The Trojan Horse weaponized trust

My Sunday movie for a week ago was Naz & Maalik. These two are Black, Muslim, and gay teens living in Brooklyn. There’s not a lot of story here, not a lot of the story line that goes all the way to resolution. They spend their days together, much of it buying inexpensive things and selling them on the street for a profit. When in public they do not show any affection. They encounter a female FBI agent, in general searching for Muslim terrorists, but they’re worried about revealing they are gay, afraid of what their parents and mosque leaders will do. I would say it isn’t a bad movie – I did enjoy it – but I’m also glad it was less than 90 minutes. My travels this past week were highly enjoyable and highly successful. Now back to blogging. My Sunday movie this week was Heartstopper Forever. The original Heartstopper is a series with three seasons and a total of 24 episodes that were released over 2022-2024. I reviewed each season as I saw it. This is a full length (2 hour) movie to close out the story. That story is about Charlie and Nick, boys at an English high school who over the series fall in love. They deal with the issues that teenagers deal with plus the issues of being gay. There is some, but not a lot, of homophobia. They have a circle of friends that include Elle, transgender female, dating Tao, Asian. Tara and Darcy are a mixed-race lesbian couple. Isaac is asexual, always with a book in his hands. The series ends with Nick, a year older than Charlie, talking about going off to university and really liking Leeds University, five hours away. The movie is about Nick’s senior year (which I thought was what season 3 was about). Charlie, a junior, is in the running as Head Boy of the school. I had to look that one up – a head boy is considered to be a top student and is given extra responsibilities. Charlie wants to be Head Boy to help stop bullying (as he had been) and make sure the school is a safe place for queer students. As for Charlie and Nick, they hear a lot that teenage romances tend not to last. Their relationship is pretty solid, but they are teens and not sure how to talk to each other. Things are said that take a while to get past. Through this time both actors do a great job. I do have a small complaint. Too many times the social events for the teens are dances where alcohol flows freely. Nick has not yet figured out how to say no. The story should show other kinds of events. By the time the movie was filmed the main actors were 20 and 21 – they definitely didn’t look like teens. When the first season was filmed, they were teenagers, but already older than the mid teens they were portraying. The whole story now has a satisfying ending. I enjoyed the movie and the original series. I pay attention to the book of Matthew, chapter 25, verses 31-46 in the Bible. This is the parable of separating the sheep from the goats. Jesus talks about six things that distinguish the two – offer drink to the thirsty, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, care for the sick, and visit those in prison. Jesus says that those who do those things to the least of the people will be invited into the Kingdom of God and those who don’t will be cast aside. I pay attention to the list partly because of the things not in it. There is nothing about oppressing various groups of people, such as the LGBTQ community, to supposedly fulfill God’s commands. There is nothing about whether one believes particular things, such as the virgin birth, or not. No, the only things in the list are about how one is to go about caring for their fellow humans. So I was quite intrigued by a segment on NPR aired on Sunday, July 12. Host Ayesha Rascoe talked to Jack Jenkins of Religion News Service about Matthew 25 being discussed on Capitol Hill. Pope Leo critiqued the nasty guy’s immigration policies by using Matthew 25. Did you welcome the foreigner or not? Speaker Mike Johnson is quoted a few weeks later as saying:

People cite passages out of the Old Testament and they say, well, you're supposed to take care of the sojourner and the neighbor, treat him as yourself, welcome then in. Yes, but that is an admonition to individuals, not to the civil authorities.

Senator Rafael Warnock, who is also a pastor and leads Martin Luther King Jr.’s church, criticized Johnson’s position, saying, “It's a very narrow individualistic faith, and I think it has consequences for the kind of policy you end up with.” I agree with Warnock and add: The policies that guide the actions of civil authorities don’t appear out of nowhere. They are created by humans. The faith, morals, and ethics of the humans are reflected in the policies they create. If the humans who create the policies follow what Jesus says they will have policies that reinforce what Jesus says. That means Johnson, as much as he crows about his faith, isn’t following Jesus. I mentioned Johnson’s comment to my pastor. That brought quite the cringy sour face from her, an expression saying Johnson completely missed what Jesus was saying. In a fortunate connection Thom Hartman of the Daily Kos community referenced Matthew 25. He talked about the just-released movie Odyssey about the ten years of wandering Odysseus had to endure after the fall of Troy. Much of what happens in the movie is based on Zeus Xenios or Zeus’ Law. That means hospitality is more than a courtesy, it is an obligation. Mistreating a guest meant offending the king of gods. Theoxenia is also a core part of Judaism, Christianity, Islam (including the Islam of Iran), and a great number of other traditions. In Genesis of the Jewish Bible, also part of the Christian Old Testament, is the story of Abraham welcoming three strangers. The welcome is extravagant in case the strangers are actually gods disguised as humans. And in Abraham’s story they are (well, not God, but God’s messengers. The story of Sodom has been used to claim that God hates homosexuals so we had better do the same. But Jewish tradition says the sin is cruelty to the stranger. And Matthew 25 shows Jesus standing squarely in that tradition. So does Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan. The Odyssey happens because how thoroughly the Trojan Horse violates Theoxenia. Hartmann then reviews the events of the movie and points out which characters follow Theoxenia and which do not. Those that welcomed the shipwrecked Odysseus do. The cyclops does not and we see his destruction as justice. Then Hartmann discusses how completely the nasty guy, in his unprovoked attack in Iran, has violated Theoxenia. That starts with the attack being unprovoked. Add to that the attack on the Iran war room that killed the Supreme Leader and 40 other top leaders. Later is the accusation by Iran that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are negotiating not to get to a resolution but as a way to manipulate the price of oil, from which Iran says they reached a profit of $9 billion – Iran says it should get a share in the proceeds.

[The Trojan Horse] is often cited as the pivot point when the ancient world turned from centuries of civilization to centuries of barbarism and democracy was lost for millennia. ... The Trojan Horse itself was the perfect emblem of that turn, because it weaponized trust, taking the oldest rule of the ancient world — that a gift offered and accepted creates a sacred obligation — and rigging it as a trap. And the gods answered in kind, scattering the victors across the wine-dark sea so that the men who’d trampled the laws of heaven learned, one drowned crew and one ruined homecoming at a time, that a civilization that wins by betraying its own sacred order will not survive the winning. ... One wonders how long America — and worldwide democracy itself, along with the civilized rules and respect for law it requires — will similarly pay for Trump’s and Netanyahu’s analogous violations of Zeus’ Law.

Democracy is fragile

A Michigan group Secure MI Vote has gotten approval to start collecting petition signatures for a proposal. They say, as their name says, their effort is to make Michigan voting more secure. But the actual text of the proposal is about voter suppression. Through a misguided provision in the state constitution, once the group collects over 340,000 signatures the legislature, controlled by Republicans, can approve it and have it become law without the governor able to veto it. The petition says it is a ballot proposal, but the Republicans have already said if it gets to them they’ll approve it. So citizens will never see it on the ballot. So today I was at Ferndale Pride at the Voters Not Politicians booth talking to people in the crowd and asking them to pledge to not sign the petition. Three years ago I helped VNP get the citizens redistricting commission passed. Yes, Pride goers were a receptive and friendly crowd. A few times I had to clarify that we’re against the petition. We don’t like voter suppression. It has been a while since I’ve been to Ferndale Pride. This time it is two long blocks on Nile Mile Road in downtown Ferndale. While there are a couple performance stages the rest of the event is booths with whatever organization or business wants to be there. This is why I rarely go – I have no interest in most of the booths and it’s not my kind of music. Even so, after my shift of talking about voting rights I did walk the length of the two blocks. And merely glanced in all the booths. I appreciate Pride as a place where my LGBTQ community can come to be who they are without stigma. I saw many families – gay or lesbian parents with children and straight parents with LGBTQ children. Some dressed up, some wore rainbow clothing, some wore shirts with appropriate slogans. My favorite slogan: “Human Being, color may vary.” The nation has officially passed 700,000 deaths due to the COVID virus. The actual count is likely over a million. According to Michigan data, the number of cases in the state since the start of the pandemic has passed 1 million. Since the population of the state is just over 10 million the case rate has passed 10% – yes, ten percent of the state has gotten sick. I also looked at the state’s data. Over the last five weeks, peak cases per day has been 2313, 3039, 3214, 3335, 4138. The rise seemed to slow, then shot up again. This last peak is almost half the size of the peaks of November last year and April this year. Over the last five weeks, peak deaths per day has been 29, 33, 41, 39, 27. I expect the last number to rise as more data comes in. There is a straight line increase in deaths from mid July to mid September. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra begins its season next weekend. They intend to have a live audience. To get in a person must show they’ve been vaccinated and also have a recent COVID test. The audience must wear masks during the performance. This is the first time in thirty years I did not renew my subscription. I normally do it in the spring (though much later than the orchestra wants me to). I wanted to wait until I could see the COVID situation – which is not good. I’m glad the DSO is at the forefront of streaming their concerts so I can watch and listen from the safety of my home. That’s most definitely not the same as being in the hall. Lean McElrath responded to an opinion piece in the New York Times by Ross Douthat. I haven’t read Douthat’s piece because it is behind a paywall (and doesn’t look like I would agree with it). McElrath wrote:

People who think the unnecessary and preventable deaths of millions of people are simply fodder for bad faith intellectual exercises and games of “gotcha” in online discourse disgust me. ... I don’t care about discourse. I don’t care about engagement. I *do* care about the fact that people are dying in incomprehensible numbers and it’s being normalized. In 18 pandemic months we’ve gone from: Prevent infection to Flatten the curve to Only the disabled and elderly die, NOT children to Only disabled children die to Oh well, it’s endemic now. And from NYT calling American 100,000 deaths “an incalculable loss” to whatever this is:

This being Douthat’s article titled, What if Covid Were 10 Times Deadlier? McElrath continued:

I suggest that what is happening is preventable, ongoing mass death is being minimized and normalized and that it constitutes propaganda. There are significant, predictable dangers associated with normalization of mass death. I’m shocked this is a controversial observation.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is the latest member of the court to push back against low opinion the public has of the court, as shown by recent polls. Barrett and Thomas have already spoken about it. Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reported Alito added another bit to his complaint: The court’s conservative majority are victims of a coordinated effort to discredit the court. Of course, their use of the shadow docket and letting the Texas abortion law go into effect can’t possibly be the reason for the low public opinion. A couple weeks ago Max Kennerly, a trial lawyer, tweeted about Thomas’ attempt at pushback:

"You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions," he said, blaming us for his votes in Bush v Gore, DC v Heller, Citizens United, Connick v Thompson, Concepcion, Shelby County, Hobby Lobby, Vance v Ball State, the eviction moratorium, the Texas abortion law...

McElrath quoted Melissa Murray, a professor at NYU Law, who described a brief filed in support of the Texas abortion ban. The brief invited the Court to overrule two major LGBTQ decisions, one of those the right to marry. McElrath added:

As I’ve warned repeatedly for the past seven years on here, right-wing SCOTUS activists intend to try to overturn marriage equality legislation and to reinstate laws making LGBTQ existence illegal.

In a post from a couple weeks ago (yeah, articles can live in my browser tabs for a while) Mark Sumner of Kos discussed the Republican Party and the memo John Eastman wrote outlining how the vice nasty might subvert the Electoral College count. I’ve written about the Eastman memo. As part of that discussion Sumner wrote:

All John Eastman did in his memo laying out the means for Mike Pence to overturn the legal results of an election was to extend that burn it, smash it mentality to American democracy. Democracy is fragile. It has to be fragile. It’s an agreement among the governed that they will participate in their own governing. It’s a system that requires, and is in fact based on, the idea that adult citizens of a society will act like adult citizens of a society, and place the concerns of that society over their individual desires. Trump supporters are being extremely upfront in making it clear: They’re not playing by those rules. What Eastman laid in front of Pence is just another page of what Ellmers spelled out in his essay: There are Americans who no longer want to make any compromise for the greater good. They don’t believe there is a greater good. They don’t have policy concerns. They don’t place their faith with churches, universities, or even corporations. That doesn’t make them, as Ellmers might say, “not Americans.” It makes them dangerous Americans. ... The core belief is not that anything needs to be conserved, but that American democracy has got to go.

The maneuverings in Congress over the two infrastructure bills is getting so complicated that professional Congress watchers are getting confused. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos quoted Pete Schroeder and Seung Min Kim tweeting essentially that. Dworkin also quoted a couple sources about a recent development. Moderate House Democrats had been insisting it was time to vote on the $1t bill passed by the Senate, even though they had previously agreed that bill and the $3.5t bill needed to be voted on at the same time. The development is the Congressional Progressive Caucus, about 100 strong and headed by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, said nope, the two bills will be linked together. Quite impressive for progressives who are pretty good at wavering. Not this time. Rebekah Sager of Kos reported that Louis DeJoy – remember him? – is still at the head of the Postal Service and is now starting to implement his plan to slow down first class mail. Amid cries of “Why is he still there?” Sager says it is because the president can’t directly fire the Postmaster General. He has to appoint members to the Board of Governors to do that. And Biden has not yet appointed a majority. A while back I wrote about an article in Nature Scientific Reports as discussed on Kos about evidence that the ancient city of Sodom might have been hit by an exploding meteor, explaining the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Nowhere Man of the Kos community wrote a reply. He said the authors of the NSR article conducted shoddy science, were not experts in archaeology, and had a strong bias in their conclusion. Nowhere Man then linked to several Twitter threads to provide background and rebuttal (which I didn’t read). The comments to this post added critiques of the rebuttals. So maybe an exploding meteor took out Sodom and a real event matched the oral history, and maybe it didn’t. Happy Birthday to Jimmy Carter! He turned 97 yesterday. Walter Einenkel of Kos gathered together several congratulatory tweets, including one from the Naval Academy which shows his graduation picture and tells us he is the oldest living former president. I believe he now has celebrated more birthdays than any other American president. Biden tweeted a photo of his younger self with Carter. Carter’s presidency didn’t play well at the time – he wasn’t elected to a second term. Historians now think this time in the White House was actually pretty good. For one, he kept us out of war. However, his time since then has shown what an exemplary human he is. Einenkel included a tweet from ClockOutWars:

Some people leave the White House and grift + lie + scam Americans. While others like former POTUS Jimmy Carter leave office and build houses. Happy 97th Birthday President Carter.

Responsible prosecutors would never ignore so much evidence

I had to run my furnace today. The high was 59F. We should be back to 70F tomorrow. Over the last few days there has been news of the various options the vice nasty considered using to disrupt the Electoral College vote last January 6th. One of those bits of news was when vice nasty called former Vice President Dan Quayle and the former VP told him his job during the count was strictly ceremonial. The law didn’t allow him to do anything else. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reports on a scenario devised by John Eastman, an attorney who represented the nasty guy in some of those failed lawsuits in the states. Eastman also claimed Kamala Harris was not an American citizen and thus ineligible to run for vice president. Eastman’s plan: * When the vice nasty got to Arizona he was to claim the state had submitted multiple slates of electors (a lie) and their count would be deferred. * He would repeat that false claim for seven other states. * He would declare that only 454 of the 538 electors had been recognized. Of those the nasty guy got 232 and thus won. Of course, Democrats would howl. * In response he would declare no candidate won and turn to the 12th Amendment. That says each state delegation gets a vote, not each elector nor each member of Congress. Since more delegations – 26 – are Republican majority (though overall more members are Democrats) again he would declare the nasty guy won. That scenario ignores the Elector Count Act of 1887. Eastman had an answer for that – the law was unconstitutional because naming electors is a state duty, though there has been no court ruling on the law. The goal was, of course, to generate enough chaos (and there would have been chaos) that Republicans could claim the nasty guy won. And allowed to stay in the White House until the various cases were trotted through the courts, leaving us to wonder how democracy died. Thankfully the vice nasty didn’t try it. Sumner also reported that the New York Times obtained a memo from the nasty guy election communication team. A few days after the 2020 election the team discussed the claims that were circulating. These were claims about all aspects of the voting machines made by Dominion and Smartmatic, such as programmed in Venezuela, and connected to George Soros and antifa. The memo listed – and thoroughly debunked – every claim. Perhaps a week later, on November 19, 2020, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell held a press conference to claim the election was rigged and that they had proof. During that presser they repeated every claim the memo had debunked. They were repeating things they knew were lies. Dominion is suing Giuliani and the nasty guy campaign for defamation. The trial is ongoing. This memo is now a part of court papers for the trial. And that doesn’t look good for the defendants. Which is good for us. Chitown Kev, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post. She wrote the Republican Party has no interest in actually governing. She added this:

But the constant stream of revelations makes it all the more difficult for the Justice Department to avoid prosecution of the former president or his cronies. Responsible prosecutors would never ignore so much evidence revealing an insurrectionist instigator’s intent (critical in proving serious crimes), nor would prosecutors upholding their oaths miss the seriousness of the plot to overthrow a government. Refusal to prosecute would amount to an invitation to repeat the coup in 2024 and beyond.

The nasty guy is still working to remove his perceived enemies. One of them is Moscow Mitch. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported the nasty is trying to depose the party’s leader in the Senate as that leader is trying to bring his party back into the majority. This is more than a party in “disarray” – a term frequently used against Democrats when the media sees even a glimmer of disagreement. This is more like the TV show Survivor. Mary Trump wrote a book about her uncle the nasty guy. She tweeted that we’re living on the edge and the current system is rigged against democracy. The prompted Leah McElrath to tweet:

If we were to compare our political system to a house, our house is teetering on the edge of a cliff with an eroded foundation. Many are expending tremendous effort trying to hold it up and keep it from falling while others are trying to push it off. But the foundation is gone. Assuming we aren’t right-wingers trying to push it off the cliff or accelerationists trying to do so from the left, we need to ask ourselves how best to allocate our resources in terms of reactivity (keeping the house from falling) and proactivity (rebuilding its foundation). Of course, there are also those of us who have reached a point of realizing the house is likely going to fall eventually and, as a result, are considering allocating our resources toward preparing for that eventuality.

A few days ago I said I would write about the “Justice for J6” rally held at the Capitol last Saturday. And now I am. Sumner posted a report on the rally that same afternoon. The rally was to demand justice for those who participated in the January 6 Capitol attack. By “justice” they mean release of the attackers from whatever prison they’re in. In preparation for the rally the Capitol Police put up fences and increased their presence. They even asked the National Guard to stand by. The rally organizers spread the word and expected about 700 people to come. They got maybe half that. Darrell Lucus of the Kos community reported that one reason for the low turnout was many on the right were claiming the event was a “false flag” or “honeypot.” Instead of a true rally by nasty guy loyalists the claim was it was really put on by antifa (the false flag) for the purpose of entrapping (the honeypot) attendees into committing violent acts. One of the things Martin Luther King said was the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. Professor Fleming, a critical race sociologist, tweeted a rebuttal.

Sometimes I wonder if the “moral arc of the universe” language is actually harmful Enlightenment dogma that encourages magical thinking and civic laziness. In reality, the universe has no moral arc. Gains can be forever lost. Rights can be undone. Progress can be crushed.. Everything around us, everywhere on this planet is showing that there is nothing inevitable about our survival, much less about progress. The belief that things will somehow “work out” despite all evidence to the contrary helps ensure that things will not, in fact, work out..

Yes, some white liberals do believe in that magical thinking and have used the phrase. Commenter Stephen Robinson added:

MLK also spoke of the “fierce urgency of now." He never shrugged off current day issues as something that would magically resolve themselves decades later.

I’ve been avoiding writing about the Haitian refugees living under the bridge in Del Rio, Texas. It is hard to deal with such abuse happening under the Biden administration. I’ll let you read about it elsewhere – there are plenty of sources. However, here is a good new story, a tweet from Nate Mook of the World Central Kitchen (of course, they would arrive):

Things I never imagined I’d be doing on a Tuesday morning: Buying 2,000 packets of baby food to make sure the most fragile Haitians living under the bridge in Del Rio, Texas have something to eat. Sorry for cleaning out your shelves today, HEB. See you again tomorrow.

HEB is a grocery chain in Texas with a reputation of giving back to the community. Commenters rightly note the WCK would do better working to get wholesale prices from a supplier and not disrupt the local HEB customers. But if they’re just getting started on the venture this may be what they have to do now. McElrath tweeted:

We need a new, specific word to describe the unique stress of watching as systems of power fail to act in proportion to urgency. Suggestions?

Some of the words proposed: ElMolino: Armagedimpotence VanessaSax2k: Exasperage Rabid Badger: Caligulabotomy Katz: Annihilanxiety Tobi: Thursday Jules: Electile Dysfunction StaceyCeeJay: Ostriching The book of Genesis in the Bible talks of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Yeah, Sodom is how we got the word sodomites to describe gay men, but a close read of chapter 19 shows the story was about rape, not about same-sex love. Because strangers in town were not treated well (as Genesis 19:24 puts it):

Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven.

skralyx of the Kos community, working from a story published in Nature Scientific Reports, wrote that evidence is mounting it really happened. Perhaps it isn’t just an allegorical story. Maybe not by a vengeful deity, but by a meteor impact around 1650 BCE. The ruined city of Tall el-Hammam, which might have been Sodom, has some shocked quartz, which only shows up around meteor impact sites, even if the meteor explodes before it hits the ground. The Bible also says that Lot’s wife looked back on the destruction and was turned into a pillar of salt. An explosion of this magnitude near the Dead Sea would have thrown salt water over the surrounding countryside, rendering the usually fertile land unusable for a few hundred years – and archaeologists have noted the villages in the area were abandoned for about 600 years.