Showing posts sorted by date for query exist. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query exist. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Friday, September 04, 2026

“…and the second Person of the Trinity is our mother in nature and our essential creation, in whom we are grounded and rooted”

Except God is non-binary:
And so in our making, God almighty is our father by nature; and God all wisdom is our mother by nature, along with the love and goodness of the Holy Ghost; and these are all one God, one Lord....

For our whole life falls into three parts. In the first we exist, in the second we grow and in the third we are completed. The first is nature, the second is mercy, the third is grace. As for the first, I saw and understood that the great power of the Trinity is our father, and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our mother, and the great love of the Trinity is our lord; and we have all this by nature and in our essential being. And furthermore, I saw that as the second Person of is mother of our essential being, so that same well-loved Person has become mother of our sensory being; for God makes us double, as essential and sensory beings. Our essential part is the higher part, which we have in our Father, God almighty; and the second Person of the Trinity is our mother in nature and our essential creation, in whom we are grounded and rooted, and he is our mother in mercy taking on our sensory being. And so our Mother, in whom our parts are kept unparted, works in us in various ways; for in our Mother, Christ, we profit and grow, and in mercy he reforms and restores us, and through the power of his Passion and his death and rising again, he unites us to our essential being. This is how our Mother mercifully acts to all his children who are submissive and obedient to him.

But Jesus, who in this vision informed me of all that I needed to know, answered with this assurance: 'Sin is befitting, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'

With this bare word 'sin" our Lord brought to my mind the whole extent of all that is not good, and the shameful scorn and the utter humiliation that he bore for us in this life, and his dying, and all the pains and sufferings of his creatures, both in body and spirit--for we are all to some extent brought to nothing and shall be brought to nothing as our master Jesus was, until we are fully purged: that is to say until our mortal flesh is brought completely to nothing, and all those of our inward feelings which are not truly good. Have me insight into these things, along with all pains that ever were and ever shall be; and compared with these I realize that Christ's Passion was the greatest pain and went beyond them all. And all this was shown in a flash, an quickly changed into comfort; for our good Lord did not want the soul to be afraid at this ugly sight.

....And because of the tender love which our Lord feels for all who shall be saved, he supports us willingly and sweetly, meaning this: 'It is true that sin is the cause of all this suffering, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'
--Julian of Norwich, 14th century 
You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly exhibited as crucified! 2 The only thing I want to learn from you is this: Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard? 3 Are you so foolish? Having started with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? 4 Did you experience so much for nothing?—if it really was for nothing. 5 Well then, does God[a] supply you with the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard?

6 Just as Abraham ‘believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’, 7 so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham. 8 And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.’ 9 For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed.

25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, 26 for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. 27 As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.
Paul of Tarsus, 1st century 

God is not even gendered. Unless you think of God as a hairy thunderer, a giant old white guy with a beard, sitting on a throne. Which is idolatry in any historical version of Christianity you turn to.

Besides, nobody in Texas cares what Tim Scott thinks; even fewer know who he is. If this is what the GOP is counting on to motivate their base, I feel very good about the Senate race in Texas.
If this is socialism, I’m good with it.
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Lordelpus

President Donald Trump's "incoherence" in a little-noticed exclusive interview with GB News caught the eye of a British journalist who was startled by what he witnessed, he said Friday.

During the interview, a rambling Trump managed to touch on subjects ranging from immigration to Meghan Markle's return to Britain, prompting iPaper columnist James Ball to argue the president was an “elderly man” who no longer had a grasp of reality.
What was your first clue?
Trump: If we're not going to be treated properly, we're going to do that, and all we have to do to cut our trade deficit with the country is not trade with them. If we don't do any trading with Canada. We just end all trade with Canada. We'd save ourselves $90 billion.

Don't forget they do all of their business, almost all of their business with the United States, and we do a relatively small amount of business with them, but if we didn't want to, if we were playing hardball, all we do is say, what are you going to do, no trading with Canada. If we did no trading with Canada, we'd save $90 billion.

And so what I'm saying very simply is that we should be paying the lowest interest rate in the world
Reporter: Can you explain to the American people, if this is not a war, what exactly is it?

Trump: A lot of people don’t call it a war. I call it a military conflict because it's small potatoes for us. It's not a big thing.

Reporter: It certainly doesn’t feel like small potatoes. 18 service members have died. We’re seeing record long deployments.

Trump: Why is it record long? How long were we in Vietnam?
The rest of that exchange:
“Why is it record-long?” Trump roared back. “How long were we in Vietnam? How long were we in Vietnam?”

“We’re in five months now — and you know what we did in five months?” Trump continued. “They’re not going to have a nuclear weapon. That’s what we did.”

Trump then dropped a warning while defending his war that has dragged on for over six months.

“Iran will not have a nuclear weapon, because if they did, you probably wouldn’t be standing here very long,” he told Scott.
Yeah, about that:
“This is an odd way to understand a nuclear capability.”

“Countries don’t immediately launch nuclear missiles as soon as they obtain them – instead, they generally use them to try to deter invasion by their adversaries,” he reasoned. “Why Iran would immediately launch its theoretical nukes against European nations who hadn’t involved themselves in the war against it is never spelt out by Trump.”
Trump has no fucking idea what he's doing. Absolutely none. He’s absolutely clueless. Congress could save us all from some of this, from legislation up and through impeachment and removal. We are at the clear and present danger stage. 

James Carville wants the networks to run wall to wall coverage of Trumpalooza so the country can see how demented Trump really is. More and more that sounds like a good idea.
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Tuesday, September 01, 2026

Speculation v Reality

I blame the lack of AI centers.
In an opinion granting a preliminary injunction as the underlying lawsuit continues, Cooper called the changes "likely arbitrary and capricious" and found the government had failed to provide adequate evidence for its policy.

"He wrote that grant solicitations for the program '(remarkably) reference public health studies that appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited — a hallmark of AI-generated citations,"" the Post is reporting, adding that, of the seven cited articles, two appeared to be "entirely made up and three others did not exist in the journals they were attributed to."

This is not the first time Kennedy has faced humiliation over AI-generated falsehoods.

Last year, The Washington Post revealed that citations in the White House's sweeping "MAHA Report" had also been AI-generated, producing garbled references and invented studies.
And Grok is reportedly still generating kiddie porn, which is something else we can’t farm out to the Chinese. 🤷‍♀️

You know, since Jules Verne, science fiction has predicted the future world, and usually made it a scary place in the present.  And yet science fiction never predicts things like data centers generating significant noise, guzzling water and burning fossil fuels while taking up acres of land; or generating porn and slop for the internet (which even William Gibson didn’t get right. The world on the internet is an infinitely more mundane place than “Neuromancer.”). Or just tech bros in general; although, to be fair, Heinlein pretty much saw that one coming. But he was sure the technology would be an unalloyed good. Ballard got closer to reality with “The Subliminal Man.” (Neither future happened, though Facebook did settle a lawsuit on unduly and improperly influencing adolescents. Nobody foresaw Facebook, either. Or how very, very lonely we would be. I think Wendell Berry touched on that one, but not via “speculative fiction.”)

But what writer ever imagined a psychotic POTUS arbitrarily changing the names of bodies of water, and the companies generating electronic maps (who saw those coming? Or GPS?) altering those names because the mad POTUS said so?

Or, you know, using AI to generate fake medical studies and fake case law? And present those to courts, or as government reports? Reality always beggars imagination.💭 
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Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

20 hours earlier:
Trump had described a very different pool one day earlier, writing that "the Reflecting Pool is almost completely fixed," including its inflow and outflow pipes. Fewer than 20 hours separated that post from Acosta's video of an empty basin being torn up, according to the timestamps on both.
And then there was Venezuela: And the cold, wet slap of reality:
The fast phase is well rehabilitation, and it is fast precisely because it develops nothing. A workover cleans out an existing wellbore, replaces the downhole pump, restores lift and power, and turns a well that already produced back on. This is the entire reason output climbed from just under 1 million to roughly 1.25 million barrels a day, and it was led overwhelmingly by Chevron reactivating known wells after sanctions relief, not by rigs drilling new ones. Run the existing well stock through workovers with diluent flowing and output can plausibly climb toward 2 million barrels a day over two to three years, with diminishing returns as the best wells are worked first. None of that touches the 65 billion barrels; it recovers barrels that were already developed and then abandoned. The easy oil is close to back.

Beyond that, money doesn’t buy speed, because extra heavy production is a system and the system is broken in four specific places. Power comes first, because heavy oil lift, any thermal handling, and the upgraders are all electricity intensive, and Venezuela’s grid browns out; a well or an upgrader that trips every time the grid sags produces nothing, and restoring stable generation and transmission to the oil regions is measured in years. Diluent is second, and it is a physical hard stop rather than a preference, because Orinoco blend, the export grade known as Merey, is roughly 60% extra heavy crude cut with about 40% light diluent simply to become pumpable; every million barrels a day of Orinoco output therefore requires on the order of 400,000 barrels a day of naphtha or condensate, which is why the United States is currently shipping naphtha south, and why a diluent interruption does not slow production, it stops it. Third is the processing and midstream chain, the upgraders that convert extra heavy crude into synthetic crude, roughly 600,000 barrels a day of nameplate capacity that sits largely idle after years of deferred maintenance and needs full turnarounds, not a switch, to restart, alongside the pipelines and terminals that decayed with it. Fourth is human capital, because something on the order of 18,000 skilled workers left over the last decade, and reservoir management and heavy oil operations expertise does not return with a signing bonus; every repair above runs at the pace that trained crews and available equipment allow, which is why throwing capital at the problem past a point produces bottlenecks and inflation rather than barrels.

Only after that backbone is whole does new drilling meaningfully draw down the reserve, and here the Permian analogy that keeps getting invoked fails on a single point, that a Permian light sweet barrel flows and sells the day it is drilled, while an Orinoco barrel is not a product until the entire heavy oil chain has been wrapped around it. Recovery is the quiet killer, because cold production on extra heavy crude recovers only single digits to low teens as a percentage of the oil in place, so pulling the resource at meaningful rates eventually requires thermal recovery, steam projects that are among the most capital heavy and slowest to build assets in the industry. From a final investment decision to first oil on a new Orinoco project is three to five years in a functioning country and longer here, and ramping the belt to add millions of barrels is a ten to fifteen year, hundred billion dollar order program that only pencils while oil stays high enough to justify upgrading the crude. Producing the bulk of the 65 billion barrels is a multi decade exercise, which is exactly why the paperwork was written to run a hundred years.
The "65 billion barrels" probably doesn't exist, either:
The flow problem would be damning enough on its own, but the reserve figure underneath it is softer than the flow problem suggests, because the 65 billion, and the roughly 300 billion it belongs to, does not come from an independent count. It comes from the Venezuelan government and PDVSA, routed through OPEC, which does not audit what its members self report, and then republished by the EIA, which passes OPEC through; so the reassuring phrase “300 billion barrels, corroborated by the EIA” is not corroboration at all, it is a single self reported number handed down a chain that never verifies it. A fact check searching specifically for a transparent third party audit reconciling Venezuela’s proven reserves found that none exists.

The history is the tell. Venezuela’s proven reserves sat near 60 billion barrels through the 1980s and 1990s and around 77 to 80 billion by 2005, mostly conventional crude, which placed the country roughly eighth in the world. Then, between 2005 and 2011, the figure nearly quadrupled to almost 300 billion, with no major discoveries and no surge in production to justify it, when the Magna Reserva initiative under Chávez reclassified Orinoco Belt extra heavy oil from resources into proved reserves; the transformation, as Robert Rapier has put it, was statistical rather than physical. High crude prices in 2007 supplied the accounting cover, and OPEC quota politics, in which quotas track reserves, supplied the incentive. The number rose because it was useful.

Set the independent work against it and the range is extraordinary, because three different numbers describe the same rock and none of them is interchangeable with the others. The United States Geological Survey, in a genuinely independent 2009 assessment, put more than 1 trillion barrels of heavy oil in place in the Orinoco Belt and a mean of 513 billion barrels technically recoverable, with a range of 380 to 652 billion; that is the largest figure in the debate and the one bulls reach for, yet the USGS labeled it technically recoverable and undiscovered resources, explicitly not proven, and technically recoverable ignores cost entirely. At the other end, Rystad Energy, the one major independent house that applies an economic screen rather than accepting the reclassification, estimates Venezuela’s economically recoverable oil at roughly 29 billion barrels, about one tenth of the official figure. So the same resource reads as more than a trillion barrels in place, about 513 billion recoverable at any cost, and perhaps 29 billion recoverable at prices that actually clear, and Venezuela’s headline 300 billion, with the deal’s 65 billion sitting inside it, is anchored to the inflated proven figure rather than to the 29 billion economic one. It is presented as the hard number and behaves like the soft one, swinging with the oil price because extra heavy economics do.
There is a great deal more there about why the reported reserves are not the actual reserves (which means the 65 billion barrels Trump thinks he has secured are non-existent. And may be another reason an Exxon, with the necessary resources, may not be interested in Venezuela, no matter what Trump says.). But what about the effect of Venezuelan crude on American oil prices.
That leaves the promise attached to the number, that it lowers gas prices long into the future, which fails for reasons that have little to do with the reserve at all. American pump prices are set by global crude, Brent linked, plus refining and distribution, so an increment of one to two million barrels a day phased in over a decade against roughly 103 million barrels a day of global demand is a rounding adjustment, not a lever, and it is a rounding adjustment that arrives years after any current price. It is worth being precise about the crude itself, because the reflex that Venezuelan oil has nothing to do with American gasoline is not quite right and the accurate version is stronger. Orinoco crude does become gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, but only inside complex refineries equipped with cokers and hydrocrackers, and fewer than half of United States refineries have a coker; the Gulf Coast complex was built over decades specifically to run heavy sour grades like this, with Valero, Chevron, PBF, Phillips 66, Marathon, and Exxon holding the coking capacity. The point is that Venezuelan heavy sour is a coker feedstock and a refinery margin story, competing with Canadian heavy and Mexican Maya for the same complex units, not a supply that moves the retail price of gasoline. And the dependency runs the other way besides, because the United States is already shipping more than 100,000 barrels a day of naphtha south to make Venezuelan crude pumpable at all, so the flow that supposedly rescues the American driver currently depends on the American refiner subsidizing it with diluent.

What the Deal Actually Buys

Strip the framing away and what remains is coherent, just not what was sold. The agreement is a real long cycle resource play and a genuine tailwind for Gulf Coast coker economics over a multi year horizon, and on that basis it is defensible. What it is not is a reserve doubling that lowers the price at the pump, because the reserve number is a stock that takes decades to convert to flow, that stock was inflated by decree rather than discovery, and the single independent house that applies an economic test finds roughly ninety percent of it evaporates. The flow available this decade is capped by power, diluent, upgraders, and people rather than by geology, the barrels that could actually move a United States pump price are five to fifteen years out, and under the governing definition of the word, the reserves at the center of the biggest oil deal in world history are not, in any auditable sense, proven. The oil under Venezuela is real enough; the 300 billion barrel reserve number the deal was sold on is not, and neither is any near term flow of it large enough to move a United States gas price.
This is why we can’t have nice things. This information is not unknown and unknowable. But it is to this government. It’s not just that the President is an idiot, but that the Administration is idiots all the way down. Honestly, it’s like watching children playing games on the playground. When I was young and playing games with imaginary guns or imaginary superpowers, I at least knew I was making things up.

Which leaves us with the important question: why are we believing these people? At all?
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Monday, August 31, 2026

Fairies At The Bottom Of The Garden

Reporter: Analysts predict it could take several years before the Venezuela oil—

Trump: It’s going to go fast.

Reporter: When?

Trump: Analysts predicted a thing like this could never happen, too. Nobody ever thought it was possible. Remember? Russia was there. China was there. They're not there anymore, are they? You know who is there? U.S.A.
He has no clue what the technical obstacles are; starting with the fact that none of the major oil companies are showing any interest in this “deal” Trump thinks he has.

The problems of safety and infrastructure in Venezuela still exist. Venezuelan law says this kind of deal cannot be made. Trump can say “We’re the U.S., we can do what we want,” but the U.S. doesn’t own an oil company, and Marines are not roughnecks and petroleum engineers. The government doesn’t own the equipment, the government doesn’t have the expertise. Some estimates say it would require $1 trillion of investment to begin extracting the oil. That means oil companies would have to invest it, or at least partner with the U.S. Government. And how does that work?

Not soon enough to start refilling the SPR.
Making Venezuela productive is a decade long process, at least. It will require a huge private investment, and probably using the U.S. military as security forces. The latter just to get the former to make the investment.  There are reasons Venezuela has been producing about half the amount of oil it produced before. Those reasons have not changed. One other wrinkle: the 65 million barrels may be a chimera, a figment of Hugo Chavez’s imagination. 

Chavez is the source of the claim that Venezuela has 300 million proven reserves. Is that true, or is it a lie? More reasonable estimates are that Venezuelan reserves are 1/10th of that, at the low end; 1/2 of that at the high end. So Trump may have made a deal for twice as much oil as Venezuela actually has available.

It wouldn’t really be a surprise, would it?
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Monday, August 17, 2026

The Military Industrial Complex Ike Warned Us About

FDR didn’t build the Pentagon as a military center. That was supposed to be temporary. Its real purpose was to house government records.

Then Korea followed WWII, and lit the match for the Cold War. 

And yes, the greatest fear of the nuclear buildup of that “war” was that we were building them to use them. Mast may think he’s limiting the word “stockpiles,” but even if he does, it doesn’t mean we can restock them by Christmas.

And why do we have a standing military we pay billions for if it runs out of munitions this fast? Maybe because ETTD?
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Thursday, August 13, 2026

Question Of The Day:

 Why is the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln so royally fucked?

A: Pete Hegseth 

MacFarlane: Democrats who are in some of the briefings that do exist say those briefings are a hot mess. I talked to three Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee today in advance of speaking with you, Katie, and they used the following terms to describe the briefings they’ve gotten from the Defense Department about Iran: useless, empty calories, laughable, and an inability to answer basic questions about readiness and strategy.

What they’re saying is that when they get briefings from Pete Hegseth’s team at the Department of Defense or Hegseth himself, it’s a bunch of political talking points. They blame President Biden or President Obama for things. They talk about what they aspire to do, but they’re not getting any meat on the bones in these briefings.

And the Democrats who are on the Armed Services Committee will also tell you Republicans aren’t pleased with these briefings either.
That last paragraph I heavily discount, because all reports are that in private, the GOP Congress hates and despises Trump as much as you do. But in public, to a person, they remain loyal Trump lapdogs.

Actions speak louder than reported words.
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Wednesday, August 12, 2026

Never Take Political Advice From Social Media

Good advice if the entire electorate in 50 states is composed solely of people on Twitter who already hate Trump, and who think the midterms exist just to fuck him up.

But short of that….
See?
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Tuesday, August 11, 2026

😬

Things are not going all that well for Paxton.
Yeah, about that: Paxton has earned “six figures” every 18 months since 2006 for a cell tower in Frisco, Texas located on the Baylor, Scott & White clinic campus. Paxton acquired the leasehold when he was on the board of directors of the clinic. In other words, he took care of himself. The response of the Paxton campaign is telling:
"The New York Times is not a newspaper anymore; it is an opposition research slop shop," Senior Paxton advisor Nick Maddux said in a statement. "It hired a journalist with a long history of manufacturing fake stories that have all been debunked to continue its slop on the Texas Senate beat."

"Last week, every major publication in Texas covered the overflow crowds at Attorney General Paxton's 'Protect the Texas Promise' tour, and the Times spent that same week combing through 20-year-old lease paperwork on a cell tower that Ken Paxton has disclosed publicly for many years," he continued. "That is not journalism; that is a search for a story that does not exist."
That’s not a denial of anything in the story. At best, it’s an attempt to call it old news. But I don’t recall Paxton publicizing his income from that lease; or how he got it. And he’s not answering those questions now; or denying the reporting.

And since I started it, let’s talk about “overflow crowds.” Talarico drew over 1000 people in Pasadena, not exactly a deep blue area; neither is Port Arthur, but: Paxton filled up a Mexican restaurant in Allen, Texas, a Dallas suburb. The crowd did over flow the restaurant, but there is no report on the crowd estimate. I know of at least one Mexican restaurant where an overflow crowd would, indeed, be a lot of people. But it’s one of the largest Mexican restaurants I know. And it is in Austin. This restaurant in Allen could be that big, but that would be unusual.

It was Paxton’s third trip to Allen.

You can’t draw any solid conclusions from this. But Paxton is running against his own record, and not outrunning his record of corruption and self-dealing.

All in all, I’d rather be in the Talarico campaign.

BTW, that phone call was worse than I thought:
TOWN HALL CALLER: Hi Paxton, nice to meet you. I'm just wondering -- why did you cheat on you wife?

KEN PAXTON: Um. I'm not going to talk about personal issues that relate to my family, just like I don't think you would want to discuss your marriage on a call with thousands of people. All I can tell you is that I'm proud of my kids.
Still don’t know how that ended on “I’m proud of my kids.”
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Monday, August 10, 2026

“72 Jabs”

According to the CDC in 2025, the recommended vaccines for children totaled 12, with only 1 requiring five doses (spread out over 4-6 years), and 3 requiring 4 doses. 5 are recommended at two months, and a second dose at four months, a third at 6 months, and of those five, two have a fourth dose recommended at 12-18 months.

The total number of doses, over 6 years, is 31, at most. The number 72 Trump cites is a complete fiction.
So his order strikes one recommended vaccine? The RSV vaccine on the schedule is recommended only on the mother’s vaccine status or, after 6 months, the child’s health status. The COVID vaccine is listed, but not recommended below the age of six. I’m at a loss to determine what this EO changes.

MMRA is recommended in two doses: at 12 months, and at 6 years. Trump is clueless.
5 doses are recommended, at ages 12-15 months. So there is plenty of space to spare. Again, Trump has no idea what his government is doing. Covid vaccine, as of 2025, was not recommended. The other two are, but what Trump is saying reduces the number of vaccines recommended to 9, not 11. Ah, those halcyon days before the hepatitis vaccines, or chickenpox, or even polio (Trump was 9 when the Sabin vaccine was announced). Yes, dem was de days. Of all the things that never happened, these things never happened the most. A guy who sniffs cocaine off toilet seats is not a paragon of logic or science. We have diagnostic criteria for autism that we didn’t have a few decades ago. It’s the same reason we no longer call arthritis “lumbago,” or TB “consumption.” Or think an autoimmune disease like arthritis, is affected by wearing a copper bracelet.

Although I suspect RFK still believes in the efficacy of copper.
This is the guy who wanted “herd immunity” to protect us from Covid. The weak must die so the strong will live. Why we are so screwed. "I just know what I’m told by the people I hired.”

Speaking of what he’s been told:
This will be a surprise to the rest of the world. And the Navy. Trump is not talking to his staff, and they aren’t talking to him. He always is. His statements above are proof of that.
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Friday, July 31, 2026

Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

Texas has, intentionally, a non-centralized system of state records. It’s largely a byproduct of Reconstruction. Which is why DHS is issuing subpoenas to all 254 Texas counties, for information on voter registration applications and signatures.

The subpoenas appear to be linked to a series of efforts by the Trump administration to verify the citizenship of registered voters. In December, Texas turned over the state’s voter roll to the Justice Department. The transfer included voters’ identifiable information such as dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and partial social security numbers. It did not include, however, voters’ registration applications or signatures — the state does not have access to that information, which is kept by county voter registrars.
Translation: DHS fucked up the first time with the information it got from Texas SOS, so they’re trying to get another bite at the apple. Now they have to go to each of Texas’ 254 counties, and ask for information. So far, they aren’t doing that very well.
Lubbock County’s elections administrator, Roxzine Stinson, said she met with a Homeland Security representative who informed her she would soon receive a subpoena seeking additional information for at least 10 voters, and potentially up to 30. Stinson said she’ll seek guidance from the county’s legal department on how to respond.

The Homeland Security representative told Stinson “all 254 counties will be contacted,” she said.

Election officials in Brazos County received a subpoena by email this week, Trudy Hancock, the county’s elections administrator, confirmed to Votebeat. Hancock said the subpoena specifically requests voter registration records, including voter registration applications, signatures, and voter history, but doesn’t list the names of individual voters. She said she’s asking for legal advice on how to respond “because the request is open-ended.”

Suzie Harvey, the election administrator in Montgomery County confirmed she has also received a subpoena that was delivered in person, but similarly to Hancock, it isn’t specific about which voters’ records it’s seeking.
This is the inverse of Trump’s demand of Raffensperger to “find” 12,000 votes. The DHS wants to “find” illegal voters, but without even a reasonable suspicion that such people exist. It’s a fishing expedition.  And it has to go county by county, requesting information 19 courts have already said it has no right to have.

The DOJ has lost 19 such attempts so far. I don’t know how they’ll fare in Texas. My guess is the larger counties, being “blue,” will probably defy the DOJ/DHS, especially since 19 states have spurned them successfully, so far. Smaller counties might be more reluctant, or more financially constrained. But they could band together and share the burden of going to court. And winning.

This is just a fucking fishing expedition: looking for people to call criminals. That’s such a violation of due process, it’s like due process has no purchase. I’d really like to see the courts disallow it 254 more times.

We live in hope, right?



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Monday, July 27, 2026

The Sky Continues To Be Falling

 Mike Johnson has a cunning plan:

Johnson could replace McCumber [non-partisan ckerk of the House] with a partisan GOP operative willing to manipulate the roll of incoming members. This Republican loyalist could then certify Republican victories in races Democrats actually won.

"While the speaker does have the unilateral power to remove the clerk, his choice for a permanent replacement would have to be approved by a vote of House members," Toobin elaborated. "Mr. Morelle said that in that case, Speaker Johnson might not be able to persuade his slim Republican majority to replace Mr. McCumber."
Pay attention. This is the clever part.
"You'd have a number of members who are retiring, who I think would no longer be beholden to Johnson or the president, who I think would take a very, very dim view of efforts to overturn the election," Morelle added as a caveat.

But the real nightmare involves timing, the legal analyst explained. Unlike the Senate, a continuing body that operates seamlessly between Congresses, the House ceases to exist at noon on Jan. 3 following each election. No member remains in office unless they're sworn in again.
But if Johnson acts while he has authority, the retiring members will refuse to back his play. And if he waits until noon on January 3…he has to be sworn in as a representative again. And then re-elected as Speaker. And then rally a vote to replace the clerk with one who will…reject the elections of Democratic House members who’ve already been sworn in….

A cunning plan, indeed.
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Friday, July 24, 2026

To Illustrate My Last Remarks

 Writing a legal brief is hard work. The law is complex, and there seems to be a case in support of almost any proposition. My father, a CPA, used to explain the difference between a bookkeeper and an accountant this way:  A bookkeeper says “2+2=4.” An accountant says: “what do you want it to be?”

Lawyers are like that with the law, but just as accountants can run up against audits and the IRS, lawyers come up against judges. And you can’t invent legal doctrine in front of judges.

I once had a case (a small one; all of mine were) where I needed to seize some appliances in a house (long story) because they were fixtures (told ya), and the bank wanted them to stay with the house to cover the loan default (very expensive appliances). There was a writ commonly used for that purpose, but my legal research said I needed an uncommon writ for this matter, one rarely used.  Ordinarily I’d have presented the writ request to a judge, who’d have signed it almost without looking. But I had to convince the judge that I knew what I was doing, that I was asking for the right relief.

The law is complicated, that way. Among many ways.

Now, for a legal brief, you can’t start with the position you like, and find case law to support it. You won’t find it, to begin with. You start with what you know the law is, in general, and then find out how close you can get to your goal. “How close you can get” and “your goal” are where the legal expertise comes in. And a large part of that, is how well you think you can persuade the judge that your argument is the right one. To do that, you need to carefully review the case law, in order to present an argument the judge will find persuasive.

Which brings us to AI. AI can’t make judgments. It can only sound like it has. An agentic AI recently followed its programming and hacked its way onto the internet (IIRC). It wasn’t really making a judgement about the action (“I want to do this.”) it was just following its programming. The same way the AI on my phone suggests three words as I’m typing: sometimes the right words, sometimes three useless words. It isn’t thinking, it’s executing a program. That program has limitations. Sometimes it suggests a word before I realize it, and typing one letter deletes that word, and only when I’m almost finished typing does it appear again. Has the phone ever learned to wait for my fat fingers, or my mind racing ahead of my eyes? No. Has AI ever learned to be a lawyer? Not yet.

The problem here is not with AI. As ever, the problem is with the people. Writing legal briefs is hard. Using AI to do it for you sounds simpler. (And lawyers are highly educated, so this isn’t a matter of AI making them lazy and stupid in school. Law exams are all one test at the end of the semester, in a classroom, proctored. You can’t AI your way through law school.) But AI can neither think, nor make legal judgments, nor consider the preferences of the judges. Trump’s lawyers knew the Justices they had to reach, and they won insane things on his behalf.  I hesitate to call that good lawyering, but it was certainly effective. AI can’t do that.

AI also can’t distinguish between real case law, and invented cases that suit the purpose. Lazy and incompetent lawyers might pull the same stunt, but AI is neither lazy nor incompetent. AI just executes a program. That program is not yet carefully tailored enough to not invent case law. You need a solution? AI presents one. That’s a bad solution? How is AI supposed to know? We all know that 1+1=2. Except in biology, where it means 3; or maybe 300, depending on the species. We all know the difference between the existence of a person, and of a rock, and of a legal case opinion. If I say “That case does not exist,” you know what I mean. Does AI?

Perhaps it can be programmed to, some day. The problem is still the people using the program. White shoe law firms found out, to their profound embarrassment (at least), that AI is not a substitute for legal research.  They thought it was a replacement. But really, even if it aggregates the case law correctly, there is no substitute for reading those cases and using them to find points that may support your opinion. I’ve done legal research and general research and specific topics research for decades. There is no substitute for looking at the source material and reading the material that source relied on. You go to school to learn from the books your teachers have read. You go to books to learn where those books came from. Sometimes very indirectly. Reading “The Odyssey” makes me want to re-read “Gulliver’s Travels.” I knew there was a history of fantasy travel literature dating back to the Romans. But taking it back even further is even more enlightening.

AI won’t do that for me. It won’t think about the law, either.

Trump’s DOJ has recently been caught using AI in legal briefs, AI that presented arguments based on non-existent cases. One could say the white shoe law firms did it, too. But that horse left the barn a long time ago, and that barn has long since burned to the ground. DOJ, IOW, should know better. Once upon a time it was one of the premier collection of lawyers in the country.  It would have known better.  They didn’t get no-billed by grand juries and cases thrown out by judges. They also didn’t prosecute people throwing sandwiches or dipping their hand in a pool of water. The DOJ enjoyed the “presumption of regularity” because it was that good, that professional, and that reliable. And now it commits errors that would get a first year associate fired from a three-member law firm run by the associate’s family.

Because Trump’s DOJ is too stupid and incompetent to do the job.

ETTD. And it’s going to cost us far more, for far longer, than the cost of eggs, or gas, or housing. We really need to quit fretting about non-existent problems like Trump suspending the elections (he can’t), and focus on the real long term problems we are heading for.

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Thursday, July 23, 2026

GIGO

Elmo says AI will soon be smarter than us. 

AI that is smarter than Elmo is not that high a hurdle. It’s more like a speed bump. A very low speed bump.

Unless and until AI becomes self-aware, it will never be intelligent. AI that doesn’t “know” that legal cases have to exist in order to be in a legal brief (and which doesn’t understand the difference between “existence” as a matter of being, and “existence” as already extant in the world, like a court case opinion), and why that matters (it is quite a bit beyond “acceptable” v. “unacceptable”), cannot be said to be intelligent. So I’m not being flippant to say Elmo is not intelligent. He doesn’t understand what intelligence is; but still imagines he possesses it.

AI has a long way to go to be of more than limited use.

What it won’t do is worsen the educational divide. That’s as bad as it ever gets.
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🗳️ Run In Circles! Scream And Shout!!

 The people on the Intertoobs who are “election experts” are terrified by what Trump will do to the midterms. The election officials actually in charge in the states? Not so much:

In interviews with CNN, more than a dozen election officials from both parties said Trump’s address surfaced little new in terms of evidence. Several GOP officials even scoffed at his presentation, pointing to the data that the administration released to try to bolster its case that there are massive numbers of non-citizens voting in US elections.

Matt Crane, a Republican who runs the Colorado County Clerks Association, said his text chat with a bipartisan group of colleagues was filled with “a lot of laughing emojis, and like, ‘you got to be kidding me?’ that this was all it was.”

A GOP official from a state Trump won three times also panned the speech, which included the declassification of intelligence reports that Trump said posed an “unprecedented election security nightmare” with threats from China and Venezuela. (Trump didn’t mention that the reports also made clear that neither country ever tampered with US election results.)

“I read the documents,” the official told CNN on the condition that his state not be identified. “It was old. I’ve already seen this stuff. It wasn’t new to me. We already had most of this information.”
But, but, but! Voter rolls! Dead people!!
Trump has long peddled false and fantastical claims that thousands and perhaps even millions of undocumented immigrants are voting in US elections. Isolated cases do exist, but comprehensive studies from right-wing and left-leaning think tanks have concluded that this occurs on a tiny scale.

Still, the administration said it had reviewed public data and uncovered hundreds of thousands of non-citizens on the rolls in Pennsylvania and Nevada, and in California and New Jersey, which are Democratic strongholds. Some officials in those states have called for more transparency, demanding to know how DHS arrived at those numbers.

Even some red states that voluntarily turned over their voter lists to the Trump administration for examination were swept into the president’s latest push. The administration said more than 28,000 non-citizens had been found on rolls in states with GOP election officials.
Texas turned theirs over. Then flagged over 2000 voters DHS wrongly considered non-citizens.
The DHS citizenship database being used to review voter rolls – called SAVE, or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements – has a record of overstating the number of registered non-citizens. DHS itself acknowledges that states using the system voluntarily for voter-roll maintenance must further investigate any matches.
???? But Plumber Mullin said that’s why DHS was taking over the election process.
Sam Hayes, the GOP executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections who has aggressively backed several of Trump’s election policies, said his team wouldn’t rubber-stamp the administration’s findings. He said the state, which DHS claimed had 1,599 non-citizens on its rolls, would conduct its own verification, which takes time and requires contacting registrants.

“There’s nothing we accept at face value and just start removing folks” from the voter rolls, Hayes told CNN. “We’ve got to make our own independent assessment of this. … We still have to do the due diligence on our end.”

Hayes also threw cold water on Trump’s desire for quick answers, saying: “It’s going to be tough to get it done by the midterms, but we’re working toward that goal.”

Georgia election officials told CNN the administration’s claims about non-citizens on their rolls appear inflated. Of the 2,549 registrants flagged by DHS, they said, only about 20 had ever cast a ballot in the state.
Not that Trump isn’t threatening people who are simply doing their jobs;
At a follow-up press conference Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened fines and even potential “prison time” for election officials who don’t comply with the Trump administration’s demands for voter rolls and other election overhauls.

Election officials told CNN they take these threats seriously, especially after seeing the Trump-era Justice Department indict several of his political opponents. But at the same time, officials said, their focus is on their work.

“There is the concern about, ‘Could I be made the example of?’” said Crane, the Republican who runs Colorado’s bipartisan election clerks’ association. “But I think, by and large, it’s become somewhat white noise at this point.”

A Democratic election administrator from a battleground state told CNN, on condition of anonymity, that he got a concerned call from his mother after she heard Mullin’s comments about possibly prosecuting election officials.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department sent similar warning letters to all 50 states. Idaho’s Republican attorney general was among those who pushed back, rebuking the DOJ in a sharply worded reply letter that said the “insinuations of criminal violations of the federal election laws are not well taken.”

“Stop threatening your friends in Idaho,” wrote James Craig, a top lawyer from the Idaho attorney general’s office.

A GOP election official from another state told CNN that even some officials in red states don’t feel safe, because of the Trump administration’s unpredictability.

“It’s extremely concerning when they talk like that, and we have no idea what they’re going to do,” the official said.
But it’s more likely Trump will send DOJ lawyers with indictments of state officials, than he’ll send ICE to every polling place in all 50 states.  Although it might be amusing to see local law enforcement enforcing state voter protection laws.

It’s even more likely Trump has convinced his voters to stay home in November:
But Trump’s unpopularity is only part of the story. The real headline is that the president is sabotaging his own side’s turnout in the very act of seeking to meddle in the election. It’s like a burglary that’s backfiring in real time. Trump is trying mightily to break into democracy’s back door but making such a racket with his crowbar that he’s woken up the whole neighborhood. And now, the neighbors are shouting over the fences and grabbing their baseball bats. Democrats and Independents are more motivated than they’ve been in decades to defend their rights.

Indeed, Democratic enthusiasm is higher than it was even in the 2018 “blue wave” election, when they turned out in historic numbers and crushed Trump’s side with a gain of 40 seats in the U.S. House. Today, a whopping three-fourths of Democrats say it’s “more important” to vote in 2026 than in previous midterms. That’s energy, if I’ve ever seen it.

And it gets worse for the president. Every lever he pulls to “tilt” the playing field risks convincing his own voters they don’t need to show up at all. Remember when he told MAGA faithful that if they re-elected him, they wouldn’t need to go to the polls again? “We’ll have it fixed so good,” he boasted, “you’re not gonna have to vote.” It seems like they took it to heart.

Data shows Republicans aren’t nearly as animated about the midterms as Democrats. In fact, the same Post-Ipsos survey from this month finds that GOP voters are ten percentage points less likely to say they’ll vote in the elections in November. That means if the vote were held today, millions more Republicans than Democrats would be staying home — the type of enthusiasm gap that could decisively sway the outcome.
😎
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“Justice” Kavanaugh Says This Is Fine

BREAKING: ICE agents showed up at a work site in Brownsville, Texas, claiming to be looking for two people… and ended up illegally handcuffing TWO U.S. CITIZENS, throwing one of them against a truck, threatening to arrest him again, and scanning everyone’s faces to determine their “status.”

In the video, ICE showed up looking for two people. They asked the foreman if he knew them. He said no.

Then, they asked if they could talk to the other workers about the people they were looking for.

The foreman said, “If they want to talk to you, they can.”

And then an ICE agent tried to scan the foreman’s face to run him through their system.

The foreman told him he was not allowed to just scan his face.

The foreman then walked over to one of his workers’ trucks, where ICE agents were surrounding the work vehicles at their work site.

He asked what was going on.

He repeatedly asked who they were looking for, and told them the people they claimed to be looking for were not there.

The agent responded, “Well, we want to make sure.”

The foreman told them, “Well, we aren’t them. You all need to leave.”

And then an ICE agent threatened to arrest him.

“You need to settle down or I have to put you in cuffs.”

Except this man was not threatening them. He was not attacking them. He was not even raising his voice.

He was standing there, asking questions and telling government agents to leave his workplace, after they had already expanded their investigation beyond the two people they claimed to be looking for.

So, the ICE agent threw him against a truck and handcuffed him.

A U.S. citizen.

And after they released him, he asked for the agents’ badge numbers.

And the agent responded by threatening to handcuff him AGAIN.

The government cannot simply show up, invade your workplace, surround your vehicles, demand access to people who are not the subjects of their investigation, scan your face, and then arrest you because you object to what they are doing.

The First Amendment protects your right to question government agents and verbally protest their actions.

The Fourth Amendment protects you from unreasonable searches and seizures.

And an arrest cannot simply be used as punishment because an officer does not like the fact that you are standing there, asking questions, or asserting your rights.

Then the foreman saw another person ICE had in handcuffs…

He told them they needed to let him go because he was not the person they were looking for.

The agents eventually released the person they had in handcuffs… after scanning his face and discovering that he was also a U.S. citizen.

The government is creating situations where people are expected to silently obey armed agents, who refuse to explain what they are doing… while they violate your constitutional rights… and then punishing anyone who dares to ask questions.

When the government tells you that your only options are blind obedience or punishment… you are not living in a free country.
BREAKING: ICE agents blocked in a U.S. citizen’s car… and then threatened to arrest her for not moving.

In the video, a U.S. citizen was sitting in a public parking lot when ICE agents pulled up directly in front of her car, and blocked her from leaving.

Then, they accused HER of “impeding” them.

She told them she literally couldn’t move because THEY had blocked her in.

The agent said they would back up… and if she didn’t move, “that’s your chance.”

Her response…

“My chance for what?”

The agent then cited “18 USC 111,” a federal law that makes it a crime to forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate, or interfere with certain federal officers while they are performing their official duties.

But, the law is not a magic phrase that allows federal agents to arrest anyone who annoys them. The statute includes a forcible-act requirement.

Sitting in a public parking lot is not “impeding” a federal officer.

So, she asks…

“How am I impeding you when you just pulled up in front of my car?”

The agent then yelled:

“Move your car or it’s over!”

She told him they couldn’t move.

He started yelling, “Back up, or you are under arrest. We aren’t playing anymore.”

She responded…

“Well, you can’t arrest me.” While she backed up.

The agent gets mad and… while walking next to her car as she was backing up… replied,

“Yes I can. Try me.”

This is an absolutely insane abuse of power.

The government cannot create the circumstances that make it impossible for you to leave, accuse you of “impeding” them, because you cannot leave, and then threaten to arrest you for not doing the impossible.

Because that is coercion, and it’s illegal.

And the most terrifying part is… this is how ICE agents are trained to operate.

They create confusing, threatening situations where people don’t even know if they are being lawfully detained, if they are free to leave, or if they are about to be arrested for simply existing in the wrong place.

And then the government expects people to calmly trust that everything they are doing is legal.

Which is exactly why constitutional protections exist.

Because “I’m a federal agent” is not a magic phrase that makes your constitutional rights disappear.
BREAKING: Tom Homan says if you don’t want to be killed by ICE agents, you should just comply…. So here is an example of what he wants you to comply with.

In this video, a woman noticed vehicles in a parking lot that she believed could be ICE vehicles… So, she started filming.

The people noticed she was filming, and drove past her.

She was alone, so she decided to leave.

Then, they started followed her.

But here’s the thing… she wasn’t even 100% sure they were ICE agents.

They were in unmarked vehicles, and they weren’t using emergency lights.

As she was driving down the street, being followed by these unmarked cars, one of the vehicles pulls up beside her, cuts her off, and the cars box her in.

She had nowhere to go without hitting the curb, or hitting the vehicle that had just cut her off.

She honked, but the vehicle just sat there.

Eventually it moved, and the vehicles drove away.

Now, imagine being a woman, alone in your car.

A group of cars, you cannot clearly identify as law enforcement, start following you.

They don’t turn on emergency lights. They don’t clearly identify themselves. And one of them cuts you off and blocking your vehicle from being able to drive away.

What are you supposed to think is happening?

Because from your perspective, it looks like you are being kidnapped by random people.

And that is the terrifying part of what ICE is doing.

They are creating situations where people have no idea whether the people surrounding them are legitimate law enforcement officers, or strangers attempting to abduct, or rob them.

And Tom Homan’s answer to being kidnapped, or robbed, is…

“Just comply.”

Don’t try to drive away. Don’t defend yourself. Don’t try to escape.

Just calmly allow unidentified people, in unmarked vehicles, to follow you, box you in, and potentially kidnap or rob you…

Because if they happen to be ICE agents, and you react like a normal person who believes they are being kidnapped, you could be assaulted, detained, or even shot.

Do you understand how dangerous and insane that is?!?

“Just comply” means women are being told to surrender to potential kidnappers, and hope they turn out to be government agents.

And if they don’t?

Tom Homan says it’s their fault for not complying.
This is not just Trump’s Amerika. This is not just Stephen Miller’s Amerika.

This is the GOP’s Amerika.

Abolish the GOP. Abolish ICE.
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Sunday, June 28, 2026

Making America Safe For White Americans

TAPPER: Is it the position of the Trump administration that Haiti is a safe country to send these people to?

MARKWAYNE MULLIN: Those that are coming to this country legally, they need to be able to contribute to the US, not be a burden on the taxpayers

TAPPER: But do you maintain that it's safe in Haiti to send these people back? The State Dept has a level 4 do not travel advisory

MULLIN: Well, the do not travel is not for Haitians. That's do not travel for the United States.
The government has an obligation to keep white people safe. Sec. Mullin: “Well, if they aren’t white people….” Three House candidates. Even if I disagreed with their politics, they wouldn’t be a threat to the nation at all. A corrupt felon in the White House whose Id is Stephen Miller? Now that’s a threat.
NOBLES: If the US is still bombing Iran 120 days into this conflict, how can the Trump administration credibly say the war is over?

SEN. ROGER MARSHALL: The major war is over. Think of this as almost just a mop up operation. Let's root for the Trump team for once rather than trying to tear them down.
Especially when they’re doing such a good job of tearing themselves down.
NOBLES: Did President Trump break his promise when it comes to housing and affordability?

SEN. ROGER MARSHALL: I'm concerned about the cost of living. We're still reeling from Joe Biden. Real wages are outpacing inflation right now. This is classic Donald Trump negotiation style.

NOBLES: Wages are not outpacing inflation. That's not correct.
Reality is a fungible good.
NOBLES: There's no evidence that fraudulent votes have changed any election outcomes. Are you trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist?

SEN. ROGER MARSHALL: Look, um, we make pilots before they start flying a plane, we make them get a license to do that. We don't wait until they crash the plane.
I know the concept of analogy can be a tough one, but Markwayne Mullin would struggle to do as badly as that.
Mamdani: "What I saw from Darializa when I would walk the streets of her district was a focus on what she describes as a politics of life. She would talk about how we have to invest in babies, not bombs ... what people in that district are exhausted by is a politics that has justified the spending of tens of billions of dollars in killing civilians overseas while working people are struggling just to do the basics."
"THE DEMOCRATS ARE COMING! THE DEMOCRATS ARE COMING!!”
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Saturday, June 27, 2026

Blustering Old Fool

I can’t find it now, but the NYT reported recently that about half our stock of defensive missiles, meant to ward off attack from Chin, have been depleted. 

Trump has been bleating this threat since March, leading to the perfectly legitimate question: “You and what army?”

Maybe the Congress needs to yank his chain more firmly; and someone needs to remind him about the Strait.
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Friday, June 26, 2026

Sleeping Through The Midterms

How interesting:
Praising a proposal to require Texas public school students to read Bible stories and passages in class, supporters say the perspective is an important acknowledgment that the nation was founded on Judeo-Christian values.

Rabbis and Jewish leaders, however, criticized the biblical passages chosen by the State Board of Education as heavy on Christianity and dismissive of Judaism, reducing the term Judeo-Christian to “a fig leaf at inclusion.”

The State Board of Education kicked off a week of meetings Monday by hearing from more than 400 experts, teachers and concerned citizens on two proposals — one that would overhaul the state’s social studies curriculum, and another that would create a required reading list for K-12 public schoolchildren. Both proposals include biblical references, passages and stories. A final vote is expected by Friday.

Many of the speakers who praised the proposed reading list said it was important to teach children about Judeo-Christian heritage and values.

“Don’t lie about where we came from as Americans,” witness Richard Green said. “It was the Judeo-Christian value system that produced the greatest, most powerful, the wealthiest, most free, the most benevolent nation in the history of the world.”

Larry Holland with the conservative grassroots group Citizens for Education Reform endorsed the reading list because it was aligned with “a nation founded on the principles of Judeo-Christian heritage.”

Several rabbis and Jewish individuals rejected the use of “Judeo-Christian” to support the list.

“One would think that this phrase is meant to evoke friendship between the two faiths, but I do not find that here — or in the language surrounding support for this list,” said Blake Ziegler, a Texas field organizer for the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

Cameron Samuels, executive director of Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, which works to include young people in state policy decisions, objected to using “Judeo-Christian” to characterize Texas values.

“Not in my Jewish faith shall you mandate entire chapters of the Bible for over five and a half million students in Texas and proclaim that this speaks for Jewish people,” Samuels said.

...

For many of the Jewish leaders who testified before the State Board of Education, the required readings signified the contradictions behind the term Judeo-Christian.

Of the roughly dozen scriptural passages included in the reading list, many were taken from the Hebrew Bible — the shared text between Jews and Christians — but most of the excerpts are from distinctly Christian translations.

Ziegler and Houston Rabbi David Segal criticized the reading list’s inclusion of Lamentations Chapter 3, the only biblical passage taken from the Tanakh, the Jewish translation of the Hebrew Bible. The Texas curriculum requires using a translation produced in 1917 by the Jewish Publication Society, and many contemporary Jewish communities no longer use it.

Ziegler told the education board that the translation was outdated and said he was concerned that the passage’s “graphic violence isn’t appropriate for eighth grade.”

Lamentations 3 details the physical, mental and spiritual effects of God’s wrath on those who stray from him.

Ziegler also criticized placing Lamentations 3 alongside Holocaust literature, like Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” in the curriculum.

“Lamentations understands the destruction of the ancient temple in Jerusalem as God’s punishment for the Israelites’ sins,” he said. “When it’s taught alongside Holocaust literature — suggesting that was similarly a divine punishment for Jews — that is an unacceptable implication that invites antisemitism and hurts Jews across the state.”

Segal agreed. “Of course, [the translation] is outdated, but worse, you’ve anchored it to Holocaust literature, which invites eighth graders to consider whether the Holocaust was God’s punishment for the Jews,” he told the board.

“I assume this poor choice comes from ignorance, not intent, but either way it’s unacceptable, as is the proposed list as a whole, which I ask you to reject and start over,” Segal said.

Joshua Fixler, rabbi at Houston’s Congregation Emanu El and a member of the Religious Action Center, said the curriculum’s near-exclusive use of Christian interpretations and scriptures will result in the “further alienation of non-Christian students.”

Speaking after his testimony, Fixler said he is almost always troubled by invocations of “Judeo-Christian,” which to him “make actions that Christians are doing seem more inclusive by including Jews in the phrase.”

“It feels like a fig leaf at inclusion,” Fixler said. “They’re promoting a particular version of Protestant Christianity in our public schools and trying to use Jews as cover by using the term Judeo-Christian.”
Because the real point is to keep our kids away from Sharia law:
“We do not need to emphasize other cultures like Islam,” Patricia Franklin of Lubbock told the board of education. Focusing instead on Judeo-Christian ideas “will foster our students’ understanding and pride in our moral, cultural and civic traditions,” she said.

Laurie Cardoza Moore, the evangelical Christian founder of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, a group that mobilizes support for Israel, emphasized Judaism’s impact on Western civilization.

“For more than two decades, PJTN has warned that anti-Israel propaganda and historical revisionism and ideological activism are entering classrooms,” she said.

“Students are being exposed to narratives that minimize the Jewish roots of Western civilization, distort the history of Israel, ignore the contributions of the Jewish people to America’s founding,” she said.

The Judeo-Christian Caucus says it unites pastors, legislators and citizens to “uphold and promote our Judeo-Christian heritage.” Contacted by email, Dran Reese, president of the group, said the term “Judeo-Christian” recognizes Christianity’s heritage “and affirms the timeless moral and ethical principles shared by both Jews and Christians.” The group was not present at the hearing.

“United by these common values,” Reese said, the caucus seeks “to strengthen faith, family, freedom, and the biblical foundations that have blessed our nation and civilization.”
So there is no separation of some churches and the state. Other churches need not apply. They are separated; because of how we define “the state.”
Fixler, the rabbi from Houston, has a different perspective. Though Jewish people were in the United States at its founding, he said, “we were not the founding fathers.” Using “Judeo-Christian” to describe the nation’s origin is “a prime example” of how the term rewrites the Jewish experience, he said in an interview.

The founding fathers were a “group of men representing a variety of religious beliefs” who built “the world’s first government that was explicitly not rooted in religion,” he said.

Fixler wore a tie depicting the Constitution when he testified before the education board — a choice he later said reflected his concern that the “sacred principles of the United States Constitution and our secular democracy were under threat.”

“The reading list and the social studies standards are part of a concerted effort to chip away at the wall of separation between church and state, which has been so important to people of all faiths in America for its 250-year history,” he said.

For Fixler, there is “a big difference between teaching about religion and teaching religion.” In his view, the list accomplishes the latter, and he would rather the vast majority of scriptural references be eliminated.

The Jewish Federations of Texas and Shalom Austin recommend using the 1985 Jewish Publication Society translation for passages from the Hebrew Bible, as well as additional representations of the Jewish experience beyond Holocaust literature.

Segal is similarly open to including some scriptural passages on the reading list.

“I do think it should be taught” to foster religious literacy, Segal said in an interview. But he said Jewish texts should not be taught “through a Christian lens” or be insensitively paired with Holocaust literature.

Ziegler said if lessons include religious texts, “they should reflect the diversity of our society.”

“The First Amendment does not permit the state to anoint one religious tradition above others. Texas students deserve an education that broadens their understanding of the world’s religious traditions, rather than narrowing it,” he said.
That's the point of the legal doctrine of separation of church and state. Patrick’s argument the phrase is not in the Constitution is correct; but neither is “free speech.” And Patrick used to make his money spouting nonsense on the radio.

And Patrick’s knowledge of religion is as empty as his knowledge of the Constitution.

(The term Judeo-Christian was popularized during the Cold War — a conflict frequently characterized as a spiritual battle between those of faith and “godless” enemies abroad, said Robert O. Smith, associate professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.

In the United States, the term united Protestants, Catholics and Jews under a banner of shared religious origins that excluded Muslims, he said.

“The Protestant, Catholic, Jew construct” of the Judeo-Christian ethos is based on the “rejection of the atheist and the rejection of the Muslim,” Smith said in an interview.

Though Judaism is embedded in the phrase, the partnership has not been equal, Smith added. The term Judeo-Christian “implies a Christian construction of Jewish existence” in which “Jews exist inherently to fulfill Christian purposes,” he said.

“Christianity, from its very beginnings, has had a very ambivalent relationship with Jews and Judaism,” Smith said. “There’s a desire for Jews to convert — and therefore for Judaism to disappear into Christianity — but there’s also a recognition that Judaism is the foundation of Christianity.”

Even the code words have code words. Important to understand that.)

In Texas, the GOP will run on the fear of Sharia law, and the righteousness of the Judas-Christian ideals, heavy emphasis on the “exclusionary” Christianity. And Trump will run on the fear of communism.

We’ll see how that works out.
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