The Group Most In Need Of Evangelization Includes The White Evangelicals

 I LIKE the Reverend Ed Tevors, an Anglican minister in the maritimes of Canada.

This one is about a "Christian nationalist" preacher, preaching the order to those who take such a huckster seriously that they are to have more babies.  

"Christian nationalism" is a terrible heresy.   It's been present in nominal Christianity ever since it started becoming an official religion tied to kings and nationalities, so a heresy that started fairly early, the official churches selling their souls to secular power for a relatively peaceful life.  The problem is that they might gain that world but in the process they have tied Christianity to everything from relatively good, though inevitably illegitimate governments to the worst monarchs and some of the worst dictators who have ever lived.   The current Patriarch of Moscow, Kiril, is as good an example of the worst of that,   I'll let the eminent Orthodox commentator on religion, David Bentley Hart state that as a good example of what such "Christian nationalism" does to Christianity, not to mention the disrepute such "Christians" earn for Christianity.

I am willing to be corrected if this is an unfair characterization, but in general the statements of “alarm” or “sadness” emanating from Orthodoxy’s ecclesial chairs and offices have been little more than the sort of vague mewlings one can generally expect from those shapeless invertebrates. And then, of course, there is that cringing, odious state functionary, Patriarch of Moscow Kirill, who has long abetted Putin’s regime in whatever way his master has demanded, and for whom a place in Hell has long been prepared. Somehow, he defies invective and indignation and disgust simply by reliably exceeding even the worst expectations one might have of him. Why, just yesterday he blamed the Russian war in Ukraine on gay pride parades (if I could explain the connection, I would). Oh well, that’s the great church of “Holy Russia” for you: ever ready to canonize those heroic figures who lost their lives for defying the cruelty of despots, whether in the Czarist or Soviet periods, but never, ever tempted to emulate them.

In the United States he has bemoaned the large numbers of converts to Orthodoxy from "evangelical Christianity" saying that American Orthdoxy was turning into Southern Baptist religion with incense added.  

The Catholic and many Protestant Churches have many figures of whom such things can be said with complete accuracy.  I'd say that the branch that has been least true of is probably the Anabaptists, though I'd limit that to the Peace Churches,  the Mennonites, the Amish, the Brethren and the Quakers,  despots have no use for Churches that preach and practice pacifism.   It's not nearly as true of Baptists and don't get me started on the many varieties of Pentecostalism.

There is no greater need in religion than for Christians who take the Gospels and Epistles, the Law and the Prophets seriously to convert the Christians who don't have any use for Christ and only use for any of the rest of it when they turn it into a weapon of their hatred and greed, the kind who could have voted for Trump. 

I still haven't gotten around to dealing with that second installment of Sean Michael Winter's really, really bad ideas about "what Democrats got wrong."  But I hope to later today or tomorrow.

She Doesn't Need Me To Add Anything

My remarks at the Oxford Union debate

by Susan Abulhawa

I will not take questions until I’m finished speaking; so please refrain from interrupting me.

Addressing the challenge of what to do about the indigenous inhabitants of the land Chaim Weizman, a Russian Jew, said to the World Zionist Congress in 1921 that Palestinians were akin to “the rocks of Judea, obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.”

David Gruen, a Polish Jew, who changed his name to David Ben Gurion to sound relevant to the region, said. “We must expel Arabs and take their places.”

There are thousands of such conversations among the early zionists who plotted and implemented the violent colonization of Palestine and the annihilation of her native people.

But they were only partially successful, murdering or ethnically cleansing 80% of Palestinians, which meant that 20% of us remained, an enduring obstacle to their colonial fantasies, which became the subject of their obsessions in the decades that followed, especially after conquering what remained of Palestine in 1967.

Zionists lamented our presence and they debated publicly in all circles—political, academic, social, cultural circles—regarding what do with us; what to do about the Palestinian birthrate, about our babies, which they dub a demographic threat.

Benny Morris, who was originally meant to be here, once expressed regret that Ben Gurion “did not finish the job” of getting rid of us all, which would have obviated what they refer to as the “Arab problem.”

Benjamin Netanyahu, a Polish Jew whose real name is Benjamin Mileikowsky, once bemoaned a missed opportunity during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising to expel large swaths of the Palestinian population “while world attention was focused on China.”

Some of their articulated solutions to the nuisance of our existence include a “break their bones” policy in the 80s and 90s, ordered by Yitzhak Rubitzov, Ukrainian Jew who changed his name to Yitzhak Rabin (for the same reasons).

That horrific policy that crippled generations of Palestinians did not succeed in making us leave. And frustrated by Palestinian resilience, a new discourse arose, especially after a massive natural gas field was discovered off the coast of Northern Gaza worth trillions of dollars.

This new discourse is echoed in the words of Colonel Efraim Eitan, who said in 2004, “we have to kill them all.”

Aaron Sofer, an Israeli so-called intellectual and political advisor, insisted in 2018 that “we have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

When I was in Gaza, I saw a little boy no more than 9 years whose hands and part of his face, had been blown off from a booby trapped can of food that soldiers had left behind for Gaza’s starving children. I later learned that they had also left poisoned food for people in Shujaiyya, and in the 1980s and 90s, Israeli soldiers had left booby trapped toys in southern Lebanon that exploded when excited children picked them up.

The harm they do is diabolical, and yet, they expect you to believe they are the victims. Invoking Europe’s holocaust and screaming antisemitism, they expect you to suspend fundamental human reason to believe that the daily sniping of children with so called “kill shots” and the bombing of entire neighborhoods that bury families alive and wipe out whole bloodlines is self-defense.

They want you to believe that a man who had not eaten a thing in over 72 hours, who kept fighting even when all he had was one functioning arm, that this man was motivated by some innate savagery and irrational hatred or jealousy of Jews, rather than the indominable yearning to see his people free in their own homeland.

It’s clear to me that we’re not here to debate whether Israel is an apartheid or genocidal state. This debate is ultimately about the worth of Palestinian lives; about the worth of our schools, research centers, books, art, and dreams; about the worth of the homes we worked all our lives to build and which contain the memories of generations; about the worth of our humanity and our agency; the worth of bodies and ambitions.

If the roles were reversed…

Because if the roles were reversed—if Palestinians had spent the last eight decade stealing Jewish homes, expelling, oppressing, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, raping and killing them; if Palestinians had killed an estimated 300,000 Jews in one year, targeted their journalists, their thinkers, their healthcare workers, their athletes, their artists, bombed every Israeli hospital, university, library, museum, cultural center, synagogue, and simultaneously set up an observation platform where people came watch their slaughter as if a tourist attraction;

if Palestinians had corralled them by the hundreds of thousands into flimsy tents, bombed them in so called safe zones, burned them alive, cut off their food, water, and medicine;

if Palestinians made Jewish children wander barefoot with empty pots; made them gather the flesh of their parents into plastic bags; made them bury their siblings, cousins and friends; made them sneak out from their tents in the middle of the night to sleep on their parents’ graves; made them pray for death just to join their families and not be alone in this terrible world anymore, and terrorized them so utterly that their children lose their hair, lose their memory, lose their minds, and made those as young as 4 and 5 year old were die of heart attacks;

if we mercilessly forced their NICU babies to die, alone in hospital beds, crying until they could cry no more, died and decomposed in the same spot;

if Palestinians used wheat flour aid trucks to lure starving jews, then opened fire on them when they gathered to collect a day’s bread; if Palestinians finally allowed a food delivery into a shelter with hungry Jews, then set fire to the entire shelter and aid truck before anyone could taste the food;

if a Palestinian sniper bragged about blowing out 42 Jewish kneecaps in one day as one Israeli soldier did in 2019; if a Palestinian admitted to CNN that he ran over hundreds of Jews with his tank, their squished flesh lingering in the tank treads;

if Palestinians were systematically raping Jewish doctors, patients, and other captives with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks, and fire extinguishers, sometimes raping to death, as happened with Dr Adnan alBursh and others;

if Jewish women were forced to give birth in filth, get C-sections or leg amputations without anesthesia; if we destroyed their children then decorated our tanks with their toys; if we killed or displaced their women then posed with their lingerie…

if the world were watching the livestreamed systematic annihilation of Jews in real time, there would be no debating whether that constituted terrorism or genocide.
And yet two Palestinians—myself and Mohammad el-Kurd— showed up here to do just that, enduring the indignity of debating those who think our only life choices should be to leave our homeland, submit to their supremacy, or die politely and quietly.

But you would be wrong to think that I came to convince you of anything. The house resolution, though well-meaning and appreciated, is of little consequence in the midst of this holocaust of our time.

For the sake of history

I came in the spirit of Malcolm X and Jimmy Baldwin, both of whom stood here and in Cambridge before I was born, facing finely dressed well-spoken monsters who harbored the same supremacist ideologies as Zionism—these notions of entitlement and privilege, of being divinely favored, blessed, or chosen.

I’m here for the sake of history. To speak to generations not yet born and for the chronicles of this extraordinary time where the carpet bombing of defenseless indigenous societies is legitimized.

I’m here for my grandmothers, both of whom died as penniless refugees while foreign Jews lived in their stolen homes.

And I also came to speak directly to zionists here and everywhere.

We let you into our homes when your own countries tried to murder you and everyone else turned you away. We fed, clothed, gave you shelter, and we shared the bounty of our land with you, and when the time was ripe, you kicked us out of our own homes and homeland, then you killed and robbed and burned and looted our lives.

You carved out our hearts because it is clear you do not know how to live in the world without dominating others.

You have crossed all lines and nurtured the most vile of human impulses, but the world is finally glimpsing the terror we have endured at your hands for so long, and they are seeing the reality of who you are, who you’ve always been. They watch in utter astonishment the sadism, the glee, the joy, and pleasure with which you conduct, watch, and cheer the daily details of breaking our bodies, our minds, our future, our past.

The sacredness of the olives trees

But no matter what happens from here, no matter what fairytales you tell yourself and tell the world, you will never truly belong to that land. You will never understand the sacredness of the olives trees, which you’ve been cutting down and burning for decades just to spite us and to break our hearts a little more. No one native to that land would dare do such a thing to the olives. No one who belongs to that region would ever bomb or destroy such ancient heritage as Baalbak or Bittir, or destroy ancient cemeteries as you destroy ours, like the Anglican cemetery in Jerusalem or the resting place of ancient Muslim scholars and warriors in Maamanillah. Those who come from that land do not desecrate the dead; that’s why my family for centuries were the caretakers of the Jewish cemetery in the mount of olives, as labors of faith and care for what we know is part of our ancestry and story.

Your ancestors will always be buried in your actual homelands of Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere around the world from whence you came. The mythos and folklore of the land will always be alien to you.

You will never be literate in the sartorial language of the thobes we wear, that sprang from the land through our foremothers over centuries—every motif, design, and pattern speaking to the secrets of local lore, flora, birds, rivers, and wildlife.

What your real estate agents call in their high-priced listings “old Arab home” will always hold in their stones the stories and memories of our ancestors who built them. The ancient photos and paintings of the land will never contain you.

You will never know how it feels to be loved and supported by those who have nothing to gain from you, and in fact, everything to lose. You will never know the feeling of masses all over the world pouring into the streets and stadiums to chant and sing for your freedom; and it is not because you are Jewish, as you try to make the world believe, but because you are depraved violent colonizers who think your Jewishness entitles you to the home my grandfather and his brothers built with their own hands on lands that had been in our family for centuries. It is because Zionism is a blight onto Judaism and indeed onto humanity.

You can change your names to sound more relevant to the region and you can pretend falafel and hummus and zaatar are your ancient cuisines, but in the recesses of your being, you will always feel the sting of this epic forgery and theft, that’s why even the drawings of our children pasted hung on walls at the UN or in a hospital ward send your leaders and lawyers into hysteric meltdowns.
You will not erase us

You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill and kill and kill, all day every day. We are not the rocks Chaim Weizmann thought you could clear from the land. We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories, because all of that was nurtured by our bodies and our lives over millennia of continuous, uninterrupted habitation of that patch of earth between the Jordan and Mediterranean waters, from our Canaanite, our Hebrew, our Philistine, and our Phoenician ancestors, to every conqueror or pilgrim who came and went, who married or raped, loved, enslaved, converted between religions, settled or prayed in our land, leaving pieces of themselves in our bodies and our heritage.

The fabled, tumultuous stories of that land are quite literally in our DNA. You cannot kill or propagandize that away, no matter what death technology you use or what Hollywood and corporate media arsenals you deploy.

Someday, your impunity and arrogance will end. Palestine will be free; she will be restored to her multi-religious, multi-ethnic pluralistic glory; we will restore and expand the trains that run from Cairo to Gaza to Jerusalem, Haifa, Tripoli, Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Kuwait, Sanaa, and so on; we will put an end to the zionist American war machine of domination, expansion, extraction, pollution, and looting.

..and you will either leave, or you will finally learn to live with others as equals.

The Coventry Carol - The Young Tradition - With an updated repost from 2022

 

The Coventry Carol is the opposite of Silent Night in that it is all about the first account of danger to Jesus from worldly power when he was a baby. 

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
Thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay?”

Herod the king, in his raging,
Chargèd he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All young children to slay.

That woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and may
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”
Posted by The Thought Criminal at 3:18 PM No comments:
Wednesday, December 28, 2022
Coventry Carol 2 - Truth That's Deeper Than The Mere Facts

RMJ has written a very fine post on this.  

AN INTELLECTUAL RUCKUS IS MADE every year about the birth narratives of Jesus in Luke and Matthew being so different and pointing out that none of what is said in them can be confirmed to have happened. The census, the slaughter of the children, etc.  Though it's become so rote a ruckus that it should be considered untellectual by now.

Even those who are supposed to be academics don't much fact check themselves on the neo-pseudo-pagan anti-Christian liturgies these days. It's not as if there's any professional price to pay if they get that wrong.  I will mention in passing that most of the history of that period, earlier and later is similarly undocumented but no one will seriously question it.

While it might be reasonable to figure that something so profitable to rulers as a census for purposes of taxation as in Luke's narrative might have left evidence which survived, anyone who thinks something as routine as the Matthew Gospel's ordered massacre of a bunch of babies of poor people would survive in historical records has an extremely naive view of how power is still routinely wielded by the rich and so powerful and what they figure is worth keeping records of. Routine murder of poor children is still too routine to matter much.  The recording of history and what gets paid attention to is a question of what those in a position to do that really value and it's still mostly money.  The United States can't even manage to change the damned Constitution to prevent even the murder of middle-class children in their schools and it's become so routine as to have no effect, whatsoever.  And we're supposed to be a republic.

I think, though, the assertion that the slaughter of the innocents is undocumented so is merely a myth gets it wrong in what is the most important way.   I think that of all of the birth narratives, the slaughter of the innocents and the family fleeing into Egypt, the El Norte of that time and place, is absolutely documented and it isn't because we can be any more certain that the actual family of Jesus experienced it.  But, I will speak up for an even standard in academic proclamations and note that even the single attestation in the Gospel of Matthew lends weight to something like that having happened even if you don't believe in astrology or significant, prophetic dreaming.  There is certainly nothing unbelievable in the general outline of the story.  A known to be murderous king coming to believe an unspecified new born baby in a specific town is a danger to his rule and his dynasty ordering his thugs to kill all the babies in that district, a parent finding out the danger and fleeing with their children. The modern fashion in historical speculation says that the actual number of such babies in such a town wouldn't be the numbers imagined by renaissance and baroque painters, more like what the peasants of 1970s Nicaragua discussed  in The Gospel At Solentiame, as they could understand the Gospel on this better than almost any American or Brit academic expert could.*  As could those in Palestine, especially those under the Israeli genocide, right now.   There is strong evidence that the Israeli terrorists are targeting young children.   Netanyahu is Herod, Putin is Herod. 

Despite the vulgar significance at the heart of that academically trivial and pointless responsible, modern obsession, that exercise in scholarly responsibility doesn't get near the heart  of the two birth narratives.  As that sermon by Bishop Gene Robinson noted, not everything has to have happened for it to be true, that is if by "truth" you mean having a coherent and important  true meaning instead of being an objective report on something that had happened in pedestrian, abstract clerical reporting.

As I've said last week, my preferences tend to be with Luke's interpretation with frightening angels telling very low status shepherds about the most significant event in human history, the birth of the Son of God, of God choosing to become incarnated as a human being - no one understands the Incarnation - and them having the faith to go look for him in an animals shed, sleeping in the feed trough. I contrasted that to the wise men with their three Christmas presents, though Matthew doesn't specify that the child was a baby and may well have been more of a toddler by the time they caught up with what their astrology told them was going on with the Jews.  Too bad their astrology didn't tell them Herod was a complete rotter.

But there is an aspect of Matthew's account we can be certain was absolutely true in the Gene Robinson way, the attempt of Herod to kill him, showing that from the start the baby who was to have the future of Jesus would be a danger to earthly power and would be the object of their murderous violence as soon as they found out about him.  He could well have been the victim of their uninformed, routine violence, anyway.  The Crucifixion of Jesus under the Romans is the final proof of the truth of Matthew's perhaps symbolic nativity story of the three astrologers and their symbolically portentous gifts. The accounts in Matthew are true in the most important way.  Certainly it's more important for human experience.  That event has been  repeatedly reenacted and expanded on. How much truth would there have been in an accurate live-birth record as found all round the United State these days as compared to the perennial truth of Matthew's scary Christmas stories?   How much would the record of a live birth be an important truth as opposed to the life of the child that followed that birth?  Just what is truth supposed to be good for, in the end?

Herod is Trump putting babies in concentration camps to keep his power through appealing to racism and hate and his media and the Republican-fascist party supporting him, many of them those "evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics."  He is Trump denying Covid-19, advocating Darwinist "herd immunity" sacrificing so many more babies and children than Herod had available to murder.  Herod is the entire Republican-fascist caucus of the Congress and the majority on the Supreme Court. And that's just here in one country.  Herod has led most of the world for most of history, including the so-called Christian world.  Imagine how different things would have been if people had taken him more seriously.  The secular world hankers for a time when even fewer people will take him seriously. Even the alleged left.

That other story in Matthew 25 in which Jesus, himself, identifies the least among us as being enough of a of God so that what we do for them we do to God and what we neglect to do, we neglect to do for God. Poor children aren't in that list as given in Matthew 25 but they would certainly have been the least of the least as they are now and for every age in the past and will be into the future as it looks now.  Children are marked out for murder by oppressive worldly power, they are certainly marked out for the violence of poverty, for neglect, they are the targets of official and unofficial violence, for both the violence of the state and the other worldly powers of organized crime, some of that organized crime conducted by other children.  And just as the parents of Jesus, Mary and Joseph are so terrified for the life of their child, they were forced to leave their homeland to save his life, just as so many are fleeing from the Herods of Central America and Eastern Africa and the Middle East and Ukraine and in so many places that none of us could come up with an adequate list.

All of those "white evangelicals" (we aren't supposed to notice the ones who aren't fascists) and in many cases their fellow "traditional Catholics" who participated in Trump's and earlier Republican-fascists use of those fleeing violence in Central America were reenacting Herod's side of the story, they still do and for exactly the same reasons.  

The blasphemy of those who mouth "Jesus Christ" or "The Bible" as they worship Mammon and take on the mark of the antichrist is unremarked in the nice, polite Christianity of the mainline churches and Catholicism, indeed, the majority of those incumbent in the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops are fully in on the act as are those billionaires and millionaires who fund the "trad-catholic" corruption that is engaged in a hostile take-over of the Catholic Church.

And that doesn't get to the foremost murderers of Children, killers of their souls, their lives if they achieve adulthood, the specters terrorizing their parents, their physical and spiritual welfare, murderous, self-satisfied neglect, addiction, sex trafficking.  Poverty is its basis.

That truth is one that you won't read or hear any snark about but it is a far more important truth than whether or not Matthew would have gotten an A in a properly conducted history class while a critique of the historicity of the most pedestrian facts of his Gospel would get the top grade. We know it's accurate history of THIS child because what this child said about the Least among us and that what we do and neglect to do for it we do to God and the consequences of that action or inaction would be the gravest alternatives we will ever provoke in our lives.  But that is held to be less important than getting his hometown right and date of birth accurate.  The real truth is Jesus was born last week in the Congo, in North Korea, in El Salvador, in Ukraine, in Somalia.

If she were close enough, her or his single-mother will have to make the flight into America's Pharaonic regime maybe as soon as they can travel, maybe the baby's father will go with them but quite likely not.  Mary was lucky she had a husband who stuck by them and who could.  The Supreme Court and the Republican-fascists in Congress, FOX with its mythical war on Christmas are Herod.  So are the gangs they'll be fleeing. So is every member of the Republican-fascist party.  And what you can say about that incarnation of The Lord, you can also tell in stories of so many places it will make you weep. And you can even weep more for the children, infants, toddlers, older children and least among us adults who are the victims of the ever reincarnated Herod power among us.  It doesn't get any truer than the most significant of real history, a narrative that is continually re-happening right before our eyes and which is the only history that matters because we have some power to do something about it.

* I will point out how acceptable "ethics" talk about killing babies after birth is and generally has been since the second half of the 19th century.  I am unaware of any "ethics" professor, any biologist, any medical guy ever being fired for advocating the killing of babies.  In the ever widening game of "I can take an even more extreme stand," which is as much a part of competitive academics as it is in degenerate politics, there are perfectly respectable and respected "ethicists" who have toyed with the assertion that parents should get to have their children killed if they don't measure up to their standards.  I'm not aware of anyone ever getting canned for that.  I'll bet someone who asserted the accuracy of Matthew's accounts would be looked more askance at than even the most infanticidal "ethics" faculty would.  If I were online as much as I used to be I'd make up a faculty identity so I could access academic publications to see what the status of that issue is in academic scribblage is these days.

Compare:

In ghetto settings, Jewish children died from starvation, disease, and a lack of adequate clothing and shelter. The German authorities were indifferent to the high death rates. They considered most of the younger ghetto children to be unproductive and hence “useless eaters.” Because children were generally too young to be used for forced labor, German authorities often selected them, the elderly, ill, and disabled, for the first deportations to killing centers, or as the first victims led to mass graves to be shot.

I am, of course, obliged to point out that I'm talking about post-partum murder of children, not access to abortion which is an entirely different matter which I've dealt with, favoring legal, accessible, medically safe abortion and universal education and availability of effective, scientific contraception. That and education in how to avoid STDs belongs in every school from earlier than kids are going to be screwing around.  Anyone who claims to be against abortion who isn't for that is a liar. 

A Women's Strike For Equality In The Church Is A Great Idea But It Will Be Thwarted By The Big Money

I WAS GOING to write in response to Michael Sean Winter's second and, I'm sad to say, as bad column claiming to know what Democrats got wrong in their narrow loss earlier this month but that will have to wait.  

Instead I'll point to this much better idea from today's National Catholic Reporter, Women calling for Women to hold a strike against the Catholic hierarchy during Lent next year:

What would the Catholic Church do without women? If some activists have their way, we're about to find out.

A new project is urging women to strike by withholding time, labor and financial resources from the church during Lent, which begins March 5. The planned action is in response to the Vatican's synod on synodality, which concluded in October without action on women's leadership, including the opening of ordination to the diaconate or priesthood.

"The strike is for Catholics who are looking for a way to express their disappointment, frustration or anger at an institution that refuses to recognize the equal dignity of half of its members," said Kate McElwee, executive director of the Women's Ordination Conference, which is organizing the strike.

The project, called "Catholic Women Strike: Global Witness for Equality," calls on women to "make your presence in the church known by your absence." It was launched earlier this month.

It would be a good idea to ask men who support Women to do the same.  They will need it because I'm sure that like the aristocrats who sullied their pure, clean hands to break the General Strike in Britain, there will be many a quisling Woman who will do that, too.   The billionaire-millinaire catho-fascists will do their best to thwart this.

I am not an active Catholic, though I'm still considered one in good standing, one interested enough so I followed the Synod process only to be one of those who, at the end of it, was left to wonder is that all there is to it?   I acknowledge it was a radical step for Pope Francis to take to call it but I'm left disappointed by its results.  It was no Vatican II, it's more like Paul VI's timid post-Council response to the reforms that so many Catholic lay people and even many members of the religious and clergy desperately needed.   I think what should have been the high point of Francis's generally great papacy has been a huge let-down leaving Women, especially, but Catholics in general demoralized and discouraged.   It's clear that Francis will not do anything to fix one of the greatest crises in the Church, the reform and expansion of the priesthood either through letting married men be ordained or ordaining Women.   He will not even reopen the absolutely documented office of deacon to Women, something that is older than the office named "Pope," 

If this doesn't work, I'd suggest that Women should seriously consider giving their support to the Roman Catholic Women Priests and the Intentional Eucharistic Community movement instead of going back to the institutional church.   Why support them when they won't listen and they never, ever will practice the justice they preach. 

Hate Mail - I've answered that before

 not only would I rather tell the hard truth to one person than have a half a million idiots listening to me lying or posting feuilletonist crap.  

Hell, I'd rather tell the truth and have no one read it than do that.   I said in the first piece I ever posted that I wasn't a journalist.   I also said I would never be a chump for the Code of Liberal Ethics imposed by those asses.   I'd just listened to Scott Simon on Weekend Edition when I wrote that.   

I suppose I should say that yesterday, as I was out for a walk, I realized that I wasn't a liberal anymore,  I'm a radical egalitarian as the first piece I wrote today shows. 

How Fucking Stupid Is Our Untelligentsia?

THE WHINING or as the fine journalist Keith Olbermann has called it,  "hand clutching and pearl wringing" of the jouros and scribblers and echoing empty talking-heads and even so-called Democratic politicians about Joe Biden's entirely justified pardoning of Hunter Biden is as good a measure of how they never, ever learn a fucking thing no matter how many Bush IIs or Trump I's or, as we are about to find out Trump II's they go through and witness - though, being affluent, aren't all that much effected by - without learning a goddamned thing.

As Olbermann - who is worth any score of them - pointed out at the link above,  Joe Biden didn't pardon his son to keep him out of jail,  he pardoned him TO KEEP THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS FROM SUBJECTING HIM TO ANOTHER SHOW-TRIAL AND, PERHAPS IN THE FULLNESS OF TIME, EXECUTE HIM AND HANG HIS CORPSE FROM TRUMP TOWER.   The sappy sanctimony of the scribbling, chattering, and stupidest part of the political classes is as nauseating as it is opportunistic.   What do you want to bet that for a lot of them, those clever enough to think a move ahead, don't figure they can use this as mitigation if the Trump regime brought them up on charges before one of those military tribunals he's so hot for.   I would guess that drugs, a diet of 70% fats and old age have deprived him of an ability to do what he did so ineptly to Stormy Daniels, one long Baron ago, and so he'll get off on torture and execution as a surrogate means of exercising the dominance he learned from his degenerate father.  

The whining and pearl wringing that says that Joe Biden has given him cover for the blanket pardons TRUMP HAS BEEN ANNOUNCING HE'D GIVE FOR THE PAST THREE YEARS, WELL BEFORE HUNTER BIDEN WAS PROSECUTED, may be evidence that the stupidity of screen viewing and tweet reading leads to has made them as stupid as your average Trumpzi.   

Most hilarious of all is that whore of whores, the soc-sci-guy of the Grey Lady, that passive-bottom, would-be"data" pimp, Nate Silver who has declared that any Democrat who hasn't condemned Joe Biden for this by 10 PM today should never get a vote in 2028.    That little whore with a calculator is working for Peter Thiel, these days.   I'd say any Democrat who believes or takes seriously anything he says is as stupid as he and the other chumps who are condemning Biden.  

But October 7th! - Hate Mail

Any Pat, Simply Stated Answer To That Is An Opportunistic Lie.  The kind of lie the American media specializes in. 

I DON'T KNOW if the severe and factually exigent critic of Israel, child of Holocaust survivors and, incidentally, atheist, Norman Finkelstein would call himself an antizionist or not but he is one of the most consistent of revealers  of the crimes of the Israeli government and military,  one of those many Jews who are regularly dismissed as "antisemites" in the total irrationality that that term has gained in the campaign to weaponize it against the critics of the many, many, the whole list of crimes of the zionists that extend well back in the colonization of Palestine. 

I was shocked the first time I heard him point out that the crimes of October 7th, which he, as I do,  acknowledged as terrible crimes and atrocities, were understandable considering the 20 year blockade with intermittent Israeli atrocities in Gaza, what the Israelis in the government and military jokingly called "mowing the lawn" the "grass" being Palestinians, children, women, non-combatant, entirely innocent HUMAN BEINGS, their homes, the infrastructure that they need to live and their environment.  Finkelstein noted that most of those involved had grown up in what was, in fact, a very large concentration camp where the Israeli government and military had terrorized their entire lives, their parents, their sisters and brothers, everyone they knew, never knowing at what time the fascists that rule Israel would decide to "mow the lawn" again. 

That is that it was understandable, as in you can understand it.  I can't remember which of the Jewish antizionists said that while they acknowledged that October 7th was an atrocity they couldn't bring themselves to condemn People who lashed out in such a terrible way,  I can condemn it though I can understand why People who have experienced what the Gazans have for the past twenty years would not see it the same way I, who has never experienced anything like that, would.   I can say that what the Israeli government and military has done has little to nothing to do with October 7th which, like our own 9-11, they had ample warning of and, like the Bush II regime here, did nothing much to prevent.  So, why don't you put that in your equation as another factor in assigning responsibility for it.

Most Americans, most Europeans, most People outside of the Palestinian People probably couldn't name any single date of any of these "mowings of lawns" like they can October 7th because the Western media and media elsewhere doesn't much talk about them, not while they're happening, not after.  The sheer number of those added to the Israeli's periodic attacks, not with a large mob of barely trained young men but with one of the largest militaries of any country, on Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere are so routine as to barely make it into the news and, never, ever without the kind of explanation of motives, such as they are, being an excuse for the Israeli government and military being part of the story.  

As a citizen of the United States I must point out that that privilege granted by the media and the enforced common consensus to Israel, to keep millions of People under concentration camp conditions for decades, to launch military attacks on civilian populations with impunity, to wage wars of conquest or for other economic motives, all without the media honestly reporting on them, WITH the media covering for them if not entirely burying it,  that happens all the time when the American government and military does that.   When there is actually no excuse one will be lied up as it was in the invasion of Iraq by Bush II, one of the most catestrophic military adventures that a corrupt American government has ever undertaken, one of which the horrific loss of life and disastrous globe-shattering consequences is still playing out.   I would bet you anything, if anyone took a rigorously conducted survey of, say 20,000 Americans, maybe even limiting those surveyed to those who graduated high school if not college, those who remembered or were aware of that invasion - and I'll bet a large percentage of those who lived as adults through it wouldn't really remember it - most of those would probably agree that Saddam Hussein was the mastermind of 9-11 (that is if they even remembered that).  .

I could go on but I'll answer about that other atrocity, October 7th, when you answer about any of the major "lawn mowings" that the Israeli government and military waged against the Palestinians in Gaza.   If we're going to talk about supposed justifications of genocide when it's Israel,  we should really go back to what motivated what they exploited as their chance to, as  the Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, "halve the population of Gaza" and . . .  well, you don't have to take my word for it. 

Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said Israel should occupy the Gaza Strip and halve its Palestinian population by encouraging "voluntary emigration".

"We can and must conquer the Gaza Strip, we should not be afraid of that word," Smotrich said late Monday at an event organised by the Yesha Council, an umbrella group representing Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.

"There is no doubt that in Gaza -- with the encouragement of voluntary emigration -- there is here, in my opinion, a unique opportunity that is opening up with the new administration," the minister said, referring to Donald Trump's recent re-election.

"We can create a situation in which, within two years, the population of Gaza will be reduced by half," Smotrich said.

Smotrich leads the ultranationalist Religious Zionism party and has courted controversy with his comments in recent months.

"Courted controversy" I think actually means the war criminal sensed a political opportunity by appealing to the worst in Israel, what has been politically ascendant for a half a century, now.

I will remind you that he said that in the context of his government and military having killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, destroying everything in the northern part of Gaza,  a strip of land about five miles wide and twenty-five miles long holding millions of People.  And, as is the case whenever Israel grabs land, they'd send the terrorist-settlers in who would start on attacks on whatever Palestinians remain, as they have in the West Bank.  Many of those terrorists hold citizenship in the United States and vote in our elections as well as Israeli ones. 

That, by the way, would fall well within the legal definition of genocide.   The Israeli government is an apartheid, genocidal government and when you look at the blatant statements of its leaders going back to the beginning with Ben Gurion, it always has been.  You don't have to take my word for that, either.    Oh, yeah, and remember, Ben Gurion was one of those nice, socialist, Labor guys, not one of the real bad ones, the ones who have actually ruled most of the history of Israel, the overt fascists in the line of Jabotinsky.  

Note:  Anyone who calls the Israeli Military the "IDF" "Israeli defense force" is misidentifying it.   It is among the most consistent and effective terror organizations in the world.  I won't ever use that name for it, ever again.  As I said, their genocide in Gaza has changed everything forever. 

I Always Feel Better Hearing Tabitha Tell The Truth

 

 

I like her thinking, I like her style.

The birth of Israel and the death of Zionism - Ilan Pappé

 

Here's what an Israeli historian says about the violent and criminal history of zionism before 1948 and after.   This is the kind of information that is under an effective embargo in the United States but can be said elsewhere. 

Pardon Everyone Don't Be A Lawyerly Chump For Trump

I AGREE WITH KEITH OLBERMANN that Joe Biden should have pardoned Hunter Biden and I agree with him that he should pardon everyone he can who can even be wildly imagined will be the focus of a combined Trump-Republican-facist criminal "criminal" investigation and or put up to a show-trial before a Republican-fascist stooge "judge" or before a Republican-fascist chaired hearing.   

Last week I heard one of the MSNBC pundit-lawyers who, when asked about whether or not Biden should pardon his son or others piously proclaimed that HE wouldn't accept such a pardon because, don't you know, the Supreme Court has declared that accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt.  

Well, he has been wrong about the law and the courts saving us for the past four years.  He had expressed his confidence in the wisdom and integrity of Merrick Garland for at least two years into his term as Attorney General, so you'll pardon me if I am not inclined to take his point of view very seriously. 

For me my doubts about the wisdom or honesty of the framers came to a head when Ford pardoned Nixon.   Those doubts started when Nixon got Lt. Calley off for committing mass murder in the mass slaughter of Children Women and Men at My Lai.   That doubt was increased when Bush I pardoned a series of his fellow criminals in his administration who he knew,  if they were brought to trial for their crimes would have implicated him for various and serious crimes.  He did that on with the advice of Bill Barr, the Roy Cohn, the gangster lawyer of Republican-fascism.  

With the stinking putrescence of the Roberts Court who have given Trump a blanket pardon by making him a king has removed any respectability from such American law as comes from that corrupt Court.   I'm not a lawyer, I don't get paid to have pretenses about the respectability or faux sanctity of "the law" and I have no self-interest to have ever believed it and no excuse in pretending that anymore.   With the antics of the Roberts Court this year, first de-criminalizing blatant pay-for-play corruption as long as the payment comes after delivery of goods - we now have legal corruption on a payment plan - and then with their coronation of Trump anyone who doesn't understand that all those old pretenses are only helping that corruption is a world-class chump.   

Joe Biden should do everything he is empowered to do to protect those vulnerable for trying to stop Trump and he has to do it within the next month and a half.  He should order the "justice" Department to investigate everyone within the Trump circle AND HE SHOULD ORDER THE FINDINGS BE RELEASED TO DEMOCRATIC SENATORS AND REPUBLICAN SENATORS AND TO THE PUBLIC.   He should pardon everyone, the entire Democratic caucus in Congress, maybe even the entire judiciary that has stood up to Trump and Republican-fascists.  If anyone is counting on the "honor" of any 2024 era Republican they are as big a chump as those mentioned above because anyone who would remain in that party after Trump I has the moral constitution as the worst of them.   

Among the other things that has failed is the phony, secular "civic morality" the putrid "civic religion" of legalistic American secular assertion.  That was never really much of anything,  if I hadn't gone on too long already I'd go over that pillar of such sanctity Joseph Storey or any number of other such failed minor dieties of such piety.  Such ersatz piety was fully in place and invoked all during the periods of expansionist genocide, slavery,  the post-Civil War reestablishment of slavery under American apartheid, etc. and it has always, ALWAYS been congenial to every crime permitted under the American Constitution and even when that document was breached and abridged and set-aside by Courts and legislatures and politics under apartheid-democracy.  

Democrats should stop propping up that system by pretending it is not corrupt because the Republicans have no honor, they have no morals, they have no compunctions about anything except what they can't get away with and with our system and under the corporate mass media, they get away with everything.   It was the mass media in the United States, under the First Amendment who turned William Calley, a mass murderer of old People, women, children, babies, into a figure of racist sympathy and pity, which is why Nixon pardoned him, in effect, by letting him go free.  He told his fellow war criminal,  Henry Kissinger, "Most people don't give a shit whether he killed them or not."  And Joe Biden should understand that when the corporate media gets done doing the bidding of Trump or his ilk,  most of them won't claim if anyone is innocent.    That is the depths of moral depravity at work in a country that could return a Trump to the presidency.   Joe Biden should face that hardest of hard realities and he should do the moral thing. 

Hate Mail

GIVEN THE CHOICE between the mature thinking of  Jurgen Habermas and two lower-mid-brow Eschaton eejits, I'll take JH's word for it.   And then there's what old Noam Chomsky said, "The Gospel is radical."   To that point, it was what I'm sure will be the feast day of Dorothy Day last week, as RMJ noted.

Eschaton, Duncan just barely bothers with it so why should anyone else give it even that little attention?  

As a bonus, here's a little passage that is apropos from The Guardian. 

 For today's militant atheists it must be inexplicable and frustrating that religion continues to engage men and women of the highest intelligence. If the grounds for faith are so easy to demolish, how is it that all the most brilliant minds have not recognised this long ago? That they haven't is attested by the continuing recruitment of fine intellects into the ordained ministry of all the mainstream denominations of the church and by the flourishing of religion in our ancient universities.

And yet there is absolutely no doubt that adherence to all the main Christian churches in western Europe has massively declined in recent decades, and religious communities seem to be waging a losing battle for hearts and minds - especially minds. At the same time there remain buoyancy and real numerical growth in the more simplistic, evangelical reaches of the church. How do we account for these two paradoxical factors - what we might call the eggheads and the sheep - spoiling the beautiful Dawkins vision of a religion-free future?

Baron Friedrich von Hügel, the early 20th-century Roman Catholic thinker, wrote of three elements of religion. In the institutional element, a child, for example, soaks up with delight and few questions all the customs and creeds of the religious institution. The second intellectual element most typically begins in adolescence, when individuals begin to pose questions to the inherited faith and attempt to make sense of it for themselves. If they fail in the quest of this second element, they may well abandon their childhood faith and its related institution. But if they succeed, they move on into the third or mystical element of religion, when - without in any way leaving behind the first and second elements - they are able to live with questions that no one can answer, exploring the connections of thought and feeling which help make belief not a groundless or fruitless activity, and living in an attitude of wonder and ultimate trust in the universe.

Now it seems to me that highly gifted people are often able to move naturally and with deep fascination into Von Hügel's third element of religion. They do not in the process leave behind the institutional and intellectual aspects of faith, and this gives them a rich multi-dimensional grasp on reality and meaning - something very different from certain and final knowledge. Many in our time have continued to be able to leap across to maturity of faith. At the other end of the spectrum, however, the simple (and the faux-simple), like the poor, we always have with us in the churches.

Which reminds me of once when my dear old Latin teacher, a Bertrand Russell style atheist, while showing off his erudition about the word "beatus" said that he thought it was ironic that the saints, by which he meant Catholic saints, didn't seem to him to be very happy.   I suggested St.  Francis as a well known contradiction to his assertion and he said, rather condescendingly that he thought Francis was a simpleton.  I didn't at the time but I could have pointed out that that simpleton had had an enormous effect for the good on countless People in his time and after, not to mention animals and had stimulated some of the most significant works of art and literature and inspired any number of brilliant thinkers, such as William of Occam, for one.   So I don't discount the importance of such "simple" People, knowing it's far, far more important to be good than it is to be intelligent.   Not that so many of the pop-atheists such as inspired this piece are much in danger of displaying either. 

The Mark Of The Cross On The Baby In The Manger

As if the lovely night of the newborn child meant that we could ignore his work and his fate three decades later and as if the child in the crib did not already bear on his brow the mark of the cross.

Hans Kung:  On Being A Christian  

We had news this morning that our grand-niece had a very difficult delivery and the baby, born in serious distress and not breathing,  was flown to one of the big hospitals in Boston.   I dread to think what might have happened if she'd been in one of the abortion-ban, dead mother states.   Or one of the war-zones around the world.  I used to take care of her when she was a little girl, so I am pretty close to her and her mother. 

Of course we're wondering what further problems there might be for either of them.   It will give me a lot to think of this Advent season that I wasn't anticipating.   

We're all born into dying, as Paul says flesh cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.  I wasn't planning on that being so much a part of it this year but now I know it will be.

Jeffrey Sachs - The Stranglehold of the Israel Lobby on US Politics or It's Not Just The Israel Lobby, The ACLU and First Amendment Has Everything To Do With It

 

One of Jeffrey Sach's most important points is in the first few lines:

The Israeli Lobby by the way which is this strange amalgamation of rich Jews to an important extent and evangelicals who have their own biblical literalism.  You know looking for the Armageddon which they think depends on Israel holding these lands.  It is simply very powerful in the US and has been powerful for a long time/  And has a lot of financial resources and America American democracy is $1 one vote.  You know it's a basically a completely corrupt political system [based] on raising money for expensive campaigns so the Israeli Lobby has long had a high influence. 

I will apologize in advance because I based this on the auto-transcript at Youtube instead of my usual transcription made from listening to it, I don't have time for that right now.   

I would ask you to listen carefully to the rest of the video because what he says is extremely important but I'm going to focus on what he said makes the Israel Lobby, one among many, many such lobbies which are such a corrupting force in American politics and is so destructive of American democracy.  

The Congress and, if you can believe such a thing is possible, the Republican president, Ford, in the wake of the Nixon scandals involving huge amounts of campaign money funneled by rich Americans to his campaign, passed some sweeping campaign finance reforms into law only to have a legal case brought by those who had a vested interest in such corrupt money deciding our elections, supported by the goddamned ACLU and other "civil libertarians" who waxed on piously about the First Amendment so as to make American politics ever more corrupt,  something even some of the "liberals" on the Supreme Court went along with in their general idiocy in the Buckley v. Valeo ruling, the first in a series of ever worsening "First Amendment" cases that has led directly to the elevation of Trump in 2016 with the help of the dictator of Russia (a cleptocratic Musk level billionaire, himself) with the full knowledge of John Roberts and his Republican-fascist colleagues. 

If you want to know why someone as generally moral as Joe Biden got drawn into such criminal support for the Israeli government's genocide and Lebensraum campaign in Gaza, it was because such rulings making the Israel Lobby so powerful is a practical reality for any Democratic politician who knows they have to hold office to do anything, in his case trying to keep Trump from regaining office - WHO WILL GIVE THE FASCIST GOVERNMENT OF ISRAEL AND ITS STORMTROOPERS A FREE HAND - his family probably hoping to snap up some property deals in the annexed Gaza.  

All of this is a direct result of the Supreme Court-ACLU doctrine that the First Amendment - in their interpretation of it - trumps everything, even keeping foreign domination out of American government and politics, even at the expense of American democracy.   

It's no small thing that the biggest, fattest promoters of "free speech" right now are America's fascists, the white supremacists, and the neo-Nazis.   I expect that if or when, after the catastrophe that Trump II will be, there is another attempt at cleaning up our politics that the ACLU and other "civil liberties" groups will be fighting to keep our politics as dirty as Jeffrey Sachs RIGHTLY says it is.  

Rich Wall Street idiots, such as Sachs says funds the Israel Lobby without knowing much of anything other than the knee-jerk support for Israel which, as I pointed out the other day , you didn't have to be Jewish to be inculcated with in the post WWII period, should have been removed from such influence in the mid-1970s.   That they were not is a direct consequence of the really bad drafting of the First Amendment and its dishonestly fundamentalist reading as promoted by the ACLU in line with the Holmes-Brandeis reading of it.   That reading of it is directly the source of almost all of the corruption of our government, ironically, it has been one of the most effective tools of our own indigenous fascists, the white supremacists.   

I am afraid that the pale chance  of finally ending the corrupt influence of money and millionaires and billionaires, foreign and domestic,  will need to come before we get free of being led by the nose by a Putin or a Netanyahu and that will require drastically altering the idol of American secular piety, the First Amendment.   As the courts from Warren on have proved, any such sloppy,  corruption and lie enabling language such as is contained in it will be exploited by the most anti-democratic branch of the government, the Supreme Court generally for the benefit of those with an interest in corrupting American society and, so, our government.   In a way,  I don't give the greatest fault to the Israel Lobby because they are just taking advantage of the corruptions that the Court has allowed to flourish,  I would say in the Rehnquist and Roberts Court, the corruptions they have not only encouraged but facilitated.  But it goes back to the stupidly drafted First Amendment which doesn't even make it clear that there is no such a thing as a right to lie, not even the most deadly and corrupting lies such as comprise most of what our "free press" produces daily.  

The rest of the horrors that Jeffrey Sachs discusses are a direct result of that and their prevention will be impossible as long as that terrible fault in our Constitution is not fixed and made Court-proof. 

Isaiah 53

 53 Who can believe what we have heard,
    and for whose sake has the Lord’s arm been revealed?
2
He grew up like a young plant before us,
    like a root from dry ground.
He possessed no splendid form for us to see,
    no desirable appearance.
3
He was despised and avoided by others;
    a man who suffered, who knew sickness well.
Like someone from whom people hid their faces,
    he was despised, and we didn’t think about him.

4
It was certainly our sickness that he carried,
    and our sufferings that he bore,
    but we thought him afflicted,
    struck down by God and tormented.
5
He was pierced because of our rebellions
    and crushed because of our crimes.
    He bore the punishment that made us whole;
    by his wounds we are healed.
6
Like sheep we had all wandered away,
    each going its own way,
    but the Lord let fall on him all our crimes.

7
He was oppressed and tormented,
    but didn’t open his mouth.
Like a lamb being brought to slaughter,
    like a ewe silent before her shearers,
    he didn’t open his mouth.

8
Due to an unjust ruling he was taken away,
    and his fate—who will think about it?
He was eliminated from the land of the living,
    struck dead because of the people’s rebellion.
9
His grave was among the wicked,
    his tomb with evildoers,
    though he had done no violence,
    and had spoken nothing false.

10
But the Lord wanted to crush him
    and to make him suffer.
If his life is offered as restitution,
    he will see his offspring; he will enjoy long life.
    The Lord’s plans will come to fruition through him.
11
After his deep anguish he will see light, and he will be satisfied.
Through his knowledge, the righteous one, my servant,
    will make many righteous,
    and will bear their guilt.
12
Therefore, I will give him a share with the great,
    and he will divide the spoil with the strong,
    in return for exposing his life to death
    and being numbered with rebels,
    though he carried the sin of many
    and pleaded on behalf of those who rebelled.

Common English Bible 

Oh, I LOVE That.

I just heard someone refer to Elon Musk as Trump's First Laddie!   Everyone, please use it, I can't think of anything that would get under both of their skins quite like it if that became wide spread.  I hope many a cartoon of that is drawn and many a joke about it, with full implications drawn, are made.

Before The Onion, Second City Documented The Pagan Origins Of Black Friday - On The Last Day Of The Church Year

I WENT LOOKING for the Onion post referred to in one of RMJ's posts and couldn't find it but found that something like it by Kristina Felske was posted on the Second City website eleven years back.   It's moderately funny, especially when you recall the online ambiance of the end of the atheist fad of the 00's and other internet anti-Xianity inanity.   Since posting actual information in refutation of the ubiquitous pop-history-pop-kulchr bull shit of that kind yields little to no improvement, maybe mockery will.  

In so far as pagans go, I generally prefer the modern ones to what gets called that from way back-a-when.   They tend to be playful nature and lore lovers instead of practitioners of human sacrifice.   Even though they've been some of the most susceptible to pseudo-historical-archeological bull shit when it comes to the "yule" and other things that Christians are accused of stealing from them - who they stole it from is unrecorded in history as just about everything short of such things as human sacrifices which leave actual archeological as well as histographic evidence.   Though no where near as susceptible to bull shit as the committed atheists and "skeptics." 

Attempting to reach herd immunity through natural infection will result in devastating losses of both life and quality of life for those infected and are completely insupportable as a public health strategy

DARWINISM, that is the theory of natural selection NOT the theory of evolution, is again mounting a direct and deadly danger to the lives of Americans and others through Trump's nominations, most well known the idiot lawyer-liar, celebraty anti-vaxxer Little Bobby Kennedy (I won't sully the name of his father, anymore) but also to other and perhaps even more dangerously important offices.  One of the worst of those is Jay Bhattacharya for head of the National Institute of Health,  Bhattacharya's professional credentials consist of the deadly combination of economist and MD, a combination I don't trust at all because economics is such a pseudo-science, one which apparently dominates in Bhattacharya's interest.   The danger he poses is best shown in his part in the deservedly infamous Great Barrington Declaration.  That declaration advocated a Darwinian form of "herd immunity" which would rely on imagined evolution of natural immunity through the mass infection of the human population, one for which the imagined mechanism of such included a very large number of deaths from, in that case, Covid-19, what we got, especially in the Trump I regime because he and Republican-fascist governors implemented that, none of those more deservedly infamous than the criminal idiot Governor Noam of South Dakota.   And it's a use of the term "herd immunity" based on the crudest and most primitive notions of Darwinism, one advocated by Charles Darwin, his son Leonard Darwin and many others of those generations, especially in opposing mass vaccination against small pox as evolutionarily dysgenic - though I have seen no evidence that the Darwin anti-vaxxers, like Little Bobby, practiced that for their own families.  Here is the most known and influential claims to that effect by Charles Darwin from The Descent of Man:

There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
 

Especially in this case, it is vitally important to notice  Darwin imagines and advocates the idea of the human population as a herd of animals and not a natural herd of animals but those kept artificially under human animal husbandry, to be exploited and then slaughtered  due solely to their economic utility, that slaughter put off, in some cases, due to their perceived superiority IN THEIR ECONOMIC UTILITY.  Though there is no actual evidence that such a thing has anything to do with the evolution of new species or that that is actually an accurate description of what happens in the wild.  That is what lead the, thankfully, unsuccessful candidate for the British Parliament and later big deal in organized eugenics, Leonard Darwin, to run on a platform that opposed mass vaccination against small pox.  And which, since many of the economists advocating "herd immunity" to Trump claimed to be practicing "Darwinian economics," is the inspiration of that deadly and stupid ideology. 

And, as is proving typical of the late 19th and early 20th century concept of natural selection, actual science, especially done later in the 20th and 21st centuries, provides ample evidence it is deadly wrong. 

Here from a paper by Angela Rassmussen, thankfully available to the public, which notices the objections of comparing the human population to a herd of animals as kept for exploitation by agriculture:

Herd immunity is a relatively recent concept, and some have taken umbrage at the term as it equates human populations with animals. However, this reflects the origin of the term, which was originally coined by livestock veterinarians in the early 20th century referring to epidemics of “contagious abortion,” or pathogens that caused spontaneous miscarriages in herds of cattle and sheep. By the 1950s, the term was applied to newly developed vaccines and their potential for preventing widespread viral diseases such as polio at population scale2. As herd immunity as a concept became more broadly associated with immunization campaigns, it gained that specific meaning. Until recently, herd immunity generally referred to population immunity acquired through vaccination.

UNTIL RECENTLY.  

It's from the National Library of Medicine so you might want to copy it and any like it before the Trump team gets in, they'll probably suppress it as they did suppress science not congenial to their idiotic and homicidal line during his first regime.

Notice that the original use of the term by actual scientists referred to its use in assessing the efficacy of vaccination.  She, as well, honestly ties the concept to the theory of natural selection.

Human communities defend themselves against specific infectious agents in a way that extends beyond the simple sum of the immune status of its individuals. By analogy with individual immunity to specific agents, the community level of immunity may vary from complete susceptibility to full protection. Herd immunity has been used to name this community property, which is the result of evolution through natural selection, leading to relationships between two species, typical of prey–predator systems. Varying uses of the term herd immunity led to the use of other expressions, such as herd protection, herd effect and community immunity. Knowledge derived from observational studies and models on herd immunity has supported decisions on the choice of vaccines and vaccination strategies for the benefit of populations. This knowledge is most likely to be extended in the future, with far-reaching effects.

Notice the phrase "typical of prey-predator systems" which is as close as anyone I've read on this in the short time available to admitting that the concept is derived from the deaths by slaughter of those labeled as "susceptible."  IT SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN THAT WHEN THE PHRASE "NATURAL SELECTION" IS USED, THAT "SELECTION" MEANS SOMEONE IS DEAD, DEATH IS THE "SELECTIVE" FORCE IN THE THEORY.   In Darwin's imagination and that of everyone who accepts the theory, the dead one is biologically inferior, though there may be no other evidence of such a valuation in nature.   It is no accident that such thinking is so congenial to the racist, bigotry practicing, elitists in the Trump world.  I would say that such Darwinism is entirely in line with it because that's the case.

Certainly, from the hard experience of human history under modern economics, including many from that list of unfortunates marked as dysgenic by Darwin in the quote above.  Elsewhere and throughout the book he lists entire groups of such dangerously dysgenic People* as the economic underclass (a product of entirely artificial choices made by law makers and the economic elite, in no way a natural population) and entire ethinicities and races of human beings, those as well subject to entirely artificial discrimination and subjugation.  I will note he not infrequently makes the contradictory claims that such "inferior" People have an enhanced state of vigor due to their violent culling by "nature" and by each other, even as he marks them as inferior.  I mention that because such thinking is endemic in the Republican-fascists who support such Darwinian economics, even those who are among the most rabid "Anti-Darwinists" as long as by that is only meant his association with the theory of evolution.  They love the scientific-racism and eugenics of Darwin, they only hate that it's tied to the fact of the evolution of species.

In her paper Angela Rassmussen also says:

Furthermore, relying on natural infection rather than vaccination to reach the herd immunity threshold assumes that infection and vaccination induce comparable immune responses with similar durability. There is growing evidence that this is not the case. Many pathogenic viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, inhibit the activity of type I interferons, which drive innate antiviral responses that are critical to both initial suppression of virus replication and subsequent induction of robust adaptive immunity. SARS-CoV-2 infection profoundly suppresses type I and type III interferons compared to influenza A virus in vivo 7. Systemic suppression of type I interferon is associated with severe COVID-198, which is also linked in multiple studies to lymphopenia9. As type I interferons drive Th1 polarization, which enhances both neutralizing antibody and CD8+ cytotoxic T cell responses, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the subversion of these responses could impact adaptive mechanisms of viral clearance and the development of immunological memory. Although most COVID-19 patients do develop detectable antibody responses, multiple studies have observed that serum antibody titers may rapidly decline within months, for SARS-CoV-2 as well as other coronaviruses10. While the significance to functional immune protection is unknown, it does suggest that SARS-CoV-2 infection may result in atypical long-term immune responses. A recent study showed substantial depletion of follicular CD4+ T cells and a loss of germinal centers in the lymph nodes and spleens of patients who died of COVID-19, and this was accompanied by severely reduced follicular B cells11. As follicular CD4+ T cells within germinal centers are necessary for differentiation of memory B cells, this finding suggests a possible mechanism by which SARS-CoV-2 infection may impair the development of long-lasting, durable immunity.

Immunity induced by vaccination is likely to produce very different responses. The current vaccine candidates in late-stage clinical trials do not cause SARS-CoV-2 infection, therefore will not interfere with or evade either innate or adaptive immune responses. Although several of the candidates are viral-vectored vaccines, these undergo an abortive, non-pathogenic replication cycle and do not suppress these immune responses. Therefore, they are less likely to result in subversion of memory immune responses. Data from pre-clinical and phase 1/2 trials support this finding: while infection results in a wide spectrum of antibody titers, immunization consistently produces neutralizing titers comparable to the highest titers seen in convalescent patients12 , 13. While there is not yet data on how this impacts durability, it suggests that immune responses elicited by vaccines are fundamentally distinct from those produced by naturally acquired infection. Thus, reaching herd immunity through immunization rather than infection will not only occur more quickly and with vastly less morbidity and mortality, it will likely result in greater functional immune protection for a longer duration of time (Figure 1 ).

In other words, there is evidence that natural infection may not produce the levels of natural immunity that the damned economists dream of.  I suspect that is tied with the widespread (even within science) old-fashioned idea that viruses and bacteria, once identified as a species, are a fixed entity which the human immune system will recognize and successfully fight off when the truth is that such pathogens are, in many cases, rapidly evolving - evolving especially rapidly in epidemic or pandemic situations in which more host organisms are infected and reacting to them - and that, as in the cases of influenza and the common cold, they are very able to surmount the human immune system due to their evolution of defenses against it.  Such is what such up-to-date researchers in evolution as Denis Noble and James Shapiro have repeatedly pointed out as overturning the neo-Darwinian dogma that most such college-credentialed "experts" hold as the foundation of their pseudo-scientific proclamations and declarations.   There are, of course, organisms which are far more permanently suppressed, perhaps in the rarest of cases to the point of extinction by mass vaccine programs. 

Rassmussen's paper ends.  

Many questions remain about how herd immunity will contribute to the ultimate control of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the long-term prospects for preventing future outbreaks. However, several facts are abundantly clear. Although vaccines, when available, will require months to distribute and tremendous efforts to overcome vaccine hesitancy, they still will reach the herd immunity threshold, whatever that may be, in far less time than natural infection would permit. They may produce more robust, longer-lasting, and more protective immune responses than infection. Most importantly, decades of reliable research demonstrate that vaccines are a safe and highly effective means of preventing widespread infectious diseases and are the only morally and scientifically acceptable approach for achieving herd immunity at national or global scale. Attempting to reach herd immunity through natural infection will result in devastating losses of both life and quality of life for those infected and are completely insupportable as a public health strategy for controlling a generational pandemic.

Our mass media, our legal system, our political class have put us at the mercy of psychotics wedded to mid-19th century science who haven't even defined their terms correctly.  It's obvious from how many of them hold prestigious university positions that the academic community isn't anything like up to date with the science.   

Will we have a mass disaster, maybe a huge version of the measles epidemic that Little Bobby helped set off in Samoa, leading to a large number of deaths of children?  Something which he lies about his role in, regularly.  Maybe it will be a new and worse pandemic disease such as is incubated regularly within the animal husbandry industry.  The damage that Trump and his pseudo-scientific hacks, Harvard trained lawyer-liar, economists - the evil of Darwin's theory of natural selection being a development of Malthus's economics - may get a lot of us killed.  One thing is clear, they will take a wrecking ball to what may be the best scientific health agency in the world and, if we get the chance, it will probably take decades to rebuild it after even four more years of Trump.   That's what was chosen earlier this month.

Well, That's Over - Hate Mail

I KNOW HE won't read it but here is a good introduction to the character of zionism beyond the PR lies by Alice Rothchild,   Zionism’s uneasy relationship with antisemitism,  that lists the blatant hatred of Jews by zionists from Herzel to well into the Israeli establishment after 1948.  She quotes most of the biggest figures in zionism, all of them I'm familiar with were atheists (since making that point has his pinafore in a twist) and I suspect the ones I am not as familiar with were hardly religiously observant.  She talks about having been sold a bill of goods in her introductory paragraph:

I grew up with a deep love for Israel, the redemptive, out-of the-ashes, kibbutz-loving, feisty little country that could do no wrong, fighting for its life in a sea of hateful Arabs and Jew-haters. I learned that Jews were a people dedicated to worship and the study of Torah and this identity kept us alive during the centuries of antisemitism in Europe. If I was not able to dedicate myself to the religiosity of my davening grandfather, tfillin and all, I understood that as a people, we were deeply committed to healing the world and working for social justice, an equally virtuous and inherently Jewish task. After all, we were naturally good, or as my mother explained, Jews bore the responsibility of being chosen for a uniquely positive role in this world.

That last sentence pretty much what I said this morning. 

You didn't have to be Jewish to have been brought up with that view of Israel. Growing up in the post-WWII decades by parents who had both been in the military in WWII, having been brought up with a knowledge of the Shoah and knowing that bigotry of all kinds was a serious sin, that's how I thought of Israel until well into my adulthood.  Her next paragraph deals only with the relationship of zionism and hatred of Jews, something I didn't know much about until the past year as I heard and read various anti-zionist Rabbis and scholars.  My disillusionment with Israel was based in its non-stop aggression and displacement of Palestinians and the theft of their land.   As I've mentioned one of the landmarks in my understanding of that came from reading the Jewish-Argentinian journalist Jacobo Timmerman and his criticism of the Israeli government, especially his statement that most of the anti-Jewish violence and acts were motivated by the actions and nature of the state of Israel.

As the decades passed, this mythology shattered against the hard rocks of reality.  One of the most difficult contradictions I now face is understanding the perverse relationship between Zionism and antisemitism. I was sold the story that political Zionism developed as a response to antisemitism and as a modern, liberating movement in the backward Middle East. But in 1897 as modern Zionism was born, it adopted the trope of the diaspora Jew as a pale, flaccid, yeshiva bocher, a parasite, an eternal alien, a nebbish. That Zionism embraced the idea that this pathetic weakling (who was often to be blamed for antisemitism) needed to be Aryanized into the bronzed, muscular Hebrew farmer/warrior tilling the soil in the Galilee is a chilling realization.  The evolution of Jews as a people who lived by Torah and its commandments into a biological race with distinct characteristics, (the money Jew, the ghetto Jew, the swarthy, hook-nosed Jew) mirrors the worst canards of antisemites, European fascists, and white supremacists. 

As she notes, that is part of the heritage and culture of those who rule Israel and have since its founding.   Added to that is some of the most racist hatred of, particularly, Palestinians and Arabs in general as well as the rampant white, European Israeli Jewish racism against Middle-Eastern and African Jews.  

I've learned almost everything I know about zionism and the reality of what Israel is and how its government and military have really acted from Jews, many of them from Israel.   It is a racist, apartheid-democracy, a violently imperialist state which has had a long-standing policy of land acquisition that is indistinguishable in result from the theory of Lebensruam. 

I will guide your attention to the excellent short critique of the United States contained within her article as a means of understanding the terrible reality of what Israel is in reality instead of the old Abba Eban style PR:

This is the combative voice of the new Jew, the Hebrew reborn in the fight to colonize and create Israel from Palestine. It is not a voice interested in negotiation, tolerance, democracy, or respect for other narratives or backgrounds. Political history creates the social and cultural norms we see today. The U.S. is facing a national conversation about the contradictions between our mythology – the American dream of justice, equality, and freedom for all – and the fact that our national heroes were slaveholders and actually only had dreams for white, landholding men.  Their lived experience and attitudes were the foundations for the cultural norms that characterized the most shameful aspects of U.S. history: destroying native peoples, enslaving Africans, owning their children, Jim Crow, redlining, discrimination in opportunities from the GI Bill to employment, anti-miscegenation laws, white nationalism, and the persistent bigotry and institutional racism that is still a major challenge in the 21st century. This kind of honest, painful discourse is critical if we are to turn our so-called democracy in a more positive direction. I would suggest that Israelis need to be having their own national origin conversation and mostly, they are not. This does not bode well.

Along with the words that need some serious consideration for adoption I will include "apartheid-democracy" because I'm always hearing apologists for Israel - as I recall hearing for apartheid era South Africa -  say that they have elections.  Well, they had elections in Alabama and Mississippi all during the lynch-law period.   We just had one which may well cement in the reinstallation of Roberts-Court anointed American apartheid.  As you will know I've been facing the facts about America's liberal democracy which has been coexistent with our own version of apartheid administered and kept in place by our own, indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy, for the entire time America's so-called democracy has been in place.  And that's not to mention the many wars of aggression, from those which stole the continent, including that with Mexico, Spain, etc. Including the disastrous Netanyahu encouraged invasion of Iraq.  

Slavery and apartheid was embedded in our Constitution from the start and its vestiges are still there, ready to be used by white supremacists under the permission of a white-supremacist Court such as the Roberts Court is.  Contrary to popularly believed faith, it survived the Civil War and the Civil War Amendments.    An apartheid democracy is not a legitimate government, no government that keeps any percentage of its citizens in legal second and lower class status is a legitimate government. 

There is no "right" for any state to exist, I've been over that many times.  If you declare that "Israel has a 'right' to exist, you cannot claim that any other government does not have the same "right,"  including the Nazi regime, the Stalin regime, that of Mao or Pol Pot or the Kim dynasty in North Korea.   States have no rights, they exist only as illegitimate despotisms or apartheid states or they exist legitimaty with the just consent of those who are governed WITH THE PROTECTION OF THE RIGHTS OF THOSE IN THE MINORITY.   Israel has no right to exist,  I've recently heard an expert in international law point out that there is no such thing in international law as  a state having a "right to exist,"    That is a smokescreen to shield the Israeli government from the same kinds and levels of criticism that is made against any other country.   Israel certainly doesn't have the right to be protected from criticism of its crimes and criminal policies and its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.  

What you're upset about, Simps, is that increasingly Israel is being given equal treatment instead of the special treatment the American, couch dwelling, petty zionists who will never set foot in the place demand.   Well, that's over.   It's entirely over.