Are some people now truly above the law, beholden to nothing and no one, free to ignore the law and without consequence?”

– Rep. Adam Schiff

This week’s featured post is “What Conservatives Tell Themselves About Critical Race Theory“.

This week everybody was talking about Build Back Better

The negotiations over Biden’s Build Back Better plan seem to be inching towards a finish line, though we won’t really know until there’s a complete agreement. It sounds like the top-line figure will be in the $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion range, in addition to the $1-1.2 trillion in the bipartisan infrastructure bill. There are still probably a billion details to work out, but I think Democrats realize they can’t go into 2022 without more legislative accomplishments than they have now.

Once there’s an actual agreement, with a list of what’s in and what’s out, I’m going to try hard to look at it fresh, without comparing it to what I thought or hoped might be in it at some earlier stage. I think the right comparison is: What was I expecting on January 5, right after Ossoff and Warnock won the Georgia run-offs and gave Democrats their zero-vote majority?

The political style here is the opposite of what Obama did with the ACA. Then, Obama didn’t indulge much blank-slate dreaming. Single-payer was out from Day 1, and the variations of the bill debated were in a fairly narrow range. Biden has allowed a much wider range of visions to flourish, while knowing that most of them would fail to manifest. It’ll be interesting to see how those strategies contrast after Democrats have run the 2022 campaign.

and January 6

I was glad to see the House take the January 6 Committee’s job seriously and recommend Steve Bannon be prosecuted for blowing off a subpoena. The case is now in Merrick Garland’s in-box. Garland has to realize that if he doesn’t prosecute, congressional oversight of the executive branch is pretty much over.

On November 4, a federal court is due to consider Trump’s suit to stop the National Archives from turning documents from his administration over to the January 6 Committee. It’s not clear the judge’s ruling will even matter, since the point of the suit is to run the clock out.

John Eastman, the lawyer whose memo laid out the plan for Trump to overturn the 2020 election results, now claims the point of his plan was to stop Trump from doing something worse. Trump wanted Vice President Pence to simply declare him the winner on January 6. But under Eastman’s plan, Pence would give states with Republican legislatures more time to replace their Biden electors with Trump electors.

Either way, the point was for Trump to stay in power after losing the election. If Eastman’s plan had worked, American democracy would have ended by now.

and the pandemic

Cases per day in the US continue to drop at the rate of about 20-25% every two weeks, which works out to falling in half about every 5-6 weeks. The current daily average is 72,644, down 25% in the last two weeks. That’s about half what it was on September 18, five weeks and two days ago. Five weeks from now is just after Thanksgiving, which last year was the beginning of a holiday surge that continued through New Years.

The frustrating thing to me personally is that cases are falling just about everywhere but here in the Northeast. The region where I live had the lowest new-case rates in the country during the late-summer surge, but now our trends are flat while the rest of the country is improving to meet us.

The daily-new-cases-per-100K rate in my county (Middlesex, Massachusetts) has been stuck in the 14-18 range for months. Meanwhile, a county I watch because friends live there (Manatee, Florida) had bounced up over 120, but has now fallen below 10. I’m not wishing anything bad for the rest of America, I just want to share in the improvement.

The Atlantic published a disturbing article written by James Heathers, a “forensic peer reviewer” of scientific research. He’s begins by talking about ivermectin as a Covid treatment (which it isn’t), and finds that the problem isn’t entirely with YouTube videos and gullible retweeters: Enough published scientific studies said positive things about ivermectin that

it might seem perfectly rational to join the fervent supporters of ivermectin. It might even strike you as reasonable to suggest, as one physician and congressional witness did recently, that “people are dying because they don’t know about this medicine.”

The problem is that a bunch of those studies are really low quality, or even fraudulent.

In our opinion, a bare minimum of five ivermectin papers are either misconceived, inaccurate, or otherwise based on studies that cannot exist as described. One study has already been withdrawn on the basis of our work; the other four very much should be. …

Most problematic, the studies we are certain are unreliable happen to be the same ones that show ivermectin as most effective. In general, we’ve found that many of the inconclusive trials appear to have been adequately conducted. Those of reasonable size with spectacular results, implying the miraculous effects that have garnered so much public attention and digital notoriety, have not.

Worse, the sorry state of ivermectin/Covid research may not be that unusual. In Heathers’ opinion, a lot of unreliable medical research gets published. In normal times, doctors ignore it

because it either looks “off” or is published in the wrong place. A huge gray literature exists in parallel to reliable clinical research, including work published in low-quality or outright predatory journals that will publish almost anything for money.

[This reminds me of when my wife (who is still doing fine, thank you for wondering) was taking a new drug to combat an unusual variety of cancer. Occasionally the oncologist would answer one of my questions by saying that a paper pointed in such-and-such direction, but he didn’t trust it yet. I remember one disparaging comment about “Italian journals”, which I never followed up on.]

But during a pandemic, apparent “cures” from the gray literature can slip past the skepticism of the medical community and go straight to a more responsive public.

In a pandemic, when the stakes are highest, the somewhat porous boundary between these publication worlds has all but disappeared. There is no gray literature now: Everything is a magnet for immediate attention and misunderstanding. An unbelievable, inaccurate study no longer has to linger in obscurity; it may bubble over into the public consciousness as soon as it appears online, and get passed around the internet like a lost kitten in a preschool.

[An aside: I wish I’d written that lost-kitten metaphor.]

and you also might be interested in …

Ross Douthat’s column “How I Became a Sick Person” is a reminder that underneath our divergent politics, we’re all human. Douthat describes a series of scary symptoms that his doctors couldn’t explain, culminating in a controlled but chronic illness. Feel better, Ross. I’ll be rooting for you.

So the choice has become clear: Democrats can’t preserve both the filibuster and voting rights.

The last time a voting rights bill came up, Joe Manchin claimed that it was too sweeping, and that a more targeted plan could get the ten Republican votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Manchin worked on crafting a narrower bill, which Republicans filibustered Wednesday. No Republicans at all voted to overcome the filibuster. I haven’t even heard one of them make a counterproposal. Up and down the line, Republicans are against any attempt to protect voting rights.

In light of the vote, key Democrats said they would regroup and try again to persuade Mr. Manchin and other Senate Democrats reluctant to undermine the filibuster that an overhaul of the chamber’s signature procedural tactic was the only way to protect ballot access around the country.

I’m not optimistic, but I also can’t guess how Manchin will justify himself now.

Two Republicans, former state treasurer Josh Mandel and J. D. (Hillbilly Elegy) Vance, have turned their Ohio Senate primary race into a who’s-the-craziest contest. Mandel is currently winning with tweets like this:

Maximize family time and keep working hard. Keep the freezer stocked and firearms at the ready. Buy #bitcoin and avoid debt. We will outlast these monsters and we will thrive for generations to come after God brings them down.

Vance will have to counter somehow, or risk surrendering the key doomsday-prepper voting bloc to Mandel.

On the Democratic side, Congressman Tim Ryan is also hoping to replace retiring Senator Rob Portman. His campaign website says:

Tim will fight to raise wages, make healthcare more affordable, invest in education, rebuild our public infrastructure, and revitalize manufacturing so we can make things in Ohio again. 

Sure, Tim, but what about the issues Ohio voters really care about? What are you going to do about the monsters? What role do you see yourself playing when God starts bringing them down?

We can only hope that some significant segment of former Republican voters will be disturbed by the absolute insanity that Trump has unleashed in their party. (See previous note.) But if they’re not, maybe they’ll notice the insanity Trump has unleashed in something they care more about: their churches.

Peter Wehner has just published “The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart” in The Atlantic. He talks to 15 Evangelical pastors who either have left the ministry or are thinking hard about it because of the right-wing political zealotry that is tearing up their congregations.

The root of the discord lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics. When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; it’s having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.

The problem is not just that Trump’s deranged rants have replaced the Sermon on the Mount as the center of many Evangelicals’ religion. It’s also that Trump’s anything-goes truth-be-damned style has corrupted how Evangelicals handle disagreements with each other.

[McLean Bible Church pastor David] Platt said church members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque. In a second vote on July 18, all three nominees cleared the threshold [for election]. But that hardly resolved the conflict. Members of the church filed a lawsuit, claiming that the conduct of the election violated the church’s constitution.

Platt, who is theologically conservative, had been accused in the months before the vote by a small but zealous group within his church of “wokeness” and being “left of center,” of pushing a “social justice” agenda and promoting critical race theory, and of attempting to “purge conservative members.” A Facebook page and a right-wing website have targeted Platt and his leadership. For his part, Platt, speaking to his congregation, described an email that was circulated claiming, “MBC is no longer McLean Bible Church, that it’s now Melanin Bible Church.”

BTW, clicking that right-wing website link, and then other links from there, is eye-opening. You’ll find yourself in a scary mirror world where a diabolical “woke” politics is taking over everything, including Evangelical institutions. And notice in the quote above how “social justice” has become a bad thing, something you don’t want to be accused of.

Speaking of insanity, check out Joy Pullmann’s “For Christians, Dying From Covid (or Anything Else) Is a Good Thing” over at The Federalist. Her main point is that churches should hold services and the faithful should attend them, independent of anything we know about how diseases spread.

Christians believe that life and death belong entirely to God. There is nothing we can do to make our days on earth one second longer or shorter: “all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be,” says the Psalmist.

I have to wonder if this is her position in general, or an ad hoc view she takes purely with respect to Covid. For example, does she stop her children when they start to wander into traffic? If she does, what does she think she’s accomplishing?

On the other hand, maybe her article isn’t insanity. Maybe it’s just bullshit.

Trump has a new scam: his own social network. And it’s off to such a good start.

Back in November, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick announced a reward for evidence leading to convictions for voter fraud in the 2020 election: He had $1 million of campaign money to offer, and would give a minimum of $25K to each whistleblower.

He was, of course, trying to put meat on the bones of Trump’s bogus claims of fraud. But that isn’t how it has worked out: He awarded his first $25K to a Pennsylvania poll worker who caught a Republican trying to vote twice for Trump. This guy is one of five voter fraud cases being prosecuted in Pennsylvania, four against Republicans.

Nevada also charged a Republican with voter fraud this week: A guy appears to have mailed in his dead wife’s ballot in addition to his own. Four people have been charged in Wisconsin, though we don’t know who they were trying to vote for. (At least one of them seems to have made an honest mistake: He was a felon who was out of jail but hadn’t finished his probation yet. He apparently thought he could vote legally.)

So:

• Nationwide, very few cases of 2020 voter fraud have been found.
• The handful of fraudsters who have been identified by party are mostly Republicans.

Neither of those results should surprise anybody. In spite of the claims Republicans keep making, study after study has shown that voter fraud is extremely rare. But Republicans like Dan Patrick have convinced their supporters that millions of Democrats get away with voting fraudulently every year — so it must be easy! Of course a few are going to try to “get even” by voting fraudulently themselves.

Oh, and what about dead voters? Pretty much the same story: Either the claim is false or the case involved people trying to scrounge an extra vote for Trump.

NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg reflects on Angela Merkel’s decision to let a million refugees from Syria and Africa settle in Germany in 2015.

But six years later, the catastrophes predicted by Merkel’s critics haven’t come to pass.

In the recent German election, refugees were barely an issue, and the [anti-immigrant party Alliance for Germany] lost ground. “The sense is that there has been comparatively little Islamic extremism or extremist crime resulting from this immigration, and that on the whole, the largest number of these immigrants have been successfully integrated into the German work force and into German society overall,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, an expert on Germany and trans-Atlantic relations at the Brookings Institution.

“With the passage of time,” Marton told me, Merkel “turned out to have chosen the absolutely right course for not only Germany but for the world.”

and let’s close with something tasty

Lately I’ve been cooking more, which Facebook somehow knows. So I’m being shown more videos about food. I was fascinated by this account of really authentic parmesan cheese.

The research I do for this blog occasionally garners me some unexpected spam email. Last week, the Heritage Foundation decided I might be the target audience for its free e-pamphlet (they call it an e-book, but at 20 pages, that’s an exaggeration) “Critical Race Theory: Knowing it when you see it and fighting it when you can”. (You can request your own free copy here.)

In some sense, they weren’t wrong: I did request the pamphlet and read it, heedless of whatever future spam that might lead to. I was curious, not because I’m afraid of CRT corrupting children at my local schools, but because I have been totally puzzled by the conservative usage of the term. Whenever I hear that somebody is supposedly “teaching CRT in the public schools”, those words turn out not to mean what they would ordinarily mean.

For example, if I told you someone is teaching the Pythagorean Theorem in public schools, I would mean that there is a class (Geometry) whose textbook has a “Pythagorean Theorem” chapter, which the teacher will at some point cover. But nobody’s high school textbook has a “Critical Race Theory” chapter. If you have attended a class that was accused of teaching critical race theory, almost certainly you did not hear the phrase “critical race theory”.

Ditto for teacher training classes. Teachers might be trained on managing racial diversity in their classrooms, or creating an environment more conducive to the success of students of color. But at no point would the instructor say, “Now we’re going to learn critical race theory.” You might hear the phrase “critical race theory” if you study law, because it was coined in the 1970s to describe the idea that “formally colorblind laws can still have racially discriminatory outcomes.” But that’s not going to happen in anything related to K-12 teaching.

In short, CRT in the public schools (or the workplace or the military) is almost invariably a label that some disapproving person applies from the outside. A teacher or teacher-trainer says something, and then somebody else says “That’s critical race theory.”

Labels. So let’s talk about applying negative labels from the outside, which people of all political persuasions do, and which isn’t necessarily bad. For example, if someone is calling for a dictatorship of the proletariat to seize the means of production, I might be doing a public service if I correctly identify that person as a “communist”, whether he uses that word himself or not.

Similarly, John Gruden doesn’t call himself a “racist”, and in fact denies that he is one. But when it came out that he had written in an email that a black representative of the NFL players had “lips the size of Michelin tires”, other people characterized his statement as racist.

I don’t see anything wrong with outside-labeling in general, because people can’t be trusted choose their own labels without external criticism. If I call myself “pro-choice” and somebody else calls himself “pro-life”, it’s just part of normal political debate if we label each other “pro-abortion” and “anti-women’s-rights”.

That said, there are responsible and irresponsible ways to negatively label someone from the outside. The responsible way has several features:

• The label is defined rather than hurled like an insult. So Michael Flynn is called a “confessed felon” because he pleaded guilty to a felony. But AOC is called a “bitch” because … well, just because.
• The definition actually fits the labeled person. Too often, a negative label gets attached to somebody based on what other people say about them rather than anything they’ve said or done themselves. Sometimes an authentic quote that was harmless in its original context gets run through a game of telephone until it’s unrecognizably outrageous.
• The definition also applies to the people typically associated with the label, and captures the essence of what is blameworthy about such people. That was the problem with Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism: To the extent Goldberg defined “fascist” at all, it was a synonym for a particular sense of “totalitarian” that he confessed could also be described as “holistic”: Liberals are “fascist” because they “see no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say”. So if you want to ban sugary sodas, regulate vaping, and boycott speakers who traffic in racial slurs, Goldberg lumps you in with other “holistic” figures like Hitler and Mussolini.
• The definition justifies the emotional baggage the label is being used to carry. In some conversations, it might be reasonable to use “communist” to mean nothing more than someone who wants to redistribute wealth. But if that’s the definition you verify, you’re not entitled to also invoke the emotional resonance of being America’s enemy in the Cold War.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether a label is being applied responsibly or irresponsibly. For example, if someone calls Donald Trump a “fascist”, they could be hurling an insult at him the way they might hurl eggs at a detested speaker. Or they could have a reasonable definition of fascism that fits Trump like a glove, as well as capturing key traits that made Hitler and Mussolini what they were.

The CRT label. OK, now let’s talk specifically about critical race theory. Until recently, I’ve been assuming the CRT label was being applied irresponsibly for the first reason: The people throwing the term around were sure it was bad, but hardly any of them could say what it meant or why it was bad. Now though, at long last, the Heritage Foundation, a think tank full of the highest-level conservative intellectuals, was going to fix all that by spelling out how to recognize CRT.

Sadly, the pamphlet does not actually define CRT, but I give it credit for providing the next best thing: a list of characteristics. And here they are:

• Systemic racism. “Critical race theory’s key assertion is that racism is not the result of individual, conscious racist actions or thoughts. Racism is ‘systemic’ and ‘structural.’ It is embedded in America’s legal system, institutions, and free-enterprise system, and imposes ‘whiteness’ as the societal norm.”
• Race drives beliefs and behaviors. I didn’t make much sense out of that phrase until I read the longer explanation: “American culture is a conspiracy to perpetuate white supremacy by imposing white concepts on people of other races.”
• White privilege. Critical race theorists “say that white people are born with unearned privilege that other Americans are denied. … Any curricula or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) program that compels students or employees to accept their white privilege and/or work to abandon it are part of CRT.”
• Meritocracy is a myth, because the system won’t let non-whites succeed. “Any curriculum or training program that says color blindness is a myth and advocates for eliminating standard measurements of success, including standardized testing for university admissions for reasons of racial equity, are part of CRT.”
• Equity replaces equality. “‘Equality’ means equal treatment of all Americans under the law. CRT’s ‘equity’ demands race-based discrimination. Because systemic racism has produced disparities between the races and because the system will only deepen these disparities by rewarding the ‘wrong’ criteria, government must treat individual Americans unequally according to skin color to forcibly produce equal outcomes.”

That’s it — the whole list. Notice what’s missing: the long litany of teachings that are banned in the numerous anti-CRT state laws that have passed red-state legislatures in the last few months. Here’s Tennessee’s:

a. One (1) race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex;
b. An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously;
c. An individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of the individual’s race or sex;
d. An individual’s moral character is determined by the individual’s race or sex;
e. An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;
f. An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex;
g. A meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist, or designed by a particular race or sex to oppress members of another race or sex;
h. This state or the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist;
i. Promoting or advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government;
j. Promoting division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people;
k. Ascribing character traits, values, moral or ethical codes, privileges, or beliefs to a race or sex, or to an individual because of the individual’s race or sex;
l. The rule of law does not exist, but instead is series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups;
m. All Americans are not created equal and are not endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; or
n. Governments should deny to any person within the government’s jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

You can find exaggerated versions of Heritage’s characteristics in this list (b, for example, resembles Heritage’s “white privilege”) but the really outrageous parts don’t show up in Heritage’s pamphlet. Heritage doesn’t claim CRT teaches “One race is inherently superior to another race” or “An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex” or “All Americans are not created equal and are not endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, much less that it promotes “violent overthrow of the United States government”.

By limiting its list of characteristics, Heritage is all but admitting that if you look for CRT in your community, you’re not going to find the teachings listed in anti-CRT laws (which mainly exist for propaganda purposes). You’re not even going to find people claiming that the “the United States is irredeemably racist”, because promoting anti-racism would be pointless if that were true.

What you might find, though, are people teaching about systemic racism, cultural imperialism, white privilege, and racially biased measures of merit, while calling for an America where the gaps between races go away in reality rather than just on paper.

Is there something wrong with that?

Before reading the Heritage pamphlet, I thought anti-CRT rhetoric failed my first test (no definition). Now that I’ve read it, I think it fails my last test (a definition that won’t carry the label’s emotional baggage).

Let’s take a look at the ideas that Heritage says CRT is really about.

Photography as paradigm. I grew up using beige-pink crayons that were labeled “Flesh”, which is pretty much the definition of “imposing whiteness as the societal norm”. My skin wasn’t exactly that color, but it was close enough to mark me as “normal” — unlike people of other races, whose flesh had some color totally different from “Flesh”.

Later I found out that my crayon was just the tip of an iceberg: Kodak’s color film (the industry standard) had been engineered to reproduce “flesh tones”, i.e. Caucasian flesh tones, with particular accuracy. Black people, on the other hand, often showed up on a color photo as white eyes and teeth in the middle of a dark blob. Black parents saw the problem immediately, but it wasn’t fixed until decades later, when furniture and chocolate makers complained that they couldn’t accurately represent their brown products in advertisements.

Aside from the dispiriting effect that dark-blob class photos must have had on black children, racially biased photography necessarily had a negative impact on entire generations of black professionals: models, photographers, TV journalists, athletes hoping to endorse products, and any other dark-skinned people who needed their images to reproduce in an attractive way. Even a movie director completely without racial bias might be reluctant to work with black actors, simply because of the technical problems involved. If you wanted a face whose subtle emotions would show up on the big screen, a white face was the better choice.

So even if bias wasn’t in individuals, it was in the system.

BTW, this is not ancient history: Facial recognition software still works better for light-skinned people than dark-skinned people.

The team that [MIT researcher Joy] Buolamwini assembled to work on the project was ethnically diverse, but the researchers found that, when it came time to present the [facial analysis] device in public, they had to rely on one of the lighter-skinned team members to demonstrate it. The system just didn’t seem to work reliably with darker-skinned users.

Curious, Buolamwini, who is black, began submitting photos of herself to commercial facial-recognition programs. In several cases, the programs failed to recognize the photos as featuring a human face at all. When they did, they consistently misclassified Buolamwini’s gender.

To me, this is the paradigm of systemic racism. Nobody at Kodak or Google was out to get black people; they just had other priorities. If photographic systems didn’t work well for dark skin, that was a shame. But, well, so what?

Now multiply that through the whole of society. System after system was designed for (and usually tested by) white people (and men and English speakers and cisgender people and neurotypical people and … and … and …). If it also happened to work for non-whites, great. But if not, who really cared?

So, in spite of the Heritage pamphlet’s claim that CRT is “a philosophy founded by law professors who used Marxist analysis”, systemic racism isn’t some invention of a Marxist propagandist; it’s a simple reality. The Heritage Foundation wants us to hide that reality from school children.

Privilege. If you’re white, like I am, it’s easy to overlook examples of your own privilege, because privilege is most obviously present when something doesn’t happen: I drive somewhere, and cops don’t pull me over for no reason. (Republican Senator Tim Scott, by comparison, says he has been pulled over 18 times for “driving while black”. I have to wonder how many of the encounters that result in police killing black men or women would not occur at all but for race.) I walk down a city street, and nobody stops and frisks me, or asks for my ID. Security people don’t shadow me in department stores. In one situation after another, I just go about my business undisturbed, never noticing that I’m enjoying a racial privilege.

Similarly, if I apply for a job, I don’t have to notice that I’m more likely to get an interview because I’m white. Or if I seek a mortgage, I just see the interest rate I’m offered, not the higher one a comparable black borrower might be asked to pay.

Some longer-term aspects of privilege are related to systemic racism: My parents were part of the expansion of the middle class that happened during the GI generation, largely because of government action. My grandfather’s farm was saved by a New Deal farm loan program (and multiplied in value many times before I sold it). After World War II, the government subsidized home ownership and higher education. It smoothed the path of unionization, which raised the wages of factory jobs like my father’s.

Some of those wealth-creating New Deal and post-war programs also worked for non-white families, but many did not. As a result, our whiteness was a factor in creating the family prosperity that allowed me to get an advanced degree without running up student debt.

In short, white privilege isn’t some sinister notion promoted to increase white guilt. (And I actually don’t feel personal guilt about this, but instead recognize a responsibility to seek a more just system.) It’s a description of how life works in America.

This aspect of American life is also something Heritage wants us to hide from children.

“Equality” without equity implies inferiority. The Heritage pamphlet makes superficial equality under the law the be-all-and-end-all of racial justice. In its response to CRT’s claim of systemic racism, the pamphlet says:

Racial discrimination is illegal in America. In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the government rejected racial discrimination and made it illegal in all public aspects of our lives. Likewise, the civil rights movement affirmed that prejudice has no place in American life. There are racists in America, as in all other countries, but the vast majority of Americans we work and worship with, live and learn alongside, embrace the equal rights and dignity of all.

So that settles that, I guess. The laws on paper say we don’t discriminate, so never mind that we continue to see large racial gaps in income, wealth, incarceration, infant mortality, life expectancy, and just about every other aspect of life. Asking for these gaps to close is demanding “equity” — equal outcomes — which (in Heritage’s world) marks you as a critical race theorist.

But think about what the persistence of these gaps implies, if (as Heritage claims) no widespread discrimination or systemic racism actually exists. If black people can’t keep up in America, and yet there is nothing wrong with America, then there must be something wrong with black people.

There’s no getting around that logic. The Heritage Foundation may not want to put it in print or say it in polite company, but I see no way to embrace their pamphlet as truth without also believing that black people are inherently inferior to white people.

What’s more, I think school children (of all races) are smart enough to draw that conclusion for themselves: If the game is fair, and yet the same people always win, then the winners must just be better than the losers.

In short, if we label all alternative explanations of racial gaps as “critical race theory” and ban schools from teaching them, then by process of elimination we’re really teaching the only remaining explanation: white superiority. The Heritage pamphlet may claim it wants to “ensure school curriculums uphold the intrinsic equality of all humans”. But in fact they’re guaranteeing that children will learn the exact opposite.

Heritage’s white-comforting fantasy world. If I restate the Heritage pamphlet’s underlying message in my own words, it amounts to this: “We had a nice fantasy going until these damned teachers started telling kids how the world really works.”

In the Heritage fantasy world, America outlawed racism back in the 1960s, so any advantages or disadvantages people have accumulated since then are purely due to their individual talent and hard work, or lack of talent and laziness.

If two people are given the same opportunity, but only one takes advantage of it, they will naturally have different outcomes. The only way government can try to produce equal outcomes for them is by taking away the result from the first person, or unfairly giving the unearned benefit to the second. Attempts by government officials to take the fruits of your achievements and give them to those who did not earn it will hurt those whose rewards are diminished as well the intended beneficiaries. This betrays the idea that the American dream belongs to all of us, and everyone should have the same opportunity to pursue success.

And let’s not talk at all about inherited wealth that originated in the Jim Crow era, which Heritage wants to safeguard against “death taxes”.

America isn’t dominated by “white culture”, but by “universal values” (which white people happened to discover first because of their innate superiority, but don’t say that part out loud).

American culture is based on a timeless understanding of rights rooted in the inherent value and nature of the human race. People of all colors and national backgrounds come here and flourish because our culture embraces common humanity and dignity.

And while it may be true that white people are doing better in America (in just about every measurable way) than black people, that can only mean that white people are enjoying “the fruits of your achievement”, which should not be taken away and given to “those who did not earn it”.

The real way to deal with racial disparities is just not to measure them, because that’s (as the Tennessee law puts it) “promoting division between, or resentment of, a race”. The ideal society is a colorblind society, where nobody notices that the people on top are mostly white and the people on the bottom are mostly black. As soon as you start noticing stuff like that, you’re “dividing America“, which was perfectly united in its color blindness until social justice warriors started quoting statistics.

Or at least it would be nice to think so, if you’re white.

2022. Republican candidates are hoping to use their anti-CRT campaign to regain ground that Trump lost in the white suburbs by being too explicitly racist. (The test case is next month’s Virginia governor’s race.) CRT is supposed to threaten precisely those white parents who were disturbed by Charlottesville. It’s supposed to remind them that Democrats are too pro-black, without pushing an explicitly anti-black message that might ring alarm bells.

That tactic might work, because critical race theory really does constitute a threat to prosperous white people. It threatens to torpedo the very comfortable fantasy that the game they’re winning is perfectly fair.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111043052/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/10-24-21-audio.mp3

This week I responded to a slice of conservative spam: The Heritage Foundation was offering me its free e-book (well, e-pamphlet, really) on how to spot and combat critical race theory. I had to get it: I keep accusing conservatives of turning “critical race theory” into a pejorative term with no actual meaning, and here was a right-wing think tank offering to tell me what it means. I have to read stuff like this just to keep myself honest (which is probably why I keep getting conservative spam).

The result is this week’s featured post: “What Conservatives Tell Themselves About Critical Race Theory”. The short version: When they feel obligated to define “critical race theory” and attach it to actual quotes from the people supposedly promoting it, conservatives serve a pretty thin soup that is nothing at all like those anti-CRT laws that talk about making white people feel ashamed of their whiteness and blaming them for the crimes of their ancestors. In a nutshell, CRT means teaching people about systemic racism.

Imagine my horror. Innocent children in our public schools are being taught that whites have advantages in our society! Clearly we need to storm the school boards and get this stopped.

Anyway, that post should be out before 10 EDT.

In the weekly summary, Democrats appear to be creeping towards the finish line on the Build Back Better plan. It’s going to look small compared to earlier proposals, but if you’d described it to me on January 5 (when the election of Senators Warnock and Ossoff gave Democrats control of the Senate) I think I’d have been happy. Once something passes, Democrats will have to work on their marketing so that voters realize how much has been accomplished rather than focusing only on what has been left out. Congress has cited Steve Bannon for criminal contempt, moving the case to Merrick Garland’s in-box. The Trumpist spirit is unleashing incredible craziness in Republican primaries, and also in Evangelical churches. And Covid numbers continue to drop everywhere but here in the Northeast.

That should be out sometime after noon.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111043031/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-10-24_Healing_Power_of_Truth.mp3

“The Land of Memory” (October 24, 2021) Worship Service

The artist Etel Adnan, wrote that her memories were like a forest with unstable boundaries. Adnan was born in Lebanon, lived in France, then moved to California, living at the base of Mount Tamalpais, where she wrote and painted for many years. Her paintings were a way to explore memories and make meaning of them. Navigating the land of memory can be complex and challenging. But it can lead us into a deeper understanding of who we are, and how to live more fully into our lives as we make our way forward.

Rev. Alyson Jacks, Associate Minister; Richard Davis-Lowell, Worship Associate; Reiko Oda Lane, Organist; UUSF Choir; Mark Sumner, Music Director; Wm. García Ganz, Pianist

Shulee Ong, Camera; Jonathan Silk, Communications Director; Joe Chapot, Live Chat Moderator; Thomas Brown, Sexton; Athena Papadakos, Flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042948/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20211024AJSermon.mp3

I am actually old enough … I mean, I know that Republicans in Texas have been conservative for a long time, but there was a time when conservative Republicans in Texas were not absolutely batshit crazy.

– Charlie Sykes

This week’s featured post is “Reading While Texan“.

This week everybody was talking about Manchin and Sinema

For weeks we’ve been wondering what price they would demand for getting on board with the Build Back Better reconciliation bill. We’re starting to see that price, and it’s steep.

Manchin is against the Clean Electricity Payment Program, which subsidizes the shift away from fossil fuels for generating electricity.

The $150 billion program — officially known as the Clean Electricity Performance Program, or CEPP — would reward energy suppliers who switch from fossil fuels like coal and natural gas to clean power sources like solar, wind, and nuclear power, which already make up about 40 percent of the industry, and fine those who do not.

Manchin claims the program isn’t necessary, because the shift is happening anyway. (The change he cites is over a 20 years period, and mainly shows a shift from coal to natural gas, a somewhat cleaner fossil fuel.) But it makes a huge difference how fast the shift happens. Remember: The most direct plan for cutting carbon emissions is just two steps long:

• Electrify everything.
• Generate electricity without fossil fuels.

He also wants means tests on a number of programs, including the child tax credit, and possibly also a work requirement for parents who get the credit.

Sinema says she won’t vote for Build Back Better until the House passes the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Since it’s almost certain the House will eventually vote for the bill, this plan only makes sense if she wants to back out of whatever commitments she makes in the negotiations to pass both bills.

She also opposes the tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy that pay for the bill in its current form. I’m not sure whether she wants a smaller increase or no increase. Democrats are discussing a carbon tax to fill the fiscal hole, though I’m not sure what Manchin would think of that.

and subpoenas

With Trump’s encouragement, a number of his administration’s former officials and unofficial advisers are defying subpoenas from the House January 6 Committee. The committee will vote tomorrow on whether to hold Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress.

“This potential criminal contempt referral — or will-be criminal contempt referral for Steve Bannon — is the first shot over the bow,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who serves on the committee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union Sunday. “It’s very real, but it says to anybody else coming in front of the committee, ‘Don’t think that you’re gonna be able to just kind of walk away and we’re gonna forget about you. We’re not.’”

It’s important not to lose sight of just how far the country has gone down this rabbit hole. We’ve gotten used to the idea that Trump obstructs justice. He obstructed the Mueller investigation, the Ukraine investigation of his first impeachment, and the January 6 investigation of his second impeachment. We’ve gotten used to the idea that he makes laughable claims in lawsuits, purely for the purpose of using the courts to delay the release of potentially damaging information.

But Trump’s intransigence is not just politics, it’s new territory in American politics — recall Hillary Clinton testifying to the Benghazi Committee for 11 hours — and it threatens the rule of law. We once believed that politicians would avoid this kind of behavior out of shame, because of course the voters would ask “What is he hiding?” But Trump hides everything, so it’s just what he does. We once believed that no president would pardon his co-conspirators, or that Congress would of course respond to such an outrage by removing him from office. But Trump has done precisely that, and Republican senators let him.

“This potential criminal contempt referral — or will-be criminal contempt referral for Steve Bannon — is the first shot over the bow,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who serves on the committee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union Sunday. “It’s very real, but it says to anybody else coming in front of the committee, ‘Don’t think that you’re gonna be able to just kind of walk away and we’re gonna forget about you. We’re not.’”

Bannon has zero justification for not testifying:

• He was not a government official during the lead-up to January 6.
• Former presidents have no claim on executive privilege unless the current president grants it, and Biden has not.
• Executive privilege allows a witness not to answer specific questions. It doesn’t justify refusing to testify.

But the law is not the point: Trump wants to run out the clock on this investigation the way he did on all the others. If his party can get the House back in 2022, presumably Kevin McCarthy will get the investigation stopped, and the public will never know what crimes Trump (or Bannon or any of the others) committed.

What’s most appalling is not that Trump and his cronies would try this. It’s that Republicans support his obstruction up and down the line (with rare exceptions like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger), and he loses no support among his followers.

and the economy

As the economy comes back from the pandemic recession, workers are quitting their jobs in unprecedented numbers. Economists are calling it “The Great Resignation“.

“Quits,” as the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls them, are rising in almost every industry. For those in leisure and hospitality, especially, the workplace must feel like one giant revolving door. Nearly 7 percent of employees in the “accommodations and food services” sector left their job in August. That means one in 14 hotel clerks, restaurant servers, and barbacks said sayonara in a single month. Thanks to several pandemic-relief checks, a rent moratorium, and student-loan forgiveness, everybody, particularly if they are young and have a low income, has more freedom to quit jobs they hate and hop to something else.

Atlantic’s Derek Thompson continues:

As a general rule, crises leave an unpredictable mark on history. It didn’t seem obvious that the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 would lead to a revolution in architecture, and yet, it without a doubt contributed directly to the invention of the skyscraper in Chicago. You might be equally surprised that one of the most important scientific legacies of World War II had nothing to do with bombs, weapons, or manufacturing; the conflict also accelerated the development of penicillin and flu vaccines. If you asked me to predict the most salutary long-term effects of the pandemic last year, I might have muttered something about urban redesign and office filtration. But we may instead look back to the pandemic as a crucial inflection point in something more fundamental: Americans’ attitudes toward work. Since early last year, many workers have had to reconsider the boundaries between boss and worker, family time and work time, home and office.

Paul Krugman weighs in:

Until recently conservatives blamed expanded jobless benefits, claiming that these benefits were reducing the incentive to accept jobs. But states that canceled those benefits early saw no increase in employment compared with those that didn’t, and the nationwide end of enhanced benefits last month doesn’t seem to have made much difference to the job situation.

What seems to be happening instead is that the pandemic led many U.S. workers to rethink their lives and ask whether it was worth staying in the lousy jobs too many of them had.

For America is a rich country that treats many of its workers remarkably badly. Wages are often low; adjusted for inflation, the typical male worker earned virtually no more in 2019 than his counterpart did 40 years earlier. Hours are long: America is a “no-vacation nation,” offering far less time off than other advanced countries. Work is also unstable, with many low-wage workers — and nonwhite workers in particular — subject to unpredictable fluctuations in working hours that can wreak havoc on family life.

All along, economists figured that when the economy started to recover, there would be a blip of inflation. Production would have trouble ramping up as fast as spending, as many Americans would have money in their pockets due to a combination of government programs and their inability to spend normally during the pandemic. (Being retired, I don’t want to think about all the driving vacations my wife and I would have taken, which probably would have pushed us to buy a new car by now.)

The question was whether inflation would just blip up briefly, or whether a new inflationary cycle would start that would require some policy intervention (i.e., higher interest rates) to get under control. Paul Krugman has been on what he calls “Team Transitory”, but now he’s not sure; the data he would ordinarily use to tell the difference between the two scenarios is (as he puts it) “weird”. In other words, the current covid/post-covid economy is unique in ways that make it hard to read. He still argues against raising interest rates, because he sees cutting off the recovery as a bigger risk than letting inflation run for a while.

More about inflation in this Washington Post article.

and John Gruden

John Gruden, head coach of the Los Vegas Raiders NFL football team, resigned last Monday, after emails leaked out where he made racist, sexist, and homophobic comments. The emails were part of a trove of 650K emails related to the Washington Football Team (then called the Redskins), which the NFL was investigating because of reports of the toxic and abusive work environment for the team cheerleaders, and possibly other female employees. Presumably somebody at the NFL is responsible for the leak.

The Gruden emails were sent between 2010 and 2018, and though Gruden was not connected with the WFT at the time, he was corresponding with WFT President Bruce Allen, whose emails were being examined. The Gruden emails leaked out of the NFL’s investigation without being formally released.

There’s a lot not to like about this scandal. The comments themselves are reprehensible, and it makes perfect sense that Gruden should leave the Raiders now that they are public. Like every other team in the NFL, the Raiders have a large number of black players, as well as the NFL’s only openly gay player, who came out in June. Knowing that your coach uses slurs against people like you has got to disrupt your relationship with the team. So the players deserve a new coach.

In general, though, I dislike scandals based on people’s private conversations becoming public years later. If I had to be judged by the worst thing I ever said to someone I trusted not to repeat it, I doubt I could pass muster. My guess is that few Americans could. In particular, I wonder how many other NFL coaches could be taken down if their private emails were published.

So yes, Gruden is racist, sexist, homophobic, … but he’s also unlucky, in that he wandered into a investigation aimed at somebody else. And whoever leaked the emails seems to have intentionally targeted him. (First one email came out, and when it started to look like he might weather that storm, more appeared.) By condemning Gruden, we may be inadvertently carrying out somebody’s vendetta.

But any sympathy I might have had for Gruden vanished when he responded by saying that there was “not a blade of racism” in him. I don’t know why people say clueless crap like that, especially right after evidence surfaces that they do have those blades. American culture is a toxic stew of prejudices of all sorts, and we’ve all been soaking in it. Why can’t we just acknowledge that, and then affirm that we’re trying our best to overcome it? (Here’s an example of me practicing what I’m preaching.) It would be refreshing to hear someone respond to past evidence of racism with “I’ve learned a lot since then.” rather than “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.“

The other thing not to like about the Gruden story is that he may not be the worst person in it. Reportedly, the Gruden emails also “featured photos of topless Washington Football Team cheerleaders”. It’s not clear whether Gruden was sending or receiving the images, but Allen was the WFT insider. Was he sharing illicit photos of his female employees?

And that raises a bigger question: The NFL launched this investigation in response to media reports that the Washington Football Team owner and executives harassed women, circulated surreptitiously obtained photos and videos of team cheerleaders, and put the women in “what they considered unsafe situations” with high-rolling season-ticket holders. Why is this the only thing that leaks out? Why is Gruden the only one to lose his job?

The report from that investigation is still secret, though we know that the team was fined $10 million dollars. And while that sounds like a lot, it really isn’t for a team valued at more than $4 billion. And remember: Whenever some law or rule or standard is only enforced by a fine, that means you can break it if you’re rich enough.

Chris Hayes discusses these issues with a former WFT cheerleader.

Friday, the NYT reported on the cozy relationship between Allen and the NFL general counsel who supervises investigations like the one into Allen’s team.

and you also might be interested in …

The downward trend in the Covid numbers continues: New cases are down 22% in the last two weeks, deaths down 19%.

One of those deaths was Colin Powell, who died at 84. He was vaccinated, but was fighting a cancer that compromised his immune system.

As Angela Merkel leaves the chancellorship of Germany, Thom Hartman notes all the ways that her position on the German center-right was considerably to the left of Bernie Sanders in the US.

Democrats are trying to pass an anti-gerrymandering law at the federal level, while simultaneously trying to gerrymander blue states like New York and Illinois more aggressively. At a simplistic level, this looks like hypocrisy, but I think this two-pronged approach is the only way we’ll get rid of gerrymandering. As long as it’s a one-sided advantage for Republicans, they’ll be unified in protecting it.

I believe in the Designated Hitter Principle: You may think that the designated hitter is a terrible idea that mars the purity of baseball. But if you play in a league where DHs are in the rules, you put a DH in your lineup.

Remember Andy McCabe, the guy who became acting head of the FBI after James Comey was fired, and then was fired himself just days before his scheduled retirement, so that his pension wouldn’t vest? He filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department, which is now under new management. This week DoJ settled with McCabe, not admitting any wrongdoing, but giving him back his retirement benefits. “Plaintiff will be deemed to have retired from the FBI on March 19, 2018.” DoJ also pays McCabe’s attorney’s fees.

Media Matters reports:

Nearly a dozen of the Fox News guests the network has presented as concerned parents or educators who oppose the teaching of so-called “critical race theory” in schools also have day jobs as Republican strategists, conservative think-tankers, or right-wing media personalities

The article lists 11 by name, including “concerned parent” Ian Prior, who has appeared 14 times on Fox to denounce CRT, without mentioning his professional work doing communications for the RNC, Jeff Sessions, Karl Rove, and other Republicans.

Fox has been particularly focused on fanning the critical race theory pseudo-issue in Virginia, where Pears and several other astroturf voices are from, and which (coincidentally) is electing a governor in a few weeks.

and let’s close with something reassuring

You may think your expressions in photos look odd, but your face does nothing like what dogs’ faces do when they’re trying to pluck a treat out of the air.

Your worst fears about Texas schools aren’t true. But your next-to-worst fears probably are.

Here’s how deep the rabbit hole goes: NBC News received an audio recording of an administrator in the Dallas suburb of Southlake [1], telling teachers that a new law (HB 3979) requires them to offer an “opposing” perspective if they have books about the Holocaust in their classroom libraries. When a teacher asked “How do you oppose the Holocaust?” the administrator didn’t offer a suggestion, but replied “It’s come up. Believe me.” [2]

What’s most disturbing in this recording, to me at least, is that the administrator doesn’t sound like Holocaust denier who has been itching for years to get her extreme opinions into the curriculum. In general, she sounds like she’s on the teachers’ side. “If you think a book is OK, then let’s go with it. And whatever happens, we’ll fight it together.” She doesn’t seem ideological, she just wants to keep the school district out of trouble — like administrators in every other Texas school district.

On the calm-down side of this story, the NBC article also quotes experts who say that she overreacted to the law. And the school district posted this statement on its Facebook page:

During the conversations with teachers during last week’s meeting, the comments made were in no way to convey that the Holocaust was anything less than a terrible event in history. Additionally, we recognize there are not two sides of the Holocaust. As we continue to work through implementation of HB 3979, we also understand this bill does not require an opposing viewpoint on historical facts.

So — big relief! — Southlake’s school libraries can still display The Diary of Anne Frank without “balancing” it against Mein Kampf.

What is controversial? Even if you accept that the Southlake administrator’s interpretation of the law was over the top, it’s worth taking a moment to read the portion of HB 3979 she was “overreacting” to:

(1) a teacher may not be compelled to discuss a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs;

(2) a teacher who chooses to discuss a topic described by Subdivision (1) shall, to the best of the teacher’s ability, strive to explore the topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective;

Apparently, cooler heads have determined that the Holocaust is not “widely debated and currently controversial” in Southlake (and thank God for that). But what is? The law is only eight pages long, and doesn’t give school districts any guidance on exactly how widely debated an issue must be before “diverse and contending perspectives” have to be “explored without deference”.

Worse, “debated” and “controversial” are fundamentally subjective notions. An issue becomes “debated” not because it is objectively dubious, but because somebody chooses to debate it. It becomes “controversial” whenever someone starts a controversy, no matter how baseless that controversy might be. [3] As much as I want to accept the school district’s assurance that “this bill does not require an opposing viewpoint on historical facts”, I can’t find such a clear statement in the text of the law.

And even if you grant an exemption for “historical facts”, the very distinction between facts and opinions is itself controversial these days. The essence of Trumpism is to deny that objective facts can be found by examining evidence. (American intelligence agencies say one thing, but Vladimir Putin says something else. Who can determine where the truth lies?) If Trump repeats something often enough, it is true — or at the very least it becomes an “alternative fact“. Any evidence that refutes his opinion is “fake news”.

So it appears to me that if, say, a large number of people in some Texas community believe the Earth is flat — or if the Oracle of Mar-a-Lago starts making that claim — a classroom’s globe might become debated and controversial; it might need to be balanced against some other representation of the Earth. HB 3979 would then require teachers not to “defer” to the view that the Earth is spherical.

Or suppose one of your students has a parent like this guy, who wore a “Six million wasn’t enough” shirt to a Proud Boys rally in December. (They’re available online.) Would that make the Holocaust “controversial” enough to invoke the provisions of 3979? Or maybe you regard the fact of the Holocaust as beyond controversy, but describing it as “a terrible event” is a value judgment that this guy disputes. Doesn’t that make it “debated”? How many people have to agree with him before it’s “widely” debated?

Maybe that’s what “It’s come up. Believe me.” means.

The big chill. But OK, let’s say you live in a sane town, where the Holocaust and the globe aren’t widely debated. Let’s say your local biology teacher can describe how evolution works without giving a “contending perspective” from Genesis, or that teachers at all levels can refer to Joe Biden as the President without any kind of disclaimer.

Or, at least, that’s how the law would be interpreted by a judge if a case went to court.

If you find that comforting, you’re ignoring the fact that most school administrators don’t want to go to court. Teachers, by and large, don’t want to be at the center of a public controversy. They want to spend their prep time on next week’s lesson plan, not on explaining to a review committee what they said or what books they made available. They don’t want to lose hours in meetings with the school district’s or their union’s lawyer, getting advice on how to present their case to a judge.

In practice, that means that bills like HB 3979 have chilling effects that go far beyond their legally enforceable boundaries.

So hurray! You can teach about the Holocaust, and maybe even say that it was wrong. What about slavery? Jim Crow? Government programs that helped White families accumulate wealth, but weren’t available to Black families? How far do you want to stick your neck out? [4]

New Kid. In a related Texas case, the Houston suburb Katy cancelled a virtual appearance by author Jerry Craft, and pulled his graphic novel New Kid from the shelves after a parent circulated a petition.

“New Kid,” a Newbery Medal-winning graphic novel, is about a seventh grader at a prestigious private school where he is one of the few students of color. …

“It is inappropriate instructional material,” [the petition-starting parent] said. “The books don’t come out and say we want white children to feel like oppressors, but that is absolutely what they will do.” [She] claimed the book promoted critical race theory as well as Marxism. The petition gained a few hundred signatures in a district of more than 80,000 students.

This article, also by NBC News, seems to imply that a “few hundred signatures” is not many. To me, it seems like an incredibly large number of people in one town to take a position on a children’s book. I have to wonder how many of the signers had ever heard of New Kid, and how many just believed that this petition would stop somebody from teaching “critical race theory”, whatever they imagine it to be.

Although HB 3979 is often referred to as a bill against teaching “critical race theory”, the law does not mention that term, and the particular things it does outlaw are a bizarre caricature of anything actually being taught, like

an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex

The petition has been taken down, so I don’t know the text of it. But I doubt it directly invokes the new law. It seems more like a standard attempt to get elected officials to take action.

My reading. I didn’t want to assume baselessly that the woman charging “critical race theory” and “Marxism” is crazy, so I read the book Saturday. (It’s 250 or so pages, but it’s a graphic novel; reading it takes maybe an hour, depending on how closely you examine the images.) Having now done my own research, here’s my newly informed opinion: She’s crazy.

New Kid is a pretty thoroughly uplifting book. What I got out of it is: If you ever reach a point where you can see past your own struggles, you’ll find that just about everybody is struggling in their own way.

The central character is a Black kid named Jordan Banks, so he struggles in a way that a Black kid might, including from the clueless assumptions of White kids and teachers. As the book develops, though, he gets enough slack to raise his glance and see the struggles of the other kids — including one White kid who is pathologically ashamed of the burn mark on her arm, and another who is afraid Jordan won’t like him because his family is too rich.

I can’t fathom what CRT or Marxism has to do with any of this, other than being buzzwords that MAGA-hatters throw at whatever they don’t like.

Craft himself describes what he’s trying to do this way:

As an African American boy who grew up in Washington Heights in New York City, I almost never saw kids like me in any of the books assigned to me in school. Books aimed at kids like me seemed to deal only with history or misery. [5] That’s why it has always been important to me to show kids of color as just regular kids, and to create iconic African American characters like Jordan Banks from New Kid. I hope that readers of all ages will see the kindness and understanding that my characters exhibit and emulate those feelings in their day-to-day lives.

If you look at this book and see nothing but an attempt to make “white children feel like oppressors”, I don’t know what to tell you.

Happy endings? Like Southlake and the Holocaust, the story of Jerry Craft and Katy has an ending that is sort-of-happy, if you don’t look at it too closely: A review committee ruled that the book is appropriate and rescheduled Craft’s appearance. [6]

But again, consider the chilling effect. Suppose you’re a teacher putting together a reading list, or assembling a mini-library for your classroom. Now you know: Even a Newberry Medal book is suspect. Even if nothing on your list would offend any sane person, your name still might wind up in a petition, and you might need to justify your choices to a review committee.

How many worthwhile books (that we’ll never hear about) have teachers struck off their suggested-reading lists, not because they contain anything remotely objectionable, but because the teachers don’t want the hassle of dealing with crazy people? How many children, who might have discovered that reading could actually be interesting, will instead receive bland assignments that have nothing to do with their experiences?

[1] If you think you’ve heard of Southlake before, probably it’s from a previous racial controversy, which became the subject of a six-part NBC podcast.

[2] Let me offer an answer to the Southlake teacher’s question: You can balance a Holocaust book like The Diary of Anne Frank with The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, a first-person novel told from the point of view of an SS officer.

This is not a serious pedagogical suggestion, because Littell’s book is way too long and difficult for most students, not to mention upsetting. (I would worry about a student who managed to finish it.) But if you need to cover your ass, it does present an opposing (or at least contrasting) perspective.

An in-between perspective might be Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy of detective novels. Kerr’s detective Bernie Gunther isn’t a Nazi himself, but given the times, he frequently finds himself unable to say “no” to cases of interest to people like Heydrich or Goebbels. Kerr should be readable by advanced students at the high-school level, and might give them sympathy for the unsavory choices ordinary people face when they live under a totalitarian regime.

Similarly, Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 detective trilogy humanizes one of Stalin’s secret policemen.

[3] Part of what makes a position “debatable” in practice is the wealth and power of the people who debate it. Climate change, for example, is still “debatable” because fossil fuel corporations have the resources to keep their point of view in the public eye, in spite of the scientific consensus on the other side.

[4] The text of the law might be on your side, if you make it into a courtroom.

[T]he State Board of Education shall adopt essential knowledge and skills that develop each student’s civic knowledge, including an understanding of: … the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong

[5] One of the running gags in New Kid is the lack of diversity in the themes of “diversity literature”, which Jordan parodies as “a gritty, urban reminder of the grit of today’s urban grittiness”. One panel is labeled “African American escapist literature”, and features books titled “Escape From Gang Life”, “Escape From Slavery”, “Escape From Poverty”, and “Escape From Prison”.

[6] I give Craft credit for not saying “Fuck you” to the whole town.

The week’s most alarming story, by far, was the claim by a Texas school administrator that teachers might have to offer an “opposing perspective” if they included books about the Holocaust in their classroom libraries. Subsequently, the school district backed away from that public-relations disaster: The Holocaust is not one of the “controversial and widely debated” topics that a new Texas law requires teachers to cover in a balanced way. It is officially “a terrible event in history”, and can be discussed without mentioning any pro-Holocaust perspective.

What a relief!

However, I can’t help but be disturbed by the idea that that’s where the battleline is. And I wonder: What books are Texas teachers tossing out right now because their topics are slightly less one-sided than the Holocaust? So this week’s featured post is “Reading While Texan”. It discusses the Holocaust “controversy” and the law that sparked it. I also look at a different school district — a Houston suburb this time rather than a Dallas suburb — where a Newberry Medal book about a Black seventh-grader got taken off the shelves so that a review committee could decide whether it was “critical race theory”. Again, the story has a “happy” ending: The book is back on the shelves. But if that’s what we’re fighting about, where is the line exactly?

That post is almost ready, and should be out shortly after 9 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the price Senators Manchin and Sinema are demanding for supporting what will remain of Biden’s Build Back Better plan. Also: the attempt to enforce subpoenas on Trump’s allies, John Gruden, inflation, workers’ reluctance to return to bad jobs, and a few other things. That should be out around noon or so.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042813/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-10-17_Cultivating_Relationship.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042747/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/10-17-21-audio.mp3

"Right Thinking, Right Feeling and Right Relations" (October 17, 2021) Worship Service

Twins and co-authors of a recent book "Burnout", Emily and Amelia Nagoski talk about patterns of thinking and dealing with stress that lead to burnout. However, they also go deeper, to patterns of thinking, feeling and being in relationships that undermine our own and one another's health, joy and, I'd say, derail us on the journey to Beloved Community. In our work to hold ourselves accountable for the proposed 8th Principle of Unitarian Universalism, they offer some very tangible ways we can untangle from problematic habits of heart and mind! 

Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister; Mari Ramos Magaloni, Worship Associate; Reiko Oda Lane, Organist; UUSF Choir; Mark Sumner, Music Director; Laurel Sprigg, soprano; Wm. García Ganz, Pianist; Jon Silk, Drummer

Eric Shackelford, Camera; Shulee Ong, Camera; Jonathan Silk, Communications Director; Joe Chapot, Live Chat Moderator; Thomas Brown, Sexton; Athena Papadakos, Flowers

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042708/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20211017VRSSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042537/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/211017.mp3

I woke to a crash of thunder about 7 a.m. this morning, with a driving rain pounding against the wall and window near the head of my bed. What a beautiful sound to start the day! The rain only lasted about an hour, and then the skies were gray, but the air was lit by leaves of gold and orange encircling our back yard. We’ve had no frost yet, and the October transformations are unfolding with beauty and grace.  

I’ve been surprised by how low in the sky the sun travels at this time of year—even at noon it is lurking behind the tree canopy shading the back half of the yard. You’d think after all these years I would be used to it by now. I’ve also been surprised by new raspberries ripening fat and delicious. Usually our “everbearing” raspberries don’t ripen in the fall—there is not enough sun and warmth in their spot to bring them to completion—but perhaps taking out the (invasive) Norway maples near the fence helped them to get more morning light. They taste better than any of the summer raspberries.

October is also a month for ancestors, leading up to Samhain on the 31^st. I have continued to search for more information about Marie-Madeleine, my Innu great-great-great grandmother. I’ve been lucky that I emailed two people who seemed to have some resources, and they both replied and sent information. Magic! One told me that, from looking at his records, Marie Madeleine Manitukueu could not be my ancestor, because she married someone else in 1815, and then that person remarried in 1825 after her death. So that was incredibly helpful. Most of the work will be eliminating the women who cannot be my ancestor.

Then he also sent me a list of 17 “Marie Madeleines” or “Madeleines” recorded births from 1790 to 1818 at the Postes du Roi, from the databases he had access to, and agreed with me that it seemed most likely that she would be born closer to 1800, rather than 1789, since her last child (Marie Sylvie) was born in 1846. (The 1789 date is based on her death record stating that she was about 60 years of age at her death in 1849.)

I believe that going by child-bearing years is the best guide. A late baby in her 40s is more possible than in her 50s. The child before the one in 1846 was born several years earlier in 1839 (Sophie)—so it seems also more likely that 1846 was a late baby. Her prior children were about 3 years apart. Her first documented child was born around 1828, but it is possible that she was the mother of earlier-born children of her spouse Peter McLeod.  (Most sources say that he had an earlier Montagnais woman spouse, but there is less agreement about which children had which mother.) To go by a childbearing age of about 16 to 50, it seems like her own birth would be between 1796 and 1812.

This leaves 11 women on the chart—stretching slightly to include Marie Madeleine Katshisheiskuet (born 11/11/1795). So, the next thing I did was explore GénéalogieQuebec.com, to see if I could do research on each of the women. But I ran into a problem immediately. The records of the Postes du roi included on that site seem to be missing many of these vital years, not yet indexed, and none were available in direct images. I could not seem to find access to the databases to which my email correspondent had access. To complicate things a bit more, the parents listed for Marie Madeleine Katshisheiskuet in GénéologieQuebec are different from my earlier resource, and I think the only way to clear that up would be to look at an original record.

So, I feel stuck again—there is such a distance between Quebec and the United States—so much knowledge does not cross the border. I would like nothing better than to pore over these old records looking for the lives of these 11 women, seeing if I could find other marriage and death records that would steer me away from some, and toward my own ancestors. I don’t know why I think I can succeed where prior genealogists have not found a link. But maybe they didn’t have the same motivation. I’ve sent an email to the GénéologieQuebec site asking about the Postes du roi records. I also think I found some at the Catholic Archdiocese of Quebec, but not published or indexed.

It’s like the detective stories I’ve been reading—so many mysteries, so many clues. Why do I write about it here? I’m putting some magic out into the universe, hoping that some kind of thunder might open the cloudy skies between me and the past, between me and the place my ancestors are from. I’ve learned a lot in the process. It has been my experience that when I reach out to my ancestors, they reach back—more so when I have actually traveled to Quebec, but since that is not possible, I hope they will reach across the border.

While Harjo's series is a hit across the country and beyond, here at home in Oklahoma, Native Americans are experiencing a deep connection to the series. Many, including myself, have been watching Harjo’s career and feel pride to see his creativity and authentic, indigenous storytelling be recognized by the world.

The post OK’s Indigenous Filmmaker brings Authentic Stories to the Screen appeared first on BeyondBelief.

Corruption and cronyism can undermine political stability and legitimacy as surely as violence can, albeit more insidiously.

– The Washington Post Editorial Board
“The Pandora Papers gave us rare transparency: Is there hope for more?“
(10-8-2021)

This week’s featured post is “What to Make of the Pandora Papers?“

This week everybody was talking about Congress

Still no reconciliation infrastructure bill, but at least we won’t pointlessly wreck the world economy by hitting the debt ceiling, at least not until December.

I know I keep repeating this, but it needs saying: There is no reason to have a debt ceiling. Other countries don’t. The time to worry about the debt is during the regular budget process, when Congress is appropriating money and setting tax rates, not when the country is borrowing to cover money already committed. In practice, the debt ceiling functions as a self-destruct button that irresponsible legislators can threaten to push.

Mitch McConnell is facing criticism in his caucus for backing down on pushing the self-destruct button, and is pledging to be more irresponsible when it comes up again in December.

It continues to be hard to tell where the reconciliation-bill negotiations are, or to predict where (or when) they will wind up. I’m having trouble even finding a good article about where things stand. We’ll know when we know.

and the Trump coup

The Senate Judiciary Committee issued a 400-page report outlining what we know about Trump’s subversion of the Justice Department in service to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The story suffers from the problems of any slowly evolving narrative: We sort of knew all that already, but we didn’t know it in this detail or with this degree of certainty.

For example, stories that the NYT or WaPo published based on anonymous sources are repeated here, but based on testimony under oath. That’s actually new, but it doesn’t feel new.

The Republican minority’s defense of Trump is basically that he didn’t succeed this time. When DoJ officials threatened to resign en masse if he installed Jeffrey Clark as attorney general so he could push the Big Lie, for example, Trump backed down. So no harm, no foul.

Josh Marshall makes an analogy:

You’re in the bank, alarm goes off, cops surround the bank: then you say, okay, I’m not feeling it. I’m calling this off.

A number of Trump’s associates are defying subpoenas from the House January 6 Committee. Trump himself is urging this defiance, and justifying it based on a completely bogus interpretation of executive privilege.

Executive privilege belongs to the office of the presidency, not to the individual who holds that office. And it is exercised by the current president, not the one whose past actions are being investigated. Often presidents will protect past administrations, particularly when the information sought continues to have security implications. But Biden is not going to help Trump cover up his attempt to steal the election from Biden.

This is a point Trump has missed all along: He always treated his power as personal power, and not as the power of his office.

and Facebook

Former Facebook insider Frances Haugen testified to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection Tuesday, following an appearance on 60 Minutes last week.

Her basic message is that Facebook’s profit motive conflicts with the public good — which is pretty much the definition of when regulation is necessary. In general, Facebook benefits by promoting engagement, and that usually means taking advantage of weaknesses. If you’re obsessed with something, Facebook gives you more of it. If something angers you to the point that you just have to respond, Facebook benefits.

That tendency is most obviously destructive and wrong when it comes to minors — teen girls, say. Haugen told 60 Minutes:

What’s super tragic, is Facebook’s own research says, as these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed, and it actually makes them use the app more

Bad as Facebook (and its subsidiary Instagram) are, I hope they don’t become scapegoats for an entire industry that responds to the same market dynamics. As Shoshana Zuboff described in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, all the social-media companies have the same model: Provide a free service, learn things about people by watching them use the service, and then use that knowledge to manipulate their behavior.

It’s not that Facebook is uniquely evil. But this is a setting where the market rewards evil. Facebook is the current market leader, but the next market leader would be just as bad.

and the Texas abortion law

Now it’s blocked, and now it isn’t, as federal court rulings ping-ponged back and forth this week.

The state law, SB 8, which effectively eliminates abortions after six weeks of pregnancy by allowing private citizens to sue people (other than the pregnant woman herself) who are involved in an abortion after the presence of electrical activity that presages a fetal heartbeat after a heart eventually develops, took effect September 1 after the Supreme Court refused to block it.

The federal Justice Department filed suit against Texas on September 9. Wednesday, a federal judge granted DoJ’s request for an injunction to block enforcement of the law, denouncing the State of Texas for contriving an “unprecedented and transparent statutory scheme” to deprive citizens of their “right under the Constitution to choose to obtain an abortion prior to fetal viability”.

Friday, a federal appeals court put a temporary stay on that injunction, pending its consideration of a more permanent ruling.

Even if the injunction is eventually upheld, abortions in Texas may still be limited by the slippery nature of SB 8. The injunction prevented Texas courts from processing lawsuits filed under SB 8, but can’t eliminate abortion providers’ liability if the law is eventually upheld, which could take years to determine. (SB 8 allows lawsuits to be filed up to four years after the abortion.)

I continue to wish that a blue state would concoct some similar civil-lawsuit scheme to ban gun sales — not in order to ban gun sales, but to see how fast the partisan Supreme Court would act to defend a constitutional right that Republican voters care about.

and the pandemic

Average new cases per day in the US have gone back below 100K, down from 175K in mid-September. Deaths have declined less sharply, from over 2000 per day to around 1750. But we’re still well above the mid-June lows, when new cases fell to around 12K per day, with daily deaths in the 200s.

In general, regional differences are evening out, with a few high-risk areas in Alaska, Appalachia, and counties along the northern border.

I’ll make a wild guess and predict that cases and deaths will continue to drop at least until Thanksgiving.

Merck has filed for FDA emergency use authorization of its new anti-Covid pill.

Right-wing politician and commentator Allen West, who is challenging Gov. Greg Abbott in the Republican primary, took hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin rather than get vaccinated. He’s going into the hospital with low oxygen levels after catching Covid.

Chris Hayes won’t let up on the Fox News hosts who challenge every vaccine mandate except the one that actually applies to them at Fox News. I think he’s enjoying himself.

and you also might be interested in …

Climate change destroyed 14% of the world’s coral reefs between 2009 and 2018. The root problem is that the increased carbon in the atmosphere gets absorbed into the ocean, making it more acidic.

September’s jobs report was positive, but still fell well short of economists’ expectations as the economy added 194K jobs rather than the predicted 500K. The unemployment rate dropped to 4.8%, indicating that the weakness was due more to people staying out of the job market than to a lack of jobs for them to find.

The theory that extended unemployment benefits were keeping people from looking for jobs — and so they would flood back into the market when those benefits ended in early September — failed, just as it failed when most red states cut benefits inJuly.

“Many people had Sept. 1 marked on their calendars as the day when things would go back to normal — when they would return to their offices, their kids would return to school and they’d head back to their favorite bars. But instead, the recovery sputtered,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist with hiring site ZipRecruiter.

As has been true all along, the economic problem is the pandemic itself (which surged in September, but now is receding again) not government responses to it. Workers (particularly women) are reluctant to go back to high-risk, low-pay, public-facing jobs, or to return their unvaccinated small children to group daycare centers (which are having trouble staffing up anyway). And as far as “favorite bars”, I’m still only going to restaurants with outdoor seating. Apparently it’s not just me:

the recent surge in covid cases, which is slowly abating, spooked many diners who earlier this summer had embraced going to restaurants in record levels. Restaurant attendance has been inching down in August and September, according to the reservation app Open Table.

The overall number of restaurants has fallen 13% since the spring of 2020 and restaurant employment is about a million jobs short of pre-pandemic levels.

Speaking of childcare, and the portion of Biden’s proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that tries to improve it (and make us more like other first-world countries), the NYT describes the situation faced by a couple in Greensboro, North Carolina:

Until their elder son started kindergarten this fall, Jessica and Matt Lolley paid almost $2,000 a month for their two boys’ care — roughly a third of their income and far more than their payments on their three-bedroom house. But one of the teachers who watched the boys earns so little — $10 an hour — that she spends half her time working at Starbucks, where the pay is 50 percent higher and includes health insurance.

… The huge social policy bill being pushed by President Biden would cap families’ child care expenses at 7 percent of their income, offer large subsidies to child care centers, and require the centers to raise wages in hopes of improving teacher quality. A version before the House would cost $250 billion over a decade and raise annual spending fivefold or more within a few years. An additional $200 billion would provide universal prekindergarten.

One aspect of the child-care problem that doesn’t get enough attention is that it’s yet another poverty trap: If child care costs more than a couple’s second paycheck, the short-term economic incentive is for the lower-earning parent to stay home. But parents who can afford to stay in the job market anyway might improve their career prospects in ways that make long-term economic sense. This poverty-trapping effect hits even harder when one parent is investing in a career, either by going to school or working an internship, rather than earning an immediate paycheck.

Saturday, the NYT’s top-of-the-web-page article examined China’s potential military threat to Taiwan, and whether either the Taiwanese or the Americans are adequately prepared for it.

The article makes me wish I could trust the Pentagon (and the Times’ relationship to the Pentagon) more than I do. Maybe the concerns expressed there are completely legit and as worrisome as they sound. Or the article could be defense-budget propaganda: Maybe the Chinese military threat has to be emphasized now that the American people have lost interest in Afghanistan and the Islamic threat more generally.

A New Yorker article from August raised that point in response to a different China hawk:

A smart liberal’s reply to Colby might be: Is this for real? Americans have spent much of the past two decades trying to find some way through the disastrous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan that political hawks urged on them. Now that the full depth of the latter debacle has become so impossible to deny that the V.A. is issuing suicide-awareness bulletins for former soldiers suffering from “moral distress,” the hawks want to urge another generation-defining conflict on Americans?

A bunch of thoughts complicate my layman’s analysis (which is all you’re left with when you don’t trust the experts): As the article points out, the US already spends three times as much on defense as China does. However, given the inefficiencies and pork-barrel spending built into our defense budget, plus the fact that things are just cheaper in China, we probably don’t have a 3-to-1 advantage in real military resources.

And then there’s the fact that China hasn’t fought a war in a very long time. From generals down to privates, just about everybody involved in a hypothetical Taiwan invasion would be seeing their first combat. Would President Xi really trust the results of his war games that much?

And finally, if I were running China, I would see many long-term global trends running in my favor, and be worried about screwing them up. (This WaPo columnist disagrees: What if pro-China trends are about to turn, as its economy becomes more government-centered and its politics more tyrannical?) War is always a throw of the dice. So I hope Xi knows the story of King Croesus of Lydia and the Oracle of Delphi. “If Croesus attacks Persia,” the Oracle pronounced, “he will destroy a great empire.”

He did attack, and the empire he destroyed was his own.

Mike Pence is laying the groundwork for a 2024 presidential campaign. He truly does not seem to understand that January 6 ended his political career. He didn’t do everything he could to steal the election for Trump, so diehard Trumpists will always see him as disloyal. But at the same time, he will never be able to separate himself from his four years of enabling and defending Trump.

When it comes to replacing democracy with a fascist personality cult, you can’t be half committed.

Trump and his followers are rallying behind Max Miller’s primary campaign against Ohio Republican Congressman Anthony Gonzalez, who committed the unforgivable sin of voting for Trump’s second impeachment. The domestic violence charges made by Miller’s former girlfriend, Trump’s former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, don’t seem to be regarded as a big deal by comparison.

This kind of thing was inevitable once Republicans decided to ignore the Access Hollywood tape (where Trump bragged about a pattern of sexual assaults), as well as the corroborating testimony from dozens of his victims. In Republican circles, assaulting women is now just something that manly men do, and that women are understood to routinely lie about.

Here’s what one guy learned from working in a California gun shop.

Guns in America require a fix that isn’t written into law. It’s something deeper, something in society that causes men to turn to weapons as their last vestiges of manhood.

and let’s close with something sexy

If you think it’s hard to attract a human mate, watch what this puffer fish has to do.

There are reasons why you should care.

Last week, a vast trove of documents called the Pandora Papers became available to the public, and stories based on these documents started appearing in newspapers around the world. The documents reveal much about the wealth that the global elite keep hidden.

If that story sounds familiar, it should. This is the third round of such revelations from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), following the Panama Papers in 2016 and the Paradise Papers in 2017. That’s why The Wall Street Journal’s Joseph Sternberg responded with “Everyone already knows this stuff.“

In other words: Yeah, the world is corrupt and here’s more of it. But so what? The super-rich play by a different set of rules — always have, always will. What’s the point of looking into how it all works?

It’s hard to imagine a more corrosive take on this story. It’s one thing if a few masterminds are so clever that their crimes escape detection. But if no one cares when hidden crimes are exposed — or if a few scapegoats are punished, but the system rolls on unchanged — then the world is very sick indeed. As The Washington Post’s editorial board observed:

[T]he big picture — of a vast, no-questions-asked-zone, open to legitimate and illegitimate transactions alike — is concerning. Corruption and cronyism can undermine political stability and legitimacy as surely as violence can, albeit more insidiously. To the extent the world’s offshore havens are facilitating official malfeasance, they are contributing to the global decline of democracy.

So while I could spend my time exploring how the offshore systems works, or raising outrage about extreme cases, or reacting in some other way, I think the most valuable thing I can do is try to answer that basic so-what question: Why should you care about all this?

After looking at what a variety of other people are saying and talking to a few insightful friends, I think the answers boil down to these:

• The importance of corruption as a central issue connecting all other issues.
• The accomplishments of previous rounds of revelations.
• The momentum of ever-larger exposures of secrets.
• America’s role in building and maintaining the corrupt system has to end.

Corruption. It’s not an exaggeration to say that corruption is the most important issue of our time. Money buys power, and power gathers more money. No matter what issue you care about, progress is impeded (or maybe blocked completely) by wealthy special interests that can influence the course of events in ways that go well beyond you and your vote and your voice in the public square.

Brooke Harrington points out that the issue is not just money.

“[T]ax havens” aren’t really for avoiding taxes: They exist to help elites avoid the rule of law that they impose on the rest of us. The offshore financial industry is generating much of the economic and political inequality destabilizing the world.

It’s one thing when money works its influence openly. If some giant corporation runs ads telling us all how wonderful it is, if it puts out press releases telling us what public policies it wants, and if it endorses and supports candidates who promise to implement those policies, then the People can judge. Climate-denying Senator James Inhofe, for example, is widely known as “the Senator from Exxon-Mobil”. But if the voters of Oklahoma know that and elect him anyway, that’s democracy.

What’s really destructive, though, is secret money in all its forms: lobbyists who work behind the scenes, writing laws that legislators attach their names to; candidates supported by political action committees with benign names, whose donors are not known; “academic” research whose conclusions are dictated by invisible donors, and so on.

The ultimate form of secret money is wealth whose owners can’t be identified at all, and which can be transferred from one person to another without any traceable transaction. Such wealth allows dictators to siphon their nation’s wealth away, and to hang onto it even after they lose power. It allows bribes of any size to go to officials in any country.

The existence of secret wealth and a system for transferring it from one malefactor to another is more than just a tax on the legitimate economy, it corrodes the public trust that is necessary for collective action. Conspiracy theories of all sorts seem more plausible, given the extent of what we know we don’t know. The vague awareness of an untouchable global elite can motivate authoritarian populism, the desire for a man-on-horseback who can sweep it all away without being caught in the tangle of corrupt laws and contracts.

Past accomplishments. Sternberg’s so-what take on the Pandora Papers roots itself in the assumption that the Panama and Paradise Papers turned out to be “duds”.

There they go again. Another year, another breathless media uproar over “revelations” of the financial comings and goings of the world’s super-rich. Reporters spend many months combing through documents extracted—we’re never told how—from various law firms and other service providers presumably because the reporters think exposing this information will accomplish . . . well, we’re never sure what.

He notes that only one world leader — the prime minister of Iceland, if you call that a world leader — had to resign. But Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s 10-year prison sentence should count for something, even if he was already out of office. And that’s not the only kind of impact. For example, by 2019, the Panama Papers had led to governments recovering $1.2 billion in taxes.

Brooke Harrington observes that impacts on the reputations of the rich and powerful are also important. Subjects of ICIJ revelations may stave off legal consequences, but the embarrassment stings.

And focusing on what the people exposed by the Panama and Paradise Papers got away with is not the full story: The whistleblowers also got away with it. The ICIJ succeeded in shielding their sources from exposure.

Five years on, we still do not know the identity of “John Doe,” who leaked the Panama Papers, nor of the person or people who leaked the Paradise Papers four years ago.

And that’s one reason why the troves of leaked documents are getting bigger: The Pandora Papers come from 14 different financial services companies, where the Panama Papers all came from one.

Brooke Harrington:

As I found in talking with wealth managers all over the world, a significant number understand that their work has contributed to dangerous levels of economic and political inequality; they want to do something, and many understand that one of the most effective uses of their insider position would be to pull back the veil of secrecy that makes so much of offshore corruption possible.

As whistleblowers are emboldened, potential clients of the offshore industry may be discouraged: The firm that promises you secrecy may not be able to fulfill that pledge.

Momentum. So the right metaphor for the various “papers” is hammer blows against a wall. The first blow didn’t bring it down, and neither did the second — though each left a mark. The third probably won’t bring it down either, though we can hope for a bigger mark, or maybe even a few chips flying.

But it’s not going to stop.

What the ICIJ has done during these five years is construct an infrastructure for attacking financial secrecy. And that makes these revelations fundamentally different from past Pulitzer-winning exposé from the point of view of one crusading newspaper like The New York Times or The Washington Post. ICIJ has constructed a searchable database that allows each local news outlet to research the story most relevant to its audience.

So while the national papers tell us about the King of Jordan‘s secretly purchased $106 million mansions in Malibu, Georgetown, and London, or the Czech prime minister‘s $22 million chateau in France, The Miami Herald writes about the local mansion secretly owned by empoverished Haiti’s richest man. (The Czech opposition parties gained enough seats in this weekend’s election that they may be able to unseat the prime minister, who has a nice chateau to retire to.)

In Florida, the Bigios have lived behind protective gates in the most exclusive of zones, Indian Creek Island. They’ve enjoyed protection from local police officers who around the clock staff the entrance gate to the private island community. Property records show their home is held in the name of two corporations: Agro Products and Services, registered in Florida, and Porpoise Investments Ltd., a shell company registered in the Isle of Man, a self-governing low-tax British Crown dependency in the Irish Sea.

In other words, there’s not just a mechanism for protecting people who reveal the secrets of the super-rich, there’s a path for getting that information to the people who will care most about it.

The ultimate point of these hammer blows is not to send some scapegoat to prison or embarrass another one into retiring from politics. The point is to change public opinion in ways that change the landscape of what is politically and legally possible. Changing public opinion always seems impossible until it happens. (Same-sex marriage is a good example.) But once it starts happening, it can move quickly.

Change starts at home. We’re used to thinking of offshore tax havens as tiny island nations like the Bermuda, or places with a long tradition of secrecy like Switzerland. But perhaps the most shocking thing I learned from the Pandora Papers articles I read was that South Dakota now rivals Zurich, the Cayman Islands, and other famous wealth-hiding havens. One Dominican family’s money came from exploiting poor workers in the sugar cane fields; it now sits in trusts in Sioux Falls, where it should be safe against worker lawsuits.

Other states competing to lure wealth include Alaska, Delaware, Nevada and New Hampshire.

Think about how you felt a few paragraphs ago, when you read about “the world’s offshore havens … facilitating official malfeasance [and] contributing to the global decline of democracy” or “help[ing] the elite avoid the rule of law”. Maybe you got angry at some imagined remote island paradise, where corporations are headquartered in post office boxes.

Nope. It’s the United States (and the UK). The people undermining the rule of law and contributing to the global decline in democracy? It’s us.

It’s got to stop.

This isn’t somebody else’s problem that we can feel superior about or shake our fists helplessly at. If public opinion is going to turn against secret money anywhere, and if popular resolve is going to force the system to change, it’s got to start here.

So sure, the overall story of the Fill-In-the-Blank Papers is hard to get a handle on. The topic is intentionally confusing, the examples are too diverse to sum up easily, and the time scale is longer than stories we usually think about. But don’t lose track of this, because it’s important, things are happening, and it’s your problem too.

Last week the Pandora Papers were coming out just as I was putting out the Sift, so all I could do was say that it was happening and give you a few links. With a week to think about it, this week’s featured post will discuss what to make of it all. Is there more going on here than just confirmation of the eternal truth that the rich play by a different set of rules?

It’s a holiday and I’m running on a slower schedule, so that post probably won’t appear until around 11 EDT.

The weekly summary has a number of things to cover: the debt ceiling deal, and the continuing negotiations around the Biden agenda; an interim report on the Trump coup; Facebook’s whistleblower testifying to Congress; the back-and-forth court rulings about the Texas abortion law; a discouraging jobs report; worries about China and Taiwan; and the continuing turn-around in the Covid surge — all of which leads up to a closing about the things a puffer fish will do for love.

Look for that around 1.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042451/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-10-10_Celebration_Sunday.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042357/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/10-10-21-audio.mp3

"Who is Earth to Me?" (October 10, 2021) Worship Service

Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book "Braiding Sweetgrass" opens with a simple description of this act of weaving, braiding the supple green stalks of a plant, but what unfolds is layers of relationship and story and a paradigm that has saving grace.

Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister; Daniel Jackoway, Worship Associate; Sam King, Worship Associate; Reiko Oda Lane, Organist; Mark Sumner, Music Director; Jon Silk, Drummer; Asher Davison, Soloist

Eric Shackelford, Camera; Shulee Ong, Camera; Jonathan Silk, Director of Communications; Joe Chapot, Live Chat Moderator; Thomas Brown, Sexton; Dan Barnard, Facilities Manager; Judy Payne, flowers

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042312/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20211010VRSSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042217/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/211010.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042155/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-10-03_The_Third_Principle.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042134/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-09-26_Wasted_Effort.mp3

Multiplatform – Outdoors and Livestreamed on Youtube, 9:30 am

This month, we’re talking about how to design a life worth living. Unitarian Universalism is a faith that knows we do not live for ourselves alone. Our theology is one of collective liberation and collective salvation. What ... read more.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042114/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzqR_XTUBhE&feature=youtu.be

A sermon for Foothills Unitarian Church, on our second Sunday in the sanctuary after being only online for 18 months.

Reading: The Tensions of I and We by Fred Muir

Near the end of my junior year in college, on the afternoon of the first Earth Day, I was in a class on American Transcen­dentalism. We sat in the grass and listened as the teacher read aloud Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Divinity School Address.” It was as though he was channeling the Sage of Concord, who was speaking to me.

After class, I asked what religion Emerson was. “Unitarian,” he said. I asked if it still existed. “Exist?” he replied. “Yes it exists! There’s a congregation on the west side. Do you want to go Sunday?” And that was that! 

Prior to my Earth Day epiphany, I was religious—I had felt the pull toward ministry as a boy in my liberal Protestant church—but did not think of myself as “spiritual” because I never had the words to put to the spirituality I had known since childhood. 

“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature,” Emerson proclaimed. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Emersonian individualism has become part of the American story, of course. 

Think of the “i” that’s placed in front of the names of Apple products. Some say the “i” means “Internet.” Others explain that the “i” stands for “individual”: This is your personal piece of technology, to be used for whatever purpose you want. Fifteen years ago, Apple appealingly exploited the theme of individualism in a commercial that sounds like Emerson channeled through Jack Kerouac: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. They push the human race forward.”

Many of us were drawn to Unitarian Universalism because it seemed to be the church of Emersonian individualism. We are the iChurch. 

I’m not sure Emerson’s goal was for us to be “the crazy ones,” but my thirty-seven years in the UU ministry have convinced me that historian Conrad Wright is correct: “[O]ne cannot build a church on Emerson’s dicta: ‘men are less together than alone,’ or ‘men descend to meet.’”

For all its appeal and its influence in American culture, individualism is not sustaining: Individual­ism will not serve the greater good, a principle to which we Unitarian Universalists have also committed ourselves. There is little-to-nothing about the ideology and theology of individualism that encourages people to work and live together, to create and support institutions that serve common aspirations and beloved principles.

The inherent worth and dignity of the individual is not just our First Principle as UUs: often it is our defining principle. But we frequently overlook another strand of our tradition in our Association’s Principles and Purposes, another story about ourselves that can deepen and grow our future. It is not the language of individualism, not of the iChurch, but of covenant: “As free congregations we prom­is[e] to one another our mutual trust and support.”

We cannot do both covenant and individualism; individuality, yes, but not individualism. Articulating and living our Principles as a commitment to covenant—creating and sustaining a community by “promising to one another our mutual trust and support”—this takes extra effort.

Sermon

In the middle of July, as wild fires raged across the west, with drought and heat threatening major cities, and as the Delta variant created the groundhog’s day of weighing risks and precautions – right then, two different US billionaires launched themselves into space.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, whose net worth is over 177 Billion, took what CNN called a supersonic joyride on July 20^th – he and three others onboard were weightless for three whole minutes.  The 11 minute ride cost Bezos 2.5 million dollars per minute – so quick math – that’s a 27.5 million dollar joyride.

Just over a week earlier, Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, also launched himself into space, on his latest test flight for what will become a space tourism company – Branson says he wants to make space accessible to everyone – it’ll only cost you $250,000 a ticket.  With a net worth of over 4.4 billion, Branson was quick to point out to reporters after his flight that he doesn’t want to be known as a “billionaire,” since as he says, he started off with 200 quid (that’s about 270 bucks), implying, I guess, that his money changes nothing. 

A third billionaire, Elon Musk, is also working on a space tourism effort – SpaceX – but has yet to actually launch himself into space.  I’d say maybe he’s saving up, except his net worth is just over 150 billion.  So.  I don’t know.

Regardless of their intentions – and at least Bezos seemed pretty insistent that his were humanitarian – the spectacle of billionaires escaping the planet while the planet is burning and COVID was raging – was to many of us disgusting, and also just one more absurd reality we’ve been forced to witness over recent years. 

One of my favorite cynical tweet went: “Jeff Bezos, you have the ability to end world hunger. You also have the ability to take a teen to space. Which do you – oh that was fast.” 

Watching the whole thing play out, I kept wondering if these billionaires and their efforts to go to space – especially right now – represented the least UU thing ever, or the most. 

I mean, most Unitarian Universalists I talked to or saw posting about it treated it like it was the antithesis of our religion – focusing on how irresponsible it was, how selfish, and wasteful, especially in light of things like world hunger, or COVID, or climate change – and how much good their resources could do to address these major global problems.

And I agree, these are not Unitarian Universalists values. 

And, I also felt like, in their choices, you could see some of the roots of our faith. We too have had times where we have made scientific discovery the most important value – leading to a shameful history in eugenics. We too have been a part of colonization – leading to our equally shameful founding of boarding schools for Native Americans.And we too have prized the sort of rugged / Emersonian individualism Branson, Bezos and Musks’ stories epitomize. 

We too appreciate calling most sacred the law of our own nature, and trusting in our individual selves most of all.  “We are the iChurch.”

For a lot of us, discovering a religious community that encouraged individualism felt like freedom. It was for many of us, the thing that brought us here.  We love Emerson!

As UU Minister Cheryl Walker has said, “Individualism is so attractive in the beginning. For many people who felt the heavy yoke of being in communities of faith where they could not fully be who they were, individualism tastes like the food they have been hungering for. But it is good only when we are starving. When we have had our fill, we look for food to sustain us for the long journey of life. That life-sustaining food can be found only in true communities of shared purpose and values, where the individual is affirmed but is not worshipped.” 

Fred Muir first described Unitarian Universalism as the iChurch in 2012 in a Lecture to his fellow Unitarian Universalist ministers, entitled “From iChurch to Beloved Community.” Muir’s critique of the iChurch focused on what he called our “Trinity of Errors”(it’s funny because we’re Unitarians!). These three historic errors, in his estimations, prevent us from living into our potential impact and relevance, and will ultimately lead to our decline. 

The Trinity of Errors start with our individualism; then, this individualism leads us to the second error, exceptionalism.  As he says, “We must stay conscious of how we explain, defend, and share our perspective, lest we come across as elitist, insulting, degrading, and even humiliating of others.”

These two errors of the iChurch are co-equal with the third error: our allergy to power and authority, which he says, ironically has led to their abuse and misuse.  He writes:

“Unitarian Universalist anxiety about power and authority makes it hard for us to welcome and listen to a diversity of interests and passions without being distracted and immobilized.”

Instead, as Rebecca Parker notes, “Most liberals, consciously or not, seem to prefer that their religious institutions remain weak, underfunded, or distracted by endless attention to ‘process’ and checks on the exercise of power. One friend of mine, quips that liberal religion teaches you can do anything you feel called to do as long as you do it alone.”

In place of these errors, Muir advocates a return and reclaiming of our practices of covenant, as we heard in the reading, he invites us to “articulate and live our Principles” not as individual statements of belief – the inherent worth of any individual, but as promises to one another, a commitment to create and sustain a community, promising to one another our mutual trust and support.”

Instead of the iChurch, we need a church focused on we.      

2012 was the year I arrived at Foothills. So if this all feels familiar to many of you, I’m glad. Over the past 9 years, many of us have been trying to look intentionally at the ways Muir’s Trinity lives in our individual hearts, and in our collective practices. 

Of course, while Muir’s critique focused on Unitarian Universalism, we can also apply it to American culture, which has also been heavily influenced by Emersonian individualism. The story of the American Dream, or what UU minister Lisa Bovee-Kemper calls the “Fallacy of the American Dream,” which, “tells us that not only are we expected to succeed alone, but also that every person has the innate ability to do so.

[This lie, as Bovee Kemper says,] is the single largest contributor to the [fractured and declining] state of our nation (and many of our churches) today.”

That the state of our nation has been such a persistent pain point for many of us over the last five-ish years has likely been motivating to many of us: we can see the impact of extreme individualism play out with each new absurdity we have had to witness, including with the elevation and election of Donald Trump as President in 2016, who seems to me, the supreme example of a proud individualist. 

In turn, as a congregation, Foothills has met each selfish, ego-driven, divisive headline over these years with an increasing care for the whole.  We became a sanctuary congregation, we started our twice-a-month food bank, we moved to three services, we accepted different sorts of music, and different styles of ministers, and different words. We addressed unhealthy uses of authority, and got more explicit about how we intend power and accountability to work.  We grew up all sorts of small groups, and spiritual practices, and we have been shockingly generous with our giving – including to fund the building we’ve needed for at least 15 years. (By the way, we break ground early next year.) We practiced partnering and following the lead of other organizations, and we regularly give away $50,000 a year to other community partners.

To be clear, we did all of this not because it was good for any particular one of us – any “I”, we did it because it was good for we.

Actually, if you talk to any one of us, you will likely hear disagreement, discomfort, and even distaste for some or all of the shifts we have made.  And, if you keep talking past that, you will also tap in to a clear abiding yes, an understanding that we do this not for me, but for we. 

Something over these years clicked.  We got done with that lonely outdated story of liberal religion as a place where you can do anything you want, as long as you do it alone. We didn’t get rid of individualism – it is the water we swim in, and we still love Emerson, and we can still get seduced by the idea of being non-conformists who just always go our own way. But along side this, we also began to discover what it could mean to prize not individualism, but the Beloved Community.  

And then came Friday March 13, 2020. Will we ever forget that day?

On that day, everything, everything changed, and for a time, we – far beyond the church – I mean, much of the world, we were all in it together. We were flattening the curve, We were cheering for health care and other essential workers, and we were learning new terms like social distancing, unprecedented times, and the promise and perils of muting yourself.    

Our congregation’s collective orientation drew an easy yes to sheltering families experiencing homelessness in our otherwise empty building, and through much of 2020 kept us committed to remaining connected in totally unfamiliar ways.   We learned zoom and circles; we spread kindness and sang silent night; we gave to the discretionary fund and the immigrant relief fund.

In our personal lives, we set aside travel plans, learned tech we had no interest in learning, and we tried to listen to well-meaning adult children who told us to stay home. 

2020 was a time of sacrifice, and we accepted the sacrifice because it was meaningful. Even as politics and capitalism troubled the idea being all in it together, we made these choices because we were living our values. Through our collective commitment, we could imagine our collective salvation.

But then, things shifted again.  The vaccine arrived.  To be clear, the vaccines are a miracle, a miracle of science. They came way sooner than any of us had any right to expect – I think of my dear queer siblings who just kept dying through all those years of AIDS – Vaccines are a miracle.

And, vaccines do not work in the iAnything.  Vaccines require we.

Many of us got our vaccine knowing this, and it made our resolve even stronger – it was our individual and collective path to liberation. It’s what led us into the work of vaccine equity earlier this year. 

But then, to our shock, and our heartbreak, it turns out, others had the opposite reaction to the vaccine. For many people, the vaccine represented not collective salvation, but the need to assert individual liberty, and individual choice. And so, here we are, nine months into the availability of an extremely effective vaccine, but instead of dwindling virus numbers – we are crossing 700,000 lives lost. Nurses and doctors and other medical staff are burning out and dealing with trauma in ways not unlike veterans of war. And all this must be set in the context of the climate crisis, where the supremacy of individual success – the fallacy of the American Dream – is corralling us all to an uninhabitable planet.

But, at least the billionaires will make it out ok, right?

Friends, I’m tired.  Are you tired? I’m tired, and I’m angry, and I’m sad. Like the series we’ve been offering online, I am filled with rage, and grief – .  I am tired of accommodating selfishness, and being the one to make all the sacrifices. I’m tired of marching for women’s right to basic health care – as I’m guessing many of you did yesterday in response to the restrictions on abortion.

I’m tired of being the ones to go high.

I’m so tired I start to think, maybe it’s time we meet today’s individualism with some of our own – we were the OG non-conformists afterall. Maybe everyone should just go their own way.  Focus on their individual lives, families, health, individual goals – If you don’t get the vaccine, and end up sick, or worse, you made your choice.

In our exhaustion, and our grief, it’s understandable that we have lost some of our resolve for the common good.   It is understandable that individualism would feel alluring, safer, familiar – both in how we interact in the world, and how we want to show up in our church. It makes sense that we’d show up here, in our church, with a strong tilt towards individualism. 

We have made so many sacrifices. “Individualism, as Cheryl Walker says, “tastes like food we’ve been hungering for.” 

And still after some time – we will also remember that if ever there was a moment to lean into the power of true community, it’s now. 

For as much as we know that initial spark of being celebrated as an individual, we also know, we remember, the deeper power of being for others. We know and we remember the power of being for the greater good, and for the future.  

We know the power of living knowing that we Inter-are.  I am of you, and you are of me.  As Thich Nhat Hahn says it.

Here we know, and we remember: we do this so that we all may live. 

So let us affirm even now, especially now: the end of the iChurch. As Fred Muir said nearly a decade ago: “That story is over; it won’t take us where we must go.  What we need for a healthy future is the Beloved Community…”

And the good news I have for you friends, is that we’re already doing it.

Right now. Look, we are wearing these masks, and we are not singing, and we are pre-registering – who would’ve ever thought Unitarians would pre-register for church?

And if you ask any one of us, do we like it, is it our preference? We’d say no way.  We hate it.  But we do it because it’s not about me, it’s about we.

The aching earth and its hurting people need us to keep declaring the end of the iChurch, and needs us to keep offering a community grounded not in individualism, but in covenant, a community grounded in the the promise of mutual trust, and support – where– no matter what comes at us next – we remain committed to life abundant, for all.

CommUUne is a space for worship, for entertainment, for edification, and for connection.

The post CommUUne: Spiritual Nourishment, Purposeful Entertainment appeared first on BeyondBelief.

The Pandora Papers … mostly demonstrates that the people that could end the secrecy of off-shore, end what’s going on, are themselves benefiting from it.

– Gerard Ryle,
Director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

This week’s featured post is “Pandemics Are Beaten By Communities, Not Individuals“.

This week everybody was talking about Congress

Some important stuff got done this week and other important stuff got delayed, but at least complete disaster was avoided for now.

in general, we’re still in the same situation I talked about last week: The public can see what has gotten done and what hasn’t gotten done. But the negotiations over the stuff that still needs doing are private, so we don’t really know what’s going to happen.

We’re talking about trillions of dollars and very important decisions, though, so everybody wants to know what’s going to happen. Consequently, commentators are speculating like mad. And that’s fine, as long as we all understand that none of us really know anything.

So I want to caution everybody not to get too spun up about Manchin and Sinema, or the Congressional Progressive Caucus, or the Democratic leadership, or President Biden, or whoever you plan to blame for whatever bad things you think are going to happen. Wait and see how it all comes out.

What got done was keeping the government running until December 3. The new fiscal year began Friday, and the government did not shut down. That seems like a relatively low hurdle, but with one of the major parties committed to sabotage, it was an accomplishment.

Beyond that, stay tuned. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warns that she will run out of wiggle room later this month if the debt ceiling isn’t raised.

The new estimate from Yellen raises the risk that the United States could default on its debt in a matter of weeks if Washington fails to act. A default would likely be catastrophic, tanking markets and the economy, and delaying payments to millions of Americans.

A bill to raise the debt ceiling passed the House but was filibustered by Republicans in the Senate last Monday. Mitch McConnell insisted that “Republicans are not rooting for … a debt limit breach.” They’re just not willing to vote to prevent one as long as a Democrat is president. Democrats did not act this way during the recent Republican administration.

And then there are the two infrastructure bills: the $1 trillion bipartisan one (which everyone is calling the BIF) that passed the Senate, and the $3.5 trillion one that Democrats want to pass via the filibuster-avoiding reconciliation process, but that Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (and a few Democrats in the House) are still not supporting.

[Note: All these numbers are over ten years, so they’re not as big as they look. We’re currently spending over $700 billion a year on defense, but we appropriate it year-by-year, so we never end up talking about a $7 trillion defense bill.]

The Manchin/Sinema faction (which isn’t very big, but doesn’t need to be with voting majorities this small) was hoping to pass the BIF first, then talk about the larger bill. So far, House progressives (with President Biden’s support) have blocked that path. (Josh Marshall points out how strangely negative the NYT’s coverage of this has been.)

Manchin wants a smaller price tag, and wants programs (free community college, for example) to be means-tested rather than general entitlements. What Sinema wants is unclear.

While I admit to not knowing any more than the other speculating commentators, I remain optimistic. All Democrats must know that they face disaster in 2022 if they can’t point to meaningful accomplishments. And whether you’re progressive or moderate, and whether you face a re-election campaign or not, you have to understand that being in the minority sucks. (If Mitch McConnell gets control of the Senate again, no one will care what Joe Manchin thinks.) So I believe they will make something happen, though I can’t predict what it will be.

Unsurprisingly, Kevin McCarthy is lying about the infrastructure bills raising middle-class taxes.

and the pandemic

This week brought a sad milestone — the 700,000th American death — but also good news: a pill that can help you get well after you’ve been infected.

Friday, Merck announced molnupiravir. (Where do they get these names? If I’d seen that word without an explanation, I’d have guessed it was a Norse weapon like Thor’s hammer.) It’s new and hasn’t been approved yet, but the results from the trials look good.

The study tracked 775 adults with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 who were considered high risk for severe disease because of health problems such as obesity, diabetes or heart disease. The results have not been reviewed by outside experts, the usual procedure for vetting new medical research.

Among patients taking molnupiravir, 7.3% were either hospitalized or died at the end of 30 days, compared with 14.1% of those getting the dummy pill. After that time period, there were no deaths among those who received the drug, compared with eight in the placebo group, according to Merck.

The breakthrough is that it’s a pill people can take at home.

All other COVID-19 treatments now authorized in the U.S. require an IV or injection. A pill taken at home, by contrast, would ease pressure on hospitals and could also help curb outbreaks in poorer and more remote corners of the world that don’t have access to the more expensive infusion therapies.

“This would allow us to treat many more people much more quickly and, we trust, much less expensively,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the research.

Experts emphasize that the best way forward is still vaccination: Prevention is better than treatment.

And like every other way to fight Covid, Merck’s pill isn’t a guarantee: 7.3% of the people who took it in the trial wound up either in the hospital or dead. (Remember: They were chosen to be a high-risk group. Your odds might be better.) So it’s best to think of molnupiravir as part of a defense-in-depth strategy: Get vaccinated. Avoid high-risk situations (like packed-in indoor crowds). Take Merck’s pill if you get sick. And if you still have to go the hospital, get monoclonal antibodies or some other IV therapy.

The other good news is that the Delta surge really does seem to have passed its peak. In spite of hitting the 700K total, deaths per day have finally started to decline. After being above 2000 per day for two weeks, they’ve now fallen to 1878 per day. New cases are averaging 106K per day, down 28% in the last two weeks.

Strangely, the states where cases are still rising are nearly all on the Canadian border: Alaska is the worst, up 54% in two weeks, but cases are also rising in North Dakota, Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Idaho, and (just slightly) in New Hampshire.

This is weird because:

• Canada isn’t seeing a big outbreak. (Cases are down 3% in two weeks.)
• There’s not a lot of transit back and forth among our northern states. The Maine-to-Idaho region is not a thing.

New York City’s vaccine mandate is working. In spite of scary stories about thousands and thousands of teachers who would lose their jobs rather than get vaccinated, large numbers are getting vaccinated at the last minute.

If you’re old enough to remember the Tea Party anti-ObamaCare protests of 2009, the current anti-mask and anti-mandate protests should look familiar: School board meetings around the country are being disrupted now, the way that congressional town-hall meetings were then, by loud people who seem to represent a upswelling of grass-roots anger. The disinformation, the over-the-top accusations of tyranny, the air of menace — it’s all pretty similar.

Coincidentally, the same people turn out to be funding and organizing it on a national level. Once again, they’re providing the disinformation and the tactics that allow a relatively small number of folks to look like a national movement.

The letter sounds passionate and personal. … But the heartfelt appeal is not the product of a grass roots groundswell. Rather, it is a template drafted and circulated this week within a conservative network built on the scaffolding of the Koch fortune and the largesse of other GOP megadonors.

The template is being distributed by the Independent Women’s Forum. But who are they, exactly?

As a nonprofit, Independent Women’s Forum is exempt from disclosing its donors and paying federal income taxes. But the group, which reported revenue of nearly $3.8 million in 2019, has drawn financial and institutional support from organizations endowed by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and his late brother, David, according to private promotional materials as well as tax records and other public statements.

Tributes to sponsors prepared for recent galas — and reviewed by The Post — recognize the Charles Koch Institute as a major benefactor. Other backers include Facebook; Dick DeVos, heir to the Amway fortune and the husband of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; and the Walton Family Foundation, a philanthropy controlled by the family that founded Walmart.

Another similarity to the Obama era: Patrician conservatives don’t care if their plebian followers die. Back then, Koch organizations campaigned to get people to refuse ObamaCare, even if they couldn’t afford health insurance without it. That campaign undoubtedly killed people, just like this one is killing people.

and the Pandora Papers

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has a new treasure trove of leaked documents outlining how the rich and powerful hide their money. You can think of this YouTube video as a trailer for the more detailed revelations that started showing up today on the ICIJ’s web site and in newspapers like The Washington Post.

I have a friend who’s been working on this project, but he’s been taking confidentiality seriously, so as of this morning I didn’t know any details.

but I want to tell you about a book

This week I read Forget the Alamo, which I found enormously entertaining.

The short version is that everything you think you know about the Alamo is wrong. The Texas Revolution wasn’t about escaping Mexican tyranny, it was about preserving slavery. Sam Houston’s army was seeded with American military “deserters”, who mostly went unpunished after they returned to their units. (That kind of resembles what Putin has been doing in eastern Ukraine.) The Alamo wasn’t a strategically significant battle where brave Texans voluntarily sacrificed their lives; William Travis just didn’t take Santa Anna’s advance seriously until it was too late to retreat. Davy Crockett didn’t go down swinging his rifle after he ran out of ammunition, as he does in the movies, but most likely surrendered and was executed. And so on.

In addition to the pure satisfaction of dispelling historical myths, the authors manage to take history seriously while still writing in an engaging style. Take this passage for example:

[Davy Crockett’s] arrival at the Alamo is one of history’s great juxtapositional flukes, as if Teddy Roosevelt or Mark Twain had darted onto the Titanic at the last minute.

In the early 1830s, Texas was where an American Southerner went after screwing up so badly that he had to disappear from somewhere else. So the backstories of all the major characters are fascinating.

After the battle, there’s the progress of the myth, which had an open field because there were no survivors to contradict tall tales. (“Ahem,” say Mexican soldiers.) What developed was what the authors call the Heroic Anglo Narrative, which served to terrorize generations of Hispanic Texan seventh-graders. (One Tejano compares “The Mexicans killed Davy Crockett” to “The Jews killed Jesus.”)

In addition to the historical detail, the book is a running meditation on the stories we tell each other, why we believe them, and what they say about us.

and you also might be interested in …

On my religious blog, I explained why “Male and female he created them” in Genesis shouldn’t be read as a divine establishment of binary gender.

The partisan hacks at the Supreme Court continue to be deeply offended that so many people think they’re partisan hacks. Samuel Alito, who continues to be my least favorite justice even after Trump’s three appointments, is the latest one to object.

Senator Whitehouse parodies Alito’s argument:

“Nope, just random that we churned out 80 partisan 5-4 decisions for Republican donors, opened dark money floodgates, crippled Voting Rights Act, unleashed partisan bulk gerrymandering, and protected corporations from court. Pure coincidence.”

Alito makes the bottom of my list due to his consistency. Other justices (Thomas, say) may at times have more bizarre opinions. But they also have ideological quirks that make them at least a little unpredictable. If you want to know where Alito will stand, though, you just need to ask three questions:

• Which side of a case increases Republican political power?
• Which side increases big business’ power over workers and consumers?
• Which side lines up best with Catholic dogma?

Unless those answers point in different directions — and they almost never do — you know what Alito’s position is.

Here in the US, we’re running into a few supply chain problems, but it’s nothing compared to what’s going on in the UK, where there is plenty of gasoline at refineries and terminals, but very little getting into people’s cars. The bottleneck seems to have something to do with all the truck drivers from various EU countries who went home after Brexit took effect.

Germany had a close election last week, and everybody is just moving on without lawsuits or riots or anything. Weird, isn’t it?

Bright red Idaho is the latest state to refute Trump’s Big Lie. A document circulated by My-Pillow-guy Mike Lindell alleged votes were switched electronically from Trump to Biden in all 44 of Idaho’s counties, and listed county-by-county what the vote totals should have been. (Why anyone would bother to perpetrate this fraud remains a mystery, since it didn’t come close to flipping the state.)

Idaho officials immediately noticed that 7 of their counties don’t have electronic vote-counting at any stage in their process, describing this as “a huge red flag” in Lindell’s claim. So they recounted the two smallest counties by hand, and found exactly the same number of Biden votes as the original count. (Trump lost a few.)

When confronted with this complete refutation of his claim, Lindell did the same thing the Cyber Ninjas did in Arizona: moved the goalposts to say that the problem was with the ballots, not the counting. “The ballots themselves are not real people.”

In spite of his somewhat snide tone, Ross Douthat makes an interesting point. From a 20-year perspective, liberals have been quite successful: Bush-style military interventionism is no longer popular, the push to limit and privatize programs like Social Security was turned back and reversed, and alternatives to one-man-one-woman sexuality are now widely accepted.

Conservative rhetoric seems to be timeless. I ran across this quote in the book Freedom: an unruly history by Annelien de Dijn (which I will say more about after I finish it). Cato the Elder, speaking in 195 BC in favor of an anti-luxury law that the women of Rome wanted to see repealed (because it specially targeted women’s jewelry), warned against allowing women to have a voice in government:

The moment they begin to be your equals, they will be your superiors.

We still hear that point today from every overprivileged class, directed at every underprivileged class. Whether the subject is women, people of color, non-Christians, gays and lesbians, non-English speakers, transfolk, or what have you, the message is the same: There’s no such thing as equality. So if men, Whites, Christians et al. stop being the masters, they’ll become the slaves.

In spite of Cato’s efforts, the Lex Oppia was repealed. But Rome never did become a matriarchy. In more than two thousand years of testing, Cato’s they’ll-take-over theory has never proved out. And yet we still hear it.

Alex Jones has lost two lawsuits filed by parents of children who died in the Sandy Hook massacre. Jones repeatedly charged on his popular InfoWars radio/YouTube show that the massacre was a “false flag operation”, and that the parents were “crisis actors” whose children did not die. In addition to causing the families emotional distress, Jones’ charges led some of his listeners to verbally abuse the parents or make threats against them.

Jones lost the lawsuits by default when he refused to cooperate with the court’s discovery process by providing documents, an action the judge described as “flagrant bad faith”. A jury will now determine the damages he owes the parents.

and let’s close with something musical

A commenter pointed out that last week’s closing wasn’t “recent” at all. The Helsinki complaint chorus video was posted in 2006, which I should have noticed. This week’s closing, “The Sounds of Starbucks” sounds like the result of a pandemic depression, but was posted in 2018.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042005/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/10-03-21-audio.mp3

We win by changing the statistics, not through an iron-clad personal defense.

Here’s what frustrates me most about the US struggle against Covid-19: the widespread attitude that rejects any partial solution, and instead demands a rock-solid personal guarantee. “If I do this and this and this, I’ll be OK.” And if that kind of assurance isn’t possible, then what’s the point?

Masks can’t offer that guarantee, unless you’re willing to walk around in a full hazmat suit. Distancing won’t do it unless you become a complete hermit. Vaccines allow breakthrough cases. Even the just-announced Merck treatment pill isn’t a complete cure: It claims to cut your risk of hospitalization in half, not eliminate it completely.

So what’s the point? No matter what I do, I’ll either catch the virus or I won’t. I’ll live or I’ll die.

The flip side of this binary attitude is a deep gullibility about snake-oil “cures”: I’m not worried about Covid, because I’ll just take hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. Or maybe I’ll prevent it by gargling iodine or something. Some guy on YouTube claims that always works.

Or maybe I’ll deny the problem completely: There is no virus. The panics at ICUs in states with low vaccination rates are all staged by “crisis actors”. Really, it’s all about government forcing us to wear masks and get shots. If they can do that, the global dictatorship is at hand.

All of this makes me despair about my former profession. I used to be a mathematician. Apparently we’ve done a really bad job teaching people how to think statistically.

You see, fundamentally an epidemic is a numbers game.

Maybe you’ve seen TV episodes where a deadly disease gets loose until a heroic scientist intuits a miracle cure: Some chemical everybody has in the garage or under the sink turns out to be a perfect antidote to whatever-it-is. You swallow a teaspoon of baking soda or something, and you’ll be fine.

The reason TV writers go for a that kind of scenario is that they need to wrap things up by the end of the hour. But it’s hardly ever how things actually work.

Maybe you’ve noticed that there’s an outbreak of Ebola in Africa every few years. One spilled over into the US briefly during the Obama administration, but they happen every now and then. The latest one was in Guinea, and it was declared over in June.

There’s still no reliable cure for Ebola. [1] And there wasn’t a vaccine until 2019. But they beat back the outbreaks — including the 2014-2016 outbreak that made it to the US — anyway. Plagues of all sorts get controlled somehow, usually without a cure.

It’s a numbers game.

So let’s talk about numbers.

During a surge in new cases, you’ll hear a lot about exponential growth, where the number of new infections doubles every so-many days: I get sick. I infect two other people. Each of them infects two other people, and so on. Before long, the ICUs are full and bodies are stacking up in the morgues.

Fortunately, though, the same dynamics can also get you exponential decay, where the number of new cases gets cut in half every so-many days.

The difference between the two scenarios can be subtle. If every 10 infected people give the virus to 11 more, you’re on an exponential growth path. But if they only give it to 9, you’re in exponential decay. [2]

That’s how a community can beat a virus without a rock-solid method of prevention or cure. So sure, masks and distancing don’t guarantee you won’t pick up an infection. Vaccination doesn’t guarantee you’ll shake it off, or even that you won’t pass it on. But if those tactics just change the odds a little bit — get those 11 new infections down to 9 — the community will beat the pandemic rather than lose to it.

That’s how we win.

Now we run into the second problem: It isn’t just that people don’t understand how to think statistically, often they don’t want to. We don’t like to think of ourselves as drops in a statistical ocean, because we are individuals. [3] The evil of modern society was summed up more than half a century ago in “Secret Agent Man“:

They’ve given you a number and taken away your name.

Conservative rhetoric in particular is tuned for me-thinking rather than we-thinking. [4] But pandemics are fundamentally statistical — they’re waves that pass through an ocean — and we beat them by acting for the common good, even if we can’t get an individual guarantee.

It’s not that you aren’t an individual, but the individualism/collectivism thing is kind of like wave/particle duality in physics. You are an individual, while simultaneously being a drop in the ocean. Whether your individuality or your membership in the community is more important depends on what question is being asked.

Pandemics are ocean-level challenges: You can’t create one by yourself, and you can’t solve one either.

We also have a bias towards all-or-nothing thinking about risk. Instinctively, we don’t want to manage risk, we want to nuke it. [5] We want to tell ourselves “Bad things can’t happen because I’m doing this” rather than “I’ve shifted the odds in my favor.”

While that kind of thinking is natural, it’s also something to be overcome, because it either incapacitates us or pushes us into denial. Every time I get into my car I risk dying in a traffic accident. I could just refuse to go anywhere, or I could deny the risk via some kind of magical thinking about my exceptional driving ability or the power of my St. Christopher medal.

Instead, I do what I can to turn the odds in my favor: I wear a seat belt. I drive carefully, and avoid getting on the highway when I’m tired or influenced by drugs.

Probably you do something similar. We know how to manage risk. We just need to do it. And if enough of us do it well enough, exponential growth turns into exponential decay.

[1] The FDA approved its first Ebola treatment in 2020. In the trial, only 33% of the people who got the drug died, compared to 51% in the control group. That’s what success looks like.

[2] I know that 11/10 isn’t 2 and 9/10 isn’t 1/2. But the weird thing about exponentials is that all the curves you get from exponents over 1 look one way, and all the curves from exponents under 1 look another way. All that changes is the scale on the time axis. In other words, the value of “so-many” in “every so-many days” changes.

[3] Except for that one guy in Life of Brian.

[4] Perversely, though, it’s often the do-your-own-research crowd that is most influenced by group-think.

Today, being pro- or anti-vaccine has become essential to many people’s social identity during the pandemic. William Bernstein, a neurologist and author of The Delusions of Crowds, pointed me to the “moral foundations” theory, which attempts to understand what motivates the decision-making of people on the right and left ends of the political spectrum.

That theory holds that, within the American right, the concepts of loyalty and betrayal are more influential to their worldview than on the American left. Staying true to your group is a powerful pull for conservatives.

“For these folks, facts mean nothing; membership and identity, everything,” Bernstein said over email. “Groupishness, in-/out-group differentiation … is much stronger on the right.”

That’s why not-getting-vaccinated or not-wearing-a-mask can become such a point of principle that people will lose their jobs or even get violent rather than comply: It’s not just the inconvenience or the relatively minor risk; it’s betraying the group they feel loyal to.

[5] The scholarly name for this is “zero-risk bias“. If you ask people what they’d be willing to pay to eliminate some low-probability high-impact risk (like toxic waste contamination in their neighborhood or a radiation leak in a nearby nuclear power plant), you’ll get one number. But if you ask what they’d be willing to pay to cut that risk in half, you’ll get a number close to zero.

People don’t want risks to shrink. They want them to go away.

It’s been a week of good news and bad news. The government didn’t shut down, but the debt ceiling is still hanging overhead, threatening a self-inflicted disaster in about two weeks. Neither infrastructure bill passed by the deadline that had been set for it, but the deadlines got extended and negotiations continue. The 700,000th American died of Covid, but a promising new treatment got announced.

There is a certain amount of water in your glass. How do you feel about it?

The featured post this week is something I’ve been meaning to say for a while. My background in mathematics for once has some relevance to a major issue: Whether we beat the pandemic or not balances on the knife-edge difference between exponential growth and exponential decay. If every 10 infected people infect 11 more, we have exponential growth. If they infect 9, exponential decay. Once you grasp that, you see the importance of tactics that change the odds — like masks and vaccines — even if they don’t guarantee your individual well-being.

That post is called “Pandemics Are Beaten By Communities, Not Individuals”. It should be out between 9 and 10 EDT.

As for the weekly summary, the focus this week is on Congress, and we’re still in the situation I outlined last week: We all desperately want to know what’s going to happen, but we just don’t. For what little it’s worth, I remain optimistic. At least the government didn’t shut down.

Elsewhere: the Covid numbers continue to turn around. The vaccine mandates are working. Alex Jones is going to have to pay the Sandy Hook parents. And I enjoyed the new book about the Alamo. The summary should be out around noon.

"Higher Love: Installation Service" (October 3, 2021) Worship Service

"The Installation Service of Senior Minister Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern"

This is a sermon (Higher Love) about where this ministry together takes us and some of what we learn along the way. Our preacher, the Rev. Elizabeth Lerner Maclay, is the Senior Minister of the First Unitarian Church of Providence, RI. Rev. Maclay has been in Providence since 2017 in a congregation that first gathered in 1720! Rev. Maclay played a central role while serving in Maryland for the successful passage of that state's Marriage Equality legislation, as well as their DREAM Act and their repeal of the death penalty. In Providence she has led the organizing of faith communities for gun control and worked during this pandemic with other faith leaders, particularly Black religious leaders, to found and co-lead Faith in Science, promoting equity of vaccine access and uptake for people of color in Rhode Island.

Shirley Gibson and Kathleen Quenneville, Members of the Search Committee that called Rev. Southern; Rohit and Leila Menezes, Rev. Southern’s husband and daughter, respectively
Dennis Adams, Worship Associate, UUSF; Rev. Elizabeth Lerner Maclay, Senior Minister, First Unitarian Church of Providence, RI; Rev. Mr. Barb Greve, Hospice Chaplain with Vitas Healthcare and former Co-Moderator of the Unitarian Universalist Association; Rochelle Fortier Nwadibia, Board of Trustees Moderator of UUSF; Harry Arthur and Max Benbow, Representatives of the Family Ministry Program; Rev. Dr. John A. Buehrens, Former President of the Unitarian Universalist Association; Rev. Alyson Jacks, Associate Minister of UUSF; Jonah Berquist, Board of Trustees Vice Moderator of UUSF; Rev. Dr. Dorsey Blake, Presiding Minister, Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples; Charles Du Mond, Co-Moderator of the Unitarian Universalist Association; Michael Pappas, M.Div., Executive Director, San Francisco Interfaith Council; Rev. Rosemary Bray-McNatt, President, The Starr King School for the Ministry; Rev. Margot Campbell Gross, Minister Emerita, UUSF; Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister, UUSF.

Eric Shackelford, Camera; Shulee Ong, Camera; Jonathan Silk, Director of Communications; Joe Chapot, Live Chat Moderator; Thomas Brown, Sexton; Dan Barnard, Facilities Manager; Judy Payne, flowers

Reiko Oda Lane, Organist & Bell Choir Director; Mark Sumner, Pianist & Music Director; Wm.; Garcia Ganz, Pianist; Andrés Vera, Cellist; Jon Silk, Drummer; UUSF Choir; UUSF Bell Choir

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111041914/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20211003ELMSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111041846/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/211003.mp3

GARY
CLF member, incarcerated in NC 

Farlow, Gary 2020-10-16 Artwork – October Walk.

Today, September 29, is my great grandmother Claudia’s birthday–she was born in 1865. I never got to meet her, but I was named for her (my middle name) and so I have felt a connection to her for quite a while. This week I was once again caught in the throes of this strange yearning obsession to try to understand the lives of my matrilineal forbears. I happened to be looking at a document about Claudia that I compiled a few years ago, and it mentioned a resource–the “General Catalogue of the Entire Montagnais Nation.” [Except the title was in Latin and the book was in French. Denis Brassard, Catalogus generalis totius Montanensium Gentis of Father Jean-Joseph Roy, 1785-1795 ]

It was a record of baptisms and other religious rites at the King’s Posts (Postes du Roi) in the Saguenay River area and North Shore of the St. Lawrence River of Quebec, in the 18th century. The Postes du Roi were the site of trading between the Innu/Montagnais and the French/British. They were also the site of missionary priests coming round to offer religious instruction and ceremonies to the Innu people. (The French called the Indigenous people of this region Montagnais, but since then, the people have reclaimed their own word, Innu.)

Claudia’s mother was Angele McLeod, and her mother was Marie-Madeleine, who was identified as “Montagnaise” in any records I had been able to find. But I had been unable to go any further back in her family, and only had estimates of her birth to be about 1789, perhaps linked to a Post du Roi. So I went looking for that book, which was available in a digital format for not so much expense. And it had a built-in translation function, which helped a lot since my French is shaky. The first half of the book was a description of how things were at the Postes du Roi. The Innu generally spent fall/winter/spring in the inland forests, hunting and gathering, and then came to the shores of the Saguenay or St. Lawrence in the summer, to fish and gather with each other. The Posts were built at these established summer gathering places to foster the fur trade, and the conversion of Innu people to Catholicism by the priests.

By searching record by record through the hundreds in the chart, I was able to find two Marie-Madeleines (Maria Magdalena) whose births were within 10 years of 1789: 1795, 1797. The Innu people did not use surnames, but rather single descriptive names, so each record included a Christian name (in Latin) and a personal name for the child in the Innu language. I found Marie Madeleine Katshisheiskueit (record #1065), and Marie Madeleine Manitukueu (record #1079). I don’t know that I will ever be able to establish a definite link between one of them and my Marie Madeleine, but one of them could be related to me. My Marie Madeleine eventually was married to Peter McLeod who worked for the King’s Posts in many places. And she was identified as Catholic, so it would be likely for her to be in these records.

Finding these names is touching a deep place in my spirit. I can’t even describe it. And deeper still, was searching out the meanings of the Innu names in the language. I was able to determine that Katshisheiskueit likely means “Hard-working/female” and her parents’ names were Antonius/ Tshinusheu which means “Northern Pike”, and Anna/ Kukuminau, which means “old woman” or “wife.” (Now the parents were only about 16 then, so likely it was an endearment, or Tshinusheu just said–“that’s my wife.”)

Manitukueu has something to do with Spirit–Manitu is the Innu word for Spirit. But I couldn’t find an exact reference. Manitushiu means someone who uses spiritual or mental power. “kueu” seems to be a common verb ending signifying something being or having. It is like detective work–and I wouldn’t be able to do any of it if I hadn’t been studying Passamaquoddy, which is related to the Innu language. Words are formed polysynthetically, with smaller parts joined together to create long descriptive concepts in one word. So I search the online Innu dictionary, with my framework of Passamaquoddy, and try to recreate what they might mean.

Manitukueu’s parent’s names were also challenging. Her father was Simeon Tshinapesuan, and the closest word I could find was something meaning “slips on a rock”, or “slippery.” Her mother was Marie Madeleine Tshuamiskuskueu, part of which meant “finding it by detecting it with body or feet.” But then I lucked out because her own birth record called it Iskamiskuskueu–which means “from Jeremy Islets,” and she was from Jeremy Islets. According to another source, this Innu name of that place meant “where you can see polar bears.” (Where you can find polar bears?) I guess I was rather far off.

So, it’s hard to trace “family trees” without surnames, but each child was listed with their parents, and by going through again searching for the parents’ names, I could find their parents too. And in fact, there were a few generations in each of their families to be found in the charts, with a lot of holding a magnifying glass over my computer screen so I could read the small letters in the charts. Much more still to do.

It is a whole world uncovered to me. And whether or not one of these women is my actual relation, this is the world she lived in, the world she came out from to enter a path that eventually would lead her daughters and granddaughters into other worlds. I never imagined that I might learn the Innu name of my great, great, great grandmother… and now there are all these names dancing in my mind, trying to form in my mouth, bringing much depth to my heart. I feel such gratitude and curiosity.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111041809/https://findingourwayhomeblog.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/claudia-tremblay.jpg

Carrie Krause, Dir. of Lifespan Faith Development

Multiplatform – Outdoors and Livestreamed on Youtube, 9:30 am

Somewhere along life’s journey, most of us in the United States are taught that staying in the lines is valued, even when those lines are strangling us as individuals and a ... read more.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111041748/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ngl_mVFEc&feature=youtu.be

A message for the 10:00 Foothills community, preached in the park on September 26th and October 3rd, 2021, the first and second Sundays in person after 18 months all online

Reading: Bluebird by Charles Bukowski

Sermon 

We were two days back after winter break when my family had our best day of pandemic school. 
 
My son was actually all online, and my daughter was technically half in person; but both of these things translated to them being at home that day. 
 
This is the funny thing about saying kids had school online for the last year – because from the perspective of our kids –their teachers were online, their classmates were online, but they were just home. 
 
My partner and I were home too, each in our own by-then well established offices and rhythms.  So that when someone texted me to turn on the real live news, on the TV, and I did, it caught the whole family’s attention.
 
Online school lessons stopped, and we all gathered round to watch history unfold in front of us. 
 
An angry mob of pro-Trump protestors had broken into the US capitol, and we were watching it all happen on live TV. Josef kept asking the question we were all asking, mom, is this really happening right now? This is real?
 
For a lot of that day, I chose my words carefully:
Yes, it’s real. They believe they’ve been lied to, that Trump was actually re-elected. 
I don’t know why the police aren’t stopping them. 
You’re right, if they weren’t mostly white, it wouldn’t be like this.
I don’t know how it will stop, I don’t understand either. 
I don’t know what will happen next.
 
To be honest, some of the time, I spoke less carefully. 
 
Still, like I said, it was the best day of pandemic school. Because watching it all, we were all learning so much – about history, and about now; about our nation, and about ourselves. 
 
Learning is actually terrible, and awful. It’s one of the earliest realizations I had in the pandemic – learning is terrible. I mean, having learned is amazing – when you’re on the other side of it all – you feel fabulous.  But when you are really learning, not just in your head - but in your whole self where you are totally discombobulated and everything about how you do anything must be re-constituted from scratch – it is so painful! 
Especially when the learning must be done quickly, because the new world is already here demanding our adaptation. 
 
Do you remember the movie Alien – and that scene where the one guy is at one minute just enjoying regular conversation and the next he’s convulsing and struggling until finally an alien comes out of his chest? 

Yeah, that’s about what I’ve realized deep learning feels like. 
 
A little bit like birthing an alien out of your chest.  
Like – who is this person I am becoming? 
What is this world I’m now in? 
And what’s all this goo I’m covered in?
 
When we think of it this way, it helps us remember that we have all been thrown into a world we don’t understand in the last 18 months, 
and we are all learning, and learning is terrible – 

Remembering this helps us stay in the place of compassion – for ourselves, and for the people around us, including the people who attacked the capitol that day in January, or for those who are having a very different understanding of the pandemic, or the vaccine, or other COVID precautions. 
 
It helps to remember that we’re all going through something big. And we all have our own story within this bigger story.  We’ve all been forced to birth an alien.  I mean, we’ve all forced to learn, and it’s been often really hard. It’s important to practice remembering, because too often instead, we’ve practiced forgetting.  
 
Too often we perform a careful amnesia that Unitarian Universalist minister Nancy McDonald Ladd describes it as performing - for ourselves, and for each other, our well-being.  
 
I mean look at us: we have all have faced multiple moments in the last 18 months where everything we knew to be true was upended, and so many of the things we turned to for comfort and courage - like working out in a gym, or dancing in a crowd, or losing yourself in live theatre, or hanging out with your grandchildren, or gathering on a Sunday in a church - all these things became non options because they were themselves the danger.  
 
But through it all, if someone asks, we’re most likely to say - I'm fine. Although my favorite answer that started last year is when someone would say I’m fine and then pause and say, I mean, pandemic fine. There’s a glimpse of the real there.  
 
But as we’ve moved into this stage of the pandemic, this stage that is still just as confusing, where we have to learn, and adapt every single day - but now I’ve stopped hearing that phrase- the performance has returned. Like, the poem: I don’t weep, do you? 
 
I read this article recently about how there’s this huge uptick in health crises from extreme dieting in the last few months – 
because we are all so desperate to ensure that it doesn’t appear the pandemic has affected us at all. The threat of climate change, the presence of wildfires, and flooding, shrug. Nah, we haven’t aged, we haven’t lost anyone, or anything, Our kids - maybe they’ve fallen behind a little but they will catch up. 
There’s no alien to see, no bluebirds.   
We’re good.  All good.    
 
I’m not judging. I do it too. 
It’s a coping technique we’ve all learned. Like somatic teacher Resmaa Menakem talks about, it’s not that we are defective by practicing this performance, we’re protective. We’re not defective, we’re protective. We’ve learned to protect ourselves by acting ok so that we could keep going.
 
I picked the poem from Charles Bukowski for today because I know that during this pandemic we’ve all had to do this. We’ve had to find ways to survive.  And some of those ways have required us to push aside what was really happening - because we just had to keep going.
 
Like the song that came out last October, from The Bengsons, the Keep Going On Song - if you haven’t listened yet and don’t know it, maybe turn it on on your way home, or when you get home.  The refrain of the song is simple - it just goes: Keep going keep going keep going on song. Keep going keep going keep going on.
 
We have all found our ways to keep going. It’s how you are all here, now.  We have found ways to protect ourselves enough so that we could keep going.  Especially in the isolation of the pandemic, the isolation we experienced, and that we watched our kids, and our youth experience. 
 
We’ve had to compartmentalize some or a lot of what is true in order to keep going. Like in the poem, he says to the bluebird: “Stay down, do you want to mess me up? Do you want to screw up my work?” 
 
We should be proud of our survival, and give thanks to our bodies and our minds for bringing us through. 

And, we also know that this perpetual performance we’ve practiced has a cost. Over time, when keep cutting ourselves off - we lose the language and the skills and the strength to deal with what’s really real - we forget how to be honest with ourselves, let alone with others. We cut connection off with the reality in ourselves, and we cut connection off with others.  

We numb pain, as Brene Brown reminds us - which means we are also numbing joy.  

And all this practice does not mean that the things we aren’t dealing with go away - more like, they go underground, become sub-conscious. 
 
More likely than not, these things end up guiding our lives and our actions in ways that we don’t even realize.  As Richard Rohr says, “pain that is not transformed is transmitted.” When we don’t heal pain, we pass it on to others. And you can’t heal pain you practice not seeing, you can’t heal pain you’re avoiding or numbing yourself from. You can’t learn the lessons, you can’t metabolize the experience - birth the alien, or set the bird free - because all your energy is going into that protection, that performance.  
 
Post pandemic, where we understand the idea of “transmission” at a whole new level - the idea that pain that is not transformed is transmitted - takes on a whole new power. 
Doesn’t it seem really clear that we are living world shaped by untransformed pain? That pain is the real superspreader? 
 
Which means that for as much as the vaccine is the way to heal the virus, the only way we’re really going to heal what’s going on in our world today - all the forces that led to those events at the capitol - and so many other things we’ve gotten through in our time - is birth the alien - learn the lessons, I mean tend to the pain.  
 
The pain in ourselves, in others. The pain from the last 18 months, the pain in our country, and the pain that has been passed on generationally – and bring it in as a regular part of our story about what it means to be human, what it means to live a human life – here in Fort Collins Colorado, in the 18th month of a global pandemic.  We need to practice remembering rather than forgetting.  We need to stop the keeping going on, the pushing through. We need to practice staying put with life as it really is - and holding, and metabolizing it.  And we need to do this together.  We can only do this together. 
 
It’s one of the main reasons we are so excited about this pod experiment, and our return to in person church.  Because it’s one of the main things we can and will do together. It’s what church is really about.  Here we help each other birth the alien.  And set the bluebird free. 
 
The bluebird is probably a better image than the alien, right? A better way to talk about what we’re doing when we are learning.  This work of deep change where we are adapting to a profoundly changing world.   
 
Because this work is so disruptive, and scary, and painful - just like a bird that comes close in always is! - but it is also beautiful. 
 
Learning like this offers us something so entirely new that it threatens our whole existence, but it is also a life unto itself.  
 
And these things are true about this world, this reality.  
All that we are holding at bay, all we have practiced holding at bay, it is so disruptive, and scary, so overwhelming - but it also contains the seeds of a new life that calls to us to pay attention, and to listen.  It calls us to release the protective performance and the forgetting, and instead remember ourselves, remember each other, stop transmitting all this untransformed pain.  

Set the bird free, and let’s heal.  

For any who remain insistent on an audit in order to satisfy the many people who believe that the election was stolen, I’d offer this perspective: No congressional audit is ever going to convince these voters — particularly when the President will continue to say that the election was stolen. The best way we can show respect for the voters who are upset is by telling them the truth. That’s the burden, that’s the duty of leadership. The truth is that President-elect Biden won the election. President Trump lost.

– Senator Mitt Romney (1-6-2021)

This week’s featured post is “The Big Lie Refuses to Die“.

This week everybody was talking about the $3.5 trillion question

I’ve been resisting writing about the Democrats’ intra-party negotiations over the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package that is supposed to supplement the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed the Senate in August.

While the issue is definitely important enough to deserve attention, the root of my resistance is that nobody really knows anything, and yet there is massive amounts of speculation about what might be happening. Maybe Joe Manchin is torpedoing the whole Biden agenda. Or maybe progressives are. Or maybe one side or the other is about to cave in. Maybe Biden is a legislative wizard who has it all under control, or maybe he’s an addled senior citizen in over his head.

It’s all speculation.

Here’s what little we know: The bipartisan bill passed the Senate in regular order, with enough Republican votes to overcome a filibuster. In terms of policy, the Democrats in the House agree that it ought to pass. But it leaves out a large number of progressive (and Biden) priorities. (The one that is most important to me is climate change.) So progressives in the House threaten not to pass the bipartisan bill if the Senate won’t pass the larger bill. No Senate Republicans support the larger bill, so it will have to pass through reconciliation (if at all), and all 50 Democrats are needed.

Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema have objected to the size of that bill, but so far have not made a counteroffer. Democratic moderates in the House had previously gotten Speaker Pelosi to commit to a vote on the bipartisan bill today, but that vote has been postponed to Thursday.

Midnight Thursday is the end of the federal government’s fiscal year, the annual witching hour when any shit not yet dealt with reaches the fan. So the government could shut down Friday, and the country might hit its debt limit shortly thereafter. In other words: a completely self-inflicted disaster of global significance.

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe any of that will happen. I think Democrats will get something together, and two sizeable infrastructure bills will pass, with most of what all sides want included. The government will not shut down, and the debt limit will be pushed back to set up some future apocalypse. (We can’t just get rid of it, because …)

I believe this because I don’t think any Democrat in Congress benefits from sabotaging the whole Biden agenda and setting the party up for a massive 2022 defeat. I also don’t believe any of the Democrats — Manchin and Sinema included — are the kinds of loose cannons Republican leaders sometimes have to deal with. I’m also not afraid of Republicans getting some advantage out of the debt-limit battle. In the 2022 campaign, I don’t believe anybody will remember or care that this time around it was the Democrats who pushed back the limit without Republican help. (I also don’t believe voters will punish Republicans for their irresponsibility, although they should.)

As I said previously, though, I don’t know. Maybe I’m too optimistic. But I’m heartened by the account in Peril of the passage of Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in March. Manchin also had problems with that, and negotiations went down to the wire. But he ultimately voted for it. The picture Woodward and Costa paint is that Manchin has to maintain his moderate image in West Virginia and separate himself from liberals like Bernie Sanders and AOC, but that he also doesn’t want to be the guy who causes Biden’s presidency to fail.

I’m not counting on Biden to be an LBJ-style wheeler-dealer, but I think he will keep all the Democrats calm enough to recognize that failure benefits none of them.

Josh Marshall points out a piece of journalistic malpractice: Progressives and moderates are often presented as rival-but-equivalent factions fighting for their rival-but-equivalent proposals, when actually Democrats are pretty much united except for Manchin, Sinema, and a handful of folks in the House.

What Manchin et al are having trouble swallowing isn’t Bernie Sanders’ bill. (Sanders, if you remember, wanted a $6 trillion package.) It’s President Biden’s bill.

and the Arizona election audit

That’s the subject of the featured post. Short version of the report written by Trumpist Cyber Ninjas: The ballots were counted accurately. But Biden won, so there must be something wrong with the ballots themselves.

and Haitian immigrants

The images of men on horseback chasing down dark-skinned people, and of 14,000 immigrants camped under the Del Rio Bridge in Texas have sparked intense reactions from both the pro- and anti-immigration factions.

The current wave was started by a major earthquake in August, but Haitians have been trying to enter the US for one reason or another for a long time. And one US administration after another has been trying to keep them out. Vox has a worthwhile article about the unique aspects of our Haitian immigration policies.

and Peril

The book Peril (that last week’s post “Seven Days in January” was indirectly based on) came out Tuesday, and I rushed to read it. I didn’t find any major surprises: The incidents discussed in the pre-publication articles are pretty much the way they’ve been described.

Woodward and Costa leave readers to guess who the source is for each scene. In general, if the book tells us what somebody was thinking at the time, you have to assume that person is the source for the whole incident (though possibly various other people were also consulted). If the book follows one character through a series of scenes, I assume that person is the source. (In the case of somebody like Mike Pence, I suppose it’s possible that a right-hand-man is the source. But even then, I doubt that person would talk in such detail without the approval of his former boss.) If one person seems reasonable and everyone else in the room is crazy, probably we’re hearing the account of the reasonable person. (I know I describe a lot of my experiences that way.)

General Milley is pretty obviously the source for the incidents that involve him. Senators Mike Lee and Lindsey Graham are clearly sources. Pence’s national security advisor Keith Kellogg was a source, and probably Pence himself. (Kellogg apparently roamed the White House pretty freely.) A bunch of people in the Biden campaign. And so on.

The closer you get to Trump himself, the fuzzier the sourcing gets, as if sources asked for more protection. Ivanka and Jared? Mark Meadows? Hard to say. Unless you believe that Woodward and Costa made stuff up out of nothing (and I don’t), it’s clear somebody talked.

A phone conversation that Milley had with Speaker Pelosi after January 6 occurs early in the book and got a lot of press. When you read it in the full context of the book, the striking thing isn’t that Milley and Pelosi both think Trump is crazy. The striking thing is how they talk about his instability. You could imagine people around Trump coming to the shocking insight that the President is dangerously unmoored. But this conversation is nothing like that. It’s more like: We always knew he was crazy, but we had hoped he was manageable.

As the book goes on, it’s appalling how many people had such conversations. I’m left with the impression that no one with a chance to view Trump close up was actually surprised that he would start raving about imaginary election-stealing conspiracies, or that he would try to bring down American democracy rather than give up power. They had hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but they weren’t actually surprised.

Lots of Republicans appear to have known, earlier or later in the process, that the election-fraud claims were bogus. Their silence is stunning. Even the ones who spoke up at one time or another have mostly shut up about it.

The lack of concern for the country is horrifying. Mitch McConnell had two chances to get rid of Trump through impeachment, and protected him both times. To this day, Republicans who know what he really is are going along with him.

and the pandemic

Once again, new-case numbers seem to be topping out, but the turn-around is slow. The seven-day average is 120K per day, down from a recent peak of 175K on September 13. Hospitalizations have also turned around nationally, though they’re still surging in some areas. Deaths are holding steady at just over 2000 per day.

Hospitals in Idaho and Alaska have instituted “crisis standards of care“, which is a fancy way of saying that they’re so swamped they can’t get to everybody.

Alaska this past week joined Idaho in adopting statewide crisis standards of care that provide guidance to health care providers making difficult decisions on how to allocate limited resources. Several hospitals in Montana have either activated crisis standards of care or are considering it as the state is pummeled by COVID-19.

Under the guidelines, providers can prioritize treating patients based on their chances of recovery, impacting anyone seeking emergency care, not just those with COVID-19. …

Typically, crisis standards of care involve a scoring system to determine the patient’s survivability, sometimes including their estimated “life years” and how well their organs are working.

Back in 2009, Republicans fighting ObamaCare warned about “death panels” that might decide old people weren’t worth saving. That didn’t happen then, but vaccine resistance is causing it to happen now.

Vaccine mandates are being tested this week, as deadlines are looming in New York and some other states. Thousands of health-care and nursing-home workers are pushing to the limit: New York says they have until midnight tonight to get vaccinated, or they’ll lose their jobs. If they hold out and are let go, care might suffer in some places. But if they remain unvaccinated and keep their jobs, care suffers in a different way.

you also might be interested in …

Germany’s 16-year Angela Merkel era ended yesterday with a federal election in which she was not a candidate. The Social Democrats appear to have won the most seats in the Bundestag, surpassing Merkel’s Christian Democrats. No party has a majority, though, so a coalition will have to be negotiated.

Among the minor parties, the Greens gained seats and the right-wing nationalist Alliance for Germany lost some.

More dramatic stories about infrastructure and debt-ceiling negotiations have drawn attention away from the collapse of negotiations over police reform. The House has already passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, but police reform is yet another casualty of the filibuster in the Senate.

Right-wing Congresswoman Lauren Boebert used campaign funds to pay rent and utilities, a violation of the law. Will something be done? It’s not clear yet.

A former Washington Post arts editor returned to her roots in rural Illinois, and moved into what she remembers as her grandmother’s house in Kinderhook. It’s been challenging to live in Trump country, where only 23% are vaccinated.

My family might go back four generations here, but we are outsiders. We are the “them.”

and let’s close with something musical

A recent trend on YouTube is for choirs around the world to set local complaints to music. Here is the Helsinki Complaints Choir.

Sharon Wylie

Continue reading "How to Keep Your Minister: A Guide for the Thoughtful Layperson"

The Arizona audit’s re-affirmation of Biden’s victory ought to finish off Trump’s stolen-election hoax. But it hasn’t.

The Cyber-Ninjas “forensic audit” of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona finally reported its findings, only four months later than planned. Guess what? Biden won.

“The ballots that were provided to us to count in the coliseum very accurately correlate with the official canvass numbers,” Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan said during the presentation. He noted that the hand recount found President Joe Biden gaining 99 votes in Maricopa County and former President Donald Trump losing 261 votes — which he called “very small discrepancies.”

So there you have it: Not even vote-counters completely biased in Trump’s favor could come up with a way to claim he won in Arizona. The Cyber Ninjas hired by the Republican majority in the state senate tested the Maricopa County voting machines that were supposed to be haunted by the ghost of Hugo Chavez, looked for evidence of fake ballots shipped in from South Korea (or maybe China), and pursued every other lunatic theory of how Democrats could have stolen the state for Biden. They came up with nothing.

Biden won.

Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chair Jack Sellers, a Republican, summed up:

This means the tabulation equipment counted the ballots as they were designed to do, and the results reflect the will of the voters. That should be the end of the story. Everything else is just noise.

But it’s not the end of the story, and Trump’s noise continues. The Great Steal has become dogma inside his personality cult, so inconvenient facts must be trimmed to fit.

Just asking questions. The quote from Chief Ninja Logan hints (if you listen closely) at the direction the conspiracy theory goes next: “the ballots that were provided to us” were counted properly, and show a Biden win. But what if some number of those ballots were cast illegally by people not entitled to vote? Or by legal voters who messed up in some way that should have allowed Republicans to disqualify them?

After all these months, Logan can’t point to any specific ballots that fit those descriptions. But what if? And what if those speculatively dubious ballots are all Biden votes? Then maybe Trump really should have won Arizona — and maybe Georgia and Pennsylvania as well. Maybe he should still be president, even without an insurrection.

That’s why a large chunk of the Ninjas’ report is devoted to casting doubt on “the ballots that were provided to us”, using the technique Tucker Carlson has made famous: Raise questions without doing even the simplest legwork to answer them, and then imply that there are no answers or even that powerful people don’t want you to ask.

Robert Graham of the Errata Security blog comments:

[The Cyber Ninjas] are overstretching themselves to find dirt, claiming the things they don’t understand are evidence of something bad.

Elizabeth Howard of the Brennan Center for Justice expressed the same idea in different words.

They’re desperately trying to suggest that what are routine procedures are suspicious, because they don’t have election administration experience or knowledge.

And precisely because the Ninjas lacked so much experience and knowledge, the “things they don’t understand” were many, and even humorous at times.

The most inflammatory allegations came from [Ben] Cotton, who claimed he discovered that thousands of files had been deleted from election department servers, and that several pieces of election equipment had been connected to the internet. 

One internet-connected device Cotton specifically named was REWEB1601, which Maricopa County’s twitter account explained very simply.

REWEB1601 (as you might gather from the naming convention) connects to the internet because it is the server for http://recorder.maricopa.gov. This is not the election system. We shouldn’t have to explain this.

And the deleted files? That wasn’t very sinister either.

CLAIM: Election management database purged

BOTTOM LINE: This is misleading. Nothing was purged. Cyber Ninjas don’t understand the business of elections. We can’t keep everything on the EMS server because it has storage limits. We have data archival procedures for our elections and @MaricopaVote archived everything related to the November election on backup drives. So everything still exists.

Oh, but what about the people voting multiple times in different counties?

Cyber Ninjas said it found thousands of voters who potentially voted twice in Arizona. The company came to this conclusion because it found 5,047 voters with the same first, middle and last name and birth year as people who voted in other counties.

“Bottom line,” the county wrote in a tweet in response, “There are more than 7 million people in Arizona and, yes, some of them share names and birth years. To identify this as a critical issue is laughable.”

Dead voters? Sometimes living people fill out a ballot, mail it, and then die before Election Day. Sometimes computer searches confuse the dead John Smith Sr. with the living John Smith Jr. of the same address, who voted. It’s not fraud. Voters who have moved? If they went to college, joined the military, or decamped to a vacation home from which they plan to return, their vote is still legal. And so on.

In short, the Cyber Ninjas found the kind of “suspicious” ballots that appear in every election everywhere. What they didn’t find was the slightest evidence of fraud.

The Romney prophesy fulfilled. When questioned, the Republican promoters of these partisan “audits” say they’re simply responding to widespread doubt about the integrity of the 2020 election, and that the point is to restore public faith in our democracy — ignoring their party’s (and often their own) role in raising those doubts in the first place by spreading lies.

The model here is the disingenuous justification Ted Cruz and ten other senators gave last January for objecting to the certification of the Electoral College vote.

A fair and credible audit — conducted expeditiously and completed well before January 20 — would dramatically improve Americans’ faith in our electoral process and would significantly enhance the legitimacy of whoever becomes our next President. We owe that to the People.

These are matters worthy of the Congress, and entrusted to us to defend. We do not take this action lightly. We are acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it. And every one of us should act together to ensure that the election was lawfully conducted under the Constitution and to do everything we can to restore faith in our Democracy.

Mitt Romney had the right response back on January 6:

For any who remain insistent on an audit in order to satisfy the many people who believe that the election was stolen, I’d offer this perspective: No congressional audit is ever going to convince these voters — particularly when the President will continue to say that the election was stolen. The best way we can show respect for the voters who are upset is by telling them the truth. That’s the burden, that’s the duty of leadership.

The truth is that President-elect Biden won the election. President Trump lost.

This week’s events proved Romney right. After the Arizona audit report leaked, 2020 Loser Donald Trump did continue to say the election was stolen.

The leaked report conclusively shows there were enough fraudulent votes, mystery votes, and fake votes to change the outcome of the election 4 or 5 times over. There is fraud and cheating in Arizona and it must be criminally investigated!

And his allies were still not convinced of his loss. At a rally in Georgia Saturday, Trump rehearsed a litany of false claims about fraud in Arizona. And then his endorsed candidate for secretary of state said “Nobody understands the disaster of the lack of election integrity like the people of Georgia. Now is our hour to take it back.” His lieutenant governor candidate said “I can assure you if I’d been our Lieutenant Governor, we would have gotten to the bottom of this thing.”

And the crowd cheered.

Undeterred by the objective failure of the Cyber Ninjas to either find fraud or restore confidence, Trumpists continue to push the Arizona-like audits that are either proposed or already underway in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and even Texas (which Trump won, but by a margin that presages future trouble for Republicans unless they do a better job suppressing the non-white vote).

In each case, Republicans claim to be “restoring confidence” in elections by responding to “doubts” about the accuracy of the 2020 outcome — doubts that they caused themselves by spreading lies. Already, we can anticipate the ninja-like outcome: reports that find no hard evidence of any miscount or fraud, but continue to “raise questions” based on nothing.

It’s almost like sowing doubt is the intention.

The goal: destabilizing democracy. WaPo’s Greg Sargent raises that issue explicitly:

Oozing with unctuously phony piety, Republicans told us again and again and again that this audit was merely about allaying the doubts of voters who have lost confidence in our elections, a specter that Republicans have widely used to justify voting restrictions everywhere.

But, now that this audit “confirmed” Biden’s win, it is still telling us that we should doubt our outcomes, and that more voting restrictions are necessary to allay those doubts. Why, it’s almost as if that was the real point all along!

The Atlantic’s David Graham points to the damage done: Whatever the outcome of the Arizona “fraudit”, its mere existence kept the stolen-election story going for five more months. The implication that there really was something to investigate (and that maybe there still is) lives on. Millions of low-information voters are left with the vague impression that there is something inherently hinky about election returns from big cities with lots of non-white voters.

The goal was to substantiate a new consensus Republican belief that Democrats cannot win elections legitimately, and that any victory they notch must be somehow tainted. It is not a coincidence that the places where audits have focused are those, like Maricopa County, or Harris County, Texas, or Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, with high levels of minority voters, who can be disparaged—mostly implicitly, but occasionally more directly—as illegitimate participants in the polity. Trump has been the foremost proponent of the theory, but he’s been joined by eager sycophants, demagogues, and conspiracists.

As for where this is going, neo-conservative thought-leader Robert Kagan presented an ominous vision in “Our Constitutional Crisis is Already Here“, where he predicted

a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.

Kagan foresees Trump running again in 2024, being nominated, and staging a better coup next time.

Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.

Trump’s attempt to overrule the voters in 2020 may have failed, but not by much, and it was not thwarted by institutional safeguards.

Trump came close to bringing off a coup earlier this year. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials with notable courage and integrity, and the reluctance of two attorneys general and a vice president to obey orders they deemed inappropriate. These were not the checks and balances the Framers had in mind when they designed the Constitution, of course, but Trump has exposed the inadequacy of those protections.

Contrary to John Adams, the Republic was saved in 2020 not by laws, but by individuals. And those brave individuals are being replaced.

[T]he amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. [1]

In the end, the “forensic audit” movement isn’t about overturning 2020 any more: The deeper purpose is to “raise questions” about elections and about democracy in general, so that fewer people will be able or willing to take a principled stand against the Coup of 2024.

[1] The point of that shift is that gerrymandering insulates Republican majorities in key state legislatures from the voters. In Pennsylvania, for example, the Democratic voting majority that carried the state for Biden has also elected a Democratic governor and secretary of state. But the legislature is well fortified against the will of the People.

So yet another counting of the votes in Arizona — this one by the openly pro-Trump Cyber Ninjas — showed that Biden won. But Trump continues to claim fraud, and his GOP allies still demand similar “audits” in other other states he lost — and even in Texas, where he won by less than previous Republican candidates.

Ostensibly, the audit was going to resolve the doubts — one way or the other — about Arizona’s 2020 election. But instead, the report doubled down on the “raising questions” tactic that undermined faith in the election in the first place. It’s almost like tearing down democracy was the point all along.

So I’ll examine that in the featured post “The Big Lie Refuses to Die”, which should be out between 9 and 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will discuss the increasingly clear picture of Trump’s coup attempt, the Haitian refugees at the border, the agonizingly slow turn-around of the pandemic’s Delta surge, Germany’s election, and a few other things. Look for it around noon.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111041652/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/09-26-21-audio.mp3

"Enough is Enough: The Inflation of Satisfied and the Risks" (September 26, 2021) Worship Service

In the stories of people I know, their children's stories, in what I see in the world, with dire consequences to the planet and to our mental health, I see the inflation of "enough" and I don't just mean in material terms. I mean in all kinds of ways. Let me give examples and let's look at what that might be doing to us and what can be done about it.

Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister; Wonder Dave, Worship Associate; Sam Hamner, Small Group Ministry; Allen Biggs, percussionist; Ben Rudiak-Gould, songleader; Mark Sumner, pianist

Eric Shackelford, camera; Shulee Ong, camera; Jonathan Silk, OOS Design & sound; Joe Chapot, live chat moderator; Amy Kelly, flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111041626/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210926VRSSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111041527/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210926.mp3

At a time when American families, communities, and businesses are still suffering from the effects of the ongoing global pandemic, it would be particularly irresponsible to put the full faith and credit of the United States at risk.

– Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen,
urging Congress to raise the debt ceiling before October

This week’s featured post is “Seven Days in January“.

This week everybody was talking about General Milley

He’s the subject of the featured post.

and the California recall election

It was not close. With 84% of the expected vote counted (a lot is still in the mail, I imagine), only 37% voted to recall Governor Gavin Newsom, and 63% voted not to recall him. That’s similar to the margin Joe Biden had over Donald Trump in California in 2020 (63%-34%), and Newsom’s original margin in 2018 (62%-38%).

The original theory of the recall was that anti-Newsom Republicans would be motivated to vote, while Newsom-supporting Democrats would be apathetic. Republicans also hoped for a popular rejection of Newsom’s aggressive approach to fighting Covid (vaccine mandates for state employees and health-care workers). Neither of these ideas panned out. In particular, exit polls showed 47% saying Newsom’s coronavirus policies were “about right”, with another 18% saying “not strict enough”.

Bizarrely, both Trump and leading GOP replacement candidate Larry Elder claimed that the results were fraudulent before there were any results. The day before the election, Elder’s web site said

statistical analyses used to detect fraud in elections held in 3rd-world nations (such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran) have detected fraud in California resulting in Governor Gavin Newsom being reinstated as governor.

as if the recall’s failure — and its vote-patterns — had already been known before any votes were counted. Former state GOP chair Ron Nehring called the statement “grossly irresponsible” and speculated that Elder’s claim may have discouraged Republicans from voting. (Why vote if the election has already been decided by fraud?)

The election threw a spotlight on California’s strange recall process, which can allow a replacement candidate to squeak into office with a tiny slice of the vote. For example, if we count all the No votes on recall as votes for Newsom, then Newsom has 6.8 million votes counted, while top replacement vote-getter Elder has only 2.8 million. It is not hard to construct a scenario in which a sitting governor has the support of 49% of the electorate, but gets replaced by someone with 25% support or less.

BTW, Elder’s total is being reported as 47%, but that’s only 47% of the people who voted for a replacement candidate. His 2.8 million votes is only 26% of the 10.6 million ballots cast.

The recall is an extreme example of the GOP’s nationwide election strategy: Rather than look for a 2022 candidate moderate enough to compete for a majority of votes in a California governor’s race, Republicans opted to manipulate a process that could allow an extreme conservative to gain power without a majority.

CNN correspondent Josh Campbell:

It was interesting how many California voters I spoke with at the polls said the Texas abortion ban motivated them to come out and vote against the recall of their governor.

Democrats are also counting on the abortion issue to work in their favor in Virginia, which has a gubernatorial election in November.

and the pandemic

Nationwide, the surge seems to be turning around, but the more specific story is that it’s shifting. The current wave started in the Ozark region of Missouri/Arkansas, moved south to the Gulf coast, and now has shifted northeast into the Appalachian region. The most dangerous part of the country right now is Kentucky/Tennessee/West Virginia, where new cases per 100K people are in the vicinity of 100, compared to 45 nationwide.

As a Northeasterner, I worry that the surge is still coming my way: The next likely destination for the wave is central Pennsylvania, where vaccination rates are still below 30% in some counties.

New-infection numbers are also high in rural counties in the mountain West and in Alaska, though their populations are too small to have much influence on the national totals.

Death totals, which tend to lag behind infections, continue to rise nationwide. That average is now over 2000 deaths per day. The peak death totals were around 3300 per day in mid-January, when hardly anyone was vaccinated yet. When you consider how many people are vaccinated now (54% of the total population, including 83% of the most vulnerable over-65 age group), and how effectively the vaccines have prevented death (New Hampshire reported this week that only 24 of its 413 deaths since January 20 have been fully vaccinated people.), it is scary to imagine how many deaths we’d be having if the Delta variant had hit before we had vaccines.

Previously, the Biden administration had been proposing that all recipients of the Pfizer Covid vaccine (like me) get a third booster shot at some point. Friday, a CDC advisory panel endorsed that idea only for people over 65 (me in another month) and those at special risk.

“It’s likely beneficial, in my opinion, for the elderly, and may eventually be indicated for the general population. I just don’t think we’re there yet in terms of the data,” said Dr. Ofer Levy, a vaccine and infectious disease specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Boosters for the other vaccines are under consideration, but the data hasn’t been analyzed yet.

A poll by Fox News (of all people) shows the public getting behind anti-Covid measures like vaccine and mask mandates in ever-increasing numbers.

and a dress

Sometimes I agree with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and sometimes I don’t, but I am consistently in awe of her political talent. If you’re looking for traditional skills, she can give a speech or grill a witness with the best of them. But she can also tweet and troll and manipulate public attention in all the 21st-century ways.

The dress she wore to the Met Gala (an annual high-priced fund-raiser for the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art) was one of the great political stunts. Ordinarily, the Met Gala is a contest in which celebrities dress up to compete for a fairly small amount of attention. (I don’t remember what anybody wore to previous Met Galas. Do you?) AOC didn’t just win that contest this year, she blew past the usual bounds of the event, so that people who ordinarily pay no attention to the Gala are talking about her. And she connected that attention to a popular political slogan: Tax the Rich.

You might be thinking: OMG, she walked into conservative criticism for hypocrisy. (I mean, what’s a socialist doing at a $35,000-a-ticket event anyway?) If so, you don’t understand the current political culture: In order to really command attention, you need to bait your enemies into attacking you in over-the-top ways that force your allies to defend you. That back-and-forth seizes center stage in a way that an unimpeachable statement never could. Trump pioneered the technique in 2016, and so reduced Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio to playing minor roles in his drama. Marjorie Taylor Greene has learned from the master, catapulting herself from obscurity to national prominence.

Among Democrats, only AOC seems to understand how this works. The Tucker Carlsons and Laura Ingrahams can’t get her out of their heads, so she can never be out of the spotlight for long.

BTW, she has good answers to the various questions that have been raised: Like other New York political leaders, she was invited to the gala and did not pay $35K to get in. The dress was borrowed from the designer, a woman of color, who also got significant positive attention from AOC’s stunt.

Finally, given all the attention paid to what women in politics wear, I appreciated seeing AOC turn that attention to her advantage. All those people who were going to stare at her butt anyway could stare at “Tax the Rich”.

An aside: Remember back in 2008 how Republicans went on and on about how hot Sarah Palin was?

and here’s a concept more people should know about

Disney Princess theology. This comes from Erna Kim Hackett’s essay “Why I Stopped Talking About Racial Reconciliation and Started Talking About White Supremacy”.

White Christianity suffers from a bad case of Disney Princess theology. As each individual reads Scripture, they see themselves as the princess in every story. They are Esther, never Xerxes or Haman. They are Peter, but never Judas. They are the woman anointing Jesus, never the Pharisees. They are the Jews escaping slavery, never Egypt.

For citizens of the most powerful country in the world, who enslaved both Native and Black people, to see itself as Israel and not Egypt when studying Scripture is a perfect example of Disney princess theology. And it means that as people in power, they have no lens for locating themselves rightly in Scripture or society — and it has made them blind and utterly ill-equipped to engage issues of power and injustice. It is some very weak Bible work.

I am reminded of something a religious educator at my church once told me: Lots of articles tell you what you should do if your kid is being bullied at school. But hardly any articles address the possibility that your kid is the bully.

You can see a lot of Disney Princess thinking in the way some Christian churches have responded to Covid: Everything is a plot to oppress them, because they are the center of the Universe. Shutting churches wasn’t a byproduct of a reasonable effort to limit crowds, shutting churches was the point! If the government can send people door-to-door to promote vaccines, it can send them door-to-door to confiscate Bibles!

Why should American Christians imagine that anybody wants to confiscate their Bibles? (I have literally never heard anybody propose confiscating Bibles. Even the atheist equivalent of “locker room talk” doesn’t go there.) Because telling the story that way makes them the damsels in distress, when actually they are the villains preventing America from beating this virus.

The Christian anti-vaxxers aren’t the faithful Israelites, they’re the Israelites who complained about manna.

and the Durham investigation finally produced an indictment

Thursday Special Counsel John Durham indicted Michael Sussman, a cybersecurity attorney for the Perkins Coie law firm. The indictment revolves around internet traffic that appeared to imply some back-channel between the 2016 Trump campaign and Putin-connected Alfa Bank. Sussman told the FBI about the traffic and its possible implications, which never panned out. (The Mueller Report, for example, doesn’t mention Alfa Bank.)

During his meeting with the FBI, the indictment says, Sussman claimed not to be representing a client, but simply providing the information as a good citizen concerned about national security. But Perkins Coie represented the Clinton campaign, and Sussman had billed time spent investigating Trump’s Russia connection. The indictment says Sussman lied to the FBI, and was in fact representing Clinton at the time, in an attempt to get the FBI investigating Trump. Sussman has pleaded not guilty; he denies that he said he was not working for a client, and claims he was actually representing a different client at the FBI meeting.

Major editorial pages split on how significant this indictment is. The Wall Street Journal says Durham has “cracked the Russia case” and “delivered on RussiaGate“. The Washington Post disagrees:

This, to put it mildly, is not the confirmation of some broad 2016 deep-state conspiracy against Mr. Trump that the former president apparently desired.

After all, Trump often said Durham’s counter-investigation of the Trump/Russia investigation would uncover “the greatest political crimes in the history of our country” and lead to indictments of Obama and Biden, not to mention high-level co-conspirators like James Comey. There’s no sign of any of that in this indictment.

Reading the indictment itself, I can’t decide whether Durham’s case is weak or he is just a bad writer. The indictment paints a picture of Sussman working with a tech-company executive and various others to research cyber-connections between Trump and Russia. It is clear that the people involved were doing opposition research against Trump. Some worked for the Clinton campaign, while others were acting out of partisan sentiment, without any professional interest. What’s missing is anything sinister: The researchers do not appear to have invented the Alfa Bank data, for example. The larger importance of what they did is also iffy: They gave the FBI a lead that didn’t go anywhere.

From Trump’s point of view, the ultimate goal of the Durham investigation was to show that the Trump/Russia investigation was a hoax from the beginning. This indictment does not do that.

What’s more, nothing Durham turns up could possibly do that, because Trump did in fact collude with Russia. His campaign manager (Paul Manafort) was passing confidential campaign information to a Russian agent. Manafort himself was a longtime contractor for Putin-connected oligarchs, to the tune of many millions of dollars. Roger Stone was involved somehow in WikiLeaks’ release of the Russian-hacked Clinton campaign emails. Don Jr. met with Russians to solicit Russian “dirt” on Clinton.

And the reason we don’t know more about these Trump/Russian channels is that Trump obstructed Mueller’s investigation of them, not the least by signalling to Manafort and Stone that they could count on pardons, which they ultimately received.

and you also might be interested in …

The demonstration in support of the January 6 insurrectionists fizzled Saturday. CNN’s Ana Navarro-Cárdenas quipped: “More people showed up to my last garage sale.”

Russia had parliamentary elections Friday to Sunday, and Putin’s United Russia Party appears to have won. The opposition to Putin operated under severe constraints, with many opposition leaders in jail, the media effectively under control of the government, and numerous fake candidates running to split the anti-Putin vote.

The opposition compiled a list of the most viable challengers in every district, but of course the government did its best to prevent distribution. The saddest and most reprehensible part of this story is that Apple and Google gave in to Putin and removed an opposition app from their app stores.

The Emmys were announced last night.

We might be headed towards another debt ceiling crisis. Democrats don’t want to push a debt-ceiling increase through on their own, and Mitch McConnell is refusing to cooperate. Something has to happen before the end of October.

As I’ve said many times, having a debt ceiling separate from the ordinary appropriation process is ridiculous. If Congress approves a budget with a deficit, the Treasury should automatically be authorized to borrow the money to cover it. Allowing Congress the option to vote for a deficit but refuse to authorize borrowing, is like installing a big self-destruct button on the government.

America’s top gymnasts testified to the Senate about the FBI’s handling of their sexual abuse complaints against USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. Nassar was eventually removed and went to prison, but only after a long delay, during which he continued sexually abusing female gymnasts.

General Kenneth McKenzie of the US Central Command admitted that a drone strike strike in Kabul on August 29 was a mistake, and that the ten people killed were not terrorists. It is a sadly appropriate ending to the US intervention in Afghanistan, given how many such mistakes we have made in the last 20 years.

A difficult but worthwhile read is “The Other Afghan Women” by The New Yorker’s Anand Gopal.

[T]he U.S. did not attempt to settle … divides and build durable, inclusive institutions; instead, it intervened in a civil war, supporting one side against the other. As a result, like the Soviets, the Americans effectively created two Afghanistans: one mired in endless conflict, the other prosperous and hopeful. It is the hopeful Afghanistan that’s now under threat.

Gopal introduces us to the Afghanistan of the countryside, rather than the cities.

Ohio Congressman Anthony Gonzalez, one of the ten Republican congresspeople to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, will not run for re-election.

His district, OH-16, is a convoluted construction southwest of Cleveland. It is reliably Republican, having been represented by a Democrat only two years out of the last 70. Trump got 56% of the vote there in both 2016 and 2020. Gonzalez himself got 63% of the vote in 2020.

I wish one of these Trump-resisting Republicans would stand and fight for his or her vision of the Party. Every time a Jeff Flake or a Bob Corker surrenders without resistance, Trump’s aura of invincibility within the Republican Party gets stronger. Every time somebody refuses to fight, it feeds the narrative that you can’t fight.

Words I never thought I’d write: Hang in there, Liz Cheney.

Every few days brings a new story of some anti-vax activist dying of Covid. I don’t think it’s healthy to focus on them or take too much satisfaction from them. But it’s useful to keep one in your back pocket in case you find yourself in a social-media argument with someone who thinks all the statistics are fake.

The web site sorryantivaxxer.com is a long series of such stories. I find it very creepy, and I would not advise hanging out there for long.

This week’s stereotype validation: Three Texas women attacked the hostess at a New York City restaurant when she asked to see proof of vaccination before letting them enter, as the current NYC rules require. They’ve been charged with misdemeanor assault.

In honor of the late comedian Norm MacDonald, who died Tuesday, here’s the moth joke, and the story behind it.

and let’s close with something adventurous

The Instagram page “On Adventure With Dad” chronicles the activities of a Photoshop wizard and his two small children. If you’re not on Instagram, the portfolio is here.

Did General Milley take steps to prevent a coup or to participate in one?

On paper, the American chain of command is simple: The Constitution makes the President commander-in-chief. Typically, he exercises that authority through a civilian Secretary of Defense and a hierarchy of generals, but nothing about that is necessary. On paper, the President can give orders to any soldier.

That authority over the entire military is summed up by an LBJ anecdote: As he was preparing to leave a military base, President Johnson walked toward the wrong helicopter until a young officer stopped him, saying “Your helicopter is over there, sir.” Johnson is supposed to have replied, “Son, they’re all my helicopters.”

At any level of the American military, though, there is an exception for illegal orders. If a superior tells you to execute prisoners, for example, you can say no. But you can well imagine that the bigger the gap in authority, the harder that “no” would be. Could a private or a green lieutenant really say no to a president?

And that brings us to the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection. According to accounts from CNN and The Washington Post of the still-unpublished published book Peril by Bob Woodward and Roberta Costa, Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley did two questionable things in the late days of the Trump administration. [1]

• Milley made two phone calls (October 30, 2020 and January 8, 2021) to his Chinese counterpart to say that America was not planning an attack on China.
• He instructed military officers not to execute any attack orders from the White House without consulting him.

Critics have a made a big deal about the China calls, but this appears to be fairly normal behavior in crisis situations. American military officers frequently cultivate personal relationships with their counterparts in other countries, and use those connections to smooth over possible misunderstandings. Politico reports:

A defense official familiar with the calls said … the calls were not out of the ordinary, and the chairman was not frantically trying to reassure his counterpart.

The people also said that Milley did not go rogue in placing the call, as the book suggests. In fact, Milley asked permission from acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller before making the call, said one former senior defense official, who was in the room for the meeting. Milley also briefed the secretary’s office after the call, the former official said.

But the second revelation raises more serious issues.

Woodward and Costa write that after January 6, Milley ‘felt no absolute certainty that the military could control or trust Trump and believed it was his job as the senior military officer to think the unthinkable and take any and all necessary precautions.’Milley called it the ‘absolute darkest moment of theoretical possibility,’ the authors write.

Milley’s fear, I surmise, was that Trump would skip over the top military leadership and directly order some junior officer to take extreme (and possibly illegal) military action, which could be either a wag-the-dog foreign attack or a coup at home.

This apparently did not happen. But it was not an unreasonable scenario to plan for, especially given what was going on in the Justice Department, where Trump was going over the head of the Attorney General to push investigations and public statements in support of his stolen-election lie.

What Milley did, though, raises questions about civilian control of the military. Might the generals, at some point, simply refuse to obey presidential orders they disagreed with? And if those orders are illegal, or arise from “serious mental decline” (as the book says Milley believed about Trump), should they?

On paper, responsibility to protect the country from an insane or mentally incapacitated president lies with the vice president and the cabinet, who can remove the president via the 25th Amendment. No military officer plays any role in that process.

But what if they’re not doing their job? If you’re the person getting the crazy orders, does that responsibility fall to you, no matter what the Constitution says?

These questions point to a grey area in our system: If you believe that the train of constitutional government has already jumped its rails (say, because the president is planning or executing a coup), at what point do you take (or prepare to take) extra-constitutional actions yourself?

I don’t have a good answer to that question.

Republicans like Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio have called for Milley to be fired, while President Biden has expressed confidence in him.

I have trouble taking Hawley seriously, given his own treasonous inclinations. But I give more weight the critique of retired Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, who Trump fired (along with his brother) in retribution for Vindman’s testimony at Trump’s first impeachment. He also believes that Milley should resign or be fired.

In recent years, too many leaders have succumbed to situational ethics, and the public has looked the other way when people considered those leaders part of their faction. Doing the wrong thing, even for the right reasons, must have consequences. Many people in the Trump administration — including me — resigned or were fired exactly because they did the right things in the right way. Milley may have done the wrong thing for the right reasons. But the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff does not deserve greater consideration for doing the wrong thing — he deserves greater scrutiny. As my friend and former Pentagon official John Gans tweeted: “You can break norms for a greater good, but that often comes with a price. Paying it is the only way to ensure the norms survive for the next time.”

That do-it-and-face-the-consequences path reminds me of my analysis of the ticking-bomb scenario. Remember? The Bush administration believed CIA agents should be able to torture terrorism suspects, because doing so might save lives if the suspect knew about a ticking bomb. The law, I wrote at the time, should never authorize torture in advance. In the unlikely event that an American official found himself in a ticking-bomb situation, and was certain that torturing a suspect would save many lives, the right move would be to break the law, and then confess and trust the mercy of a jury. Do it if you think you must, but don’t hide from the consequences. An official who isn’t willing to risk a jury disagreeing shouldn’t be torturing anybody.

Similarly, I think Milley should have made a full public confession as soon as the crisis had passed. (After Biden’s inauguration, say.) In a roundabout way, he has done this by talking to Woodward and Costa. [2] He will be appearing before Senate Armed Services Committee a week from tomorrow, where I suspect he will be asked a lot of questions related to the Peril revelations.

However, I think Republicans should approach this hearing carefully. At some point a Democrat might ask, “What specific behavior did you witness personally that convinced you that President Trump had undergone ‘serious mental decline’ after his defeat in the November elections?” Whatever else the hearing might uncover, the answer to that question is likely to be the headline.

[1] When you think about this story, you need to bear in mind how far we are from the root facts: The general public can’t even see the book until tomorrow. CNN and the WaPo are summarizing what Woodward and Costa report that various newsmakers told them. Even if you trust everybody involved, it’s still third-hand information.

[2] I am assuming the quotes attributed to Milley come from direct interviews.

It’s another week where many stories require more than a paragraph or two of attention: General Milley’s fears of what Trump might do in his final days in office, and the precautions he took; the California recall election; AOC’s dress; the Durham investigation’s first indictment; and whether or not the Covid surge is turning. Additionally, there’s the fizzling of Saturday’s demonstration in support of the January 6 terrorists, another anti-Trump Republican retiring, and a few other noteworthy things.

For that reason, there’s no featured post this week. I’ll put out a weekly summary around 11, and nothing else until next Monday.

In addition, the summary will include a brief introduction to the concept of “Disney Princess theology”, and close with a link to the Instagram page of a Dad who likes to appear to be endangering his kids.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111041401/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-09-19_Resilience.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111041340/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/09-19-21-audio.mp3

"Ganesh Chaturthi and the Need to Remove Obstacles" (September 19, 2021) Worship Service

Each year in India there is a ten or eleven-day festival to celebrate Ganesh, the Elephant-headed god who is playful but who also is famous for a particular kind of power, one we all always seem in need of summoning into our lives. Join me for some stories, images, and reflections on the power of ritual.

Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister; Sam King, Worship Associate; Puran and K.G. Singh; Unitarian Church Jowai; UUSF Church Choir, conducted by Mark Sumner

Eric Shackelford, camera; Shulee Ong, camera; Jonathan Silk, OOS Design & sound; Joe Chapot, live chat moderator; Amy Kelly, flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111041254/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210919VRSSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111041216/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210919.mp3

Even in the difficult days of the pandemic, the music has continued!  The following selections were recorded by dedicated, gifted musicians and were used in online services of the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos (NM).  Concert premiere Saturday, September 18, 2021 @ 7 pm (mountain) on our YouTube channel or on our Live! page.  All music is in the public domain; videos used by permission.  Program developed by Nylea Butler-Moore, Director of Music.  Production created by AV Engineer Rick Bolton, with posting help from AV Tech Mike Begnaud. 

PROGRAM

I have been at a loss for words these past few weeks. But sitting quietly in the back yard–often next to the frog pond–has enabled me to see some beautiful birds. I’ll start with this cardinal, cardinals being for a long time my favorite bird. I saw this rather scraggly (like all juveniles) female while I was lying in the hammock reading. I love their little chirps.

I saw the cardinal just as I started reading a new book, Carnival Lights, by Chris Stark. It has taken me several weeks to finish because it was so painful. I had to stop and start, stop and start. This novel should have all the trigger warnings. It brings to life the theme of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and it also weaves the past into the near present (1969) with the long history of land theft, murder, and oppression. I grew to love cousins Sher and Kris, two teenage Ojibwe girls, running away in Minnesota. But I am not even sure to whom I might recommend the book? I felt like I was plunged into vicarious trauma as a reader, and I wouldn’t want to re-trigger that kind of trauma for my Native friends, one of whom already mentioned that, yeah, she’d never be able to read it.

Yet there were also threads of beauty and resilience interwoven into the tapestry of the story that fed my spirit too. Such powerful gorgeous writing, such depth of expression, such love. It is a brilliant book. I first found it because it was recommended by a Native author I love–Mona Susan Power. So perhaps for some Native women, the trauma is well known and understood, and the beauty and love in this story is a healing balm.

For me, in between reading, I had to go to my own backyard to find the grounding and fortitude to be able to continue. I was sitting near the pond watching the frogs when two yellow warblers (I think that’s who they are) started flitting about in the bushes, trying to attract my attention–perhaps away from something else? It seems too late for there to be a nest, but who knows? It must be almost time for their migration south. They were definitely letting me see them, and then flying to another bush close by. I saw them on two or three separate days, and caught these photos.

What do we do with the obscene brutality and violence that our whole society is built upon? What do we do with the exquisite beauty of a bird on a summer day?

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111041153/https://findingourwayhomeblog.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/cardinal-1.jpg

Megan Foley

Continue reading "The Blessings We Didn’t Want"

The defendant insists that his liberty is invaded when the State subjects him to fine or imprisonment for neglecting or refusing to submit to vaccination … But the liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint. … Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own, whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.

– Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan,
Jacobson v Massachusetts (1905)

This week’s featured post is “On Doing Your Own Research“.

This week everybody was talking about Biden’s vaccine “mandate”

Which is not even actually a mandate; a company that isn’t a government contractor can avoid penalties by instituting weekly testing for its unvaccinated workers. Anyway, here’s what President Biden announced in his speech Thursday.

• Federal employees and contractors have to get vaccinated to keep their jobs and contracts. “If you want to do business with the federal government, vaccinate your workforce.”
• Workers at health-care facilities have to get vaccinated if the facilities receive government funds (i.e., Medicare or Medicaid). “If you’re seeking care at a health-care facility, you should be able to know that the people treating you are vaccinated.”
• Even companies that don’t do business with the federal government (if they have more than 100 employees) have to mandate vaccines for their workers. Workers can claim a religious or health exemption, but if they do, they have to be tested for Covid weekly.

In all, about 100 million Americans will be affected by the order. If we assume that they’re typical of the total American adult population (about 75% vaccinated already), that would mean that 25 million unvaccinated Americans are now facing the options of (1) get vaccinated (and maybe save your own life); (2) get tested every week; or (3) look for a job at a smaller company.

Republicans, who in general have fought any effort to control the virus, were quick to denounce Biden’s move.

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves, for example, said the mandate was “tyranny” and “unconstitutional”. He charged that Biden was only doing it to distract attention from Afghanistan. (Because why else would an American president respond to a plague that had killed 677,000 Americans and was adding to that total at the rate of 3K every two days?)

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey called it “dictatorial” and predicted “This will never stand up in court.” South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem was one of several GOP governors pledging to challenge the rule in court. When asked about these threatened lawsuits, Biden said, “Have at it.“

Assuming that the Supreme Court will uphold the laws and long-established precedents — always a dangerous assumption with this highly political court — Biden is on pretty firm ground.

The authority for the mandate comes from the Occupational Health and Safety Act of 1970 (which was signed by that flaming liberal Richard Nixon). OSHA has never been used to mandate a vaccine before, but gives the government broad powers to enforce workplace safety.

As to whether individuals have an inherent right to refuse vaccination, that was decided back in 1905, when Massachusetts (among other states) mandated a smallpox vaccine. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan (the greatest justice you’ve probably never heard of; among other claims to fame, he was the lone dissenter in both Plessy v Ferguson and in the Civil Rights Cases that opened the door for Jim Crow) reasoned that a community’s power to protect itself against an epidemic would violate an individual’s 14th Amendment rights only if it went “far beyond what was reasonably required for the safety of the public”.

In order to prevail, then, a challenge would have to argue on fairly narrow grounds. Either:

• Individuals have more extensive rights to resist a federal mandate than a state mandate.
• OSHA’s sweeping grant of power to regulate workplace safety has an invisible vaccine exception.
• Increasing vaccinations does not increase workplace safety, and is not a reasonable measure to protect the public from Covid.
• OSHA itself is unconstitutional.

CNN reports that corporate America is actually pretty pleased with this government interference: Companies want a vaccinated workforce, but don’t want to appear heavy-handed. So they’re happy to demand vaccination and blame Biden for it. That’s why groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, who are knee-jerk opponents of all other government regulation, are on board.

This Texas Dad creatively lampoons the masks-violate-my-freedom crowd by stripping down during a school board meeting. Who’s free now?

With characteristic cruelty, anti-maskers laugh at a teen as he talks about his grandmother dying of Covid.

Last week I was uncertain whether the new-case numbers were peaking, or if Ida had disrupted the statistics. This week confirms the peak. New cases are down 7% over the last two weeks, though deaths (which usually run two weeks behind new cases) are still increasing. New cases are averaging 145K per day in the US, and deaths are averaging 1648 per day. The total American death total since the start of the pandemic is up to 677,988.

I continue to be amazed at the reactions of people who resist vaccines and masking and anything else that might mitigate the spread. 677K Americans are dead, with three thousand more every two days. You’d think that kind of impact would justify a little inconvenience. But no.

and the 20th anniversary of 9-11

The anniversary was Saturday. I noticed two main trends in the commentary. First, acknowledging again the human impact: the losses people suffered on that day, the long-term suffering of people exposed to whatever got into the air, and the heroism of people who tried to help others at great risk to themselves.

The second major trend was to take a step back and recognize just how badly we screwed up our national response. After 9-11, the public was united in a way it hadn’t been since World War II. The country wanted to do something, and even people who believed that George W. Bush hadn’t legitimately been elected the previous November recognized that he was the only leader available to rally behind. For the next year or two, President Bush could have done just about anything he wanted, if he could claim it had some reasonable connection to 9-11.

What he did, largely under the influence of Vice President Cheney, was to start two wars that were unwinnable because they lacked reasonable goals. American military power could topple the the Taliban and Saddam governments fairly quickly, but Bush and Cheney had no clear notion of how to replace them, or what they wanted out of the new governments.

Many of the prisoners from those wars wound up in a lawless zone in Guantanamo, where they were tortured in violation of both our treaty agreements and longstanding American values. Once introduced, torture spread to other US facilities. In addition, the US government claimed enormous new powers to spy on its own citizens, and even to whisk them into military brigs indefinitely by declaring them “enemy combatants”. Internationally, America claimed the right to launch attacks on the soil of any country where we believed terrorists were hiding.

Subsequent administrations could have reversed these policies, but didn’t (unless forced to by the Supreme Court). They could have leveled with the American people about how little we were accomplishing in Iraq and Afghanistan, but didn’t.

The mainstream media was largely complicit in these efforts, and remains complicit today — as we saw recently when it savaged President Biden for ending the Afghan War. Twenty years of wasting money and misusing power never aroused a fraction of the ire that was unleashed when a president reversed that foolish course.

And while our troops are no longer fighting in Afghanistan, and President Biden claims the combat mission of our remaining 2500 troops in Iraq will end this year, the internal spying powers remain, and 39 prisoners are still at Guantanamo. The Biden administration may have tightened up control over drone strikes, but, like all post-911 administrations, it claims the right to attack anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice.

Every surviving president but Carter appeared at ceremonies to mark 9-11. Biden, Obama, and Clinton were all in New York, and Biden and Bush were at the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Carter’s absence is understandable. He’s 96 and has a variety of health problems. Also, his presidency ended two decades before 9-11, so he neither caused nor responded to it.

Trump took heat for not attending, and for marking 9-11 at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida, where he was a guest commentator for a boxing match. He did, however, address by video a Day of Prayer event on the National Mall organized by the Let Us Worship organization. Trump never tried to be the president of all the people, so it’s not surprising that he acts as ex-president only for crowds of his supporters.

In The Guardian, Harvard Professor Linda Bilmes examines where the $5 trillion spent on Afghanistan and Iraq went: mostly to military contractors.

Ross Douthat owns up to being part of a misguided post-911 consensus, and now sees the War on Terror as a 20-year distraction from our real foreign-policy challenge: the rise of China.

Kurt Andersen notes that the 20th anniversary of Pearl Harbor was not a big deal.

Paul Krugman recalls how willing Republicans were to exploit 9-11 to push an unrelated political agenda (“Nothing is more important in a time of war than cutting taxes,” said Tom DeLay), and how this foreshadowed the party-over-country trend that has characterized the GOP ever since.

and the Texas abortion law

After a week of speculation about how the Biden administration would respond to the law, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a lawsuit. (The text of the suit is here.) The approach AG Garland chose was to sue the State of Texas in federal court, seeking “an order preliminarily and permanently enjoining the State of Texas, including its officers, employees, and agents, including private parties who would bring suit under the law, from implementing or enforcing S.B. 8.”

Because SB8 specifically does what Supreme Court precedents say laws cannot do (substantially burden a woman’s right to choose an abortion before a fetus is viable), the suit says SB8 is “in open defiance of the Constitution”.

The United States therefore may sue a State to vindicate the rights of individuals when a state infringes on rights protected by the Constitution. … The United States has the authority and responsibility to ensure that Texas cannot evade its obligations under the Constitution and deprive individuals of their constitutional rights by adopting a statutory scheme designed specifically to evade traditional mechanisms of federal judicial review.

The suit notes that while Texas executive-branch officials may not be involved in enforcing the law, Texas judges are.

while Texas has gone to unprecedented lengths to cloak its attack on constitutionally protected rights behind a nominally private cause of action, it nonetheless has compelled its judicial branch to serve an enforcer’s role.

And when private individuals file suit to enforce the law, they also become agents of the state “and thus are bound by the Constitution”. (One indication of their state-actor status is that the people who sue under SB8 can collect a payment even though they have not personally suffered damages. Clearly they are not suing in their private capacity.)

The suit also notes an impact on the federal government: Whenever a government program requires it to cover someone’s health care, the government might wind up paying for an abortion — and thus itself being liable for damages under SB8. (Job Corps, Refugee Resettlement, Bureau of Prisons, Office of Personnel Management, Medicaid, and Department of Defense are examples.)

AP reports that yesterday Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett “spoke at length about her desire for others to see the Supreme Court as nonpartisan”.

Maybe she should worry first about what she is, and then worry about how she appears.

Texas Governor Abbott was asked about forcing women to have their rapists’ babies, and he responded in ways that make it clear he doesn’t take the problem seriously: First, he claimed the law gives women “six weeks” to get an abortion, when most women will not know they are pregnant by then, and most pregnancy tests are unreliable until after a missed period. And then he went to Fantasyland:

Rape is a crime and Texas will work tirelessly that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them and getting them off the streets.

So: Nothing to worry about, because there aren’t going to be any more rapes in Texas. Sadly, though, Texas had nearly 15,000 reported rapes in 2019 (the most recent numbers I could find), and some unknown number of unreported rapes. Abbott did not reveal his magic plan to eliminate rape, or explain why he has not implemented it during the six years he has been governor. And what will he do when accused rapist Donald Trump comes back to the state?

And so Abbott joins the long list of Republican politicians who have said stupid and/or heartless things about rape.

and Lee’s statue

A giant Robert E. Lee statue came down in Richmond Wednesday, provoking all kinds of discussion of Lee’s place in history.

Probably no American historical figure has been as thoroughly mythologized as Lee, who in Southern hindsight became the great saint of the Lost Cause. The glorification of Lee was so extreme that in 1996 a biography was titled Lee, Considered because it claimed that the Southern general had never been realistically evaluated by historians. So “considered”, not “reconsidered”.

The two main points of contention are (1) Lee’s relationship to slavery, and (2) how good a general he really was. The first was discussed by Gillian Brockwell in the Washington Post. As for the second, Lee, Considered makes a convincing case that Lee was a brilliant tactician, but not much of a strategist.

As Rhett Butler explained in Gone With the Wind, the South went into the war over-matched in manufacturing capacity and potential manpower. So there were basically only two ways the South could have defeated the North:

• A “bloody nose” strategy, where a quick Southern strike would convince the North that it didn’t really want to pursue this war.
• A Fabian strategy that would avoid pitched battles, drag out the war, and frustrate the North’s desire for a decisive victory until its electorate lost patience.

But no matter how clever its generals were from battle to battle, the South couldn’t possibly win the kind of war Lee got them into: a multi-year war of attrition. Bad strategy. The strategy by which Grant ultimately defeated Lee was to stop worrying about his own casualties and focus instead on inflicting as many as possible. Grant understood that he could replenish his forces, but Lee couldn’t.

How the South ultimately did win (in 1877) was through an endless terrorist campaign, not a second try at Gettysburg.

Connecting this note with the 9-11 retrospective: If Americans understood our own history, we would never have tried to remake Afghanistan. Even after the victories of Sherman and Grant, and a decade of military occupation, the North was never able to remake the South in its own image. Like the Taliban, the White supremacist aristocracy reestablished itself as soon as the Union troops left.

and you also might be interested in …

Tuesday is election day for the California recall. Polls on recalling Newsom were tight a month ago, but Keep now has a wide lead over Remove. Consequently, Republicans are already preparing to accuse Governor Gavin Newsom of fraud, because no elections they lose can possibly be legit.

Someday I want to hear their theory on how Newsom managed to coordinate this election fraud with all the polling operations.

Nate Silver does a quick analysis of the decline in President Biden’s approval rating. It corresponds to two events: the Afghanistan withdrawal and the rise in Delta variant cases. Like Nate, I think the Afghan situation will either fade from public attention or look better in hindsight. If this Covid wave is also peaking, Biden might bounce back, though Nate isn’t sold on that as a likelihood.

The negotiations over the Democrats’ reconciliation infrastructure package is getting serious, with Bernie Sanders on one side and Joe Manchin on the other.

James Fallows describes efforts to rethink college rating systems. The traditional US News approach measures inputs: how accomplished students are when they enter college. It would be better to measure what students gain while they’re there.

In line with this week’s historical themes, an actual historian debunks the Molon Labe slogan favored by gun-rights extremists. After all, according to the story, the Persians did come and take the Spartan weapons, after killing the Spartan king and all his warriors. Persian casualties were likely larger, but Thermopylae was merely “a speed bump under the wheels of the Persian war machine”, which went on to burn Athens before losing the naval battle of Salamis.

Probably, though, the whole Thermopylae myth was Greek propaganda intended to spin a disastrous defeat as a moral victory. (The Alamo myth serves a similar purpose.) It persists today for a different reason:

[The pro-gun] right-wing fringe favors Molon Labe, and by extension the larger toxic myth of Spartan badassery, primarily because it dovetails with other ideas they favor—namely, the advancement of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim causes. … In the film version, a hunky 36-year-old Gerard Butler (the real Leonidas was 60 at the time of this battle) led a tiny, beleaguered force composed entirely of musclebound white men to defend the gates of Europe against a brown-skinned tide of decadent foreigners. This wildly false take on Thermopylae, and by extension Sparta, has become a constant reference point for right-wing fringe groups in slogan after poster after stump speech.

and let’s close with something wild

Back in 2015, Paul Joynson-Hicks and Tom Sullam started the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. Last year’s winner was “Terry the Turtle flipping the bird“.

This year’s finalists are now posted. The whole gallery is worth a look, but my favorite is this undersea choir.

It’s easy to laugh at the conspiracy theorists. But our expert classes aren’t entitled to blind trust.

One common mantra among anti-vaxxers, Q-Anoners, ivermectin advocates, and conspiracy theorists of all stripes is that people need to “do their own research”. Don’t be a sheep who believes whatever the CDC or the New York Times or some other variety of “expert” tells you. If something is important, you need to look into it yourself.

Recently, I’ve been seeing a lot of pushback memes. This one takes a humorous poke at the inflated view many people have of their intellectual abilities.

While this one is a bit more intimidating:

And this one is pretty in-your-face:

I understand and mostly agree with the point these memes are trying to make: There is such a thing as expertise, and watching a YouTube video is no substitute for a lifetime of study. In fact, few ideas are so absurd that you can’t make a case for them that is good enough to sound convincing for half an hour — as I remember from reading Erich von Daniken’s “ancient astronaut” books back in the 1970s.

Medical issues are particularly tricky, because sometimes people just get well (or die) for no apparent reason. Whatever they happened to be doing at the time looks brilliant (or stupid), when in fact it might have had nothing to do with anything. That’s why scientists invented statistics and double-blind studies and so forth — so they wouldn’t be fooled by a handful of fluky cases, or by their own desire to see some pattern that isn’t really there.

All the same, I cringe when one of these memes appears on my social media feed, because I know how they’ll be received by the people they target. The experts are telling them: “Shut up, you dummy, and believe what you’re told.”

They’re going to take that message badly, and I actually don’t blame them. Because there is a real crisis of expertise in the world today, and it didn’t appear out of nowhere during the pandemic. It’s been building for a long time.

Liberal skepticism. Because the Trump administration was so hostile to expertise, we now tend to think of viewing experts skeptically as a left/right issue. But it’s not. Go back, for example, and look at liberal Chris Hayes’ 2012 book The Twilight of the Elites. Each chapter of that book covers a different area in which some trusted corps of experts failed the public that put its faith them: Intelligence experts (and the journalists who covered them) assured us that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Bankers drove the world economy into a ditch in 2008, largely because paper that turned out to be worthless was rated AAA. The Catholic priesthood, supposedly a guardian of morality for millions of Americans, was raping children and then covering it up.

Experts, it turns out, do have training and experience. But they also have class interests. Sometimes they’re looking out for themselves rather than for the rest of us.

More recently, we have discovered that military experts have been lying to us for years about the “progress” they’d made in promoting Afghan democracy and training an Afghan army to defend that democratic government.

It’s not hard to find economists who present capitalism as the only viable option for a modern economy, or who explain why we can’t afford to take care of all the sick people, or to prevent climate change from producing some apocalyptic future.

Such people are very good at talking down to the rest of us. But ordinary folks are less and less likely to take them seriously. And that’s good, sort of. You shouldn’t believe what people say just because they have a title or a degree.

If not expertise, what? So it’s not true that if you argue with a recognized expert, you’re automatically wrong. Unfortunately, though, recent events have shown us that a reflexive distrust of all experts creates even worse problems.

• It’s hard to estimate how many Americans have died of Covid because we haven’t been willing to follow expert advice about vaccination, masking, quarantining, and so on. Constructing such an estimate would itself require expertise I don’t have. But simply comparing our death totals to Canada’s (713 deaths per 100K people versus our 2034) indicates it’s probably in the hundreds of thousands.
• Our democracy is in trouble because large numbers of Americans are unwilling to accept election results, no matter how many times they get recounted by bipartisan panels of election supervisors.
• The growing menace of hurricanes and wildfires is the price we pay because the world (of which the US is a major part, and needs to play a leading role) refuses to act on what climate scientists have been telling us since the 1970s.

Without widespread belief in experts, the truth becomes a matter of tribalism (one side believes in fighting Covid and the other doesn’t), intimidation (Republicans who know better don’t dare tell Trump’s personality cult that he lost), or wishful thinking (nobody wants to believe we have to change our lives to cut carbon emissions).

Which one of us is Galileo? The foundational myth of modern science (Galileo saying “and yet it moves“) expresses faith in a reality beyond the power of kings and popes. People who have trained their minds to be objective can see that reality, while others are stuck either following or rebelling against authority.

The question is: Who is Galileo in the current controversies? Is it the scientific experts who have spent their lives training to see clearly in these situations? Or is it the populists, who refuse to bow to the authority of the expert class, and insist on “doing their own research”?

Simply raising that question points to a more nuanced answer than just “Shut up and believe what you’re told.”

Take me, for example. This blog arises from distrust of experts. After the Saddam’s-weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco, I started looking deeper into the stories in the headlines. Because I was living in New Hampshire at the time, it was easy to go listen to the 2004 presidential candidates. Once I did, I noticed the media’s habit of fitting a speech into a predetermined narrative, rather than reporting what a candidate was actually saying. Then I started reading major court decisions (like the Massachusetts same-sex marriage decision of 2003), and interpreting them for myself.

In short, I was doing my own research. Some guy at CNN may have spent his whole life reporting on legal issues, but I was going to read the cases for myself.

When social media became a thing, and turned into an even bigger source of misinformation than the mainstream media had ever been, I began to look on this blog as a model for individual behavior: Don’t amplify claims without some amount of checking. (For example: In this weeks’ summary — the next post after this one — I was ready to blast Trump for ignoring all observances of 9-11. But then I discovered that he appeared by video at a rally organized by one of his supporters on the National Mall. I’m not shy about criticizing Trump, but facts are facts.) Listen to criticism from commenters and thank them when they catch one of your mistakes. Change your opinions when the facts change.

But also notice the things that I don’t do: When my wife got cancer, we didn’t design her treatment program by ourselves. We made value judgments about what kinds of sacrifices we were willing to make for her treatment (a lot, as it turned out), but left the technical details to our doctors. At one point we felt that a doctor was a little too eager to get my wife into his favorite clinical trial, so we got a second opinion and ultimately changed doctors. But we didn’t ditch Western medicine and count on Chinese herbs or something. (She’s still doing fine 25 years after the original diagnosis.)

On this blog, I may not trust the New York Times and Washington Post to decide what stories are important and what they mean, but I do trust them on basic facts. If the NYT puts quotes around some words, I believe that the named person actually said those words (though I may check the context). If the WaPo publishes the text of a court decision, I believe that really is the text. And so on.

I also trust the career people in the government to report statistics accurately. The political appointees may spin those numbers in all sorts of ways, but the bureaucrats in the cubicles are doing their best.

In the 18 years I’ve been blogging, that level of trust has never burned me.

Where I come from. So the question isn’t “Do you trust anybody?” You have to; the world is just too big to figure it all out for yourself. Instead, the question is who you trust, and what you trust them to do.

My background gives me certain advantages in answering those questions, because I have a foot in both camps. Originally, I was a mathematician. I got a Ph.D. from a big-name university and published a few articles in some prestigious research journals (though not for many years now). So I understand what it means to do actual research, and to know things that only a handful of other people know. At the same time, I am not a lawyer, a doctor, a political scientist, an economist, a climate scientist, or a professional journalist. So just about everything I discuss in this blog is something I view from the outside.

I don’t, for example, have any inside knowledge about public health or infectious diseases or climate science. But I do know a lot about the kind of people who go into the sciences, and about the social mores of the scientific community. So when I hear about some vast conspiracy to inflate the threat of Covid or climate change, I can only shake my head. I can picture how many people would necessarily be involved in such a conspiracy, and who many of them would have to be. It’s absurd.

In universities and labs all over the world, there are people who would love to be the one to expose the “hoax” of climate change, or to discover the simple solution that means none of us have to change our lifestyle. You couldn’t shut them up by shifting research funding, you’d need physical concentration camps, and maybe gas chambers. The rumors of people vanishing into those camps would spread far enough that I would hear them.

I haven’t.

Not all experts deserve our skepticism. Similarly, one of my best friends and two of my cousins are nurses. I know the mindset of people who go into medicine. So the idea that hospitals all over the country are faking deaths by the hundreds of thousands, or that ICUs are only pretending to be jammed with patients — it’s nuts.

If you’ve ever planned a surprise party, you know that conspiracies of just a dozen or so people can be hard to manage. Now imagine conspiracies that involve tens of thousands, most of whom were once motivated by ideals completely opposite to the goals of the conspiracy.

It doesn’t happen.

I have a rule of thumb that has served me well over the years: You don’t always have to follow the conventional wisdom, but when you don’t you should know why.

Lots of expert classes have earned our distrust. But some haven’t. They’re not all the same. And even the bankers and the priests have motives more specific than pure evil. If they wouldn’t benefit from some conspiracy, they’re probably not involved.

Know thyself. As you divide up the world between things you’re going to research yourself and things you’re going to trust to someone else, the most important question you need to answer is: What kind of research can you reasonably do? (Being trained to read mathematical proofs made it easy for me to read judicial opinions. I wouldn’t have guessed that, but it turned out that way.)

That’s what’s funny about the cartoon at the top: This guy thinks he credibly competes with the entire scientific community (and expects his wife to share that assessment of his abilities).

My Dad (who I think suspected from early in my life that he was raising a know-it-all) often said to me: “Everybody in the world knows something you don’t.” As I got older, I realized that the reverse is also true: Just about all of us have some experience that gives us a unique window on the world. You don’t necessarily need a Ph.D. to see something most other people miss.

But at the same time, often our unique windows point in the wrong direction entirely. My window, for example, tells me very little about what Afghans are thinking right now. If I want to know, I’m going to have to trust somebody a little closer to the topic.

And if I’m going to be a source of information rather than misinformation, I’ll need to account for my biases. Tribalism, intimidation, and wishful thinking affect everybody. A factoid that matches my prior assumptions a little too closely is exactly the kind of thing I need to check before I pass it on. Puzzle pieces that fit together too easily have maybe been shaved a little; check it out.

So sure: Do your own research. But also learn your limitations, and train yourself to be a good researcher within those boundaries. Otherwise, you might be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

This week, Biden upped the pressure on vaccine refusers, and Republicans freaked out about it. The new-case numbers finally started going down. We marked the 20th anniversary of 9-11. The Justice Department started fighting back against the Texas abortion law. And a big Robert E. Lee statue came down in Richmond.

This week’s featured post, though, backs up a little to address a more general question: Whether or not ordinary people should “do our own research” on the issues of the day. It’s easy to shake your head at the people eating horse paste to guard against Covid and say “Obviously not.” But the issue is actually more nuanced than that. This blog, for instance, is an example of someone doing his own research up to a point. I don’t run my own clinical trials, but if I totally trusted mainstream journalists to turn my attention in the right directions, there’d be no purpose in most of what I do.

So “On Doing Your Own Research” is a bit more sympathetic to the populist view than you might expect. It should appear around 10 EDT.

The weekly summary discusses the developments mentioned in the first paragraph, with particular attention to the legal basis for Biden’s “mandate” order, and for DoJ’s lawsuit against Texas. I’ll also go off on historical tangents about General Lee’s weakness as a strategist, and the similarity of the Thermopylae and Alamo myths. Let’s say that posts around noon.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111041110/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-09-12_Down_to_the_river_to_pray.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111041049/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/09-12-21-audio.mp3

"New Eyes and Not Afraid" (September 12, 2021) Worship Service

This Sunday is this confluence of holidays and holidays and anniversaries raising the question not just of how we begin in the midst of ongoing challenges, but how people have always done so; even we ourselves did 20 years ago. We frame that exploration with music, special music, for the occasion. Come join us.

Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister; Rev. Alyson Jacks, Associate Minister; Richard Davis-Lowell, Worship Associate; Reiko Oda Lane, organist; Sarah Brindell, Guest soloist/songwriter; Bill Klingelhoffer, shofar; UUSF Church Choir, conducted by Mark Sumner

Eric Shackelford, camera; Shulee Ong, camera; Jonathan Silk, OOS Design & sound; Joe Chapot, live chat moderator; Carrie Steere-Salazar, flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111041028/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210912VRSSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040941/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210912.mp3

Susan Frederick-Gray

Continue reading "A Reflection from the UUA President: Choosing Love On This Anniversary of September 11"

Jami A. Yandle

Continue reading "Reframing Rejection"

It’s almost impossible to get your mind around how much is currently being sacrificed in favor of a Senate procedural rule that appears nowhere in the Constitution and emerged to buttress segregation.

– Ben Rhodes

This week’s featured post is “A Dozen Observations about Texas, Abortion, and the Supreme Court“.

This week everybody was talking about the Texas abortion law

That’s the subject of the featured post.

and the cost of the filibuster

The Texas abortion law could be undone if Congress passed the Women’s Health Protection Act. But it won’t, of course, because the WHPA can’t muster 60 votes to get past a Republican filibuster.

So we can add one more item to the bill America pays to maintain the filibuster. Similarly, all the hoops and hurdles Republican legislatures have put in the way of voting could be reversed if Congress passed the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, or some watered-down version of either bill. Even Joe Manchin claims to want to pass something to protect voting rights, but again, unified Republican opposition makes the filibuster an insuperable roadblock.

Similarly, the filibuster dooms the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a $15 minimum wage, and statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico. It’s the reason January 6 is being investigated by a House committee rather than a bipartisan commission.

Historically, the filibuster protected segregation in the South, preserving Jim Crow for decades.

Filibuster defenders need to be challenged to answer: What victories balance all these losses? At what moment in American history was the Republic saved from a catastrophic mistake because some prescient minority filibustered? I don’t know of one.

and the growing Republican acceptance of gangsterism and violence

Thursday, CNN reported that the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection had asked telecommunication companies to preserve the phone records of a number of Republican congresspeople, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Notice: preserve, not turn over. If the committee eventually decides that it needs some of those records, it will presumably subpoena them. At that point, McCarthy et al might challenge the subpoenas in court, and I assume the companies will do whatever the courts tell them. All perfectly normal.

Kevin McCarthy responded like a Mafia don.

If these companies comply with the Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States. If companies still choose to violate a federal law, a Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law.

An appropriate response to this tweet might be: WTF? Or more specifically, WFL: what federal law?

McCarthy’s office has not responded to CNN’s request for clarification on what law McCarthy believes the telecommunication companies would be violating.

Marjorie Taylor Greene was more explicit about the threat, if not the law:

These cell phone companies, they better not play with these Democrats, because Republicans are coming back into the majority in 2022, and we will take this very serious.

When you warn people not to cooperate with investigators, or else — that’s pretty much the definition of obstruction. But for congressional Republicans, it’s just Tuesday.

A week ago yesterday, North Carolina Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn issued this threat:

If our election systems continue to be rigged, and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place, and it’s bloodshed.

He went on to say that he dreads “having to pick up arms against a fellow American.” Not that he wouldn’t do it, but that he doesn’t look forward to it. You don’t “dread” things that you know you aren’t going to do.

Cawthorn’s spokesman claimed he was opposing violence. But when a conditional threat is based on a lie, the result is just a naked threat. Democrats can’t stop rigging and stealing elections, because they haven’t done that in the first place. If I tell you I’m going to burn your house down unless your dog stops peeing on my lawn, and you don’t have a dog, then the bottom line is that I’m threatening to burn your house down.

As we’ve seen again and again, Trump claims fraud whenever he loses. He claimed that fraud prevented him from winning the popular vote against Hillary Clinton in 2016, and he also claimed Ted Cruz committed fraud when he beat Trump in the 2016 Iowa caucuses, tweeting: “Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.”

Given that history and Cawthorn’s devoted Trumpism, the only conclusion to draw is that Cawthorn is regretting in advance all the Americans he will kill if his side loses again. If they lose, they will claim fraud again and get violent again, but with more bloodshed this time.

A Republican candidate for county executive in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, explained how he plans to handle schools boards that impose mask mandates.

Forget going into these school boards with frigging data. You go into school boards to remove ’em! That’s what you do! They don’t follow the law! You go in and you remove ’em. I’m going in there with 20 strong men, I’m going to speak to the school board and I’m going to give them an option. They can leave or they can be removed.

No attempt to convince, no organizing for the next election, no petitions or marches or sit-ins. Just “20 strong men”. Increasingly, that’s how the GOP wants to handle things.

All across the country, there are reports of the Proud Boys joining anti-mask protests outside of schools and school board meetings. Explicit threats are often part of these demonstrations.

and the pandemic

I’m not sure I trust this week’s numbers. On the one hand, they follow the recent trend of slowing growth: New cases are up only 8% over the last two weeks, compared to last week’s 20%, preceded by 36% and 60%. On the other hand, the biggest drop is 51% in Louisiana, with even bigger drops in the coastal counties where Ida hit. It could just be that the hurricane interrupted testing and reporting of new cases. But if these numbers are accurate, we could hit a peak this week.

and you also might be interested in …

It’s weirdly ironic that Covid-related unemployment benefits are expiring on Labor Day.

My part of the northeast got some rain, but no serious flooding when the remnants of Ida blew through Wednesday night and Thursday morning. South of here, though, particularly in Philadelphia and New York, things got ugly, and more than 40 people died.

Meanwhile, Louisiana is still recovering from when Ida hit there eight days ago.

In addition to the abortion ban, Texas now has open carry of firearms, without permits or training. So if you want to shoot up a Texas school or shopping mall, you aren’t breaking any laws until you pull the trigger.

The anti-voting law that Texas Democrats delayed by leaving the state? It passed. Harris County is suing to keep it from being enforced.

You’ll be pleased to know that Rudy Giuliani reports that he is “not an alcoholic” and functions “more effectively than 90% of the population”.

Trump Tower is having trouble finding tenants, but it has one really reliable, deep-pocketed one: the Make America Great Again PAC that Trump runs himself. It rents a space that could accommodate 30 employees, but it only lists three, and they’re not there most days. The high-priced lease appears to be a simple way to turn donors’ money into personal income for Trump, but it’s all perfectly legal.

and let’s close with something explosive

I’ve previously closed with videos of elaborate domino constructions that fall in amazing and beautiful ways. An even more kinetic version of the same basic idea is the stick bomb. The elasticity of tongue depressors is used to store potential energy, which can be released in a chain reaction.

If you want to build your own, here’s a tutorial.

As you undoubtedly already know, the Supreme Court refused to interfere with the new Texas abortion ban, which took effect Wednesday. In brief, the law bans abortion after a “heartbeat” is detectable in the embryo, which happens (not really, but sort of, more below) at around six weeks. That’s usually before a woman knows she’s pregnant, so most pregnant Texas women will not, at any point in the process, have legal options other than carrying their fetus to term.

What makes this law different from dozens of other anti-abortion laws (that routinely get voided by the federal courts) is its method of enforcement: Abortion is illegal, but not criminal. No one is arrested or sent to jail. But private citizens can sue people (other than the pregnant woman herself) who perform or “abet” a post-heartbeat abortion. If they win, they get attorneys fees plus $10,000.

That enforcement method makes it tricky for a federal court to block the law. Ordinarily, a court would enjoin state officials not to enforce a law that violates established constitutional standards, but here Texas can say: “We don’t enforce it. Private citizens and the state courts enforce it.” Five conservative judges (three of them appointed by Trump) decided to take advantage of that loophole. So the law stands and abortion is effectively banned in Texas.

Much has been written about this situation in the last week, so rather than add another article to the stack, I want to organize what’s already out there. That’s why this post is a list of short observations rather than a single essay. In each case, I’ll point you to other sources that do the elaboration.

Let’s start with some basic references.

The law itself (Senate Bill 8) is here. It’s written for lawyers, and I don’t recommend reading it unless you’re really getting down into the weeds.

The Supreme Court’s rejection of the request to intervene is only 12 pages, and is much more readable. The majority’s statement is barely more than a page. Chief Justice Roberts wrote a three-page dissent. Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan also wrote dissents, each of which was co-signed by the other two. So the Court published roughly ten times as much material explaining why it shouldn’t have done this than justifying why it did.

Slate has a good FAQ about what the law covers and how it might be interpreted. Some of the issues will depend on what judges do, and even if the law is technically on your side, you still will have to respond if someone sues you.

The bill is named the Texas Heartbeat Act, but a six-week embryo doesn’t have a heart.

LiveScience.com explains:

Rather, at six weeks of pregnancy, an ultrasound can detect “a little flutter in the area that will become the future heart of the baby,” said Dr. Saima Aftab, medical director of the Fetal Care Center at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami. This flutter happens because the group of cells that will become the future “pacemaker” of the heart gain the capacity to fire electrical signals, she said.

NPR goes into more detail:

“When I use a stethoscope to listen to an [adult] patient’s heart, the sound that I’m hearing is caused by the opening and closing of the cardiac valves,” says Dr. Nisha Verma, an OB-GYN who specializes in abortion care and works at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

The sound generated by an ultrasound in very early pregnancy is quite different, she says.

“At six weeks of gestation, those valves don’t exist,” she explains. “The flickering that we’re seeing on the ultrasound that early in the development of the pregnancy is actually electrical activity, and the sound that you ‘hear’ is actually manufactured by the ultrasound machine.”

Healthline.com says that at six weeks, an embryo is “about the size of a grain of rice”.

You might be wondering why anti-abortion activists lie so blatantly about this rather obscure point of biology (or perhaps how they can call themselves Christians while they do). Similarly, they make bogus claims about a fetus’ ability to feel pain at 20 weeks. Neither of these thresholds have any legal significance. (After all, farm animals have heartbeats and feel pain, but they are killed by the millions without any political backlash.)

What activists are trying to suggest with heartbeats and suffering is the presence of a human soul, which many of them say enters the embryo at conception. (In National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winters writes: “That heartbeat should strike the consciences of anyone with an open mind about the morality of the issue.” Sorry, but that shot just goes right past me; I am neither engaged nor shamed by it.)

They may describe this theological speculation as “Biblical”, but in fact it is not, as I’ve explained before. In Catholic circles, this teaching was virtually unknown before the 1600s, and it didn’t become orthodox among conservative Protestants until after Roe. For Evangelicals, the politics motivated the theology, not the other way around.

In any case, one American’s theology does not bind other Americans, because the Founders very explicitly did not set up a theocracy.

Complete bans on abortion are not popular now, and never have been.

Gallup has been asking about abortion for nearly half a century, and the numbers have been remarkably stable. Less than 1-in-5 Americans believe abortion should be “illegal in all circumstances”, and that’s been true consistently since 1975. The split between those who want abortion legal in “any circumstances” or “certain circumstances” bounces around a bit more. Even that may not represent an actual change of opinion, but could correspond to a change in the circumstances that came to mind when the question was raised.

On the specific question of overturning Roe v Wade, public opinion has long supported leaving Roe alone. In 1989 the public was against overturning Roe 58%-31%, and the most recent survey was 58%-32%.

I sum up my reading of public opinion with a quip. Most Americans, whether we are conservative or liberal, have exactly the same opinion about both abortion and guns: “I am appalled by the sheer number of them in this country, and wish there were fewer. But if my family gets into some extraordinary situation and decides that we need one, I don’t want the government to stand in our way.”

The court majority is acting in bad faith.

The majority purports to be stymied by the complexity of the situation: No one knows exactly who will decide to enforce the Texas law, so how can they craft an injunction?

it is unclear whether the named defendants in this lawsuit can or will seek to enforce the Texas law against the applicants in a manner that might permit our intervention.

Will Wilkinson points out the obvious:

you know that the conservative majority would not affirm this principle in general. There is zero chance that Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Thomas would offer the same deferential treatment to a formally identical California law designed to frustrate citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights by incentivizing civil lawsuits against anyone who gives away or sells or in any way aids or abets the possession or ownership of a firearm.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent is blunt and direct:

It cannot be the case that a State can evade federal judicial scrutiny by outsourcing the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to its citizenry.

But of course, it’s not the case in general. This is a one-time-only principle that applies solely to abortion.

A decision this consequential shouldn’t happen through the shadow docket.

Essentially, the Court has reversed Roe v Wade: Texas has made nearly all abortions illegal; the Court has refused to protect a woman’s previously recognized constitutional right; and now other red states are scrambling to pass their own bounty-hunter law.

It is certainly within the Court’s power to reverse previous precedents and thereby reinterpret the Constitution. But the typical way for a reversal to happen is through the regular docket (known to lawyers as the “merits” docket): A case challenging the precedent works its way up through the federal courts. Through that process, the lower courts develop a body of publicly available evidence and reasoning. Then the Supreme Court hears lawyers for both sides argue the case, and interested third parties submit briefs supporting one side or the other. The justices withdraw for weeks or months to consider it all, and then a decision is announced, supported by a written majority opinion (which may be critiqued by dissents from judges outside the majority). When Brown v Board of Education reversed Plessey v Ferguson in 1954, that was the lengthy process it went through. (The original lawsuit was filed in 1951.)

A case challenging Roe is already on the Court’s calendar for this term. We should get a decision by June at the latest. If a majority wants to reverse Roe — and apparently it does — that is the proper way to do so.

One key virtue of the regular process is transparency: The Court’s power may be mostly unchecked, but when it does something, we at least know what it did and why. Five justices can’t just say “Do this” and go home; they have to spell out the new interpretation in enough detail that lower courts and the various levels of state and federal government know what the law is now. The Court’s reasoning is available for legal scholars to examine and criticize, and Congress knows exactly what it must do if it wants to achieve a different outcome.

But the Court also has what is called the “shadow docket”. Wikipedia explains:

Shadow docket decisions are made when the Court believes an applicant will suffer “irreparable harm” if the request is not immediately granted. These decisions are generally terse (often only a few sentences), unsigned, and are preceded by little to no oral arguments. Historically, the shadow docket was used only rarely for rulings of serious legal or political significance, but since 2017 it has been increasingly utilized for consequential rulings, especially for requests by the Department of Justice for emergency stays of lower-court rulings.

So, for example, you might ask the Court to intervene if a law was about to go into effect that would remove one of your previously recognized constitutional rights. If, say, you had to give birth to your rapist’s baby because all the abortion providers in your state had to turn you away, you might reasonably claim to face irreparable harm. The no-longer-viable clinics might also reasonably claim irreparable harm.

By not acting, the Court is basically announcing: “Not so fast about thinking you have a constitutional right.” It has made women’s rights evaporate without any kind of transparent process. Or maybe that’s not the Court’s intention at all. Who can say, when the majority barely wrote a page of explanation?

Chief Justice Roberts, who is usually thought of as one of the conservative justices, complained about this lack of process:

I would grant preliminary relief to preserve the status quo ante—before the law went into effect—so that the courts may consider whether a state can avoid responsibility for its laws in such a manner. … We are at this point asked to resolve these novel questions—at least preliminarily—in the first instance, in the course of two days, without the benefit of consideration by the District Court or Court of Appeals. We are also asked to do so without ordinary merits briefing and without oral argument. … I would accordingly preclude enforcement of S. B. 8 by the respondents to afford the District Court and the Court of Appeals the opportunity to consider the propriety of judicial action and preliminary relief pending consideration of the plaintiffs’ claims

Translating from the legalese: If we don’t know what to do, we should freeze the situation as best we can until we have time to figure it out. But the other five conservative justices rejected that reasoning.

The Senate’s hearings on recent Supreme Court nominees have been a charade. The nominees lied, and the senators who credited those lies were either naive or complicit.

Numerous examples are possible, but the most ridiculous one was the 45-minute speech Susan Collins gave defending her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. For eight paragraphs she addressed “the concern that Judge Kavanaugh would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade”, assuring the country that the constitutional right established in Roe “is important to me”, and extolling Kavanaugh’s reverence for long-established precedents.

Naive? Complicit? Hard to say.

The 6-3 conservative majority is the result of a system rigged to over-represent White rural voters. The Court’s current conservatism does not and never has represented the will of the American people.

Supreme Court justices are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Both of these institutions are rigged in favor of White rural voters.

Three of the current justices (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) were nominated by Donald Trump, who was chosen by the Electoral College in defiance of the American people. (Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.8 million votes, but won a 304-227 victory in the Electoral College.)

Sometimes Roberts and Alito are included on this list of minority justices, because George W. Bush also lost the popular vote in 2000. However, they were nominated in Bush’s second term, after he won re-election democratically.

Recent Republican majorities in the Senate have also not represented the American people. The principle that each state has two senators means that blue (and racially diverse) California’s 39 million residents have the same power as red (and almost entirely White) Wyoming’s 581 thousand. Combined with the successful attempt to stack the Senate by admitting tiny Northwestern states in 1889-1890, Republicans have a consistent structural advantage: For the last quarter-century, Republican senators have neither represented a majority of voters nor received a majority of votes, and yet they have held the majority of Senate seats about half the time.

This includes the term when Mitch McConnell refused to consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, as well as the next term when McConnell and popular-vote-loser Donald Trump awarded that Court seat to Neil Gorsuch.

Senate Republicans use their artificially inflated numbers, together with the filibuster, to make sure the system stays rigged in their favor by denying statehood to (largely Black and urban) District of Columbia and (Hispanic) Puerto Rico.

Now that abortion rights have actually been lost, the Republican dog has caught the car.

Somewhere in Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway describes a bridge that is much desired but (precisely for that reason) can never be completed: As long as the bridge is in the future, corrupt politicians can raise funds to build it. But if it is ever finished, the money will dry up.

For decades, anti-abortion politics has been a similar scam, as David Frum explains:

Pre-Texas, opposition to abortion offered Republican politicians a lucrative, no-risk political option. They could use pro-life rhetoric to win support from socially conservative voters who disliked Republican economic policy, and pay little price for it with less socially conservative voters who counted on the courts to protect abortion rights for them.

That dynamic played out most clearly in 2016, when Trump dominated the anti-abortion vote, while pro-choice people assured each other that they could stay home or vote for Jill Stein.

But now, after years and years of warnings and an ever-increasing set of hoops women have had to jump through, abortion rights really are vanishing, even for women who are privileged in every way other than gender. If you live in a professional-class suburb of Dallas, and if your U of T freshman daughter gets roofied at a frat party and comes home pregnant, she either carries the baby to term or your family has to break the law — and maybe get sued.

If this possible impact on their lives means that the complacent majority will get riled now, the jig is up. That’s why national Republicans haven’t been spiking the football to celebrate an achievement they’ve been promising for decades.

Congress could fix this, if Democrats thought women’s rights were more important than the filibuster.

The Texas abortion law would be undone if Congress passed the Women’s Health Protection Act, which reinstates the protections of Roe v Wade nationally. Speaker Pelosi believes she can get the bill through the House. It’s unclear whether all 50 Democrats in the Senate would vote for it. But a handful of Republicans also claim to be pro-choice — here’s a chance to redeem yourself, Senator Collins — so the bill should get a majority, if it comes to a vote.

But it won’t come to a vote, because of the filibuster. A woman’s right to choose is yet another price the country must pay for Senator Manchin’s and Senator Sinema’s attachment to this time-dishonored Senate tradition, because the WHPA clearly can’t muster a 60-vote supermajority.

The Department of Justice could also do something.

Law professor Lawrence Tribe explains: It turns out the country has previously faced the problem of states turning a blind eye to (or even encouraging) vigilantes trying to intimidate Americans out of exercising their constitutional rights. In that previous era, Congress responded by passing the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which is still on the books.

Section 242 of the federal criminal code makes it a crime for those who, “under color of law,” willfully deprive individuals “of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” … In addition, Section 241 of the federal criminal code makes it an even more serious crime for “two or more persons” to agree to “oppress, threaten, or intimidate” anyone “in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same.” This crime may be committed even by individuals not found to be acting “under color of law” but as purely private vigilantes, as long as they’re acting in concert with others.

Tribe believes that using the KKK Act to protect abortion rights in Texas would be “in tune not just with the letter but the spirit the law”. He asserts that we have now reached the point where “the need to disarm those who cynically undermine constitutional rights while ducking all normal avenues for challenging their assault on the rule of law becomes paramount.”

Ordinary people can monkey-wrench the enforcement process.

A campaign to spam websites asking for tips on Texas abortions is taking off. We’ll see if this is just a snap reaction or if it has staying power.

If any pro-life folks think women’s-rights defenders are playing dirty, let me point out that so far no one is using the kinds of tactics the pro-life movement has long used against abortion clinics. No one is bombing their offices or threatening their workers with violence, because (unlike the pro-life movement) the pro-choice movement doesn’t have a terrorist wing.

As satisfying as monkey-wrenching might be, though, it probably won’t make much difference. Even if monkey-wrenchers make vigilante lawsuits harder to assemble, abortion clinics and other support services are already being shut down by the threat of such lawsuits, even if suits have not yet been filed.

Texas has made rape a viable reproduction strategy.

If you are a man who is unable or unwilling to convince any woman to bear your children voluntarily, you can still win the evolutionary battle to pass on your genes by committing enough rapes. Eventually you may wind up in jail, but your descendants will thank you. They will also thank the Evangelical Christians who paved the way for you.

The big news this week was the Supreme Court’s refusal to block Texas’ abortion-banning law. This was a backhanded way to subvert Roe v Wade, and other red states are already moving to copy Texas. There’s a lot to say about this situation — legally, politically, and socially — and there is no shortage of people already writing about it.

With that in mind, I have decided to take this blog’s name literally and do some sifting. Rather than write a long essay of my own, I’m pulling together what other people are saying as concisely as I can. So the featured post will be “[N] Observations about Abortion, Texas, and the Supreme Court”. N is currently up to 12, and I think I may stop there. The post should be out shortly.

Restoring the Roe rights is now another thing Democrats could do, if not for the filibuster. The weekly summary will make a list of these costs of the filibuster.

The summary will also examine the growing number of examples of Republican leaders embracing gangsterism and violence, including Kevin McCarthy threatening telecommunication companies with vague consequences if they cooperate with the investigation of January 6, and Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s threat of “bloodshed” if elections “continue to be stolen”. (Since no elections have been stolen, Democrats can’t avoid this bloodshed by not stealing them. But they could avoid it by not winning, which seems to be Cawthorn’s point.)

Hurricane Ida ravaging the Gulf coast makes this week’s Covid numbers hard to interpret. (Reported infections on the coast are down, but what does that mean?) The summary will include a few other odds and ends, before closing with a more kinetic variation on the domino principle: stick bomb explosions. That should be out before noon.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040855/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-09-05_Right_Livelihood.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040833/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/9-05-21-audio.mp3

"In Our Hands Is Placed a Power" (September 5, 2021) Worship Service

Welcome to our annual Labor Day service, where we celebrate the contributions to social justice by the labor movement both currently and historically. As has been true for several years now, we will be joined by members of San Francisco's labor union choir Rockin' Solidarity. Hard times have always been here for the vast majority of the world's population, but now all of us are at critical crossroads, and which roads we take over the next decade or two may determine the very survival of humanity. As we make these life-or-death choices, what can we learn from both the victories and defeats of organized labor?

Rev. Millie Phillips, Guest Minister; Wonder Dave, Worship Associate; The Rockin’ Solidarity Labor Chorus, Pat Wynne, Director; Mark Sumner, songleader; Bill Ganz, pianist

Eric Shackelford, camera; Shulee Ong, camera; Jonathan Silk, OOS Design & sound; Joe Chapot, live chat moderator; Carrie Steere-Salazar, flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040811/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210905MPSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040728/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210905.mp3

Multiplatform – Outdoors and Livestreamed on Youtube, 9:30 am

We had expectations for what Fall 2021 was going to be like … and those plans have changed. As we move into another year where covid shapes much of what we do (and don’t do), perhaps we ... read more.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040707/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuH6NrcyGes&feature=youtu.be

Multiplatform – Outdoors and Livestreamed on Youtube, 9:30 am

Join us either in person, outdoors at Live Oak, or on our Youtube channel for our annual Homecoming/Water Communion service.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040623/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWa6jyUDy4A&feature=youtu.be

How is your anger showing up? Are you more irritable, or carrying a slow-simmering rage? There are many justifiable reasons to be mad right now. How do we best channel that anger in a way that is productive and doesn’t harm us or the people ... read more.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040541/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj4YukhliOc&feature=youtu.be

The last 5 years, and especially the last 8 months have given us ample reason to question some things we took for granted. We may be feeling disillusioned with humanity and with life itself. What do we do with those feelings?

This service will be streamed ... read more.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040458/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1eObhy2msE&feature=youtu.be

PHOTO BY MELISSA ASKEW ON UNSPLASH

After the close of Summer,
before the land lies ‘neath snow,
there comes the Magic of Autumn,
when all nature is aglow.

Days grow ever shorter,
harvest time is nigh,
‘tis Mabon now my love,
as the earth breathes a sigh

The Moon doth shine her glory,
reflecting Maiden, Mother, Crone,
the Wiccan Year comes full circle,
like our love which we have shown

So arise my love and come away,
let us sing, feast, and make love,
for Wiccan Mabon is a celebration,
of the Goddess’ bounty from above.