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Religion Lesson

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I have an advanced degree in theology, courtesy of eight years of intensive religious instruction at Our Lady of Sorrows (real name) Grammar School in Hartford. Sorrowfully, Our Lady of Sorrows is no more, so generations of Hartford kids will go without the instruction that resulted in my high level of expertise.

Today, I will bring my gifts to bear on the latest atrocity brought to you by the Catholic Church:

The Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans urged Catholics on Friday against taking a vaccine for COVID-19 manufactured by Johnson & Johnson because the vaccine is developed from stem cells obtained from two abortions.

In a statement on the archdiocese’s website, the organization argued that Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was “morally compromised.”

“The archdiocese must instruct Catholics that the latest vaccine from Janssen/Johnson & Johnson is morally compromised as it uses the abortion-derived cell line in development and production of the vaccine as well as the testing,” the statement read.

I have brought my theological skills to bear on this issue, and I’m happy to announce that the good Catholics of New Orleans can take the J&J vaccine with no problem, so long as they do a bit of advance planning and follow some simple recommendations.

Now, some might argue that you should do as the Diocese directs (and is this only the rule in New Orleans?), and if you happen to die of COVID, you will get an automatic ticket to heaven, because that makes you a martyr. I think that’s a theologically dubious proposition, one you might have a tough time getting by Saint Peter at the pearly gates. Anyway, it’s pretty inconvenient.

I recommend ditching the martyrdom route and following another course. It’s really quite simple. Take the vaccine. Immediately thereafter say an act of contrition. This is a stop gap measure in case you die before you can follow the next step. This will not, by the way, diminish the vaccine’s effectiveness. That’s science, a subject the rest of this post will avoid.

After you’ve said your act of contrition, head over to the nearest Catholic Church when confessions are in session, confess your sins, professing contrition throughout, say the prescribed number of Hail Mary’s set forth by the priest, and there you are. Vaccinated and absolutely washed clean!

Now, some might argue that if you plan all this in advance, you can’t possibly be sincerely contrite (an alleged requirement) at the appropriate times. This is really a laughable objection, because Catholics have been getting their sins absolved for years without being sincerely contrite. If the priest mumbles the magic words, and if you say the prescribed prayers, that automatically and retroactively renders your contrition sincere. After all, the priest waved his magic wand, and what he “loose[s] on earth will be loosed in heaven”, no questions asked. It’s up to the priest to refuse to “loose” you by catching your insincerity, and if he doesn’t, and absolves you (which he always does), you’re home free. Take it from me, I’m an expert. So, if you’re not sincerely contrite when you walk in the booth, just fake it. It works. Ask any Republican politician or televangelist, not to mention the Catholic Church’s spokespeople who apologize for predatory priests. They all fake sincerity, and it works for them.

Now, if you still think this is a loophole much too narrow to squeeze through, consider this: who says it’s a sin in the first place? So far, it’s only a sin in New Orleans, and I assure you that even my nuns would have been hard put to explain localized sins, though now that I think of it, back when you could punch your ticket to Hell by eating meat on Friday, it was fine to eat meat as long as you were in Spain, because the Spaniards got an emergency exemption in 1492 for some reason probably connected to the Inquisition, and the Pope just sort of forgot to rescind it for the next 400 and some odd years.

But the fact is you can search high and low in the Bible, and you can’t find the following: Thou shalt not be vaccinated with a substance developed using stem cells obtained through an abortion. Jesus never said a word about it, and even the mad god of the Old Testament had not a word to say about it. So, the weight of the evidence is to the effect that you don’t really have to be sincerely contrite or even fake contrite, since it’s not a sin in the first place. But still, take a tip from Pascal, who also saw nothing wrong with insincerity in the proper circumstances, and follow my advice. Just in case, get your slate wiped clean in the nearest confessional, and enjoy your escape from COVID.

Caveat: In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that while I normally got excellent grades at Our Lady of Sorrows, my grades in religion usually lagged a bit. I attribute this to my unfortunate habit of asking questions. Still, I completed the course, and like all OLS alums, I’m an acknowledged expert.

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We can’t let the French beat us!

Tuesday, March 2, 2021

The French have thrown down the gauntlet and we can’t refuse the challenge! Our country, this precious land of Freedom Fries was, is, and shall always be number one! We can’t let the French, who stupidly refused to get bogged down in an endless war in Iraq, one-up us, and yet look what they’ve done:

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was found guilty and sentenced to prison by a court in Paris on Monday on charges of corruption and influence peddling, only the second time in modern French history that a former president has been convicted of a crime.

We have to show them that they can’t get away with this. The stuff Sarkozy did was nickel and dime stuff compared to the crimes a certain self-styled genius committed while he was in office. We can’t let them do this to the genius. He’d be the first to tell you that not only were his crimes perfect, and way more numerous, but he was also way more guilty than Sarkozy ever was. Plus, if we do right by him and put him in the pen, he’d crush Sarkozy in the records department because he’d be the FIRST! former president of the US to be convicted of a crime, while Sarkozy is a pathetic number two. And sure, as the linked article says, Sarkozy was “conservative”, but that was by French standards, which puts him just shy of Antifa by our standards. Again, we have the French beat! Our conservative criminal was just shy of being an out and proud Nazi!

Well, maybe not that shy really.

It’s time for American prosecutors to step up and put the French in their place. When it comes to presidential criminality, we have to show that WE’RE NUMBER 1!

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More stuff you couldn’t make up

Saturday, February 27, 2021

I frequent a blog called Above the Law, which features articles about my former profession. I think it’s fair to say the site has a slightly leftward slant, but then one can say that about anyone who is rational these days.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about the posts here and here about a Trump loving lawyer who just lost his job as Associate General Counsel at Goosehead Insurance (yes, I duck-duck-goed it, there is such a company) after joining the insurrection on January 6th.

His name is Paul Davis, which doesn’t sound very Latino, but he has just brought a lawsuit seeking to overturn the election, actually the government, on behalf of Latinos for Trump. In the lawsuit, he has cited The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in support of his argument that the court should declare the entire federal government essentially non-existent:

During the course of the epic trilogy, the rightful King of Gondor had abandoned the throne. Since only the rightful king could sit on the throne of Gondor, a steward was appointed to manage Gondor until the return of the King, known as “Aragorn,” occurred at the end of the story. This analogy is applicable since there is now in Washington, D.C., a group of individuals calling themselves the President, Vice President, and Congress who have no rightful claim to govern the American People. Accordingly, as set forth in the Proposed Temporary Restraining Order, as a remedy the Court should appoint a group of special masters (the “Stewards”) to provide a check [sic] the power of the illegitimate President until this Constitutional Crisis can be resolved through a peaceful legal process of a Preliminary Injunction Hearing and a jury trial on the merits.

There’s more craziness in the posts to which I’ve linked. Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and Lin Wood owe this guy big-time, inasmuch as he makes them look like legal scholars.

The laughing part comes easy, but you are tempted to cry when you consider that the legal profession is infested with people like this, and that over the course of the last few years, a number of them have become federal judges. (See my last post)

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Expect More of This

Friday, February 26, 2021

Everyone is aware that the Republican Party is in the grip of religious fundamentalists, but over the next few years we will become ever more aware that it, and as a result the nation, is now in the grip of legal fundamentalists, judges who are intent on reviving once thought dead constitutional jurisprudence in order to render the federal government powerless to address issues of national concern.

This is a recent example:

For nearly a year, millions of Americans who are unable to pay their rent due to the economic crisis triggered by Covid-19 have had some protections against eviction. Both the CARES Act, which became law last March, and the second Covid-19 relief bill, which was signed in December, included temporary moratoriums on many evictions.

In the interim periods when these statutory safeguards against eviction are not in effect — the CARES Act’s moratorium expired after 120 days, and the second relief bill’s moratorium expired on January 31 — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed a similar moratorium using its own authority, citing a federal law that permits the CDC director to “make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases.”

On Thursday evening, a Trump-appointed judge on a federal court in Texas handed down a decision that calls into question the legality of these moratoriums. Currently, there is no congressional moratorium on evictions in place, only the CDC moratorium, although it is likely that the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill currently being negotiated in Congress will implement a new statutory moratorium.

The article to which I’ve linked begins its discussion of the previously relevant case law with this entirely justifiable statement:

The opinion is a mélange of libertarian tropes, long-discarded constitutional theory, and statements that are entirely at odds with binding Supreme Court decisions.

As the article amply proves, the Texas judge ignored binding precedent in an almost breathtaking display of legal bullshittery. Nonetheless, the likelihood is that he’ll be upheld, as will most of the cases brought to frustrate any legislation the Democrats manage to get by Senate Republicans, Joe Manchin, and Kyrsten Sinema.

The intent of these decisions, and it is by design, is to drag our constitutional jurisprudence back into the early nineteenth century, rendering it impossible for the federal government to respond to the realities of modern times. This is entirely consistent with the Republican philosophy, articulated by Saint Ronnie, that government is the problem and can never be the solution. What better way to prove that proposition than by making it legally impossible for the government to accomplish anything? It is also consistent with another objective: returning the country to the conditions prevalent in the South prior to the voting rights act and the abolition of the poll tax, such that the vast majority of people inclined to vote against the Republican Party and its fascist agenda will be disenfranchised. The next step will be the return of Jim Crow, complete with a denial that they are doing exactly that.

Addendum: It is somewhat misleading to refer to judges as “Trump-appointed”. Trump had little or nothing to do with choosing judges. As with everything else, he really didn’t care. He simply passed on names given to him by McConnell and/or the Federalist Society. That Society will, for the foreseeable future, continue to hold sway whenever we have a Republican president.

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Grifters gotta grift

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

I spent a bit of time yesterday reading the complaint in the case of U.S. Dominion, Inc. et. al. v. My Pillow, Inc., et. al over the last couple of days. You can read and/or download it here. Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, is one of the et. als. among the defendants. It’s a fun read, but I must say that I am now feeling just a bit naive, for I didn’t know what a grift his whole act has been.

I knew that MyPillow itself was a scam, but it never occurred to me that all his bloviating about the election was primarily a way for him to sell more pillows. The complaint lays it all out in exhaustive detail.

In my own defense, I don’t directly consume the fictions peddled on Fox or the even more extreme right wing media on which Lindell has appeared, so I wasn’t aware that each and every one of his appearances was nothing more than a commercial for MyPillow, complete with discount codes like QAnon. The complaint documents that while he has been dropped by some major retailers, mail order business has never been better, and has more than made up for any losses in the retail sector.

So you have to hand it to the guy. He saw an opportunity and he grabbed it. His business has, as the complaint also documented, always been based on fraud, and he knows where the marks are. Under each MAGA hat there sits a brain, or what passes for a brain, that is completely bereft of fraud detectors. Such brains actually believed the stuff spewed by a person who formerly occupied the office of President of the United States. Lindell saw that they were ripe for picking. All he had to do was feed them the lies they wanted to hear, assure them he was telling them the truth, and remind them that they weren’t really supporting the cause unless they were also buying one of his pillows. It was that tactic that allowed Dominion to sue not only Lindell, but his company, because in all his appearances his connection to MyPillow is front and center, and he is clearly speaking on its behalf. If Dominion gets a judgment, it will be able to seek monetary satisfaction against MyPillow, and not just Lindell, who will probably hide his assets while the case is proceeding.

The lawsuit was filed in DC, and there’s a reasonable chance it will be assigned to a decent district court judge. I think there’s a reasonable chance that a judge would enter a summary judgment as to liability, based on the exhaustive facts alleged, all of which seem to be easily provable, as most of them are a matter of record, either on video, written form, or social media posts. For you non-lawyers out there, a judge can enter a summary judgment, no trial necessary, if there is no dispute as to the material facts necessary to support a judgment. In that context, you can’t get away with simply saying you do dispute a fact, you have to come up with a solid basis for doing so, such that a reasonable jury might go your way. If such a judgment were entered, the jury would be required to determine the amount of damages only.

In any event, it looks like a rock solid case, assuming you can get a jury free of folks with the kind of brain I described a few paragraphs ago. Assuming Dominion does get a judgment, it will be interesting to see if any appellate judges decide that it’s worth distorting the law and their reputations in order to give Lindell a get out of jail free card. My guess is that the Appeals Courts will take a pass on rescuing Lindell and the rest of the folks Dominion has sued. Even the judges appointed by Trump are likely to do that, since they all know he actually had nothing to do with appointing them. He just did what the Federalist Society told him to do, as will the next Republican they get in. Most of them will probably make the calculation that the chances of getting another Republican president soon will be enhanced if Trump can be shoved down the memory hole.

Afterword: After I wrote the above, my wife sent me a link to this article at Talking Points. Apparently Lindell, after initially saying he welcomed the lawsuit, is now having second thoughts.

The complaint includes this sourced allegation:

Lindell began benefitting at Dominion’s expense even before producing and broadcasting his “ABSOLUTE PROOF” “docu-movie.” Indeed, every time Lindell was called out for making false claims about Dominion, his business “would go up anywhere from 10 to 30%” because, as Lindell has explained, “everybody on the Right buys more, they buy more to support the cause.” As a result of the defamatory marketing campaign against Dominion, MyPillow sales are up 30 to 40% and MyPillow is the busiest it has ever been.

Lindell is now trying to walk back the happy talk, claiming he has lost millions in revenue as a result of being dropped by the big box retailers. Apparently, he has had a sit down with his lawyers, who can’t be looking forward to defending the case. In any event, they should get their money up front. He is a fan of the genius’s after all.

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Liberal bias runs rampant! Well, actually, not so much

Monday, February 22, 2021

First, let me recommend this site, to which I’m linking for purposes of this post. Eric Boehlert covers media bias, the real kind, that routinely consigns Democrats to the bench. In this instance, he points out something that is both outrageous and perfectly predictable:

After creating new programming rules for the Trump administration and airing virtually every minute of every White House press briefing live and in its entirety, CNN has quietly cut the cord with the new Democratic administration.

Just one month into President Joe Biden’s term, the all-news cable channel last week stopped airing the daily White House press briefings. Perhaps the events weren’t entertaining enough, as White House spokesperson Jen Psaki has routinely declined to insert Biden into cultural war debates, refused to castigate reporters, and won’t make stuff up in the name of partisan warfare, the way her Republican predecessors did.

Read the whole thing.

The fact is that this bias, which is standard fare on the Sunday shows (how many times has the idiotic Lindsey Graham been on Meet the Press?) makes the press complicit with the ongoing destruction of democratic norms in this country. If you give the liars prominence, you are implicitly endorsing their point of view, whether you want to admit it or not.

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Politics is a funny business

Sunday, February 21, 2021

My wife and I get three newspapers every morning, the execrable New London Day, which I rarely read, the New York Times, because I need my dose of Paul Krugman, and the Boston Globe.

As a result I’m somewhat up on Massachusetts politics. The tendency of the folks in Massachusetts to elect Republican governors has always somewhat mystified me, though I have to admit that maybe the corrupt Massachusetts Democrats do need some counterbalance. Specifically, I’ve always been amazed at the popularity of their governor, Charlie Baker, who has always seemed a mediocrity to me. Baker, though, is fairly good at making sure he is perceived in a positive light, i.e., good at self promotion.

Lately, Baker’s popularity has taken a bit of a hit, due to his administration’s fairly disastrous vaccine rollout, which followed a fairly poor record on dealing with the pandemic in the first place.

Consider also, the fact that until recently Andrew Cuomo was a pandemic golden boy, more out of his ability to be a self promoter than his actual accomplishments.

And that brings me to the whole point of this little piece. It is a sad fact of life that a politician can thrive more as a result of self promotion than on the merits of his or her performance.

Consider our governor, who entered the pandemic with one of the lowest approval ratings in the country. What had he done to deserve such low ratings? His job and nothing but his job. If he has a horn, he doesn’t toot it.

His ratings have improved somewhat since COVID, but my guess is that he’s still lagging both Baker and Cuomo. From the start, his inability to engage in self promotion has been his most obvious flaw, and that is certainly the case in the midst of this pandemic.

A week ago the Globe ran an article about Baker’s fairly disastrous vaccine rollout, which included this graphic:

Connecticut was number 6 so far as effectiveness was concerned, and appeared to be first among the densely populated states. It may have slipped a bit since then, but we’re still doing pretty well. During his daily press conferences Lamont comes across as totally earnest, doing his best to do his job, but in such a low key way that he fails to earn the plaudits that were heaped on Cuomo, who even got a boost from Randy Rainbow.

From a political point of view it is almost better to be a loud and pandering non-achiever or obstructionist than a low key achiever. Consider the state Senator from my district, Heather Somers, who spends her time on Facebook firing up the anti-vaxxers. She’ll probably get more political return for that than Lamont will for doing his job well. Or consider Greg Abbott, who is very much responsible for the disaster in Texas, who will probably skate to re-election, as quite likely, will Ron DeSantis in Florida, who has been steering vaccinations to his wealthy supporters.

It seems like the state Democrats should step up and start talking up Lamont’s response to this crisis, but Connecticut Democrats are like their federal brethren. Republicans will all repeat the latest lie, but Democrats will never pound away at the truth.

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Rush Limbaugh is dead

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

It’s days like this when it saddens me that I no longer believe in Hell.

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Some things never change

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

While my wife and I await our second shot, after which we will feel free to, you know, do things, and as I wait out the weather, which has pretty much put an end to daily biking, I’ve been doing more reading than usual. Among the books I’m currently reading is Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man. It’s not on the Moby Dick level, but it’s still reasonably amusing.

It’s the story, humorously told, of a grifter who boards a Mississippi Riverboat and plies his trade, trading personas and grifts as he passes various stops on the trip.

At one point he is peddling snake oil to the rubes, and comes upon a backwoodsman who won’t buy into his con. During the course of their back and forth the backwoodsman asks the grifter if he’s an abolitionist.

And here’s where we come to the part that’s relevant to today. Here’s the grifter’s reply:

“As to that, I cannot so readily answer. If by abolitionist you mean zealot, I am none; but if you mean a man, who, being a man, feels for all men, slaves included, and by any lawful act, opposed to nobody’s interest, and therefore, rousing nobody’s enmity, would willingly abolish suffering (supposing it, in its degree, to exist) from among mankind, irrespective of color, then am I what you say.”

To which the backwoodsman replies:

“Picked and prudent sentiments. You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right.”

As the title of this post says, some things never change.

I am sorry to say that after this scene, the grifter “disembarks” in one guise and reboards in another, and manages to work a new grift on the backwoodsman. Let us hope that the grifter down in Florida is not able to pull off that trick.

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Be careful what you ask for

Friday, February 12, 2021

The Republicans are making a deeply dishonest argument.

I know, every argument they make is deeply dishonest, so I really have to be a little more specific.

As the FCC gets closer to restoring net neutrality, a new and bizarre GOP talking point has emerged. It goes something like this: if you’re going to restore some modest rules holding telecom monopolies accountable, you just have to dismantle a law that protects free speech on the internet! This of course makes no coherent sense whatsoever, but that’s not stopping those looking to demolish Section 230, a law that is integral to protecting speech online.

via Above the Law

This is an interesting piece of dishonesty, because it might be an instance in which the Democrats should call their bluff.

As I understand it, Section 230 grants various content providers on the web protections from libel and slander actions that other publishers do not have. The underlying rationale makes sense, and made even more sense when the statute was passed, as the harm that social networks could cause was not yet obvious. The difficulty of policing such large volumes of speech was just one of many factors that led to Section 230. A newspaper can easily police its own content, but it’s not so easy when the content is uploaded by millions of users a day. In any event, the net result is that Facebook, for instance, is not liable for most if not all of the misinformation, libel, slander, and conspiracy theorizing that takes place on its platform. If it were a socially responsible company it would do its best to make sure that its platform was not abused, but it is owned by Mark Zuckerberg.

The Republicans have chosen to try to make “Big Tech” out to be the bogeyman, but I ask you, who is most likely to suffer if “Big Tech” has to police the content on its sites, and cleanse them of hate speech, misinformation, libel, and incitements to violence? Wouldn’t it be the political party and ideology that traffics in hate speech, misinformation, libel, and incitements to violence?

Personally, I think it might be productive to take another look at Section 230, in light of the way in which it has shielded actors like Facebook from the obligation to police the content it inflicts on the world. There’s no question that there are competing interests involved, but it certainly appears that there may be a need to impose some obligations on content providers that would protect the public’s interest in decreasing hate speech, misinformation, libel, and incitements to violence. One can certainly make a cogent argument that the unfettered “speech” in which the rioters and their Führer engaged prior to the insurrection was a necessary precondition to their attempt to overthrow the government. We do have a right to protect ourself from people who want to overthrow the government, even at the stage when their planning is taking place. I won’t even bother to explain why cries of “free speech” are inapplicable in this context.

So, while the Republican’s arguments make no sense, which they almost never do, it might not be such a bad idea to take them up on it. It would be interesting to see how long it takes for them to come up with some way of attacking Democrats for daring to even consider amending Section 230, which will, overnight, transmogrify into the guardian of our liberties.

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