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Quite definitely no fun

Wednesday, January 19, 2022

I am in, hopefully, the final few days of recovery from what, my doctor tells me, is overwhelmingly likely a case of breakthrough COVID, and I can tell you it is not a pleasant experience. No idea where I may have caught it. Suffice to say I am now on the mend, and am keeping myself well hydrated, among other things. Anyway, it’s an explanation for a lack of recent posting, as among other things, it causes fatigue and a concomitant inability to concentrate. I expect to be in the mood to rant soon.

But I can still peruse the blogs and I thought I’d link to this post at No More Mister Nice Blog, as it makes a point I’ve made quite a few times: that the Democrats stink at messaging. We may now be to the point that our democracy will fall victim to their ineptitude.

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Let me explain something, Mitt

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

I suppose there are people in the press corps that will take this seriously, but does anybody else who is politically aware? Mitt Romney warns of the dire consequences of getting rid of the filibuster:

“The United States Senate is one of our vital democratic institutions, and the power given to the minority in the Senate and the resulting requirement for political consensus are among the Senate’s defining features,” Romney said on the Senate floor.

“Note that in the federal government, empowerment of the minority is established through only one institution: the Senate,” he added. “The majority decides in the House; the majority decides in the Supreme Court; and the president, of course, is a majority of one. Only in the Senate does the minority restrain the power of the majority.”

Romney proceeded to lash out at Democrats, cautioning that different types of legislation, including taxes, safety net programs, and national security, would change once a different party secures the majority.

“There is also a reasonable chance Republicans will win both houses in Congress, and that Donald Trump himself could once again be elected president in 2024,” he continued. “Have Democrats thought what it would mean for them — for the Democrat minority — to have no power whatsoever?”

Let me explain Mitt. If Trump is elected in 2024 and the Republicans have majorities in both houses they will get rid of the filibuster as soon as the Democrats threaten to use it. And you will not stand in the way.

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Book Report

Sunday, January 9, 2022

My professorial son gave me a book for Christmas: Anna Della Subin’s Accidental Gods. His book choices tend to seem a bit like reading assignments, but they’re usually interesting, and this book certainly is that. It is an examination of the tendency of some humans to bestow godhood, or to worship as gods, ordinary humans. Haile Selassie, for instance, is the god of the Rastafarians. In fact, Rasta Farian was his original name, before he became the Ethiopian emperor. Oddly enough, even the rather bland Prince Philip had a cult, which may or may not still be operating, now that he has shuffled off this mortal coil. Other gods, who have since faded into obscurity, were themselves obscure people of whom you have surely never heard. At least so far in my reading, with the exception of the Rastafarians, the god-makers have tended to belong to cultures that Westerners considered backward, but in many cases that was unfair. For instance, cults arose under the British Empire among the Indian people centered around British officers or officials who often were also their oppressors. The British may have considered the Indian culture to be backward, but it was, in reality, hardly that.

The book makes me squirm a bit, as she relates some of the claimed miracles performed by these deities as if they really happened, but more fundamentally I don’t think there’s enough emphasis, in fact there’s none, on the fact that these were cults and the majority of people in the relevant areas were not members. Not everyone in Jamaica, for instance, believes that Haile Selassie is or was a god. Of course one could argue that the majority of people in this and other countries believe in the godhood of Jesus Christ, for which there is as little evidence as there is for the godhood of Prince Philip, but that would require too much time to fully discuss.

Anyway, the book has gotten me thinking about whether there is a similar phenomenon going on here in the USA. Given that a claimed Christianity is so deeply embedded in the whackjob culture, explicit deification of anyone other than Jesus is out of the question, but an analog to deification is certainly on the table.You can see where this is leading, right? One pattern that comes through in Subin’s book is that once deified, it is almost impossible for the believers to shed their belief, even when the deity in question disclaims his (she points out that the god is always a male) own divinity, or, in at least one case, where he literally whips his followers for deifying him.

We can certainly see this sort of thing happening, absent the explicit deification, with a certain very stable genius, whose adherents will almost univerally (there are always a few heretics) continue to adore him no matter what he says or does, including demonstrable lies that are apparent to anyone with a brain, total hypocrisy (vaccines for me but not for thee) and a total disregard for the interests of the true believers. In the orange man’s case, he not only encourages the pseudo-deification, he may believe it himself, which sets him apart from the likes of Prince Philip.

So, our culture is not so far removed from those in which godhood is bestowed on mortal man. As in those cultures, our deifiers seem to have the same bad taste in deities as those discussed in Subin’s book, for at least so far in my reading, good Prince Philip seems to be the most praiseworthy of the deified, and that’s not saying much.

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First rant of the year

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

If you’re like me you get about a hundred or more emails a day asking for your money in support of some good cause. Needless to say the senders are aware that they are just one of many clogging the nation’s in-boxes, so they try hard to have a subject line that attracts.

This rant is about one particular strategy used to draw views and eventually pry money from the wallets of dedicated Democrats that I find particularly galling: the Republican glorification strategy.

Today, for instance, I got an email from the Vote By Mail Pac, an entity about which I know nothing. Some of these PACs are surely just money vacuums. (See, e.g., the Lincoln Project). But, I am straying from the main point of my rant.

This particular email tells me that “Senator Romney is stepping Up!”, adding in parentheses “Do you Agree?”. Reading further we are told that we should sign a statement so that we can show “MASSIVE” ( all-caps in original) public support for Romney’s “brave” stance of calling a spade a spade, for this is what he had to say about the insurrection:

What happened was a violent effort … It was an insurrection against the constitution.

I have gotten tons of similar emails praising Liz Cheney’s courage, which also consists of stating the obvious. Somehow, these people expect to pry money from me using this strategy, and judging by its ubiquity, it must work on a lot of people.

I’m old enough to remember sitting through Watergate. Back in those days a Republican who stated the obvious about Richard Nixon’s criminality was not cited for bravery. They were, once the evidence was in, merely average Republicans. It was more or less expected that they would acknowledge his criminality. After all, he resigned precisely because Republican Senators told him he was doomed. It was Republicans like Sandman, the Congressman from New Jersey who made a jackass of himself defending Nixon on the judiciary committee, who were singled out for scorn and derision.

Romney, especially, gets no credit for bravery. His is a safe seat. You can make an argument that Cheney’s seat is now in peril, but if she loses she will spend the rest of her life as a highly paid commentator on MSNBC or CNN, and she is fully aware of that fact.

What further pisses me off about this type of thing is the fact that the brave Republicans we are supposed to love are unalterably opposed to doing anything to make sure that this sort of thing truly never happens again. That can be avoided only by maintaining the Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate, and that can be accomplished only if people are allowed to vote. The Vote by Mail PAC tells me it is “working day and night to ensure every American has easy access to vote by mail”. How many days or nights has Romney worked to ensure those rights? The answer, in a very round number, is none. Maybe I’ll give some Republicans credit for something if they actually do the right thing, instead of merely saying the right (and always obvious) thing.

This rant is officially over. I know it’s not much, but it’s the best I can do.

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The Year Ahead

Saturday, January 1, 2022

In the past, as the new year approached, I’ve often posted predictions for the coming year. I haven’t always been right, but I think I have a pretty good track record.

This year I’ve got almost nothing.

There are some things that are a given.

The media, particularly the broadcast media, will, by and large continue to both-side current events, ignoring the fact that there is only one party that is seeking to establish a fascist state. The Supreme Court will strip away abortion rights without making abortion technically illegal, as that can wait for a later date. The federal courts will also, when asked, give the green light to voter suppression tactics.

The elections in 2022 may very well be the most consequential since the election of 1860. If the Democrats can maintain their majorities in Congress and render Manchin and Sinema irrelevant, then they may be able to save the Republic. It will be an uphill battle, given the voter suppression that the courts will uphold, and the constant media assurances that of course the Republicans will take over both the House and the Senate, because 1) Democrats are always in disarray, and 2) the president’s party always loses in the mid-terms. Yada Yada Yada.

If the Democrats can’t pull it off, then the presidential election of 1860 will fall to second place behind that of 2016 so far as its impact on American history. It will go down as the beginning of the end of the American experiment in representative government. There is no way the Democratic candidate can win in 2024 if the voter suppression laws enacted this year are in force. It’s easy to win elections if you get to choose who gets to vote.

On a related note, it would be nice to think that the denizens of the Trump White House and their congressional co-conspirators will pay a price for inciting an insurrection, but I’m doubtful.

Of course it’s always possible that something good will happen in the coming year. Maybe the Red Sox will win the pennant.

Anyway, Happy New Year!

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If they accuse us of doing something, that means they are doing it

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Basically just passing this along, though I’m willing to bet it will get no notice from the mainstream press.

Rand Paul emitted this tweet:

“How to steal an election: ‘Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results,’” Paul wrote.

To translate even more succinctly:

How to steal an election: Engage in legal and common campaign tactics while being a Democrat.

This says all you need to know about the modern Fascist Republican Party. So far as they are concerned no Democrat elected to any office is legitimate. It follows, of course, that it is perfectly acceptable for them to actually steal elections, as they intend to do in both 2022 and 2024. Thanks to Manchin and Sinema they will be successful, and Ben Franklin’s observation will never be more salient.

Somewhat related observation: When I did a web search for Franklin’s quote, almost all of the results were from right wing web sites, warning of the threat to the Republic from the left. Projection never ceases.

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Don’t expect consistency from this court

Saturday, December 18, 2021

Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, is planning to turn the tables on the Supreme Court, using the same dodge Texas used to abolish abortion rights to abolish the already bogus gun rights.

In their rush to permit the state of Texas to deputize private citizens to bring lawsuits against women seeking abortions and their abortion providers, the U. S. Supreme Court left the door open to some deliciously unexpected payback. California Governor Gavin Newsom now wants to take that legal precedent and use it to allow private citizens to sue manufacturers of assault weapons and ghost gun providers. When New York Attorney General Letitia James heard about Newsom’s plan she went to her team and told them, “We need to follow his lead.”

It won’t work, though it’s certainly worth doing if only to expose the hypocrisy of the current Supreme Court.

Back in law school the professors used to talk about “distinctions without a difference” and “result oriented” decision making. The current court is quite adept at making the former, and is certainly infected with the latter. The court will find a way to distinguish the two situations, and gun nuts will have no problem getting what they need to shoot up schools, shopping malls, or other venues of their choice. I can think of a bunch of bogus distinctions, though I won’t bother to set them down, as I don’t want to decrease the court’s workload.

It is also the case that there is something to be feared if the court upholds Newsom’s proposed law. You can likely use the same dodge to undermine any constitutional right, not that I’m conceding that owning a gun is in fact a constitutional right. Why not allow private citizens to sue any newspaper that prints something that offends the right wing sensibility in some fashion. How about allowing suit against any church or individual who refuses to accept Our Lord Jesus Christ as his or her personal savior? When the court upholds the Texas law it will essentially be rolling back all the precedent that held that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights. Recall that prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, individual states were free to impose any limit on free speech they wanted, to have an established church, etc. As a side note, the Second Amendment is one that should obviously not have been incorporated, given it’s introductory clause, since it clearly envisions regulations by the states.

The right is already planning to use the tactic to squelch speech it doesn’t like. Expect more of the same.

Update: Elie Mystal agrees with the gist of what I said above.

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Rock and Roll legend and first class asshole

Friday, December 17, 2021

I’d like to think that this, along with his anti-vax shenanigans, is simply a sign of oncoming senility, but from what I’ve read in the past few days, Eric Clapton has apparently always been an asshole:

What with all this recent COVID crap coming from Eric Clapton one almost forgets that he’s been a dick for many years. In this instance, suing a German woman for putting an old bootleg CD that her husband bought in a department store up on eBay. So, for a €9.95 ($11) CD the woman was found to be infringing on copyright and now has to pay legal fees of about $3500. And, “if she continues to keep the listing of the bootlegged recording up on eBay, she’ll face a fine of about $283,000 or six months in prison.”

The woman said her late husband bought the CD in a department store in 1987 and she had no idea it was a bootleg.

I have several Cream albums, a Blind Faith album, and even a Clapton Christmas album, and now I can’t bring myself to listen to any of them. It’s hard to conceive on anyone being so petty.

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Democracy is at risk and Democrats are largely silent

Thursday, December 16, 2021

According to at least one poll, reported at Hullabaloo, more Republicans than Democrats think that democracy is in trouble and that the next elections will be stolen. It is not clear whether the Republicans are elated at the possibility or whether they are projecting, but digby rightly asks why Democrats are so sanguine.

I think the answer is obvious. When there’s a fire, someone has to ring an alarm, and it has to be someone you trust. At the moment, only Republicans are accusing Democrats of election theft. Democrats are rightly tuning them out. Top Democrats are, of course, not ringing the alarm. It is clear as day that Republicans are in fact planning to steal the next presidential election, and probably the next congressional election, and I’m not just talking about gerrymandering. Democratic office holders should be ringing the alarm. If they did, more Democrats would accept the reality.

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Religion Lesson

Thursday, December 16, 2021

I have mentioned before that I have an advanced degree in theology from Our Lady of Sorrows Grammar School, but it’s been a while since I passed on the fruits of the knowledge I acquired during those eight years of diligent study. This article (behind a paywall), from Free Inquiry Magazine, which I read in the bathroom while answering a call of nature, impels me to pound my keyboard yet again to explain the ways of god to men.

First, the woefully sad story with which the article begins:

It seems that Father Matthew Hood, associate pastor of St. Lawrence Parish in Utica, Michigan, watched a video of his 1990 baptism and was thunderstruck to discover that Deacon Mark Springer, the officiating clergyman, had used improper wording while performing this sacrament. Hood’s baptism had therefore been (gasp of horror) invalid!

As the article goes on to explain, that means that not only was “Father” Hood not a Catholic, he wasn’t a priest either, because only Catholics can be priests.

Totally logical so far, right?

But it gets even more logical. As we all know, sex is a sin unless you are married, and you’re not really married unless you are married by a priest, which means most people sin every time they have sex, but for most of them it doesn’t really matter because they’re committing so many other mortal sins (not being Catholic, and all) that the sex sins are just one more brick in the wall.

But, spare a tear for the actual Catholics who thought they were married by Mr. Hood (we can’t call him Father Hood, after all) but actually weren’t, because he wasn’t really a priest. They all went off on their honeymoons thinking they could have all the sinless sex they wanted, but in fact they were committing mortal sins without number and stamping their tickets to hell. And this is just one small example of the virtual pandemic of sin resulting from Deacon Springer’s fatal error.

Now, I am going to digress here, and note that in criminal law there is a doctrine that absolves one of a crime if the alleged criminal lacked the mens rea to commit the crime. That is, for many crimes, a person cannot be guilty of a crime unless he or she intended to commit a crime. Apparenlty, according to both Hood and the Church, God doesn’t see things that way.

So, as all my classmates from Our Lady of Sorrows could tell you, Hood has, despite his lack of mens rea, caused innumerable people to commit mortal sins, despite their lack of mens rea. For instance, it’s a mortal sin to take communion unless your soul is sin free, and the only way to get your soul sin free is to go to confession and get your sins wiped off your soul. But only a priest can say the magic words with efficacy, so all those people who walked out of Hood’s confessional believing their souls were clean still had dirty souls and further dirtied them by eating Jesus the next time they went to Mass! And spare a tear for the dying sinners who called Hood to their deathbeds to give them extreme unction, which would have given them a ticket to heaven, no matter the number of sins on their souls, had it been validly given. Imagine their surprise when Saint Peter informed them that they were going to Hell on a technicality!

The article notes that the church, which is taking all this seriously, is trying to do what it can for the unfortunates it can identify who have unknowingly led lives of sin as a result of Hood’s acts, but how many will remain blissfully unaware that they are not, in fact, baptized or married, or that their souls were not wiped clean that time they confessed to “Father” Hood? By the way, Hood himself should have no problem. All he has to do is confess all of his mens rea free wrongdoing and he’s off the hook. He has to get baptized first, of course. You have to do these things in order. Come to think of it, he doesn’t even have to confess, because the baptism alone cleans his soul completely.

Now you may wonder, what did Deacon Springer do wrong when he screwed up Hood’s baptism. Prepare to be shocked:

And why was Hood’s 1990 baptism invalid? Springer had changed a single word in the formula that priests are required to utter when administering this sacrament. Instead of “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” Springer said, “We baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Yes, changing the pronoun from first-person singular to first-person plural gummed up the whole works.

Personally, I’m amazed that God didn’t express his displeasure by striking Springer down with thunder and lightning. Some people might say that the pronoun you use shouldn’t make a difference, unless, of course, your talking about some transgender person assuming the right to choose their own pronoun. Some might even ask whether we can be sure the approved language in its English version is an accurate translation of whatever language in which God first set it forth, which of course opens up the possibility that the English speaking world is totally bereft of honest to God Catholics. But what do those questioning people know?

Now, there’s another principal in the law, that looks with disfavor upon actions that are arbitrary and capricious and some people (see the previous paragraph) might argue that God himself is pretty arbitrary and capricious when it comes to consigning people to hell and damnation. But, as god tells us in Randy Newman’s Faust:

My ways are mysterious! …Sometimes even to myself!

But, as this blog reminds us every Easter, we must always look on the bright side, For every person who has led a good life who ends up in hell, there’s an inveterate sinner who gets into heaven due to the same sort of technicality that sent the good guy to hell. It all evens out! Who can ask for anything more?

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