Category Archives: Just plain foolish

The Death of Manliness: Teen Hearts is What’s Wrong with America

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Keffiyeh wearing vegan douchebags who diet their way into genetic effeminacy banging away at instruments they can barely handle while “ironically” performing songs they wrote in 5th grade. A feverish caricature  of youth culture made up by some scoffing Pagan Republican dripping machismo? No, my friend, this is what passes for the underground nowadays. Via L.A.T.F.H. here is the reason America will depopulate in the face of financial collapse or global pandemic. I give you the band Teen Hearts, all of whom look nearer to 40 than any number with a “teen” in it.

It always saddens me to see this sort of thing. But on the upside, in the event of civil disorder a man with a normal testosterone level should be able to take over any trendy part of town with a raised voice and some harsh language if Teen Hearts’ mincing quasi-men are typical of today’s hipsters.

I never thought I’d run across a group that made Brokencyde look hardcore (and talented) in comparison.

Exit question: Is it self awareness or lack of cocaine that is making girl in the band look so miserable?

Atheist Rapist Claims Rights Violated by Sharing Cell with a Christian

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I knew this would happen eventually. Atheism is a philosophy rejects morality, thus the creed’s appeal to rapists and other degenerates like Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs. Most Atheists don’t want to be confronted with the idea that they may face an ultimate judgment for their perfidy. The left believes that that blissful ignorance is a human right and your ability to drift through life without being criticized is the mark of civilized society.

So naturally you have a situation where this bit of insanity makes perfect sense:

AN atheist rapist has complained that his human rights were breached by having to share a prison cell with a Christian lag.

Barman Steven Relf, 40, was jailed indefinitely after admitting raping two women he targeted when he served them drinks in a pub.

Police branded him a “sexual predator” and said he could have had as many as 40 victims.

In a letter to an inmates’ magazine, Relf wrote: “I recently had the displeasure of sharing a cell with a Bible-thumping believer.”

A source said Relf was “furious” at having to share at Manchester Prison with the Christian convict and wanted him to be “evicted”.

He said: “He moaned about how the guy wouldn’t shut up about God. He said he wanted to speak to a lawyer about his rights so he could be moved cells.”

The other inmate was later transferred.

England has little interest in the rights of the women he raped. If you ask me some finger wagging is exactly what he needs. By why “subject’ a rapist to the idea that there’s such a thing as right and wrong or good and evil? I mean how would that benefit society?

A Website Scorned: World Net Daily Takes on Glenn Beck in Defense of Birtherism

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I have to admit that W.N.D. is one of those sites I began reading when I was first involved in political blogging, then slowly began distancing myself from as they tend to make that perfect circle the “old right” makes when they lean so far to what they perceive as the right that the end up on the far left. Their support for conspiracy theories of various stripes didn’t help their credibility with me.

Conspiracy theories are almost always scams. The North American Union, 9/11 “Truth” and now Obama’s citizenship are all carny style schemes designed to get you to buy books and frequent websites or forums which run ad programs where companies bid to get their ads on your site based on traffic. The rise of the Satanic Ritual Abuse movement, what we now refer to as the Satanic Panic, was one such scheme largely pushed (even to this day) by people like Ted Gunderson who make a living spreading nonsense around. The W.N.D. version of Ted Gunderson is Jerome Corsi, a 9/11 truther who is at the center of the Birther movement. He also has gone on record claiming President Bush allowed 9/11 to happen to set the stage for the formation of the North American Union and that oil comes not from decomposing organic matter but from abiotic processing, which is a fancy way of saying oil just appears out of the earth.

Unsurprisingly, Corsi has written several books which sell very well among the fringe. The Late Great U.S.A. and America for Sale are both lurid accounts of the conspiracy against America by “them” and Black Gold Strangle Hold makes the case that the oil companies, every world government, and the scientific community all are hiding the fact that oil is not at all scarce. Vapid irrationality to be sure, but lucrative in the extreme for Corsi. And those who sell his books.

The problem, of course, isn’t whether Corsi is making a little cash, as I don’t begrudge any American their right to run a snake oil shop, but it’s in how Corsi’s conspiracy mongering is allowed to reflect on the right by supposedly serious people taking him seriously. Aside from the obvious, I dislike conspiracy theories for two reasons. The first is as we have seen during the Satanic Panic, these theories can have very real consequences for innocent people caught up in the fantasy world of the conspiracist. The second, however, is that it distracts from real conspiracies. The progressive agenda is a conspiracy, not one plotted in shadows by secret societies but simply an alliance of leftists all working to steer this country into a European cultural and political model. We know this because we can go to sites like Media Matters and see it for ourselves.

While people waste time trying to find the secret N.A.U. treaty written by the Illuminati, the Obama administration openly cedes our interest to the United Nations. While people buy Corsi’s book on how oil is really as plentiful as the air we breath, China is drilling for the last remaining oil off our coasts while progressive groups block us from adding that precious resource to our own reserves. While idiots seek “the truth” about 9/11, a Jihadist movement is sweeping the globe and overrunning Europe with its eye on America next. There are real enemies to face, real conspiracies to unravel. Corsi and his ilk waste our time in an old right version of the live action Vampire: The Masquerade game.

Which brings me to World Net Daily, a website scorned by what they thought was their soul mate. World Net Daily, long associated with Corsi and the worst sorts of conspiracy mongering, has discovered Glenn Beck cheating on them with common sense. Hurt and angered, they launched into an attack on Beck loaded with justifications for their idiocy and pleas for Beck to come back to them:

“Birthers,” however, reflect a far greater diversity of opinion than is assumed by Beck’s characterization. For example, while the term has been applied to anyone questioning Obama’s eligibility to serve as president under the Constitution’s “natural born citizen” clause, many “birthers” don’t doubt Obama’s Hawaiian birth, but instead take issue with his father’s foreign citizenship.

While other top radio hosts, including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Mark Levin and Lou Dobbs, have all said unequivocally and publicly that the Obama eligibility issue is legitimate and worthy, a few – including Beck and fellow Fox TV host Bill O’Reilly – have taken the position that the issue is, in O’Reilly’s words, “bogus.” Both Beck and O’Reilly cite the contemporaneous appearance of birth announcements in two Honolulu newspapers as prima facie evidence Obama was born in Hawaii and “birthers” are conspiracy nuts.

However, what neither talk host realizes is that newspaper birth announcements are not placed by parents phoning their local paper with the good news that they had a child. Rather, as WND has reported based on interviews with the two Hawaii papers involved, the Obama newspaper birth announcements stemmed from information automatically sent to the papers by Hawaii’s Department of Health upon the state’s issuance of a “Certification of Live Birth,” which, as WND has also reported, is considered insufficient on its own to positively document the president’s birthplace.

Many people remain unaware that a child does not even have to be born in Hawaii to receive a “Certification of Live Birth – that’s the “short form” that provides no hospital name, delivering physician or any of the other information that traditionally appears on a legitimate birth certificate. And yet the “short form” COLB is the one and only piece of evidence the White House has cited in defending its assertion Obama was born in Hawaii.

Hawaiian law specifically allows “an adult or the legal parents of a minor child” to apply to the health department and, upon unspecified proof, be given the birth document.

The only requirement for proof cited in the law doesn’t address the birth of the child either, just “that the legal parents of such individual while living without Territory or State of Hawaii had declared the Territory or State of Hawaii as their legal residence for at least one year immediately preceding the birth or adoption of such child.”

Demand the truth by joining the petition campaign to make President Obama reveal his long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate!

And since Obama’s long-form birth certificate remains locked away from public view and sealed by privacy laws, no brainwashing device – such as Beck alluded to in his program – would be necessary to keep Hillary Clinton from discovering the contents of Obama’s original birth certificate.

That excerpt sets the tone. A desperate plea by desperate people who fear not only losing their credibility as they are attacked by a well known pundit, but their meal ticket as his huge audience abandons the snipe hunt for proof that Obama can’t be President. It should be obvious to all that W.N.D. does not exist on page views only. They have a bookstore which admittedly has some very good books for sale, such as Ray Comfort’s thought provoking (if flawed) Nothing Created Everything and Jamie Glazov’s United in Hate. But the W.N.D. book catalog also relies heavily on the sale of conspiratorial works which relies in turn on the persistence of a conspiratorial mindset among the right.

World Net Daily has a donation page where the top cause you can donate to is a fund to buy billboards that promote Birtherism. Surely no one believes that the majority of that money would not be used in “administrative” costs? They also sell DVDs, clothing and other items, something they have in common with Alex Jones’ websites.

In other words, W.N.D. is financially invested in people being hooked on their conspiracy theories. The site, like Alex Jones’ Prison Planet, is in itself a conspiracy designed to prey on suckers who need to feel as if there are secret forces at work against them for a variety of reasons.

The real conspiracy is the conspiracy to separate the gullible from their cash, and the “Birthers” are a part of that conspiracy. Beck is right to dismiss them and we’d all be better off dismissing anyone who makes a living peddling their asinine fever dreams.

Answering Email: Why I “Don’t Celebrate” Yule and Ross Douthat Doesn’t Know What “Pantheism” Means

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Being a well known Republican Pagan means that I get my share of criticism from people who like to anonymously carp about something that is usually boring and/or inconsequential. More annoying is that often these people prefer to carp either in email form or on some blogspot blog I don’t want to link to because while the owner may be willing to quote me at great length he just can’t bring himself to link to me.

Mainly these people tend to be Wiccans of some stripe playing a gotcha’ game to prove I am in fact not a pagan at all but a Christian pretending to be a pagan for some mysterious motive that they’re never quite clear about. Unless there is some other point to make in these instances I rarely bother getting worked up over them because I have no interest in what the “online neopagan community” thinks of me. I am not a Wiccan (though I was once as I’ve pointed out before) and since I’m not looking to pick up an obese Gorian who speaks Tolkien’s Elvish and suffers from some sort  personality disorder my travels through the online pagan community are more focused on causes rather than socialization.

But, I have gotten some interesting questions put to me about some recent events so that I thought the answers to would be instructive for both my pagan and non-pagan readers so here we go:

One question I get, usually in the form of an accusation or an attempt to “expose” me as a “secret Christian” double agent, is that although I always put up a post about Halloween I never have posts about the other Sabbats. Also, I rarely use the term Samhain (pronounced Sow-en not Sow-een) which thus proves something or the other. I will completely scandalize Wiccans now by admitting I refer to February 2nd as  Candlemass  not the more politically correct Imbloc and I do indeed think that candles made on that day are better than others.

How do I explain these outrageous revelations? As for the terminology I use, I was first introduced to Witchcraft by books on Witchcraft not Wicca. This was in the mid eighties when the so-called Occult Underground was still vibrantly un-P.C. and not overrun with the infamous “tent women” as Israel Regardie would later call them. Thus, Paul Huson and Anna Riva have influenced me more than Starhawk or (shudder) Silver Ravenwolf. As to why I am more public in my celebration (or Hallowmas as we used to call it) the reason is two-fold.

The first is that it is The Grand Sabbat, the first day of the Witch’s year. It is in truth to me what Christmas is to the Christians, the holiday most representative of my entire religious experience. The second and perhaps more important reason I am more public about my Halloween revels is that it is also an American tradition.

Halloween is unique for pagans because it is a holiday that has both religious and cultural significance. Halloween as it is celebrated is uniquely American and many of the things we love to do on that day are traditions that come from this country. It is, like Christmas, something that can be shared with people of other faiths just as Christians you know will be sending you a gift this time of year. My favorite part of Halloween is in fact handing out candy to trick-or-treaters.

Yule is not the same, nor are the other Sabbats. I find it interesting that the same people who cry online about “Christian privilege” and having Christianity inflicted on them by the right wing are eager to bore those same Christians with their holiday schedule. I’m sure the world is as interested in hearing about the other seven Sabbats (and 12 Esbats) that I celebrate as I am in hearing about what people gave up for Lent.

In other words, I don’t blog about Yule for the same reason I don’t blog about my banana pepper plants (which came in quite nicely this year) or the fact that I recently lost 30lbs when I got back into exercising, switched to diet Coke and stopped sitting on my now not so fat ass. It simply doesn’t concern anyone and most people wouldn’t care if I told them.

Halloween, as an American cultural expression increasingly under attack, is something we should keep in the public sphere not just for us but for all Americans. What I did on Yule is simply religious minutia only of concern to a sub-section of pagans who celebrate Yule (all don’t by the way) so I don’t bother discussing it on Red Alerts.

The Wild Hunt had a nice Yule post which makes more sense since that blog is specifically about religion. I prefer The Pagan Temple’s interesting Yule posts concerning divination and a good post on the war on Christmas from a pagan perspective.

In a similar vein, I still get the occasional “why do you hate Wiccans” email/comment/note nailed to my door with a cheap “made in China” athame and the short answer is that I was one.

The longer answer is that Wicca is the bush leagues of occultism that most people outgrow if they’re at all serious, but that answer is actually unfair to the many Wiccans who were serious about their craft and have been overshadowed by the liberal arts college set who think Wicca is some sort of unholy combination of identity politics and group therapy. Therefore, to be more precise, I don’t hate you if you’re a Wiccan unless you insist I actually call you Black Dragon FireCat while lecturing me on the inherent misogyny of pronouns or think that your Harry Potter replica wand actually works. There are Wiccans I respect, even some online. To Know, Will and Dare for example is a Wiccan blog which I think gives quite respectable advice about Wicca to people with questions. The unfortunately semi-retired blog Hecate’s Crossroad was run by a Wiccan and I think quite highly of the author.

But my criticism of Wicca comes from my experience with Wiccans which is remarkably similar to what S. Jason Black and Dr. Christopher Hyatt describe in their book Urban Voodoo:

For example, we have had many experiences with the Wicca community in southern California. These groups were invariably dominated by extremely obese, loud women – Israel Regardie used to call them “tent women” – whose goal at any gathering seemed to be to push people around. This was usually accompanied by the sort of verbal moralizing (”that’s black magic” or “he’s incurring bad karma”) that many of us can remember from Sunday school. These people claim to be nature mystics, but the clinical obesity, poor hygiene, chain smoking and chronic bickering tell a very different story. Jason was once shown a particularly pompous and moralizing article in a “Neo-Pagan” magazine and in annoyance, he asked (about the author), “Does she weigh four hundred pounds?” His friend replied in some indignation that he knew her and she was quite thin. Looking at him in the eye Jason asked, “What’s wrong with her?” After a moment’s silence: “Well, she’s kind of cross-eyed and has a neurological disorder.”

It is not our intention to be cruel here, merely to point out some unpleasant truths about the “New Age” or any other movement.

I feel likewise.

Which brings me to supposed conservative Ross Douthat who I had never heard of, but that could be because I don’t read lefty rags like The New York Times which even communists like Charles Johnson thinks are traitors. He wrote a piece on Avatar and Hollywood’s “Pantheism” which has sent many a pagan to the swooning couch but whose effect on the pagan community is best illustrated by Jason Pietzl-Waters response which though eloquent (and of course steeped in the same sort of sweeping generalizations about Christians he claims Christians have about pagans) misses the point entirely. What Douthat describes in his piece as Pantheism is not Pantheism at all:

At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps “bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.

Indeed, it represents a form of religion that even atheists can support. Richard Dawkins has called pantheism “a sexed-up atheism.” (He means that as a compliment.) Sam Harris concluded his polemic “The End of Faith” by rhapsodizing about the mystical experiences available from immersion in “the roiling mystery of the world.” Citing Albert Einstein’s expression of religious awe at the “beauty and sublimity” of the universe, Dawkins allows, “In this sense I too am religious.”

[…]

Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.

Wrong. Had Douthat bothered to consult a reputable scholar of religion he’d have found that what he describes isn’t Pantheism but a new- agey combination of Animism, “personal development” and Unitarian-Universalism style pseudo-religion. Oh, have I never mentioned before that Unitarian-Universalism isn’t a real religion? It isn’t.

Pantheism is a term used by academics like myself to describe a tradition in which there is one god who manifests as multiple gods or in some cases things. Some Hindu traditions are Pantheistic, in that all the gods (and reality itself) are thought to be manifestations of the supreme deity. The Upanishads touches on this idea quite beautifully.

Much of what Douthat complains about is what we would term monism. This is the idea that there is an impersonal absolute that gives life to the universe, as opposed to monotheism which puts forward the idea of a personal absolute. Taoism is the tradition in Comparative Religion we most often use to illustrate monism. And it is this dumbed down monism combined with quasi-nature worship that Douthat is talking about. In that respect I agree with him. I don’t like the smorgasbord religion of Hollywood, where they take the easiest to achieve ideals of every tradition that doesn’t directly criticize their callow lifestyles and blend it into a gray and lifeless gooey mass of do nothing feel goodery designed to make self-righteous moralizing about carbon offsets seem less trivial and asinine than it is.

But Douthat misses that point in his zeal to attack a non-existent religion that is only promoted by an online scam called the Universal Pantheist Society and a bunch of morons who are pissing on the graves of every Comparative Religion academic in history by making up a religious tradition out of thin air.

Hug-A-Thug Judge Claims North Carolina Sex Offender Restrictions Unconstitutional

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Outrageous. Readers may remember back in early October I wrote about Sarah Tofte and Human Rights Watch taking up the cause of rapist and child molester James Nichols who was barred from attending a church that was also a daycare facility. Nichols, who was twice convicted of indecent liberties with a child and attempted second degree rape claimed he just couldn’t find another church to pray at. I guess a man who likes to rape children can’t pray for forgiveness without being able to lurk around more potential victims.

Judge Allen Baddour agrees with him:

PITTSBORO, N.C. — A judge has ruled that a North Carolina law limiting sex offenders’ ability to worship is unconstitutional.

Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour (bah-‘DOO-er) ruled Thursday that two parts of the law aimed at protecting children from child molesters are too vague and broad.

The judge also finds the statutes infringe on the constitutionally protected right to worship.

The decision comes after authorities arrested registered sex offender James Nichols in March for attending a Baptist church outside of Raleigh because the church provided child care.

The statute says offenders must stay 300 feet away from any area intended for the use, care of supervision of minors and any place where minors gather for regularly scheduled events.

What could go wrong? North Carolina is a progressive stronghold these days so this doesn’t surprise me. Nor will the buck passing when children in church daycares start getting raped at a higher rate. Nichols has already raped or tried to rape children on three different occasions and Sarah Tofte and her ilk have successfully overturned a law keeping him from doing so again.

I wonder if they ever think about the “human rights” of the next victim Nichols will abuse?