The Accidental Weblog

So one Ms. Jessica Ahlquist has been getting some pretty shitty email ‘n tweets of late, since that whole ACLU case in Rhode Island earlier this year.

I figured I’d wear this today in solidarity. Sure, I’ve generally not been much into activist wear. And, honestly, much as I’m pretty visible with my opinions on stuff like this on the net, I tend to keep it a little more on the not-quite-as-visible in real life.

Normally. But y’know, I think mebbe this whole image of an insanely gutsy high school student having to put up with shit like that is kinda, well, y’know…

Well, putting me to shame, pretty much.

So, seriously, I think I can afford to do this much. It’s kinda in the ‘least I could do’ category, even, wearing one shirt with a hardly obvious message to my two errands outside the home office today… And, I mean, it ain’t like they usually make death threats for that sorta thing around here, after all.

Oh, also, to the hammerheads who pull charming crap like that: congratulations. You have successfully dragged someone else that little bit further out of the closet. Well done.

There’s much that’s funny in Randi’s exposé of Popoff and Co., back some years now. I still get a bit of a giggle, just trying to picture the expression on Elizabeth Popoff’s face as she’s realizing the audience member her husband had just ‘cured’ of uterine cancer was not, in fact, a woman. If you’re looking for a laugh, it’s worth revisiting, sure.

But then, there’s also stuff less funny. Like a small boy on crutches and his parents, who’d come to several shows in a row, hoping for a miracle. But, regrettably, and as you may have noticed, faith healers and the gods they claim to serve generally prefer to ‘cure’ conditions rather less graphically visible than those. So, well…

Look, you already know how this ends, right?

… Those crutches were aluminum, badly worn and bent, and the boy’s legs were terribly twisted. These three people told me they’d driven for eight hours to get to this Popoff meeting, the fifth—and last—one that they could afford to attend, always trying to get to the stage for healing, but always being held back behind the security barrier where Popoff’s minions placed them if they were obviously not the sort of disabled person who could at least show some small sign of fake recovery to please the audience and raise Popoff financial “love gifts.”

A film crew from a local TV station had accompanied me, and we witnessed the usual farce inside the auditorium, then went outside to interview the victims as they left. We saw the family slowly going to their beat-up old car, tears streaming down their faces, shaking with sobs since they’d failed—again—to receive a miracle.

The cameraman placed the lens cap on his camera. “Sorry, I can’t do this,” he said. I just nodded in assent, and as far as I know, none of that footage was ever used.

So, also on the subject of Joseph Smith and No Man Knows My History, I happened to read this interview on the PBS site of one Michael Coe, an anthropologist and expert on the Maya, who thus knows a fair bit about the people who inhabited the same part of Mexico and Central American where Mormon scholars say the events of the ‘Book of Mormon’ took place…

… and honestly, I find it a bit weird. Coe’s a secular scholar who’s also read Brodie, and who also happens to know as a consequence of his field of study how utterly flaky Smith’s bizarre claims about North American prehistory are revealed to be against the actual archaeological evidence, and who concludes, obviously enough, that Smith was full of it. Furthermore, and kinda interestingly, he mirrors quite exactly my supposition on Smith’s thinking, and, more generally, my suspicion about how characters of this ilk may frequently proceed:

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Fox News is full of shit. Again.

(/I suppose I could also just write ‘still’, as opposed to ‘again’, there.)

… Hitler, that’s who!

Seriously, if someone pulls a line of that form on the net, in general, you can assume they’re being facetious. And, indeed, with the right setup, it could actually be funny.

Random sample:

‘You know who else flossed their teeth? Hitler, that’s who!’*

But when someone actually pays for a billboard campaign to pull this…

Well, seriously, guys, that’s just above and beyond. A bit much, even…

But hey, let’s give it up for the Heartland Institute, all the same. If only all comics were so dedicated to their craft.

(*/Also: try this in person at your dentist’s office, for extra lulz.)

Yes, the title is a blatant appeal for traffic. I’m shameless that way.

Or, okay, no, maybe it’s not quite entirely that…

Maybe just mostly. As I will, honestly, be mentioning that particular aspect of their lives rather briefly, at best.

It’s a bit slimy of me, I know, but then, you’ve got to appreciate the company I’ve been keeping lately, and the sort of negative influence it’s apparently had on my character. And a bit more more on that in a sec.

Anyway. So I got on a brief kick over the last week or so of reading biographies of founders of two relatively recent religions. Specifically, I’d picked up various electronic and hard copy editions of Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History, Russell Miller’s Bare-Faced Messiah, Jon Atack’s A Piece of Blue Sky—the first of these concerning Joseph Smith, the man who began Mormonism, the latter two on L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.

Oh, and about those sex lives…

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… on another subject entirely. And, honestly, this one is also ‘read between the lines, a bit’.

So there’s this story making the rounds that Egypt’s Moslem Brotherhood-dominated parliament is considering this law that would make it legal for a man to have sex with his wife up to six hours after her death…

… Sounds a bit unlikely, huh? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not terribly fond of the Islamists, either. Not at all, even. But c’mon. Seriously?

This hasn’t stopped a whole pile of people quoting it, passing it around. Including, y’know, several actual newspapers…

(… ‘kay. So The Daily Mail barely qualifies as a newspaper, exactly. Anyway.)

Anyway, for what it’s worth, this is what is out there: al-Arabiya’s Abeer Tayel is quoting al-Ahram’s Amro Abdul Samea as reporting it’s a letter from Egypt’s National Council for Women protesting this…

Which, you may already note, is a bit convoluted. And note also that the al-Arabiya story doesn’t quote the alleged parliamentarians considering the law, and I note that the NCW site seems to make no mention of this, at least on the front page, so far as I can work out through machine translation.

… and, also, The CSM’s Dan Murphy thinks it’s ‘utter hooey’.

Shorter: a little skepticism is in order, here.

(/Or, really: more a lot.)

(/Updated: This Egyptian blogger says she follows parliament pretty closely, and that this has no basis.)

(/Updating again: The part about ‘farewell sex’, yes, is bullshit. The 14-year old age of marriage thing, not as much so. Details at link.)

David Edgar Love is a Big Damn Hero.

(/And see also Inside Scientology’s Rehab Racket.)

I’ve no particular axe to grind on drug policy. Not one of my issues, really. I guess I might confess I’d probably be broadly for decriminalization of soft drugs at least, but it’s not like it’s a hard or seriously-considered stance, really.

So today’s CBC thing on 4 20 I’d normally have almost nothing to say about…

… oh, ‘cept for this one bit: they quoted a ‘Narconon’ ‘drug prevention expert’…

Yeah. Right. Narconon. Tip to reporters in general: before quoting anyone from Narconon, please Google ‘Narconon and Scientology’. And ask yourself if you really want to give these folk the credibility they could gain from your doing so.

A few news stories for your consideration, to get you started:

This one…

.. and this one.

That is all.

David Irvine’s ‘redirected paintings’.