Christian authoritarianism

Will Bunch, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the blinders Republicans seem to have for political candidates failing to live according to their purported values: “Because the so-called “family values” of American fundamentalists now drawn toward Christian nationalism turn out to be mere window dressing that can be tossed for the movement’s true aim: authoritarianism.

2022-10-07T14:22:22-05:00October 7th, 2022|Home, Musings|

Nature is amazing

This was a wonderful story in the Times about the godwit, which holds the record for the longest annual nonstop migration for a land bird – over 7,000 miles, from Alaska to New Zealand! And that’s over 8-10 days, no stops for food or water, and flight by continuous flapping, not dynamic soaring. Their round trip migration is about 30,000 km, since the return trip includes a stopover in China.  Scientists do not completely understand the birds’ physiology, since all models predict they should not have the available energy stores to make such a nonstop flight.  An excerpt:

‘…they are proficient at the incredibly risky endeavor; the survival rate is more than 90 percent.

“It’s not really like a marathon,” said Christopher Guglielmo, an animal physiologist at Western University in London, Ontario, who studies avian endurance physiology. “It’s more like a trip to the moon.”’

Amazing stuff.

2022-10-04T11:45:46-05:00October 4th, 2022|Home, Musings|

Isn’t it ironic…

From Heather Cox Richardson, writing in her September 28 Newsletter:

“This destructive storm highlights the distance between reality and the ideology that calls for getting rid of the federal government.

As a newly elected congress member in 2013, now-governor of Florida Ron DeSantis was one of the 67 House Republicans who voted against a $9.7 billion federal flood insurance assistance package for the victims of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey. Now, with Florida on the ropes, DeSantis asked President Joe Biden for an emergency declaration to free up federal money and federal help even before the storm hit, and said Tuesday, ‘We all need to work together, regardless of party lines.'”

2022-09-29T11:48:04-05:00September 29th, 2022|Home, Musings|

Steve Jobs on our interdependency

From the Steve Jobs Archive, a site set up by his friends and family, an email Steve sent to himself in 2010:

From: Steve Jobs, sjobs@apple.com
To:      Steve Jobs, sjobs@apple.com
Date:  Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 11:08PM

 

I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow
I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

I do not make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I did not invent or refine.

I did not discover the mathematics I use.

I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive
of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

I am moved by music I did not create myself.

When I needed medical attention, I was helpless
to help myself survive.

I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor,
object oriented programming, or most of the technology
I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am
totally dependent on them for my life and well being.

 

Sent from my iPad

2022-09-12T14:15:49-05:00September 9th, 2022|Home, Musings|

Tax takes

More good stuff from Matt Yglesias,  writing on the peculiar reluctance of law-and-order Republicans to support adequate funding of the IRS (defund the police? horrors!  defund the IRS? they vote yes!):

“…the government collecting the tax revenue it’s owed is unambiguously good, and the Republican Party’s opposition to it is telling and disturbing.

After all, they wrote a tax reform bill in 2017, and even though their bill cut taxes on net, it did raise a bunch of revenue (most famously from curbing the SALT deduction) to partially offset the cost of the tax cut. The GOP could have increased tax enforcement as another offset, and instead of letting Democrats spend the revenue, they could have used it to make the cuts in the Trump tax bill even bigger.

But they didn’t. Because separate from the party’s overall view on the desirable level of taxation, they’ve developed a peculiar soft spot for tax cheats.”

2022-08-24T09:58:29-05:00August 24th, 2022|Home, Musings|

How prophetic…

From Adam Schiff’s closing arguments at DJT’s impeachment trial:

“We must say enough — enough! He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again.

He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again.

Can we be confident that he will not continue to try to cheat in [this] very election? Can we be confident that Americans and not foreign powers will get to decide, and that the president will shun any further foreign interference in our Democratic affairs? The short, plain, sad, incontestable answer is no, you can’t. You can’t trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change and you know it.

You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all.

What are the odds if left in office that he will continue trying to cheat? I will tell you: 100 percent.

A man without character or ethical compass will never find his way.”

He couldn’t have been more correct.

2022-08-15T12:51:25-05:00August 15th, 2022|Home, Musings|

He lies like he breathes…

DJT just can’t help himself – he lies like he breathes.   From The NYT:

Former President Donald J. Trump claimed on Friday that before leaving office, he declassified all the documents the F.B.I. found in this week’s search of his Florida residence that agents described as classified in a list of what they seized — including several caches apparently marked as “top secret.”

“It was all declassified,” Mr. Trump asserted in a statement.

and:

Seeking to deflect attention from reports that the classified documents he had kept in his Florida home might have contained materials related to nuclear weapons, former President Donald J. Trump claimed on Friday that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had done the same thing.

“President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified,” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!”

But the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, which preserves and maintains records after a president leaves office, confirmed on Friday afternoon that Mr. Obama had not kept his documents — classified and unclassified — as required under the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

The National Archives “assumed exclusive legal and physical custody of Obama presidential records when President Barack Obama left office in 2017, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act,” the statement said. “NARA moved approximately 30 million pages of unclassified records to a NARA facility in the Chicago area, where they are maintained exclusively by NARA. Additionally, NARA maintains the classified Obama presidential records in a NARA facility in the Washington, D.C., area.”

“As required by the P.R.A.,” the statement added, referring to the Presidential Records Act, “former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the presidential records of his administration.”

2022-08-12T17:07:32-05:00August 12th, 2022|Home, Musings|
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