Only 28% of American biology teachers teach evolution the way it should be taught. Evolution should be part of every lesson.
13% of American biology teachers teach magical creationism instead of evolution. I'm not making this up.
60% of American biology teachers either don't teach evolution at all, or they teach evolution for just one day and they don't know what they're talking about. They avoid the subject because they don't know anything about it and because they want to avoid harassment from Christain assholes. I'm not making this up.
When I was a high school student the teacher never said anything about evolution. The students learn how to hate science because they think it's boring.
These incompetent teachers should be fired but in Idiot America nobody cares.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
I found this stuff at http://dannyboston.blogspot.com/.
Evolution, Creationism, and the ‘Cautious 60 Percent’
The recent headlines were disturbing:
13% of H.S. Biology Teachers Advocate Creationism in Class
Troubling: 13% of Biology Teachers Supporting Creationism
13% of US biology teachers advocate creationism: Welcome to 2011
These articles were responding to a commentary in Science by Penn State political scientists Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer (“Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, But Not in the Classroom”; 28 January 2011). Berkman and Plutzer’s research — detailed in several articles and a book–involves large surveys of science teachers. In this most recent study, 926 public high school biology teachers were surveyed, and 13 percent reported “explicitly advocat[ing] creationism or intelligent design.”
The 13 percent number is bad — 1 in 8 public school biology instructors teaches creationism. As the headlines above show, most reporting focused on this 13 percent. But Berkman and Plutzer identified an even greater problem: a “cautious 60 percent” of teachers who, while not preaching creationism, nevertheless fail to be “strong advocates for evolutionary biology.”
Berkman and Plutzer write,
The cautious 60 percent may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists.
There are more of these cautious teachers, and their reluctance to present evolution forthrightly not only impedes their students in learning biology, but also undermines understanding of the nature of science. They fail to teach evolution in the way recommended by the nation’s leading scientific organizations, such as the National Research Council — as the central, unifying principle of the life sciences.
Why is “neutrality” toward evolution such a disaster for college-bound kids?
Evolution is the foundation of biology. Just as geologists cannot decipher the earth’s features without plate tectonics, and physicists cannot understand the interaction of light and matter without quantum electrodynamics, biologists cannot explain the diversity of life on earth without evolution. Trying to teach biology without evolution is like teaching auto mechanics without discussing engines. Teachers should not be neutral toward evolution because scientists are not neutral about evolution.
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"The National Law Review" This is about the Christian war against teaching evolution in Idiot America.
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Is supernatural real?
supernatural: (of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.
Supernatural includes things like heaven, hell, the Magic Man, and the magical resurrection of a decomposing preacher man.
Is supernatural real or is it just a fantasy?
Here in Idiot America millions of fucktards think supernatural bullshit is real.
"Roughly seven-in-ten (72%) Americans say they believe in heaven — defined as a place 'where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded,' according to the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study."
72% of Americans are cowards. Reality makes them cry.
••••••••••••••••••••••••
"What do you think or want heaven to look like?"
Somebody named Juli wrote this:
I imagine it to look like a bunch of zombies crawling around licking god's boots 24/7.
••••••••••••••••••••••••
There is no cure for birth and deaths save to enjoy the interval.
-- George Santayana
Birth and death are minor events it is what you do between them that counts!
-- David G Manley
‘Tisn’t life that matters! ‘Tis the courage you bring to it.
-- Sir Huge Walpole
Why waste the one life you get in the vain hope of getting another to waste?
-- David G Manley
Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.
-- Richard Dawkins
Supernatural includes things like heaven, hell, the Magic Man, and the magical resurrection of a decomposing preacher man.
Is supernatural real or is it just a fantasy?
Here in Idiot America millions of fucktards think supernatural bullshit is real.
"Roughly seven-in-ten (72%) Americans say they believe in heaven — defined as a place 'where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded,' according to the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study."
72% of Americans are cowards. Reality makes them cry.
••••••••••••••••••••••••
"What do you think or want heaven to look like?"
Somebody named Juli wrote this:
I imagine it to look like a bunch of zombies crawling around licking god's boots 24/7.
••••••••••••••••••••••••
There is no cure for birth and deaths save to enjoy the interval.
-- George Santayana
Birth and death are minor events it is what you do between them that counts!
-- David G Manley
‘Tisn’t life that matters! ‘Tis the courage you bring to it.
-- Sir Huge Walpole
Why waste the one life you get in the vain hope of getting another to waste?
-- David G Manley
Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.
-- Richard Dawkins
Google Search: trump environment national geographic
15 ways the Trump administration has changed environmental policies
For the past three years, National Geographic has been tracking how this administration's decisions will influence air, water, and wildlife.
BY SARAH GIBBENS
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 1, 2019
SINCE THE TRUMP administration took office, it has been fighting what they call an “anti-growth” agenda put in place by the Obama administration. Regulations that required businesses to spend time and money to meet the former administration's environmental standards were swiftly reviewed and, in many cases, rolled back.
National Geographic has been tracking the decisions that will impact America's land, water, air, and wildlife. What started with curtailing information when the president took office in 2017 has evolved into actions like executive orders that open public land for business.
States, municipalities, and NGOs have responded to these changes by filing lawsuits to block the administration. Some, like lawsuits against the Keystone XL pipeline, have successfully kept public land closed to additional development.
Below are 15 influential decisions made by the Trump administration that could impact the future of our nation.
Clean air
1. U.S. pulls out of Paris Climate Agreement
This is perhaps the decision that set the tone for the Trump administration's approach to the environment: when he moved to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement in June of 2017. To many, it signaled less U.S. leadership in international climate change agreements. (Read more about this decision.)
2. Trump EPA poised to scrap clean power plan
The Clean Power Plan was one of the Obama's signature environmental policies. It required the energy sector to cut carbon emissions by 32 percent by 2030, but in October 2017 it was rolled back by Trump's EPA. Among the reasons cited were unfair burdens on the power sector and a “war on coal.” (Read more on why Trump can't make coal great again.)
3. EPA loosens regulations on toxic air pollution
This regulation revolved around a complicated rule referred to as “once in, always in” or OIAI. Essentially, OIAI said that if a company polluted over the legal limit, they would have to match the lowest levels set by their industry peers and they would have to match them indefinitely. By dropping OIAI, the Trump EPA forces companies to innovate ways to decrease their emissions, but once those lower targets are met, they're no longer required to keep using those innovations. (Read more about air pollution.)
4. Rescinding methane-flaring rules
Under the Affordable Clean Energy rule issued in August 2018, states were given more power over regulating emissions. In states like California, that means regulations would likely be stricter, whereas states that produce fossil fuels are likely to weaken regulations. The following month, the EPA announced they would relax rules around releasing methane flares, inspecting equipment, and repairing leaks. (Read more about methane.)
5. Trump announces plan to weaken Obama-era fuel economy rules
Under the Obama administration's fuel economy targets, cars made after 2012 would, on average, have to get 54 miles per gallon by 2025. In August 2018, the Trump Department of Transportation and EPA capped that target at 34 miles per gallon by 2021. The decision created legal conflict with states like California that have higher emission caps. (Read more about speed bumps in the way of super-efficient cars.)
Water
6. Trump revokes flood standards accounting for sea-level rise
In August 2017, President Trump revoked an Obama-era executive order that required federally funded projects to factor rising sea levels into construction. However, in 2018, the Department of Housing and Urban Development required buildings constructed with disaster relief grants do just that. (Read more about how rising sea levels may imperil the internet.)
7. Waters of the U.S. Rule revocation
What are the “waters of the U.S.?” President Trump issued an executive order in 2017 ordering the EPA to formally review what waters fell under the jurisdiction of the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers according to the 1972 Clean Water Act. The proposed change narrowed the definition of what's considered a federally protected river or wetland. (Read more about Trump's plans to roll back the Clean Water Act.)
Wildlife
8. NOAA green lights seismic airgun blasts for oil and gas drilling
Five companies were approved to use seismic air gun blasts to search for underwater oil and gas deposits. Debate over the deafening blasts stem from concerns that they disorient marine mammals that use sonar to communicate and kill plankton. The blasts were shot down by the Bureau of Energy Management in 2017 but approved after NOAA found they would not violate the Marine Mammal Protection Act. (Read more about how scientists think seismic air guns will harm marine life.)
LEARN WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN ENDANGERED SPECIES
9. Interior Department relaxes sage grouse protection
The uniquely American sage grouse, a bird resembling a turkey with spiked feathers, has become the face of the debate between land developers and conservationists. In both 2017 and 2018, the Trump administration Department of Interior eased restrictions on activities like mining and drilling that had been restricted to protect the endangered bird. (Read more about how the sage grouse become caught in the fight over who owns America's west.)
10. Trump officials propose changes to handling the Endangered Species Act
In July of 2018, the Trump administration announced its intention to change the way the Endangered Species Act is administered, saying more weight would be put on economic considerations when designating an endangered animal's habitat. (Read more about the rollbacks facing endangered animals.)
11. Migratory Bird Treaty Act reinterpretation
Companies installing large wind turbines, constructing power lines, or leaving oil exposed are no longer violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act if their activities kill birds. This controversial change was declared by the Trump administration in December of 2017. (Read more about why legally protecting birds is important.)
Opening public lands for business
12. Trump unveils plan to dramatically downsize two national monuments
Unlike national parks, which have to be approved by Congress, national monuments can be created by an executive order, which the president said means they can be dismantled just as easily. Such was the case for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, which President Trump reduced and opened for mining and drilling companies in 2017. Tribes and environmental groups are challenging that interpretation in court. (Read more about the impacts of downsizing these two monuments.)
13. Executive order calls for sharp logging increase on public lands
Just a day before the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, President Trump issued an executive order that called for a 30 percent increase in logging on public lands. The decision was billed as wildfire prevention, though environmental groups say it ignores the role climate change plays in starting wildfires. (Read more about California's historic wildfires.)
Security & Enforcement
14. Trump drops climate change from list of national security threats
The Trump administration's decision to delist climate change from national security threats in December of 2017 meant less Department of Defense research funding and a nationalistic viewpoint on the potential impacts of wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and other natural disasters. (Read more about how climate change is forcing migration in Guatemala.)
15. EPA criminal enforcement hits 30-year low
The size and influence of the EPA has shrunk under the Trump administration, and it's illustrated by their diminished prosecuting power. Criminal prosecutions are at a 30-year low, and many violations that would have been prosecuted in the past are now being negotiated with companies. The administration says this is streamlining its work, but environmentalists have warned it could lead to more pollution. (Read more about the scientists pushing back against President Trump's environment agenda.)
See a longer list of actions taken by the Trump Administration here.
Sarah Gibbens is a digital writer at National Geographic.
For the past three years, National Geographic has been tracking how this administration's decisions will influence air, water, and wildlife.
BY SARAH GIBBENS
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 1, 2019
SINCE THE TRUMP administration took office, it has been fighting what they call an “anti-growth” agenda put in place by the Obama administration. Regulations that required businesses to spend time and money to meet the former administration's environmental standards were swiftly reviewed and, in many cases, rolled back.
National Geographic has been tracking the decisions that will impact America's land, water, air, and wildlife. What started with curtailing information when the president took office in 2017 has evolved into actions like executive orders that open public land for business.
States, municipalities, and NGOs have responded to these changes by filing lawsuits to block the administration. Some, like lawsuits against the Keystone XL pipeline, have successfully kept public land closed to additional development.
Below are 15 influential decisions made by the Trump administration that could impact the future of our nation.
Clean air
1. U.S. pulls out of Paris Climate Agreement
This is perhaps the decision that set the tone for the Trump administration's approach to the environment: when he moved to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement in June of 2017. To many, it signaled less U.S. leadership in international climate change agreements. (Read more about this decision.)
2. Trump EPA poised to scrap clean power plan
The Clean Power Plan was one of the Obama's signature environmental policies. It required the energy sector to cut carbon emissions by 32 percent by 2030, but in October 2017 it was rolled back by Trump's EPA. Among the reasons cited were unfair burdens on the power sector and a “war on coal.” (Read more on why Trump can't make coal great again.)
3. EPA loosens regulations on toxic air pollution
This regulation revolved around a complicated rule referred to as “once in, always in” or OIAI. Essentially, OIAI said that if a company polluted over the legal limit, they would have to match the lowest levels set by their industry peers and they would have to match them indefinitely. By dropping OIAI, the Trump EPA forces companies to innovate ways to decrease their emissions, but once those lower targets are met, they're no longer required to keep using those innovations. (Read more about air pollution.)
4. Rescinding methane-flaring rules
Under the Affordable Clean Energy rule issued in August 2018, states were given more power over regulating emissions. In states like California, that means regulations would likely be stricter, whereas states that produce fossil fuels are likely to weaken regulations. The following month, the EPA announced they would relax rules around releasing methane flares, inspecting equipment, and repairing leaks. (Read more about methane.)
5. Trump announces plan to weaken Obama-era fuel economy rules
Under the Obama administration's fuel economy targets, cars made after 2012 would, on average, have to get 54 miles per gallon by 2025. In August 2018, the Trump Department of Transportation and EPA capped that target at 34 miles per gallon by 2021. The decision created legal conflict with states like California that have higher emission caps. (Read more about speed bumps in the way of super-efficient cars.)
Water
6. Trump revokes flood standards accounting for sea-level rise
In August 2017, President Trump revoked an Obama-era executive order that required federally funded projects to factor rising sea levels into construction. However, in 2018, the Department of Housing and Urban Development required buildings constructed with disaster relief grants do just that. (Read more about how rising sea levels may imperil the internet.)
7. Waters of the U.S. Rule revocation
What are the “waters of the U.S.?” President Trump issued an executive order in 2017 ordering the EPA to formally review what waters fell under the jurisdiction of the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers according to the 1972 Clean Water Act. The proposed change narrowed the definition of what's considered a federally protected river or wetland. (Read more about Trump's plans to roll back the Clean Water Act.)
Wildlife
8. NOAA green lights seismic airgun blasts for oil and gas drilling
Five companies were approved to use seismic air gun blasts to search for underwater oil and gas deposits. Debate over the deafening blasts stem from concerns that they disorient marine mammals that use sonar to communicate and kill plankton. The blasts were shot down by the Bureau of Energy Management in 2017 but approved after NOAA found they would not violate the Marine Mammal Protection Act. (Read more about how scientists think seismic air guns will harm marine life.)
LEARN WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN ENDANGERED SPECIES
9. Interior Department relaxes sage grouse protection
The uniquely American sage grouse, a bird resembling a turkey with spiked feathers, has become the face of the debate between land developers and conservationists. In both 2017 and 2018, the Trump administration Department of Interior eased restrictions on activities like mining and drilling that had been restricted to protect the endangered bird. (Read more about how the sage grouse become caught in the fight over who owns America's west.)
10. Trump officials propose changes to handling the Endangered Species Act
In July of 2018, the Trump administration announced its intention to change the way the Endangered Species Act is administered, saying more weight would be put on economic considerations when designating an endangered animal's habitat. (Read more about the rollbacks facing endangered animals.)
11. Migratory Bird Treaty Act reinterpretation
Companies installing large wind turbines, constructing power lines, or leaving oil exposed are no longer violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act if their activities kill birds. This controversial change was declared by the Trump administration in December of 2017. (Read more about why legally protecting birds is important.)
Opening public lands for business
12. Trump unveils plan to dramatically downsize two national monuments
Unlike national parks, which have to be approved by Congress, national monuments can be created by an executive order, which the president said means they can be dismantled just as easily. Such was the case for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, which President Trump reduced and opened for mining and drilling companies in 2017. Tribes and environmental groups are challenging that interpretation in court. (Read more about the impacts of downsizing these two monuments.)
13. Executive order calls for sharp logging increase on public lands
Just a day before the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, President Trump issued an executive order that called for a 30 percent increase in logging on public lands. The decision was billed as wildfire prevention, though environmental groups say it ignores the role climate change plays in starting wildfires. (Read more about California's historic wildfires.)
Security & Enforcement
14. Trump drops climate change from list of national security threats
The Trump administration's decision to delist climate change from national security threats in December of 2017 meant less Department of Defense research funding and a nationalistic viewpoint on the potential impacts of wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and other natural disasters. (Read more about how climate change is forcing migration in Guatemala.)
15. EPA criminal enforcement hits 30-year low
The size and influence of the EPA has shrunk under the Trump administration, and it's illustrated by their diminished prosecuting power. Criminal prosecutions are at a 30-year low, and many violations that would have been prosecuted in the past are now being negotiated with companies. The administration says this is streamlining its work, but environmentalists have warned it could lead to more pollution. (Read more about the scientists pushing back against President Trump's environment agenda.)
See a longer list of actions taken by the Trump Administration here.
Sarah Gibbens is a digital writer at National Geographic.
What a normal person (aka atheist) wrote for a bible-thumping moron. Internet name: havfanridindis
How does flogging and capital punishment relate to Exodus 21:21? It clearly says the word "slaves". It's about slaves, who people could buy at the time. Not about punishments for outlaws and the ethical dilemmas derived from it. Selling and owing people as property shouldn't have existed in the first place under any circumstances and in any context, let alone having rules on how to enforce it properly. You've gone from interpreting things slightly differently to suit you, to completely changing the meaning of the words in passages.
Also, I expected that if you actually answered, you would deny that there are mistakes in it. Your brain isn't in a position to be able to do otherwise, unfortunately. Any person who can read facts in the Bible like:
"GE 1:14 God created lights in the firmament of heaven to divide the day from the night
GE 1:4 God had already made this division earlier
GE 1:11-12, 26-27 Trees were created before man was created.
GE 2:4-9 Man was created before trees were created.
GE 1:20-21, 26-27 Birds were created before man was created.
GE 2:7, 19 Man was created before birds were created.
GE 1:24-27 Animals were created before man was created.
GE 2:7, 19 Man was created before animals were created.
GE 1:26-27 Man and woman were created at the same time.
GE 2:7, 21-22 Man was created first, woman sometime later."
and say that there are no contradictions or things like:
"Earth does not move (Ps 93:1, 96:10, 104:5, 1 Chr 16:30).
Thunder is God's voice (Ps 77:18).
Earthquakes are caused by God's anger (Job 9:5, Ps 18:7, 77:18, 97:4, Isa 2:19, 24:20, 29:6, Jer 10:10, Ezek 38:20, Nah 1:5). Or by his voice (Heb 12:26). Or by Lucifer (Isa 14:16)."
and go on to claim there is nothing factually incorrect, then that person is beyond help. You're just being dishonest with yourself at this point, and you'll pretty much say anything to defend that demonstrably wrong position that the Bible is without error. At least some Christians have the decency to admit that it's not perfect and not nearly as clear as they'd like it to be and they go on believing in something. And then there are the plain dishonest people like you who deny everything.
And yes I know I'm copy/pasting but that only causes you're failing to address these things. But maybe I just helped you avoid it more easily by sending too much for you to analyze. So just pick a few of the 8 things I mentioned above or the rest in the previous posts which are demonstrably false (like the cause of thunder) and try to explain how they're not wrong.
And if you want a purely scientific one, here's one too:
1 Kings 7:23-26
"And he made a molten sea [cauldron], ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about. And under the brim of it round about there were knops compassing it, ten in a cubit, compassing the sea round about: the knops were cast in two rows, when it was cast. It stood upon twelve oxen, three looking toward the north, and three looking toward the west, and three looking toward the south, and three looking toward the east: and the sea was set above upon them, and all their hinder parts were inward. And it was a handbreadth thick, and the brim thereof was wrought like the brim of a cup, with flowers of lilies: it contained two thousand baths."
Circumference (C) = 30 cubits ("a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about")
Diameter (d) = 10 cubits ("ten cubits from the one brim to the other")
Thus:
Biblical Pi (π) = (C/d) = (30 cubits/10 cubits) = 3.0
That is an impossible value for a circle as we know Pi is 3,14......
Please, justify your claim that the Bible is without error when you're being presented with a mathematical error, as clear as it can get.
Also, I expected that if you actually answered, you would deny that there are mistakes in it. Your brain isn't in a position to be able to do otherwise, unfortunately. Any person who can read facts in the Bible like:
"GE 1:14 God created lights in the firmament of heaven to divide the day from the night
GE 1:4 God had already made this division earlier
GE 1:11-12, 26-27 Trees were created before man was created.
GE 2:4-9 Man was created before trees were created.
GE 1:20-21, 26-27 Birds were created before man was created.
GE 2:7, 19 Man was created before birds were created.
GE 1:24-27 Animals were created before man was created.
GE 2:7, 19 Man was created before animals were created.
GE 1:26-27 Man and woman were created at the same time.
GE 2:7, 21-22 Man was created first, woman sometime later."
and say that there are no contradictions or things like:
"Earth does not move (Ps 93:1, 96:10, 104:5, 1 Chr 16:30).
Thunder is God's voice (Ps 77:18).
Earthquakes are caused by God's anger (Job 9:5, Ps 18:7, 77:18, 97:4, Isa 2:19, 24:20, 29:6, Jer 10:10, Ezek 38:20, Nah 1:5). Or by his voice (Heb 12:26). Or by Lucifer (Isa 14:16)."
and go on to claim there is nothing factually incorrect, then that person is beyond help. You're just being dishonest with yourself at this point, and you'll pretty much say anything to defend that demonstrably wrong position that the Bible is without error. At least some Christians have the decency to admit that it's not perfect and not nearly as clear as they'd like it to be and they go on believing in something. And then there are the plain dishonest people like you who deny everything.
And yes I know I'm copy/pasting but that only causes you're failing to address these things. But maybe I just helped you avoid it more easily by sending too much for you to analyze. So just pick a few of the 8 things I mentioned above or the rest in the previous posts which are demonstrably false (like the cause of thunder) and try to explain how they're not wrong.
And if you want a purely scientific one, here's one too:
1 Kings 7:23-26
"And he made a molten sea [cauldron], ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about. And under the brim of it round about there were knops compassing it, ten in a cubit, compassing the sea round about: the knops were cast in two rows, when it was cast. It stood upon twelve oxen, three looking toward the north, and three looking toward the west, and three looking toward the south, and three looking toward the east: and the sea was set above upon them, and all their hinder parts were inward. And it was a handbreadth thick, and the brim thereof was wrought like the brim of a cup, with flowers of lilies: it contained two thousand baths."
Circumference (C) = 30 cubits ("a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about")
Diameter (d) = 10 cubits ("ten cubits from the one brim to the other")
Thus:
Biblical Pi (π) = (C/d) = (30 cubits/10 cubits) = 3.0
That is an impossible value for a circle as we know Pi is 3,14......
Please, justify your claim that the Bible is without error when you're being presented with a mathematical error, as clear as it can get.
The pope belongs in prison.
What I wrote at the Wall Street Journal:
"The Vatican doesn’t require church officials around the world to report sex abuse to civil authorities unless local laws require it. In 2014, Italy’s bishops voted against requiring themselves to report abuse to civil authorities."
Enough is enough. The Catholic Church must be completely destroyed. Catholics need to grow up and stop feeding the child abusers. If they can't do that then they are part of the problem. They have my contempt.
"The Vatican doesn’t require church officials around the world to report sex abuse to civil authorities unless local laws require it. In 2014, Italy’s bishops voted against requiring themselves to report abuse to civil authorities."
Enough is enough. The Catholic Church must be completely destroyed. Catholics need to grow up and stop feeding the child abusers. If they can't do that then they are part of the problem. They have my contempt.
Saturday, March 30, 2019
New York Times: In a major legal blow to President Fucktard Trump’s push to expand offshore oil and gas development, a federal judge ruled that an executive order by Mr. Fucktard Trump that lifted an Obama-era ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean and parts of the North Atlantic coast was unlawful.
For some reason Republicans want to destroy the environment. I never met a Republican who wasn't a stupid fucking asshole.
New York Times - Fucktard Trump’s Order to Open Arctic Waters to Oil Drilling Was Unlawful, Federal Judge Finds
By Coral Davenport
March 30, 2019
WASHINGTON — In a major legal blow to President Trump’s push to expand offshore oil and gas development, a federal judge ruled that an executive order by Mr. Trump that lifted an Obama-era ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean and parts of the North Atlantic coast was unlawful.
The decision, by Judge Sharon L. Gleason of the United States District Court for the District of Alaska, concluded late Friday that President Barack Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawal from drilling of about 120 million acres of Arctic Ocean and about 3.8 million acres in the Atlantic “will remain in full force and effect unless and until revoked by Congress.” She wrote that an April 2017 executive order by Mr. Trump revoking the drilling ban “is unlawful, as it exceeded the president’s authority.”
The decision, which is expected to be appealed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, immediately reinstates the drilling ban on most of the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Alaska, a pristine region home to endangered species including polar bears and bowhead whales where oil companies have long sought to drill. Along the Atlantic coast, it blocks drilling around a series of coral canyons that run from Norfolk, Va., to the Canadian border which are home to unique deepwater corals and rare fish species.
In addition, Friday’s ruling by the judge, an Obama appointee, has broader implications for Mr. Trump’s effort to push drilling across the American coastline and on public lands.
Specifically, the Arctic Ocean drilling case could give legal ammunition to opponents of Mr. Trump’s efforts to roll back protections for two million acres of national monuments created by Mr. Obama and President Bill Clinton.
The case adds to a growing roster of legal losses for Mr. Trump’s efforts to undo Mr. Obama’s environmental legacy. Experts in environmental law estimate that the Trump administration has now lost about 40 environmental cases in federal courts.
Most immediately, the decision will force the Interior Department to withdraw the waters of the Arctic Ocean from its forthcoming plan detailing where the federal government intends to lease federal waters to oil companies for offshore drilling. A draft of that plan published last year called for drilling off the entire United States coastline.
The White House referred questions on the matter to the Interior Department, where a spokeswoman declined to comment.
And although Friday’s court decision relates specifically to a law on offshore drilling, it could also hamstring Mr. Trump’s efforts to erase or reduce the creation of large protected areas of public lands by previous presidents.
“The statutes and the Supreme Court have been silent on the authority of a president to modify or reduce a predecessor’s protections of these public lands, waters and monuments,” said Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law School. “But these decisions are showing that if a president wants to reverse a predecessor’s environmental policy, they have to give a cogent reason why. Just saying ‘energy dominance’ is not enough. Saying ‘I won the election’ is not enough.”
Professor Parenteau predicted that the case was likely to reach the Supreme Court, though probably not for several years.
Both Mr. Obama’s efforts to use his executive authority to ban drilling in the Arctic Ocean, and Mr. Trump’s efforts to undo that ban, are legally unprecedented.
In using his executive authority to permanently ban drilling in most of the Arctic Ocean, Mr. Obama relied on an obscure provision of a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which governs how the executive branch uses federal waters for offshore energy exploration.
The law includes a provision that lets presidents put those waters off limits to oil and gas drilling. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon and Mr. Clinton used the law to protect sections of the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans, but those protections came with time limits, usually one to two decades.
In late 2016, as he sought to legally cement environmental protections before Mr. Trump, then the president-elect, took office, Mr. Obama used what both supporters and critics called a creative and unusual interpretation of that law to set a permanent ban on drilling in most of the Arctic Ocean.
Three months after taking office, Mr. Trump issued an executive order rescinding the ban. That made him the first president to seek to revoke a decision by his predecessor to use the law to protect federal waters.
Environmental groups promptly sued the administration over the move. They welcomed Friday’s court decision.
“Since coming into office, Trump has been on an one-man campaign to undo the work of his predecessor,” said Niel Lawrence, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, who took part in the oral arguments in the Alaska case. “What this opinion confirms is that there are constitutional limits to that.”
Erik Milito, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry and which joined the Trump administration’s case, said, “While we disagree with the decision, our nation still has a significant opportunity before us in the development of the next offshore leasing plan to truly embrace our nation’s energy potential and ensure American consumers and businesses continue to benefit from U.S. energy leadership.”
Experts said that Judge Gleason’s decision could affect the legal outcome of Mr. Trump’s efforts to roll back certain protections created by his predecessors on public lands.
Just as presidents have used the 1953 offshore-drilling law to protect federal waters, they have used a different law, the 1906 Antiquities Act, put in place by President Theodore Roosevelt, to designate and protect millions of acres of lands as permanent public monuments. Presidents throughout the past century have created such monuments.
While at least two presidents have used their authority to shrink the size of monuments created by their predecessors, Mr. Trump has done so at a more drastic scale. In December 2017, Mr. Trump cut about two million acres from two national monuments in Utah: the Bears Ears monument, created by Mr. Obama, and the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument, created by Mr. Clinton. At the time it was the largest rollback of federal land protection in the nation’s history.
Already, lawsuits on the issue are making their way through federal courts. Professor Parenteau and others predicted that Judge Gleason’s decision could possibly have a bearing on those cases.
That is because, in the language of both laws, Congress gave the president the right to occasionally designate public lands and waters for protection. However, each of the laws is silent on whether a successor can reduce or revoke those protections.
If Mr. Trump’s challengers win in court, the decision could affirm future presidents’ right to set bans of offshore drilling that could be undone only by Congress (as opposed to a later president) and similarly could set a precedent that presidential decisions to expand protections of public land could be revised or reversed only by Congress.
If Mr. Trump prevails in court, future presidents could potentially use an executive order to shrink any of the dozens of monuments created by their predecessors or similarly revoke presidential decisions to protect federal waters.
For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.
Coral Davenport covers energy and environmental policy, with a focus on climate change, from the Washington bureau. She joined The Times in 2013 and previously worked at Congressional Quarterly, Politico and National Journal. @CoralMDavenport • Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on March 30, 2019, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Order to Open Arctic Ocean to Drilling Was Unlawful, Judge Rules.
Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
New York Times - Fucktard Trump’s Order to Open Arctic Waters to Oil Drilling Was Unlawful, Federal Judge Finds
By Coral Davenport
March 30, 2019
WASHINGTON — In a major legal blow to President Trump’s push to expand offshore oil and gas development, a federal judge ruled that an executive order by Mr. Trump that lifted an Obama-era ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean and parts of the North Atlantic coast was unlawful.
The decision, by Judge Sharon L. Gleason of the United States District Court for the District of Alaska, concluded late Friday that President Barack Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawal from drilling of about 120 million acres of Arctic Ocean and about 3.8 million acres in the Atlantic “will remain in full force and effect unless and until revoked by Congress.” She wrote that an April 2017 executive order by Mr. Trump revoking the drilling ban “is unlawful, as it exceeded the president’s authority.”
The decision, which is expected to be appealed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, immediately reinstates the drilling ban on most of the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Alaska, a pristine region home to endangered species including polar bears and bowhead whales where oil companies have long sought to drill. Along the Atlantic coast, it blocks drilling around a series of coral canyons that run from Norfolk, Va., to the Canadian border which are home to unique deepwater corals and rare fish species.
In addition, Friday’s ruling by the judge, an Obama appointee, has broader implications for Mr. Trump’s effort to push drilling across the American coastline and on public lands.
Specifically, the Arctic Ocean drilling case could give legal ammunition to opponents of Mr. Trump’s efforts to roll back protections for two million acres of national monuments created by Mr. Obama and President Bill Clinton.
The case adds to a growing roster of legal losses for Mr. Trump’s efforts to undo Mr. Obama’s environmental legacy. Experts in environmental law estimate that the Trump administration has now lost about 40 environmental cases in federal courts.
Most immediately, the decision will force the Interior Department to withdraw the waters of the Arctic Ocean from its forthcoming plan detailing where the federal government intends to lease federal waters to oil companies for offshore drilling. A draft of that plan published last year called for drilling off the entire United States coastline.
The White House referred questions on the matter to the Interior Department, where a spokeswoman declined to comment.
And although Friday’s court decision relates specifically to a law on offshore drilling, it could also hamstring Mr. Trump’s efforts to erase or reduce the creation of large protected areas of public lands by previous presidents.
“The statutes and the Supreme Court have been silent on the authority of a president to modify or reduce a predecessor’s protections of these public lands, waters and monuments,” said Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law School. “But these decisions are showing that if a president wants to reverse a predecessor’s environmental policy, they have to give a cogent reason why. Just saying ‘energy dominance’ is not enough. Saying ‘I won the election’ is not enough.”
Professor Parenteau predicted that the case was likely to reach the Supreme Court, though probably not for several years.
Both Mr. Obama’s efforts to use his executive authority to ban drilling in the Arctic Ocean, and Mr. Trump’s efforts to undo that ban, are legally unprecedented.
In using his executive authority to permanently ban drilling in most of the Arctic Ocean, Mr. Obama relied on an obscure provision of a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which governs how the executive branch uses federal waters for offshore energy exploration.
The law includes a provision that lets presidents put those waters off limits to oil and gas drilling. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon and Mr. Clinton used the law to protect sections of the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans, but those protections came with time limits, usually one to two decades.
In late 2016, as he sought to legally cement environmental protections before Mr. Trump, then the president-elect, took office, Mr. Obama used what both supporters and critics called a creative and unusual interpretation of that law to set a permanent ban on drilling in most of the Arctic Ocean.
Three months after taking office, Mr. Trump issued an executive order rescinding the ban. That made him the first president to seek to revoke a decision by his predecessor to use the law to protect federal waters.
Environmental groups promptly sued the administration over the move. They welcomed Friday’s court decision.
“Since coming into office, Trump has been on an one-man campaign to undo the work of his predecessor,” said Niel Lawrence, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, who took part in the oral arguments in the Alaska case. “What this opinion confirms is that there are constitutional limits to that.”
Erik Milito, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry and which joined the Trump administration’s case, said, “While we disagree with the decision, our nation still has a significant opportunity before us in the development of the next offshore leasing plan to truly embrace our nation’s energy potential and ensure American consumers and businesses continue to benefit from U.S. energy leadership.”
Experts said that Judge Gleason’s decision could affect the legal outcome of Mr. Trump’s efforts to roll back certain protections created by his predecessors on public lands.
Just as presidents have used the 1953 offshore-drilling law to protect federal waters, they have used a different law, the 1906 Antiquities Act, put in place by President Theodore Roosevelt, to designate and protect millions of acres of lands as permanent public monuments. Presidents throughout the past century have created such monuments.
While at least two presidents have used their authority to shrink the size of monuments created by their predecessors, Mr. Trump has done so at a more drastic scale. In December 2017, Mr. Trump cut about two million acres from two national monuments in Utah: the Bears Ears monument, created by Mr. Obama, and the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument, created by Mr. Clinton. At the time it was the largest rollback of federal land protection in the nation’s history.
Already, lawsuits on the issue are making their way through federal courts. Professor Parenteau and others predicted that Judge Gleason’s decision could possibly have a bearing on those cases.
That is because, in the language of both laws, Congress gave the president the right to occasionally designate public lands and waters for protection. However, each of the laws is silent on whether a successor can reduce or revoke those protections.
If Mr. Trump’s challengers win in court, the decision could affirm future presidents’ right to set bans of offshore drilling that could be undone only by Congress (as opposed to a later president) and similarly could set a precedent that presidential decisions to expand protections of public land could be revised or reversed only by Congress.
If Mr. Trump prevails in court, future presidents could potentially use an executive order to shrink any of the dozens of monuments created by their predecessors or similarly revoke presidential decisions to protect federal waters.
For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.
Coral Davenport covers energy and environmental policy, with a focus on climate change, from the Washington bureau. She joined The Times in 2013 and previously worked at Congressional Quarterly, Politico and National Journal. @CoralMDavenport • Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on March 30, 2019, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Order to Open Arctic Ocean to Drilling Was Unlawful, Judge Rules.
Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
The Dangling Conversation
It's a still life watercolor
Of a now-late afternoon
As the sun shines through the curtained lace
And shadows wash the room
Of a now-late afternoon
As the sun shines through the curtained lace
And shadows wash the room
And we sit and drink our coffee
Couched in our indifference, like shells upon the shore
You can hear the ocean roar
Couched in our indifference, like shells upon the shore
You can hear the ocean roar
In the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs
The borders of our lives
And the superficial sighs
The borders of our lives
And you read your Emily Dickinson
And I my Robert Frost
And we note our place with book markers
That measure what we've lost
And I my Robert Frost
And we note our place with book markers
That measure what we've lost
Like a poem poorly written
We are verses out of rhythm
Couplets out of rhyme
In syncopated time
We are verses out of rhythm
Couplets out of rhyme
In syncopated time
And the dangled conversation
And the superficial sighs
Are the borders of our lives
And the superficial sighs
Are the borders of our lives
Yes, we speak of things that matter
With words that must be said
"Can analysis be worthwhile?"
"Is the theater really dead?"
With words that must be said
"Can analysis be worthwhile?"
"Is the theater really dead?"
Lovéren -- Track #04: Sessa Nulma
Sessa Nulma, Sessa Nulma Enchant tonight Sessa Nulma, Sessa Nulma Bring me to life Spirit take me behind the sea to a universe that's ours Sessa Nulma, Sessa Nulma Treasure that I seek to find Enchant me, sweetly, quietly, slow Rivers flow out to the corners of the earth Sessa Nulma, Sessa Nulma Reflections in your eyes Sessa Nulma, Sessa Nulma Draw me close tonight Guide me through all the sands of time Through the darkness that binds me Sessa Nulma, Sessa Nulma Relentless desire Cast your light on all that's true Surrender your beauty Let it be my muse Sessa Nulma, Sessa Nulma Enchant tonight Sessa Nulma, Sessa Nulma Bring me to love
Friday, March 29, 2019
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Edith Hahn Beer
I have read several books about the Holocaust. They're all very interesting. They have different stories that explained how they survived despite the odds. What they have in common are the terrible things they had to endure.
One of these books I own is completely different. It's about a young Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by being married to a Nazi Officer. She had to be very careful and very lucky to keep her past a secret. It's a very interesting story. I recommend it.
Amazon: "The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust" by Edith Hahn Beer
4,863 customer reviews
Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a slave labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a hunted woman and went underground. With the help of a Christian friend, she emerged in Munich as Grete Denner. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi Party member who fell in love with her. Despite Edith's protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity a secret.
In wrenching detail, Edith recalls a life of constant, almost paralyzing fear. She tells how German officials casually questioned the lineage of her parents; how during childbirth she refused all painkillers, afraid that in an altered state of mind she might reveal something of her past; and how, after her husband was captured by the Soviets, she was bombed out of her house and had to hide while drunken Russian soldiers raped women on the street.
Despite the risk it posed to her life, Edith created a remarkable record of survival. She saved every document, as well as photographs she took inside labor camps. Now part of the permanent collection at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., these hundreds of documents, several of which are included in this volume, form the fabric of a gripping new chapter in the history of the Holocaust—complex, troubling, and ultimately triumphant.
Wikipedia: Edith Hahn Beer
Edith Hahn Beer
Born January 24, 1914
Died March 17, 2009 (aged 95)
Edith Hahn Beer (January 24, 1914 – March 17, 2009) was an Austrian Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by hiding her Jewish identity and marrying a Nazi officer.
One of these books I own is completely different. It's about a young Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by being married to a Nazi Officer. She had to be very careful and very lucky to keep her past a secret. It's a very interesting story. I recommend it.
Amazon: "The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust" by Edith Hahn Beer
4,863 customer reviews
Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a slave labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a hunted woman and went underground. With the help of a Christian friend, she emerged in Munich as Grete Denner. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi Party member who fell in love with her. Despite Edith's protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity a secret.
In wrenching detail, Edith recalls a life of constant, almost paralyzing fear. She tells how German officials casually questioned the lineage of her parents; how during childbirth she refused all painkillers, afraid that in an altered state of mind she might reveal something of her past; and how, after her husband was captured by the Soviets, she was bombed out of her house and had to hide while drunken Russian soldiers raped women on the street.
Despite the risk it posed to her life, Edith created a remarkable record of survival. She saved every document, as well as photographs she took inside labor camps. Now part of the permanent collection at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., these hundreds of documents, several of which are included in this volume, form the fabric of a gripping new chapter in the history of the Holocaust—complex, troubling, and ultimately triumphant.
Wikipedia: Edith Hahn Beer
Edith Hahn Beer
Born January 24, 1914
Died March 17, 2009 (aged 95)
Edith Hahn Beer (January 24, 1914 – March 17, 2009) was an Austrian Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by hiding her Jewish identity and marrying a Nazi officer.
Life
Early life and education
Hahn was one of three daughters born to Klothilde and Leopold Hahn. Her parents owned and ran a restaurant. In June 1936, Leopold died while working at a hotel as the restaurant manager in the Alps.
Although it was uncommon for a girl of that time to attend high school, Hahn's professor persuaded Leopold to send his daughter. After graduating, Hahn continued her studies at university and was studying law at the time of the Anschluss, when she was forced to leave the university because she was Jewish.[2]
World War II
In 1939, Hahn and her mother were sent to the Jewish ghetto in Vienna. They were separated in April 1941, when Hahn was sent to an asparagus plantation in Osterburg, Germany and then to the Bestehorn box factory in Aschersleben. Her mother had been deported to Poland two weeks before Hahn was able to return to Vienna, in 1942.[2] With duplicate copies of the identity papers of a Christian friend, Christa Denner, Hahn went to Munich.[3]
In Munich, Hahn met Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member who sought her hand in marriage, and volunteered as a German Red Cross nurse. The couple lived together in Brandenburg an der Havel, married, and had a daughter, Angelika, born in 1944.[4]
Vetter, whose blindness in one eye had initially exempted him from military service, was ultimately drafted as a Nazi officer. He was captured as a prisoner-of-war and sent to a Siberian labour camp in March 1945.[5]
Later life
Following the war, Hahn used her long-hidden Jewish identity card to reclaim her true identity. The Allies' need for jurists called her law education into use, and she was appointed as a judge in Brandenburg. Hahn pleaded with the Soviet occupation authorities to free Vetter, and he was released in 1947, but their marriage ended shortly afterward. Vetter died in 2002.[1]
Pressed by the authorities to work as an informer, Hahn fled with her daughter to London, where her sisters had settled after seeking refuge in Palestine at the onset of the war. In London, Hahn worked as a housemaid and a corset designer.[1]
In 1957, she married Fred Beer, a Jewish jewelry merchant, and they remained married until his death in 1984.[2] After Beer's death, Hahn emigrated to Israel and lived in Netanya until returning to London, where she lived for the last few years of her life. She died in London, in 2009.[6]
Archive
In December 1997, a collection of Hahn's personal papers was sold at auction for $169,250. The collection, known as the Edith Hahn Archive, was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[7]
Works[edit]
- Hahn Beer, Edith & Dworkin, Susan (1999). The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust. Little, Brown & Company.
There are millions of idiots in Idiot America.
What I wrote:
"Is life meaningless if there is no afterlife?"
An easy question to answer because there never was and never will be a magical 2nd life. The fantasy is too ridiculous and too childish to take seriously. Also, it's impossible. There is no magic in the universe.
My life is not meaningless because I eat pork steaks. Other people do other things that make their lives meaningful.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
What a stupid fucking asshole (aka Christian fucktard) wrote:
"Is life meaningless if there is no afterlife?"
Yes because then there is no reason to be moral. If there's no Heaven or Hell, then everything in this life is for nothing. Atheists would have you believe that life can have meaning based on materialism, but everything on this earth besides our souls will eventually crumble to dust. The believers will be all that's left in the end.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
What a normal person, aka atheist, wrote for the Christian fucktard:
If Christianity is so moral, explain why the Bible condones slavery and genocide. And don't tell us the OT doesn't count anymore; it's the entire reason Christianity exists in the first place.
"Is life meaningless if there is no afterlife?"
An easy question to answer because there never was and never will be a magical 2nd life. The fantasy is too ridiculous and too childish to take seriously. Also, it's impossible. There is no magic in the universe.
My life is not meaningless because I eat pork steaks. Other people do other things that make their lives meaningful.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
What a stupid fucking asshole (aka Christian fucktard) wrote:
"Is life meaningless if there is no afterlife?"
Yes because then there is no reason to be moral. If there's no Heaven or Hell, then everything in this life is for nothing. Atheists would have you believe that life can have meaning based on materialism, but everything on this earth besides our souls will eventually crumble to dust. The believers will be all that's left in the end.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
What a normal person, aka atheist, wrote for the Christian fucktard:
If Christianity is so moral, explain why the Bible condones slavery and genocide. And don't tell us the OT doesn't count anymore; it's the entire reason Christianity exists in the first place.
What I wrote 8 years ago about a bible-thumping fucktard in the UK.
Maybe this is why Christians are terrified of science.
I was just reading this bullshit from a professional Bible thumper at According to their deeds.
He's a minister from Britain so apparently Idiot America isn't the only country infected with the Christian disease.
After numerous Bible quotes, as if that idiotic book of fantasies has any value, he wrote this insane nonsense:
"The Biblical teaching on the day of judgement is that Jeebus Christ will examine our lives for hard evidence that we really belong to him. It will be done with God's perfect knowledge of hidden actions and motivations and mitigating circumstances, and it will be shown that those who have truly put their faith in Christ have behaved differently, and they will be graciously welcomed in to God's eternal reward — not for the merit of works that they have done, but by the grace of the one who put that faith and love into them in the first place. Those who do not have this faith and love will be sent into eternal punishment."
"It must be noted that Jeebus' only purpose in this judgement is to discover those who have true faith. In this context, he will not judge in order to show that “all the world is guilty before God” — that is the purpose of the law, and it is already complete (Romans 3:19). Jeebus will not expose the works of his followers in order to put them to shame, but exactly the opposite. It is true that some believers will 'suffer loss' on that day (1 Corinthians 3:15) — the scrutinising fire of that day will expose that there was less evidence than they thought of real love for Jeebus, though they will be saved themselves. But Jeebus' purpose is to show, with perfect impartiality, the reality of the faith and love of his disciples, the vast change that he has produced in the hearts of his own.This part is very interesting: Those who do not have this faith and love will be sent into eternal punishment."
This nutjob believes in a magical hell, a place where dead scientists go to be tortured for not believing in the dead Jeebus.
Could this be why it's impossible for a Christian to accept the facts of evolutionary biology?
I know some of the slightly less insane Christians think they accept evolution, but since they virtually always stick their dead Jeebus in there somewhere they are really batshit crazy creationists. Therefore all Christians are science deniers.
A brainwashed Christian has two choices:
1. Continue being a gullible idiot and be rewarded in a magical heaven.
2. Grow up, face facts, and be tortured for it in a magical hell.
Christians are cowards, they're insane, they're unable to understand anything that doesn't make them feel good, so of course they will always choose number one which is believe in a magical Jeebus who will magically send them to a magical heaven to reward their stupidity, as if eternal boredom can be called a reward.
The same British minister wrote a post about one of my favorite evidences for our evolutionary relationship with our chimpanzee ape cousins at Human chromosome 2 - a creationist response.
Please notice that the Bible thumper calls biologists evolutionists. Christians, biologists are called biologists. Please try to remember that to avoid being laughed at.
Also please notice that science deniers never provide evidence for magic. Instead they always provide bullshit evidence against science, as if that would be evidence for magic. Even if their misconceptions were correct that wouldn't be evidence for their fantasies. They don't provide any evidence for their bullshit creation myth because there is no evidence for it. How could a childish fantasy possibly have any evidence? So they attack science and then they say "therefore magic is true." Science doesn't work that way, Christian subhumans. You can't provide fake evidence against something and expect that to be evidence for something else.
My blog has a post which is a collection of excellent easy to understand explanations of Human chromosome 2 and chimpanzee chromosomes 2p & 2q. It's impossible for a person who isn't insane to study the evidence in this post and still be a science denier.
The British minister has two problems (besides being an imbecile). His part time minister job depends on his not understanding any scientific evidence that conflicts with his disgusting Bible, and he is convinced he will be tortured if he makes any attempt to understand why every single biologist in the world accepts and loves evolution (because of the overwhelming powerful evidence).
So what does the cowardly brainwashed minister do when he writes about one of the countless extremely powerful evidences for the proven beyond any doubt fact we share an ancient ape ancestor with chimps?
What the minister does is very easy for an uneducated moron. He doesn't understand and makes no attempt to understand the point of this evidence which is biologists made predictions about human chromosome two which had to be correct if evolution is true, and by the way those predictions were spectacularly beautifully correct in extreme detail.
Instead the minister writes bullshit like "I'm mainly looking at this from an explicitly creationist perspective, but some of this may apply to some intelligent design positions."
Wow minister. Why don't you try looking at this evidence from a reality perspective instead of a magic perspective? Obviously he has decided even before looking at this undeniable evidence for evolution that it couldn't possibly be true. He has completely ruled out the possibility the evidence is correct because that would mean his Christian Death Cult is bullshit. So he writes this ridiculous excuse for not wanting to understand science: "The problem with the conclusion, and with much of the discussion, is that it mingles the evidence with the explanation--so the conclusion, as stated, assumes that there was a common ancestor between apes and humans, which makes it difficult to use it as evidence for a common ancestor."
You fucking idiot. Of course every scientist in the world assumes evolution is true. It's been an established basic scientific fact for more than a century you pathetic uneducated moron.
Also, the whole point of the predictions made about human chromosome two is those predictions had to be correct or else biologists would have to throw out 150 years of scientific progress and praise your dead Jeebus. And they were correct. Their predictions could not have been more perfectly correct. There's a beautiful match between human chromosome two and chimpanzee chromosomes 2p and 2q. It's a wonderful scientific discovery but you call the whole thing magic.
Idiots will always be idiots. There is no cure for Christian insanity.
I was just reading this bullshit from a professional Bible thumper at According to their deeds.
He's a minister from Britain so apparently Idiot America isn't the only country infected with the Christian disease.
After numerous Bible quotes, as if that idiotic book of fantasies has any value, he wrote this insane nonsense:
"The Biblical teaching on the day of judgement is that Jeebus Christ will examine our lives for hard evidence that we really belong to him. It will be done with God's perfect knowledge of hidden actions and motivations and mitigating circumstances, and it will be shown that those who have truly put their faith in Christ have behaved differently, and they will be graciously welcomed in to God's eternal reward — not for the merit of works that they have done, but by the grace of the one who put that faith and love into them in the first place. Those who do not have this faith and love will be sent into eternal punishment."
"It must be noted that Jeebus' only purpose in this judgement is to discover those who have true faith. In this context, he will not judge in order to show that “all the world is guilty before God” — that is the purpose of the law, and it is already complete (Romans 3:19). Jeebus will not expose the works of his followers in order to put them to shame, but exactly the opposite. It is true that some believers will 'suffer loss' on that day (1 Corinthians 3:15) — the scrutinising fire of that day will expose that there was less evidence than they thought of real love for Jeebus, though they will be saved themselves. But Jeebus' purpose is to show, with perfect impartiality, the reality of the faith and love of his disciples, the vast change that he has produced in the hearts of his own.This part is very interesting: Those who do not have this faith and love will be sent into eternal punishment."
This nutjob believes in a magical hell, a place where dead scientists go to be tortured for not believing in the dead Jeebus.
Could this be why it's impossible for a Christian to accept the facts of evolutionary biology?
I know some of the slightly less insane Christians think they accept evolution, but since they virtually always stick their dead Jeebus in there somewhere they are really batshit crazy creationists. Therefore all Christians are science deniers.
A brainwashed Christian has two choices:
1. Continue being a gullible idiot and be rewarded in a magical heaven.
2. Grow up, face facts, and be tortured for it in a magical hell.
Christians are cowards, they're insane, they're unable to understand anything that doesn't make them feel good, so of course they will always choose number one which is believe in a magical Jeebus who will magically send them to a magical heaven to reward their stupidity, as if eternal boredom can be called a reward.
The same British minister wrote a post about one of my favorite evidences for our evolutionary relationship with our chimpanzee ape cousins at Human chromosome 2 - a creationist response.
Please notice that the Bible thumper calls biologists evolutionists. Christians, biologists are called biologists. Please try to remember that to avoid being laughed at.
Also please notice that science deniers never provide evidence for magic. Instead they always provide bullshit evidence against science, as if that would be evidence for magic. Even if their misconceptions were correct that wouldn't be evidence for their fantasies. They don't provide any evidence for their bullshit creation myth because there is no evidence for it. How could a childish fantasy possibly have any evidence? So they attack science and then they say "therefore magic is true." Science doesn't work that way, Christian subhumans. You can't provide fake evidence against something and expect that to be evidence for something else.
My blog has a post which is a collection of excellent easy to understand explanations of Human chromosome 2 and chimpanzee chromosomes 2p & 2q. It's impossible for a person who isn't insane to study the evidence in this post and still be a science denier.
The British minister has two problems (besides being an imbecile). His part time minister job depends on his not understanding any scientific evidence that conflicts with his disgusting Bible, and he is convinced he will be tortured if he makes any attempt to understand why every single biologist in the world accepts and loves evolution (because of the overwhelming powerful evidence).
So what does the cowardly brainwashed minister do when he writes about one of the countless extremely powerful evidences for the proven beyond any doubt fact we share an ancient ape ancestor with chimps?
What the minister does is very easy for an uneducated moron. He doesn't understand and makes no attempt to understand the point of this evidence which is biologists made predictions about human chromosome two which had to be correct if evolution is true, and by the way those predictions were spectacularly beautifully correct in extreme detail.
Instead the minister writes bullshit like "I'm mainly looking at this from an explicitly creationist perspective, but some of this may apply to some intelligent design positions."
Wow minister. Why don't you try looking at this evidence from a reality perspective instead of a magic perspective? Obviously he has decided even before looking at this undeniable evidence for evolution that it couldn't possibly be true. He has completely ruled out the possibility the evidence is correct because that would mean his Christian Death Cult is bullshit. So he writes this ridiculous excuse for not wanting to understand science: "The problem with the conclusion, and with much of the discussion, is that it mingles the evidence with the explanation--so the conclusion, as stated, assumes that there was a common ancestor between apes and humans, which makes it difficult to use it as evidence for a common ancestor."
You fucking idiot. Of course every scientist in the world assumes evolution is true. It's been an established basic scientific fact for more than a century you pathetic uneducated moron.
Also, the whole point of the predictions made about human chromosome two is those predictions had to be correct or else biologists would have to throw out 150 years of scientific progress and praise your dead Jeebus. And they were correct. Their predictions could not have been more perfectly correct. There's a beautiful match between human chromosome two and chimpanzee chromosomes 2p and 2q. It's a wonderful scientific discovery but you call the whole thing magic.
Idiots will always be idiots. There is no cure for Christian insanity.
The best New York Times columnist wrote about how the liberal media fucked up with their prediction that Trump was part of the Russian thing to get him elected.
A comment I wrote at the New York Times:
"what we have is a W.M.D.-size self-inflicted media disaster"
It's about time for liberals to admit they made fools out of themselves. They made it much more likely Trump will win in 2020.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Is Trump Keyser Söze — Or Inspector Clouseau?
Maybe the president brilliantly played the media. Or maybe we just played ourselves.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
March 28, 2019
Maybe we’ve had this all wrong.
Maybe Donald Trump isn’t just some two-bit con artist who lucked his way into the White House thanks to an overconfident opponent. Or a second-rate demagogue with a rat-like instinct for arousing his base’s baser emotions and his enemies’ knee-jerk reactions. Or a dimwit mistaken for an oracle, like some malignant version of Chauncey Gardiner from “Being There.”
Thanks to Robert Mueller, we know he isn’t Russia’s man inside, awaiting coded instruction from his handler in the Kremlin.
Maybe, in fact, Trump is the genius he claims to be, possessed — as he likes to boast — of a “very good brain.”
O.K., I don’t quite believe that. But going forward, it would be wise for all of his inveterate critics in the news media, including me, to treat it as our operating assumption. The alternative is to let him hand us our butts all over again, just as he did by winning the G.O.P. nomination and then the election, and then by presiding over years of robust economic growth.
That should be the central lesson from the epic media fiasco of Russiagate.
Let’s specify what the fiasco is not. It’s not that there was nothing for Mueller to investigate. It’s not that he uncovered no wrongdoing. It’s not that the president did not act in suspicious ways, epitomized by his appalling performance at Helsinki. It’s not that he didn’t lie and mislead, not least about his business ties in Russia. It’s not that the Trump campaign wasn’t studded with people who were, at a minimum, profoundly vulnerable to Russian blackmail. It’s not that the Kremlin didn’t actively seek to interfere in the election, with a favorable eye toward Trump’s candidacy.
Pace the president and his sycophants — the ones who spent nearly two years casting aspersions on Mueller’s integrity, only to now hail his conclusions as dispositive — the nature and extent of Trump’s ties to Russia required a thorough investigation. It got done. Barring some major discrepancy between the attorney general’s summary of Mueller’s report and the report itself, it’s time to say: Case closed. Thank God the president is not a Russian stooge.
The fiasco was to assume that the result of Mueller’s investigation was a forgone conclusion. And to believe that the existence of dots was enough to prove that they had to connect. And to report on it nonstop, breathlessly, as if the levee would break any second. And to turn Adam Schiff into a celebrity guest. And to belittle or exclude contrarian voices.
Last July, I wrote of the special counsel’s inquiry: “The smart play is to defend the integrity of Mueller’s investigation and invest as little political capital as possible in predicting the result. If Mueller discovers a crime, that’s a gift to the president’s opponents. If he discovers nothing, it shouldn’t become a humiliating liability.”
Instead, as Matt Taibbi perceptively observed last week, what we have is a W.M.D.-size self-inflicted media disaster, which ought to require some extensive self-criticism before we breathlessly move on to Trump’s latest alleged idiocy. Assume for a moment that Trump’s odd Russia behavior, including the obsequiousness toward Vladimir Putin and the routine eruptions against Mueller, was merely a way of baiting journalists for years.
If so, he could hardly have played us better: He’d be the Keyser Söze of media manipulation. To adapt a line, perhaps the greatest trick Trump ever pulled was to convince the world his brain didn’t exist.
There’s a simpler, opposite explanation: Trump was never sophisticated enough to have been involved in some high-flown conspiracy with Russia. It would have required too much guile. Forget Söze; think Inspector Jacques Clouseau. The difference between suspicious and shambolic behavior often depends on who is doing the watching. Where some see chaos, others detect patterns. From a certain distance, they can be hard to tell apart.
For years I’ve bounced between these two interpretations of the president — at times astonished by his incompetence; at other times amazed by his cunning. There’s much about the world that Trump will never understand. What he knows, however, is that success is above all a matter of being seen (regardless of results); that the more one lies, the less people notice; that winning is a matter of playing by one’s own rules (and changing them as needed); that, while hope may be inspiring, rage is intoxicating.
These ideas may be noxious, but they are also the fundamental political insights of our time.
Whichever view one takes, Donald Trump has just won a major victory over his chosen political enemies, including this newspaper. Whether he’s achieved this through genius or luck, it would behoove us not to take him for a fool. This was the week to examine our own foolishness instead.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email:letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) andInstagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. @BretStephensNYT • Facebook
"what we have is a W.M.D.-size self-inflicted media disaster"
It's about time for liberals to admit they made fools out of themselves. They made it much more likely Trump will win in 2020.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Is Trump Keyser Söze — Or Inspector Clouseau?
Maybe the president brilliantly played the media. Or maybe we just played ourselves.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
March 28, 2019
Maybe we’ve had this all wrong.
Maybe Donald Trump isn’t just some two-bit con artist who lucked his way into the White House thanks to an overconfident opponent. Or a second-rate demagogue with a rat-like instinct for arousing his base’s baser emotions and his enemies’ knee-jerk reactions. Or a dimwit mistaken for an oracle, like some malignant version of Chauncey Gardiner from “Being There.”
Thanks to Robert Mueller, we know he isn’t Russia’s man inside, awaiting coded instruction from his handler in the Kremlin.
Maybe, in fact, Trump is the genius he claims to be, possessed — as he likes to boast — of a “very good brain.”
O.K., I don’t quite believe that. But going forward, it would be wise for all of his inveterate critics in the news media, including me, to treat it as our operating assumption. The alternative is to let him hand us our butts all over again, just as he did by winning the G.O.P. nomination and then the election, and then by presiding over years of robust economic growth.
That should be the central lesson from the epic media fiasco of Russiagate.
Let’s specify what the fiasco is not. It’s not that there was nothing for Mueller to investigate. It’s not that he uncovered no wrongdoing. It’s not that the president did not act in suspicious ways, epitomized by his appalling performance at Helsinki. It’s not that he didn’t lie and mislead, not least about his business ties in Russia. It’s not that the Trump campaign wasn’t studded with people who were, at a minimum, profoundly vulnerable to Russian blackmail. It’s not that the Kremlin didn’t actively seek to interfere in the election, with a favorable eye toward Trump’s candidacy.
Pace the president and his sycophants — the ones who spent nearly two years casting aspersions on Mueller’s integrity, only to now hail his conclusions as dispositive — the nature and extent of Trump’s ties to Russia required a thorough investigation. It got done. Barring some major discrepancy between the attorney general’s summary of Mueller’s report and the report itself, it’s time to say: Case closed. Thank God the president is not a Russian stooge.
The fiasco was to assume that the result of Mueller’s investigation was a forgone conclusion. And to believe that the existence of dots was enough to prove that they had to connect. And to report on it nonstop, breathlessly, as if the levee would break any second. And to turn Adam Schiff into a celebrity guest. And to belittle or exclude contrarian voices.
Last July, I wrote of the special counsel’s inquiry: “The smart play is to defend the integrity of Mueller’s investigation and invest as little political capital as possible in predicting the result. If Mueller discovers a crime, that’s a gift to the president’s opponents. If he discovers nothing, it shouldn’t become a humiliating liability.”
Instead, as Matt Taibbi perceptively observed last week, what we have is a W.M.D.-size self-inflicted media disaster, which ought to require some extensive self-criticism before we breathlessly move on to Trump’s latest alleged idiocy. Assume for a moment that Trump’s odd Russia behavior, including the obsequiousness toward Vladimir Putin and the routine eruptions against Mueller, was merely a way of baiting journalists for years.
If so, he could hardly have played us better: He’d be the Keyser Söze of media manipulation. To adapt a line, perhaps the greatest trick Trump ever pulled was to convince the world his brain didn’t exist.
There’s a simpler, opposite explanation: Trump was never sophisticated enough to have been involved in some high-flown conspiracy with Russia. It would have required too much guile. Forget Söze; think Inspector Jacques Clouseau. The difference between suspicious and shambolic behavior often depends on who is doing the watching. Where some see chaos, others detect patterns. From a certain distance, they can be hard to tell apart.
For years I’ve bounced between these two interpretations of the president — at times astonished by his incompetence; at other times amazed by his cunning. There’s much about the world that Trump will never understand. What he knows, however, is that success is above all a matter of being seen (regardless of results); that the more one lies, the less people notice; that winning is a matter of playing by one’s own rules (and changing them as needed); that, while hope may be inspiring, rage is intoxicating.
These ideas may be noxious, but they are also the fundamental political insights of our time.
Whichever view one takes, Donald Trump has just won a major victory over his chosen political enemies, including this newspaper. Whether he’s achieved this through genius or luck, it would behoove us not to take him for a fool. This was the week to examine our own foolishness instead.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email:letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) andInstagram.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. @BretStephensNYT • Facebook
Some good news for women's rights in the Muslim theocracies. Women are allowed to blow themselves up.
The daily suicide bombings in shithole countries happen so often it's become boring. This is batshit crazy and it's out of control but these days people think it's normal because it happens every day.
Always it's Muslim morons who are blowing themselves up. When people hear the words "suicide bombing" they immediately know it was a cowardly Muslim asshole. Islam is a disgusting violent cult and it's about time for wimps to stop sucking up to this bullshit. The only way to reform Islam is to get rid of Islam. Muslim scum need to know their disgusting cult will never be tolerated.
If you haven't seen this before you need to see it now: The Religion of Peace.
Two female suicide bombers blew themselves up and gunmen then attacked civilians.
Niger: Boko Haram suicide bomb and gun attack in Diffa region kills at least 10
Ten people were killed when at least two suicide bombers and gunmen staged a coordinated attack late Tuesday in a town in eastern Niger’s Diffa region which the local mayor blamed on Boko Haram.
“Two female suicide bombers blew themselves up and gunmen then attacked civilians,” Abba Kaya Issa, the mayor of the town of N’Guigmi, told AFP on Wednesday, March 27.
“We have a provisional toll of 10 dead plus the two suicide bombers,” along with “seven or eight” wounded, he said, blaming “Boko Haram elements” for the assault.
“One of the suicide bombers blew herself up in the courtyard of a policeman’s home, which is located inside the police barracks, and the second triggered her explosives belt between the town hall, the police barracks and the prefecture,” he said, referring to the office of the state representative.
A local resident said several houses had been burned and wounded children in the police camp had been taken to the local hospital.
Another inhabitant said “armed Boko Haram” attacked the district of Dileram, “killing civilians and torching homes.” A camp for internally displaced people is located in Dileram.
Some local reports put the death toll higher. ActuNiger reported at least 12 people, mostly civilians, were killed and others were missing.
Attacks on civilians in eastern Niger appear to be increasing. On March 21, eight people were killed in the village of Karidi in Gueskerou district and 14 died in attacks in the Diffa region two days later. Seven villages in the Diffa region were attacked between March 19 and 23, according to ACLED.
It is unclear which faction of Boko Haram carried out the attacks. Islamic State has made a slew of claims of attacks by fighter from its West Africa province affiliate on both sides of the Niger-Nigeria border, but many have not been confirmed by official sources and the claims are at times contradictory.
Boko Haram split into two factions in mid-2016. One led by long-time leader Abubakar Shekau is notorious for suicide bombings and indiscriminate killings of civilians. Shekau pledged allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in March 2015, but ISIS central only gives formal backing to the other faction, which is known as Islamic State West Africa province.
The ISWA faction, which largely focuses on attacking military and government targets, was led by Abu Mus’ab Al-Barnawi, but earlier this month, audio recordings revealed that ISIS appointed Abu Abdullah Idris bin Umar also known as Ibn Umar al-Barnawi as leader. ISIS has not yet made a public statement confirming the change.
ISWA rarely uses suicide bombs in its attacks, although its use of SVBIEDs – suicide vehicle bombs – appears to be increasing.
In Niger, the Diffa region near Lake Chad has borne the brunt of cross-border infiltration by insurgents. Diffa and neighboring Borno state in Nigeria have seen a number of attacks in recent weeks, as the Multinational Joint Task Force, which comprises troops from Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria, conducts Operation Yancin Tafki against Boko Haram around Lake Chad.
On March 9, seven police and 38 militants were killed near Gueskerou, according to a government toll. The MNJTF said in a statement that “27 terrorists” were killed.
Islamic State claimed ISWA fighters killed 30 soldiers in a March 9 attack on a military base in Toumour in the Diffa region. Toumour is around 30 km (19 miles) northeast of Gueskerou, and it is unclear whether the ISIS statement referred to the Gueskerou incident or to another attack.
Across the border in Nigeria on March 12, aircraft from Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon supported by MNJTF ground troops killed 33 ISWA militants around Tumbun Rego and Arege, the regional force said.
ISIS claimed ISWA militants fired three Grad rockets at Diffa airport on March 14. ActuNiger reported that ISIS claimed that an ISWA militant carried out a SVBIED attack in Toumour the same day and that local and security sources confirmed that it occurred. ISIS’s Al-Naba magazine put the Grad attack on March 15 and the SVBIED attack on March 13. ISIS later published images of what it said were the Grad launches.
Boko Haram’s bloody insurgency began in northeastern Nigeria in 2009 but has since spread into neighboring Niger, Chad and Cameroon, prompting a regional military response. Some 27,000 people have been killed and two million others displaced, sparking a dire humanitarian crisis in the region.
Always it's Muslim morons who are blowing themselves up. When people hear the words "suicide bombing" they immediately know it was a cowardly Muslim asshole. Islam is a disgusting violent cult and it's about time for wimps to stop sucking up to this bullshit. The only way to reform Islam is to get rid of Islam. Muslim scum need to know their disgusting cult will never be tolerated.
If you haven't seen this before you need to see it now: The Religion of Peace.
Two female suicide bombers blew themselves up and gunmen then attacked civilians.
Niger: Boko Haram suicide bomb and gun attack in Diffa region kills at least 10
Ten people were killed when at least two suicide bombers and gunmen staged a coordinated attack late Tuesday in a town in eastern Niger’s Diffa region which the local mayor blamed on Boko Haram.
“Two female suicide bombers blew themselves up and gunmen then attacked civilians,” Abba Kaya Issa, the mayor of the town of N’Guigmi, told AFP on Wednesday, March 27.
“We have a provisional toll of 10 dead plus the two suicide bombers,” along with “seven or eight” wounded, he said, blaming “Boko Haram elements” for the assault.
“One of the suicide bombers blew herself up in the courtyard of a policeman’s home, which is located inside the police barracks, and the second triggered her explosives belt between the town hall, the police barracks and the prefecture,” he said, referring to the office of the state representative.
A local resident said several houses had been burned and wounded children in the police camp had been taken to the local hospital.
Another inhabitant said “armed Boko Haram” attacked the district of Dileram, “killing civilians and torching homes.” A camp for internally displaced people is located in Dileram.
Some local reports put the death toll higher. ActuNiger reported at least 12 people, mostly civilians, were killed and others were missing.
Attacks on civilians in eastern Niger appear to be increasing. On March 21, eight people were killed in the village of Karidi in Gueskerou district and 14 died in attacks in the Diffa region two days later. Seven villages in the Diffa region were attacked between March 19 and 23, according to ACLED.
It is unclear which faction of Boko Haram carried out the attacks. Islamic State has made a slew of claims of attacks by fighter from its West Africa province affiliate on both sides of the Niger-Nigeria border, but many have not been confirmed by official sources and the claims are at times contradictory.
Boko Haram split into two factions in mid-2016. One led by long-time leader Abubakar Shekau is notorious for suicide bombings and indiscriminate killings of civilians. Shekau pledged allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in March 2015, but ISIS central only gives formal backing to the other faction, which is known as Islamic State West Africa province.
The ISWA faction, which largely focuses on attacking military and government targets, was led by Abu Mus’ab Al-Barnawi, but earlier this month, audio recordings revealed that ISIS appointed Abu Abdullah Idris bin Umar also known as Ibn Umar al-Barnawi as leader. ISIS has not yet made a public statement confirming the change.
ISWA rarely uses suicide bombs in its attacks, although its use of SVBIEDs – suicide vehicle bombs – appears to be increasing.
In Niger, the Diffa region near Lake Chad has borne the brunt of cross-border infiltration by insurgents. Diffa and neighboring Borno state in Nigeria have seen a number of attacks in recent weeks, as the Multinational Joint Task Force, which comprises troops from Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria, conducts Operation Yancin Tafki against Boko Haram around Lake Chad.
On March 9, seven police and 38 militants were killed near Gueskerou, according to a government toll. The MNJTF said in a statement that “27 terrorists” were killed.
Islamic State claimed ISWA fighters killed 30 soldiers in a March 9 attack on a military base in Toumour in the Diffa region. Toumour is around 30 km (19 miles) northeast of Gueskerou, and it is unclear whether the ISIS statement referred to the Gueskerou incident or to another attack.
Across the border in Nigeria on March 12, aircraft from Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon supported by MNJTF ground troops killed 33 ISWA militants around Tumbun Rego and Arege, the regional force said.
ISIS claimed ISWA militants fired three Grad rockets at Diffa airport on March 14. ActuNiger reported that ISIS claimed that an ISWA militant carried out a SVBIED attack in Toumour the same day and that local and security sources confirmed that it occurred. ISIS’s Al-Naba magazine put the Grad attack on March 15 and the SVBIED attack on March 13. ISIS later published images of what it said were the Grad launches.
Boko Haram’s bloody insurgency began in northeastern Nigeria in 2009 but has since spread into neighboring Niger, Chad and Cameroon, prompting a regional military response. Some 27,000 people have been killed and two million others displaced, sparking a dire humanitarian crisis in the region.
What I wrote about the Magic Man and the fucktards who think the thing is real.
A long time ago some ancient morons invented the Magic Man. Religions exist because other morons made stuff up about the Magic Man. Even today in the 21st century this planet is infested with morons who continue to make stuff up and then call their bullshit a fact.
Marijuana edibles are the way to go. Just remember to eat only one. The New York Times explains why.
I recently moved to Illinois. The special substance will be legal here in about one year. Where I use to live, Idiot Florida, Republican fucktards want to make this wonderful plant against the law, as if the government, which works for us, has the right to tell us what we can do or can't do. I never met a Republican who wasn't a stupid fucking asshole.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/well/eat/marijuana-edibles-may-pose-special-risks.html
“When you’re smoking marijuana, you start seeing the effects in a couple of minutes,” said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. “But when you take it orally, it takes a long time to feel the effects, and if you’re taking it in order to feel good and you feel nothing, you may think you didn’t take enough. This is a common phenomenon. People take another dose.”
The edible candies “look very innocent and safe, so you take another and another, and slowly it is being absorbed. And then you start to feel awful, before you complete the absorption, and that can lead to a psychotic episode,” Dr. Volkow said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/well/eat/marijuana-edibles-may-pose-special-risks.html
“When you’re smoking marijuana, you start seeing the effects in a couple of minutes,” said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. “But when you take it orally, it takes a long time to feel the effects, and if you’re taking it in order to feel good and you feel nothing, you may think you didn’t take enough. This is a common phenomenon. People take another dose.”
The edible candies “look very innocent and safe, so you take another and another, and slowly it is being absorbed. And then you start to feel awful, before you complete the absorption, and that can lead to a psychotic episode,” Dr. Volkow said.
Iran and Saudi Arabia
I found this stuff after I played a chess game (aka knife fight) against somebody in Tehran, Iran.
Women's rights, some progress in Iran. Unfortunately not very much progress.
Iran and Saudi Arabia race to pass gender reforms as Tehran relaxes headscarf arrests
Josie Ensor, middle east correspondent
Agence France-Presse 29 DECEMBER 2017 • 11:49AM
Women in the Iranian capital will no longer be arrested for failing to wear a headscarf, Tehran police have said, in a move which follows an unexpected raft of gender reforms in Saudi Arabia.
Morality police will no longer automatically detain women seen without the proper hijab head-covering in public, a strict Islamic dress code in place since the 1979 revolution.
For nearly 40 years, women in Iran have been forced to cover their hair and wear long, loose garments.
Younger and more liberal-minded women have long pushed the boundaries of the official dress code, wearing loose headscarves that do not fully cover their hair and painting their nails, drawing the ire of conservatives.
The announcement signalled an easing of punishments for violating the country's conservative dress code, as called for by the reform-minded Iranians who helped re-elect President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate, earlier this year.
But hard-liners opposed to easing such rules still dominate Iran's security forces and judiciary, so it was unclear whether the change would be fully implemented.
"Those who do not observe the Islamic dress code will no longer be taken to detention centers, nor will judicial cases be filed against them," General Hossein Rahimi, Tehran police chief, was quoted as saying by the reformist daily newspaper Al Sharq.
The semi-official Tasnim news agency said violators will instead be made to attend classes given by police. It said repeat offenders could still be subject to legal action, and the dress code remains in place outside the capital.
Iran's morality police - similar to Saudi Arabia's religious police - typically detain violators and escort them to a police van. Their families are then called to bring the detainee a change of clothes. The violator is then required to sign a form that they will not commit the offence again.
Iran's arch foe Saudi Arabia, under similar internal pressure to liberalise, announced in September that it would finally allow women to drive.
Activists had been arrested for driving since 1990, when the first driving campaign was launched by women who drove cars in the capital, Riyadh.
Shocking the kingdom, one of the most repressive countries for women in the world, the young Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced a tranche of liberalising changes. In 2018, women will also be allowed to attend sporting matches in national stadiums, where they were previously banned.
Designated "family sections" will ensure women are separate from male-only quarters of the stadiums. The crown prince tested public reaction to the move when he allowed women and families into the capital's main stadium for National Day celebrations this year.
And Saudi authorities this week allowed female contestants at an international chess tournament to play without the abaya, a long robe-like dress
The ambitious 32-year-old heir to the throne upended decades of royal family protocol, social norms and traditional ways of doing business. He bet instead on a young generation of Saudis hungry for change and a Saudi public fed up with corruption and government bureaucracy.
Related Topics
Middle East
Iran
Saudi Arabia
Women's rights, some progress in Iran. Unfortunately not very much progress.
Iran and Saudi Arabia race to pass gender reforms as Tehran relaxes headscarf arrests
Josie Ensor, middle east correspondent
Agence France-Presse 29 DECEMBER 2017 • 11:49AM
Women in the Iranian capital will no longer be arrested for failing to wear a headscarf, Tehran police have said, in a move which follows an unexpected raft of gender reforms in Saudi Arabia.
Morality police will no longer automatically detain women seen without the proper hijab head-covering in public, a strict Islamic dress code in place since the 1979 revolution.
For nearly 40 years, women in Iran have been forced to cover their hair and wear long, loose garments.
Younger and more liberal-minded women have long pushed the boundaries of the official dress code, wearing loose headscarves that do not fully cover their hair and painting their nails, drawing the ire of conservatives.
The announcement signalled an easing of punishments for violating the country's conservative dress code, as called for by the reform-minded Iranians who helped re-elect President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate, earlier this year.
But hard-liners opposed to easing such rules still dominate Iran's security forces and judiciary, so it was unclear whether the change would be fully implemented.
"Those who do not observe the Islamic dress code will no longer be taken to detention centers, nor will judicial cases be filed against them," General Hossein Rahimi, Tehran police chief, was quoted as saying by the reformist daily newspaper Al Sharq.
The semi-official Tasnim news agency said violators will instead be made to attend classes given by police. It said repeat offenders could still be subject to legal action, and the dress code remains in place outside the capital.
Iran's morality police - similar to Saudi Arabia's religious police - typically detain violators and escort them to a police van. Their families are then called to bring the detainee a change of clothes. The violator is then required to sign a form that they will not commit the offence again.
Iran's arch foe Saudi Arabia, under similar internal pressure to liberalise, announced in September that it would finally allow women to drive.
Activists had been arrested for driving since 1990, when the first driving campaign was launched by women who drove cars in the capital, Riyadh.
Shocking the kingdom, one of the most repressive countries for women in the world, the young Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced a tranche of liberalising changes. In 2018, women will also be allowed to attend sporting matches in national stadiums, where they were previously banned.
Designated "family sections" will ensure women are separate from male-only quarters of the stadiums. The crown prince tested public reaction to the move when he allowed women and families into the capital's main stadium for National Day celebrations this year.
And Saudi authorities this week allowed female contestants at an international chess tournament to play without the abaya, a long robe-like dress
The ambitious 32-year-old heir to the throne upended decades of royal family protocol, social norms and traditional ways of doing business. He bet instead on a young generation of Saudis hungry for change and a Saudi public fed up with corruption and government bureaucracy.
Related Topics
Middle East
Iran
Saudi Arabia
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
March 27, 2019 - Some news that's interesting for me but not anyone else.
I don't know why anyone would want to come here but in the past 24 hours these countries visited this place: Germany, United States, Chile, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Nigeria, Nepal, Poland.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
More news nobody cares about:
Today I agreed to pay $3,400 and my landlady will pay about $12,000 to get all eleven windows of this house changed to triple pane glass windows which will kill the traffic noise. For me this is a wonderful thing. I like peace and quiet.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
More news nobody cares about:
Today I agreed to pay $3,400 and my landlady will pay about $12,000 to get all eleven windows of this house changed to triple pane glass windows which will kill the traffic noise. For me this is a wonderful thing. I like peace and quiet.
Creationist fucktards (aka evolution deniers) are too lazy to educate themselves.
Creationists should read this book about the evidence for evolution which was written by people who used to be creationists. Unfortunately for them, they're too lazy to educate themselves. They will waste the rest of their entire lives being completely wrong about everything.
This is a quote from the book God's Word or Human Reason?: An Inside Perspective on Creationism.
"Common ancestry of humans and apes can be inferred from the other lines of evidences described in this chapter, but the way that shared ERVs reinforce this pattern is perhaps the strongest single indication of it, a truly powerful and decisive smoking gun."
This is a quote from the book God's Word or Human Reason?: An Inside Perspective on Creationism.
"Common ancestry of humans and apes can be inferred from the other lines of evidences described in this chapter, but the way that shared ERVs reinforce this pattern is perhaps the strongest single indication of it, a truly powerful and decisive smoking gun."
I answered a good question about the religious implications of evolution.
"How can you be Christian but believe in evolution at the same time?"
Very good question.
The Magic Jeebus Man was a creationist. That's obvious because everyone was creationist 2,000 years ago.
If a Christian accepts the established truth of evolution then he or she will be admitting Jeebus was an uneducated moron.
The religious implications are obvious. Evolution kills Christianity.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Another question I answered:
"Christians, what do you pray for when you pray and how often do you pray?"
As if their "Magical Master of the Entire Fucking Universe" listens to human apes talk to themselves on this insignificant planet in the middle of nowhere.
"Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."
-- Carl Sagan
Very good question.
The Magic Jeebus Man was a creationist. That's obvious because everyone was creationist 2,000 years ago.
If a Christian accepts the established truth of evolution then he or she will be admitting Jeebus was an uneducated moron.
The religious implications are obvious. Evolution kills Christianity.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Another question I answered:
"Christians, what do you pray for when you pray and how often do you pray?"
As if their "Magical Master of the Entire Fucking Universe" listens to human apes talk to themselves on this insignificant planet in the middle of nowhere.
"Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."
-- Carl Sagan
What I wrote about Christian scum.
"Atheists, what do you think of Christians?"
I never met a Christian who wasn't a stupid fucking asshole.
Christian morons brainwash children. This is child abuse and they belong in prison for it.
Christians either throw out evolution or they pollute evolution with theistic bullshit.
Christians are cowards. They can't exist without their childish magical 2nd life fantasy.
Christians are gullible. They are willing to believe any bullshit that makes them feel good.
Christian assholes are constantly trying to stick their noses into other people's private lives.
Christian assholes are constantly trying to suppress or dumb down the teaching of evolution.
Christians are Christians because they're just plain fucking stupid.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
What somebody else wrote about Christian scum:
Anyone who takes pleasure in the thought that a God would consign another being to eternal torture and agonizing pain, revels in the idea, looks forward to it, and is constantly telling other people that they are "going to Hell" - is an evil, sick, twisted person.
-- Lord Bearclaw of Gryphon Woods
I never met a Christian who wasn't a stupid fucking asshole.
Christian morons brainwash children. This is child abuse and they belong in prison for it.
Christians either throw out evolution or they pollute evolution with theistic bullshit.
Christians are cowards. They can't exist without their childish magical 2nd life fantasy.
Christians are gullible. They are willing to believe any bullshit that makes them feel good.
Christian assholes are constantly trying to stick their noses into other people's private lives.
Christian assholes are constantly trying to suppress or dumb down the teaching of evolution.
Christians are Christians because they're just plain fucking stupid.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
What somebody else wrote about Christian scum:
Anyone who takes pleasure in the thought that a God would consign another being to eternal torture and agonizing pain, revels in the idea, looks forward to it, and is constantly telling other people that they are "going to Hell" - is an evil, sick, twisted person.
-- Lord Bearclaw of Gryphon Woods
One more time to help fucktards understand.
"Can we prove that there is no God?"
It's easy to prove there is no god thing for the same reason it's easy to prove the Easter Bunny is not real.
Magic is not real therefore magic god fairies and magic rabbits are impossible.
It's easy to prove there is no god thing for the same reason it's easy to prove the Easter Bunny is not real.
Magic is not real therefore magic god fairies and magic rabbits are impossible.
Christian assholes are insane.
A Christian fucktard wrote "Saved from sin and eternal damnation (torments of hell). Without salvation through Jesus Christ, we stand condemned."
Saved from their loving god who tortures people who don't suck up to it.
These assholes for Jeebus belong in a nut-house. They're totally insane.
Saved from their loving god who tortures people who don't suck up to it.
These assholes for Jeebus belong in a nut-house. They're totally insane.
I like Russians but Putin is a stupid fucking asshole. Putin, drop dead you fucking retard.
 |
| Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro |
Russia, you have to get rid of your dictator. He belongs in prison. If it was up to me he would be executed.
Venezuela, you know what you have to do. Kill your dictator.
Trump, you need to send a missile that lands on Maduro's head.
Wall Street Journal - Russia’s Venezuelan Power Play
Putin is testing Trump by sending troops to back up Maduro.
The stakes for American interests keep rising in Venezuela, as Vladimir Putin is now moving his little green men to keep dictator Nicolás Maduro in power. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called his Russian counterpart Monday after Russian air force planes carrying about 100 troops arrived in Caracas Saturday.
“The continued insertion of Russian military personnel” risks “prolonging the suffering of the Venezuelan people who overwhelmingly support” interim President Juan Guaidó, the State Department said in a statement. It added that Mr. Pompeo called on Russia to “cease its unconstructive behavior and join other nations” that want a better future for Venezuela.
This isn’t Ukraine next to Russia, or Syria in the Middle East. This Russian military provocation is in America’s backyard, and the Trump Administration will have to do more in response than issue statements or phone calls of disapproval. The Maduro regime’s fortress socialism is spreading millions of refugees and havoc throughout the region. President Trump needs to decide if he is going to let Mr. Putin get away with it.
Idiot America: An airhead in a small town in Indiana wrote "Both evolution and creationism are belief systems." I'm not making this up. Americans are fucking morons.
If you're interested in extreme stupidity click this link: Both evolution and creationism are belief systems.
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
What I wrote about Idiot America's science deniers.
"Why do we have flat earthers here, and why is it that they just so happen to be Christians? Is it a lack of education?"
One of the definitions of flat-earthers is anyone who is a science denier, for example creationist fucktards, aka evolution deniers.
Why do these morons want to throw out two centuries of scientific progress? The only possible explanation is extreme stupidity.
One of the definitions of flat-earthers is anyone who is a science denier, for example creationist fucktards, aka evolution deniers.
Why do these morons want to throw out two centuries of scientific progress? The only possible explanation is extreme stupidity.
What I wrote for a stupid fucking asshole who sucks up to Muslim scum.
The word "Islamophobia" was invented by assholes who want to suppress freedom of speech.
Some stuff I added to my list of favorite quotes. It's about god bullshit.
It is sad that in this great age of science people still believe in God. There are no scientific theories that have the existence of a supernatural deity as a working hypothesis. Where is it, why doesn’t it show itself?
••••••••••••••••••••••••
The vicious and violent spread of Christianity coincides with Europeans' bloodthirsty colonialism. That Christianity is popularly viewed as a beacon for morality shows the extent to which Westerners have whitewashed their thuggish history.
••••••••••••••••••••••••
It seems to me that the worst thing about God is all the killing that is done in his name.
••••••••••••••••••••••••
As an atheist, I have been convinced that God does exist. Now how is that for a contradiction? But where does this God exist? Why, in the fanciful imagination of the believer, that's where.
••••••••••••••••••••••••
I am an atheist, 91 years old, and have never felt the need for a god or gods to live what is considered a moral life.
••••••••••••••••••••••••
There is much more of this stuff at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/opinion/-philosophy-god-omniscience.htmls
••••••••••••••••••••••••
The vicious and violent spread of Christianity coincides with Europeans' bloodthirsty colonialism. That Christianity is popularly viewed as a beacon for morality shows the extent to which Westerners have whitewashed their thuggish history.
••••••••••••••••••••••••
It seems to me that the worst thing about God is all the killing that is done in his name.
••••••••••••••••••••••••
As an atheist, I have been convinced that God does exist. Now how is that for a contradiction? But where does this God exist? Why, in the fanciful imagination of the believer, that's where.
••••••••••••••••••••••••
I am an atheist, 91 years old, and have never felt the need for a god or gods to live what is considered a moral life.
••••••••••••••••••••••••
There is much more of this stuff at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/opinion/-philosophy-god-omniscience.htmls
The Russians who visit this place might be interested in this New York Times article about President Vladimir Putin.
New York Times - How Powerful Is Vladimir Putin Really?
Russia today doesn’t seem like “a properly run dictatorship.”
By Andrew Higgins
Mr. Higgins is a Moscow correspondent for The New York Times.
March 23, 2019
ORYOL, Russia — After 19 months in a Russian jail awaiting trial for “extremism,” Dennis O. Christensen, a Jehovah’s Witness from Denmark detained for his faith, received an unexpected lift from President Vladimir V. Putin at the end of last year.
The president, speaking in the Kremlin in December, declared that prosecuting people for their religious affiliations was “a total nonsense” and had to stop.
But instead of curbing a campaign across Russia against Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mr. Putin’s remark has been followed by more arrests; a conviction and six-year prison sentence for Mr. Christensen; and, in a new low, reports late last month of the torture of believers detained in Siberia.
The gulf between what Mr. Putin says and what happens in Russia raises a fundamental question about the nature of his rule after more than 18 years at the pinnacle of an authoritarian system: Is Mr. Putin really the omnipotent leader whom his critics attack and his own propagandists promote? Or does he sit atop a state that is, in fact, shockingly ramshackle, a system driven more by the capricious and often venal calculations of competing bureaucracies and interest groups than by Kremlin diktats?
The belief, widespread among critics of President Trump, that Russia propelled him to the White House by colluding with his campaign is premised in part on the first view of Mr. Putin’s capacities and reach. The Mueller report, if ever released to the public, may help Americans better understand how Russia does or doesn’t work in reality.
But to some of Mr. Putin’s fellow citizens, the Russian president’s grip already looks less firm than often imagined.
Ekaterina Schulmann is a political scientist in Moscow and a member of Mr. Putin’s Council for Civil Society and Human Rights who challenged the president over the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses at the December meeting in the Kremlin. She said Mr. Putin’s grip on the country had been vastly exaggerated by both supporters and opponents.
“This is not a personally run empire but a huge and difficult-to-manage bureaucratic machine with its own internal rules and principles,” she said. “It happens time and again that the president says something, and then nothing or the opposite happens.”
A plethora of bureaucratic and political forces both reinforce and sap the president’s power: the security services, the Russian Orthodox Church, billionaire oligarchs, local officials and others, each with its own sometimes competing and sometimes overlapping interests. Mr. Putin has to manage them as best he can, but he doesn’t control everything they each do.
One analyst is even more blunt about Mr. Putin and the state he presides over. “The system is dysfunctional,” said Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow and now an associate fellow at Chatham House, a research organization in London. “No one man could possibly control everything.”
To most Westerners, accustomed to seeing Mr. Putin strutting in front of TV cameras and projecting an aura of effortless command, such statements can sound incredible. It is true that in high-prestige matters of state, like hosting the Olympic Games or the World Cup soccer tournament, or building a bridge to Crimea, Mr. Putin has made the system act on his commands. The same is true for matters that ensure his grip on power, like cracking down on disobedient oligarchs and political opponents.
And after he came to power at the end of 1999, he effectively curbed the conspicuous disorder and noisy infighting that under his frequently drunk predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, left Russia with a state that barely functioned.
But many projects he has backed, like a critical bridge over the Amur River between Russia and China, and a high-profile undertaking to build a highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, have stalled.
There are limits to just how much time and political capital Mr. Putin can invest in prodding corrupt or incompetent officials and contractors to do as they are told.
The construction of a new rocket launch center in the Russian Far East, pushed by Mr. Putin as “one of modern Russia’s biggest and most ambitious projects,” is taking years longer than planned, slowed by corruption, strikes by unpaid workers and other setbacks. The prosecutor general’s office in Moscow says that more than $150 million has been stolen from the project, which it said had been marred by 17,000 legal violations by more than 1,000 people.
This stark mismatch between Mr. Putin’s words and the system’s actions was on display again last month when the police in Moscow arrested Michael Calvey, the American founder of one of the oldest and biggest Russia-focused investment funds, on fraud charges after a dispute with a rival over control of a Russian bank.
Mr. Calvey’s arrest, on charges that could result in up to 10 years in prison, was at odds with repeated statements by Mr. Putin that Russia must attract foreign investors and keep law-enforcement agencies from meddling in business disputes.
Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, insisted that Mr. Putin had no prior knowledge of Mr. Calvey’s detention, but no one outside the president’s innermost circle can be sure.
Aleksei Kudrin, a liberal-minded old friend of Mr. Putin’s from St. Petersburg and his former finance minister, complained that the arrest “fully disregards the directives of the president” and had created an “emergency for the economy.”
Mr. Kudrin’s observation drew widespread scorn. Critics of Mr. Putin accused the former minister of deluding himself with the idea that the president was not responsible for Mr. Calvey’s troubles and countless other examples of Russian law enforcement run amok.
Some recalled how at the height of murderous purges in the 1930s, many of Stalin’s acolytes refused to believe that the Soviet dictator knew what was going on — which he clearly did, since he signed off on lists of people to be executed — and blamed out-of-control underlings.
But Russia today, Ms. Schulmann said, resembles not so much the rigidly regimented country ruled by Stalin as the dilapidated autocracy of Russia in the early 19th century. The ruler at the time, Czar Nicholas I, presided over corrupt civilian and military bureaucracies that expanded Russian territory, led the country into a disastrous war in Crimea and drove the economy into a stagnant dead end.
Nicholas knew the limits of his power: “It is not I who rule Russia,” he complained. “It is the 30,000 clerks.” The only real difference now, Ms. Schulmann said, is that “clerks,” or bureaucrats, now number over a million and a half.
“It is a great illusion that you just need to reach the leader and make him listen and everything will change,” she added. “This is not how it happens.”
The illusion, however, is largely a result of the Kremlin’s own propaganda about the man at the top of what it calls the “power vertical.”
An annual call-in show broadcast on state television features Mr. Putin taking hours of questions and complaints from the public. The ritual is invariably followed by reports in state media about how crumbling schools, broken heating systems, giant potholes and other problems raised by callers have been fixed on Mr. Putin’s orders.
Mr. Christensen, the Dane who has been jailed since May 2017, said he still held out hope that Mr. Putin might, in similar fashion, command compliance with his December statement that “we can and even must be more liberal” toward Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian denomination.
“I was very encouraged by this statement,” Mr. Christensen, 47, said last month, interviewed from behind bars while on a video link to a courtroom in Oryol, a city 230 miles south of Moscow. “I hope that the Russian president was telling the truth and was speaking honestly.”
Mr. Putin, he said, had sent a clear signal that “this should not be happening in the 21st century. We don’t live in the Middle Ages anymore.”
For taking part in Bible readings and prayer sessions in Oryol, Mr. Christensen, a former carpenter, was found guilty in early February of committing “a grave, premeditated crime directed at the foundations of the constitutional order and the security of the state.”
His wife, Irina, who is Russian, attended the court hearing where a lawyer made a request that her husband be released to house arrest pending an appeal of his conviction. She said she did not know whether Mr. Putin had made his Kremlin comments only as a public relations ploy or had bowed to other forces in the system that favored harsh crackdowns.
The Orthodox Church has campaigned for years against Jehovah’s Witnesses, a rival it views as a heretical sect. This hostility has meshed neatly with the interests of the security services, which since Soviet times have viewed the denomination as subversive because its global headquarters are in the United States and its members steadfastly refuse to inform on one another.
To buttress Mr. Christensen’s plea to be let out of jail, his lawyer, Irina Krasnikova, noted in court that judges previously involved in the case “have apparently not read the president’s statement.” The judge, unimpressed, ordered that the Dane be kept behind bars.
“The cult of Putin at the top of an all-powerful ‘power vertical’ is a myth. It does not exist,” said Mark Galeotti, a British Russia expert and the author of the new book “We Need to Talk About Putin: How the West Gets Him Wrong.” Instead, Mr. Galeotti said, Mr. Putin is a “gray blur that allows us all to create our own Putin,” either all-powerful and Machiavellian or struggling just to hold an essentially decrepit system together.
This at times chaotic setup has proved particularly advantageous to Russia’s security apparatus, notably the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the domestic arm of the Soviet-era K.G.B. Mr. Putin, himself a former K.G.B. officer, has largely given the F.S.B. free rein, even when its actions directly contradict his stated goals.
Mr. Putin has frequently spoken, for example, of Russia’s need to develop small and medium-size businesses but has left the F.S.B., which operates mafia-style protection rackets, to ride roughshod over many enterprises.
In his annual state of the nation address last month, he again stressed the need to let business people work freely. Noting that he had made the same demand in a previous address, Mr. Putin acknowledged that “unfortunately, the situation has not improved much.”
Mr. Christensen blamed the F.S.B., with an assist from the Orthodox Church, for his own legal troubles. Mr. Putin may think it’s “total nonsense” for people like Mr. Christensen to be sitting in jail. But for now, that is where he waits. He was recently joined there by a second believer from Oryol, Sergey Skrynnikov, whom prosecutors want jailed for three years for “extremism.”
“A properly run dictatorship looks very different from this,” Mr. Galeotti said.
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting from Moscow.
Andrew Higgins is a Moscow correspondent. He was on the team awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting, and led a team that won the same prize in 1999 while he was Moscow bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal.
A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2019, on Page SR4 of the New York edition with the headline: How Powerful Is Vladimir Putin Really?.
Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Russia today doesn’t seem like “a properly run dictatorship.”
By Andrew Higgins
Mr. Higgins is a Moscow correspondent for The New York Times.
March 23, 2019
ORYOL, Russia — After 19 months in a Russian jail awaiting trial for “extremism,” Dennis O. Christensen, a Jehovah’s Witness from Denmark detained for his faith, received an unexpected lift from President Vladimir V. Putin at the end of last year.
The president, speaking in the Kremlin in December, declared that prosecuting people for their religious affiliations was “a total nonsense” and had to stop.
But instead of curbing a campaign across Russia against Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mr. Putin’s remark has been followed by more arrests; a conviction and six-year prison sentence for Mr. Christensen; and, in a new low, reports late last month of the torture of believers detained in Siberia.
The gulf between what Mr. Putin says and what happens in Russia raises a fundamental question about the nature of his rule after more than 18 years at the pinnacle of an authoritarian system: Is Mr. Putin really the omnipotent leader whom his critics attack and his own propagandists promote? Or does he sit atop a state that is, in fact, shockingly ramshackle, a system driven more by the capricious and often venal calculations of competing bureaucracies and interest groups than by Kremlin diktats?
The belief, widespread among critics of President Trump, that Russia propelled him to the White House by colluding with his campaign is premised in part on the first view of Mr. Putin’s capacities and reach. The Mueller report, if ever released to the public, may help Americans better understand how Russia does or doesn’t work in reality.
But to some of Mr. Putin’s fellow citizens, the Russian president’s grip already looks less firm than often imagined.
Ekaterina Schulmann is a political scientist in Moscow and a member of Mr. Putin’s Council for Civil Society and Human Rights who challenged the president over the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses at the December meeting in the Kremlin. She said Mr. Putin’s grip on the country had been vastly exaggerated by both supporters and opponents.
“This is not a personally run empire but a huge and difficult-to-manage bureaucratic machine with its own internal rules and principles,” she said. “It happens time and again that the president says something, and then nothing or the opposite happens.”
A plethora of bureaucratic and political forces both reinforce and sap the president’s power: the security services, the Russian Orthodox Church, billionaire oligarchs, local officials and others, each with its own sometimes competing and sometimes overlapping interests. Mr. Putin has to manage them as best he can, but he doesn’t control everything they each do.
One analyst is even more blunt about Mr. Putin and the state he presides over. “The system is dysfunctional,” said Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow and now an associate fellow at Chatham House, a research organization in London. “No one man could possibly control everything.”
To most Westerners, accustomed to seeing Mr. Putin strutting in front of TV cameras and projecting an aura of effortless command, such statements can sound incredible. It is true that in high-prestige matters of state, like hosting the Olympic Games or the World Cup soccer tournament, or building a bridge to Crimea, Mr. Putin has made the system act on his commands. The same is true for matters that ensure his grip on power, like cracking down on disobedient oligarchs and political opponents.
And after he came to power at the end of 1999, he effectively curbed the conspicuous disorder and noisy infighting that under his frequently drunk predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, left Russia with a state that barely functioned.
But many projects he has backed, like a critical bridge over the Amur River between Russia and China, and a high-profile undertaking to build a highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, have stalled.
There are limits to just how much time and political capital Mr. Putin can invest in prodding corrupt or incompetent officials and contractors to do as they are told.
The construction of a new rocket launch center in the Russian Far East, pushed by Mr. Putin as “one of modern Russia’s biggest and most ambitious projects,” is taking years longer than planned, slowed by corruption, strikes by unpaid workers and other setbacks. The prosecutor general’s office in Moscow says that more than $150 million has been stolen from the project, which it said had been marred by 17,000 legal violations by more than 1,000 people.
This stark mismatch between Mr. Putin’s words and the system’s actions was on display again last month when the police in Moscow arrested Michael Calvey, the American founder of one of the oldest and biggest Russia-focused investment funds, on fraud charges after a dispute with a rival over control of a Russian bank.
Mr. Calvey’s arrest, on charges that could result in up to 10 years in prison, was at odds with repeated statements by Mr. Putin that Russia must attract foreign investors and keep law-enforcement agencies from meddling in business disputes.
Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, insisted that Mr. Putin had no prior knowledge of Mr. Calvey’s detention, but no one outside the president’s innermost circle can be sure.
Aleksei Kudrin, a liberal-minded old friend of Mr. Putin’s from St. Petersburg and his former finance minister, complained that the arrest “fully disregards the directives of the president” and had created an “emergency for the economy.”
Mr. Kudrin’s observation drew widespread scorn. Critics of Mr. Putin accused the former minister of deluding himself with the idea that the president was not responsible for Mr. Calvey’s troubles and countless other examples of Russian law enforcement run amok.
Some recalled how at the height of murderous purges in the 1930s, many of Stalin’s acolytes refused to believe that the Soviet dictator knew what was going on — which he clearly did, since he signed off on lists of people to be executed — and blamed out-of-control underlings.
But Russia today, Ms. Schulmann said, resembles not so much the rigidly regimented country ruled by Stalin as the dilapidated autocracy of Russia in the early 19th century. The ruler at the time, Czar Nicholas I, presided over corrupt civilian and military bureaucracies that expanded Russian territory, led the country into a disastrous war in Crimea and drove the economy into a stagnant dead end.
Nicholas knew the limits of his power: “It is not I who rule Russia,” he complained. “It is the 30,000 clerks.” The only real difference now, Ms. Schulmann said, is that “clerks,” or bureaucrats, now number over a million and a half.
“It is a great illusion that you just need to reach the leader and make him listen and everything will change,” she added. “This is not how it happens.”
The illusion, however, is largely a result of the Kremlin’s own propaganda about the man at the top of what it calls the “power vertical.”
An annual call-in show broadcast on state television features Mr. Putin taking hours of questions and complaints from the public. The ritual is invariably followed by reports in state media about how crumbling schools, broken heating systems, giant potholes and other problems raised by callers have been fixed on Mr. Putin’s orders.
Mr. Christensen, the Dane who has been jailed since May 2017, said he still held out hope that Mr. Putin might, in similar fashion, command compliance with his December statement that “we can and even must be more liberal” toward Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian denomination.
“I was very encouraged by this statement,” Mr. Christensen, 47, said last month, interviewed from behind bars while on a video link to a courtroom in Oryol, a city 230 miles south of Moscow. “I hope that the Russian president was telling the truth and was speaking honestly.”
Mr. Putin, he said, had sent a clear signal that “this should not be happening in the 21st century. We don’t live in the Middle Ages anymore.”
For taking part in Bible readings and prayer sessions in Oryol, Mr. Christensen, a former carpenter, was found guilty in early February of committing “a grave, premeditated crime directed at the foundations of the constitutional order and the security of the state.”
His wife, Irina, who is Russian, attended the court hearing where a lawyer made a request that her husband be released to house arrest pending an appeal of his conviction. She said she did not know whether Mr. Putin had made his Kremlin comments only as a public relations ploy or had bowed to other forces in the system that favored harsh crackdowns.
The Orthodox Church has campaigned for years against Jehovah’s Witnesses, a rival it views as a heretical sect. This hostility has meshed neatly with the interests of the security services, which since Soviet times have viewed the denomination as subversive because its global headquarters are in the United States and its members steadfastly refuse to inform on one another.
To buttress Mr. Christensen’s plea to be let out of jail, his lawyer, Irina Krasnikova, noted in court that judges previously involved in the case “have apparently not read the president’s statement.” The judge, unimpressed, ordered that the Dane be kept behind bars.
“The cult of Putin at the top of an all-powerful ‘power vertical’ is a myth. It does not exist,” said Mark Galeotti, a British Russia expert and the author of the new book “We Need to Talk About Putin: How the West Gets Him Wrong.” Instead, Mr. Galeotti said, Mr. Putin is a “gray blur that allows us all to create our own Putin,” either all-powerful and Machiavellian or struggling just to hold an essentially decrepit system together.
This at times chaotic setup has proved particularly advantageous to Russia’s security apparatus, notably the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the domestic arm of the Soviet-era K.G.B. Mr. Putin, himself a former K.G.B. officer, has largely given the F.S.B. free rein, even when its actions directly contradict his stated goals.
Mr. Putin has frequently spoken, for example, of Russia’s need to develop small and medium-size businesses but has left the F.S.B., which operates mafia-style protection rackets, to ride roughshod over many enterprises.
In his annual state of the nation address last month, he again stressed the need to let business people work freely. Noting that he had made the same demand in a previous address, Mr. Putin acknowledged that “unfortunately, the situation has not improved much.”
Mr. Christensen blamed the F.S.B., with an assist from the Orthodox Church, for his own legal troubles. Mr. Putin may think it’s “total nonsense” for people like Mr. Christensen to be sitting in jail. But for now, that is where he waits. He was recently joined there by a second believer from Oryol, Sergey Skrynnikov, whom prosecutors want jailed for three years for “extremism.”
“A properly run dictatorship looks very different from this,” Mr. Galeotti said.
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting from Moscow.
Andrew Higgins is a Moscow correspondent. He was on the team awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting, and led a team that won the same prize in 1999 while he was Moscow bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal.
A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2019, on Page SR4 of the New York edition with the headline: How Powerful Is Vladimir Putin Really?.
Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe