BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
I don't know a lot about Gwyneth Paltrow. My co-workers taught me that she runs a wellness empire. My partner, yesterday, informed me that she was in Iron Man. The internet taught me she's been sued for selling wellness products that allegedly lack scientific backing.
But I do know a lot about the American weapons industry, which somehow means I'm now forced to learn about Gwyneth. This week, the actress invited Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens onto her podcast.
At first glance, they make a strange pair: Paltrow’s known for hawking vaginal eggs and antidepressive flower essences; Stephens sells drones. But the Goop podcast is actually the perfect stage for Stephens to do a little reputation management for Anduril, which develops unmanned submarines, border surveillance towers, missiles, and “smart battlefield” technology, with the aim of killing thousands more cheaply than traditional weapons might. Paltrow appeared determined to make weapons-tech legible and even appealing to Goop’s affluent, wellness-focused audience.
I dug into their hourlong conversation, during whichStephens held forth on God, great power conflict, the male loneliness crisis, and what he thinks the pope really meant when he said, “[Jesus] does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” Check out their apparent attempts to forge bridges between the weapons industry and MAHA.
—Sophie Hurwitz
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80 years of the CARE PACKAGE shows the most enduring humanitarian idea may also be the simplest: give people exactly what they need, exactly when they need it.
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For mothers, the “modest gains of recent years” may not survive this administration, a new report warns.
BY CHASITY HALE
MOTHER JONES MEMBERSHIP UPDATE
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Eleven people were taken into custody Saturday after an hours-long standoff with police early Saturday outside Boston.
While police engaged in negotiation, members of the group engaged the public on social media, saying their group was called "Rise of the Moors."
The heavily armed men were said to be driving from Rhode Island to Maine for "training."
The incident started around 1:30 a.m., when state police noticed two cars stopped at the side of I-95 near Wakefield, Mass., apparently out of fuel. As troopers stopped to assist, they noticed that some individuals near the cars had "military-style" gear, and were carrying long guns and pistols, Massachusetts State Police Col. Christopher Mason told reporters.
"You can imagine 11 armed individuals standing with long guns slung on an interstate highway at 2 in the morning certainly raises concerns and is not consistent with the firearms laws that we have in Massachusetts," Mason said.
Police requested backup, and thus began a standoff that lasted several hours. The men refused to lower their weapons, saying that they "don't recognize our laws," police said. Some of the armed men fled into a nearby wooded area, police said, and a portion of I-95 was closed for several hours.
The standoff was broadcast on social media
Around 4 a.m., a man whom the Boston Globe identified as Jamhal Talib Abdullah Bey said he was broadcasting live from I-95 and said that he told police they had nothing to fear.
"I reassured them that we are not sovereign citizens," a man who appeared to be Bey said in a live-streamed video. "I reassured them that we are not Black identity extremists. I reassured them that we are not anti-police. I reassured them that we are not anti-government. I reassured them that these men here will not be pointing guns at them. I reassured them that we are trying to come to a peaceful resolution."
"We're going to our private land to train, which is our Second Amendment right," he said, showing a vehicle he said contained camping equipment.
Politics Shape The Debate Over What To Call Far-Right Extremism
NATIONAL SECURITY
Politics Shape The Debate Over What To Call Far-Right Extremism
As police tactical teams brought in armored vehicles to surround the area, and negotiators interacted with the men, they ultimately surrendered. Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan told reporters the suspects were expected to appear in court on Tuesday morning.
State police "don't have any knowledge about this particular specific group" but as state police "it is not unusual for us to encounter people that have sovereign citizen ideologies — I'm not saying that this group does — but we have had those encounters before in the past," Mason said at a Saturday morning press briefing.
"We train to those encounters," Mason continued. "We very much understand the philosophy that underlies that mindset. And we train our officers, actually, at the academy, on these interactions and how to de-escalate those situations, and how to engage with people that have that philosophy and mindset and resolve those situations in a peaceful manner."
The group calls itself "Rise of the Moors"
The same man appearing to be Bey said in a later video: "They keep portraying us as being anti-government, but we're not anti-government at all."
The group's website lists Bey as a leader of the "Rhode Island State Republic and Providence Plantations." According to the site, Bey served in the military for four years, some or all of that time in the Marines, after which he began studying "Moorish Science."
That website, "Rise of the Moors," explains that Moors are not "sovereign citizens" because "sovereignty does not stand alone," but can rather be considered synonymous with "nationality."
"The record show that the Moors are the organic or original sovereigns of this land — America," the FAQ says. "When we declare our nationality as Moorish Americans we are taking back the position as the aboriginal people of the land, to which the sovereign power is vested in."
Bey's group may be associated with the Moorish sovereign citizen movement, which the Southern Poverty Law Center characterizes as an offshoot of the antigovernment sovereign citizens movement. Moorish sovereigns "have come into conflict with federal and state authorities over their refusal to obey laws and government regulations," SPLC writes.
"The Moorish Sovereign movement is a rapidly growing group of people who believe that they belong to a sovereign nation that has a treaty with the US but otherwise operates outside of the federal and state laws," JJ MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism, explained on Twitter.
"They rely on an alternative history that borrows from Moorish Science Temple, Black Hebrew Israelism, Nation of Islam, UFO theories, phony Native American tribes, and the pseudo-legal arguments crafted by white supremacist 'patriot' groups in the 1970s," MacNab said.
mitt romney is a liar, and from what this former LDS member says, that is a basic tenant of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (did you catch that all you Christian evangelical right wingers?). A primer from Daily KOS followed by the full article from The Daily Beast, and for more on the religious right's political agenda see my post GOP Insider: How Religion Destroyed My Party 7AUG12
http://bucknacktssordidtawdryblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/gop-insider-how-religion-destroyed-my.html
....
I saw this rather interesting story at The Daily Beast
today. It is an interview with Brigham Young's great great
grand-daughter, who, at the age of 55, left the Mormon Church. Her
decision was based primarily on the treatment of women within the
Church. She has formed an Ex-mormon organization to help others with
the transition out of the religion. She is now 71 years old and rarely
gives interviews. She is not a Mormon-basher by any means. But she has
a unique perspective, both on Mormonism in general and Mitt Romney in
particular.
A few of her insights I found interesting:
“Mitt is a product not only of his wealth, but of an organization that gives men power when they are 12 years old,” she says. ...
As for what pundits say is Romney's difficulty connecting with people, Emmett blames it largely on what she calls “the entitled Mormon male syndrome, where the leadership professes compassion and concern but leaves the manifestations of that to the drones.”
Emmett says Romney was a bishop, “a position where everyone
defers to you. What a bishop says goes. People come to them to receive
blessings.” He then became a stake president, she says, which means he
presided over several congregations, and at that point bishops deferred
to him.
“Mitt has had people defer to him and not challenge him his entire life,”
says Emmett. “In the Mormon church if you challenge your priesthood
leaders it’s a very bad thing to do, especially for women. As the world
can now see, Mitt has a very hard time with being questioned and
criticized; he’s had so little of this in his life."
Emmett says she doesn’t think Romney has the ability to separate what leaders of the church want from what the country needs.
“Mitt has been groomed to become president from a very young age,” says Emmett.
Emmett says she thinks Romney’s biggest fault is that he has
a “serious problem telling the truth. There is flip-flopping, which he
has done more than any politician in modern history, and then there is
out and out lying,” she says. “This kind of thing has sadly been a part
of the church from the very beginning. Some modern apostles
actually taught that it is not always the best thing to tell the truth
if it interferes with preaching gospel.”
At a presentation on Lying for the Lord at
the 2008 Exmormon Foundation conference, Ken Clark addressed the issue.
Clark, who worked as a teacher for the LDS Church Education System (CES)
for 27 years and also served as a bishop before leaving the church in
2003, tells The Daily Beast, “Lying has become an institutionalized method of administrative control with the church
Mitt has been told from an early age that he has an entitlement to
leadership, he has been fawned over and deferred to his whole life, and
he does not like to be questioned. He is an abject liar. He believes in
a hierarchy with men superior to women. He puts his personal religious
views above what is best for the country. Not good qualities in a
president.
Originally posted to JLFinch on Tue Aug 07, 2012 at 03:17 PM PDT.
Exclusive: Brigham Young’s Great-Great-Granddaughter on Mormonism and Mitt Romney
A direct descendant of Brigham Young, Sue Emmett left the church
because of the very values she says would make Romney a frightening
president. She speaks exclusively with Jamie Reno.
Sue
Emmett is Mormon royalty. Her great-great-grandfather was Brigham
Young, the founder of Salt Lake City, first governor of Utah, and
president and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
(LDS) from 1847 until his death in 1877.
Clockwise from top left: A billboard advertising ex-Mormon support
groups; a statue of Mormon pioneer leader Brigham Young in front of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Temple in Salt Lake City;
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney; ex-Mormon Sue Emmett.
(Getty Images; AP Photo)
Emmett, whose grandmother was born in Young's historic Beehive House, attended Brigham Young University, where she walked past the imposing 7-and-a-half-foot bronze-casted statue of her great-great-grandfather every day on her way to class.
“Walking
by that statue every day, I was reminded of my heritage, my lineage,”
says Emmett. “That, plus going up to Salt Lake and walking through the
Beehive House a couple of times and thinking of my grandmother, who I
knew very well, all that pretty much sealed the deal for me being a very
devout, obedient Mormon girl.”
But
by the time she reached her mid-30s, she began to have doubts. Emmett
started questioning the ethics and veracity of the church’s doctrine and
its founders, including Young himself, and she grew increasingly
concerned with the way, she says, the church treats women. She held
these questions close to the vest for many years until, in 1999, at the
age of 55, she finally made the hard decision to leave the church.
"There
was a powerful mystique around me that I was special because of my
heritage, so it was really difficult for me to leave,” says Emmett, now
71. “It was the only life, the only home I ever knew. But I just
couldn’t stay any longer.”
Emmett,
who still has dear friends and family members in the church—“You can be
critical of the church and still be compassionate toward the people in
it,” she says—is now president of the Exmormon Foundation,
which was organized to give support and understanding to those who
leave Mormonism. In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, Emmett,
who rarely speaks to the media, talks about what life is like in the
church, why she left, and what she thinks motivates Mitt Romney to want
to be president.
Sue Emmett discusses her experience as a woman in the Mormon church.
"The
church has astutely created a very benign image to the world. They
spend millions of dollars a year doing this," says Emmett, who was born
and raised in Portland, Ore., and still lives there. "But there are
things that go on inside the church that are hurtful to women. There are
many women still in the church who have complaints about not having any
real say in what goes on, but they have nowhere to go with these
complaints.”
Emmett
says there is a lot of silent suffering among Mormon women, but she
just reached a point where she couldn’t stay silent anymore.
“The church has astutely created a very benign image to the world.
They spend millions of dollars a year doing this,” says Emmett.
Divorced
from her husband of 34 years, who is still a Mormon, Emmett—the mother
of seven grown children, five of whom are still in the church while two
have left—says that “the one thing that finally put the arrow in me" was
when she and her sister-in-law decided to start a retreat for Mormon
women. Church leaders were not amused, she says.
“It
was just a social and cultural thing," Emmett explains. "We made a vow
that we would never have anything at the retreat that was anti-church,
it would just be a place for cultural events and sharing ideas. We had
artists and guest speakers, including one woman who spent her life
traveling around the world taking pictures of women and their cultures.”
Emmett
says the retreat, which was held in an Oregon mountain lodge and
typically attracted between 60 and 70 Mormon women, had feminist
overtones, “but we never talked about problems at church. We did nothing
wrong.”
Still, the negative reaction among her church’s leadership was the last straw.
"We
knew we'd get in trouble for doing it, but we did it anyway," she says.
"From that point on, I was marginalized. I’d done everything a good
Mormon woman could do in the church, including teaching children in
Sunday school, but after we did the retreat I was treated differently.”
Responding
to Emmett’s comments about the church’s treatment of women, Ruth Todd, a
spokeswoman for the church, tells The Daily Beast: “Nearly half of the
14 million members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
are women. To assert that my membership or participation in the church
is based on compulsion or deception is both offensive and disparaging to
me as a woman, and is patently false.”
Says
Todd: “The right of every individual [Mormon] to make choices for
themselves that determine their path in life and in the eternities is a
fundamental doctrine of our faith. As a woman, I view my role in the
church and in God’s plan as distinct and complementary to the efforts of
men. Trying to characterize the role of women in the church in a purely
hierarchical way misses the mark and is a flawed premise that demeans
the role and value of women.”
Since
she left 13 years ago, Emmett has become a leader of the ex-Mormon
movement, which she says is not about bashing her former church but
about helping former members make the difficult adjustment. “It’s such
an insular world, and for some people it is really hard to make it on
the ‘outside,’ so to speak,” she says.
Emmett
has watched Mitt Romney very closely throughout his public life and has
strong opinions about what shaped his personality and his character.
“Mitt is a product not only of his wealth, but of an organization that
gives men power when they are 12 years old,” she says. “That is when
boys are ordained with the priesthood. It is a big moment in a Mormon
male’s childhood.”
As for what pundits say is Romney's difficulty connecting
with people, Emmett blames it largely on what she calls “the entitled
Mormon male syndrome, where the leadership professes compassion and
concern but leaves the manifestations of that to the drones. All male
leadership is not this way; there are some wonderful men who do their
best to exercise their power compassionately, but many do not.”
Emmett says Romney was a bishop,
“a position where everyone defers to you. What a bishop says goes.
People come to them to receive blessings.” He then became a stake
president, she says, which means he presided over several congregations,
and at that point bishops deferred to him.
“Mitt
has had people defer to him and not challenge him his entire life,”
says Emmett. “In the Mormon church if you challenge your priesthood
leaders it’s a very bad thing to do, especially for women. As the world
can now see, Mitt has a very hard time with being questioned and
criticized; he’s had so little of this in his life."
Will
he be more beholden to his church than to the American people? Emmett
recalls that when Romney was stake president in the church, he was
pro-life. But when he was running for governor he changed his position
to pro-choice. A woman in the church who was a good friend of Emmett’s
went to see Romney and thanked him for changing his position. “He told
her that he had talked to church leaders in Salt Lake,” Emmett says,
“and that they gave him permission to change his position.”
The Romney campaign did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
Emmett says she doesn’t think Romney has the ability to separate what leaders of the church want from what the country needs.
“Mitt
has been groomed to become president from a very young age,” says
Emmett. “The thing is, I think his father [George Romney, who ran for
president in 1968] would have made a much better president. In many ways
the church was more benign then than it is now.”
Regarding
Romney and the presidency, Emmett cites a bit of Mormon lore called the
White Horse Prophecy that has floated around since the time of Mormon
founder Joseph Smith. It suggests that Mormons believe a time will come
when the U.S. Constitution is eroding and Mormon leaders will save it
and usher in a new theocracy with Mormons in charge. Emmett’s
great-great-grandfather talked about it. In a discourse
from 1855, Young wrote that "when the Constitution hangs, as it were,
upon a single thread, they will have to call for the 'Mormon' Elders to
save it from utter destruction; and they will step forth and do it."
Romney
has said that he considers the White Horse Prophecy just a matter of
speculation by church members. "I haven't heard my name associated with
it or anything of that nature," he toldThe Salt Lake Tribune in 2007. "That's not official church doctrine…I don't put that at the heart of my religious belief."
But
Emmett begs to differ. “I can guarantee you that there are millions of
Mormons who believe this prophecy and see Romney as potential
fulfillment of it,” she says. “As a Mormon, you grow up hearing about
this prophecy. I think Mitt believes he has a mandate from God to become
president so he can help move this along. I don’t know if it’s a
conscious thought, but it's in his subconscious.”
Emmett
says she thinks Romney’s biggest fault is that he has a “serious
problem telling the truth. There is flip-flopping, which he has done
more than any politician in modern history, and then there is out and
out lying,” she says. “This kind of thing has sadly been a part of the
church from the very beginning. Some modern apostles actually taught
that it is not always the best thing to tell the truth if it interferes
with preaching gospel.”
Emmett
says the notion of “Lying for the Lord,” as it has been called, implies
that teaching the whole truth about the church should be avoided. At a
presentation on Lying for the Lord at the 2008 Exmormon Foundation
conference, Ken Clark addressed the issue.
Clark, who worked as a teacher for the LDS Church Education System
(CES) for 27 years and also served as a bishop before leaving the church
in 2003, tells The Daily Beast, “Lying has become an institutionalized
method of administrative control with the church.”
“Every
Mormon grows up with the idea that it’s OK to lie if it’s for a higher
cause,” says Clark, who now works for a company that markets employment
and labor market data. “But what happens is when this becomes a part of
your ethical tool kit, you develop a condescending attitude toward
people. Like Ann Romney saying 'you people.’ This idea of lying for the
Lord gives you license to place people on an inferior level. It’s OK for
Mitt Romney to ignore the principle of full disclosure because it’s in
his DNA. Look what he’s doing with his taxes, and how he talks only in
generic and sanitized terms about his religion.”
But church spokeswoman Ruth Todd says there is no merit to Clark's accusations.
“To
assert that there is a culture of dishonesty or deception in the church
is both woefully uninformed and ridiculous," Todd says. "The pursuit of
truth is at the heart of who we are. Mormon women around the world
participate actively in our church because we find value and truth in
the doctrines, structure and deep meaning provided by the gospel of
Jesus Christ that is at the core of our faith. All church members are
encouraged to study for themselves and develop their own convictions
about the church and its teachings.”
When
Clark left the church, he says, Emmett was of "great help to me. She is
one of best people I know. She is very courageous and compassionate."
And
Emmett, despite her issues with Romney and the church, does not want to
be cast as a Mormon hater. She says that while she strongly disagrees
with many of the tenets and practices of Mormonism, most Mormons are
kind, honest people.
“Many
of my children and other family members are still devout Mormons, and I
want to be sensitive to their beliefs and I have no desire to hurt
them,” says Emmett. “It’s been hard for me. It was my entire life for 50
years. I was very sincere and devout for a very long time. But as a
feminist and someone who believes that you should be allowed to say what
you really feel, I had to leave.”
Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and
follow us on Twitter for updates all day
long.
Jamie Reno, an award-winning correspondent for Newsweek for 17 years, has also written for The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, People, Men’s Journal, ESPN, Los Angeles Times, TV Guide, MSNBC, Newsmax, Entertainment Weekly, and USA Today. Reno, who’s won more than 85 writing awards, was the lead reporter on a Newsweek series
on the 9/11 terrorist attacks that earned him and his colleagues the
National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the highest award in
magazine journalism. Reno, who’s also an acclaimed author,
singer-songwriter, and 15-year cancer survivor, lives in San Diego with
his wife, Gabriela, and their daughter, Mandy.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/07/exclusive-brigham-young-s-great-great-granddaughter-on-mormonism-and-mitt-romney.html
