Graphic Humor 236

This section of Graphic Humor in political-economic, national or international issues, are very ingenious in describing what happened, is happening or will happen. It also extends to various other local issues or passing around the world. There are also other non-political humor that ranges from reflective or just to get us a smile when we see them. Anyone with basic education and to stay informed of important news happening in our local and global world may understand and enjoy them. Farewell!. (CTsT)

 

Faith-Based Fanatics

He’s had a busy summer. As God only knows, he was summoned to slaughter in the Holy Land, asked to end the killings of Muslims by Buddhist monks in Myanmar, and played both sides again in the 1,400-year-old dispute over the rightful successor to the Prophet Muhammad.

In between, not much down time. Yes, the World Cup was fun, and God chose to mess with His Holinesses, pitting the team from Pope Francis’s Argentina against Germany, home of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Well played, even if the better pope lost.

At least Rick Perry was not his usual time-suck. The governor proclaimed three days of prayer to end the Texas drought in 2011, saying, “I think it’s time for us to just hand it over to God, and say, ‘God: You’re going to have to fix this.’ ” The drought got worse. Two years ago, Perry said that God had not “changed his mind” about same-sex marriage. But the states have. Since Perry became a spokesman for the deity, the map of legalized gay marriage in America has expanded by 50 percent.

Still, these are pillow feathers in a world weighted down with misery. God is on a rampage in 2014, a bit like the Old Testament scourge who gave direct instructions to people to kill one another.

It’s not true that all wars are fought in the name of religion, as some atheists assert. Of 1,723 armed conflicts documented in the three-volume “Encyclopedia of Wars,” only 123, or less than 7 percent, involved a religious cause. Hitler’s genocide, Stalin’s bloody purges and Pol Pot’s mass murders certainly make the case that state-sanctioned killings do not need the invocation of a higher power to succeed.

But this year, the ancient struggle of My God versus Your God is at the root of dozens of atrocities, giving pause to the optimists among us (myself included) who believe that while the arc of enlightenment is long, it still bends toward the better.

In the name of God and hate, Sunnis are killing Shiites in Iraq, and vice versa. A jihadist militia, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, boasts of beheading other Muslims while ordering women to essentially live in caves, faces covered, minds closed. The two sides of a single faith have been sorting it out in that blood-caked land, with long periods of peace, since the year 632. Don’t expect it to end soon. A majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are peaceful, but a Pew Survey found that 40 percent of Sunnis do not think Shiites are proper Muslims.

Elsewhere, a handful of failed states are seeing carnage over some variant of the seventh-century dispute. And the rage that moved Hamas to lob rockets on birthday parties in Tel Aviv, and Israelis to kill children playing soccer on the beach in Gaza, has its roots in the spiritual superiority of extremists on both sides.

The most horrific of the religion-inspired zealots may be Boko Haram in Nigeria. As is well known thanks to a feel-good and largely useless Twitter campaign, 250 girls were kidnapped by these gangsters for the crime of attending school. Boko Haram’s God tells them to sell the girls into slavery.

The current intra-religious fights are not to be confused with people who fly airplanes into buildings, or shoot up innocents while shouting “God is great.” But those killers most assuredly believed that their reward for murder is heaven.

“It’s not true that all wars are fought in the name of religion, as some atheists assert.”Which atheists assert that? I’ve certainly never…

Of late, God has taken a long break from Ireland, such a small country for such a big fight between worshipers under the same cross. There, the animus is not so much theological as it is historical. If the curious Muslim is wondering why Protestants and Catholics can’t just get along on that lovely island, take a look at the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century, when about 20 percent of the population of present-day Germany fell to clashes between the two branches of Christianity.
Violent Buddhist mobs (yes, it sounds oxymoronic) are responsible for a spate of recent attacks against Muslims in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, leaving more than 200 dead and close to 150,000 homeless. The clashes prompted the Dalai Lama to make an urgent appeal to end the bloodshed. “Buddha preaches love and compassion,” he said.

And so do Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The problem is that people of faith often become fanatics of faith. Reason and force are useless against aspiring martyrs.

In the United States, God is on the currency. By brilliant design, though, he is not mentioned in the Constitution. The founders were explicit: This country would never formally align God with one political party, or allow someone to use religion to ignore civil laws. At least that was the intent. In this summer of the violent God, five justices on the Supreme Court seem to feel otherwise.

 

* Timothy Egan, NYT, July 18, 2014

 

Texas actress gets 18 years for mailing ricin to Obama

A minor actress from Texas was sentenced Wednesday to 18 years in prison for sending ricin-tainted letters to President Obama, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and the head of his gun-control group.

Shannon Guess Richardson, 36, was also ordered to pay $367,000 restitution as part of a plea bargain for pleading guilty in December to one count of developing, producing, possessing and transferring a biological agent for use as a weapon. She bought the materials — castor bean seeds and lye — online.

The FBI arrested her in June 2013 after she was indicted by a federal grand jury. She gave bith the next month while in jail.

Richardson mailed three letters in May 2013 from her home in New Boston, near Texarkana, and then drove to a Shreveport, La., police station to implicate her estranged husband, who had filed for divorce. She told the FBI she did not think the letters would be opened because of security measures.

“What’s in this letter is nothing compared to what ive got in store for you mr president,” read the letter to Obama. “You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns. Anyone wants to come to my house will get shot in the face.”

A former Dallas beauty queen, she had bit parts in TV series and film, including The Vampire Diaries, The Walking Dead, Franklin & Bash, All My Children and The Blind Side.

Richardson apologized Wednesday before being sentenced by U.S. District Judge Michael Schneider.

“I never intended for anybody to be hurt,” she said. “I’m not a bad person. I don’t have it in me to hurt anyone.”

“I do love my country, and I respect my president,” she added.

Schneider said Richardson’s actions “put many lives in danger and threatened public officials at the highest level of government. The defendant claims that she did not intend to harm anyone, but certainly her actions could have had grave consequences.”

Ricin is a biological toxin that can be fatal if inhaled or swallowed. There is no antidote or cure.

 

* Text by USAToday, July 16, 2014

 

The solution to smartphone stupidity

Starting Friday, fines for texting, emailing and using handheld phones while driving will get more expensive in New York State. Fines for using mobile devices will increase to up to $150 for a first offense, plus a mandatory $80 surcharge for moving violations, and go up to $400 (plus the $80) for a third. A violation also costs a whopping 5 driver’s license points. In addition, teen and probationary drivers — arguably those most prone to violating existing laws — will face 60-day license suspensions.

That’s one expensive text message, and it puts your license in jeopardy.

But if that’s what it takes to deter device-dependent drivers from this obviously dangerous behavior, then so be it. Laws against handheld mobile phone use and texting have been on the books for years in New York, but we all know how widely those laws are flouted. In fact, despite drivers’ nearly universal disapproval of texting and emailing while driving, more than one in four of us admitted sending a text message or email while driving in the previous month, according to a survey conducted by AAA’s Foundation for Traffic Safety last year.

Texting behind the wheel is extraordinarily dangerous, research has shown. That’s because it engages the driver visually, manually and cognitively, creating a trifecta of deadly distractions. Studies show that on average, a texting driver takes his or her eyes off the road for about five seconds to read or send a text message, more than doubling a driver’s risk of a crash. At highway speeds, that’s long enough to cover the length of a football field. Yet drivers continue to do it. While increased penalties may be a painful lesson for some, a bigger stick is clearly needed to change widespread behaviors.

Over the past two decades, New York’s combination of stronger laws and enforcement led the nation in successful efforts to persuade drivers to wear seat belts and not drive while drunk. As a result, we helped establish a national model for other states, saving thousands of lives. Today, widespread texting and phone use while driving threaten the hard-earned reductions in motor vehicle crashes — a leading cause of preventable death and injury in the United States.

In fact, from 2005 to 2011, there has been about a 143 percent increase in mobile phone-related crashes in the state. In that same period, there’s been an approximately 18 percent decrease in alcohol-related crashes. We can’t let the progress we made saving lives erode.

Teenage drivers — the “digital generation” — are especially prone to distracted driving. Surveys indicate that on average, they talk on their mobile phones an hour each day and send 80 texts per day. Many have handheld devices with Internet capabilities. Ninety-four percent of them report keeping their mobile phones on while driving. Those are troubling statistics, given that car crashes remain the No. 1 cause of death and injury for that generation. Hopefully the state’s new laws will send a powerful message to our young and inexperienced drivers that texting and driving will not be tolerated in New York State.

Now that the new penalties are going into effect, state and local police departments have pledged to vigorously enforce these laws this summer, with checkpoints and undercover vehicles to catch distracted drivers. Some violators may be taken by surprise by the steep fines and points, but I say bring them on. One look around will tell you that many drivers won’t drop their devices without them.
By JOHN A. CORLETT, NewsDay,  July 24, 2013

John A. Corlett is legislative committee chair of AAA New York State, based in Garden City.