The film centers on the story of David, a straight-A student from Colorado who was sent to Escuela Caribe in May of 2006 after coming out to his parents as gay. Like many others, David was taken in the night without warning by a “transport service” and was never told where he was going or when he would be brought back home. While at Escuela Caribe, David had no way of communicating with any of his friends or family back home until the filmmakers arrived and he decided to ask them if they would smuggle out a letter that he had secretly written to his best friend. Once word got back to David’s community about what had happened to him, many people sprung to action and formed a plan to get him released. Getting David out of this school, however, turned out to be a much more difficult task than anyone had thought, and the trials they went through to get David released revealed just how far Escuela Caribe would go to prevent a student from leaving.

Here’s the trailer:

Via Joe.My.God. If you’re interested in the larger issue, visit the NHYM Alumni page:

We are a group of former students who have reconnected through the Internet and wish to publicize our experiences with New Horizons Youth Ministries. We range in age from our teens to our 40s, and attended “The Program” between 1970 to 2005. New Horizons purports to help adolescents through “Christian milieu therapy” but in fact does more harm than good. Most of our complaints center on Escuela Caribe, the boot camp located in the Dominican Republic, where we witnessed and experienced physical and emotional abuse and had our communications to and from our families censored to keep us from divulging the truth. We are now free to do so, and hope to dissuade more parents from subjecting their children to the trauma we lived.

Pat Robertson and co-host Kristi Watts discuss the atheists, who don’t believe in anything. Watts goes on on a tangent, talking about how Wiccans are “all about the environment,” and that “trees are their God.” [wtf?] She then asks why atheists aren’t saying that we should cut down every tree.

“Just a thought,” she says. I’m afraid that I don’t see any evidence of thinking there, so I’m going to have to disagree.

Anyway, the ever reliable Jason Pitzl-Waters responds:

Atheists aren’t gunning to chop down all the trees us Pagan tree-huggers hug because they predominantly believe in environmental and climate science, and know that cutting down “every tree” would destroy our ecosystem, and life on earth itself (sadly, ski resort Jesus statues don’t absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen).

But maybe Watts has a point. Maybe it’s time to rethink my career path …

(Maybe this is funnier to me, because my wife was an agnostic and a lumberjill when I met her.)

There have been a lot of reaction to this. Some of the better ones I’ve found:

Rev. Wil Gaffney picks apart some of the claims made by Messer.

13. The notion that there is such a thing as a “king chromosome” is a fiction, as is the claim that it is kohenic, that is priestly; the Israelite and Judean monarchs — there were queens as well — were not priests.
14. The man’s articulation of what “God wants,” is to say the least unsubstantiated outside that particular setting.
15. The man never says how he knows that none of Long’s ancestors or relatives has ever seen a Torah scroll.
16. While there are some traditional reflections on the human body — including DNA and chromosomes — in the mystical Kabbalistic tradition, the speaker is crafting a verbal montage without reference to the classical texts or their theologies.

Anthea Butler at Religion Dispatches has been watching Long for awhile:

I wish I could say I was surprised by Long’s latest antics, but I’m not. Actually, I am surprised he stayed away from the church this long. After declaring in December that he was taking a hiatus to work on the problems in his marriage, Long has returned with a new lacefront and a defiant attitude. Having a fake rabbi declare him “King” of a fading, dying mega-church is a joke, but what is not are the deluded New Birth Members cheering him on.

Clearly they have drunk the “Kool Aid” and I don’t use that term lightly. I’ve believed since my trip to New Birth back in 2010, when Long promised to fight his civil case, that New Birth was a cult-like organization. Long’s hold over his congregation reminds me of Jim Jones. That may sound harsh, but Jim Jones slept with his members too, before leading the People’s Temple into the jungles of Guyana.

Messer is sometimes called a Messianic Rabbi, but he’s part of the “Hebrew Roots” movement, which other Messianic Rabbi do not accept. Apparently, this is all just part of Messer’s shtick. From Bartholomew’s Notes:

This is not the first time Messer and his scroll have come to the rescue of a beleaguered evangelist; in 2007 Tampa Bay Online reported from Randy White’s Without Walls International Church, following White’s split from church co-founder Paula White:

[Randy] White preached for a few minutes before turning over the pulpit to Ralph Messer, a Messianic rabbi from Denver who teaches about the Hebrew roots of the Christian faith.
Messer preached about the Torah and Jewish entrepreneurship and spoke again at the 11 a.m. service, where he led the congregation in a prayer that ended emotionally for White.

The Torah that Messer presented is apparently linked to Rabbi Menachem Youlus. According to the Grey Lady, Youlus has recently confessed to fraud:

For years Rabbi Menachem Youlus, a self-described “Jewish Indiana Jones,” received plaudits from those captivated by his stories of traveling to Eastern Europe and beyond to search for historic Torahs that were lost or hidden during the Holocaust.

But on Thursday, Rabbi Youlus stood inside the federal courthouse in Manhattan and confessed that he had made up those tales of daring.

“Between 2004 and 2010, I falsely represented that I had personally obtained vintage Torah scrolls — in particular ways, in particular locations — in Europe and Israel,” he told Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court. “I know what I did was wrong, and I deeply regret my conduct.”

Here’s a swarm of quad-rotor robots hovering in formation. They’re a creation of the GRASP labs at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kind of cool. Before you get too impressed, check out the blooper reel at io9 and see all the ways the little four-rotor guys can screw up.

Sure, they’re cute, but what can the little guys do? Here’s an exhibit titled “Flight Assembled Architecture,” created at the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France. Several quad-copters are used to pick up polystyrene foam blocks and drop them into place, eventually creating a 6m tower. This is the work of Swiss architect Gramazio & Kohler and Italian robot designer Raffaello D’Andrea.

There’s more about this sort of Flying Machine Enabled Construction at the website of the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control.

These little rotor robots are not the only kind of flying bot out there. Markus Fischer and his team at Festo, a German tech company, have created “SmartBird,” a robot that flies in the same manner as a bird. Here he is displaying their creation at the TED Talks:

Finally, the good folks at Neural Robotics, Inc have produced this RC gunship. For all I know, Neural Robotics is a respected company with a sterling reputation. However, it looks like two good ‘ol boys got together and said, “Hey, let’s build us a big RC chopper and strap a shotgun to it!”

Evangelicals rapping = bad thing

Evangelicals with puppets = bad thing

Now for the test: Rapping evangelical puppets = ?

Via Scott Bailey

As we approach the next election, the examples are worse. Chuck Norris? Seriously? Seriously seriously?

But somehow the worst is Victoria Jackson. She’s just so … baffling. She’s playing a ditzy blonde character while ranting about Tea Party talking points. Is she joking? Is she serious?

Julia Sweeny, who has apparently been a target of Jackson’s, believes that she’s serious. Or to put it another way, “She’s not Andy Kaufman,” so she’s not yanking the audiences’ chain. She wants the laughs she gets from her “dumb blond” character, but also believes the opinions that character is spouting.

Sweeny considers how counterproductive Jackson’s style is:

To me it would be like, like if there was a “comedian” who’s character was a Marxist-Leninist. He wears a beard and small round glasses and all black and he says things like: The Government should own all the land! People should not be allowed to own any money! Free Enterprise should be stopped!

And then he has a soap box that he carries around with him, and he puts it out there – and it even says “Soap Box” on it, and he gets on top of it and yells and gesticulates like a cartoon of communism.

And he’s on talk shows and everyone laughs at how nutty he is.

Only he really believes what he’s saying. He may be somewhat confused about why people are laughing. But he doesn’t care enough to analyze it, he really just wants the laughs. He hears the laughs, and he’ll happily take the laughs.

Now, wouldn’t you have a certain contempt for this person?

That makes Jackson sound like she’s desperate for the attention, not matter what kind of attention. But in playing both self-mocking comedian and pundit at once, she’s doing more damage to her side than anything else. Which, of course, means that I hope she keeps it up.