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Murfin Verse for the Tree of Life Mass Murder—Sanctuary in a Very Bad Week

28 October 2021 at 09:09

A memorial to the victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue mass murder three years ago this week in Pittsburgh.

This week marked the third anniversary of the mass murder at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018.  I was asked to do the Chalice Lighting at the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenrythe next day.    The topic for the morning was sanctuary.  I threw away what I had carefully prepared.  I was planning on reading this new poem instead which was totally inadequate to the situation but due to a scheduling mix up, I didn’t read it that day.  Instead, I read it for the first time a year later at the Tree of Life Coffee Houseat the church.  The poem also referenced other ugly, hateful episodes the same week.


Sanctuary in a Very Bad Week

Headlines: 

Trump Attempts to Erase Transgender Identity

Two Blacks Killed at Walmart by Angry Racist

14 Bombs Sent to Targets Denounced by Trump

11 Dead at Tree of Life Synagogue Mass Murder

 

Sacred shelter—A haven offered or sought, 

   a holy obligation and a desperate resort.

The Church once offered it to those fleeing

   the wrath of a king or war lord.

Today we are called to offer it to

   immigrants and refugees,

      the homeless and unwanted,

            the despised of color, gender, faith,

               abused women and families,

                  all the wretched.

 

Know this—Sanctuary can fail.

   Ask Thomas Becket, Ann Frank,

      the four little Girls of Birmingham,

            the frozen bum,

               the murdered wife,

                  the deported asylum seeker,

         the immigrant children in cages,

            the dead Jews of Tree of Life.

 

But failure does not cancel hope or duty.

   time to step up,

      to take our chances,

            to become a People of Sanctuary.

 

—Patrick Murfin

  


How It Went: Four Reviews from the October Viewing and Reading Challenge

28 October 2021 at 09:00
Earlier this month I issued An October Viewing and Reading Challenge. I wanted to watch one new movie, one new TV series, one old movie that I’ve forgotten, and read one new book. Challenge accepted, challenge completed. Here’s how it went.

Anne Sullivan & the Making of a Miracle Worker

28 October 2021 at 08:00
      The other day my spouse Jan and I watched the PBS “American Masters” segment, “Becoming Helen Keller.” It was a real tread. And even more so for me as I saw Jan’s name scroll by in the credits among a bunch of people marked out for “thanks.” A really good summary of […]

Certainty and Not Knowing

27 October 2021 at 15:29
      It was today, the 27th of October in 312 that the general and would be emperor Constantine, later called the Great, claimed to have a vision of a cross in the sky and heard the words “With this sign, conquer.” I’ve commented on this moment in the past. In 2011 I titled […]

Share the blessings you have received.

27 October 2021 at 13:15


A miracle is a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive. T-1.1.27:1-2


God doesn’t really forgive us because God doesn’t even know what we have created for ourselves in this world of the ego. God loves us unconditionally, always has, does now, and always will. Life is, after all, the gift we all have been given to learn what we need to learn to be consciously aware of our Source. When we decide to no longer make other people and circumstances responsible for our unhappiness, we are blessed to become aware of Love which is our natural inheritance. With this awareness, we are able to bless others.


In Alcoholic Anonymous, it is suggested, in step twelve, that we share this spiritual awakening with others and practice this blessing in all our affairs.


In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to accept one another and encourage spiritual growth in our congregations and around the world.


Today, we recognize and acknowledge the universal blessing of God’s love for us and we share this blessing with everyone whom we interact with as we go about our daily affairs.


Old Obscure Poet Contemplates Two Great Young Dead Ones

27 October 2021 at 10:40

Dylan Thomas in a characteristic pose before a bookstore reading.

A few years ago, I noticed that Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath shared a birthday, October 27—1914 in Wales for him, 1932 in Boston for her.  They had little in common except that they wrote poetry—although poetry very different in form, theme, style, and substance—and died young each in a kind of pitiful squalor.  Each had crossed the ocean and died in the other’s country, a nice cosmic balance.

That year—2012—their common birthday also coincided with a new moon and where I was, at least, a howling storm of darkness. 

 

Sylvia Plath in a similar venue battling her invisible demons. 

You know me.  I am a sucker for cosmic coincidence.  So, I scribbled a poem for the occasion.

Writing poetry about poets, both infinitely more gifted than I, is an act of terminal hubris for which I shall be justly punished.  But here it is anyway.

 


 

How Black the Night

October 26, 2011—New Moon, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath

 

Even the New Moon hides behind the howling clouds.

 

Happy Birthday Dylan—

Why did you not

            rage, rage against the dying of the light

            in that pool of your own black vomit

            at the Chelsea?

 

Happy Birthday Sylvia—

The same year, you dewy goddess,

            you emptied the medicine vials

            and crawled under your mother’s porch.

 

Not ships passing in the night,

                    but traversing the same black ocean

                    away from home

                    to something else.

 

Did you find what you were looking for

                    in worship and whiskey,

                    in broken love and madness?

 

As Dylan moldered under Laugharne,

                    Lady Lazarus, you wrote.

                   Dying

   Is an art, like everything else.

   I do it exceptionally well.

 

But laying your head in an oven

             is no art

             and posthumous poems

             no resurrection.

 

How black the night, dead poets,

                    how black the night?

 

—Patrick Murfin

 


There is nothing to fear God loves you.

26 October 2021 at 15:03



Miracles represent freedom from fear. “Atoning” means “undoing.” The undoing of fear is an essential part of the Atonement value of miracles. T-1.1.26:1-3


There is nothing to fear because God loves you unconditionally. It is the undoing of our fear of God’s wrath for our separation from God which is the meaning of atonement. All it takes is a choice for the world of the spirit instead of the world of the ego. Jesus taught that the way to the kingdom is to “love as I have loved.” As kids say, “Easy peasy.”


In Alcoholic Anonymous it is suggested, in step eleven, that we improve our conscious contact with God through prayer and meditation. This is a choice we have and actions we take. Do it or not, God is always there for us. All we have to do is listen.


In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning and this search takes us ultimately to the unconditional love of God which is found within us in our hearts as our natural inheritance once we get past the fear. When we do this, it seems like a miracle.


Today, we bypass the fear deep in our hearts to find the unconditional love of God which the Universalists have taught is there if we pay attention to it. Setting aside the fear we find the love of God which is our natural inheritance.


The Erie Canal Opened an Inland Empire

26 October 2021 at 11:52

 

Mule tow grain barges in the 1880s.

 

I’ve got an old mule and her name is Sal

Fifteen years on the Erie Canal

She’s a good old worker and a good old pal

Fifteen years on the Erie Canal

We’ve hauled some barges in our day

Filled with lumber, coal, and hay

And every inch of the way we know

From Albany to Buffalo

 

Chorus:

Low bridge, everybody down

Low bridge for we’re coming to a town

And you’ll always know your neighbor

And you’ll always know your pal

If you’ve ever navigated on the Erie Canal. 

—Thomas S. Allen, 1905.  Original lyrics written to commemorate the 15 years of construction on the Erie Canal.


The original sheet music for Thomas Allen's song.  It is often mistaken for a 19th Century folk song.

The Erie Canal opened October 26, 1825.  Few innovations in American history had such immediate and far reaching consequences as the public works projectonce derided as Clinton’s Folly.

A canal linking Lake Eriewith the Hudson River at the New York capital of Albany was first proposed by Thomas Eddy, a businessman with interests in a failing canal digging companyand sponsored in the New York State Assembly by Jonas Platt, leader of the Federalists in the Senate.  To gain bi-partisan support for the ambitious project, Platt proposed a commission carefully balanced between leading figures in both his party and the Democratic-Republicans. 

On March 13, 1810 the Erie Canal Commission was created with the assignment to do preliminary feasibility studies, explore possible routes, and come up with plans to finance what would be by far the biggest engineering project yet undertaken in North America.  Gouverneur Morris, a distinguished former Federalist Senator and one of the principal authors of the Constitution, was named as President.   The other commissioners were Federalists Eddy, Stephen Van Rensselaer, and William North plus Democratic Republicans DeWitt Clinton, Simeon DeWitt, and Peter Buell Porter.

DeWitt Clinton. the man most responsible for guiding the Erie Canal to reality, in a portrait by George Catlin.

The driving force on the Commission quickly became Clinton with strong support, despite their different political connections of Van Rensselaer, the heir of the greatestof the Patroon dynasties of semi-feudal landownersin Up State.  The Commissioners quickly went to work and several of them explored the route as far as possible by water and on an arduous cross-country trek via unimproved roads and trails.  Clinton kept a detailed diaryof his adventures on this trip. 

The following March the Commission issued a report that dismissed competing plans for a possible canal to Lake Ontario and proposed that a totally manmade channel be dug straight west from Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo.  Morris dissented proposing instead a physically impossible schemeto deepen existing rivers and have Lake Erie “empty into them to fill them.”  Little wonder that his leadership on the Commission was by-passed.  Perhaps most importantly, the commission acknowledged that the project was too big to be financed by private capitaland recommended public financing by the State.

In April 1811 the Legislature responded by authorizing the Commission to take all necessary steps to finance the entire project and granted $15,000 to begin its work.  It also added Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston to the body.  Fulton had launched a commercially viable steamboat service between New York City and Albany with Livingston, a member of a powerful political family, as his partner in 1807 which had spurred interest in a western canal.  Both men were Democratic-Republicans, giving Clinton extra clout in addition to lending their enormous prestige to the project.  Fulton would actively work with Clinton on engineering aspectsof the project until his death in 1815.

The War of 1812 ground progress to a halt.  Van Rensselaer was appointed General incommand of the New York Militia.  The frontier with Canada around Buffalobecame a major theater of operations in the war and was a jumping-off point for attempted invasions by both sides.  The lack of reliable transportation to bring artillery, arms, powder, and supplies to the front crippled American efforts and provided a national defense justification for a canal. 

Meanwhile Clinton, then serving as Mayor of New York City and Lt. Governor, was reluctantly draftedby a dissident Democratic-Republican rump and backed by the Federalists to run for President against James Madison in 1812.  It was a close-fought election and Clinton took 47% of the popular vote while losing by a wide margin in the Electoral College.  The run strained his relations with loyal Democratic-Republicans, notably the powerful Livngstons.

At the conclusion of the war, Clinton revived interest in the project by holding a large public meeting in the New York City.  He promised residents that the project would bring about a boom:

The city will, in the course of time, become the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations.  And before the revolution of a century, the whole island of Manhattan, covered with inhabitants and replenished with a dense population, will constitute one vast city.

In 1816 the Legislature reformed the Commission with explicit authorization to supervise acquisition ofland and the actual constructionof the project. Clinton was named the new President and Van Rensselaer, who now abandoned the dying Federalists to become a Clintonian Republican, were held over.  Joseph Ellicott, an agent for the powerful Holland Land Company which donated 10,000 acres of land to the project; Myron Holley, a state Assemblyman and political ally; and Samuel Young, who had written the influential book A Treatise on Internal Navigation: A Comprehensive Study of Canals in Great Britain and Holland. 

In 1816 outgoing President James Madison vetoed a bill that would have contributed Federal funds to the construction.  Madison supported using Federal funds for internal improvements but doubted that barring an authorizing amendment to the Constitution that the government had the authority.  But there must also have been satisfaction to slapping back at Clinton.

1817 proved to be a big, break-out year for the canal. Clinton became the beneficiary when Daniel D. Tompkins was elected as James Monroe’s Vice President.  Despite the bitter opposition of the growing Tammany organization in New York City, Clinton was easily elected to serve out Tompkins’s term as Governor.  With his support in April Legislature created a Canal Fund which was authorized to spend $7 million for construction of a canal 363 miles long, 40 feet wide, and four feet deep. Commissioners of the Canal Fund was made up of the state Constitutional officers.

The route of the Canal across Upstate New York from the Hudson River to Lake Erie.

Construction began on July 4 at Rome.  The first 15 miles to Utica took two years to build due to the difficulty in felling trees through the virgin forest, excavating and removing earth by hand.  An innovativestump puller was used, but at best three man crews with mules could only build a mile of canal and adjacent tow path in a year of arduous labor. 

Also holding up construction was the fact that in the entire United States there was not one trained civil engineer.  The surveyorswho had laid out the route, James Geddes and Benjamin Wright were in over-all charge of construction and learned by doing.  They were aided by Canvass White, a 27-year-old amateur engineer who traveled to England at his own expense to study canal construction there and Nathan Roberts, a mathematics teacher.  Despite the inexperience they laid out an impressive record of achievement, carrying the “Canal up the Niagara escarpment at Lockport, maneuvered it onto a towering embankment to cross over Irondequoit Creek, spanned the Genesee River on an awesome aqueduct, and carved a route for it out of the solid rock between Little Falls and Schenectady...” according to Canal historian Peter L. Bernstein.

The eventual arrival of thousands of Scotch-Irish laborersgreatly speeded construction.  These navies, although Ulster Presbyterians, were the first of a wave of hundreds of thousand Irish laborers who dug the canals and built the turnpikes and railroads of their new country.  Conditions were brutal.  Over a thousand men died of swamp fever at Montezuma Marsh, the outlet of Cayuga Lake west of Syracuse.  Work there ground to a halt until winter when the marsh froze over.  But work in the frigid weather by men without adequate coats was almost as lethal.  Soon Catholic Irishmen were replacing the Ulstermen.  In 1825 Father John Raho wrote to his bishop that “so many die that there is hardly any time to give Extreme Unction to everybody. We run night and day to assist the sick.”

Despite the hardships, year after year the work pressed on.  The middle section from Utica to Salina(now Syracuse) was completed in 1820 and traffic on that section started up immediately. The eastern section, 250 miles from Brockport to Albany, opened in 1823 to great fanfare as did another 64 mile section from Watervliet on the Hudsonto Lake Champlain. 

Construction a Lockport where the canal needed to raise boats up the Niagara Escarpment was the most significant engineering feat.  Powder was used to blast through the rock and cranes used to hoist blocks but most of the labor was still dangerous pick and shovel work.  The mostly Irish canal diggers suffered and died on the job.

Next, climbing the Niagara Escarpment up though an 80 foot wall of hard limestone was the great challenge.  Generally following the course of a “wildstream pouring over the cliff, a series of five locks were carved out so that bargescould be lifted to the level of Lake Erie.  This is the only section where wide-spread use of blasting powder occurred, predictably with fatal consequences for many workers. 

The step locks at Lockport pictured in the early 20th Century post card have been preserved and still are operated for tourist exhibitions.  

On the west end the village of Buffalo they dredged a channel of Buffalo Creek to make it navigable and built a port facility on Lake Erie.  That secured the village as the terminus of the canal over neighboring, and much less enterprising, Black Rock on the Niagara River.  In doing so Buffalo secured a futureas an industrial powerhouse and the economic center of the region.

Despite the apparent success of his great project, Clinton was in political trouble.  Tammany politicians in New York City allied themselves with the Albany Regency, a masterfully assembled Up State political machine created by Martin Van Buren.  Together they became known as the Bucktails faction of the Democratic Republican Party and declared war on Clinton and his supporters.  Gaining control of a state Constitutional Convention in 1821, the Bucktails shortened the term of governor to two years and moved the term from a July 1 start to a January 1, thus shaving a year off Clinton’s term.  They also passed a 2 million dollarappropriation for the canal attached to a measure that stacked the Canal Board with Clinton’s political opponents.  The governor was forced tosign the measure or jeopardize funding of his pet project. In 1822 Clinton, despite huge personal popularity, was denied re-nomination by the Democratic-Republicans and he was out of office at the end of the year.  In 1824 the Legislature ousted him as President and a member of the Canal Commission.

The last act proved a step too far for his opponents.  With the Canal nearing completion, voter indignation over Clinton’s shabby treatment propelled him back into the Governor’s chair that fall.

Gov. Clinton Mingling the Waters of Lake Erie with New York Harbor.

It was with understandable glee that Governor Clinton got to preside over the ceremonies opening the canal in October 1825.  He sailed on the packet barge Seneca Chief along the Canal from Buffalo to Albany then transferredto a steam packet for the trip down the Hudson to New York City.  He poured two casks of Lake Erie waterinto the harbor in the City making a symbolic Marriage of the Waters to officially open the whole waterway system.

The economic and social effects of the Canal quickly surpassed the most optimistic predictions.  The vast resources of the Great Lakes basin were immediately accessible in the east as they had never been before when the Allegany and Appalachian Mountains presented a substantial barrier to commerce.  Freight rates from Buffalo to New York went from $100 per ton by roadto $10 per ton by Canal. In 1829 3,640 bushels of wheat were transported down the Canal.  By 1837 this had increased to 500,000 bushels and four years later it reached one million. In nine years short years Canal tolls more than recouped the entire cost of construction.  

Equally, if not more important, the Erie Canal became the great highway to the West for hundreds of thousands of settlers who were eager to claim land and begin to ship their crops east for good hard cash money.  Previously growth of the trans-Appalachian West was limited to the heartiest pioneers who had to stay close to the great river systems to ship their produce to market via the long tripdown to New Orleans.  The younger sons of New England and New York farmers, craving land and with the resources to buy it flooded the Old Northwest transforming Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and even distant Minnesota from frontier wilderness to prosperous, populous states by 1850.

A Canal passenger packet circa 1850.

Not only did the mostly farming settlers find easy access to market, others began to ship the endless lumber of the Great North Woods, iron ore to feed the smeltersand furnaces of an industrializing nation, and other resources.  Within 15 years New York City had fulfilled Clinton’s dazzling prediction.  It had leapfrogged its competitors, Boston, Baltimore, and New Orleans and was handling more freight than all those cities combined.  The Canal also spurred development in towns and cities along the route from Buffalo on down the Hudson.  Many cities developed industries that fed manufactured goods into the interior.  New York State communities along the path of the canal, the lateral canals built to feed it from the more remote interior of the state, and the Hudson River became boom towns.

The Canal was deepened and widened twice in the 19th Century to accommodate larger bargesand greater traffic.  Between 1905 and 1918, engineers decided to abandon much of the original man-made channel and use new techniques to “canalize” the rivers that the canal had been constructed to avoid—the Mohawk, Oswego, Seneca, and Clyde plus Oneida Lake.  A uniform channel was dredged; dams were built to create long, navigable pools, and locks were built adjacent to the dams to allow the barges to pass from one pool to the next.  When it opened in 1918, the whole system was renamed the New York State Barge Canal.

Today most of the traffic on the New York State Barge Canal is private pleasure boats, canoes and kayaks, tour boats, and on some sections reproductions of mule drawn canal boats..  Here boat await entrance to the Canal at Buffalo during an annual Canal Fest.

The system remained an economic engine for New York State until the St. Lawrence Seaway was completed in 1959.  Traffic then dropped to a trickle.  In recent years the system has experienced arenaissance as recreational corridor.  Abandon stretches of the original canal have been preserved in many places, including a 36 mile stretch in the Old Erie Canal State Historic Park from the town of DeWitt near Syracuse to Rome.

Working With Troublesome Ancestors

26 October 2021 at 09:00
If honoring a particular ancestor causes you suffering and stress, don’t do it. But if you can, you may want to work with – and for – your troublesome ancestors. Doing so can help them, your family, our wider society – and in the process, you.

Ida B Wells: American Hero

26 October 2021 at 08:00
      It was on this day, the 26th of October in 1892 that Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases was published. It is extremely hard to overstate the importance of this book and of Ms Wells, herself. From when I first learned of her, I’ve tried to note this […]

Consequences

25 October 2021 at 16:38

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

Rep. Adam Schiff

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

This week everybody was talking about Build Back Better

https://www.startribune.com/sack-cartoon-traffic-jam/600108124/

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

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

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

and January 6

https://claytoonz.com/2021/10/20/bannons-contempt/

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


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


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

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

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1006248/prove-your-loyalty

and the pandemic

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and you also might be interested in …

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


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

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

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

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

https://nickanderson.substack.com/p/the-pledge

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

So:

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

and let’s close with something tasty

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

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgjWOo7IqQY?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&w=530&h=299]

TRUE HEART RISING: Jesus & Ikkyu, Scrooge & Tiny Tim

25 October 2021 at 16:00
      TRUE HEART RISING Jesus & Ikkyu, Scrooge & Tiny Tim Edward Sanshin Oberholtzer Joseph Priestley Zen Sangha and Empty Moon Zen I was preparing a dharma talk the other day that touched upon the Zen priest and poet Ikkyu Sojun, that antinomian character who, were he Chinese, might well have been referred […]

What Conservatives Tell Themselves About “Critical Race Theory”

25 October 2021 at 14:42
https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/opinion/cartoons/2020/06/21/race-america-cblm-black-lives-matter/3232878001/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is there something wrong with that?

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

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

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

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

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d16LNHIEJzs?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&w=530&h=299]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://medium.com/@CRA1G/the-evolution-of-an-accidental-meme-ddc4e139e0e4#.tm1cbg2vn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can accept our natural inheritance whenever we are ready.

25 October 2021 at 14:17


Miracles are part of an interlocking chain of forgiveness which, when completed, is the Atonement. Atonement works all the time and in all the dimensions of time. T-1.1.25:1-2


The miracle is the shift in perception from the world of the ego to the world of the spirit (love). This shift in perception occurs when we forgive, that is, we decide to give up making other people and circumstances responsible for our unhappiness. When we forgive we become one with the Oneness from which we separated ourselves at our incarnation and this re-integration, giving up our separation is what the Course calls the “Atonement.” The atonement works all the time and in all the dimensions of time because that is the only thing that is real. The atonement is all that ever was in the first place. What we have created in the world of the ego is bull shit and merely an illusion. The problem arises when we forget the Ground of Our Being and think that what we have created is real when ultimately it is not but will simply pass away sooner or later. As it says in the introduction to the Course, “Nothing real can be threatened and nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.”


In Alcoholic Anonymous it is suggested, in step three, that we turn our willfulness and our lives over to the care of God. In other words, it is suggested that we recognize and acknowledge the Tao and go with the flow.


In Unitarian Universalism, we join together to affirm and promote the respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. This respect comes from forgiveness which recognizes and acknowledges the idols we have made and thought real. Further, this respect encourages us to become aware of the whole, not just the parts. Our awareness, then becomes holy and the atonement is realized.


Today, we are encouraged, in miracle principle 25, to recognize and acknowledge that we can be part of an interlocking chain of forgiveness which brings about an awareness of the Atonement which always was, is now, and ever will be. All we have to do is give up our worship of idols in the world of the ego and realize the Unconditional Love of God which is our natural inheritance.


The Monday Morning Teaser

25 October 2021 at 12:31

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

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

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

Anyway, that post should be out before 10 EDT.

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

That should be out sometime after noon.

The Man Who Invented English Literature— Geoffrey Chaucer

25 October 2021 at 12:10

Geoffrey Chaucer, a 17th century portrait based on an illustration in an illuminated manuscript.

Way back when dirt was new and I was an exceptionally earnest high school student, we learned that before there was William Shakespearethere was Geoffrey Chaucer, period.  In those distant days students were generally assigned at least a chunk of The Canterbury Tales to read and try and decipher.  We were told it was English, but it was Greek to most of us.  I remember that after some hours of labor, I got a hazy idea of what he was writing about.

English literature prior to the 20th Century apart from a medicinal dose of the Bard, a dollop of Dickens, and a few lines from a dreamy Romantic poethas long been banished from most high school curricula.  You might not even encounter Chaucer today in many introductory survey level English Lit. courses in College.  Certainly, you would have to be an English major and toiling in the 200-300 level courses before you really encounter him.

Perhaps things are better for Geoffrey in England. One hopes so.

 

An English inn similar to the one Chaucer wrote about in The Canterbury Tales and the Inne of the Shrews in Greenwich where he died.

I bring this up because October 25 mark the anniversary of Chaucer’s passing in 1400He was then the resident of the Inne of the Shrews in Greenwich.  After a lifetime as a mostly successful courtier, he had been out of favor and broke, but was recently restored to Royal favor.  But he may have been murdered by those who did not take kindly to his portrayal of the clergy, or so some stories have it.  None-the-less, he was respectable enough to be buried in an unimportant corner of Westminster Abby.  In later years other literary men asked to be interred near him in what eventually became the revered Poet’s Corner.

Chaucer's crypt in Westminster Abby was located in a dim, obscure corner of the church but became the nucleolus of the celebrated Poets' Corner, the final resting place of the British literary elite.

Today his fans celebrate his life on his death day because no one knows exactly when he was born.  It was about 1342 or ’43 in London.  He came from a Normanfamily whose name originally meant shoemaker.  But the family fortunes had risen.  His father was a successful wine merchant and minor courtierdeputy to the King’s Butler.  Nothing is known of his education except that it was quite good.  By the time young Geoffrey was ready to enter the service of the noble and highborn himself at about age 13 he could already read and write Latin, French, and Italian.

That career started with an appointment to the household of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster and Prince Lionelin 1357.  Two years later he was a soldierin France fighting for King Edward IIIin the 100 Years War.  He was evidently a good and valuable soldier because after being capturedby the French he was paroled under the terms of the Treaty of Brétignyin 1360.  The King himself and other courtiers contributed to raising the substantial ransom of £16.  It was during his presumably not too-uncomfortable imprisonment that Chaucer completed, according to some sources his first literary work, Romaunt of the Rose, a translation from the French into the Anglo-Norman language of the court.

Around 1337 Chaucer apparently married very well indeed.  His wife, or at least the mother of his two sons, was Philippa Roe, the sister of the future wife of John of Gaunt, third surviving son of Edward III.  Due to this happy circumstance, he enjoyed the support and patronage of the Prince as long as he lived.

In 1369 he would re-work that earlier Romaunt of the Rose into vernacular English, what we now know as Middle English in The Book of the Duchess, dedicated to his sister-in-law after her death.

Such connection earned him more important and lucrative appointments.  From 1338-78 he traveled extensively in Europe on several diplomatic and commercial assignments.  He was said to have met the Italian Poet Petrarch on one such trip.  He was also exposed to Dante’s Divine Comedy, which was written in vernacular Italianrather than Latin.  This was supposedly an inspiration for Chaucer to work in vernacular English but as we have seen, he was already working in that language.

Back in England he was awarded the very lucrative post of Comptroller of the Customs and Subside of Wools, Skins, and Tanned Hides for the Port of London, just the kind of position where money could not help but fill the purse of a poor, but honest public servant.  He survived a charge of rape by Cecile Champaigne and was able to get her to withdraw her suit after a hefty private settlement

 

                        Chaucer's fortunes waxed and waned with those of his patron, John of Gaunt the Earl of Lancaster. 

He could survive scandal, but not the shifting sands of politics.  With John of Gaunt out of favor, so was he.  He lost his post and free housing.  But he moved to Kent, got a minor sinecure as Postmaster, and eventually was elected to Parliament.  Away from London and the demands of court Chaucer devoted himself more and more to literature.  He composed Troilus and Criseyde, a long poem based on a Trojan romance by the Italian poet Boccaccio. 

When his wife died and with John out of favor, Chaucer was sued for debt.  Several friends and acquaintances were executed.  But in 1389 John returned to power and influence over his nephew Richard II, who in turn favored the poet with a new appointment as Clerk of the King’s Works responsible for the upkeepand repair governmental buildings in and around London.  He was the beneficiary of Royal gifts and pensions in the 1390’s.

It was during this period that he did most of his work on his magnum opus, The Canterbury Tales.  The loose collection was said to have been inspired in some ways by Dante’s journeys through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.  But Chaucer’s tales were grounded in the real, even mundane world

 

From an illuminated manuscript of the tales.  The figure on horse back is thought to be Chaucer himself.

A group of 30 pilgrims gather for a journey to the grave and shrine of Thomas à Becket in an Inn much like the one in which Chaucer himself resided.  It was a remarkably diverse group cutting across the rigid class lines of England at the time.  Included in the group and telling their stories at the behest of the inn keeperwere a knight, a monk, a prioress, a plowman, a miller, a merchant, a clerk, and an oft-widowed wife from Bath.  The stories, some of them borrowed from earlier tales and sources, were often humorous and sometimes bawdy.

Chaucer never lived to complete the work.  Perhaps because he was interrupted by another episode of political intrigue

After Chaucer’s patron John died, Richard II disinherited his son, Henry ofBolingbrook.  Henry returned from exile in France in 1399 to supposedly re-claim his lands and titles.  He quickly gathered a large army against the king.  He deposedRichard and seized the crown.  Chaucer was reportedly in Henry’s service at the time, ever loyal to the line of John of Gaunt.  As Henry IV the new king rewarded such loyal service with a generous increase in his annuity

But he never received either lands or title and remained until he died the next year, as he had lived, a commoner with uncommon connections to Royalty.

For those who may have forgotten—and for those who have never seen it, here is a sample of Chaucer’s most famous work:

The Pilgrims.


Here begins the Book of the Tales of Canterbury

 

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye

(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,

To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

And specially from every shires ende

Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,

The hooly blisful martir for to seke,

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

           

Bifil that in that seson on a day,

In southwerk at the tabard as I lay

Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage

To caunterbury with ful devout corage,

At nyght was come into that hostelrye

Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye,

Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle

In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,

That toward caunterbury wolden ryde.

The chambres and the stables weren wyde,

And wel we weren esed atte beste.

 And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,

So hadde I spoken with hem everichon

 That I was of hir felaweshipe anon,

And made forward erly for to ryse,

To take oure wey ther as I yow devyse.

           

But nathelees, whil I have tyme and space,

 Er that I ferther in this tale pace,

Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun

To telle yow al the condicioun

Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,

And whiche they weren, and of what degree,

And eek in what array that they were inne;

And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.

 

—Geoffrey Chaucer 

Unitarians in Palo Alto, 1910-1915

25 October 2021 at 08:30

Part Three of a history I’m writing, telling the story of Unitarians in Palo Alto from the founding of the town in 1891 up to the dissolution of the old Unitarian Church of Palo Alto in 1934. If you want the footnotes, you’ll have to wait until the print version of this history comes out in the spring of 2022.

Part OnePart Two

Building the Institution, 1909-1915

Following Rev. Sydney Snow’s departure, the leaders of the Palo Alto church were able to attract Rev. Clarence Reed as their next minister. Reed had been ordained in the Methodist Episcopal church in 1894, served a series of short-term pastorates in that denomination, and wound up in San Francisco in 1904. He then decided he was a Unitarian, resigned from his Methodist pastorate to spend a year at Harvard Divinity School, and was called to the Alameda Unitarian Church. The Alameda church was even smaller and had less money than the Palo Alto church, but it proved convenient for Reed to serve there while pursuing graduate study in philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. The Alameda church had paid him $1500 per year (roughly $44,000 in 2020 dollars), and by moving to Palo Alto he received a modest increase in his salary to $1600 per year (roughly $47,000 in 2020 dollars).

Reed took two extended sabbaticals while at Palo Alto. In 1910, just a year after arriving at the church, he spent eight months traveling in Europe recovering from a health crisis. Then in 1914, he spent six months traveling in East Asia. Thus although he served the Palo Alto church from 1909 to 1915, he was actually at the church for only five of those six years.

Reed’s relationship with the Board of Trustees was not entirely harmonious. There are moments in the Board minutes where Reed is portrayed as ambitious, driven, and annoying, while for their part the Trustees seem content to remain a small, close-knit group comfortably supported financially by the American Unitarian Association. Not to put too fine a point on it, Reed wanted the church to grow, and the Trustees weren’t that interested. Reed also managed to ruffle the feathers of other lay leaders. Emma Rendtorff sounds slightly resentful when she notes in her Sunday school records that Reed took over running the Sunday school from her, and then didn’t even keep careful records of attendance. Yet Reed must have done something right, for he increased average attendance in the Sunday school to around 60 students, probably twice the average attendance Emma Rendtorff was able to achieve.

Despite the low-level tension between Reed and some lay leaders, the years when Reed was minister were a golden age for the church. Sunday attendance probably averaged around 60 to 70. The congregation finally built the social hall that they had hoped for since they bought the building lot in 1906. Sunday school enrollment climbed to 90 children and teenagers; the church had enough children and teens to stage a fairly elaborate play, “King Persifer’s Crown,” in May, 1916. But beyond these statistics, what was the church like during this golden age?

By our standards, the Unitarian Church Palo Alto church did little of what we now call social justice work. In the early twenty-first century, Unitarian Universalists believe social justice work should be one of the primary purposes of local congregations. But Unitarian churches a century ago did not necessarily share this belief, nor would they have known the phrase “social justice.” Today’s Unitarian Universalists congregation’s might provide social services (e.g., hosting a homeless shelter), take a public stand on an issue, participate in direct witness (e.g., protests, rallies), and/or provide education about societal ills. By contrast, Palo Alto Unitarians of the early twentieth century understood their church as an organization for spiritual nurture; changing society was less the responsibility of the church as an institution, and more the responsiblity of the individual members of the church.

Individual Palo Alto Unitarians were directly active in several social reform movements during the years from 1909 to 1915. Reform of women’s rights undoubtedly had the widest support. Alice Locke Park, Annie Corbert, Emily Karns Dixon, Helen Sutliff, and other Unitarian women were deeply involved in the woman suffrage issue, culminating in the 1911 statewide ballot measure which gave women the right to vote in California. In addition to the political activism of the woman suffrage movement, many women lived out the fight for women’s rights in their own lives. Caroline Morrison is a case in point. She was reportedly the first woman to earn a Doctorate of Science degree in the United States, when she earned her D.Sci. in physics at Cornell in 1898. She married in that same year, but taught physics, co-wrote a physics textbook, and published at least one journal article before abandoning her career to have children. Another case in point is Dr. Eugenie Johnson, who began practicing medicine in 1907 and continued through the early 1960s; she was able to pursue her career because she never married.

1915 passport photo of Alice Locke Park

Unitarian women also belonged to other progressive women’s organizations. A dozen or so Unitarians were members of the Palo Alto Woman’s Club, including Emily Karns Dixon, Fannie Rosebrook, and Dr. Anna E. Peck, another woman physician. Fannie Rosebrook and probably other Unitarians were members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

A number of Palo Alto Unitarians were pacifists. Alice Park was probably the most active of the pacifists, but Anna Coggins, Guido Marx, Karl Rendtorff, Marion Alderton, and Ewald Flügel all held pacifist views as well. Marion Alderton was Vice President of the Palo Alto Branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Annie Tait was a member of the organization. David Starr Jordan, though he was barely involved in the congregation during the years leading up to the First World War, was also a well-known pacifist. But there were others in the church who were most definitely not pacifists. By 1916, Melville Anderson ardently supported American involvement in the war, putting a strain on his friendship with Ewald Flügel, a pacifist. In the years leading up to the war, ill feelings would grow between the pacifists and the war supporters in the congregation.

The church also included a handful of eugenicists. Although eugenics is now widely discredited, during the early twentieth century era some white people saw eugenics as another means for carrying out the Progressive ideals of creating a good society through science and rationality. Vernon Kellogg, professor of biology at Stanford, was one of these Unitarian eugenicists, and William Herbert Carruth was another. Most famously, David Starr Jordan, who was only loosely affiliated with the church in these years but widely considered to be a Unitarian, was a prominent eugenicist.

The presence of eugenicists helps us understand the racial attitudes of the church and its members. All the church members and friends were white. Most were descended from northern Europeans, a fact important to remember in those days of prejudice against Europeans from Mediterranean countries. The church records show no interest in or awareness of the racism faced by black or indigenous people in those years. Indeed, George Morell, the publisher of the Palo Alto Times who was peripherally associated with the church in 1919, publicly advocated for racially segregated housing in Palo Alto. Most church members evinced little interest in racial justice, and some went further than that: before moving to Palo Alto, Isabel Dye Butler had actively worked to enslave indigenous people. However, there were also a few individuals who showed remarkably enlightened racial attitudes, like Dr. Eugenie Johnson, who was known in Palo Alto for her lack of racial bias in treating patients.

Aside from the activities of individual Unitarians, the church did distribute modest charitable contributions on a fairly regular basis. For example, Clarence Reed announced to the Board in November, 1914, that a special offering for the Red Cross was $79.20 (roughly $2,075 in 2020 dollars); in that same month, the church donated an unspecified amount to combat child labor. The church also made regular contributions to various appeals from the American Unitarian Association, to help further the cause of Unitarianism, and the members of the church probably saw these contributions as contributing to the betterment of society.

One remarkably progressive step taken by the congregation was hiring Rev. Florence Buck while Clarence Reed went on sabbatical in 1910. By 1910, the wider Unitarian movement had turned against women ministers. Perhaps the Palo Alto church only hired Florence Buck because they could pay a woman less money than a man; but the congregation may also have been influenced both by the memory of Eliza Tupper Wilkes, and the examples of professional women who were members of the congregation. In any case, after seeing Buck in the pulpit, sixteen-year-old Helen Kreps was inspired to pursue a career in ministry (tragically, Kreps died in the great influenza epidemic, just before completing her divinity degree). Since other girls surely found inspiration and a role model in Florence Buck, her presence in the pulpit helped the wider cause of women’s rights.

The church relied on a few key lay leaders to keep the institution going. Karl and Emma Rendtorff were the most important lay leaders in the congregation from 1905 through 1913, constantly serving in various leadership roles. But when William Herbert Carruth came to Palo Alto in 1913, he immediately moved into a central leadership role in the church, both because of his personal charisma and because of his experience as a lay leader at the national and local levels. Before arriving in Palo Alto, Carruth had served on the national board of the American Unitarian Association, and had been the national president of the Unitarian Laymen’s League. Less than a year after moving to Palo Alto, he was elected president of the Board of Trustees of the Palo Alto church. Until his untimely death in 1925, William Carruth was also one of the central leaders of the church, along with the Rendtorffs.

Just before Carruth had arrived in Palo Alto, Isabel Dye Butler, another important lay leader, had died. Isabel, with her husband John Strang Butler, were a wealthy couple who gave the single largest contribution to the church lot subscription fund in 1906, and continued as significant donors thereafter. After Isabel died, John moved to Oakland and ended his financial contributions to the church. After John left Palo Alto, Emily Karns Dixon was the one wealthy person left in the church, and she never gave as generously as did the Butlers.

During this golden age of the church, the Sunday school doubled in size, from about 45 scholars to about 90. By 1915, the Sunday school was able to use the recently completed Social Hall as well as an outdoor garden designed by Clarence Reed as an outdoor classroom. The garden, measuring fifty by seventy feet, was laid out within the rectangle formed by the Social Hall and the church; a pergola covered with climbing roses and vines outlined the other two sides of this rectangle, leaving a gravel court twenty-five by forty feet in the center. A large sandbox in one corner could accommodate all the younger children, while the other age groups met in various places under the pergola.

Photo of the outdoor Sunday school that was printed in the Pacific Unitarian in 1915

The curriculum was an innovative as the outdoor meeting place. Reed wrote:

“One purpose of the outdoor Sunday school has been to discover the symbolism that will make religious ideals real to boys and girls. Ant and spider houses were constructed in order to teach industry by the observance of the habits of ants, and perseverance by the study of spiders. A bird’s nest in a rosebush has been guarded by the pupils as a sacred trust. A class of boys has been held spellbound by a graduate student of Stanford University, through the teaching of religious ideals by means of a series of experiments illustrating the great discoveries of science. Artist’s clay has been used to make a map of Palestine, and to build an Oriental house.”

Religious education that used dioramas, nature study, and science was surprisingly progressive for 1915.

Another highlight of the golden age of the church was the visit of the Bahá’í prophet ‘Abdu’l Bahá. David Starr Jordan invited ‘Abdu’l Bahá to speak at Stanford on October 8, 1912, and probably arranged for the prophet to speak at the Unitarian church that evening. After Clarence Reed gave a brief introduction, ‘Abdu’l Bahá’s began his address thus:

“Praise be to God, this evening I have come to a Unitarian Church. This Church is called Unitarian—attributed to unity. Hence I desire to discourse on the subject of unity, which is a fundamental basis of Divine teachings.”

At the conclusion of ‘Abdu’l Bahá’s remarks, Reed gave a brief and very Unitarian conclusion to the evening:

“I feel that a man of God has spoken to us tonight. There is no way I know to close the service than with a prayer—not a prayer in spoken words, but a prayer in silence. Let each person pray in his own way for the coming of the universal religion—the religion of love, the religion of peace, a religion of the fullness of life. (Silence.) You are dismissed.”

This address is still remembered by Bahá’ís today, and occasionally a Bahá’í will stop by the current Unitarian Universalist church, only to be disappointed when told that it is not the building in which ‘Abdu’l Bahá spoke.

The Unitarian Church of Palo Alto’s golden age lasted until Clarence Reed’s departure in the summer of 1915. Reed, being an ambitious man, must have welcomed the energy that William Herbert Carruth’s arrival brought to the congregation, but not even Carruth’s charisma could fix the fundamental problems of the church: Palo Alto did not have a large enough population to support a larger church, and more to the point, the congregation had no ambition to increase in size. In 1916, Reed picked a fight with the Board of Trustees over finances, indirectly accusing the treasurer, Andrew McLaughlin, of financial mismanagement. After McLaughlin resigned as treasurer, an audit found little wrong with the church finances—but Reed was already on his way out, and was immediately called by the Unitarian church in Oakland. By moving to a larger, wealthier church, Reed nearly doubled his salary, from $1,600 per year in Palo Alto to $3,000 per year (roughly $78,000 in 2020 dollars) in Oakland. Probably from the start, Reed viewed the the Palo Alto church as a just a stepping stone in his career. After six years there, he was ready to take the next step.

Part four coming soon.

We can be an extension of God’s love into the world.

24 October 2021 at 15:32

Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead because you made sickness and death yourself, and can therefore abolish both. You are a miracle, capable of creating in the likeness of your Creator. Everything else is your own nightmare, and does not exist. Only the creations of light are real. T-1.1.24: 1-4

The miracles Jesus performs in the bible are usually read and understood as a magic show. Jesus is portrayed as a magician with supernatural powers that defy the laws of nature. In a sense this is true if one considers miracles are of the mind and not of the body.


The metaphysics of A Course In Miracles teaches that the laws of nature in the world of the ego are a social construction and aren’t real and don't exist in the spiritual realm. The miracle is the shift in perception from the world of the ego in the physical realm to the world of the spirit in the spiritual realm. Jesus’ miracles are all acts of love and therein lies the miracle.


In Alcoholics Anonymous when we carry the message of spiritual awakening we have learned from the program to others as it is suggested in step twelve, we are working miracles. Recovery for many people, and those who love them, seems like a miracle after the hell they have been living in.

 

In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning and this search, eventually, takes us to the world of the spirit from the world of the ego. The world of the spirit is where Unconditional Love abides as the Universalists taught and preached. The teaching of Universalism, though, has fallen on deaf ears and blind eyes and when one awakens to the meaning of the teaching, a miracle has occurred.


Today, we are encouraged to recognize that we have a choice in which realm we choose to function: in the realm of the ego or the realm of the Spirit. When we choose the realm of the spirit, miracles abound as a manifestation of who we really are, an extension of God’s unconditional love into the world.


Zoom Lunch (27 October 2021)

24 October 2021 at 04:21

Please join us next Wednesday (27 October 2021) at 12 noon for our weekly Zoom lunch.

Bring your lunch and meet up with your All Souls friends, have lunch, and just catch up.

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Tree of Life UU Welcomes Dr. Jie Yi as Interim Music Director

23 October 2021 at 07:00

Dr. Jie Yi, Interim Music Director for the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry.

The Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road in McHenry, Illinois has appointed a new interim Music Director to aid the congregation in providing quality musical programing while it continues to conduct Sunday morning services via Zoom due to the continued of the Coronavirus pandemic.  Although the congregation hopes to return to in-person services as soon as it is safe and possible, that is weeks or months away.

Dr. Jie Yi is currently the Music Directorof the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington, New Yorkand will continue in that position as well. 

Jie holds a Doctor of Music Arts degreein conducting from Manhattan School of Music. He is the authorof Chinese for Singers, the first comprehensive guide for Western singers to use in singing Chinese texts. Jie conducted Messe de Minuit by Charpentier, Musikalische Exequien by Schütz, and Missa O quam gloriosum by Victoria at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 2018 and 2019. He also conducted Handel’s coronation anthem Let Thy Hand Be Strengthened at Riverside Church in 2018. In 2015, he made his Carnegie Hall debut, conducting Xian Xinghai’s Yellow River Cantata. He was Chorus Masterand Assistant Conductor at the Shanghai Opera from 2008 to 2013.

Jie is a recipient of the Asian Culture Council Fellowship (2011) and the U.S. China Cultural Institute Fellowship for Young Conductors (2006). As pianist and vocal coach, he performed at La Lingua della Lirica Festival in Italy(2015–16) and performed Bellini’s opera I Capuletti e i Montecchiat Manhattan School of Music (2013).

Jie will be able to work remotely from Huntington because he is especially adept at the technical aspectsof creating videos blending the voices of many individual singers recording their parts from their homes. He has already begun work with members of the Tree of Life Choir and together they expect to create music for services two times a month and prepare a Christmas/Yule/Solstice/Winter holiday music service in December.  He will work closely in planning services with Tree of Life’s Interim Minister, the Rev. Jenn Gracen.

The congregation’s choir is one of the most highly regarded in McHenry County and is known for its wide repertoireincluding not only hymns and other traditional worship music but also jazz, pop, folk, Broadway, international music, and classical. They toured internationally to Romania (Transylvania) in 2016 and have performed in both McHenry County choral music programs and with regional Unitarian Universalist choirs.  The ensemble includes several outstanding soloists as well.

Former Tree of Life Music Director Tom Steffens led the Choir in the annual Christmas/Winter Holiday concert in 2015.  This year Dr. Jie Li and the Choir will prepare Zoom program.

Tree of Life is also still conducting a searchfor a permanent Music Director who will be able to lead the choir and coordinate other music as the congregation returns to live, in-person worship.

Tree of Life Sunday services are currently held via Zoom at 10:45 am.  Visit the congregation at https://treeoflifeuu.org/ for links to the services. 

Meditation with Larry Androes (23 October 2021)

23 October 2021 at 06:06

Please join us on Saturday (23 October 2021) at 10:30 AM for our weekly meditation group with Larry Androes.

This is a sitting Buddhist meditation including a brief introduction to mindfulness meditation, 20 minutes of sitting, and followed by a weekly teaching.

The group is free and open to all.

For more information, contact Larry via email or phone using (318) 272-0014.

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What has been making you sick?

22 October 2021 at 12:08


Miracles rearrange perception and place all levels in true perspective. This is healing because sickness comes from confusing levels. T-1.1.23: 1-2


A miracle is a shift in perception from the world of the ego to the world of the spirit, or from the world of conditional love to a world of unconditional love. Distress and suffering comes from confusing the two different types of love.


In Alcoholics Anonymous it is suggested, in the first step, that we admit that in the world of the ego our lives have become unmanageable. Living in the world of the ego has made us sick. We are encouraged, in step three, to make a decision to turn our willfulness and our lives over to the care of God. In other words, we are encouraged to leave behind the world of the ego and choose the world of unconditional love.


In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote the acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth. This requires that we move from the world of conditional love to the world of unconditional love. The first world is the world of the ego and the second is the world of God. It is suggested that we become God-like.


Today, we become aware of the two levels which we operate on: the world of the ego and the world of the Spirit. The miracle occurs when we choose the world of the Spirit and leave the confusion of the levels which has made us sick behind.


Prophecies of the End: Dreams of Justice and Mercy and a Goodness Without End

22 October 2021 at 08:00
      And I saw heaven opened, and behold a pale horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. Dreams. John’s Apocalypse, the Book of Revelations, that hallucinatory revisioning of Nero’s Rome is a lot of things. Among them a fevered […]

An Encounter—Murfin Verse

22 October 2021 at 07:00

A street encounter between acquaintances.  What will they discover?

Yesterday Facebook's memory dredge hauled up a status report from way back in 2010.  I had completely forgottenabout it but after years of ever increasing American polarization and its attendant personal trauma I found it more relevant than ever.  It was also found versemaking a poem simply by breaking up the lines exactly as originally written.  I have discovered of few of the over they years.  At least they are shortand sweet and don’t drone on forever.

William Carey's sketch of the Old Poet reading.

An Encounter

Discovered in a Facebook status from

October 21, 2010

 

Pleasantries with a wave and nod acquaintance of some years. 

Don’t know each other’s last names.

You know—weather, sports, a bit of family trivia.

A passing word betrays an affiliation. 

The eyes narrow, the jaw sets just so. 

In an instant the other, the enemy, the sub-human. 

Whose eyes, whose jaw?

 

Patrick Murfin

  

Action Alert: 3 Ways to Voice Your Support for Child Care

21 October 2021 at 19:09
By: ptc15

 

Child Care Action Alert

 

Rich countries contribute an average of $14,000 per year for a toddler’s care. In the U.S. it’s $500.

The New York Times: How Other Nations Pay for Child Care

 


 

Child care in the United States is in a crisis — and it’s time for change.

The New York Times recently shared shocking statistics about child care support in the United States. While most rich countries around the world contribute an average of $14,000 per year for a toddler’s care, the United States contributes just $500 per year, per child.

The United States — one of the richest countries in the world — spends only $500 per child on early childhood care each year.

 

Child Care Spending

 

This number is staggeringly low, and the truth is undeniable.

In the developed world, the United States is an outlier in its abysmal levels of financial support for child care.

Affordable child care is essential to millions of workers and their families. Parents and caregivers cannot work if their infants and toddlers are not safe and cared for.

President Biden has proposed spending $450 billion to subsidize child care and offer universal preschool as part of his 10-year, $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan. Congress is now on the verge of making transformational policy change for babies by investing in comprehensive paid leave, high-quality child care, and an expanded Child Tax Credit.

But negotiations continue, and these objectives remain at risk.

We need to make sure that Congress understands that scaling any of these components back could lower the odds that our children will thrive.

The needs of America’s children are non-negotiable.

Funding and building a child care infrastructure is key to supporting our families, providing the recovery our nation needs, and addressing America’s shameful underinvestment in child care.

It’s time that every family in the United States has access to a high-quality, affordable child care system. Help make this vision a reality by letting your legislators know that high-quality child care should be affordable for every family in America.

Here are 3 Ways to Voice Your Support for Child Care:

1. Share Your Story: Child Care Aware of America has a vision for the future of child care. Contact your legislators and share your personal child care story here: https://www.childcareaware.org/our-issues/advocacy/take-action/support-affordable-child-care/

2. Write a Letter: Take action with MomsRising to urge Congress to support kids and families by passing critical care infrastructure: https://action.momsrising.org/sign/NY_Times_Care_RR/?source=action

3. Send a Note: Urge Congress to pass the Build Back Better Act by sending a note through Think Babies: https://www.thinkbabies.org/take-action-build-back-better-act/

Further Reading

Fact Sheet on the Build Back Better Act

The Build Back Better Act Would Greatly Lower Families’ Child Care Costs

The True Cost of High-Quality Child Care Across the United States

 

 

The post Action Alert: 3 Ways to Voice Your Support for Child Care appeared first on Promise the Children.

Come clean and into the light.

21 October 2021 at 15:38


Miracles are associated with fear only because of the belief that darkness can hide. You believe that what your physical eyes cannot see does not exist. This leads to a denial of spiritual sight. T-1.1.22: 1-3


The opposite of love is fear. What is it that we are so afraid of? We fear God’s wrath because of our separation from God into the world of the ego. Like Adam and Eve, we hide in the Garden after eating the apple from the tree of knowledge fearing that it is only a matter of time before God finds out what we have done and punishes us for abandoning God. We think that if we can keep God in the dark about what we have done, we are safe from punishment. After a while we even forget that we are hiding from God. We think that what is not seen doesn’t exist. Silly us. How naive. How innocent.


In Alcoholic Anonymous, in step four, it is suggested that we do a fearless moral inventory of all the shit we have pulled. Notice that the suggestion states that our moral inventory should be “fearless.” It is suggested that we give up the fear so we can become aware of the Love which is our natural inheritance.


In Unitarian Universalism we join together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Notice that the principle states that our search for truth and meaning should be “responsible”. Being responsible means that we do not allow fears to stand in the way of our search.


Today, it is suggested that we drop the fear, stop hiding in the darkness, and come clean into the light. This coming clean and into the light enables spiritual sight because we have left the world of the ego for the world of the mirac


A Pagan Theology of the Dead

21 October 2021 at 09:00
Before we talk about how we work with the dead, we need to talk about who and what the dead are. We need a theology of the dead. We will never be able to say it’s true in an absolute sense, but we will be able to say that it’s reasonable and helpful.

Recalling Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sometime Unitarian, Once and Later Anglican, and All Around Romantic

21 October 2021 at 08:00
      Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on this day, October 21st, in 1772. He was a member of the Lake Poets, and considered a co-founder with William Wordsworth of the English Romantic Movement. Coleridge is often credited for introducing German Idealism to the English speaking world. Obviously an overstatement. But he is very important. […]

Ultimately, Love is all there is.

20 October 2021 at 12:26


Miracles are natural signs of forgiveness. Through miracles you accept God’s forgiveness by extending it to others. T-1.1.21:1-2


A miracle is the shift in perception from the world of the ego to the world of the Spirit. When we decide to make this shift, we also decide to no longer hold other people and circumstances responsible for our unhappiness. This decision to no longer hold other people and circumstances responsible for our unhappiness is what the Course names as “forgiveness.” Forgiveness is a miracle. And when we have received it, it flows beyond ourselves to others.


In Alcoholics Anonymous, it is suggested in step ten, that we continue to take a personal inventory and when we have made a mistake to promptly admit it. This process involves forgiving ourselves for the mistakes we have made which releases us from dwelling on past sins and frees our attention to the Love that exists which we could extend first to ourselves and then to others. This shift in attention from condemnation to Love is a miracle.


In Unitarian Universalism, we covenant together to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This worth and dignity is our natural inheritance. When we eschew the things of the ego, we become aware of Love which is our natural inheritance. The Universalists taught this a couple of centuries ago and this teaching continues to this day. Attending to the inherent worth and dignity of every person allows us to experience miracles.


Today, it is suggested that we forgive our mistaken notions about what is real. The things of the ego are not real. Only the things of the Spirit are which is Unconditional Love.


The Johnny Bright Incident Was An Indelible Stain on College Football

20 October 2021 at 10:34

An isolation and blow-up from a series of photographs in the Des Moines Register clearly show Johnny Bright  being smashed in the face after handing off the ball.  The brutal late his was the third time Bright was knocked unconscious in the first quarter of a 1951 Drake vs. Oklahoma A&M football game.

It was the most brutal and flagrant on-field racist attack in NCAA college football history.  The irrefutable evidence was splashed on front pages across the country.  The leading contender for the 1951 Heisman Trophy was severely injured and knocked out of a game causing his undefeated team to lose its only game of the season.  Yet no action was taken against the player who assaulted Johnny Bright, the coach who ordered the hit and drilled the assault in practice, or the administrationwhich apparently approved, defended, and covered up the attack.  In fact, for decade after decade the University denied any wrongdoing and refused to apologize to the wounded player or the team they cheated.  It was not until September 28, 2005 that an Oklahoma State University President acknowledged wrongdoing in a letter to the President Drake University.  The apology came almost 54 years after the assault and 22 years after the victim’s death.

Johnny Bright was born to a working class African American family on June 11, 1930 in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  He was raised with three brothers and a sister by a single mother.  At the city’s Central High School, he was an excellent student and lettered in football, basketball, and track and field, leading his football team to a city title in 1945, and helped the basketball team to two state tournament Final Four appearances.  He also played local league softball and was a successful amateur boxer.

Bright was one of the most heavily recruited high school athletesin the nation when he graduated in 1947.  He accepted a scholarship at Big Ten powerhouse Michigan State University (MSU.)  It was not a good fit.  As a freshman he was unhappy with the direction of the football program and disappointed that coaches seemed to actively discouragewasting time” on academics instead of concentrating on football. 

Bright dropped out of MSU and accepted a track and field scholarship at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa a smaller but prestigiousuniversity.  Bright’s scholarship allowed him to try out for the football and basketball squads, but because he was a transfer he was redshirted for football in his freshman year.  During his college career he letteredin all three sports.

Drake competed in the Missouri Valley Conference (MVC), then considered a second tier college conference.  Within the conference Drake was a traditional powerhouse.  Once he became eligible for varsity play in his sophomore year, Bright quickly helped the program step up to a whole new level.  In 1949, his sophomore year he rushedfor 975 yards and threw for another 975 to lead the nation in total offense.   The Drake Bulldogs finished their season at 6–2–1.  In Bright’s junior year as a halfback/quarterback he rushed for 1,232 yards and passed for 1,168 yards, setting an NCAA record of 2,400 yards total offense and again led the team to a 6–2–1 record.

Early in his freshman year Bright became the first Black player to compete against MVC rival Oklahoma A&M at Lewis Field in Stillwater.  A&M, which would later become Oklahoma State University, had just, extremely reluctantly, become officially integrated that year.   Bright, then unknown, had competed without incident or controversy and led his team to a victory over the Aggies.  In his sophomore year Drake hosted the contest between the two teams and once again Bright had romped over the Oklahoma team.

In his senior year Johnny Bright was leading all college players in total yardage and both passing and rushing as a half back/quarter back for Drake University and was the odds on favorite to win the Heisman Trophy.

Before the beginning of the 1951 season and Bright’s senior year, he had become a genuine national star.  He was rated by sports writers as the hands down favorite to win the Heisman Trophy.  As his team began to roll up victory after victory, Bright became an open target at A&M.  The student newspaper, The Daily O’Collegian, and the Stillwater News Press, reported that Bright was a marked man, and several A&M students were openly bragging that Bright “would not be around at the end of the game.”  A&M Coach Jennings B. Whitworth, an Arkansas native, exhorted his team repeatedly during practices to “get that Nigger!”  He ran special drills featuring his toughest defenseman, tackle Wilbanks Smith practicing how to do just that.

On the day of the game, Bright led a 5-0 team and was the nation’s leading collegiate scorer.  But in the first ten minutes of the A&M game bright was knocked unconscious three times by Smith.  The third time, after Bright had handed the ball off to Drake fullback Gene Macomber, and well behind the play, Smith smashed into his face with his elbow, breaking Bright’s jawDespite the pain, Bright was able to stay in the game long enough to complete a 61-yard touchdown pass to Drake halfback Jim Pilkington a few plays laterBut he was unable to play after the first quarter.  For the first time in his college career Bright had less than 100 yards total offense.  Without their star player, the Bulldogs fell to the Aggies 27-10.

No penalty was called on Smith for the flagrantly late hit.  After the brouhaha over the attack reached national proportions the MVC refused to take any action.  A&M President Oliver Willham denied anything happened even after evidence of the incident was published nationwide.  Drake withdrew from the Conference in protest.

The evidence that caught the nation’s attention was a series of photographs taken byDes Moines Register cameramen John Robinson and Don Ultang.  They had picked up on rumors sweeping the stadium that day that Bright would be targeted.  They set up their cameras specifically to follow him in play.  In six shots they captured the whole sequence of the play from Bright’s hand-off to Smith’s elbow smashing into his face which ran on the front page of the next day’s paper.  The photos were so dramatic that they also ended up on the cover of Life magazine.  Robinson and Ultang won the Pulitzer Prize for their effort.

The Register followed up with an in-depth investigation by reporter Bob Spiegel who interviewed many spectators at the game who confirmed the threats circulating and quoting comments from a A&M player on the bench which confirmed that the attack had been planned and drilled.

The NCAA investigated the incident but took no action against Smith or A&M, much to Drake’s outrage.  They did tweak rules about late hits and illegal blocking and established a new rule requiring ball handling players wear helmets with face guards.

                                                    In a press photo Bright showed his jaw wired shut.

After the game Bright’s jaw was wired shut.  He most likely also suffered a concussion, although those kinds of head injuries were not well understood at the time.  He was only able to see limited action in the team’s remaining three games, but he earned 70 percent of the yards Drake gained and scored 70 percent of the Bulldogs’ points over the whole season anyway.  The limited action in the last games probably costBright the Heisman.  He finished fifth in voting anyway.

Bright was taken fifth in the NFL Draft, picked by the Philadelphia Eagles.  Bright would have been the first Black on the team.  He was concernedthat he would not be well receivedby the many Southerners on the team.  He was not eager, he told people later, to be “football’s Jackie Robinson.” 

Instead after playing in the post-season East-West Shrine Game and the Hula Bowl, Bright unexpectedly accepted an offer from the Calgary Stampeders of the Western Interprovincial Football Union, the precursor to the West Division of the Canadian Football League, leading the Stampeders and the WIFU in rushing with 815 yards his rookie season.  In his third season in Canada, Bright was traded to the Edmonton Eskimos.  He would go on to win three Gray’s Cup Championships with the team, be elected CFL’s Most Outstanding Player in 1959, and establish numerous offensive records in a 13 year long pro career.  When he retired in 1964 he was the League’s all-time leading rusher with, had five consecutive 1,000 yard seasons, and led the CFL in rushing four times.  He is a member of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, the College Football Hall of Fame, the Missouri Valley Conference Hall of Fame, the Edmonton Eskimos Wall of Honour, the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame, and the Des Moines Register Iowa Sports Hall of Fame.

After college Bright declined to be the "football Jackie Robinson" in the NFL and instead  played in Canada where he became the Canadian Football League's record setting Most Outstanding Player and a Canadian Football Hall of Fame honoree.

But the football honors were only part of the remarkable legacy of Johnny Bright.

Like most Canadian football players of the era, Bright held down a full time off-season job.  Using his Drake Bachelor of Science degree, Bright became an Edmonton school teacher.  Over the years he turned down several offers from the NFL because it would have meant giving up teaching.  Bright eventually became principal of D.S. Mackenzie and Hillcrest Junior High Schools in Edmonton.  In profound gratitude for the opportunities Canada provided him, Bright became a citizen in 1962.

Bright was frequently asked about what had become known as the Johnny Bright Incident.  He expressed surprisingly little bitterness toward Wilbanks Smith.  While acknowledging that there was “no way it couldn’t have been racially motivated…What I like about the whole deal now, and what I’m smug enough to say, is that getting a broken jaw has somehow made college athletics better. It made the NCAA take a hard look and clean up some things that were bad.”

Bright died of a massive heart attackon December 14, 1983 at the age of only 53, at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, while undergoing surgery to correct a knee injury suffered during his football career. He was survived by his wife and four children.

Bright's other legacy as an outstanding and beloved teacher and principal was honored by this Edmonton school.

In 2006, the football field at Drake Stadium, in Des Moines was named in Bright’s honor.  Four years later his second career was recognized with the opening of Johnny Bright School, a kindergarten through grade 9 facility in Edmonton.

And what of the villains?  There seems to be some kind of karma and rough justice in the case of Coach Whitworth.  He left Oklahoma A&M after four years as head coach in 1954 with a losing 22–27–1 record. Then he went on to coach his alma mater, the University of Alabama from 1955 to 1957 where he posted miserable a 4–24–2 record that included a 14-game losing streak from 1955 to 1956.  He was firedand replaced by the legendary Bear Bryant.  Whitworth could only get an assistant job at Georgia, where he worked for one year.  He died in 1960 at the age of 52.

Wilbanks Smith was said to have had a successful career in engineering and to have been devoted tocommunity service.  He was said to have taken “personal responsibility for the incident” mainly to deflect criticism of his coach, team, and the University but he never expressed any regretat injuring Bright or made any attempt to contact him or make amends

With typical grace, Bright shrugged it off, saying he felt “null and void” about Smith, but adding “The thing has been a great influence on my life. My total philosophy of life now is that, whatever a person’s bias and limitation, they deserve respect. Everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs.”

  

Recalling the Amazing Randi

20 October 2021 at 08:00
  One year ago today, the 20th of October, 2020, the Amazing Randi died. A loss for us all. I wrote about him some years ago. And I use that reflection as the basis for this remembrance. Randall James Hamilton Zwinge was born in Toronto, Ontario, on the 7th of August, 1928. In later years […]

Making Space for All to Thrive

18 October 2021 at 16:49
By: Karen
This month, my congregation’s worship theme is Sacrifice — a hard one to lean into even as the world seems to be asking all of us to wrestle with it. To understand sacrifice today, in the third decade of the 21st century, let us begin not on the altars of ancient stories where living beings […]

Nostalgia

18 October 2021 at 15:54

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

Charlie Sykes

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

This week everybody was talking about Manchin and Sinema

https://twitter.com/mluckovichajc/status/1448011993114361859

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and subpoenas

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

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

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

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

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

Bannon has zero justification for not testifying:

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

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

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

https://www.ajc.com/opinion/mike-luckovich-blog/1017-mike-luckovich/CQ6C2PAXZRDHVFX4VE7GLTQOWA/

and the economy

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

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

Atlantic’s Derek Thompson continues:

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

Paul Krugman weighs in:

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

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

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


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

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

More about inflation in this Washington Post article.

and John Gruden

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Chris Hayes discusses these issues with a former WFT cheerleader.


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

and you also might be interested in …

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


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


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


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

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


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


Media Matters reports:

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

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

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

and let’s close with something reassuring

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

Is hope a super power?

18 October 2021 at 13:53



One of the sources for the living tradition of Unitarian Universalism is the "words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love."

Krista Tippet and Bryan Stevenson are two  of these prophetic women and men.

From Krista Tippet's interview with Bryan Stevenson 

So now let’s turn briefly to the wisdom Bryan Stevenson teaches

that hope is our superpower, but the first step in developing

that is very close to home. It’s about getting proximate. And the question

to live here is where you will direct your curiosity and care.

And remember that getting yourself up closer — and that is physically, perhaps;

also, certainly, mentally, spiritually — getting yourself up closer to

new people and places, to questions and possibilities and insights you

couldn’t have seen before, that is the first part of the work. That comes

before setting an action plan. 

Consider these words of Bryan Stevenson: “You should not underestimate

the power you have to affirm the humanity and dignity of the people who

are around you. And when you do that, they will teach you

something about what you need to learn about human dignity,

but also what you can do to be a change agent.”


For more click here

Reading While Texan

18 October 2021 at 13:20
https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/opinion/columns/7111880-ProCon-Critical-race-theory-is-a-manufactured-fear-being-exploited

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.adl.org/blog/proud-boys-bigotry-is-on-full-display

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.politico.com/cartoons/2021/10/01/october-2021-000259

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truth in our post truth world feels like a miracle.

18 October 2021 at 13:16

Miracles reawaken the awareness that the spirit, not the body, is the altar of truth. This is the recognition that leads to the healing power of the miracle. T-1.1.20:1-2

The spirit is of the mind not the body. It is the spirit in the mind that is the altar of truth. Truth, goodness, and beauty reside in the Infinite Presence.


In Alcoholics Anonymous we are encouraged in step eleven to improve our conscious contact with God after having decided in step three to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God. We have come to understand that it is in joining with the will of God that we find truth.


In Unitarian Universalism, we covenant together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. The truth and meaning that we seek resides in the infinite presence of spirit not in the body. If we are to find truth and meaning we must give up our attachment to the idols of the ego. Giving up these attachments we become aware of Love’s presence which is our natural inheritance.


Today, it is suggested that we be aware of where truth lies. It is not in the things of the world. Truth resides in spirit and the experience of it feels like a miracle.


The Monday Morning Teaser

18 October 2021 at 12:40

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

What a relief!

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

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

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

Unconditional love is eternal not temporal.

17 October 2021 at 16:44
 


Miracles make minds one in God. They depend on cooperation because the Sonship is the sum of all that God created. Miracles therefore reflect the laws of eternity, not of time. T-1.1.19:1-3

A miracle is a decision to shift one’s perception from the world of the ego to the world of God which is unconditional love as the Universalists understood and taught. This decision involves cooperation, collaboration, and mutuality. This rapport taps into the eternal not the realm of time. Falling in love means that time stands still and has no meaning any longer. The individual experiences what psychologists call a “flow state”. In a spiritual frame of reference it is called a “mystical” experience.


In Alcoholic Anonymous it is suggested, in step eleven, that we improve our conscious contact with God through prayer and meditation. The eleventh step  suggests that we perform miracles and make our mind one with God. Having experienced the eleventh step we then naturally move into the twelfth step which is to carry the message of God’s unconditional love to others.


In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. When we join with others to love each other our transcendent yearning is fulfilled as we all become one with our Transcendent source.


Today, it is suggested in miracle principle nineteen that we make our minds one with God by cooperating with God’s Sonship which exists far beyond the ego’s idol of time.


We Owe Toxic Ancestors Nothing

17 October 2021 at 09:00
We give honor to those who are worthy of honor. If someone was abusive in life, they are unworthy of honor in life or in death. If honoring a problematic ancestor causes you stress and suffering, don’t do it. We owe abusive ancestors absolutely nothing.

Thunder Magic

16 October 2021 at 19:16
Trees at the back of our yard in fall colors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epic Migration Threatened—Beloved Monarchs Face Extinction With Murfin Verse

16 October 2021 at 12:56

For those of us who grew up in North America, the Monarch was the most recognizable of all butterflies.  Large and brilliantly marked with a rich orange/gold and black pattern they could be seen by the millions twice a year in their migrations between Canada and a single Mexican forest region.  Their metamorphosis from a milkweed munching caterpillarspinning their cocoons to emergenceas a regal flyer was a staple of grade school science curricula.  But all of that is under a dire threat as populations collapse with the rapid alterations in their critical Mexican nesting grounds due to global climate change and threat to their essential milkweed due to dramatic climate change all along their long migration routes. 

 

All monarch butterflies east of the Rocky Mountains migrate in various corridors from Canada and the norther U.S.  to a single wintering site and breeding ground in Mexico.  Those in the West regurn to a strip of costal California which is threatened by long-term severe drought, soaring temperatures, and habitat destroying development and wild fires.

Nearly ten years ago a report on the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) explained:

 

Monarch butterflies appear headed for a perhaps unprecedented population crash, according to scientists and monarch watchers who have been keeping tabs on the species in their main summer home in Eastern and Central North America.

There had been hope that on their journey north from their overwintering zone in Mexico, the insect’s numbers would build through the generations, but there’s no indication that happened. Only a small number of monarchs did make it to Canada this summer to propagate the generation that has now begun its southern migration to Mexico, and early indications are that the past year's record lows will be followed by even lower numbers this fall. Elizabeth Howard, the director and founder of Journey North, a citizen-scientist effort that tracks the migrations of monarchs and other species, says one indicator for the robustness of the monarchs is the number of roosts they form in late August and September, something Journey North monitors throughout the migration periods. “During migration, monarchs form overnight roosts in places like Point Pelee or Long Point [in southern Ontario], where the monarchs are congregating before crossing the Great Lakes, places where people generally see huge overnight clusters of monarchs gathering.” Howard told CBC News that at this time in 2011, Journey North had already received 55 reports of roosts, followed by just 25 in 2012. This year, only 17 reports of roosts came in. “This is really a proxy for peak migration because this is where people see really large numbers of monarchs and we’re just not getting the reports, it’s looking pretty bad,” she says.

The monarch butterflies that are now flying south are the fourth generation of those that left the few hectares in central Mexico where millions of monarchs spend the winter.

Several years ago, while I was working as a school custodian in Cary, Illinois, the visit of a lone Monarch on its southward migration, a pioneer, inspired a poemthat was included in my 2004 Skinner House Books collection We Build Temples in the Heart and was also anthologized by Edward Searl in his compilation In Praise of Animals A Treasury of Poems, Quotations, and Readings.

Some of the science is fuzzy—a single insect does not make the whole epic journey, it takes four generations—but the sense of awe and wonder remains. 

And to think we may be the last generation to experience it…


Migrations

 

Later they will come,

            the legions of Canada

            on the edge of cutting cold,

            backs scraping stratus slate,

            arrayed in military majesty,

            dressed in ranks and counting cadence,

            squadron after squadron, an air armada,

            single minded in their migratory mission.

 

But now,

            when September sun lingers and

            lengthened shadows hint ferocity to come,

            the first glints of gold and black flit

            with seaming aimlessness,

            pushed here and there by the faintest zephyr,

            the pioneers of a nation,

            descended from Alberta prairies

            and Minnesota Lakes.

 

One will linger

            briefly on my shoulder

            if I am blessed, then be off again.

 

Then, if she is lucky

            she will pause to rest with

            the millions along the bend of the Rio Grande

            before finding a winter’s respite of death

            amid deep Mexican forests.

 

And it will turn again next spring—

egg to larva,

            larva to silken slumber

                        pupa to Monarch

                                    Monarch to migration.

 

            Oh ye proud Canada,

                        mute your boastful blare—

the mighty bow before true courage.

 

—Patrick Murfin

 

The parable of the chipmunk—letting be, listening and seeing.

16 October 2021 at 10:16

Eastern chipmunk (Tamias striatus) (picture source)

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation 

(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)

—o0o—

The Czech philosopher and writer Erazim Kohák (1933–2020) asks us to imagine this little scene (“The Embers and the Stars”, University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 35):

A small group of us are gathered together in a wood on the edge of a clearing when a chipmunk suddenly darts across the open space before us. One of our number quickly identifies the creature and labels it for us: “a chipmunk” they say out loud. Another, knowing about such things, then explains the chipmunk’s behaviour to us in biological and physiological terms. Within a few minutes, a consensus has formed and it is easy to feel that somehow, and entirely unproblematically, we now know and understand what it is that we have just seen and experienced. 

Kohák uses this story to point out that “[w]hen two or three are gathered together, they seldom have the patience of letting be, of listening and seeing. All too eager to speak, they constitute in their consensus, a conventional image which they interpose between themselves and the living world around them.” And he concludes that, “[d]eafened by consensus, we lack the humility to watch the chipmunk, busy at its tasks, to let him present himself.” 

Kohák’s basic point here is that “the consensus of a crowd can constitute a conventional world far too readily, far too soon.”

Kohák realised that to see the chipmunk as it presents itself — or, indeed, to see anything else in this world as it presents itself — we need to find ways to suspend this consensus making by bracketing it off in some fashion. An obvious and important way to do this bracketing is actively to seek moments of solitude away from the crowd. 

But it is also true that we need to find ways of bracketing off an all too easy and swift consensus making whilst we are gathered together in small groups. The question is then, how, together, might we let things present themselves? How might we better collectively develop the patience of letting be, of listening and seeing?

One way is, of course, regularly and silently to spend time sitting alone together in a time of mindful meditation such as the one we share each week, becoming aware, paying attention and being mindful of what is coming and going just as it presents itself to us. 

Any community that can genuinely and regularly do this is likely to be one which has a reasonable chance of reaching the kind of gentle, ever-developing and ever-revisable consensus that can heal rather than harm and bless rather than curse this extraordinary world we share with all other things — not chipmunks only or, as the poet Gary Snyder observes, “plum blossoms and clouds, or lecturers and [honoured teachers],” but also all manner of other unexpected things including “chisels, bent nails, wheelbarrows, and squeaky doors” (“Blue Mountains Walking”, in “The Gary Snyder Reader”, Counterpoint, Washington, 1999, p. 206). All of these things, when they are truly allowed to present themselves to us, are, astonishingly, always-already teaching us how the world is and our place in it. 

John Brown Leads his Assault on Harper’s Ferry

16 October 2021 at 08:00
    On Sunday evening on the 16th of October, 1859, John Brown, American visionary and terrorist, led a small band of men in an assault on Harper’s Ferry. “John Brown was John the Baptist for the Christ we are to see” sang those who saw his Quixotic raid on Harper’s Ferry as the beginning […]

A Feast for Teresa, Mystic & Founder

15 October 2021 at 13:41
      Teresa Sanchez de Cepeda y Ahumada died in a moment when time ceased to be. It was in 1582 exactly as the Julian calendar was replaced by the Gregorian. And with it ten days vanished, the 5th through the 15th. In this negative time, so did Teresa. We know her as Teresa […]

If you see someone without a smile, give them one of yours.

15 October 2021 at 12:12


A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service you can render to another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. You recognize your own and your neighbor’s worth simultaneously. T-1.1.18:1-4

The miracle is a shift in perception from the world of the ego to the world of the Spirit. In the world of the ego we are separate, alone, divided. In the world of the Spirit we are all One together in love. Salvation is when everybody loves everybody all the time. So when we engage in miracles we are engaging in love where no one is excluded and we recognize that while in the world of the ego we see ourselves as droplets we are, in fact, all part of the ocean.


In Alcoholic Anonymous, it is suggested in step eleven that we improve our conscious contact with God, our Higher Power as we understand our Higher Power, and in step twelve that we share this spiritual awakening with others. This sharing is a miraculous service.


In Unitarian Universalism we join together to affirm and promote the acceptance of one another and the encouragement to spiritual growth. This acceptance and encouragement is the work of miracles.


Today, when you see someone without a smile give them one of yours. Sharing your optimistic joy engenders hope and comfort to those who temporarily are without any.


The Girl Who Became the First Political Image Consultant

15 October 2021 at 07:00

The evolution of Lincoln's beard.  The clean shaven Lincoln of the campaign was, as Grace Bedell observed, gaunt and homely.  His first photo with whiskers taken weeks after the election, and the full Lincoln we have come to know as he neared inauguration.

All right everybody let’s all gather ‘roundand sing a rousing happy birthdayto Abe Lincoln’s Beard.  On October 15, 1860 an 11 year old girl wrote the famous letter that got Lincoln to put away his razor making this the anniversary of the most famous whiskers since Jesus.

Grace Bedell as an attractive young woman in the early 1870's.  The story of her letter to a homely candidate had already entered Lincoln lore and made her famous.

Grace Bedell was the daughter of a supporter from Westfield, a western New York village on the shores of Lake Erie now best known as the home of the Welch’s Grape empire.  Grace wasn’t too impressed by a picture of the candidate that her father brought home.  She wrote:

Dear Sir

My father has just home from the fair and brought home your picture and Mr. Hamlin’s. I am a little girl only 11 years old, but want you should be President of the United States very much so I hope you won’t think me very bold to write to such a great man as you are. Have you any little girls about as large as I am if so give them my love and tell her to write to me if you cannot answer this letter. I have got 4 brother's and part of them will vote for you any way and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husband’s to vote for you and then you would be President. My father is going to vote for you and if I was a man I would vote for you too but I will try to get every one to vote for you that I can I think that rail fence around your picture makes it look very pretty I have got a little baby sister she is nine weeks old and is just as cunning as can be. When you direct your letter direct to Grace Bedell Westfield Chatauque County New York

I must not write any more answer this letter right off Good bye

Grace Bedell

When the presidential candidate received the letter he was in a quandary.  In the whole history of the Republic there had never been a President with a beard.  Martin Van Buren and his impressive muttonchops had come close, but then he had been run out of Washington after one term for being a dandy and a fop.  And if there is one thing a self-proclaimed Man of the Peoplecannot afford to be it is a fop.  And he had to remember that it was the very first log cabin candidate, William Henry Harrison—who had not really been born in a log cabin at all—that sent the Red Fox of Kinderhook packing back to Albany.

On the other hand, facial hair was becoming all the rage back East, and not just the sign of an ignorant backwoodsmanwho couldn’t afford arazor

But if he grew one, what sort should it be?  A stylish Imperial like Louis Napoleon and his old client the President of the Illinois Central Railroad George McClellan? Neck whiskers like Horace Greeley?  The full patriarchal bush a la John Brown? No, none of those would do.  And Lincoln wasn’t even sure he could raise a decent beard at all.  Still, the girl had a point.  He wrote her back:

My dear little Miss

Your very agreeable letter of the 15th is received—I regret the necessity of saying I have no daughters—I have three sons—one seventeen, one nine, and one seven years of age—They, with their mother, constitute my whole family—As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?

Your very sincere well wisher

A. Lincoln

Despite the non-committal nature of the letter, Lincoln decided to give growing whiskers a try.  By the time he left Springfield for his train trip to Washington, he was sprouting a semi-respectable stubble.

Mr. Lincoln meets Miss Bedell in these statues erected in 1999 in Westfield, New York.

The train made a whistle stop in Westfield.  As was his custom the President-elect stepped to the rear platform to address the crowd.  He asked if Grace Bedell was present and called her forward.  He gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek and told the crowd that she was the inspiration for his new look.

Lincoln and his beard were photographed many times over the next few years.  He settled on a middle-ground kind of beard—a strip of hair that hugged his jaw and chin but still required the attention of a razor to his upper lip, cheeks, and neck.  It aged with him.  Sometimes it was a little longer, sometimes he let the fuzz on his cheeks fill in.  At least once he shaved a little between his sideburns and chin. 

Grace was right, by the way.  He did look better with it. 

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

14 October 2021 at 14:29



Miracles transcend the body. They are sudden shifts into invisibility, away from the bodily level. That is why they heal. T-1.1.17:1-3


A miracle is the shift in perception from the world of the ego to the world of the Spirit. The body is the creation of the ego. The body is constantly changing. It is not a permanent thing and in that sense it isn’t real. The miracle shifts our perception into the realm of the felt but unseen. Miracles are not concerned with bodily and physical things. Miracles are about Love which puts faith in the unseen, the intangible.


In Alcoholic Anonymous it is suggested, in step eleven, that we improve our conscious contact with God through prayer and meditation. This conscious contact has to do more with the heart than the head.


In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote the respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. This respect is an appreciation of the systemic whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. This respect for the systemic whole takes our awareness from the physicality of the parts to an awareness and appreciation of something greater that imbues the parts with connection and disregards their separation and division. This wholeness, holiness, heals what was divided and broken.


Today, it is suggested that we stop separating and dividing and instead apprehend the healing wholes of which things are apart. This understanding of ever ascending wholeness takes us to our Transcendent Source and is immensely healing. Some call this awareness a “miracle.”


Empower Shower and Compassion for Campers Meet Needs of the McHenry County Unhoused

14 October 2021 at 10:45


 

Fall nights are getting cooler and rain is on the way.  Compassion for Campers, the programthat provides camping gear and equipment to the homeless, will have what is needed by those who are sleeping outdoors including warm clothing at the Community Empower Shower event this Friday, October 15 at Willow Crystal Lake, 100 S. Main Street from 10 amto 2 pm.  The following distribution will be held there on Friday, November 5 during the same hours.

Compassion for Campers also has gear available at Warp Corps, Benton Streetin Woodstock, for daily walk-up availability. 

Community Empower Shower provides wide-ranging services for the homeless and those who are facing housing crisis and are held on the first and third Fridays of each month.  

This week and on every third Friday Algonquin Township if providing shuttle bus service to the event from the Fox River Grove Metra Station at 9:30 am and the Crystal Lake Jewel/Osco at 9:45. The shuttle will leave Willow Crystal Lake for the pick-up spots a 1:30 pm.

This week showers will be offered inside the building.

Organizers have included even more groups, agencies, and services for the homeless population.  The Empowerment Shower is a collaborative effort of many organizations and agencies including the Crystal Lake Food Bank, Consumer Credit Counseling, Family Health Partnership Clinic, Home of the Sparrow, Live 4 LALI, McHenry County Housing Authority, Pioneer Center, Prairie State Legal Services, Salvation Army, St. Vincent DePaul Society, Veterans Path to Hope, Willow Crystal Lake, and Warp Corps.

Services offered at no cost include:

 

Showers

Laundry Facilities

Camping Supplies including Tent, Stove, Sleeping Bags

    Toiletries/Personal Care items

Clothing

Onsite Meal

Food

Haircuts

Transportation

Assistance obtaining IDs, birth certificates, Social Security cards

Assistance with SSI/SSDI (Disability)

Assistance with Medical coverage, SNAP, TANF

Medical Access—Doctor care, Covid-19 vaccine

Debt Management Services/Advocacy

Shelter and Housing Referrals and Linkages

Domestic Violence support

Veteran’s Services

Substance Use/Harm Reduction Tools and Support

Mental Health, Spiritual, and Social Support Referrals

 

Compassion for Campers founder and super volunteer Sue Rekenthaler with some of the camping gear offered--sleeping pads, stoves and fuel, rain ponchos, and tents.  Much more is available for free.

Contributions to support Compassion for Campers are urgently needed to continue to purchase supplies for both of the locations sending a check made out to the Tree of Life UU Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road, McHenry, IL 60050 with Compassion for Campers on the memo line. The donations are placed in a dedicated fundand not used for any other purpose.  Tree of Life also donates all the administrative expenses of the program so 100% of all donations go directlyto client assistance.

For more information contact Compassion for Campers coordinator Patrick Murfin at 815 814-5645 or email pmurfin@sbcglobal.net.

 

Dr Ambedkar Converts to Buddhism

14 October 2021 at 08:00
      Sixty-five years ago, today, the 14th of October, 1965, Dr B. R. Ambedkar shook India when he converted to Buddhism. I try to note the major events of his life. Partially because he deserves to be celebrated. But, also to let people who might not otherwise be aware of him, to know […]

Recognize the Duwamish

13 October 2021 at 15:51

https://www.shorelineareanews.com/2021/10/duwamish-plaque-dedication-at-shoreline.html

This past Sunday my congregation dedicated a plaque. Set on our grounds as a reminder that the Duwamish, Chief Seattle’s people, are still here and that the area of Shoreline and Eliot Bay were not given the land they were promised in the treaty of 1855, nor in later agreements. In my sermon I talked about their dispute with the Muckleshoots and the US Federal government. I also encouraged people to visit the Duwamish Long house on Marginal Way, get to know the Duwamish and the Muckleshoots, pay Duwamish Real Rent, and encourage our legislators to help heal old wounds.

Sharing is a miracle.

13 October 2021 at 12:45


Miracles are teaching devices for demonstrating it is as blessed to give as to receive. They simultaneously increase the strength of the giver and supply strength to the receiver. 

T-1.1.16:1-2


A Course In Miracles teaches that we learn what we teach, we get what we give, we experience more vibrantly what we do with others such as sing in a chorus and tell a joke to an appreciative listener who laughs with us.


In Alcoholic Anonymous it is suggested, in step twelve, that we share the spiritual awakening we have experienced in the program with others. Sharing our spiritual awakening, we strengthen it in ourselves and demonstrate the blessings it can imbue in others.


In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to accept one another and and encourage spiritual growth. We are encouraged to share what we have gained from our faith.


Today, as the Holy Spirit inspires us, we can share what we know for ourselves and for others. The key word for the day is “share.” Sharing is a miracle.


From the President’s Palace to the White House

13 October 2021 at 11:13

Architect James Hoban's elevation sketch of the President's Palace after revisions to the original plan were ordered by George Washington.

On October 13, 1792 the cornerstone of the President’s Palace was laid in the virtual wilderness of the Federal District designated as the future Capitol of the infant United States.  President George Washington was in the temporarycapitol of Philadelphia and did not dignify the occasion, as he had when the cornerstone of the Capitol Building was laid by presidingin his Apron for a full Masonic ceremony.  Indeed there was no ceremony at all.

With the cornerstone in place the workforce of mostly slaves hired from their Virginia masters, Black freemen from the Georgetown area, and a handful of immigrant artisans began digging the foundations.  FewAmerican citizens with full rights were ever employed on the project which took eight years to complete at a cost of $232,372—$ 2.8 million in 2007 dollars.  To save money, common brick was used to line the exterior walls which were then faced by sandstone blocks.  The stone masonry was largely the work of Scottish craftsmen employed by the architect, Irishman James Hoban.

                Irishman James Hoban, architect.

Although some interior workand details remained unfinished, the house was deemed habitable when the Capitol was transferred to Washington City.  President John Adams and his dismayed wife Abigail officially moved in on November 1, 1800, just days before the election that would send him packing the next year and leave the building to his archrival, Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson, an amateur architect of some accomplishment, may have had mixed feeling about the building himself.  He had anonymously submitted one of nine designs competing for final selection for the building.  He was disappointed when Washington selected Hoban’s design.

Of course, that competition would not have been possible without the delicate political maneuvering that located the future capitol city on the banks of the Potomac instead of the bustling commercial centers of New Yorkor Philadelphia.

 It was also a tribute to the enormous prestige and influence of the first President.  The authority to establish a federal capital was provided in Article I,Section Eight of the Constitution, which designated a “District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States.”

In what later became known as the Compromise of1790, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Jefferson with the benign approval of Washington, came to an agreement that the federal government would assume war debtcarried by the states, on the condition that the new national capital would be in the South.  The precise location, personally selectedby Washington, was designated in the Residence Act on July 19, 1790.

Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French engineer who laid out the city plan for Washington, envisioned a grand European style palace on the opposite end of a grand boulevard from the Capitol.  Republican virtue demanded a much simpler residence.

Washington commissioned French military engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant to lay out the future city.  He envisioned the spokes-of-a-wheel plan with broad ceremonial avenues and the Capitol Building and President’s house on opposite ends of one such grand boulevard

At the site selected by the President, L’Enfant sketched in the footprint of a truly grand palace on the European scale for the President.  His building would have been five times larger than the one that was eventually built.  Those plans quickly proved to be impractical—both too expensiveand too difficult to acquire the necessary amount of building stone.  It was also politically unacceptable to those who demanded that the new government be housed in edifices of sensible republican simplicity.

As Secretary of State, Jefferson advertised the architectural competition which he entered anonymously.  The final selection was to be made by the official commission overseeing construction of public buildings in the new capital, but in fact it was Washington who personally selected the design submitted by Hoban.

Hoban was one of the few—some say the only—trained architects in the county.  He had emigrated from Ireland after the Revolution and first established a practice in Philadelphia.  But after moving to North Carolina, he began to get commissions for important public buildings, like the Charleston County Courthouse which Washington saw and admired on his presidential tourof the Southern states.  He personally invited Hoban to submit a design to the contest.

Leinster House, now seat of the government of the Republic of Ireland in Dublin was an inspiration for Hoban's design.

For inspiration, Hoban drew on the Georgian country houses of the Anglo-Irish aristocracyand particularly on Leinster House, the Dublin seat of the Duke of Leinster and destined to become the home of the Irish Parliament in the 20th Century.  Despite winning the competition, Washington demanded substantial changes from his architect.  He ordered the elevation changed from three to two floors, but that the dimensions of the building be expanded by 30% and include a large ceremonial space for balls and public receptions—the commodious East Room. Hoban’s surviving drawings reflect these changes—the originals submitted for the competition having been lost.

Upon completion the porous sandstone was sealed with a whitewash consisting of a mixture of lime, rice glue, casein, and lead.  This belies the popular story that the building was only painted white to cover the scorch and smoke damage from the burning of Washington by the British during the War of 1812.  Informal references to the building as the White House have been found as early as 1811.  It is possible that the original whitewash was fading or dirtiedby the time the British put a torch to the building.  At any rate, the fresh white paintapplied during the restoration undoubtedly contributed to the informal use of the name.

A painting of the President's House in 1814 before it was burned by the British in the War of 1812.  Note its already white color and its relative isolation in the still rustic village of Washington.

Jefferson rejected the name Presidential Palace preferred by Adams as too aristocratic.  Under his administration it was commonly simply called the President’s House and for the next century the house was officially named the Executive Mansion.  Theodore Roosevelt changed the official designation to the White House in 1901.

The building has undergone many modifications over the years, starting with the colonnades that Jefferson had constructed out from each side of the house to screen the stables, greenhouses, and domestic outbuildings—including slave quarters—from view from Pennsylvania Avenue.  The southportico was constructed in 1824 during the James Monroeadministration and the north porticowas built six years later.  Both followed plans originally drawn by Hoban. 

The earliest known photo of the Executive Mansion, a daguerreotype taken in 1847. 

In 1881 Chester Arthur ordered a significant remodel of the building’s interior.  Theodore Roosevelt added the West Wing, which his successor William Howard Taft expanded, and the Oval Office was added.  Herbert Hoover added a second floor to the West Wing following a fire there and added extensive basement office space for an expanding staff. Franklin Roosevelt moved the Oval Office to its present location by the Rose Garden.  Harry Truman added the still controversial balcony to the South Portico.

                           Work during the almost total reconstruction of the White House during the Truman administration.

During Truman’s administration the building was found in danger of collapse from neglect.  The President moved to near-by Blair House for two years as the interior was gutted and reconstructed.  In 1961 First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy began her interior restoration of the building to its French Empireinspired appearance during the later Madison and Monroe years.

The White House now routinely undergoes modifications with the coming of each administration.  President Barack Obama ordered the instillation of solar panelsto replace those put up by Jimmy Carterand taken down by Ronald Regan.  His wife Michelle built extensive vegetable gardenson the grounds which had not been used for agricultural purposes since sheep were kept browsing the lawn.  Of course, among the former Resident first fits of spite and revenge was to remove the solar panels and obliterate the gardens.  He also trashed up the interior with his beloved gaudy gold bling wherever he could, and Melania famously maimed the Rose Garden.

Joe Biden has so far been too busy undoing the Cheeto’s disastrous policies and trying to get his ambitious agenda through Congress to spend much time re-doing the official offices and dwellings beyond hangingand displaying art and making the private residence rooms more modestand comfortable.

The official logo of the White House features the North Portico which faces Lafayette  Square. 

There is continual work expanding or improving the vast underground complex that now extends below much of the White House lawn and houses offices, communications centers,and, reportedly, a hardened bunkercapable of withstanding a nuclear attack

But the core of the building remains as Hoban and Washington imagined it more than two hundred years ago. 

There Are Four Lights

13 October 2021 at 09:00
When someone spouts conspiracy theories about Covid, when they overstate the side effects of vaccines and understate their effectiveness, when they deny or ignore almost 5 million deaths, I hear “there are five lights.”

Recalling the Buddhist Founder Nichiren & His Many Followers

13 October 2021 at 08:00
        On the 13th of October, in 1282 the Japanese Buddhist priest, controversialist, and founder, Nichiren died. In 1253 by our common reckoning Nichiren had his realization that the Lotus Sutra was the epitome of all Buddhist teachings. This was a commonly held view. But, he took it one step further, saying […]

Bad UU hiring practices

12 October 2021 at 18:05

Over the past year, I’ve talked to quite a few UU professionals who are thinking about changing jobs. Mind you, this happens every year. If you have a professional job in a small nonprofit, the typical path for job advancement is to find a job at another, slightly larger, nonprofit. This is obviously true for part-time directors of religious education — the quickest path for a part-time professional to advance in their career is to find a similar position elsewhere that’s full-time. There’s also the classic career path for full-time senior ministers — stay in a small congregation for about seven years (until you get your first sabbatical), then move to a larger congregation that pays more.

The result of all this is a constant movement of professional employees — directors of religious education and parish ministers — among UU congregations. This kind of movement is actually a good thing, because it helps spread best practices and new ideas from one UU congregation to another. It also provides an obvious upward career path, which means we all can continue to attract the best talent into our congregations.

Problem is, there are too many UU congregations who do a lousy job of hiring new employees. I’m going to give three examples of lousy hiring practices by UU congregations. I’m going to change details to protect the innocent — and by “protect the innocent,” I don’t mean I’m going to protect the UU congregations who have lousy hiring practices — no, I mean I’m going to protect the UU professionals who provided some of these examples for me.

Requiring more than full-time work

Several months ago, a colleague showed me a job posting where a UU congregation in the northeastern U.S. posted a job that required eight hours a day, six days a week.

The first problem with this is that it’s stupid. Back in June, 2019, Shainaz Firfiray, Associate Professor of Organisation and Human Resource Management at the Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, England, wrote a piece for The Conversation titled “Long hours at the office could be killing you,” in which she cites growing evidence that a 35 hour work week is most efficient, whereas longer work weeks can cause stress, anxiety, and depression. That’s even more true in the middle of the pandemic, where I’m seeing a huge increase in stress, anxiety, and depression among UU professionals.

I know we have congregational polity, so no one can stop your congregation from being stupid and demanding six day work weeks of your professionals. But if you do that, please do not complain to me or express surprise when your professionals grow stressed, anxious, and depressed — and then become less efficient and effectual — and even in the worst case scenario engage get driven into unethical or unprofessional behavior. Do not complain or express surprise, and also, please, accept full responsibility for being stupid.

The second problem with demanding a six day work week is that it’s unethical. Why? Well, first of all, if you claim to be paying a salary that conforms to UUA guidelines for this six-day-a-week job, you’re lying. The UUA guidelines are for full-time work, so if you’re demanding more than full-time hours, then you’re not paying the salary required by guidelines. I’ll walk you through this. Let’s take the example of a parish minister in a small congregation with fewer than 150 members in Geo Index 3. For full-time work, the UUA guidelines call for a range of $54,100 to $76,500. If you’re demanding a six-day work week, then on an hourly basis you should pay time-and-a-half for every hour over 40 hours. That gives a salary range of $70,330 to $99, 450. So if you advertise a salary range of $54,100 to $76,500, require a six-day workweek, and claim to be meeting UUA guidelines, you are in effect lying.

There’s another reason why this is unethical. It’s treating your professional employee like a wage slave. Actually, a congregation that demands a six day work week of its professionals is treating them worse than wage slaves. I spent twelve years punching a time clock, and when you punch a time clock your employer tends to be very respectful of your extra hours. But an unscrupulous employer will ask for more and more hours from a more-than-full-time salaried employee, because demanding more doesn’t cost them a cent.

Not publicly advertising the salary

Recently, BBC News reported on “Why companies don’t post salaries in job adverts.” UU congregations appear to be part of this world-wide trend. Over the past year, UU colleagues have pointed out to me several instances of UU congregations posting jobs that give no indication of what the salary is.

In addition, there now seems to be a trend of posting jobs with the vague claim that the congregation “pays UUA guidelines.” Except that when you get to the interview, it turns out that the salary that’s offered is the lowest possible salary the congregation can get away with. A year ago, I was shown one job posting for a religious educator that claimed to “pay UUA guidelines.” Now for religious educators, there are five different salary levels based on your level of experience and training. For example, the salary ranges for a full-time religious educator position in a mid-sized II (250-349 members) congregation in Geo Index 3 range from $55,100 to $65,200 for a Credentialed Masters Level religious educator, down to a range from $34,700 to $37,900 for an inexperienced, untrained Religious Education Coordinator. When my colleague got to the interview, this congregation that claimed to “pay UUA guidelines” for a Director of Religious Education was actually only offering $34,700, the lowest possible salary for a Religious Education Coordinator. That’s dishonest.

It’s not only dishonest, it’s stupid. As the BBC reports, “knowing the expected salary upfront lets a candidate understand whether a job will be financially viable for them.” So the hiring committee is actually wasting its own time reviewing applications and conducting interviews with people who are going to turn them down when they hear what the salary is. Furthermore, it’s also stupid because, according to the BBC, “organisations that are more transparent about their salaries can win over the best candidates and attract diverse applicants.” BBC quotes one expert as saying, “if the salary banding isn’t there, I think there can be a tendency for some of the better talent on the market to not apply.” In short, lack of salary transparency means you’ll attract a lower-quality and less diverse talent pool.

Finally, it’s not only dishonest and stupid, it’s also illegal in some states. As of 2019, Colorado requires employers to disclose pay ranges in all job listings. Similar legislation is pending in other states. The very title of the Colorado law makes it clear that this is a justice issue — “Equal Pay for Equal Work At” –and the law is designed to eliminate the gender pay gap, and all other pay disparities. So to avoid potential fines, and to hep further justice in the work world, you might as well get in the habit of posting the salary range in your job listings.

Cheating on benefits

Some UU congregations post jobs where they claim to compensate at UUA salary guidelines, but then they don’t offer the full benefits package called for under UUA guidelines. So technically, they’re not lying — the congregation is in fact paying the salary called for under UUA guidelines. But the total compensation package does not meet UUA guidelines. That’s dishonest. It’s the old bait-and-switch game.

Actually, sometimes it goes beyond dishonest into stupid. A colleague showed me one job posting where the congregation claimed to pay at UUA salary guidelines. Of course the actual salary wasn’t listed. But they did list the benefits. And the benefits package wasn’t even close to the UUA recommendations. I guess they assumed that applicants were going to be either desperate enough not to care, or ignorant enough not to look at the UUA guidelines. It’s stupid when you go out of your way to try and attract applicants who are desperate and/or ignorant. It’s also stupid to assume applicants are going to be desperate, when in actuality there’s a nationwide labor shortage.

Lessons to be learned

First lesson to be learned: There’s a labor shortage right now. If UU congregations want to attract the best candidates, especially if they want to attract more diverse candidates, they need to offer reasonable hours, they need to be transparent in their job postings, and they need to offer a decent benefits package.

Second lesson to be learned: If the congregation’s budget won’t pay for all the staff they want, trying to squeeze more work out of your staffers for less pay is not the way to go. You’ll get lower quality work, and pissed-off staffers. Either raise more money, or reduce your expectations of what you can get out of staff.

Third lesson to be learned: Financially, it’s gotten to be a harsh world for small nonprofits. We all know that staff cuts are going to be the norm for most congregations for the foreseeable future. We all know that the way to attract the best talent in this harsh world is to be fair and transparent. And I’m predicting that the congregations that attract the best talent, the most diverse talent, are going to be the congregations that survive — and even thrive — in the face of today’s harsh financial realities.

Are you devoted to miracles?

12 October 2021 at 14:02


Are you devoted to miracles?


Each day should be devoted to miracles. The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning. T-1.1.15:1-4


A miracle is a shift in perception from the world of the ego to the world of the spirit (love.) Each day we should devote ourselves to paying attention to love. Paying attention to love is a constructive use of our time which, here in the body, is limited. The time here in the body is to be used to learn, to become consciously aware of Love’s presence and to eliminate the barriers and obstacles which prevent us from doing so. Once we have done this, time has no meaning because our awareness will have become one with our Transcendent Source, the Infinite Presence.


In Alcoholic Anonymous it is suggested, in step eleven, that we improve our conscious contact with the God of our understanding through prayer and meditation, what we call today, mindfulness. When miracle principle 15 suggests that we devote ourselves each day to miracles it is this mindfulness it is speaking of.


In Unitarian Universalism we join together to affirm and promote a respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. This respect takes devotion. Miracle principle 15 suggests that each day we devote ourselves to miracles which involve an awareness of the interdependent web of existence.


Today, it is suggested that we be mindful and continually ask ourselves, “What would Love have me do?”


A Red, White and Blue Propaganda Coup—The Scary Ogre With the Shoe

12 October 2021 at 11:21

Photoshop was far in the future in 1960 when a loafer was maladroitly manipulated into a photo of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's pounding fist at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly.

For those of us of a certain vintage, the image of the evil dictator of Communist Russia, an ugly little man who resembled a pig, pounding his shoe on a table at the United Nations confirmed our worst fearsthat the possibility of a nuclear World War III was in the hands of a crude mad man.  And that’s exactly what we were supposed to think.

According to most of the almanacs I consult regularly in preparation of these blog posts, it was October 12 1960 when Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party and Premier of the Soviet Unionthrew that famous temper tantrum.

But it turns out that it may have been September 23 or 29, or October 13 during the Plenary Meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York.  It may have come in protest to a speech by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan or remarks by Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong.  He was visibly upset by statements of both men.

He may have banged his shoe at the podium…or at his seat in the Soviet delegation…or perhaps not at all.

And the old man was not really a dictator, as in the single,unquestioned authority of the nation in the way of Hitler, Stalin, or Third World generalissimos.

How could we have gotten it so wrong?

The trouble is, there is no documentation of the event in the official records of the United Nations.  In the daily press it was not mentioned in reports on any of the possible dates.  No footage could be found in the archives of NBC and CBC, both of which covered the General Assembly regularly and often broadcast important speeches live.  Nor has any authentic photograph of the episode been found—more on that later. 

Fuzzy accounts of the event have been pieced together from memories and memoirs, many of which don’t agree.

The meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in the fall of 1960 gripped world attention, dominated U.S. news, and attracted top international leaders.  In addition to Khrushchev's temper tantrums the session is remembered for the appearance of Cuba's Fidel Castro and a retinue in fatigue uniforms.

In retrospect, it is astonishingthat the leader of one of the most powerful nations on Earth came to the major city of his chief rival to sit for hours daily over a span of weeks for the meeting of the Security Council.  And he wasn’t the only one—Macmillan was only one of the topWestern leaders who did the same, as did a parade of presidents, prime ministers, kings, and despots from lesser nations.  If Dwight Eisenhower elected only to attend briefly to make his annual speechand to consult with world leaders in private meetings, the United States was represented at the top level by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as well as the Cabinet level Ambassador to the world body.  It shows how important the UN was viewed in those distant days.

Most historians now discount the possibility that the shoe came off in September.  He did take to the podium, pounding his fists, in angry denunciation of Macmillan’s speech that day.  Later an AP photo of that diatribe would be altered by someone, and a shoe inserted into Khrushchev’s fist.  It was released and widely circulated by the mediawithin weeks of the alleged event and not questioned at the time.  Who made the alteration and how did get to the media?  No one seems to know, but it has all the earmarks of a classic intelligence service disinformation operation.

The consensusnow is that it was Sumulong’s speech on October 12 that was the trigger—if the event happened at all.  The Philippine delegate rose in support of an anti-colonial resolution that had the supportof the Soviets and their allies.  The delegate spoke as a representative of a nation with a colonial past which had achieved its independence.  Of course, the Philippines, while independent, were known as a staunch ally of their former colonial master, the United States.  Although the resolution was tailored to the remaining colonial holdings of the Westernpowers, Sumulong strayed from the topic at hand to offer a slap at the Soviet Union:

 …It is our view that the declaration proposed by the Soviet Union should cover the inalienable right to independence not only of the peoples and territories which yet remain under the rule of Western colonial Powers, but also of the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights and which have been swallowed up, so to speak, by the Soviet Union.

An enraged Khrushchev was recognizedon a point of order and rushed the podium. He shoved the Philippine diplomat aside and launched an extended diatribe calling Sumulong a “jerk, a stooge, and a lackey…a toady of American imperialism” and demanding that he be ruled out of order.  Assembly President Frederick Boland of Ireland did caution the Sumulong to “avoid wandering out into an argument which is certain to provoke further interventions.”  But Sumulong was permitted to continue his speechand Khrushchev returned to his seat in the Soviet delegation.

At least one person remembersthe Soviet premier as using his shoe at the rostrum in this confrontation.

Khrushchev, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and others in the Soviet delegation pound their fists at their desks in protest.

But most agree that it happened after he sat back down.  As the Filipino continued to speak, Khrushchev pounded both fists angrily on his desk, joined obediently by other members of the Soviet delegation and Eastern Bloc nations.  In fact, he pounded so hard that his watchstopped or flew off his wrist—not speaking well of qualityof Soviet consumer goods.  According to a memoir by Khrushchev’s daughter Nina, confirmedby interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev who sat next to him, he looked down and saw his shoe, which he had removed for some reason earlier and spontaneously picked it up and began pounding the table.  He never, as some reports had it, removed the shoe from his foot, a virtual impossibility in the cramped spaceof the desk and given his girth.

The only evidence of a shoe--it rests on the desk in front of Khrushchev as the delegation listens quietly and evidently with some amusement.

Decorum at the session soon broke down and it was gaveled to adjournment by President Boland, who was being abused and booed from the Soviet bloc seats.

However, other accounts do not remember or mention the shoe at all.

To make matters even more confusing in his own memoirs Khrushchev remembered a shoe pounding incident but placed it in an entirely different context—a protest to remarks by a diplomat from Franco’s Spain.  A later published edition, however, contained a footnote saying that the incident was misremembered.

An English translation of Khrushchev's memoirs in which he gave a garbled and erroneous account of the shoe banning.

That United Nations trip is also remembered for Khrushchev’s own addressto the world body in which he famously said of the United States, “We will bury you.”  That was played in the U.S. press as a threatof nuclear annihilation.  In fact, translators and linguists are unanimous that he had a different, less threatening meaning.  He was quoting a well-known Russian proverb that means “we will survive you and see you in your grave.”  It was a prediction of the triumph of Communism over capitalism as inevitable, but not a threat of war.

No matter what happened, Americans were soon convinced that Khrushchev was an arch-villain and dictator.  In fact, although he had consolidated considerable power in the Party, Khrushchev was never able to rule alone.  He was answerable to the Presidium of the Party and to the larger Polit Bureau, each of which included powerful rivals who limited his freedom ofaction.

Moreover, in the Soviet sense, Khrushchev was a liberal and reformer.  He had presided over de-Stalinization of the Party.  He had also loosened economic regulations, liberalized the still restricted freedom of writers and intellectualsto express themselves, and broke with the most aggressive military ambitions of hard liners.  Western intelligence agencies undoubtedly knew all of this.

In fact, four years later Khrushchev was deposed by the hardliners led by Leonid Brezhnev.

But to keep up public supportfor continued high defense spending and the proclaimed policy of aggressive containment of Communism, it was necessary to paint the Soviet leaders in the same stark terms as the U.S.’s late enemies in World War II.

All of this should be kept well in mind as one after another leaders of smalland weak nations are portrayed to the American people as, inevitably, Hitlers.


Noting Aleister Crowley’s Birthday

12 October 2021 at 08:00
      Aleister Crowley was born on this day, October 12th, in 1875. He is one of those figures I visit in this blog from time to time. The last time looks to be five years ago. What follows is an updated version of that last entry. I believe the first time I became […]

Noted without comment

11 October 2021 at 17:23

Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn now lives in the Bay Area, where he attends the Lighthouse Church in San Francisco, and plays in the worship band. According to a recent news article — about how he recently recorded four songs that will benefit the church’s homeless ministries — being a Christian in the U.S. may require apology:

“While he doesn’t have ‘any hesitation’ identifying as a Christian, [Cockburn] is starting to wonder if that’s such a good thing to say in public in the U.S. these days. If someone asks if he’s a Christian, he still says, ‘Yes, I’m a Christian, but I got vaccinated.'”

Insidious Undermining

11 October 2021 at 16:55

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

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

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

This week everybody was talking about Congress

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

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

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


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

and the Trump coup

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

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

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

Josh Marshall makes an analogy:

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


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

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

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

and Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the Texas abortion law

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the pandemic

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

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

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


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


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


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

and you also might be interested in …

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

and let’s close with something sexy

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

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQr8xDk_UaY?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&w=530&h=299]

SECOND THURSDAYS WITH JAMES: Conversations with Zen teacher and Unitarian Universalist Minister James Ishmael ford

11 October 2021 at 15:45
    SECOND THURSDAYS WITH JAMES at the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles   October through June, 2021, we will be exploring the religions and other related topics that have particularly caught our consulting minister Rev. James Ishmael Ford’s imagination over the years. These conversations are not meant to be comprehensive, but lightly touching […]

What to Make of the Pandora Papers?

11 October 2021 at 15:22
https://cartoonmovement.com/cartoon/looters-0

There are reasons why you should care.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brooke Harrington:

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

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

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

But it’s not going to stop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-bramhall-editorial-cartoons-2021-jul-20210714-q3ci53xdj5fnlop6bxwz63pbk4-photogallery.html

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

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

It’s got to stop.

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

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

Will you bear witness to the true, the good, and the beautiful?

11 October 2021 at 13:28




Miracles bear witness to truth. They are convincing because they arise from conviction. Without conviction they deteriorate into magic, which is mindless and therefore destructive; or rather, the uncreative use of the mind. T-1.1.14:1-3


Miracles, remember, in A Course In Miracles is the shift of perception from the world of the ego to the world of the spirit. When we perceive the world of the spirit, love, we are witnessing truth. Jesus taught that the way to the kingdom is “to love as I have loved.” The love that Jesus is talking about is unconditional. We love just because we choose to. It does not depend on other factors. When love is conditional it descends into magic and can be destructive. Conditional love is transactional and as such is subject to multiple distortions and deceptive machinations.


In Alcoholic Anonymous it is suggested, in step eleven, that we improve our conscious contact with God through prayer and meditation and this conscious contact is a miracle.


In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning and this search eventually brings us to the realm of miracles which is based on conviction about what is the true, good and beautiful. Magic is counterfeit and leads to anger and sorrow. Unconditional love, as the Universalists taught, is the real deal and brings us to truth.


Today, it is encouraged that we bear witness to the existence of love which is often hidden by the idols of the ego. We are encouraged to look behind the veil of magic to the true, the good, and the beautiful which is infinite and permanent.


The Monday Morning Teaser

11 October 2021 at 12:22

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

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

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

Look for that around 1.

Nixing a Plundering Invader and Celebrating the Peoples Nearly Eradicated by his Ilk with Murfin Verse

11 October 2021 at 11:12

Today is celebrated as Indigenous People’s Day in most of the Americas and in other parts of the world.  I first blogged the still spreading and growing recognition that has its official origins in the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007.  But in the United States Native Americans have been staging actions, protests, and alternative events to a Federal Holiday on the Second Monday in October for decades.

That’s right, your calendar probably marked today as Columbus Dayin recognition of Cristoforo Colombo/Cristóbal Colón/Christopher Columbus.  I’ve blogged about him, too, and his alleged discovery—alleged because he didn’t know where he was going, found” what was never lost, claimed what wasn’t his to take, and didn’t even know where the hell he was.  When just about everyone else in Europe had figured out that he never reached the East Indies or Asia he continued to lie about it.


None-the-less the mercenary mariner was rewarded with fancy titlesAdmiral of the Ocean Sea for one—and made Viceroyover half the damned world.  And he screwed that up by being so brutal that he virtually wiped out the once numerous Carib peoples who inhabited the islands under his immediate effective sway.  He also bullied and oppressed potential rivals—would be Conquistadors of even richer realms on the mainland, many of whom had better connections at Court than a Genoan hireling.  He was stripped of his titles,wealth confiscated, and shipped to Spain in disgrace and chains.

Not much to celebrate there.

Yet despite the fact that Columbus never set foot in North America—the closest he got was wandering around portions of Central America after being abandoned by mutineers and quite typically lost—he somehow became an iconic folk figure and symbol of the New World to the English and overwhelming Protestant colonists hugging to the Atlantic shore far to the north of any of his voyages. 

Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian sailor with even less to justify it, swooped in and got his name attached to two continents just because he knew the right cartographer.  But Columbia was a popular alternative name for Western Hemisphere lands and some Patriots wanted to officially adopt it for their new country.  Think of the song, once almost an unofficial national anthem, Columbia the Gem of the Oceanand other evidence.  When Thomas Jefferson’s pal Joel Barlow, a diplomat and literary dabbler, wanted to create a national epic poem he churned out The Columbiad, a turgid contemplation of Columbus and the new world.

Around the 400th anniversary of the alleged discovery in 1892 interest in him was elevated by events around the world, but particularly at Chicagos World Columbian Exposition.  American Catholics—a struggling and despised minority—looked to the notoriously pious Columbus who had slaughtered all of those natives in the guise of converting them to the One True Church to establish their bona fides as worthy AmericansThus, the Knights of Columbus became the Catholic answer to the WASP Masonic Lodges.

But it was urban Italians, among the last European immigrants to become White, in the big cities of the East Coast and Midwest who made Columbus Day and lavish annual parades and answer to the earlier immigrants—especially the Irish—in their struggle for a fat slice of the patronage and privilege pie of the Democratic Party machines.

In the early 1970's even before the United Nations declaration Native Americans from the American Indian Center in Uptown marched through the Chicago Loop to protest when their request to participate in the annual Columbus Day Parade was curtly turned down.  Protests, counter demonstrations, and marches grew year by year.

As protests against honoring a figure who represented centuries of land theft,colonial subjugation, genocide, and cultural annihilation has grown, support for the holiday has waned.  City after City and several States have officially dumped Columbus Day, and most have adopted some form on Indigenous Peoples Day in its stead.  Support had dwindled to indignant Italian civic organizations and the kind of cultural fuddy-duddies who cannot stomach change of any kind.

More recently, however, a sub-set of the Alt-Right and neo-fascist movements who claim to honor and preserve European culture and secure its dominance in American society, have begun to make war on the anti-Columbus Day warriors, especially attacking Native Americans and a “cultural elite of race traitors.”

This year President Joe Biden proclaimed the second Monday in October as Federal Indigenous Peoples Day.  That did not, however, erase Columbus Day which was created and recognized by Congress.  The two celebrations are like bitterly divorced spouses forced to continue to live together in the same house.

Anyway, all of that is more than I intended to write about Columbus.  By now you know the story.  So I celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day.  I hope you do too.

In honor of the occasion, I am revisiting a verse I wrote in 2016 just during the most important Native American resistance in decades—the campsto block the Dakota Access Pipeline which threatened to pollute the Missouri River and defile traditional Sioux lands.  May their long and valiant prayerful witness be inscribed in the sacred winter count and sung of around the campfires for all of the generationsthey were trying to protect.

Photo of a mural taken by my old college pal Bill Delaney at Art Alley Gallery in Rapid City, South Dakota.

Tonto Will Not Ride into Town for You

For The Camp of the Sacred Stone 9/30/2016

 

Tonto will not ride into town for you, Kemosabe,

            and be beat to pulp by the bad guys

            on your fool’s errand.

 

Pocahontas will not throw her nubile, naked body

            over your blonde locks

            to save you from her Daddy’s war club.

 

Squanto will not show you that neat trick

            with the fish heads and maize

            and will watch you starve on rocky shores.

 

Chingachgook will save his son and lineage

            and let you and your White women

            fall at Huron hands and be damned.

 

Sacajawea and her babe will not show you the way

            or introduce you to her people,

            and leave you lost and doomed in the Shining Mountains.

 

Sitting Bull will not wave and parade with your Wild West Show

            nor Geronimo pose for pictures for a dollar

            in fetid Florida far from home.

 

They are on strike form your folklore and fantasy,

            have gathered with the spirits of all the ancestors

            to dance on the holy ground, the rolling prairie

            where the buffalo were as plentiful

            as the worn smooth stones of the Mnišoše,

            the mighty river that flows forever.

 

They are called by all the nations from the four corners

            of the turtle back earth who have gathered here,

            friends and cousins, sworn enemies alike,

            united now like all of the ancestors

            to kill the Black Snake, save the sacred water,

            the soil where the bones of ancestors rest,

            and the endless sky where eagle, Thunderbird, and Raven turn.

 

Tonto has better things to do, Kemosabe…

 

—Patrick Murfin

 

Nestorian Christianity: A Survey of materials and scholarship concerning Nestorianism / East-Syriac Christianity in China

11 October 2021 at 08:00
      景教 Nestorian Christianity A Survey of materials and scholarship concerning Nestorianism / East-Syriac Christianity in China From the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism (shared here with permission of the author) Jeffrey Kotyk (I have a long fascination with the Nestorian mission to China. And the hybridization of that tradition with indigenous Chinese culture […]

Thinking about the Great Questions of Human Existence

10 October 2021 at 21:30

 


THINKING ABOUT THE GREAT QUESTIONS OF HUMAN EXISTENCE

Rev. Kit Ketcham

Oct. 10, 2021


When I was a kid, growing up in a pretty strict Baptist minister’s household with my very devout parents, every religious question seemed to already have an answer, an answer that never changed much.

Who is God?  Well, of course, God is Jesus’ father and is everywhere, sees everything, controls everything, and will punish anyone who does bad things.  And, oh by the way, God is love, also.

What is the Bible?  Well, it’s God’s message to us, his people, and every word is true.  It is a history book and tells us all the important events of Jesus’ life, as well as what came before Jesus arrived.

Who was Jesus?  Jesus was the son of God, born to a human mother.  He was perfect, never did anything wrong (unlike me), and he was God too, in a way.  And he died on the cross to save us from our sins.

What is a sin?  It’s anything you do, deliberately or accidentally, that makes God mad at you.

What should I do with my life?  Well, as a Christian, you are expected to give your life to God in service.  You can be anything you feel capable of being, but your primary mission in life is to serve God and teach about Jesus and how to be saved.

There were slight variations on the theme, every time the questions were asked, but there was always an answer, always pretty much the same.  And questioning those answers was frowned upon, even though the correction might bes delivered lovingly and sincerely.

It was pretty soothing to know that there were answers to everything, that no question about God or life or good and evil was unanswerable.  At least when I was ten years old.

At age ten, I knew better than to ask a second time, knew better than to argue with the answers, knew better than to voice my own opinions, as they began to come along, with education and with the advent of my own ability to think critically.  By the time I was in college, though, and away from home, the answers to my questions were beginning to shift.  I wasn’t so comfortable any more with the old answers.

And over the years, I came to understand that there were questions underneath these questions.  That my question about God and what or who God was could be stated another way:  who or what is in charge of the universe? Or is anything or anyone in charge?  What runs the universe? How did the universe come to be?  What is the power beyond human power?

My question about the Bible could be rephrased too:  how do I know what to believe?  Who can I trust, when it comes to spiritual teachings?  If the Bible was written by humans and humans aren’t perfect, how could the Bible be perfect?  Are there other writings that are inspirational and that I can trust?

As I grew older and somewhat more wise, I came to understand that there are many heroes like Jesus, that there were many stories about those heroes and heroines, and that some of them had very similar miracle stories, as in being born of a virgin or healing people or performing other miraculous deeds.

When it came to the idea of sin, it occurred to me that maybe the question beneath the question is “what is human nature and why do humans so often behave badly toward each other?”

Human beings question things.  Human beings are even more curious, I think, than the legendary cat, the one curiosity killed.  And the questions we ask as we develop our own worldview and ethical standards tend to stir up a lot of the world’s anxieties:  “Is it ever okay to end a life?  How was the universe created?  Who, if anyone, should be privileged over others?”

When I went to seminary in 1995, I had certainly heard the word “theology” many, many times.  To me, at that point, it mostly meant doctrine or dogma, beliefs by various religions that formed the backbone of their religious practice and were the standard by which people became members of that religious community.

Literally, the word theology means “study of God” and for many religions, that’s what it is.  But non-theistic or pluralistic religions have a different take on it; it’s more the “study of the sacred” or ultimate value and a recognition of the idea of sacredness.

Because people who are agnostic or atheist or Buddhist or pagan or any non-theistic religious path have reverence for the sacred but do not necessarily have a concept of God, at least not a traditional concept of God.

Yet most human beings who are introspective at all or critical thinkers do ask themselves big questions and the questions tend to be similar in nature.  In seminary, I learned to think of these questions in categories.

There is the question of ontology or being:  who am I?  what is the nature of humanity?

There is the question of epistemology or knowledge:  how do I know what I know?  What is the ultimate source of human knowledge?

There is the question of cosmology, or rulership:  who or what is in charge of the universe?  What is the power that infuses life with meaning?

There is the question of soteriology:  What can heal me or make me whole?

And there’s the question of eschatology, or the end of days:  What does my death mean?  What is the state of human beings beyond death?

These are questions of ultimate concern for humans, questions that circle around us throughout our lives, changing form, expressed as yearnings, even depression, and joggling us into attention from time to time.  These are the questions that live deeply within us and, depending on the circumstances of our lives, arise to haunt us on occasion, even when we think we may have answered them once and for all.

Over time, doctrines and dogmas have developed to answer these questions in certain ways.  Religious doctrines and dogmas are efforts to institutionalize thinking about the great questions of human life.  Most religions expect their followers to believe in and follow the doctrines and dogmas in order to attain the blessings of the universe, or God as they understand God.

Unitarian Universalism does not have specific doctrines or dogmas that we are expected to follow.  We have our seven principles (going on eight, with the proposed addition of a principle about anti-racism), and these principles are behavior-based, rather than belief-based.  We do not test people on whether or not they adhere to the principles at every moment.  But our principles nevertheless suggest approaches to the great questions of human life.  And one unique feature of our faith tradition is that we are open to new truth and can change our thinking if compelling evidence presents itself.

We as individuals find our answers in our own experience of life; we are guided by the ideas of influential other humans, our own early religious learnings, science, the philosophies of many world religions, and our own knowledge of the earth and its cycles. We bring all these influences into this community and learn to live with the diversity of thought that we find here.  We do not all hold the same theology and that is good.  We do tend to hold similar values.

How and why did we humans begin to think about these questions?  Human beings from time immemorial have puzzled over their relationships with the world around them, recognizing that we have so little control over some of the events of our lives, and wondering how to influence those powers that seem to supersede our powers.

Out of a desire to influence the uncontrollable universe, ancient human beings devised ceremonies and behaviors that might convince the universe (or the gods) to favor them:  sacrifices of goods, crops, animals, even fellow humans.  They learned to work in concert with the universe, planting crops at certain times, using all the materials they had at hand as tools, as fertilizer, as shelter, as food, using the stars and planets, sun and moon as directional guides.

Out of these ancient practices grew many of today’s traditional religious practices and beliefs:  baptism of humans represents cleansing---of food or bodies or clothing—or the soul.  Jesus’ death on the cross is seen by many Christians as the ultimate sacrificial gift, as recompense for human sin, which was the function of sacrifice in ancient times, to appease angry gods.  Prayer for mercy from the weather gods expanded to become prayer for any number of blessings, including success in the stock market or on the football field.

Still, despite our growing sophistication, our scientific understandings, and our differences in religious thinking, we still feel a drive to be in right relationship with the universe.  We study it, we want to understand it, we stand in awe at its beauty, we think about what our lives within it are like, what we’d like them to be like, what our potentialities within that universe might be.  And we do what we can to influence and/or moderate the universe’s effect on our lives.

In past centuries, it has also become increasingly obvious that our relationship with the earth (and the universe by extension) has become toxic; we lost sight, over the centuries, of proper care of the earth and its resources.  So our efforts to reclaim a right relationship with the earth have resulted in a heightened awareness of our need to befriend and care for the earth as part of our being in right relationship with the power of the universe.

What is the function of questioning in human life?  What does it mean that we ask questions?  In the beginning, we humans needed to learn how to survive on the planet; we asked questions of the earth, of our companions, of the animals we saw.  We built upon those answers to create a body of knowledge about the earth and the universe which enabled us to live more comfortably.

Since the beginning of time, human beings have asked questions about answers that seemed incomplete or based on faulty reasoning or, as our understandings of how things work developed, too reliant on supernatural forces which could be debunked.

Even the most seemingly-solid answers were open to question as humanity evolved into an organism which had a great capacity for understanding, for high levels of reasoning, for exploratory methods which could open doors to ideas never before considered.

Questioners in ancient times were often seen as heretics, as sorcerers, as eccentrics whose wild ideas were dangerous to the established order.  As religions became more institutionalized, questioners of the orthodox answers were often anathematized or excommunicated, from the body of believers, even executed.

As we consider what Unitarian Universalist theology has become, as it diverged from orthodox Christianity, it is useful to draw a general timeline of our theological history.

We are a descendent of the religion established in the wake of the prophet Jesus’ ministry on earth, over 2000 years ago.  However, when that religion (now called Christianity) institutionalized the doctrine that the Divine was three Beings in one (now called the Trinity and defined as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit), our religious ancestors disagreed.  At that time, this heretical strand of belief was called anti-Trinitarianism but gradually acquired the name Unitarian, for its understanding of the Divine as One Being.

Some years, perhaps centuries later, Universalism as a religious idea, also heretical, formed in response to the idea of hell and eternal damnation for nonbelievers.  Our religious ancestors observed the nature of God and decided that if God was love, then God would not condemn beloved children to eternal hellfire, even if they misbehaved badly.  This too was considered a heretical idea and was an underground movement across Europe before moving to the American colonies.

During the Enlightenment period of the 18th century, when reason was advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority, scientific inquiry, and democratic principles, reason began to make an impact upon religious and political life, spreading rapidly across the European continent and into the fledgling United States of America.

In the mid19th century, the rational Enlightenment Christianity of Unitarians was also modified by the thinking of the American Transcendentalist writers and philosophers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Margaret Fuller.  These thinkers began to see the Divine in the natural world and expanded the horizons of religious thought with their poetry, their essays, and their lectures.

In the early to mid 20th century, Humanism, having developed out of the Enlightenment period, became a strong pillar of Unitarian thought, as Unitarians diverged farther from their Christian roots.  

In fact, for a time, Unitarians pretty well disparaged their Christian heritage and, indeed, even today some are made uncomfortable by some of the implications of that heritage, particularly as evangelical fundamentalism has devolved from Jesus’s teachings to the mouthings of the Prosperity Gospel preachers and their ilk.

In 1961, the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America, seeing that their numbers were small but that their open-minded approach to theology was similar, joined forces and became the Unitarian Universalist Association, probably the most liberal of all the protestant denominations which grew out of early Christian roots.

Over the decades since the merger of these two small but influential denominations, our UU theology has been modified.  Today Unitarian does not mean a belief in the Unity, the Oneness of God, as much as it means a belief in the Unity, the Oneness of the human species and the understanding that all humans are related to one another and are a part of the interdependent web of all existence.

Today, Universalist does not mean a belief in heaven for all, as much as it means a dedication to acceptance and understanding of the great diversity of the earth and of the human community, seeing that diversity as essential to a healthy and productive life that must be available to all.

We here in this congregation are the product of the coming together of a Rational religious philosophy as represented by Unitarianism and a Spiritual religious philosophy as represented by Universalism.  In this congregation, we meld strong scientific and rational ideals with a desire to explore our inner emotional and spiritual depths, acting these out as we strive to bring love and justice to the world around us.

We work hard at respect for individuals and divergent viewpoints; within this congregation we have Christians, we have Jews, we have Buddhists, we have atheists and agnostics, we have Deists and and pagans and none of the above.  We have lifelong Unitarians and Universalists and Unitarian Universalists.

Our aim in this congregation is not to dwell on the differing theologies we may hold, for we understand at a very deep level that it is our behavior toward each other and the earth that matters. Our theologies may inform that behavior, but our principles guide us toward a common set of goals, emphasizing our responsibility to treat each other with respect, kindness, and humility.

In his book “Letters to a Young Poet”, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote these words, with which I’d like to close:

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.  Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.  Do not now look for the answers.  They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them.  It is a question of experiencing everything.  At present, you need to live the question.  Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”  (And haven’t we all been there?)

Let’s pause for a time of silent reflection and prayer.              

                                                         

BENEDICTION:  Our worship service, our time of shaping worth together, is ended, but our service to the world begins again as we leave this place.  Let us go in peace, remembering that we all have questions about what it means to be who we are and what our lives should be.  May we be patient as we seek our answers, looking to each other for the emotional and spiritual and mental connections we crave, and may we strive to live with open hearts and minds, so that our answers are not rigid but loving and accepting of those with other answers.  Amen, Shalom, Salaam, and Blessed Be.


Weekly Bread #141

10 October 2021 at 15:32

We see a lot of wildlife while we are hiking. Around here it is mainly coyotes, snakes, turkeys, squirrels, birds, and deer. I refuse to list all the different bugs. We saw a bobcat once in the Headlands. In the Sierras I have seen a lot of bears and one young mountain lion. With the mountain lion, I was happy that there were a lot of other people around.

I took a picture of these deer because we parked at Deer Park and just seemed funny that it was so aptly named. Notice the leaves on the ground. It is fall, but unlike other parts of the country, the leaves are mainly brown and not very spectacular. Sometimes not spectacular is just fine. That is what this week felt like -just fine. When I lived in Utah, the locals always said “you’re fine” rather than “no problem” or “no worries.” The culture there tends to be optimistic – except when it’s not. Sweeping statements, generalizations, don’t work for me any more. I need more nuance I think.

My weight is up again, but I had fun at a luncheon on Friday and clearly ate more than I needed. That is OK. Rambling is also OK. Counting your blessings is a good thing in general, but don’t count your chickens until they have hatched. The show isn’t over until the fat lady sings, but you still have to take one step, one day, at a time on the road to any type of transformation. Sometimes there are deer in Deer Park, and sometimes a tree falls over and blocks a trail. I am not a fan of opera, but I do like to sing along with most other types of songs. Staying in tune is a challenge I also rarely meet, but it would be easier in a choir. Not that one would let me in and yeah, COVID, so singing in a group is not a risk I would take, even though I am vaccinated. Some “breakthroughs” are good, others not so much. Nuance. Gotta love it, but hating it is OK too. I think.

L’Chaim!

My average weight this week is up 1.8 pounds for a total loss of 169.9

Should the seven principles be considered sacrosanct?

10 October 2021 at 13:55


The statement of the seven principles of Unitarian Universalism was adopted by the Unitarian Universalism General Assembly in 1985 and has served the association of UU congregations well.

Now there is talk of messing with it by adding new principles. As Rev. Denise D Tracy has written the seven principles should be considered immutable and unchangeable. Amendments can be added but the original seven principles which were developed over 9 years of study and discernment should be considered sacrosanct.

Unitarian Universalists do not like authority which is considered sacred. They would rather question, complain, discuss, reason, and argue. This tendency to be skeptical, curious, and rebellious is a good up to a point, but is nothing holy, is nothing true, can nothing be counted on?

Unitarian Universalists either believe in nothing permanent or they believe in something true. In the post modern world, sometimes called the "post truth world", there is no truth according to the adherents of this worldview. But this is false belief and leads one eventually to pessimistic nihilism. If you believe in nothing, you will fall for anything.

There is an infinite presence, whatever you want to call it, "Higher Power," "God," "Mother Nature," "The Force," and it fuels the good, the true, and the beautiful. The Seven Principles are good, true, and beautiful and they should be not only allowed to stand, but lifted up as a beacon of faith not to be tampered with.


Suspending the temporal order is when miracles occur.

10 October 2021 at 13:36


Miracles are both beginnings and endings, and so they alter the temporal order. They are always affirmations of rebirth, which seem to go back but really go forward. They undo the past in the present, and thus release the future. T-1.1.13:1-3


We have expressions like “Time stood still,” “Where did the time go?” “I lost track of the time.” In A Course In Miracles the experience of the eternal present is what is called “The holy instant.” In these experiences the temporal order has been suspended and there is no past or future we are simply in what psychologists call a “flow state.” When we experience these states it feels like a miracle.


In Alcoholic Anonymous it is suggested in step eleven that we improve our conscious contact with God. A way of improving this contact is to enter into flow which is as pleasantly mood altering as any chemical and with no hangover.


In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote the love for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. When we experience this love we feel as if we are one with everything and time stands still.


Today, it is suggested that we become aware of and welcome the suspension of the temporal order. It is in that space that miracles occur.


What Kind of Witch Do You Want To Be?

10 October 2021 at 09:00
It’s October, when the media remembers that witches are real and tries to use them to attract viewers and readers. Their definitions of witchcraft vary widely and I don’t want to argue about that. I just want to ask: what kind of witch do you want to be?

The Lasting Legacy of Joseph Labadie Anarchist Labor Leader and Hoarder

10 October 2021 at 07:00

                                    Joseph Labadie circa 1880.

Joseph Labadie with his flowing moustache and imperial goatee cut quite a dashing figure as a young man and after his adoption of big wide-brimmed hats in his later years looked like he might have toured with Buffalo Bill Cody and Ned Buntline.  But he was one of the late 19th and early 20th Century’s leading anarchists and the only one to have a long careerat the very center of the labor movement.

His background was strikingly different from most of the better known figures of the movement—the German Johann Most who introduced the European model featuring the idealizationof the propaganda of the deed or immigrants like most of the Haymarket Martyrs,Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Carlo Tresca.  He was also unique among home grown anarchist figures like Bostonian Benjamin Tucker and former Confederate trooper, Texas Radical Republican, and Chicago labor leader Albert Parsons and his bi-racial wife Lucy Parsons.

He was born as Charles Joseph Antoine Labadie on April 18, 1850 in Paw Paw, Michigan into a Frenchfamily who settled on both sides of the Detroit River when the land was claimed as New France.  Even at this late date the area was still frontier-like and as a boy spent much time fishing and hunting with the Potawatomi tribes in southern Michigan, where his father served as interpreter between Jesuit missionaries and the native tribes.  He deeply admired their culture, especially a sense of communalism. 

His only formal schooling was a few months in a parochial school.  But he was bright, inquisitive, and read everything he could lay his hands on.  He must have had some informal apprentice training because by his late teens he had become a tramp printer, literally packing a small press and type font cases on his back or in a pushcart as he made a circuitof small towns and farming villages.  The life on the road was an eye-opening experience in and of itself. 

After five years on the road, Labadie settled in Detroit where he became a typesetter at the Detroit Post and Tribune.  He joined Typographical Union Local No. 18, rapidly rose in its leadership and was one of its two delegates to the International Typographical Union convention in Detroit in 1878.

Labadie's dues card for the Detroit Typographical Union No. 18.  His vast collection of included every dues card he ever had.

He married a first cousin, Sophie Elizabeth Archambeau, in 1877. Together they had a happy marriage and raised three children Laura, Charlotte, and Laurance, who also became a prominent anarchist essayist.

Labor conditionsof the post—Civil War era of rapid industrialization were brutal and labor unrest was sweeping the country culminating in the Great Railway Strike of 1877.  Although Detroit was only on the fringes of that epic battle it inspired Labadie as it did his fellow typographer in Chicago, Albert Parsons.  Like Parsons he joined the early Socialist Labor Party, which included all sorts of radical tendencies and was soon a familiar sight handing out its tracts and pamphlets on the streets of Detroit.  He was gaining a reputation.

Like others of the era, he dabbled in several radical ventures while slowly evolving his unique political philosophy.  In 1878 he organized Detroit’s first assemblyof the Knights of Labor and ran unsuccessfully for mayor on the Greenback-Labor ticket.  In 1880 he served as the first President of the Detroit Trades Councilwhich united both Knights lodges and craft unions. He also founded the Michigan Federation of Labor.

His positions with the Detroit Trades Council and the Michigan Federation of Labor eventually made him a de facto ally of Samuel Gompers and the emerging American Federation of Labor (AFL) although the relationship was often strainedand tenuous.

Labadie also edited a succession of local labor papers and began contributing articles and columns to several other publications including the Detroit Times, Advance and Labor Leaf, Labor Review, The Socialist, and the Lansing Sentinel.  His long running opinion column Cranky Notions was carried widely and admired for its forthright style and humor.

                            Labadie became a supporter of individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker.

In 1883 Labadie announced that he was embracing the individual anarchism of Benjamin Tucker.  It was a somewhat odd and contradictory association that he never renounced even though his commitment to an organized labor movement was at oddswith Tucker.   But both renounced violence and owed much to the philosophy of the American Universalist anarcho-pacifist Aden Ballou, Russian Mikhail Bakunin, and presaged the work of Leo Tolstoy.

Nominally accepting identity as a socialist in the days before Marxism solidified as the dominant trend in the international labor movement, Tucker rejected any permanent or transitionalstate involvement and advocated for a free market solution.   Tucker wrote

The fact that one class of men are dependent for their living upon the sale of their labour, while another class of men are relieved of the necessity of labour by being legally privileged to sell something that is not labour...And to such a state of things I am as much opposed as any one. But the minute you remove privilege...every man will be a labourer exchanging with fellow-labourers...What Anarchistic-Socialism aims to abolish is usury... It wants to deprive capital of its reward.

Tucker also rejected organized labor unions and their intermediate reform demands like eight hour day and minimum wage laws.  He believed instead that strikes should be organized by free workers rather than by bureaucratic union officials and organizationsand that such spontaneous uprisings would lead to the collapse of the state.  Labadie was sympathetic in the abstract but as a practical leader he never abandoned the labor movement which he continued to serve the rest of his life.  In fact, no other anarchist ever had a longer or more fruitful association with organized labor that Labadie.

Both Tucker and Labadie were initially critical of the violence advocated by the German anarchists and the Haymarket defendants.  But both became active in international defense efforts because they did not believe they were the sole perpetrators of violence. Labadie broke with the Knights of Labor when Grandmaster Workman Terrance V. Powderlytheir national leader, repudiated the defendants completely.

Without the oppression of the state, Labadie believed, humans would choose to harmonize with “the great natural laws...without robbing [their] fellows through interest, profit, rent and taxes.” But sometimes at odds with Tucker, he supported localized public cooperation, and was an advocate for community control of water utilities, streets, and railroads.

By the turn of the 20th Century the great majority of the labor left of the anarchist movement rejected Tuckerism and became centered on anarcho-syndicalism which viewed labor unions as the natural building blocks of a society without state oppression.  Today Tucker is considered the inspiration for modern libertarianism.  Labadie’s association with him has taintedhis reputation on the left.

Some of the pamphlets and books that Labadie issued on his own press.

After the turn of the Century Labadie also began writing poetry and issuing both prose and verse publications that he handcrafted using his skills as a typographer.  In 1908 a zealous postal inspector refused to handle his mail because it bore stickers with anarchist quotations. After the ensuing uproar the Detroit Water Board where Labadie then worked as a clerk, fired him for expressing anarchist sentiments.  But by then he was a beloved figure in the city not only with the labor movement but with much of the public which admired him as the “Gentle Anarchist.” In both cases the officials were forced to back down in the face of mass public protests in support.

Labadie and Judson Grennell, labor editor of the Detroit News at a union convention in 1918.  The two had been friends and comrades since they both worked together in the same print shop in 1877.

Despite his considerable achievements is best remembered because he was something of a hoarder—he never threw any scrap of paper the passed through his hands or over his desk away.  That included all his personal manuscripts and coorespondence with figures like Tucker, Powderly, Albert and Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, Gompers, and Eugene V. Debs; clippings of articles; copies of pamphlets, leaflets, and handbills; posters; and photographs.  Significantly it also included recordsof all the organizations he was part of or related to including membership rolls, meeting minutes, by-laws and constitutions, ledgers and invoices,coorespondence, invitations to programs and social occations, and the badges and ribbons of membership and for attendance at meetings, conventions, and even funerals.  Taken together the collection that filled the attic of his home constituted the most complete and detailed archive of labor, socialist, anarchist activity of almost forty years, including the ephemora that rarely survives.

Labadie knew his collection would be a gold mine for historians.  Arround 1910 he began to look for a repository that would value, cataloge, and maintain it.  The libraries of Johns Hopkins Univeristy and Michigan State in East Lancing expressed interest.  The University of Wisconsin in Madison vigorously pursued it and made an attractive offer to purchase the collection which would have been a great boon to Labadie who was still a poor man and near the end of his working life.

But he was determined to place his collection at the University of Michigan in near-by Ann Arbor, close enough for him to make regular visits.  The U of M was more than coy.  It sent an inspector to Labadie’s home to determine the value of the collection.  He returned a negative reportthat scorned it as a useless “mass of stuff.”  The school demurred to several offers.  Finnally nine Detroit residents, including several businessmen donated $100 each to purchase of the collection, which was then donated to the university with requisite pomp.  The university did not have to directly pay the notorious anarchist. 

In 1912 twenty crates of material were moved from Labadie’s attic to Ann Arbor.  Labadie spent the remaining years of his life soliciting contributionsof additional material from his wide circle of friends and aquaintences across the labor and radical movements.  But the University did not seem to know what to do with the ever-increasing mass.  The material remained un-sorted and uncatalogued and was kept in  receiving boxesin a locked room of the library.  Any interested researcher was given a key to the room and left to his or her own devices to sort through the mass.  Undoubtably some material was removed by some of the researchers and lost.

Shortly before his death, Labadie sent another large consignment of material to the University.

He died on October 7, 1933, in Detroit at the age of 83.

Iris Inglis working in the Labadie Collection in 1929.

Wealthy Detroit activist Agnes Inglis began doing research in the Labadie Collection in the early 1920s.  Her inherent organizing instincts took over, and she stayed to sort out the materials and bring some order to the chaos. She stayed at the Labadie Collection for over 20 years as its unofficial curator. Inglis donated her time to the effort, working without a salary of any kind except for one brief period when she received a small stipend.

After Inglis died at age 81 on January 29, 1952 the administration did nothing to replace her and did not keep a promise to her to continue to collect contemporary radical and labor material.  The neglected collection was pillagedby researchers and collectors and Inglis’ careful catalogue system was disrupted and eventually lost.  Only her note cards on most items remained in disturbed card files.

In 1960 reference librarian Edward Weber was finally appointed as formal curator.  Weber also brought his own social/political interests to the job, which included the radical elements of sexual freedom, gay liberation, Freethought, and civil liberties. Because there was still no acquisitions budget, Weber relied on donations and sympathetic library workers, who adjusted accounts somehow and funneled subversive literature into the Collection. Weber was an outspoken criticof censorship and ignorance, as well as a prolific letter writer, and the extensive correspondence he generated throughout his 40-year tenure kept the Collection growing.

It was not until the mid-1970s that the Labadie Collection was finally given a book budget. Weber was, for the first time in the history of the Collection, able to make legitimate purchases.

In 1994 Julie Herrada was hired as the first Assistant Curator, and as the first trained archivist in the Labadie Collection. When Weber retired in 2000, Herrada took over as curator.

Viewing an exhibit of radical posters from 1968 at the Labadie Collection.

The Collection currently contains over 50,000 books, 8,000 serials titles (including nearly 800 current periodical subscriptions) records and tape recordingsof speeches, debates, songs, and oral histories, sheet music, buttons, posters, photographs, and comics. On the Labadie Collection’s websiteover 900 photographs can be viewed as well as the descriptions of over 100 archival collections, listings of some non-print materials, online exhibitions, and browse a directory of nearly 9,000 subject files.  

In short the Labadie Collection is the most comprehensive and still growing repository for radical American history.

That old hoarder would be proud.

Sunrise on Black Mountain

10 October 2021 at 02:08

We took some kids backpacking to the Black Mountain Trail Camp last night. The trailhead is a short drive from Palo Alto, and the hike in is just two miles with only 500 foot elevation gain, making it a nice get-away for both church and Ecojustice Camp kids.

I got up before sunrise and heard some Great Horned Owls. And then, as the muted chorus of autumn birds was starting up, watched “rosy-fingered Dawn [Eos]” cast her glow on low-hanging stratus over Black Mountain.

It was a good way to start the day.

Unitarian Universalism badly in need of a revival.

9 October 2021 at 18:35



If you have sat through UU sermons are there any that you remember? Are there any that made a difference in your life? If so, how? Are there any that made a difference in your congregation, in your community, in the nation, in the world?

If the answer is "no" to these questions then you begin to understand why the growth of Unitarian Universalism is stagnant and declining.

What is to be done about this sad state of affairs? Unitarian Universalism is in need of a revival. It needs to return to its roots and recapture what was and is important in its faith tradition.

Contemporary Unitarian Universalism has lost its way. It has no vision for the future that captures the interest of the members of society. It has lost its mission of nurturing the spiritual development of humanity. It has been distracted by social justice issues and psychobabble not knowing what else to pay attention to. Lately, the attention of many gifted UU leaders has been captured by infighting about issues which have no relevance outside of denominational politics.

Here at UU A Way Of Life ministries we work to nurture spiritual development in all people and in our communities. The miracle principle # 12 in A Course In Miracles is that "Miracles are thoughts." A quick way to assess the state of Unitarian Universalism is to answer the question, "What are UUs giving their attention to?" They are primarily giving their attention to social issues. This is a huge error. Jesus, when asked about the split between the political and the spiritual said, "Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's."


Miracles occur based on what we give our attention to.

9 October 2021 at 18:12



Miracles are thoughts. Thoughts can represent the lower or bodily level of experience, or the higher or spiritual level of experience. One makes the physical, and the other creates the spiritual. T-1.1.12:1-3


What A Course In Miracles teaches and trains people for is mind control. On what do you give your attention? What you give our attention to creates your reality. If you give your attention to negative things your experience of life will be negative. If you give your attention to positive things your experience of life will be positive. Your attention can be given to both the positive and the negative. What is most real and most true in your estimation? It’s up to you.


In Alcoholic Anonymous negative thoughts and pessimism is called “stinkin thinkin.” People in AA warn its members against it.


In Unitarian Universalism people covenant together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. What is it the person is searching for? Based on the psychological mechanism of confirmation bias a person tends to find evidence for what they expect is true. So would one want to find goodness, truth, and beauty or evil, deceit, and ugliness?


Today, we are reminded that we should be careful what we look for because our perception no matter how skewed, distorted, and erroneous will give us what we want. The miracle is in our mind’s eye. Jesus taught that the way to the kingdom is to “love as I have loved.” What’s in your heart, love or fear?


The Banishment of the Contrarian —Roger Williams

9 October 2021 at 13:39

No authenticated portrait of the quintessential religious dissenter and maverick  Roger Williams but an oil painting that was used for this engraved illustration that was supposedly made in 1644 during a trip back to England was circulated from the min 19th Century and other images derived from it.  Art historians have determinized that it was painted more than a century later and may actually have been adapted from a poor likeness of Benjamin Franklin.  Some of the derivatives took the faint darkening on the subject's upper lip and just below his lower lip and showed a moustache and   "soul patch." 

On October 9, 1635 the General Court of Massachusetts ordered Roger Williams, who they considered an obnoxious religious and political crank, into exile from the colony.  Specifically, the 32 year old was convicted of both heresy and sedition for spreading, “diverse, new, and dangerous opinions.”

Williams was born in 1603 to a conventional Anglican family.  His father was a prosperous master tailor and merchant in Smithfield, London.  A bright, inquisitive, and pious boy, Williams had a personal religious conversion experience which began his long journey as a dissenter.  His father disapproved but allowed his wayward son to continue his education, including an apprenticeship with the great legal scholar and jurist Sir Edward Coke.  He attended Charterhouse, a prestigious public school before enrolling at Pembroke College, Cambridge from which he graduated in 1627.  He excelled at classicalHebrew, Greek, and Latin—and modernDutch and Frenchlanguages.

While at Cambridge Williams became a Puritan—an advocate of purifying the Church of England by stripping away the remaining trappings of Catholicism including the Mass, use of Latin in liturgy, and idolatry in the form of statues of saints and icons.  He took Holy Orders as an Anglican priest, but his chances at advancement were blocked by the firmly High Church hierarchy.  He took a position as a private chaplain to Sir William Macham, a leading Puritan lord.  As such he was privy to plans to seed a Puritan colony in the New World.  Newly married, he passed on his opportunity to go in the first ships sent to found what would become Massachusettsin 1630.  But he was soon so disgusted with church leadership that he determined to join the migration.  He also privately abandoned any hope of reforming the corrupt church and became a Separatist.

Williams and his wife Mary set sail for New England in December on the Lydenand arrived in Boston in February 1731.  He found himself not only welcome but honored.  He was offered as a position as Teacher—sort of an associate pastor—of the Boston congregation.  He declined the position and openly declared himself as a Separatist.  He also insisted that civil magistratesshould have no authority over religious maters and that individuals were free to develop and express their own religious convictions.  These positions shocked and appalled the Puritan worthies who demanded complete conformity to their beliefs in matters both civil and religious.

The church in Salem was then tending toward Separatism and invited Williams to become Teacher there.  Outraged leaders in Boston threatened the Salem church, which rescinded the invitation.  By August 1631 he had left Massachusetts for a friendly welcome among the Separatists of Plymouth.  Although not given an official position, he assisted the local minister and occasionally preachedGovernor William Bradshaw found his preaching, “entirely amicable” to the local church.

But Williams was never one to go long without examining his conscience and in holding the church to the exceedingly high standards he demanded.  He began to doubt that the Plymouth church was sufficiently separated from Anglicanism.  And his growing and admiring contact with native inhabitants led him to question the legitimacy of Royal Charters that granted land that the King did not own.  Instead, he maintained that land need be purchased from its rightful owners, the native tribes.  In December 1632 Williams wrote a lengthy tract on these subjects which he circulated to churches in both Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies.

By this time Bradford noted that Williams had fallen “into some strange opinions which caused some controversy between the church and him.”  In 1633 he had worn out his welcome and was back in Salem, which now seemed more inclined to support him.  Upon learning of his return, the Massachusetts General Court summoned him to Boston.  Williams apparently agreed to make some concessions and all known copies of his critical tract were burned.  Allowed to return to Salem, he became acting pastor when his sponsor, Rev. Samuel Skelton died.

Soon Williams had returned to his criticisms of both civil authority over religious matters and of the legitimacy of colonial charters.  He was called before the General Court again in March of 1635 and in April he so vigorously opposed a new oath of allegiance to the colonial government that it became impossible for the magistrates to enforce it.

Unable to rein in Williams, the General Court turned on the Town of Salem.  It refused a routine petition to annex adjacent land on the Marblehead Neck and took other actions against Salem’s interest.  In July the Court formally demanded that Williams be removed from the pulpit of the Salem Church.  The Salem Church asserted that the order was a violationof congregational polity and independence and circulated a protest letter to other churches.  The General Court ordered that the letter not be read in the other churches and refused to seat delegates from the town of Salem until the Church was in compliance.

As pressure grew on the Church, Williams demanded that it formally separate itself from the Standing Order.  His support within the Church then collapsed. Williams withdrew as minister and began meeting privately with a few followersin his home.

Without the protection of the Salem church or Town, the General Court went ahead with its seditionand heresy trial in October.  When the conviction was handed down, Williams was confined to his bed by illness.  He was given a reprieve from banishmentuntil spring on condition that he remain quiet.  Typically, Williams would not shut up.  The Sheriffwas sent to seize him in January 1636 but found Williams gone. 

Williams rest on his winter flight from Massachusetts in 1636 in a 19th Century illustration. 

Rather than be taken into custody and dumped, most likely, in hostile Indian country, Williams fled on foot through the deep mid-winter snows.  He marched 105 miles from Salem to find refuge at the head of Narragansett Bay, where he was welcomed by his friend Massasoit, sachem of the Wampanoags.  That spring he was joined by his most loyal followers from Salem and began to settle on land he purchased from the Wampangoags.  Learning that his claim was within the boundaries of the Plymouth Colony, however, Williams and his people crossed Seekonk River to territory beyond any charter and purchased land from Canonicus and Miantonomi, chief sachems of the Narragansetts.  Williams named his new settlement Providence.

Williams declared his settlement a haven for those of distressed ofconscience.  It was soon attracting dissidents and exiles from both Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies. The settlement was governed by a majority vote of the heads of households, and newcomers could be admitted to full citizenship by a majority vote.

The Landing of Roger Williams in 1636 painted in1857 by Alonzo Chappel depicts Williams crossing the Seekonk River to meet with Native peoples to purchase their land.

In August of 1637 electors drew up a town agreement, which limited the government to civil matters.  In 1640 another agreement declared their determination “still to hold forth liberty of conscience.” Williams had founded the first place in modern history where citizenship and religion were separated, and where there was religious liberty and separation of church and state.  In fact, Williams advocated what he called a “wall of separation” between church and state—a term Thomas Jefferson would borrow over a 140 years latter in his famous Letter to the Danville Baptists.

Meanwhile, a second wave of exiles arrived on the Narragansett Bay.  In 1837 the Massachusetts Court moved against the followers of Anne Hutchins.  Williams invited them to settle near him and arranged for them to purchase land on Aquidneck Island.  They named their settlement Portsmouth and the island Rhode Island.  Their elected leader, William Coddington quickly turned out to be a civil and religious tyrant and was ousted.  He formed a second town, Newport.  Eventually these two settlements reunited with separate local administrations.

Meanwhile the Pequot War had broken outand much of Massachusetts was in flames.  Leaders there were forced to do what they loathed most—turn to Roger Williams for help.  And help he did.  Not only did his extensive contacts among all of the tribes—he was making his living by this time trading with the natives for furs—provide vital intelligence, but he also persuaded his friends the Narragansetts not to join the uprising and to become alliesof the settlers.  The assistance of the Narragansetts became critical to the final victoryin that ugly war.

Williams, his colony and his native allies became regional powers. In the next three decades Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth exerted pressure to destroy both Rhode Island and the Narragansetts.  In 1643 those colonies joined in an alliance excluding the towns around Narragansett Bay and hostile to them—the United Colonies.  To prevent the alliance from overwhelming them, Williams went to England to secure a Charter of his own.  He arrived just as his breakthrough dictionary of Native American words was published and creating a sensation among the English intellectual elite.  Through their influence he was able to get his charter for Providence Plantations over the vehement objection of Massachusetts agents.

                       Roger Williams's banned book.

While in England, however, Williams could not refrain from stirring the pot.  In July of 1643 he published his most famous book, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, a scathing indictment of religious intolerance and plea for separation of church and state.  The book caused an uproar and cost him the support of many former friends.  The Public Hangman was ordered to confiscate and burn copies.  Luckily Williams was on board ship home with his charter in his pocket or he might have been arrested and even executed.

Back home it took Williams until 1643 to bring the two towns of Rhode Island—by then prosperous seaportswith larger populations than Providence—into a single government under his Charter.  Coddington, in fact, plotted to usurp Williams.  He sailed to England and in an astonishing bit of power politics returned in 1751with a document naming him governor for life over Rhode Island.  Providence and its allied town of Warwick sent Williams back to England to reverse the decision joined John Clarke representing Coddington’s numerous critics from Portsmouth and Newport.  Williams had to sell his trading post, the only source of income for his family, which now included six children, to pay for his crossing.  The two somehow succeeded in overturning Coddington’s patent.

Williams returned to America in 1654 and was immediately elected the President of the colony. He subsequently served in many offices in the town and colonial governments, and in his 70s he was elected captain of the militia in Providenceduring King Philip’s War in 1676.

Clark stayed in England and in 1664 obtained a new charter under the name Rhode Island that covered all of the towns on the mainland and on the island.  The colony remained a haven for all sorts of religious minorities—Baptists, Quakers, even Jews and Catholics.

Williams is usually described as a Baptist.  And indeed by 1638 had come to adopt the key Baptist tenant of believer’s baptismor credobaptism as opposed to the Puritan and Separatist practice of infant baptism.  He had been exposed to the writing of English General Baptistsbut arrived at the conclusion on his own.  He was baptized by Ezekiel Holliman in late 1638 and founded the First Baptist Church in America in Providence.  A few years later John Clarke formed a second church in Newport.  Following the traditions of their founders, Baptists in America became the leading advocates of church and state separation.

Yet the restless Williams did not himself remain a Baptist long, although he remained sympatheticto them.  He concluded that the corruption of the early church when it was co-opted by the Roman Empire under the Empower Constantine had broken the sacred covenant between God and the Church.  A new church, he now believed, could not be established without a special new divine commission.  He declared, “There is no regularly constituted church of Christ on earth, nor any person qualified to administer any church ordinances; nor can there be until new apostles are sent by the Great Head of the Church for whose coming I am seeking.”

Williams spent the rest of his days praying privately with friends awaiting that great day.  Despite his honors in the colony, he founded and his many achievements, Williams died in relative poverty and obscurity some time in early 1683.  He was buried in an unmarked grave on his property. 

Williams's WPA built grave site and monument.  You can be sure that this hater of idols and icons and the man who first advocated for "separation of Church and State" would not have approved.

Within 50 years his house had collapsed, and his grave was lost.  In 1860, Zachariah Allen sought to locate his remains but found only an apple tree root in the grave he believed to be that of Williams.  The root has been preserved as a relic by the Rhode Island Historical Society.  Dirt from the supposed grave was named “the Dust of Roger Williams” and preserved in an urn that was finally interred in a monument erected by the Works Project Administration (WPA) in Providence’s Prospect Terrace Park in 1937.  You can be sure that he would have protested. 

Levelling up?

9 October 2021 at 11:24
Margherita Caruso as Mary in Pasolini’s Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)

A short thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation 

(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)

—o0o—

An ancient, anonymous Hebrew author famously wrote in the Book of Isaiah (40:3-5, trans. NRSV) that

A voice cries out:

“In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.”


Again and again during the past few months, and particularly during this last week with the Conservative Party Conference and against the background of the release of the Pandora Papers, I have heard the term  “levelling up.” But, as our ancient author realised, in order to create any level plain — or, in the language of today, any “level playing field” —  the levelling up of valleys must be accompanied by a levelling down of mountains and hills.

All four gospel authors (Matthew 3:3, Mark 1:3, Luke 3:4, John 1:23) put this passage’s opening sentence into the mouth of John the Baptist as he announces the ministry of Jesus because they share the idea that any levelling up which really signals the coming of a kingdom of love and justice will only come when there is an appropriate and simultaneous levelling down.

In the Gospel of Luke this thought is expressed in clear social and political terms in the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55, trans. David Bentley Hart), the song sung by Jesus’ mother, Mary, during her pregnancy:

“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”


It’s a song which, for over two thousand years, has served to remind our religious communities that only when these two movements, levelling up and levelling down, are truly intra-acting with each other will there come about the level enough playing-field required to start building the kingdom of love and justice for which we still long and work.

The universal and everlasting gospel of boundless, universal love for the entire human race without exception that we proclaim in this church demands nothing less.

比特币上涨10%_11

9 October 2021 at 05:25
By: admin

比特币上涨10%
英为财情Investing.com – 根据英为财情 Investing.com Index的行情系统显示,星期一23:14 (15:14 GMT) 比特币 交投于7,769.4附近,上涨幅度达到10.43% ,这是 从2019年5月13日 以来 ,该币种获得的最大日涨幅。此次上涨推升 比特币 的总市值达到 $132.6B ,在加密货币总市值中的占比为 59.46% . 而 比特币 市值此前在达到高位时为$241.2B .在最近的24小时内, 比特币 的价格维持在$6,893.1 到 $7,769.4 之间交投。在过去的7个交易日里, 比特币 上涨了 30.69% ,其总市值出现了明显的 增长 。截至发稿, 比特币 24小时内的总市值为 25.1B ,在全部加密货币总市值中占比 33.42% .在过去的7个交易日里,比特币 保持在 $5,745.5068 至$7,769.4248 间交投,该币种目前相较于其 2017年12月17日 的历史高值 $19,870.62,相差 60.90%.其他加密货币行情根据英为财情Investing.com的行情数据显示,以太坊目前报$198.37,当前交易日 上涨了7.13% .另外,行情数据同时显示,瑞波币 目前报$0.32270 ,增长了 4.62%.以太坊 目前的总市值为 $20.7B ,该币种目前市值在全部加密货币的总市值中占比为 9.30% , 于此同时, 瑞波币目前的总市值为 $13.6B , 在加密货币市场中占比为 6.09% .

比特币 下跌10%_1

9 October 2021 at 05:24
By: admin

比特币 下跌10%
英为财情Investing.com – 根据英为财情 Investing.com Index的行情系统显示,星期一13:36 (05:36 GMT) 比特币 交投于6,536.6附近,下跌幅度达到10.05% ,这是 从2019年9月24日 以来 ,该币种遭遇的最大日跌幅。此次下跌导致 比特币 的总市值下降至 $120.1B ,在加密货币总市值中的占比为 65.09% . 而 比特币 市值此前在达到高位时为$241.2B .在最近的24小时内, 比特币 的价格维持在$6,536.6 到 $6,955.3 之间交投。在过去的7个交易日里, 比特币 下跌了 22.3% ,其总市值出现了明显的 下跌 。截至发稿, 比特币 24小时内的总市值为 42.9B ,在全部加密货币总市值中占比 38.04% .在过去的7个交易日里,比特币 保持在 $6,536.5898 至$8,245.6152 间交投,该币种目前相较于其 2017年12月17日 的历史高值 $19,870.62,相差 67.10%.其他加密货币行情根据英为财情Investing.com的行情数据显示,以太坊目前报$131.97,当前交易日 下跌13.54% .另外,行情数据同时显示,瑞波币 目前报$0.20594 ,下跌 10.89%.以太坊 目前的总市值为 $14.6B ,该币种目前市值在全部加密货币的总市值中占比为 7.91% , 于此同时, 瑞波币目前的总市值为 $9.1B , 在加密货币市场中占比为 4.91% .

October

8 October 2021 at 20:19

Every year I celebrate October with pumpkins, spiders, skeletons, monsters and ghosts. The pumpkins become Jack-O-Lanterns the week before Halloween.

Our Alderwood balcony.

What do UUs hear at church on Sunday morning?

8 October 2021 at 14:19

 


What do UUs hear at church on Sunday morning?

UU preachers have "freedom of the pulpit" meaning that they can preach on anything they want to. How do they decide what topics to cover? What are their objectives in choosing their topics and delivering their sermons? Is there any rhyme or reason or is it a local decision based on the preference of the preacher and what the preacher thinks the congregation wants to hear?

There is an interesting article in the New Yorker published on 10/07/21 entitled "What American Christians hear at church." which describes studies done of on line sermons both before and after the pandemic.

It is relatively easy to listen to UU sermons from various congregations because they are posted on-line on platforms like YouTube. The sermons range from poor to mediocre to excellent. In rating them what would be the criteria an evaluator could use? There are multiple criteria such as informative, entertaining, inspiring, etc.

The most important criteria is to what extent does the sermon promote the vision and the mission of the church?

The question of to what extent does the promote sermon the vision and mission of the church can be answered only if there is a clear vision and mission statement. The mission and vision of Unitarian Universalism is articulated in the seven principles that people covenant together to affirm and promote.

The prime mission of the church is to encourage acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth. Using this as a criteria there are few sermons that encourage spiritual growth. It seems that UUs are much more focused on social justice and feel good psychobabble.

Given that preaching is the corner stone of worship, and in UU congregations so much of the preaching is off the mark, is it any wonder that the denomination is stagnant if not loosing members?

UUs don't even have a shared model of spiritual growth let alone resources that facilitate the development of it. This lack of shared model for spiritual growth is a huge deficit in Unitarian Universalism limiting its ability to carry out its mission and achieve its vision of achieving salvation for humanity.

Let's focus on models of spiritual development and then see to what extent sermons preached in UU churches facilitate it.

Can your life become a prayer?

8 October 2021 at 13:22



Prayer is the medium of miracles. It is a means of communication of the created with the Creator. Through prayer love is received, and through miracles love is expressed. 

T-1.1.11:1-3


A miracle is a shift in perception from the world of the ego to the world of Spirit. A miracle is a decision to focus our attention on love instead of the idols of the ego. The best prayers are prayers of forgiveness and gratitude. When we forgive and express gratitude, love is received and a miracle occurs.


In Alcoholic Anonymous it is suggested, in step eleven, that we improve our conscious contact with God as we understand God through prayer and meditation. AA suggests that we work miracles.


In Unitarian Universalism we join together to affirm and promote a respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Perhaps we want to add love to the respect for it is in loving the Oneness that we find bliss.


Today, we are reminded that if we are to work and experience miracles it is helpful to pray. What should our prayer be? It should be a prayer of forgiveness and gratitude. We can cultivate prayer to the extent that our whole lives become a prayer.


恒星币上涨18%

8 October 2021 at 07:25
By: admin

恒星币上涨18%
英为财情Investing.com – 根据英为财情 Investing.com Index的行情系统显示,星期四00:05 (16:05 GMT) 恒星币 交投于0.15054附近,上涨幅度达到17.90% ,这是 从2019年5月15日 以来 ,该币种获得的最大日涨幅。此次上涨推升 恒星币 的总市值达到 $2.85896B ,在加密货币总市值中的占比为 1.12% . 而 恒星币 市值此前在达到高位时为$12.12000B .在最近的24小时内, 恒星币 的价格维持在$0.13168 到 $0.16040 之间交投。在过去的7个交易日里, 恒星币 上涨了 62.18% ,其总市值出现了明显的 增长 。截至发稿, 恒星币 24小时内的总市值为 916.23557M ,在全部加密货币总市值中占比 0.74% .在过去的7个交易日里,恒星币 保持在 $0.0883 至$0.1604 间交投,该币种目前相较于其 2018年1月3日 的历史高值 $0.92,相差 83.64%.其他加密货币行情根据英为财情Investing.com的行情数据显示,比特币目前报$7,991.2,当前交易日 下跌0.05% .另外,行情数据同时显示,以太坊 目前报$273.62 ,增长了 13.37%.比特币 目前的总市值为 $141.30546B ,该币种目前市值在全部加密货币的总市值中占比为 55.59% , 于此同时, 以太坊目前的总市值为 $29.05616B , 在加密货币市场中占比为 11.43% .

EOS 下跌12%

8 October 2021 at 07:25
By: admin

EOS 下跌12%
英为财情Investing.com – 根据英为财情 Investing.com Index的行情系统显示,星期日00:16 (16:16 GMT) EOS 交投于2.3697附近,下跌幅度达到12.17% ,这是 从2019年9月24日 以来 ,该币种遭遇的最大日跌幅。此次下跌导致 EOS 的总市值下降至 $2.3951B ,在加密货币总市值中的占比为 1.20% . 而 EOS 市值此前在达到高位时为$17.5290B .在最近的24小时内, EOS 的价格维持在$2.3697 到 $2.6972 之间交投。在过去的7个交易日里, EOS 下跌了 26.05% ,其总市值出现了明显的 下跌 。截至发稿, EOS 24小时内的总市值为 2.2342B ,在全部加密货币总市值中占比 2.80% .在过去的7个交易日里,EOS 保持在 $2.3697 至$3.4003 间交投,该币种目前相较于其 2018年4月29日 的历史高值 $22.98,相差 89.69%.其他加密货币行情根据英为财情Investing.com的行情数据显示,比特币目前报$6,967.1,当前交易日 下跌4.76% .另外,行情数据同时显示,以太坊 目前报$142.92 ,下跌 6.61%.比特币 目前的总市值为 $129.3899B ,该币种目前市值在全部加密货币的总市值中占比为 65.06% , 于此同时, 以太坊目前的总市值为 $16.0277B , 在加密货币市场中占比为 8.06% .

以太坊上涨10%_14

8 October 2021 at 07:25
By: admin

以太坊上涨10%
英为财情Investing.com – 根据英为财情 Investing.com Index的行情系统显示,星期三00:10 (16:10 GMT) 以太坊 交投于173.41附近,上涨幅度达到10.43% ,这是 从2019年4月2日 以来 ,该币种获得的最大日涨幅。此次上涨推升 以太坊 的总市值达到 $18.11B ,在加密货币总市值中的占比为 10.28% . 而 以太坊 市值此前在达到高位时为$135.58B .在最近的24小时内, 以太坊 的价格维持在$160.99 到 $175.01 之间交投。在过去的7个交易日里, 以太坊 上涨了 21.86% ,其总市值出现了明显的 增长 。截至发稿, 以太坊 24小时内的总市值为 9.72B ,在全部加密货币总市值中占比 12.81% .在过去的7个交易日里,以太坊 保持在 $137.6818 至$175.0117 间交投,该币种目前相较于其 2018年1月13日 的历史高值 $1,423.20,相差 87.82%.其他加密货币行情根据英为财情Investing.com的行情数据显示,比特币目前报$5,046.4,当前交易日 上涨了6.25% .另外,行情数据同时显示,瑞波币 目前报$0.36239 ,增长了 7.17%.比特币 目前的总市值为 $88.13B ,该币种目前市值在全部加密货币的总市值中占比为 50.05% , 于此同时, 瑞波币目前的总市值为 $14.98B , 在加密货币市场中占比为 8.51% .

Do you believe in magic or love?

7 October 2021 at 14:27


Do you believe in magic or in love?


The understanding of miracles as spectacles to induce belief is a misunderstanding of their purpose. T-1.1.10:1


People love magic shows. They are mesmerized, enthralled, amazed, and entertained. When magic is used to induce belief in the characteristics of our Transcendent Source, though, it is questionable and an attitude of skepticism is appropriate and warranted.


In Alcoholic Anonymous it is suggested, in step one, that we admit that our lives are often unmanageable and no amount of magic is going to set them right.


In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning and the use of magic may not be responsible.


Today, it is suggested that we attend to a shift in our perception and attention from the world of magic to the world of Spirit which is Love. Love is the miracle not magical powers in the world of the ego.


EOS上涨10%_26

7 October 2021 at 04:15
By: admin

EOS上涨10%
英为财情Investing.com – 根据英为财情 Investing.com Index的行情系统显示,星期一03:50 (19:50 GMT) EOS 交投于2.4506附近,上涨幅度达到10.01% ,这是 从2019年1月14日 以来 ,该币种获得的最大日涨幅。此次上涨推升 EOS 的总市值达到 $2.2499B ,在加密货币总市值中的占比为 1.81% . 而 EOS 市值此前在达到高位时为$17.5290B .在最近的24小时内, EOS 的价格维持在$2.2183 到 $2.4547 之间交投。在过去的7个交易日里, EOS 下跌了 10.64% ,其总市值出现了明显的 下跌 。截至发稿, EOS 24小时内的总市值为 757.6369M ,在全部加密货币总市值中占比 4.43% .在过去的7个交易日里,EOS 保持在 $2.1987 至$2.9534 间交投,该币种目前相较于其 2018年4月29日 的历史高值 $22.98,相差 89.34%.其他加密货币行情根据英为财情Investing.com的行情数据显示,比特币目前报$3,648.6,当前交易日 上涨了4.58% .另外,行情数据同时显示,瑞波币 目前报$0.33198 ,增长了 6.12%.比特币 目前的总市值为 $64.9704B ,该币种目前市值在全部加密货币的总市值中占比为 52.28% , 于此同时, 瑞波币目前的总市值为 $13.7752B , 在加密货币市场中占比为 11.08% .

以太坊 Geth 客户端开发者考虑移除对存档节点功能的支持

7 October 2021 at 04:15
By: admin

以太坊 Geth 客户端开发者考虑移除对存档节点功能的支持
链闻消息,以太坊 Geth 客户端开发者 Peter Szilagyi 发推表示,考虑移除对存档节点功能的支持,在 Gas 越来越高的情况下,存档节点没有可持续发展的意义。Peter Szilagyi 在回复中表示也有可能采用一种混合模式,让用户有一个用于访问存档数据的全局数据分发层和自己的完整客户端,可以验证和证明数据是正确的。

You get what you give.

6 October 2021 at 12:18


Miracles are a kind of exchange. Like all expressions of love, which are always miraculous in the true sense, the exchange reverses physical laws. They bring more love both to the giver and the receiver. T-1.1.9:1-3


You get what you give. It is part of the law of karma. What goes around comes around. You learn what you teach.


In Alcoholic Anonymous it is suggested, in step eight, that we make a list of all the persons we have harmed and in step nine make amends when it would do no further harm.


In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion in our human relations.


Today, we can focus on the idea that if we would have love we should give it. If you see someone without a smile, give them one of yours.


Thinking of Thor Heyerdahl & Kon Tiki

6 October 2021 at 08:00
    Thor Heyerdahl was born today, the 6th of October, in 1914. it isn’t going to be easy to convey to a current generation just how much his grand adventure could set young hearts beating in the 1950s. In 1947 he and his crew aboard the raft Kon Tiki made it to the reefs […]

Sharing is a miracle.

5 October 2021 at 15:02



Miracles are healing because they supply a lack; they are performed by those who temporarily have more for those who temporarily have less. T-1.1.8:1


At times one person can help another in need. Should they?


In Alcoholic Anonymous it is suggested, in step twelve, that we carry our message of spiritual awakening to others.


In Unitarian Universalism we affirm and promote the acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth.


Jesus said that the way to the kingdom is to “love as I have loved.’


Nothing difficult or strange about working miracles. Children learn how to do this in kindergarten when they are taught to share. It’s interesting how quickly in the world of the ego we start clinging to things, and then accumulate them, and then hoard them and make our lives miserable. Today, deliberately share something you have with someone who has less. See what happens. Report back in the comments.


Those Warbling Wobblies—A Singing Union and Its Little Red Songbook

5 October 2021 at 11:45

A vintage edition of the IWW Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent a/k/a The Little Red Songbook.  This version featured a cover illustration by Ralph Chaplin based on the poster for the Patterson Pageant in 1913.

There have been at least 38 editions of the working people’s hymnal popularly known as the Little Red Songbook since it appeared in 1909.  Here is the story of those remarkable little books.

The Wobblies, members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were always a singing union and from the earliest strikesand job actions after the union’s founding in 1905 music was a part of meeting, rallies, marches, and picket lines.  Nowhere was this truer than in the Pacific Northwest where early organizing drives among lumber workers who were often called timber beasts because of their ragged appearance and often near starving conditions

Unable to effectively get to remote logging camps, IWW organizers relied on street meetings in cities like Spokane,Washington to protest the job shark hiring agencies that dispatched men to the camps collecting fees from the ax men and employers alike.  They found that songs helped attract crowds for the union’s soapbox orators. When Salvation Army Bands were often sent to drown out the meetings workers would sing the old hymns with new words.

The Spokane local issued a song card featuring four selections in 1906.  The sold for a penny, but most were probably handed out for free at the street meeting.  The card featured already familiar labor songs and one original— Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock’s Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.  McClintock was a former Texas cowboy, harvest worker, and hobo who had become a lumber worker while also working as a musician in saloons.  The song was originally written in the 1890’s but was popular with all sorts of migratory workers.  McClintock also penned another popular Hobo song, The Big Rock Candy Mountain

A rare and battered copy of the Songbook's first edition published by the Spokane, Washington IWW local.

The song cards were so successful that the localdecided to assemble and sell a small songbook designed to easily fit into a shirt pocket.  It sold for 10¢, not an insignificant sum in those days when a dime could generally buy a meal at Skid Road diners, but not a prohibitive one.  The first edition did not have the now familiar red cover but did have red lettering.  The songbook hit the streets in January of 1909 and was an immediate success. The book’s official title was a mouthfulSongs of the Workers, on the Road, in the Jungles, and in the Shops – Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent.  Subsequent editions shortened that to Songs of the Workers and/or Songs of the IWW to Fan the Flames of Discontent.  Three editions were printed in Spokane over the next three years and were bound in heavy red stock, giving it the enduring nickname, The Little Red Song Book.  But that title appeared on only two of the subsequent 38 official editions.

Each new songbook added new songs like the labor standards The Red Flag sung to the tune of O Tannenbaum, the global Socialist anthem The Internationale, and the easily adapted Civil War song Hold the Fort.

When the Spokane local was under siege during aftermath the 1909 Free Speech Fight, issuing and printing new editions shifted to Seattle.  It was in an early Seattle edition that Joe Hill’s song The Preacher and the Slave was published in 1911.  Mac McClintock claimed to be the first to sing it at a street meeting because Hill was too shy to perform publicly.  

Carlos Cortez's linocut poster tribute Wobbly bard and martyr Joe Hill.

Joel Hägglund a/k/a Joseph Hillstrom and Joe Hill was a young Swedish born itinerate worker who had been involved with the IWW for a few years.  Several of his songs were added to editions of the Songbook including The Tramp,Stung Right, Where the River Frazier Flows, There is Power in a Union, Mr. Block, and Casey Jones Union Scab all of which have become labor standards.  Hill was famously framed on a murder charge in Salt Lake City, Utah.  While being held he was inspired by young IWW orator Elizabeth Gurly Flynn who worked tirelessly on his defense committee and who had visited him in jail to write The Rebel Girl.

After Hill’s execution by firing squad on November 19, 1915 his poem Final Will was included in all subsequent editions of the Songbook.  At least two later versions of the book were officially named Joe Hill Memorial Edition, including one issued by the Cleveland Metal and Machinery Workers Industrial Union 440 in the early 1950’s.  By popular demand later editions have also included I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson which was popularized by Paul Robeson and Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs’ long ballad Joe Hill.

Industrial Worker editor Ralph Chaplin wrote the enduring labor anthem Solidarity Forever.

Other notable early additions to the Songbook included Dump the Bosses off Your Back by John BrillIndustrial Worker editor and commercial artist Ralph Chaplin’s rousing Solidarity Forever was included in a 1916 edition and has become the leading labor anthem of all time.  Chaplin’s illustrationswere also used on the covers of several editions.  The powerful We Have Fed You All for a Thousand Years with words by an “Unknown Proletarian” and music by Rudolph Von Liebich appeared in 1919.

Somewhat surprisingly a song closely associated with the IWW’s 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike did not make it into the Songbook until 1984 although it appeared in the union magazine Industrial Pioneer in 1946.  James Oppenheimer’s Bread and Roses was first published as a poem in the American Magazine in December of 1911 shortly before the strike.  The mostly women mill workers adopted Bread and Roses as their strike slogan.  It wasn’t until the 1940’s that Carolyn Kohlsatt adapted the song to the melody most Wobblies still sing, although an alternative tune by Mimi Fariña in 1976 is gaining popularity.  In the 1970’s the song became a Women’s Liberation anthem as much as a labor one and it has even been included in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal Singing the Living Tradition.

Production of the Songbooks moved to IWW General Headquarters in Chicago and resumed after the great post-World War I Red Scare sent most Wobbly leaders, including Ralph Chaplin, to prison.  The ‘20’s saw the appearance of another notable contributor, Matt Valentine Huhta, who signed is contributions T-Bone Slim including The Popular Wobbly, Mysteries Of A Hobo’s Life, and The Lumberjack’s Prayer.

Editions of the Songbook have also included labor songs from other sources notably Woody Guthrie’s Union Maid with an updated final verse by Nancy Katz, The Banks are Made of Marble by Lee Rice and popularized by the Almanac Singers with more contemporary lyrics added, Which Side are You On by Florence Resse, and the old British rouser The Black Leg Miner as sung by Billy Brag.

The "double tall" 1995 36th edition featured music from around the world as well as old favorites an music for each song.

In 1995 the union issued an unusual “double tallInternational Edition, one of only two editions to use the words Little Red Songbook on the cover.  In addition to most of the standard songs included more modern music and songs from around the world including songs in Spanish. It also included for the first and only time the full musical notationof each song.

Wobblies have continued to add new songs and adapted old ones, especially with more gender inclusive language.  Bruce “Utah” Phillips was the union’s popular balladeer, philosopher, storyteller, and inveterate agitator who died much loved and mourned in 2008.  His contributions to the book included Larimer Street, Starlight on the Rails, and All Used Up.  He also introduced the music from the Songbook to whole new generations. 

Bruce "Utah" Phillips introduced the IWW and its songs to  new generations.

Other newer contributors include Anne Feeney,Scabs and Whatever Happened to the Eight Hour Day; Kathleen Taylor, The LIP Song and Soul Stealers; Goddard Graves, Go I Will Send Thee; Leslie Fish, Babylon Updated and Freedom Road; Carlos Cortez, Outa Work Blues; Darryl Cheney, Where Are We Gonna Work When the Trees Are Gone and Who Bombed Judi Bari; and Tom Morello,Union Song.

Hell, even I made an appearance under the monikerThe Irish Cowboy with a rock & roll picket line song Roll the Hours Back and The Dark and Dreary Slum Where I Was Born, a take-off on Woody Guthrie’s Oklahoma Hills.

Rebel Voices was the realization of a long cherished dream to produce a "Little Red Record."

Utah Phillips gathered both touring and Chicago-based member of the IWW’s Entertainment Workers Industrial Union #630 for a concert performance at Holstein’s on Lincoln Avenue to record a long dreamed of “Little Red Record.”  Released under the title Rebel Voices in 1988 the record included performances by Phillips, Faith Petric, Fred Holstein, Bruce Brackney, Marion Wade, Bob Bovee, Jeff Cahill, Kathleen Taylor, J. B. Freeman, Robin Oye, Eric Glatz, and Mark Ross.  It is still available on CD or by Download.

Almost all of the songs included in the first 36 editions of the Songbook are included in The Big Red Songbook published by Charles H. Kerr & Company.

In 2007 noted folklorist Archie Green published The Big Red Songbook which included 250 songs culled from the various editions of the IWW songbook.  In 2016 a new edition was co-edited by Green, labor historian David Roediger, Franklin Rosemount, and Salvatore Solerno with an introduction by Tom Morello, the Wobbly rocker of Rage Against the Machine andAudioslave, and a posthumous afterward by Utah Phillips.

 

An October Viewing and Reading Challenge

5 October 2021 at 09:00
Comfort-watching is fine. But at some point, you start missing out on a lot of good books, movies, and TV shows. So I’m challenging myself to watch and read some new stuff in October.

A Zen Meditation on the Four Abodes

5 October 2021 at 08:00
  A ZEN MEDITATION ON THE FOUR ABODES James Ishmael Ford When it is stripped to its essentials, I find the good of the Christian religion boils down to one thing. Love. It attempts to bridge the gap between humanity and the pain of humanity and some mysterious force that calls everything together. And that […]

Me and We (in the time of COVID)

4 October 2021 at 19:30

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

Reading: The Tensions of I and We by Fred Muir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I agree, these are not Unitarian Universalists values. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Benefits?

4 October 2021 at 15:49

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

Gerard Ryle,
Director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

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

This week everybody was talking about Congress

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/end-filibuster-toomfoolery/

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

https://www.startribune.com/sack-cartoon-in-case-of-emergency/600100189/

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

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

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

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

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


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

and the pandemic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

This is weird because:

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the Pandora Papers

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

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

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHAtIFyDB8k?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&start=8&wmode=transparent&w=530&h=299]

but I want to tell you about a book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and you also might be interested in …

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


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

Senator Whitehouse parodies Alito’s argument:

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

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

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

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


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

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/aug/09/sketches-from-a-trying-year-10-cartoonists-reflect-on-2020

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


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

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

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

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1005517/youre-out

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

and let’s close with something musical

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

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlc5Bii_Qf8?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&w=530&h=299]

Pandemics are beaten by communities, not individuals

4 October 2021 at 13:12
https://www.gocomics.com/claybennett

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

You see, fundamentally an epidemic is a numbers game.


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

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

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

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

It’s a numbers game.


So let’s talk about numbers.

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

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

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

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

That’s how we win.


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Monday Morning Teaser

4 October 2021 at 12:34

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you would have Love you must let go of the things of the ego.

4 October 2021 at 12:32
 Topic Ten


If you would have Love you must let go of the things of the ego.


Miracles are everyone’s right, but purification is necessary first.” T-1.1.7:1


The miracle is a shift in perception from the world of the ego to the world of the Spirit. This shift is everyone’s right, but for it to occur two things have to happen; First the person has to know that there is a choice between ego and Love and secondly, a person can’t have both. If the person would have Love they must purify their mind by letting go of the ego.


In Alcoholic Anonymous it is suggested, in step three, that we make a decision to turn our willfulness over to the care of God as we understand God.


In Unitarian Universalism we join together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. This search requires a letting go as much as a curiosity about our Transcendent Source. All the major world religions teach that we can’t have both. It is this letting go of the things of the ego which the Course names “purification.”


Today, it is suggested that we purify our minds by forgiving all the people and circumstances that we hold responsible for our unhappiness. It is time for us to experience miracles.


❌