There's No Reason To Be A Thought Criminal If I Don't Tell You The Forbidden Truth

ISRAEL WILL TRY TO BLOW UP THE IRAN DEAL.   I call it "the Iran deal"  because, as is being pointed out,  Trump caved on all 10 of Iran's demands.   Trump has proved that the man who has, his whole life, mastered and controlled the American judiciary and legal system,   couldn't master the Iranian government.   No, he was the one who was mastered by, first the Israeli, Saudi and other governments who bribed him and, I'm certain, blackmailed him into making this war on Iran and, who in the end ended up caving to the Iranians.  It is to be hoped that Trump and his goons will be more afraid of the economic consequences of renewed fighting than they will be of what Israel has got on them.  And if there is one thing that you can take on faith with little danger of being wrong, it is that Israel has got stuff on them. 

Iran's government goes from being in some real danger of internal overthrowing earlier in the year to being in the strongest position it has ever been in since the revolution that brought it to power more than four decades ago.    THAT IS THE PRODUCT OF US HAVING A REALITY-TV PRESIDENT WHO HAS BEEN ENABLED BY THE SUPREME COURT,  REPUBLICANS IN THE CONGRESS, THE CORPORATE MEDIA AND OUR INDIGENOUS FASCISTS, THE WHITE SUPREMACISTS.   

Indeed, it is a product of all of the 18th century, "classical" liberal democratic theories and institutions, complete with the amorality of that,  the enablement of lying as a "right," the elevation of property over People,the "liberty" of the privileged over the lives of the underclass, the legalizing of quid-pro-quo corruption and the enthronement of the American presidency by the Roberts Court, and all the rest of it.  

One of the most startling of realities of this five week war has been the shocking conclusion that has to be reached that it was the dictatorial, theocratic regime of Iran who acted more responsibly, in a more adult fashion, with whatever moral restraint and measurement of response there was demonstrated in their choices of targets made in proportional response to the Israeli and American attacks on Iran and its allies.   As a full and total egalitarian democrat, that disturbing reality is something I'm having to come to terms with. 

I would not, for a second, say that they proved their regime to be superior to a true democracy but they have proved that their regime is, at most morally superior or at least more adult than to the apartheid, corporatist, oligarchic democracies of Israel and the US.   

I doubt, very strongly that anyone but myself will notice the role that the Supreme Court majority played in producing this disaster - most of that on the basis of their First Amendment rulings - but they had a bigger hand in this than much of anyone will notice or, if they do notice that, admit to it.   IT ALL STARTED WITH LIES BEING GIVEN LEGAL PROTECTION, LIES TOLD BY TRUMP SINCE AT LEAST HIS CENTRAL PARK 5 AD BUY, LIES TOLD IN THE MEDIA, LIES THAT THE NEW YORK TIMES STILL BRAGS ABOUT HAVING HAD SUCH A HAND IN ENABLING.   Apart from that the revival of Jim Crow under the Rehnquist and Roberts Court, the overturning of what would have been the first achievement of the United States of true democracy, egalitarian democracy under the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts had almost as much of a role in producing the Trump disaster.  

The other big loser in this war,  Israel, may have, finally, suffered its greatest defeat since its founding in that for the first time very large numbers of Americans have had enough of it, exactly as I predicted would happen twenty years ago during a previous invasion of Lebanon by Israel.  It opened my eyes as to the real nature of what was sold to us lefties in the early years of a progressive, quasi-socialist experiment in democratic governance.    The extent to which the PR nonsense sold in the measured, eloquence of Abba Eban was always a lie gradually broke through.   I think that at least a large minority of Israelis now realize what a disastrous mistake that colonial settler project was.  As I understand it the Israeli government is trying to prevent as many Israelis fleeing as possible.  It would be ironic if the expansionist Israeli apartheid state ended up using its Palestinian-containment walls to keep Jewish Israelis in like the Berlin wall did. 

A winner in this is the growing Jewish anti-Zionist movement, both its always present religious side and the secular-leftist side.   The Rabbis who have always been anti-Zionists have now got a status they never had in the United States and elsewhere.  The credibility of the opposing Rabbis and secular scholars has risen enormously in the past five years, first from the Gaza genocide and now with this disaster war that Netanyahu and his fascist government have finally suckered the stupidest, most corrupt and now certainly senile American president into bringing on for the Israeli government.   

If this finally forces the break between Israel and its major lifeline to the US and its lesser ones to Europe, that would be a good thing.   Twenty years ago I said that if the collapse of Israel I thought was inevitable happened,  I'd be in favor of the US taking in the Jewish population of Israel.   Now, given the war crimes, the crimes against humanity and the well over 90% support for those among the Israeli population,   I wouldn't favor that anymore.  I want there to be a full ban on emigration of war criminals and fascists from anywhere, including Israel now.  Where they would go is not a moral burden that the United States has a responsibility to shoulder.   I would, of course, welcome any Israelis who could demonstrate that they opposed the fascist-apartheid-criminal government in any real way.   We can always use People of high morals, we have no use for more racist-apartheid-fascists and criminals,  we have way, way too many of those now and have from before the founding of the country.   

To a lesser extent the credible, non-Jew-hating, anti-Zionist population among non-Jews has gained in credibility as they have weathered the smearing of them by the Israel lobby, both its professional and media and its academic and popular followers.   That accusation has lost an enormous part of the hold it once had over those who faced the reality of what a moral and political and humanitarian disaster the Israel project has developed into.  If anyone wants to discredit them,  I'll point out that to do that will only enhance the antisemitic anti-Zionists who have also gained something that will be made to pass as credibility through Israel's criminal conduct as the embargo on exposing that has fallen. 

Israel's apartheid, racist, gangster democracy will do everything it can to blow up any peace and certainly will this one on Iran's terms.  It is already saying it will not stop its expansionist program in Lebanon,  it will certainly continue its genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and into Lebanon.   They will do everything they can do to get the attacks on Iran to resume.   All they will have to do is remind Trump of the texts, photos and videos that they certainly have on him, certainly a lot of that having come from Epstein and Maxwell. 

What the United States will pay for this will be going on decades if not from now on.   I'm not predicting that that will result in any kind of moral and intellectual reform of the country,  nor am I predicting that the close call WHICH MAY NOT BE OVER in which we face the real prospect of our worst president in American history starting a nuclear war to cover up his pedophile crimes and with the bribery of the Israeli and Saudi and other governments.   There has been no change that would keep a Trump from carrying out a nuclear attack without the Congress, the judiciary or the military stopping him.  ANYONE WHO WASN'T PRAYING FOR A MILITARY COUP TO PREVENT TRUMP NUKING IRAN LAST NIGHT IS A MORALLY DEPRAVED PSYCHOPATH.   And I am totally opposed to military coups, but using nuclear weapons is a greater and super-mortal sin.  

I am sure that as I say this the MS-Now and other liberalish lawyers are making claims about the "unconstitutionality" of what Trump and his gang of oligarchic criminals have done being in some way a violation of the sacred Constitution.   Which is bullshit.   He's gotten away with it and will continue to get away with it,  Hegseth, Rubio, Kuschner, etc. will all get away with it JUST AS THE RAILROADING OF BLACK PEOPLE BY THE COURTS WAS WHAT THE CONSTITUTION REALLY, TRULY WAS AND IS, THE PERMISSION OF RICH, WHITE, FASCIST, OLIGARCHS BY THE LEGAL SYSTEM AND THE JUDICIARY TO COMMIT THE GREATEST CRIMES EVER COMMITTED BY AMERICANS AND GET OFF WITH TOTAL LIBERTY AND THE MONEY THEY STEAL IS WHAT THE REAL MEANING OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION IS.  The claims of the Meidas and MS Now lawyers other than to that effect are pious lies. 

I doubt anyone else anywhere is going to tell you that truth but I won't stop pointing it out. 

That Trump Is Still In Office Proves That The Constitution Has Failed, Utterly And Completely

ANYONE WHO IS PUTTING their hopes on that fraudulent and quick fix, the 25th Amendment, is as much of a sucker as those who put their hopes on the impeachment myth.  

It is one of the fatal defects in the presidential system that those who are assigned the choice of removing the most criminal or dangerous presidents in our history have the most personal, selfish, self interested reason to keep them in office.   And the worse the president, the worse those he puts around him that the 25 Amendment gives the responsibility to make that responsible decision and the worse the members of his party, IN OUR CASE THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS IN THE HOUSE AND SENATE who will block their removal.

It is one of the features of democratic parliamentary systems that those who have those choices,  whether as part of a failing an disastrous prime minstership or those in such a disasters' party are those with a real and important self-preservation interest in removing a Trump level disaster.   

Our Constitution has repeatedly failed to remove the worst presidents in our history,  and now we have the worst example of that in our history.   It failed to remove him and, thanks to the Roberts Court, the means of preventing his return to power in the 14th Amendment was nullified by the Republicans with help by a Democratic appointee.    Never, ever put your hopes on the Supreme Court, especially the Ivy League Law school class of them. 

I pray and hope that the rest of the world,  the free and aspiring to be democratic countries and forces tell us to change it or they're cutting us off,  that the boycotts will continue and increase,  that they can't trust us at all until the goddamned presidential system we have now is drastically altered to really, basically protect the world from another Trump.  

Our system is entirely,  completely, catastrophically failed.  THAT ANYONE IS EVEN TALKING ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF TRUMP USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS THIS WEEK PROVES HOW DANGEROUS OUR CONSTITUTION IS.    I fear that even that won't be enough to overcome the putrid, lying founders fetish that protects our failed Constitution.   Maybe if Lin-Manuel Miranda makes it rap and boogie on Broadway,  something might be done.   But he'll never do that.   If he did the NYT and the NY based funding agencies that gave his founders fetish show its legs would never back him.  

A College Credentialed And Tiresome Would Be Wise Guy Makes Me Do A Repost I Hadn't Planned On

If there is one thing that is predictable about the day,  it is that some mid-brow, college-credentialed dolt is going to snark about this on Easter.   All they prove is that, despite their credentialing,  they are ignorant dolts.  I think I first posted this about eleven years back. 

My Easter Evergreen - Eostre, My Ass

It comes around every year as certainly as FOX "news" pushing the "war on Christmas" nonsense, the internet babble about how the "Xians" stole Easter from those poor put upon pagans.  I'm reading it all over the place today so I'm posting this now.  Somehow the "reality community"  thinks that the English invented Easter.   The whole thing centers around the derivation of the English name "Easter" by the Anglo Saxon monk, The Venerable Bede in 725.  From The Reckoning of Time:

Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated "Paschal month", and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.

Apparently that statement is the sole reason that this modern myth arose, no other one, apparently, making that claim.  You wonder why a bunch of "Xian" haters take the word of a Catholic monk for it.   I'm no expert in the minor goddesses of Germanic paganism but the entire issue of Germanic paganism as known in the early 8th century is made moot by the fact that by that time Christians around the Mediterranean had been fighting over the right time to observe the PASCAL TIME for, oh, about 535 years and likely longer. 

Ecclesiastical history preserves the memory of three distinct phases of the dispute regarding the proper time of observing Easter. It will add to clearness if we in the first place state what is certain regarding the date and the nature of these three categories.

First phase

The first was mainly concerned with the lawfulness of celebrating Easter on a weekday. We read in Eusebius (Church History V.23): "A question of no small importance arose at that time [i.e. the time of Pope Victor, about A.D. 190]. The dioceses of all Asia, as from an older tradition, held that the fourteenth day of the moon, on which day the Jews were commanded to sacrifice the lamb, should always be observed as the feast of the life-giving pasch [epi tes tou soteriou Pascha heortes], contending that the fast ought to end on that day, whatever day of the week it might happen to be. However it was not the custom of the churches in the rest of the world to end it at this point, as they observed the practice, which from Apostolic tradition has prevailed to the present time, of terminating the fast on no other day than on that of the Resurrection of our Saviour. Synods and assemblies of bishops were held on this account, and all with one consent through mutual correspondence drew up an ecclesiastical decree that the mystery of the Resurrection of the Lord should be celebrated on no other day but the Sunday and that we should observe the close of the paschal fast on that day only." These words of the Father of Church History, followed by some extracts which he makes from the controversial letters of the time, tell us almost all that we know concerning the paschal controversy in its first stage. A letter of St. Irenæus is among the extracts just referred to, and this shows that the diversity of practice regarding Easter had existed at least from the time of Pope Sixtus (c. 120). Further, Irenaeus states that St. Polycarp, who like the other Asiatics, kept Easter on the fourteenth day of the moon, whatever day of the week that might be, following therein the tradition which he claimed to have derived from St. John the Apostle, came to Rome c. 150 about this very question, but could not be persuaded by Pope Anicetus to relinquish his Quartodeciman observance. Nevertheless he was not debarred from communion with the Roman Church, and St. Irenæus, while condemning the Quartodeciman practice, nevertheless reproaches Pope Victor (c. 189-99) with having excommunicated the Asiatics too precipitately and with not having followed the moderation of his predecessors. The question thus debated was therefore primarily whether Easter was to be kept on a Sunday, or whether Christians should observe the Holy Day of the Jews, the fourteenth of Nisan, which might occur on any day of the week. Those who kept Easter with the Jews were called Quartodecimans or terountes (observants); but even in the time of Pope Victor this usage hardly extended beyond the churches of Asia Minor. After the pope's strong measures the Quartodecimans seem to have gradually dwindled away. Origen in the "Philosophumena" (VIII, xviii) seems to regard them as a mere handful of wrong-headed nonconformists.

The fact is that in the Greek language the far older name for the feast day is "Paskha" apparently from where the Latin "Pascha" comes from, all of which is taken from the Hebrew word for the Passover "Pesach",  all of which pre-date any interaction that Christians are likely to have had with Germanic rabbit worshipers by a considerable time. 

Let me take a second to point out that anyone who knows anything about the accounts of the execution and Resurrection of Jesus, would know that it was entirely, intimately and from the beginning related to THE PASSOVER, WHICH HAD ALREADY BEEN SET FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL BY THE 1ST CENTURY.

14 This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance. 15 Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread; on the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses, for whoever eats leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day shall be cut off from Israel. 16 On the first day you shall hold a solemn assembly, and on the seventh day a solemn assembly; no work shall be done on those days; only what everyone must eat, that alone may be prepared by you. 17 You shall observe the festival of unleavened bread, for on this very day I brought your companies out of the land of Egypt: you shall observe this day throughout your generations as a perpetual ordinance.

Exodus 12:14-17

The Christian holiday has NOTHING to do with German paganism, it would be more accurate to say that pagan practices polluted the Jewish-Christian holiday.

All of the romance languages I know of derive their name for Easter from the same cognates from the Hebrew.  And even a number of  Germanic tongues, such as Danish (Påske), Swedish (Påsk), and even Icelandic (Páskar) who would seem to have missed the Eostre bandwagon. You'd think that the isolated island that preserved the Sagas and, as my old History of English teacher claimed, a closer affinity with Anglo Saxon than modern English does, would have retained it if anyone would have, but it was likely never there to start with. *

If anyone had a legitimate beef to make over the holiday, it would be the Jews and Jesus and everyone named in the accounts of the event, except a few Romans, were Jews, including Jesus. 

But what can you expect, the same people run their own ideological campaigns around Christmas, just like FOX does.

*  Update:  Other than German and English and a few modern descendants of German such as the language of the Pennsylvania Dutch, just about all of the names for Easter in most languages are, clearly, derived from the Hebrew cognate name for the the holiest day of the Christian year.  Some examples, Norwegian (Påske), Scots (Pace),  Welsh (Pasg), and,  Irish Gaelic, (Cáisc) I suspect through a p to hard c consonant shift, though I'm no Irish scholar, much to my shame.  Even the near cousins of English don't share in the "Eostre" stuff showing more affinity in their name for the day to the Hebrew, Flemmish (Poaschn),  Frisian (Peaske).

Update 2026:   I think this old evergreen is going to be fresh every year until the last of at least my generation of mid-brows dies out.  And, unfortunately, it doesn't look like the upcoming generations are any more interested in historical or etymological accuracy than they are.   College credentialing ain't what it used to be and it never was. 

Holy Saturday - The Harrowing Of Hell

IT WAS ONE OF THE FIRST things that scandalized me about the faith I was being brought up on, was the line from the Apostles' creed "he descended into hell" because according to my infantile understanding of things,  hell was NO  place that God, Jesus would have gone to.   Unfortunately, the cleric-centered governance of the pre-Vatican II Catholic church was largely unconcerned about any kind of extensive or detailed instruction into what Scripture or even Catholic doctrine held about such things.   Such teaching was also done on the cheap so it was largely given over to teaching nuns who often, in those days, not now,  didn't have much of an education in such things, themselves.   

Though Protestants may, with some justification, note that Catholics of my generation, at that time, were not encouraged to read Scripture much or very deeply,  I haven't noticed that Protestantism on the popular level has done a much better job,  whether with Scripture reading or not.  

So it had to wait decades for me to read what I should have read then, what should have been pointed out to us, then, a fuller meaning of the Incarnation and how fully and completely that enfleshment had to be - half-measures and token embodiment wouldn't have been real and the real thing is required.   And as a consequence of that incomplete view of the Incarnation,  the full meaning of the death and Resurrection couldn't start to have any clarity.  But that's for tomorrow.   For now, here is what Luke Timothy Johnson says on this in his book The Creed:  What Christians Believe and Why It Matters 

AND WAS BURIED     

The final moment of Jesus' earthly existence noted by the creed is that he was buried.  Once more, we find the tradition of Jesus' burial both in Paul and in the Gospels.

I will break in here to note that a lot of the As Seen On TV and on the internet "historical Jesus" stuff typically doesn't deal with the Epistles, concentrating on the Gospels and their alleged omissions and disagreements.  The earliest expressions of such things are almost certainly found in the Pauline letters and much early material is also found in the other letters.  I am especially interested in why what is generally, these days, for now, at least, is claimed to be the earliest of the Gospels,  Mark, says so little about the death and entombment and Resurrection of Jesus.  The answer to that is, of course, we don't know why.   Whether it was an accident of the textual history of Mark's Gospel that left us with an incomplete version of the book or that being incomplete and vague was an intentional choice made by the Gospel writer can't be known.  It has been pointed out that in the available text of Mark, as is not subject to such speculation,  Jesus was not hesitant to predict something would happen very much like the accounts given by Paul and the other three Gospels,  details in those books differing somewhat.  As Luke Timothy Johnson points out, the fact of the burial is not among the points of difference among them. 

Writing to the Corinthians around the year 54, Paul provides a summary of the good news that he ha himself received and had handed on to them,  a "by which you are being saved if you held firmly to the message" (1 Cor 15:1-2).  It begins,  "that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried."  Note that Paul reported this in an unadorned fashion.  It is simply one of the "facts" about Jesus that he received from the first believers,  therefore within some few years of Jesus' death  He does not suggest that,  like the death for sins and like the resurrection on the third day, these are matters predicted by scriptures.

The same matter-of-factness about the burial is found in the Gospel narratives, with several small variations (see Mark 15:43-47; Matt 27:55-66; Luke 25:50-55; John 19:58-42). More striking is the strong agreement on the basic characters and actions and above all on the fact of the burial itself.  That Jesus was buried and remained in the tomb for some length of time certainly serves to confirm the reality o his death.  Compare Martha's comment concerning her brother Lazarus,  "Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days: (John 11:52), and the resurrection of a body so thoroughly dead must also be regarded as an act of God. 

But another dimension of the burial is equally ancient and important.   The burial symbolizes Jesus' descent into the realm that in ancient cosmology was most removed from heaven or the place of God's dwelling.  He goes "under the earth,"  which in the Psalms is called sheol, and in the Greek translation, hades.  In Peter's speech at Pentecost,  he quotes Psalm 16 in connection with Jesus' death:  "You will not abandon my soul to hades,  or let your Holy One see corruption" (acts 2:27).

I will break in here to note that one of the most important keys to understanding the meaning of the Scriptures is that, as human writing, human literature using human words, ideas, concepts and imagination (as in fact every bit of writing and scientific observation, calculation and analysis are) that, of course, such things would have to be presented in the human understanding of life, the world and the entire cosmos that was the common imaginative and intellectual understanding of their time.   

What reads to us as a hopelessly naive view of the physical universe was merely the common intellectual currency by which those trying to explain their experience of the living, the executed, the buried and the Resurrected Jesus to their contemporaries and, perhaps as an after thought, those of us living two thousand years later, used to say it.   

And we're just as bound by our current, entirely likely to be surpassed in the future conception of reality as they were. 

Any modern reader, thinker, non-thinker or scoffer who believes that we, in our high sciencyness have surpassed such parochial vicissitudes only marks themselves as being as  unsophisticated as those who believe you can read the Scriptures as you would a magazine article or newspaper journalism written at what used to be a 4th grade level of reading ability and taken as "objectively true."   That is something that the materialist-atheist-devotee of scientism has in common with so, so many of those white evangelicals who they love to believe are so different from themselves.  

This connection may help account for the conviction that Jesus, after his death, entered into the dungeons of the lower depths in order to free those most distant from the divine presence, a motif that was subsequently termed "the harrowing of hell" or, in the Apostles' Creed, "the descent into hell."  In Ephesians 4:5, Paul asks cryptically,  "When it says 'he ascended,' what does it mean but that he also descended into the lower parts of the earth?:  The conviction is stated more clearly by 1 Peter 3:18-20:

"He was put to death in the flesh  but made alive in the spirit,  in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison  who in former times did not obey when God waited patiently in the days of Noah."  

Peter continues, "For this is the reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead  so that even though they had been judged in the flesh as everyone is judged,  they might live in the spirit as God does" (1 Pet 4-6).   

The descent of Jesus into hell is,  in this view, an expression of God's universal will for salvation and a part of his cosmic victory, so that every tongue even those "under the earth should proclaim that Jesus is Lord (Phil 2:10).  In terms of the movement of the creed, the burial represents the nadir of downward descent, the ultimate expression of Jesus' sharing the human condition  even to the depositing of the flesh in the soil like a seed (John 12:24; see 1 Cor 15:55-41).

It's important to note that the common conception of what is being claimed by the Resurrection of Jesus wasn't just that his corpse was reanimated like a Frankenstein experiment, the glorified body of Jesus as described in the accounts that People left us is certainly not like that.  His closest followers,  Mary Magdalene, the disciples on the road to Emmaus, didn't recognize him when they first saw him.  And his glorified body could appear and disappear, entering locked rooms, but also not what we'd consider to be a ghost or a spirit, he could cook and eat food.   I don't remember who it was I heard or read recently who said they though it would be better to talk about him as "Glorified" instead of "Resurrected" because of the limited imagination that so many have of a merely reanimated corpse when that was not what was being talked about from the start. 

As to today's theme,  here is Philippians 2: 10-11  

10 And so, in honor of the name of Jesus
    all beings in heaven, on earth, and in the world below
    will fall on their knees,
11 and all will openly proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

Good News Translation

I won't get into the problem such a passage of Scripture poses for those, Catholic, evangelical, etc. who favor the hideous theory of eternal damnation, at least not here on Holy Saturday.   But such an idea, that Jesus rescued those lingering in hades, hell, in the period before his earthly Resurrection produces a theory of God as loving and just that the infernalist theory of him cannot produce.   As David Bentley Hart has pointed out,  the God of the infernalists is a God who cannot be the focus of the primary Commandment that Jesus taught,  to love God because such a theory of God presents God as the most evil being of all.   I'll point out that such an infernalist view of God and Jesus also leads in the opposite direction of universal love of our fellow creatures, human and animal than what the second of those Jesus given Commandments requires.  

On the Theme from Julian's Chapter xx - Denise Levertov

Six hours outstretched in the sun, yes,
hot wood, the nails, blood trickling
into the eyes, yes—
but the thieves on their neighbor crosses
survived till after the soldiers
had come to fracture their legs, or longer.
Why single out the agony? What’s
a mere six hours?
Torture then, torture now,
the same, the pain’s the same,
immemorial branding iron,
electric prod.
Hasn’t a child
dazed in the hospital ward they reserve
for the most abused, known worse?
The air we’re breathing,
these very clouds, ephemeral billows
languid upon the sky’s
moody ocean, we share
with women and men who’ve held out
days and weeks on the rack—
and in the ancient dust of the world
what particles
of the long tormented,
what ashes.

But Julian’s lucid spirit leaptto the difference:

perceived why no awe could measure
that brief day’s endless length,
why among all the tortured
One only is “King of Grief.”
The oneing, she saw, the oneing
with the Godhead opened Him utterly
to the pain of all minds, all bodies
—sands of the sea, of the desert—
from first beginning
to last day. The great wonder is
that the human cells of His flesh and bone
didn’t explode
when utmost Imagination rose
in that flood of knowledge. Unique
in agony, Infinite strength, Incarnate,
empowered Him to endure
inside of history,
through those hours when he took to Himself
the sum total of anguish and drank
even the lees of that cup:

within the mesh of the web, Himself

woven within it, yet seeing it,
seeing it whole. Every sorrow and desolation
He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.

Landon Reid Has Already Demonstrated Bryon Noem's Makeup Look

 And his commentary is the best I've heard on this so far. 

On Bryon Noem's Hobby Lobbys

HE SHOULD WATCH LANDON REID'S makeup videos,  he'd do it a lot more classy if he followed his advice.  

Hey, if Kristi took his advice she'd do it a lot classier than she does. 

I might have Hitler on the mind but I have yet to hear anyone point out that in the picture where he's in pink pants he's got a Hitler mustache.  

Landon is about the classiest drag queen I've ever seen.  And quite funny. 

Reese Waters speaks for me on most of the rest of it.

A drop on a hot stone that evaporates without purpose or success or failure or anything

SOMEONE WHO READ what I wrote the other day asked me if I'd ever seen the movie "Hannah Arendt" that was made in 2012 and sent me a link to it on Youtube.   Now, you may know that I have a severe allergy to movies made about real People and, especially, People with such fraught biographies as the great thinker,  so much more than just a philosopher, who was the subject of the movie.   Especially anything around the subject of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.   But I watched it and, a few somewhat minor liberties taken with some actual events in her life, it's very much worth watching, though no where near as much worth it as reading her or listening to the number of interviews and lectures you can read online.   Margarethe von Trotta made one fine film.  Barbara Sukowa,  Janet McTeer, Axel Milburg etc. gave extremely fine performances as Arendt, McCarthy and Heinrich Bluchner (Arendt's husband) and all of the smaller roles were well acted, as well.  

It was especially satisfying, if only in a movie,  to have her very close friend,  the novelist and intellectual Mary McCarthy tell off what I believe is supposed to be the putrid racist and what passed as an American intellectual, Norman Podhoretz, pointing out to him and some other so-called New York intellectuals deriding Arendt, that, unlike them, she had been in a concentration camp and had escaped from it as well as directly experiencing Nazism as a Jew.   There were a number of such satisfying occasions in the movie as well as some disturbing ones.   Especially effective was the use of actual footage from the Eichmann trial, using the actual words of witnesses,  the prosecutor, the judges and Eichmann instead of using actors saying their words.  The skillful use of that black and white film inter-cut with color reenactment of Hannah Arendt sitting in the courtroom, in the press room, was very effective.  

But I wouldn't be telling you about this without one real life exchange between one of the judges*and Eichmann in the actual footage,  in which the judge, Benjamin Halevi, asks him, in German, about his motive in carrying out the deportation of Jews to their deaths, which Eichmann said was his duty in wartime,  you should follow the  closed captions that translate it to English.  I've transcribed those here, with one change in emphasis I could catch (I really need more practice in listening to German). 

Judge: Did you experience any conflict between your duty and your conscience?

Eichmann: One could call it a state of being split.

Judge: Split?

Eichmann:  Yes.  A conscious split state where one could flee from one side to the other. 

Judge:  One's conscience was to be abandoned?

Eichmann:  Sorry? [I'd have translated that, "Excuse me."]

Judge:  One's personal conscience was to be abandoned?

Eichmann: You could say that.

Judge: If there had been more civil courage, things could have been different. Am I right?  Answer. 

Eichmann: If civic courage had been hierarchically organized,  then yes, absolutely. 

Judge:  So this was not destiny.  It was not inevitable. It was a question of human behavior. 

Eichmann: A question of human behavior  and, of course, it was wartime, upheaval.  Everyone thought, "It's useless to resist. . . "  Yes.  A drop on a hot stone that evaporates without purpose or success or failure or anything.  It was connected to the times, I think.  To the times, how children were raised, with ideological education, rigid discipline, that sort of thing. 

Hearing what Eichmann said to excuse himself in the murders of millions of People made my blood run cold because it almost exactly matches, almost verbatim,  something I've repeatedly warned of here about the total and absolutely guaranteed consequences of holding a materialistic, a scientistic view of human life.   Here is one of the times I said it:

Materialist-atheist-scientism is an ideology that can only be true if it is false, though that argument requires a few more steps dealing with the inevitable debunking of human minds, which, as mentioned, is one of the more vigorously pursued goals of materialist-atheist-scientists including many of the biggest names in it such as Francis Crick.  And with that any reason to believe in any of the work of such scientists evaporates.  And with it the very category of truth as opposed to error or falsity evaporates into a banal and meaningless chemical reaction like water evaporating or iron oxidizing.  Materialism is the one ideology that can only be true if it is false because it corrodes the meaning of the idea of truth.

Early in the movie, when Arendt and some others are listening to a news report that said Eichmann had escaped through the infamous "ratline" that was tied to the Vatican (I won't get into that right now, but there is certainly a lot that could be said about both the reality and the myths regarding that),  one of them snarks that they helped him due to his Catholicism, though what he said is not only antithetical to Catholicism and Christianity, it proved that his faith was not in revealed religion but in the ideology of materialist scientism.   The same materialist scientism which is, actually, the default ideology that is the ubiquitous ideology of the educated class, world-wide, so ubiquitous that many of those whose academic and professional life is in Christian and other theologies adhere to it.   

I don't recall if Arendt, the person and not the character in the movie, directly addressed that, alas, I don't own the book and would have to get a copy to look it up, but it is a key to understanding how he chose to do what he did, without any reference to the moral absolute that would have told him that, apart from being instrumentally "useless" for him to have refused to obey orders, even during wartime, that he had an absolute obligation to disobey them.    And if you think that is something relevant to only the crimes of the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s,  you are entirely discounting those who are reproducing Eichmann's crimes right now, today, Americans, Israelis, Iranians,  Russians, . . . 

I had thought at first, when I was so struck by that quote that I decided to write about this that it was a departure from what I should be writing about,  Holy Week, but now I can see that this is a Holy Week post.   Pilate washed his hands when he was modeling what Eichmann was claiming was his lack of responsibility for his crimes.   Materialists in the governments, judiciary, media, academia don't bother to even notice the blood on theirs.  

*  It is one of the criticisms of Hannah Arendt's famous book on the trial that she was scathing in her criticism of the prosecutors and the Israeli government under Ben Gurion but she had a lot more respect for the judges in their questioning of Eichmann.   When I finally read the entire book a few years back, it was clear that she hadn't made excuses for the Nazis or Eichmann while reaching what was a far deeper and more troubling view of the trial than just about everyone wanted.   The lies that were told about her in the American media, and elsewhere, have, unfortunately survived, especially for those who never read her to see what she really said.  And a lot of those who lied about that have come close to repeating the thinking of Eichmann, either as active participants in history or of commenting and approving of subsequent crimes in history.   

No More Make Believe When It Comes To Israel Or Any Other Country In The World

I DIDN'T MAKE ANY OF THAT UP.   Here's part of an article from The Guardian

American citizens have been at the forefront of the rise of settler violence in the occupied territories, and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land, but as US passport holders they cannot be barred from their own country.

Many of the estimated 60,000 Americans living in the West Bank outside of occupied East Jerusalem moved to settlements for the lifestyle and have little to do with the Palestinians on whose land they live. But a core of ideologically driven US citizens were at the forefront of building religious settlements on land expropriated from Palestinians while others have led the rise of what has been described as “settler terrorism”.

The US announced the travel restrictions as settler violence against unarmed Palestinians escalated in the wake of the Hamas cross-border attack in October, including shootings, the destruction of Arab homes and entire communities driven out at gunpoint. The UN estimates that about 500 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank this year including dozens of children. While Israel claims many of the dead were associated with armed Palestinian groups, the UN said the army frequently works with settlers attacking Arab civilians.

Hadar Susskind, president of Americans for Peace Now, said these settlers militias draw inspiration from two Americans infamous as the godfathers of the campaign of violence against ordinary Palestinians.

An American doctor from Brooklyn, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Muslim worshippers in the West Bank city of Hebron in 1994. Goldstein was a follower of another American, Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the far-right religious Kach party that was eventually banned in Israel and the US under anti-terrorism laws.

“If you asked who are the most prominent examples of literally murderous violent settler extremism, the two answers are Goldstein and Kahane. Those people are the prophets of the settler movement,” said Susskind.

“Earlier this year I led a trip to Israel and Palestine. We went to Hebron and stopped in Meir Kahane park where they have a shrine to Baruch Goldstein. His grave is there. It’s shocking that they have a public park named after an American whose party was declared so racist that it was not allowed to be in the Knesset, a person who espoused violence and hatred. And then a shrine to Baruch Goldstein who took those lessons from Kahane and actualised them in murdering a group of people at prayer.”

The spokesperson for the Hebron settlers who maintain the memorials to Kahane and Goldstein was for many years an American from New Jersey, David Wilder.

A lot of that settler violence is as American as apple pie.  And it's increased in frequency and severity since that article was written,  yet the Israeli government has passed laws specifically targeting Palestinians with the death penalty.   Which defines it absolutely as an apartheid, racist, fascist government.   

As for the complaint that I mentioned Israel's part in bringing on this disastrous war with Iran and either suckering or bribing (DOES ANYONE BELIEVE FOR A SECOND TRUMP DOES ANYTHING WITHOUT SOMETHING IN IT FOR HIM?)  the Trump regime into bringing on,   you act as if there's something wrong WITH POINTING OUT A FACT THAT EVERYONE KNOWS AND THE TRUMP REGIME HAS CONFIRMED.  And we know that Israel was far from alone in that,  Saudi Arabia's ruling family and those of other autocratic governments in the region were, as well.   Paying money to Trump, his family and his cronies to get the war against Iran they thought they wanted but, for at least some of them, they are having some serious buyers remorse.  

The time to play let's pretend in regard to Israel OR ANY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD is over.   The stakes are too high to make exceptions.   They always have been.  

I've got a family member who joined the military last year, he'd almost certainly get sent to fight Trump's war of whim,  Israel, the Saudi's etc. to order war.   I haven't mentioned him yet but he's been on my mind even before the start of the war.   Send Eric (who would now be allowed to enlist under their changed age limits), send Tiffany and Baron and Little Donnie's brat, Kai,  who for some reason has Secret Service protection.  Let the military provide that for her.   

Someone Close To Me

 told me he lost five thousand dollars in the stock market last week,  someone who though financially secure is certainly not wealthy, just good at saving money.   I'd warned him that diasater was coming and that was only when it was the "AI" bubble bursting which I was sure was coming,  then came the Israeli-American war on Iran.   About which,  what will $200 per barrel oil do to the energy hogging "AI" bubble?    You know, what has been inflating the stock markets so irrationally up till now. 

Get ready for a depression.   It's coming and this one is going to be worse than the last one because back then lots and lots of People grew up on farms and in hard scrabble conditions and knew how to cope.  Americans brought up on media and lies are not going to cope well, especially that one third (at the best of times) who have violent, fascistic tendencies.   We're going to see some really, really hard times.  Biden almost saved us from it but the media sandbagged him and then Kamala Harris ran face on into America's indigenous fascists, the white supremacists and that other strain of native fascism, misogynists.   We're already finding out how expensive racism is, yet again.

Speaking of Israel,  they just imposed a death penalty on Palestinians exactly in the period when Palestinians are under some of the most intense and deadly attacks from the largely American born "settler movement,"  the fascist movement largely comprising Meir Kahane's fascists.   There is absolutely no doubt about it,  Israel which so many of us were suckered for so long into believing was some kind of idealistic socialist progressive movement is a fascist apartheid country which is even more extreme than South Africa's apartheid government was.   This was inevitable, as those such as Hannah Arendt predicted it would be in the early 1940s.   And they, along with such as the Saudis and some of the other Sunni governments in the region are the ones who bribed Trump into starting this war.   

The end result of fifty years of Zionist politics was embodied in the recent resolution of the largest and most influential section of the World Zionist Organization. American Zionists from left to right adopted unanimously, at their last annual convention held in Atlantic City in October, 1944, the demand for a “free and democratic Jewish commonwealth … [which] shall embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished.” This is a turning point in Zionist history; for it means that the Revisionist program, so long bitterly repudiated, has finally proved victorious. The Atlantic City Resolution goes even a step further than the Biltmore Program (1942), in which the Jewish minority had granted minority rights to the Arab majority. This time the Arabs were simply not mentioned in the resolution, which obviously leaves them the choice between voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship. It seems to admit that only opportunist reasons had previously prevented the Zionist movement from stating its final aims. These aims now appear to be completely identical with those of the extremists as far as the future political constitution of Palestine is concerned.

It is a deadly blow to those Jewish parties in Palestine itself that have tirelessly preached the need for an understanding between the Arab and the Jewish peoples. On the other hand, it will considerably strengthen the majority under the leadership of Ben-Gurion, which, through the pressure of many injustices in Palestine and the terrible catastrophes in Europe, have turned more than ever nationalistic.

I don't know if she would have welcomed me saying so but this passage strikes me as prophecy in line with anything in the Old Testament and as disturbingly topical right now. 

Nationalism is bad enough when it trusts in nothing but the rude force of the nation. A nationalism that necessarily and admittedly depends upon the force of a foreign nation is certainly worse. This is the threatened fate of Jewish nationalism and of the proposed Jewish State, surrounded inevitably by Arab states and Arab peoples. Even a Jewish majority in Palestine—nay, even a transfer of all Palestine Arabs, which is openly demanded by Revisionists — would not substantially change a situation in which Jews must either ask protection from an outside power against their neighbors or effect a working agreement with their neighbors.

I am absolutely certain that she, more fully informed than almost everyone about the politics of Europe and the world, knew that that outside force would certainly be the United States.   And she was right. 

You can read her entire essay,  Zionism Reconsidered here. 

There Can Be No Evidence If There's Nothing There

IT WASN'T WHO you probably suspect it was but someone didn't like me pointing out that what evidence there is on the question, it is that there is life after death.   

You don't have to believe that evidence, whether it is in the form of reports of near death experience,  veridical accounts of details in near death experiences unknowable to the one who had the experience, claims of communication with the dead by mediums - some of those, also giving veridical details almost certainly unknown to the medium*- or one of the most ubiquitious of reported human experiences,  seeing ghosts, but all of that is evidence.   What is entirely unevidenced is the claim that there is nothing after brain death because everything about our minds is a product of brain chemistry.   There is no possibility of that producing evidence.

In taking the last few days off because I've got another damned cold I thought about what I said that got a materialist, atheist of the would-be scientistic variety all annoyed,  it occured to me that the theologian I respect highly,  Hans Kung, dismissing the early reports of near death experience in his book-length study of the topic, translated into English as "Eternal Life?" it didn't surprise me that a 20th century academic theologian would choose to not deal with that evidence in what was, no doubt, an academic study - as always with Kung, the footnotes are an opus in themselves.    But, if I had had the chance to ask him,  I would point out what I pointed out above and ask why, since he deals at book-length with the non-evidence based argument that there is nothing after death, he would not at least acknowledge that complete lack of evidence while admitting that those reports of near death experiences and everything else listed above, including reports of seeing ghosts,  is, in fact, the only evidence there is to make any kind of evidenced, empirical case on the subject.  

If there is evidence that there is no life after death, what does that consist of?   Reports of near death non-experience?   Of no information being given about real life given in non-readings?   Of no ghosts seen?  

If you claim to base your beliefs on evidence, well, you can't base a disbelief in an afterlife on evidence because there quite plainly can be no such evidence.  

As for anyone thinking I'm nuts for what I wrote,  I left jr. high a long, long time ago.   I'm entirely unbothered by name calling.  I have no academic career to worry about, no one is going to be voting on me getting tenure or advancement.   I certainly don't care about it being declared that I've got cooties. 

* Some of that information comes from clients who concealed their identity, name, etc. from the medium before their session to prevent any access to information.   Again, you don't have to believe such clients as you don't know but when you know the person who had the reading and know they wouldn't want to take a chance on someone googling them to get information, that's evidence as credible as, in fact, the large majority of evidence which relies on such known credibility. 

It's All Slop And Trump Wants To Replace Education With It

IT SHOULD BE THE LAW OF THE LAND that the "AI" robots that the blow-up, world-champion, Soviet-style honey pot trap,  Melania Trump wants to replace the nation's school teachers with HAVE TO REPLACE THE FACULTY AT ALL OF THE ELITE PREP-SCHOOLS IN THE COUNTRY BEFORE THEY PUT ONE IN ANY PUBLIC SCHOOL.   And I do mean a law as in that will never happen because the elite will never let the only kids in the country they care about,  their own, to be subject to what Melania and whatever bull  shit billionaire "AI" conman put her up to this are peddling. 

"AI" is essentially a souped-up search engine that will indiscriminately return wides-spread lies, myths, nonsense, etc. as if it was accurate information, only to be believed by the naive and gullible who often have no idea that they're being sold junk info.   I couldn't imagine a worse idea than to have robots spouting "AI"   Since we know Melania is a rather good example of natural stupidity with a penchant for plagarism (she stole Michele Obama's speech, remember?) would be pushing what is, in effect, automated plagarism which definitely doesn't disriminate as it will steal from the worst as well as the best.  

Democrats,  the teachers unions, should definitely make this proposal the law of the land when they get that chance.   Make the super-rich buy that bullshit first.    And deport Melania while you're at it.  

About The Truth About Cesar Chavez Being Told

AT FIRST I WAS SUSPICIOUS of the breaking stories accusing Cesar Chavez of sexual crimes and violations of Women's rights.   It wasn't until I read that Dolores Huerta was one of those revealing those horrible truths that I knew they were credible.   Her admission that she had covered up his attack and abuse of her for decades in order to protect the Farm Workers Movemet that she had dedicated her life to was all the confirmation I needed to take those accusations as credible no matter how much I didn't want to believe someone I'd considered a hero had done things like that. 

We develop ideas of those heroes from a combination of their own appearances and words but also from the narratives that are published around them.   I will admit that my concept of Cesar Chavez the hero of the Farm Workers Movement was a creation of both of those and not of any kind of deep, serious knowledge of him, his colleagues such as Dolores Huerta or their movement.   It was certainly part of my life to read about that, especially as presented in the liberal Catholic media and circles that my parents and other family members supported and subscribed to.  

Now more of the reality of what happened then and why it happened as it did has to form our ideas of him and, entirely more importantly, the movement he came to be the figurehead of.   This article by Kat Armas is the most probing and thoughtful one I've yet seen to do that.   It questions how the culture that produced that first impression of those things was, itself, distorted by the diminiution of Women's struggle, work and sacrifice in that movement due to the general sexism of the time and even the liberal media milieu.  

To revisit Chavez's legacy, then, is not only to reassess a man, but to recognize how narratives themselves are formed; how power, proximity and even empire — the systems of power and domination that structure social and political life — shape which voices are amplified, and which are silenced. Women's stories are not simply side notes; they are essential to understanding the full human cost of social justice work, and the deeper truths that often remain just outside the official record.

I recommend the entire article which shows that Cesar Chavez, himself, should have grown up with entirely more respect for Women than he did, especially in his moral formation because his mother and grandmother had had such a strong and decisive part in that.   Today I don't have the time  to do justice to the entire article now,  nor the theologies that are presented in it,  the informal though all important Womens' theologies that are not recorded in writing or documented or taken seriously (until, maybe now) that, certainly, must share the forms and methods and character of those in the earliest Church,  Jesus, himself, not having written anything and many, almost certainly most of the first followers of Jesus being either non-writers or illiterate, themselves.  The Catholic Church has ignored and denied that reality ever since they decided that Women were not allowed to preach,  them basing that on the WRITINGS  of Paul, even though Paul also named Women as Apostles and carriers of the Gospel.  Or at least Epistles.  

I'll try to get back to this as soon as I can.   I will give this as an example of why the Catholic Church should have a policy against rapid canonization.   I don't know if any kind of formal or informal process to canonize Chavez has been mounted, though I would bet such has been at least discussed.   You can compare these revelations about him to those which have been revealed about Josemaria Escriva, the dubious Opus Dei "saint" whose canonization cause probably had the financial and power backing that would certainly have opposed the United Farmworkers cause. 

Verified X Account Puts Literal Bounty on Mohammad Marandi; Musk Leaves It Up

 

While Declaring "NO KINGS" Remember His Corrupt Court Is Planning On Ratfucking The Election For Him

I HAVE BEEN TELLING EVERYONE I COULD that the Roberts Republican-fascists were going to directly AND ACTIVELY try to rig the election for their Republican-fascist party way back when that election was the last one.    With the oral arguments the other day,   it couldn't be more obvious that the entire,  Federalist (fascist) Society,  Republican-fascist six Republicans on the Court are doing exactly that.   I'm beginning to think our only hope is that the Republicans fuck up the economy so badly that it will be a landslide election of the kind that put LBJ or the on that put FDR in the presidency and one which will give Democrats a majority in the House and a filibuster proof majority in the Senate but we can't depend on that.

I have also been telling everyone for far, far longer that the Supreme Court, despite the Nina Totenberg style lore surrounding them IS AND HAS BEEN THE MOST CORRUPT BRANCH OF THE GOVERNMENT GOING BACK TO WHEN JOHN MARSHALL WAS THE CHIEF JUSTICE.   Then, as now, race and partisanship was central to the corruption of that Court,  I've gone into and over the record of the Court and subsequent ones.  I have leane very heavily on one of the current best historians of the Court, Paul Finkelman and that previous one,  Louis Boudin to make what I say is an irrefutable case that the Court, certainly after the unconstitutional Marbury power grab by John Marshall, after the infamous pro-slavery decisions - a whole host of those during the Marshall years, including the infamous Prigg decision penned by the official oppoent of slavery on the court, Joseph Storey and every decision that Marshall authored which sided with even those slavers who broke federal law passed to outlaw the importation of slaves.   That was only the begining.

The Roberts Court is certainly the most openly white supremacist Supreme Court during my lifetime.   Though one that doesn't need to imply the "N" word to make it the spirit of its rulings.  And that certainly includes that monument of psycho-pathology,  Clarence Thomas.    It is probably the most consequentially white supremacist since the Plessey Court THOUGH THE TOTALITY OF ITS RULINGS PUTS IT MORE IN THE SAME CLASS AS THE TANEY COURT OF 1857.    The ruling which they will hand down allowing Republican-fascist dominated states and very likely, before November, in a case in which the Republican-fascists in the Congress and the Trump regime will blatantly violate the Constitution as written to ratfuck elections around the country marks, in addition to Trump v USA and other decisions and indecisions that rig things for Trump and Republicans have certainly, already, earned them the same role in history that Roger Taney and his colleagues have earned themselves.  

If that miracle of a Democratic watershed election happens,  against the certain resistance of the ilk of Chuck Schumer and other establishment lawyer-Congressmen, the Supreme Court has to be finally and definitively cut down to size, whether by packing the bench with those who reject such atrocities as the Marbury-Dred Scott power the court gave itself to nullify duly adopted federal laws and the even worse practice that not only the Roberts but other Courts have taken on itself TO NULLIFY SUCH THINGS AS THE ANTI-INSURRECTION PROVISIONS OF THE 14TH AMENDMENT have to be done. 

Trump AND THE REPUBLICAN MAJORITY IN THE CONGRESS AND ON THE SUPREME COURT have laid bare the fatally, anti-democratic nature of the Constitution and our entire legal framework through their knocking down those flimsy and makeshift "norms and practices" that have been the only things that have not caused our alleged democracy to be exposed for the oligarchic tyranny that it has been just under the surface.   Among other things, that has cost, almost certainly permanently, the position of world leadership that the United States achieved during the 20th century.  That Joe Biden almost saved that from the effects of Trump I only to have the free-press and the regime of lying with impuity that the Warren, Berger, Rehnquist and Roberts Court started and maintained sink Biden who was the most domestically successful president since LBJ.   Thout the media addled American population may not realize that,  the world has no choice but to face that reality.   Unless the Constitution of the United States is drastically changed to prevent another Trump or Bush II or, I'd say even going back to Nixon,  I hope and pray the world never trusts the United States ever again.   No one should trust a system that, having produce Trump I would then produce Trump II.   The Roberts Court was central to that happening as was the free press as was the billionaire oligarch class even more so that Putin and the Saudis and the others who the Court allowed the power to sway our politics WITH THE FULL KNOWLEDGE THAT THOSE ENEMIES OF DEMOCRACY FOREIGN AS WELL AS DOMESTIC FAVORE THEIR REPUBLICAN-FASCIST PARTY.

If Democrats have any chance of crushing the Roberts Court they must do it or that loss of faith that America force onto the world will have to be the hard reality of even the most idealistic of Americans.  By that I don't mean those who fall for the civics piety of Sorkin or Burns or Miranda or even those whose naive faith in America is based on something more real.   I mean those who are idealistic enough to face the hardest of reality who still understand that anything but government by the consent of an informed majority who vote out of good will on an egalitarian basis.    If Democrats don't defeat the lawyers who have so much invested in the system as it has been and is to overturn what has produced this situation, starting with radically changing the Supreme Court, then I'd suggest we will have to dump that party as well and try something else.   Not trying is not an option.   Not facing the hard reailities of what will waste our efforts is also not an option.    Dump Schumer.   He's more of an obstacle than Fetterman is, at this point. 

If Democrats only take the House they should zero out the budget of the Court except for the Constitutionally gurarnteed salaries of the "justices."   They should defund the Supreme Court's fascist-marble palace, not allowing it to keep the lights on or to have internet access.   They should definitely get rid of the clerkships and other perks and hold hearings on the corruption of the members of the Court.   I don't care if all three of the Democratic appointees of the Court are upset and discomforted by that,  I don't especially care about any members of the Court as compared to the damage they've done to us all.   Cut it down to the size of a Supreme Court in a modern democracy,  one which doesn't ratfuck things for oligarachs and against justice.   Tear down the obscene lie over the door of that fascist-marble palace,  that place doesn't produce "equal justice under law."   They produced Trump II. 

When Asked Why I Haven't Commented On The Death Of Mueller

I'll rest on what I said about him while he was alive.   I didn't trust or respect him, I don't trust or respect anyone who remained a Republican after Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II,  You certainly know I don't trust anyone who stayed one even as Trump I was in its earliest days.  He did.  I'll leave it as that.   

Speaking About The Billionaires' Hostile Takeover Campaign Of The Catholic Church

I DON'T KNOW IF THE OPUS DEI CULT coopted John Paul II or if, as I long ago suspected, he was all in on it.   Early in his papacy I suspect he was an actual CIA asset before and during at least the early years of his papacy, but he was certainly part of what is being revealed about how evil and dangerously powerful that fascist cult has been.   

The warnings were given  eary and contiuously from the 1940s, when those who were alarmed by the authoritarian secret society started telling the Vatican that it was dangerous.    I'm not that familiar with those warnings until the reactionary and, in so many ways, disasterous papacies of JPII and Benedict XVI, so I don't know how the other popes and figures in the Vatican took those warnings, though clearly they either weren't taken as seriously as they should have been or the warnings were things that didn't bother them very much.   Benedict, whatever else you can say about him, at least took some of those warnings serously, though he was a weak man when it came to opposing the powerful and wealthy,  and too beholden to the seriously flawed legacy of his patron and predecessor,  JPII.   John Paul II, on th other hand, was a total sucker for the fascist, neo-medieval, hyper-clerical-financially-tied-in cult.  He rushed through the canonization of its truly evil founder, Josemaria Escriva whose sainthood is as dubious a one as has been given official status in the modern period.   He also made the cult a power in itself, a "personal prelature" which was not answerable to local bishops.   

It is encouraging that Pope Leo has had a private meeting with the author of what appears to be an extremely important expose of Opus Dei, Gareth Gore, and that Leo seems to take the revelations of corruption, moral, financial, personal, human trafficking and enslavement, secretive political influence and everything else that Gore has documented in his book, Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church.   You can hear him talking about his meeing, here. 

It's not only liberals and liberal Catholics who think Opus Dei is dangerous,  here's a conservative Catholic,  (John Farrell identifies himself as such at the beginning of his review) who goes into considerable detail.   I will post just some of what he says that directly corrupts U.S. politics.* 

The most notorious figure in the American Opus network was the late Father C. John McCloskey, a former Wall Street broker turned priest of the prelature. In 1998, he was appointed the head of the Catholic Information Center (CIC) in Washington, D.C. Initially a modest chapel and bookstore entrusted to Opus Dei, the CIC, under McCloskey, became a central meeting place for high profile conservative Catholics working in the nation’s capital. He became famous for the conversions of right-wing politicians and scholars: the likes of Newt Gingrich, Senator Sam Brownback, and the late Judge Robert Bork. McCloskey also became a regular commentator on shows like CNN’s Crossfire, NBC’s Nightly News, Dateline, and Meet the Press, where he inveighed against “the culture of death,” contraception, IVF, and abortion, famously insisting that no Catholic could vote for Democrats with a clear conscience.

Around 2002, as the clergy abuse scandal was turning the American Catholic church inside out, McCloskey suddenly disappeared from public view. It would only come out in 2019 that he had been removed from his post at the CIC after a married woman member of Opus Dei sought legal action over his aggressive sexual overtures to her in private counseling sessions. Members of Opus Dei at first assured the woman that McCloskey would no longer serve in active ministry and settled the case for just under a million dollars. When she discovered that McCloskey was not only in active ministry but hearing confessions, she went public with her story. McCloskey, a heavy drinker, died of early Alzheimer’s at a home for priests in early 2023.

Even without McCloskey, the CIC has continued to be a magnet for conservative U.S. Catholics, including Leonard Leo, a leading member of the Federalist Society, which is dedicated to installing ultra-conservative judges in the federal courts and ultimately on the supreme court. According to Gore, in his chapter on Opus Dei’s connections in American politics, the overturning of Roe v. Wade would not have been possible without the direct involvement of Opus Dei insiders working for Trump and longtime Catholic influencers like Leo. With Trump’s re-election, their involvement will only deepen through their connections with the authors of Project 2025, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. Its President Kevin Roberts is a patron of Opus Dei’s Catholic Information Center where he receives regular spiritual guidance.

One of the foremost tools of corruption by Opus Dei is its secretiveness which was baked into it from the start, like an organized crime network.   Members are required or encouraged to keep their membership in it a secret so there is no reliable way of knowing if someone who is suspected of Opus Dei membership is, actually, a member.   I certainly wouldn't put lying about that past any of that list of Republican-fascists given in that passage or, really, anyone who gives any reason to make someone suspicious.   I would like it if Leo ordered an end to such secrecy if for no other reason than that it might lessen the suspicion of that for those who are innocent of cult membership.   I strongly suspect at least a three of the right-wing Catholics on the Supreme Court of membership, though two of those would seem to have defected to the Episcopal church, at least that's what I recall them claiming.  Episcopalians, beware. 

I would like there to be a full investigation into whether Opus Dei has trafficked people to or from or inside of the United States, especially those Women who are suckered into it young and then spend their lives slaving away for men who they are never even supposed to see.   I would like any crime they are involved in any corruption they are involved in exposed and those involved prosecuted.   As a Catholic, I would like to see the thing entirely exposed, its secret documents made public, testimony of its victims taken in public and the thing dissolved.  

Unfortunatly,  I don't think there is any liklihood that the disgusting canonization of Escriva to be disavowed by the Catholic church, I'm unaware of any proceedure for doing so and to do so would bring that other dubious saint,  JPII into disrepute.   Personally,  I don't find anything about either of their alleged saintliness to be at all convincing.   I would welcome a very severe slowing down of the saint-making process that JPII sped up so he could indulge his theatrical tendencies,  I don't think anyone should be canonized for more than a century after their deaths when all of those with personal interests in that are, also, long gone and the cover ups of any potential scandals ended.   I especially think there should be a moratorium in not ban on canonizing popes.   

But, then, I'm old enough to remember when a long list of early and medieval saints were taken off the calendar back in the 1960s, including such popular ones as St. Valentine and St. Christopher.   You never know what they might do sometime in the future though I'm not going to live to see it. 

* In looking around online you will find a lot of lies that are clearly posted by either those in Opus Dei or those who like he corrupt fascist cult.   One of the things I read said that Pope Paul IV was an admirer of the cult.   Farrell says this in his review: 

In private, Gore writes, Escriva was given to fits of rage, and open contempt for popes John XXIII and Paul VI. As Gore shows in a depiction of one revealing meeting between the two, it seems Pope Paul saw through Escriva from the beginning.

I can't say that Paul VI is among my favorite popes but I've had reason to come to respect him a lot more than I used to.   I think a lot of the things I didn't like about him were a result of his trying to cope with the extremely powerful reactionaries and arch conservatives in the hierarchy and in Catholic circles.   I hope Leo has the courage to effectively suppress such as that. 

Those "Boots On The Ground" Mean Far Less Than Nothing To Trump Or His Crime Syndicate

SINCE IT IS THE FAITH HOLDING OF the American media, government, and at least the plurality of the American voters in the last election that any number of dead in Iran are not worth taking seriously,  I'll have to put this in terms of those American lives which have already been spent in Trump's war of whim and who they are planning on sending into a bloodbath in invading Iranian territory.   

Just as Trump and the likes of his filthy Treasury Secretary are giving Putin's Russia a huge gift of suspending sanctions on them EVEN AS THEY ADMIT THEY HAVE BEEN AIDING IRAN IN TARGETING AMERICAN TROOPS, they are also, to keep the price of oil down, AIDING THE IRANIAN GOVERNMENT EVEN AS THEY ARE MAKING WAR ON THEM USING AMERICAN SOLDIERS AS CANNON FODDER. 

From RMJ's place.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has issued waivers temporarily lifting nearly all sanctions imposed on tankers originating from or carrying oil from the Islamic Republic of Iran, dubbed “Authorizing the Delivery and Sale of Crude Oil and Petroleum Products of Iranian-Origin Loaded on Vessels as of March 20, 2026” effective for vessels loaded on or before 12:01a.m. EST, March 20, 2026 through 12:01a.m. EST, April 19, 2026.

I DON'T THINK THERE HAS BEEN A MORE BALDLY AND CRIMINALLY CYNICAL, A MORE LITERALLY TREASONOUS ACT IN AMERICAN HISTORY OR POSSIBLY IN THE HISTORY OF NATION STATES!  

If I were in the military,  I'd be trying to foment a coup to bring down the government that is doing this.  I would risk being railroaded and killed by them, no oath I took to any Constitution that doesn't stop this can possibly have any valid moral effect,  no obligation of citizenship can possibly include what Trump and his gang of white collar criminals are doing.  

Meditations After The Death

I AM NOT SURPRISED that the death of my beloved 18-year-old, little black cat leaves me feeling the kind of bereavement that I have felt when my nearest and most loved relations and friends have died.  She was my friend and daily companion for a very significant part of my life.   I've only had one other pet who I lived with almost as long, a parrot whose long line of "owners" started with the mother-in-law of one of my great aunts.  After her Paul lived with, to my knowledge, two of my great aunts, my grandmother and grandfather and then with us.  I think he died about 16 years after we took him in and I felt very sad but he wasn't nearly as much of a friend as my last cat.  

Like David Bentley Hart, I have no time or respect for theologians or others who claim that animals do not have immortal souls.    Such as that fat-headed genius Thomas Aquinas, whose most interesting act was not writing his voluminous would-be systematic theological masterwork but when he stopped writing it after he had a profound mystical experience that led him to declare all of his previous work to be "straw."  I find him, someone who was certainly steeped in a deep knowledge of the Latin translation of the Scriptures, Jerome's Vulgate (from what I understand he didn't read either Hebrew or Greek) using that language interesting because of the verses in Isaiah that proclaim that all flesh will see the glory of God while comparing human bodies to grass that withers and is no more.   

Which leads me to think about the verses in the Scripture I most dislike and discount,  Ecclesiastes, which says that human beings and animals end up with the same fate which, in that book, ends at death.   For the life of me, I don't see how anyone ever, when they were choosing from the many, many books to include in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures included that cynical sourpuss who provides so much of the contradiction of so much of the far more inspiring Scripture, certainly in both the Jewish Scriptures but ever more so the Christian Scriptures.   I have little to no use for Aquinas so I haven't looked up to see how he may have squared that with his other claims.   David Bentley Hart points out that he was quite able to contradict himself on any number of things, including the claim that effective change of spiritual status was impossible in spirit when he believed in the story of the fallen angels.   I don't know how the Church squared such an idea with the inspired idea of purgatory.  

And all that leads me to what I understand was the first Pope to make a quasi-dogmatic declaration that Animals do not have immortal souls,  one of the worst of the modern Popes,  the odious Pius IX.  Among other things he is infamous for refusing to endorse the Italian society to prevent cruelty to Animals because to endorse kindness to Animals would contradict his vile conception of such things, probably based on the offically official theology of Aquinas. 

The traditional view that Animals have no immortal souls gives, among its reasons, that Animals can't reason so Animals can't have immortal souls.   I have to conclude that anyone who believes they can't reason has never spent much time with Animals because it's often far clearer than it is with many People that mammals, birds, and other Animals demonstrate reasoning abilities when they are presented with novel situations which they figure out far, far, faster than they could learn from trial and error unaided by reason.   Even in her last week my cat was figuring out, almost immediately, the novel means that I gave her for getting up on her favorite perch, of me, for the first time in her life, moving it into the sun for her (it didn't take two days of me doing that, for the first times, for her to make it clear to me it was time to do that).    I've seen cats do that, I've seen dogs do that,  I've seen chickens do it,  I've seen squirrels do it and chipmunks are even faster.  And with the many, many wildlife camera feeds and videos that have been posted online in the last quarter of a century, anyone who thinks wild animals can't reason has to be an amazingly stupid and clueless Person.  

An even stupider reason that I understand was shared by a number of Catholic theologians, was that Animals and plants have no immortal soul was because they were made for human beings to use and there would be no use for them in heaven so they have no immortal souls.    What, I would have asked them, were we to make of the very large majority of Animals who are never encountered by any human beings and who live out their lives unmolested and unexploited by the only animals known to be capable of intentional sin and evil?   You might forgive an Augustine or Aquinas or those whose ideological commitment insisted that their opinions had a weight that was, supposedly, reserved for the words of Jesus but, certainly, now that we know how long the line of life on Earth has been, the idea that all of those trillions of living beings and creatures (plants being creatures as well as animals - human beings, too) who lived for the vast majority of the history of known life before there were any humans, the large majority of them having no contribution made to the eventual emergence of human beings, anyone who depends on that idea today is stupider than a young-earth-creationist who is also a flat earther and a Republican-fascist dispensationalist, antisemitic Zionist. 

I know for an observed, experienced fact that many Animals, I would say most of those I've known intimately, are morally superior to most of the People I've known.  And what evils they do exhibit come with an innocence that all but the youngest or least intelligent People can be believed to share with them.  I have never known animals to show cruelty or evil actions that can, by any measure, come up to the tsunami of evil that can come from People acting in concert or, as we can see before us right now, small groups of those given enormous power through the combined forces of evil with cruel and evil intent.   And those who are the most cruel and hateful among us are presented as paragons of moral righteousness,  moral authority (religious as well as civil) and "legitmate" exercisers of power who others are morally depraved enough to believe they and others are morally obligated to follow.   No wild dog pack hunting down a deer to inflict such fear and pain as their nature as wolves hunting for food compels them to do are as cruel as the majority voting in the last American election and those they empowered to do such enormous evil - which the secular civil stand-ins for religious authority, the Constitution, the law, the judges and, worst of all, the "justices" give their would-be moral approval of.  And the would-be religious authorities, in so many cases, most of whom I'm sure would hold with the superstition that Animals are not loved enough by God for him to give them immortal souls, are all the evidence anyone would need to know that Animals are our moral superiors.  

I am of the opinion that one of the most important figures in Christianity,  Paul, had his life changed by a near death experience,  or likely two of them.  First there was the experience on the road to Damascus where he intended to do evil to the disciples of Jesus which led to his conversion.  The second one was when he was stoned by those who didn't like his preaching and was left for dead by them, only for him to survive and be rescued by his friends.   I think his entire and enormously effective career is based on that near death experience, about which, more in a minute.   I think his experience led him to believe he had a direct connection to Jesus and which seems to have given him a radically expansive view of the Gospel and the good news (so I'll give you this relevant passage from the Good News translation).  

8 I consider that what we suffer at this present time cannot be compared at all with the glory that is going to be revealed to us. 19 All of creation waits with eager longing for God to reveal his children. 20 For creation was condemned to lose its purpose, not of its own will, but because God willed it to be so. Yet there was the hope 21 that creation itself would one day be set free from its slavery to decay and would share the glorious freedom of the children of God. 22 For we know that up to the present time all of creation groans with pain, like the pain of childbirth. 23 But it is not just creation alone which groans; we who have the Spirit as the first of God's gifts also groan within ourselves as we wait for God to make us his children and[c] set our whole being free. 24 For it was by hope that we were saved; but if we see what we hope for, then it is not really hope. For who of us hopes for something we see? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Passages such as that, read directly in the original Greek, led many in the Eastern church to see the Resurrection of Jesus as having not only implications of glory for human beings (those who Paul and everyone else in the Scriptures were talking to and, mostly, about) but for the entirety of Creation, as Paul addressed in that passage in Romans.   I think that those universalist theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa, his sister Macrina, Issac of Syria, etc. get it far more than many in the Western European tradition, especially those who depended on Latin translations of the Greek that was the mother tongue of the Greeks.   I'm not familiar with the Aramaic Scriptures, so I can't relate those to the universalism that is far more often found in the Eastern Churches.   I am encouraged to read more and more Roman Catholic theologians, even some Popes are veering towards universalism, not only the limited and stunted universalism of Humans (why else would Catholics have the insight of purgatory if not for that) and also for Animals.  One of my favorite living theologians Elizabeth A. Johnson has explicitly said that and has the brilliant insight that it is a necessary understanding if we are to save the natural world from those who believe it is there for us to destroy in our exploitation of it.  Another I've just come to start reading and listening to is the Methodist David Clough who is very much worth listening to and who articulates a Christian veganism which I find about as convincing as I did the Chief Rabbi of Dublin who had such an influence on my adoption of veganism.  Though I didn't force my cat to convert, I lived with that moral ambiguity for her sake though if I could be convinced I could provide a cat or dog with an adequate vegan diet, I might try it.   Though at my age I think adopting another pet longer lived then a rat would be unfair.

Unlike, for example, the late great Catholic thinker and theologian Hans Kung,  I think the testimony of those who credibly report having had a near death experience is a valid thing to consider.   I don't mean those who have made talking about it and endlessly scribbling about it a career, I mean those who, by a change in their life for the better who say they have seen the other side.   From what I read, about a quarter of those who come back report having encountered their pets who are happy to see them and who, in at least some cases, let them know it's not their time to pass over.   Of course there's no way to know that, though there are reports of People saying that about pets they don't know died while they were held to be unconscious.   There are also reports of those who are near death and who die, having death bed experiences of seeing their loved ones, People and Animals, come to see them off.   I don't think those are of knowable reality, though I've been with dying People who clearly had those experiences, one of whom had their blood oxygen level and other vitals taken and who the nurse said were perfectly normal and who, otherwise, had all their marbles.  Unlike many, especially academic writers on such topics,  I think those provide valid evidence on which we can legitimately base our beliefs.    I think it's as knowable as any historical accounts, many of which we have only second or third hand reports - INCLUDING EVERYTHING IN SCRIPTURE.    I certainly think if you are going to take what Paul concluded from his vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus as the basis of a huge swath of Christian theology then contemporary near death experiences are validly taken as evidence.   

I will also say, since I know this will likely be read or mischaracterized by scoffing atheists, that what they claim about what happens after death is uniformly UNEVIDENCED.    When given the choice to draw conclusions about something I have not experienced or witnessed,  I'll always take what there is evidence for as producing validly held beliefs that totally unevidenced claims drawn from a priori ideological choices can't be held to have.   That is not unrelated to the theological positions I slam above which are, as well not based on any evidence but are based on commitments to ideological, philosophical authorities.   I think that the thinking of a David Bentley Hart, Elizabeth A. Johnson or David Clough are far more likely to produce good than the alternatives, atheist or religious.    I'll put my lot in with the radical universalism that holds out the hope I'll see my cat again, happy in eternity over the dismal dismissal of her goodness as existentially futile.