard since George W. Bush’s “If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come and get me.” As Geier says,we’d laugh at such comic book dialog in a movie. (But then, I’m going to guess that’s the whole point of Lewis’ book: a movie deal. These Wall Street stories have been pretty easily greenlit over the past few years.) But this isn’t the first book to feature some youthful swasbuckling traders defying the evil elders to make Wall Street safe for God, mother and apple pie. Kevin Roose’s Young Money tells a similar tale.
I suppose it’s natural to yearn for heroes. But I’m afraid that most of us aren’t going to be able to suspend our disbelief enough to buy that Wall Street is the place where you can find them.
That’s not to say you can’t make a good movie about it:
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The battle against trigger-happy religious conservatives is the same the world over
by David Atkins
The trigger-happy conservative theocrats in America organize themselves under the banner of the Republican Party. In Afghanistan they organize themselves under the banner of the Taliban.
Today in Afghanistan women and urban voters went to the polls to tell their own violent conservative theocrats to shove it where the sun don’t shine, in the nation’s first peaceful democratic transition of power. One picture is worth a thousand words:
And just like everywhere else in the world, life improves when conservative, misogynistic theocratic violence fetishists are routed out of power:
The education system in Afghanistan is regarded as one of the country’s biggest success stories since the Taliban were driven from power.
In 2001 no girls attended formal schools and there were only one million boys enrolled. By 2012 the World Bank says there were 7.8 million pupils attending school – including about 2.9 million girls.
The position of women in Afghanistan has begun to improve. Under the Taliban they were barred from attending school and going out to work. Latest figures from the World Bank say 36% girls are now enrolled in school – although many do not complete their secondary education and figures from 2007 suggest 52% of women were married by the age of 20.
Literacy among female adults is still very low – although official statistics are hard to come by. A report by the Central Statistsics Organisation/Unicef reported a literacy rate of 22.2% among women aged 15-24 in 2010/11.
Some women have begun to forge careers for themselves. More than a quarter of parliament and government employees are now women, according to charity Islamic Relief. A survey by the Central Statistics Oranisation (CSO) in 2009 found women were being employed by government at a much faster rate than men. If the female growth rate continued, the share of female employees would be more than 40% by 2020.
Women are now also employed in the police and army. British officers have helped to establish a military training academy that aims to train 100 female army officers per year…
There have been big improvements in the country’s health system.
Life expectancy has increased slightly from 56 to 60 years. But there have been big improvements in the under-five mortality rate and the maternal mortality rates.
According to the UN, access to safe drinking water improved from 4.8% of the population to 60.6% by 2011. Access to better sanitation, including private rather than shared toilets, has also improved to an average 37%. But the averages again mask big differences between urban and rural areas, with much less improvement in rural areas.
Vaccination campaigns continue to work towards the elimination of polio in Afghanistan, one of the last remaining countries where the disease remains endemic. In 2013 there were 14 reported cases, down from 37 in 2012.
There is a global battle between conservative economic royalist theocrats who want to disempower governments and urban liberals to revert all control to rich local religious patriarchs, and decent people who want a brighter and fairer future for everyone.
The names and religions change, but the battle is always the same.
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All you need is love
by digby
It’s an old message but it’s still a good one. Via HuffPost:
Last month, Honey Maid released an incredible gay-inclusive advertisement that celebrated the diversity of all families.
The commercial, predictably, generated backlash from anti-gay groups like the One Million Moms and the American Decency Association.
Here’s the ad. I honestly can’t remember when any advertisement gave me a lump in my throat. But this one did:
I don’t eat graham crackers. But if I did I’d certainly buy them from Honeymaid.
That’s such a great way to respond. We could all take a lesson from it, I think.
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The Randroids’ very, very good day
by digby
It’s been hard on the right wingers these last few years being forced as they are to live in a communist country where the government requires people to buy health care policies from for-profit insurance companies. On the other hand, there is this to soothe their battered souls:
Private Job Numbers Back To Pre-Recession Levels, But Public Workers Are Out Of Luck
This is the best of all possible worlds for Austerians. They have a recovered private sector rolling in profits, high unemployment keeping wages suppressed and government starved of the kind of services that make people vote for politicians who will raise taxes to pays for them stay home.
Too bad about the crumbling infrastructure and the impending disaster or climate change and other environmental crises. And poverty. And hunger. Oh well.
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Keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill isn’t that simple
by David Atkins
Elsbeth Cameron Ritchie has a great piece today on the difficulty of keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, particularly those in the military.
Suffice it to say that mental illness already carries a very strong stigma in American society. In the military, admitting to mental health issues could wind up not destroying your career but even get you kicked out as well. Add to that the potential to be prevented from owning a firearm after a career centered about combat, and the unintended consequence of stricter laws on gun ownership for the mentally ill would be a chill on seeking out mental health services–particularly among military personnel but also among the broader public.
Elsbeth’s conclusion to all of this is to focus on more responsible gun ownership and safety practices, as well as better job prospects. But we all know that’s not going to accomplish much of anything to prevent future massacres.
If it’s hard to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, then the answer isn’t to give up and do nothing. The answer is broader gun control policy. A world in which those with mental health issues feel free to seek the treatment they need is much more ideal than one in which every paranoiac gets to carry around a handheld death machine.
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