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God sure works in mysterious ways

Monday, January 29, 2024

Here in the New London area lots of people are wondering why God chose to demolish a beautiful stone church that has graced downtown New London since the middle of the nineteenth century rather than, say, a den of iniquity somewhere. But, as they say, he works in mysterious ways. The incident in New London is nowhere near as mysterious, though, as God’s decision to fleece some of his worshippers in Colorado.

I first learned about this on the Onion, where it seemed too crazy to be true, but would the New York Times lie? Mislead, sure, but not outright lie:

A pastor in Denver who said that God told him to sell cryptocurrency that could not be cashed is facing civil charges, along with his wife, for marketing a digital coin that prosecutors said was “practically worthless” and using the proceeds to support a “lavish lifestyle.”

The pastor, Eligio Regalado, and his wife, Kaitlyn Regalado, were charged on Thursday in a civil complaint filed in Denver District Court by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, the Colorado Division of Securities said in a statement. The agency said that the couple created, marketed and sold a cryptocurrency that they called INDXcoin through a cryptocurrency exchange, which they also ran.

But you can’t blame the guy for taking the money and running! God told him to, as he explained in a video:

Mr. Regalado said that because of problems with the cryptocurrency exchange, investors could not take their money out.

Mr. Regalado also said in the video that he went into the cryptocurrency business because “the Lord” told him to. He said that God had once come to him a dream and asked him to do so, and he accepted that he and his wife spent the funds in “a home remodel that the Lord told us to do.”

But it turns out that he may have misunderstood what God was telling him, as did the investors who took God’s word:

About nine months ago, Mr. Regalado said, the undertaking “started falling apart,” adding that he didn’t know what he was doing.
“One of two things have happened,” Mr. Regalado said, “One: Either I misheard God and every one of you who prayed and came in, you as well, or two: God is still not done with this project and he’s going to do a new thing.”

So, everyone is at fault for the scam, as his “investors” didn’t quite understand what God was telling them to do. Or, alternatively, God lacks the ability to communicate clearly, which, when you think of it, has been a problem for him, given how often Evangelicals tell us that this or that weather event is God’s way of condemning homosexuals, even when he chooses to inflict the storm on a red state. I mean, who knows, maybe God was sending a message to the church in New London that he didn’t like the way they were feeding those homeless bums instead of collecting money to give to the rich.

But not to worry, the Lord will provide:

Mr. Regalado said that he still hoped that investors could get their money back, and that he believed “God is going to work a miracle in the financial sector.”

By the way, besides the home improvement, he and his wife also pocketed about another million dollars, which I’m sure the Lord has now rendered safe from the prying hands of the law.

Cryptocurrency, in my humble opinion, is pretty much a scam overall, but you have to wonder why anyone would have put their money down in this particular scam. You also have to wonder if there’s a single one of those Regalado fleeced that didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I’m sure they’re all still ripe for picking.

UPDATE: Well, it turns out that God did choose to demolish the church in New London. I had reserved judgment on the “Engaging Heaven” church, which bought the building from the Congregationalists that had owned it previously, since I read that they, at least, fed homeless people, but it turns out that, as you’d expect, they’re a bunch of grifters. The City of New London is footing the bill for the cleanup, because the insurance Engaging Heaven was supposed to have (it was required by their mortgage) doesn’t appear to exist. But have no fear, according to their grifter minister, who claims to work miracles (don’t they all?):

Meanwhile, Engaging Heaven is fundraising, which the church does a lot of, off the disaster.
A slick video with soaring music on a gofundme page from Engaging Heaven suggests the church collapse was God’s work.
“What if he wants to use this collapse to showcase the rebuilding of the church in our day like never before,” the video narrator says.

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Grifters Gotta Grift

Thursday, January 25, 2024

Couldn’t resist passing this along. It truly is the case than on multiple levels the Republican Party is just a massive grift. After all, the business plan is to get Fox-addled minds to cast votes against their best interest so the Republicans can deliver for their real constituency, the selfish rich, by sucking money from those at the bottom and sending it up to the top. So it stands to reason that part of that process will also involve separating the marks from their money:

Turning Point USA’s America Fest, held at the Phoenix Convention Center from Dec. 16 to Dec. 19, was a who’s who of conservative TV and internet personalities, interspersed with a smattering of failed candidates and elected officials: Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, Kari Lake, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, Mike Lindell, ex-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Dr. Ben Carson, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Trump lawyer Alina Habba all graced the stage. But a big chunk of the cash that produced the pre-holiday pow-wow came from two outfits that allegedly swindled the very voters and activists these figures purported to champion.

The event’s sole “Diamond Sponsor”—reflecting the highest level of support—was Fisher Capital, a precious metals dealer that regulators charged in April 2023 with tricking conservative senior citizens into liquidating their retirement accounts and using the cash to buy gold and silver coins at “grossly inflated prices,” with the enterprise falsely warning its victims that the Federal Reserve or Obama-era regulations would soon sever access to their savings. In the rank directly below Fisher Capital was the New Federal State of China, an organization co-founded by Bannon and indicted Chinese financier Guo Wengui.

Just weeks after America Fest wrapped, federal prosecutors identified this group, ostensibly a shadow government seeking to replace the current regime in Beijing, as part of Guo’s alleged criminal conspiracy to deceive his supporters in the Chinese dissident community into investing in a spurious cryptocurrency venture—one which the Justice Department claims in fact funded Guo’s lavish lifestyle.

(From The Daily Beast via Crooks and Liars)

I don’t feel sorry at all for the victims, and I doubt that many of them will learn from the experience.

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New Hampshire speaks

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

…and now everyone can argue about what they said.

I think it’s fair to say that reactions to yesterday’s vote are all over the map, often depending on the spin one wants to put on things. Trump won, though I understand that in terms of delegates to the convention, he came away with a small majority.

Count me among those who are looking on the bright side, at least to a certain extent.

I do think it’s fair to say that there are a lot of Republican voters who want to see the last of Trump. These are people who haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that the Republican Party they inherited from their parents is now the American Nazi Party. They were confronted with a menu of alternate choices none of which were very tasty, but a large percentage of them went for the only choice left after all the others dropped out. I think it’s fair to say that those folks didn’t vote for Haley because they like her, most of them voted for her because they want to see the end of Donald Trump. I think the folks mentioned here are fairly representative of a large chunk of the Republican electorate, at least in the states that have not converted to full on fascism. I think we can expect to see similar results in most of the states that hold primaries. It appears that Trump, who had another of his meltdowns last night actually understands it that way, despite his dementia.

The question is, what will those voters do in November. They can swallow hard and vote for Trump, stay home, or vote for a third party candidate. I’m guessing that it will be a combination of the latter two options, either one of which is good news for Biden, as these are votes that went for Trump the last time around. The chances of such an outcome can only increase when he is convicted of treason. It will be interesting, by the way, to see how the Republican convention plays out as they nominate a man who can be there only because he’s out on bail.

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For Republicans, Trump’s Dementia may be a plus

Saturday, January 20, 2024

It is becoming increasingly clear that the very stable genius may not be stable or a genius, and may in fact be slipping (or should that be “plunging”) into dementia. He recently blamed Nikki Haley for failing to do something about the attackers on January 6th, clearly mixing her up with Nancy Pelosi. This is one of many times that he has made similar slips, so it’s no longer possible for a rational person to make excuses for him, but who ever said Republicans were rational? And of course, lurking in the background is the question of why either Nikki or Nancy should have done anything to stop the people he has consistently labeled patriots and/or hostages, all of whom are deserving of pardons.

Yet, according to many Republicans, it is Joe Biden who suffers from dementia, though he shows no signs of it. This is, it goes almost without saying, just another example of Republicans accusing Democrats of something that applies to them. Despite the undoubted fact of Trump’s dementia, they are all on board with nominating and electing a criminal whose best defense would probably be a claim of diminished mental capacity.

But the Republican establishment may be looking on the bright side. Remember that from Trump’s point of view, being president is all about satisfying his ego. He doesn’t care about policy whatsoever. He has adopted right wing talking points simply because, as an accomplished grifter, he realizes that they are what sell to the easy marks. When he was president, it’s unlikely that he had much to do with the nuts and bolts of running the things the Republican establishment cares about. As a for instance, I’d say it’s fairly clear that he had absolutely nothing to do with his court picks, from the lowliest District Court Judge to the Supreme Court. That was up to the Federalist Society. The same was true on multiple fronts, though there may have been one or two times when he insisted on having something his way that the establishment didn’t like.

But imagine how easy it would be for them if he goes full on into dementia. He will simply do whatever he is told. All they have to do is keep him in the White House and put a pen in his hand once in a while and tell him to sign on the line. He’ll do what he’s told, because that’s how folks with dementia tend to behave. Of course, they’ll throw in some stuff to massage his ego, but he’ll essentially be their puppet, so things will be better for them than they were in his first term.

If I had to bet, I’d say he’ll lose the election even if he’s not yet in jail. But that presupposes that the Republicans can’t find a way to steal it that the Supreme Court will then certify as just fine. They are in complete agreement with his point of view that if you can’t win an election you should steal it, so if they’re successful in enough places we will have him back and be well on our way to a fascist state. He is, after all, not the only fascist in the Republican ranks. He is, in fact, merely the instrument the fascists have embraced to complete their takeover. It is not necessary for him to be cognitively competent for them to achieve that goal.

Addendum: In my last post I put up a notice to the effect that comments were working again. I said you can leave a comment and the site will show that there is a comment on the post. However, the comments don’t appear under the post. You have to click the link in the footer below the post that says you can read the comments at the “RSS feed”. It worked for me when I did a test comment, but I’m informed by a reader that he got an error message when he tried. If anyone else out there gets the same message I’d appreciate an email to that effect, as one of these days I’ll call my hosting service and see if they can fix it.

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If they accuse others you know they’re doing it themselves

Saturday, January 13, 2024

I am certainly not the first to make the observation encapsulated in the title of this post. If a Republican accuses a Democrat, or Democrats generally, of certain behaviors, it is almost a given that said Republican is doing those things. I thought I’d pass the latest one along, as it is happening in our neighboring state:

Vivek Ramaswarmy found election fraud! But it was in the most unlikely place – on the nomination papers his own staff submitted to local authorities in Rhode Island. The Daily Beast had bombshell reporting showing that numerous dead voters were listed on paperwork submitted to confirm that Vivek could make it onto the Republican Presidential Primary.

Ramaswarmy, besides being a typical Republican in this respect, is emblematic of another trend among Republican politicians. Trump epitomizes it, but he didn’t start it. Ramaswarmy is a con artist from first to last. It’s how he made his fortune, and it’s how he’s running his campaign.

There was a time, believe it or not, which was not so very long ago, that a con artist, including a clone of Donald Trump, would have had little success as a politician. But the brains of a substantial number of voters have been pulverized by Fox News, and they are now ready to believe anything. The internet isn’t helping, as people drift from somewhat decent information sources (e.g., newspapers and Uncle Walter type newscasts) to conspiracy sites that tell them what Fox has trained them to believe they want to hear.

UPDATE: I sort of have comments working again. You can leave a comment and the site will show that there is a comment on the post. However, the comments don’t appear under the post. You have to click the link in the footer below the post that says you can read the comments at the “RSS feed”. I’m going to put this update on the next few posts I write, just to let people know. Assuming, of course, that anyone is reading this.

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Shocking news: Trump refuses to lie! Or does he?

Tuesday, January 9, 2024

I was truly shocked when I read this. Never before, in his entire life, has Donald Trump refused to lie, but he just did!

President Joe Biden’s campaign knocked former President Donald Trump on the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack for refusing to sign an Illinois loyalty oath that says he won’t advocate to overthrow the government. 

The WBEZ/Chicago Sun-Times reported Saturday that Trump did not voluntarily sign the loyalty oath this year when he and his campaign registered for the primary ballot in Illinois. The former president signed the oath in 2016 and 2020.

Candidates who sign the oath – including Biden and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – attest that they “do not directly or indirectly teach or advocate the overthrow of the government of the United States or of this state or any unlawful change in the form of the governments thereof by force or any unlawful means.”

You have to give credit where credit is due. Trump could have done the convenient thing, because after all, as Hamlet said, “It’s as easy as lying”, something that has always come particularly easy for Trump. But the guy whose lawyers just told a court that it’s alright for a president to murder his political opponents apparently wants us to know that he’s got some principles, and he’s not going to lie about his plans to overthrow the government if given the chance.

But wait, maybe he’s playing some kind of eleven dimensional chess. Try to follow me: Maybe he figures that if he signed the statement, everyone would assume he was lying in doing so, because he always lies, and therefore, if he refused to sign it, we would assume that he is signaling that he isn’t going to overthrow the government because he hasn’t said that he won’t, because if he did say that he won’t, we’d assume he was lying. In fact, we’d know that he’s lying. So, maybe in his mind, he’s being really crafty, by lying by refusing to lie.

I’ll leave it to the reader to decide.

UPDATE: I sort of have comments working again. You can leave a comment and the site will show that there is a comment on the post. However, the comments don’t appear under the post. You have to click the link in the footer below the post that says you can read the comments at the “RSS feed”. I’m going to put this update on the next few posts I write, just to let people know. Assuming, of course, that anyone is reading this.

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All the words are in English but…

Saturday, January 6, 2024

We’re all used to politicians, particularly the lying liars in the Republican camp, responding (I won’t use the word “answering” as that doesn’t quite describe it) to questions by spewing a word salad that not only does not answer the question, but is often incomprehensible. But politicians are hardly alone in coming up with whole sentences that make no sense, which is not good because after all, the word “sense” is embedded in the word “sentence” and the nuns at Our Lady of Sorrows always taught us that a sentence was supposed to convey a complete thought.

This morning I was perusing the Boston Globe app and came upon an article in the business section about a Boston area startup that is laying off a quarter of its staff. I can’t link to the Globe article as I couldn’t find the article on my browser, but here’s a link to the same article at another publication. Maybe I’m wrong, but it contained what appears to me the tastiest word salad ever contrived. Here’s the company spokesman:

“In 2023, Aera launched to pursue an ambitious mission to develop transformative genetic medicines by harnessing enabling delivery technologies and precision payloads,’’ spokesman Dan Budwick said in a statement. “Although Aera remains in a strong cash position today, given the current biotech funding environment, we have chosen to take steps to focus our strategy and investments on the development of our novel delivery platforms, thereby further extending our cash runway.’’

All those words are English words, and I think I could probably give a reasonable definition of each just off the top of my head. Some of the phrases even make sense if you consider them in isolation. But after reading it, you come away no more enlightened about Aera’s doings than when you started. I don’t know what the future holds for Aera, but Dan Budwick definitely has a future as a Republican politician.

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They don’t know much about history, but they still get to write it

Friday, January 5, 2024

Scott Lemieux, over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, notes that some in the media have now started to both sides the insurrection. The headline of the piece to which he links reads:

One attack, two interpretations: Biden and Trump both make the Jan. 6 riot a political rallying cry.

The text he excerpts from the article, as he says, renders the headline “a fair summary of the content”. If this becomes widespread, we can expect the media’s tune to solidify into a determined both siderism, because after all, who are they to say that attempting to overthrow the government is a bad thing or even was actually a thing. After all, some people say the rioters were just a bunch of tourists taking a look at the Capitol. Of course, other people say they were actually Antifa with one breath, while with the other breath they will assert that they were patriots trying to save the nation. After all, if you’re a Republican, the facts depend on who you happen to be lying to. Rewriting history to suit is hardly unprecedented in this country. The alternate histories of the Civil War and Reconstruction propounded by Southern historians like Claude Bowers held sway for years. If we do succumb to the fascism that Republicans are pushing, their alternate history of the Trump insurrection will hold sway for the foreseeable future.

It might be interesting if someone were to ask the other Republicans running for the presidency a question along the lines of that someone asked Nikki Haley about the Civil War. Quite obviously, no member of the press will ask such a question, or if they did, they would let the candidate in question get away with a word salad response. My guess is that just as Haley consciously avoided saying that the Civil War was about slavery, so she would, as would all of them but Christie, go to great lengths to avoid acknowledging that it was a insurrection intended to overthrow the government of the United States, an insurrection incited by the person who held the office of president of the United States.

In my diary from this date a year ago I noted that there were folks joking that if the Republicans could ever pick a Speaker of the House (the multiple votes that finally landed McCarthy his disastrous Speakership were taking place) their first order of business would be to make January 6th a national holiday. Mind you, these were jokes, but the day may not be far off when the joke will be on the rest of us.

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On this day (actually on yesterday) in Trump history

Thursday, January 4, 2024

I keep a sort of journal, usually only a few paragraphs a day. No Thoreau or Pepys am I, but during the Trump years I usually put in something about whatever idiotic thing the stable genius did on that particular day. The journal is on my Ipad, and it has an “On This Day” feature that makes it easy to look at entries from the same date on previous years. I read them to my wife most nights, so we can relive our boring lives, but I skip the parts about the genius. That is, i don’t read them to her, but I do look at them myself. It never ceases to amaze me how much of his bizarre behavior has been assigned to the memory hole. Again, if Joe Biden did any of this stuff we’d never hear the end of it.

In any case, it occurred to me that I might, every once in a while, resurrect some of this stuff. This is from January 3, 2018, and it is illustrative of something that continues to happen in the MAGA world. It is the case that no matter how much Trump abuses his acolytes, they are always willing to come back for more. In this case, we’re talking about Steve Bannon. Michael Wolff had just published a book about the Trump White House and Bannon was quoted, and he didn’t have a lot of nice things to say about the Trump campaign:

He is particularly scathing about a June 2016 meeting involving Trump’s son Donald Jr, son-in-law Jared Kushner, then campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in New York. A trusted intermediary had promised documents that would “incriminate” rival Hillary Clinton but instead of alerting the FBI to a potential assault on American democracy by a foreign power, Trump Jr replied in an email: “I love it.”

The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting Trump Jr to say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked mockingly: “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

So Bannon basically accused the Trump campaign of treason. I’m not arguing with him, but it didn’t go over well with the genius, who released the following statement:

”Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

”Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base — he’s only in it for himself.

”Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.

Pretty harsh language from both sides, not something most people on either side of the equation would be likely to forget, but my guess is that they both have. In MAGA land, one says what suits ones mood or interest at the time one says it, and then one proceeds to forget it if it suits ones interest. Just ask Mike Pence, who has totally forgotten that it was fine with Trump if Mike Pence was killed by the mob he sicced on the Capitol. And it’s true, as well, that Bannon had cause to get back to kissing Trump’s ass, inasmuch as he needed a pardon after he was indicted for defrauding Trump’s MAGA followers by claiming to use their money to build a wall.

Yet more proof that there simply is no fixed reality for Trump specifically and Republicans generally. They will assert anything that suits their purpose in any given moment, and assert the contrary the very next moment of that serves their purpose. Just ask Joe Rogan.

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Dean Baker calls out the media

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

I’m a big Dean Baker fan, but sometimes he just doesn’t get it. Take this post, in which he complains as follows:

It may not qualify as “The Big Lie,” but the media feel the need to constantly claim that young people can no longer afford to buy homes. The latest salvo is the Washington Post telling how young people have to live with their parents to save money for a down payment:

“The trade-off comes down to temporarily relinquishing a measure of independence to achieve a milestone increasingly out of reach for people their age.”

This is not true. Homeownership rates for people under age 35 are actually above their pre-pandemic level.

What Dean doesn’t appear to understand is that there’s a rule, unwritten though it may be, to which the major media must adhere. If a Democrat is in office, one must put a negative spin on everything in the economy. A corollary of that rule is that while, when a Republican is in office, one must scour Midwestern diners to interview fans of the current president, when a Democrat is in office there is no need to seek out and interview his or her supporters. Perhaps, to give the media the benefit of the doubt, they think that anyone with a brain considers such diner patrons risible curiosities while people who support Democrats are simply uninteresting rational people.

Despite Dean’s failure to understand this media-wide rule (or, more likely, expound on it, as I’m sure he’s actually aware), his economic analyses are well worth reading. I’m one of his Patreon supporters and he’s worth every dime. Well, actually it costs more than a dime.

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