A bit of hope

A member of the Dedicated Reconciling United Methodist leadership sent me a message of hope. After this General Conference progressives in the denomination understand there won't and can't be unity. There will be a split. Various people are now talking about hwo to make that happen so there will be something to vote on at the 2020 General Conference 14 months from now. Read it on my brother blog here.

Failure of leadership

I wrote another post about my thoughts of what happened at the just concluded United Methodist General Conference. Part of the post is what I think is a big problem – a failure of leadership. It’s on my brother blog here.

United Methodist General Conference

A special General Conference ended this afternoon. It did not go well. I wrote about it in my brother blog here.

Take Montana. Please.

There are a lot of online petitions. I get a few in my inbox every day. Sometimes a few go viral. From CBS News:

An online petition to sell the state of Montana to Canada for $1 trillion has gone viral. The Change.org petition has more than 8,000 signatures so far. “We have too much debt and Montana is useless,” says the petition. “Just tell them it has beavers or something.”

A few of the comments on the blog Joe My God:

From Idaho: Take us too!

From a Canadian: We’re not interested. The land is infested with Americans. Like bedbugs. We’d need to fumigate first.

From New Zealand:

We could take it. They're already a bunch of sheep-shaggers. They'll feel right at home. Unfortunately they'll get universal healthcare, good public education, a proportional representation system of government. And sensible gun legislation. … You guys are paying shipping.

Gary: Add Oklahoma free with purchase.

That brought a reply from Toronto: “No Oklahoma, never, no way, nuh uh, nope, will not happen.”

from aagold76: “Throw in North Dakota while you're at it- do we really need 2 Dakotas?”

Decriminalize homosexuality!

The nasty guy put a line in his State of the Union address about ending HIV and AIDS within ten years. Some sites have treated this as serious and have explored what it might take.

But knowing the source of that goal I wondered about the underlying reasoning and how it might be twisted to not be a good thing at all.

It seems the goal to eradicate HIV has become a goal of decriminalizing homosexuality around the world. When the nasty guy was asked about it he said I don’t know what you’re talking about.

This effort appears to be coming from the vice nasty guy (which is why the nasty guy is clueless). And now I know there is an underhanded reason for the effort.

And Matthew Rodriguez of Out explains it. The VNG using an old racist tactic.

The truth is, this is part of an old colonialist handbook. In her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak coined the term “White men saving brown women from brown men” to describe the racist, paternalistic process by which colonizing powers would decry the way men in power treated oppressed groups, like women, to justify attacking them. Spivak was referencing the British colonial agenda in India. But Grennell’s attack might be a case of white men trying to save brown gay men from brown straight men, to the same end.

This is paternalism, not altruism.

Endless emergency

Sarah Kendzior, as part of her Gastlit Nation podcast says the national emergency (which isn’t) came with more than we’ve been told. She tweeted:

The national emergency gives Trump the ability to use an internet kill switch, to shut down citizens’ bank accounts, to deploy troops to attack protesters. There’s no end to the national emergency because it’s tied to his fantasy wall.

I didn’t know the internet had a kill switch. I thought it had too many pieces built by too many companies for that. Besides, I would think the big media players would get quite annoyed at their loss of income and influence.

However, I can see since it would take a really long time to build the wall the national “emergency” would also last a really long time.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville adds:

In other words: Trump has achieved the means to swiftly and effectively quash any mass protests that might happen in response to Mueller's investigation being shut down.
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It has never been, not really, about building a wall, but about building the foundations of autocratic rule.

Kendzior adds:

People have normalcy bias. They assume that if it's really as bad as what we've been saying, that someone will intervene. That's been one of the most dangerous assumptions of this entire crisis.
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Contact your representatives and say you want hearings. Not because impeachment will happen, but because it will get information out there.

Drag queen support

Back in December I posted about election fraud in North Carolina. Minions associated with GOP candidate Mark Harris of the 9th District collected absentee ballots and filled out, perhaps even revised, enough of them that Harris had a small lead. Now Harris agrees the confidence in the election has been undermined and that a new election should be held. The five-member board of elections voted unanimously to call for that new election.



Drag Queen Story Hour started (as one would expect) in San Francisco. The idea to have drag queens read to children has spread across the country, even to the Detroit suburb of Huntington Woods, where it is popular. Parents bring their children to get the tykes to think about diversity and inclusion.

Of course, there are various fundamentalist groups that try to insert themselves to say such storytellers are inappropriate for children, especially since the stories are about a variety of gender identities. When the protesters came to Michigan there were enough supporters so the kids didn’t see the protesters. Even the mayor wrote an editorial in the newspaper saying the protesters should go away. If his town wants Drag Queen Story Hour it is none of their business.

The latest city to get a protest was Brentwood, California. The number of protesters: 25. The number of supporters: 500.

On Presidents Day honor their slaves

The host on my classical music radio station has been saying today is officially George Washington’s Birthday. The bit about naming this particular national holiday as Presidents Day got deleted from the final bill before passage.

Whether this day is to honor all the presidents or just the first one Denise Oliver Velez of Daily Kos has something better for the day – honor the slaves of our early presidents. This is still important because blackface is back in the news and the current guy in the White House is a white supremacist.

Velez pulled in a few items from Five Truths about Black History by Jeffery Robinson of the ACLU.

* The first slaves arrived in our colonies in 1619.

* Virginia passed more than 130 laws regulating the ownership of black people – meaning what the white owner was allowed to do to a slave.

* There were 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. 40 of them owned slaves. Ten of the first twelve presidents owned slaves.

Starting with Washington. In 1786 he made a list of his slaves and the total was 216.

Velez has been writing these kinds of articles for Daily Kos in mid February for a few years now. She included excerpts of them in this year’s post.

The first national capital was Philadelphia. Pennsylvania had a law that said if a slave had been in the state for six months, they must be set free. So Washington rotated his slaves back to Virginia just before the deadline. But these slaves saw what freedom was like. Ona Judge was one of those who saw freedom, so escaped to New England. Washington responded with an intense manhunt. Several other slaves created escape plans.

Hercules was the chef for the Washington household. He was the subject of a children’s book about the creation of a birthday cake for the great man. The book’s story supposedly claimed that slaves were proud of the “status” positions – the “good” aspects of slavery. Once the book hit stores it caused such a public outcry it was withdrawn. But how did it make it that far?

On to “All men are created equal” Thomas Jefferson. Velez is quite tired of apologists. Go read about Robert Carter who actually freed his slaves. Plaques at Monticello now discuss how much slave labor was needed to run it.

Then there is James Monroe. He was the target of a slave revolt in 1800 and as governor of Virginia he led the repressive restoration of order (that order being white slave owners in charge). Rebellious slaves were publicly executed.

So what do we do now?

Dorothy Butler Gilliam, the first black female reporter for the Washington Post wrote about the location of the unmarked grave for slaves on the Mount Vernon grounds. There is now a marker at the location. Go visit.

And the big thing is to change how we teach about slavery. The Southern Poverty Law Center found only 8% of high school seniors could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War (not surprising from the many decades where that was intentionally obscured). This means updating textbooks and getting Teaching Tolerance materials. Teaching Tolerance tweeted:

If you can’t accurately understand the past—the way in which society has been built and constructed, economically, politically and socially—then you cannot make sense of the present.

Velez lists 10 key concepts from Teaching Tolerance to be taught in schools. Some of them:

Protections for slavery were embedded in the founding documents; enslavers dominated the federal government, Supreme Court and Senate from 1787 through 1860.

Slavery was an institution of power,” designed to create profit for the enslavers and break the will of the enslaved and was a relentless quest for profit abetted by racism.

Slavery was the central cause of the Civil War.

Slavery shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness, and white supremacy was both a product and legacy of slavery.

Enslaved and free people of African descent had a profound impact on American culture, producing leaders and literary, artistic and folk traditions that continue to influence the nation.

Virginia History has a database of Virginia slave names, so a schoolchild can “adopt” a slave family and follow their history. Other sites have similar data.

The SPLC site includes writings of Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries. Some things he notes:

* The Preamble to the Constitution lists some lofty goals for the new country. Racial justice is not in the list. Other parts of the constitution protect slavery and the slave trade, guaranteeing inequality for generations.

* Slavery is more than our country’s original sin. It’s also our country’s origin. Slavery was behind our country’s growth and transformation into a new nation.

* Slavery nearly destroyed the country. The South took up arms because they could not allow a world in which they did not have authority to control black labor and black behavior.

* Teaching about slavery unnerves us.

If the cornerstone of the Confederacy was slavery, then what does that say about those who revere the people who took up arms to keep African Americans in chains? If James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, could hold people in bondage his entire life, refusing to free a single soul even upon his death, then what does that say about our nation’s founders? About our nation itself?

Pre-scheduled national emergency

Lauren Clawson of Daily Kos reports that as Congress was completing a deal to fund the government to avoid another shutdown the nasty guy turned against it. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to cajole the nasty guy to sign. Instead, the nasty guy told McConnell he wouldn’t sign unless McConnell supported the national emergency declaration to build the border wall.

Which is why the news of the declaration came from McConnell and not the nasty guy.

When I first heard what McConnell said I had lots of thoughts about how he has been avidly becoming the gravedigger of democracy. In this case he’s been played.

Keep in mind: (1) McConnell had previously spoken against the emergency declaration, (2) Congress specifically did not fund the full requested amount for the wall. So this is the nasty guy refusing to abide by the funding law that Congress passed.

Sarah Kendzior tweeted:

That aspiring autocrats can pre-schedule a "national emergency" is the actual national emergency.

When someone thought this authoritarian power grap might lead to the cancellation of the 2020 election. Kendzior replied:

Fascists usually don't call off elections. They hold fake ones to give a contrived sense of legitimacy, with absurd margins like 95% of the vote. For fascists, elections are a performance of power. People should worry more about elections being free and fair than cancellation.

In another tweet Kendzior responds to someone who claims the GOP supports the nasty guy because he can deliver voters.

This take is off. Trump's appeal to GOP wasn't that he'd draw voters. It was that he'd change laws, pack courts, enable corruption and disenfranchise voters to the point that elections lose relevance and GOP can more easily pursue one-party rule and a constitutional convention.

Ari Berman, who wrote a book about the struggle to keep voting rights tweeted:

How democracies die:
Unconstitutional national "emergencies"
Demonizing immigrants & minorities
Attacking free press
Suppressing votes
Extreme gerrymandering
Election interference
Rigging census
Lame duck coups

Let me know if any of those sound familiar.

Speaking of election interference…

Erin Blanco and Betsy Woodruff of The Daily Beast report:

Two teams of federal officials assembled to fight foreign election interference are being dramatically downsized, according to three current and former Department of Homeland Security officials. And now, those sources say they fear the department won’t prepare adequately for election threats in 2020.

“The clear assessment from the intelligence community is that 2020 is going to be the perfect storm,” said a DHS official familiar with the teams. “We know Russia is going to be engaged. Other state actors have seen the success of Russia and realize the value of disinformation operations. So it’s very curious why the task forces were demoted in the bureaucracy and the leadership has not committed resources to prepare for the 2020 election.”
...
“If the president isn’t interested and there is no strategy, it’s no surprise that DHS is not wasting its time,” said Rosenzweig, now a senior fellow at the R Street Institute. “The failure of the White House to take this seriously is perhaps its single most significant dereliction of duty.”
...
“It’s very clear which direction we’re headed in DHS,” one staffer told The Daily Beast. “Everything, it seems, is dictated by someone higher up the chain who is making it abundantly clear to the rest of us that immigration and border security are the real focuses.”

Perhaps The Onion has it right. We should have protective border fencers.

Where freedom is protected

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos talks a bit about utopia. His words make me think of a world without a social hierarchy.

A utopia in the sense of a post-scarcity society, one where people’s needs are met, where opportunities abound, where freedom is protected, and creativity is encouraged.
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It’s my firm belief that we have everything we need to create a post-scarcity society, one that truly enables and encourages the achievements of every human being on the planet, while simultaneously protecting the nature of that planet as a biologically diverse, complex, and fundamentally living world.
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The fundamental inequality that keeps so many billions deprived isn’t an issue requiring some fundamental technical breakthrough, it’s a structural problem that arises from government and economic systems that were never designed to solve those problems. Instead, we created a system that is an inequality engine. Occasionally we feel guilty about it and hurl a tiny percentage of resources toward the problem. Which is followed by a round of back-patting. Then a round of making things incrementally worse. And then we wonder why the system that was designed to create inequality does it so, so well.

There are now a few ideas out there that will tackle the fundamentals of this inequality engine, some that have been around for a long time. There is the Accountable Capitalism Act drafted by Elizabeth Warren. There’s the Second Bill of Rights from Franklin Roosevelt (so not a new idea). And the latest idea is the Green New Deal that Alexsandria Ocasio-Cortez is promoting.

I’ve written about the Second Bill of Rights (nearly 10 years ago!). This bill of rights includes such things as the right to a useful job that provides a living wage, the right to a decent home, to medical care, a good education, and protection from economic fears.

Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act would require corporations that have more than $1 billion in revenue to recognize duties beyond maximizing profits for shareholders. One goal is prevent corporations from trying to maximize short-term profits at the expense of worker’s rights and long-term corporate health.

The Green New Deal is a framework for how Congress should proceed. There are a lot of details to be added later. The Deal includes these provisions:

* Achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in a way that is fair to all communities and do so by 2030.

* Create millions of good jobs with family sustaining wages, paid vacations, and retirement security along with union support.

* Invest in infrastructure and industry of the country.

* Secure clean air and water, climate resiliency, healthy food, access to nature, and a sustainable environment.

* Promote justice and repair oppression of the poor, low-income workers, women, indigenous people, people of color, migrants, deindusrialized communities, depopulated rural areas, the homeless, the disabled, and the youth.

There is then a long list of ways to achieve those goals.

Some conservatives, noting that last point, said Ocasio-Cortez should have stayed in her lane.

But Sumner wrote:

I’m supporting the Green New Deal because it’s not just a plan to help halt the destruction of climate change, but a plan that recognizes that efforts to address climate change while leaving intact all the systems that have created the problem have not worked. We can save ourselves. We can save the planet. But we can’t do one without doing the other.

Supports our actual bodies

Ragen Chastain, in her blog Dances With Fat, discusses the cavalier attitude of the health care industry has towards fat people.

The underlying belief of diet culture is that it’s better to be miserable, or even dead than to be fat.

She mentions an example. A fat person and a thin person go to a doctor with identical high levels of blood sugar. The fat person is referred to harmful bariatric surgery. The thin person is given medication.

I’m writing about this because I think it’s important to realize that when we are advocating for our health and healthcare, we are often advocating against a system that thinks that it’s worth killing us, or ruining our lives, to make us thin – no matter what we think.

Fat people have the right to exist, in fat bodies, and it doesn’t matter why we’re fat, what the “consequences” of being fat might be, or if we could (or want to) become thin. Fat people have the right to healthcare that supports our actual bodies, rather than insisting that we risk our lives to be thin before we are treated as human beings, worthy of appropriate, evidence-based healthcare

Nobody knows what fat people’s health outcomes would look like if we lived in a society that celebrated the diversity of body sizes, gave us the opportunity to love our bodies and see them as worthy of care, and the access to take good care of them. I’d like to find out.

Polluter panels

Snow overnight and rain today (with temps at the freezing point) means my evening rehearsal was canceled. Likely more snow coming. So this is a chance to share a few things in my browser tabs.

Sometime last year the GOP controlled Michigan legislature created panels to oversee the state’s environmental regulations. Alas, it’s no big surprise that the voting members on these panels are representatives from oil, gas, solid waste, and public utility companies. The former GOP governor signed it into law. These “polluter panels” have the authority to overrule all new environmental regulations. Keep in mind Flint with its disastrous water problems is in Michigan.

Incoming Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed an executive order to abolish the panels. Within two days the still GOP controlled House voted to overturn her order. The vote was along party lines. The state Senate has begun hearings on whether to also vote to overturn the order. One election (under gerrymandered districts) wasn’t enough to throw the bums out.



The GOP in Tennessee have introduced the Tennessee Natural Marriage Act. Yeah, it’s an effort to ban same-sex marriages. It was introduced before and failed. The reason it is being proposed is to have a way of taking same-sex marriage back to a more conservative Supreme Court in hopes they will overturn the 2015 ruling.

Anti-abortion advocates are passing laws in several states to attempt the same kind of thing.



Allegra Kirkland of Talking Points Memo gives many reasons why the 2020 census could be a disaster. Voting rights advocates and election law experts warn…

Inadequate funds, insufficient outreach, a wave of high-profile data breaches, and a deep mistrust of the Trump administration among minority communities compound the bureaucratic challenge inherent in moving the census online for the first time.

There’s mistrust of the nasty guy even if he can’t force a citizenship question on to the census. That mistrust means many minority groups think the census data might be given to the FBI or ICE, even though the census, by law, can’t share personal information.

We’ll be invited to do the census online and the recent huge data breaches make people think that isn’t safe. There is real fear that Congress simply won’t allocate enough money. And because 2020 is a presidential election year there is fear the census will become a political issue.

All these fears could mean a large undercount of minority populations. Yet census data is used to allocate federal dollars, to decide how many representatives a state sends to the US House, and to draw district boundaries for the next decade. An accurate count is basic to our democracy.

Advocates for justice

This is a post about the United Methodist Church that I’m specifically not posting to my brother blog that deals with UMC news. I’m doing it this way because there is a general point behind it.

Two weeks from today the United Methodist General Conference will be in progress. This is a special and limited Conference of delegates from around the world. There are only three proposals on the agenda, all dealing with how or if the denomination continues to exist. I won’t go into the three plans, only to say one is designed for all of us – progressive to conservative – to live together, another is a conservative takeover, and the third is just too complicated to be considered. The conservative organization, the Wesleyan Covenant Association, has already declared we do it their way or they leave. The conservative plan is so punishing that if it is approved many, perhaps most, progressives will leave.

I am not a delegate. I’m not going as an observer/demonstrator (I did go observe and demonstrate at the 2012 General Conference and that was so painful I’m not about to repeat the experience). I will be paying close attention from my home.

Leading up to GC I’ve been reading the Hacking Christianity blog written by Rev. Jeremy Smith. He has been explaining the issues around the various plans, including the various maneuvers of the conservatives.

The conservatives currently call themselves the Wesleyan Covenant Association, trying to claim they are more faithful to Methodism’s founder John Wesley. Before them was Good News, who took their name from the Gospels in the Bible. Gospel means “good news” and they’re called that because Jesus as God become human is good news to humans. They were trying to claim that their conservative viewpoint was liberating for humans the same way the Gospels are.

I mention all this because Rev. Smith laid out how the WCA plans for General Conference were first laid out in a Good News document … in 2004. For fifteen years they’ve been working on expelling those who don’t think like they do under the goal of “unifying” the denomination. This is a supremacist tactic.

In Rev. Smith’s post there was this comment by Jan Nelson:

Did this document [the plan from 15 years ago] result in some part from the IRD? I’ve understood that their goal was to destroy the UMC (and others) as effective advocates for justice and their motives were political, not at all theological. Is that close to what’s in this?

Rev. Smith did not answer Nelson’s question, nor did anyone else.

Fifteen years ago a partner with Good News was IRD, the Institute for Religion and Democracy. It isn’t an organization within the United Methodist Church; they tried to influence several mainline Protestant denominations. I don’t know how active they are now. I haven’t heard about them in several years.

Back then it didn’t take long for me to understand that the IRD name was a cover. The a better name would be the Institute for Religion Without Democracy. They were trying to undermine denominations that had a democratic way determining religious doctrine. The General Conference of the UMC does exactly that. The IRD decreed doctrine cannot be decided by a democratic process, it is ordained by God and declared by some top church figure, such as a pope. The UMC does not have that kind of office. Yes, this is a very conservative position, one all about maintaining a social and religious hierarchy.

The UMC has a strong and long history of advocating for justice. That the goal of the IRD was to cripple the denomination’s ability to advocate for justice makes sense to me, especially in the era of the nasty guy, and especially considering the rise of an authoritarian leader like the nasty guy has been a goal of political conservatives for about 40 years.

In just over two weeks we may see whether our long history of advocating for justice will continue.

Modernize government

Chris Reeves of Daily Kos has a few suggestions for modernizing the federal government.

As a result of the 2020 census Rhode Island is likely to lose one of its two House seats, resulting in a record number of states with only one House member. In 2022 Illinois is likely to send its smallest delegation since the 1860s. It is time to expand the number of members of the House. Until a century ago the size of the House grew with the population of the country. But now, the balance of power doesn’t match the balance of population. This imbalance has led to gerrymandering.

Federal government websites need a big update. Too many sites rely on users (that being us) to print forms and mail them in. Sites have wrong info, broken links, ancient interfaces, and don’t work on mobile devices. It would also be good to modernize what those websites do.

Improving interactions with the government will also improve participation. If we look at ways to boost citizen involvement, we make a better government.

Expanding the House can be done through the legislature. Expanding the Senate, also needed, would require a constitutional amendment. One idea is a state gets an extra senator for each 10 million in population (alas, Michigan is at 9.95 million).

The GOP is quickly filling court vacancies (which they held open under Obama) with lifetime appointments. It’s time to consider capping terms at 15 or 18 years. This would allow a federal court system that looks more like America. An amendment would also be needed to allow capping terms at the Supreme Court.

Refusing blackmail

A curious – and alarming – story played out last week. I’m not sure I can summarize all the details, so here is the story on Daily Kos. I’ll try anyway. AMI is the company that publishes the National Equirer, a supermarket tabloid that publishes scandals of the rich and famous and doesn’t worry about whether they’re true. Except not stories about the nasty guy. In his case AMI would buy the story (some about another woman accusing him of assault) for the purpose of not publishing it. Because the person sold exclusive rights to AMI they can’t sell the story elsewhere. The story gets buried. Instead, AMI published stories of the nasty guy’s supposed greatness.

The second party in this story is Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post. The Post began running stories about AMI and its blackmail and extortion.

So AMI threatened Bezos, saying if the Post continues with these stories they’ll publish photos of Bezos in compromising situations – not good for Bezos in the middle of divorce proceedings. AMI especially objected to the Post publishing anything suggested AMI’s actions were “political.”

But Bezos didn’t cave. He made AMI’s threats public in a blog post and questioned how AMI got stolen personal information.

There is another big aspect to the case. Bezos and the Post were the employers of slain reporter Jamal Khashoggi. AMI has published favorable propaganda on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who, many intelligence sources have documented, ordered the killing of Khashoggi.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville made an important point:

As Bezos said in his piece, if this is what they feel like they can do to someone with his wealth and influence, what are these sadistic crooks going to use their continued freedom to do to dissidents who have nothing with which to fight back but their own voices?

This is likely a partial answer to why other media outlets are so deferential to the nasty guy. They’re being blackmailed by the likes of AMI.

I’m not a fan of Bezos. One becomes the richest man in the world by exploiting employees. So I now avoid Amazon (for the same reasons I avoid Walmart). Even so, I appreciate what Bezos did in this case.

New grotesqueries will be revealed

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville comments on those who think the various investigations into the nasty guy will be a show worthy of popcorn. This is not entertainment. The nasty guy won’t go easily. The various government agencies are already in a shambles. The idea that the vice nasty guy will also be booted is fantasy. There will be massive upheaval.

In addition, as McEwan has said many times, the nasty guy isn’t a GOP aberration, he is the GOP endgame. That plan was certainly sped up by the nasty guy, but their annihilation of democracy doesn’t need him.

McEwan concludes:

And then there is this chilling reality: The subterranean internecine struggle between the anti-democratic dominionists [extreme religious right] and the anti-democratic oligarchs is going to be horrendous to live through.

And guess who's figured out how to marry those forces? Putin.

Which is why he's courting both sides in the U.S.

So whoever wins will be beholden to him.

And so will whoever loses.

We must keep fighting to remove the nasty guy. But if he goes new grotesqueries will be revealed.



Sarah Kendzior understands what has happened to our government. She hears the call for an “inspiring” leader of the Democrats to be the next president. But she has different criteria:

I also look at the 2020 winner as someone who will be shoveling the US out from under a massive pile of shit for the entirety of their term. I don't care if they are fun or pleasant or charismatic. I care whether they remove the massive pile of shit.

Here’s a quote from the latest episode of Kendzior’s podcast Gaslit Nation:

The GOP is the party of death. They want to take away our healthcare. They threaten children who come to the border fleeing war with death. They want to continue killing the planet. The GOP today stands for nothing but death.

You can listen to the episode here.

And why are they the party of death? Part of it is supremacy – I get to live and you don’t. Part of it is what I wrote about last week, that the rich think their chances of survival go up if they allow global warming kill off the rest of us.

The nuclear weapons deterrence is based on MAD – mutually assured destruction. If you use nukes against us we will make sure you are also destroyed. That has worked for about 60 years. But will that same deterrence work against the rich? That idea prompted this from Kendzior:

What if a group of autocrats and plutocrats -- many already of an apocalyptic bent -- believed that a depopulated earth would be easier to manage during the climate crisis, and embraced accelerationalism while building ways to insulate themselves? Just throwing it out there.

What if this wealthy group of resource-hoarders have neither baseline respect for human life nor a traditional sense of the future, but instead viewed the future as a endangered commodity? A commodity that only a chosen few -- them -- deserve. What would they do differently?

Ian Bremmer shares a tweet of a president who has successfully built a wall. Alas, the photo doesn’t show the president’s head so we can’t see that it’s Jimmy Carter. The wall he is standing beside is a part of a Habitat for Humanity House. Such a profound difference between Carter and the nasty guy.

Hating people is easy

I followed links to find another important voice on the internet. This is John Pavlovitz and his blog Stuff That Needs To Be Said. His “about” page says he is a pastor in Wake Forest, North Carolina and also a writer and activist committed to equality, diversity, and justice within and outside faith communities. I read a few of his recent posts and I very much like what I read. I’ll likely quote him in the future.

From a post Hating People is Easy. Loving Them Isn’t:

At the unnaturally accelerated pace we live and move through the world, we simply don’t have time to linger with people long enough to really see them or hear them, let alone imagine they might have a perspective we could learn from—or worse yet, that we might actually like them. We grab a quick cue from their profiles: a political affiliation, a religious expression, a retweet source, and on that spindly, fragile skeleton, we instantly create a human being we can attach all our fears, biases, and past wounds to.

Toxic tribalism thrives in such relational shorthand. I can view someone across the social media chasm, and in an instant I can size them up, remove any nuance or humanity, and fully caricaturize them into the irredeemable adversary I need. That makes hating them much easier for me—and hating them is just a hell of a lot quicker and simpler than knowing or understanding them.
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We’re all going to have to figure out how to do the difficult work of loving people we dislike.
We’re going to have to stop creating false stories about people from a safe distance, and get truer stories. We’re going to have to find a way to offer an open hand as often as a clenched fist. We’re going to need to slow down enough, and get close enough proximity to our supposed enemies, so that we can look in the whites of their eyes and find the humanity residing there. It may be buried in jagged, ugly layers of fear and grief and hopelessness—but it is almost always there.

I don’t like to think about the humanity of people when they are acting inhumanely, mostly because I don’t want them to get away with something. I don’t want to risk giving tacit consent to the terrible things they do, to the wounds they inflict, to the violence they manufacture—and the simplest way to do this, seems to be to despise them.

Pavlovitz related an incident where he was one of several people asked to speak. At the back of the audience were members of an alt-right group who loudly heckled the speakers. Pavlovitz, when it was his turn to speak, admitted he ended up shouting about the love of God. He was aware of the irony.

But the next speaker, Genesis B., said:

Before I share my story I want to speak to my potential future co-collaborators back there. I don’t see you as my enemies, but my potential co-collaborators. I want to know if any of you would be willing to come up here and embrace me.

One man came forward and they hugged. Afterward, the heckling continued, but with a lot less volume and anger.

Pavlovitz concludes:

Hating people is always going to be the easier and more expedient path than loving them, because loving them means seeing them fully, hearing them, stepping into their skin as best we can, and finding something worth embracing.

I wonder if we can do that.

I wonder if I can.

A second post by Pavlovitz is titled, It’s Inhumane Not to Want Someone to Have Healthcare. To those who fight to take away life-saving care, who applaud the exclusion of the already sick, he says:

What is wrong with your heart?

How did you make it this far in life without acquiring basic empathy?

If you’re a professed Christian, what is your understanding of your faith tradition, that you would place yourself opposite the side of healing wounds?

This isn’t a political or a financial issue after all, it’s a philosophical and an ethical one. It has nothing to do with funding (because every other developed nation seems to have figured it out), it’s about whether or not you give enough of a damn about another human being, not to place barriers between them and staying healthy or staying alive. This is a pass-fail test of simple decency.
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Underlying the opposition to universal healthcare is ultimately selfishness; the belief that I am forever living in scarcity, that someone else’s gain must automatically be my loss, that if another person receives, then I might be left with nothing. The level of self-preservation is toxic, but worse than that, there is an insidious, twisted resentment of strangers at work here, that doesn’t want someone else to “get away with something,” to cheat the system and pull one over on us (and you know, not die). This callousness is a national cancer that seems to be metastasizing in these days, and we need to attend to it.

We should stop pretending that this is about making an unreasonable and unprecedented financial sacrifice for someone else. We all pay for roads for everyone, for education for everyone, for missiles for everyone. We can find a way to pay for medicine for everyone. That’s not what this about.

Our shared humanity is at stake here, and you care enough to defend it or you don’t.

Another human being not dying, is either a priority for you or it’s not.

People being allowed to stay healthy and alive and with the people who love them is either a pressing issue—or it isn’t.

If the latter in any of these cases is true, it is the symptom of a far more grave illness.

Just after the new Congress was sworn in Rep. Rashida Tlaib used a cussword when saying she very much wants to impeach the nasty guy. That prompted Pavlovitz to say a few things about the reaction to Tlaib’s choice of words. The post is titled I Don’t Care About a Congresswoman Cussing (And Neither Do You).

If dropping an MF-bomb or profanity or coarse language were at all offensive to you, you wouldn’t have voted for this President a couple of weeks after hearing him talk about women like they’re pieces of garbage—would you?
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I care that families are being separated.
I care that medical bills are bankrupting people.
I care that we’re drowning in guns and daily shootings.
I care that Muslims are caricatured into terrorists, migrants into advancing hordes, and LGBTQ people into imminent threats, by our elected leaders.

That is the start of a very long list of things that Pavlovitz cares about.

I wish you cared about those things. You don’t. I wish injustice as discrimination and inequality were offensive to you. They aren’t. I wish marginalized people could merit such passion from you. They don’t.

That offends me.

Best odds of survival

There’s the Clinton Global Initiative, the Bill Gates Foundation working to eliminate disease, and the work Al Gore has been doing to make us aware of climate change. They’re working to save lives and prevent mass-scale deaths among vulnerable people as our world heats up.

And the rest of the rich dudes? Jeff Bezos? Koch brothers? Elon Musk?

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville noted a recently released study that concludes about 90% of the original inhabitants of the Americas, about 54 million people, died in the 100 years after Columbus opened the New World to colonization, and that huge loss of life affected the climate of the planet. The result was a drop in global temperatures.

I had heard a similar conclusion that said the cause of the Little Ice Age was the Black Death that swept through Europe in the middle of the 14th Century.

Both scenarios resulted in a large reduction of the human population. Both scenarios led to agricultural land being reclaimed by forests, which these studies say pulled enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to chill the planet.

Which got McEwan wondering why the extremely wealthy don’t seem to care about climate change. It looks like they believe

their best chance of long-term survival, and the survival of their descendants, is a much smaller human population with far less communicable disease and demand on limited resources.
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They've all calculated that their best odds of survival depends on the rest of us dying.
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People with the power to do something about climate change aren't. And I think the reason is because they have calculated letting it happen is the fastest route to the depopulation they see as the key to their own salvation, and they believe they have the resources to weather the (literal) storm, and they're making as many of us as vulnerable as possible in the meantime.

Humans have always been each other's worst enemy. Especially when they're trying to save themselves.

And right now, the humans with the most influence on the planet see the rest of us as a threat to their existence. That makes them an extremely pressing threat to us.

As I read McEwan’s words I began to realize the rich and their billions have the resources to tackle some of the big science fictiony things that could reduce global warming. I’ve seen proposals for processes to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and bury it underground. I’ve read about the idea to spread black dust in the upper atmosphere to reduce the amount of light reaching the earth (and thus the amount of heat reflected back into space that’s captured by greenhouse gases. There’s a lot that could be done with proven technology – such as covering the roof of every Amazon warehouse with solar arrays. Parking lots could also be covered with solar arrays on stilts so we could park beneath them to keep our cars cool. Yeah, it would take a few billion. Which these guys have.

But I notice the rich aren’t funding these kinds of initiatives. Not at all.

Of course you work for daddy!

The nasty guy has said he will cancel the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. He says Russia has been violating the agreement (which Russia denies). Melissa McEwan of Shakesville notes:

I am absolutely sick at the groundwork being laid here for the expansion of the Russian empire under Putin's direction, and I am incandescently angry that every single item about this in U.S. media won't be framed in the crucial context that the president who has ordered the nation's withdrawal from this treaty is a Russian asset.

Trump is not making this stark move to put pressure on Russia. He is doing it so that Russia can resume expansion of its nuclear arsenal. Because he is a puppet of Vladimir Putin.

I and many others have noted that American news media have either mostly given the nasty guy a pass or actively support him. One aspect in particular is the nasty guy’s daughter and son-in-law as senior advisors even though both got security clearances over strong objections by the people who research such clearances.

Sarah Kendzior, in a quote from the latest episode of her podcast Gaslit Nation, explains why the presence of Ivanka are Jared in the White House is not questioned by the media:

The products of nepotism are covering an admin rife with nepotism. A reporter gets a job at her daddy's paper to cover a POTUS whose career relied on his own daddy and who then installed his son-in-law and daughter in the White House…

A normal person looking at Jared and Ivanka is gonna be like 'WTF is this? This is a violation of nepotism laws and they're dangerously unqualified.' But these reporters are like 'Of course you go work with daddy! Of course you keep it in the family!