Cavalcade of Dumbness

Lots of dumb crap in the news the past couple weeks, kids. I’ve just been too busy to poke it with a stick & see what sort of ichor oozed out. Each story is dumber than the one before it, and you’re left not quite knowing whether to laugh, cry, or climb a bell tower with a burp gun.

First there’s the supposed controversy surrounding an ad that FoodTV/talk show host Rachael Ray did for Dunkin Donuts. The Powers That Be at Dunkinz pulled the ad over fears that they’d be boycotted after columnist Michelle Malkin and other conservative observers thought the scarf looked too much like a kaffiyeh, what Malkin describes as "the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad." I’ve seen the ad, and it looks like Ray is wearing….GASP!!!! A scarf. I’ve seen kaffiyehs and this, friends, is not a kaffiyeh. You might be able to confuse Ray with The Joker, but not an operative for Hezbollah. I think I saw Ellen Degeneres wearing a red & white scarf on her show today so is she a jihadist too? (Please…she’s a lesbo, not a Hezbo.)

Then you have the polygamist cult disguised as Mormons at the Yearning for Zion Ranch, or as I call it, the Texas Harem For Teen Mothers. After authorities stepped in and took 400-odd kids (with about only 5 sets of DNA branchings) from their parents as part of an investigation into underaged brides being used as concubines for cult leaders, the news feeds were full of freakishly plain zombie women in pastel gunnysacks taken from the set of Little House on the Prairie. They make the Amish look positively chic. Each woman would dodge questions in a Stepford-like monotone with a pre-scripted speech and say they just wanted their babies back. They make regular Mormons look bad. I've never seen anything even remotely like this in any of the Mormon friends I've had over the years.

Somehow I thought judges in Texas were smarter than this, but after a few weeks in foster care their Supreme Court ordered the kids returned to their families, just in time for the traditional June wedding season. The lesson in this is that it’s cool to force 13-year olds to marry 50-year olds, so long as you disguise it as “religion”. Cult leaders have said they’ll stop marrying underaged girls, but said nothing about pumping them full of babies out of wedlock.

And over across the pond in Myanmar, or what everyone except Myanmar calls Burma, a huge hurricane tore through the nation and killed tens of thousands. The world rushed to offer aid, and the military government, perhaps the most corrupt in the world, pretty much said no. They felt that they could handle the situation themselves, and handled it by stealing the few supplies that they allowed in for themselves while thousands more died.

Well, today we finally pulled anchor on the ships that we had offshore waiting to airlift relief supplies to the countryside after the country’s “leaders” claimed that they feared we were going to invade Myanmar to steal their oil deposits. C’mon, guys. Be for real. If we were gonna invade your back-assward Fourth World Cesspit, we’d send in wave after wave of stealth aircraft to bomb you to powder first. We wouldn’t send in a destroyer, an oiler, and a couple of “gator freighters” with 23 helicopters and 4 landing craft.

And finally, today the world celebrated the 19th anniversary of the uprising in China’s Tiananmen Square by continuing to reward China’s abysmal human rights record by getting ready for the Olympics. I mean, hell, China has enough to worry about with the earthquakes & stuff to give them any crap over it now, right? And that dude had it coming anyways. He shouldn’t have climbed on that tank with that big bad briefcase.

Hmmmmm...Polygamy? No, it can't be.

I'm not re-posting this Reuters story to bash Mormons. Far from it. I have no problem with Mormons on the whole. I'm not too keen on the kids knocking on my door trying to convert me or accosting me in the grocery store parking lot trying to convert me. I'm not too keen on anyone trying to convert me to anything, actually.
I'm reposting this to raise awareness of this cult disguised as Mormons who are pissing in the gene pool and think they're a law unto themselves. They give Mormons a bad name. All the Mormons I've known have been great folks and it's skeedgy types like these guys who make decent Mormons look bad, and keep raising the stereotype of all Mormons as having ten wives.
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COLORADO CITY, Ariz. - In a dusty neighborhood under sheer sandstone cliffs studded with juniper on the Arizona-Utah border, a rare genetic disorder is spreading through polygamous families on a wave of inbreeding.

The twin border communities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., have the world’s highest known prevalence of fumarase deficiency, an enzyme irregularity that causes severe mental retardation brought on by cousin marriage, doctors say.

“Arizona has about half the world’s population of known fumarase deficiency patients,” said Dr. Theodore Tarby, a pediatric neurologist who has treated many of the children at Arizona clinics under contracts with the state.

“It exists in a certain percentage of the broader population but once you get a tendency to inbreed you’re inbreeding people who have the gene there, so you markedly increase the risk of developing the condition,” he said.
The community of about 10,000 people, who shun outsiders and are taught to avoid newspapers, television and the Internet, is home to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a sect that broke from the mainstream Mormon church 72 years ago over polygamy.

The group, who wear conservative 19th-century clothing, is led by Warren Jeffs, who was arrested in August and charged as an accomplice to rape for using his authority to order a 14-year-old girl against her wishes to marry and have sex with her 19-year-old cousin.

Doctors in the area declined requests for interviews and families refuse to talk to reporters. But former FLDS members, independent doctors and authorities say the disorder appears to have struck at least 20 children in the past 15 years.
“The disease itself is very rare in the rest of the world,” said Dr. Vinodh Narayanan of Arizona’s St. Joseph’s Hospital & Medical Center and Barrow Neurological Institute. Doctors worldwide had only studied about 10 cases just a decade ago.

“Once you get people within the same community marrying, then the chances grow of having two people carrying the exact same mutation.”

Local historian Benjamin Bistline said 75 to 80 percent of people in the area are blood relatives of two men — John Y. Barlow and Joseph Smith Jessop — who founded the sect on the remote desert plateau in the early 1930s.

“There aren’t any new people coming in. It’s a closed door and that gene just keeps getting passed around,” said Bruce Wisan, a court-appointed accountant overseeing a trust of the sect’s assets.

Dr. Leslie Biesecker, chief of the Genetic Disease Research Branch at the National Institutes of Health, said the bad gene could have been introduced after the original founding families settled there. “Any person who joined that community could have brought that mutation with them,” he said.

Tarby, who has recently retired, said he first observed the problem when an FLDS couple came to a Phoenix clinic about 15 years ago with a 10-year-old boy suffering from a degenerative condition. He sent a urine sample to a lab in Colorado for analysis and was stunned by the diagnosis.

Since then, increasing numbers of children in the community have been stricken with the disease, which causes unusual facial features, frequent epileptic seizures, episodes of coma and possibly early death.

In the disorder, brain cells fail to receive enough fuel to grow, multiply and function properly because of a missing enzyme needed to generate energy from food, causing severe mental retardation and muscle control problems.

Tarby met with about 150 FLDS members in November, explaining that the disorder was not caused by tainted drinking water as rumored but by cousin marriage.
But even with that knowledge, it is still hard for people to leave the sect, said Brenda Jensen, 55, who fled the FLDS several years ago and now works for the Utah-based HOPE Organization, which helps women leave.

“If they are willing to marry their cousin, or unwilling but do it anyway, or even in a relationship that is closer than that, it can be very hard for them,” Jensen said.

And local habits are deeply ingrained, authorities say.

“They will tell you if that’s what God wants for you than that’s what you will get,” said Gary Engels, an investigator assigned to Colorado City by the Mohave County attorney’s office. “They don’t think too much about marrying cousins and things like that.”

Copyright 2007 Reuters Limited.