Thursday, November 09, 2017

"Deplorables" on the march


Trump's response from Asia to Tuesday's election results

Charlie Pierce writes about the Politico Magazine piece about Trump supporters and misses the point entirely. He gives two long excerpts (which you can pause and go read) and ends with this observation:

These people are not reachable. I wish they were. There’s no point in getting angry about it anymore. There’s also no point in wondering why they feel the way they do, why they fell for the snake oil, and why they consistently vote against their own interests, or don’t vote at all. Reading what they told Kruse about where they are a year after voting for Trump is like listening to someone in the throes of a hangover talk about a bar fight they were in the night before.

"These people" were never any more reachable than Louie Gohmert or Paul Ryan or Steve King.  To act like they are average Americans representing the heartland or the forgotten working class or the proletariat of 1984 about to rumble and move and shake off the ruling class, is farcical and always has been.  Donald Trump didn't awaken a sleeping giant in 2016, Hillary Clinton put too much of the rest of the country to sleep.  Hell, we all went to sleep, convinced there was no way a boob like Trump could win, that the "system" would stop him, would save us, and what did we have to worry about?  No one was gonna vote for him, or at least not enough "no ones" to matter!  And in the strictest sense of mattering to a body politic, these people identified as Trump supporters, as his base which will never abandon him, are no ones, and deserve to be abandoned by the body politic, because they themselves have abandoned that body first:

What I heard from Schilling is overwhelmingly what I heard in my follow-up conversations with people here who I talked to last year as well. Over the course of three rainy, dreary days last week, I revisited and shook hands with the president’s base—that thirtysomething percent of the electorate who resolutely approve of the job he is doing, the segment of voters who share his view that the Russia investigation is a “witch hunt” that “has nothing to do with him,” and who applaud his judicial nominees and his determination to gut the federal regulatory apparatus. But what I wasn’t prepared for was how readily these same people had abandoned the contract he had made with them. Their satisfaction with Trump now seems untethered to the things they once said mattered to them the most.

"Electorate" is an interesting term.  Does it mean those eligible to vote?  Or those who actually voted last?  Because quite a different "electorate" seems to have spoken yesterday.  But we can't hold that against Politico; after all, these people are die-hard Trump supporters, that's gotta mean something, right?

When I asked Del Signore about the past year here, he said he “didn’t see any change because we got a new president.” He nonetheless remains an ardent proponent. “He’s our answer.”

I asked Schilling what would happen if the next three years go the way the past one has.

“I’m not going to blame him,” Schilling said. “Absolutely not.”

Is there anything that could change her mind about Trump?

“Nope,” she said.

Yup; unreachable.  But that's only the start, even though that's where Piece leaves it:

More than anything, what seemed to upset the people I spoke with was the National Football League players who have knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Frear told me, “if I was the boss of these teams, I would tell ’em, ‘You get your asses out there and you play, or you’re not here anymore.’ They’re paying their salaries, for God’s sake.”

“Shame on them,” Del Signore said over his alfredo. “These clowns are out there, making millions of dollars a year, and they’re using some stupid excuse that they want equality—so I’ll kneel against the flag and the national anthem?”

“You’re not a fan of equality?” I asked.

“For people who deserve it and earn it,” he said. “All my ancestors, Italian, 100 percent Italian, the Irish, Germans, Polish, whatever—they all came over here, settled in places like this, they worked hard and they earned the respect. They earned the success that they got. Some people don’t want to do that. They just want it handed to them.”

“Like NFL players?” I said.

“Well,” Del Signore responded, “I hate to say what the majority of them are …” He stopped himself short of what I thought he was about to say.


Wait for it; it's coming.  It's not the rich snotty players disrespecting the flag and Mom and apple pie by kneeling on a football field.  No, it's not that at all; scratch that surface, and see what you reveal.  Wait for it, because this is something even beyond being "mulishly immune to processing empirical facts in the world around them."  As Marvel comics used to say:  "Face front, kiddies!  Here it comes!"

Schilling and her husband, however, did not restrain themselves.

“The thing that irritates me to no end is this NFL shit,” Schilling told me in her living room. “I’m about ready to go over the top with this shit. We do not watch no NFL now.” They’re Dallas Cowboys fans. “We banned ’em. We don’t watch it.”

Schilling looked at her husband, Dave McCabe, who’s 67 and a retired high school basketball coach. She nodded at me. “Tell him,” she said to McCabe, “what you said the NFL is …”

McCabe looked momentarily wary. He laughed a little. “I don’t remember saying that,” he said unconvincingly.

Schilling was having none of it. “You’re the one that told me, liar,” she said.

She looked at me.

The NFL?

“Niggers for life,” Schilling said.

“For life,” McCabe added.
It probably is 30% of the electorate, after all.  I grew up with people talking about painting the football green so players wouldn't drop it, and how their "n---ers were beating up on our black boys!" and other such jests.  I've heard the "NFL" line, too; but not in 40 years.  Tell me again these are people I need to pay any political attention to.  Still doesn't mean they swing the most weight because their guy is President.  Mostly because he doesn't know how to swing his weight as President.  GOP donors are threatening to cut the GOP off if they can't pass tax reform, and what is Trump going to do to see that happens?

President Donald Trump called 12 Senate Democrats Tuesday, hoping to sway them in favor of the Republican tax cut bill, and told them he would personally "get killed" financially by the GOP bill. He said the wealthy need a repeal of the estate tax, according to multiple people who were present.

"My accountant called me and said 'you're going to get killed in this bill,'" the president said during a phone call from his trip in South Korea. He was apparently trying to increase Democratic support by claiming the bill would hurt wealthy taxpayers like himself, making the point that only the repeal of the estate tax would provide him any benefit.

Yeah, that's what I expected.  The GOP's answer to LBJ, right?  Tell me again why I should even care about the political clout of Trump's "base".  "Unreachable"?  Like a friend of mine used to say, I wouldn't touch 'em with a club.
Posted by at No comments:

Meanwhile, in the Ivory Tower....


Well, whether or not you are a nice person is probably influenced by culture, too.

Miguel Farias of Coventry, who was lead author of the paper, said in the statement: “We don’t think people are ‘born believers’ in the same way we inevitably learn a language at an early age. The available sociological and historical data show that what we believe in is mainly based on social and educational factors, and not on cognitive styles, such as intuitive/analytical thinking. Religious belief is most likely rooted in culture rather than in some primitive gut intuition.”

Whether Mozart writes classical (in the strict sense) music, or classical Chinese music, is clearly influenced by culture.

This study is presented with a sort of "No shit, Sherlock!" frame:

The fact that more intelligent people do not profess a belief in god or religion has been known for long, both through historical evidence and modern data collected through surveys. And social scientists have often tried to explain this curious connection by evoking religion’s supposed links with intuition and rationality, but a new study finds the link does not really exist.
The idea that "intelligent people do not profess a belief in god or religion" is as old as the 19th century, which ain't exactly that long ago in a European history that reaches back millennia.  The very idea that "intelligent" people discard God at the first chance is belied by St. Augustine and St. Aquinas, two of the pillars of Western culture, as well as so many important thinkers in Western history (not overlooking Lemaitre, who proposed the Big Bang theory, or Gregor Mendel, the monk), is just a laughable assertion.  And what is valued as "intelligence" is a matter of culture, not "primitive gut intuition" (which is itself a cultural standard).

And I don't think I'd discard culture's importance to humanity and simply "being human" as cavalierly as these scholars do.  It's not like culture is some set of clothes one puts on and takes off within a lifetime.  Even the pursuit of science is a cultural artifact, after all, and all the standards of science are creations of culture, not gifts from the universe which are the true keys to knowledge.

Knowledge itself is an artifact of culture.  "Cognitive styles" are as culturally bound a concept as any expression of religious belief (and no more a hard reality than IQ.  A stone is a reality; "intelligence" itself is a concept, and therefore a cultural artifact.).  It's rather absurd to argue as if you stand on a promontory apart from and above the very culture you are examining.  Anthropologists, the scientists of culture, know better than this; or should.  There has been a powerful critique and examination of anthropology going on in Continental philosophy and anthropology for at least half a century.  Why haven't the authors of this paper caught up with that?

These things that pass for knowledge I don't understand.
Posted by at 5 comments:

Wednesday, November 08, 2017

Follow the bouncing ball

No, it's real.
It's a slice of pumpkin pie; and a metaphor; and a dessert topping!

Monday night:

Tuesday:
Wednesday morning:
Embrace the suck.

Posted by at 1 comment:

"A Penny for the Old Guy"


You can smell the natural gas pumped into your house because of New London, Texas.

I've mentioned this in passing before.    Sometime in the late '60's I spent a day in New London, and found it a town still haunted by the specter of the gas explosion that took out the school that cold early morning in March.  As the website at my link indicates, it is remembered there to this day, 80 years later.

Now imagine how long the people of Sutherland Springs will remember November 5, 2017.  "Remember, remember, the 5th of November."  But they won't be burning bonfires, wearing masks, or asking for a penny for the Old Guy.  The world will move on, and forget; Sutherland Springs won't.

New London faded into history but left a legacy of safety, a warning to the rest of us, a way of preventing that calamity from happening again (it still does, from time to time, but not because no one can possibly now what is building up in the basement).  We don't need to remember New London; we live now because of it's lesson.  That, in itself, is a lesson:  we can't prevent every explosion from natural gas buildup, but we have prevented so many it is a rare event.  We can't prevent every murderous act, but that doesn't mean, like the FBI agent told Sutherland Springs per NPR this morning, that we have to start thinking about how much danger we are in when we gather together to watch a movie or to worship or just to be together.  If that's what we have to do, then government has failed us, and we can no longer enjoy life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.

And this is in the name of freedom, of the "right" to "keep and bear arms"?  Why does that right trump our ability to gather together, to worship, to pray, to be entertained?  Is the lesson we are going to take from Sutherland Springs the lesson that there's nothing we can do but be afraid (because even the "good guy with a gun" didn't prevent 50 people from being shot or killed)?

That's not the lesson we took from New London.  It doesn't have to be the lesson this time.
Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, November 07, 2017

God was there; where were we?


I drafted something about this, then decided to ignore it; and now I see it in context.  Let's start where I was going to start, first:

Some of the more regular viewers here may remember when this blog essayed a motto:

Things don't matter.  Ideas don't matter.
People matter.


“It may seem, on the surface, that God was refusing to give such protection to his Texan children,” he writes. “But we are also praying that God would deliver us from evil eternally. Through these same words, we are asking God to deliver us out of this evil world and into his heavenly glory, where no violence, persecution, cruelty, or hatred will ever afflict us again.”

Fiene then says that, in order to fully defeat evil eternally, God has to let evil get some temporary victories, such as this weekend’s mass shooting.

“So when a madman with a rifle sought to persecute the faithful at First Baptist Church on Sunday morning, he failed,” Fiene says. “Just like those who put Christ to death, and just like those who have brought violence to believers in every generation, this man only succeeded in being the means through which God delivered his children from this evil world into an eternity of righteousness and peace.”
I just want to pause and say:  whatever that is, and the speaker is identified as a Lutheran pastor, those ideas are not Christian, are not in keeping with any Christian doctrine I know, are not in anyway statements aligned with Christianity.  But then, neither are these, nor are they meant to be:

In a statement distributed to reporters Tuesday morning, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma called the goal of covering more people a “hollow victory of numbers,” and instead called for changes that “reduce federal regulatory burdens, increase efficiency, and promote transparency and accountability.”

The announcement also promises to fast-track approval of states’ proposed Medicaid changes (which HHS grants in the form of waivers from existing Medicaid requirements) and to scrap some of the requirements that states report back to the federal government whether the changes improve health outcomes for recipients.  (emphasis added)

 Shorter and sweeter:  screw people, we've got to save money!  Medicare and Medicaid aren't about helping human beings, they're about pinching dollars 'til George Washington screams!

Which, frankly, is the same attitude that Lutheran pastor displays:  the people in the pews in Sutherland Springs weren't people, they were just things.  The people on Medicaid aren't people:  they are cost units  impeding the goals of "reduc[ing] federal regulatory burdens" (on whom?), "increas[ing] efficiency, and promot[ing] transparency and accountability."  Helping people just gets in the way, because people don't matter.  Ideas matter; things matter; people are a damned inconvenience.  Or expendable, in the service of an idea.  And that's exactly where the Trump Administration and the Lutheran pastor join hands, and jump off the cliff.

And just to answer this question "Where was God?"  God was with the people of Sutherland Springs, wondering where the rest of us were.  God didn't make that gun, market that gun, sell that lunatic 450+ rounds of ammunition, or promise people in a small church a bullet proof shield.  God was with the people, wondering how much savagery the rest of us are going to allow, and why we still allow it.  I'm reminded of a Damon Knight story which I think Harlan Ellison published in one of the volumes of Dangerous Visions:  a devastating war has wiped out humankind, and God comes strolling through the aftermath, only to confront a sign meant for God that reads:  "WE WERE HERE!  WHERE WERE YOU?!"  Knight's feeble stab at theodicy.  In the case of the worst mass shooting in Texas history, the proper question comes from God:  "I WAS HERE.  WHERE WERE YOU?"

As a civilization, we are our brother's keeper at least to the extent of protecting them as best we can against violence like this.  Where were we, and what did we do, to try to keep this from happening?  We stop murderers, we stop drunk drivers, we work to abate floods and natural disasters, but against this we are helpless?  We can defend ourselves and others against acts of God (fire, flood, storm), but against a gunman with an arsenal and a boxful of bullets, we can do nothing?

 Things don't matter.  Ideas don't matter.
People matter.

Posted by at 4 comments:

Monday, November 06, 2017

Flyover country


The home of Donald Trump supporters and gun nuts:

“We’ve seen it time and again,” NBC analyst Beth Fouhy offered. “Congressman Cuellar  seems to be saying, primarily Republican politicians and people who live in rural areas, and of course, this community is one. They cherish their right  to have the a gun and will never, ever give that up. If that means the occasional or frequent mass shooting, accidental shooting of children, shooting of the elderly — they accept that as the price for the freedom to have a gun.”

Which doesn't explain why local news reports (v. national ones) keep mentioning people who said they moved to Sutherland Springs (it's not that far from San Antonio, by Texas standards) to get away from the gun violence of the big city (I spent time in San Antonio; 10 p.m. TV news always lead with the knifings and shootings in and outside bars that evening).

And even the resident who shot at the murderer wasn't wielding a semi-automatic with a clip, as he only got two shots off.

It's never as simple as we say it is, in other words.
Posted by at 1 comment:

The Evil that Politicians Do


He should have stopped right there:

“The thoughts and prayers of all Texans are with the people of Sutherland Springs as tragic reports come out of First Baptist Church. My office stands ready to assist local law enforcement as needed. Please join Angela and me as we pray for those impacted by this horrific shooting.” 

The Texas AG doesn't do a lot to assist local law enforcement, as it has little criminal prosecutorial power.  Texas doesn't have a statewide criminal prosecutor, only county and district attorneys.  Ken, of course, couldn't keep his yap shut:

"We've had shootings at churches, you know, forever. It's going to happen again. And so, we need people in churches -- either professional security or at least arming some of the parishioners or the congregation -- so that they can respond, when something like this happens again," Paxton told Fox News on Sunday. "All I can say is in Texas at least we have the opportunity to have conceal carry. And so ... there's always the opportunity that gunman will be taken out before he has the opportunity to kill very many people."

Now take what he said there and apply it to recent history all along the Texas Gulf Coast.

"We've had [hurricanes and floods], you know, forever. It's going to happen again. And so, we need people in [cities] -- [to be prepared] -- so that they can respond, when something like this happens again," Paxton told Fox News on Sunday. "All I can say is in Texas at least we have the opportunity [to have neighbors and churches to provide shelter and assistance]. And so ... there's always the opportunity [to evacuate] before the [flood or hurricane] has the opportunity to kill very many people."

Because we can't stop floods and hurricanes, so why do anything about them?  Right, Sen. Cruz?

“You know, it is an unfortunate thing that the first place the media goes after any murder is politicizing it,” Cruz stated. “We don’t need politics right now. You know, I would note in New York we saw a terror attack just this week with a truck. Evil is evil is evil, and it will use the weaponry that is available.”

We can't stop murderers, so I don't even know why we prosecute them.  After all, Cain and Abel, people.  We've had murders, you know, forever.  Evil is evil is evil and it will use the weaponry available.  The only thing we can do is pray, offer our thoughts, and shoot each other.

You heard it here first.
Posted by at No comments:

The Evil that Men Do


The Rev. Jeffress imagines a shooting as if it were a scene in a movie:

“They bring them into the church with them,” Jeffress confirmed. “And if somebody tries that in our church, they may get one shot off, or two shots off, but that’s it — and that’s the last thing they’ll ever do in this life.”

The shooter in Sutherland Springs shot 50 people in 15 seconds, and was wearing a bullet proof vest.  How long would it take you to:  a) realize there was an active shooter in the building; b) realize you had to respond to that shooter; c) remove your concealed weapon from where you were carrying it; d) stand (assuming you were seated and not, say, an usher); e) locate the shooter; f) aim; g) fire, hoping your round doesn't strike someone else in the building by mistake, of which there is a high likelihood; h) while being shot yourself (as all indications are every person in the church building was wounded, if not killed) or facing fire?; i) realize the shots you made to center mass were not having the effect you expected, because of the body armor?

15 seconds, and 26 people are dead, another 25 wounded.  15 seconds.  A highly trained person might get one round off, or several if the weapon was at least a semi-automatic.  The odds any of those rounds would hit the shooter are low (consider how many rounds were expended against the Boston marathon bomber trapped in a boat (upwards of 150), and how many actually struck him), the odds of a shot being fatal even lower.  The odds of there being such a highly trained person in a congregation with so many guns (“I’d say a quarter to a half of our members are concealed carry,” Jeffress said.) are so low as to be non-existent.

And yet the solution to our lawlessness is more lawlessness.  This is diseased thinking.  This is malignant thinking.

This is evil, pure and simple; as evil as the shooter in that church yesterday.
Posted by at 1 comment:

I think my head is going to explode


“I’m sorry that we even have to show her Twitter comments,” Conway told the hosts of Fox & Friends. “Because it’s so far beyond any type of reasonable response that anyone should have.”

“People are taking to Twitter in the comfort of their very luxurious lives, pointing fingers, and as far as I can tell, never really helping in between the tweet storms,” she opined. “Never really helped charities, never helped people to heal, never try to reach across for understanding.”

Cownway added: “I’m really happy at times like this that President Trump is our commander-in-chief and our leader in this nation. Because unfortunately every president has to help heal the nation at different times, different tragedies. But the rush to judgement, particularly by people who just see politics and Trump derangement in every single thing they do, it doesn’t help the victims and it’s disrespectful to the dead.”
What is there about a "time like this" to be happy about?  And how about, instead of just understanding and healing and charitable work, the government actually does something to protect its citizens from the criminally insane among us?  Wouldn't that be more respectful of the dead than being happy about who occupies the office of POTUS?  I mean, really, Chelsea Handler is unreasonable, but being happy about the circumstances of national leadership in a horror like this is acceptable?

I'll retire to Bedlam.
Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, November 05, 2017

Not Today. Not Ever!


Pretty sure God was there way ahead of you.  And here's a clue, chump:  you're the Commander-in-Chief, not Pastor-in-Chief.  For a guy who barely knows what "Christian" refers to, you need to keep your yap shut on invoking God for anything, but especially a shooting in a church service!  Maybe worry a bit less about God being there for the families, and a bit more about law enforcement being there before the crime happens.  What possible reason is there for any human being not in military uniform to carry a weapon that can kill and wound 50 people inside of 15 seconds!  Count it off, Charlie!  That's over 3 people per second!  Can you even count that fast?  Or that high?

You aren't monitoring shit, and it doesn't matter now anyway.  What mattered came much earlier, when this idiot got a gun capable of that much lethal firepower in that short a space of time.  If you can't stop that from happening again, you're worthless and your invocations of the Almighty border on blasphemy.  You and Paul Ryan can go piss up a rope.  Today you prove you aren't fit for decent society.  I don't know why we keep electing sociopaths to high office, but that's on us.  Your statements are on you.

Hiding behind God on a day like this is as vile and contemptible a thing as I can imagine.  Say what you tweeted directly to the families of the 2 year old and the 14 year old dead today, and then to the families of every person in that tiny church.  I've been in churches like that, and believe me they have more grace and humanity than you two twits could recognize or imagine.  If you two can't say anything useful, just shut up!  You're both disgusting!

And while I'm ranting, Texas AG Ken Paxton can just go fuck himself:

Attorney General Ken Paxton suggested to FOX News on Sunday afternoon that there should be "professional security" at churches and other places where many people gather.

"I think churches and places of business need to think about how they're going to address this if a shooter can shoot so many people before first responders can get there," he said.

Stop right there.  We can't control guns, we can't control people, so we need churches to hire armed guards at the doors and put snipers in the belfry?  This was a church of 50 people, you goddamned moron!  I doubt they have the resources to hire a full-time pastor!  And you want them to hire security?!  Have you lost what passes for your mind!!  Don't answer that, it'll take you too long to come up with one.  I haven't got all day.

Paxton also expressed doubt that stricter gun control laws could influence the frequency of mass shootings.

"I wish some law would fix all this," he said. "The reality is, if somebody is willing to kill someone, changing gun laws probably doesn't affect that person. What you have to do is you have to allow citizens to protect themselves."

You know, boys will be boys and murderous gits with semi-automatic weapons will be murderous gits!  Nothin' you can do about it, except turn a country church into a walled fortress and shoot anybody who tries to come in late, 'cause you just can't be too careful!  Hell, I guess if we're gonna be safe, we should all just hire armed bodyguards, right?!

Shit!  I'll fuckin' retire to Bedlam.  It's gotta be more sane than this!

(And since it didn't happen in New York City, Trump isn't really all that upset about it.  Or maybe it's because somebody used a car to kill 8 people, not a gun to kill and wound 50.  Either way, he's turning it over to God and getting back to his planned golf game with Abe.)
Posted by at 2 comments:

Well, this is going well....

The other lesson is:  Don't feed the trolls.

We were shocked to learn the news that Donna Brazile actively considered overturning the will of the Democratic voters by attempting to replace Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine as the Democratic Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees. It is particularly troubling and puzzling that she would seemingly buy into false Russian-fueled propaganda, spread by both the Russians and our opponent, about our candidate’s health.

Oh, no, that was just something that rattled around in her head, donchaknow!

In her new book, Brazile writes that she considered moving to replace Clinton with Joe Biden after Clinton fainted after a 9/11 memorial ceremony last year. “This was something that you play out in your mind,” Brazile said of that consideration.

And quit tryin' to tell her to shut up!

“Those who are telling me to shut up—they told Hillary that a couple of months ago—you know what I tell them? Go to hell. I want to tell my story,” Brazile said on ABC’s This Week, adding that she “found no evidence” that the 2016 Democratic primary was rigged against Bernie Sanders.

Yeah, she's kind of crawfishing now, so I'm not sure what to say in her defense, except:  'SHUT UP!!!!!!111!!!!!"  Especially to mean things like this:

Donna came in to take over the DNC at a very difficult time. We were grateful to her for doing so. She is a longtime friend and colleague of many of us and has been an important leader in our party. But we do not recognize the campaign she portrays in the book.

And this; this is just intolerable:

Finally, we are pretty tired of people who were not part of our campaign telling the world what it was like to be on the inside of our campaign and how we felt about it. We loved our candidate and each other and it remains our honor to have been part of the effort to make Hillary Clinton the 45th President of the United States.

I mean, as Brazile herself said:

“I’m not Patsey the slave,” Brazile said she told them, referring to a character in the film, “12 Years a Slave.” “Y’all keep whipping me and whipping me and you never give me any money or any way to do my damn job. I am not going to be your whipping girl!” 

I do think "Go to hell" was sufficient.
Posted by at 2 comments:

Saturday, November 04, 2017

THIS STINKS!


I haven't had much to say about the Donna Brazile allegations against the Clintons, except in comments at Thought Criminal.

But this is taking on the stink of mendacity:

As reported by Philip Rucker, Brazile writes in her new book that she became concerned with Clinton’s candidacy — calling it, “anemic” and saying it had taken on “the odor of failure.”

“Again and again I thought about Joe Biden,” Brazile wrote, adding “No matter my doubts and my fears about the election and Hillary as a candidate, I could not make good on that threat to replace her.”

Brazile writes that she considered multiple candidates to replace Clinton but backed off attempting to drop the first female Presidential candidate.

“I thought of Hillary, and all the women in the country who were so proud of and excited about her. I could not do this to them,” she wrote.
Is Brazile really trying to convince us she had the authority to replace Clinton? *(Josh Marshall confirms that she, in fact, did not.)  Talk about a weak candidacy!  And after telling us Clinton had bought the DNC body and soul (a gross exaggeration that doesn't pass the smell test itself), and "rigged" everything so she (Clinton) could win?

This is what a party does when it loses and is leaderless:  it looks for scapegoats while waiting for a leader.  Fact is, both parties are leaderless at the moment.  Trump is no more a Republican than Sanders is a Democrat, and both are too old and feckless (in their separate ways) to provide new leadership to the party.  In fact, if this analysis is correct:

In 26 states he remains above the threshold of 50 percent approval, giving him enough electoral college votes to pull off a win in the 2020 election. A survey conducted by NPR late October showed that 55 percent of white Americans believe white people face discrimination.

If anything, some of the white voters who support Trump on immigration and racial issues think he doesn’t go far enough. For a poll tracking how Trump’s support is slipping in rural areas published in early October, Reuters spoke with John Wilson, a 70-year-old retired banker in Ohio who voted for Trump. One of his main worries was Trump might back down from his promise to force illegal immigrants out of the country.
Then the only hope the Democrats have of defeating Trump is to run another black candidate.  It's the only chance they have to overwhelm the angry white old guy vote.

Brazile wants her turd polished on her way off the stage.  It's ignominious, but it's small beer compared to the need to field a candidate, not just a platform, who will bury the GOP's racism in history's grave.

*Josh Marshall puts the stake in the heart of this nonsense:

This and other claims from Brazile’s book which have come out in the last few hours only confirm me in thinking that her claims are at least self-serving, in other cases highly improbable and in some cases literally impossible.

And he draws the right conclusion:

I can’t say I think this controversy is worth it because I think it is fundamentally based on falsehoods and ones that resurface all the most toxic battles of 2016. But rethinking the way the DNC works would be a good thing. The DNC is the one committee whose stakeholders should be all Democrats – not the DCCC, which works for House incumbents or the DSCC or the DSCC which works for Senate incumbents. It should never be about one candidate or one election cycle. It is a genuine shame that someone like Donna Brazile, who has worked so hard and so consistently in Democratic politics for decades, has now chosen to make it all about herself.
One is tempted to say Trump is truly poisonous, that he's infected Donna Brazile with the same egomania he displays.  That's too simple, of course, and confusing correlation for causation.  It can't be cured or expunged from the psyche, but just as Harvey Weinstein is highlighting how truly heinously some men treat women (and too many such men, whatever percentage of the population they actually represent), Trump highlights the problems of self-aggrandizement.  Perhaps we can at least learn some self-examination from these public crises and lessons.
Posted by at 1 comment:

"Dial 'F' for Frankenstein"

I think...I think I am.  Therefore I know I am....I think....

This takes a more care consideration than I'm willing to give it just now, but is this what consciousness is?

We suggest that the word “consciousness” conflates two different types of information-processing computations in the brain: the selection of information for global broadcasting, thus making it flexibly available for computation and report (C1, consciousness in the first sense), and the self-monitoring of those computations, leading to a subjective sense of certainty or error (C2, consciousness in the second sense).
The subject of memory is missing entirely.  Does an infant have consciousness?  Undoubtedly; at least, it would be hard to argue against it.  And yet who has a memory of their infant consciousness?  Is memory not a major portion of consciousness?  If I don't remember who I am, does consciousness matter?  (The literary reports of amnesia indicate it doesn't affect consciousness, but still, who are you aware of, if you have no memory of who you are?)  Isn't consciousness linked to identity, and identity to memory?  And there's an interesting leap there that presumes the dualism it tries to discredit, one I often put this way:

If you are talking to yourself, who are you talking to?  And who is listening?

"Self-monitoring of these computations" presumes an ability to monitor that is separate from the computations themselves; and where does that come from? What computational system is computing the monitoring of the computations going on in C1?  And how is that separate from, but still a part of, the C1 functioning?   What, in other words, is the machine "self" that is doing this "monitoring"?  And what does it mean to "self-monitor"?  It's back to Hume's argument that consciousness is just the result of sensory input being received in the brain, but that prompts a further analogy:  an empty room with a TV receiving a signal.  But if no one is there to watch it, is the TV being watched?  Is the signal turned into perception, consciousness,  even "information processing."  If information is being processed, what is doing it?  Computers "process information," but they do it as a matter of function, the way a television receives a signal or a stereo system turns electronic impulses into sounds.  One could say a stereo "processes" the signal from a source into sound, but in the same way a light bulb "processes" electricity into light, and nothing more.  Is consciousness awareness of the act of computation, or is it awareness of the information?  A musician processes information into a musical performance, but the performer who is wholly aware of the act of performance is not producing music.  A pianist aware of where every finger is at all moments, is a pianist who stops playing the instrument.  But does a musician play "unconsciously"?

Which raises the issues of the other level of "processing" posited by this argument:  C0.

We argue that despite their recent successes, current machines are still mostly implementing computations that reflect unconscious processing (C0) in the human brain.
Is this the "unconsciousness" of Freud?  Will machines develop Id, Ego, and Superego as well?  It's only an abstract (I can't log in to read the full article), but there are huge leaps in reasoning going on here in order to reach dubious definitions.  Besides, where is the consciousness of love?  Of self-interest?  Of art, beauty, music?  Are these things merely "types of information-processing computations in the brain"?  It seems a rather reductionist assertion.

These scientists are trying to escape dualism:

“Centuries of philosophical dualism have led us to consider consciousness as irreducible to physical interactions,” the researchers state in Science. “[But] the empirical evidence is compatible with the possibility that consciousness arises from nothing more than specific computations.”

But to accept that consciousness is not the processing of information, but the awareness of processing the information, is to let dualism in the back door.  The very idea of consciousness arises from self-awareness:  I am aware of my hands, but my hands are not me, and are not aware of me.  Indeed, what is "me"?  The result of a computational process, a la Hume?  But again, what is the "me" that is aware of this "me," and of these processes?  If the answer is that the processes simply become sufficiently complex to create a state called "consciousness," then we're back to Clarke's conclusion that enough telephones connected together would equal the number of neurons in the human brain and make a self-aware entity in the phone system (which means the internet should have become self-aware some time ago).

So it's still a reductionist assertion resting on the concept of dualism it seeks to replace.

Or  it's just a man with a hammer, seeing the whole world as a nail.
Posted by at 4 comments:

Friday, November 03, 2017

Speaking of Donald Trump and chaos



Posted by at 1 comment:

L'etat, c'est moi!


In case it wasn't clear Trump is just trolling the country....

Trump has been busy making it all about Trump:

President Donald Trump made an appearance on Larry O’Connor’s radio show where he lamented his inability to control the many investigations into possible collusion or possible obstruction of justice.

“The saddest thing is because I’m president of the United States I’m not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department, the FBI, doing the kinds of things that I would love to be doing and I’m very frustrated by it,” Trump told O’Connor.

But found at TPM that I missed the fruity context:

“The saddest thing is that because I’m the President of the United States I’m not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department, I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI, I’m not supposed to be doing the kinds of things I would love to be doing and I’m very frustrated by it. I look at what’s happening with the Justice Department, why aren’t they going after Hillary Clinton with her emails and with the dossier and the kind of money…?”

"I," "I," "I."  It's all about Trump and what Trump can't do and should be able to do, especially to take attention away from Mueller's investigation.   Why can't the President do what the President wants to do?

"... it's very discouraging to me, I'll be honest, I'm very unhappy with it that the Justice Department isn't going—now maybe they are but you know as president, you're not supposed to be involved in that process but hopefully they are doing something and maybe at some point we can all have it out."

That would certainly make him feel better, and after all, isn't that what government is all about?  But before we get too deep into any controversy involving Hillary Clinton, let's examine his ideas on immigration:

"It's just common sense, these countries aren't giving us their finest people. So when they put them in the lottery, if they even do a fair lottery, they probably don't do that they probably just hand us people that they don't want like this character, this animal, this horror show that just came in and did this horrible damage [in New York]...."

"We're supposed to take people that the rest of the world doesn't want and we're supposed to say it's a lovely event, it's not going to happen that way anymore with me."

Trump doesn't understand immigration policy, in gross or in fine, so that means the country is being taken advantage of (just like NAFTA and anything else he doesn't understand, which is almost everything about government).  He doesn't understand that individuals apply for visas to this country, they aren't selected by foreign governments, and he can't seem to wrap his head around the idea this immigrant was here for 7 years before he went homicidal.  The shooter in Las Vegas was born here, but somehow he's not "this animal, this horror show that....did this horrible damage."

The man is just as senseless and ignorant as a young child.  A spoiled brat of a young child.  Which, it turns out,  is a frightening thing in a President:

“Let me tell you, the one that matters is me, I’m the only one that matters,” Trump said. “Because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be,” he said. “We don’t need all the people that they want,” he said. “Don’t forget, I’m a business person and I tell my people, ‘Well, you don’t need to fill slots, don’t fill them.’” Without naming names, Trump also said there are “some people” whose “thinking process” he is not pleased with.

He is, you see, the only one that matters.  Which is why he's tweeting this today:

I wonder if the indictments will refer to "Pocahontas" and "Crooked Hillary"?  And while we're wondering, let's add:  just how dumb is Donald Trump?  Well, remember when he told the Russians he fired Comey because of the collusion investigation?

 Mine, too, actually.  



Posted by at 3 comments:

Thursday, November 02, 2017

Four O'Clock


A neglected little gem of a story, brought to mind by this exchange:

“You are reminded that there is evil in this world,” the Fox News host opined. “So, how do we eliminate evil? How do we eliminate ISIS? What do we do?”

“Yes, there’s evil,” [former Navy SEAL Jaco] Willink agreed. “And the things that [the terror suspect was watching on YouTube] are things those evil subhumans perpetrate on a daily basis. And the way you get rid of people like that is you kill them. You hunt them down and you kill them. And that’s what we should be doing.”

Sure; if we just kill all the evil people, only the good people will be left.  Simple as curing smallpox!

The story made it to the Twilight Zone, but the original is much better.
Posted by at No comments:

Coincidence?

Call me cynical, but maybe this is why Trump changed his mind on sending the New York city attacker (whose name will not be mentioned here, why give him any more publicity?) to Gitmo:

The Guantanamo Bay military tribunals on Wednesday won their first conviction without a plea deal since 2008. Only it wasn’t a terrorist who was convicted – it was a one-star Marine general sticking up for the rights of the accused to have a fair trial.

In defending the principle that attorneys ought to be able to defend their clients free from government surveillance, Brigadier General John Baker was ruled in contempt of court and sentenced to 21 days in confinement. He also must pay a $1000 fine.

Baker is a senior officer within in the highly controversial military commissions process: the Chief of Defense Counsel. Maj. Ben Sakrisson, the Pentagon spokesman for detentions, confirmed that Baker is being confined in his quarters – at Guantanamo Bay.

“The military commissions are willing to put people in jail for defending the rule of law,” Jay Connell, who represents another Guantanamo detainee facing a military commission, told The Daily Beast. “If they’re willing to put a Marine general in jail for standing up for a client’s rights, they’re willing to do just anything.”

Truth be told, I didn't read far enough to see the connection has already been made:

The shocking development at Guantanamo, described as a “national disgrace and an embarrassment” by the executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, came on the same day President Donald Trump publicly mulled detaining accused New York terror suspect Sayfullo Saipov at Guantanamo.

I'm sure this sentence has something to do with the strange nature of military courts, where fealty to superior officers overrides more mundane issues like due process of law and equal protection under the law.  I say that not because I know anything about military law, but I remember what my Criminal Law professor told us, himself a former JAG:  "Military law is to law as military music is to music."

So call me cynical.
Posted by at No comments:

Winning is good

By now I doubt you can buy one of these in Houston for love or money.  I'll have to make do with this:


Besides, I still think of the Astros this way, maybe because the last time I saw them play, it was in the 'dome (back when they couldn't win a game for love or money):


Who says it's not getting better?  Well, at least for sports in Houston....
Posted by at 1 comment:

Verdict first!


Trump yesterday:

That was a horrible event, and we have to stop it, and we have to stop it cold. We also have to come up with punishment that’s far quicker and far greater than the punishment these animals are getting right now. They’ll go through court for years. And at the end, they’ll be — who knows what happens.

We need quick justice and we need strong justice — much quicker and much stronger than we have right now. Because what we have right now is a joke and it’s a laughingstock. And no wonder so much of this stuff takes place. And I think I can speak for plenty of other countries, too, that are in the same situation.
Trump 'round midnight:
And Trump this morning:
So, our justice system sucks, and why can't we move straight to execution, and this murderer was going to Gitmo but now, maybe not anyway he should be dead, dead! DEAD!!!  Do you think somebody explained to him there is no Federal death penalty?  And does anybody doubt this scream-of-consciousness is because the assault was in NYC?  That Trump is reacting the way he would if he still lived there, and wasn't the POTUS?  Because he's really not reacting like the head of the branch of government that administers justice.


Posted by at 1 comment:

Meanwhile, talking to the pictures....



JMM notes that Paul Manafort is not mounting a legal defense, but a political one:

Manafort’s spokesman and lawyers are tightly mimicking the President’s message: fake news, no collusion, no obstruction. Not a hint of daylight.

The political defense doesn't matter to me, because the only one the courts care about is the legal defense.  According to the formal federal prosecutor Marshall quotes, Mueller has a strong case, on paper, against Manafort.  Manafort's only hope is a plea deal, or a pardon.  But here's the problem with a pardon:  if Trump starts down that road, he's toast.

GHWBush pardoned the Iran/Contra players on his way out the door.  It was widely seen as a CYA effort to protect Poppy from any involvement in something he was probably in up to his eyeballs.  The blowback against him was severe, but he was leaving office.  Ford pardoned Nixon, one reason among many he was never elected President.  If Trump pardons Manafort, not only could it lead to a court case on using the pardon power to obstruct justice (and will the courts allow that?), it ends Trump once and for all, and the GOP has nothing to stand on in defending him or at least allowing him to play at POTUS because of tax reform or ACA repeal or making the trains run on time.

Trump didn't do anything for himself when he pardoned Arpaio; but mostly people didn't care, because it didn't affect the Presidency.  If Trump starts pardoning people in order to avoid scrutiny himself, it will be another matter entirely.  Trump is already down to 33% approval (it doesn't really matter what the GOP voters think of him; all that matters is how they vote next November, or whether they vote).  If he starts issuing pardons, especially before November 2018, he just sinks lower and pushes more voters to put Democrats in the House and Senate.

And that's the critical analysis:  what does a pardon do for Trump?  He's already disavowed Manafort as "unpaid" (he was, which is very curious for other reasons) and fumed that Manafort didn't win the election, Trump did (Trump's ego will not allow that anyone was instrumental in his victory aside from Trump).  Does Trump even understand that Manafort could give evidence against him?  He doesn't seem to think so.  His entire defense against Mueller is a political one:  there is no evidence (yet we don't know what Mueller knows, as the plea agreement with Papodopolous showed everyone); Manafort's crimes are old and unrelated to the campaign (not that old or unrelated, however), and he never heard of these people anyway.  It doesn't seem Trump understands what these three people could say about him that might put him in legal jeopardy, and I'm not sure his ego would allow him to see it.

There are also simple legal problems:  pardon someone, and they can't plead the 5th to avoid testifying against you.  Mueller wants to "flip" Manafort, say.  If he doesn't, and Manafort is pardoned, he is still liable for perjury after the pardon. There's also the matter of what the pardon covers.  Any offense not specifically identified could be deemed not included, and that means the 5th Amendment still applies, but so does the threat of prosecution.  Then there's the matter of state crimes:  Trump could pardon Manafort for the federal crimes listed in the indictment against him, but not for the same crimes in state court (the financial crimes, in that case).  So a pardon might not buy Trump as much as he wants it to.  On top of all that  there's the obstruction issue:

If the President issues a pardon in order to influence a witness and impede the investigation, that would also be a further act of obstruction. Although he has the legal authority to pardon, he cannot use that power to commit another crime. A defendant in, say, a fraud case also has the “power” to shred documents that belong to her, but doing so with the intent to shield those documents from a pending investigation would be criminal obstruction.

So when a pardon itself becomes a criminal act, it doesn't protect the President from anything.

Pardons would not protect Trump from investigation and prosecution, as those pardoned could still be required by court order to testify, and still be subject to prosecution for perjury.  Trump can't purchase silence with Presidential power, in other words.  And if he starts pardoning people who might testify against him, he has to keep pardoning them for perjury or other offenses.  The question then becomes;  what's in it for Trump?  He pardoned Arpaio because it was an exercise of power without consequences.  However, he's never shown any willingness to exercise his Presidential powers where there are consequences, as in negotiating with Congress.  Trump jumps at the opportunity that makes him a winner, and when there isn't one, he stays resolutely out of the scrum.  He issues claims of directives on Twitter, but walks away from public executive order signing ceremonies because he can't be bothered with the actual effort.  He might think pardons would buy him immunity, but could as easily understand they will only buy him trouble, and create a chaos that would consume him, not protect him.

The best case scenario for Trump is to pull a Nixon:  pardon everyone, resign, and get Pence to agree to pardon Trump.  But that would require Trump to willingly play the part of loser, to be the "quitter" that Nixon was.  I don't see that happening, either.  Dare I be so "optimistic"?

“Here’s what Manafort’s indictment tells me: Mueller is going to go over every financial dealing of Jared Kushner and the Trump Organization,” said former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg. “Trump is at 33 percent in Gallup. You can’t go any lower. He’s fucked.”

Oh, it's far more than that:

The collapse of Obamacare repeal, and the dimming chances that tax reform will pass soon—many Trump allies are deeply pessimistic about its prospects—have created the political climate for establishment Republicans to turn on Trump. Two weeks ago, according to a source, Bannon did a spitball analysis of the Cabinet to see which members would remain loyal to Trump in the event the 25th Amendment were invoked, thereby triggering a vote to remove the president from office. Bannon recently told people he’s not sure if Trump would survive such a vote.

And Trump's response to Mueller:  "Why don't they go after Clinton this way?"

“Trump wants to be critical of Mueller,” one person who’s been briefed on Trump’s thinking says. “He thinks it’s unfair criticism. Clinton hasn’t gotten anything like this. And what about Tony Podesta? Trump is like, When is that going to end?” According to two sources, Trump has complained to advisers about his legal team for letting the Mueller probe progress this far.

He has no clue what he's in for, and no idea what's really going on.  He wants to link ACA repeal to tax reform, which helps nobody.  Tax reform has already been pulled, with only weeks to go to year's end.  There are stories that the divisions between Republicans on what to do about taxes are greater than divisions with Democrats.  The question for the GOP is rapidly going to become "What have you done for me lately?," and the answer won't be that Trump is their savior.  If he fires Mueller, no one will stand by him.  Roger Stone's "advice" (to appoint a special prosecutor for the Uranium One deal, and then run Mueller off by making him and the FBI the subject of the investigation for approving the deal) is DOA (because A) it's not a situation requiring a special prosecutor, since no one involved is part of the current administration, and B) the FBI's investigation wouldn't affect Mueller's at all.  Trump really does hire children and give them shotguns.)  There really isn't an exit strategy and Trump isn't plotting one, except via Twitter.

There isn't anything to stop Mueller and nothing that saves Trump.  Stick a fork in 'im, he's done.

Posted by at 1 comment:

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?



Erin Gloria Ryan is completely right:  we should not start writing fanfic about what Mueller is going to do to Trump.  We did that with John Kelly, and where did it get us?

It’s natural to try to make sense of the slow motion explosion of the last 18 months in American history. But it’s also important to remember that seductive narratives are seductive because they make sense, because they satisfy in a way that reality often doesn’t. It felt nice to think that Kelly would be a grizzled war veteran with nerves of steel and a heart of gold whipping the White House into shape instead of a cranky, less interesting version of Trump, but here we are.

Even NPR today was having trouble letting go of the fact Kelly was not the "adult in the room" who would represent us all in Trump's White House, but rather is in Trump's White House for reasons that have nothing to do with those of us who didn't vote for the guy.  But they came around, after his ludicrous statements to Laura Ingraham about the Civil War.  Not that we shouldn't have seen this coming:

Announcing you will absolutely not apologize for smearing a black congresswoman in the same interview where you praise Robert E. Lee and try to whitewash the Confederacy? Not great, General. It's almost like Kelly shares more of his boss' worldview than the Beltway media types were ready to admit.

Except anyone watching without rose-colored glasses glued to their temples could see that Kelly is no saint, even relative to the rest of this kakistocratic administration. Before moving to the chief of staff position, Kelly oversaw the Department of Homeland Security as the agency turned into a deportation machine.

Immigration-related arrests didn't just spike by 40 percent. Kelly did away with prosecutorial discretion for undocumented immigrants, which had prioritized the deportation of those who committed serious crimes. Now ICE agents were essentially free to target any undocumented immigrant. He also expanded the definition of "criminal alien" to anyone who "committed anything that might be a 'chargeable criminal offense'" and "directed the department to pursue anyone who, 'in the judgment of an immigration officer,' posed a national-security risk to the country." Again, the new policy was that an ICE agent could essentially target anyone.

Just because Kelly isn't on Twitter calling people insulting nicknames and undermining United States foreign policy doesn't make him a responsible steward of our nation. He is perfectly happy, if his comments in this interview are anything to go on, to continue perpetuating a culture of white supremacy—whether or not he's a true believer, or merely ignorant of the implications of his words. As with many in Trump's orbit, Kelly was a bona fide extremist until he stood close to the bright orange orb. The Media ought to try some perspective rather than grasping in the dark for camouflaged heroes.

We really got to get over our love of military men.  Ike is gone, and he's not coming back anytime soon.
Posted by at 1 comment:

Wednesday, November 01, 2017

All Saint's Day 2017


Originally posted 10 years ago; no reason not to reprise it.

Revelation 7:9-17
7:9 After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no
one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.

7:10 They cried out in a loud voice, saying, "Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!"

7:11 And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God,

7:12 singing, "Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen."

7:13 Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, "Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?"

7:14 I said to him, "Sir, you are the one that knows." Then he said to me, "These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

7:15 For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.

7:16 They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat;

7:17 for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."

Psalm 34:1-10, 22
34:1 I will bless the LORD at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth.

34:2 My soul makes its boast in the LORD; let the humble hear and be glad.

34:3 O magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together.

34:4 I sought the LORD, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears.

34:5 Look to him, and be radiant; so your faces shall never be ashamed.

34:6 This poor soul cried, and was heard by the LORD, and was saved from every trouble.

34:7 The angel of the LORD encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them.

34:8 O taste and see that the LORD is good; happy are those who take refuge in him.

34:9 O fear the LORD, you his holy ones, for those who fear him have no want.

34:10 The young lions suffer want and hunger, but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing.

34:22 The LORD redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.

1 John 3:1-3
3:1 See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.

3:2 Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.

3:3 And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

Matthew 5:1-12
5:1 When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.

5:2 Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

5:3 "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

5:4 "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

5:5 "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

5:6 "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

5:7 "Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

5:8 "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

5:9 "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

5:10 "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

5:11 "Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

5:12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

God, he told me, is spiritual, not material; not bread and wine, not flesh and blood. And when I mentioned that was largely the picture of Jesus we got from the gospel of John, he mentioned the letters of John, too, to support his point.

The gospel of John doesn't include what we call the Beatitudes. In John's gospel, for John's community, those blessings have no place. They are too open-handed, too generous, too inclusive. Which is not to say John is not inclusive, that John doesn't know the other gospels. He clearly knew the gospel of Luke. John, like all four gospels, includes the anointing of Jesus before his death; unlike the other three gospels, in John's version the woman who anoints Jesus has a name. She is Mary, and she anoints Jesus in gratitude for raising her brother Lazarus from the dead. Perhaps there is a joke there, for John, because Lazarus is the poor beggar in Jesus' parable in Luke, of the poor man who goes to Abraham, and the rich man who dies and goes to Gehenna. But John had read Luke, because Luke moves the anointing of Jesus from his head to his feet; and Mary, in John's version, bathes Jesus feet with the perfume, the scent of which fills the house. John knew enough about Luke's gospel to know the anointing recorded in Mark and Matthew, had changed in the transmission to Luke.

But John's is not an inclusive gospel; it is almost a gnostic gospel. Those who know, know; those who do not, are Nicodemus; imagining that they know, but understanding nothing. Never mind; they are saved in the end. In the end, Nicodemus is one of those who recovers the body after the crucifixion. Or maybe that is John's joke again, since the body was never Jesus in the first place; since it only appeared to be Jesus.

But in Matthew's gospel, the body is clearly Jesus, and the blessings are clearly concrete; meant to be real, not just platitudes. They are meant to comfort people who mourn now; people who are merciful now; people whose spirit is poor now, and needs encouraging; people who are pure in heart now, merciful now, trying to make peace now. For they will be called "saints." And saints are always people; never ideals; and never plaster. Ideals are not real; and plaster is not human. Saints are human. Saints are real.

The blessings are announced for now; not for some time in the sweet bye and bye. We miss that, too often, because the merciful hardly seem blessed, and the peacemakers hardly seem successful, and the merciful receive no mercy, the pure in heart seem to see nothing except what can't possibly be; and the only promise given is that our reward will be great in heaven; and heaven, despite the peacemakers and the merciful and those who are hungry right now for justice and righteousness, heaven is certainly not here, not now. So the blessings seem to be set aside, promises of a time to come.

No, say the saints. No. No. The blessings are here. The blessings are real. The blessings are pronounced, right now. They take affect here; for you. Now.

The language of this day all sounds like language of what will come, will happen, will be seen one day; but not now:

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, "Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?"

I said to him, "Sir, you are the one that knows." Then he said to me, "These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.

They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat;

for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."
We hear those words and we think: "Yes. Yes!" And we want them to be true now; but we know they are not true. We know they cannot yet be true. But the saints admonish us. The saints tell us, remind us, wave their hands before our blind eyes, shout into our deaf ears: "The time is now! The blessing is now! The great ordeal is over and the throne of the Lamb is in front of you right now! The shepherd guides you now! The springs of water wash your feet right now! God is wiping your tears away now, now, even now! Oh, won't you open your eyes and see?! Won't you open your ears and listen?!" And then they weep for us, the saints; the clouds of witness who surround us and know what we know and know what we refuse to know. They surround us and weep and try once again to get our attention, to make us listen, to make us see, to get us just to notice.

O taste and see that the LORD is good; happy are those who take refuge in him.

O fear the LORD, you his holy ones, for those who fear him have no want.

The young lions suffer want and hunger, but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing.

The LORD redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.
If you could but taste, then you would see! If you would but taste, then you would hear! Those who seek the Lord lack no good thing. The lives of the servants of the Lord are redeemed! And they are redeemed right now! That is what the saints tell us, and they know! They know, because they are human. They know because they are just like us. They know, because they are saints. And they surround us; and they are here, now.

Samhain is what the Irish once called this time. It was their new year, and the ancestors came back to see them for a celebration. It was when time itself was a "thin place," and the spirits could communicate with the living, and the veil between the two worlds was thin enough to allow communication. For them, the spirits were as real as flesh and blood family members. For us, perhaps even the saints don't seem quite real. The saints seem like the blessed ones, and their blessings seem to have come long after they could enjoy them in this life. But they know what we forget: that the blessings are for life, not for death. Blessings that only come as rewards in the end, are no blessings at all. Blessings that are not for this life, are only cruel promises. The saints know that God is the God of the living, not the dead; and that in God’s sight, all are alive. Which is why this time of year is still a time of celebration, not of mourning. Which is why the great ordeal has passed, and the lamb is with us now. And why the ones who seem so little, and have so little, and struggle to be merciful and make peace and keep pure hearts, are blessed right now, and not later, not as a reward for being stubborn or persistent or for simply hanging on. The struggle has passed. Blessed are we; right now. That is what the saints know.

The saints are flesh and blood and bone, as Jesus was; and they know what our struggles are, as Jesus did, and they know what our hope is; and that is what sets them apart from us. But not for long; never for long; and they don’t want to be set apart, they want to be with us, they want us to be with them. They are here, now, in this “thin time” they are as near as our next breath, and they know: the blessings on the merciful, and the mourning, and the pure in heart; on the peacemakers and the meek and the ones who are so hungry and thirsty for righteousness they are sure they can just taste, and if only they could be satisfied! They know, the saints, the wise and humble and loving saints, that we are with them, right now; and that we are blessed. Right now. And they want us to know it, too. For all the saints. God willing, we’ll see that we’re ones, too.

Because that’s what it means, to be children of God. The saints, look just like you. Have hands, and hearts, and eyes, and ears, and mouths, shaped just like yours. And that is your blessing, now, and evermore. Because you are merciful. Because you are meek. Because, whether you know it or not, your heart is pure. Because you will never stop being hungry and thirsty for righteousness. Because you know it is there, that it will come, that it will be done. Because you know, the great ordeal is no ordeal at all. Because you know, that you want everyone else to know this; and to know they are blessed.

For all the saints. And you are one, too.

Amen.
Posted by at 1 comment:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)