Now I've seen everything

Yeah Eggy, I am surprised to see your paisan Emeril in Good Morning America too!

What? Who's Emeril?
I just dont believe you americans. What's with this god thing, for crying out loud. We do not mix religion and politics. We do not have organized religious lobbying groups.
We do not even have the G word on the news, at all, ever, let alone people seriously proposing creationism. It's just shocking to me. You're just like those middle eastern countries you so love to bomb.

Trust me, there are a lot of people in America that grok that irony too.

(But....I could find you a dozen other stories in the mainstream media that illustrates that point much better than this article does. If you really think your link exemplifies your statement, Eggy, you ain't even seen the half of it.

If anything, I kinda said "whoo hoo" because if the neocons are into saving the damn planet, then they go head to head against the corporations that control the other half of the politicans, and maybe they'll get into a massive D.C. streetfight and we can all go back to the business of not tearing each other and the world down.)

Yeah but why isn't anyone doing anything??
It's scary. I am actually, honestly and seriously frightened.

Lots of people are doing lots of positive things for the environment here in the US. But our media seem more concerned with who's Pope. The millions of Americans that work with the Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, and a myriad of other organizations to work towards a healthier planet don't get the limelight.

The exception is when somebody goes to court to stop the madness (or at least slow it down a bit). Even then, the corporate-controlled media tends to paint it as obstructionism by some wacko activists in collusion with an out-of-control judiciary, rather than a genuine grass-roots movement.

You're not the only one, Eggy.

I'm actually happy to see some evangelicals stepping up to the plate over the environment. Some of the really hardcore religious right don't care about the environment because they truly believe that the end times are near and that God gave them a mandate to have dominion over the earth... in other words, it's theirs to ravage because it'll only make Jesus come back that much sooner If we have to suffer that kind of lunacy it's nice to hear the more rational voices among the Christian right speaking out for something that actually makes sense.

Because we're complacent, fat and happy, and won't do anything until something comes along that takes that away from us. Lack of oil might be the first thing to do it, but total lack of civil liberties/theocracy in the making might do it too. (Google "Constitution Restoration Act" for some truly scary stuff.)

Our political parties are a joke, and we've allowed them to turn the idea of a viable third party into a joke as well.

Our instinctual urge to bond with and protect our family as been perverted into the "Our Nation, Right or Wrong" ideology. (Actually, you could replace "nation" with "religion" and still have a true sentence.)

My mom is an old-school 1960's liberal who marched in Vietnam and civil rights protests. She smells riots coming soon. I could only say "I hope so", because that would mean there are a few people that won't go down without a fight - not that I want the pain and instability that riots bring, but damn. We aren't having kids anytime soon, if that gives you an idea of my outlook on our prospects in the next 20 years.

Well..it is the present administrations policy to have all protesters arrested and the police force is coached to lie about, or exaggerate the truth.

Now that the protests are in hand, the next step will be to use the Homeland Security act to take away more freedoms, including rounding up lists of names of anyone speaking out too loudly against; A. The Government, or B. Large Corporations.

Sometime in the future, perhaps as early as Jeb Bush's presidency, we will see "re-education" centers popping up for those that fail the new "Patriot Test", that will be mandated for all residents in the U.S. that fall under the $500,000 a year income bracket.

After all..if you ain't with the U.S. government, you ARE a terrorist!

So..I wouldn't expect to see any environment-friendly policies in say, the next 20 years or so. At least until after the next U.S. Civil War.

Do you really think in terms like this? That "Americans" are a huge brain that controls government policy through our temporal god lobe?

At least half of us (probably more due to voter fraud) voted against the nutjob neo-con evangelical MINORITY.

Any time that you place "you" in front of a group of people, my douchebag alarm goes off.

And the fact that you assume that "nobody is doing anything" is more obtuse than your original sweeping ignorant post.

You're not kidding. These people are whack jobs and this bill is brought to us by the biggest whack job of them all, one Roy Moore...



The willful ignorance of these people completely and utterly astounds me. How does one become chief justice of a state and be so clueless about the history of law in the United States?

Strange but I was thinking this exact same thing on the way home from work yesterday. My temperature tends to run a little paranoid anyway, but it seems like every magazine I pick up from Time to Scientific American has something about religion and/or the end of the world in it. The same applies to shows I've seen advertised on television lately.

When people or a government seriously believe that the end of the world/rapture is imminent, what incentive do they have to take care of our environment? It's like they want it to happen and by ignoring our planet, it has a good chance of becoming a self fulfilled prophecy.

Combine that with technology available today that would actually make monitoring of the communications and travel of every living person possible and it makes for a pretty scary vision of the world. Particularly when what one can say and do become more restrictive by law and the judicary is relagated to the back benches and lose power.

It's a virtual recipe for cooking up power hungry leaders with bad intentions who have potential to do very destructive things.

The only way out that I can see is if the majority of us set aside our own private agendas and apathy and vote for the good of future generations.

.

YES, Eggy, I am angry and frightened too.
I've just been posting about exactly this in a related thread (about the pope) here:

/120/76/43465/3.html

Here is a post which is bang on your topic. It was in reply to posters saying we are now in the "end days":

_________________________________________________________________

"Does no-one else find it horrific that the leader of the most powerful nation on earth is making decisions that intimately affect the survival and happiness of our children ? WHEN...

...He openly claims that one of his fundamental assumptions is that reality-as-we-know-it will shortly be wiped out. Making the ordinary real-world welfare of those children irrelevant ? They'll never get to a normal future ? The whole world ?

And he WELCOMES this destruction ??????

This doesn't anger and frighten you ?
You WELCOME progress towards DESTRUCTION of known reality ?
For EVERYONE ??

And you think you're sane, benevolent, caring and responsible ?
Telling your kids this ? Encouraging Zionist aggression as a step towards it ?

I'm just horrified."
__________________________________________________________________

Here's another:

"Its the maniacs who talk of prophecies, "end days" and who are trying to prod us toward a real catastrophe in the mistaken belief that it is actually a benign and desirable spiritual event. They scare and anger me. I'm surprised to learn here that Catholics (and cardinals and Pope) are among them.

Those who believe such things are suddenly, now, beginning to threaten all our children. At this point their beliefs stop being just their concern, and become ours."
_________________________________________________________________

I seriously believe it's time the sane stand up, and purge Christian religious extremists from politics. Before it is too late.

I thought it was just the angelicals, but aparently the Catholics are starting to move. A collective madness is apparently beginning to grow. Something to do with "prophecies" starting to come true. Did you know this for instance :

__________________________________________________________________

Icon Serpentine:
"The thing is that the catholic church maintains it's theological integrity via the prophecies and scriptures of old. They have a college that all cardinals attend in order to train them in the prophecies and scriptures... it's a very entrenched and developed church."
___________________________________________________________________

What? Who's Emeril?!

Eggy, Eggy... Emeril Lagasse is only the most famous Portuguese man in the United States!



and btw...

Every time someone says "YOU AMERICANS" I laugh very hard.

The United States of America is a nation of immigrants (since the Native Americans were pretty much exterminated). So every freaking thing Americans do is the freaking fault of our freaking ancestors, that means YOU (like in all of you World)!





You mean you don't ANYMORE. Ask the tens of millions of Indigenous people around the world that were killed by the Spanish and Portuguese to bring Jesus to them...

So that we may not forget.

Tito

Hey - I just thought.
What say we all start waking up to the danger these madmen pose to us all ?

What if we find a charismatic leader who gets a powerful political movement going to exclude extremist "end-days" views from political power ( by voting it out ). We may need it, to avoid nuclear war starting in the Middle East (as per the prophecies).

(Quick aside - Israel has about 200 nuclear warheads, three ballistic missile submarines and cruise missiles to deliver them, to potentially anywhere in half Europe. All denied, and uninspected)

Sorry, got distracted - how would the religious react if such a powerful figure appeared ?

They would think the prophecies were being fulfilled - they would identify him as the "anti-christ". This is an argument it's very hard to win.

Already done. I might try to find the link, but there are livejournal users who've reported visits from the secret service regarding defamatory posts about the president on their journals.

Is that the new "Anti-Terrorist Freedom Force"? I think they are called the US-SS for short...

Since the issue is "YOU AMERICANS" and not the indigenous people of...wherever, I'd like to point out that American values are English Puritanical in origin, not mainland European. They felt they were being persecuted, probably for being obnoxious assholes, so they came here to set up shop. And now we have a whole nation based on the moral values of some obnoxious extremist assholes. If you want to blame Europe for America, blame them for not beheading the pilgrims before they got here.

Not that some other group of assholes wouldn't have done worse... but blaming the Europeans for America seems as silly as blaming all of Europe for England sending criminals to Australia.

In any case, humanity sucks, will always suck, and will be easy to pit against itself to make way for the master race of genetically engineered Carebears that will proliferate in the rainbow of nuclear waste that we leave behind.

I have read that journal. Crazy.

Reminds of a friend of a friend of mine. She had a livejournal and was in a group for her college. One day she had a "frustrating" day and blurted out how much she wanted to *insert violent action* some people, and didn't bother to put the entry private. The next day the police came by her dorm and had her arrested, and also was expelled from her college. I forgot why she couldn't go to other colleges in the states, maybe because of no funds or the college won't give her a recommendation, but she ended up leaving the states and going to a college in Canada. It was a sad day indeed...

What's my point? I don't know, I felt like telling a story.

Continuting with what Icon said, I read this and it scared the crap out of me:

http://www.progressive.org/0901/roth0102.html

They are paying visits to and investigating museums, people with posters, Journalists, Editors, students, Television Commentary, Book Stores, Teachers - anyone who's descent becomes public or goes against the grain of someone they work with that happens to be a republican supporter and chooses to report them.

http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/05/04/ale05054.html

Another museum hit.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/anniesj/331112.html

A Blogger

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/28/national/main614193.shtml

15 year old school kids

Heh. My mail used to regularly come pre-opened back in the 90's, usually with a razor blade slit perfectly along one edge that didn't quite reach wide enough for the contents to fall out but just enough to allow someone to remove and reinsert what they wanted to, right around the time I had all the weird clicks and beeps on the phone all the time (and other weird phone problems-- not cordless). When I'd go to the post office to pick up mail, the postmen would give me really weird looks after noting my address.

Good times.

Looks like it's time to purchase this.

Fun times indeed. Some fundamentals about our situation and my stance:

1) America is a Christian state. We're just in denial of it half the time. Currently, the pendulum has swung one way with the whole Pope and Terry Schiavo cases. Give or take a few months and we'll be right back to "omg noes, government and religion" stories.

2) The rash of stamping out tolerance, be it for opposing views, religion, sexual preference, etc. - scares me. I'm seriously hoping this pendulum will also swing the other way, but until the American people (read: current population) become tolerant as a group, that likely won't happen. I don't see that happening for some time, if at all.

3) However, I'm not surprised by the situation at all. It's just very fitting of what the nation has been raised on - consumerism, protection of power, media mass appeal, and what's best called Americana. Is it suddenly amazing that dissenting opinions are getting silenced or scrutinized?

4) You're never going to "prove" something to someone that's set in their opinion. Ever. Pure Creationism as a worldview would not exist today if not for people refuting tangible proof of the reverse. While everyone is welcome to their own opinion, the staunch of religion will continue to dominate so long as there are strong leaders and individuals to give it credence.

At any rate, ladies and gentlemen, the internet is still a pretty free place for opinions. Hopefully it'll remain that way and not get taken by a single power base like America has.


Or one of these:

Did you know: Vin Diesel only eats Lasagna - Lasagna made of Kenyan children.

Also: Vin Diesel's toenail clippings are worth up to 29'000 gallons of virginial blood on the black market.

I bought my first SL gun from you. It was an AA cannon.