Evangelical pastors are helping to create a terrible new campaign of violence against young Nigerians. Children and babies branded as evil are being abused, abandoned and even murdered while the preachers make money out of the fear of their parents and their communities.
The rainy season is over and the Niger Delta is lush and humid. This southern edge of West Africa, where Nigeria’s wealth pumps out of oil and gas fields to bypass millions of its poorest people, is a restless place. In the small delta state of Akwa Ibom, the tension and the poverty has delivered an opportunity for a new and terrible phenomenon that is leading to the abuse and the murder of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children. And it is being done in the name of Christianity.
Almost everyone goes to church here. Driving through the town of Esit Eket, the rust-streaked signs, tarpaulins hung between trees and posters on boulders, advertise a church for every third or fourth house along the road. Such names as New Testament Assembly, Church of God Mission, Mount Zion Gospel, Glory of God, Brotherhood of the Cross, Redeemed, Apostalistic. Behind the smartly painted doors pastors make a living by ‘deliverances’ – exorcisms – for people beset by witchcraft, something seen to cause anything from divorce, disease, accidents or job losses. With so many churches it’s a competitive market, but by local standards a lucrative one.
But an exploitative situation has now grown into something much more sinister as preachers are turning their attentions to children – naming them as witches. In a maddened state of terror, parents and whole villages turn on the child. They are burnt, poisoned, slashed, chained to trees, buried alive or simply beaten and chased off into the bush.
Some parents scrape together sums needed to pay for a deliverance – sometimes as much as three or four months’ salary for the average working man – although the pastor will explain that the witch might return and a second deliverance will be needed. Even if the parent wants to keep the child, their neighbours may attack it in the street.
This is not just a few cases. This is becoming commonplace. In Esit Eket, up a nameless, puddled-and-potholed path is a concrete shack stuffed to its fetid rafters with roughly made bunk beds. Here, three to a bed like battery chickens, sleep victims of the besuited Christian pastors and their hours-long, late-night services. Ostracised and abandoned, these are the children a whole community believes fervently are witches.
Sam Ikpe-Itauma is one of the few people in this area who does not believe what the evangelical ‘prophets’ are preaching. He opened his house to a few homeless waifs he came across, and now he tries his best to look after 131.
‘The neighbours were not happy with me and tell me "you are supporting witches". This project was an accident, I saw children being abandoned and it was very worrying. I started with three children, then every day it increased up to 15, so we had to open this new place,’ he says. ‘For every maybe five children we see on the streets, we believe one has been killed, although it could be more as neighbours turn a blind eye when a witch child disappears.
This is the country that’s posturing to the world about being more godly and righteous then those liberal American Episcopalians who are rewriting the bible to excuse sexual deviancy. This is what the "conservative" American Episcopalian churches that are aligning themselves with Akinola are buying into so they don’t have to treat their homosexual neighbors as anything other then human garbage. Without a doubt it’s what the billionaire Ahmanson wants the Anglican Church he’s paying for to look like. Ahmanson you may recall, is the billionaire "former" Christian Reconstuctionist who once said that stoning homosexuals to death was all part of God’s plan.
When you start inciting mob religious passions against your neighbors you are walking down a path that leads right into the Pit and what you need to understand about that is that the fall has no speed limit, and there is no bottom to stop you. It just gets worse and worse and worse until every last shred of human nobility and decency is gone and all that is left is the jungle and screams in the night.
Mary Sudnad, 10, grimaces as her hair is pulled into corn rows by Agnes, 11, but the scalp just above her forehead is bald and blistered. Mary tells her story fast, in staccato, staring fixedly at the ground.
‘My youngest brother died. The pastor told my mother it was because I was a witch. Three men came to my house. I didn’t know these men. My mother left the house. Left these men. They beat me.’ She pushes her fists under her chin to show how her father lay, stretched out on his stomach on the floor of their hut, watching. After the beating there was a trip to the church for ‘a deliverance’.
A day later there was a walk in the bush with her mother. They picked poisonous ‘asiri’ berries that were made into a draught and forced down Mary’s throat. If that didn’t kill her, her mother warned her, then it would be a barbed-wire hanging. Finally her mother threw boiling water and caustic soda over her head and body, and her father dumped his screaming daughter in a field. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she stayed near the house for a long time before finally slinking off into the bush. Mary was seven. She says she still doesn’t feel safe. She says: ‘My mother doesn’t love me.’ And, finally, a tear streaks down her beautiful face
The righteous men of god in Nigeria are killing children now as witches. If you thought all that would stop with the sinful wicked devil possessed homosexuals you have never opened a book of human history. There’s a reason why Jesus said the most important thing after loving God, is loving your neighbor.
So one of my chain smoking friends is quitting now…and I’m back to my cigars all of a sudden. Ah well… Seasonal stress is coming early.
Wishing will make it so
just keep on wishing and care will go
Dreamers tell us dreams come true
It’s no mistake
Wishing are the dreams we dream when we’re awake
The curtain of night will pass
If you are certain within your heart
So if you wish long enough wish strong enough
You will come to know
Wishing will make it so
Weather Report, For My Family In California Where They Don’t Have “Weather”
Yes, yes…it looks like New England is getting clobbered right now. Yesterday NOAA was calling for freezing rain this morning here in Baltimore, but the freeze line had apparently moved north by late last night and right now we’re only getting our usual miserable cold wet drizzle. Good thing it’s not cold enough for snow though, or we’d be getting socked in too.
P.S.: I hear you had a very severe cold snap out there recently. Temperatures plummeted all the way down to…thirty-eight, was it? It must have been awful having to…you know…put on a jacket or something…
Somedays, it is my profoundest wish that the one true god turns out to be some refrigerator that washed ashore on some remote island in the pacific. And that nobody but the natives there, and there alone, worship.
Visualizing this made me smile. It gave me the warm fuzzies somehow. The creator of All That Is embodies one day as a refrigerator and washes ashore on some lost and out of the way island, where it’s venerated by the natives there…and by them alone. What a completely goofy…and yet evocative image that is…
ARCHBISHOP Desmond Tutu has accused the United States and Britain of pursuing policies like those of South Africa’s apartheid-era government by detaining terrorism suspects without trial.
At an event to commemorate the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDR) today, the Nobel laureate said the detention of suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a "huge blot on a democracy".
"Whoever imagined that you would hear from the United States and from Britain the same arguments for detention without trial that were used by the apartheid government," Archbishop Tutu said.
I take it you haven’t noticed yet that the Bush base here in America are the same folks who wholeheartedly supported Apartheid. And not just abroad…
Paul Krugman – Op-Ed Columnist – New York Times Blog: So, people ask why, in The Conscience of a Liberal, I downplay the role of issues other than race in swinging the political balance in favor of the GOP. The answer, basically, is the math: once you take the great southern switch into account, there isn’t much left to explain.
In some correspondence with Larry Bartels, whose “What’s the matter with “What’s the matter with Kansas?”" is must reading for anyone trying to understand modern American political, economy, the issue of how the Democrats lost white males came up. Larry points out that you really need to separate out the South. Here’s what he had to say:
Unless you have a peculiar nostalgia for the racially coercive Democratic monopoly of the Jim Crow era, it makes sense to focus on the rest of the country. There, the Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote among white men was 40% in 1952 and 39% in 2004.
White men didn’t turn against the Democrats; Southern white men turned against the Democrats. End of story.
Who would have imagined the the United States of America would one day piss on the Geneva conventions and laugh? The republican base…that’s who. The American gutter that came charging into politics after the hated Warren court told them to desegregate their schools, and allow their negros to vote. They’ve dreamed of it for decades. Reagan delivered that gutter into power. Bush told them they didn’t have to give a shit.
Well I reckon Disney World’s out. Thanks for the warning about the crowds during Christmas week guy. And here I was wondering if they were even open then…
Bush and Cheney have broken the law consistently throughout their reign, often openly, and to the great detriment of our own country and others; when they obey it, they do so more as a matter of convenience than from any fealty to it or any fear of retribution. They’re pleased to use the legislature to achieve their ends when they can – as when Congress obligingly immunized administration personnel from prosecution under the War Crimes Act – and to ignore it when they can’t. Former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith explains the dynamic as described to him by Dick Cheney’s current number two, torture maven David Addington: "We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop." They have, and that larger force has not materialized – and the administration have been at pains to ensure that the force, if it ever arrives, won’t do so in the person of the courts – and the result is a constitutional republic with its framework intact and its guts eviscerated. There is only one remedy, and that’s impeachment.
(Emphasis mine)
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
-George Washington
Washington was probably thinking about the democrats when he said that…
See…This is why I wish you’d let me email you…I could just bop these little questions back to you and maybe get a quick answer, instead of putting them into the Christmas card I’m sending.
My friends up here are just a tad too disorganized this year to count on them doing anything all together this New Years, alas. I’ve pinged them and pinged them and it looks like it’s just going to be catch as catch can and I tend to slip right between the cracks when it’s like that. I have a week off between Christmas and New Year and I don’t want to spend it moping around the house alone. Be nice to take a drive in my new car somewhere…particularly somewhere it’s warm. Somewhere I’ve never seen before.
So…basically…will Disneyworld be open during the week between Christmas and New Year…?
And…
What part of the complex, in your experienced opinion, would most appeal to a single adult? I’m not interested in the kiddy stuff, or the thrill rides so much (Unless I had a companion to thrill along with). I’ll probably just be wandering around all by myself. So maybe something to engage my mind and my curiosity? If such as that even exists at Disney? Epcot Center maybe? Or is there something else you think would be better?
And where would you suggest I get a room for a few days. Something basic, and not horribly expensive.
Mike Huckabee says he stands by his statements fifteen years ago about AIDS patients, though he concedes he might phrase them differently today.
How many different ways can you say "Death Camps" Mike…?
In some old candidate questionnaires the Associated Press has dug up, Huckabee suggested back then that AIDS patients should essentially be quarantined.
"Fifteen years ago, the AIDS crisis was just that. It was a crisis," Huckabee told reporters at a campaign stop in Asheville, N.C. this weekend. "There were a lot of questions back in that time as to just how the disease could be carried. There was just a real panic in this country."
A reader asks, “what’s the big deal?” After all, didn’t a lot of people advocate quarantine for AIDS patients early in the epidemic? Yeah, early in the epidemic some did advocate just that—and not just bigots salivating at the prospect of rounding up all gay people, diseased or not. But that was early in the epidemic, very early, 1984-86. By 1992 only raving bigots were still talking about quarantining people with AIDS or HIV. People like, you know, Mike Huckabee.
You need to pay attention to that, because even back in the early stages of the AIDS outbreak, people talking about rounding up and "quarantining" AIDS victims weren’t doing that out of concern with the spread of the disease itself, as with the ever growing visibility of the people they despised:
Huckabee said he also stands by his words that homosexuality is sinful.
What a coincidence, that. Huckabee was far from the only one still calling for an AIDS "quarantine" by the 1990s, and yes, the ones who were just also happened to have a bottomless bit of animus toward homosexual people. One they often dressed up in biblical rhetoric that was as cheap as it was transparent.
If AIDS had hit America in the early 1950s, the Huckabees of the world would have without a doubt gotten their wish and every homosexual the authorities could identify would have been rounded up and locked into concentration camps…and from there, isolated from the rest of the American community who didn’t have to see, didn’t have to care, didn’t have to know, a final solution to the sexual pervert problem would have been just one small step away. In 1986 William F. Buckley shocked even many of his fellow wingers by advocating the forcible tattooing of AIDS victims, once on the arm, and once on the buttocks, he claimed to prevent the spread of the disease via shared needles and sex. He only withdrew his suggestion after being forced to admit that the plan had an "unfortunate association" with the Holocaust.
AIDS didn’t happen in 1950, it happened in the early 80s, over a decade of gay rights activism after Stonewall, and the republican right wing theocratic base is deeply resentful to this day that they didn’t get their chance back then to let their hate run free and unfettered over the lives of all gay people, whether we had the disease or not, and gleefully stomp the human life out of us.
Delegates at the annual convention of the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin voted Saturday in Fresno to withdraw from the U.S. Episcopal Church. With the decision, the diocese is the first to leave the U.S. Episcopal Church, which has 110 dioceses and 2.4 million members.
Delegates said they voted to break away from the church because it allows the blessing of same-sex unions, the ordination of gay bishops and the ordination of women.
Women and Gays and Liberals Oh My! Women and Gays and Liberals Oh My! That’s San Joaquin as in San Joaquin Valley…the sullen and resentful red heartland of California. If the California coast and its coniferous mountain north are laid back, progressive wonderlands, the San Joaquin valley is Rush Limbaughville. Agrarian, xenophobic, insular, it’s the Antebellum South, only with lots and lots of irrigation and Hispanics playing the part of the darkies picking in the fields. The only surprising thing about this is they didn’t bolt back when women got the robe. Oh…and they’re aligning with the South American church instead of the murderous Bishop Akinola. But he was probably a shade too dark for them.
After Mitt’s wee tirade on religion the other day I found myself presented with a torrent of LDS history crossing my screen, some of which I’d never heard of before. A hat? I’m sorry…a hat? And this man is bellyaching about secularism being an invented religion???
Anyway…reading the LDS story of Elohim and his spirit children who live on a planet circling the star Kolob, it crossed my mind that you can tell which religions were founded after the invention of the telescope because they always read like bad science-fiction novels (praise Xenu), whereas the ones founded before the telescope read like planet earth is at the center of the universe, with a somewhat ambiguous heaven floating above it.
I think at the moment that Huckabee has it cinched in the heartland, and if he doesn’t get the nomination the base is going to be very, very upset.
I knew when I bought my Mercedes, that I was buying into a culture as much as getting a nice new luxury car. That was reinforced for me when I got an invitation from the Mercedes-Benz Owners Club to come to a new members reception last week.
Most of the folks there were actually long time members, but I was surprised at how many came, and I had a nice time geeking away all afternoon with other completely smitten Mercedes owners, and sampling the tasty h’orderves. The reception was held at a Mercedes dealership in Bethesda, that turned out to be much, Much larger on the inside then it seemed on the outside, in part because its service area was under the showroom and it was friggin’ huge. The showroom was full of Mercedes, new and used (er…Previously Owned…), and I took advantage of the opportunity to slide into a few S class beauties and dream.
The dealership gave us a tour of their facilities, and I have never in my life seen mechanic’s stations so spotlessly clean, well organized, and so Spacious. Each service bay had tons of room around it for the technicians to go about their work, and everything, their tool cases, their work benches, their computer terminals, all the hoses and electrical cabling, was laid out in an uncluttered arrangement that seemed to make everything easy to get at and work with. I was told that the factory pretty much required that kind of thing from all their dealers, even down to specifying how the floors had to be tiled and kept clean. That was no concrete floor in there…it was all ceramic tile. Huge, and I mean Huge, air ducts changed the air out in the entire service area once every fifteen or twenty minutes and kept the place cool in the sweltering Washington summers. Our tour guide, the head of the service department, said the dealership spent around thirty grand a month in the summer on the A/C bill alone. He explained how Mercedes keeps track of all the work done on each car in a system that any technician in any Mercedes dealership can access directly from their service bay, and that each technician is sent for training and recertification annually.
I’d already firmly decided well before then that no mechanic was so much as touching my car unless they were a trained and factory authorized Mercedes-Benz technician. I’ve never felt that way about a car before, but as I said, you buy one of these you’re buying into a culture too, and in any case they’re just different enough from the run-of-the-mill average everyday automobile that it made sense to me to just bear the extra cost of letting only Mercedes dealers work on it. Things I’ve read since I bought the car, of how if even body work isn’t done by someone who knows those cars, it can degrade or outright disable the car’s safety features, only reinforced that mindset. The effect of seeing that amazingly well laid out service area last week pretty much cinched it. But I had to figure that service on these cars is probably a tad pricey.
My car came with a little maintenance history booklet that the service folks are supposed to fill out and stamp and sign for each page of each scheduled servicing, and then tear out a little stub on the end of the page. I had my first free thousand mile checkup a few weeks ago, and in theory wasn’t scheduled for any more servicing until 6 and a half grand, when I get a free tire rotation. I get what Mercedes calls Services 1/A and 3 at 13 grand. I assume that includes an oil change. And there’s where I part company with Mercedes.
Traveler has synthetic oil in its engine, which is supposed to last for thousands more miles then regular. But I have always changed my oil every 3 grand and I don’t see any reason to stop doing that now. I got about 135k miles on my first car, a 1973 Ford Pinto for gosh sake, in part I’m certain by changing the oil every 3 thousand miles no matter what. In the end you could pop off that motor’s valve cover and the inside looked factory new (unfortunately the rest of the car was falling apart but…oh well…). When I go on my cross country trips I stop, religiously for an oil change wherever I happen to be, when that 3 thousand mile clock ticks over. As far as I’m concerned, synthetic oil means I have a bigger safety buffer, but I don’t want to test it. Oil changes are cheaper then new engines, even at synthetic prices, and this car was too expensive for me to not take fastidious care of it. So I called my dealer, Valley Motors, and scheduled an oil change. I had to figure I wasn’t going to be charged Jiffy Lube prices.
The lady I spoke with asked me if I had a service agent assigned to me. I hadn’t known I was supposed to get one of those at my first thousand mile servicing. She assigned one to me, and it was scheduled for this morning.
You pull right up into a long indoor service check-in bay and walk up to the counter where your servicing agent is waiting for you. You get checked in and you hand off your key and the agent goes out to the car and collects it’s vitals (milage, plate number, vin and so forth) and then prints out a service order for you to sign. Then if it’s waitable you go rest in a nicely appointed lounge where you can eat the free pastries, make some coffee or tea or grab a free soda. The lounge also just happens to be next to a little Mercedes boutique where you can buy all sorts of Mercedes-Benz goodies…jackets, drink holders, factory approved car cleaners, anti-freeze, washer fluid, wallets, hats, wrist watches…
It took about a half hour and they gave the car a thorough washing and cleaning before handing it back to me. They drive it back into the service check-in bay and call your name and hand you the bill. It cost about 110 dollars for my oil change…almost but not quite three times the Jiffy Lube price. But I was feeling secure that the only hands that touched my car during the procedure were those that know these cars specifically, and in detail, and that whatever they put into it was something that was specifically supposed to be there. I figured most of the bill was labor. But to my surprise the labor was only twenty bucks. Parts came to almost 84 bucks and the rest was tax. And most of the parts cost was the oil, which I knew wasn’t cheap being it was that synthetic stuff. Nine quarts at almost seven bucks a quart.
I’m sorry…Nine quarts…? In a V-6…???
When I got home I brought in my owners manuals and looked it up. That engine holds 8 and a half U.S. quarts of oil! A Ford Explorer V-8 only holds 6…I just Googled it.
Damn. Damn! They’re not fucking around are they? The engineers figure almost nine quarts is what their V-6 should have on hand while it’s running, that’s what it gets, and never mind what the bean counters say.
Something else I learned while Googling this: the oil drain is on the Side of Mercedes engines, not the bottom, so if it ever comes out while you’re driving, all the oil won’t drain out of the engine. Mercedes technicians use a vacuum to remove the oil from the engine during an oil change. Another reason not to go to Jiffy Lube.
Okay…I’m a geek. But this is why I always wanted one of these cars…
[Update…] While Googling around and reading more about the synthetic oil recommended by Mercedes (which is the Mobil 1 type of Group IV synthetics), I’ve found that the consensus is you should still change the oil at the same intervals you otherwise would if you were using plain old regular oil. The modern synthetics give you better protection at the low and high temperature ranges, which is why some high performance engines require it, but normal wear contaminants will still build up in a synthetic just as they would in regular oil, and the only way to deal with that is to change it.
So it seems to be pretty much as I’d figured: the synthetic oil in my engine gives me a bigger safety zone, but the best thing is to keep changing it at the intervals I normally would anyway…around every three-thousand miles, though one guy said with advances in modern engines the air cleaners, compression and oil-control rings and positive crankcase ventilation systems, he’s leaning toward five-thousand miles between changes. But I’m going to stick to 3k.
Anger: Among financially prudent Americans who are pissed at the government bail-out other Americans are getting for accepting mortgages they couldn’t afford.
Well I’m not angry, and I think I qualify as prudent. I bought my little Baltimore rowhouse in 2001 and it was way less house then I could "theoretically" afford, but I wanted something I could pay the monthly mortgage on with a week’s take-home pay. It was my first house ever, and I didn’t want to be saddled with a lot of debt over it. Debt makes me nervous. And I wanted to have plenty of financial breathing room to afford the maintenance costs I knew would be coming with home ownership. Like the seven grand worth of new furnace I had to put in a couple winters ago. The purchase price on my house was just under ninety grand, and since then, its "theoretically" gone up in value to just around two-hundred and fifty grand. So my house could loose over half of its "theoretical" value and it would still be worth more then what I have left to pay on the mortgage.
So I think I qualify as prudent. But I was also lucky in some ways. I bought before the price of housing began to skyrocket here in Baltimore…when for a while there was affordable housing near the place where I work. If that hadn’t been the case I’d have had to either keep on renting, for every increasing rents as the price of housing around here went up, or I’d have had to find a place to live further out of the city and commute. And the prices in the outer suburbs were starting to go up, even back then. Before I got work at Space Telescope, I rented a one bedroom apartment in the suburbs and I watched my rent rise from just under four-hundred a month back in 1993, to close to a thousand a month before I bought my house in 2001. What do you do when the price of housing just keeps going up and up and up, even in the outer suburbs? What do you do if you have a family and kids? I was, and am, a single gay guy. It’s not terribly hard for me to get a decent place to live at the low end of the cost scale. If I needed space for a family, I’d have been constantly worried to death about the rising prices.
So if someone came along and said they could get me into a house, even at today’s prices, with some of that new high-tech free-market creative financing stuff…my second thoughts might get snuffed out in the gnawing fear that if I didn’t jump on it now, right now, I might get left behind while home prices soar into outer space, so far beyond my reach I might as well resign myself and my family to living in slums and still not having enough to pay the rent. Especially when they sit me down and wave a bunch of numbers in my face telling me that even though it looks like I can’t afford this house, I really can because the trend is that in a few years the house’s value will have doubled and I’ll be able to refinance easily then, before the balloon payment comes due. Pay no attention to that crushing monthly payment behind the curtain…
If you want to point your finger at anyone in all this, point it at the jackasses who, for purely ideological reasons having little to do with the reality of how human beings behave, worked diligently to construct what is essentially a shadow banking system that could exist with nearly no governmental oversight, figured it would self regulate because free markets naturally self regulate to the best possible outcome, and then watched mutely as it evolved into a system of borrowing, wherein the people selling the loans, didn’t have to bear the burden of financing them. Oh who could have predicted that a bunch of people lending other people’s money for a tidy profit of their own, regardless of whether or not the loans went bad, would make so many bad loans? Oh who could have predicted that injecting so much easy credit into a market with so much demand for so limited goods would drive the price of those goods into outer space? Oh who could have predicted that the people making all those bad loans would view those rising prices as a way to make even more money making even more bad loans?
And once again, an unregulated market drives itself off a cliff, taking with it hundreds of thousands of hard working families. This is the Savings and Loan collapse of 1988 writ large. And…surprise, surprise…the current little unpleasantness is brought to us by the same people who gave us that other little unpleasantness. I guess the 1988 Savings and Loan fiasco was just practice, because I don’t think that one sacred Wall Street like this one is scaring Wall Street.
"According to Ars Technica, California testers have discovered severe flaws in the ES&S voting machines. The paper seals were easily bypassed, and the lock could be picked with a "common office implement".
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