the counter-jihad

Foreign Policy | We hope, and perhaps need, a man who would gun down teenagers in cold blood to be mad. How could a man who is not insane carry out such heinous acts? What possible justification could make anyone act so barbarously? And yet all around the world when others have carried out atrocities of similar horror -- from the genocidaires of Rwanda to the al Qaeda butchers of Baghdad -- those of us lucky enough to live in the safe and comfortable global north have asked -- what made them do it? Their political ideology? Their interpretation of their religion? Calling them mad is not enough.To do so requires an appreciation of a transatlantic movement that often calls itself "the counter-jihad." As his writings indicate, Breivik is clearly a product of this predominantly web-based community of anti-Muslim, anti-government, and anti-immigration bloggers, writers, and activists -- no matter how much the movement's leading lights may deny this and denounce his actions.

So when Anders Behring Breivik says that his killing spree on Friday, July 22, was "gruesome but necessary" -- as he reportedly told his lawyer -- we must not just dismiss him as mad, but ask why he thinks so. Having left a 1,500-page manifesto and a YouTube video -- all conveniently in serviceable English for the international audience -- he clearly wants to be understood.

In contrast, the counter-jihad movement defines itself in part in opposition to neo-Nazis, indeed taking great pains to attempt to show that the Nazis were "socialists." This is taken to rather silly lengths where modern European social democrats (and even U.S. President Barack Obama and American Democrats) are called "socialists" alongside other "socialists" like Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Marx, and -- of course -- Hitler. Breivik's manifesto reproduces in full an essay by a well-known Norwegian counter-jihad writer called only "Fjordman" that argues that socialists and Nazis are one. This may seem ridiculous to anyone with a grasp of modern world history, but clearly was very important in leading Breivik to target a youth camp of the Norwegian Labour Party.

The opposition to neo-Nazism is most visible in the counter-jihad's overt philo-Semitism. This takes the form of a strong defense of Israel and the policies of Israeli right-wing parties, including the denial of there being "occupied territories" -- only Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the West Bank. This has led to the inclusion in the counter-jihad movement of various hawkish American voices, both Jewish -- for example, Daniel Pipes -- and some Christian evangelicals. And whereas anti-Semitism is banished, it has been replaced with a rabid fear of Islam and of Muslims. Nevertheless, by focusing on the religion and culture of European Muslims being a threat, along with its proud philo-Semitism, the movement deems itself to be non-racist.

multiculturalism and abortion to blame for massacre

Salon | Opposition to Islam was the killer's stated motivation. He targeted other white Scandinavians because he considered them race traitors. He wrote all of this down, too, so we don't even have to make guesses about it! He blamed liberals for enabling jihad by supporting "multiculturalism." (Funnily enough, that is also exactly what Mark Steyn thinks.)

If Steyn's intentionally obtuse response is the dumbest I've read, the Jerusalem Post's editorial is the most shocking. Because it basically says Breivik is right

Perhaps Brievik’s inexcusable act of vicious terror should serve not only as a warning that there may be more elements on the extreme Right willing to use violence to further their goals, but also as an opportunity to seriously reevaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere. While there is absolutely no justification for the sort of heinous act perpetrated this weekend in Norway, discontent with multiculturalism’s failure must not be delegitimatized or mistakenly portrayed as an opinion held by only the most extremist elements of the Right.

They want this act of politically motivated violence to ... work.

If there's any humor in this miserable news, it is to be found at Pamela Geller's place, where she compares herself to the Beatles and Jodie Foster. The comparison isn't quite apt, though, as Charles Manson and John Hinkley were notorious for misinterpreting harmless pop cultural artifacts. The Beatles song was about a fair ride, it was not actually titled "There Is a Race War Coming." Breivik seems to have interpreted Ms. Geller's writing correctly -- he just decided to address the "problem" through horrible, violent means.

But right-wingers generally agree that no one should blame right-wing beliefs for Breivik's horrible crime. Instead, as one RedState contributor argues, we should blame the pro-choice movement. And euthanasia.And `... Al Gore. Is it any wonder that people kill people in a world where Al Gore something something overpopulation? No, no it isn't. Ye gods.

To sum up: This tragedy can obviously be blamed solely on one truly evil, insane person, and nothing else. Besides multiculturalism. And abortion. It is disgusting to pin responsibility for this massacre on anything besides one crazy person and multiculturalism and abortion. And Al Gore.

I can understand how the self-preservation instinct would make sober reflection among the professional hate-mongering Islamophobia crowd unlikely, but I didn't really expect everyone to be blaming the liberals for getting shot by a fucking Norwegian Freeper.

hmm.., lemme see..., uh, phukkem!!!

NYTimes | The Murdoch drama is now entering its fifth act, the part when the bodies start to pile up. At the hearing before a parliamentary committee, Mr. Murdoch interrupted his son near the beginning of the proceedings to say: “This is the most humble day of my life.”

His native Australian optimism may be misleading him, however. The mood in Britain seems to desire nothing less than his complete destruction. Everything he cherishes must be sacrificed. The paper. The BSkyB deal. Rebekah Brooks. Possibly his son’s takeover of the company.

We go to tragedy to watch a man be destroyed. Macbeth must be destroyed for his lust for power, Othello for his jealousy, Antony for his passion, Lear for the incompleteness of his renunciation.

They are tragic precisely because their flaws are all too human. We do not yet know how far Mr. Murdoch is implicated in the crimes of his company, so we do not know which of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes he resembles most. If he didn’t know the extent of the phone hacking, then he’s most like the bungling Richard II, who fails to spot the decay within his kingdom. If he did know, then he’s more like the conniving Richard III, whose love of the machinations of power eventually grinds him into the machinery he’s created.

Regardless, Mr. Murdoch’s distinguishing flaw is common ambition — an outsider’s desire to force his way into the establishment. He has been singled out because his flaw is so ordinary, so widespread. Putting aside for a moment the complicity of every single reader of The News of the World, nearly all journalists and politicians played the same game, only Mr. Murdoch played it better.

One of the most profound feelings that follows watching a Shakespearean tragedy, once we have witnessed the destruction we crave, is how empty the world seems. The tension of tragedy lays bare a part of our hypocrisy that we should at least recognize in the case of Rupert Murdoch: Maybe he is a monster. Maybe he needs to be punished. But he is being destroyed because we cannot stand seeing ourselves, whether on stage or before Parliament.

murdoch backed hacking behind climategate

WhatsNew | Called "Screws of the World" for its focus on celebrity sex scandals, the British tabloid was the top selling English-language newspaper in the world when owner Rupert Murdoch permanently closed the paper two weeks ago, citing its role in the British phone-hacking scandals. Why do I not believe the worlds best selling newspaper was closed because it used improper methods to get a story? It was a tabloid for God's sake! Something much bigger had to be going on here. On 20 Nov 09, just two weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, a server was breached at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the UK. Hackers posted thousands of private e-mails and computer files on the web for the world to see. Climate skeptics claimed the hacked emails showed climate scientists manipulating data. They showed nothing of the sort. Nevertheless, the Copenhagen Summit was held in the shadow of an ongoing investigation into groundless charges. The media focused on the victim: the Climate Unit at the U. of East Anglia. "Who did the hacking," WN asked?. The only crime was breaking into private files, but the media made scant effort to find out who did it. For the next eight months neither the media nor Scotland Yard made any attempt to identify the hackers. WN never let up asking. Now we find it was Rupert Murdoch who was behind the climate gate hacking, having added Scotland Yard to his empire.

ideas are viruses...,

Slate | Perhaps the most fateful decision in all of European history was made by Augustus Caesar, when he chose to fix the border of the Roman Empire at the Rhine. As a result, the region known to the Romans as Germania would go without the products of Roman civilization—good roads and big cities and the Latin language and Christianity. But it would also remain vigorous and untamed enough to threaten Roman power, and finally destroy it in the fifth century A.D. For the next 1,500 years, the line where Roman writ ended would remain visible on the political and cultural map of Europe. The border between Romance and Germanic languages, between Catholicism and Protestantism, even between the Entente and the Central Powers in the First World War, all shadowed the border between Germania and Rome.

It is no wonder, then, that the sense of being "not-Rome," for good and ill, did so much to shape modern German identity. But the great irony, as Christopher Krebs shows in A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania From the Roman Empire to the Third Reich, is that it was a Roman who did most to define and crystallize that proud German otherness. Cornelius Tacitus, best known for his grimly disillusioned history of Rome's wicked emperors, was also the author of a short ethnographic treatise on the German tribes, known as the Germania. This book, written in 98 A.D., was almost lost during the Middle Ages. But when it was rediscovered and disseminated in the 15th century, just as the Renaissance and Reformation were gathering force, it became something like the bible of German nationalism.

Given where that nationalism led, Krebs is quite justified in the title of his clever, learned new study, which synthesizes a great deal of classical scholarship and intellectual history into a concise, accessible story. To drive the point home, the book opens with a vignette from 1943, when SS troops were dispatched by Heinrich Himmler to a villa in Italy, ordered to retrieve the oldest extant copy of the Germania before it fell into Allied hands. They failed, but the Raiders of the Lost Ark-style mission shows just how much numinous power the Nazis attributed to this ancient book.

And they were not alone. Krebs, a German-born classicist who teaches at Harvard, shows that just about every important German intellectual movement, starting with the Reformation, made a fetish out of the Germania. Based on a simple reading of the text—and Krebs' one failing is that, in concentrating on the Germania's afterlife, he does not say enough about what it actually contains—this might seem surprising. Tacitus is hardly flattering about either the land or its people. It is "a region hideous and rude, under a rigorous climate, dismal to behold or to cultivate." The men are undisciplined and lazy, leaving all manual labor to the women, and they drink so much that "if you will but humor their excess in drinking, and supply them with as much as they covet, it will be no less easy to vanquish them by vices than by arms."

Yet if these are the vices of primitives, the Germans are also credited with the primitive virtues. They are tall, handsome, and vigorous, excellent warriors, jealous of their liberty, and sexually chaste. In short, they are the diametric opposites of the luxurious aristocrats of Rome, who were Tacitus' original readers. The historian turned the Germans into noble savages, just as later European writers would do with the American Indians, in order to reproach the excesses of his own society. As Krebs summarizes, "Freedom, fortitude, morality, and simplicity … could still, it seemed, be found, if not in Rome, at least in Germanien."

Fifteen hundred years later, when the Germania resurfaced in the library of a German monastery, it was again Romans who were most eager to read it. With a scholar's sense of the drama of bibliophily, Krebs details the quest of the Italian humanists to recover lost and unknown works of antiquity. He thrills to the brief note in the diary of a papal secretary that announces, "Cornelius Tacitus' book on 'the origin and situation of Germany' is found; seen in Rome in 1455."

But while Italians rediscovered the Germania, Germans made it a Renaissance best-seller. In an intellectual judo-flip, this Roman treatise on German primitivism was taken over by Germans who wanted to assert their historical and moral superiority to Rome. Followers of Martin Luther "produced their own Latin editions, the first German translation, and an extensive commentary" on Tacitus' work. The leading Lutheran Philip Melanchthon hoped the work would help readers "contemplate … the strength and virtuousness of ancient Germany." Fist tap Nana.

can the plot GET any thicker?

Gilad | I learned last night from an Israeli online journal, that two days before the Utoya Island massacre, AUF’s (Labour Party's youth movement) leader Eskil Pedersen gave an interview to the Dagbladet, Norway's second largest tabloid newspaper, in which he unveiled what he thinks of Israel.

In the course of the interview, Pedersen stated that he “believes the time has come for more drastic measures against Israel, and (that he) wants the Foreign Minister to impose an economic boycott against the country.”

Pederson went on to say, “The peace process goes nowhere, and though the whole world expect Israel to comply, they do not. We in Labour Youth will have a unilateral economic embargo of Israel from the Norwegian side.”

The AUF Labour Party Youth Movement have been devoted promoters of the Israel Boycott campaign, The Dagbladet newspaper reporting that “The AUF has long been a supporter of an international boycott of Israel, but the decision at the last congress, demands that Norway imposes a unilateral economic embargo on the country and it must be stricter than before.”

“I acknowledge that this is a drastic measure”, stated Pedersen, “but I think it gives a clear indication that we are tired of Israel's behaviour, quite simply”.

Yesterday we also learned that mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik was openly enthusiastic about Israel. According to a variety of internet outlets, Behring Breivik was a regular poster on several Norwegian internet sites, notably the blog document.no, which is run by Hans Rustad, a former left-wing journalist. Hans Rustad is Jewish, extremely pro-Zionist, and warns against ‘Islam-isation’, violence, and other social problems he assumes to be connected with Muslim immigration.

Alongside the UK’s infamously Islamophobic Harry’s Place and other Jewish pro-war Zionist blogs, the observant amongst us are becoming more and more aware of an increasingly pervasive trend of Jerusalemite internet journals that -- ostensibly – like to give the impression of ‘rallying for the preservation of Western culture,’ and of ‘standing up for democratic values’. For the most obvious of reasons, these blog pages are almost exclusively focused on ‘the problem of Islam,’ and on Muslim migrants’ ‘troubled and reactionary’ communities and politics, whilst all the while, simultaneously, relentlessly and forcefully propounding a propagandistic Zionist agenda. Interestingly enough, other immigrants are routinely depicted on these blog pages as being 'harmless', or as 'positive contributors to society' -- you won’t find Hans Rustad or Harry Place criticising the Jewish Lobbies, the Lord Levy’s or the Russian Oligarchs’ disastrous impact on ‘Western culture’ or on ‘democratic values’ any time soon.

Gordon Duff wrote yesterday in “Veterans Today” that the “car bombing carries the signature of an intelligence agency. Nobody else bothers with such things.”

And indeed it is after all, pretty clear that a car bomb of such magnitude, and an operation of such sophistication is not exactly something a layman can put together with such apparent ease: it would surely take some specialist knowledge, and the question here is, who could provide such knowledge, and such a vast amount of lethal explosives?

templar gang-bangin an professional dope-slangin?

Video - Aljazeera reports on Michoacan Knights Templar methamphetamine cartel.

Aljazeera | Pictures of the latest objects seized by the police in the Mexican state of Michoacan, revealed that the mysterious 'Knights Templar" drug cartel is more bizarre than most people imagine.

There were four hooded tunics, with a red cross, a metal helmet, and a pamphlet or Templar rule book. This drug cartel claims to draw inspiration from the medieval Christian warriors who fought to protect Jerusalem and the Holy Grail.

No one knows if its founder, Servando Gomez, a school teacher, was a history entuthiast or simply read the Da Vinci Code.

The rules in the modern day 'templar bible' call for observance of 'gentleman' like behaviour and respect for women – but also state that any disclosure of knights templar activities will result in the death of the person and his whole family, and confiscation by the cartel of the snitch’s property. Watch my tv report from Michoacan.

The cartel is like a secret society.

The Mexican Templars have an initiation ritual, which apparently includes dressing up like knights from the Middle Ages, and performing blood pacts.

The cartel recruits drug users and enrolls them in the organisation's rehabilitation centers; the process is closely monitored and has a strong religious component.

The double standard is striking: the Templars can not take drugs, and yet they run one of the biggest methamphetamines traffic corridors to the United States.

A resident of Morelia, the capital of the Michoacan province, tells me the cartel that preceded the Templars, La Familia, hired 'cooks' who had learnt to manufacture meth (known as ice or crystal) in the US.

As the government regulated the sale of one of meth's core components, pseudoephedrine (found in cold medicine), the 'crystal makers' or cristaleros moved back to Mexico and now get supplies from China through ports on the Pacific coast.

The young recruits are told to be 'gentlemen', the word for 'knight' in Spanish means a 'gentleman', but they have to kill those who they judge as thieves, rapists, or kidnappers, hanging them from bridges and attaching messages to their bodies.

The government of Felipe Calderon has declared war on the cartels.

It receives substantial military aid from the US to combat these drug gangs.

The national security spokesperson says the Templars are an offshoot of La Familia and their beliefs are a mere PR campaign to gain support of Michoacan residents.

President Calderon is from Michoacan, and his sister is running for governor.

But others see the religious element as a calculated move by its founder to prevent his hit men leaking information, while giving the group an aura of mystery that could inspire fear and respect. It is hard to know

The cartel's structure, wealth, and size. It is perhaps the second most notorious Mexican cartel in terms of killing methods, the most vicious one, the 'Zetas', is a group formed by Mexican army special forces in the 90s. Fist tap Dale.

black robes brought dark ages...,

Credo in unum Deum,
Patrem omnipoténtem,
Factórem cæli et terræ,
Visibílium ómnium et invisibílium.
Et in unum Dóminum Iesum Christum,
Fílium Dei Unigénitum,
Et ex Patre natum ante ómnia sæcula.
Deum de Deo, lumen de lúmine, Deum verum de Deo vero,
Génitum, non factum, consubstantiálem Patri:
Per quem ómnia facta sunt.
Qui propter nos hómines et propter nostram salútem
Descéndit de cælis.
Et incarnátus est de Spíritu Sancto
Ex María Vírgine, et homo factus est.
Crucifíxus étiam pro nobis sub Póntio Piláto;
Passus, et sepúltus est,
Et resurréxit tértia die, secúndum Scriptúras,
Et ascéndit in cælum, sedet ad déxteram Patris.
Et íterum ventúrus est cum glória,
Iudicáre vivos et mórtuos,
Cuius regni non erit finis.
Et in Spíritum Sanctum, Dóminum et vivificántem:
Qui ex Patre Filióque procédit.
Qui cum Patre et Fílio simul adorátur et conglorificátur:
Qui locútus est per prophétas.
Et unam, sanctam, cathólicam et apostólicam Ecclésiam.
Confíteor unum baptísma in remissiónem peccatorum.
Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum,
Et vitam ventúri sæculi. Amen.

Constantine chose Christianity, and not one of the other dying god cults chosen by his predecessors. Perhaps because his mother had been a Christian, perhaps because he was attracted to the authoritarian nature of what the early bishopricks had managed to organize. Constantine planned to use the organization of the bishopricks to help him unite and control what remained of his empire. The problem was that the bishops had been disagreeing with one another since the beginning of their hustle.

Constantine's solution? He organized the first ever pan-bishoprick conference and invited all the important bishops to Nicea to ratify a common Christian playbook. No sooner had the dogmatic bishops arrived, than they began petitioning Constantine to adopt one or another of their irrelevant little creeds in preference to the others. Constantine's solution? He burned all their inconsequential petitions, asserted a unitary creed and enforced it.

A unitary and literally magical-thinking creed was composed and imposed at Nicea via a simple carrot and stick. Those bishops who signed on to Constantine's new playbook got to stay on for months of lavish entertainment as Constantine's guests, those who refused were banished from the Roman empire as criminals. The Nicene Creed was constructed by a despotic Roman emperor, imposed on the bishopricks by force, and is still mindlessly repeated in churches all across the world today.

Bishop Eusebius arrived at the Council of Nicea in opposition to the what became the creed, and he left the Council as Constantine's right-hand man. Eusebius became Constantine's biographer and wrote The Oration which praised the evil Roman as a living saint. (When Constantine returned to Rome from Nicea, he had his wife suffocated and his son murdered) You would never know this, however, from reading Eusebius.

Eusebius also wrote the hugely influential History of the Church, which history is as accurate an account of Christian origins as The Oration is an accurate portrait of Constantine. The History of the Church is a complete fiction crafted to serve the authoritarian aims of the new Holy Roman Church. Yet this complete fabrication serves as the basis of the traditional understanding of Christian history because for centuries it was all anyone had to rely upon as a source. Why? All alternative accounts of Christian origin were banned and burned.

From the 4th century forward, the Holy Roman Church (the embodiment of the Roman empire) began violently persecuting their Gnostic and Pagan rivals completely out of existence. Armed with a New Testament that repudiated heretics and an Old Testament (Tanakh) that advocated and validated scorched earth and genocide, the Holy Roman Empire enforced Constantine's Christianity with centuries of black-robed violence. Not only did the Holy Roman Empire manage to exterminate all other religions, it even managed to destroy civilization itself, plunging Europe into many centuries of the Dark Age.

The wealth of temples was plundered and shared between the emperor and his bishopricks. Priests and priestesses were murdered, temples burned and razed. Libraries were put to the torch and nearly all the literature of antiquity was destroyed. The lights of civilization went out all across Europe and the west reverted to a brutal life of apocalyptic ignorance and superstition vaguely but resonantly preserved for us in the Grimm's Faery Tales....,

templars in the 21st century?

CBSNews | Breivik laid out his extreme nationalist philosophy as well as his attack methods in a 1,500-page manifesto. It also describes how he bought armor, guns, tons of fertilizer and other bomb components, stashed caches of weapons and wiped his computer hard drive — all while evading police suspicion and being nice to his neighbors.

Meanwhile, police in France raided the home of Breivik's father on Monday. Jens Breivik lives in southern France. It wasn't immediately clear whether investigators believed he might share his son's extremist views.

Breivik claims in his writing to be part of a new Knights Templar group, and he hints that there may be others waiting to execute similar attacks, though his lawyer said he insists he acted alone.

"Will attempt to initiate contact with cell 8b and 8c in late March," he writes at one point, but doesn't reference them again or explain if these are aliases.

Norwegian police declined to comment on whether they're concerned about similar attacks. European security officials said they were aware of increased Internet chatter from individuals claiming they belonged to a new Knights Templar group that Breivik describes, in fantastical terms, in the manifesto. The Knights Templar was a medieval order created to protect Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land after the First Crusade in the 11th century.

The officials said they were still investigating claims that Breivik, and other far-right individuals, attended a London meeting of the group in 2002. The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the investigation.

too much information too fast?

Video - Russia Today interviews Stephen Lendman about Norway attacks.

SJLendman | Who gains and loses from every terror incident must also be asked, certainly not suspects charged, convicted and imprisoned. Geopolitical interests are central. This time Western and Israeli ones are key.

On July 22, New York Times writers Elisha Mala and J. David Goodman were in battle mode headlining, "At Least 80 Dead in Norway Shooting," saying:

"A lone political extremist bombed the government center here on Friday, killing 7 people....before heading to an island summer camp for young members of the governing Labor Party and killing at least 80 people."

A July 23 follow-up headlined, "Death Toll Rises to 91 in Norway Attacks," saying:

"The Norwegian police charged a 32-year-old man (Anders Behring Breivik, identified as) a Christian fundamentalist with right-wing connections, over the bombing of a government center here and a shooting attack on a nearby island that together left at least 91 people dead."

Police didn't know if he was part of a greater conspiracy. "What we do know," said police official Roger Andresen, "is that he is right-wing and a Christian fundamentalist." Oslo police chief of staff Johan Fredriksen said he wasn't surprised that a blond, blue-eyed man was involved. He likely would have made a harsher statement if a Muslim was charged, homegrown or otherwise.

Police also said very likely the two incidents were connected. No evidence proves it despite claims of explosives found on Utoya island where the shootings occurred.

An anonymous police official said that "it seems that this is not linked to any international terrorist organizations," adding it's "probably more Norway's Oklahoma City than (its) World Trade Center."

Reuters said Breivik belonged to Norway's Progress Party, the second largest in Parliament, was a member from 2004 - 2006, and in its youth party from 1997 - 2007. Progress leader Siv Jensen indicated he left the party, wanting to disassociate it from anyone charged with terror attacks.

Obama's initial reaction stoked war on terror fears, saying:

"It's a reminder that the entire international community has a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring, and that we have to work cooperatively together both on intelligence and in terms of prevention of these kinds of horrible attacks," implying Islamic involvement to justify America's imperial aggression.

It's much too early to know or draw conclusions about Oslo. Yesterday on Russia Today television, this writer told viewers to be wary of official accounts, especially early ones later proved false. Red flags were also mentioned, notably when accusations are made quickly, naming names, followed by arrests.

Police work takes time. Often weeks or months are needed to solve crimes. In fact, many end up unsolved in closed case files. Quick conclusions should make everyone wary.

targetting the children of liberal elites?

NYTimes | It has been a rite of passage for Norway’s liberal elite for decades: a summer camp set on a verdant Nordic isle called Utoya, where this week hundreds of young people gathered to meet government ministers, dive into election strategy sessions and maybe find a little summer romance.

But for Helen Andreassen, a 21-year-old aspiring politician, a celebration of bright futures became something horrifyingly different when she and her friends jumped from a second-story window to escape the bullets of a man who was hunting them specifically because of their politics.

They ran for their lives, she said, tumbling down the rocky heights to the sea shore, hoping the man in the police officer’s uniform would not pursue them into the water. But he kept shooting.

“He was standing just by the water, using his rifle, just taking his time, aiming and shooting,” Ms. Andreassen said. “It was a slaughter of young children."

For more than an hour, the gunman stalked the forests and steep, rocky shores of the island. There were no bridges to provide escape. Time was on his side.

The young people desperately silenced their cellphones and stripped off colorful clothing. But the shooter was methodical. After killing several people on one part of the island, he went to the other, and, dressed in his police uniform, calmly convinced the children huddled there that he meant to save them. When they emerged into the open, he fired again and again.

“He shot a boy in the back,” said Stine Renate Haaheim, 27, a member of Parliament who was also among those hiding. “I saw that some people were falling, and we turned around and ran. At that point I didn’t look back.”

The police have identified the suspect as Anders Behring Breivik, who in his writings has portrayed himself as a modern knight, charged with driving out Islam and immigrants and the political correctness that he said had been wrongly invited into Norway and was thriving there.

The campers at Utoya appeared to be the embodiment of his hatred.

fear of islam and plan for war....,

NYTimes | The Norwegian man charged Saturday with a pair of attacks in Oslo that killed at least 92 people left behind a detailed manifesto outlining his preparations and calling for a Christian war to defend Europe against the threat of Muslim domination, according to Norwegian and American officials familiar with the investigation.

As stunned Norwegians grappled with the deadliest attack in the country since World War II, a portrait began to emerge of the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, 32. The police identified him as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian, while acquaintances described him as a gun-loving Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threats of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration.

“We are not sure whether he was alone or had help,” a police official, Roger Andresen, said at a televised news conference. “What we know is that he is right wing and a Christian fundamentalist.”

In the 1,500-page manifesto, posted on the Web hours before the attacks, Mr. Breivik recorded a day-by-day diary of months of planning for the attacks, and claimed to be part of a small group that intended to “seize political and military control of Western European countries and implement a cultural conservative political agenda.”

He predicted a conflagration that would kill or injure more than a million people, adding, “The time for dialogue is over. We gave peace a chance. The time for armed resistance has come.”

The manifesto was signed Andrew Berwick, an Anglicized version of his name. A former American government official briefed on the case said investigators believed the manifesto was Mr. Breivik’s work.

The manifesto, entitled “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” equates liberalism and multiculturalism with “cultural Marxism,” which the document says is destroying European Christian civilization.

The document also describes a secret meeting in London in April 2002 to reconstitute the Knights Templar, a Crusader military order. It says the meeting was attended by nine representatives of eight European countries, evidently including Mr. Breivik, with an additional three members unable to attend, including a “European-American.”

The document does not name the attendees or say whether they were aware of Mr. Breivik’s planned attacks, though investigators presumably will now try to determine if the people exist and what their connection is to Mr. Breivik.

Thomas Hegghammer, a terrorism specialist at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, said the manifesto bears an eerie resemblance to those of Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, though from a Christian rather than a Muslim point of view. Like Mr. Breivik’s manuscript, the major Qaeda declarations have detailed accounts of the Crusades, a pronounced sense of historical grievance and calls for apocalyptic warfare to defeat the religious and cultural enemy.

my name paul: that isht between y'all...,

Phillipians 3:5-8Though I might also have confidence in the flesh. If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: 5 Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; 6 Concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless. 7 But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. 8 Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ,

The Tanakh (a.k.a. Old Testament) has been a part of our culture for so long that we seem incapable of applying the same critical standards to this musty collection of cut and pasted literature that we would apply to any other such quaint material. After all, if we found this material today, we would we even for half a hot minute pretend that Noah and his wife had actually herded all the world's animals onto their little rickety, non-Phoenician raft? Or that Joshua had blown down the walls of a city with a magical trumpet?

We would give this material less credence than we give the Epic of Gilgamesh or the story of Beowulf, with the clear-eyed understanding that anything even remotely historical in this material is buried beneath so much silly accretion as to be ridiculous. We would certainly not be in the absurd situation in which we find ourselves in which a nuclear-armed garrison state of European refugees has laid claim to Palestine on the basis of fraudulent mythology and threatens to thrust the world into the chaos of nuclear war later this year.

Two thousand years ago a Jew born of the tribe of Benjamin, circumcised on the eighth day, a zealous Pharisee, fully righteous and down by law described the sacred texts of Judaism as isht. We know this cat as the "apostle" Paul, and although he was entirely right back in the day to describe the Tanakh as so much isht, he was wrong about them being supplanted by the entheogenic gnosis of the Christ. Instead, the coded literature of the gnostic cults of the entheogenic Christ was subverted and distorted into the wholly made-up scriptures of the Church of Rome which also adopted the Tanakh isht as its Old Testament. This fustercluck was further compounded when another later engineered scientological formation calling itself Islam based itself on much of this same old musty isht. Now, almost half of the world's population calls itself Jewish, Christian, or Moslem and this fact has left the rest of us up to our eyebrows in isht.

a right-wing christian fundamentalist

CNN | As Norway struggles to come to terms with its greatest loss of life in decades, all eyes are on the man charged in the explosion in central Oslo and the deadly shooting rampage at a youth camp.

While police have not officially named him, Norwegian television and newspaper reports have identified the suspect as 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik, of Norwegian origin.

A picture is emerging, gleaned from official sources and social media, of a right-wing Christian fundamentalist who may have had an issue with Norway's multi-cultural society.

Norwegian and international news outlets have run photographs of a blond man with blue-green eyes and chiseled features, dressed in a preppy style.

A victim who was shot during the attack at the youth camp on Utoya island told CNN Saturday that he had seen pictures of Breivik taken from what is believed to be his Facebook page and shown on NRK and TV2. The victim said he recognized the man from the news reports as the gunman.

Breivik is a member of the Oslo Pistol Club and has three weapons registered in his name, according to leading Norwegian newspaper VG, citing Norway's official weapons register. They are a Glock pistol, a rifle and a shotgun, VG reported.

A post in Breivik's name on an online forum, Document.no, from December 2009, talks about non-Muslim teenagers being "in an especially precarious situation with regards to being harassed by Islamic youth."

"I know of many hundred occasions where non-Muslims have been robbed, beaten up and harassed by Islamic gangs," the post reads. "I had a best friend between the ages of 12-17 who was a Pakistani, so I was one of the many protected, cool 'potatoes' that had protection. But this also made me see the hypocrisy up close and personal and made me nauseous."

A Twitter account attributed to Breivik by Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has only one message, dated July 17. "One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who has only interests," it says, adapting a quote from 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill.

how the other side roles...,

Video - BBC report on right wing mass-murder atrocity in Norway.

CBSNews | A home-grown terrorist set off an explosion that ripped open buildings in the heart of Norway's government Friday, then went to a summer camp dressed as a police officer and gunned down youths as they ran and even swam for their lives, police said Friday.

As of early Saturday, police say at least 80 people were killed in a shooting spree at the youth camp of Norway's Labor Party. Police told reporters they had discovered many more victims after initially reporting the death toll at 10.

A police official said the 32-year-old ethnic Norwegian suspect arrested at the camp on Utoya island appears to have acted alone in both attacks, and that "it seems like that this is not linked to any international terrorist organizations at all." The official spoke on condition of anonymity because that information had not been officially released by Norway's police.

"It seems it's not Islamic-terror related," the official said. "This seems like a madman's work."

The official said the attack "is probably more Norway's Oklahoma City than it is Norway's World Trade Center." Domestic terrorists carried out the 1995 attack on a federal building in Oklahoma City, while foreign terrorists were responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The official added, however, "it's still just hours since the incident happened. And the investigation is going on with all available resources."

TV2 Norwegian TV reported that the shooting suspect in custody has links to right wing extremism

anonymous?

Video - stick187 where do we go from here?

Video - ANONYMOUS: "THE PLAN" IS NOW LIVE. PHASE 1: INITIATED. WAR AGAINST THE SYSTEM.

"The Plan" 1 year. 3 phases. A world of change.

Share this message with everyone you can.

PHASE 1: Better yourself. Spread the message. Be the message.

*Educate yourself on the depths of the system, the functions put it place to inhibit true freedom as well as the mechanisms within the system that motivate the masses to subconsciously accept giving up those freedoms. The structures within the system that promote division within the people of the countries of this world and the injustices that are placed upon the people.

*Spread the message. Share this video and the website with everyone you can. Make your own videos, songs, art, graffiti etc... spreading the word that we are here, the movement is taking hold. Expect us.

*Learn ways that will allow you to break free from the system. Start small and implement them in your daily lives. This will be implemented as a focus of Phase 2 as well, escalating what you have learned.

*ANON hackers - begin supporting the movement. This is a calling to all of you for the aid of this movement. Low-priority targets are your engagement. Assist with the movement and spread the message of "The Plan".

The resistance is here.
Expect us.

the murdochs: power without responsibility

Video - Rupert and James kinda/sorta testify...,

The Nation | What did we learn from the Murdochs’ testimony [1]? That, at 80, Rupert Murdoch is losing his grip—or wants to appear that way. The billionaire tyrant’s saurian response to his tormentors on the parliamentary select committee showed a man who struggled with names, dates and details, and who needed to be rescued by his son James (who seemed almost pathetically eager to do so). But the picture that emerged of a father far too busy struggling (and by yesterday’s evidence, failing) to keep track of a global media empire to have any knowledge of what his underlings’ underlings were up to on one lowly British tabloid was profoundly at odds not only with Murdoch’s track record as a manager in total command of every detail of his empire, but even with portions of his own testimony yesterday. When MP Tom Keen tossed him a softball: “You’ve been kept in the dark, Rupert Murdoch,” he blasted it right back: “Nobody kept me in the dark. Anything that’s seen as a crisis comes to me.”

James Murdoch’s portrayal of the dutiful son who arrived on the scene too late to have been involved in any wrongdoing—but just in time to sign off on the multimillion-pound payoffs to a handful of hacking victims—was more convincing. Though here too it is worth noting that the legal opinion from Harbottle & Co., the high-priced London firm that News International used to handle the invasion of privacy claims, which James waved around like a doctor’s note getting out of a particularly unpleasant school trip, has been undercut by the firm’s statement yesterday [2] that its advice had been wrongly summarized, but that the firm’s request to be released from confidentiality to explain exactly how had been turned down by News International.

On the whole, the Murdoch strategy of running out the clock was successful—even before the doubtless unpleasant distraction of wiping a shaving cream pie off Murdoch senior’s face, which cost Murdoch a small portion of his majesty but also kept Tom Watson, by far the most dangerous member of the panel, from being allowed to ask a concluding set of questions. There were two small but genuine revelations: that News International continued paying the legal fees for Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator jailed in 2007 for hacking into mobile phones belonging to members of the British royal family (and who also hacked into the voice messages of the murdered school girl Milly Dowler) long after his conviction, and that Rupert Murdoch himself never even considered resigning or in any way accepting responsibility for the illegal actions of his employees.

What happens next? There are currently at least ten separate British investigations, including an independent inquiry headed by a judge, police investigations into both phone hacking (“Operation Weeting”) and the issue of police corruption and illegal payments to police officers by Murdoch’s newspapers and other British press organizations (“Operation Elveden”), as well as an examination by the media regulator Ofcom about whether the actions of Murdoch employees on the News of the World throws into question the family’s fitness to retain control of its British broadcast operations.

An optimist might think that with so much smoke surely a barbecue is in the offing. But the adage about too many cooks is probably just as relevant. One problem facing any regulator or national legislature genuinely trying to come to grips with Murdoch is that News Corporation is a truly global company. The most recent GAO report shows the company operating 782 foreign subsidiaries—of which 182 are in such notorious tax havens as the British Virgin Islands (sixty-two), the Cayman Islands (thirty-three) and Luxembourg (four). The career of Les Hinton—or indeed James Murdoch—demonstrates the ease with which Murdoch shuffles managers from continent to continent. Tracking the flow of News Corporation assets around the world is far more difficult.

And as I’ve said before [3], News Corporation is no ordinary business enterprise. The thousands of journalists on the company’s books—and the untold number of private investigators, “blaggers” and other practitioners of journalism’s black arts paid off the books—mean that in addition to men and money, News Corp. also has global reach in amassing information, particularly the kind of titillating personal information that can put a troublesome regulator or meddlesome legislator on Page Six of the New York Post or the front page of the Sun. That’s why the most significant comment on the scandal before Nick Davies managed to get the British public to pay attention was from the anonymous MP who, when asked why Parliament kept allowing Rebekah Brooks to refuse repeated invitations to testify, replied that they felt too intimidated [4] by the threat of what might be done to them by News International journalists if they insisted. Combine that threat with a corporation whose unabashed largesse to its friends—from the £ 5 million Harper Collins paid for Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs to the $4.5 million the company offered to pay Newt Gingrich to the $1.25 million paid to Sarah Palin for Going Rogue [5]—seems to transcend business logic and you have assembled a powerful set of incentives for accommodation.

Really getting to the bottom of News Corporation would require a global effort, with global focus—and far more determination than anything shown either by Attorney General Eric Holder’s tepid assurance that the Justice Department would look at any evidence of phone hacking in the United States or David Cameron’s government, whose links with News Corporation go far beyond sharing the occasional egg nog at Christmas.

wage slaves in the warehouse

Video - Capitalism vs. Socialism - which is more productive?

DeclineoftheEmpire | In our Capitalist Utopia, wage slaves are not allowed to talk. They might say stuff like "wow, it's really hot in here" or "let's go upstairs and kill all the big guys in the suits." No cell phones either—if there's an medical emergency in the family, your phone will be confiscated.

A few days later, I had breakfast with someone who coincidentally works with the CEOs of logistics companies. Telling him about the conditions and the sterility and the mind-numbing sadness of the warehouse made him almost too bummed to eat his oatmeal.

"Somebody did studies and spreadsheets and crunched those numbers," he said, "and figured out that the cheapest way to get that job done is to treat people like that." Which is important, he explained, because "the profit margins on those contracts are razor thin." Of course. A lot of the Internet retailers' merchandise is nearly worthless—ice princess star-shaped ice cube trays, cheap sunglasses, anthropomorphic stuffed bacon toys—and is sold for nearly nothing, often with free or reduced-price shipping.

Susie told me it's pretty dispiriting to act as though her workers are as disposable as the products they're shipping. But that's just the way it is, she said. The logistics clients aren't interested in spending money on a better or more sustainable work culture. Nor do they need to. There are 100 people employed in the warehouse I visited, and Susie could fire every one of them today without costing her bosses a dime of lost profits. She has applications from hundreds of people ready to take the job.

There's your vaunted job market flexibility. This, too, will make America more competitive. Disposable workers can be fired in a New York minute for talking, or taking too many breaks, or otherwise displaying a bad attitude. Ungrateful sons of bitches. Firing these SOBs is just like taking out the trash. After all, there are hundreds of people waiting to take their place. The working wage slaves are the lucky ones.

It's a Capitalist's wet dream. Is this a great country or what? Fist tap Dale.

CIA exhales: 99 out of 101 torture cases dropped...,

Wired | This is how one of the darkest chapters in U.S. counterterrorism ends: with practically every instance of suspected CIA torture dodging criminal scrutiny. It’s one of the greatest gifts the Justice Department could have given the CIA as David Petraeus takes over the agency.

Over two years after Attorney General Eric Holder instructed a special prosecutor, John Durham, to “preliminar[ily] review” whether CIA interrogators unlawfully tortured detainees in their custody, Holder announced on Thursday afternoon that he’ll pursue criminal investigations in precisely two out of 101 cases of suspected detainee abuse. Some of them turned out not to have involved CIA officials after all. Both of the cases that move on to a criminal phase involved the “death in custody” of detainees, Holder said.

But just because there’s a further criminal inquiry doesn’t necessarily mean there will be any charges brought against CIA officials involved in those deaths. If Holder’s decision on Thursday doesn’t actually end the Justice Department’s review of torture in CIA facilities, it brings it awfully close, as outgoing CIA Director Leon Panetta noted.

“On this, my last day as Director, I welcome the news that the broader inquiries are behind us,” Panetta wrote to the CIA staff on Thursday. “We are now finally about to close this chapter of our Agency’s history.”

oligarchy in the united states?

Cambridge | We explore the possibility that the US political system can usefully be characterized as oligarchic. Using a material-based definition drawn from Aristotle, we argue that oligarchy is not inconsistent with democracy; that oligarchs need not occupy formal office or conspire together or even engage extensively in politics in order to prevail; that great wealth can provide both the resources and the motivation to exert potent political influence. Data on the US distributions of income and wealth are used to construct several Material Power Indices, which suggest that the wealthiest Americans may exert vastly greater political influence than average citizens and that a very small group of the wealthiest (perhaps the top tenth of 1 percent) may have sufficient power to dominate policy in certain key areas. A brief review of the literature suggests possible mechanisms by which such influence could occur, through lobbying, the electoral process, opinion shaping, and the US Constitution itself.

compare and contrast with wikileaks...,

Interactive: Murdoch's media empire on Prezi

the hell you say?!?!?!?!

Video - Murdoch's doxie stands by her man.

WSJ | How does this year's phone hacking scandal at the now-defunct British tabloid News of the World—owned, I hardly need add, by News Corp., the Journal's parent company—compare with last year's contretemps over the release of classified information by Julian Assange's WikiLeaks and his partners at the New York Times, the Guardian and other newspapers?

At bottom, they're largely the same story.

In both cases, secret information, initially obtained by illegal means, was disseminated publicly by news organizations that believed the value of the information superseded the letter of the law, as well as the personal interests of those whom it would most directly affect. In both cases, fundamental questions about the lengths to which a news organization should go in pursuit of a scoop have been raised. In both cases, a dreadful human toll has been exacted: The British parents of murdered 13-year-old Milly Dowler, led to the false hope that their child might be alive because some of her voice mails were deleted after her abduction; Afghan citizens, fearful of Taliban reprisals after being exposed by WikiLeaks as U.S. informants.

Both, in short, are despicable instances of journalistic malpractice, for which some kind of price ought to be paid. So why is one a scandal, replete with arrests, resignations and parliamentary inquests, while the other is merely a controversy, with Mr. Assange's name mooted in some quarters for a Nobel Peace Prize?

The easy answer is that the news revealed by WikiLeaks was in the public interest, whereas what was disclosed by News of the World was merely of interest to the public. By this reckoning, if it's a great matter of state, and especially if it's a government secret, it's fair game. Not so if it's just so much tittle-tattle about essentially private affairs.

You can see the attraction of this argument—particularly if, like Mr. Assange, you are trying to fight extradition to Sweden on pending rape charges that you consider unworthy of public notice.

You can also see its attraction to anybody who claims to know what the public interest ought to be and is in a position to do something about it.

The New York Times Questions The Journal's Integrity

The Atlantic | The Players: The New York Times vs. The Wall Street Journal

The First Serve: Yesterday, David Carr of The New York Times wrote a column questioning the future of Rupert Murdoch and News Corps. "The News Corporation may be hoping that it can get back to business now that some of the responsible parties have been held to account — and that people will see the incident as an aberrant byproduct of the world of British tabloids," he wrote. "But that seems like a stretch. The damage is likely to continue to mount, perhaps because the underlying pathology is hardly restricted to those who have taken the fall."

Carr also pointed to Murdoch's strategy of burying problems: "And the money the company reportedly paid out to hacking victims is chicken feed compared with what it has spent trying to paper over the tactics of News America in a series of lawsuits filed by smaller competitors in the United States."

Fellow columnist Roger Cohen, who had previously defended Murdoch, furthered the conversation in a column that appeared on The Times's site yesterday (and appears in the International Herald Tribune, a Times company, today) which questions Murdoch's character. "Murdoch is a flawed genius whose very ruthlessness has now led him to his comeuppance," he wrote. "He knew, more viscerally than anyone, what postmodern societies wanted to satisfy their twisted appetites and he provided that material in all its gaudiness. I don’t think he created those appetites. But he sure fed them"

Meanwhile, Monday The Wall Street Journal published an editorial defending its owner and its integrity (and was met with a chorus of social media jeers--covered here). The board did not stop there and took the opportunity to lob barbs at The New York Times and The Guardian.

"We also trust that readers can see through the commercial and ideological motives of our competitor-critics. The Schadenfreude is so thick you can't cut it with a chainsaw. Especially redolent are lectures about journalistic standards from publications that give Julian Assange and WikiLeaks their moral imprimatur. They want their readers to believe, based on no evidence, that the tabloid excesses of one publication somehow tarnish thousands of other News Corp. journalists across the world."

The Return Volley: Schadenfreude? Chainsaws? Joe Nocera of the The Times responded to the WSJ's allegation of schadenfreude. "Well, yes, the schadenfreude is pretty darn thick," he writes in today's column. "Who would deny it? The whole thing reminds me a little of the ending of Ian McEwan’s wonderful novel “Solar,” in which the many awful things the central character has done in his long life suddenly come together to bury him in an avalanche of comeuppance. I’m O.K. with that."

fox news cackling over anonymous roundup

Video - RT stirs to pot over a bit of lulzsec mischief

Forbes | The international wave of alleged hacker arrests associated with the digital vigilante movement Anonymous continued Tuesday, and this time on American soil. Fox News reports more than a dozen arrests across California, Florida and New Jersey, as well as FBI interviews and searches in Long Island and Brooklyn, New York.

Those police actions follow others in England, where an Anonymous-related hacker named Ryan Cleary was arrested last month in Essex, followed by more than 45 other arrests in Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and Turkey.

U.S. law enforcement have yet to reveal exactly what hacking charges those newly-arrested American suspects will face. Update: An FBI press release states that there are 14 suspects, and that they’ll be charged with “various counts of conspiracy and intentional damage to a protected computer” related to attacks on Paypal in December following the company’s decision to cut off service to WikiLeaks.

Within the hacker community, many are watching the fate of one individual who goes by the handle “Sabu” and who is suspected of involvement in multiple operations including the attacks on HBGary and later the hacking spree perpetrated by the Anonymous spinoff group LulzSec. Sabu has claimed involvement in yesterday’s hacking of the British newspaper The Sun, and wrote on his Twitter feed that LulzSec will soon release stolen emails from the News Corp-owned tabloid.

Sabu claimed Tuesday on Twitter that he was not involved in the day’s police operations, despite several attempts by hackers in opposition to Anonymous to publicly identify him. One hacker who goes by the name th3j35t3r recently published a suspected name and Portugese address for Sabu on his blog. The LulzSec hacker responded Tuesday by taunting th3j35t3r over the arrests: “Damn, it must hurt you emotionally that I was not part of that.”

why we are all different (and not all religious)

epiphenom | So, on to the paper by Robert Rowthorn, which I see now has even been picked up by the Denver Post!

Just to explain a bit of the background. Rowthorn is an economist, and his paper is basically a model of what would would happen if you have a gene (strictly speaking [and for Bjørn's benefit], an allele) that predisposes for membership of a group, and if that group has high reproduction.

What he shows is that the gene spreads incredibly quickly - just 10 generations after it appears, 80% of the population have it. After 20 generations, 95% have it, and it keeps increasing until that figure reaches 100%.

Because the gene spreads, membership of the group increases. It starts off a little slower, and never quite reaches 100% (because even gene carriers can opt out in this model).

Since there is a gene for religion, and the religious (especially the ultra-conservatives) have more kids, you can easily see how this model directly relates to the real world.

And that, Dear Reader, is why 95% of the world's population are Orthodox Jews!

Oh. Alright there is clearly something wrong with the model, but that's OK. Models are usually wrong, and the fun part comes in trying to figure out why. And this model is particularly interesting because it touches on a number of popular misconceptions.

Some are specific to this model but there's also a much bigger issue underlying all this: just why is there so much variation in how religious people are, if (as some theorists will have you believe) religion is so beneficial?

But first, let's look at some specific problems with the assumptions in this model. First off, it isn't really a model of religion, despite the title of the paper. It's a model of conservatism.

Rowthorn starts from some basic assumptions. That global birthrates have fallen, but they have fallen more slowly among the most religious (and not at all among certain sects like Orthodox Jews and the Amish). That conservatism and religion are inextricably linked (and that they have a simple genetic basis). And that religion is inextricably linked to high birth rates.

A quick survey just of European history will quickly show that the last two assumptions don't hold. There have been countless examples of religious anti-conservative movements - the Protestant reformation is just the most obvious example, but there are numerous others, like the anti-slavery movement and the 12th century reformation.

Religion is invented by people, and religion can be radical and innovative - according to their needs.

man-made god(s)

LATimes | Before John Lennon imagined "living life in peace," he conjured "no heaven … / no hell below us …/ and no religion too."

No religion: What was Lennon summoning? For starters, a world without "divine" messengers, like Osama bin Laden, sparking violence. A world where mistakes, like the avoidable loss of life in Hurricane Katrina, would be rectified rather than chalked up to "God's will." Where politicians no longer compete to prove who believes more strongly in the irrational and untenable. Where critical thinking is an ideal. In short, a world that makes sense.

In recent years scientists specializing in the mind have begun to unravel religion's "DNA." They have produced robust theories, backed by empirical evidence (including "imaging" studies of the brain at work), that support the conclusion that it was humans who created God, not the other way around. And the better we understand the science, the closer we can come to "no heaven … no hell … and no religion too."

Like our physiological DNA, the psychological mechanisms behind faith evolved over the eons through natural selection. They helped our ancestors work effectively in small groups and survive and reproduce, traits developed long before recorded history, from foundations deep in our mammalian, primate and African hunter-gatherer past.

For example, we are born with a powerful need for attachment, identified as long ago as the 1940s by psychiatrist John Bowlby and expanded on by psychologist Mary Ainsworth. Individual survival was enhanced by protectors, beginning with our mothers. Attachment is reinforced physiologically through brain chemistry, and we evolved and retain neural networks completely dedicated to it. We easily expand that inborn need for protectors to authority figures of any sort, including religious leaders and, more saliently, gods. God becomes a super parent, able to protect us and care for us even when our more corporeal support systems disappear, through death or distance.

Scientists have so far identified about 20 hard-wired, evolved "adaptations" as the building blocks of religion. Like attachment, they are mechanisms that underlie human interactions: Brain-imaging studies at the National Institutes of Health showed that when test subjects were read statements about religion and asked to agree or disagree, the same brain networks that process human social behavior — our ability to negotiate relationships with others — were engaged.

Among the psychological adaptations related to religion are our need for reciprocity, our tendency to attribute unknown events to human agency, our capacity for romantic love, our fierce "out-group" hatreds and just as fierce loyalties to the in groups of kin and allies. Religion hijacks these traits. The rivalry between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, for example, or the doctrinal battles between Protestant and Catholic reflect our "groupish" tendencies.

In addition to these adaptations, humans have developed the remarkable ability to think about what goes on in other people's minds and create and rehearse complex interactions with an unseen other. In our minds we can de-couple cognition from time, place and circumstance. We consider what someone else might do in our place; we project future scenarios; we replay past events. It's an easy jump to say, conversing with the dead or to conjuring gods and praying to them.

Morality, which some see as imposed by gods or religion on savage humans, science sees as yet another adaptive strategy handed down to us by natural selection.

Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom notes that "it is often beneficial for humans to work together … which means it would have been adaptive to evaluate the niceness and nastiness of other individuals." In groundbreaking research, he and his team found that infants in their first year of life demonstrate aspects of an innate sense of right and wrong, good and bad, even fair and unfair. When shown a puppet climbing a mountain, either helped or hindered by a second puppet, the babies oriented toward the helpful puppet. They were able to make an evaluative social judgment, in a sense a moral response.

magical-thinking brand management...,

The Atlantic | Michele Bachmann is practically synonymous with political controversy, and if the 2008 presidential election is any guide, the conservative Lutheran church she belonged to for many years is likely to add another chapter due to the nature of its beliefs--such as its assertion, explained and footnoted on this website, that the Roman Catholic Pope is the Antichrist.

Bachmann was a longtime member of the Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church in Stillwater, Minn., which belongs to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), a council of churches founded in 1850 that today comprises about 400,000 people. WELS is the most conservative of the major Lutheran church organizations, known for its strict adherence to the writings of Martin Luther, the German theologian who broke with the Catholic Church and launched the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. This includes endorsing Luther's statements about the papacy. From the WELS "Doctrinal Statement on the Antichrist":

Since Scripture teaches that the Antichrist would be revealed and gives the marks by which the Antichrist is to be recognized, and since this prophecy has been clearly fulfilled in the history and development of the Roman Papacy, it is Scripture which reveals that the Papacy is the Antichrist.


During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama's relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright nearly derailed his quest for the Democratic nomination after video surfaced of Wright's extreme pronouncements. Similarly, the views of Bachmann's church toward the papacy--which are well outside the mainstream of modern political discourse--could pose a problem as she pursues the Republican nomination.

Seeking to better understand WELS theology and how voters should regard it, I called the Rev. Marcus Birkholz of Salem Lutheran Church in Stillwater. When I identified myself, he hung up. Turning the other cheek, I called WELS and had slightly better luck. While I didn't get to speak to a pastor, as I'd hoped, Joel Hochmuth, the communications director, did his best to oblige. On the matter of the Antichrist, he said, "Some people have this vision of a little devil running around with horns and red pointy ears. Luther was clear that by 'Antichrist' [he meant] anybody who puts himself up in place of Christ. Luther never bought the idea of the Pope being God's voice in today's world. He believed Scripture is God's word." Hochmuth hastened to add that despite the lengthy doctrinal statement, the belief that the Pope is the Antichrist "has never been one of our driving principles."

Hochmuth also revealed that Bachmann is no longer a member of the WELS congregation. "I do know that she has requested a release of her membership," he said, adding that she took the unusual step of formally requesting that release in writing. "She has not been an active member of our fellowship during the last year." Hochmuth wouldn't speculate on whether her presidential ambitions factored in this decision -- the nation's 70 million Catholics (who lean Republican) might not respond kindly to the Pope-as-Antichrist stuff -- but he did emphasize that "it's not something you're going to hear preached from our pulpits every Sunday."

like scientology - tanakh and koran are total frauds as well...,

HuffPo | Since the early years of Christianity, various myths, legends, and even conspiracy theories about the origins of the Bible have enjoyed wide circulation. The discovery in recent decades of many books that were not accepted into the Christian canon has only added to this speculation, spawning numerous best-sellers and television programs. Though the number of theories has grown, however, the three most popular are sufficiently well defined that we can consider them as we might various options on a multiple-choice quiz. So read carefully and then make your selection.

The Big Three

A: Holy Dictation. Promoted by conservative Christians, this view stresses the inerrancy -- that is, the factual accuracy in all matters of faith, history, and science -- of the Bible. Authors, in the grip of the Holy Spirit, received a divine revelation directly from God that they transcribed without error. So while the biblical authors may have written in their own voice and style, the contents of their compositions were nevertheless divinely inspired and controlled. For this reason, there are no errors of any kind in the Bible; hence, if the Bible says the world was created in seven days then, indeed, it was created in seven days.

B: Imperial Decree. Popularized by historical works like The Gnostic Gospels and fictional books like The Da Vinci Code, this view suggests that the official and final contents of the Bible were established by ecclesial councils ordered by Emperor Constantine and his successors. The intent of these councils was both to provide theological unity to the fledgling Christian empire and to stamp out the rise of feminism and other movements in the heavily patriarchal and increasingly orthodox early Christian church. According to Elaine Pagels, divergent theologies like Gnosticism were a threat to the unity and power of the imperial-backed ecclesial authorities, while for Dan Brown there existed a conspiracy to suppress the "true" story of Jesus' romantic relationship with Mary Magdalene, their unrecognized child, and Mary Magdalene's significant influence in the early church.

C: Forgeries & Falsehoods. Who wrote the Bible? All too often, this view suggests, it wasn't who the actual authors purported to be. Rather, much of the New Testament was written either by persons whose identity remains irrecoverably anonymous or by frauds impersonating famous and powerful Christians of an earlier generation. While the gospels represent the former case, many of the letters attributed to the Apostle Paul as well as those attributed to Peter and others represent the latter. As Bart Ehrman has recently argued, the checkered history of the composition of these books undermines the integrity of the New Testament as a whole.

So what do you think -- did you find a satisfactory answer? If not, it will help to remember that multiple-choice tests often offer a fourth choice, "D: None of the Above." As it happens, that choice would be the better answer for this question, as each of the first three possibilities is flawed. For instance, while Mormons have a story that describes the divine transmission of their holy book, Christians by and large have rarely made such claims. In fact, the theory of inerrancy -- a word never used in the Bible -- was only coined only a century ago by fundamentalist Christians seeking to defend the Bible from recent discoveries about its historical origins and fallible conclusions in the realms of history and science.