Joe Manchin finally laid out what he wants in a voting-rights bill. It’s a significant compromise, but it’s not bad. Sadly, it’s not going to get Republican support either. So what happens next? Is the point just to frame an issue for 2022, or is something actually going to get done?
President Biden’s meeting with Putin was blessedly uneventful. Juneteenth became a national holiday. The Supreme Court refused for the third time to end ObamaCare. The heat wave has the West worried about the looming wildfire season.
That stuff, and a few other things, will get covered in the weekly summary. This week’s featured post focuses on George Packer’s framing of the four narratives of American politics: Free America, Smart America, Real America, and Just America. I think he’s done a good job of listening to the rhetoric of the current moment, and I believe we’ll be hearing about his four narratives for years to come. That post should appear between 10 and 11, EDT. I’ll try to get the summary out by noon.
Assistant Minister Rev. Chris Jimmerson's sermon delivered on June 20, 2021. Getting through challenging times like this, working for justice, building the Beloved Community all require serious contemplation, hard work and allowing ourselves to feel the painful emotions that may come up. We must remember also that play, fun, and humor are necessary to sustain us. We must allow ourselves moments of joy. Love is our ultimate source of resilience, and one of the ways we express that love is through playfulness.
For Father’s Day, we’ll take a deeper dive into what it means to be hopeful. Tom Wyman, author of Infinitely Full of Hope: Fatherhood and the Future in an Age of Crisis and Disaster, and soon to be a first time father, believes that – despite the despair – now is not the time to give up on hope. Rather, we need to cultivate it and keep it alive.
Rev. Alyson Jacks, Associate Minister
Mari Magaloni Ramos, Worship Associate
Gregg Biggs, Small Group Ministry
Bobbi Kovac, Small Group Ministry
Rev. Millie Phillips, Small Group Ministry
Andrés Vera, double bass
My-Hoa Steger, pianist
Brielle Marina Nielson, mezzo soprano
Jon Silk, drummer
Mark Sumner, pianist
Ben Rudiak-Gould, lead
Eric Shackelford, camera
Shulee Ong, camera
Lyle Barrere, sound
Jonathan Silk, audio, oos design, drums
Joe Chapot, social media chat
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Athena Papadakos, flowers
Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour
a collections of readings, prayers and music from the Favourite Readings Service of Sunday 20th June 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Rev. Bridget Spain, minister of Dublin Unitarian Church with readings and musical contributions from 10 congregation members
Photo: one crow perched, another below to his right, dipping her head in the water, tail up
Yesterday, I was excited to see a few crows visiting the pond! I was looking out my window from the house, and there is a string-and-bamboo trellis (for our snap peas) about halfway between the house and the pond that partly blocks the view. But if you look carefully, you can see one crow taking a bath, while the other is perched on a log on the edge behind it.
Photo: Crow in the water lifts up its head
I have been slowly gathering more stones from country roads, and adding them to cover the pond liner all around the edge, along with placing some aging branches there, from around our land. Seeing the crows perched on the branches, I am so glad I included them. This process of covering the liner edge is about two thirds complete now, and the plants in the water are also beginning to grow some new leaves and shoots.
Photo: crows on the branch, one with a stone in his beak, one wet from her bath
I didn’t notice until I saw these photos, but one crow has picked up a little stone in his beak! He reminds me of me as I go around looking for stones the right size for the edge. I wonder if he brought it with him to place somewhere himself. (By the way, I don’t know whether these crows are male or female, but they are not “its” so I prefer to give them personal pronouns. I wish English was like the Wabanaki languages in that the personal pronouns are not gender specific.) After placing a new batch of stones in the morning, I felt really exhausted and rested for the afternoon. But in the evening, I came out and just sat down next to the pond, enjoying the reflections in the water.
Last summer, many volunteer and religious professional leaders were so consumed by the challenges of transitioning to virtual operations that they never took time off. We urge you to do so this summer because rest is critical for the quality and sustainability of our work.
Rev. Diane Dowgiert comes to First UU Nashville with 20 years of ministry experience. She holds degrees from Metropolitan State University of Denver and Starr King School for the Ministry. With a background in social services, Diane has a passion for responding to the needs of the local community, bringing Unitarian Universalist principles and values to social justice issues. She has served Unitarian Universalist congregations in Coralville, Iowa, Greensboro, North Carolina, Tucson, Arizona, and Marietta, Ohio. Outside of church, Diane enjoys hiking and quilting. Her family consists of her husband of 45 years, two adult sons, one daughter-in-law, and one adorable cat.
What does Unitarian Universalism mean to you?
Unitarian Universalism is a living tradition with roots that run deep into the past, a living tradition that changes and evolves to meet current day need, a living tradition that holds a hopeful vision for the future. Unitarian Universalism is more concerned with life here and now than with a possible after-life. We work to create a heaven here on Earth and we work to eradicate the hells that exist here on Earth. We believe that salvation is collective, for everyone, not just a chosen few. We seek religious and spiritual truths not just in one book, but in many sources. We are held together not by common belief but by the covenant we make with each other, a promise to abide together in the spirit of love and service. We strive toward a set of commonly held principles. We welcome and celebrate diversity in all its forms.
Briefly describe what you do at FUUN
As Developmental Lead Minister, I am hired by the Board of Directors to work with the congregation on an established set of goals that will strengthen the congregation for its future ministry. Developmental ministry is intentionally time-limited, usually somewhere between 3 and 7 years, depending on the scope of work that is hoped to be accomplished. In addition, I perform the duties of the Lead Minister — leading worship, providing pastoral care, collaborating with and supervising the paid staff, representing the congregation in the larger community, working with the lay leaders of the congregation, performing weddings, child dedications, and memorial services, and generally leading the congregation in fulfillment of its mission.
Are you a part-time or full-time employee?
I am full time.
What is the most time-consuming part of your job?
As with any minister serving in a lead position, a large percentage of my time is spent preparing for worship — researching and writing a sermon, choosing readings, hymns and stories, coordinating with the Worship Committee and other service participants.
What is your busiest day of the week, and why?
It varies by week depending on what committees are meeting, what else is going on at the church, or any pastoral emergencies that may arise.
What improvements, if any, have you made to your job?
As a Developmental Minister, I specialize in serving congregations in transition after a settled minister has resigned or retired. I don’t necessarily make improvements in the job, but I definitely do things differently than my predecessors. A period of developmental ministry is a time to closely examine the congregation’s practices, including how the role of the minister functions.
What do you love best about your job?
I love Unitarian Universalist congregations. I love getting to know a congregation — its people, its history, its traditions, its triumphs and failures, its challenges, and its hopes and dreams.
What is the most challenging part of your job?
Keeping it all in balance. There is always more to be done than there is time. Remembering that churches move at the speed of church which is sometimes frustratingly slow.
What are some things you do that the congregation might not be aware of?
Part of what I do as a Developmental Minister is help the congregation discover the things they weren’t aware their previous minister did, and then, to examine whether or not it is something they expect their minister to do going forward.
What’s been one of your proudest moments working at FUUN?
I am most proud of making it through a year of global pandemic and all the challenges that went along with it.
How does your work support the mission of FUUN?
I strive to do my work in such a way as to embody the mission of FUUN, creating community, nurturing spiritual growth, and acting on our values in the larger world.
Is there anything else you want people to know about your job?
In normal times, other than Sunday morning, much of the work of ministry is invisible, witnessed by only a few or not seen at all. Time spent in study and writing, time spent on the telephone or Zoom or exchanging emails, time spent in hospital rooms — these are but some examples. In this abnormal past year, my work has been more invisible than usual, conducted almost exclusively from behind a computer screen.
Tell us about your family (pets, people, etc.)
My family consists of my husband of 47 years, two adult sons, one daughter-in-law, one grandchild, and one adorable cat.
How do you keep your work/life balance?
I spend as much time outdoors as possible walking, hiking, or gardening. I love to get together with family and friends to cook, eat, and play games.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg. She was a trailblazer for women. I would have loved the opportunity to learn from her about how she managed to do all she did and leave such a mark on her profession.
What would you do (for a career) if you weren’t doing this?
I honestly can’t imagine doing anything else, nor do I want to. Ordination to the ministry is a lifetime vow, a vocation and a calling. I will likely be doing ministry in some form until the day I die.
If you could choose anyone as a mentor, who would you choose and why?
Ruth Bader Ginsberg. She was a trailblazer for women. I would have loved the opportunity to learn from her about how she managed to do all she did and leave such a mark on her profession.
If you could pick one superpower, what would it be?
Tirelessness.
What top three traits define you?
Perseverance. Sense of humor. Love.
What is the one thing you cannot resist?
Black licorice.
What do you like to do when you’re not at the office?
Take naps. Binge-watch old TV shows.
Where is your favorite place to be? (only non church answers allowed!!)
At the kitchen table with my whole family.
What do you think is the greatest game in history?
Scrabble.
What’s something about you (a fun fact) that not many people know?
I was tear-gassed. No, it wasn’t at a protest, but at the first rock concert I attended when I was 16.
If you had to eat one meal every day for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Tacos.
If you won the lottery, what is the first thing you would do?
I have been having a few days in the garden that humble me to my core. This process of finding our way home to earth community is so difficult. Trying to care for fruit trees involves learning about so many insect pests and disease processes. Observing the trees carefully every day. Yesterday and today I was thinning the tiny peaches leaving only one every 6 inches, so that the branches can support them to grow. Often I am trying to figure out which organic solution goes with which problem. And yesterday morning, I saw one of our squirrel neighbors climbing the peach tree–a whole other issue. Will we get to eat any peaches, or will the squirrels take a bite out of each one? Or will birds peck holes in them? Or some other insect pest eat them from the inside?
I hate how gardening sets me at odds with the other critters on this land–figuring out which are “beneficial” (to us) and which are “enemies” (to us.) I remember that when I first had a little garden, many years ago now, I was surprised that so much of it was about killing–pulling weeds, drowning slugs in beer, and so forth. And now that I am caring for an orchard, a permaculture food forest, it’s the same thing. A constant battle. So how is that teaching me how to live in a mutually beneficial relationship with this land?
I start to wonder if human beings should ever have shifted from hunting/gathering to agriculture. Hunting and gathering certainly included the taking of animal life, but it seems like it was more in balance, it was received with gratitude, it was a kind of partnership. I am thinking about the different role of the groundhog in the lives of different cultures. The bane of many gardeners’ lives, groundhogs are incredibly inventive and persistent garden eaters. It was amazing to me that here on our land, the groundhog whose den was next door seemed to respect the orchard as our place, while the garden bed behind the garage she claimed for her own. But I have a friend who built a fence deep into the ground around her entire garden, and still the groundhog family dug a tunnel and emerged right in the center of the garden to eat her vegetables.
However, the groundhog played a different role in Wabanaki cultures, in tribes that were traditionally hunting and gathering. I only know a few of the stories about the legendary figure for good, Koluskap (Glooscap), the creator of human beings. But I learned that his grandmother was the groundhog, Munimqehs, and she guided him and taught him the wisdom he needed. What a different perspective! She taught him that people and animals relied on each other, that hunting was necessary for the people to be strong, but that taking more than was needed was destructive to both.
Photo: The groundhog who used to live near our yard.
Likewise, deer might be a blessing for hunters, but destructive to trees and gardens. We see about one deer each year passing through the back of our yard. We used to have a gang of turkeys that roamed the streets of our neighborhood. They are gone now. Eventually, the groundhog disappeared too–I think a neighbor had something to do with that. Now, it seems, along with birds, we only have squirrels and a little star-nosed mole that tunnels under our wood chip paths, and an occasional chipmunk. But the squirrels are very adept at causing trouble to our garden. All winter long, for example, they climbed up our hazelnut bushes, eating the catkins that would pollinate the flowers in spring. After, they would act drunk and run around wildly in circles. Eventually I put some nets over the two smaller shrubs, to try to protect them. Maybe it worked? The smallest shrub now for the first time has some “future hazelnuts” forming on the end of its branches. I don’t know why the larger two do not.
Photo: Future hazelnut?
Sometimes I am amazed at what grows, what we can harvest. I just cut a whole bunch of soft thyme to dry, and I’ve been finding wine cap mushrooms hiding under clover to add to meals. The sea kale was delicious, and now its flowers smell like honey. There are green berries on the blueberry plants. I got the advice to buy some fake rubber snakes and hang them in the trees to scare off the squirrels–as long as I move them every few days. Last night, Margy and I sat in the back of the yard and watched fireflies signaling to each other in the tall grasses and weeds. In this garden, I am bewildered, sometimes discouraged, often exhausted, and always humbled by how little I know, and how difficult it is. What are you trying to teach me, little squirrels?
Photo by Margy Dowzer: Squirrel sitting, eating, on a sunflower last fall
While there are supposed to be laws and limits on the presidency, Trump was unrestrained, exposing just how toothless those safeguards have become and just how urgently the nation needs to reform the office of the presidency itself.
The other featured post examined how CRT is becoming just another content-free scare-label, in the tradition of cancel culture and political correctness.
and the G-7
With Biden replacing Trump, the G-7 meeting in Cornwall lacked the fireworks we’ve gotten used to. Trump had an attention-grabbing habit of insulting our democratic allies while fawning over our authoritarian enemies, but Biden has returned to more typically American behavior. It looks like we can trust him to go overseas without embarrassing us.
The seven nations all pledged to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030, and together they will donate a billion doses of Covid-19 vaccine to the developing world.
The group last met in 2018, with the 2020 meeting being canceled due to the pandemic. (If you remember, that was the meeting Trump initially awarded to his own company to host, before backing down from such a blatantly corrupt act.)
Biden is now heading to a NATO summit. From there he goes to a meeting with Vladimir Putin on Wednesday in Geneva. That’s unlikely to be the lovefest it was for Trump.
This socially distanced photo of the G-7 leaders (plus two guests I haven’t identified; I’m amazed at the news sites that will publish a nine-member G-7 photo without comment) has led to a lot of humorous response.
Before I order these figures, does anyone know if you can take them out and play with them or are they glued to the display stand?
Some people noticed the resemblance to a Star Trek crew that has just beamed down (and expressed concern about Angela Merkel’s prospects for survival, given her red top). Others thought the diplomatic meeting was about to end with a song and dance. (Both Macron and Trudeau look ready for a solo.)
and you might also be interested in
Last week I quoted Seth Abramson’s point that Trump could stop talk of a coup with a short statement saying that he would not cooperate with an effort to reinstate him as president by force. Well, this week Reuters outlined the death threats Trump supporters have been making against election officials who refused to let Trump intimidate them into overturning a legal election. This is something else Trump could probably easily stop, but doesn’t. He’s complicit.
In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes. Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.
As is so often the case, the scandal is not that they broke the law, but that they didn’t. The biggest loophole is that capital gains on stock aren’t taxed until the stock is sold. So as Amazon stock skyrockets, Jeff Bezos can become the world’s richest man without triggering a taxable event.
Middle-class people, whose wealth is mainly in their homes, can’t do that. Even if you don’t sell it, your home is subject to property tax. It may take a while for the assessor to catch up with the value a zooming house market puts on your home, but eventually it will happen.
Nearman was removed for the disorderly behavior of allowing rioters into the closed Capitol building during a special legislative session on Dec. 21, 2020. His actions led to dozens of people — some armed and wearing body armor — gaining access to the Capitol, thousands of dollars in damage and six injured Salem and Oregon State police officers. …
Republicans had stayed mostly silent on Nearman’s actions until the past week, after a video surfaced that showed Nearman suggesting to a crowd days before the riot that if demonstrators texted him he might let them into the Capitol.
This is one reason why it’s not unthinkable that Republican members of Congress might have collaborated in the January 6 riot. A bipartisan commission would have been a good way to look into such possibilities, if Republicans in the Senate hadn’t filibustered the proposal to create such a commission. Treason was in the air in late December and early January. It was being spread by the President of the United States, and some number of Republican officials were infected by it.
The upcoming national meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville is the latest battleground in the culture wars. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal both have good summaries. Southern Baptists may still seem quite conservative to non-evangelicals, but from the point of view of its own conservative wing, the denomination has been “drifting” to the left.
One faction argues the SBC should step back from its role in electoral politics in order to broaden its reach and reverse a 15-year decline in membership. Another faction says the denomination has been drifting to the left, and the way to retain and attract members is to recommit to its conservative roots and stay politically engaged. Each side accuses the other of straying from the SBC’s core mission.
What’s unusual about this conflict is that it seems to have little to do with theology. One side objects to “wokeness” and wants to denounce “critical race theory”, while the other wants to be more welcoming to non-whites, and to take sexual assault accusations more seriously.
One lesson from Israel: to defeat an autocrat who attacks democratic norms and institutions, oppositions need to unify under a big tent. In Israel’s case, that even led Lapid to compromise on who would start as PM, but he understood the imperative of getting Bibi out first.
This is an increasingly common and necessary strategy around the world. In Hungary, opposition parties have agreed to put aside differences and unify in next year’s election to oust Netanyahu’s good buddy and fellow corrupt, nationalist autocrat: Viktor Orban.
and let’s close with some maps that make an interesting point
Voting Trump out of office stopped the bleeding, but the Republic isn’t out of danger yet.
The Boston Globe ran an important series this week: “Future-proofing the Presidency“. Over four years, the Trump administration shredded the laws, institutional norms, and political norms that we had previously trusted to protect the Republic from a corrupt or power-hungry president.
The fact that the voters managed to throw Trump out after four years should only comfort us up to a point. Because of the Trump precedents and the roadmap his administration provides, the next unscrupulous president — who could be Trump himself in 2025 — will begin his assault on democracy with a head start.
The Globe series proposes reforms to turn norms into laws and give teeth to the laws Trump ignored. The specific problems it diagnoses are: financial conflicts of interest, nepotism, immunity from prosecution, ability to shield co-conspirators, and power to obstruct congressional investigations. And the reforms it recommends are
require presidents to divest from all businesses and investments that could pose a conflict of interest
require presidents to publish their tax returns
require an explicit congressional waiver before a president can appoint a relative to office — even if that relative foregoes a salary
strengthen protections for government whistle-blowers, and extend those protections to political appointees
root congressional subpoena power in legislation, so that subpoenas served to the executive branch can be enforced more easily and quickly
allow a president to be indicted while in office, but delay the trial until the presidency ends
pass a constitutional amendment voiding a president’s power to pardon personal associates
The series concludes with “The Case for Prosecuting Donald Trump“. Congress’ impeachment power is broken, and can no longer be trusted to hold presidents accountable.
If Congress had played the role the Founders envisioned, by removing Trump from the presidency after his criminality became clear in the Ukraine affair, that might have been enough of a deterrent to scare future presidents straight. But lawmakers didn’t.
So now there is only one way left to restore deterrence and convey to future presidents that the rule of law applies to them. The Justice Department must abandon two centuries of tradition by indicting and prosecuting Donald Trump for his conduct in office. …
The reluctance to prosecute presidents is deep-rooted, and extreme caution does make sense. (The last thing that the country needs is for Trump to be charged, tried, and then acquitted.) But it cannot be the case that there is no line — no hypothetical act of presidential criminality that would not rise to the level of seriousness that merits setting aside our qualms. And if one accepts that there is a line, it’s hard to imagine Donald Trump didn’t cross it.
The two lawmakers in question — Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell — were outspoken administration critics that Trump frequently attacked on Twitter. (“Shifty Schiff” was one of his playground insult names.) Swalwell became a Democratic presidential candidate. At the time, the Intelligence Committee was engaged in an investigation of Trump’s collusion with Russia.
Not only were they targeted, but so were their family members, including their children. What’s more, a gag order has kept Apple from revealing its cooperation until recently, so the congressmen did not know they were under this kind of scrutiny, and neither did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“President Trump repeatedly and flagrantly demanded that the Department of Justice carry out his political will and tried to use the Department as a cudgel against his political opponents and members of the media,” Rep. Schiff told Recode in a statement. “It is increasingly apparent that those demands did not fall on deaf ears.”
The transcript of Dan McGahn’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on June 4 was released Wednesday, in accordance with the agreement that led to that testimony (after two years of legal wrangling that saw the courts refuse to back up congressional subpoenas). The transcript is 241 pages, and the main thing you can learn by reading large chunks of it is that McGahn was indeed a hostile witness. Releasing only a transcript (rather than video) means that his evasiveness will not be appreciated by the general public.
The pre-interview agreement limited questions to
one, information attributed to Mr. McGahn in the publicly available portions of the Mueller report and events that the publicly available portions of the Mueller report indicate involve Mr. McGahn; and, two, whether the Mueller report accurately reflected Mr. McGahn’s statements to the Special Counsel’s Office and whether those statements were truthful
In the early questioning, McGahn frequently claimed not to remember the events in question until his questioner noted a passage in the Mueller Report. McGahn would then respond with something like “what you’ve read in the report is accurate”. He tried hard not to introduce any new information. I also have to wonder if he used the interview’s ground rules to hide relevant conversations with Trump without perjuring himself. For example:
Q: Did you advise the President as to whether he personally could call Mr. Rosenstein about the investigation? A: I may have at some point in time. Do you have anything in particular? I mean, I was on the job quite a while so — Q: Understood. I’ll direct you to page 81, bottom of the paragraph.
Like Trump himself, and so many other people in his administration, McGahn seems not to recall a number of events that most other people would think of as memorable.
Q: On June 14, 2017 … The Washington Post reported for the first time that the special counsel was investigating President Trump personally for obstruction of justice. Do you recall your reaction to that reporting? A: I don’t recall my reaction to it, no. No. Q: You don’t recall your reaction, as a White House counsel, to learning that the press had reported that the President of the United States was under personal investigation by the special counsel? A: I don’t recall my subjective impression on the evening of June 14th about a news report. No, I don’t. Q: Do you recall speaking to the President that evening? A: I do recall speaking to him, yes. Q: Can you describe that conversation? A: I don’t have a crisp recollection of it.
Again and again, McGahn claimed that his memory had been fresher when Mueller questioned him, so he yielded to whatever description was in the Mueller report. That raises an obvious question: Instead of questioning McGahn about Mueller’s summary of McGahn’s testimony, why doesn’t the Judiciary Committee just look at the transcripts of those interviews? And the answer is that they can’t, at least not yet. Like the McGahn subpoena itself, this was the subject of a long legal wrangle, which the Supreme Court put off deciding until after the election. So at the moment, Congress doesn’t even have access to the still-redacted portions of the Mueller report.
After Trump lost the election, the grounds for releasing grand jury records to Congress changed completely, so Congress suspended its pursuit to coordinate with the new Biden administration. In part, McGahn’s appearance was supposed to be a substitute for the grand jury material.
So that’s where the House investigation into Trump’s obstruction of justice has led: McGahn finally appeared, but under rules that allowed him to do little more than point to quotes in the Mueller report and verify that he actually said that.
Meanwhile, Rachel Maddow has been waging an almost nightly campaign for Attorney General Merrick Garland to expose and reverse Trump administration abuses in the DoJ.
Given that those officials that knew about this are still in the Department right now, why did it take a New York Time article about this abominable behavior to spark an inspector general investigation today? I mean, this scandal wasn’t known to any of us in the public, but it was known to multiple officials inside the Justice Department. None of them thought to peep about it? …
It is clear that the Justice Department under President Biden does not want the job of investigating and rooting around what went rotten inside their own department under the previous president. But even if they don’t want that job, that is the job they have now. … Wake up, you guys! You’re going to work in an active crime scene, and there’s no other cops to call.
You have to fix this. You’re the only ones who can.
Trump and Bill Barr have provided the next would-be despot with a detailed plan for turning the Justice Department into a sword to attack enemies and a shield to protect corrupt friends. If there are no consequences for what they did, either to them or to the lower-level officials who went along, the danger has not passed.
Conservatives can’t tell you what it is, but they know it’s destroying America.
As I’ve explained at length before, conservatives regularly create boogeyman phrases — strings of words that never get defined, but are somehow the source of the current evil: political correctness, socialism, cultural Marxism, cancel culture, and now critical race theory. [1]
The purpose of imbuing these scapegoat phrases with demonic power isn’t to debate a point, it’s to create a label and give it a sinister aura. Such a phrase is supposed to invoke emotions — to cast shame on liberals, and raise outrage for conservatives — not point to an idea. Rather than contribute to discussions, these phrases end them. And so, there is no need to consider the wisdom or folly of Medicare for All; it is “socialism”, so it is evil. End of story.
If the labels were defined, the corresponding concepts could become two-edged swords. Conservatives might, for example, have to explain why it’s not “cancel culture” to drive Colin Kaepernick out of the NFL. But being undefined, the boogeyman phrases simply have usages: Kaepernick isn’t a victim of right-wing cancel culture, because that’s not how the phrase is used. The conservative faithful can simply laugh when “cancel culture” is turned back on them, the way native speakers of English might laugh when a foreigner misuses some common word.
Like the other boogeyman phrases, “critical race theory” started out as an actual thing, which Education Week described like this:
The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies. … A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.
Many of those red-lined areas continue to be segregated ghettos today, as is well described in The Color of Lawby Richard Rothstein.
The Washington Post has a similar account of the actual critical race theory.
Critical race theory is a decades-old academic framework that holds that racism is systemic, embedded in government policies and laws that are evident in any serious examination of American history.
But in its boogeyman usage, CRT applies to any notion that White people might participate in racism without consciously hating Black people. Refusing to allow the word “racism” to have any systemic content, the conservative account of CRT has it casting individual moral blame on all Whites.
So, in Education Week’s example of red-lining, the boogeyman usage of CRT would interpret it as accusing all the White loan officers who applied the red-lining rules of consciously hating Black people — which would obviously be unfair, if anyone were actually making that accusation.
That’s how Republicans arrive at the anti-CRT laws they are passing in the red-state legislatures they control. Fortunately, laws have to at least pretend to define the things they are banning. So Oklahoma’s anti-CRT law, which was signed by Governor Kevin Stitt in May, bans any “teacher, administrator or other employee of a school district, charter school or virtual charter school” from teaching that
an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously, … an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex, … an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex, … any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex
All these ideas are either gross distortions of anti-racist teachings, or appeal to subjective responses White students or parents might have, especially after Fox News tells them they should feel that way. (What if teaching Oklahoma high school students about the Tulsa race massacre causes some White descendant of the rioters to feel “guilt, anguish, or … psychological distress”?)
But an obvious question to raise at this point is: If that isn’t really what anti-racists teach, what’s the problem? The law just won’t apply. After all, the legislature could ban teaching that the Moon is made of green cheese without affecting any actual astronomy classes. Josh Marshall shrugs the issue off like this:
I’ve now reviewed a wide body of articles, news reports and legislative debates and I can conclude that the public/political debate [about] critical race theory is quite stupid and laws banning it may be hard to enforce since no one has a clear idea of what it is.
Surely the goal is not to have enforceable laws but to intimidate teachers from talking about racism. A chilling effect.
A historical model here would be Tennessee’s anti-Darwin law of the 1920s, which led to the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. The law was indeed hard to enforce. (Scopes was found guilty, but the Tennessee Supreme Court set aside his fine on a technicality, and the state decided to drop the case.) But the sheer amount of hoopla that trial evoked — the fictionalized version Inherit the Wind is still streaming, and was remade for TV in 1999 — underlines Heer’s point: What teacher or school district is going to want to start something like that? Wouldn’t it be simpler just to leave out any racially charged interpretations of US history, and skip over historical events that might make White students uncomfortable? (Just about every state that is banning CRT has such an incident to sweep under the rug. Florida, for example, was the site of the Rosewood massacre in 1923. And lynchings, though concentrated in the South, happened almost everywhere.)
I will say it’s already playing out. The White teachers who started doing a little bit more teaching about race and racism are now going back to their old way of teaching. I’ve had conversations with teachers who said things like, “I’m getting so much pushback for teaching Alice Walker, I’m going to go back to teaching what I used to teach.” So all the teachers who would have done a little bit of what I was doing — anti-racism work and culturally responsive teaching — they’re not going to do anything next year. They’re already declaring, “I’m not doing nothing,” or “It’s not safe,” or “I don’t want to lose my job.”
Nonetheless, some teachers are resisting. The Zinn Education Project organized a National Day of Action on Saturday, when
thousands of educators and others gathered virtually and in person at historic locations in more than 20 cities to make clear that they would resist efforts in at least 15 Republican-led states to restrict what teachers can say in class about racism, sexism and oppression in America. … Several thousand teachers have signed a pledge that says: “We, the undersigned educators, refuse to lie to young people about U.S. history and current events — regardless of the law.”
The military is a second front in the Critical Race Theory war. Here CRT stands in for any form of diversity training. [2] The conservative Heritage Foundation is a source of rhetoric for both fronts, having published 17 articles on the topic since Biden took office.
The theme of military anti-CRT arguments is that the US military has been a paradise of racial harmony until now, when CRT-influenced diversity training has begun to stir up racial conflict.
Senior Research Fellow Dakota Wood, for example, is a White male who served in the Marines for 20 years. He didn’t notice any racism or sexism during that time, so obviously there wasn’t any.
The beauty of military service is that the uniform and common objective supplants grouping by individual identities of color, class, gender, or religion. …
What united everyone with whom I served was the singular identity of being a U.S. Marine committed to defending our country, a country comprising every sort of person from countless different backgrounds.
It didn’t matter where you came from. All that really mattered among Marines was whether you were competent in your job, committed to the mission, and were someone your fellow Marines could depend on.
Military service truly is the best example of America as the proverbial great melting pot.
And he repeats the standard conservative slander of what diversity training tries to accomplish.
Programs that emphasize differences among service members, that impose a demand for people to feel guilty about their identity and background, that elevate one group over another, or that seek to subordinate a group relative to another generate resentment, or a sense of aggrieved victimization, or entitlement to special handling.
Such initiatives destroy the fabric of military service that otherwise unites an extraordinarily diverse population in common purpose and identity. Identity politics is a cancer that corrodes good order and discipline and the necessary authorities inherent in a chain of command.
Senator Tom Cotton echoed these sentiments to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Thursday:
Mr. Secretary: We’re hearing reports of plummeting morale, growing mistrust between the races and sexes where none existed just six months ago
Racism and sexism in the military! Who ever heard of such a thing before the Biden administration? Jeff Schogol, writing for the military-focused site Task and Purpose, answered that question.
The Pentagon tried to bury a 2017 survey that found nearly one-third of Black service members who responded said they had experienced racism. Moreover, 30% of Black respondents and 22% of Asian respondents felt their chances for promotion would be harmed if they reported the racial harassment and discrimination that they endured. …
But clearly, if the armed services just refuse to talk about these problems, they will go away. Diversity training is the problem, not racism or sexism.
So Cotton has proposed a bill to block such training. The press release announcing the bill cites two horrifying recent developments:
Last month, the Navy released a recommended reading list to facilitate the “growth and development” of sailors. One of the books on this list is Ibram X. Kendi’s bestseller [How to be an Antiracist] advocating Critical Race Theory and discrimination on the basis of race.
Separately, the Navy’s Second Fleet created a book club for sailors to read White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, a book that claims white people are inherently racist, whether consciously or subconsciously, and that race is the insidious subtext for virtually all human interactions.
Cotton would end such outrages.
This bill would prevent the military from including such theories in trainings or other professional settings, if their inclusion would reasonably appear as an endorsement. It also would prohibit the military from hiring consultants to teach such theories
His ban would extend to any notion that “The United States is a fundamentally racist country” or that “The Declaration of Independence or the United States Constitution are fundamentally racist documents.”
As with high school history courses, you have to wonder about the chilling effect of such a law. What instructor would dare to point out, say, the implications of the Constitution counting a slave as three-fifths of a person?
Having given so much time to falsehood, I feel that I have to end by coming back to truth: What is it that anti-racist books and diversity trainings are trying to accomplish? If they’re not trying to convince us that “America is an evil, oppressive place” (as Cotton’s press release puts it), what ideas are they trying to communicate?
Having read a number of the books CRT critics object to, I would boil anti-racism down to a few points (which apply to sexism as well):
A culture’s fundamental assumptions get baked into institutions, laws, economic structures, and traditions that live on, even after those assumptions are no longer explicitly taught. [3]
For centuries, American culture explicitly promoted race-based rules and racial stereotypes that marginalized non-Whites, and made it either difficult or impossible for them to achieve positions of authority and influence, or even of equality with White Americans.
The structures created during those centuries are still with us, and participating in them maintains the effects of historical racism. Present-day Americans need not consciously hold racist beliefs to uphold a racist system.
Because their personal experiences do not confront them with the injustices of systemic racism, White Americans have a hard time noticing these injustices, which simply seem like “normal life” to them.
Unless systemic racism is brought to conscious awareness and actively countered, it will endure.
Put together, these points explain why the conservative notion of color-blindness, even if put forward in good faith (which it often is not), is inadequate for overcoming America’s racist heritage. None of this implies that “America is evil” or “Whites are inherently racist” or any of the other canards the Tom Cottons are pushing. But neither can we simply ignore racism and hope that it will go away.
[1] Something similar happens with people, who are demonized to the point that anything they might say is already discounted, and conspiracy theories targeting them need no evidence. Hillary Clinton is the longest-standing example. During the Trump administration, large numbers of FBI agents and officials were similarly demonized: Jim Comey, Andy McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page. Simply mentioning their names evoked a dark conspiracy whose details never really came into focus. So far, Kamala Harris is the most prominent demon of the Biden administration. How dare she tell the country to “enjoy” the Memorial Day weekend!
[3] In assembling these points, I have to note that racist ideas are still being taught in many places. The US has an active white supremacist movement, which many conservative politicians and media figures wink-and-nod at, even while professing color-blindness in public.
Every week gives me a new reason to rejoice that Donald Trump is no longer president. This week, it’s the G-7 meeting in England, where President Biden did not insult our democratic allies, tweet something petulant, or stand in the way of shared commitments to confront climate change. Admittedly, being happy that a president can go overseas without embarrassing our country sets a low bar for Biden. But it still feels refreshingly strange to me.
Inside our borders, the question of how to repair the damage Trump did to the presidency and to the government in general is starting to come to a head. The Boston Globe did a week-long series on the reforms that are needed, culminating with prosecuting Trump himself. A new scandal emerged concerning Trump’s use of the Justice Department to go after his critics in Congress. Don McGahn’s testimony to Congress, after all this time, was both enlightening and frustrating, pointing out how completely the Trump administration defied congressional oversight. And Attorney General Garland is beginning to come under fire for standing by various questionable (or even corrupt) decisions made by his predecessor.
This looks like another two-featured-post week. The first, “Critical Race Theory is the New Boogeyman” looks at conservative efforts to make “critical race theory” a new content-free buzzphrase, in the tradition of “cancel culture” and “political correctness”. It should be out soon.
The second is still untitled, and concerns the what-to-do-about-Trump question. Biden seems to want to move on without calling the previous administration to account for its corruption and its endangerment of democracy, maybe hoping that some local jurisdiction will prosecute him for his pre-presidency crimes. Like many others, I am questioning whether that response is adequate. That still needs work, so it might not appear until noon, eastern time.
The weekly summary has the G-7 and a few other things to cover. Let’s say it gets out by 1.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on June 13, 2021. The third strand of the eightfold path is right speech. How do we become mindful of our speech? How do we practice telling the truth, being kind, knowing when to speak and knowing when not to speak?
“Teach us all you can by saying yes,” Nancy Shaffer writes in a poem titled “Calling.” Rather than coming from some booming voice on high, the sort of calling that Shaffer describes is marked by the subtle work of learning to listen- and being willing to respond. Preaching for the last time as our ministerial intern (but not her last time in our pulpit) Meg McGuire reframes this notion of calling and reflects on what it might look like for this community going forward.
Meg McGuire, Ministerial Intern
Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister
Rev. Alyson Jacks, Associate Minister
Richard Davis, Worship Associate
Richard Davis-Lowell, Worship Associate
Cal Ball, chalice lighter
Luanne Schulte, Internship Committee
Reiko Oda Lane, organist
Dr. Mark Sumner, choir director
UUSF Choir
Bill Ganz, pianist
Sarah Rose Cohen, lead
Bill Klinglehoffer, lead
Asher Davison, lead
Ben Rudiak-Gould, lead
Eric Shackelford, camera
Shulee Ong, camera
Jonathan Silk, audio, oos design, drums
Joe Chapot, social media chat
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Amy Kelly, flowers
Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour
a collections of readings, prayers and music from the Sunday service of 13th June 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Will O'Connell, congregation member at Dublin Unitarian Church with contributions from Gavin Byrne and Josh Johnston
the address from the Sunday service at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland, on 13th June 2021. Will O"Connell is a congregation member at Dublin Unitarian Church.
I am slowly adding stones and plants and developing the top edge of the pond, to cover up all the liner. I did a minor adjustment to the overflow channel to lower the water level by about an inch, and added some soil (underneath the liner and layers) to an edge that was a little bit lower than other parts. I’ve been using my pile of small stones for the edges, but stabilizing them behind larger stones. I decided to use the larger stones to also cover the vertical slope between the planting ledge and the top. This was in the original plan, but I didn’t think I would have enough stones to do it. And I don’t. The other day, Margy and I went to another rural road and brought home another batch of larger stones from the side of the road. But it doesn’t take long to use them up.
By the way, in the background, from left to right, you can see a ninebark shrub in bloom, a summer sweet shrub, and a little elderberry that’s barely visible. I am trying to start some hazelnut bushes from off shoots of our big ones. Also, there is a lot of goldenrod that will flower later in the season, and on the far right back, our mulberry tree–which after a couple rough starts is finally doing better this year.
Back to the stones for the pond, even though I don’t have enough of the larger stones, it seemed smart to do as complete a finish as possible, section by section. Here is a close up of the most completed section, behind the cardinal flower, where I also incorporated an old piece of a branch. I am enjoying this design process.
Photo: pond detail with stones and log
I also ordered and received some more plants–this time I got some pickerel rush (or pickerel weed), Pontederia cordata. This native plant will grow 2-4 feet tall and have blue flowers. I ordered five, but received eight little root and stem starts. So then I decided to rearrange the arrowhead plants, moving them closer to the “front” from where the photo is taken, and where we’ll sit to watch the pond. I planted the pickerel rush mostly where the arrowhead had been, on the back left, and then put a couple of the smallest ones in front of that log. Here is what it looks like right now, and this is the largest one. It takes faith and imagination to see them growing and flowering in the summer and fall.
Photo: Pickerel Rush held in place in the water by stones
In other news, I have twice seen (from my window) a crow walk up to the pond and get a drink of water. Tonight I also saw a few little water bugs of some kind swimming around. Animal life is starting to arrive. The other day, when it was so hot, there was some green algae in the water, which is to be expected until the plants grow bigger–but then it disappeared again today. Time to think of another place to find some more of the larger stones. It all feels magical.
Photo: Pond with new plants, and also pine pollen covering the whole surface.
This morning I was up at sunrise, which seemed such a sacred time to finish filling the pond! While the hose was running, I planted several plants that I had previously purchased, and then added three ferns from our yard. Sometimes, I just had to sit and watch, amazed at its coming to life in this way.
I used our city water from the outdoor spigot because the rain barrels nearby were empty from yesterday’s filling. City water is less ideal because of chlorine, but the chlorine will evaporate quickly, especially in our 90 degree sunny weather today. Plus it is being intermixed with the water already there. I filled it until it just started to drain into the overflow channel. Hurray! The overflow channel worked.
The method I used for planting was that recommended by Robert Pavlis in Building Natural Ponds. No soil, just anchor the roots of each plant with some stones. That meant rinsing off the plant roots from the soil they were packed in. I added some more stones in one area because the recommended depth was less than what I had. Here are the plants I planted:
Photo: Sweetflag
Sweetflag was first. It was a bit unclear whether this was Acorus calamus, or Acorus americanus. Online where I purchased it, it was listed as Acorus calamus (Americanus). I was hoping to buy the plant native to here (americanus); the other was brought by Europeans, but naturalized, and then it was also used by Indigenous people. I learned the Passamaquoddy name for this plant in the class I took. Kiwhosuwasq, (which now can refer to either plant). It means “muskrat root,” because the muskrat would eat it, and it was an important medicinal plant.
Next I planted Cardinal Flower, or Lobelia cardinalis, which will have a bright red blossom that is beloved by hummingbirds. It is a native plant. Both Sweetflag and Cardinal Flowers will grow tall, so I placed them toward the back of the pond, across from where we tend to sit.
Photo: Cardinal Flower
The next plant is Arrowhead, or Sagittaria latifolia, which is a shorter plant. It will have white flowers. When I rinsed off its roots, it divided into two plants, so I planted them near each other. It is native plant, but also an aggressive grower so I placed it on the narrower planting ledge where it can spread out on its own. I hope that all of these plants will spread out to fill their areas, but also make room for each other. The goal is to cover half the water surface with these plants on the planting ledges.
Photo: Arrowhead plants
Photo: Blue Eyed Grass
I had two pots of Blue Eyed Grass, or Sisyrinchium atlanticum. This one is also a smaller plant, and in the spring it blooms early with delicate blue flowers. I placed it in the part of the pond nearest to where we will sit.
Because it is so late in the season, a number of the plants I wanted to buy were no longer available this year. I am hoping I can find some Marsh Marigold sometime. (Calthus palustris.) It is another shorter plant, with spring blooming bright yellow flowers.
I was able to purchase a hardy white water lily, on Etsy. (Nymphaea spp.) The hardy variety of lilies can survive the winters in Maine, especially if their roots are deep in the pond. They sent me two root tubers. They arrived in my mailbox on one of the hot days, and were warm when I opened the package, so I hope they will be okay. But I planted them in temporary pots filled with stones, and placed those pots on the planting ledge. When they get bigger, I will move them lower in the pond. Water lilies are important parts of a natural pond, partly because their pads cover the surface of the water, providing shade and inhibiting algal growth. Plus, maybe frogs will sit on them. But for now, they are tiny.
Photo: Water lily in pot
After planting all these, I found two types of ferns among the many growing at the back of our yard, dug them up, rinsed off their roots, and planted three of them in the pond. I tried a few different ones–one tall, one small, one mixed, to see which might transplant best. A friend has offered me some Blue Flag Irises from her pond, so I’ve saved a space in my plan for them. Of course, now the question is, shall we try to buy some more plants to fill in more space right away, or wait for these to grow into larger versions of themselves? In the meantime, by 10 a.m. I had to come inside to get away from the heat, so all future parts of this project have to wait. Maybe this evening, we’ll just sit by the side of the water and enjoy.
We’re never gonna see eye to eye on whether I should have been hanged, but I’m proud to have been at his side (except for the one time he sent a violent mob after me and my family)
and the dimming prospects for protecting democracy
In an op-ed yesterday, Joe Manchin doubled down on his defense of the filibuster, and said he will vote against the For the People Act. I discuss this more fully in a featured post.
Tuesday, for the first time in the century since it happened, an American president showed up to observe the anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre. President Biden gave a very good speech that emphasized the massacre’s continuing significance.
When people deny American racism, they usually end up explaining the racial wealth-and-income gap in terms of some Black deficiency. Maybe Blacks lack intelligence or a work ethic or two-parent households or the ability to defer gratification. After all, it’s the only logical conclusion: If nothing is wrong with American society, something must be wrong with Black people.
But Tulsa points out a factor we can’t sweep under the rug: In the Greenwood neighborhood, Black people were building wealth the way traditional ideals say Americans are supposed to: They opened businesses, trained for professions, and owned homes. But all that was destroyed by white violence. And Tulsa was not the only place this happened.
While the Tulsa massacre was a century ago, it’s not just ancient history, because wealth has a way of sticking around and growing generation by generation. I appreciate that Biden didn’t just lay a wreath; he called our attention to what the massacre and the burning of 35 blocks of Greenwood mean in terms of Black success or lack of success.
Imagine all those hotels and diners and mom-and-pop shops that could have been passed down this past hundred years. Imagine what could have been done for Black families in Greenwood: financial security and generational wealth.
Biden tied this violent destruction (and the subsequent unwillingness of insurance companies to pay claims) to other ways that Black families have systematically been denied the opportunity to build wealth.
While the people of Greenwood rebuilt again in the years after the massacre, it didn’t last. Eventually neighborhoods were red-lined on maps, locking Black Tulsa out of homeownerships. A highway was built right through the heart of the community … cutting off Black families and businesses from jobs and opportunity. Chronic underinvestment from state and federal governments denied Greenwood even just a chance at rebuilding.
One common objection to the notion of white privilege is: “Nobody gave me what I have. I worked for it.” Nobody gave me this house — I made all the payments. Nobody gave me my education — I studied hard and my parents took out a second mortgage. Nobody gave me this job — I earned the credentials to get started and I worked my way up. Nobody gave me this business — I took the risks and made them pay off.
All that may be true. Despite notable exceptions, for the most part successful White people don’t just cruise into affluence. They have to walk the path to success step by step. When they look back, they see their struggles and resent the implication that they don’t deserve what they have.
And yet, while they (i.e., we) did have to walk that path themselves, the path was open. The loans had to be paid back, but they were available. Their parents had something to mortgage. Schools let them in, and teachers took them seriously. Teen-age hijinks didn’t land them in jail or get them killed by police. They found mentors (or investors) when they needed them. When they deserved a promotion, they got one. And after they had built something, nobody took it away.
Whites don’t usually think of those things as privileges. That’s just the way life is supposed to work for everybody. But it hasn’t always and it still doesn’t now. That’s the point.
and assault weapons
A federal judge threw out a California assault-weapons ban that has been in place for 31 years. Reading the decision leaves me puzzled. Judge Benitez roots his reasoning in the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision (which Justice Stevens described as “the Supreme Court’s worst decision of my tenure“) which says the Second Amendment “elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.”
Benitez’ point, then, is that the AR-15 is great weapon for defense against home invaders.
While the state ought to protect its residents against victimization by a mass shooter, it ought also to protect its residents against victimization by home-invading criminals. But little is found in the Attorney General’s court filings reflecting a goal of preventing violence perpetrated against law-abiding citizens in their homes.
I’m having trouble picturing the usefulness of a long gun in a home-invader context. In a close-combat situation, I would think you’d want a weapon where the barrel is hard to grab or push aside. Special Operations Force Report claims otherwise. Still, the implied scenario in that article is multiple intruders who are themselves armed and determined to shoot it out with you, so merely killing one of them will not scare the others away. I have to wonder how often that situation occurs. Is it more or less frequent than, say, mass shootings?
Maryland banned assault weapons after the Sandy Hook massacre, and a federal appeals court upheld that law in 2016, noting that the Heller decision specifically mentioned M-16 rifles (which are close cousins of the AR-15).
Because the banned assault weapons and large-capacity magazines are “like” “M-16 rifles” —“weapons that are most useful in military service” — they are among those arms that the Second Amendment does not shield.
But that was in 2017, and the Supreme Court is different now: A man who lost the 2016 popular vote by 2.9 million votes became president, and a Republican Senate majority representing a minority of American citizens approved his three appointments to the Court. So because of that exercise of minority rule, the Constitution means something different now than it did in 2017.
The thing I find most disturbing in conservative judges’ continuing expansion of the Second Amendment is that it puts any kind of gun control permanently beyond the reach of democracy, regardless of future events. If Sandy Hooks start happening in every state on every day, nothing can be done.
and you also might be interested in …
The seven-day average of daily new Covid cases in the US is now below 15K, with less than 500 daily deaths. 51.3% of the population has received at least one vaccine shot, and 41.6% are fully vaccinated. (You’ll see higher numbers in some sources, because they are giving a percentage of adults, or of the eligible population, which is now people 12 and over.) But vaccination rates are going down, particularly in the South.
The G-7 group of advanced economies announced an historic accord to set a minimum global corporate tax rate on Saturday, taking a first step to reverse a four-decade decline in the taxes paid by multinational corporations.
As things stand now, big global corporations can play countries off against each other. “You want me to pay taxes? I’ll just go somewhere else.” If countries can work together, though, they can avoid the race-to-the-bottom on corporate tax rates.
Economist Heidi Shierholz debunks the “labor shortage” theory, which you may see popping up in Facebook memes about how people don’t want to work.
Shierholz defines a labor shortage as “accelerating wage growth, accompanied by sluggish job growth”. That’s not happening. Every recession ends with a sorting-out process, where employers evaluate how many workers they need and workers evaluate their job prospects. It usually doesn’t go all that smoothly, but it works out eventually. So far, there’s no reason to think it will be different this time.
My personal guess is that a lot of women will re-enter the job market when children go back to school in the fall.
The May jobs report can fit into just about anybody’s theory of what the economy is doing. The economy added over half a million jobs, which is good. But some economists were predicting more. The unemployment rate is dropping (now 5.8%), but is still higher than before the pandemic.
In short, the economy continues to bounce back, but it’s not all the way back yet. Maybe it will get there and maybe it won’t. The whole last year is kind of unprecedented, so there’s not a lot of history to base a prediction on.
Democrat Melanie Stansbury held the House seat vacated by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland by a 25-point margin in a special election Tuesday. A Republican victory, or even a close race, would have been shocking in this district, but Stansbury easily overcame an effort to paint her as anti-law-enforcement.
If there’s a pattern in the special elections held since November, it’s that voters show up when they expect their side to win: Republicans are outperforming in Republican districts and Democrats in Democratic districts. There hasn’t been a true swing-district special election yet.
I can’t believe we have to keep defending Anthony Fauci, but any time I scan through Fox News, they’re going after him. The narrative the Trumpists want to tell is that the whole pandemic was a conspiracy between Fauci and China, and that Trump performed admirably. It’s insane.
Is it too soon to say good-bye to Netanyahu? A bizarre coalition looks ready to form a new government, while Bibi himself seems to be plotting his own January 6.
Just learned our 9y/o did an experiment on us. Lost tooth, told no one for 3d, kept tooth under his pillow. No $. Then he tells us he lost the tooth, next night there is money under his pillow. Then confronted us with his scientific evidence that the tooth fairy isn’t real.
The kid guesses that a scam is happening, constructs a method to prove it, but doesn’t blow the whistle until after he gets his payoff.
and let’s close with something magnificently pointless
The idea of domino patterns is to build something up just so you can knock it down. I don’t know why it’s so compelling, but it is. In this video, 82 days of work are undone in about five minutes.
Watch the Service: To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on June 6, 2021. The second in our series on the Noble Eightfold Path. In order to reach peace of mind, we understand how the mind and spirit work, and we make powerful intentions to keep impermanence in mind, to hold onto joy lightly, and to remember that everyone dies in the end. Does this turn out to be cheering or depressing, or both?
"Dismantling Perfectionism: Bring it on!" (June 6, 2021) Worship Service
There is a whole set of things that Tema Okun argues are part of White Supremacy Culture in her classic article, "White Supremacy Culture". One of them is perfectionism. Ever since I read that article I've thought most of where and how perfectionism shows up. It was one of the ones that didn't make obvious and immediate sense. And it is the one I am more and more excited to dismantle, take apart, keep some bits of and toss the rest. In our lives of spirit and connection, love and liberated life, I think it is the one that will leverage the most transformation!
This Sunday we'll formally welcome new members with a special New Member Recognition Ceremony. And there will be a special video presentation of this year's Rheiner Award. The Rheiner Award was established by the UUSF Board of Trustees in 1989 to recognize and celebrate a member of this Society for social justice activism and community service.
Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister
Rev. Alyson Jacks, Associate Minister
Meg McGuire, Ministerial Intern
Carrie Steere-Salazar, Board Moderator
Sarah Ellerman, membership
Reiko Oda Lane, organist
UUSF Choir
Mark Sumner, choir director
Maria Roodnitsky, soprano
Brielle Marina Neilson, alto
Ben Rudiak-Gould, tenor
Gilead Wurman, baritone
Asher Davison, bass
Eric Shackelford, camera
Shulee Ong, camera
Jonathan Silk, audio, oos design, drums
Joe Chapot, social media chat
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Amy Kelly, flowers
Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour
a collections of readings, prayers and music from the Sunday service of 6th June 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Rev. Bridget Spain, minister of Dublin Unitarian Church with contributions from Jennifer Flegg, Gavin Byrne and Josh Johnston
the address from the Sunday service at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland, on 6th June 2021. Rev. Bridget Spain is senior minister at Dublin Unitarian Church.
before the pandemic I used to go to church every weekend. not only that, but I would also help with childcare and go to re and owl on sunday afternoons. now, church is all through zoom and it just doesn't feel the same to me. so I rarely go to the church zoom meetings. it doesn't help that I usually work on Sundays. I still consider myself religious and spend time every day being spiritual, but I feel bad for not going to online church.
Photo: A bulk order of small round stones of many sizes
This week has been a big adventure in stones. In my last post about my pond project, I mentioned that I needed to get a pickup truck, to go to a store that had “2 inch round stones” in bulk. Well, I did some research, and put on my big girl pants, and rented a pickup truck from Home Depot. I drove to Estabrooks, where a clerk rang me up for a half cubic yard of the stones. But then they were informed by the people in bulk orders that they didn’t carry 2 inch round stones. Despite a clerk reassuring me two days earlier that they had them. So a manager came by, and explained that the previous clerk was wrong, they didn’t carry them any more, and had no way to order that amount from a possible supplier. She was very apologetic about the mistake, and gave me a $40 gift card to compensate me for the truck rental.
So truthfully, I was proud of myself for doing something I hadn’t done before–renting the truck–and they did treat me well and took responsibility for their mistake. But I was disappointed, and back to square one for finding stones. I started looking again at the notes I had made before, and noticed that I had written down another possible source for stones–but the information online wasn’t very complete. (I think people who sell stones in bulk don’t really like to work on websites.) So I called New England Specialty Stones, left a message and got a call back a few hours later. They were happy to deliver a half yard of 1 1/2 inch round stones to my house, with a delivery charge, and the total price was $76 dollars–less than what it would cost for my earlier Estabrooks adventure. The stones arrived on Thursday, and were expertly dumped on the tarp I had placed on our patio. I felt such relief and joy to see those stones.
Some parts of the pond project have been step-by-step, like digging a hole. But other parts have required a big push on my part, with some help from others–like laying the pond liner, or getting a bulk order of stones. Now that the stones have been delivered, I am back to the step-by-step processes. The person I spoke with about these stones mentioned that they’d need to be washed, to use them for a pond. So I started doing that today.
Photo: Stone rinse #1 of 5
It took five rinses before the water was relatively clear. But I did have the idea to dump out the “dirty” water onto the beds around my fruit and nut trees. I am thinking that this stone dust is likely a very good soil amendment–like the granite dust I put around the tree beds earlier on. Once rinsed, the stones are actually quite pretty and colorful, with a great variety of sizes and shapes.
Photo: rinsed stones
Once rinsed, I take them via the wheelbarrow back to the pond area to use. Load by load. First of all I rebuilt the stone “beach” that is an incline for critters to be able to access the water, to get in and out easily. I mentioned before that after my first attempt I was worried it was too steep. So I removed those stones, lifted up the liner and underliner, and dug it out deeper–I took away a whole wheelbarrow full of soil to make a longer gentler incline. Then I positioned larger stones at the bottom inner edge, and also at the lower outer edge, to be a stronger support for the stones on the incline. Now, it feels sturdy and very usable. Once the pond is filled, the water will reach about halfway up that incline.
Photo: Rebuilt stone “beach” for critter access
The beach completed, I started bringing back stones to put on the planting ledge. I positioned a few of the larger stones I had previously found into spots along the inner edge of the ledge, and then shoveled lots of the small stones behind them. Well, I did this wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow, after five rinses of the stones each time. I think I did about 5 or 6 wheelbarrows this evening. I have seen some beautiful ponds on the Building Natural Ponds Facebook group–with large rocks covering every part of the pond liner. I don’t think that will be my pond. I don’t have access to that kind of rock. My goal is to cover the planting ledge with these small stones, and then finish filling the pond. Then I will start putting plants there, and eventually, they’ll hide the pond liner going up the side from the ledge to the top. But that might take a while. Once I’ve put plants in, I’ll use whatever stones I have left to cover the liner at ground level. Or come up with another idea. But I am excited that critters will have access, and I am happy to be back in a step-by-step process.
The other day, I was talking to a group of friends, and articulated why this work is so important to me. With all of the pain of our world, the injustices past and present, the dangers of environmental degradation and climate change, why do I work in the garden, why do I make a pond? For me, to make relationship with this little piece of land, to love and care for this land, is a spiritual practice. I am only one small person, but I hope by learning to love this small piece of land I can make a prayer, make magic, for humankind to learn to love the earth. I pray that we can stop exploiting the earth and find a different sort of relationship to the earth. A relationship built on respect and mutuality and humility. A relationship in which we understand the sacredness of the earth. A relationship of gratitude, for water, for soil, for stones, for plants. That is the magic that lives in each stone.
Photo: Pond tonight, after putting some stones on the planting ledges
Every year, members give Rev. Joanna their questions, and she answers them in this service. Come join us for answers about Unitarian Universalism, Live Oak, and anything else members have curiosity about.
As humans, we crave togetherness with others. But the key to the happiest relationships (as well as peace within oneself) is learning how to hold healthy boundaries and differentiate between what is our responsibility, and what is the responsibility of others. Come hear what Dr. Murray Bowen, and Johnny Castle from Dirty Dancing, can teach us about this liberating skill.
Our musicians continue the amazing work they’ve done in our virtual sanctuary, sharing special music in this worship service dedicated to the power of melody.
Join us online for a worship service full of music, story, and message honoring our UU tradition of the flower communion. Then after the service, from 11-1, come up to Live Oak for a wandering flower communion on our labyrinth and chalice pathway. In case of rain, the flower communion will be a drive-through event, under the porte-cochere by the Sauber building.
Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray shares some of the many highlights of General Assembly this year and invites you to join us online June 23-27 for worship, workshops and much more.
*Note: This is a guest post, written by a trusted colleague who prefers to remain anonymous because the cult who refer to themselves as “Gadflies” have been known to attack ministers who disagree with them. They have even succeeded forcing some to resign. That alone should pretty well indicate who we’re dealing with. I have […] The post Understanding “Gadflies” as GA Approaches* appeared first on Dennis McCarty.
Thank you to Rachel for your above piece, “Loss as a Gateway to Compassion” — this reflection is prompted by and written in response to your words.
As I write this, I’m about two months into the most significant and all encompassing grief journey of my life. My beloved mother passed away at the beginning of April — a fact that still feels completely impossible, no matter how many times I share it.
I’m new to the experience of this level of grief, so I won’t pretend to have particular wisdom on it. But I can say that so far, this has been the most embodied experience of my life. I’ve never felt more completely in my body than in the moment I learned my mother would soon be leaving hers, and every day since is teaching me more and more about how to care for and love my full, embodied self.
My family had a precious almost week between my mom’s stroke and her death, during which we knew that she was dying and that the most we could do for her was to sit by her bedside and surround her with our presence and love. Every inch of my body hurt that week, and I found myself uninterested in numbing the pain — feeling it made this unfathomable thing that was happening more real, somehow. The pain was as appropriate and warranted as my sobs and panic attack I had by her bedside, each one a physical expression of my complete love for her, and how very much I wanted things to be different.
I could barely eat for that entire week, as if my love for her was taking up too much of my being for there to be room for anything else. I’ve regained my appetite in the time since, but it often feels like my body chemistry has been changed by this loss. My mom loved cooking nourishing, vegetarian meals, and these days, any food that’s even slightly less healthy than what she would make doesn’t sit well anymore (and food that does remind me of her feels even better than it did before).
As I’ve waded into grief, I’ve found that it’s impossible to describe without some level of contradiction. I never experience it as just one feeling: for me, pain and sadness have been woven so tightly together with love and gratitude, there is no
separating them out. Noticing and naming where I’m experiencing each of these feelings physically, in my body, has become a necessary and almost constant practice for me just to move through the overwhelm.
The pain and heaviness usually shows up in my back and my limbs, building up as tension in moments when I feel the wrongness of a world without my mother’s physical presence. But that pain is always coupled with a feeling of warmth and protection wrapping around my heart: what I understand as her presence and love as it’s with me now.
I do feel that warmth around my heart as my mother’s spirit, with me now as she is with all that she loved in life — and I try to simply rest in that feeling as much as I can, and to ignore the nagging pull of my mind when it doubts the ‘realness’ of what I’m feeling. It is easy to doubt, because our minds can’t ever fully make sense of even our deepest spiritual truths; they can simply be experienced, known at the level of the body, and disembodied Western culture has taught so many of us to mistrust what is felt.
Through the heartbreak and exhaustion of feeling so much all of the time, in grief, I’ve also found myself more able to appreciate the everyday pleasures of simply being in a body. When I feel the sun on my skin and smell the spring flowers coming alive in my mother’s garden, each of those sensations feels like a huge gift, anchoring me to my love of this life. There’s no more room for me to take for granted the miracle of physical presence on earth while I’m this close to the otherworld of death.
Loving my physical body, caring for it through its overwhelm and pain, also feels like the most important, everyday way to honor my mother. She cared for me, for my body, so completely in life — caring for myself with that level of love is perhaps the most simple and most significant way for me to carry on her legacy.
If you are on your own grief journey — whether from a recent loss or one still carried close from many years ago — I hope that some of these words have landed gently in your body, either as a mirror or comparison point for your embodied experience. There is no one right way to feel or live with grief; each of our experiences plays out within our unique, messy, infinitely complex bodies, and I think the most important thing may be to simply be with what our bodies are feeling. I hope that’s true, anyway — being with all my body is feeling has been my way of making it through so far, so I’m holding on to it and trying hard to understand it as sacred. Our bodies are sacred, without a doubt, so all their experiences of love and grief must also surely be so.
The CLF held its Annual Congregational Meeting on Sunday June 6, 2021. Anyone who could not attend the meeting was invited to vote by mail ahead of the meeting. To date we have received 440 votes via mail, with over 400 coming from our incarcerated members. 33 members voted in person at the meeting. We are still receiving ballots that were postmarked prior to the meeting and will have final tallies in next month’s Quest.
CLF members voted for the slate of nominations presented by the nominating committee (preliminary vote 445 yes, 1 no, 21 abstain). Annalee Durland-Jones, Aisha Ansano, and Julica Hermann de la Fuente were all voted onto the board. Danielle Di Bona was voted as clerk. John Hooper was voted as treasurer. And Debra Gray Boyd was voted onto the nominating committee.
CLF members voted to affirm the 8th principle, which states that “We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote: Journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.” (preliminary vote 420 yes, 34 no, 19 abstain)
CLF members also vote for the new revised bylaws developed by the board (preliminary vote 427 yes, 8 no, 24 ab stain). For those with internet access, the new bylaws can be found on the CLF website by choosing About on the main menu and then About again.
This week everybody was talking about the Trump grand jury
Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. had “convened the grand jury that is expected to decide whether to indict former president Donald Trump, other executives at his company or the business itself”.
a broad examination of the possibility that Trump and his company engaged in tax, banking, and insurance fraud. Investigators are questioning whether Trump profited illegally by deliberately misleading authorities about the value of his real-estate assets. [Former Trump lawyer Michael] Cohen has alleged that Trump inflated property valuations in order to get favorable bank loans and insurance policies, while simultaneously lowballing the value of the same assets in order to reduce his tax burden.
The vision of Trump in an orange jumpsuit is so compelling that Democrats are easily tempted to waste time speculating about how or when it might happen. But we just don’t know. When Republicans investigate Democrats — like the Starr investigation of Bill Clinton or the FBI probe into Hillary’s emails — those investigations leak, because politics was the point from the beginning; the investigation was never about finding a serious crime and taking it to court. But from Mueller and Comey through to Vance, the various investigations into Trump have not leaked.
So despite the many hours of coverage this topic has attracted this week, the legitimate tea-leaf reading can be summed up fairly quickly: Vance must believe he can prove that somebody committed a crime. Maybe it’s Trump. Or maybe it’s somebody Vance hopes to flip against Trump, like Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg or one of Trump’s children.
But financial charges against rich men are hard to make stick, both because plutocrats hire good lawyers, and because they can always hide behind underlings. (“I just the sign the documents my staff tells me to sign. I couldn’t possibly read them all.”) Convicting Trump will require getting some of those underlings to flip. Somebody needs to tell a jury, “I explained this to him and he told me to break the law.”
With regard to George Floyd, the big question raised by the one-year mark is: How much has changed? And the answer is: some things, but not nearly enough.
The biggest change, in my opinion, is the precedent set by the Chauvin trial itself: George Floyd’s killer was convicted of murder, and other Minneapolis police officers testified against him. It’s still possible to argue that Chauvin should have been convicted of first-degree murder rather than second, but “Police always get away with it” isn’t true any more.
Colorado now bans the use of deadly force to apprehend or arrest a person suspected only of minor or nonviolent offenses. Also, though many states permit the use of deadly force to prevent “escape,” five states enacted restrictions or prohibitions on shooting at fleeing vehicles or suspects, a policy aimed at preventing deaths like that of Adam Toledo, a 13-year old shot by Chicago police during a foot chase. Additionally, 9 states and DC enacted complete bans on chokeholds and other neck restraints while 8 states enacted legislation restricting their use to instances in which officers are legally justified to use deadly force.
But the national shock of the Floyd murder, the millions of Americans who demonstrated against it, and the many white people who finally seemed to recognize the problem, appeared (just for a moment) to promise much more. Perhaps the nation would fundamentally rethink public safety and the role of police. “Defund the Police” may have inspired more backlash than reform, but nonetheless the idea was getting out there: Not every kind of disorder is best handled by people with guns. Maybe some of the money that now passes through police departments should instead go to unarmed first responders trained in mental health or social work. Maybe traffic tickets could be written by civil servants who can’t shoot people.
Despite a few tentative steps, that promise has gone unfulfilled. The symbol here is the Minneapolis City Council’s pledge to “end policing as we know it”, which came to nothing.
If we were rational about this problem, US police departments would be flying folks in from Norway or England to explain how they police modern cities without killing people. But instead, American cops have been paying “experts” like Dave Grossman of the Killology Research Group to tell them how to be better “warriors” on the “battleground” of American cities.
The 100-year anniversary of Tulsa raises a different set of issues: how we teach and commemorate US history. When I was growing up in the 1960s, “race riot” meant outbreaks of violence in Black sections of Los Angeles or Detroit. Race riots were yet another reason for Whites to fear Blacks, and to vote for “law and order” candidates like Richard Nixon or George Wallace.
Only decades later did I discover that often Whites have been the rioters. I’m not sure when exactly I first learned about the destruction of the prosperous Greenwood district in Tulsa, but it has definitely been in the last ten years.
When it was over on June 1, 1921, 35 square blocks of what was nicknamed Black Wall Street lay in smoldering ruins. There were reports that bodies were thrown into the Arkansas River or buried in mass graves. Hundreds of survivors were rounded up at gunpoint and held for weeks at camps.
No one was ever held accountable for the lives lost or the property destroyed. Insurance claims filed by homeowners and business owners were rejected
Except for Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, [the Black people Lincoln emancipated] vanished like the Lost Tribes of Israel. They wouldn’t re-enter history until the 1950s, when for some reason they still weren’t free.
So: Black people in Tulsa in 1921? What Black people?
Fortunately, ignorance about the Tulsa riot is declining. Recently, Tulsa has become a touchstone in popular culture’s re-examination of America’s racial history. It plays a key role, for example, in both the Watchmen and Lovecraft Country series on HBO.
Similarly, I first heard of Ida B. Wells and her anti-lynching campaign when I went to the National Museum of African American History in 2018. Ditto for the Harlem Renaissance. I mean, are you sure Black culture bloomed in the 1920s? Did we even have Black people then?
So as Republican legislatures ban “critical race theory” from schools and protect Confederate statues against liberals who want to “erase history“, it’s worth remembering Tulsa. The history of white supremacy in America, and the racist violence that has maintained it, was erased from public consciousness long ago. We need efforts like the 1619 Project to recover the national memories that white racist propaganda has made us forget.
Recent trends continue: Vaccinations continue to rise while new cases and deaths fall. The 7-day average for daily new cases is down to 21K, after peaking over 250K in mid-January. The number of people with at least one dose of the vaccine has crossed 50%.
A new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that we might get to the 70% vaccinated level that some experts say would give American society herd immunity. In particular, some holdout groups are starting to come around, particularly Latinos and people without college degrees.
Sometimes trends advance because nobody wants to be on the fringe. As long as some friend you think of as more sensible is holding out, joining the trend doesn’t seem urgent. But at some point, it’s just you and people you think of as wackos.
I kinda-sorta get how a person might mistrust the government and the medical establishment so much that they avoid vaccination. Last summer, when it looked like Trump might push the FDA to approve a vaccine prematurely so that he could tout it as a campaign issue, I was skeptical myself. But that didn’t happen, millions of people have been vaccinated with few side-effects, and the case-counts and deaths have been dropping. So I got vaccinated.
But even in the Trump-corrupts-the-FDA scenario, it never occurred to me that I might protest against other people taking the vaccine, just like it never occurs to me to hassle people who wear masks in situations where I don’t think they’re necessary. (If you want to wear a mask when you’re alone in your own home, go for it. Why should I care?) After all, the point of not taking the vaccine would have been to make my own risk assessment, which I should be free to do in all but the most dire circumstances. But using my judgment to overrule other people’s risk assessments is something else entirely.
Well, I’m clearly not thinking like a true right-wing loony. In fact, people are protesting against the vaccine, including a Tennessee woman — what got into Tennessee this week? — who shouted “No vaccine!” as she drove her SUV through a vaccination tent “at a high rate of speed”, threatening both the medical staff and ordinary people who came to be vaccinated. She’s been arrested and charged with seven counts of reckless endangerment.
Demonstrations have popped up in vaccination sites such as high schools and racing tracks in recent months, and anti-vaccine protesters temporarily shut down Dodger Stadium after maskless people blocked the entrance to one of the country’s largest sites.
I also can’t explain why hitting people with a car has become such a popular tactic on the right, to the point that Republican legislatures are starting to write it into law.
A lady just came up to me and said “Speak English, we are in San Diego.” So I politely responded by asking her “how do I say ‘San Diego’ in English?” The look of bewilderment on her face made it feel like a Friday.
Apparently by coincidence, two once-crazy ideas are now being treated more respectfully: the lab-leak theory of Covid, and the existence of UFOs.
I’m not really in a position to say anything definitive on either theory, but I do think it’s important not to jump too far: Even if Covid leaked out of a Chinese lab, that doesn’t mean it was engineered by humans or released as a bioweapon attack. More likely, the lab collected a bunch of viruses to study, and one got loose.
Wired’s Adam Rogers does a good job of separating ordinary scientific uncertainty from what he calls “weaponized uncertainty”.
When scientists say “We’re not totally sure,” they mean their analysis of some event or outcome includes a statistical possibility that they’re wrong. They never go 100 percent. Sometimes they think they might possibly be wronger than others. This is the world of confidence intervals, of mathematical models and curves, of uncertainty principles. But non-scientists hear “We’re not totally sure” as “So you mean there’s a chance?” It’s the mad interstitial space between scientific—let’s say, statistical—uncertainty and the meaning of normal human uncertainty. This is where “just asking questions [wink]” lives.
It’s a subtle difference. When Tony Fauci says he’d like to get more certainty, for example, he most likely means that, yeah, all things being equal, it’s better to know than not know—especially if that’s the way the political winds are blowing.
But when political actors like senators and right-wing TV commentators talk about this uncertainty, this doubt, they’re trying to jam a crowbar into this gap in understanding and lever it open. They’re still hinting that the Chinese government is doing something sneaky here, something warlike—and that even the scientists think it’s possible. Because if they can seem to have the backing of science, they can use that power elsewhere. They can bang shoes on tables about Biden administration inaction and Chinese skullduggery to distract from their lies about the election, about attempts to curtail voting rights, about the January 6 insurrection, about efforts to get the world vaccinated against the disease they claim to want to understand better.
FWIW, I live next door to a biologist, who tells me that Mother Nature is still much better at constructing nasty viruses than we are. Apparently, engineering the Andromeda Strain is more difficult than the movies would have you believe.
Richard Pape from the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats, on what he’s learned from studying the people arrested for the Trump Insurrection:
One overriding driver across all the three studies that we’ve now conducted is the fear of the Great Replacement. The Great Replacement is the idea that the rights of Hispanics and Blacks — that is, the rights of minorities — are outpacing the rights of whites. … The number one risk factor [in whether a county sent an insurrectionist to Washington] is the percent decline of the non-Hispanic white population.
The whole interview is worth watching. The insurrectionists are overwhelmingly white and male. We ordinarily think of violent revolutionaries as young and desperate, but these folks are mostly middle-aged and well-to-do, with some of them owning their own businesses. What unites them is racial anxiety, their fear that whites are losing their superior place in American society.
Sean Hannity, who is worth $250 million and makes $40 million a year, advises his listeners to “work two jobs” rather than “rely on the government for anything”. Better that you should never have time to see your kids than that he should have to pay taxes.
“One of the craziest, little-league type plays you’ll ever see.” Batting with a runner on second and two outs Thursday afternoon, Cub shortstop Javier Baez apparently grounds out to end the inning. When the throw from third pulls the first baseman Will Craig off the base, he moves to tag Baez, who starts retreating back towards home. Craig forgets he could just go back to tag first and end the inning, and things just get wilder from there.
If only six Republican senators will support a bipartisan January 6 commission, while one Republican Congressperson openly calls for new violence and another trivializes the Holocaust, what hope is there for reasonable compromise on anything?
Friday, the Senate voted on the filibuster of a bill (already passed by the House) that would authorize a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 riot. Thirty-five senators voted to continue the filibuster, while 54 voted to end it.
That means it continued and the bill was blocked. By the rules of the Senate, the 35 outvoted the 54.
That’s how the Senate works, or rather, doesn’t work. If some senator wants to prevent a bill to come to a vote, it takes 60 senators to break that filibuster. Even though 54 is 61% of the 89 senators voting; 54 isn’t 60, so the 1-6 commission is blocked indefinitely.
That raises the whole end-the-filibuster discussion, which we’ll get to further down the page. But it’s important not to jump over the even more outrageous part of this story: Given that both American democracy and their own safety was endangered, how could 35 Republican senators possibly oppose an investigation of the storming of the Capitol?
What happened. On January 6, rioters tore down barricades, assaulted police, broke into the Capitol itself, and forced the temporary adjournment of a joint session of Congress that is mandated by the Constitution: Once every four years, the House and Senate meet together to count the electoral votes and officially announce the winner of the presidential election.
That joint session is arguably the most sacred, most essential ceremony of American democracy. It lies at the heart of our most prized tradition: the peaceful transfer of power from one leader to the next, in accordance with the will of the People, as expressed (imperfectly) by the Electoral College. Congress has carried out this duty in an uninterrupted sequence going back to the certification of George Washington’s election on April 6, 1789.
That’s what the rioters were trying to stop. They chanted “Hang Mike Pence”, invaded the chambers of the Senate, and broke into offices looking for members of Congress, hoping to disrupt the transfer of power so that the loser of the election, Donald Trump, could remain president.
They failed. In the end, the certification process was delayed by about six hours, but it reached a conclusion and Joe Biden’s victory was officially recognized.
What could have happened. Despite all the things that went wrong on that day, it’s easy to imagine how January 6 could have gone worse if the rioters had been luckier or better organized, or if Congress had been slower to react. Rioters (some of whom brought zip-ties) might have captured Vice President Pence, Speaker Pelosi, or other key figures, leading to a hostage situation. Who can say how President Trump might have responded to that chaos? If the stand-off had continued past January 20, when Trump’s term expired, the United States would have reached a constitutional crisis unforeseen by the Founders.
Questions that need answers. The rioters themselves are being handled by the justice system, as is appropriate. Courts and juries will decide who broke in and what laws they violated. But the crimes of rioters are not the only things that need investigation. We also need to answer questions like these:
Why was the Capitol so poorly defended? What needs to be changed to prevent similar security failures in the future?
Did the riot have a larger structure? In other words, did a mob simply get out of hand? Or was there a plan? If it was planned, who planned it?
Were the rioters simply the Trump supporters they appeared to be? Or were they egged on by anti-Trump provocateurs, as many Republicans believe?
How well did the various security forces — Capitol police, D.C. police, National Guard — perform? Are the procedures for coordinating their efforts adequate?
Did members of Congress help the rioters prepare, say, by giving them “reconnaissance tours” of the Capitol, as many Democrats believe?
What was President Trump’s role? Did he intend the protests to turn violent? Did he respond appropriately once the violence started?
Some of these questions will come up in investigations that lead to prosecutions, but a court is not the right place to answer them. Maybe, for example, the larger plan behind the riot will never be nailed down well enough that particular people can be prosecuted for it. If that turns out to be the case, no one will be indicted and the public might never learn — at least not through the justice system — whatever evidence points in that direction.
Ditto for Trump’s culpability. It’s possible that prosecutors will decide they can’t make incitement-to-riot or conspiracy charges stick, so his behavior will never be described in an indictment. But he seems to be angling to run for president again, so shouldn’t the public learn as much as possible about whether he tried to overthrow democracy during his first term?
In short, somebody should write a report that tells the whole story, from beginning to end, and from all points of view. Ideally, that report would be trusted by the great majority of Americans, rather than leaving the whole affair in a he-said/she-said state.
The commission proposal. With that in mind, the investigating body should be widely respected, have full investigatory powers, and rise above partisan bias. No way of setting up such an investigation is perfect, but the bipartisan commission is the best model we have. That’s how we handled 9-11, and it seemed to work pretty well.
This particular implementation of the 9-11 model was negotiated between the leading members of each party in the House Homeland Security Committee, Bennie Thompson for the Democrats and John Katko for the Republicans. Democrats did not use their majority-party status to drive a hard bargain: Each party appoints five members of the 10-person commission. Speaker Pelosi appoints the chair and Minority Leader McCarthy the vice-chair, but there is little the chair can do unilaterally.
Rep. Katko thought he had done a good job of achieving McCarthy’s goals. “I encourage all members, Republicans and Democrats alike,” he said, “to put down their swords for once, just for once, and support this bill.”
Trump’s motive. It’s important to understand what Trump gains by blocking the commission. He isn’t preventing an investigation, because Democrats can set up a select committee in the same way that Republicans did after the first nine investigations of Benghazi failed to find evidence for their conspiracy theories. That’s just one of the options, but Democrats will certainly investigate somehow.
So all that Trump is preventing is a bipartisan investigation. Whatever the select committee comes up with, he can brand a “partisan witch hunt”. The Trump Insurrection will continue to be a he-said/she-said thing, without any common truth both parties agree on.
That’s bad for democracy and for America, but apparently it’s good for Trump.
One thing this tells us, though, is that neither Trump nor any other Republican in Congress really believes the antifa-did-it theory that they occasionally promote, and that nearly 3/4ths of Republicans claim to believe. If there were any chance of uncovering an antifa conspiracy, Republicans would begging for a bipartisan commission to expose it.
Bipartisanship? Let’s sum up: A proposal that should be a slam dunk, that should get 35-40 Republican votes in the Senate, instead got only six. One of the Republicans who left town early to start his Memorial Day weekend, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, says he would have voted for it, bringing the total to seven. So if all 100 senators had stayed in town and all 50 Democrats voted to establish the commission, it would still have been three votes short of breaking the filibuster.
We just can’t pretend that nothing bad happened or that people just got too excited. Something bad happened. And it’s important to lay that out. I think there’s more to be learned. I want to know and I don’t want to know … but I need to. And I think it’s important to the country that there be an independent evaluation.
The commission filibuster is ominous for two reasons:
A lot of important legislation has been working through the legislative process and is due for a Senate vote soon.
The GOP is tolerating (and sometimes promoting) increasingly crazy rhetoric.
The Joe Manchin theory that Republicans can be sane negotiating partners, and that compromises can be reached that will be good for the country, is looking increasingly unlikely.
The wave of executive orders that he issued shortly after he took office.
The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (i.e., Covid relief) that Congress passed and Biden signed on March 11.
Together with his administration’s good management of the vaccination effort, and the optimism about the end of the pandemic that has accompanied that success, Biden has successfully projected an image of a president who takes action and does the things he says he will do.
But time is running out on those trends. The executive orders were a one-time thing: Presidents do not typically get fresh supplies of executive power (which is a good thing; otherwise we’d drift towards autocracy). So almost everything Biden can do without Congress is already done. And Covid relief was an example of the Democrats going it alone: In spite of their subsequent attempts to take credit for its good features, not a single Republican voted to pass it.
A lot of stuff Biden has said he will do is now sitting in the Senate’s queue:
protecting voting rights and fair elections. This includes the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which repairs the hole John Roberts tore in the Voting Rights Act in 2013, and the For the People Act, which outlaws partisan gerrymandering, reforms campaign finance, ends a variety of forms of voter suppression, and sets a national standard that no one should wait more than 30 minutes to vote.
rebuilding America’s infrastructure. Biden’s American Jobs Plan devotes $2 trillion over ten years to fixing our roads and bridges, replacing the lead water pipes that have poisoned American children in places like Flint, and reorienting the economy for a post-fossil-fuel future.
police reform. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which creates national standards for police use of force and gives the Justice Department tools to enforce those standards.
If none of that passes, or if the bills get watered down to the point that nothing really changes, Biden becomes a nice guy who talks a good game, but doesn’t accomplish much. And Democrats go into the 2022 midterms not having delivered the change they promised, while facing increasing Republican efforts to restrict voting in states around the country. It will be harder to voter, and the voters Democrats need to target will be discouraged.
So far, Biden and the Democrats are trying to use that popularity with the voters to move Republicans in Congress. Negotiations are underway, but the infrastructure negotiations are typical. Grist sums up the Republican counterproposal as “all bridges, no climate” and observes:
It certainly looks like Republicans and Democrats are engaging in some honest-to-god political compromise: Biden started out with a big number and made it smaller, Republicans started with a small number and made it bigger. But closer investigation reveals that Republicans haven’t compromised very much at all.
Nearly $1 trillion in spending sounds like a lot, but the lion’s share of the money Republicans want to spend on infrastructure isn’t new — it’s money that already gets budgeted out by Congress for infrastructure improvements every year and “leftover” money from previous COVID-19 relief bills. The assumption that there are wads of coronavirus money languishing in federal and state coffers is flawed, experts say. There is a lot of relief money that hasn’t been spent, but much of it will be spent in the coming years on Medicaid, federal lending programs, and state and local relief programs.
Without robbing Peter to pay Paul “[Senator Shelley Moore] Capito and company are proposing just $257 billion in new federal spending.” That’s over ten years. In particular, the GOP wants nothing to do with electric vehicles, reducing Biden’s $174 billion proposal to $4 billion.
Worse, as we just saw with John Katko and the 1-6 Commission fiasco, getting Capito to agree to something doesn’t mean the GOP caucus will support it. Biden could reach an agreement with Capito and still see the bill blocked by a filibuster when Capito brings less than ten colleagues with her. Ditto for Tim Scott and police reform.
This is a pattern we should all remember from the Obama years. Repeatedly, President Obama would seem to reach a “grand bargain” with Speaker Boehner, only to discover that Boehner could not deliver his caucus’ support.
The GOP’s ever-expanding grass-roots lunacy. While Tim Scott and Shelley Moore Capito play the role of reasonable Republicans in D.C., something else is happening out in the Trumpist countryside, where Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene are on an America First tour.
The Internet’s hall monitors out in Silicon Valley, they think they can suppress us, discourage us. Maybe if you’re just a little less patriotic, maybe if you just conform to their way of thinking a little more, then you’ll be allowed to participate in the digital world. Well you know what? Silicon Valley can’t cancel this movement, or this rally, or this congressman. We have a Second Amendment in this country, and I think we have an obligation to use it.
In case there’s any doubt about what he means by that, here’s another clip from the same speech:
The Second Amendment is not about hunting, it’s not about recreation, it’s not about sports. The Second Amendment is about maintaining within the citizenry the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government, if that becomes necessary.
As far as I know, Gaetz did not identify by name anyone his audience should shoot. So I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg will be fine. It’s not like anybody ever listens to Trumpist rhetoric and then literally guns people down or mails bombs to them.
Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene has been trivializing the Holocaust. On several occasions, she has compared the public-health guideline that unvaccinated people continue to wear masks — and in particular, Speaker Pelosi’s insistence on maintaining the House’s mask mandate until all members are vaccinated — to the yellow stars that the Nazis required Jews to wear.
You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens, so much so that they were put on trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany, and this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.
The House GOP leadership has been unwilling to exert any real pressure to control Gaetz or Greene. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has not commented on Gaetz’ call for violence, and his response to Greene was late and weak. Tuesday, he released a statement that did not even hint at consequences for Greene, should she not back down. (She hasn’t.) McCarthy tacitly excused Greene’s anti-Semitism by invoking both-sides-ism, saying Greene’s comments come “At a time when the Jewish people face increased violence and threats, anti-Semitism is on the rise in the Democrat Party and is completely ignored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.”
The analogy between the unvaccinated and Jews in Nazi Germany makes perfect sense if you believe the following:
Jews in the Third Reich were spreading diseases that endangered other Germans.
The Nazis were trying to save Jewish lives.
Jews could have opted out of Nazi oppression at any time by taking a shot that would improve their health and make them less dangerous to others.
Over the next few years, the rest of us are planning to herd the unvaccinated into camps and exterminate them.
If you do believe those things, you and your family have my sympathies, and I hope you reestablish contact with reality soon. But if you don’t, and you wear the yellow star anyway, you’re just being an asshole.
Finally, there’s the continued unwillingness of Trump or his cultists to admit that he lost the election. (Mitch McConnell may say he wants to “move on” from January 6, but his party is unwilling to move on from November 3.) The bizarre Maricopa County “audit” continues, and just in case the Trump-biased auditors can’t find the fraud they are looking for, the Arizona Senate is already looking ahead to another audit. It’s like Benghazi: If one investigation can’t find the evidence you are looking for, just start another one.
Bringing all this back to Congress: There’s no one Democrats can negotiate with in good faith. If Biden should happen to reach an acceptable compromise with some Republican, we know what will happen: Trump will denounce the agreement, and before long any Republican who stands by it will be accused of being in league with the Rothschilds and their space lasers. Any compromising Republican who resists Trump’s pressure will have to keep looking over his shoulder for people “exercising their Second Amendment rights”.
The filibuster. Which brings us back to the filibuster. I already made my case for ending the filibuster back in January, so I won’t repeat it. The Democrats have the power to end the filibuster, but only if they all agree. So far, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are holding out.
Manchin in particular has been vocal about the importance of bipartisanship, and nostalgia for a time when relationships across party lines were more cordial.
Generations of senators who came before us put their heads down and their pride aside to solve the complex issues facing our country. We must do the same. The issues facing our democracy today are not insurmountable if we choose to tackle them together.
One point he makes in that op-ed is legitimate: If Congress could pass legislation through bipartisan compromise, the United States would have more stable laws and policies; flipping a couple seats in the Senate wouldn’t completely reverse the direction of country.
The problem is in the “if”. The reality is that the Senate can’t pass legislation through bipartisan compromise, and when Republicans have control, they have no reservations about pushing controversial proposals through without Democrats, as they pushed through Trump’s tax cuts and Supreme Court nominees. They would have repealed ObamaCare that way, but a handful of Republicans realized that the party had no replacement plan. None of the defecting Republicans seemed to be worrying about leaving Democrats out of the process.
So far, Biden and Chuck Schumer have been giving Manchin a chance to prove his case. He and Sinema worked hard to find 10 Republicans willing to back a 1-6 commission, and they came up short. He’s trying to put together an infrastructure compromise, which is also looking like a failure. In his op-ed, Manchin also cited voting rights as an issue that “should” have bipartisan support.
But it doesn’t.
Increasingly, it feels like these hopeless negotiations are intended to prove a point rather than reach a solution. But who is the demonstration for? Is it for Manchin, so that he can see that his vision of bipartisanship doesn’t work? Is if for the voters of West Virginia, so that they see that Manchin tried everything before giving in to reconciliation and filibuster reform? Is it for the American people, who are supposed to give Democrats credit for trying hard to make life better, even if they didn’t actually accomplish much?
I can’t figure it out.
But whoever the demonstration is for, it has to be coming to a conclusion. The Biden presidency and the Democratic control of Congress will succeed or fail in the next few months. Either Democrats will rig a way to pass popular high-priority bills without Republicans (either by creative use of reconciliation or by changing the filibuster), or they will throw up their hands and admit that America is ungovernable; it doesn’t matter what the People want, Congress can’t give it to them.
Watch the Service: To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player.
The big development this week was the Senate’s unwillingness to establish a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Beyond the issue of the insurrection itself, the fact that only six Republicans would vote to end this filibuster exposed the hopelessness of bipartisanship. They won’t even support investigating an attack on their own workplace that endangered their own lives. What are the odds that they will support anything else the country needs?
I’ll discuss all that, plus the grassroots GOP craziness being promoted by Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, in “The Bipartisanship Charade is Almost Over”, which I’ll try to get out by 9:30 EST.
The weekly summary will discuss the Manhattan grand jury deciding on Trump indictments, what the disheartening anniversaries of George Floyd’s murder and the Tulsa race riot mean for police reform and teaching racial history, the continuing good trends for the pandemic, second looks at the lab-leak theory and UFOs, and a revealing study of what motivated the Capitol insurrectionists, before closing with one of the wildest plays in baseball history.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on May 30, 2021. Facing Texas' anti-Trans legislation, what does our faith tell us about our responsibility to respond?
Finding stones for the pond project is proving to be an adventure. It is raining here today, and was yesterday too. The days before that I was able to place all the stones I had previously gathered onto the pond planting ledge. I also bought some white stones in small bags–they were supposed to be 3 to 5 inch stones, but at least half were much smaller than that. Maybe not such a great buy. But I had enough to finish a ring around the center of the planting ledge. These stones will be large enough to stabilize smaller stones behind them. Once the pond is filled, all of them will be below the water.
Pond with stones in a ring around the ledge, plus “beach.”
I worked on the “beach,” which is an incline for critters to be able to reach the water easily. I did it early in the process because It seemed like this might be the trickiest part, and I wasn’t wrong. In the photo it is at the back, with mostly white stones. I had gently placed each stone one by one. However, I am thinking I might need to redo the upper part of it because when I imagine little critters walking on those stones, it seems like they are not stable enough–the incline being slightly too steep. But to redo it, I’ll have to move the upper stones, and go beneath the liner and the carpet, and take out a bit more soil so the slope is more gradual. When the pond is filled, the water will cover the white stones and come to the level of the row of larger stones behind them.
Close up of pond “beach”
After I finished the (imperfect) beach, I put all of my smaller stones on the ledge to the right of the beach. As you can see in the first photo, they didn’t cover very much. So I will have to buy more small stones for the planting shelves, but I am now looking at 1-2 inch round stones, not “pea stones”. I discovered that a nearby nursery has such stones available in bulk–but that means either borrowing or renting a pickup truck to be able to collect them. I can get a half-yard of them for a good price, which should do it. It is just a big project to rent a truck, get stones, unload them at my house, and return the truck. I don’t mean to complain! If anyone locally (Portland Maine) has a pickup truck (with an open bed) who is willing to loan it, can you let me know? For some reason, this part feels challenging to me.
So, in the meantime, last night I suddenly had an idea of where I could find some more bigger stones. In our old neighborhood there were rural roads with no houses nearby, and I thought I remembered seeing stones on the side of those roads. Today before the rain came, I drove over there with two intentions. Get some stones, but also, look to see if the lady slipper plants we use to find in the woods there were still blooming. And they were. And I did get some good stones by the side of the road! I have a feeling this gathering of stones will continue for some time.
"We Shall Not Sleep, Though Poppies Grow" (May 30, 2021) Worship Service
From an 1865 gathering at the Charleston race track through two World Wars to modern day, collectively remembering our dead remains an important ritual for the living. On the 50th national observance of Memorial Day, what have we learned about communal grief in times of war and peace?
Rev. Mr. Barb Greve, Guest Minister
Meg McGuire, Ministerial Intern
Sam King, Worship Associate
Eric Hamilton, guitarist
Maria Roodnitsky, song leader
Ben Rudiak-Gould, song leader
My-Hoa Steger, pianist
Eric Shackelford, camera
Shulee Ong, camera
Jonathan Silk, audio, oos design
Joe Chapot, social media chat
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Amy Kelly, flowers
Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour
a collections of readings, prayers and music from the Sunday service of 30th May 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Andy Pollak, a congregation member of Dublin Unitarian Church with contributions from Denise Dunne, Will O'Connell & Josh Johnston
the address from the Sunday service at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland, on 30th May 2021. Andy Pollak is a congregation member at Dublin Unitarian Church.
Memorial Day is not to be celebrated. It is to be observed, scrutinized, and witnessed on behalf of the true witnesses of our human failure to love our neighbor as ourselves.
Sometimes the mental work is as hard as the physical work of building the pond. If you’ve been following along with this project, you know that after digging the hole, after putting down old carpet to protect against invasive bittersweet roots, after placing the underlayment and then the pond liner, we started filling the pond with water a few days ago. That felt so great! But then I felt stuck. The Building Natural Ponds book, by Robert Pavlis, which has been such a great guide to this whole project, suggested using old carpet as an “overlayment” on the planting shelves, to protect against the stones that were to go there. But I had run out of most of the carpet, and also had misgivings about putting old carpet into the actual water of the pond. So what to do?
I thought and thought and then posed the question in two Facebook groups–the Building Natural Ponds group and the Northeast Permaculture Network. Then, I went outside and started gathering all the stones I’d been saving for the last five years from around the yard. I had some in five gallon buckets, and some in a pile next to the garage where violets had decided it was the perfect place to bloom. I had to dig under the roots to get all of those stones. But violets are very prolific in our yard, so I wasn’t worried about them. I also brought back the final bits of carpet I had–2 by 2 squares made of eco-friendly nylon.
Photo: Gathering all the stones to use in the pond.
Once that was done, I came back inside and checked my Facebook posts. I had gotten a variety of answers and suggestions from folks, and finally came up with my answer. I would use extra pond liner as an overlayment. Robert Pavlis had thought that idea would work well, so that gave me the confidence to do it. Some folks didn’t bother with any overlayment, but it gives just that added layer of protection against cuts or punctures from stones or little animal claws. So I went back outside, and I bravely made the first snips to cut off the extra pond liner around the edges of the pond. Because the pond wasn’t quite as deep as originally planned, there was quite a bit of extra liner.
Photo: extra pond liner
I started cutting it up and laying pieces of it all around the planting ledge, starting with the spot that I hope will be a little incline “beach” for animals to be able to approach. And as it happened, I had just enough liner to cover everything I needed. Then I started putting some stones into place. I did that in bare feet, and an old carpet square worked as a place to wipe off my feet before getting onto the planting ledge. We had some slate pieces that we found here when we first moved here, so I am hoping to use them around the edges of at least part of the circle. But I am also trying out using them for steps into the pond. Once the pond is full of life, it will be slippery, so maybe not. Decisions for later.
Photo: pond with liner overlay done, and stones begun to be placed.
I worked into the late afternoon, but finally came inside for another commitment. Today I am feeling all that work in my body–sore hands, sore muscles. I am eager to continue laying the stones I have–and then I will see how many more I will need. More decisions. The basic idea is to put larger stones around the center of the planting ledge, and larger stones near the outer ring of the planting ledge, then pea stones to fill in–those will be the growing medium for bacteria that clean and filter the water and aquatic plants that clean and filter the water. But as with this whole process, I am taking it step by step. I think if I had really known how much work it would be, I might not have had the temerity to begin. But here I am.
What more is there to say about the Republican refusal to support a bipartisan commission to investigate Trump’s insurrection? Kevin McCarthy gave Rep. John Katko a list of demands before he negotiated an agreement with House Homeland Security Chair Benny Thompson, and Katko achieved them: Republicans and Democrats name an equal number of members of the commission, and have equal influence on subpoenas and staff. And yet McCarthy refused to take Yes for an answer: He opposed the commission anyway, though he couldn’t stop 35 Republicans in the House from voting for it.
In the Senate, Mitch McConnell is against the commission, and there appears to be slight chance of getting 10 Republicans to break a filibuster. So: no bipartisan commission.
A congressional investigation will still happen, but it will have to take place in committees with Democratic leadership, which Republicans will doubtless label a “partisan witch hunt”. So the Trump Insurrection will remain a he-said/she-said issue.
That seems to be what Republicans want. They had their chance to seek truth, and they said no.
Meanwhile, many Republicans are simply lying about January 6. Like Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin:
I’ve talked to people that were there. By and large, it was peaceful protest except for, you know, there were a number of people, basically agitators, that with the crowd and breached the Capitol.
And, you know, that’s really the truth of what’s happening here. But they like to paint that narrative, so they can paint a broad brush, and basically impugn 75 million Americans, call them potentially domestic terrorists and potential armed insurrectionists as well if they get another chance. So this is all about a narrative that the left wants to continue to push, and Republicans should not cooperate with them at all.
Those largely “peaceful” protesters beat Capitol police with flagpoles. I think Johnson would not enjoy seeing some similarly “peaceful” protesters show up at his office.
I assume Johnson’s 75 million is supposed to refer to Trump voters. Actually there were 74.2 million, which would round to 74 million. I don’t know why it’s necessary to constantly exaggerate Trump’s support. But more importantly, I don’t know anyone whose narrative says that Trump voters are to blame for the insurrection. Literally no one.
For the record, if you merely voted for Trump, I profoundly disagree with you, but I don’t question your loyalty to America, to democracy, or to the Constitution simply because you voted differently than I did. If you listened to President Trump’s “Save America” speech, but then went home without breaking any laws, I think you exercised your rights as an American. But if you broke into the Capitol in order to stop the constitutionally mandated counting of the electoral votes, if you roamed the halls of Congress chanting “Hang Mike Pence” or calling out “Naaancy” while the Speaker of the House hid from you, I think you’re a traitor, and I hope you go to jail for a long, long time.
and Bitcoin
The 30% crash on Wednesday was the trigger to get out ideas I’ve been thinking for a while. They’re in the featured post.
Both sides claim victory in the recent fighting, which underlines the point I was making last week: Neither side is motivated to seek a lasting peace. Israel can point to all the Hamas infrastructure it destroyed in Gaza. Hamas can point to the destabilization of Israeli society, and the increasing radicalization of Arab Israelis.
Whenever I’m tempted to stereotype American Christians as fundamentalist Trumpists, I go back to John Pavlovitz, a pastor and blogger from North Carolina.
In moments like these, people want you to pick a side because that’s how most people’s minds work. They need a hard and fast litmus test position so that can sum you up and decide whether they are for you or against you, whether you are good or evil. But that kind of all-or-nothing extremism seems to be what has fueled and perpetuated the conflicts were watching right now.
So, with all that I don’t know and all I can’t understand and with all the nuances that escape me, here’s the side I’m on:
I’m on the side of ten-year old girls and boys wherever they live and whoever they’ve been raised by and whatever God they pray to and whatever pigmentation their faces carry. I am for disparate humanity being treated with equal reverence without caveat or condition and I am against powerful people who dehumanize the powerless for political gain.
As long as any children have to contend with nightmares that they were born into and cannot escape and do not deserve—I’m going to declare how grievous that is.
Until there is no longer terror in any young child’s eyes, that will be the side I’m on.
You don’t have to be a fan of Bibi Netanyahu to deplore the recent outbreaks of anti-Semitism in the US. It would be bad enough to persecute random Israelis because you dislike what their government has been doing. (Ditto for the citizens of any other country. I wouldn’t have wanted foreigners mad at Trump to take their revenge on me if I had happened to be in their country during his administration.)
But American Jews are Americans. Full stop. They’re not Israelis, and Netanyahu is not their leader.
I resent it when supporters of the Israeli government blur the boundary between criticizing Israel and anti-Semitism (as Ben Shapiro is doing now). But that puts a responsibility on me to guard that boundary. I can’t object to Shapiro, and then wink and nod at people harassing Jews.
We’re getting close to having vaccinated half the population with at least one dose. If you’re only looking at the eligible population — people over 12 — we’ve at least partially vaccinated 58%. New vaccinations are well below their peak, but still close to 2 million a day.
New England is leading the parade: New Hampshire’s fully vaccinated percentage is 41%, just slightly above the national average of 39%. But Rhode Island is at 49.7%, and all the other New England states are over 50% fully vaccinated.
The South is trailing. Mississippi is at the bottom with 26.5% fully vaccinated. Then come Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia, and Tennessee — all below 31%.
So far, that difference is not showing up in the new-case numbers: Vermont and Mississippi are both averaging 5 new cases per 100K people, while Rhode Island and Wyoming (31% fully vaccinated) both have 14.
New cases are down to a daily average around 25,000 nationally, down tenfold from the January peak. Average daily deaths are below 600, lower than they’ve been since July. In January, that average was over 3,000.
The Supreme Court will consider an appeal from Mississippi concerning its ban on abortions after 15 weeks, which was struck down by lower courts in accordance with Roe v Wade and subsequent Supreme Court cases. The only reason to take up the case is if the Court wants to alter those precedents in some way. This will be the first abortion ruling since Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Court.
Yesterday, the NYT published an article about the problems population decline might cause. Some projections have the world population peaking around 2070, and then heading downward. In most first-world countries, fertility is already well below the replacement rate.
Given the strain that increased population puts on the environment, it’s hard to get worried about this. But it will require some adjustment.
A point worth making: The US will be one of the last first-world countries to feel the negative effects of population decline, if it preserves its ability to integrate immigrants into its society.
Another NYT article makes a point I rarely hear: The doubling of life expectancy during the 20th century wasn’t just due to scientific advances like antibiotics. Without social and political change, the benefits of the new science would never have reached the masses.
Nikole Hannah-Jones will not get the tenured position that typically goes with the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for creating the 1619 Project that emphasizes the role of racism and slavery in American history. She has received a MacArthur Genius Grant. NC Policy Watch quotes Hussman School Dean Susan King:
Hannah-Jones was on the school’s radar as a potential faculty member before the publication of “The 1619 Project,” King said. But the project is part of Hannah-Jones’s long career of reporting powerfully on race. …
Last summer, Hannah-Jones went through the rigorous tenure process at UNC, King said. Hannah-Jones submitted a package King said was as well reviewed as any King had ever seen. Hannah-Jones had enthusiastic support from faculty and the tenure committee, with the process going smoothly every step of the way — until it reached the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees.
[A board member] who had direct knowledge of the board’s conversations about Hannah-Jones … had one word for the roadblock to Hannah-Jones gaining tenure. “Politics.”
Hannah-Jones appears to be a victim of conservative financier Art Pope, who funds a network of groups that dominate Republican politics in North Carolina. One of those organizations is the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
Last week, a columnist for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (formerly known as the Pope Center for Higher Education) wrote that UNC-Chapel Hill’s board of trustees must prevent Hannah-Jones’s hiring. If they were not willing to do so, the column said, the UNC Board of Governors should amend system policies to require every faculty hire to be vetted by each school’s board of trustees.
The upshot is that conservatives are doing exactly what they accuse liberals of: violating academic freedom to suppress points of view they don’t like.
In the post-Trump era, no scandal sidelines a Republican candidate. You just brazen it out, the way he did.
In Wyoming, State Senator Anthony Bouchard, one of the Trumpist candidates challenging Liz Cheney for the Republican nomination to Congress, admitted (ahead of it coming out elsewhere) that when he was 18 he got a 14-year-old girl pregnant. They married at 19 and 15, and got divorced three years later. She committed suicide at 20. Bouchard is “almost” estranged from the son, who has “made some wrong choices in his life”. (The linked article quotes another source claiming the son faces “multiple sexual offense charges” in California.)
There’s always the question: Aren’t teen-age mistakes forgivable? After all, who among us wants to be judged for who we were at 18? For me, the answer to the forgiveness question hinges on three other questions: Does the person who made the mistake understand and take responsibility for it? Has he or she learned? Are they wiser now?
Bouchard expresses no shame about his sexual abuse of an underage girl, describing himself and his victim as “two teen-agers”. He says: “It’s like the Romeo and Juliet story.” So the answers to those questions are No.
Like Trump, Bouchard may seem an unlikely choice to represent the party of “family values”. But also like Trump, Bouchard is the real victim here. “This is really a message about how dirty politics is. They’ll stop at nothing, man, when you get in the lead and when you’re somebody that can’t be controlled, you’re somebody who works for the people. They’ll come after you.”
The video is part of a series titled “The Calling,” which features a diverse group of soldiers, several who are people of color or from immigrant families, and one who overcame learning issues. The entry that really roused Cruz’s ire tells the story of Cpl. Emma Malonelord, a white woman brought up by two moms in California.
Cruz retweeted a TikTok video that juxtaposes the recruitment video with Russian propaganda featuring he-man paratroopers, and added the comment.
Holy crap. Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea….
When critics — particularly fellow senator Tammy Duckworth, who lost her legs piloting a helicopter in Iraq — pointed out that he was glorifying the Russian military at the expense of our own troops. Cruz doubled down with an anti-gay slur.
I’m enjoying lefty blue checkmarks losing their minds over this tweet, dishonestly claiming that I’m “attacking the military.” Uh, no. We have the greatest military on earth, but Dem politicians & woke media are trying to turn them into pansies.
In view of Ted’s own lack of masculine virtues — he bowed down to Trump after Trump viciously ridiculed his wife and accused his father of being involved in the JFK assassination — the hashtag #emasculaTed went viral.
Sure, it doesn’t make sense, but no form of money does. The more serious problem is that it’s an environmental disaster.
The value of the digital currency Bitcoin, which has skyrocketed since its introduction in 2009, fell 30% in one day on Wednesday. Should that worry anybody?
The mystery of money. I’ve barely said a word about Bitcoin and its rival cryptocurrencies on this blog, mostly because I know I don’t completely understand them. In some sense, though, that’s neither their fault nor mine. Money in general is mysterious: Dollars only have value because we all think they do. If everyone else in the world decided your dollars were worthless, you’d have a tough time convincing them otherwise.
The reasons dollars should continue to have value are a bit circular: All over the world, people owe dollars, so they’re going to have to obtain them to pay their debts. Also, the US government wants you to pay your taxes in dollars, so you’re going to need a few at some point. (Though, if you lived entirely by barter or by trading some untraceable currency like Bitcoin, what would the government tax?)
The Federal Reserve can create dollars at will just by entering a credit on its balance sheet, and that’s hard to square with the idea of intrinsic value. After all, farmers can’t increase the grain supply by manipulating their accounting. If GM wants to produce more cars, it has to buy components, pay workers, and build them in physical reality; it can’t just change some numbers on a spreadsheet and announce a million new Chevy Malibus. Stuff of actual, usable value can’t be magicked into existence, but money can.
That mystery has been highlighted during the pandemic, when the government kept the economy going by giving people dollars, which it mostly borrowed from the Federal Reserve, which conjured those dollars out of nothing. But the food and whatnot people bought with that money couldn’t be conjured out of nothing, so common sense tells us there’s a piper to be paid somewhere. In response, the smartest economists in the world say, “Well, yeah. Maybe eventually.” (If they sound more like priests of the Money goddess than practitioners of a hard science, that makes historical sense: The word money derives from an aspect of the queen of the Roman gods. Roman money could only be coined in the Temple of Juno Moneta.)
Libertarians are quick to tell you that such government-conjured “fiat money” is all a bubble that will pop someday: Real money is gold, and any paper money not redeemable for gold is a sham. But gold is mysterious in its own way. We dig gold out of the ground, smelt it into purified ingots, and then bury those ingots again in bank vaults. Somehow this strange digging-up-and-reburying process is supposed to be the basis of the world economy.
I mean, gold actually does have a few uses in jewelry-making and dentistry and electronics. But every year the world produces about twice as much gold as it uses for any practical purpose, so there’s little prospect that we’ll need our vast accumulated hoards of gold anytime soon.
Alchemists used to dream of transmuting more common metals into gold, which, if you think about it, would be exactly like the Fed conjuring dollars. The quantity of usable goods in the world would not change at all, so how would this new gold represent new wealth? A similar precious-metal illusion is sometimes mentioned as a cause of the fall of the Spanish Empire. Spain’s economy came to revolve around extracting gold and silver from the New World, while England was leading the Industrial Revolution. So Spain acquired the appearance of wealth, while England built a modern economy.
Anyway, the purpose of this long preamble is to make sure you have the right context for thinking about Bitcoin. If you only know two things about Bitcoin, this is what you should know:
There is absolutely no reason why a bitcoin should be worth anything.
It shares that characteristic with all other forms of money.
The history of Bitcoin emphasizes both the potential and the insubstantiality of its value. Wired says that the first recorded Bitcoin transaction happened in 2009, when someone traded 10,000 bitcoins for two Papa John’s pizzas. Bitcoins peaked at over $64,000 each in April, and crashed down below $40,000 on Wednesday. But in spite of the crash, whoever sold the pizzas is still doing pretty well.
What a cryptocurrency does. Understanding what a bitcoin is involves you in all kinds of complicated cryptological mathematics, and is mostly unnecessary. (It’s like computers: You don’t have to know how they work to use one confidently.) As Paul Krugman put it Friday, “Money is a role, not a thing.” So we should start by thinking about what Bitcoin does rather than what it is.
In general, a currency is a means of exchange, and its purpose is to facilitate trade, so that you aren’t constantly negotiating how many chickens to give the dentist for Jennifer’s braces. Traditionally, currencies have involved some kind of physical token, like a coin or a bill. You spend the currency by giving someone the token, which allows them to spend it somewhere else. (That description itself represents a change that has happened in my lifetime. Decades ago, people would have said that the coin or bill is money. Now we realize that it’s a token representing money, which is inherently intangible.)
These days, most transactions are done digitally, through credit cards or interbank transfers. This allows you to order stuff from Taiwan without shipping coins or bills around the world. So I might buy an app from a game designer in Bangalore or a song from a K-pop band in Seoul without any tangible objects moving in either direction. That makes the transaction faster, cheaper, and more reliable.
This system works because there are parties we all trust who can vouch for us. The game designer has no reason to trust me, but he trusts Visa, which trusts me. Ultimately, stuff like Visa and PayPal and Venmo work because banks trust other banks, all the way up to the central repository of trust, the Federal Reserve.
The point of a cryptocurrency is to get the advantages of digital transactions, but to avoid trusting the Fed, some equivalent government entity like the Bank of Japan, or a giant corporation like Citibank or Apple. Corporations shouldn’t be trusted because they don’t even pretend to have a purpose higher than profit, and a government might have all kinds of reasons to debase its currency — arguably, the US has been doing that with these recent trillion-dollar deficits — so why not create a system that isn’t subject to such temptations?
Also, the Fed (or whoever) can keep track of transactions that go through its systems, which you might not like because you’re a drug dealer or a tax evader or just somebody who puts a high value on privacy. (Right now, Matt Gaetz is probably wishing he hadn’t used Venmo.) Central-bank-based digital transactions may be fast, cheap, and reliable, but you have to give up the anonymity of cash.
So that’s the hole a cryptocurrency is trying to fill: fast, cheap, and reliable transactions that are as anonymous as cash, and denominated in a medium not vulnerable to political debasement.
Disintegrating the Fed. Essentially, the banking system that centers on the Fed is a big ledger that keeps track of how much money each person has; dollars are just the units it uses. When I pay my electric bill (whether by check or electronically), I send a message to deduct dollars from my account and add them to the electric company’s. If we use the same bank, that bank changes the numbers on its ledger. If not, ultimately the Fed changes its ledger to deduct dollars from my bank and add them to the electric company’s bank; the two banks then figure it out from there.
Again, this involves trust. We all just assume that the ledger will be kept accurately. If the ledger couldn’t be trusted, we’d soon be back to exchanging physical tokens, or maybe even swapping chickens.
Similarly, Bitcoin has to function like a big ledger that keeps track of how many bitcoins people have. If I’m going to buy something with Bitcoin, the system has to verify
that I own the bitcoins I’m trying to spend
that after the transaction, I have fewer bitcoins and the seller I bought from has more.
Further, I need to have confidence that if I don’t spend my bitcoins, I will continue to own them. Also, that the system won’t suddenly create massive numbers of new bitcoins in other people’s accounts, which could flood the market and lower the value of my bitcoins.
Now, if that ledger were just a file somewhere, like a spreadsheet, it wouldn’t offer either of the advantages a cryptocurrency is supposed to provide: We’d still have to trust somebody to maintain and update the spreadsheet, and investigators could subpoena it to see what we’ve been buying and selling. So why not just let the Fed keep doing that?
Instead, the list of Bitcoin transactions is encrypted and public. You could download the data yourself, but you couldn’t make sense out of it. The list of transactions is constantly being updated and verified by thousands of independent “miners”, who earn bitcoins for their effort. Any one of them could try to insert a fake transaction, but the others would catch the discrepancy. So we’re not trusting them as individuals, we’re trusting the collective entity they form.
Advanced mathematics gets into the picture to guarantee anonymity. The algorithms that define the Bitcoin system are constructed in such a way that even the miners who verify the list of transactions don’t know what they mean. (A more complete — but still not really complete — explanation is at Investopedia.) The important thing is
With your key — like a password — you can prove that you own a bitcoin you want to spend.
Without your key, no one can generate a “balance” that says how many bitcoins you own.
The situation is summed up by a rhyme Neal Stephenson put into his futuristic fairy tale The Diamond Age in 1995.
Castles, gardens, gold, and jewels contentment signify for fools like Princess Nell. But those who cultivate their wit, like King Coyote and his crows, compile their power bit by bit, and hide it places no one knows.
What’s a bitcoin worth really? The reason the value of Bitcoin can fluctuate so much is precisely the fact that it’s untethered from physical reality. Other kinds of money are too, but there’s a difference: None of them were ever really new.
Think about it. Trading in precious metals evolved “naturally”. There was never a moment when some chieftain or pharaoh announced for the first time “OK, from now on, gold is going to be our means of exchange”.
Coins derived their value from the metals they were made of. Originally, a coin was just a standard unit of metal whose purity and weight was validated by the government that minted it. So when King Croessus minted his gold coins 2600 years ago, he didn’t have to tell people what they were worth; they were worth whatever that amount of gold was worth. If you didn’t believe that, you could melt it down.
Paper money piggybacked onto the coin system. A bank note signified that some bank had precious-metal coins in its vault, and they’d give them to you if you turned the note in. So (as long as everybody believed that promise) nobody had to answer the question “What’s a ten-pound note worth?”
By the time paper money stopped being redeemable for gold or silver — 90 years ago for the British pound — its value had a long tradition behind it. So while the currency of a stable government might inflate or deflate a few percent each year, it won’t swing up and down week by week the way Bitcoin does. (When I was growing up, before the inflation of the 1970s, the way to say that a person was financially sensible was that he or she “knows the value of a dollar.” Today, somebody who truly knew the value of a bitcoin would be a savant.)
Digital dollars, euros, and yen are still convertible to paper currency. That’s what ATMs do.
So the units in the Fed’s database (i.e., dollars) may be just as theoretically meaningless as Bitcoin, but they have continuity of value that stretches back into prehistory.
Bitcoin doesn’t. That’s why 10,000 bitcoins might buy two pizzas, or a 600-foot luxury yacht, depending on what people happen to think that day.
A yacht worth slightly less than 10,000 pre-crash bitcoins.
What caused this week’s crash? Anything that booms is likely to bust at some point, so the search for a “cause” never has a clear answer. But one precipitating event was that Tesla announced it will no longer trade cars for bitcoins. This disrupted the story behind Bitcoin in two ways:
According to its boosters, Bitcoin is supposed to become more and more accepted with time, until it becomes the premier means of exchange.
The reason Elon Musk gave for Tesla’s decision: Bitcoin mining soaks up a lot of electric power, much of which comes from fossil fuels, including coal. If Tesla is promoting Bitcoin, it’s undoing the positive environmental effect of its cars.
And nowadays we use Bitcoin to buy houses and cars, pay our bills, make business investments, and more.
Oh, wait. We don’t do any of those things. Twelve years on, cryptocurrencies play almost no role in normal economic activity. Almost the only time we hear about them being used as a means of payment — as opposed to speculative trading — is in association with illegal activity, like money laundering or the Bitcoin ransom Colonial Pipeline paid to hackers who shut it down.
He goes on to point out that 12 years is a long time in tech: Bitcoin is the same age as Venmo, and older than the iPad or Zoom. The fact that it hasn’t caught on yet is a really bad sign.
One reason for that failure to catch on is habit, and the fact that most people are not nearly so desperate to get out of “fiat currencies” as Libertarians think they should be. (That might change if the current burst of inflation turns into more than the temporary blip economists like Krugman are predicting.) But a second good reason is the fluctuation in the dollar-value of Bitcoin itself.
Imagine, for example, that you’re a contractor negotiating a deal to spend the next two years building a bridge. You’d be crazy to take your payment in Bitcoin, because no one has any idea what Bitcoin will be worth in two years. Similarly, imagine if you’d taken out a mortgage in Bitcoin at the beginning of 2020, when a bitcoin was worth about $10,000. By this April, you’d have owed six times as much (in dollar terms). If your salary were denominated in Bitcoin, you’d have taken a 30% pay cut Wednesday.
The only way this makes sense is if you are living in a complete Bitcoin system, where you can pay your workers (or your rent) in the same currency that you’re earning, so that your income and expenses rise and fall together. Otherwise you’re gambling, not participating in a productive economy.
Now, it’s not unusual for new technology to face this kind of chicken-and-egg problem. (It made little sense to be an early adopter of the telephone, for example, because there were so few people you could call.) Tech that succeeds is compelling enough to overcome that problem.
But Bitcoin doesn’t seem to be that compelling. Maybe you weren’t planning to buy a Tesla with your bitcoins anyway. The fact that you can’t, though, is symbolic.
Bitcoin and global warming. The deeper problem is that Bitcoin mining eats up an enormous amount of computer power, which in turns eats up an enormous amount of electrical power. The Guardian reports:
Cambridge’s Centre for Alternative Finances estimates that bitcoin’s annualised electricity consumption hovers just above 115 terawatt-hours (TWh) while Digiconomist’s closely tracked index puts it closer to 80 TWh.
A single transaction of bitcoin has the same carbon footprint as 680,000 Visa transactions or 51,210 hours of watching YouTube, according to the site.
As more people learn about bitcoin and mining—and as the price of bitcoin increases—more are using their computers to mine bitcoins. As more people join the network and try to solve these math puzzles, you might expect each puzzle to be solved sooner, but bitcoin is not designed that way.
The software that mines bitcoin is designed so that it always will take 10 minutes for everyone on the network to solve the puzzle. It does that by scaling the difficulty of the puzzle, depending on how many people are trying to solve it.
Of course, the carbon footprint depends on how the electricity is being generated. And that brings up a different problem: No one knows exactly where the mining computers are, or how their electricity is generated. And because there is no central authority controlling Bitcoin — that’s part of the point, after all — no one can enforce environmental standards on the miners.
It seems likely, though, that miners are setting up in places where electricity is cheap. And at the moment, that is likely to be where it’s easy to burn coal.
Now, you could imagine setting up Bitcoin-mining supercomputers on the vast plains of Oklahoma, and powering them with fields of windmills. But even that plan is environmentally questionable. The growth in sustainable energy is supposed to replace fossil-fuel energy, not power some new need that didn’t exist 12 years ago.
Fatal wounds? For what it’s worth — notice that I’m putting it out for free — I think the environmental problem is a fatal wound for Bitcoin. Maybe in a not-too-distant future, computation requires much less electricity, which is generated by solar arrays in orbit, so nobody cares about the computational burden of their digital currencies. But maybe not.
In the meantime, we’re not there.
Right now, for Bitcoin to catch on and rival the dollar, the yen, and the euro, it needs the kind of early-adopter enthusiasm that comes from people believing that they’re doing something cool. Twelve years ago, those two Bitcoin-purchased Papa Johns were the coolest pizzas in the world.
Now they’re not, and even Elon Musk realizes it. Maybe at some point, your friends would have been awed if you’d said, “Like my new Tesla? I bought it with Bitcoin.”
But with every day that goes by, you’re less and less likely to get that reaction, and more and more likely to convince people that you’re willing to destroy the planet for your own vanity. “Oh, you’re that kind of asshole.” (At the moment, the world’s most famous Bitcoin miner is Joel Greenberg. That kind of asshole.)
That’s fatal. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon.
This all says nothing about the underlying argument for some kind of cryptocurrency. Maybe trillion-dollar deficits really are evidence that the world’s governments and central banks can’t be trusted to maintain our money. Maybe there is room in the world for — or even a need for — a crowd-sourced money based on cryptographic algorithms.
But that currency is going to need a high level of coolness to beat the chicken-and-egg problem and catch on. And eating up a nation-sized chunk of the world’s energy output is not cool.
One thing I appreciate about the Biden administration is that the rate of news has slowed a little. That gives me time to think about longer-term issues once in a while rather than constantly react to the most recent threat to democracy.
This week I take advantage of that freedom to reflect on Bitcoin, which crashed 30% against the dollar on Wednesday. I can’t guess what the market will do day-to-day or even month-to-month, but long-term, I’m bearish on Bitcoin. In order to catch on as a currency for everyday use, it’s going to need a aura of coolness; using it should impress your friends. But the environmental disaster of Bitcoin mining is anything but cool. I’ll develop that point — and make some rude observations about the paradoxes of money in general — the in the featured post “The Problem with Bitcoin”. That should be out shortly.
The weekly summary does have stuff to cover: Congress’ looming failure to authorize a bipartisan commission to investigate the Trump Insurrection, the Israel/Palestine ceasefire, the usual run of Republican scandals, and a few other articles that are taking advantage of breathing space in the news to reflect on the possibility of global population decline, or the reasons life expectancy doubled in the 20th century.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on May 23, 2021. Conspiracy theories have always been with us. People like to make sense of the events happening in their world. How do you know what's true. Who falls for conspiracy theories, and why.
Watch the Service: To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player.
"Marge and Barb Have Class" (May 23, 2021) Worship Service
The title of the sermon is a set of words my cousin and I saw spray painted on the side of a falling down old shed on a country road one day in Upstate New York. A good place to leap into a conversation on our obsession, perhaps, with the whole wild notion of "class".
Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister
Rev. Alyson Jacks, Associate Minister
Linda Enger, 8th Principle Testimony
Reiko Oda Lane, organist
Brielle Marina Neilson, alto
Ben Rudiak-Gould, tenor
Asher Davison, bass
Wm. García Ganz, pianist
Eric Shackelford, camera
Shulee Ong, camera
Jonathan Silk, audio, oos design, drums
Joe Chapot, social media chat
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Amy Kelly, flowers
Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour
the address from the Sunday service at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland, on 23rd May 2021. Rev. Bridget Spain is senior minister at Dublin Unitarian Church.
a collections of readings, prayers and music from the Sunday service of 23rd May 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Rev. Bridget Spain, minister of Dublin Unitarian Church with contributions from Monica Cremins and Josh Johnston
Photo by Margy Dowzer: I am in the water as we fill the pond!
Such an exciting moment when we began to put water in the pond yesterday! It was a sunny hot day, so being in the cold water was great. I found I had to get right into it to do the folds of the pond liner which are necessary when you take a square liner and put it into a round hole. We filled it up to just under the level of the planting shelf.
Photo: black cloth underlayment
But back to the earlier parts of the process–the first thing I did yesterday was install the pond liner underlayment–a very light felty fabric thing that protects the pond liner. We might not have needed it, because of the carpet strips, but the pond liner is guaranteed for life if you use the underlayment. I had purchased a 20 by 20 foot 45 mil EPDM liner, and the underlayment came in two pieces of 10 by 20. I overlapped them about 3 feet. After that, I also dug further and deeper on the overflow channel, and made sure it sloped away from the pond. You can see it in the left on the photo.
Then, midday, our neighbors came by to help with installing the pond liner itself–the liner is very heavy, but with the three of us (plus a kid!), it wasn’t hard to position it over the hole. So grateful for helping hands! Because the pond wasn’t quite as deep as planned, I knew we’d have extra liner on the sides, so we didn’t have to worry about getting everything exactly centered.
Photo: getting in position to install the liner.
As it turns out, black rubber gets very hot in the sun, so we all wore gloves, along with our masks for COVID.
After the liner was roughly in place, the neighbors went home. I got into the hole and adjusted everything so it was flush with all the surfaces underneath, creating folds where needed. It was recommended by my Building Natural Ponds book to not step on it with shoes, but socks weren’t enough to protect my feet from the heat–so I pulled out my fuzzy slippers and a blanket.
Photo by Margy Dowzer: Taking a moment to rest while shaping the liner to the hole.
After a short break, we started filling the pond with our garden hose. Water from the house has chlorine in it, but the chlorine will evaporate quickly and so this water is fine to use especially before we have any life in the pond. Eventually, we’ll use water from the rain barrels you can see in the back of the photo, but we’ve had no significant rain for a while. While the hose was running, Margy and I wandered around the back of the yard looking at plants, and then finally pulled up chairs to watch the water fill. And I got in a few times to keep adjusting the liner–glad to have an excuse!
It isn’t the end of the process by any means. I have been doing this step by step, not knowing how long each step would take. The next thing to do, and why we only filled up to the planting shelf, is to cover the planting shelf with stones and pebbles. I’ve collected lots of rocks from around the yard, but will definitely need to purchase more. And that is a bit more complicated than I realized, likely involving borrowing or renting a pickup truck. But in the meantime, I went online and ordered 5 native pond plants that will arrive in about 10 days. It is really happening! And there is water in the pond!
Photo by Margy Dowzer: me working inside the pond, surrounded by pieces of carpet.
Yesterday, I laid down all the carpet pieces to cover the ground surface of my little future pond! (I got these pieces from kind strangers when I posted on Freecycle and Buy Nothing that I was looking for old carpet for the pond.) It was a bit like putting together a puzzle, making sure to overlay the pieces so all the ground was covered. As I mentioned before, this is one method for protecting the pond liner from roots and sharp stones–in our case, mainly from bittersweet roots. The toughest part was matching up square pieces in a circular area. That, and the dustiness–which is why I am wearing a mask and gloves. I used up all my pieces of carpet, except for some 2 by 2 squares that I plan to use over the liner on the planting shelves, to protect the liner from those stones. It was just right–I would have hated to have a bunch of leftover old carpet.
Photo: carpet layer completed!
Today, I still have to dig some more of the overflow channel, install the official “underlayment” that came with the liner, and then some neighbors are coming over to help me position the pond liner–it is too heavy for me to move it on my own. I am trying to get it in place before some rain in the forecast on Saturday, though we did get some drizzle this morning. I’ll post more pictures as the work gets done.
Meanwhile, these beautiful purple lupine flowers started blooming in our front road edge, with no work at all from me this year, and I just want to include them here, for anyone who’s reading this far. May you have a beautiful day!
Photo: Cutting old donated carpet in 2 feet+ strips
I had a slow start today. I haven’t talked much lately about living with chronic illness, but for some reason I’ve been feeling much better energy than usual this spring. Still, I have a method for energy use: First of all, I rest when I need to. But what seems to work with garden projects is that I exert myself for a short while–say 10 minutes, or one wheelbarrow load. And then I sit and rest for 10 minutes. I don’t time myself, that is just a guess. I stop when I need to and rest until I can start again. While resting, I drink some iced licorice-root tea–that is a big help. I make a big batch of the tea (boiling licorice root for 15 minutes), and cool it to keep in jars in the fridge. Then I put together a big plastic glass (with a cover to take outside) adding ice and some lemon juice. Licorice root is said to be good for adrenal glands, so maybe this is why it has been so good for my energy.
But for example, this afternoon about 3 p.m., after my slow start, I was able to make my way outside. I started on the next step for the pond–cutting the old carpet (that I collected for free) into strips about 2 feet wide. I started with the biggest carpet piece I had received. Margy bought me a really good pair of carpet cutting scissors. Oh my gosh–they are so sharp and nice and easy to use. So I cut one 8 foot (?) strip, and then I rested. Then I cut another one. It went like that. After I had finished cutting that carpet piece into about 8 strips, I decided to see how it might lay on the pond surface.
But then I had another thought while experimenting. Since the pond is no longer going to be 3 feet deep, but rather about 2 1/2 feet, and since I have a pond liner that is 20 by 20, why not make it a bit wider at the top. (Since the equation for the pond liner size takes into account depth and width and length.) So instead of 11 by 11 1/2, just add a bit more on the half that has a one foot planting shelf, let the pond be closer to 12 by 12, and the planting shelf be a bit wider too. So I started digging again around the top edge. And then I remembered the advice to make a sloping “beach” edge for small critters to be able to get in. So I did some of that. Again, bit by bit.
While doing this further digging, I again saw more bright orange bittersweet roots. This is the biggest reason why we are using carpet strips as an underlayment. Some folks like sand better, but we need something that can stop the roots from puncturing the pond liner.
So the next photo is what it looked like when I called it a day. I was lying in the hammock a bit, resting, and then when I got up I could barely move. That is the other part of this process. I get really exhausted and sore all over. So I came in and took a hot shower, and then took two aspirin, which lately always seems to help. I’ll be down for the evening, but tomorrow, probably ready to start again. Unless I am not. I am sharing all these details to say that I am so grateful I am able to do this outside work, in this rhythm of work and rest. And also, maybe it might be a helpful suggestion for others who don’t have stamina for whatever reason. Work and rest, work and rest, in little segments. It has been a good day.
Photo: the pond, which is wider now (on the left and foreground), with blue carpet strips covering the “beach” area, and going down to the bottom.
Since the election, Republicans, driven by the lie that is now their party’s central ideology, have systematically attacked the safeguards that protected the last election. They have sent the message that vigorous defense of democracy is incompatible with a career in Republican politics.
This week everybody was talking about getting back to (sort of) normal
Tomorrow marks two weeks since my second Pfizer shot, so according to the new CDC guidance I should be able to more-or-less resume normal life.
If you’ve been fully vaccinated: You can resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic. You can resume activities without wearing a mask or staying 6 feet apart, except where required by federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules, and regulations, including local business and workplace guidance.
Now, breakthrough infections were expected, and don’t cast doubt on the effectiveness of the vaccines. Epidemiology is a numbers game; the vaccines substantially reduce the odds of catching, transmitting, or dying from Covid, but they’re not guarantees.
Personally, I regard mask-wearing as a fairly trivial hardship, so I think I’ll still do it when I’m in stores or crowds. I may wear masks in movie theaters for the rest of my life (unless I get popcorn). And I plan to keep avoiding indoor dining until the new-case numbers drop much further. Some people are being even more cautious.
There are at least a few reports of people being harassed for wearing masks, which apparently anti-maskers regard as turnabout-is-fair-play. But it’s not: People who refused to wear masks when they were necessary were endangering everyone else. People who continue to wear masks when they’re not necessary are only inconveniencing themselves. Why should anyone else care?
Since CDC announced the new COVID-19 mask guidance for vaccinated Americans, a flurry of right-wing accounts — seemingly belonging to unvaccinated people — have tweeted saying they “identify as vaccinated” and won’t be wearing a mask. It’s the new anti-vaccine talking point.
“Identifying as vaccinated” is a twofer in conservative circles: It parodies the rhetoric of trans people in order to undermine the public health system’s battle against Covid. This is what passes for cleverness on the Right. As my junior high English teacher told us, “Some people are so stupid they think they’re intelligent.”
Long but worth it: Wired has a medical whodunnit: How did the medical establishment become so convinced (wrongly) that Covid could only travel short distances in droplets, rather than hanging in the air and covering longer distances? The problem goes back to a misinterpretation of a tuberculosis study in 1962, and it was fixed this year by a small group of scientists who wouldn’t let rejection slow them down. Their work not only helped control Covid (much later than it should have been controlled), but should prevent flu deaths for years to come.
If your relationships, work, and life have been disrupted by the pandemic, the weeks and months before you fully reenter the world should not be wasted. They are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to come clean with yourself—to admit that all was not perfectly well before.
… Many of us have taken to asking each other, over the past year or so, what we miss from before the pandemic and hate about living through it. But for your happiness, the more germane questions are “What did I dislike from before the pandemic and don’t miss?” and “What do I like from the pandemic times that I will miss?”
Brooks recommends that you take inventory of your pre-pandemic life and make a plan for not returning to normal.
I saw Brooks interviewed on CNBC, where he made another interesting point: The pandemic may be a once-in-a-lifetime event, but something turns the world upside-down about every ten years: the financial crisis of 2008, 9-11, the fall of the Soviet Union.
and Israel/Palestine
A featured post discusses two articles outlining very different ways to look at the situation.
Matt Yglesias makes an interesting point that doesn’t fit in that article:
I’m not saying you or your favorite politician should have a strong take on the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia — it is every American’s right to ignore foreign events! — but it’s worth asking why some things get on the news agenda and others don’t.
and Republicans behaving badly
I cover Liz Cheney’s ouster from House Republican leadership, and what it means for the GOP, in a featured post. But that was far from the only story illustrating the ongoing decline of the Republican Party.
But before leaving the Cheney story, I want to point out an irony: The GOP’s acceptance of Trump’s Big Lie is an example of what “political correctness” originally meant, before it became a meaningless insult.
In Stalinist circles, everybody understood that he Party told lies. So in order to function, you had to stay aware of two realities: the real world, but also the alternative reality described by the Party’s propaganda. To get things done, you had to appreciate what was factually correct. But often you couldn’t say the truth out loud, because those factually correct statements weren’t politically correct.
Same thing here: Kevin McCarthy and the rest of the House Republican leadership understand that Trump lost the election. But in an authoritarian party, you can’t contradict the Leader. “Biden won fair and square” may be factually correct, but it’s not politically correct.
Tom the Dancing Bug portrays the insurrectionists as a comic character. It had to be either Snoopy’s air ace or Calvin as Spaceman Spiff.
This is the kind of craziness the insurrectionists are still spreading: Trump lawyer Lin Wood in Myrtle Beach on May 11: Trump is still president, because he won the election. The military is still looking to him for leadership. “This isn’t about Trump. This isn’t about flesh. This is about God. This is about Powers and Principalities. God’s getting ready to clean up this world.”
Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas took to the House floor on Friday to downplay the January 6 Capitol riot, describing the insurrections as “political prisoners held hostage by their own government.”
“Joe Biden’s Justice Department is criminalizing political protest, but only political protest by Republicans or conservatives,” Gohmert said in his lengthy speech in which he cited several conservative news outlets, according to CNN. “They’re destroying the lives of American families, they’re weaponizing the events of January 6 to silence Trump-supporting Americans.”
Lest we forget: Trump had masked federal police abducting people off the streets in Portland because protesters were defacing a federal court house with graffiti. But folks who broke windows and beat policemen with flagpoles in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying the peaceful transfer of power are “political prisoners”.
A lot of news stories this week told us about Republicans who might get indicted, but haven’t been yet. I’m keeping track of these developments, but trying not to get too excited about them until there’s something definite in the public record.
Friday, Joel Greenberg, often described as Congressman Matt Gaetz’ “wingman” (though I haven’t been able to track down how that started), pleaded guilty to six federal charges, including sex trafficking women, one of whom was a minor at the time.
As part of his plea deal, Greenberg plans to admit in court that he introduced a child “to other adult men, who engaged in commercial sex acts with the Minor in the Middle District of Florida,” according to the document filed Friday.
It’s widely suggested that one of those men was Gaetz, though the plea deal doesn’t name him, and Gaetz denies any wrongdoing. In the deal, Greenberg promises to “cooperate fully with the United States in the investigation and prosecution of other persons”. Who those persons are is not specified, but it’s reasonable to assume one of them is a bigger fish than Greenberg himself. If not Gaetz, then who?
The Daily Beast has been the leading news source on the Gaetz scandals. My impression of DB is middling: I don’t think they’d invent a story out of nothing, but I also don’t trust them to be as scrupulous as The New York Times or Washington Post. It bothers me that top-line news organizations haven’t been able to verify many of DB’s claims through their own reporting. (When MSNBC’s Chris Hayes interviewed DB’s reporter, he said: “I want to stress here that we at NBC have not confirmed this reporting.”)
Friday DB posted this claim: After Gaetz was the lead speaker at the Trump Defender Gala at a resort in Orlando on October 26, 2019, his hotel room was the site of cocaine party that Gaetz participated in. The drugs were provided by a woman who had an ongoing money-for-sex relationship with Gaetz and a no-show government job provided by Greenberg.
The woman is identified, but not the witnesses the story relies on.
Elsewhere, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance is still working on his investigation of Donald Trump’s finances. The investigations appears to be trying to get something on Trump accountant Allen Weisselberg in an effort to flip him against Trump.
Vance already has millions of pages of Trump financial documents, but (according to numerous lawyers speculating in the media) doesn’t want to make a purely document-based case against Trump. Documents are far more persuasive with an inside witness who can lead the jury through them.
Still no word on what might have been found in the raid on Rudy Giuliani’s home and office.
It looks like Trump’s former White House Counsel, Don McGahn, will finally testify to Congress. The interview will not be public, but a transcript will be released a week later.
The interview will be limited to information attributed to McGahn in the publicly available portions of the Mueller Report, as well as events that involved him personally. He can decline to answer questions that go beyond that scope.
That should include instances that the Mueller Report analyzed as possible obstructions of justice by Trump, like when Trump allegedly instructed McGahn to tell Rod Rosenstein to fire Mueller, and then instructed McGahn to publicly deny that Trump gave any such order.
And while McGahn “can” decline to answer other questions, it will be interesting to see what he chooses to answer.
Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to have cheated on her state taxes. She and her husband have claimed homestead exemptions on two houses. You’re only allowed one.
Greene apologists would like to say this is just ordinary politics, but it isn’t. This is deeply disturbing behavior that could get somebody killed. No member of Congress has ever had to take out a restraining order against another, but AOC should.
If Trump is indicted in New York, both the U.S. Constitution and a federal statute dating to 1793 require DeSantis (or the governor of whatever state Trump is in at the time) to hand him over. And if DeSantis still refuses, a 1987 Supreme Court decision makes clear that federal courts can order him to comply.
A ransomware attack, apparently by the Russian criminal group Darkside, shut down a major pipeline supplying gasoline to the east coast for a little over a week. The pipeline is now back in operation. The C|Net article on this is pretty good.
Back in the 1800s, someone described various cabals’ attempts to corner the wheat market as “like watching men wrestling under a blanket”. In other words, you can see that something is happening, but it’s hard to tell what it means. Ditto here.
Colonial Pipeline appears to have paid a $5 million ransom, so that looks like a win for Darkside. But the criminal group also appears to have suffered consequences.
As of Friday, the group appeared to have disbanded, according to the Journal, which reported Darkside had told associates that it had lost access to the infrastructure it needs for its activities. The group said law enforcement actions had prompted its decision, according to the paper.
Those responsible for DarkSide are very organized, and they have a mature Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) business model and affiliate program. The group has a phone number and even a help desk to facilitate negotiations with and collect information about its victims—not just technical information regarding their environment but also more general details relating to the company itself like the organization’s size and estimated revenue.
This is bound to be merely the first example of a larger problem. All kinds of vital infrastructure is controlled by computers, or related to computer systems in some other way. (One account I’ve seen of the Colonial Pipeline hack speculated that Darkside had hacked the billing software, not the software that runs the pipeline itself. So Colonial could still deliver gasoline, but wouldn’t know how to get paid. I don’t know if that’s true, but it points out the breadth of the vulnerability.) Software is notoriously full of bugs, and much of it is developed on platforms that are themselves full of bugs, like Windows.
Georgia Tech media studies Professor Ian Bogost commented on the general state of computer security:
You need a license to go fishing but not to deploy software at global scale.
The root issue is the extreme level of corruption in the organization, centering on Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre. (Even GQ is horrified by LaPierre spending a quarter million of the NRA’s money on suits.) Escaping state regulatory enforcement, a federal judge in Texas ruled, is not “a purpose intended or sanctioned by the Bankruptcy Code”.
This week I noticed Hi/Storia, a Facebook page devoted to amusing memes and cartoons about history. For example:
I’m always amused by Trae Crowder’s “Liberal Redneck” rants. But his “Confederate Memorial Day” is laugh-out-loud funny.
in order to grasp the full nuance of his views, though, you should also watch his “In Defense of Dixie” from 2016.
While we’re talking about Confederate remembrance, Clint Smith is a Black man who tours some iconic Confederate shrines and writes “Why Confederate Lies Live On” for The Atlantic.
Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth.
Among other myths, Smith debunks the frequently heard claim that
“From the perspective of my ancestors, [the Civil War] was not [about] slavery. My ancestors were not slaveholders. But my great-great-grandfather fought.”
Even if you didn’t own slaves — and large numbers of Confederate soldiers’ families did — you probably liked the idea that you weren’t at the bottom of society.
The proposition of equality with Black people was one that millions of southern white people were unwilling to accept. The existence of slavery meant that, no matter your socioeconomic status, there were always millions of people beneath you. As the historian Charles Dew put it, “You don’t have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system.”
and let’s close with something you can dance to
The genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was in translating a WASPy bit of American history into a modern ethnic musical genre, hip-hop. Well, what if somebody from a different American ethnicity had gotten a similar idea, and told Alexander Hamilton’s story through polkas?
Of course, this is a Weird Al Yankovic question, and he provides this answer.
Wednesday, House Republicans did what they had been expected to do for a week or two: ousted Liz Cheney as chair of the Republican conference.
From one point of view, this is a fairly meaningless event: A month ago, how many Americans could even name the House GOP’s #3, much less describe the position’s responsibilities? Since Cathy McMorris Rodgers got the job in 2013, it has functioned primarily as the party’s see-we’re-not-all-white-males leadership post. (That’s why Elise Stefanik was the obvious choice to replace Cheney.)
But from another view, Cheney’s removal matters very much, because it defines the GOP as the pro-insurrection Party. Cheney’s unforgivable sin is that she has continued to say the kinds of things that Kevin McCarthy said shortly after January 6.
The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action by President Trump. … [He should] accept his share of responsibility, quell the brewing unrest and ensure President-Elect Joe Biden is able to successfully begin his term. … Let’s be clear, Joe Biden will be sworn in as president of the United States in one week because he won the election.
But that was before McCarthy made his pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring. Now there is no place in Republican leadership for anyone who disputes Trump’s Big Lie of a stolen election, or accurately describes the threat it poses, as Cheney did on on the House floor just before her ouster.
The Electoral College has voted. More than 60 state and federal courts, including multiple judges the former president appointed, have rejected [Trump’s] claims. The Trump Department of Justice investigated the former president’s claims of widespread fraud and found no evidence to support them. The election is over. That is the rule of law. That is our constitutional process. Those who refuse to accept the rulings of our courts are at war with the Constitution. Our duty is clear. Every one of us who has sworn the oath must act to prevent the unraveling of our democracy.
This is not about policy. This is not about partisanship. This is about our duty as Americans. Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar. I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence, while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.
Liz Cheney is just the most visible example of a much wider phenomenon: Republicans of integrity — the people at all levels who stopped Trump’s attempt to overturn the election and stay in power — are being purged. Michelle Goldberg lays out the details:
Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election revealed how much our democracy depends on officials at all levels of government acting honorably. Republicans on state boards of election, like Aaron Van Langevelde in Michigan, had to certify the results correctly. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had to resist Trump’s entreaties to “find” enough missing votes to put him over the top. Republican state legislatures had to refuse Trump campaign pressure to substitute their own slate of electors for those chosen by the people. Congress had to do its job in the face of mob violence and count the Electoral College votes. Trump’s rolling coup attempt didn’t succeed, but it did reveal multiple points at which our system can fail.
Since the election, Republicans, driven by the lie that is now their party’s central ideology, have systematically attacked the safeguards that protected the last election. They have sent the message that vigorous defense of democracy is incompatible with a career in Republican politics. (Besides losing her leadership role, Cheney could easily lose her House seat.) Michigan Republicans declined to renominate Van Langevelde to the Board of State Canvassers. Raffensperger will most likely face a tough primary challenge in 2022.
And let’s not forget Mike Pence, who allowed the certification of Biden’s electoral votes to proceed. In his January 6 incitement-to-riot speech, Trump put the onus on him:
If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. … All Vice-President Pence has to do is send it back to the States to recertify, and we become president.
(Trump was assuming Republicans in the legislatures would participate in his coup, which might not have happened in 2020, but is more likely in 2024.) That’s why the insurrectionists were chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” Pence currently has no official position he can be purged from, but he is done in Republican politics, because he followed the Constitution and did his job rather than obey Trump.
It’s important to see what this means going forward. If Republicans succeed in this purge, and if gerrymandered districts continue to put a moat around their majorities in the legislatures of purplish-blue states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, then the voters may not get to decide the 2024 election at all. Or imagine Republicans controlling Congress after the 2022 elections, which is a real possibility. There will be no need for an insurrectionist mob to invade the Capitol and intimidate Congress into ignoring the voters, because the insurrectionists will already be inside the building.
Already at their 2020 convention, the GOP proclaimed that its platform was to support Trump. In other words, the party had a Leader, not a set of policies. Now the only duty of a GOP official is to bring Trump back to power. The “right” decision is not the one that follows the Constitution or the laws or respects the will of the voters. The only right decision is the one that returns Trump to power.
Admittedly, agreeing with Liz Cheney is a strange position for most Democrats to find themselves in. After all, Cheney is unabashedly carrying forward the legacy of her father, Dick Cheney, who was the primary villain of the Bush-43 administration. It’s weird to see her portrayed as a champion of Truth, when her father’s lies got so many Americans (and many more Iraqis) killed in the Iraq War.
But we need to recognize that the current debate is happening on a different level. The proper use of American military power — like tax rates and environmental regulations — is a decision for the American people to make through the political process. But what we’re talking about now is whether there’s going to be a political process at all, or whether Trumpists will simply seize power at the first opportunity, like the fascists they are.
When Cheney’s liberal critics place her support for democracy alongside her other positions, they implicitly endorse the same calculation made by her conservative opponents: that the rule of law is just another issue.
The only way democracy survives is if both sides respect the outcome of a free and fair election as a precondition to all their other disagreements. Democracy is a system for maintaining domestic peace. You make peace with your enemies, not your friends.
I try to bear this in mind: In order to beat fascism the last time, FDR had to ally with Stalin. On the evil scale, Liz Cheney is nothing compared to Stalin.
The temperature of the fighting goes up and down, but there is no real prospect for peace. Two articles express two very different ways to look at this situation.
There are basically two truthful ways to cover the current wave of violence between Israelis and Palestinians:
A pox on both your houses, because neither side seems to have any plan that involves making peace with the other. (See cartoon above.)
One side, Israel, bears more responsibility because it is far more powerful, is doing far more damage, and has far more ability to shape the course of events.
A good example of the first type is Vox’ “The Gaza doom loop” by Zack Beauchamp. Beauchamp does mention that the two sides are not equal, but focuses on the similarities between them.
It would seem as if the current round of violence emerged out of a complex series of events in Jerusalem, most notably heavy-handed actions by Israeli police and aggression by far-right Jewish nationalists. But in reality, these events were merely triggers for escalations made almost inevitable by the way the major parties have chosen to approach the conflict. … It’s clear that that this status quo produces horrors. The problem, though, is that these terrible costs are seen as basically tolerable by the political leadership of all the major parties.
Hamas continues to be able to rule Gaza and reaps the political benefits from being the party of armed resistance to Israeli occupation. Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas appears cowed by Hamas’s power — most analysts believe he canceled the Palestinian election because he thought he would lose — and so is content to let Israel keep his rivals contained in Gaza.
Beauchamp similarly breaks Israeli politics into two factions: “annexationists … who want to formally seize large chunks of Palestinian land while either expelling its residents or denying them political rights — ethnic cleansing or apartheid” and “the control camp” who (rather than looking for a viable long-term solution) are just trying to minimize the damage that Palestinians can do to Israelis.
The status quo in Gaza serves both groups. From the annexationist view, keeping the Palestinians weak and divided allows Israeli settlements to keep expanding and the seizure of both the West Bank and East Jerusalem to continue apace. Lifting the blockade on Gaza, and working to promote some kind of renewed peace process involving both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, jeopardizes the agenda of “Greater Israel.”
… Meanwhile, the “control” camp sees this as the least bad option. Any easing of the Gaza blockade would risk Hamas breaking containment and expanding its presence in the West Bank, which would be far more dangerous than the rockets — a threat heavily mitigated by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. In this analysis, periodic flare-ups are a price that has to be paid to minimize the threat to Israeli lives — with heavy escalations like this one required to restore a basically tolerable status quo.
There used to be a third faction, the “equality” camp, which “believed that Palestinians deserved a political voice as a matter of principle — either in a single state or, more typically, through a two-state arrangement”, but it “collapsed after the failure of the peace process and the second intifada in the early 2000s.” Beauchamp estimates that the equality camp controls about 10% of the Knesset, and so has virtually no influence on policy.
The second type of coverage is exemplified by Branko Marcetic’s article in Jacobin: “On Palestine, the Media is Allergic to the Truth“. To Marcetic, putting the recent Hamas rocket attacks on Israel and Israeli airstrikes on Gaza “in context” would mean
explaining that the rockets came in the wake of a series of outrageous and criminal Israeli provocations in occupied East Jerusalem: a series of violent police raids on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam during its holiest month, that have damaged the sacred structure and injured hundreds, including worshippers; that Israeli forces were attacking Palestinians who were occupying Aqsa both to pray and to protect it from bands of far-right Israeli extremists who have been marching through East Jerusalem, attacking Palestinians, and trying to break into the compound; and that all of this sits in the shadow of protests against Israel’s most recent attempt to steal land from Palestinians in the city, and the ramping up of Israel’s theft of Palestinian land more broadly under Trump.
While you’re at it, you might at least make clear that the Israeli attacks on Gaza have been far more vicious and deadly than the rockets they’re supposedly “retaliating” against, having killed forty-three people so far [many more since the article was published], including thirteen children, and leveled an entire residential building. You might make clear that Hamas’s rockets are, owing to their own cheapness and Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, at this point closer to the lashing-out-in-impotent-frustration part of the spectrum (which, of course, is not to say they don’t do damage or occasionally take lives — they’ve killed six Israelis thus far). All of this would help people understand why what they’re seeing unfold on their screens is happening, and what might be done to stop it.
Marcetic skewers the even-handedness of most articles of the first type, which refer to “clashes” and “rising tensions” as if they were reporting storms at sea rather than intentional human actions. Israel doesn’t do things so much as stuff happens and a bunch of people wind up dead.
As for what American policy should be, I have no idea. I’m not sure President Biden does either. How exactly do you make peace between sides whose leaders — backed by a sizeable chunk of their constituents — don’t want to make peace?
That said, I’m glad to see the end of the Trump/Kushner policy, which I would sum up as “Fuck the Palestinians.” The Trumpists’ primary goal in the Middle East was to create an Israel/Sunni alliance against Shiite Iran. So they brokered agreements between Israel and four minor Sunni states: Morocco, Sudan, Bahrain, and the Emirates. If that spirit of cooperation could be extended to larger Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia, the Palestinians would be left without any allies, and presumably would have to take whatever deal Israel feels like offering them.
In essence, the Palestinians were in the way of the strategic realignment Kushner wanted. So to hell with them.
No doubt Israel can create a situation where the Palestinians ought to give up. Arguably, it already has. The Kushners of the world, who have lots of non-hopeless options to choose from, certainly would give up and move on to Plan B, C, or D. But I don’t think the Palestinians will. They’ll keep throwing rocks at tanks until the Israelis either deal with them or kill them.
After taking a week off, I return to a full plate of news.
I don’t enjoy writing about Israel and Palestine, because it’s a dismal situation where I have no solutions to offer. So this week I lean heavily on two other articles, “The Gaza Doom Loop” in Vox and “On Palestine, the Media is Allergic to the Truth” in Jacobin. They reflect very different views: the Vox article fairly even-handedly explains why neither side wants peace, while the Jacobin article holds Israel responsible because it has far more power to shape events. Jacobin additionally offers a devastating critique of news sources that try to stay even-handed.
So that’ll be the first featured article to appear: “What to Make of Israel/Palestine?”. Let’s say that gets out by 9 EST.
Another featured article looks at the Liz Cheney ouster, and what it means for the Republican Party going forward. “Why Liz Cheney Matters” should be out around 11 or so.
That leaves the weekly summary to discuss the new CDC guidance for fully vaccinated people (a group I join tomorrow); other Republican problems like Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the various Trump investigations; the pipeline that got shut down by a ransomware attack; the alarming cracked girder in the bridge that takes I-40 over the Mississippi; and a few other things, before closing with the question: What if Hamilton had been done with polkas rather than hip-hop? I’ll guess that gets out between noon and one.
Assistant Minister Rev. Chris Jimmerson's sermon delivered on May 16, 2021. The stories we tell ourselves both as individuals and as a culture have powerful effects on how we live our lives, make meaning of our world and treat one another. Might some of them be retold in ways that would improve our lives and our world!
Watch the Service: Download 05-16-21 Full Text To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player.
a collections of readings, prayers and music from the Sunday service of 9th May 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Pam McCarthy, congregation member at Dublin Unitarian Church with contributions from Paul Murray and Josh Johnston
the address from the Sunday service at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland, on 16th May 2021. Pam McCarthy is a congregation member at Dublin Unitarian Church.
"Holding Ourselves Accountable: The 8th Principle and the Future of Our Faith" (May 16, 2021) Worship Service
Paula Cole Jones, a Lay Leader who has been a member of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C. for decades, was also one of the two authors of the 8th Principle and leaders of the effort to broaden and deepen when we fundamentally hold ourselves accountable for in our Principles. She and Vanessa "met" over Zoom to discuss and debate some aspects of what the 8th Principle and the work it calls us to as UU's might mean, where we imagine it might take us. And so we continue our reflection as we prepare as a community to vote on this Principle on June 6th at our Annual Meeting.
Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister
Paula Cole Jones, Guest Speaker
Mari Magaloni Ramos, Worship Associate
Reiko Oda Lane, organist
Maria Roodnitsky, soprano
Brielle Marina Neilson, alto
Ben Rudiak-Gould, tenor
Asher Davison, bass
Mark Sumner, director/pianist
Jen Hayman, Spirit of life song leader
Amelia Peele, Spirit of life song leader
Rochelle Rice, Spirit of life song leader
Gordon Kent, Spirit of life pianist
Gary Penn, Spirit of life video production
Stephen Benson, Spirit of life video production
Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour
Leeland Jones, Sexton
Athena Papadakos, flowers
Chris Curry, cover image
Jonathan Silk, AV, OOS Design
Order of Service:
https://content.uusf.org/Order_Of_Service/2021/20210516OSWeb.pdf
If you’ve been following my work on digging the pond, I will mention that I took a little break, first to find out what to do about the water that has seeped into the bottom, and then because I twisted my ankle on Friday while I was digging. So annoying! My ankle is not so bad–after a couple days of rest, I can hobble around now, and I will be digging again soon.
In the meantime I wanted to share this photo of the flowering peach and cherry trees in our food forest. They flowered a bit earlier this year than last. In the photo, the peach blossoms are pink, and it is hard to see the white cherry blossoms amid their green leaves in the photo. But they are so beautiful! There are more cherry blossoms this year than last, when we got just a few.
However, I’ve been concerned about pollination. Our neighbor keeps honey bee hives, and usually we have lots of her bees visiting over here, drinking nectar and drinking water from our bird baths. But this year, it has been very sparse for bees. I found out that our neighbor’s hives died in a cold snap earlier in the spring and she hasn’t replenished them yet with new bees.
One day, I did see bees of all sizes in the Lapins cherry tree (on the right in the photo), but I didn’t see them in the peach tree. (Not that I sit and stare all day.) But I’ve been doing so much TLC with the trees this year, with Kaolin clay, and holistic foliar sprays. It would be a shame if we didn’t get fruit because of pollination problems. It is too late now to try to hand-pollinate. The other potential glitch is that while the Lapins cherry is self-fertile, the Black Tartarian cherry needs the Lapins to cross-pollinate. They are both sort of blooming now, but the Lapins had peak blooms earlier, and the Black Tartarian has new blooms that just came out yesterday. So we wait and see.
It reminds me of the sad danger to pollinators everywhere because of climate change, environmental pollutants, pesticides, and development. All of our human food is dependent on these little creatures who pollinate the plants. If the bees die, so do the humans.
Today I pray for the pollinators, with gratitude and humility. Part of this prayer is offering to the bees so many other plants in our food forest: daffodils, dandelions, and violets are blooming now; soon we will also have chives, oregano, clover, thyme, and many more. All of us can do more to provide food for bees and other pollinators throughout the season. Only then can they also provide food for us. May this circle of life be blessed.
"Arms Wide Open: Parenting as a Spiritual Path" (May 9, 2021) Worship Service
I am a year and a few months from an empty nest, and halfway into a process of pulling together an anthology of writings on the place of children in our wisdom-making living. The book is a project that started as an excuse to go looking for all the gorgeous stories we don't think to tell in the midst of the work and the chores. I want us to hold up some of them together to reflect on our relationship with children as a part of our spiritual paths.
Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister
Meg McGuire, Ministerial Intern
Dennis Adams, Worship Associate
Lori Lai, 8th principle testimonial
Reiko Oda Lane, organist
Kate Offer, soprano
Brielle Marina Neilson, alto
Ben Rudiak-Gould, tenor
Asher Davison, bass
Mark Sumner, director/pianist
Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour
Eric Shackelford, camera
Shulee Ong, camera
Dan Barnard, Facilities Manager
Athena Papadakos, flowers
Marek Piwnicki, cover image
Jonathan Silk, AV, OOS
I'm sure many of you have seen online tests like this to find out where you are as far as religion, politics, or almost anything else. And I agree with the test results that said I am Unitarian Universalist.
But there is a problem. UU is no longer a church, at least not where I live. It is a political movement. They might talk about love, diversity, understanding, and so on. But what I am hearing is that I, as a straight white male, must bow down and worship gays, feminists, trans people, and anyone who wants to defund the police.
So where is there ever any message for me? Or TO me? to help me and inspire me in my life? I don't hear that nowdays.
I have said over and over again that I respect all people and want to get along with everyone, but apparently that is not enough. Well excuse the hell out of me you all, I have struggles too. I respect people who are different from me in any way, BUT, where can I go when I need some inspiration? I really don't know where to go to.
And yes, I have posted here before making similar comments. I am not trying to troll or be disrespectful. I just really don't know where to go.
Maybe UU has way too big of a class, education, and income divide.
I don't know if this post might get taken down, but whoever gets to read this, remember something. There more people like me out there than you might realize.
I pray that oneday people from all walks of life really will be able to get along and actually talk to each other.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on May 9, 2021. This Sunday we begin revisiting the Buddhist 8 fold path. I am not a Buddhist, but I am fascinated by what I've read and heard. This Sunday we will talk about the way things are, according to Buddhist thought, and why abandoning hope and fear might not be a bad thing.
Watch the Service: To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player. Download 05-09-21 Full Text
a collections of readings, prayers and music from the Sunday service of 9th May 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Rev. Bridget Spain, minister of Dublin Unitarian Church with contributions from Aidan O'Driscoll, Gavin Byrne and Josh Johnston
I've recently discovered R. Buckminster Fuller while learning about utopian communes. I've not read anything by him nor listened to his interviews or lectures. Currently I'm engaged in work along the lines of libertarian municipalism as a way of pursuing UU values by creating democratic and sustainable economic institutions in my area and would like to talk with my local UU congregation about libertarian municipalist projects such as permaculture, cooperatives, neighborhood councils and time banking. I'm heavily inspired by Murray Bookchin but do want to try to use UU reference points in the service. With that in mind, I'm curious to know if Fuller has specific writings whose insights I could use. What essential writings by Buckminster Fuller are to start with and are any in particular that either implicitly or explicitly describe his worldview from a UU perspective?
I had a helper yesterday for digging the pond. My friend Sylvia came by in the afternoon and the very first thing we did was drag the pond-liner in its box from near the house to back closer to the pond. (You can see it in the picture, behind the wheelbarrow.) That would have been enough help all by itself–so heavy! But then we took turns digging, hauling, and resting nearby. We got a lot done, and also enjoyed a rare COVID-time visit, walking around the yard and in the woods, looking at birds and plants.
Sylvia standing on the planting shelf, while digging in the pond!
So here is what the pond looks like now, in layers. The first layer down, about 8-10 inches, is for the planting layer. The next layer down, maybe 18 inches, is for a step layer–part of that I might take away as we go along, but some will remain to be a step into the pond going forward. In the middle, we dug to about 2 feet down, as measured with this string set-up I created. My aim is to go three feet down in the middle.
Pond layers dug out.
But then we came upon a problem that wasn’t mentioned in the Building Natural Ponds book by Robert Pavlis. Water started to seep up from the sandy soil. We are actually at the time of year when vernal pools abound here in Maine. We have a ditch way back behind the edge of our property and the properties next door that fills during spring rains. And we had an inch of rain last week, though generally it has been a dry winter. Does this mean we can’t go any deeper for a lined pond? Or do we need to wait until it is a bit dryer as the days go by? Will it mess up the pond to have water under the liner at the bottom? Or does it not matter at all? I am going to ask my questions in the Facebook group Building Natural Ponds, and see whether I might find some answers.
Water seeping from the soil in the bottom of the pond.
Maybe the pond just wants to be a pond so badly, that it doesn’t want to wait, lol. Meanwhile, I am going to rest today from digging, and more rain is coming tomorrow. So we will see. If you have any wisdom about this, I’d love to hear from you.
"Religious Imagination: What it Means to be a Teaching Congregation" (May 2, 2021) Worship Service
This Sunday marks the final class for our Sunday School program. Our classes have been virtual – like our worship services – for the whole year. We will take time to celebrate our achievements and honor our Lead Teachers. It’s also a good time to reflect upon the importance of religious education and spiritual growth for the entire congregation. We’ve certainly learned a lot this last year! Rev. Jacks will be joined by Ministerial Intern Meg McGuire sharing reflections on the role of a teaching congregation in shaping beloved community.
Rev. Alyson Jacks, Associate Minister
Meg McGuire, Ministerial Intern
Sam Hamner, 8th Principle Testimonial
Reiko Oda Lane, organist
Maria Roodnitsky, soprano
Brielle Marina Neilson, alto
Ben Rudiak-Gould, tenor
Asher Davison, bass
Mark Sumner, director/pianist
Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour
Eric Shackelford, camera
Leeland Jones, Sexton
Athena Papadakos, flowers
Jacek Dylag, cover image
Jonathan Silk, AV, OOS, drums
Before getting into the details of either Biden’s televised speech to Congress [video, transcript] or Senator Tim Scott’s Republican response [video, transcript], I want to make one view-from-orbit observation: When Democratic leaders are given a microphone, they talk about the American people, the challenges we face, and what can be done to make things come out right. When Republicans leaders are given a microphone, they list their grievances against Democrats.
Biden’s speech was about fixing things and setting the country up for future prosperity. It was hopeful and encouraging. He kept saying things like “We can do this.”
Scott started out by saying that President Biden “seems like a good man … but”. God forbid Republicans should give a Democratic president the benefit of the doubt about being a good man. “I won’t waste your time tonight with finger-pointing or partisan bickering,” Scott said, and then did essentially nothing else.
More high-level impressions of Biden’s speech are in the featured post.
I won’t do a full bulleted list of what’s in Biden’s American Families Plan and American Jobs Plan, because CBS News already has that. Basically, the Families Plan is about child care, education, paid time off, and money for parents. The Jobs Plan is about traditional infrastructure like roads, bridges, and public transportation, plus broadband, adjusting to climate change, transitioning to electric vehicles, and capital spending on schools. It also includes “workforce development” (which I think we used to call “job training”), money for taking care of the elderly in their homes rather than institutionalizing them, R&D, and a few other things.
What I found most striking in Scott’s speech was the amount of conservative Christian identity politics in it. He talked about prayer, original sin, grace, and closed with a Christian blessing.
The most quoted line of Scott’s response is “America is not a racist country.” I have to agree with Matt Yglesias:
“Is America a Racist Country?” is the perfect meaningless culture war debate because it has basically no content at all. What is it asking? Compared to what?
Scott clearly wasn’t claiming America has no racism, because he also said “I have experienced the pain of discrimination.” He even allowed that American racism is not entirely in the past: “I know our healing is not finished.” So the argument he started is basically semantic: How much racism does it take to count as a “racist country”? Today’s US is not as racist as the Confederacy or Nazi Germany or the old apartheid regime in South Africa. Is that good enough? How many angels of color have to be included before we consider a pinhead dance to be integrated?
Remember: Meaningless debates serve the interests of people who have nothing to say. If you have a real vision of the future you want, avoid getting baited into arguing about nothing.
BTW: By talking about what America is or isn’t, Scott is invoking a popular trope of conservative rhetoric; he’s talking about essence rather than behavior or results. Similarly: an argument about whether certain drawings in a few Dr. Seuss books reinforce racial stereotypes — they do — becomes “Was Dr. Seuss a racist?”
The next step in that dance is to argue that we can’t know someone else’s essence, so it’s unfair to claim that so-and-so is a racist (which probably nobody did).
I saw this happen in my social media feed this week. Someone objected to Biden claiming that all police are racists. When I asked when he did that — he didn’t — she responded with a quote where Biden mentioned “systemic racism in law enforcement”, which is not at all the same thing. Systemic racism is about the results of our law enforcement system. “All police are racists” is a statement about the essence of a large number of individuals.
Another point of debate between the parties is the effect of Republican voter-suppression laws. It’s possible to cherry-pick comparisons between states, as Scott did when he claimed: “It will be easier to vote early in Georgia than in Democrat-run New York.”
But it’s important to keep your eyes on the bottom line: Where do people end up waiting in line for hours to vote? And the answer is: In Black neighborhoods, especially in states with Republican legislatures. Georgia was already particularly bad before the recent law, and now it will be worse.
Unlike voter fraud and ballot fraud, people waiting hours to vote actually happens already. It’s not a conspiracy theory or a what-if fantasy. It should deeply embarrass all Americans, and legislatures should be full of proposals to process more voters faster, especially in urban Black neighborhoods.
I live in a majority-white Boston suburb, and it takes me about five minutes to vote. Why can’t that happen in inner-city Atlanta?
Every time I checked Fox News on Thursday, they were talking how badly liberals were treating Tim Scott. WaPo columnist Kathleen Parker wrote:
The only Black Republican in the Senate, Scott was quickly trending as “Uncle Tim” on Twitter, as a tool of white supremacists and as a blind servant of the far right. Liberals just cannot handle a Black conservative.
This, my friends, is (also) what racism looks like in America today.
OK, white people should not lob racialized insults at non-white politicians of any philosophy. (Though Scott did indeed act as the mouthpiece of a party that panders to white supremacists; that’s not an insult, it’s just factual.) But Twitter was being mean? How is that news? Have you seen what conservatives tweet about AOC?
If Democratic politicians or opinion leaders are talking about “Uncle Tim”, that’s worth calling out. But I haven’t seen that. Vice President Harris responded to Scott by agreeing that American is not a racist country, but adding
We also do have to speak the truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today. … One of the greatest threats to our national security is domestic terrorism manifested by white supremacists. And so these are issues that we must confront, and it does not help to heal our country, to unify us as a people, to ignore the realities of that.”
You can also find other sharp-but-not-racist disagreements with Scott from WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson, radio host Clay Cane, and many other liberals. Perhaps an actual discussion could be had. But Fox News does not want that.
Instead, Fox and its allies stoke conservative outrage by pointing out that there are obnoxious people on the internet, some of whom profess to be liberals. Who knew?
FBI agents with a search warrant executed a crack-of-dawn raid on Rudy Giuliani’s apartment and office Wednesday. Giuliani ally Victoria Toensing was also raided. The agents took phones and other electronic devices.
The Justice Department isn’t commenting, but unofficially told AP the investigation “at least partly involves Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine”. Giuliani’s attorney said the warrant mentioned “possible violation of foreign lobbying laws and that it sought communications between Giuliani and people including a former columnist for The Hill, John Solomon”. Reuters claims to have seen the warrant and lists a dozen people, all of whom have some Ukraine connection.
The intelligence agencies warned the White House late last year [i.e. 2019] that Russian intelligence officers were using President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani as a conduit for disinformation aimed at undermining Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential run, according to four current and former American officials.
One question seems to be: To what extent was Giuliani knowingly working for Russia or its Ukrainian allies like Firtash?
A search warrant must be based upon probable cause and the applicant must present a sworn affidavit to a neutral and detached magistrate or judge. Within this affidavit, there must be facts sufficient to persuade that judge that a crime was committed and that searching in the locations specified within the search warrant will reveal evidence of the crime, or crimes. The locations to be searched must be described with particularity, as well as the items that will be seized from those locations.
In the case of someone like Giuliani, there would have been the requirement that those search warrants be approved by someone at the highest levels of the Department of Justice, as well as the requirement of exhaustion of other less-intrusive investigative means. Giuliani is an attorney, and an attorney’s communications with clients are usually deemed to be confidential and protected by the attorney-client privilege.
We shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Giuliani is guilty of something, that the government already had enough evidence to indict Giuliani, or that they necessarily found the evidence they were looking for. But they clearly have more than just a desire to harass a Trump ally.
Giuliani’s lawyer called the raid “another disturbing example of complete disregard for the attorney-client privilege”, but it’s not clear that’s true. Typical practice for searching a lawyer’s office, which we saw when former Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s office was searched, is for a “clean team” to conduct the actual search, forwarding to the investigating agents only the items not privileged.
Giuliani’s son Andrew briefly stepped outside of his father’s Manhattan apartment on Wednesday afternoon to denounce the Department of Justice, saying that if this can happen to “the former president’s lawyer, this could happen to any American.”
Once you put the situation in context, the younger Giuliani’s statement is exactly right: If federal investigators can convince a judge that a crime has probably been committed and that evidence of that crime is probably in your home or office, they can get a warrant to search for that evidence, even if you’re buddies with a former president. It could happen to any American, but you’re most at risk if you’ve committed crimes.
Giuliani’s people are complaining about “politicization” of the Justice Department, but all the indications are that the political influence has been working in the other direction: Prosecutors have been investigating Giuliani since 2019, but his relationship with Trump protected him. Now that Trump is out of office, the investigation can continue the way it would against any suspected criminal.
and the virus
Good news and bad news this week. The good news is that the US definitely seems to have turned the corner on new cases. The daily average is down to about 50K. Deaths also continue their slow decline. We’re down to less than 700 per day.
more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.
Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.
The second piece of bad news is the international picture. New cases in India continue to skyrocket, and the numbers in several South American countries are near record highs. Adding it all up, the virus worldwide is spreading faster now than it ever has.
The more Covid-19 there is in the world, the more mutations we’ll see. Eventually, some variant could beat our vaccines.
The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson listens to people not planning to be vaccinated, and isn’t optimistic about convincing them. But this is his best suggestion:
Instead of shaming and hectoring, our focus should be on broadening their circle of care: Your cells might be good enough to protect you; but the shots are better to protect grandpa.
and you also might be interested in …
Last week I wrote about Republicans in Florida and several other states trying to criminalize protest, pointing out once again that the GOP’s commitment to “liberty” and “the Constitution” is bogus.
The Florida bill would prohibit social media companies from knowingly “deplatforming” political candidates, meaning a service could not “permanently delete or ban” a candidate. Suspensions of up to 14 days would still be allowed, and a service could remove individual posts that violate its terms of service.
The state’s elections commission would be empowered to fine a social media company $250,000 a day for statewide candidates and $25,000 a day for other candidates if a company’s actions are found to violate the law
I can imagine a proposal to split up social media companies, or perhaps to turn their networks into some kind of public/private entity like the post office. But as long as they are private corporations whose users, advertisers, and employees come to them by choice, they’ve got a right to manage their own affairs and set their own policies.
It’s hard to come up with any rationale that justifies this law and also upholds previous conservative causes, like allowing a baker to refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding reception, or letting Hobby Lobby object to providing birth control for its employees. If Twitter decides it no longer wants to be associated with Trump’s domestic terrorism, how is that illegitimate?
One possible but scary rationale is contained in a Zero Hedge article a friend sent me. The author was discussing a scenario where companies require their employees and/or customers to be vaccinated (which would be terrible for some reason that escapes me).
These companies do not represent private business or free markets anymore. Instead, they are appendages of establishment power that receive billions in taxpayer dollars to finance their operations. They should no longer be treated as if they have the same rights as normal businesses.
That is one way the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline might work. Businesses have rights until they do something the fascists don’t like, at which point they become “appendages of establishment power” and their rights go away.
Weird development in the Matt Gaetz scandal. The Daily Beast claims to have copies of communications between Gaetz associate Joel Greenberg and (wait for it) Roger Stone, who Greenberg was willing to pay $250,000 if he could broker a pardon from Trump. (No pardon was given and no money paid.)
In the private text messages to Stone, Greenberg described his activities with Gaetz, repeatedly referring to the Republican congressman by his initials, “MG,” or as “Matt.”
“My lawyers that I fired, know the whole story about MG’s involvement,” Greenberg wrote to Stone on Dec. 21. “They know he paid me to pay the girls and that he and I both had sex with the girl who was underage.”
If you’re wondering “Why on Earth would you ever admit that to somebody, especially in writing?”, you’re not alone.
As Biden keeps proposing things the American people like, Trumpist attacks on him are getting increasingly desperate. Here, a NewsMax talking head goes off on a clip of Biden bending down to pick a dandelion and give it to Jill. This act is labelled “bizarre” and somehow deserving of ridicule.
You know who’s a communist now? Mitt Romney. At least that’s what the hecklers at the Utah Republican Convention were calling out as he tried to speak. But a motion to censure Mitt for daring to vote to convict Donald Trump narrowly failed 711-798.
As someone who went to a few Burning Man festivals years ago, I’m not sure what I think about the proposal for a permanent art installation that generates solar electricity. Don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it is a key element of the Burning Man experience. The fact that this is all going up in smoke at the end of the week teaches a lesson about being truly present.
On the other hand: renewable energy in an attractive package.
Biden’s speech and the response (or lack of response) from Republicans demonstrates that no one believes in the old nostrums any more.
The day Clinton surrendered. In the 1996 State of the Union, President Bill Clinton said, “The era of big government is over.” This has been widely marked as the moment when the Democratic Party surrendered to the Reagan revolution.
For the 12 years of the Reagan and Bush administrations, many Democrats in Congress had tried to hold the line. Then, after Clinton was elected in 1992, he set out to extend the legacy of FDR and LBJ by fulfilling the longstanding Democratic ambition to create some version of universal health care. After seeming popular at first, “HillaryCare” didn’t pass. Democrats were subsequently routed in the 1994 midterm elections, making Newt Gingrich the first Republican Speaker of the House since the legendary Sam Rayburn replaced the much-less-legendary Joseph W. Martin Jr. in 1955.
The lesson Clinton learned from that defeat was that Democrats needed to temper their ambitions. Subsequently, he worked with Gingrich to achieve goals that appealed to Republicans, like balancing the budget, ending “welfare as we know it”, passing NAFTA, and de-regulating the banking system (in ways that would blow up by 2008). There would be no more big-ticket proposals until ObamaCare in 2009. Democratic governance became little more than a kinder, more efficient version of Republican governance.
For most of the 20th century, Democrats had stood for an active government trying to solve people’s problems. FDR’s New Deal had given the country Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the minimum wage. LBJ’s Great Society had added Medicare, the War on Poverty, and the Voting Rights Act. But all that was over now. Clinton was not just refusing to advance, he was actively capitulating: “Big government” was itself a Reaganite phrase that would have been anathema to Democrats just a few years before. (To make a present-day comparison: Imagine what it would mean if major Republicans started denouncing “white privilege”.)
Meanwhile, Republicans continued to worship at the shrine of the Great Communicator. For three decades, the philosophy of the Republican Party didn’t waver: low taxes, less regulation, free trade, more spending for defense but less for social programs, and “traditional family values” — which mainly meant opposing abortion and homosexuality.
This constancy gave Republican candidates a significant branding advantage in campaigns. If you saw an R next to a politician’s name, you immediately knew what he stood for — even if you had never heard of him before. Democrats, conversely, had to put considerable effort and money into introducing themselves to voters, and explaining why they weren’t the “tax-and-spend liberals” Reagan had so successfully vilified.
That was the Reagan Era. Even if you hadn’t been born yet when he left office in 1989, you have been living in his era. Until Wednesday, when President Biden announced the end of it.
Two cycles. The Reagan Era did not end all at once. It took two complete election cycles to bring it down.
When Republicans started campaigning for the presidency in 2015, Reaganite orthodoxy still seemed solidly in control. Marco Rubio, for example, might talk about “new ideas”, but what he really meant was “new faces”. After listening to his stump speech, I wrote:
What in that plan does he think Jeb Bush will disagree with? Less regulation, lower taxes on corporations and the rich, less government spending, traditional family values, strong defense, aggressive American leadership in the world. How is that different from what every Republican has been saying since Ronald Reagan?
Rubio’s “new leadership” plea just meant that the old Reagan program needed a fresh young Hispanic spokesman, and that nobody really wanted another Bush vs. Clinton election.
But Trump upended all that. Occasionally he would wave in the direction of tax cuts and strong defense, but his real applause lines appealed to a rising white nationalist anger that Bush or Rubio could not speak for. (“Build a wall.” “Lock her up.”) Jeb Bush was “low energy” compared to the violence-promoting Trump. “Little Marco” was too mousy and too brown to stand up for the oppressed white working class.
An undercurrent of the Trump campaign was that Republicans had sold out white workers just as much as Democrats had. (In the other primary, Bernie Sanders was saying that Democrats had sold out workers just as much as Republicans had.) It was never clear just what time period the “again” in “Make America Great Again” pointed back to, but it wasn’t the Reagan administration. Maybe it was the 1950s, or the 1920s, or the Confederacy.
Trump’s speeches had a scatter-shot approach that sometimes could invoke big government positively. He told 60 Minutes that he would replace ObamaCare with a “terrific” healthcare plan that would cover all Americans “much better”. “I’m going to take care of everybody” he claimed, and “the government’s going to pay for it.”
Free trade was out and tariffs were in. And while he professed to be against regulation in general, he often threatened to interfere with American business in ways far beyond what Obama or Clinton had done. If Ford threatened to move a plant to Mexico, Trump said he would tell Ford’s CEO
Let me give you the bad news: every car, every truck and every part manufactured in this plant that comes across the border, we’re going to charge you a 35 percent tax — OK? — and that tax is going to be paid simultaneously with the transaction.
By 2020, the GOP was not even pretending to be more than a Trump personality cult. Their convention didn’t bother to write a new platform, because why weigh down the Great Leader with a specific policy agenda? Republicans would support Trump in 2020 — that’s all voters needed to know.
Supply-side economics. The beating heart of Reaganism was supply-side economics, as crystalized in the not-at-all-funny Laffer Curve, which started out as a drawing on a napkin and never got much more precise than that. The idea was that as taxes rose, economic activity shrank, with the result that sometimes a higher tax rate produced less revenue than a lower one. (At the extreme, it makes sense: If the tax rate were 100%, nobody would bother to make money.)
There was never a solid estimate of where the peak of the Laffer Curve was supposed to be, but Republicans uniformly believed that it was always at a lower rate than the current one. So tax cuts became the free lunch that economics wasn’t supposed to have: Cut taxes and the economy will grow so fast that the government will get more revenue. Everybody wins!
It didn’t work for Reagan or either of the times when Bush Jr. tried it. Lower taxes might goose the economy a little, but not enough to raise revenue beyond the previous projections. Invariably, tax cuts led to deficits.
So by the time Trump proposed a tax cut in 2017, supply-side economics had hit the same point Soviet Communism did during the Brezhnev Era: Everyone trotted out the old slogans, but no one really believed them. Trump cut rich people’s taxes because he was rich and wanted to pay less tax. McConnell and the other Republicans in Congress went along because their donors were rich and wanted to pay less tax. Mnunchin and various other hired experts might claim that it would be different this time, but soon Trump’s deficits began to approach $1 trillion a year, pre-Covid, at a time in the economic cycle when classic Keynesianism would call for a surplus. Obama had run trillion-dollar deficits to pull the economy out of the Great Recession. Trump was running them because … well, why not?
And the personality cultists in the GOP didn’t care.
When Covid hit, Trump realized that direct payments from the government were popular, and that no one cared about the deficit. So the deficit for fiscal 2020 (October, 2019 to October, 2020) clocked in at $3.1 trillion. During the fall campaign, Trump proposed another round of direct payments, plus infrastructure spending. The second round of payments passed after the election, at a lower level than either Trump or the Democrats wanted, but the infrastructure proposal never turned into a specific piece of legislation.
Biden. After Trump’s coup attempt failed and Biden took over, Republicans in Congress attempted to run the same play that had stymied Obama: Underfund and slow-roll everything, so that the economy will limp along and the new administration will be blamed.
On Covid relief, Biden decided not to play that game. He politely listened to a lowball Republican proposal that they probably would have backed away from anyway, and then pushed ahead with a reconciliation strategy (the same one Trump had used to pass his tax cut). The $2 trillion package passed quickly with only Democratic votes. It has been quite popular, and Republicans have at times tried to take credit for it, despite unanimously voting against it.
In his speech to a joint session of Congress Wednesday night, the President promoted two additional proposals — the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, that together would spend over $4 trillion during the next ten years. The plans are funded by tax increases on corporations (rolling back part — but not all — of Trump cut in the corporate tax rate) and the rich (the top tax rate returns to its pre-Trump level, and capital gains are taxed as ordinary income for those making more than $1 million a year). Biden pledges not to raise taxes on those making less than $400,000 a year. The middle class, he said, “is already paying enough”.
This is all heresy against Reaganomics, which says that if taxes on the wealthy are kept low, they’ll invest their money more productively than government could, resulting in higher economic growth, more jobs, and increased wages. That was a formidable argument in the 1980s, and still had teeth even when it was used against Obama.
But no one believes it any more. Biden saw no need to give an elaborate justification for taxing the rich to build American infrastructure. Instead, he called supply-side economics by its liberal name, and brushed it off:
Trickle-down economics has never worked.
That simple statement is the bookend to Clinton’s “The era of big government is over.”
The true history of American infrastructure. It has now been more than two centuries since New York State began constructing the Erie Canal, which made Buffalo a boom town and promoted economic growth across the Great Lakes. Once cargoes from Lake Superior started floating down the Hudson, New York City soon replaced Philadelphia as the nation’s top port.
What the last two centuries have taught us is that the economy needs a mixture of public and private investment. The logic of that can get a little wonky, but the gist is that certain big investments, like the Erie Canal, the transcontinental railroad, the interstate highway system, or rural electrification, create what economists call “positive externalities”. In other words, they promote a general growth that no private-sector entity is broad enough to capture. (Even New York State failed to capture the growth its canal promoted in Chicago and Detroit.) So the private sector either will not build them at all, or will build them much too small and too late.
One result of Reaganism has been an under-investment in the public sector. That’s what Biden is trying to reverse. By taxing the rich, he is taking money from a bloated private sector to catch up on the public-sector investments that have gone begging for decades. Biden is betting that this shift will increase growth and create jobs — the exact reverse of what Reaganomics predicts.
In the official Republican response to Biden’s speech, Senator Tim Scott invoked trickle-down when he described Biden’s tax plan as “job-killing”, and predicted “it would lower Americans’ wages and shrink our economy”. If the Trump tax cuts — or the Bush tax cuts before them — had actually created jobs and promoted growth, as they were supposed to do, then it would make sense to predict that reversing them would kill jobs and stifle growth. But none of the promised benefits of Trump’s plan actually happened, so the jobs that it didn’t create won’t be lost when Biden goes back to pre-Trump tax rates.
Where is the Tea Party? Writing in Politico, conservative Rich Lowry waxes nostalgic about 2009, when “President Barack Obama created a spontaneous, hugely influential conservative grassroots movement on the basis of an $800 billion stimulus bill and a health care plan estimated to cost less than a trillion.”
Once upon a time, Joe Biden’s spending proposals would have launched mass demonstrations in opposition.
Little else would have been talked about in conservative media, and ambitious Republican politicians would have competed with one another to demonstrate the most intense, comprehensive resistance, up to and perhaps including chaining themselves to the U.S. Treasury building in protest.
But now, he laments, Republicans just want to talk about the border and cancel culture. No one is defending the Reagan orthodoxy, because no one believes in it any more.
WWUUD stream 
