COVID, God and Science, Fatal Fatalism, Death Party, Unvaccinated War, Florida

  • You would think conservative Christians might keep up with Francis Bacon’s reconciliation of God and science. They have had 400 years:
     
    God created the universe.
    Science is a study of God’s creation.
    God created science.
     
    North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz watches our brethren bravely insist they will trust God, not science! Right up until they can’t breathe.
     
    This is an old story, but it works:
     

     
  • About this whole COVID thing, Marjorie Taylor Greene goes existential fatalist about fatalities – We’ll all die of something. M. Bouffant, ever the angry cynic, at Web of Evil draws the angry cynical essential reductio, which does indeed look a bit absurdum.
     
  • Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit distills to its essence what today’s Republican Party has adopted as its rock bed principle.
     
  • NOJO describes our newest COVID attack as a sort of biological civil war, with one side going all suicide vesting with weapons of mass destruction.
     
  • According to The Borowitz Report, Ron DeSantis’s favorability numbers are plummeting among Floridians who describe themselves as “somewhat,” “very,” or “strongly” opposed to being dead.
     
  • John Scalzi at Whatever ponders the degree of sympathy we ought to have when the willfully unvaccinated die. He decides it depends on to which of three broad categories the unprotected belong.
     
  • Journalist Imani Gandy has this about right.

    There are no words.

  • On his podcast, Cato’s Julian Sanchez talks about freedom, conservative rights, and Senator Rand Paul’s YouTube suspension.
     
  • At The Onion, Rand Paul gives a rousing speech urging unvaccinated patriots to rise up. His audience is oddly unresponsive
     
    …although, to be fair, they are intubated patients lying unconscious in hospital ICUs.
     
  • At News Corpse, Donald Trump imagines what the reaction might have been if, while he was President, there had been a Coronavirus attack.
     
    Should someone tell him?
     
  • Tommy Christopher brings us the video and the story as White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki gently carves a Fox Reporter into pieces, reminding him which former President suggested people inject poison into their veins.
     
    Fox reporters never seem to learn. She’s unfailingly polite and friendly, but a knife fight with Jen Psaki only has one rule. She always wins.
     
  • Didn’t we all wish for this information before COVID changed us to work-from-homies? Reductress reveals private places at work to weep bitter tears or to practice cartwheels.
     
  • COVID is the immediate threat. It is not the most massive. Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger explains in a few seconds the two contrasting approaches to the climate crisis.
     
  • The tension between majoritarianism and individual rights will be with us as long as democracy co-exists with those rights. Those rights are why we have a Bill of Rights and additional Constitutional guarantees.
     
    Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara takes it a bit further, proposing that those of us who value voting rights, particularly we Democrats, pretty much favor totalitarianism.
     
    That’s because democracy is essentially hostile to rights.
     
    Among his other arguments: racial discrimination does not exist, and Democrats, in 1828, favored slavery.
     
    I dunno. I suppose being elderly and set in my ways, I pretty much favor protecting the right to cast a ballot. Voters should choose politicians who protect their interests. Politicians should not be choosing voters who protect theirs.
     
    And, I suppose being elderly and set in my ways, I pretty much favor exempting some rights from majority rule. Like the right of gay people to marry and live free from harassment. Or to be Muslim and live free from harassment. Or to have to be strangely libertarian and live free from harassment. Or to be most anything that doesn’t hurt anyone or restrict anyone else’s rights and live free from harassment.
     
  • Hackwhackers goes to the net for a few celebratory reactions to yesterday’s Trump Reinstatement Day.
     
  • Wonder why Mike Lindell, the pillow guy, left stage so soon after oathing to stay 72 hours? Well-l-l-l don’t!
     
    Vixen Strangely, at Strangely Blogged, ponders the difficulty of defending yourself from a massive defamation suit, as you hear about it going forward while you are in the middle of a televised defamation fest.
     
  • In fact, the PillowFellow had a very bad day yesterday. President Biden and Vice President Harris did not resign on schedule. The Billions and Billions of dollar lawsuit was not dismissed and can go to court, as everyone outside of Krakenville expected. The Palmer Report says that as he discovered Mr. Trump has not taken office as predicted, and now Mr. Lindell filed a police report. Not about the election, though.
     
    Brings back a memory.
     
    Like others before him, (Jussie Smollet, Morton Downey, Jr.), Mr. Lindell has been victimized by a violent political attack while in a very small, private, unobserved place.
     
    Lindell later clarified that the attack took the form of an unidentified assailant viciously poking at him with his finger.
     
    Ruthless bastard!
     
  • Deadly insurrection violence didn’t start on January 6, did it?
     
    In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson remembers the deadly Charlottesville rightwing gathering that included the murder by hit‑and‑attempted‑run of a young woman, and then‑president Trump’s weaselly praise of very fine people on both sides.
     
    Yup. Very fine protestors against the Nazis. And, of course, very fine people marching along with Nazis.
     
  • Deadly massive racist violence goes way back before Charlottesville, doesn’t it?
     
    At The Moderate Voice, Robert Levine revisits the Tulsa riots of 1921, and the fact that the sexual assault that started it all turned out to have never happened.
     
  • driftglass goes a bit higher than usual with the blunt side of sarcasm as Five Thirty Eight does the research and discovers there is fairly blatant racism in Republican ranks. Okay over-the-top sarcasm seems merited.
     
    Perhaps a bit of Casablanca might have worked as well.
     

     
  • Scotties Toy Box takes a peek at the Fox Network as a guest instructs viewers that poor people are like dogs that need to be starved to be kept obedient.
     
    Well, FOX presentations often do possess the virtue of clarity.
     
    They put the current state of contemporary conservatism front and center.
     
  • Iron Knee at Political Irony goes to the pundits to find a couple of reactions to Tucker Travels within the magical kingdom of Viktor Orban’s Hungary where one man rules, dissent is crushed, and Tucker can disdain America without being excoriated by bothersome critics (Damn pro-American liberals).
     
  • Frances Langum has the account, backed up by video, as Republican Congressional representative Dan Crenshaw commits a grave offense and utters the truth about the 2020 election.
     
  • Ant Farmer’s Almanac comes up with a reasonable word and its dictionary definition describing the decline and fall of a former New York mayor, former president’s lawyer, and now former lawyer.
     
  • You think it’s a little out of bounds for Rand Paul secretly to buy up COVID related stocks, then attack health care professionals in personal terms when they offer advice that might affect the value of those shares?
     
    tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors has a reverse case. Seems Louis DeJoy, the guy Trump put in charge of tearing down the US Postal Service before voters could mail in their ballots, is about to be fired by the board in charge of that same Post Office. So about-to-be-fired DeJoy buys a ton of stocks through the company run by the guy who runs the board who can fire about-to-be-fired DeJoy. Reads like a Dr. Seuss book about Trump corruption.
     
    Anybody got a title?
     
  • Ted Cruz gets slammed horribly, and Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson is right there to stand shoulder to shoulder wi—
    Wait! Is there ANYone who likes Ted Cruz?

  • CalicoJack in The Psy of Life looks into why conspiracy theories exist and why they waft around grand events.
     
  • Infidel753 puts forth a manifesto of sorts on tolerance and individual choice: a sort of primer on how to uphold firmly held personal standards while accepting others who differ.
     
    I see it as a wise variant of the old quote of my youth, from God knows who, Why doesn’t everyone leave everyone else the hell alone?
     
  • PZ Myers finds something amazingly ironic about the Global Prayer to End Atheism. It seems God acts in mysterious ways.
     
  • In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, a pastor presumes to speak for God as he uses religion to attack Simone Biles.
     
    Nice.
     
  • My long time friend Darrell Michaels abandons, for a nanosecond, his various fantasies about evil leftists. This week, as Unabashedly American, he remembers his time serving our country, defending our freedoms, in the United States Navy. He revisits his visits to the incredibly huge Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and laments its later deterioration from hurricanes and official neglect.
     
    Wonderful photos and a great story from a demonstrated patriot.
     
  • SilverAppleQueen gets personal with a brief poem dedicated to a past unrequited forbidden love. The affair that wasn’t.
     
  • @momwino98 has an important question about the new school year:
     

    @momwino98

    Fucking virus…##getyourshot ##tiktokmom ##fortourpage ##phizervaccine

    ♬ original sound – Cayla

  • Sarah Cooper has a suggestion on feeling young…

    …that does not work for me.


– Podcasts –
 

2 thoughts on “COVID, God and Science, Fatal Fatalism, Death Party, Unvaccinated War, Florida”

  1. LaFerrara:

    It implies that our liberty rights are the property of the state, to be granted, denied, or rescinded by the state, simply because the government has been elected.

    I would remind him that for 99.999% of human history any “liberty rights” any human being has ever had…have been at the mercy of the bigger guy with a sword, and how many fellow guys with swords he could muster.

    There is not, nor has there ever been any such state of ‘magical liberty rights’ absent some mechanism to enforce it; in a democracy that is voting.

    As a much wiser person has put it: *”Democracy is the worst possible form of government…except for all the others.”*

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