Unconventional Convention, No There There, Guilfoyle Screech, Blown Speech
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Green Eagle provides a 34 second read that summarizes the third and fourth day of the GOP diatribe. By the way, it helps if you know that Cthulhu is a gigantic entity worshiped by cultists, in shape like an octopus, a dragon, and a caricature of human form, which I got from Wikipedia, thus sparing myself reading anything by H. P. Lovecraft.
Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger points to a lack of a Republican platform this year as consistent with the Trump convention theme. With no other unifying message, the convention was designed to antagonize the opposition. The gathering and contained speeches were not a presentation of principle. They were little more than a performance of provocation. Let’s own the libs! Tiresome.
The old joke has an old farmer helping a census researcher with the area’s death rate. The farmer says it’s one per person. Frances Langum reports as Jim Acosta asks a senior White House official about the wisdom of cramming an audience of supporters shoulder to shoulder without protective masks during a dangerous pandemic. The answer from the White House is it doesn’t really matter. Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually.
So it’s one death per person. Now THAT is cold.
The Ant Farmer’s Almanac reveals that, after a private call with Vladimir Putin, my president will issue more pardons to select historical figures. Hey! Put a lid on it. I know it’s satire.
I was kind of relieved when some of my medications got here before I completely ran out. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit looks at Trump efforts to hinder mail delivery so as to disrupt the November election. Seems some folks in Trump-supporting rural areas are not as lucky as I was this time.
“This lawsuit is not about whether masks are good or bad, or whether Wisconsin ought to do more, or less, to address COVID-19. It isn’t even about whether the state should have a mask mandate,” but rather it’s about procedure. The Governor can’t declare the emergency more than once in order to establish more rules.
Really? That’s your issue?
I do wish James and others would consider taking a similar, not identical, but perhaps more valid, approach to procedural detail concerning abortion rights and the correct level of government that should decide that legal issue.
Why can we not agree that, with some extreme exceptions, the right to abortion should not be decided at the federal level?
Or the state level?
Or even at the local level?
The debate should be whether the correct level of government is the self-government of the individual.
With testing itself being attacked, how are we to know how many actual deaths resulted from COVID-19? In MadMikesAmerica, Bill Formby has an idea. Take the normal death rate for this time in other years, and check it against what we’re experiencing now. From March through July, the number of deaths went about 200,000 more than we would have expected. Doesn’t count August, of course.
nojo, one of the best writers around, takes a look at debates over voter suppression and who should be allowed, and what crazy steps they should have to go through. For better, simpler election ethics, nojo suggests Schoolhouse Rock where votes are cast and counted and the one with the highest total wins. You know… like in a democracy. Like… not a tyranny.
Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara admits it. “True, there are lingering negative effects of the systemic racism of Jim Crow laws and the like, such as zoning and government-imposed redlining on the banks.” Key here is lingering.
Since racism does not exist today except as a slight residual negative effect – kind of like a few puddles drying in the sun after a hard rain – then any attempt to correct past wrongs is itself wrong. With a few scattered exceptions, the only real racists are those who protest against racism.
Dave Dubya, who got banned last week from the site of a self-proclaimed Proud Boy, and who has a talent for getting banned from right-wing sites, gets banned again. This time it’s by a frustrated socialist. I write for FairAndUNbalanced but I’m for balance when it’s accurate. Dave publishes debate details, and it does indeed appear that the socialist fellow ends up resorting to name-calling before exercising exile. Good for Dave!
North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz urges Christian value-voters to look beyond political party to what they know to be right, you know … values, in choosing a President. He proposes that there is something wrong with a religious faith that requires an alliance with “white supremacists and Neo-Nazis and anti-immigrant bigots and flat-earthers and fear-peddlers and conspiracy theorists…” Seems a valid point to me.
Infidel753 examines how an ordained priest turns out not to be ordained because of a minor slip of the tongue thirty years before. So all kinds of marriages, baptisms, communions, transubstantiation, confessions, absolutions, and worship services are retrospectively invalid. Kind of a spiritual butterfly effect. For the record, I really DID know what transubstantiation means.
I often miss my long-time friend. We lost contact a few decades back. He told the most engaging true tales of his own developing life’s story. I occasionally felt as if I was playing the Wallace Shawn part in My Dinner with Andre.
He once told me of an epic spiritual journey. He walked away from his family, his job, his life, and started hitchhiking. About the second or third driver who stopped asked where he was going. He told the friendly guy, “I’m on a journey looking for God!” The driver answered “He’s already here!”
There is more, of course, but that exchange came to me as I read a piece by my long-time close friend Darrell Michaels.
Darrell has a beautiful writing talent, and it shows here, as he explores parallels between two faiths, and how one flows from the other.
I do hope he will one day look into a similar relationship between Christianity and the third Abrahamic faith, Islam. I’m especially curious about my friend’s reaction to Jesus’ words about a future figure, one he calls the Advocate who will arrive to continue God’s work. I understand that some Islamic scholarship claims that Jesus spoke the truth and that The Advocate did come to the world as the Prophet Muhammad.
By the way, my decades-ago friend eventually ended up across the state on a dark street in the cold. Shivering and hungry, he noticed a distant light at the upper part at the back of a church, where a meeting was being held. He pounded on the door until it was answered unto him. He explained that he was on a mission looking for God and wondered if he might be allowed to sleep that night in their basement.
He was allowed into the basement. The man went upstairs and called the police. There was a crazy man who came to their church looking for God.
My friend was taken back to where he had begun. I have, over the years, wondered if perhaps we might find more success searching at home.
Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes seems to be on irreversible physical decline. He deals with dread, the shadow of death, finding in action and grace the ultimate Invisible. Of course, we wish him well.
