Category Archives: current events

Critical Thinking Skill Builder

In an age when pencil-necked eggheads are mocked as cuckolded weenies, and critical thinking is discouraged in public discourse, it is more important than ever to keep the critical thinking skills sharp.   I offer the excellent analysis, from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, as a great short primer on how to critically read mainstream news.    Check out Janine Jackson’s brilliant, and simple, dissection of the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post’s contorted description of President Trump’s accidental bit of truth-telling, when he candidly revealed to FOX news that making access for voting easier was “crazy,” explaining that expanding voting options would result in:

“levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Here is the paragraph Janine Jackson dissected, read it slowly and thoughtfully:

Trump didn’t expand on the thought. But he clearly linked high turnout to Republicans losing elections. The most generous reading of his comment is that he was referring to large-scale voter fraud resulting from the easier vote-by-mail options; Trump has in the past baselessly speculated about millions of fraudulent votes helping Democrats in the 2016 election. The more nefarious reading would be that allowing more people to participate in the process legally would hurt his party because there are more Democratic-leaning voters in the country.

As Janine Jackson points out, would you rather be generous or nefarious?  An idiotic reduction of the choices.

Here is a line edit, for clarification:

Trump didn’t expand on the thought, frequently expressed privately by Republican strategists acknowledging the unpopularity of most of their policies, which tilt famously toward the wealthiest 1%.

But he clearly linked high turnout to Republicans losing elections, something borne out in recent elections as his party veers to the extreme right; reducing turnout is something his party’s voter suppression efforts in many states is designed to do.

The most generous reading of his comment is that he was not lying this time, as this paper has documented he has publicly done over (insert latest number, north of 20,000) times in the course of his presidency.  

He was likely referring to the completely debunked claim of large-scale voter fraud resulting from the easier vote-by-mail options;

Trump has in the past baselessly speculated about millions of fraudulent votes helping Democrats in the 2016 election.  Mike Pence and Chris Koback, two Trump loyalists appointed to investigate this alleged fraud, were unable to turn up any proof of widespread voter fraud in the months before their commission was disbanded.

The more nefarious logical reading of the president’s comment would be that allowing more people to participate in the process legally would hurt his party because there are more Democratic-leaning voters in the country.

Not so fucking hard, Jeff, you evil fucking fuck.

 

 

 

Pinhead Heir Emerges as Pandemic Czar

Sekhnet gets upset when I read her the most recent raving from our cunningly survivalist, unhinged, counter-grammatical Commander-in-Chief.   Most people I know cannot watch the compulsively lying, floridly bragging president who needs attention and approval as much as the angriest two year-old.  Some profess to become physically sick watching the reality TV star spew his divisive non sequitars. I can picture millions projectile vomiting as he speaks, though I admit, I’ve never seen even one Trump hater do it.   As for me, I can eat anything while watching short spurts of his shit spewing without even a twinge of nausea, though I avoid hearing him whenever I can.

Late last night Sekhnet read something on her phone that caused her to roar in disgust.  Mike “Cure Your Homosexual Child or Spend Eternity in Hellfire” Pence had, apparently, announced that Jared Kushner was officially in charge of all interactions with FEMA.   There had been a jumble at the top of the dungheap that is Trump’s supremely disorganized, jealous, competitive administration when it came to whether medical experts, Christian extremists or born-wealthy pinheads would have the final say about how to best fight this deadly and highly infectious disease.   A lot of back and front stabbing in Trump’s inner circle, as the Mooch described from his week as Communications Director for America’s Greatest Winner.  

Now Jared Kushner, flushed with his unbelievable victory in the war on Opiate Abuse and his successful brokering of a totally fair, one-sided peace deal between Israel and the Ungrateful, Loser, Uncooperative, Opportunity-blowing Palestinians [1], was in charge of the federal response to the coronavirus plague.   Sekhnet was almost howling at the news.   I couldn’t blame her, and I didn’t take the opportunity to ask her to pipe down because she was going to make me vomit.   I’ve acquired a fairly strong stomach.  That said, Kusher is a mediocrity who can barely craft an English sentence, and who, also like his powerful father-in-law, would be rightfully unknown without the vast inheritance he got from his father, and, in Jared’s case, outsized talents for ass-licking and arrogance.  

This example of Jared’s oratorical brilliance, for example, leaps off the page.  The new liaison between Americans at risk of dying in this pandemic and FEMA made this childishly nonsensical remark about the proper use of federal stockpiles:

the notion of federal stockpiles was it’s supposed to be our stockpile, it’s not supposed to be the states stockpiles that they then use

 Even the cadence of it is childish, like Boof Kavanaugh’s petulant “even when I did good enough at the confirmation hearing, they attacked me unfairly”.   The notion of somebody in charge of a vast health emergency being stupid enough to utter something like that on live TV… well, it’s supposed to be qualified, in some way, the person in the position to utter something that stupid, or else not.  It’s our right not to die, not his!

It is hard not to admire the unintended irony of this one, while we’re all “trying to think about who will be a competent manager” :

“What a lot of the voters are seeing now is that when you elect somebody to be a mayor or governor or president, you’re trying to think about who will be a competent manager during the time of crisis,” he said. “This is a time of crisis, and you’re seeing certain people are better managers than others.”

source [2]

The man is clearly an imbecile, qualified for nothing but looking like an imperious, entitled, well-born SS officer.  

Here is a great opinion piece from Paul Waldman on the half-wit in charge of the federal response to the pandemic, from the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post and here’s an equally good one from Michele Goldberg at the New York Times.   Read them and join Sekhnet, and countless other concerned Americans, in a good group howl.

 

[1]  I found myself howling, in laughter– not horror–  at the CNN chyrons as loyal Jared was giving himself and Trump props for the historic peace deal that his genius father-in-law had enlisted him to draft.  Check out the wonderful start of Christiane Amanpour’s interview with the great man, and mind the comically brilliant chyrons.   It’s not like both sides are needed at the negotiating table to craft a fair compromise, particularly when one side are stupid, evil, losers! ROTFLMAO!  

20200406_152705.jpg

 

[2]  The incoherent ass-covering is kind of fun to watch, in a sick way.

from that same NPR piece:

A day after Kushner made his remarks, language on a government website about the national stockpile was changed to more closely reflect his description. But a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said the department had been using the new language for weeks. The assistant secretary for preparedness and response “first began working to update the website text a week ago to more clearly explain to state and local agencies and members of the public the role of the” Strategic National Stockpile, the spokesperson said.

When asked Friday about his son-in-law’s remarks, Trump said Kushner was “talking about our country.”

“We need it for the government and the federal government,” he said, complaining that state governments should have had their own stockpiles. “The federal government needs it, too, not just the states,” he said.

Why the Extreme Right are actually Nazis

I now use the word “Nazi” for the right wing extremists who are currently calling the shots here in our exceptional nation.   I know the word has an intemperate, hyperbolic ring to it, but hear me out.   Many governments have been oppressive, autocratic, several were/are openly fascist.   The Nazi regime stands head and shoulders above all these because of their openly racist criminality (draconian racial laws, death squads, death camps and so on) in the name of an imaginary ideal: to purify the blood of the most exceptional “race” in history.   A hallmark of Nazis everywhere is their willingness to see millions die in order to achieve their goals.  As that unimpeachable expert on Nazi philosophy and practice, Dr. Josef Goebbels, once remarked during the war: if we win, history will regard us as the world’s greatest benefactors, if we lose we’ll be remembered as its most notorious criminals.  

The American Extreme Right is animated by many of the same sentiments that ignited the Nazi revolution.  It is based, largely, in racism, organized hatred, a stilted “meritocracy” based on loyalty and anti-democratic obedience to the will of a superior being, an infallible leader.  In a pinch they don’t care how many of their “enemies” need to die so that they might prevail, a characteristic their ilk demonstrates daily in this pandemic we’re currently all trying to survive.

In 1954 the Supreme Court belatedly, almost a hundred years after a decision stating that blacks could not be citizens or possess any rights “the white man is bound to respect”, ruled that segregated education is an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of “non-white” Americans.   Recall at the time lynching was still practiced in many parts of the country.   The National Guard had to be called in when schools were integrated, by a few brave children, to protect these kids from being murdered by screaming crowds of outraged racists.

Almost immediately a small group of wealthy reactionaries formed the extremist John Birch Society in reaction to this indignity.   They got up and running, Fred Koch, father of the infamous Koch Brothers among them, in 1958.   They were appalled that Negroes were given full rights at the stroke of a pen by the Supreme Court, a court they were convinced had been taken over by Communists.   They were against the “mongrelization” of our country that would be caused by equal civil rights for all citizens and the likely “race mixing” that would result.  The Birchers were the ultimate anti-communists during a period of anti-communist hysteria.  The John Birch Society was a lunatic fringe group, considered nut jobs by most Democrats and Republicans of their time.   Now they are basically running the United States of America in the form of the current lockstep Republican party led by Mr. Trump, Mitch McConnell and their plutocrat sponsors.

Of course, I have skipped a few steps.  One of the first political campaigns Charles and David Koch undertook was an anti-integration campaign in North Carolina. They used some of their vast wealth to get their candidates on the school board and implemented policies that allowed white parents “school choice.”    This school board was able to immediately re-segregate the district’s schools and did considerable damage to the educational opportunity in the poorest, blackest schools before it was voted out.   This tells you a lot about the agenda of guys like the Koch boys.

They spent millions nationwide fighting minimum wage laws.  They spent tens of millions on influence machines from “think tanks” that informed and later dominated public debate on every issue (think “climate skepticism”) to colleges and universities who took their donations in exchange for promoting their ideology. They funded the campaigns of anti-union politicians.   They supported laws restricting voting in state after state, in order to increase their chances of victory for wildly unpopular anti-government policies.   They were big funders of the Federalist Society, a national legal fraternity dedicated to creating a cadre of solid, right wing federal judges to rule in favor of industry, deregulation, curtailment of underclass voting rights, protecting the rights of employers, landlords and fetuses and other issues important to protecting the privileges of the wealthy and powerful.  Why millions of the powerless go along with this agenda is a perplexing mystery.  The chance to vent their anger and hatred, and feel superior to others in comradeship with fellow travelers, seems to explain some of it.

A lifetime ago I enrolled, briefly, in a PhD program in history with a concentration on the Nazi regime.  I wanted to understand how an ignorant, violently opinionated sociopath could take over a famously civilized nation and order the murder of, among millions, my entire family.   I took it somewhat personally, I admit.  I quickly got into a fight with a professor about who supported the Nazis.  I’d read about the wealthy reactionaries and aristocrats who, early or late in the Weimar Republic, threw their support behind the regime that would protect them from Marxism, provide some of them with slave labor (Bayer among them) and the rest of them with generous protection of their privileges.  

The professor, an American who retained a bit of his German Jewish accent, a somber and well-read historian, told me dismissively that I sounded like Hugh Trevor-Roper, a freewheeling, acerbic British historian who shared my view, apparently, to great controversy [1].  I understood that this was a sophisticated way of calling me an unlearned, wildly opinionated crackpot.   I surmise that the professor was offended by Trevor-Roper, as apparently other Jewish historians were [2].  During my semester as a PhD candidate I quickly came to understand the role of politics in the writing of history, and began to read it differently.  I had to concede to the outraged professor that perhaps many of the wealthy did not throw their support behind Hitler until he was Fuhrer, which I thought was fair enough.   

You don’t need an active conspiracy to have a world of shared goals with like-minded people, if you have overriding interests in common.   The segregationist, anti-minimum wage, anti-union, anti-regulation, voting rights suppressing Kochtopus (they control dozens of influential institutions, Charles Koch’s favorite is called The Institute for Humane Studies) has a lot of very wealthy fellow travelers who are not specifically on board with all of their anti-humane, anti-democratic policies.  

You have very wealthy people who might be considered socially liberal, someone like Jeff “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Bezos, who are on board with many of the core reactionary beliefs of many of his fellow billionaires, primarily that he has a absolute right to every penny he can put into his portfolio.   Unions, hated by the Kochs and their ilk, are forbidden in Bezos operations.    Bill Gates, Bezos’s fellow billionaire philanthropist and smartest man in any room, like Michael Bloomberg, share many of the features of the Koch belief system — fighting for monopoly control of their industries, promoting chosen projects they can throw vast sums of money into (for Gates “charter schools” was one) to create a good, philanthropic public name, and when in power, having cops throw random black kids against the wall (Bloomberg) as a way of “fighting crime.” 

It’s easy to hate people who wake up every day burning to increase fortunes they already could not spend if they lived to be 1,000 years old.  I find it easy, anyway.  But when they promote policies that ensure that the poor will stay poor, and die in numbers as large as necessary to preserve the status quo that advantages the super-privileged, and spend millions to convince the credulous that there is something in this grotesque arrangement for them too, well, in my book these fucks, regardless of their well publicized “philanthropy”, are straight up evil.   Nazis, if you will.

 

[1]  Trevor-Roper’s most widely read and financially rewarding book was titled The Last Days of Hitler (1947). It emerged from his assignment as a British intelligence officer in 1945 to discover what happened in the last days of Hitler‘s bunker. From his interviews with a range of witnesses and study of surviving documents he demonstrated that Hitler was dead and had not escaped from Berlin. He also showed that Hitler’s dictatorship was not an efficient unified machine but a hodge-podge of overlapping rivalries.  

source

Echo of history with Mr. Trump’s hodge-podge of overlapping rivalries.  Pence and Kushner, for example, vie for control of the “response” to the plague currently killing many Americans.

[2] The American historian Lucy Dawidowicz in The Holocaust and Historians (1981) delivered what the British historian David Cesarani called an “ad hominem attack”, writing that Trevor-Roper in his writings on Nazi Germany was indifferent to Nazi antisemitism, because she believed that he was a snobbish antisemite, who was apathetic about the murder of six million Jews.[28] Cesarani wrote that Dawidowicz was wrong to accuse Trevor-Roper of antisemitism but argued that there was an element of truth to her critique in that the Shoah was a blind-spot for Trevor-Roper.[29]

source

FUN FACT from Homo Sapiens History

We don’t question things like the American president dropping the largest conventional bomb in history on a remote area of the Middle East, as Trump did, to applause from the US media for being “presidential”.   U.S. presidents must sometimes project power on the world stage by being violent, we all understand.  It’s something every red-blooded American can get behind.  Remember social justice advocate Van Jones gushing on CNN that Trump was finally “presidential” when he unleashed fifty or a hundred million dollars worth of our greatest missiles against a Syrian airfield to show that America would not tolerate the Syrian dictator using poison gas on his own people?

In light of the impressive irrationality of our species, today’s fun fact should come as no surprise, though it is nonetheless also cool and noteworthy.   The Spanish Flu, the deadly strain of influenza that killed more than 50,000,000 worldwide toward the end and right after the First World War, did not originate in Spain!   It was no more prevalent in Spain than anywhere else.  Spain was merely publicizing the spread of the deadly disease, those traitorous fucks.

I heard an interview about the last pandemic (and lessons, and hope, we can draw from it) with Jeremy Brown, a doctor who wrote a book about the 1918 Flu Pandemic [1].   Seems Spain, neutral during WWI, was the only country whose newspapers reported on the plague that was spreading (largely among the filthy and undernourished troops returning from trenches and weakened populations hungry and dirty from wartime deprivation).   All the belligerents had a tacit agreement to keep the news on the back pages, for fear of hurting the war effort [2].  So, obviously: The Spanish Flu.  Homo sapiens: the wise ape!

Because of this deliberate underreporting about the spread of this highly contagious and deadly disease, millions more died than might have had the information been put out there earlier and had appropriate steps been taken by governments.  Until the mass media sounds the alarm, and the president takes decisive and effective action, people continue going about their business, largely unaware of the deadly plague spreading wildly in their midst.

Echoes of history.   The Spanish Flu is a fitting name that could have been pulled directly out of the Trump playbook — the Nazi mass-murders of the last century?   The Poisonous Jew Rebellion.  And, you know, not many people know this, but, there were some very fine people on both sides, on both sides — and, by the way, did you see my ratings?   Like Monday Night Kristalnacht numbers!

 

[1]

BROWN: I’m an emergency physician, and I’m the author of the book “Influenza: The Hundred Year Hunt To Cure The Deadliest Disease In History.” And I also work at the National Institutes of Health, where I am the director of the Office of Emergency Care Research.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/821597079

[2] 

BROWN: No. The Spanish flu certainly did not originate in Spain. So why was it, and sometimes to this day – why was it called the Spanish flu? And the answer is this. It was widely reported in newspapers in Spain, and that’s where the first stories broke of this disease. Why wasn’t it reported perhaps in other newspapers in the U.S. or in Europe or in Great Britain? The answer is this. There was a tacit agreement between the governments of the Western powers and the newspaper editors not to report bad news.

ARABLOUEI: Wow.

BROWN: Certainly, there were reports of influenza, but they were generally small and often relegated to the back pages. And what we have, therefore, is an underreporting of influenza in the newspapers. Spain, to remind everybody – Spain was a neutral country in World War I. It did not have, therefore, this tacit agreement between its newspaper editors and its government not to report influenza. And so the first reports of influenza being widespread came out of Spain.

Nazis are always on point

It is a challenge to get a coherent and reasonable view of the whole sickening death spiral most of us, and all other living things on the planet, are up against.  If we can’t see it, how do we take action?   We are all soaking in this perilous status quo solution because a few people, determined to have everything at any cost, wake up on fire to get more every day, no matter what the price to the most vulnerable among us.  Nazis and klansmen are always on point, ready to serve their masters.   They know exactly who they want to kill at every moment, in a way that ordinary people don’t.

We are so well marinated in this corporate/fascist moment (where mass death of our most vulnerable “losers” is vastly preferable to even a momentary loss of profits for the most successful winners among us) that it’s impossible for most of our fellow frogs to even see what we are neck deep in or to even imagine that there are alternatives to it.  

So effective has Rugged Individualist advertising/propaganda been that even very intelligent and politically progressive friends have come to feel (notice “feel”, not reason or decide) that doddering compromiser Joe Biden is our best hope against Trump/Bolsinaro/Putin et al.    Frustrating.   The Democratic party has sold out to corporatism to the extent that a gif of a saucy Nancy Pelosi snarkily wagging her finger at an uncheckable Hitler-wannabe seems to be the best we can hope for.

We live by corporate rules, and many more millions will die worldwide because of it.   We cannot escape the merciless logic of these rules.  Random example:

I’ve been resisting doing the update on my phone for months, hating every update I’ve been forced to do over the years.  Yesterday and today the corporation that made my phone  began disabling my phone randomly, middle of a call– screen black, $800 device rendered useless.   They just did it four or five consecutive times as Sekhnet called to verify that my phone, set to ring at top volume, no longer rings when she calls me.  Sekhnet urges me to just do the update for my phone while I scream about Korean fucking fascists (Samsung) and the perfect unbeatable BIRD WINS mindfuck of surveillance capitalism.

How do we get out of this almost boiling pot when the vast majority of our fellow sodomized citizens can’t even see the problem?  How do we fucking organize to fight back?  Any ideas?  You, in the back…
 

Liars sometimes accidentally tell the truth

The other day on Fox and Friends the show’s greatest friend, Donald J. Trump, had a moment of unintended truth-telling that nobody will notice much, so, what the hey?

He was talking about some of the “ridiculous” things the Democrats were trying to put into the $4,500,000,000,000.00 Coronavirus/corporate bailout bill.   They tried to put in provisions about expanding voting during the plague.  According to the president, the extreme left Democrat plan sought

“levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Shrewdly observed, sir.

The Zero Sum Game of Sociopaths

Sociopaths, once they have power, use it to run the table.   They live in a zero sum world of winning or losing, there is nothing in between.   You can see this with some of our great philanthropist billionaires, people who in most other countries are called oligarchs.  If you go to sleep with a billion dollars, why do you still dream of having two hundred billion dollars?  When a worldwide health crisis hits, use it as an opportunity to distribute $4,500,000,000,000.00 to yourself and your wealthiest cronies.

Of course, it’s easy for me, a pampered man beloved by so many, a guy whose feet never touch the ground (they carry me tenderly from place to place and set me down gently on pillows) to snipe at the world-changing drive of the movers and shakers, dynamic men of vision like Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg.   Still– what is their vision?   To have more money and power than anybody in the world.  To WIN.

Then we finally get one as president (though he had a small $400,000,000 head start from his evil father), a compulsive liar who claims to be a billionaire and has an army of lawyers aggressively  hiding all of his financial records.  A winner, a great winner, our greatest winner.  What happens when he is in charge during an emergency?   He is concerned with only one thing — winning.  As for the losers, well, many will die, which, in the end, is probably not such a bad thing, there are too many of us, uselessly eating and using up water and oxygen, ultimately making life harder for the winners.  Having to worry about losers losing is just the burden of being the world’s most powerful super-wealthy predator.   The Guardian beautifully sets out the massive increase of deaths caused by the president’s six weeks of denial before taking action here. 

Wow, this got pasted in here by accident (I’d emailed the link to a friend).  Good for a laugh, I say!

Fighting Helplessness

In the end, it’s losing all hope that finally kills us.   The challenge is to remain hopeful, with our eyes open, and to act in a way most likely to make our best hopes come true.   How do we sustain ourselves in an unfairly competitive  society clearly rigged to fuck most of us, unto the death?  Particularly during a pandemic that is literally sucking the oxygen out of this troubled world, at a time when the constricting threat of immediate death is palpably tightening.

While ordinary people, except during overwhelming catastrophe, are generally content to go about their lives, feeling everything is more or less OK, extraordinary people are up early every day, never satisfied, organizing and scheming to get more than they will ever need if they live to be a thousand years old.  During Obama’s time in office, when Hope and Change were in the air because we were now a “post-racial” society with a black guy as president, a great orator who seemed reasonably in tune with the great majority of Americans, the forces of reaction kicked into high rage mode.  

Untold mountains of money were spent to undermine and cripple an “illegitimate” president and his insane desire to see more people covered by private health insurance.  We wound up with neither hope nor change, we got Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first white president, the reactionary’s reaction to a half black man in the White House.

I confess, I don’t understand the motivation of these vicious motherfuckers, though I get how infernally determined they are to rule everybody by sheer force.   You see them now, during a literal plague, arguing that luxury cruise lines and the most profitable industries in history, like the highly toxic but super lucrative fossil fuel and fracking industries, need hundreds of billions in taxpayer bailouts more than people walking around on the earth need all available help to live out a plague.    If you pay attention you notice a hundred little things on the extreme right wish list being implemented during plague time: the EPA has relaxed all enforcement of those hated regulations  that so hamper the liberties of the highly profitable fossil fuel refining industry.  [1]  

Crisis equals opportunity and this crisis is a heady aphrodisiac for the greediest and most powerful among us.   These evil fucks (and we can call someone who prefers increasing his personal fortune to saving lives an evil fuck, I’m looking at you, Jeff Fucking Bezos) have a long, consistent wish list written, edited and ready for immediate implementation when crisis equals a chance for them to get richer and more unaccountable to anyone but themselves.

What chance do we puny earthlings have against the ruthless, one-sided power that in increasingly exerted upon us?    In a culture where vast entities whose sole mandate is making profit are treated as “persons” for purposes of putting them on equal legal footing with human “persons”, how do we make ourselves heard?   I have no fucking idea, outside of organizing, and how the hell do we do that in a place when we’re all thoroughly brainwashed to believe the lesser of two evils is the best choice we’ll ever deserve in the wealthiest and most extraordinary nation in history?

Much of the time we have to sustain ourselves with small things, I suppose. Reminding ourselves of the general good will of most people (outside of the outsized psychopaths who dominate most political discourse) is a help.   Most of us are at our best, our most generous and selfless, during times of crisis.

 It also helps, I think, to not accept indignities we are not required to accept.   In this category I put things like acquaintances who try to insist that we obey their irrational dictates.  When appeals to Reason and mercy prove useless, a tart and finely pointed “fuck you” can do wonders for the mood.  Come to kill me, demanding I “respect” your right to do so?   Fine, but first, I kill you with the smallest effective dose of the specific poison you require.   Now we’re cool, brother, kill away, my zombie friend.

I am wrestling with a too long letter to the CEO of the corporation that politely wished me dead while claiming my best interests were their number one priority.  It is a wrestling match that seems futile, a corporate “person” is not worth talking to, once the outcome is settled.   Will it make me feel better to write the most succinct and persuasive statement of an issue no human could refute?  I have to think it will.  

I need to go back to the drawing board, write a one page “open letter” that I can send the CEO, cc straight to the Attorney General (who should be ashamed her office can’t provide the simple legal  answer to the direct legal question in my letter) and the New York Times editor in charge of health and education.

Picture the case that Americans have an absolute right to know, at minimum, the laws that protect them, written plainly in 1,000 words, printed in the public record. Seems like the least I should be able to do, if also, sadly, the most.

 

 

[1] and this beauty, from the greedy and the evil, from today’s New York Times.  Who needs those pesky, job-killing Obama fuel efficiency goals after the air quality in urban areas has noticeably improved after only two weeks of reduced traffic?  No proof that car exhaust has anything to do with air pollution, assholes!!

Pack the churches for Easter, yo!

With a president whose strategy for dominating the world is dominating the news, fake and otherwise, during a pandemic or on any other day, it’s not surprising he’d call for packed churches on Easter Sunday.   Why Easter Sunday, of all days?   Oh, thanks for the reminder, Don!   Nobody would ever accuse you of being subtle, you rascal!

It’s easy to forget, when thinking of those 63,000,000 votes he allegedly got in 2016, that many millions were cast by America’s most organized, religiously fervent Protestants, the Evangelicals.   The pastors of these mega-churches were mostly all in on MAGA.   As long as Trump meant a government that comports with Christ’s message that no fetus ever be executed by the state and things of that nature, they urged their credulous followers to go to the polls and make it happen.  

In the noisier Trump world of white racists and corrupt super-greedy super-wealthy folks, it is easy enough to overlook the millions of true believers who came out to vote for the flawed vessel of Christ’s will, Donald Trump, in 2016.  Without the Evangelical voting block, no President Trump.

As you wait out the plague hoax, and get ready to rush out to pack the churches, take a moment to read this excellent opinion piece The Religious Right’s Hostility to Science Is Crippling Our Coronavirus Response.

It seems unfair, perhaps, to blame decent men and women of unshakeable faith for the acts of many of their leaders.   The Intercept put together a collage of Evangelical pastors telling their flocks that faith would protect them from this overblown new illness.  One of these pastors, naturally, promised that “God is going to purge a lot of sin” with this novel disease.   

I have a personal story about Evangelicals.   By Evangelicals I refer specifically  to faithful believers in whatever God-revealed truth their charismatic preacher tells them is true,  obedience to an authority-based belief system being their highest duty to God and man.   

My parents, toward the end of their lives, befriended a young Evangelical couple whose daughter my mother was trying to teach to read.   My mother reported that the girl was very sweet, and that she really enjoyed working with her, but that the child seemed unable to grasp the first thing about letters, sounds, the mysterious elements of reading.  

My parents soon became friends with the family, the young parents, having become fervent Evangelicals, were estranged from their own families.  They really took to these old Jews.   The theological and political arguments (the couple and everyone in their church had voted for Born-Again Dubya and the aptly named Dick Cheney), though bitter, were always tinged with love.

When my father was dying they came to the hospital, with a group of their co-religionists.   They loved him and wanted to make sure he got into heaven, so they held a prayer vigil around his bed and asked him to accept Christ.  My father was beyond giving a shit about anything at that point (this was a day before he died) and probably nodded at some point to get them to leave him alone.  They blessed him and left.  He died.  None of these religious lovers of Christ ever called his widow, ever.

Had I been there when these fanatics held hands and asked Jesus to save this old Jew from hell,  I’d have done my Christ with the money changers imitation.  You want to see a righteous Jew, you misguided fucking soul-saving Evangelicals?   Leave the poor bastard alone, particularly if you intend to abandon his widow in her time of grief.

But I digress.   Evangelicals look forward to the End Times, the Rapture, the blessed day when the earth with all its wickedness will be destroyed, as it is foretold, and the righteous will be spared, and taken up directly to Jesus’s ever-merciful bosom, while the wicked will be cast into eternal hell-fire.  My father, I’m glad to say, will presumably be among the blessed saved, his head on his saviors breast.  Although a Jew, these good Christians saved him from hell.   Me and most of my friends and loved ones?  Big party in the hot place, yo.   Do you think science will save you from religious fanatics and the beliefs that make them impervious to heresy?

After all, what is “science,” my friends, but a set of organized alternate alternate facts, vainglorious “theories” “proven” by unenlightened atheists who heed not the voice of the Lamb, nor do they tremble before the might of the Holy One, blessed be He.   Can I get an amen, you ignorant fucking dumbasses?   Hallelujah!

A cynical friend thinks it’s a great idea to pack the mega-churches on Easter Sunday during plague time.  Let them put their powerful beliefs to the test that religious zealots have always selflessly submitted themselves to.  Only, make them stay in the churches for two weeks afterwards, that their souls may be purified.   And as should be done with all the so-called Libertarians who revere individual liberty above all else, and recognize no role for organized people governing themselves to protect everyone, deny them entry to those despised, coercive halls of science where the arrogant pretend to know more than the righteous about the best way to treat a deadly, highly infectious disease created by the All Mighty.

 

“We’ve done one hell of a job,”

“nobody’s done the job that we’ve done.”

The president is right.   His words to a nasty reporter the other day need to be remembered.   We’re now number one, worldwide, in Coronavirus cases.  USA!  USA!!!

Nobody does it better.

In fairness to the president, admitting he was slow to react to the looming pandemic, denied it for crucial weeks, called it a Democratic Hoax, and dismissed it as no worse than the flu, all those things might hurt his chances of reelection.  So, basically, he has to pat himself on the back for the hell of a job he did, literally.

Plus, look, he’s over 50% in approval polls for the first time in his life as the most unfairly attacked president in history.  Constantly exonerated, constantly attacked by wealthy elite enemies.  Jesus himself must wonder how the man can take it.