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[ by Charles Cameron — regretting the ways people trample on Christianity if they think they can squeeze political advantage out of it ]
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Here is Rep. Michele Bachmann, speaking recently:

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I’m certainly not a “biblical inerrantist” — but I do have a considerable affection for both Christianity and theology, and I appreciate that someone who reads the book of Amos in the New International Version will find the prophet declares at chapter 3 verse 6:

When disaster comes to a city, has not the LORD caused it?

Of course, this was immediately preceded by a comment in the same verse, “When a trumpet sounds in a city, do not the people tremble?” which might give pause to one Richard Waddell next time he’s thinking of playing a trumpet solo at a wedding or funeral in Boston — but as I say, I don’t take scriptures that literally, and I hope the man plays on…

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Look — if you are a person of influence, and are going to take a theological stand on an issue as grave as whether an entire nation is under divine judgment on the basis of your reading of acts of terror in the skies and riots in the Middle East, you might first want to ponder this advice from Douglas Sukhia in the Journal of the Western Reformed Seminary [WRS Journal 9/1 (February 2002) 1-5]:

Caution Against Rushing to a Conclusion

Although there are negative events that are clearly identified as acts of God’s judgment in Scripture, there are times when “bad things” happen as part of the general consequences of the fall and not due to specific sins. The book of Job, which many consider the oldest book in the Bible, deals with theodicy, i.e., the justice of God’s actions in the world. The book shows that Job’s counselors were wrong in their opinion that Job must have sinned to have experienced such a terrible disaster — i.e., the sudden loss of loved ones, property and health (Job 8:20; 18:5ff; 22:4-11, 21-25, etc.). Jesus corrected that same kind of thinking on the part of the disciples in John 9:1-2. He tells them the man was not blind as a result of his sins. Jesus also makes clear that the tragic deaths of several in a tower collapse and others at the hands of Pilate were not because the victims were especially evil (Luke 13:1-5). Paul and the faithful saints of Hebrews 11 experienced unjust, cruel treatment due to their obedience and faithfulness to God not because they were being judged by God. God often lets the wicked prosper in this world (Ps. 73:2-12; Job 24) and He assigns special trouble to the righteous (2 Tim. 3:12; 1 Pet. 2:19-20). Without special revelation from God I think it is presumptuous to dogmatically conclude that any temporal tragedy is a judgment of God for specific sins. We should humbly admit with the “wise man” that “No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun” (Eccl. 8:17; Dt. 29:29).

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See?

It’s a little bit subtler than claiming you know at all times whom God is punishing right now — and always somehow in line with your own set of political beliefs and preferences.

From the State Department Human Rights Report on Russia under the Putin administration:

….The law forbids officials from entering a private residence except in cases prescribed by federal law or on the basis of a judicial decision. The law also prohibits government monitoring of correspondence, telephone conversations, and other means of communication without a warrant and prohibits the collection, storage, utilization, and dissemination of information about a person’s private life without his or her consent. While these provisions were generally followed, there were allegations that government officials and others engaged in electronic surveillance without judicial permission and entered residences and other premises without warrants.

News from yesterday about the United States government under the Obama Administration:

….The IRS sent Crossroads’ application to ProPublica in response to a public-records request. The document sent to ProPublica didn’t include an official IRS recognition letter, which is typically attached to applications of nonprofits that have been recognized. The IRS is only required to give out applications of groups recognized as tax-exempt.

“In an email Thursday, an IRS spokeswoman said the agency had no record of an approved application for Crossroads GPS, meaning that the group’s application was still in limbo.

and:

Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved with investigating conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear that the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

IRS officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to tea-party-affiliated groups, the documents show.

and:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” Pruitt said.

I look forward to the report by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Human Rights in the United States.

WIRED magazine so far is the only outlet to report on this nasty Creepy-State digital authoritarianism buried in the cosmically awful proposed Immigration “Reform”bill:

Biometric Database of All Adult Americans Hidden in Immigration Reform 

….Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf)  is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.

Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo.

This piece of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act is aimed at curbing employment of undocumented immigrants. But privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep, ending with the proof of self being required at polling places, to rent a house, buy a gun, open a bank account, acquire credit, board a plane or even attend a sporting event or log on the internet. Think of it as a government version of Foursquare, with Big Brother cataloging every check-in.

“It starts to change the relationship between the citizen and state, you do have to get permission to do things,” said Chris Calabrese, a congressional lobbyist with the American Civil Liberties Union. “More fundamentally, it could be the start of keeping a record of all things.”

….“The most worrying aspect is that this creates a principle of permission basically to do certain activities and it can be used to restrict activities,” he said. “It’s like a national ID system without the card.”

For the moment, the debate in the Senate Judiciary Committee is focused on the parameters of legalization for unauthorized immigrants, a border fence and legal immigration in the future.

The committee is scheduled to resume debate on the package Tuesday. 

This provision is flatly unconstitutional, but the Bill of Rights is not held in high esteem by most members of Congress or the largest donors to the Democratic and Republican parties. Big Data  corporations intend to make enormous profits helping advocates of Big Government transform the “normal” of American life into what formally used to be considered appropriate for inmates in a minimum security prison.

Could a far less intrusive scheme be devised to validate employment status? Sure, but that would not hand bureaucrats and stringpullers of the Oligarchy enormous leverage to use someday over every man, woman and child in the United States.

Imagine, you have offended some local worthy with your letter to the editor or your campaign donation to their opponent and suddenly….your debit and credit cards stop working, your employer can no longer issue you your paycheck, you can’t enter any public facilities (the biometric scan rejects you as a “security threat”), the local hospital can’t provide you with medical care (“Access to records denied”). Maybe your driver’s license is suddenly void and the authorities therefore remotely disable your “smart car”. In a keystroke, you can be cyberoutlawed.

To where will you go to escape a powerful person manipulating an omnipresent data system? Or fix a “simple” computer error that is putting your entire life on hold? Or if a hacker gains access to your biometric records?  There are few good and reasonable uses for this kind of system, an enormous number of bad ones and none at all that justify being incorporated into an even a semi-free society.

The digital road to serfdom is being legislated one deceptively presented unread bill at a time.

[ by Charles Cameron — on the West Coast ]
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Sources:

John Arquilla, Killer Swarms

RT, East coast of US braces for billions-strong cicada swarm

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Exodus 10. 3-6:

And Moses and Aaron came in unto Pharaoh, and said unto him, Thus saith the Lord God of the Hebrews, How long wilt thou refuse to humble thyself before me? let my people go, that they may serve me. Else, if thou refuse to let my people go, behold, to morrow will I bring the locusts into thy coast: And they shall cover the face of the earth, that one cannot be able to see the earth: and they shall eat the residue of that which is escaped, which remaineth unto you from the hail, and shall eat every tree which groweth for you out of the field: And they shall fill thy houses, and the houses of all thy servants, and the houses of all the Egyptians; which neither thy fathers, nor thy fathers’ fathers have seen, since the day that they were upon the earth unto this day.

Qur’an, 7. 133:

So We let loose upon them the flood and the locusts, the lice and the frogs, the blood, distinct signs; but they waxed proud and were a sinful people.

And the Eastern seaboard of the US is way more sinful than the ill-reputed West?

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For a different view, we turn to Basho. Here are the earlier and later forms of one of his poems:

Source:

Eleanor Kerkham, ed., Matsuo Bashô’s Poetic Spaces: Exploring Haikai Intersections

There is legitimate room for debate if there could have been an effective military reaction to the attack in Libya by al Qaida terrorists that killed Ambassador Stevens and other US personnel.  One was apparently never seriously entertained  by senior White House, State Department and Pentagon officials. I think there ought to have been an effort to move heaven and earth and far, far greater willingness to inflict massive casualties on an attacking Libyan mob than existed, but in fairness to the Obama administration, a seat-of-the-pants, unsupported, undermanned response could also have been a replay of Blackhawk Down or Desert One. It’s a tough judgment call for any President.

That’s not why the Obama administration is in trouble today.

Poorly supported security and inept decision making by the State Department in Libya was likewise, disappointing but politically survivable and sadly, unsurprising.. We have seen similar bungling before and after 9/11 by most of our major national security departments and agencies at one time or another. It is a bipartisan phenomenon, albeit one we take far too lightly.

No, as damning testimony today made clear, the Obama administration is in trouble because their poor but not remarkably so handling of Benghazi was shielded by a ridiculous lie told entirely for partisan gain and to protect the overrated reputations and overweening egos of various administration bigwigs, most notably the former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

Is there anyone today – anyone at all – who still believes that Benghazi occurred because of an obscure crackpot’s video on youtube?

Had the administration manfully said “This attack is a terrible tragedy and we dropped the ball but you can believe we won’t make a similar mistake tracking down the people who did this and make them pay” most Americans would have accepted that. No, not rabid partisan Republicans, but most Americans would have wanted to back the President, any President, in the wake of such terrorism which is directed, in the last analysis, at all of us.

They did not – and much of the rest of their reaction indicates that the real concern at State and the White House was and still is with the temerity of their political opponents in daring to demand they account for their actions as if we lived in a Republic or something.

In American politics, it is the self-inflicted wounds that fester and turn gangrenous