St. Francis died
almost eight hundred
years ago,
the homilist said
St. Francis dead? No!
He lives
in caring hands
and quieting eye,
in singing stream,
flaming leaf,
and flowering sky.
The death that separates
him from us
is so thin!
He moves among us
freely here,
unlimited by skin.
Sr. Irene Zimmerman Order of Saint Francis
who shows how a white probably peroxide enhanced Aryan dimwit can lose big and make a career of it in white-supremacy hate on FOX Lies. Though these days she could probably do the same at CNN or CBS, for that matter.
Her challenge to debate the really accomplished Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was hilarious and clearly based on the Trumpian appeal to racism and sexism. Our fascists really have it out for Women of Color. AOC's challenge to her to get a real job shows that if they did debate, one on one, Whiney would still come in 5th.
UPDATE: "Riley Gaines is a Christian"
17 I appeal to you, brethren, to take note of those who create dissensions and difficulties, in opposition to the doctrine which you have been taught; avoid them. 18 For such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites, and by fair and flattering words they deceive the hearts of the simple-minded.
Romans 16:17-18 RSV
She's made a career out of spreading hate and now racism on FOX Lies., She's no Christian any more than J.D. Vance is no matter what such outfit she's a member of.
the guy I said it to, agreed, but he thought most People younger than us wouldn't know what that annoying cartoon character was so I'll post this for now.
I GENERALLY AVOID listening to the sound of Donald Trump's voice so I hadn't heard till just now his senile diatribe about President Biden, claiming he'd claimed to be a pilot and a truck driver in front of an audience of service members who must have been stunned to hear the guy designated to be their commander sounding loonier than Captain Queeg raving about pilfered strawberries and, unlike that fictional character, just having his mind shut down mid-sentence.
And it's not as if Trump hasn't been doing this for the past nine months or even the years before, you have to consider that at least several thousand of the more than thirty-thousand documented lies told back when the Washington Post was still something like a journalistic outfit had to have been similarly drug induced or dementia induced expressions of something that Trump may have had something like a fleeting notion were true.
Trump is exactly what, no doubt, the framers and founders must have felt themselves to have narrowly escaped, being governed by a clearly insane George III. Though by the time of the American Revolution he is still considered to have been largely in his right mind. Trump has never had much of an attachment to reality or history or reason or even the own commonly experienced reality that he might make some twisted reference to BUT HE'S CLEARLY A RAVING, DROOLING, LYING AND DANGEROUS LUNATIC NOW AND NOT ONLY IS NOTHING BEING DONE TO REMOVE HIM, HIS MOST DANGEROUS ROYAL IMPULSES ARE BEING ENABLED BY THE COURTS, BY THE REPUBLICAN-FASCIST CONGRESS, BY THE MEDIA AND BY THE LEADING (THAT IS WELL-FINANCED) INSTITUTIONS IN THE COUNTRY.
This is way past what Britain has had so recently with Boris Johnson this is us being ruled by a mad king made more like the situation in Britain under the House of Hanover than the American Federalists could imagine happening under their Constitution.
The U.S. Constitution, our presidential system, our "free press" our legal system has failed catastrophically and there is no sign that things won't get far worse. Even if Trump is removed by natural death the failure has happened and the impunity the Roberts Court gave our mad king will be used more skillfully by Vance and his owner Thiel. And that's before whoever the Courts and the tatters of our ratfucked election system puts in after him.
I DON'T NECESSARILY AGREE WITH EVERYTHING that Tad Stoermer says in every video he issues but his understanding of American history as "resistance history" is enormously valuable. Instead of the typical "which side of the aristocrats are you on" view of history, he says to introduce this topic, "Yes, both groups are bastard covered bastards with bastard filling. I get it. But we don't et to study just the history of People we like." The sides in this case are the Federalists, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, etc. who tried to freeze out others from ever governing, on one side, and the Democratic-Republicans, Jefferson, Madison, etc. on the other side (the so-called Jeffersonian revolution of 1800). Ultimately the side I'm on are the People of that period who were left out of both the Federalist fascists and the Jefferson-Madison side, those held in slavery, those without property, Women, other minority groups who were living under subjugation under the Constitution, even with that alleged Bill of Rights which, it should never be forgotten, even Madison wasn't all that hot on.* Even as I admit that the Jeffersonian revolution made some progress for dispossessed white men, it was entirely short of what needed to happen to the original Constitution that the goddamned "originalists" want to bring us back to. I'm no more happy with us going back to 1801 than I am going back to 1789. I'm not happy to go back to any minute in American history, not even the day before the last presidential election. All that gets you is going back to where things went wrong with the conditions that produced that wrong.
The only legitimate history of the United States to be proud of in any way was the resistance to that Federalist establishment's Constitution as it was written then and as the aristocrats and thugs and the Supreme Court (to risk tautology) and the struggle for equality and, so democracy, most of all by those suffering under that subjugation and secondly to those more affluent, formally educated and almost uniformly religious enfranchised white men whose conscience was stronger than their sense of entitlement and greed. If you want to call that "resistance history" I'd suggest that it's only really valuable to instruct us in those instances when it was successful. BUT NEVER FORGETTING THAT THE SUPREME COURT, THE ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA, ENTERTAINMENT INCLUDED, WAS ALWAYS READY TO TRY TO TURN BACK THAT HARD-WON PROGRESS. If you want a recent example, it occurs to me that you could look at Susan Faludi's book from the 1990s, Backlash: The undeclared War Against american Women, something which the Dobbs decision is a product of.
But here's the video:
His reading of the
* Paul Finkleman's essay James Madison And The Bill of Rights: A Reluctant Paternity is one of the best things I've ever seen on the topic. Though I would note this reference to it from an article earlier this year by John B. Vile
Madison pivoted in favor of Bill of Rights
The chapters by Paul Finkelman and Howard Schweber deal most closely with the First Amendment. Describing Madison as the “Stepfather” of the Bill of Rights, Finkelman notes that Madison was both a “reluctant and unenthusiastic,” albeit nonetheless effective, advocate for the Bill of Rights. He primarily viewed it as a relatively harmless way of avoiding a second constitutional convention that might undo the work of the first. It is commonly believed that Madison may have changed his mind about the value of the bill of rights as a result of his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, who strong favored such guarantees. Finkelman demonstrates that Madison had pivoted in favor of this bill even before he had received Jefferson’s letters.
Finkelman does not, however, note that, speaking before Congress on June 8, 1789, Madison argued that if individual rights were incorporated into the Constitution, “independent tribunals of justice will consider themselves in a peculiar manner the guardians of those rights” and “will be an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive.” This is very close to the argument that Jefferson presented to him in a letter of March 15, 1789, where Jefferson lauded “the legal check” that a bill of rights would put “into the hands of the judiciary.”
Anyone who knows the history of the "Bill of Rights" in the hands of the Supreme Court without having their blood run cold can't realize how wrong those luminaries were. That's especially true of the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, but also courts going back sixy-one years distorting the First Amendment to do exactly the opposite of what Madison and Jefferson expected would be the results of putting such matters into the hands of the courts, that that would guarantee a the protection of rights and the prevention of such usurpations of power as they faced in the run up to the election of 1800. For anyone unfamilar with me on that topic, I hold the Warren Court's absurd expansions of the meaning of "speech" in many of its most celebrated rulings to have opened the door that the Republican-fascists forced us into so as to do after 1976 what Adams and Hamilton tried to do, this time through "free speech" as distorted by the courts, starting with Buckley v Valeo.
that my relative who died of an easily treated infection didn't have insurance because he couldn't afford it even under the ACA in his state in which the Republicans had blocked Medicaid expansion in any real way. He was murdered by the Republicans. Especially John Roberts and the other Republican-fascists on the Court as well as in the state legislature in his state.
---------
I am asked, in a related question, if I've read John Fugelsang's book, Separation of Church and Hate. No, I haven't. I've listened to Fugelsang and agree with much of what he is saying though I was disappointed that, like virtually everyone, he seems to misunderstand the long argument against sanctimony and arrogance that most people think is a definitive condemnation of same-sex sex in Romans when, if you read over the artificial chapter break which Paul didn't put there, he used that in a list of things that he presumed his audience found disgusting or distasteful BEFORE HE POINTED OUT THAT THEY AS WELL AS HE DID THINGS THAT WERE AS WRONG AS HE ASSUMED THOSE OTHER THINGS WERE. Instead of focusing on the entire list of things Paul lists, AFTER HE MENTIONS SAME SEX SEX. I would point out that instead of falling for that, if he kept on and pointed out the list, it sounds like the list of things held to be virtuous by Republican-fascists, Hollywood fascist-chic, bro-kulcha, and eutrophic level American capitalism. Oh, and what the free press was given as a "right to lie, slander, vilify and etc. by current First Amendment dogma. Here's his set up in "Chapter 1, which shows what they ignore to concentrate on exclusively on what he says about sex.
24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen.
26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. 29 They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them. RSV
Anyone reading the list that render those who do them deserving of death without thinking of Donald Trump is someone who knows nothing about Trump. But not only Trump. The MAGAs, when they're confronted with the actual Gospel sometimes realize they hate Jesus who isn't their dispensationalist, fundamentalist action figure with blond hair and blue eyes.
In a related and excellent video released yesterday by Hysteria, there is this investigation of the central figure in the history of the current "Christian" hate, Jerry Falwell.
You will note that they announce they're going to do his sonny boy, too. I just hope that somewhere, Jerry's looking up from hell to see he's being roasted by feminists here, too. He makes the rich man of the parable seem like Dorothy Day or Mother Teresa, who he probably figured was going to hell for being a papist. At least before she became useful or at least not touchable. I recall some of his fellow TV hallelujah peddlers say she was in hell.
THIS STRIKES ME as one of the most important channels I hadn't heard about and Paulina Borsook impresses me as someone I should have known about before today. I intend to read her book as soon as I can get hold of it.
of expanding on something I posted. It's probably better to read it than much of what I said below. He does philosophy a lot better than I do. You lose a lot of reading time having to practice your scales and other exercises. I doubt most music majors could really count as intellectuals considering how much time playing an instrument takes. Though that did a lot for my typing.
I'm looking forward to Advent.
if they want to produce a really well written book. Harper Lee worked on To Kill a Mockingbird with Tay Hohoff, her editor, for more than two years to polish what apparently was a quite rough stone into the jewel that that book was. When its precursor, Go Set A Watchman was published with Lee's permission but without much of her participation, a lot of people noted that it would have been a far better novel if it had undergone the same kind of editing process.
I've been trying to do some translation work on a book by an author I have the highest respect for and am finding that this particular book - not one of his most well known but one which I think is uniquely valuable - could have used some rigorous editing, as well. I've realized that my virtually clause by clause notes which I've taken on it broke down many of his extremely long complex sentences into separate sentences and have wondered if translating my notes might not be both easier for me to do and to publish online - I'm sure it would violate America's absurd copyright laws but I might do it anonymously in several places so someone might profit from it. The author will be long dead by the time I get around to doing that so I don't feel any moral compunctions against doing it. I don't much give a damn about the American copyright laws as they've been expanded to absurd lengths to maximize profits well past the death of the original author or their children's lives.
As I've said to you guys before - this is an answer to yet another trolling about the quality of my writing - if you notice a marked rise in the quality of the writing here, such things as the words that unintentionally get deleted in my revisions remaining where they were, you'll know I've hit the numbers and can hire someone to edit me. Till then you get it quick and dirty, just like I write it.
A MEMBER OF MY FAMILY, close but not immediate, has died, uninsured, of a matter that could have been likely cured by a dose of antibiotics. He deferred treatment for the simple reason that he couldn't afford to go to the doctor another time this year. He was middle aged with two children and others who are devastated by his death. He had hidden his condition from everyone as he tried to treat it himself, he didn't want to burden his family with even that significant but relatively modest cost.
I used to babysit him when he was a child. He was an ornery little kid but adulthood improved him enormously. He was a good father and son to his parents and brother to his siblings.
His sudden death has affected me deeply but I can see that there is someone to blame for it, it's the goddamned Republicans who, first in the Roberts Court weakened the Affordable Care Act through his declaration that the Medicaid expansion requirement on the states was unconstitutional. The Republican ruled state he lived in didn't do much of anything in that direction. His inability to pay was a direct consequence of that decision by John Roberts who has to bear responsibility for such deaths that his choice caused. Though the original weakening of the Act, itself, so that Barack Obama could try to, unsuccessfully coax Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to vote for it so he could declare it was "bipartisan" and Rahm Emanuel's deal with big Pharma to keep their profits up played a role, too. If he had lived in Canada, cost would have been no issue at all.
I remember when the debate over the ACA was going on, a Canadian commented that the original Canadian healthcare law was only a few pages long whereas, catering to private insurance and hospital corporations in the typical American way the ACA was close to a thousand pages long. Our Constitutional system, especially as distorted by the Supreme Court in things like its "corporate person-hood" bullshit gets us killed at an earlier age, sometimes of horrific, agonizing conditions that are routinely cured in other countries. There is a reason that in healthcare, the rich get top level care, most of us get something closer to what the poor can get in developing countries. Lots of us get to die prematurely.
And the Republican's most recent destruction of it haven't kicked in yet.
