A TrumpWorld Cabinet of Curiosities

 

Pictures often are worth a thousand words--take a look at the picture above of Elon Musk, standing, not seated at the table, while Donald Trump is not even at the head of the table, but slumped, unnoticed by anyone, apparently drifting off to sleep. Just a podgy senior citizen with his hands in his lap, while everyone is listening to the real boss, who has not even bothered to put on a suit for the occasion but is dressed, as he generally is, like some close approximation an adolescent might make at adult clothing. He threw on a big-boy jacket over his play-clothes. 

It's not exactly The Last Supper, but what if I told you one of these folks assembled would betray Trump and every last one of them had eaten of his body and blood? 

We are getting on to a political Carnival. Lent for you, and Fat Tuesday for rich motherfuckers forever, so I felt like sprinkling a little Catholic consciousness over the above tableau. Also, I am very, very mean. 

I thought to myself when I perused Twitter's commentariat regarding the first cabinet meeting that what we were looking at was a Dunning-Kruger Group Therapy session where no one realized what their problem was and no one was getting any better. 

Gaetz Pulls Out

 

Having viewed at least some portion of the iceberg of dirt set to crash his Titanic nomination for AG, Matt Gaetz has graciously stepped aside for someone else who might slip past senatorial review. 

I'm kind of joking. When I say "graciously stepped aside", I guess I'm still wondering at the hubris that let Matt Gaetz keep his name in knowing of his ethics investigation and probably being well aware of whether he paid for sex with a minor once or a few times or whatever--or whether he was always ass deep in hookers and blow. 

Before we get on to the quandary of Pam Bondi, the recipient of Trump money to forget about any prosecution against Trump University, which defrauded down on their luck folks of all sorts who thought lessons from real estate stable genius Trump would change their fortunes, not leave them even more immersed in debt, as the new Gaetz--let's think about the old one:

The Deaths We Could Have Prevented

 

Vice President Harris: We now know that women have died because of Trump Abortion Bans. That includes a healthy 28-year-old woman in Georgia. Her name was Amber Nicole Thurman. She died of sepsis, and experts have determined that her death was preventable pic.twitter.com/loBJDsbY9Z

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 20, 2024

I have seen on social media how angry some "pro-lifers" are at the idea that abortion care saves lives. You can't EVER terminate a pregnancy--it's MURDER!  These stories that humanize and normalize the procedure that can save women's lives appalls them, because they can't accept that the God they profess to love and believe in would make babies ("before you were in the womb I knew you") with gross congenital defects, tumors, or other difficulties "incompatible with life".

Something else other than the lack of abortion care "must have" killed these women. They took abortion drugs. They were sin-minded. This had to be their own fault. 

It wasn't. 

The Weird Problem

 

Some conservatives are pushing back on claims that JD Vance and Donald Trump and maybe a lot of other Republicans are "weird"--but I'm sorry, it is what it is. I get that Republicans have put a lot of stock in saying they represent "Real America (TM)" and the cosmopolitan Big City Lefty Liberal Arugula-Eaters with Their Fancy Brown Mustard and Priuses and pronouns are oddball hippie Comsymps or whatever, But right off the bat, deciding lettuce, Grey Poupon and parts of speech are weird--is weird.

Being really mad at the Olympics because you were told Christianity was being insulted when the opening show had nothing to do with Christianity and demanding others agree with you--is weird.

Smashing coffee makers or shooting cases of Bud Lite because a talk show host told you to be mad is weird. 

Pretending to be a party of small government but wanting to track women's menses, stop them from travelling, or wanting to take inventory of people's pee parts before they can use a public restroom, is weird.

Wanting women to carry dead fetuses is weird, and ghoulish. 

Climate Sunday: Fire, Water, and the Sacred Things

 

Saudi Health Minister Fahd bin Abdurrahman Al-Jalajel said that 83% of the 1,301 fatalities were unauthorized pilgrims who walked long distances in soaring temperatures to perform the Hajj rituals in and around the holy city of Mecca.https://t.co/ULoOMijRBI

— KATU News (@KATUNews) June 23, 2024

The Saudi Health minister can go ahead and blame the faithful for being "unauthorized" to come to do the Hajj, but this denial is hiding a very terrible story--the Hajj is becoming unsustainable. The pilgrimage to the site of the two holy places is too hot in the summer months for many people--the aged, the disabled. The faith of the pilgrims is great--the human ability to withstand the temperatures that are becoming more common is limited.

We've seen climate activists target several works of art, but most recently, the painting of Stonehenge got our attention:

This act disturbs ancient lichens that have protected the stones for one thing (ignore JK Rowling--she actually is Dolores Umbridge which is just the worst thing, and even worse, she is and probably knows it).  It's a weird act of vandalism that detracts from the message that we need to protect the things we love, for another. Also, just as a person with some ancestral connection to Blighty, there's some folk shit you need to leave alone. You fuck about with ancients liths and you are bound to get spirited off and knackered by rogue Morris dancers the next time you're exiting last call at the pub. 

Cops Killed Jesus

 

In addition to Easter Sunday it is also the 125th Anniversary of Paul Robeson's birth. So in honor of the man who once said, “Artists are the gatekeepers of truth," here's a message from an Asheville, NC graffiti artist. pic.twitter.com/A8YMxYYbyX

— Daryle Lamont Jenkins (@DLamontJenkins) April 9, 2023

I've been saying for some time that the things no Christian should be about are blasphemy laws and the death penalty. The trumped-up charge against Jesus of Nazareth was that he played at being king of the Jews, which was an office that could only be bestowed by Rome. He claimed a moral right to the children of Israel that he politically could not claim. But he wasn't saying he was the King of the Jews, only his presence as a preacher against the princes of this world existed as a problem for them. 

His sentence was death, and before his death was carried out, he suffered police brutality in the form of a crown of thorns. In custody, he was mocked and stripped naked. His judge, Pilate, didn't seem to think he was guilty, but "washed his hands and sealed his fate". Because someone had to be made an example of. 

Call me, the atheist, a Holy Saturday Christian, because I see the Christ in the downtrodden and persecuted, in the wronged and derailed, in the fucked up and failed people around me. I don't know that the fallen rise, but I want to believe we can all get lifted by understanding one another and helping ourselves up from failure bit by bit. I have no proof for my faith, I just think it would be great. 

Interrupting the Solemnities

 

Democratic gubernatorial challenger Beto O'Rourke interrupted the assembled unified Republicans at their press conference whilst they were performing part of their sacred office--moving from the ritual saying of thoughts and prayers that sanctified the slaughter of the innocents, to the Ceremonial Blaming of Other Things. 

By pronouncing the feared "assigning of blame to Republicans about anything, ever", there was a narrow danger that attention might be directed at the people in the room who literally do less than nothing every single time this horrific nightmare happens. O'Rourke was expelled for the grave sin of politicizing the solemn event, because you know, people who politicize human misery are the wooooorrrrst. The danger past, the Republicans went on to assign blame to various things, like mental illness and doors, as others suggested rap music, fatherlessness, and lack of prayer in the schools. 

This is how Republicans demonstrate that they are so very serious about gun violence, in addition to mentioning Chicago. They will probably all go to a nice NRA event in a couple of days and their jowls will cease to quiver with rage about the heathen who violated their safe space with the threat of accountability and reality-facing. 

One People and One True Church?

 

So, bear with me, because Mike Flynn has spared you from my explaining why Mark Thiessen,* who employs Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to mean something along the lines of "music critics hate music" and fumbles around his actual Golden Rule refinements to create a general code of ethics (a categorical imperative) to imply that one of the most influential philosophers of the 18th century actually meant objective reality is bullshit so just make shit up as you go along to satisfy your needs--which might describe how Thiessen became a torture apologist, but doesn't really sort out how people experiencing actual privations came to identify the source of their privations and, by means of historical review, call them out. 

But I can switch off from the obvious bad faith train of somehow MSM-published and wildly intellectually bankrupt Thiessen, the Ed Gein of anti-intellectual elites: he dresses up in the skin of intellectualism to mock it. After all, we have people willing to actually burn heresies in the form of books--a bonfire of the vanities, if you will. Why use words at all, if fire will do? Look at the willingness of so-called conservatives to burn books. This is not just because of the backlash at education because of anti-CRT astroturfing, but also because they are concerned with children being exposed to LGBT characters and history. But it has been said that where people would burn books, they would burn people. 

So what does this have to do with Mike Flynn? Mike Flynn, recently suggested that the US should exist under one God. Presumably the Christian God. What does that even mean for non-Christians in MAGAland? Mike Flynn wants Christian soldiers for his version of the future of America. Which is an America in which the 1stAmendment means nothing and military law is always around the corner. 

What I Cannot Swallow

 

The US Catholic Bishops would like Joseph Robinette Biden, President of the United States and observant Catholic, to be barred from the sacrament of communion because he holds, as a matter of conscience, that other people should also follow the dictates of their conscience with regard to the medical termination of pregnancy.

I am unbaptized and non-believing, so I can't speak for the practice of communion as a Christian, but I studied the odd bit of theology. Sharing in the body of Christ is a reminder that God so loved us, he became flesh, and we are closer to him through that gift. In the Bible, Christ asks us to recognize that we share oneness in the body--what you do to anyone, imagine you do to Him. The leaders of the Church in America are denying a member of their body communion with that body. They are cutting him off because he cares what happens to female-bodied people trying to access reproductive health care.

I'm not a person of faith, but I've been female-bodied my whole life, and my sex is one of the reasons why I've always felt the Church had nothing for me. Where was the culture of life for the children of the Magdalene laundries, or for the women themselves? Where was the culture of life for indigenous children in the United States, Canada or Australia? Where was the culture of life when children were and are sexually assaulted by church leaders? Whre was the culture of life when women stayed married to husbands without benefit of divorce, being abused and giving birth to child after child? If they never cared to deny the sacrament to warmongerers, or torturers, or supporters of the death penalty, why pick on Grandpa Joe Biden, who just thinks maybe people can choose whether they should have kids right now, and understands that these things are complicated? Because of any number of things, tragic and not. 

I don't know how significant it is to receive communion in the form of a religious ritual, because to me, communion is when you empathize with other human beings you meet along the way--and believe me, Biden does this. He is a gregarious, people-oriented person who can't not feel for others. I think the Church is actually diminished when it stoops to this kind of low political pettiness. I would greatly prefer it leave Biden's conscience alone, and consider the Church's own.

Matt Schlapp Misses the Point

I'm screen-capping the Twitter post for this one on the off-chance that Schlapp will understand where he went wrong here, but the picture of his post above reads: "Statues of Jesus are next. It won't end. Pray for the USA." This is apparently in response to the recent protests having resulted in the toppling and removal of statues honoring Confederate figures, slaveowners, and other figures that honor persons or events representing racism and colonialism.  It's three short sentences, but it packs in a lot of how conservatives can get the thrust of what's happening quite wrong.

The roots of abolition, both of slavery and of the injustice system, are long, and intricately tied with religion, with people who passionately believed that "whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me." I don't know if Schlapp's education somehow missed that the Great Awakening in the US encouraged abolitionism, and that evangelicals, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics and Quakers were moved to speak against slavery, just as many of their descendants today speak out about social justice.  After all:

a man who preached about loving one's neighbor as oneself, was apprehended for his activism, scourged, and then hung from a wooden beam by the state authorities, is not the image of the transgressor. Jesus of Nazareth was railroaded. Jesus of Nazareth was abused by Rome's cops. Jesus died because Pilate washed his hands of the whole thing when, maybe, he could have stood up to a multitude wanting to do evil. 

But the point is, the mob Schlapp is concerned about isn't the "godless (probably Commies)" he seems to think they are. Sure, there's a weird current of thought amongst the far right, your Birchers and them, that the civil rights movement is dictated from the Kremlin and that Black people don't have the agency to be quite deservedly pissed at the treatment they have experienced. The civil rights movement of the 20th century was anything but godless. But the idea that there's a slippery slope from "Fuck General Lee" to "Fuck Jesus Christ and the ass and her foal he rode in on" is without any reason. For what it's worth, if you think an actual feeling human being needs, for example, to be paid by Soros or whoever, to be stricken with horror at the idea of a human being, lying on the ground and without defense, with the very breath he needs to live denied him by a knee--a knee! of a person wearing the uniform of a civil servant for nine damn minutes, then fuck you and your civilly anesthetized ass. 

But for another thing, if I had it in my heart to pray, and held the philosopher from Galilee in my mind, I'd pray we answer the fucking question: are all men and women created equal here, or what? Wasn't that what our US of A Founding Fathers were trying to say, even if they weren't about to really put their slave-holding money where their mouths were when they wrote the Declaration of Independence?  Do we value the life of a Breonna Taylor, of George Floyd, of Tamir Rice, of Walter Scott, of Sean Bell, of Sandra Bland, of Tony McDade, of Ahmaud Arbery, and so on, more than we do the fictions that let us keep thinking this country was built with clean hands?  And doesn't letting it go on leave us all in the position of Pilate--washing our hands of what we could have done, but had not the will to do? 

I'm not a Christian, but if Schlapp believes that statues of Jesus would topple, who does he think that image is for? Because I know very well who the statues of Confederate generals are for, and I don't care if they fall one little bit. 

Jesus should be safe in this movement. Schlapp's preconceptions are not. And is that not a reason to pray and tremble? (Nah, I think he'll stick with his mouthful of pitch that defiles. He is accustomed to the taste.)

The Words of the Prophets

It's interesting to watch something like this:

"We come against the animal kingdom. ... (&) against any strange wind...that comes against our president."

"We command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now. We pray that anything conceived in Satanic wombs will miscarry."
—Trump White House Spiritual Adviser Paula White pic.twitter.com/R6yHy4xfaV

— Ashton Pittman (@ashtonpittman) January 26, 2020

and see a lot of folks on Twitter wonder "Is this a pro-life attitude?" I can't say it's necessarily pro-life, but it is Biblical. It mirrors Hosea, who prophesized about the times ahead for those who went against the chosen of god:

14 Give them, LORD— what will you give them? Give them wombs that miscarry and breasts that are dry.

In context it can be taken a couple of ways, literally, that the entire people be cut off root and branch and flourish no more, ceasing to exist, or figuratively, that no thing they attempt will come to any good and history will forget them. (In Jeremiah, God is not so harsh:

Is Ephraim my dear son?
Is he my darling child?
For as often as I speak against him,
I do remember him still.
Therefore my heart yearns for him;
I will surely have mercy on him,
declares the Lord. )

Anyway. this kind of language fits in with some of the cultish trappings that surround Trump's presidency. In the recent drop of an audio recording of Trump at a 2018 dinner in which he apparently speaks with Parnas about Ukraine, natural gas, and firing the ambassador. But a really interesting thing stands out:

In a bizarre moment near the end of the dinner, Parnas and Fruman compare Trump to the messiah. Parnas tells him: “It’s like messiah is the person that’s come to save the whole world. So it’s like you’re the savior of (inaudible).”

The two present to him a gift that they say shows how Trump’s name adds up to the same numbers as the Jewish messiah, a reference to the Jewish mystical practice of Gematria. In Gematria, every Hebrew letter is assigned a numerical value, and the sums of those values are then compared to numerical values of other words or phrases to identify hidden meanings or connections.

“The messiah comes out to 424. Your name, your name, it adds up to his name. So it’s 424, 424,” Parnas says.

Fruman adds: “So all Jew people of Ukraine, they are praying for you.” Another unidentified voice tells Trump to “talk to Jared, he’ll explain it to you” — a reference to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is an observant Jew.

This is something I don't know a great deal about, but it is not something Fruman and Parnas are making up--gematria has been used to suggest Trump will bring about the Messiah. (I worry myself that he is likely to immanentize the eschaton.) It had been noted that he has called himself the Chosen one and some around him also speak that way.

Personally, I think this religious-based flattery of Trump is mostly just that--flattery. But in the mind of someone who is a bit of an egomaniac already? Or spread out among people who think Q is a real thing? It's not quaint or ironic, but a bit disturbing.

The Talisman of the American Religion

As seen with Rep. Dan Crenshaw's interesting take on loaning firearms out to a friend in need, whenever the subject turns to gun control in the US, we have some pretty strange turns of conversation that reveal a lot about how people view guns not as a tool for home defense, but as a cultural artifact. Maybe it's the "Wild West" mythos that informs notions of how America grew into the big bad country we are today, or maybe in part it's the "Dirty Harry"/"Death Wish" movies of the 1970's and 80's that glorified armed vigilantism against violent crime, but this country's attitude about guns is effectively talismanic: the gun takes on a kind of power in the mind beyond what it does to the human body when it fires projectiles into it. It's a thing of value not for what it does, but what it represents. (Freedom, power, protection, and control.)

I can't say I've read a lot of literature about this, but the connection between guns and God in this country, anyway, seems pretty-well established--"Thou shalt not grab our guns" has become one of the Ten Commandments. The idea of a "God-given right" to owning any material thing, like a gun, doesn't exactly make a lot of sense to me, first of all, because I'm not going to presuppose there even is a deity, but second--a gun? A right to self-defense seems perfectly clear--you were born with a life, a body, it's yours, protect it! But guns are made by humans, we aren't born with them. They don't grow on trees. Do we assume one has a right to a heroin needle or a Lamborghini or a full-length mink? Everything is conditional. Most gun control people aren't even looking to stop all people from having all guns; just some people (people who are liable to do violent things for reasons other than self-defense) or for certain guns (high-volume round rifles that can kill masses of humanity faster than your hypothetical "good guy with a gun" can even get it out of his shoulder holster). But the gun itself is not to blame, says the religion of the gun, but the fallen nature of humanity. Or mental illness, Satan, video games. Just don't blame the poor innocent tool.

The guns are good. It's the people that are wrong.

Batshit is an Accelerant

Notre Dame's famous rose windows survived fire: report https://t.co/QDw7pC4CQP pic.twitter.com/E910ldv7m6

— The Hill (@thehill) April 17, 2019

When I consider the great tragedy of the fire that threatened to consume the Notre Dame Cathedral, I will hold on to the amazing effort of so many people, the fire department, the clerical and historical personnel, that tried to ensure that whatever existed of cultural and historical and artistic importance that could be preserved, was. That the rose windows survived, the optical brilliance that they are, the technological and artistic genius of a bygone era that they represent, still survive, is, to me, a great comfort. Glass, after all, is notoriously fragile. But this glass was made to endure. As many things of great beauty and cultural significance have been and do, despite heat and pressure and the accidents and incidents of mankind's interference. The rose windows created a part of the sacred atmosphere within the cathedral by diffracting light in a way different than we normally see--in a human-engineered way, that seems touched by whatever we might mean when we think of the divine.

I have a great reticence for taking the potential destruction of any work of human hands as symbolic of anything--are we so stolid and numb to our fate to fail to know that even the works of our hands are subject to decay and disaster? It should not be possible. The bashed noses of the Sphinx and other ancient representations of faces should tell us that much. There is no homeland skyline that will not be altered in someone's lifetime. In one of our great US cities, we have seen a skyline greatly altered, ourselves, via a travesty of political demonstration and a tragedy of human action.

And here is were the greatness subsides to the banal and even stupid--where one might even ask how anything so old might burst into flames?

I don’t understand how a fire of this magnitude could happen accidentally

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) April 15, 2019

The question might well be how it was not destroyed prior to now, wood being very flammable and growing more dry and brittle over the years. The structure was a mess and in the midst of a renovation--perhaps too late. But now a more radical correction can be made.

Certainly, some people never being off of their bullshit, will openly suppose it had to be the result of an act of arson and terrorism. The irresponsibility of this is incalculable as fingers of blame can point any and everywhere, but certainly at non-Christians.


The imbeciles of the right wing somehow made the supportive comment of Rep. Ilhan Omar the subject of a more than two-minutes' hate. I will not point out those commentaries except to note that all buildings are art and architecture, even those occupying a sacred space. Taking any words said by anyone anywhere, and holding them to an impossible standard of saying exactly what your own brain wants them to say, is more chillingly PC than any liberal would ever expect for any speaker, ever. Congrats for out jack-boot-thugging us libs again--the fanciest way to own us is always by being worse, so, you go, guys!

Anyhow, Fox News proceeded from the idea that Paris deserved this tragedy, even if no actually good network would've. And several sites spread bad information.

The fire at Notre Dame is now out, but the rumor and lies regarding what happened can be an accelerant to further tragedy. This kind of thing would be a greater folly and a worse catastrophe. There is no good reason that batshit should reignite such a destructive fire.

CNN is Making a Mistake, I Think

CNN cuts ties with Reza Aslan over anti-Trump tweet: https://t.co/Ob7M7lKWhw pic.twitter.com/8u9omQqdsh

— Slate (@Slate) June 10, 2017

I like Reza Aslan. He is a good writer and scholar. I enjoyed his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth and think he contributes a lot to the discussion of how faith/belief intersects with politics. I like him as he is understood on the label--as an opinion correspondent. I do not expect Reza Aslan to be necessarily unbiased.  No person of education can be entirely unbiased. A life of the intellect means opinions have been formed.

The glib and not-informed opinions of American POTUS Donald Trump provoked a profane response from Aslan. I think I understand why it did. Trump responds to terror by reaching back to othering and discriminating against people who are Muslim or from Muslim-majority nations.  Aslan is Iranian-American, and exactly the kind of person Trump's "travel ban" type of bullshit, would discriminate against. He understands, as an American, how what Trump is doing by dividing people against Muslims, is dangerous and damages our discourse by cutting Islam-practitioners out and Arab and Persian ethnicities out. It is divisive by nature and design. What Trump has promoted is profane from his POV (and from mine, actually, as a very blue-eyed and Christian-cultural US-aian).  He shared a berth on CNN with Corey Lewandowski, who assaulted a reporter and somehow was nevertheless hired by a news channel, and Jeffrey Lord (who I have no respect for as an intellect of any kind) and Jack Kingston and Jason Miller and Rick Santorum and Scottie Nell Hughes and...

Really? I don't think I understand CNN's standards. Unless their rule is, hire two conservative jerkwagons for every liberal-leaning or intellectual correspondent you manage to fire. And never vet for quality opinions, just pretend balance.

I don't have cable and get all my news from memes and Twitter links and streaming. Aslan does useful informative good work. Trump is not a literal piece of shit, but is figuratively not a turkey dinner with all the fixin's either. Christ--is a little perspective that difficult? Why must CNN be pulling this PC card all of a sudden?

The Role of the Press

I guess it's been pretty well documented that the package of KellyAnne Conway and Steve Bannon added to the Trump campaign at it's quasi-ebb was probably a gift from the Mercers. This is why it isn't any real surprise to find them on the same page about something like what the media ought to do--like shut their word holes! KellyAnne Conway put this a little bit more diplomatically, by just suggesting that the journos who were "wrong" about Trump (by probably just reporting things that actually happened that were negative, because OMG, yeah) should be fired. As in, said things that were negative but pretty accurate about Trump. Right. Steve Bannon has referenced the media as the "opposition party". So does Trump--it seems a little paranoid, maybe?

This kind of denial that Trump does anything wrong ever and that people can't actually see what he's doing because of the smokescreen is quaint, but I need to direct your attention to this funny bit of WH propo:

One senior administration official explained the ground rules to reporters gathered at the White House and listening on a conference call, then said: “With that, I'll turn it over to a senior administration official.”

“Thank you,” the other senior administration official said before beginning a 45-minute defense.

Their overarching message: Everything is going exactly according to plan, nothing has changed since the order was signed, and the news media need to calm down their “false, misleading, inaccurate, hyperventilating” coverage of the “fractional, marginal, minuscule percentage” of international travelers who have been simply “set aside for further questioning” for a couple hours on their way into the greatest country in the world.

Hi, I'm a grown adult with a history of reading newspapers and voting--are the massive protests and ACLU suits and all that really that dismissible if we were to presuppose a USA that still had Constitutional rights? Because in my world, it looks to me like Donald Trump took an oath of office to the Constitution with no faith in it at all. Are WH staffers really supposed to just take an open crap on the First Amendment like that?

Press Secretary Sean Spicer was heard not that long ago vowing that the press would be "held accountable" for what they do.  It's the other way about--the job of the press is to hold elected officials accountable to the public they supposedly are here to serve. So they can't just pretend all is well. The many protests at airports all over are not normal and are not just some kind of liberal flash mob.  This is about who we are as a nation, and the so-called SJW's, the lawyers and civil liberties types, the bleeding heart pink hats and multiculturalists and immigrant-lovers--

Are America, too. Yeah, this is the crowd that didn't vote for Trump. But hey, he lost the popular vote, didn't he? Maybe listen to the immigrants, and the vets , and the descendants of immigrants, and the people who have done contract or missionary work in those arbitrary seven countries. Try to listen to the narratives that bubble up from the media, who are just trying to tell the story of the day.

Silence is violence, Conway, Spicer, and Bannon. People need to know what is being done in their name. When Iraqi interpreters and their families are detained and submitted to questions they should not be asked about their allegiance, when little kids and disabled elderly Muslims are held for hours at a time, when they could be of no threat to anyone--how is this going well?

This is not well, or normal at all, and if no president ever was faced with so many well-attended protests so early in his term of office, let it be admitted into the record that Trump earned his disapprobation via the hard work of the bigoted villains he let run his shop.

If We Have Forgotten

If there was a thing I thought growing up, it was that the US was great. The great melting pot. The leader of the free world.  A nation of laws, not men. A free country. One nation, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all. And I continued to believe it as an adult, for old time's sake, even when the sins of a nation were uncovered through greater study--mostly good. Aspiring to be great. Freer than most.

Our unique position, historically, has been called "American Exceptionalism". The American cradle story we ought to know is that our country exists on paper--it is not any particular religion or ethnicity that informs our uniqueness,  but the documents that inform our law and our values. We have made sacred texts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution because they represent the formation of the American viewpoint. The expansion of the US meant that over time, our borders changed, and the influx of immigrants over the years meant our ethnic and religious composition also changed, but what was not called into doubt was that we made Americans of our immigrants and they became ours. This happened imperfectly. But it's been going on for years.

Later on, American Exceptionalism meant something about our strength as a nation and our military power--post-WW2 and through the Cold War and beyond. This in part can be viewed as a product of the denouement of WW2--the fall of the Nazis and the liberation of the camps, and the shock and awe of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Divorced from the aspirational view of an arc of history bending towards justice, there was always the more pessimistic view of our collective trajectory--voiced by H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, that fascism could happen here--and I, steeped in liberal altruism, concurred.  It could happen here, wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross. Popular sentiment, that accepted slavery, segregation, know-nothings, bigotry against Catholics and Jews, Jim Crow, lynching, and so on, would betray our American ideals, because we aren't just aspirational about our exceptionalism, but are also always fucking it up.

Peace to the Greatest of All Time

BREAKING: Boxing legend Muhammad Ali, 'the greatest of all time,' has died at 74https://t.co/tA6SGOWREz pic.twitter.com/wrHYu3wnOn

— NBC News (@NBCNews) June 4, 2016

Muhammed Ali was not just the greatest in the ring, a man of poetic footwork and sizzling athleticism, but a man of introspection and faith, whose greatest legacy may well be that tribute to what one person can with discipline and insight make of him or herself. He was boxing's poet and bard. He was a forthright commenter on race and faith. He was a powerful symbol of resistance against the Vietnam War. He was a beautiful person and well-respected and beloved.

He will be missed.

Climate Sunday: Ted Cruz, Climate Blasphemer Edition

Via Right Wing Watch, here's a clip of Ted Cruz (I'm sorry I'm on his case as of late) explaining that climate change alarmists are actually in a religion because they "never" argue from facts, and that being called a denialist proves it, because he thinks he's really a "skeptic". Bless his heart.

He's precious. I think it's kind of weird to hear a flat-out statement that people persuaded by climate change theory don't have facts, because it seems to me like I'm stuffing all sorts of observable data into my Climate Sunday posts. I think it's also adorable that he defines the business of a skeptic as being the business of science, which in effect is correct--but he isn't a skeptic, because he himself isn't engaging with the business of disproving squat, he's just ignoring whatever evidence does exist while providing disproved anecdata about an 18 year gap which is cherry-picked nonsense. That there isn't scientific--that's just political Lysenkoism.

In keeping with his idea that being a climate change evangelist makes me a religious adherent, then, I dub Cruz a climate blasphemer. The spit should dry up in his mouth like the Texas drought, and then the sweat should pour from his face like the Texas floods. This is my malocchio against him.

Happy Aleister Crowley Day!

As Christopher Columbus is generally determined to be a genocidal colonialist prat, I've reserved October 12 to commemorate the birthday of Aleister Crowley, who was a poet and Satanist who probably wasn't as much of a genocidal colonialist prat but is no less absurd a person to ascribe a day to, being a European who stumbled onto various territories of spiritual space already previously discovered by other people, who then went on to profit from them, except he didn't, because he spent the money on heroin, because no magician is perfect, am I right? But his face got on the Sgt. Pepper album of the Beatles, and the Scientology of Hubbard and the witchcraft of Gardner would probably alike be poorer if not nonexistent without his enquiry.

Which isn't to call him a prophet or anything. Only he "Columbused" so many pagan/syncretic faiths and practices that you can't hardly have an alternative pagan faitheism without at least a shout out to the guy who yoinked out so much esoterica that any regular Joe or Josephine could be a lifetime trying to figure out what he was about.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love, and do what thou wilt. (Yeah--he basically tried to bogart the Golden Rule like he owned it. Basic.)

So I am going to go eat a small child and probably have some still wines unto the Beast, or something like that. You also, go have yourself a good time. He would have wanted it that way, I think. Bloody hard to tell.

Climate Sunday: Am I the World's Keeper?

In Genesis, the brother-slayer Cain replies to God when asked where his brother is: "Am I my brother's keeper?" It's a very sarcastic and defensive question. He is trying to deflect from his culpability in slaying his brother, to ask whether he was ever responsible for making sure his brother was safe to begin with. When reading the scriptures entire, an answer to this murky question of filial responsibility emerges--"Yes, stunato, you are your brother's keeper! Not only are you not to murder him, but you should see to his thirst and hunger. You should love him as you love yourself. "

The encyclical of Pope Francis with respect to the creation goes a sensible degree further--"Yes, you are also the World's Keeper." And why wouldn't you be? You and your brother live here, and nowhere else.

The response to this simple moral entreaty to not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs or to try and make the wheat grow by pulling it up by its stalks, has been greeted by some fairly thick people by labeling the Pope a Leftist if not a Communist. Why, they fret, is the Pope trying to hurt the economy? Why is he decrying greed--isn't greed good? Shouldn't people make money off of the earth? Doesn't financial success speak for itself?