Eideard

A group of militia members arrested nearly two years ago in southern Michigan effectively operated as a “social club” that amassed guns and bombs to defend themselves, not to plot a war against the government, their lawyers said Monday at the start of a trial for seven of the defendants…

“David Stone was exercising his God-given right to blow off steam and open his mouth,” his lawyer, William W. Swor, told jurors.

But the federal authorities contend that the Hutaree (pronounced hu-TAR-ee) was on the brink of carrying out a plan to begin attacking police officers, possibly by killing one and then using improvised explosives to ambush mourners at the officer’s funeral…

Nine members of the Hutaree were arrested in March 2010, days after Mr. Stone declared, “It’s go hour,” in a voice mail to an undercover federal agent who had been training with the group, Mr. Graveline said. The seven now on trial are charged with seditious conspiracy, attempting to use weapons of mass destruction and various firearm charges. If convicted, they could be sentenced to life in prison…

One of the nine arrested, Joshua Clough, pleaded guilty in December to a firearm charge that carries a minimum sentence of five years in prison. Another defendant, Jacob Ward, was ruled incompetent to stand trial and is undergoing treatment.

Mr. Graveline said the authorities have seized about 100 firearms, including some illegal short-barrel rifles and machine guns, and 148,000 rounds of ammunition from the defendants’ homes. He showed jurors one table covered with guns and held up other examples of evidence collected, including flak jackets, ghillie suits used to camouflage snipers, Kevlar helmets, night-vision goggles and bomb-making instructions…

Mr. Swor described Mr. Stone as a preacher’s son who was raised in an “apocalyptic tradition” and studied the Book of Revelation. Mr. Stone, who invented the name Hutaree because he thought it sounded like something from the “Star Wars” movies his sons liked, believed he needed to be able to defend his family from the Antichrist, Mr. Swor said.

It’s easy enough to dismiss fools like this as paranoid and deluded. Except for the fact that the arrests were initiated because the threat level to the lives of citizens and police seemed elevated and immediate.

The reality is that these murderous clowns aren’t any funnier than any other rightwing gang – from the KKK to posse comitatus militias – who have murdered innocent people for decades.

 
Demba Ba and Papiss Cisse are two of my favorite footballers – even if they play for Newcastle United. Demba Ba in particular has a shot like a cannon.

But, I got to thinking about the difference in sophistication likely between the UK and the US. Americans get all woo-hoo over Tim Tebow and his Christian prayer pose. That’s just as common among athletes in Europe. Except oftimes those athletes aren’t Christian – they’re Muslim. Their celebration means as much to them as do the poses of Christian athletes.

So – you think there aren’t any Muslims in the NFL? Think, again. Do you think maybe it’s been suggested that for their own safety they shouldn’t kneel and face in the direction of Mecca when they score a touchdown? Tell us what you think would happen?

A US climate scientist at the centre of a row over Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s stance on climate change has spoken out for the first time, condemning the polarisation of the issue.

Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, had written a chapter for Gingrich’s upcoming book of essays on the environment. The chapter was aimed at climate sceptics, and those who fear it will cost too much to deal with climate change, but it was ditched by the presidential candidate after the book came under attack by rightwing talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Gingrich, desperate to shore up his conservative credentials, said of the chapter at a recent campaign event: “That’s not going to be in the book. We didn’t know that they were doing that and we told them to kill it.”

In her first extensive comment on the matter, Hayhoe told the Guardian she condemned the polarisation of a crucial global concern. “I really, really deplore the politicisation and polarisation of this issue. There are these increasingly unprincipled attempts to polarise the science when the science is fact – like the sky is blue, the grass is green and the temperature of our planet is increasing.”

The decision to drop her contribution arrived as a complete shock to Hayhoe, who was told in a 7 December email that her chapter had been accepted without major changes. Days later, the chapter was on the scrap heap…

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After services at the Church at Cane Creek on a recent Sunday, a few dozen families held a potluck picnic and giggling children played pin the tail on the donkey.

The white-bearded preacher, Michael Pearl, who delivered his sermon in stained work pants, and his wife, Debi, mixed warmly with the families drawn to their evangelical ministry, including some of their own grandchildren.

The pastoral mood in the hills of Tennessee offered a stark contrast to the storm raging around the country over the Pearls’ teachings on child discipline, which advocate systematic use of “the rod” to teach toddlers to submit to authority. The methods, seen as common sense by some grateful parents and as horrific by others, are modeled, Mr. Pearl is fond of saying, on “the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules.”

Debate over the Pearls’ teachings, first seen on Christian Web sites, gained new intensity after the death of a third child, all allegedly at the hands of parents who kept the Pearls’ book, “To Train Up a Child,” in their homes. On Sept. 29, the parents were charged with homicide by abuse.

More than 670,000 copies of the Pearls’ self-published book are in circulation, and it is especially popular among Christian home-schoolers, who praise it in their magazines and on their Web sites. The Pearls provide instructions on using a switch from as early as six months to discourage misbehavior and describe how to make use of implements for hitting on the arms, legs or back, including a quarter-inch flexible plumbing line that, Mr. Pearl notes, “can be rolled up and carried in your pocket.”

The furor in part reflects societal disagreements over corporal punishment, which conservative Christians say is called for in the Bible and which many Americans consider reasonable up to a point, even as many parents and pediatricians reject it.

Few, if any, pediatricians would support the medieval ideology of the Pearls. I’m not surprised that many Christians adopt their practices. Everything else they believe in is equally out-of-date, divorced from modernity derived from science and civility.

RTFA for detail after detail of one more backwards facet of fundamentalists who would sing away while shutting down what freedoms we have remaining.

 
South Africa’s advertising watchdog has banned a television commercial depicting angels falling from heaven because they are attracted to a man’s deodorant after a complaint from a Christian.

The advertisement for Axe deodorant (known as Lynx in Britain) features winged, attractive women crashing to earth in an Italian town.

The scantily-clad women are then drawn towards a seemingly unremarkable man preparing to get on a moped. They regard their quarry lasciviously while sniffing the air before one by one smashing their halos and advancing towards him.

A viewer who complained to South Africa’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said the suggestion that God’s messengers would literally fall for a mortal being because of a deodorant was incompatible with his belief as a Christian.

ASA agreed, and ordered Unilver SA, which sells Axe deodorants, to withdraw the advertisement.

As such, the problem is not so much that angels are used in the commercial, but rather that the angels are seen to forfeit, or perhaps forego their heavenly status for mortal desires,” it said in a statement.

Idiots. Not just the dweeb who made the complaint, of course; but, the petty bureaucrats who made the decision to ban the commercial.

Like – if you don’t like the commercial don’t buy the fracking deodorant!

“I switched back to Windows, this time!”

When the California Christian group known as Family Radio predicted the beginning of the end of the world as we know it back in the spring (not for the first time), Harold Camping and his followers splashed dire warnings on billboards around the globe.

But then nothing happened on May 21. There was no rapture and true believers weren’t swept to heaven while everyone else was left waiting to be consumed in the total destruction of Earth by Oct. 21.

Despite that setback, the California-based group is still looking on Friday as a day of reckoning, even if its predictions have been toned down.

There aren’t any billboards this time, and the 90-year-old Camping has shifted from definitive language to adding the word “probably” to his vocabulary.

So, if history repeats itself, the world will be just fine on Saturday. In fact, one observer expects Family Radio, which describes itself as a “non-profit, non-commercial Christian radio network,” will keep sending out its signals, too.

I doubt that Camping’s followers will experience sufficient frustration over his latest klutzup to stop sending in their hard-earned money. One thing that’s consistent about True Believers is that repeated failure does not constitute contradiction.

Thanks, Cinaedh

Officials in Rick Perry’s home state of Texas have set off a scientists’ revolt after purging mentions of climate change and sea-level rise from what was supposed to be a landmark environmental report. The scientists said they were disowning the report on the state of Galveston Bay because of political interference and censorship from Perry appointees at the state’s environmental agency.

By academic standards, the protest amounts to the beginnings of a rebellion: every single scientist associated with the 200-page report has demanded their names be struck from the document. “None of us can be party to scientific censorship so we would all have our names removed,” said Jim Lester, a co-author of the report and vice-president of the Houston Advanced Research Centre…

However, Perry, in his run for the Republican nomination, has elevated denial of science, from climate change to evolution, to an art form. He opposes any regulation of industry, and has repeatedly challenged the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Texas is the only state to refuse to sign on to the federal government’s new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. “I like to tell people we live in a state of denial in the state of Texas,” said John Anderson, an oceanography at Rice University, and author of the chapter targeted by the government censors…

Officials even deleted a reference to the sea level at Galveston Bay rising five times faster than the long-term average – 3mm a year compared to .5mm a year – which Anderson noted was a scientific fact. “They just simply went through and summarily struck out any reference to climate change, any reference to sea level rise, any reference to human influence – it was edited or eliminated,” said Anderson. “That’s not scientific review that’s just straight forward censorship.”

The barbarian cohort of politicians catering to every whim of the Oil Patch Boys is nothing new to anyone who lives within 600 miles of the Permian Basin. That they are marching towards full control of the Republican Party in concert with the flat-earthers of the Tea Party isn’t a surprise either.

The foolishness of born-again libertarians is compounded not only by ignorance and a fear of educated folk – censorship once again comes into play as thoroughly as xenophobia and bigotry.

The editor of a science journal has resigned after admitting that a recent paper casting doubt on man-made climate change should not have been published.

The paper, by US scientists Roy Spencer and William Braswell, claimed that computer models of climate inflated projections of temperature increase. It was seized on by “sceptic” bloggers, but attacked by mainstream scientists.

Wolfgang Wagner, editor of Remote Sensing journal, says he agrees with the criticisms and is stepping down.

“Peer-reviewed journals are a pillar of modern science,” he writes in a resignation note published in Remote Sensing. “Their aim is to achieve highest scientific standards by carrying out a rigorous peer review that is, as a minimum requirement, supposed to be able to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims.

“Unfortunately, as many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora, the paper by Spencer and Braswell… is most likely problematic in both aspects and should therefore not have been published…”

In essence, Dr Wagner, a professor of remote sensing at Vienna University of Technology, is blaming himself for this failing. But he also blames the researchers themselves for not referencing all the relevant research in their manuscript.

“The problem is that comparable studies published by other authors have already been refuted…, a fact which was ignored by Spencer and Braswell in their paper and, unfortunately, not picked up by the reviewers…

Scientific papers that turn out to be flawed or fraudulent are usually retracted by the journals that publish them, with editorial resignations a rarity.

But Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said Dr Wagner had done the decent thing. “It was a mistake, he’s owned up to it and taken an honourable course, and I think he’s to be commended for it,” he told BBC News.

“I think it remains to be seen whether the authors follow a similar course.”

Since the authors of the crap article have their strongest commitment to right-wing politics and a “Christian” view of science – I think there is little or no likelihood of honor and ethics straying into their path.

Should we dress like carnival time year-round, too?

Australian Christians are furious over changes to the national curriculum that will drop the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) from text books, replacing them with neutral, non-religious language.

Under the new politically correct curriculum BC and AD will be replaced with BCE (Before Common Era), BP (Before Present) and CE (Common Era) .

Peter Jensen, the Archbishop of Sydney, said that taking references to the birth of Jesus Christ out of school books was an “intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history” that he likened it to calling Christmas “the festive season”.

“It is absurd because the coming of Christ remains the centre point of dating and because the phrase ‘common era’ is meaningless and misleading,” he told the Sydney Daily Telegraph.

The changes have also angered conservatives in the opposition Liberal National party.

But the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, which is responsible for developing the secondary level national curriculum, said the new terms were the increasingly common standard for the representation of dates.

While BC and AD, which translates to “in the year of Our Lord” are designations used to number years in the Christian Era, the terms BCE and CE are widely applied as their secular counterparts.

Although they were first devised in the 6th century, BCE and CE became popular in the late 20th century to emphasise sensitivity to non-Christians. However, they still use the Gregorian calendar on which BC and AD operate.

The little-known term BP (before present or before physics) is a time scale traditionally used by scientists to refer to the era before 1950, when carbon dating technology became more reliable.

The “political correctness” as usual lies in the dim brains of the religious professionals who have relied on their correctness. The rest of the world – as usual – has been changing.

In every country with self-important fundamentalists of one or another flavor, the blather about Judeo-Christian heritage is not only holy writ in their view – it is supposed to be requisite. As they always wish it had been. As they always wish it would be. Self-deluded.

“I will rise into the air and you will see God embrace me…”

When Gov. Rick Perry of Texas called for a day of prayer and fasting in Houston, world-famous televangelist John Hagee answered enthusiastically…

When Perry officially launches his presidential campaign this weekend, he will not be the only Republican candidate to carry the banner of Christian piety…Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty discovered his inner Honest Abe at the Faith and Freedom Conference in June. Heedless of the risks to his campaign, Honest Tim read from the Bible and thundered to the mostly evangelical audience, “We need to be a nation that turns toward God, not away from God!”

Another presidential candidate, Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, refers to God so frequently in the context of her political ambitions that you would think He was her running mate. At the Faith and Freedom Conference, she treated the audience to a prayer of her own design: “Lord, we know there are things we have done in our nation that have not been pleasing in your sight,” she sorrowfully intoned, “Lord, we ask your forgiveness for that…”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich may not be able to boast about Christian values in his personal life, but he has vowed to defend his grandchildren from the imminent threat of “a secular atheist country” or, somewhat inconsistently, political domination by radical Islamists. Gingrich has also promised to resist the fearsome “homosexual agenda” on the grounds that he supports “pro-classical Christianity,” a hitherto-undiscovered Christian sect that may be imaginary.

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