From a New York Times article about the resurgence of left-wing political activism among “communities of faith” and even “evangelicals”:
“The fact that one party has strategically used and abused religion, while the other has had a habitually allergic and negative response to religion per se, puts our side in a more difficult position in regard to political influence,” said the Rev. Jim Wallis, the evangelical social justice advocate who founded the Sojourners community and magazine in 1971.
“Most progressive religious leaders I talk to, almost all of them, feel dissed by the left,” he said. “The left is really controlled by a lot of secular fundamentalists.”
I have some bad news for Reverend Wallis: the “Left” isn’t controlled by anybody. There is no “Left” per se. There is a “Right” called “The Moral Majority” and led by Don the Con. But there is no one politician, nor any one group, that can claim possession of the soul of the “Left.” Even the Democratic Party doesn’t have the allegiance of left-wingers. They wanted Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, remember?
So if I wanted to say that a true Left-wing position includes religious people who are willing to tolerate other faiths and even atheists/agnostics, no one could say that I am wrong. Because no-one has the moral authority to claim that exclusion of anyone who wants to be included is right. So there.
Woody Packard
Lewiston, Idaho
I am a patient person, and willing to wait to see how this all sorts out. But the longer we wait, the more normal it all seems. Regardless of who you voted for, please take a look at Linda Greenhouse’s article today. Stop parsing as a lawyer or judge, use and trust your instincts as a smart and concerned citizen. (By all means be open for new information, which is certainly possible.) But,
1. Who won the election, even without the majority of voters voting for him?
2. Who, by all credible accounts, was helped by the efforts of the Russians?
3. Who, even on the day that he fired Comey, has had a jolly relationship with those who helped him in the elections?
4. Who has had on staff those with a continuous relationship for many years with Russians at the top level of their country’s intelligence agencies.[?]Perhaps there is a good explanation, and I am willing to wait for it. In the mean time, please, members of Congress, don’t try to convince us that there is nothing that needs investigating here.
This is new territory. If a presidential campaign cheats to get in office, does the vice president from the cheating party take over? Does a Supreme Court justice, denied to a legitimately elected president but appointed by a cheating President, retain a lifetime appointment?
Can we, citizens of the United States, agree what a democracy is?
Milky Way Found to be In a Void
Astronomers have discovered that the Milky Way Galaxy is sitting in a huge void, a relatively empty area of the Universe that is roughly a billion light years in radius. This void, which has been christened the Keenan-Barger-Cowie (KBC) void, is apparently the largest empty area in the visible Universe. The Milky Way is sitting in the middle of a huge empty spot instead of among the “normal” filaments of matter that make up the Swiss-cheese like consistency of the rest of the Universe.
This observation explains the discrepancy between measurements of the Hubble constant taken by observing “standard candle” stars locally and the measurement found in the Cosmic Wave Background. Local “standard candles” are influenced by the unbalanced gravity of matter outside of the local void area, while the cosmic microwave background is not biased by the presence of the void. This explanation for the discrepancy makes astronomers feel much better about their measurements of the Hubble constant.
All this is explained in a blog post on the wonderful blog The Universe Today (universetoday.com) entitled “At the Largest Scales, Our Milky Way Galaxy is in the Middle of Nowhere.”
Comment of the Day: Propaganda Now Being Disseminated by Right Wing Pro-Trump Agents Against Comey
Christine McM
is a trusted commenter Massachusetts20 hours ago
These prepared remarks are remarkable, no pun intended. The level of detail is astounding.
I was listening to a pundit say that the reason why these remarks were released a full 24 hours before Comey’s appearance is to counter what appears to be a concerted effort by the White House to discredit him.
I’ll say! I could not believe my eyes the other day to watch an ad, from some Trump superPAC, maybe the Mercers, essentially stating that James Comey can’t be trusted. As far as I know, Mr. Comey is not running for office, to spend money in creating an ad–some might see it as a smear campaign–in advance of the testimony is unparalleled.
Trump must be very worried indeed to spend such money on something that, on the surface, doesn’t do his “cause” any good. In fact the more agitated he becomes over all this, the guiltier he looks.
I guess the best I can say is, if I’m shocked by the anti-Comey ad, I have no idea how I’ll feel if Trump live-tweets during tomorrow’s testimony.
I guess there are no limits to how far Trump will go to debase the office he once claimed to feel honor to have won.
my feet.
A report in the Intercept yesterday detailed a leak from the NSA showing that the Russian military hacking apparatus sent phishing emails to VR Systems, a provider of software to US election campaign organizations– not the providers of software for ballot boxes but very close to it. An employee of the NSA was almost immediately arrested for leaking this information. The phishing effort apparently occurred only a week or two before the presidential election, after Obama had warned Putin to stop trying to hack into US campaign organizations.
The significance of this revelation is simply that Putin is intent on subverting or even destroying the US election system and undermining the trust of the US public in their own democratic systems. What little trust is still present– many Americans do not believe that democracy is working, even before they learn that the Russians are trying to undermine it. The American government is barely functioning at present– only the ICE is actually working to harass and delay people trying to enter the US. The Treasury Department is still handing out Social Security checks, and government employees are still being paid.
The web presence of the US government has been purged of all mentions of climate change and of any reference to actions that they might take to alleviate it. Instead, propaganda supporting Don the Con and his erratic behavior has a place of honor on government web sites. There is a yawning chasm in front of us, and without drastic action, the disintegration of government services and government protection for the environment is imminent.
Creating the American Junkie
This textbook by Caroline Jean Acker, published in 2002, combines historical, medical, and sociological points of view to thoroughly dissect the state of the art in addictionology today. This quote from the blurb explains the purpose of the book:
Acker examines how the construction of addiction in the early twentieth century was strongly influenced by the professional concerns of psychiatrists seeking to increase their medical authority; by the disciplinary ambitions of pharmacologists to build a drug development infrastructure; and by the American Medical Association’s campaign to reduce prescriptions of opiates and to absolve physicians in private practice from the necessity of treating difficult addicts as patients.
Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control
This article from Yahoo news explains how Don the Con and his cronies tried to end the sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Crimea and its treatment of Ukraine as soon as they took office. They were stopped by left-over members of the State Department from the Obama administration. It’s a good article, and I recommend a perusal rather than just taking my word for it. There’s no question that Don wanted to do it, and it’s not anonymous leakers who are saying this– it is named people who were in the State Department when Don took office, but have now retired and are free to talk about it.
This puts more force behind the investigations of Don the Con’s collusion with the Russians before the election. It also makes more believable the theory that the Russians have had Don on a string since 2007, when they rescued him from the real-estate crash in the US by generously funding him. One known example of Russian funding is the estate he sold for tens of millions in profit right as the real estate market was crashing. Ever since 2007, Don has been saying nice things about Vlad “the Impaler” Putin. The Russians clearly saw Don as an asset, and they could even have encouraged him to run for president with offers of guaranteed funding.
But who is Nigel Farage? He is the man who, as former leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, led the British into voting to leave the European Union. “Brexit”, as it is known, or negotiating an exit from the European Union system, is a startlingly rash and self-defeating maneuver that will take years and lead to prolonged negotiations between Britain and multiple countries over trade and immigration policy. Brexit is popular with slightly more than half of the population of Britain, with the glaring exception of Scotland, who are somehow sick of immigration and immigrants and display a consistently low degree of education and high degree of racism.
Here is a quote from today’s Guardian about Nigel Farage:
“One of the things the intelligence investigators have been looking at is points of contact and persons involved,” one source said. “If you triangulate Russia, WikiLeaks, Assange and Trump associates the person who comes up with the most hits is Nigel Farage.
“He’s right in the middle of these relationships. He turns up over and over again. There’s a lot of attention being paid to him.”
The Guardian reported today that Nigel Farage is a ‘person of interest’ to the FBI. This means that investigators have found him connected to numerous other people who are involved in activities with the Trump campaign and/or Russian intelligence operatives, not that he has done anything specifically illegal. It turns out that Nigel Farage is everywhere you look. He was at the Republican National Convention last July. He met Don the Con and gave a speech in August. He appeared on RT (the Russian propaganda outlet) several times and apparently received compensation from them, just as Michael Flynn did. He has expressed positive opinions about Vladimir Putin and was seen celebrating with Don the Con when he won the presidential election. He is also a fan of Steve Bannon, the ultra-alt-right wing advisor to Don.
This conjunction of people highlights the commonality between the campaign to remove Britain from the European Union and Don the Con’s campaign for president.
Two Almond Trees on June 1, 2017
Can you see the almonds yet?
Anonymous leaks reported that Jared Kushner had discussions with Russian officials after the election and before Don the Con’s administration began. In the course of these conversations, Jared specifically asked for a communications channel that was secret– not hidden from the public or other national security agencies but secret from our own spies. This proposed channel would go through Russian diplomatic facilities, as the New York Times described it: “a direct line to Mr. Putin outside of established diplomatic channels.” The Times article claims that such meetings never actually took place.
Unfortunately for Jared, US spies have facilities for eavesdropping on practically everyone, particularly Russians who work for banks that are under sanctions by the US. Jared was meeting with a man named Sergey N. Gorkov, who happens to be a banker whose bank is under sanctions imposed by the US after Russia’s invasion of the Crimea. Jared proposed having meetings at “Russian communication centers at an embassy or consulate in the United States”– I think that this was an effort to hide the contents of these meetings from our spies. Supposedly Russian Ambassador Kislyak suggested the meeting between Jared and Sergery when he went to Trump Tower to meet with Jared. Apparently, American security agencies can eavesdrop on conversations within Trump Tower whenever they feel it is necessary.
Jared may have thought that Mr. Gorkov’s meetings with him were not spied upon because Gorkov was not known to be involved in diplomacy. If he thought that, he was wrong, because the contents of their conversation were obviously recorded. The fact that Mr. Gorkov’s bank is under sanction and that Gorkov is a close associate of Vlad “the Impaler” Putin probably suggested to our spies that he should be spied upon as well.
In addition, the New York Times says that “The meeting came as Mr. Trump was openly feuding with American intelligence agencies and their conclusion that Russia had tried to disrupt the presidential election and turn it in his favor.”
It appears to me that, at the very least, Don the Con may be guilty of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign power. This is because I think that Don has received payments in cash or in kind from the Russian government and has not reported those transactions in accordance with American law, which requires that all persons who receive money from foreign governments report such activity to the American government on a yearly basis. Mike Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser, received tens of thousands of dollars from RT, a television channel which functions as a propaganda arm of the Russian government. Mr. Flynn has been speculated to be under investigation for failing to report these payments as well as even larger payments from the Turks.
If this were the only indictment of Don the Con, it would be an echo of the prosecution of Al Capone for income tax evasion. We can only hope that Don, a notorious germ-a-phobe, will suffer the same microbiological fate as Al– an outcome too salty for even me to mention.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 