Five Before Chaos

I saw this in the Argus yesterday and then in more detail over at Pharyngula. It’s probably the first news story in a fortnight that pissed me off and didn’t involve that sleazebag Hillary Clinton. Some parents in Wisconsin are being charged with second degree manslaughter, because they let their daughter die in a diabetic coma. Her death was easily preventable. Here’s the stupid, outrageous part:

Even as her 11-year-old daughter lay dying on a mattress on the floor of the family dining room on Easter Sunday, Leilani Neumann never wavered in her belief in the power of prayer.

“We just thought it was a spiritual attack and we prayed for her,” Neumann said, according to a police report. “My husband, Dale, was crying and mentioned taking Kara to the doctor, and I said the Lord’s going to heal her and we continued to pray.”

Prayer didn’t save Madeline Kara Neumann, who died of untreated diabetes March 23.

And now, the law is poised to come down hard on the girl’s parents, Leilani and Dale Neumann, who were both charged with second-degree reckless homicide Monday by Marathon County District Attorney Jill Falstad.

If convicted, the parents face maximum sentences of 25 years in prison and a $100,000 fine.

Good. They should rot in jail for this one, and should set an example. Get a load of this:

According to the police report, made available with the charging documents, Dale Neumann said “throughout the interview that he and his family do not need any traditional medical intervention nor do they ‘believe’ in it.”

The document also states: “Neumann said his family never gets sick and if they would, prayer and God would heal them.”

Neumann and his wife are idiots. They don’t “believe” in traditional medical intervention which saves thousands and thousands of lives every day, instead putting the life of their daughter in the hands of the Sky Fairy. They also said that thy thought her symptoms had to do with puberty. Because you know, things like this just typically happen in puberty, no different than zits:

Meanwhile, Leilani Neumann told police that by Saturday, “Kara was laying on the couch. Her legs looked skinny and blue. I didn’t realize how skinny she was. We took her to my bed where I got her warm. I thought it was a spiritual attack. We stayed by her side nonstop and we prayed.

A “spiritual attack”? They have three other kids that they haven’t killed yet, who thankfully have been taken away. Good thing, because there was no “teaching moment” to be had here:

Dale Neumann told investigators that “given the same set of circumstances with another child, he would not waiver in his faith and confidence in the healing power of prayer,” according to the interview statement.

So he’d do it again, and he would not waver in his confidence, even though it didn’t even come close to working the first time and his daughter is dead. Unbelievable. Let’s hope that in addition to jail time, they get some serious deprogramming, too.

UPDATE: Shawn Peters has a look at the legal aspects of this case here (it’s not as open-and-shut as you might think).

The only decent reason for Rolling Stone magazine’s continued existence is the fact that Matt Taibbi writes for it. His latest is a real hoot: he goes undercover on a batshit insane fundie retreat: Jesus Made Me Puke.  He joins a megachurch and actually gets on a bus to go to one of those crazy “Encounter Weekends” in which the truly pathetic listen to a bunch of nonsense, cry a lot, and come away even more braindead and suggestible than when they went in there. But first he had to look the part:

I slunk in my seat, trying to look inconspicuous. My disguise was modeled on other men I’d seen in church — pane glasses and the very gayest blue-and-white-striped Gap polo shirt I’d been able to find that afternoon. Buried on a clearance rack next to the underwear section in a nearby mall, the Gap shirt was one of those irritating throwbacks to the Meatballs/Seventies-summer-camp-geek look, but stripped of its sartorial irony, it really just screamed Friendless Loser! — so I bought it without hesitation and tried to match it with that sheepish, ashamed-to-have-a-penis look I had seen so many other young men wearing in church. With the glasses and a slouch I hoped I was at least in the ballpark of what I thought I needed to look like, which was a slow-moving hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for an Answer.

But I don’t think he was prepared for what he was going to experience. He even had to make up some sort of story, his being that his dad was an alcoholic circus clown that used to beat him with his oversized shoes. And they bought it. The crazy part was the ‘deliverance’ part at the end, which involved the usual nonsense of puking in paper bags, speaking in tongues and casting out of all sorts of demons:

“In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, I cast out the demon of the intellect!” Fortenberry continued. “In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of anal fissures!”

It was a rather eye-opening experience, in that it showed the deep psychological underpinnings that go with this kind of territory that makes believers willing suckers impervious to fact. It’s a fantastic and entertaining smartass read, classic Taibbi, and he really picks up on how so many of these suckers do indeed fit the stereoetypes we have of them.

Yep, the crazy uncle whose Christian compassion extended to disowning his lesbian daughter is still around. And apparently the GOP is just not fetus-lovin’/gay-hatin’ enough for him. As Frederick Carlson lets us know over at Talk to Action, Keyes is seeking the nomination for the party for people whom the GOP isn’t crazy enough – the ironically named Constitution Party.

Alan Keyes, perennial Republican presidential primary contender, popular orator on the Religious Right, and one-time Obama opponent in his race for the Senate from Illinois — is now the probable presidential nominee for the Constitution Party, which his holding its national convention in Kansas City, Missouri this week. Keyes, who had been considering bolting the Republican Party for at least a year, meeting privately with the CP National Committee on more than one occasion, took the leap last week and announced that he would seek the CP nomination.

The neotheocratic Constitution Party, which has been on the ballot in more than 30 states for every presidential election since 1996, kicked off its national convention in Kansas City yesterday.

Carlson goes on to speculate that this could indeed be a headache for John Sidney McCain, in that it gives the ones who find McCain not god-crazy enough to vent their frustrations. Apparently McCain’s endorsements from the hateful Godidiots John Hagee and Rod Parsley aren’t good enough. No surprise, consiering the views of the Constitution Party’s founder and former nominee Howard Phillips. Get a load of these nuggets of wisdom for the ages from Phillips (all of which you can find here, as well as the sources):

Q: How would a Constitution Party governor or state legislature punish homosexuals?

A: It’s not my intention to go into somebody’s home and see what he’s doing in there. What a president can do is stop the billions of dollars in subsidies to homosexual groups to teach safe sodomy, which is what AIDS education is. (here)

The Supreme Court has no right to amend the Constitution, and appointing pro-life justices is irrelevant. The unborn child is a person, and even [Roe v. Wade author Justice Harry] Blackmun conceded that if the unborn child is a person that abortion is unconstitutional. I’ll appoint pro-life U.S. Attorneys who will prosecute abortion doctors for homicide.

The radical, anti-growth, anti-business, environmental socialists could not pass their so-called Clean Air Bill costing us $40 billion per year until George Bush pushed it through.

[Those who] advocate. separating church from state are hypocrites unless they similarly insist upon the separation of education from state, because every government-subsidized and regulated school has become an establishment of the officially approved state religion, censoring prayer, subsidizing sex, denying creation, rewriting history, undermining parental authority, denigrating Biblical values, and dumbing down the children so that they may be no wiser than those who run our government.

Funny how that laundry list of grievances against public education are what many rational thinking people would consider to be the prime example of how to dumb down a kid. So, yes, these people almost make the GOP look rational, so it’s good to know Keyes has finally found the party where they won’t treat him like the crazy uncle anymore; he’s one of them!

As to whether or not it will hurt McCain, who knows. The GOP hasn’t really stopped pandering to the fundies, because even though some of them know they’re just being used, they still have nowhere else to go,and their sheeplike mindset keeps ‘em in the flock.

Anyone else out there think Keyes sounds like Kermit the Frog when he speaks?

UPDATE: Apparently, Keyes is too kooky even for the C.P. nutters. They picked someone else.

That Higher Ground show I went to last Sunday was the best show I’ve seen in quite a while. The band was smokin’, although I don’t know what the club was thinking when it booked some horrible noise-rock opener band that looked like something out of a Verizon commercial. But the Greyboy Allstars were obviously having a lot of fun up there. Karl Denson was quite the frontman, and he had that pointy jazzman goateé thing going, too.

Someone actually made a rather funny video involving a muppet-like version of the GBA, of their recent song, Still Waiting. You can check out the band’s website here. Have a good weekend.

Fridays at FBC usually mean laziness, in that a lotta YouTube action ends up happening. Just couldn’t pass up this silly video that all three candidates played on the WWE wrestling show. Hiilary called herself “Hillrod”, possibly an allusion to the fact that she’s screwing/giving the rod to the Democratic Party. Obama said something about a smell… But McCain’s is undoubtedly the funniest, in that he sounds like such a crotchety old man that I was expecting him to wave a cane and yell, “Get off my lawn, you gawdamn kids!”, and then immediately fall out of his rocking chair.

Friday Nite Funk… with Muppets! coming up later tonight. Alan Keyes is stopping by tomorrow.

Don’t tell the family values crowd… It’s Teenage Mother (or Teenage Muthah, because of the obnoxious Brooklyn accent on the voiceover):

And whatever you do, watch out for The Young Runaways:

Those of you who follow the neverending assault on science and reason known as “Intelligent Design Theory” are probably familiar by now with the new movie out now about it by former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein, called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. PZ at Pharyngula has been writing about it quite regularly, so if you need some background, go over there and poke around.

The long and short of it is it’s an hour and a half of pure bullshit, persecution complexes, faulty logic, and something that will appeal to the incredibly ignorant. Arthur Caplan eviscerated the movie in a review at MSNBC. The worst thing about the movie, though:

Then, and most culpably in terms of the downright immorality of the movie and everyone associated with it, we are presented with what will happen if we keep teaching Darwinism in our schools. The logical consequence of Darwinism is Nazi eugenics: the state directed murder of the handicapped, mentally ill, political dissidents and racial “inferiors”!

No, I am not making this up. The core of the movie consists of a sequence in which Stein visits the former German psychiatric hospital at Hadamar where the mass sterilization and murder techniques were first perfected that were later to be used in the concentration camps. Then Ben heads to Dachau, the first concentration camp, where 35,000 people died. These excursions are followed by a visit to Down House, Charles Darwin’s country home outside of London where Ben looks warily at the memorabilia of Darwin’s scientific work that led him to posit the theory of evolution. Stein finishes this sequence by bravely visiting a statue of Darwin where he stares the long deceased now marbleized evil-doer down while making it clear who is directly to blame for Hitler, the sterilization of tens of thousands of German children, the death of 6 million Jews and the deaths of countless other millions of victims of Nazism and those who died fighting the Nazi regime.

This frighteningly immoral narrative is capped off with a lot of shots of the Berlin Wall, old stock footage of East German police kicking around those trying to escape through the wall to the West and some solemn blather by Ben, who calls upon each one of us to rise up in defense of freedom and knock down a few walls in order to get creationism back into the curriculum at Iowa State, Baylor, and other dens of American secular iniquity.

I suspect this movie will rake in a lot of Christianist bucks, no surprise considering how much money they give away to other bullshit-spreaders. And of course, anyone with even a cursory understanding of evolution (sadly, too few Americans) either won’t waste their time with this garbage, or will come away with even more ammo against the IDiots.

One of the good news/bad news things about living in Vermont is although fundie Christian types are a distinct minority up here and one can openly live as an atheist without any repercussions, hokey new-age spiritual nonsense is quite rampant, such as energy healing, astrology and psychics. Granted, none of ‘em are as malicious and destructive as fundamentalist Christianity, but ignorance and superstition are still never good things.

So in that regard, I’m a bit jealous about a development in the UK.  A bit in the Guardian called End is Nigh for Zombie Slayers by Ben Goldacre tells us of some legislation that will put some consumer protections in place, putting the burden of proof on psychics and other charlatans about the veracity of their claims.

How, then, can we police this kind of mis-selling? Next month the Fraudulent Mediums Act will be repealed, and replaced with general consumer legislation, which is to regulate various popular psychic services including predictions for the future, casting good luck spells, managing spooks (but perhaps not zombies) and communicating with the dead. The burden of proof is shifted to the psychic, and they are up in arms, with their union visiting the government yesterday to lobby against the new regulations.

Psychics are popular. They do what they say on the tin. They serve consumers who possibly shouldn’t watch telly after 9pm, but who have chosen to seek out practitioners with a very odd take on evidence. Apparently, special protection will be given to those who may be “particularly vulnerable” on account of their “credulity” (“consumers who may more readily believe specific claims”).

The author, although no believer in nonsense himself, seems to think the law is simply a waste of time because it’s unenforceable. But, strangely enough, the best stuff is actually in the comments section:

“If the mainstream angle on this is that its right in principle but leans too much towards protecting the gullible then lets include religion in the debate.”

“The “spiritual workers” certainly seem to be taking it seriously. According to reports I’ve seen there was a mass protest by “about a dozen” of them in Trafalgar Square yesterday.”

“These professional psychics are all well and good, but what measures have the government taken to deal with the bogeyman threat? Millions of citizens are menaced by supernatural monsters in wardrobes and under beds, which can only be defeated by fully covering all exposed parts of the body. Where is the government’s taskforce to deal with the issue?”

“Why not treat psychic claims in advertising as we do smoking? A large public health warning plastered over the advertisment, to the effect that the product has no scientific basis whatsoever, and is harmful to one’s mental health. Big, in-yer-face, just like on cigarette packets.”

I like the first and last ones particularly. It would most certainly put most charismatic and fundie preachers out of business. The thing I’m really wondering, of course, is why didn’t the psychics see this coming?

It’s been a while since I’ve had a Dumb All Over segment, but last time I checked, there was no shortage of oxygen-wasting right wingers spewing off ignorant nonsense, so I figured it was once again time to do it up. It’s always easy… just go over to Townhall.com and grab the first article you see. Even easier when the author of the article is dimwitted asshole Michael Medved. One of his more recent screeds (if by ‘screed’ I mean random writings on the wall of a padded cell using his own feces): Americans Are Right to Resist an Atheist President. The first thing that popped into my head when I read the title was “When have we even had an atheist candidate to ‘resist’ in the first place?” Of course, Medved and his tiny God-virus infected brain doesn’t concern himself with those kinds of things.

What he does concern himself with, unsurprisingly, is a bunch of incredibly ignorant horseshit. Where to begin? Well, first off, there’s a picture of Barack Obama in the article that has nothing to do with the article. Although, yes, Michael, we get your little subtle inference there, that Obama is possibly some sort of atheist. But wait, I’m confused! I thought he was a radical Muslim? Or was it an American-hating black radical Christian? In the mind of Medved (and his borderline-to-severely retarded fans), it doesn’t matter. Obama’s all of those things. The important thing to remember is he hates whatever God you believe in.

Continue reading

Just doing my part and sharing the love….