Houston, we have a problem....

If a happy cartoon doesn't inspire you, what will?

My neighborhood is going from recycling buckets picked up by human beings, to recycling containers picked up by trucks (auto v. manual, basically).  To say it is not going smoothly would be an understatement.

A few weeks ago the City sent out a letter explaining that new containers were coming, the weeks during which they would arrive, and when they would be used.  We all have buckets, hand-held containers for recycling that get put out twice a month; these would be replaced with green (v. black) garbage cans much like we all have now.  These will also be picked up twice a month (v. weekly for garbage), but the new trucks won't pick up the new containers until two weeks after the old containers are used.  The old containers will be picked up on the last day of use, the new containers will be used two weeks after that.

You can probably see the problem already.

The letter that went out didn't say which date our old containers would vanish, and which date the new ones would be employed.  It didn't say which date because the letter was written for the entire city, and different neighborhoods get their recycling and garbage picked up on different days.  Instead, the letter indicated which schedule you were on would affect the schedule of the transition, and that schedule was, for this area, one of two.  You figure it out, in other words, based on the information in the letter, and respond accordingly.

Therein lies the problem.

The streets of my neighborhood this morning are lined with old green buckets and new green containers.  Some of the containers seem to contain trash.  Some probably contain recyclable items.  Some stand alongside the old green buckets, also overflowing with recyclables.  Some stand alone.  Some aren't out at all.

Did I mention that when the new buckets arrived, a copy of the same letter received two weeks earlier was attached?  Communication was not the problem; although the letter read like it was written by a bureaucrat instead of a regular person.  It could, in other words, have been much clearer.

We've been through this before.  The City stopped picking up regular plastic lawn bags, and required all bags be decomposable, so the lawn trash could be mulched into compost.  Lots of black bags kept appearing at curbside and received lots of orange stickers explaining why they were left at curbside before everybody finally got the message.  It was easily six months, and probably a year, before that transition finally ended.

I suspect a lot of houses in the neighborhood are going to be left with the green buckets after today.  I also suspect a lot of people are going to wonder why the green containers weren't emptied; especially the people who used them as trash cans.

If this sounds vaguely similar to the minor freakout over the ACA that seems to be all D.C. can talk about, I don't think that's an accident.  Maybe a million people looked at insurance policies, but didn't commit.  A handful are complaining they can't keep pouring money down the rathole of the plans that are completely worthless, mostly because they haven't figured out yet that those plans are worthless (some more so than others).  I suspect if the City made recycling mandatory on the grounds it would save a great deal of landfill space, a lot of residents of the City would complain about the burden that put on them; never realizing the burden they put on everyone else by expecting whatever they don't want in their house to vanish with the least effort or attention on their part possible.

If we don't handle these changes well, it's not because the government is incompetent.  Indeed, as Charlie Pierce said this morning, almost all of this is on us.

Maybe that's why we complain so much about everybody else.

Fools rush in

...there they'll talk you dead....

The major problem here is that Jerry Coyne is really not terribly well informed on the subject he addresses.  He makes sweeping assertions about religious faith that pretty much rest on defining faith as William James said most people erroneously define it:  "when you believe what you know ain't true."  He does start off with slightly better language by quoting Walter Kaufman, who is about as much an authority as Carl Sagan on astronomy:  a good popularizer, but not really the solid authority you want to go to.  Faith, per Mr. Kaufman, is:

intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.

Coyne can't resist going James' imagined young boy one better, though:  "To state it bluntly, such faith involves pretending to know things you don’t."  I think William James did a better job of saying the same thing.  And James had the decency to point out that's about the poorest definition of faith available, and not not ascribed to by most believers.  And I'm sure "such faith" does just as Mr. Coyne says; what I'm not sure of is such a definition of faith has anything to do with what most believers mean when they use the term.

Coyne's argument rests on the erroneous (and unexamined, at least by him) assertion that there is only one epistemological theory to explain "valid" knowledge, and that theory rests on some version of empiricism.  He even ends his argument with a quote from Richard Dawkins, a quote that goes to the more fundamental question of epistemology and which knowledge is best, although Coyne doesn't seem to realize this.  The distinction Dawkins introduces (even as Coyne insists it is invalid, because there is only one valid source of information) is between that which is discovered (the standard of empiricism) or that which is revealed (the standard of religion):

 There is a very, very important difference between feeling strongly, even passionately, about something because we have thought about and examined the evidence for it on the one hand, and feeling strongly about something because it has been internally revealed to us, or internally revealed to somebody else in history and subsequently hallowed by tradition. There's all the difference in the world between a belief that one is prepared to defend by quoting evidence and logic and a belief that is supported by nothing more than tradition, authority, or revelation.

 Yes, there is a difference; but saying one of these things is not like the other, is not simultaneously saying one of these things is better than the other.  All Dawkins, and Coyne by using him, have established is that science and religion are like chalk and cheese.  They haven't established a hierarchy, although they desperately want to.  As for the differences between such beliefs as Dawkins speaks of, I sincerely hope he doesn't rule out any love he has for his wife because he cannot defend it by quoting evidence and logic.  I would hope that belief, at least, is based on revelation and  internal knowledge.

Sadly, Coyne's argument just gets sillier:

The conflation of faith as “unevidenced belief” with faith as “justified confidence” is simply a word trick used to buttress religion.

 First, he's trying to use Wittgenstein's concept of "language games" without ever invoking the rigorous analysis of Wittgenstein.  That rigor, of course, would stop Coyne's analysis in its tracks, and send him packing.  Nevertheless, the trick employed here is not a conflation of terms, but the conflagration of a straw man.  Faith as "unevidenced belief" is not an illusory form of knowledge (because empirical knowledge is not the only valid form of human knowledge), nor is that even a valid definition of "faith" in a religious context.  Having erected his straw man on little knowledge, study, or investigation (one presumes that, like Dawkins, Coyne sees no reason to educate himself in a subject before presenting his ignorance about it), he sets it on fire and declares himself the victor of a race only he is running.  But that's not the worst of it, either.

Scientists give no special credence or authority to books, either, except insofar as they present comprehensive theories, novel analysis, or verified truths. When I became an evolutionary biologist, I was not required to swear to the truth of Darwin with my hand on The Origin of Species. Indeed, that book was wrong on many counts, including its fallacious theory of genetics. In contrast, many believers must regularly swear adherence to unchanging and dubious religious claims (think Nicene and Athanasian Creeds), and many ministers swear to uphold church doctrine.

The first sentence is sheer balderdash.  Science no more reinvents the wheel every generation or so than Christianity rest solely on what was written down in the 1st century C.E.  And when I was ordained as a minister I didn't put my hand on a book and swear to the truth of it, either.  Coyne is confusing ordination, or even baptism, with archaic courtroom dramas (nobody swears on a Bible anymore in court).  And "regularly swear adherence to unchanging and dubious religious claims"?  Aside from the many Protestant churches which don't recognize creeds at all (the Southern Baptist Convention being the largest of them), I grew up repeating the Apostle's Creed and the Nicene Creed until I had them memorized by sheer repetition, but I never once "swore" my "adherence" to them, or considered their claims either "unchanging" or "dubious;" at least not in the religious context.  Frankly, sometimes I thought about the claims of the creeds; sometimes I didn't.  Coyne has, in his work as a scientist, claimed adherence to unchanging and dubious claims as well; and those claims have changed not because science discovered new versions of the "truth," but because of paradigm shifts, as Kuhn has pointed out.

Science is as much philosophy as religion is theology; a point I've not doubt Mr. Coyne would find offensive to his empirical sensibilities.  But then many a believer I've met doesn't like to have the theological underpinnings of his or her belief pointed out, either.  Discomfort doesn't mean the disclosure is inaccurate.

Coyne's argument, in the end, comes down to special pleading.  Science is above such human concerns as "belief" and "faith," because science is pure and, dare I say it, heilige.  It is beyond reproach because everything it says is true and can be trusted.  However, as the great empiricist David Hume pointed out, all such knowledge is also quite pointless.  It can either tell us the obvious ("This stone is heavy."), or it can only tell us an unprovable synthesis ("This statue is pretty.").  If that's where Coyne wants to be left, I am happy to leave him there.

I feel compelled to point out he's left, not on the cutting edge, but somewhere in the mid-19th century.  If he wants to stay there with the evangelicals who believe the conversion of the Jews is necessary to the return of Christ, the group George W. Bush is addressing as I sit and type, I, for one, am happy to leave him there.

But I'm not going to leave him thinking he's describing the world the rest of us live in now.

Adding:  before I wrote the above, I wish I'd remembered I'd written this.  And the questions raise din comments there are worth going back to.   Hmmmm......

Don't you love farce?

His fault, I fear...

So this is what it feels like when you at least hope something is going to work out with a new government program, and you think, at least to yourself, that it isn't as bad as everyone says it is, and that even if a website doesn't work, it will, so why doesn't everybody just relax?

And then the President is the loudest voice shouting "FIRE!" in the crowded room where the cattle (all Congressional Democrats) are gathered and already starting to get so wide-eyed you can see the whites of their eyeballs, and you know the stampede is coming.

And so Obama fires off the pistol, just for good measure.

Screw it.  The ACA was a terrible idea that always depended on the kindness of insurance companies, or at least on satiating their greed with enough new customers they'd be more politic about how they run their business, but that moving part in particular was NEVER going to work, so here we are.  "Here" is where we were at the first of October.  Nothing has moved except Obama has made himself look as inept as possible (those tweets are not going to help him raise his approval rating in the future).  As Jonathan Chait said, nothing Obama said is going to mean anything; we're still waiting for that damned website, upon which apparently the fate of nations now rests:

Does Obama’s plan solve the policy problem of people losing their plans? Probably not — the main mechanism is to let Obama throw the blame to insurance companies (many of whom, as noted, originally threw the blame at Obama.) Does it solve the political problem of angry individual market customers? Again, probably not — many and perhaps most people won’t be able to keep their individual plans. Democrats also want the chance to take an affirmative vote to “fix” Obamacare, and an administrative ruling doesn’t let them do that. Obama’s announcement mainly leaves the law in the same place it’s been for a month and a half: waiting to see if the administration can fix the website.

In other words, more of nothing will happen, but at least the President caved before the Democrats in Congress did it for him; so there's that.

Sod it.  I'm moving to Bedlam, before it fills up.

My father's house has many reasons....

Yeah, something like that.

There are many reasons why Christ's teaching is not understood...

But the principle reason, which is the source of all the other mistaken ideas about it, is the notion that Christianity is a doctrine which can be accepted or rejected without any change of life.

--Leo Tolstoy

I found this here (a new blog to keep up with!).   And immediately coupled it with Wittgenstein, a quote I've used more than once ("Do I repeat myself?  Very well then, I repeat myself.  I am finite, I contain recursivities."--Walt Whitman).

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Ethics, Life and Faith," The Wittgenstein Reader, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford, Blackwell Press 1994).

And an excuse to mention this, which, although it is four years old, is still timely.  Not to mention pretty darned good.

Aaaarrrrggghhhh!!!!!

And how long had we been building bridges when this happened?

First, a note to Bill Clinton:  when Dick Cheney agrees with you, it's time to retract what you said and shut up.  And to the Democrats:  trying to essentially nationalize health insurance companies will not "fix" what is wrong with Obamacare.  And as for this "problem":

A senior Democratic aide told the Washington Post's Greg Sargent that without an administrative fix for people who are losing their existing individual health insurance policies -- which the White House is reportedly searching for -- it will be hard to maintain Democratic opposition to a House GOP bill that would seek to solve the problem.

Maybe the Democrats need to listen to Dean Baker:

First, it is important to note that the ACA grand-fathered all the individual policies that were in place at the time the law was enacted. This means that the plans in effect at the time that President Obama was pushing the bill could still be offered even if they did not meet all the standards laid out in the ACA.

The plans being terminated because they don't meet the minimal standards were all plans that insurers introduced after the passage of the ACA. Insurers introduced these plans knowing that they would not meet the standards that would come into effect in 2014. Insurers may not have informed their clients at the time they sold these plans that they would not be available after 2014 because they had designed a plan that did not comply with the ACA.

I bought one of those plans.  After the first two premium payments, we got a letter saying the plan was being cancelled, and then a letter saying the premiums were going up on the new plan.  The cancellation was not directly linked to the ACA, but it was implied (and, to be fair, the letter directed us to the national marketplace to seek out a plan that suited us better).  Why was the plan cancelled?  Because it was an individual policy that the insurer was looking for an excuse to cancel, the better to raise the rates in the new year.  That's the likeliest explanation.  We've had this experience before.  An employer-provided plan was cancelled a few years back, at renewal.  Seems the insurance company simply didn't want to deal in those policies anymore, so away it went, and new policies were more expensive with higher deductibles and premiums and more of the cost had to be shifted to the employees.  It was all perfectly fair; my wife was on the committee that looked at new insurance plans, not that they had much choice in what to look at.  But that didn't make national news or cause politicians to quake in terror, so it passed without general notice.

It has ever been thus, in other words:

In this case also it is wrong to view the insurers as passive actors who are being forced to stop offering plans because of the ACA. The price increases charged by insurers are not events outside of the control of insurers. If an insurer offers a plan which has many committed buyers, then presumably it would be able to structure its changes in ways that are consistent with the ACA. If it decides not to do so, this is presumably because the insurer has decided that it is not interested in continuing to offer the plan.

As a practical matter, there are many plans that insurers will opt to drop for market reasons that may or may not have anything to do with the ACA. It's hard to see how this could be viewed as a violation of President Obama's pledge. After all, insurers change and drop plans all the time. Did people who heard Obama's pledge understand it to mean that insurers would no longer have this option once the ACA passed?

As I say, with or without ACA, insurance companies make decisions on what plans to offer to whom, and whether or not to offer them at all.  There is no law requiring insurance companies to be in business, or to offer a product affordable to all.  One could see this as the fundamental flaw of the "Affordable Care Act," where "affordable" is largely provided by relying on employers to keep buying policies, and on subsidies to help out the middle class (the lower class is left to the tender mercies of GOP governors who won't expand Medicaid).  So once again, this is a middle class fight.*

Which apparently is scaring the likes of Mary Landrieu, who, if she had any political sense, would decry the stinginess and heartlessness of Bobby Jindal, a man who is as much a political powerhouse as Rick Perry.  In her best homage to Huey Long Mary Landrieu could point out that Louisiana is doing nothing to care for its poor and indigent, people who would get help if Bobby Jindal would accept it on their behalf from Washington.  She could also point out that waiting for a website to work is not nearly the same thing as waiting for a bridge to be designed and built, which is what one idiot "Silicon Valley" majordomo compared it to on NPR yesterday morning.

The next time a bridge design is changed by a Supreme Court opinion 6 months before it is scheduled to open, let me know.  And the first time a website collapse kills people, we can talk about websites being "infrastructure" like bridges.  Until then, that Silicon Valley guru can put a sock in it.

All of this is, as Baker says, a "Fox News Special."  Obama, Baker points out, also promised you could keep your doctor.  Many doctors have died or retired since Obamacare was signed into law; so, was that line a lie, too?

Stuff the outrage.  I'm tired of government by the loudest screamer, and politicians who jump at the sound of their own name spoken above 3 decibels. This morning the news is that only a few people have actually bought plans, although nearly 1 million people have looked into them.  54,000 from Texas completed applications, although only 3000 have purchased.  This, too, is a sign of disaster; except it's completely in line with the experience in Massachusetts under Romneycare.   People like to look before they buy.  This isn't catastrophe; this is normal.

Immigration; poverty; joblessness: we have bigger problems than a jiggy website and consumers who don't want to commit until 2014..

*The irony is the "fix" currently proposed by Sen. Udall would effectively nationalize the insurance companies by requiring  "insurers to continue policies that were in effect as of Sept. 30, 2013 until Dec. 31, 2015 if the consumers choose to renew them and meet the eligibility requirements"  Of course, "eligibility requirements" is a loophole big enough to drive a herd of elephants through, because it sounds like you're gonna have to suspend the provisions of the ACA about life-time caps and pre-existing conditions to get there, unless you just mean, can the consumer pay the rate hikes we're gonna impose?

Which is the likeliest explanation, since no way are the insurance companies gonna let Washington pass a law that doesn't allow them to make money.

And if I would add anything to what Josh Marshall said, it is that this is getting media coverage precisely because the House isn't doing anything between now and January, so there's nothing else for the DC press to obsess about.  And living in the DC bubble, Democrats are starting to crack.  "Gut check time" indeed. 

What a cock-up.

"We Must Love One Another, or Die"

Setting a very poor example of personal responsibility

So here we are then:

If the Democratic Party continues to provide everything for a voter without encouraging some personal responsibility, I fear a gap between taxpayers and beneficiaries will open so wide that our government will not be able to repair the financial damages.

While I do not support the premise of Obamacare, I can fully understand the frustration of the unemployed, uninsured American. I cannot judge those who choose to use the program, for I know exactly what it is like to need it.

I really don't understand this reasoning.  At. All.  The "premise" of Obamacare is that a civilized society takes care of its members.  We might just as well worry about the gap between taxpayers and beneficiaries from sustaining fire departments.  Does Ms. Hurley imagine that injured and sick people who have no insurance are left to die in the streets, the better they should learn "personal responsibility"?  That we leave victims of motorcycle crashes with head injuries from refusing to wear a helmet to the tender mercies of their damage, so they can see what "personal responsibility" is all about?  That people who retire without savings because they were never wealthy, and for whom "retirement" is simply they are too old to be hired by anyone, too ill, too infirm, should die and decrease the surplus population, because "personal responsibility"?

Where do such pernicious notions come from, except from the idea that "they" are all of one kind and NOK, and "we" are all of another kind, among the Elect, and deserving of whatever human kindness we can give each other?  Are we really going to all become louts and layabouts because of Obamacare?  Is that what happened with Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security?  Shouldn't those people take personal responsibility and die if they are too old to pay their bills and too poor to pay for a doctor?

Being now among the unemployed and uninsured, suddenly Ms. Hurley has some empathy for the problem.  Don't expect her to keep it once she gains employment and reacquires insurance.  Not that Obamacare is limited to the unemployed anyway, or that insurance is a grant of employment enshrined in law.  Before Obamacare, more and more employers were raising the premiums for insurance so high coverage was shrinking rapidly. It will probably continue to shrink, albeit more slowly, under Obamacare.  If there is a Ponzi scheme afoot, a system which transfers wealth from the poor to the rich and provides less and less ROI (because it isn't an investment), it is health insurance, and I don't really believe Obamacare has altered that fundamental fact.

And speaking of "personal responsibility" and healthcare:

Half of veterans who are insured, but report only relying on the Veterans Administration for their health care needs, could also “qualify for Medicaid to supplement their VA care under the expansion,” the analysis found.

But many of them won't because they live in states which refused to expand Medicaid.  That'll teach 'em to be more responsible on the battlefield!

Maybe when none of us but the wealth can afford the "greatest medical care system in the world," we'll all finally understand what personal responsibility means.  Or maybe before that catastrophe, we'll start to reconsider just whether or not we MIGHT be our brother's, and sister's, keeper after all.

Marching as to war....

Sarah Palin has re-started the war on Xmas with her new book (about her more below), but it's the sentiments inspired by this "war" that interest me.  As she says:  “The phrase ‘war on Christmas’ sounds like an oxymoron. I mean, how can there be a war about the holiday that celebrates the Prince of Peace?"  I dunno, but somehow they manage it:

This is actually a bit more blunt than the sign I saw one year.  It was in a small East Texas town I was driving through.  It was one of those moveable road-sign signs owners can stick letters on to form their own message.  The Yuletide (this was actually just after Thanksgiving) message outside this small business read:  "WE SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS!"  The "Dammit!!" was strongly implied.

There's more of this out there than I imagined (but why am I not surprised?).  Apparently you can send this as a card to your friends at Christmas:

Which really reflects the festive spirit.  Or you can share your sentiments around town with this on your car bumper:

I always just preferred putting a wreath on the front of mine; or maybe those antlers with the red nose for a hood ornament.   Bumper stickers are so year 'round, donchaknow?  Sadly and inevitably, everyone gets sucked into it:

Except, of course, those are the very words that end "A Charlie Brown Christmas" every year.

And no, the "War on Christmas" is not limited to signs and cartoons:

Last December, my 8-year old daughter was very excited about her upcoming Christmas Party at her school. However, she was very confused one day when she brought home a letter from her teacher informing her mother and me that the annual event would now be referred to as a 'Holiday Party' and gave us a set of rules to abide by on the day of the event. We were told that the school was discouraging students from wearing the colors red or green in order to be sensitive to other students, and that the phrase 'Merry Christmas' should be replaced with generic greetings such as 'Happy Holidays' or 'Season's Greetings' on any 'holiday' cards. This may come as no surprise to those of us who have witnessed this trend in recent years, but I can tell you it didn't make a whole lot of sense to our daughter. I guess it's never too early to be forced to teach your child about the absurdity of political correctness.

Being in the Texas Lege, the easily offended Mr. Bohac got a law passed, a law that is now going to be rigorously enforced:

One, it's circulating an online petition and asking those who sign to share a summary of the Merry Christmas Law with their school districts. Two, it's monitoring school districts' compliance with the law by crowdsourcing reports on how they're doing.

"No student in Texas should fear exercising their religious freedom at school," the group writes. Instead, they should fear God and praise His only begotten son.

And the law should make sure they do, amirite?  I can only weep thinking of the 1st Amendment suits these school districts are being set up for.  Because this is the website for the "Merry Christmas Bill" which includes insights like this:

“YES, KEEP Christmas in our schools! I still remember being an angel in my first grade Christmas Pageant... which was a PUBLIC school. KEEP America, American—with the values of our Founding Fathers in tact.”

Men who were Deists and some, like Jefferson, who even denied the divinity of Jesus (he cut the nativity stories out of his "Jefferson Bible").  Yeah, those Christmas values.  And there are, as of the day I looked, 8 "Tales of Christmas Past."  Clearly a landslide of sentiment in favor of a good old fashioned white Christmas.   And it all certainly brings Christmas much closer to a person...

Speaking of confusion and the holiday season, does Sarah Palin even listen to what she says?  Her opening salvo on this year's "War on Christmas" was a speech at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition's fall fundraiser where she noted that “everywhere it seems that we see that faith, religious freedom is under attack… and it’s censored.”  Which I guess is why I had so much trouble finding these pictures, or why her book didn't get published.  But the best part of her speech was when she tried to connect Xmas to government programs she doesn't like:

Palin warned the audience that they were up against liberals who would offer “a lure of free stuff.”

But she told Sean Hannity that "There are double standards being applied to those who wish to celebrate Christmas, for instance, in a traditional way.” And isn't that precisely the "traditional Christmas" she wants, one that offers the lure of 'free stuff'?

It's so hard to tell the players without a scorecard.
 
Still, if we are to go to war on a sentiment, I am sympathetic to anything that would keep this song from going through my head:

Although I think most people would secretly agree with this, making this card too true to be good:

Even if I did mean it, I wouldn't wish it to y'all yet, since Thanksgiving isn't even over.  Right, Sarah?

So until it's time to, and if I fail to remember, or feel stifled by the oppressive forces of political correctness, just remember the 1960's Boy Wonder speaks, in impeccable fake Ye Olde Englishe script, for me as well, and it will finally be:

Keeping the Hidden Wound Hidden

 Good thing this was made into a movie so we'd finally know slavery was this bad....

Sarah Palin compared the national debt to slavery.  E.W. Jackson tagged the Great Society programs as equivalent to slavery.  And, of course, Allen West spoke of the Democratic Party "plantation."

This is not just an ahistorical obsession with a national crime that spanned 300 years of American history.  This is not just a failure to recognize that slavery was an inhuman, brutalizing system which created American wealth by violence and cruelties so hard to understand even Richard Cohen had to see a movie to "get it."  (Did somebody give him an expurgated copy of Beloved, or does he just not read?)  This is not a failure it all.  Using slavery to condemn modern political policies is a feature, not a bug; and the feature is racist, to the core.

Now that a black man is in the White House, we all have to face our prejudices about how "inferior" African-Americans are.  We can ignore the business acumen of Puffy Combs by only paying attention to the fact he is an entertainer.  We can admire Beyonce because she can sing and dance; we don't have to consider her as a person.  Michelle Obama offended so many people as First Lady (and still does) because she was a perfectly capable black woman who didn't sing, dance, or crack jokes to get in the public eye.  Do I exaggerate?  Aside from Herman Cain, name three prominent black men or women in the field of business.  Three people equal to Donald Trump (before he became a clown) or Jamie Dimon.  Off the top of your head, name them.  I'll wait.

Googling is cheating.

Black public figures are still entertainers:  athletes; movie stars; singers; comedians.  It should not be so, but it is; it is so, far too much.  Barack Obama pole vaulted all of that, and landed in the White House.  And white America still hasn't forgiven him for it.  So white America must reclaim slavery, just as it reclaimed the reason for the Civil War.  If slavery was as bad as it is in the movie which caused the scales to fall from Richard Cohen's eyes, then slavery must be re-classified as taxation, as regulation, as government policy the right wing congenitally dislikes.

The right is not obsessed with slavery.  The right is obsessed with maintaining white privilege.  Why else is Richard Cohen, 46 years after the Loving decision, still stunned by seeing a mixed race couple in Gracie Mansion? *  The right is obsessed with maintaining its claim to racism.  We are not seeing the abuse of the concept of slavery as it was practiced in America.  We are seeing the white-washing of it.  Again.


*should we tell him the nation's fourth largest city just re-elected a lesbian mayor, whose daughter campaigned for her this time?

Dept. of Corrections

Like I said; it's a meme

I'm really not anti-Amanda Marcotte, because I think she means well rather than ill with her articles/opinion pieces on conservative Christianity in American politics.  The problem is she really isn't all that well informed on the topic, as her latest reveals.  To take just three categories that she identifies:

Catholics: 

Modern American conservative Protestants embrace Catholics and have even started to borrow some Catholic arguments against things like abortion and contraception. But in the early 19th and 20th centuries, there was widespread anti-Catholic sentiment, much of it tied up in hostility to Catholic immigrants. 

Anti-Roman Catholic sentiment is as old as the Reformation itself.  When the Puritans finally got here and started leaving their indelible stamp on things, one of the things they outlawed was Christmas because, in part, the word itself included the RC term for worship, "Mass."  The Puritans outlawed a lot of things because they wanted their church to be "pure," and the "things" they mostly particularly outlawed were anything that smacked of the Roman church.

Even Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad betrays an almost nativist anti-Papist streak, one he clearly acquired on the Western frontier.  Anti-Catholicism has deep roots in Europe (going back, as I say, about 500 years) and deep roots in America (where it goes back for  nearly 400 years).  The "widespread" anti-Roman sentiment was present in America long before the 19th century, and had roots even deeper in the lives of the immigrants who brought it here.

And most conservative Christians still think Rome is the Whore of Babylon; but politics makes strange bedfellows, and the CC's figure they can dust off the Roman curse before Judgment Day.  That doesn't mean they've set aside their anti-Roman sentiments, though:

"My mom was raised Catholic, and she . . . was yearning for something more,” she said. “His invitation for people to know that they could have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ — my mom understood that from the way that he could articulate it. She became a Christian, led the rest of the family to Christ, and that I believe transformed our family.”

The "she" there is Sarah Palin.  Her comments were made at Billy Graham's 95th birthday celebration.  And yes, she is saying that Catholics are not Christians.

Why is anyone surprised?

School prayer: 

Along with supporting segregation and opposing feminism, the third issue that created the modern religious right is the issue of prayer in public schools.... Even though there’s no evidence that these bullying tactics have ever converted anyone to their faith, they keep trying.

Actually, conservative Christians aren't trying to recruit to their side by making kids pray, any more than they are evangelizing by insisting on prayers at all governmental public gatherings (and most private ones, like sporting events).  If they want anything, its to remove any risk they didn't do everything they could to present God's Word to the heathen before the End Times.  The soteriology of many of these groups puts a burden on them to "save" as many souls as they can; failure to do so is a failure to follow the "Great Commandment" of Matthew and make disciples of all nations.  Where the KJV of the koine Greek may have merely meant "ethnicities," CC's tend to read it as nation-states (a concept that didn't exist when the KJV was produced), and "all" means "all;" not just some from every group.

Slavery: 

Both sides of the American slavery debate claimed to be speaking from profound Christian conviction. The Bible clearly has a positive view of slavery, something pro-slavery Christians routinely pointed out. Abolitionists took a broader, less literal view of the Bible. Unsurprising that this divide led to the South being, to this day, home of the most people who take a literalist, fundamentalist view of Christianity.

"The Bible clearly has a positive view of slavery?"  Well, the Bible is also objectively anti-woman, unless you read it as many modern Biblical scholars do.  Not only can the Devil cite Scripture to his own purpose, but interpretation is a matter of which community you attend to.  Given the variety of interpretations the texts have been subject to over centuries, I don't think it's fair to say the Bible has a "clear" view of almost any subject.  ("Biblical theology" failed on precisely this point.  Try as those theologians might, they could not find a clear, consistent theology throughout the many books.)  And yes, I mean that as broadly as it sounds; and I still hold to the Bible as the revealed Word of God.

But insisting on a single view in it?  Good luck with that.  Let one example suffice:  "Religious leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. led the desegregation movement, but it’s also important to note that the pro-segregation movement was also conceived as a Christian one."

Yup.  'nuff said.

One size always fits all

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio....

Philosophy, Roy Scranton (honesty compels me to note, a Ph.D. candidate in English; all English majors think they are philosophers....) says, is about learning to die.  It is an idea central to his essay at NYT, which ends with these words:

The biggest problem climate change poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should put up sea walls to protect Alphabet City, or when we should evacuate Hoboken. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.

The choice is a clear one. We can continue acting as if tomorrow will be just like yesterday, growing less and less prepared for each new disaster as it comes, and more and more desperately invested in a life we can’t sustain. Or we can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever problems the present offers without attachment or fear.

If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.

Yes, we're all going to die, because we can't go on living like we have.  Which apparently means all of America will be Baghdad after the U.S. invasion, but frozen there in amber, in perpetuity, hell without end, Amen.

So get used to it.

First:  if philosophy is about learning how to die, I'll take theology, thanks.  Second, if philosophy is about learning how to die, then dying is some form of living, and again, I'll still take theology, thanks. 

Historian Philippe Ariès reminds us that death was a part of life. Medieval and early modern romances, chronicles and memoirs speak with one voice: when death knocked, the door was opened and the visitor was welcomed in remarkably similar ways.

Organization was essential. The dying person was responsible for the proper execution of his final exit. The doctor's principal task was not to delay death, but to guarantee that it was welcomed properly. And, indeed, the doctor wasn't alone. Family and friends gathered for the ceremony and the doctor was simply a face in the crowd. One and all understood their roles and the lesson that was imparted: they, too, would eventually be called.

The intimate relationship between life and death unfolded in unexpected places. The medieval and early modern cemetery was no less public place than the deathbed. For centuries, the activities we associate with the marketplace commonly took place in cemeteries, amongst the tombs and charnel houses. Merchants and scribes, musicians and dancers, jugglers and actors and, gamblers and the like sought to make a living in the company of the dead. When Hamlet clowns about with Yorick's skull, he's exceptional only in the fluency of his language.

By the late eighteenth century, language and attitudes began to change. Public authorities tried to stop profane activities in the newly redefined sacred spaces like the cemetery. At the same time, doctors began to sound the way they do today: the crowd of family and friends around the deathbed, they complained, complicated the job of attending to their patients.

Death thus got away from the dying person; it became the responsibility of others. It is only recently, with the rise of the hospice movement, that we're reminded of the ways in which we formerly responded to death. The recognition of death's finality, the planning for its arrival, the gathering of family and the redefinition of the physician's task: rather than confronting a brave new world, we seem to be returning to a simpler and older world. Ariès called this older understanding "tamed death." According to him, the old attitude in which death was both familiar and near, evoking no great fear or awe, [is in] marked a contrast to ours, where death is so frightful that we dare not utter its name. I do not mean that death had once been wild and [is no longer], I mean, on the contrary, that today it has become wild. And death has, in part, grown wild through the very tools with which medical science tries to domesticate it: an irony that would not be lost on Hamlet's creator.

If today, then, philosophy must be about learning to die, it is only because philosophy has first taught us that we should not die; that death is wild and untamed and terrible.  So now philosophy is about undoing what philosophy has done?  Isn't that like the "hair of the dog" cure for a hangover?

The topic always makes me think of these words from Thomas Merton:

THE cross, with which the ashes are traced upon us, is the sign of Christ's victory over death. The words "Remember that thou art dust and that to dust thou shall return" are not to be taken as the quasi-form of a kind of "sacrament of death" (as if such a thing were possible). It might be good stoicism to receive a mere reminder of our condemnation to die, but it is not Christianity.--Thomas Merton

Christianity is not, in other words, concerned with reconciling us with death.  It never was.  Martyrs didn't commit suicide to be with God; they were faithful in life to the end, knowing they were already with God.  God, as Jesus said quite pointedly, is the God of the living, not the dead.  It is not death, or even the fear of death, that Christianity either teaches or ameliorates; it is life.  The Greek phrase usually translated as "eternal life" is not really so Platonic as that.  It is more correctly rendered:  "life into the ages."

With Merton, I'm not anxious to reduce all of Western philosophy to some form of Stoicism, any more than I can agree with modern Biblical scholarship which wants to root some of Christianity's teachings in Cynicism. No more am I anxious to see human beings in terms of computers as understood by non-computer nerds:  Mr. Scranton's editor plucks out a sentence clearly thought to be insightful, but actually quite pitiful, to the effect that we humans are "hard-wired" to think tomorrow will always be like today.

First:  "hard wired"?  Does anybody use that metaphor any more?  And isn't that fear that tomorrow won't be like today the source of modern anxiety?  Aren't we quite convinced tomorrow can't be like today, because of "progress" or "technology" or "Steve Jobs!" or something?  The whole idea is as ludicrous as the generalization that philosophy has anything to do with accepting death.

"My death," Jacques Derrida wonderfully asked; "Is it possible?"   Derrida wasn't trying to make us accept death with that question; he was confronting us with the fact that we could not imagine our non-existence.  It's not quite the same thing as being "hard wired" to think tomorrow, when you are dead, will be just like today, when you are alive.  It's a bit more particular and incisive than that.  Imagining your own death without the continuation of your existence (if you deny the immortality of your Platonic soul), is simply impossible.  To imagine your death is to imagine you observing your death, and death without immortality is simply the end.  There is no you left to experience, or observe, anything.  Imagining that is virtually impossible.  Perhaps the warriors of Beowulf's day didn't have trouble imagining their own deaths, but more likely they simply didn't dwell on the question.  Life was nasty, brutish, and short, and death was very long (in Andrew Marvell's felicitous phrase, "oceans of vast eternity").  Why dwell on the inevitable?  It is only as we have managed to push death back, to overcome infirmities of cancer and infection and even heart problems, that we need to consider the reality of our own death.  It is inevitable, but it is not coming from a sword thrust or an axe blow or an illness in the bloom of youth; it is more likely coming in slow, creeping decrepitude and decline.

"Learn how to die" sounds not just fatalistic to me but positively perverse.  I think if anything we should learn how to live.  We have learned how to kill:  people, animals, species, plants, ecosystems, perhaps the biosphere of a planet.  If that hasn't taught us equally how to die, nothing will.  "How should we then die?" is never the question; it is always "How should be then live?"

And the answer, at a bare minimum, is:  "Probably not like this."

What, then?  It's not death I need to learn, or dieing.  The moment I was born I began that, and I needn't learn it; it will happen in it's own good time.  It's living I need to learn.  It's living without killing, without destroying, without causing every other thing within my reach (and as a member of a highly industrialized society, my reach is long indeed) to learn to die.  No, I think we have dieing down to an art form, to a cultural norm, to an absolute given.

It's living that we need to learn.

Those who have ears had better look!

Let's not focus on this:

or this:

Let's focus on what was said; or, more precisely, on what wasn't said:

But Ms. Kurt recently took the Pope Francis prayer card down and threw it away. "It seems he's focusing on bringing back the left that's fallen away, but what about the conservatives?" said Ms. Kurt, a hospice community educator. "Even when it was discouraging working in pro-life, you always felt like Mother Teresa was on your side and the popes were encouraging you. Now I feel kind of thrown under the bus."

But it's worse than that!

Steve Skojec, the vice president of a real estate firm in Virginia and a blogger who has written for several conservative Catholic websites, wrote of Francis' statements: "Are they explicitly heretical? No. Are they dangerously close? Absolutely. What kind of a Christian tells an atheist he has no intention to convert him? That alone should disturb Catholics everywhere." In an interview on Friday, Mr. Skojec said he was overwhelmed by the positive response to his blog from people who said they were thinking the same things but had not wanted to say them in public. He said he had come to suspect that Francis is a "self-styled revolutionary" who wants to change the church fundamentally. "There have been bad popes in the history of the church," Mr. Skojec said. "Popes that murdered, popes that had mistresses. I'm not saying Pope Francis is terrible, but there's no divine protection that keeps him from being the type of guy who with subtlety undermines the teachings of the church to bring about a different vision."

Francis was probably born in Kenya, too.

If ever we needed evidence that the message of the Christ of the Gospels was a radical message at odds with the demands of the world, thanks be to God that evidence is renewed from time to time for all to see.

Although I will say, now I think he's just playing with us:

Besides, this is where it's really gonna hit the fan!

In this corner:

"There has to be a noticeable lifestyle characterized by simplicity and holiness of life. This is a sure way to bring our people to an awareness of the truth of our message," said Vigano, the apostolic nuncio based in Washington.

"The Holy Father wants bishops in tune with their people," Vigano said, noting that he visited the pope in June. "He made a special point of saying that he wants pastoral bishops, not bishops who profess or follow a particular ideology."

And the challenger(s):

Many conservative Catholics argue that the next head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) should maintain the doctrinal standard the Catholic Church has upheld throughout its history — and resist the temptation to adopt a more relative theology.

“The church is not a democracy,” said Judie Brown, president of the Catholic organization American Life League. “We cannot vote on what we want to believe and what we don’t want to believe.”

And that's where the fight comes to:  is it a matter of theology; or simply a matter of emphasis?

Here's all the people?

"No damn cat!  No damn cradle!"

No, it's not the fact atheists are now forming "churches" that interests me.

It's the fact they are aping the churches and, frankly, I'm not sure there's a lot of difference between the origin and the copy:

Jones got the first inkling for the idea while leaving a Christmas carol concert six years ago.

"There was so much about it that I loved, but it's a shame because at the heart of it, it's something I don't believe in," Jones said. "If you think about church, there's very little that's bad. It's singing awesome songs, hearing interesting talks, thinking about improving yourself and helping other people — and doing that in a community with wonderful relationships. What part of that is not to like?"
....
Hundreds of atheists and atheist-curious packed into a Hollywood auditorium for a boisterous service filled with live music, moments of reflection and an "inspirational talk, " and some stand-up comedy by Jones, the movement's co-founder.

During the service, attendees stomped their feet, clapped their hands and cheered as Jones and Evans led the group through rousing renditions of "Lean on Me," ''Here Comes the Sun" and other hits that took the place of gospel songs. Congregants dissolved into laughter at a get-to-know-you game that involved clapping and slapping the hands of the person next to them and applauded as members of the audience spoke about community service projects they had started in LA.

At the end, volunteers passed cardboard boxes for donations as attendees mingled over coffee and pastries and children played on the floor.

I say this as someone with a strong preference for liturgical worship, but then again I've been to church services, among both conservative as well as liberal Christians, that varied only slightly from this description.   At some of those churches I've strongly felt the presence of God, and people who loved each other because of God; at others...well, drop a few words, and it could have been the event described above.  And frankly, this sentiment could have been expressed by almost any member of any "church":

"I think the image that we have put forward in a lot of ways has been a scary, mean, we want to tear down the walls, we want to do destructive things kind of image is what a lot of people have of us," he said. "I'm really excited to be able to come together and show that it's not about destruction. It's about making things and making things better."

Where's the fundamental difference between the believer and the non-believer?  That's not an idle question; that's the first question I remember being put to me in seminary.  Why is Jesus somebody other than a guy with some really good ideas?  And no faculty member answered that; they wanted us to find an answer.

Rachel Maddow had John Lewis on the other night.  I can't find a shorter version of this, because the reason I post it is in the reading of Lewis' book, in the first few minutes of the video.  It is the idea that the marchers for civil rights endured the beatings and assaults not just because their cause was right, but because they had been taught not only to take it passively, but to love their attackers.



Love their attackers; imagine that. Now imagine that being taught on a wholly rational basis, and imagine how far you would get, how many people you would get to join you, agree with you, act with you, bear the pain with you, when you tell them the goal is not just to endure, but to love.

I know many churches don't teach the lesson quite that personally, either.  But I'm trying to imagine an atheist "church" doing it.  Or inspiring what Dr. King inspired, and making possible the organizations that made the civil rights struggle possible.

I'm not condemning atheist "churches" here.  But in the struggle between the Church of Belonging and the Church of Meaning and Belonging, I still think the true church is finally found in the latter.  If that church expresses itself like Pope Emeritus Benedict, it faces certain problems and limitations; but if that church doesn't create and allow the leadership of a Pope Francis, it faces even deeper problems.

And I'm not sure an atheist "church" would ever produce anything more than a Joel Osteen.

Veteran's Day 2013

 It's only words....

Kurt Vonnegut, b. November 11, 1922, d. April 11, 2007.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. 

"The sudden silence was the Voice of God."

Precisely so.

Tick tick tick....

I really didn't think it would be this easy to assemble the images.

So here's Lara Logan on "60 Minutes" on Benghazi:

And here's Lara Logan again, on "60 Minutes" on Benghazi:

And, just for grins, here's Lara Logan apologizing for the story the first time, on CBS's morning show:

I think we can safely say we know when the apology that aired on "60 Minutes" was taped; just as we can safely say the apology "60 Minutes" issued through Ms. Logan was much more detailed on the morning show than it was on Sunday night.  Maybe since she'd said it all once that day she was bored with repeating herself.

The first picture is from the original broadcast.  The second picture is from the sorry/not sorry apology.  I don't like paying attention to how people are dressed, especially because sexist and classist and other things, but does anybody think it's an accident Ms. Logan was showing cleavage on the first show (Hey!  A "sexy" news story is SEXY!) and wearing basically a T-shirt collar for her apology appearances?

Yes, her apology was a joke and her motives in the original story are questionable (Wonkette has all the details; and the link to CBS and Fox News via David Rhodes makes this story at TPM seem all the more likely, especially when you add in CBS owned Threshold Editions), and even yes, the second dress is more appropriate for a morning TV show when you aren't a Hollywood celebrity and no, I don't care how Lara Logan dresses for TV appearances, and yes, this is small beer compared to Ms. Logan's "I Want to Believe" approach to Dylan Davies, but...

Does anybody else feel played by all of this, on several levels?

It just seems a little too purposeful for me.  And it makes the whole thing, if that's possible, even sleazier.

He does know we remember this, right?

He's hiding behind more than those glasses....

Ted Cruz is a big fat liar:

"Listen, Jay, I'm one of the many people who was not a fan of shutting down the government," Cruz said. "Throughout this whole thing, I said..."

"Well you looked like a big fan from where I was standing," Leno interjected.

"I said throughout 'we shouldn't shut down the government,'" Cruz said seconds later. "And the reason we had a government shutdown is President Obama and the Democrats said 'we will not negotiate and we will not compromise.'"

Um, what?

 Texas Sen. Ted Cruz says this month's partial government shutdown and his key role in it were a success: They got people talking.

"One of the things we accomplished in the fight over Obamacare is we elevated the national debate over what a disaster, what a train wreck, how much Obamacare is hurting millions of Americans across this country," Cruz told about 600 Iowa Republicans on Friday at the Iowa GOP's annual fundraising dinner in Des Moines.

 He was for it:

Cruz agreed: "A significant amount of Republicans assume, with an impasse, that President Obama will never ever ever give up his principles, so Republicans have to give up theirs... If you have an impasse, you know -- one side or the other has to blink. How do we win this fight? Don't blink." Cruz tells The National Review that Republicans who disagree have Clinton PTSD — they're "haunted by ghosts of shutdowns past."

Before he was against it.  Because it was Obama's fault!

When it was over it was such a good idea, let's do it again!
 

Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who pushed the strategy to tie government funding to defunding President Obama’s health care law, wouldn’t rule out revisiting it in the coming months.

“I would do anything, and I will continue to do anything I can, to stop the train wreck that is Obamacare,” Cruz said when asked by ABC News’ Jon Karl whether he would rule out another shutdown. “The test that matters Jon, is are we doing anything for all the people that are getting hurt from Obamacare?”

And why does Cruz get elected?  Mostly because nobody cares:

To understand Texas politics, an important number to keep in mind is 750,000. In a state of 26 million people, that is how many votes it generally takes to prevail in a statewide Republican primary — which is tantamount to being elected, considering that no Democrat has won statewide office here since 1994.

Democrats have not won statewide office in 20 years because they haven't put up any candidates worth voting for since Ann Richards.  That may change with Wendy Davis, despite that fact Texas voter turnout is around 36%, the lowest in the country.  GOTV is the next big fight in Texas.  Which is why we have the most restrictive voter ID law in the country.  Least popular, too. 

Wendy Davis is 6 points behind Greg Abbott, and the campaigning hasn't even started yet.  Abbott was re-elected as state Attorney General in 2010.  Prior to her filibuster, Wendy Davis was virtually unknown outside of the Texas Legislature.  Can Texas' restrictive voter ID law (which Wendy Davis saved from preventing Greg Abbott and others from voting altogether) be a spark that starts a prairie fire?

Stranger things have happened in Texas history....

REDRUM!

We'll be replacing doors, too.  Why do you ask?

We are painting the living room red. Again.

I am disappointed there is no "Red Rum" color in the paint selections.

I know by the time we're through it will be a popular sentiment around the house.

Is Christmas Over Yet?

Because I'm not doing anything that promotes her new book

I ask because the local strip mall had it's Xmas decorations out in mid-October.  No, that isn't a typo; I typed what I meant and meant what I typed:  mid-October.

Hallowe'en wasn't over before they were up at all the other retail parking lots around me.  Christmas music has already started, too. 

Some years ago I recall hearing about a German store clerk who sued for violation of his human rights because the store he worked in started playing Christmas music in mid-December.  More and more, he has my sympathies, and my wish that such a suit would be recognized in an American court.

Fat chance.

I have no desire to go to war on Christmas, but every year I get closer to thinking about enlisting, if only because the retail observances of it are so insufferable.  Perhaps it is best for me to simply restate my support for Bill McKibben's Hundred Dollar Holiday and recommend it to all of you for your yuletide reading and pleasure.  We could do worse than recover the Christmas Charles Dickens resurrected with Pickwick and Ebenezer Scrooge.  No tree, no presents, and lots of games and food and family or friends.  Let Thanksgiving be for family, if you must close in.  Let Christmas be for everyone you know who you can gather.

I know; too radical.  We are all beholden to Clement Clark Moore.  Maybe it's time, however, to start loosening those mind-forged manacles, and regain the holiday we have all but lost.

Before Sarah Palin sells it right out from under us.....

Beauty is in the story of the artist....

A good view spoiled.

In my admittedly limited experience with art schools and art courses (including two I took in graduate school, art history, not studio!  You don't want me near an art studio....), I've been surprised by how much the instruction (at least) was tied up with narrative.  My unscientific conclusion is that art teachers are more obsessed with story than English teachers are.  Sadly, this only confirms that for me:

The landscape was originally painted by an artist named K. Sager. According to media reports, it had been purchased at a Housing Works thrift shop months earlier for $50. It reportedly was then altered and mysteriously dropped off on Oct. 29 at a Housing Works location in the city's Gramercy neighborhood.

That's where the story started.  Unfortunately for the charity, it didn't stay there long:

In another twist, Emling also said Bernardo shared with him an origin story of the painting that conflicted with the accounts given to the media at the time of the auction.

"They were in on it all along. They knew. Actually, Banksy's people actually contacted them saying, 'Hey, we're looking for a landscape piece, we want to paint a monster on it,'" Emling said.

"So the whole story about somebody buying it weeks ago and then somebody coming and dropping it off and telling them, 'I need to speak with the manager, you have a very expensive piece on your hands here,' isn't the case," Emling said.

There are denials and no doubt by now counter-denials; but the fact is, this is a "sofa painting" suddenly worth 6 or more figures because of it's story.  And without the story, it's a sofa painting again.

So:  is it art?  Did Banksy actually add value to it, or did the story of Banksy add the value?

Funny what people actually think they're buying; one seldom sees it made quite so plain.