Making Kookery Great Again

People who question whether the Earth is round — a fact understood by the ancient Greeks and taught to American children in elementary school — might have been political pariahs a decade ago. Now, they’re running local Republican parties in Georgia and Minnesota and seeking public office in Alabama.

A prominent far-right activist who has said, despite years of research and intelligence establishing otherwise, that the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were an inside job by the U.S. government commemorated the 9/11 anniversary last year alongside President Trump.

And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, pledged the agency’s support last month for a fight involving so-called chemtrails, a debunked theory that the white condensation lines streaming behind airplanes are toxic, or could even be used for nefarious purposes.

Conspiracy theories that were relegated to random and often anonymous online forums are now being championed or publicly debated by increasingly powerful people. Mr. Trump in particular has embraced, elevated and even appointed to his cabinet people promoting these theories — giving the ideas a persuasive authority and a dangerous proximity to policy.

“The real problem with the ideas and the communication of conspiracy theories is when they get evinced by people with the power to act on them,” said Joseph E. Uscinski, a professor at the University of Miami who studies conspiracy theories. “If some guy, somewhere, thinks the Earth is flat, the answer is ‘So what?’ But when people in power have those beliefs, it becomes a serious issue.”

He added: “You can wind up harming many, many people over a fantasy.”

Anna Kelly, a spokeswoman for the White House, said in a statement that the mainstream media “has tried and failed to paint President Trump as extreme for his entire political career” and that his agenda was “common sense.”

Read the rest here. 

Political Silly Season

Periodically one sees really idiotic proposals from political people. Most of the time they are some form of red meat, intended to appeal to the more extreme wing of their party or to provoke people from the other side of the political spectrum. Think of it as the political version of trolling. Here are two recent examples that are going nowhere at the speed of light. 

Mississippi lawmaker introduces 'Contraception Begins at Erection Act'

Montana bill would jail priests for 5 years if they refuse to violate seal of confession

San Francisco is Giving Free Booze to Homeless Alcoholics

Words fail.

More leftist idiocy

Normally I don't condone this sort of thing. But if leftists can tear down statues they find offensive, and vandalize both public and private property to promote their cause de jour; one can hardly complain here. This is simply asinine and whoever came up with the idea should be sacked. Meanwhile, waiting for the condom dispenser in the lady's bathroom. 

HT: Brian.

New England Knavery

Bat $&!# crazy idiocy from Vermont. Calvin Coolidge must be turning in his grave.

Quote of the day...

"It wasn't one of my better moves." -Matthew Tulley after super gluing his face to a public street in London as part of ongoing protests over climate change. Apparently the process of separating his face from the pavement was both protracted and painful.  

Still trying to make satire redundant

San Francisco (who else?) has banned smoking by private citizens in their own homes (apartments). However, they did write in an exception... for weed. Yep. You can be fined $1000 for lighting up in your own home, unless it's a joint. 

From here.

Didn't see this coming...

Florida university says students tested positive for coronavirus after spring break trip

Romanian court tells man he is not alive

In a case reminiscent of a Kafka novel, a Romanian court has ruled that a 63-year-old man is dead despite what would appear to be convincing evidence to the contrary: the man himself appearing alive and well in court.

Constantin Reliu asked the court in the town of Barlad to overturn a death certificate obtained by his wife after he had spent more than a decade in Turkey, during which time he was out of contact with his family. The court told him he was too late, and would have to remain officially deceased.

“I am officially dead, although I’m alive,” a bemused Reliu told local media outlets. “I have no income and because I am listed dead, I can’t do anything.”
Reliu left Romania for Turkey in 1992, apparently to seek employment. He last returned to the country in 1999, and appears to have cut off all contact with his family. After years of silence from her estranged husband, Reliu’s wife obtained a backdated death certificate for him.

The Romanian daily Adevarul said Reliu’s wife had argued in court that having heard nothing from her husband since 1999, she had assumed he had died in an earthquake while in Turkey. The paper said Reliu believes she sought the death certificate in order to annul the marriage and allow her to remarry.

Read the rest here.

Some people exist for the sole purpose of making satire redundant

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill issued a guide this week which instructs students that Christmas vacations and telling a woman “I love your shoes!” are “microagressions.”

The taxpayer-funded guide — entitled “Career corner: Understanding microaggressions” — also identifies golf outings and the words “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” as microagressions.

The UNC Chapel Hill guide, published on Thursday, covers a wide range of menacing microaggressions — which are everyday words that radical leftists have decided to be angry or frustrated about.

Christmas vacations are a microagression, the public university pontificates, because “academic calendars and encouraged vacations” which “are organized around major religious observances” centralize “the Christian faith” and diminish “non-Christian spiritual rituals and observances.”

If you haven't had a good laugh today then you really should read the rest here.

San Francisco may double down on its illegal alien "sanctuary" policy

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors is set to vote Tuesday on an ordinance tightening the city’s sanctuary city law. Introduced by Supervisor John Avalos, the measure would prohibit local law enforcement from responding, except in very limited cases, to requests from federal immigration officials for an inmate’s personal information or release date. Supporters say that the change is necessary following findings earlier this year that police violated the sanctuary city law by releasing San Francisco resident Pedro Figueroa-Zarceno to federal immigration agents. Critics say that local agencies should have greater latitude to cooperate with federal authorities. We discuss the proposed legislation and how it might impact the city’s immigration policies.

Listen to the rest here.

World's First Lesbian Bishop Calls for Church to Remove Crosses, to Install Muslim Prayer Space

The Bishop of Stockholm has proposed a church in her diocese remove all signs of the cross and put down markings showing the direction to Mecca for the benefit of Muslim worshippers.

Eva Brunne, who was made the world’s first openly lesbian bishop by the church of Sweden in 2009, and has a young son with her wife and fellow lesbian priest Gunilla Linden, made the suggestion to make those of other faiths more welcome.

The church targeted is the Seamen’s mission church in Stockholm’s eastern dockyards. The Bishop held a meeting there this year and challenged the priest to explain what he’d do if a ship’s crew came into port who weren’t Christian but wanted to pray.

Calling Muslim guests to the church “angels“, the Bishop later took to her official blog to explain that removing Christian symbols from the church and preparing the building for Muslim prayer doesn’t make a priest any less a defender of the faith. Rather, to do any less would make one “stingy towards people of other faiths”.

Read the rest here.

Navy, Marines To Open All Jobs to Women

Ray Mabus has made up his mind: there’s no job in the Navy or Marine Corps that’s going to be off-limits to women.

With more than a month to go before the deadline, the Navy Secretary made it clear on Monday: he will not be requesting any exceptions to the Pentagon edict that all U.S. military jobs be opened to women.

“Nobody’s asking for an exemption in the Navy,” Mabus told an audience at the the City Club of Cleveland. “And I’ve been pretty clear about this for a while – I’m not going to ask for an exemption for the Marines.”

That may have come as a surprise to the Marine Corps Commandant, Gen. Joe Dunford; Marine Corps Times reported Thursday that Dunford had met with the secretary on the issue but had yet to issue his recommendations. Defense Secretary Ash Carter asked the services to complete their reviews of obstacles to full gender integration and report back by Oct. 1. If no service seeks or is granted an exemption, the military will open to women all 200,000 positions that remain closed to them on or before the first of the year.

Mabus spoke just a few days after publicly criticizing a Marine Corps study that compared the performance of ground combat units with female members to all-male teams — and found the women lacking. “In the all-volunteer study, the men consistently outperformed the women in speed and accuracy, while female Marines were injured at more than double the rate of their male counterparts,” Marine Corps Times reported.

In his Sept. 14 speech, the Navy secretary argued that the study wasn’t relevant to the debate.

Read the rest here.

I am so glad I got out when I did. These clowns are playing politics with lives. 

The worst op-ed of the month

Yeah I know; there is still a little over a week left in the month. I don't care. No one is going top this idiocy.

Thanks to a compromise between Southern slaveholders who wanted enslaved blacks counted in the population, for the sake of boosting Southern congressional representation, and Northern whites who didn’t, the framers enshrined the three-fifths clause in the Constitution. This agreement set the census value of a slave as 60 percent of the value of a free person. Even after the 13th Amendment neutralized the political (and moral) compromise by abolishing slavery, Jim Crow laws, which contravened the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equality, stopped blacks from voting. The just answer today is to invert that ratio. If black Americans were once counted as three-fifths of a person, let each African American voter now count as five-thirds.

Reparations in America have come to mean “free” money, so any serious discussion about them also mandates a discussion of how much — an exercise doomed to failure. Other ways of imagining reparations (as the spilled blood of more than half a million Union soldiers during the Civil War; as affirmative action in universities and workplaces; as subsidized education) don’t involve cash payments, but they also don’t do enough to combat the structural disadvantages black Americans face — disadvantages that have gone largely unaddressed by our legislative and executive branches.

Under the constitution an African American slave was originally counted as three fifths of a person for the purpose of determining a state's electoral vote count and House representation. That boosted the power of slave states in the federal government.

 What if we now turned that ratio upside down? To make up for past racial injustices, what if in elections the United States counted an African American voter as five thirds of a person?

Read the rest here.

IRS to pay refunds to illegal immigrants who didn’t pay taxes

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told Congress on Wednesday that even illegal immigrants who didn’t pay taxes will be able to claim back-refunds once they get Social Security numbers under President Obama’s temporary deportation amnesty.

Read the rest here.

Contrary to possible appearances, given the last several days' postings,  I am not trying to give the Anti-Gnostic a stroke. It is purely coincidental that the idiocy has been gaining momentum of late and is being duly passed along here.

People with too much free time

Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Committee may ask Vatican to revoke Papal Bulls of Discovery

Seriously, we need a universal statute of limitations. If somebody did something bad and it was more than 100 years ago, then let's confine the discussion to history or some other branch of academia.

Speaking of morons...

I am back online after a long day without internet. Yes, I am aware that you want a detailed explanation of how such a thing could happen. It went down thusly...

The house I rent has two very large, indeed sprawling pine trees in the yard that help to shade it during the often brutal summer days. However the tree limbs have grown to the point where they overhang the road to a degree that sometimes they fall off creating potential traffic hazards. The city has, somewhat understandably gotten a bit irritated and after the latest such incident they sent a crew over to trim one of the trees back. Since the landlord has thus far shown little interest in the matter, I have no real issue with the city's decision.

But in the course of trimming the tree branches that overhang the road... they CUT THE BLEEPING INTERNET CABLE LINE! After making sure they left word to the effect that the landlord would be billed for the trimming, they got into their truck, performed a well executed K Turn and then stopped before the downed internet cable lying in the street. At which point our fearless tree trimming heroes got out of the vehicle, gathered around the downed cable, picked it up and passed the end around. Then they dropped it, got back into their truck and without another word, DROVE OVER THE DOWNED CABLE and left.

I cannot of course be certain, but I will hazard a guess that no man on the tree trimming detail makes less than $50,000 a year plus full civil service benefits.

It took most of the day to get the Charter internet repair guy out here; not his fault, they were backed up with service calls. Once here the poor guy spent about an hour and half rerunning the cable and then another half hour fiddling with the modem which didn't want to read the signal. He ended up installing a new one. Oh, I forgot to mention that the outdoor work was done mostly in the dark and it was raining. Happily we were his last call for the day. I gave him a couple bottles of Guinness in gratitude for his outstanding customer service.

As for what I'd like to give the the city's tree trimming crew, one wonders if they would even know what a piece of coal looks like. I hope Charter sends a nasty note and a bill to the city.

US Navy Bows to Political Correctness

The Navy said it will deploy enlisted female sailors in 2016 aboard submarines with female officers already assigned to them. 

In July, the Navy announced that enlisted female sailors will begin deploying on submarines in 2016. The enlisted women will be placed on ships with female officers where those naval officers can function as role-models and mentors, Connor said. 

"We will build upon the ships that have women officers to lead and bring in senior women at the chief petty officer level just like we did with the women supply officers," he explained.

Read the rest here.

Idiocy.

Worst Op-Ed of the Month

OK, there are still a few days left in September. But I am calling it game over and handing this month's prize to Dan Emmett for this piece promoting a further militarization of our society and law enforcement. I won't even touch who he wants to put in charge of protecting the President of the United States.

From the "you can't make this up" file

In Louisiana a state legislator has proposed that the King James version of the Bible be declared the state's official book.