www.theatlantic.com

Entonces #fundie theatlantic.com

This. The idea that there's something inherently wrong with discriminating against people because of their race or ethnicity (like the idea that there's something inherently wrong with slavery) is one that originated with people of European ancestry. Those ideas got a lot of traction in the 20th century, when Europeans still dominated the world. Once their long retreat is completed, it will be interesting to see whether Third Worlders continue to see any reason to give even lip service to principles of non-discrimination.

Donald Trump Jr #wingnut theatlantic.com

If we get together, they cannot cancel us all. Okay? They won’t. And this will be contrary to a lot of our beliefs because—I’d love not to have to participate in cancel culture. I’d love that it didn’t exist. But as long as it does, folks, we better be playing the same game. Okay? We’ve been playing T-ball for half a century while they’re playing hardball and cheating. Right? We’ve turned the other cheek, and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference—I understand the mentality—but it’s gotten us nothing. Okay? It’s gotten us nothing while we’ve ceded ground in every major institution in our country.

Andrew Anglin #racist theatlantic.com

His panic was almost palpable as he tried to walk back the fearsome reputation he’d cultivated. “I am not actually a ‘Neo-Nazi White Supremacist,’ nor do I know what that is,” he wrote in mid-September. He claimed that his violent rhetoric was never sincere but simply a way to mock those who slap a Nazi label on anyone who “stands up for white people’s rights” or “refuses to believe the stupid lies about Hitler” or rejects the “alleged Holocaust” narrative. Anglin now shared what he said had been his true editorial approach all along: “Ironic Nazism disguised as real Nazism disguised as ironic Nazism.”

Five days later, he posted about “the world being ruled either by reptiles from another dimension or some other type of reptilian or insectoid race of aliens.” Where the irony started and stopped was hard to know. I emailed Anglin one more time asking for an interview. He didn’t answer. The next day, he wrote a post calling for the mass execution of journalists. “I want to see pieces of journalist brains splattered across walls,” he wrote.

Trump Supporters #fundie theatlantic.com

I’ve [David Frum] talked with well-funded Trump supporters who speak of recruiting a troll army explicitly modeled on those used by Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russia’s Putin to take control of the social-media space, intimidating some critics and overwhelming others through a blizzard of doubt-casting and misinformation. The WikiLeaks Task Force recently tweeted—then hastily deleted—a suggestion that it would build a database to track personal and financial information on all verified Twitter accounts, the kind of accounts typically used by journalists at major media organizations. It’s not hard to imagine how such compilations could be used to harass or intimidate.

The citizens of Malawi #fundie theatlantic.com

Confronting a Sexual Rite of Passage in Malawi

The world has many coming-of-age traditions: sweet sixteens, bar mitzvahs, quinceañeras. But in one African country, 'initiation' is endangering the health of girls and boys.


 Grace Mwase, 14, may look like a child, but her community sees her as an adult because of a sexual initiation she attended at age 10. (Beenish Ahmed)

CHIRADZULU, Malawi — A slight frame gives her the appearance of a child, but the hardened look Grace Mwase wears makes her seem older than her 14 years. In many villages across Malawi, a largely agrarian sliver of a country in southern Africa, custom dictates that both boys and girls as young as eight attend a rite of passage known as “initiation,” after which they are no longer seen as children. The practice is most entrenched in the country's south, where Mwase's Golden Village is located.

Mwase was just 10 when she was led, along with about a dozen other girls, to remote huts outside her village during winter vacation from school in August. The girls were accompanied by older women from their village in Chiradzulu district, near the border with Mozambique. The women, known asanamkungwi, or “key leaders,” told them that when they returned to their villages they should cook and clean—and have sex. According to Mwase, most of the two weeks she spent at the initiation camp were dedicated to learning how to engage in sexual acts. She had been excited for this time with friends away from home, but that feeling quickly gave way to dread as she learned the true purpose of initiation.

“They taught us only how you can handle a man,” she says, looking down at her hands. “So you should be dancing for the man. The man should be on top of you and you should be dancing for him, making him happy.”

The anamkungwi told the girls to lie on top of one another and get a feel for the various positions described to them. They then encouraged the girls to “practice” what they had learned. In fact, girls in Malawi are often told that if they don’t have sex upon concluding initiation, their skin will become dry and brittle. This will mark them for life, and they will be ostracized if they don't complete the custom as their mothers and grandmothers did before them. These guardians often force their daughters to go through with the ritual for fear of breaking with tradition.

“There’s nothing like adolescence. You are either a child or an adult.”

Initiation is a centuries-old practice in the region, according to Harriet Chanza of the World Health Organization. In many agrarian communities, she notes, “There’s nothing like adolescence. You are either a child or an adult.” Initiation is meant to establish the gender norms that boys and girls are expected to follow as men and women. The emphasis on having sex may also have a darker purpose in a country where nearly three-fourths of the population lives below the poverty line. Chanza, who is based in Malawi, says that some parents may actually want their daughters to get pregnant at a young age. A girl is often married soon after she is found to be pregnant, deferring the cost of caring for her and her baby from her parents to her husband.

Mwase was told, "'You are a woman enough'" by an anamkungwi in her village, and informed, "'If you come out [of the initiation camp], you should sleep with a man to cleanse you of your childhood thing.'" Worse, Mwase says though a translator, "They said you should do your sexual cleansing but not use a condom. You should do it plain."

Mwase sits in an uneven plastic lawn chair in an empty hall used for community gatherings as she recounts her experiences. She had walked to our meeting point in Chiradzulu district from her village to speak with foreign journalists, and agreed to discuss a topic that few women are willing to broach because we didn’t share ties to her community or culture. “You’re like a visitor so you don’t know anything,” she says. Conversing with us, in other words, isn't as difficult as telling women in her village how she feels about a custom they might support.

Her small, sharp eyes aglow in the dimly lit room, a grain mill whirring in the background, Mwase says the anamkungwi who oversaw her initiation told her to find an older man to have sex with after she left the camp. In defiance of tradition, however, Mwase refused to do so, fearing the costs to her health from unprotected sex. Like many first-born daughters in Malawi, Mwase was raised by her grandmother. She says her grandmother, who had sent her to the camp, didn't force her to have sex—likely because Mwase never told her about her decision not to do so. If her grandmother had learned the truth, she might have paid a man to take Mwase’s virginity. In some villages, young men hired for this task are called “hyenas,” and they occasionally have sex with many girls in a single village who have gone through initiation together.

Thera Rasing, an anthropologist who has studied girls’ initiations in Zambia,writes that the secrecy surrounding these rituals increased during the colonial era and has remained in place to keep missionaries and churches from “trying to control and christianize these rites.” Still, as abominable as such customs might seem, Rasing adds that initiations are associated with honor for many women: “A woman’s capacity to elicit change, to be powerful and empowered arises from her relative success in being a proper woman. Through this she acquires the respect of her spouse and of the neighbourhood as a moral community. This is what a girl learns during her initiation into womanhood, and that she is told during her wedding ceremony.”

Despite the social role of initiations, there are numerous public health concerns surrounding the custom in Malawi. Young girls largely unaware of the risks are being told to have unprotected sex in a country where a tenth of the population is HIV-positive. (While this figure is on par with other countries in the region, it is far higher than rates elsewhere in the world; 70 percent of AIDS-related deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa.) And teenage pregnancies also abound in Malawi, where one in four teen girls under 18 is a mother (in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, more than 50 percent of births take place during adolescence). The young age at which girls become pregnant complicates their deliveries and puts them at greater risk for losing their babies, losing their lives, or developing an obstetric fistula—a condition where a rupture in the birth canal leaves women suffering from incontinence and ostracized from their communities.

Girls are taught a dance known as chisamba “as a way of preparing them for their role of satisfying their husbands in bed.”

Female genital mutilation, which often entails the complete or partial removal of the clitoris, is not common in Malawi, though it can take place during similar rites of passage in other parts of Africa. But initiation can leave lasting trauma even without physical injury. The Malawi Human Rights Commission, a government agency, has reported that initiations impinge on girls’ rights to education, health, liberty, and dignity. The Commission further elaborates on some of these rituals, stating that girls are taught a dance known as chisamba“as a way of preparing them for their role of satisfying their husbands in bed,” and that they are made to perform this dance at the end of their initiation “bare-breasted in a very explicit manner as they are being presented to the whole community.” The study also notes, however, that initiation rites vary widely, and that in some communities girls attending initiation are advised not to have premarital sex.

For boys in Malawi, and in several other African countries, initiation sometimes involves circumcision. According to the Malawi Human Rights Commission, Malawian boys live in camps on the outskirts of villages and are occasionally forced to consume foods prepared with urine and “medicine” made with their severed foreskins. The report notes, “Once the boys undergo circumcision they are considered mature and are actually advised to have sexual intercourse with any girl as soon as they go back home.”

Initiations for boys can easily go awry, since the circumcisions are often performed by people without medical training wielding ritual knifes. Last year in South Africa, an estimated 60 young men died after their initiation ceremonies as a result of botched circumcisions and dehydration due to “survival tests.” Local government officials were hesitant to intervene because of “cultural sensitivities.”

“The difficulty with culture is you deal with the [village] chief and he says, ‘I have changed. I have put [in] bylaws [to prohibit initiations]. [Then] you come [back] and [initiations] are quietly being done,” says Jean Mwandira, a specialist in reproductive and adolescent health with the United Nations Population Fund in Malawi.

We speak over dinner beside the glittering but parasite-ridden Lake Malawi. Here in southern Malawi, where initiations are most widespread, girls are often married off as soon as they reach puberty and literacy rates are among the lowest in the country. In the district of Mangochi, which borders the lake,48 percent of teenagers have begun bearing children—the highest incidence in Malawi. Mwandira says it is hard to persuade local leaders here and elsewhere in the country to stop a custom that has such a long history, especially since annual initiations for boys and girls have become a kind of industry.

"Those people who perform such tasks are paid, either in cash or kind, so it's difficult for the whole thing to die [out]," she explains. Even "the chief gets something for allowing that initiation ceremony to take place."

In the face of public scrutiny, those who have a vested interest in keeping the custom alive try to do so covertly. Initiation camps are held outside villages in temporary shelters built just for this purpose and then burnt to the ground once children are sent home, Mwandira says. Adults who aren’t involved in managing the camps are not permitted near them. What’s more, the girls who take part in initiations are loath to talk about them.

I spent a day in Mangochi, asking every young woman I could whether she had been initiated. Each time I got a shy smile and swift ‘no’ in response. This despite what Mwandira told me: “It’s not possible to live in Mangochi and not be initiated.”

In Chiradzulu, a few hours south by car, Grace Mwase was the rare exception willing to speak about her experiences with initiation. When I asked if she wanted her testimony about this deeply private matter to be kept anonymous, she said, “No, use my name.” Her lack of shame may well stem from her involvement in the Girls Empowerment Network, a locally run coalition of young women.

The group is led by a woman named Joyce Mkandawire. She says that when she first arrived in Chiradzulu, where Mwase lives, she was struck by the lack of freedom afforded to girls. “A girl leaves a school [because she is] pregnant, nobody cared. A girl gets married today, nobody cared,” she recalls. Mkandawire is now advocating for new bylaws in local villages to bar teenage girls from getting married. She has also reached out to local headmasters, who notify her when a girl has dropped out of school so that she and the Girls Empowerment Network can try to convince her to return—and to focus on education rather than marriage.

Joyce Mkandawire poses with young mothers from the Girls Empowerment Network. (Beenish Ahmed)

In speaking out about these issues, Mkandawire has inspired girls like Mwase to do the same. About her work as a leader in the Network, she says, “I am there just to help the community and to encourage myself. If there is anything [wrong], I go to the elders and speak to them.” Mwase also goes to the initiation camps outside her village every year to speak to the girls there. “I go to tell them after your initiation, if you go out, don’t do the sexual cleansing thing because it’s bad for us,” she explains.

And she’s pleased with the progress she’s made so far. “If I go talk to them, they listen to me,” Mwase says, breaking into a smile.

????? ???? #conspiracy theatlantic.com

We start with a montage of forests, peaceful scenes studded with sunlight, the kind of pictures just waiting for some inspirational quote to be plastered on top of them. We’ve all seen forests, we all know what they are; how could anyone claim that they don’t exist? But our narrator knows better. “They make us think that this is a forest,” he tells us, “when you are actually looking at thirty-meter bushes. After watching this video, you will reverse your concept of forests by 360 degrees.” This isn’t a forest at all: only a diminished imitation. Thousands of years ago, a cataclysmic event destroyed 99% of the Earth’s biosphere, and when it happened, it took away the real forests. Real trees are nothing like their stunted cousins, the miserable perishing scraps of wood that we see today; they were truly vast, hundreds of kilometers tall, magical organisms that sustained a total living ecology of the flat earth. These things were the anchor of a beautiful world that has now vanished forever. And how does he know? Because everywhere around us, we can see their stumps.

The first piece of evidence is Devils Tower in Wyoming, U.S.A., a great geological stub (pictured above) rising out of the rolling lowlands on all sides, four hundred meters of towering igneous rock that may have formed as a volcanic plug, rising out of the ground as the sedimentary stone that surrounded it slowly eroded away. Or so they want you to think. See its intricate hexagonal columns, curving up in a way that looks almost organic. See the perfection of its sheared-flat summit. Doesn’t this remind you of something?

For several minutes, our guide to this new reality shows us images of mesas, plateaux, flat-topped mountains, chunks of isolated cliffs, placed next to pictures of astoundingly similar-looking tree-stumps. Every time there’s the same challenge. ‘Name ten differences.’ You can’t. ‘There are only two differences: material and size.’ These things look the same: they are the same thing.

Not just mesas—ordinary mountains are contrasted with the shattered, splintered remnants of trees; the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland is revealed to be a petrified organic structure, because (we’re told) cooling lava simply does not assume these shapes. There is no such thing as a mountain; there is no such thing as inert rock. Everything we walk on was once living wood, the mountain ranges were once tremendous forests reaching up to the stellar canopy, providing a link between humanity and the celestial spheres. The earth was really flat. But some malignant power cut all these trees down using vast machinery, and ever since then they’ve been gouging into the corpse of the earth, mining the dead trees for precious minerals, carving deep quarries that we, in our ignorance, call gorges and canyons (you can see the monstrous tracks leading away from Antarctic valleys); we think they’re natural, we even think that the traces of our destruction are somehow beautiful.

Andrew Snelling #fundie theatlantic.com

A Creationist Sues the Grand Canyon for Religious Discrimination
The national park wouldn’t let him collect rocks for research.

“How did the Grand Canyon form?” is a question so commonly pondered that YouTube is rife with explanations. Go down into the long tail of Grand Canyon videos, and you’ll eventually find a two-part, 35-minute lecture by Andrew Snelling. The first sign this isn’t a typical geology lecture comes about a minute in, when Snelling proclaims, “The Grand Canyon does provide a testament to the biblical account of Earth’s history.”

Snelling is a prominent young-Earth creationist. For years, he has given lectures, guided biblical-themed Grand Canyon rafting tours, and worked for the nonprofit Answers in Genesis. (The CEO of Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham, is also behind the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter theme park.) Young-Earth creationism, in contrast to other forms of creationism, specifically holds that the Earth is only thousands of years old. Snelling believes that the Grand Canyon formed after Noah’s flood—and he now claims the U.S. government is blocking his research in the canyon because of his religious views.

Last week, Snelling sued park administrators and the Department of Interior, which administers the national parks program, because they would not grant him a permit to collect 50 to 60 fist-sized rocks. All research in the national park is restricted, especially if it requires removing material. But the Grand Canyon does host 80 research projects a year, ranging from archaeology digs to trout tracking.

Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal advocacy group that filed the lawsuit on behalf of Snelling, alleged discrimination by the park. “National Park Service: Research in Grand Canyon okay for geologists — but not Christian ones,” read the headline on their press release. (Interior department and NPS spokespeople declined to comment because of the pending litigation.)

If the permit application hit a nerve, it’s because young-Earth creationists have a bit of an obsession with the Grand Canyon. Where geologists see billions of years of rock layers carved out by a persistent flow of water, young-Earth creationists see sediments laid down in Noah’s flood. As the flood receded, they believe, water became trapped behind natural dams, until it finally broke through in a “catastrophic erosion” that carved the Grand Canyon.

This is the story told on religious rafting trips organized by companies like Canyon Ministries, for which Snelling also works as a guide. In 2004, a book by the Canyon Ministry founder Tom Vail caused a stir when it was sold at the national park’s bookstores.

It’s all part of an uneasy relationship between the park and young-Earth creationists. The park does permit the rafting trips, and it has allowed creationists, including Snelling according to the lawsuit, to work in the park before. Another prominent young-Earth creationist, Steve Austin, took photos of nautiloid fossils in the park and used them to argue that the creatures died during the flood. “I think the NPS has felt a bit stung by past creationist research in the Grand Canyon,” says Steven Newton, who teaches geology at College of Marin and serves as the programs and policy director for the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit that opposes teaching creationism in public schools.

Exactly why the park did not grant Snelling’s application is, of course, now the subject of a lawsuit. His project did involve collecting a sizable number of rocks, which can invite more scrutiny. In an email to Snelling filed as part of the lawsuit, a park officer said the project was not granted because the type of rock he wanted to study can also be found outside of the Grand Canyon. The park solicited peer reviews from three mainstream geologists. One mentioned the rocks could be found elsewhere; all three overwhelmingly denounced the work as not scientifically valid, a criterion the park also uses to evaluate proposals. Snelling, who holds a Ph.D. in geology, did not disclose his Answers in Genesis affiliation, nor did he explicitly say he wanted to prove the Grand Canyon is young in his initial permit application, but the reviewers became aware of his reputation.

Geology as a profession has struggled with what to do with young-Earth creationists, whose beliefs are contradicted by literal mountains of scientific evidence. Shut them down, and you get cries of censorship—like this lawsuit. “This just so plays into their hands,” Newton says about the national park’s treatment of Snelling’s application. Newton favors letting creationists do their research and then arguing on the merits of their science. But allowing them to present at scientific conferences, others say, is lending creationists legitimacy.

“That’s really a tough question because in science we want to be the type of community where people can bring about ideas that are controversial,” says Stephen Moshier, a geologist at Wheaton, a Christian liberal arts college in Illinois, and a former president of the Affiliation of Christian Geologists. The problem, according to Moshier, who is not a young-Earth creationist, is that they want mainstream geologists to be open to new ideas, but it’s the young-Earth creationists themselves who have proved inflexible in the face of new evidence contradicting their ideas. “Often I read things by young-Earth creationists where I think they really ought to know better. Many of them have excellent training in the geosciences,” he says. (Snelling declined to comment because of the lawsuit. Four other young-Earth creationists who study the Grand Canyon did not respond to requests for comment.)

That the Grand Canyon is the stage where this conflict now plays out is no coincidence. The canyon is such a potent example of the power of small changes over time—of what’s possible on geological time scales. “Look through any introductory geology textbook, any sedimentology textbook, and the Grand Canyon is going to be there in either full color or on the whole page,” says Moshier.

Last year, he and other Christian geologists published a book titled The Grand Canyon, Monument to an Ancient Earth, directly refuting young-Earth creationists who cite the canyon as evidence of Noah’s flood. “It wouldn’t be of any use writing about the Appalachian Mountains—even though I think we can make a stronger case for an ancient Earth there because the geology is so complex,” says Moshier. “Because they make a big deal out of the Grand Canyon and use it as a lab for young-Earth creationism and flood geology, that’s naturally where we had to focus the book.”

When young-Earth creationists invoke God, they are tapping into a real sense of wonder about the Grand Canyon. It’s easy—in fact all too human—to wonder how so small a river could have carved so vast a chasm. One partial answer is that the Glen Canyon dam has quelled the spring floods that originally bored through rock; the lazily winding Colorado River that you see today is not the river that formed the Grand Canyon. But also, humans are bad at intuiting the consequences of deep time. Once you add enough zeros to number of years they all start to sound the same.

It’s hard to imagine how much can happen in geological time. About 1.7 billion years ago, a series of volcanoes crashed into what would become the continent of North America and created mountains taller than the Himalayas today. Those mountains eroded back down to hills to form the rock that now rests at the base of the canyon. Over countless millions of years, a shallow sea expanded and contracted over the area, laying down the sediment that would become the sandstone, shale, and limestone layers. Plate tectonics then pushed those rock layers up and up to became the Colorado Plateau. And finally, flowing water carved its way down 1.7 billion years of rock.

It’s hard to imagine, but there is wonder and grandeur in this imagination, too.

Newt Gingrich #fundie theatlantic.com

Let me be as blunt and direct as I can be. Western civilization is in a war. We should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in sharia, they should be deported. Sharia is incompatible with Western civilization. Modern Muslims who have given up Sharia—glad to have them as citizens. Perfectly happy to have them next door.

Kenneth_W_Treuter2011 #conspiracy theatlantic.com

GIVE ME A BREAK INDEED. Birth certificate aside, he was either born as a natural-born citizen of the United States or he was not and the "HE WAS NOT" evidence is stronger than the "he was" insistence by his supporters. I want him to prove that he is qualified to serve as the POTUS and thus far he has spent millions in legal fees to hide the documents which must OBVIOUSLY prove that he is not.

With that said, he has certainly PROVEN one thing beyond any reasonable doubt. He, a Kenyan-born mulatto who was from birth indoctrinated in Muslim thuggery, socialism, Chicago-styled political thuggery, pathological lying, hanging with domestic terrorists and defending foreign terrorist and their attacks on the U.S., race baiting, and anti-captialism and American exceptionalism should not be in the office of POTUS. In other words, the CEO of OBAMANATION UPON THE NATION, INC. should be evicted from the American Constitutional Republic's White House and Oval Office and then deported to his true home, Kenya, Africa.

Disappointed #fundie theatlantic.com


Conservatives have made this country great. Conservatives have moved mankind forward for thousands of years. Conservatives have created and nurtured families. People who have brain damage like you and other liberals are regressive.

You want to kill babies.
You want same sex marriage.
You want to chop off sexual organs because you don't identify with them.
You want handouts and no accountability.
You want Muslims from countries who kill gay people as a matter of law to be welcomed because you think it spites conservatives.
You abandon your women and leave them on welfare.

You are slowly driving yourself towards extinction. You are weak and worthless. You tell everyone you're intelligent, but your actions say otherwise.

Karl Pomeroy #fundie theatlantic.com

The media attacks on Trump lie beyond the bounds of civility and decency. Destroying or attempting to destroy the reputation of a presidential candidate is not legitimate "vetting", it is uncalled-for vilification that undermines the electoral process.

The Trump University case is a civil case that Trump could settle out of court. It's probable the people just want his money. He chooses to go to court in order to keep people from suing him regularly, which settling out of court would encourage them to do.

Those who attack Trump's business record appear naive and ignorant about how entrepreneurs handle big transactions within the law. Have Trump's critics known any big money people personally? If so, these critics are hypocrites to pretend Trump may have done something fraudulent. I am of modest income, but there have been millionaires among my extended family, and what Trump does is not out of line. Lawsuits and business bankruptcies are common for people who deal at high levels.

If you want to sue a University, sue the University of California at Berkeley. They made students pay tuition for required classes that had no seats available, such that some had to stand in the hallway and miss the lecture. UCB failed to deliver. Indeed, people were jumping off the Campinele Tower---committing suicide right on campus---because they were cheated out of an education by that fraudulent University.

The Trump University prospectus offers inspiring Trump quotes. Probably this really is how Trump succeeded at real estate, and he was passing his techniques on to the students. Trump was, after all, a fan, follower and friend of Norman Vincent Peale, author of "The Power of Positive Thinking." If positive thinking sounds like generic advice, the student has missed the point.

People who criticize Trump unfairly must harbor a hidden desire to destroy humanity.

Karl Pomeroy
Quemado Institute

Jay_Sherman #racist theatlantic.com

[Commenting on What Happens When Detroit Shuts Off the Water of 100,000 People]

You're not allowed to speak the truth about America's [ig]noble savages, who are counted as a national treasure which must be preserved at taxpayer expense. Have 6 babies by 5 different men when you can't afford to support a goldfish? No problem! Get free housing/support/food/medical care and then use your cash to buy cigs and lotto tix instead of paying the water bill? No problem! This is America! Just blame it on the "evil white man", 'cause they're all "racist" ya know; unlike these wonderful savages who can never seem to find an honest job, whether times are good or bad; whether they live in NYC or Detroit..... Such truth might offend a white liberal!

Saudi "Anti-Witchcraft Unit" #fundie theatlantic.com

The Saudi government's obsession with the criminalization of the dark arts reached a new level in 2009, when it created and formalized a special "Anti-Witchcraft Unit" to educate the public about the evils of sorcery, investigate alleged witches, neutralize their cursed paraphernalia, and disarm their spells. Saudi citizens are also urged to use a hotline on the CPVPV website to report any magical misdeeds to local officials, according to the Jerusalem Post.

By 2011, the unit had created a total of nine witchcraft-fighting bureaus in cities across the country, according to Arab News, and had "achieved remarkable success" in processing 586 cases of magical crime, the majority of which were foreign domestic workers from Africa and Indonesia. Then, last year, the government announced that it was expanding its battle against magic further, scapegoating witches as the source of both religious and social instability in the country. The move would mean new training courses for its agents, a more powerful infrastructural backbone capable of passing intelligence across provinces, and more raids. The force booked 215 sorcerers in 2012.

Exiled_At_Home #racist theatlantic.com

Perhaps, if the Jewish tribe stopped trying so hard to demarcate themselves from the rest of humanity, e.g. Chosen People, God's Covenant, innate geniuses, etc. maybe you'd find less people treating your tribe differently. Just a thought. What do I know, though, I'm just a lowly goyim.

nanablan #fundie theatlantic.com

How dare you label Trump as a narcissist and his followers as sociopaths? Who do you think you are? Your comments are nothing but left-wing talking points, and you're in extreme denial about your own candidate.

Anyone with half a brain knows that Hillary should definitely have been indicted, at the very least, but, of course, the fix was in at the DOJ to prevent this from happening. Just what exactly do you think was Bill Clinton's goal for meeting privately with Loretta Lynch just 2 days before FBI's interrogation of Hillary? And, Lynch's choice of leaving the decision up to the FBI as to whether to indict was only a part of the whole plan to let Hillary off the hook.

We all know that if any other government employee were to set up an unsecured email system in his/her home involving the flow of classified information, and who deliberately erased emails with pertinent government and FOIA requested information would without doubt be indicted and prosecuted.

This illegal email system is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Clintons. The recent discovery of numerous "pay for play" scenarios involving the Clinton Foundation and Hillary while serving as SOS is extremely disturbing, and I believe there is much more to follow.

Without venturing into the Benghazi lies and cover-up situation on the part of Hillary, I have to ask how you can support a candidate who is so dishonest and corrupt? What is wrong with you? Do you really want this person to return such illegal activities to the White House? If so, you are truly living without morals of any kind.

In closing, I would like to share that I have a Master’s Degree in Counseling, and, therefore, am much more knowledgeable than the average person about the various mental disorders as outlined in the DSMV. My experience tells me that Hillary is the one with the personality disorder, as she definitely qualifies under each and every measurement of Narcissism. Just to educate you, I’ve outlined these measurements below:

- Belief that you're special and more important than others
- Fantasies about power, success and attractiveness
- Failure to recognize others' needs and feelings
- Exaggeration of achievements or talent
- Expectation of constant praise and admiration
- Arrogance
- Unreasonable expectations of favors and advantages, often taking advantage of others
- Envy of others or belief that others envy you

These are all classic Clintonian principles. As far as I’m concerned, anyone planning to vote for Hillary is choosing the most flawed, dishonest, and corrupt candidate in the history of the U.S. If this is what the Democrat party has come to represent, we have no choice but to elect Trump as our next President, as he stands for all the good things our nation was founded on: freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Cal2 #racist theatlantic.com

No, the British were, as anyone who gone thru the private papers of our Presidential libaries knows, pressing the US to join the war...pleading actually for us to join in. There are also considerable archive papers on the US Jewish zionist leaders at the time also urging Roosevelt to war. Also the NYT archive contains many articles and editorial opinions of the Jewish groups urging the US to join the war.

However it was the Pearl Harbor attack that finally did it. So who can say....I think the US would have eventually anyway. What those who spend all their time spouting opinion instead of researching the documented facts don't know is how badly Europe was losing, would have fallen to Hitler except for 1) Russia coming in and 2) the US coming in ....they also don't understand that Eisenhower and many others had monumental fears from time to time that we (the allies) were going to lose and Europe was going to fall to Hitler. People fail to understand also what a force the German military was...the largest, most trained and disciplined the world had ever seen at the time and the world will never see again in a conventional army. It was a juggernaut, it rolled over east Europe like it was nothing.

To put the holocaust in perspective...over 75 million people were killed in WWII.....25 million of them Russian civilians.....in the same camps with Jews, 5 million non Jews, POWs mostly Russian soldiers, political dissents, Catholics and others termed undesirable; gays, the disabled, etc. were executed. After the war 2 million German ethnic Polish and others were expelled from eastern European countries. The ally records show 1 million + DP's (displaced persons) at the end of the war of which 460,00 were Jews.

Any time you put these facts in front of the whinning zio bots their reply is '''but they killed us just because we were Jews"....well they killed the gays and Catholics and Russians ''just because'' of what they too. So the Jews that think the war was 'all about them'' and are still whinning 65 later disgust me. They should show some graditude and kiss the world's ass for stopping Hitler or they would all be dead.

And the crap about how the US wouln't take in Jews, also a lie, the US admitted 140,000 Jews, took in more Jewish refugees than any other kind and more than any other country. It is actually quit easy to refute their myths and propaganda....simply go the revelant Presidential Libraries, the Library of Congress, the NYT archives, and History Commons for a start. As for Israel and the history of zionism and what they did in Palestine go to the British National Archives....for on the ground official reports of who did what. It will be an eye opener.

Donald Trump #conspiracy theatlantic.com

He continued: “You’ve seen what happened in Paris and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening. It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in may cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”

C.Y. Leung #fundie theatlantic.com

Since pro-democracy protests erupted in the territory in late September, Hong Kong chief executive CY Leung has maintained that universal suffrage, a core demand of the protesters, would not be granted. On Monday, however, Leung offered a startling justification for his intransigence: Democratic reforms would disproportionately benefit the poor.

In comments to reporters gathered at his official residence, a stately mansion built by the British, Leung said "you have to take care of all the sectors in Hong Kong as much as you can," adding that "if it’s entirely a numbers game and numeric representation, then obviously you would be talking to half of the people in Hong Kong who earn less than $1,800 a month."

Guest #racist theatlantic.com

I see nothing wrong with excluding foreigners that have dissimiler cultures and governments. Our Founding Fathers warned us about that. "Be care who you allow in. They bring with them their own cultures and political preferences, then go about changing ours. Then our own culture and government are gone." Ring a bell? As for intelligence, the U.S. or any First-World country didn't become a superpower with low intelligence. The kind of intelligence needed is what IQ tests measure, but we are to alter those tests so Hispanics do better. That's ridiculous. That's like throwing ineligible students into accelerated classes, then making excuses for why they fail.

We, as a European created nation must look out for ourselves or we will be enveloped by people unlike us. They will eventually take over and rule, change our culture and government to their own liking. Now, if you don't like the U.S. and her history, or are a foreign immigrant, you might not approve of that. But keep in mind, it was Europeans who founded the country, kept it a majority European peoples until 1965. Most Americans at that time did not approve of the 1965 Immigration Law, but legislators passed it anyway. There's a great deal of resentment and it won't go away soon. It will become greater as more immigrants arrive.

All we hear are gripes. IQ tests don't measure Hispanics accurately. They must be changed to include poor environmental realities. Before the 1965 Immigration Law, there were quite a few Hispanics here, most from Mexico. Their environments were much better than Mexico; however, studies show they did not improve that much. In fact, third generations do worse than second, second worse than first. Environment does play a role in IQ's, but when that is corrected, IQ's do not go up that much. Regardless, of whether IQ's go up, generally, Hispanics stay below Whites and Asians.

Immigrants don't like these words, but let's consider Europeans emigrate in mass into non-White countries, take over, change the cultures and government, and demand rights for which they haven't earned? Asians' IQ's are slightly higher than Whites; however, we hear no excuses from Whites as to why Asians are higher. No racism accusations, etc.

Everyone would be much happier if all races and ethnicities stayed in their own countries. Differences in cultures, races, ethnicities, political preferences would not be issues of conflict. Those looking for a better life should help their own countries improve. God divided people into nations, then gave them their own language that others could not understand. He gave them attributes that they could use to survive in their own landscapes, not in other landscapes.

Centurion 9.41 #fundie theatlantic.com

Yes, making someone pay a "fair" wage IS anti-Christian.  If you doubt it ask yourself where in the bible Christ said to FORCE someone to pay a certain wage.  In fact, Christ told a parable about paying field workers AND said "render unto Caesar".... 

Fairness is NOT a religious concept because it implies the decider is a god.  In fact Christ didnt say treat others fairly, He said do unto others as ... 

Seriously, you are very poorly educated on what Christ said or have been gravely mislead by Liberation Theology type thoughts and idols.

Dogmatic #racist theatlantic.com

(Responding to a study saying racists had lower IQs)

The answer for that is pretty obvious, though you seem to fail to see it. Low IQ whites have to live closer to blacks in general and low IQ blacks in particular. This close proximity leads to antipathy (I.e. racism). So of course the low IQ in whites correlates with racism. If you corrected for proximity to low IQ blacks, the association would disappear.

bitminimod #fundie theatlantic.com

Article shows time lapse movie of bacteria evolving resistance to ever stronger antibiotics.
Creationist arrives to explain that it's all nonsense . . .


Evolution fails every time! Thats why it's still just a theory and a very shoddy one at that. Evolution has never been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt.

All the so-called evidence in support of the theory of evolution can literally only fit inside of a box the size of a coffin-------which is where it rightfully belongs, since evolution is nothing more than a psuedo-scientific explanation which makes it dead in the eyes of truly objective analysis based on analogical reasoning.

Evolutionary theory is as much a religious following as any other so called religious institution. To say that creationism or 'intelligent design' is merely credulous is quite niave to say the least, especially when much of what evolutionary theory is based upon are guesses and prods and pokes in the dark of an idea that some would like to be the answer but then refuse to accept the fact that it's still far from it.

Carbon-dating has been proven to be quite inaccurate in many cases. Also the fossil record does not contain so called evolutionary chains but rather clear evidence of the fact that life has progressed in patterns which corroborate the genesis account, including the fact that large mammals were discovered 'frozen in place' under the ice-------a fact that, when combined with other archeological findings, certainly adds weight to the idea that a global flood did occur. It explains the existence of these findings and again corroborates the true history of our world, rather than some psuedo-scientific conception of our existence.

eggman2 #conspiracy theatlantic.com

[Comment under "How Schools Are Dealing With Anti-Vaccine Parents"]

@Laura

@Guest

@k2p2inmyfreetime

Good for them, and I hope the measure in CA passes, also. 20 - 50 years ago, schools used to be stricter about vaccination exemptions and we had fewer cases of measles and pertussis when they were. Time to go back to what works.

People forgot. They don't know any little kids who died, so they think it's not a problem.

Some people need to be punched before they believe being punched hurts. Anti-vaxxers are a symptom of vaccine effectiveness.

The problem is, of course, that it's the kids who pay the price.

To say that I am 100% wrong means that you are either an extremely stupid person or a for profit psychopath that I commonly call " propaganda prostitute ".

There has never been a scientific experiment conducted on vaccines, but observations on the effects of vaccines have confirmed that they are dangerous.

Common sense tells us that injections of " GMO-putrefactive-biohazardous material in a soup of carcinogens, mutagens and teratogens " (vaccines) can not be good for anyone.

Diseases are prevented with nutrition.Learn more. It is extremely stupid to believe that chemicals unrelated to living human beings injected under the skin can be beneficial. Vitamins, minerals, proteins, and so on exist in our body and can be used for strengthening it or curing it from illnesses.

Vaccines are a stupid invention. Other stupid inventions are the infernal ( instead of internal ) combustion engine. nuclear power, pesticides, GMO's, junk medicines prescribed by your stupid medical doctor that is actually a pusher for the drug companies , and so on.

There is no such thing as MEDICAL SCIENCE. Biology , chemistry, and biochemistry are sciences, but present day junk medicine makes very little use , if any, of those. If those sciences make discoveries against vaccines, the facts are hidden by the junk medicine robber barons because they want to make a profit with their junk medicine. What you call MEDICAL SCIENCE is really a faith based religion with stupid medical doctors as their priests. Those priests promote a system for curing people based on faith and compliance with a for-profit driven agenda, without relying on true scientific knowledge.

unknown #conspiracy theatlantic.com

Thousands of years ago, the reptilian beings [from the constellations Orion, Sirius, and Draco] intervened on planet Earth and began interbreeding with humans. Not physically, however, but rather through the manipulation of the human coding, or DNA. Icke states that it is no coincidence that humans have fundamental reptilian genetics within their brain.

Rush Limbaugh and caller on his show. #fundie theatlantic.com

CALLER: You can't spend 40 years telling people and telling children that if I make a mistake -- if something comes up and this child that I don't want is in the way of my future and the way of me graduating high school, is in the way of me going to college, is the way of me being happy, is in the way of whatever I want out of life -- then it's okay for me to kill the baby. But later on when I become a disgruntled employee, when I become an unhappy student at school because children are bullying me, then I want to eliminate them to get them out of the way? It's the same concept.

RUSH: Well, it's a good point. You know how to stop abortion? Require that each one occur with a gun.