China executes more people than rest of world combined, Amnesty International reveal

April 1, 2015 by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in China, Death penalty

China executes more people than rest of world combined, Amnesty International reveal

by: DEBRA KILLALEA

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In 2014, there was an alarming rise in death sentences as governments resorted to capital punishment to combat crime and terrorism. An alarming number of countries used the death penalty to tackle real or perceived threats to state security linked to terrorism, crime or internal instability in 2014, Amnesty International found in its annual review of the death penalty worldwide. Courtesy Amnesty International

While the number of executions dropped, the number of people being sentenced to death skyrocketed. Picture: Courtesy Amnesty International. Source: Supplied

IN A single year, it executed more people than the rest of the world combined.

But exactly how many death row prisoners have been killed in China remains top secret.

Amnesty International estimates at least 1000 people were executed by the Asian powerhouse in 2014 alone.

In its Death Penalty 2014 report, the human rights group said it actually believed the real number of people being put to death in China each year was in the “thousands”, conceding the true figure was impossible to determine.

And with more than 50 offences punishable by death and a startling 99 per cent conviction rate, it is perhaps the one country in the world where you don’t want to be accused of committing a crime.

At least one Australian resident, New Zealand-born Peter Gardiner, is facing the prospect of a Chinese firing squad after being accused of smuggling ice into the country with his girfriend, Sydney woman Kalynda Davis, who has since been returned to Australia.

The annual report names China among 22 nations which still carry out executions, despite the scrapping of capital punishment in more than 140 others.

And unlike other nations, China does not reveal its official figures to the world.

Amnesty International spokesman Rose Kulak said the conservative estimate of 1000 deaths was obtained via non-government agencies, families who’ve had bodies returned to them and activists on the ground.

“The Chinese Government treats executions as a state secret,” she said.

“In China you can get the death penalty for a wide scope of crimes (roughly 55 different crimes). This includes burglary, burning down a shop or accepting a bribe.

China remains the world’s top executioner according to Amnesty International. Source: AFP

“The lack of fairness in trials, which sees on average a 99 per cent conviction rate and a huge number of charges for which you can face the death penalty, is why there’s such a massive execution tally in China, and why the exact number remains a secret.”

Just last month, a Chinese court sentenced a man to death for a 1996 rape and murder, after admitting it had earlier executed the wrong man by mistake for the same crime.

Zhao Zhihong, 42, confessed to the attack in 2005, after an innocent Huugjilt, 18, had already been put to death. He was posthumously exonnerated and his family awarded compensation.

Amnesty said while the numbers of executions around the world had fallen by 22 per cent, the number of people being sentenced to their deaths had skyrocketed by 28 per cent.

It said 607 official executions were recorded across the world, excluding China’s figures, with countries using the death penalty “in a flawed attempt to tackle crime, terrorism and internal instability.”

Amnesty also said the spike in death sentences being handed out — 2466 globally —was largely due to recent mass sentencing carried out across Egypt and Nigeria.

While China remained the world’s top executioner, Iran came in second with 289 deaths officially announced. It is understood a further 450 which have not been officially acknowledged.

Saudi Arabia came in at number three with at least 90 executions, followed by Iraq, 61, and the United States in number five position with 35 executions.

The 607 recorded global executions carried out in 2014 was a decrease on the 778 recorded in 2013, a drop of more than 20 per cent.

Amnesty International has used its annual report to again call for the global abolition of the death penalty, which it regards as a harsh, inhumane and cruel punishment.

Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s Secretary-general, said governments which used the death penalty to tackle crime were deluding themselves.

“There is no evidence that shows the threat of execution is more of a deterrent to crime than any other punishment,” he said.

How executions compare around the world. Picture: Courtesy Amnesty International. Source: Supplied

“The dark trend of governments using the death penalty in a futile attempt to tackle real or imaginary threats to state security and public safety was stark last year.

“It is shameful that so many states around the world are essentially playing with people’s lives — putting people to death for ‘terrorism’ or to quell internal instability on the ill-conceived premise of deterrence.”

Mr Shetty said the numbers spoke for themselves and the death penalty was slowly becoming a thing of the past.

“The few countries that still execute need to take a serious look in the mirror and ask themselves if they want to continue to violate the right to life, or join the vast majority of countries that have abandoned this ultimate cruel and inhuman punishment,” he said.

OPERATION: STRIKE HARD

China, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq all executed people accused of terrorism offences, according to Amnesty.

Pakistan attracted global headlines when it announced 8000 prisoners on death row would soon be executed.

It lifted its moratorium on the death penalty in all capital cases after restarting executions for terrorism offences in the wake of a Taliban school massacre in December last year.

Pakistan has lifted its moratorium on the death penalty in all capital cases. Source: AFP

In China, authorities used the death penalty as a punitive tool in the “Strike Hard” campaign against unrest in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, executing at least 21 people during the year related to separate attacks, Amnesty figures reveal.

North Korea, Iran and Saudi Arabia continued to use the death penalty as a tool to suppress political dissent, while Jordan ended an eight-year moratorium in December, putting eleven murder convicts to death.

The government claimed it was a move to end a surge in violent crime.

In Indonesia, the government announced plans to execute mainly drug traffickers to tackle a public safety “national emergency”.

Executions have declined worldwide since 2013. Picture: Courtesy Amnesty International. Source: Supplied

Among the methods used to kill in 2014 were beheading, hanging, lethal injection and firing squad.

In Saudi Arabia and Iran, executions are carried out in public, often by beheading and hanging.

People were executed for a range of crimes including robbery, drug-related offences, economic offences, adultery, blasphemy and even sorcery.

The firing squad execution chamber at the Utah State Prison in Draper. The US ranks fifth for its execution tally. Source: AP

AUSTRALIANS ON DEATH ROW IN CHINA

Little is known about those on death row in China, however recent cases involving Australian citizens have brought it into the global spotlight.

New Zealand-born Australian resident Peter Gardiner is among the thousands understood to be facing the firing squad in China.

Gardiner was allegedly caught with 30 kilograms of methamphetamine, worth up to $80 million, with Australian woman Kalynda Davis earlier this year.

The pair were busted after meeting on Tinder and travelling to China on a whim. However, while Mr Gardiner awaits his fate, Ms Davis has returned to Australia after top secret negotiations led by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop saw her secretly flown back to Sydney.

New Zealand-born Australian resident Peter Gardiner could also face the firing squad in China. Source: Supplied

In September last year, an Australian government source also revealed there are an unknown number of citizens possibly facing the death penalty in China after being arrested for drug smuggling.

Government sources would not reveal how many people are involved but told The Courier-Mail there appeared to be a pattern of Australians being caught carrying “significant quantities”.

It is understood “several Australians have been arrested, and that Chinese laws mandate an immediate death sentence for serious drugs offences.”

A GRIM PICTURE

According to the report, the US remained the only country in the Americas to carry out executions, which dropped from 39 to 35 compared to the previous year.

Seven states carried out executions in 2014, with 90 per cent taking place in four states: Texas, Missouri, Florida and Oklahoma.

The overall number of people sentenced to death dropped from 95 in 2013 to 77 in 2014.

In the Asia-Pacific, executions were recorded in nine countries with 32 recorded deaths, excluding China and North Korea, whose figures are also unknown.

Sub-Saharan Africa recorded 46 executions which was down from 64 in 2013, a drop of 28 per cent.

Belarus remained the onlyEuropean nation to record executions, with three in 2014.

However, the Middle East raised concern among human rights groups with Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia recording 72 per cent of the world’s global executions, excluding China.

Amnesty International has called for a complete abolition of executions worldwide. Picture: Courtesy Amnesty International. Source: Supplied

Technobiophilia

September 28, 2013 by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Cyberspac, Digital World, Nature, Technobiophilia

Technobiophilia

We surf the net, stream our films and save stuff in the cloud. Can we get all the nature we need from the digital world?

by Sue Thomas

Getting back to nature: a visitor takes a photo of jellyfish in the aquarium in Wuhan, China. Photo by Reuters

Sue Thomas is a writer and digital pioneer. Her latest book is Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace (2013).

There are fish in my phone. Some are pure orange with white fins; others have black mottled markings along their orange backs. They glide, twist and turn above a bed of flat pale sand fringed by rocks and the bright green leaves of something that looks like watercress. Sometimes they swim out of view, leaving me to gaze at the empty scene in the knowledge that they will soon reappear. When I gently press my finger against the screen, the water ripples and the fish swim away. Eventually, they cruise out from behind the Google widget, appear from underneath the Facebook icon, or sneak around the corner of Contacts. This is Koi Live Wallpaper, an app designed for smartphones. The idea of an aquarium inside my phone appeals to my sense of humour and makes me smile. But I suspect its true appeal is more complicated than that.

In 1984, the psychiatrist Aaron Katcher and his team at the University of Pennsylvania conducted an experiment in the busy waiting room of a dentist’s office. On some days, before the surgery opened, the researchers installed an aquarium with tropical fish. On other days, they took it away. They measured the patients’ levels of anxiety in both environments, and the results were clear. On ‘aquarium days’, patients were less anxious and more compliant during the surgery. Katcher concluded that the presence of these colourful living creatures had a calming influence on people about to receive dental treatment. Then in 1990, Judith Heerwagen and colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle found the same calming effect using a large nature mural instead of an aquarium in the waiting room of a specialist ‘dental fears’ clinic. A third experiment by the environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich and colleagues at Texas A&M University in 2003 found that stressed blood donors experienced lowered blood pressure and pulse rates while sitting in a room where a videotape of a nature scene was playing. The general conclusion was that visual exposure to nature not only diminished patient stress but also reduced physical pain. I’m not in pain when I look at my mobile, though I might well be stressed. Is that why I take time to gaze at my virtual aquarium?

A simple answer to this question is no. Katcher’s fish were real. Mine are animations. But there is increasing evidence that we respond very similarly to a ‘natural’ environment, whether it’s real or virtual, and research confirms that even simulated nature experiences can be remarkably powerful. In a 2008 study of Spanish energy consumers, the researchers Patrick Hartmann and Vanessa Apaolaza-Ibáñez at the University of the Basque Country examined responses to a new TV marketing campaign by one of the country’s leading energy brands, Iberdrola Energía Verde. The company was attempting to ‘green’ its image by evoking a virtual experience of nature through the use of pleasant imagery such as flying eagles, mountain scenery, and waterfalls. The intention was to evoke feelings of altruism and self-expression (‘Now, every time you switch on your light, you can feel good because you are helping nature’). The researchers found that consumers responded positively to the new branding, no matter whether they were already environmentally conscious or among the ‘non-concerned’. The ads brought the benefits of a ‘warm glow’ and a positive feeling of participating in the common good of the environment. The visual simulations were meeting a human desire to experience nature and reap its psychological benefits (pleasure, stress reduction, and so on). The research concluded that in societies where the experience of actual nature is becoming scarce, and life is increasingly virtual, the consumption of ‘green products’, especially those that evoke virtual contact with nature, can provide surrogate experiences.

The psychologist Deltcho Valtchanov at the University of Waterloo in Canada reached a similar conclusion in 2010 when he found that immersion in a computer-generated virtual reality nature space prompted an increase in positive feelings such as happiness, friendliness, affection and playfulness, and a decrease in negative feelings such as fear, anger and sadness. There were also significant decreases in levels of both perceived and physiological stress. Again, he and his colleagues concluded that encounters with nature in virtual reality have beneficial effects similar to encounters with real natural spaces. In other words, it seems that you can gain equal benefit from walking in a forest as from viewing an image of a forest or, as in my case, from watching virtual goldfish as opposed to real ones.

But what do we mean when we refer to ‘nature’? It’s a common term that seems to have an assumed collective meaning, often romanticised and sentimental. We speak of ‘getting back to nature’ as if there was once a prelapsarian baseline before we humans interfered and spoiled it. Gary Snyder, the American poet and environmentalist, offers alternative definitions from which we can choose. In The Practice of the Wild (1990), he distils down to two ways in which the term ‘nature’ is usually interpreted. One, he argues, is the outdoors: ‘the physical world, including all living things. Nature by this definition is a norm of the world that is apart from the features or products of civilisation and human will. The machine, the artefact, the devised, or the extraordinary (like a two-headed calf) is spoken of as “unnatural”.’

The other meaning is much broader, taking the first and adding to it all the products of human action and intention. Snyder calls it the material world and all its collective objects and phenomena. ‘Science and some sorts of mysticism rightly propose that everything is natural,’ he writes. In this sense, ‘there is nothing unnatural about New York City, or toxic wastes, or atomic energy, and nothing — by definition — that we do or experience in life is “unnatural”.’ That, of course, includes the products of technology. This is Snyder’s preferred definition — and mine too. However, though it’s not always made clear, I’d venture a guess that environmental psychologists might have a preference for the former, human-free definition of nature.

Either way, it’s been claimed that the love of nature derives from ‘biophilia’, or the biophilic tendency. The term, coined in the 1960s by the German social psychologist Erich Fromm, was intended to denote a psychological orientation towards nature, but it became better known when popularised by the American biologist E O Wilson in Biophilia (1984) as an ‘innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes’. Note that Wilson avoids the ‘n’ word, referring to ‘life’ instead. Of course, today the digerati are deeply engaged in conversations about what ‘life’ will mean in technologies of the future, a debate that will continue for a long time to come. More recently, the concept of biophilia has been celebrated by the Icelandic musician Björk in her 2011 album and musical project of the same name.

Perhaps biophilia can soothe our connected minds and improve our digital well-being

The notion of biophilia draws upon a genetic attraction to an ancient natural world that evolved long before we did. It appears that our urge for contact with nature can, as shown in the experiments described, restore energy, alleviate mental fatigue, and enhance attention. It also appears to be surprisingly transferable to digital environments.

In 2004 I began collecting examples of metaphors and images of the natural world commonly found in computer culture — terms such as stream, cloud, virus, worm, surfing, field, and so on. I intended to find out what can be learnt from them about the intersections between human beings, cyberspace, and nature. I quickly amassed a long list of examples but found myself unable to suggest a reason for this phenomenon, until I came across Wilson’s theory. I realised that the story had been right in front of me all the time. It can be found in the images on our machines, in the spaces we cultivate in our online communities, and in the language we use every day of our digital lives. It began the moment we moved into the alien, shape-shifting territory of the internet and prompted a resurgence of that ancient call to life, biophilia.

Our attempts to place ourselves in this new world nourished the growth of a new spur, a hybrid through which nature and technology become symbionts, rather than opponents. I have coined the term ‘technobiophilia’ for this. It’s a clumsy word — probably not quite the right one — but for now it helps to spell out what is happening so that we can understand it better. Is there the possibility that perhaps biophilia can soothe our connected minds and improve our digital well-being? How can we harness and develop our technobiophilic instincts in order to live well in the digital world?

One option would be that rather than keeping the virtual and the natural worlds separate — turning off our machines, taking e-sabbaticals, or undergoing digital detoxes, in order to connect with nature — we think about them all as integrated elements of a single life in a single world. There is already a growing sense in the wired community that connections with the natural world are vital to digital well-being, both now and in the future. This same community needs to pay attention to biophilia and to its implementation in biophilic design. With the help of biophilic insights, we can connect the planet beneath our feet with the planet inside our machines.

Slides from The Future of Cyberspace – Professorial Lecture, DMU, 26/4/12 #Technobiophilia (travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com)
Transliterate Spaces at 3Ts 2013: Transliteracy from Cradle to Career (travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com)
Technobiophilia (aeonmagazine.com)
Digital Methods as Mainstream Methodology, NCRM Seminar, 7/12/12 (travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com)
New Device Enables You to Physically Walk in Virtual Realities (scienceworldreport.com)
Take real-life strolls in virtual reality environments with the Virtualizer (wired.co.uk)
New device to revolutionize gaming in virtual realities (nanowerk.com)

Communism As Religion

March 18, 2013 by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Communism, Communism Is Religion, Religion

Communism is Religion

Posted by Daniel G. Jennings

One major argument that apologists for religion like to make against proponents of secularism, humanism and religion is to equate all opponents of religion with Communism and the numerous crimes against humanity perpetuated by such monsters as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Fidel Castro. The best argument against these people of faith is a simple one, far from being a humanist or rationalist belief system, Communism was and is a religion.

Like all religions, Communism is irrational, dogmatic and based on faith rather than science. Just like Christianity and Islam, Communism had its Holy Books which were treated as Holy Scripture, namely the writings of Lenin, Mao, Marx and others–all of which were far from scientific. Karl Marx, who was treated by Communists as a genius, was actually a small-time journalist whose writings are a collection of prejudices, generalizations and editorializing. Marx held and promoted some beliefs which were later disproved by science, for example Marx taught that many human characteristics we now know to be inherited through genetics were caused by environmental factors. When scientists in 1930s Russia pointed this fact out, Stalin reacted by throwing the scientists into the gulag just like the Church imprisoned Galileo. Just like fundamentalist Christians who promote creation science, Stalin (himself the recipient of an “education” in a Christian seminary) backed a charlatan named Lysenko who came up with a completely false science of genetics that fit squarely with Communist dogma and then banned the teaching of genetics because it contradicted Communist dogma.

As with Christianity and Islam, Communism attracted followers by promising a pie-in-the-sky heaven to the faithful. The difference being that the Communist heaven would be sometime in the future when all people would be happy and equal under Communism rather than after death. This magical future was conveniently pushed farther and farther into the future so that Communist leaders could “explain” to the average people impoverished by their wonderful system why they hadn’t yet achieved utopia. It might also be pointed out that the Communists never actually said exactly how this utopia would be created–just as Christians and Moslems can present no evidence of life after death.

Like most religions, Communism operated on irrational faith; people in Communist countries had to have absolute faith in the Communist system and its leaders. Thinking for oneself was strictly verboten in Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and Ho’s Vietnam. Those who questioned Communism and its leaders were treated as heretics by the Communist state.

Far from being an example of the evils that occur when religion is removed in society, Communism is a perfect example of the excesses and horrors that result when religion is allowed to take over a society. The Communist Party acted just like the church had in Medieval Europe.

Just like the Church in Medieval Europe, the Communists tortured and killed those who refused to adopt the official faith. Just like the Church, the Communists promoted the belief that governmental authorities were all-knowing, all-powerful and sanctioned by God, and the idea that refusing to bow to authority was a sin.

Just like the medieval church, the Communist Party promoted the idea of saints, people whose total devotion to the Communist cause was a good and holy thing and entitled them to be worshiped. The difference was that the Communists substituted Communist leaders like Mao and Stalin for the saints. The Communists even revived the bizarre medieval practice of worshiping the dead bodies of the saints; they built massive mausoleums in which they placed the embalmed bodies of their dead leaders and forced their people to worship them.

Just like the Russian Orthodox Church, the Communists also created icons, pictures of Communist leaders whom people were to worship. In North Korea, for example, it is even a crime to destroy a picture of the late dictator Kim Il Sung.

The Communists also revived the horrendous medieval practice of the Inquisition, an official body to hunt down and eliminate heretics, in the form of the purge trials and the various secret-police forces. Hundreds of thousands of people in Communist countries were tortured, brutalized and murdered by such bodies.

Just like the church before them the Communists tried to force their captured enemies to repent their “sins.” After the fall of Saigon, 600,000 Vietnamese were forced into concentration camps called reeducation centers to learn Communist dogma. Just as the “First Holy Roman Emperor,” the religious fanatic Charlemagne, tried to forcibly baptize German pagans captured in his wars, captured American soldiers in the Vietnam and Korean wars were also forced to admit the “truth” of Communism.

As if bringing back the Inquisition wasn’t bad enough, the Communists also revived the witch hunt. Like other people of faith, the Communists blamed the failings of their system–not on their own loony dogma–but on hidden enemies who were secretly sabotaging Communism so as to prevent the Communists from creating a utopia. In 1930s Russia, tens of thousands of innocent people, many of them good Communists, were falsely accused of being foreign agents and “wreckers” who were sabotaging the Stalinist system, and then executed or thrown into the gulag–where many of them died from torture, forced labor and starvation. Those killed in this purge included several of the Red Army’s top generals who were falsely accused of being enemies by Communist courts using information provided by the Nazis (thus leaving Russia unprepared in 1941 when it’s real enemies attacked).

It must also be noted here that it didn’t take the Russian Communists long to revive another old evil of the church: anti-Semitism; by the early 1950s, Stalin was blaming Russia’s problems and his own bad health on the Jews. Just as the Medieval Christians blamed plagues and the black death on Jews secretly poisoning wells, so Stalin blamed his ill health on Jewish doctors who were trying to poison him.

In the 1960s, Mao went Stalin one better. When the Chairman’s brutal attempt to create the Communist heaven on Earth, the “Great Leap Forward,” failed miserably, resulting in the worst famine in human history, Mao blamed–not himself or his faith–but the Chinese people for not having enough faith in Communism (much as Hitler had blamed the German people and not his own incompetence, arrogance and stupidity, for his defeat in World War II). Mao then turned vast numbers of Communist fanatics, known as Red Guards, loose to punish the Chinese people for not showing enough faith in Mao and Communism. Just as the Medieval witch hunters burned little old ladies at the stake for owning cats, Chinese people were beaten up and terrorized for such crimes as owning birdcages or wearing makeup in the so-called Cultural Revolution. Many great treasures of China’s past were destroyed by Communist thugs during the Cultural Revolution (just as the Taliban blew up Buddhist statues in Afghanistan).

The excesses in Soviet Russia and Red China have been repeated in almost every other Communist country. Almost every Communist regime has behaved like a religion that is in a manner completely irrational and paranoid. The major difference between the Communist fanatics and the Christian fanatics of the inquisition was that the Communists had access to modern technology, weaponry and systems of government that enabled them to kill far more people far more quickly. Had the inquisition access to the same technology as the Communists, its body count would have rivaled that of Stalin and Mao.

Far from being an example of what happens when religion, faith and God are removed from society, Communism is a perfect example of what happens when society is turned over to religion. People are deprived of their basic freedoms, science and scholarship are suppressed, and average people are tortured and murdered for not displaying sufficient faith.

It must also be said here that Christianity did little or nothing to stop Communism or the horrible crimes the Communists committed against humanity. Russia was the most religious country in Europe in 1917 yet the Church was unable to stop the Bolshevik takeover. If Christianity is such a powerful force for morality, why couldn’t the Orthodox patriarchs and bishops have simply ordered the Russian people not to follow Lenin and Stalin’s orders? Why weren’t the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church able to appeal to the piety of Joseph Stalin, himself a product of an Orthodox seminary, and get him to recant Communism? Far from protecting Russia’s people from Communism, the Orthodox Church did little but have the Russian people sit and pray to icons for the end of the Communist system.

It was not the Orthodox Church or its leaders that formed the main resistance to Communism in Russia, it was humanists and rationalists who refused to bow to irrational Communist beliefs. For example, the great scientist, Andre Sakarov, and many other Russian intellectuals, refused to go along with the Communist assault on the human mind. Later on, more enlightened and intelligent Soviet leaders, such as Mikhail Gorbachev, undermined Communism by allowing people to question and challenge its basic assumptions. Just like Christian and Islamic dogma, Communist dogma can’t stand up to a close examination based on reason and the scientific method.

It was the secular, democratic, capitalist societies in the United States, Japan and Western Europe–which are based on humanistic and rational values–which ultimately proved to be the undoing of Communism. The irrational, faith-based, Communist system simply couldn’t compete with the rational, secular United States and its allies. By basing their societies on faith rather than on reason, thus being in no position to change or adapt their system to meet future challenges, the Communists thereby sowed the seeds of their own destruction–except, of course, in countries such as Vietnam and China where Communist leaders have quietly abandoned Communism and adopted capitalism in order to preserve their own skins and line their own bank accounts.

Far from being an example of a godless society, Communism is a perfect example of the dangers which religion poses to human freedom and humanity’s future. Those Americans who want to establish an official religion should take a hard look at the history of Communism, for any country that establishes an official religion and a faith based system will end up just like the Communists–in the ash heap of history.

Sixty years after death, Stalin turning hero for Russians (thehindu.com)
Confronting Stalin’s Legacy, 60 Years After His Death (reason.com)
VIDEO: Russia divided over ‘hero’ Stalin (bbc.co.uk)
Russia Marks 60th Anniversary of Stalin’s Death (abcnews.go.com)

Religious Right Zealot Blames Gays for North Korea Nuke Threat

March 11, 2013 by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Gays, Homophobia, Religious Right

Gays blamed for North Korea nuclear threat

“A few weeks ago, we started listening to Rick Wiles’ “Trunews” radio program because we discovered that he regularly interviews a variety of Religious Right activists that we monitor here. But since then, we’ve begun listening just because his show – “the only newscast reporting the countdown to the second coming of Jesus Christ” – is also a cavalcade of insanity.

And yesterday’s program was no exception, as Wiles’ grew increasingly worked up about North Korea’s latest threat against the United States, which he blamed on “gay rights fanatics”

Via Right Wing Watch

China executes more people than rest of world combined, Amnesty International reveal

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