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Month: December 2021

Hey, Mr. Spaceman

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 28, 2021

Hey, Mr. Spaceman
Won’t you please take me along
I won’t do anything wrong
Hey, Mr. Spaceman
Won’t you please take me along for a ride
— “Mr. Spaceman,” The Byrds (1966)

Maybe we should look up, suggests Harvard’s Avi Loeb. The head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s Black Hole Initiative, etc., etc. thinks we Terrans should be prepared for encounters with, if not extraterrestrials themselves, then with their technology. Probes, that is.

Loeb writes in The Hill:

Earlier this year, the U.S. military and intelligence community issued a report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP, also called UFOs). Before the report’s release, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe stated, “we are talking about objects that have been seen by navy or air force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for.” 

The attention-grabbing part of this statement is the reference to “satellite imagery.” I — and the hundreds of scientists engaged in studying UAP — have never seen any publicly released data on this. We would be extremely interested in analyzing any data on objects that enter the Earth’s atmosphere and do not follow ballistic orbits like meteors. But no such data is currently available to open scientific analysis.

A new Department of Defense office budgeted for 2022 “will empower military and civilian personnel as well as the intelligence community to report incidents and information involving UAP.”

Loeb considers the possibility that analysis could show the UAPs are not LGMs themselves but rather “physical objects from another civilization.” That is, hardware, perhaps with artificial intelligence (AI) meant for “seeking information about the habitable planets around the sun.”

Interactions with such devices means we need protocols in place for immediate engagement rather than through radio signal-delayed communications that might take years or centuries.

Currently, there is no international agreement on how humanity should engage with a visiting object of extraterrestrial origin. It would be prudent to formulate guidelines before they are needed. Any engagement could have implications for the future of humanity and should not be left to the spontaneous whims of a small team of researchers.

We should weigh the risks and benefits that will result from different engagements. The decision tree on how to proceed will have branches that depend on the objects’ properties and behavior. Since it is difficult to forecast these unknowns in advance, decisions will have to be reached in real-time. 

Deciphering the intent of an intelligent extraterrestrial equipment may resemble the challenge of breaking the code of an encryption device. We might need to rely on our AI systems in figuring out the intent of extraterrestrial AI systems.

A proper interpretation of prompt contact with extraterrestrial technologies could bring about the most significant advance in understanding of the reality around us in the entire history of humans. 

Extraterrestrial contact might also have the benefit of giving humans someone else to fear instead of each other, not that the distraction would last. The strongest hatreds seem to arise between groups that most resemble each other, as Elizabeth Kolbert notes at The New Yorker, citing a 1954 social science experiment at a Boy Scout camp.

“The participants had been chosen because they were so much alike,” she writes. “All it took for them to come to loathe one another was a different totem animal and a contest for some penknives.”

Since that time, we have sorted ourselves by our “mega-identities” defined by ” one, all-encompassing group.” No, not Terrans. Just your standard “Us” vs. “Them.”

Kolbert continues:

“We need to work on ourselves,” Robert B. Talisse, a philosophy professor at Vanderbilt, urges in “Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side” (Oxford). “We need to find ways to manage belief polarization within ourselves and our alliances.”

The trouble with the partisan-heal-thyself approach, at least as this partisan sees it, is twofold. First, those who have done the most to polarize America seem the least inclined to recognize their own “impairments.” Try to imagine Donald Trump sitting in Mar-a-Lago, munching on a Big Mac and reflecting critically on his “own thinking.”

Second, the fact that each party regards the other as a “serious threat” doesn’t mean that they are equally threatening. The January 6th attack on the Capitol, the ongoing attempts to discredit the 2020 election, the new state laws that will make it more difficult for millions of people to vote, particularly in communities of color—only one party is responsible for these. In November, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a watchdog group, added the U.S. to its list of “backsliding democracies.” Although the group’s report didn’t explicitly blame the Republicans, it came pretty close: “A historic turning point came in 2020–2021 when former President Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election results in the United States. Baseless allegations of electoral fraud and related disinformation undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process.”

At this point, having proof, not just of extraterrestrial life, but that an extraterrestrial intelligence has taken an interest in our little planet out here in the galactic sticks might be welcome. It wouldn’t keep us from wanting to kill each other for long, but a lot of us could use the break.

NASA is hiring priests to make human beings prepare for a possible alien first contact in the future. Maybe they know something they are not telling us.


Vaxxes are the name of the game

Published by digby on December 27, 2021

In my ongoing quest to bring you good advice from the front lines about the pandemic, this from an ER doctor struck me as being a useful guide. The upshot, as always, is to get vaccinated. But it’s become clearer and clearer that boosters are an absolute must:

I’ve seen a lot of Covid in the ER recently. With so many people getting infected recently, some folks may wonder what’s the point of getting vaccinated at all? And is there really any value to a booster dose if I’ve had two Pfizer/Moderna or a shot of J&J?

My observations:

Every patient I’ve seen with Covid that’s had a 3rd ‘booster’ dose has had mild symptoms. By mild I mean mostly sore throat. Lots of sore throat. Also some fatigue, maybe some muscle pain. No difficulty breathing. No shortness of breath. All a little uncomfortable, but fine.

Most patients I’ve seen that had 2 doses of Pfizer/Moderna still had ‘mild’ symptoms, but more than those who had received a third dose. More fatigued. More fever. More coughing. A little more miserable overall. But no shortness of breath. No difficulty breathing. Mostly fine.

Most patients I’ve seen that had one dose of J&J and had Covid were worse overall. Felt horrible. Fever for a few days (or more). Weak, tired. Some shortness of breath and cough.But not one needing hospitalization. Not one needing oxygen. Not great. But not life-threatening.

And almost every single patient that I’ve taken care of that needed to be admitted for Covid has been unvaccinated.

Every one with profound shortness of breath. Every one whose oxygen dropped when they walked. Every one needing oxygen to breath regularly.

The point is you’re gonna hear about a LOT of people getting Covid in the coming days and weeks. Those that have been vaccinated and got a booster dose will mostly fare well with minimal symptoms. Those getting two doses might have a few more symptoms, but should still do well.Those who got a single J&J similarly may have more symptoms, but have more protection than the unvaccinated (if you got a single dose of J&J, please get another vaccine dose—preferably Pfizer or Moderna—ASAP!)

But as I’ve witnessed in the ER, the greatest burden still falls on the unvaccinated. Those who haven’t gotten a single dose of vaccine. They’re the most likely to need oxygen. They’re the most likely to have complications. They’re the most likely to get admitted. And the most likely to stay in the hospital for days or longer with severe Covid.

These are all just observations from my recent shifts in the ER.

But the same has been borne out by local and national data showing that the unvaccinated make up a very disproportionate share of those with severe disease, needing hospitalization, and dying from Covid.

So no matter your political affiliation, or thoughts on masks, or where you live in this country, as an ER doctor you’d trust with your life if you rolled into my emergency room at 3am, I promise you that you’d rather face the oncoming Omicron wave vaccinated.

by Craig Spencer MD MPH (@Craig_A_Spencer) on December 27, 2021.

People are getting increasingly frustrated and upset about the rules around COVID which I get. But really, if you are triple vaxxed you are almost certainly safe from anything beyond cold-like symptoms from Omicron. But little kids, immunocompromised and yes, the unvaxxed resistors, are not safe from you, at least as far as we know. So, we have to wear masks and then isolate for some period of time — today they say five days — if we have it. It’s not optimal but it’s better than it was. For those of us who are vaccinated and boosted, at least we have the peace of mind that we aren’t going to die from this variant. I count that as a big win.


Who do we all like? Nobody.

Published by digby on December 27, 2021

There isn’t anyone in American public life who is truly popular across the board anymore. The only one who even has close to a healthy majority is Chief Justice John Roberts and that’s no doubt because nobody ever hears from him.

Naturally, it’s all very partisan.

I guess Joe Biden is so unpopular with Republicans that Gallup didn’t even bother to include him on that second list.

Notable that Donald Trump is not on this list. He’s certainly more of a political leader than Jerome Powell, whether he currently holds office or not.


Our Democracy From 30,000 Feet

Published by digby on December 27, 2021

I thought this was a nice concise overview of where we stand with the assault on democracy:

As 2021 comes to an end, what is the state of American democracy?

The reactionary counter-mobilization against democracy has accelerated. It’s happening on so many fronts simultaneously that it’s easy to lose sight of how things are connected. Thoughts on the big picture:

So many things are happening at the federal, state, and local levels all around the country that are directly tied to the broader struggle over whether or not America should finally realize the promise of multiracial, pluralistic democracy. That’s the defining conflict.

In Washington, Republicans have adopted a position of total obstruction (what else is new?), very much including the obstruction of any attempt to investigate a violent attack on the Capitol. But it’s the state level where the reactionary project has accelerated most.

States passing extreme gerrymanders; or anti-“CRT” laws; and functionally banning abortion; school board meetings becoming battlefields; Kyle Rittenhouse is celebrated as a conservative hero; elected officials talking about burning books… these are not disparate events.

The overriding concern for the Republican Party, which is solely focused on the sensibilities, anxieties, and interests of (wealthy) white conservatives, is to maintain traditional political, social, cultural, and economic hierarchies.

Republicans don’t call it “maintaining traditional hierarchies,” of course – they call it preserving “real” America, by which they mean a predominantly white, Christian, patriarchal nation. America, to them, is supposed to be a place where white Christian men are at the top.

Due to political, cultural, and most importantly demographic changes, Republicans do not have majority support for their political project anymore – certainly not on the federal level, and even in “red” states, their position is becoming increasingly tenuous.

No one understands this better than Republicans themselves: They feel their backs against the wall, therefore they are determined to do whatever it takes, regardless of how radical, to protect their hold on power and preserve existing hierarchies and the traditional order.

Republicans see Democrats not as a political opponent, but as an Un-American enemy that must not be allowed to govern and destroy “real” America. Everything else follows from that understanding of the political conflict. (Small-d) democrats they are not.

Republicans understand that in a functioning democratic system, they would have to either widen their focus beyond the interests and sensibilities of white conservatives, which they are not willing to do; or relinquish power, which they reject. They chose a different path:

It all starts with not letting too many of the “wrong” people vote. This year alone, Republican lawmakers have introduced hundreds of bills intended to make voting more difficult – and have enacted such laws almost everywhere they are in charge.

All of these voter suppression laws are ostensibly race-neutral and non-partisan, as they have always been in American history. But what is actually going on – who is targeted by these laws, and who is supposed to benefit – isn’t exactly hard to figure out. It’s not subtle.

If too many of the “wrong” people are still voting, you make their electoral choices count less: through gerrymandering. Wisconsin has long been the poster child for these gerrymandering efforts – but they are happening everywhere, and they are accelerating and radicalizing.

If that is still not enough to keep the “wrong” side from winning, as happened in November 2020, you have to be in a position to nullify their win: We’re seeing election subversion efforts up and down the country – an all-out assault on state election systems.

Election commissions are being purged, local officials are being harassed, people who are a threat to Republican rule because they have demonstrated even a shred of allegiance to democracy and the rule of law are replaced by Trumpist loyalists.

What if such blatant undermining of democracy leads to protests? Well, you criminalize those protests, by defining them as “riots,” and you declare “rioters” outlaws who do not deserve the protection of the law, not even when they’re physically attacked and killed.

And you make it clear how you think these pro-democracy “rioters” should be dealt with by encouraging white militants to use whatever force they please to suppress these protests, and by celebrating and glorifying those who have engaged in such violent fascistic fantasies.

Finally, Republicans are flanking all this by a broad-scale offensive against everything and everyone criticizing the legitimacy of white nationalist rule – past, present, and future. They clearly understand the importance of being in control of the national story.

We need to pay attention to how these efforts are connected, and we have to acknowledge the underlying political project of entrenching white Christian patriarchal dominance by establishing one-party-rule systems. Can it really happen here? It is already happening.

Republicans are not “delusional,” they haven’t temporarily “lost their mind.” Such pathologizing language obscures rather than illuminates the fact that Republicans are engaged in a deliberate, systematic, and highly successful project to abolish democracy.

The American Right is fully committed to this anti-democratic project, and the Republican Party has a comprehensive strategy to put it into practice. Are enough people in positions of influence as committed to preserving democracy as Republicans are to abolishing it?

2021 almost over, and so far, the pro-democracy camp – and the Democratic establishment, in particular – has failed to effectively counter this accelerating authoritarian onslaught. We are running out of time to save American democracy. Let’s act accordingly in 2022.

And it doesn’t even touch on the massive influence of the right wing media which will be pushing whatever Big Lie is necessary to secure GOP power and cultural dominance.

This is a clear and present danger and I don’t think it ends with Trump.


Stories of the Black Plague

Published by digby on December 27, 2021

This piece by Matthew Rozsa at Salon about the conspiracy theories during the bubonic plague is fascinating. The more things change …

Of course, one might have expected people in the 21st century, what with our knowledge of science and all, to be a little bit less superstitious but apparently we haven’t really evolved as much as we thought:

While the COVID-19 pandemic has been an inflection point of modern history, it is nowhere close to being the deadliest pandemic in human history. That dubious distinction belongs to the infamous “Black Death,” a bubonic plague that swept through Europe and the Near East in the mid-14th century. Like COVID-19, the bubonic plague was a terrible way to die, but with very different symptoms. The most notorious were the dreaded buboes (hence ‘bubonic plague’), severe inflammations of the lymph nodes that oozed pus and broke out over the groin, armpits and neck. A victim’s skin and flesh would eventually turn black and rot, although long before this happened they would experience intense nausea, vomiting, fever, headaches and aching joints. Within days — or, at most, a couple weeks — the infected person would die.

One might imagine that a disease this terrible would have been burned into humanity’s collective consciousness. Indeed, the Black Death did have a profound impact on our day-to-day lives, influencing everything from the professionalization of medicine and the decline of feudalism to works of art like Giovanni Boccaccio’s book “The Decameron” and Ingmar Bergman’s movie “The Seventh Seal.” Yet the Black Death is not often mentioned in reference or in contrast to the COVID-19 pandemic — even though there are important parallels. Perhaps most tellingly, both diseases fueled scapegoating and mass hysteria because of widespread ignorance.

While the scientific illiteracy in the COVID-19 era is fueled by a mixture of motivated reasoning, political bias and historically-based concerns about institutional trustworthiness, inhabitants of the Middle Ages lacked modern humanity’s sophisticated knowledge about biology. Louis Pasteur did not develop modern germ theory until the 19th century, half a millennium after the Black Death. Today we know that the Black Death was a disease, and that the microorganisms was most likely imported from Asia through the Crimea and into Europe and the Near East by way of fleas living on black rats. People who lived in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East in the 1340s and 1350s could not have even imagined what a microorganism was, much less the complex chain of events that would have brought such a deadly one into their homes.

In the absence of knowledge, some ugly alternative theories emerged. Because Jews had been a popular scapegoat in Europe for centuries, a wave of pogroms against Jewish communities broke out during this time as they were blamed for the plague. For years Jews had been collectively blamed for the death of Jesus Christ and accused of sinister blood rituals; around the Crusades, the stereotype also emerged of Jewish wealth, one reinforced in anti-Semitic minds by how Jews were barred from owning land and therefore were disproportionately concentrated in finance. Attacks on Jewish communities were commonplace prior to the Black Death, but now occurred with renewed vigor and effectiveness because the attackers had more motive. Jews were accused of poisoning wells and of other conspiratorial actions, all somehow connected back to alleged vendettas against Christianity, desires to earn money, ominous religious practices or some combination of the three. Victims were tortured into confession and exterminated in large numbers.

There is an obvious parallel between this and the rise of anti-Chinese prejudice during the COVID-19 pandemic. While nowhere near as pervasive as anti-Semitic sentiment during the Black Death, there have been thousands of anti-Asian hate incidents in the United States since COVID-19 reached our shores. These have ranged from taunts and slurs to acts of physical violence. And the rhetoric of certain politicians, who reinforce and encourage the scapegoating of China — or even promote unfounded conspiracy theories that China somehow created the virus — hasn’t helped. 

[…]

Scapegoating during the plague era wasn’t confined to Jews. Setting aside lepers and other unfortunate individuals from marginalized groups that were also sometimes blamed for the plague, medieval people had a wide range of theories about who was behind the Black Plague. Some turned to astrology for an explanation for the plague, as well as a possible cure. Many religious people believed it was God’s wrath or Satan’s scourge; flagellants, or religious penitents who would flog themselves in public and beseech the almighty for forgiveness, became a common sight at this time; more educated people subscribed to the idea that miasmas, or “poisoned air,” was responsible for causing disease. (This was probably the closest anyone came to the truth without knowing anything about microbiology.)

There is a lesson in humility there: It is possible that there is much we don’t know about COVID-19 in our era that could become common knowledge in a handful of generations. Likewise, there are parallels between the people who saw deities and devils behind every bubonic sore and blister, and those who insist that analogous sinister conspiracies are at work behind current events today. These ideas may seem outlandish, such as claiming that Bill Gates or George Soros is somehow behind the whole thing. On other occasions they have a measure of plausibility, albeit a grossly exaggerated one, such as the idea that the bug may have originated from a Chinese laboratory. Just as the flagellants and anti-Semites of medieval Europe drew from pre-existing religious traditions to color their interpretations of the Black Plague, so too do individuals who were conspiracy theory-minded before the pandemic turn to those types of explanations during it.

“The people who are believing in those conspiracy theories were likely believing in similar conspiracy theories before the COVID-19 pandemic, and they’re just applying that style of thinking to this new thing,” Joseph E. Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, told Salon last year. “Basically what we find is that the people who buy into these sorts of conspiracy theories do so because they have what we call underlying conspiracy thinking, meaning that they see the world through a conspiratorial lens.”

Not all of the comparisons between the Black Plague and COVID-19 are foreboding. As briefly mentioned earlier, the Black Plague drew attention to how medieval practitioners of medicine usually had no idea what they were doing. This planted seeds that eventually grew into a systematized, scientific approach to healing the human body — in short, the renaissance of modern medicine. While human beings were thankfully much farther progressed in biotechnology by the 2020s, the pandemic helped jump start the development of a new class of vaccine technology, the mRNA vaccines like those mass produced by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, which could revolutionize medicine. Everything from cancer vaccines to universal influenza inoculations are all within the realm of possibility thanks to this platform, which trains cells how to produce proteins that the immune system can recognize as being associated with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

By the time it had finished peaking (1347 to 1351) and ravaged most of the Western world, the Black Death had claimed anywhere from 75 million to 200 million lives. The COVID-19 pandemic’s death toll, though no less tragic, is at the time of this writing just shy of 5.4 million, with more than 800,000 of those in the United States. Fortunately, this is a small faction of the total human population of more than 7.7 billion today; while it is impossible to know for sure how many people were alive in the mid-14th century, most estimates place it around 300 to 400 million. Reflecting back on how far humans have come, we can at least be grateful to live at a time when science has brought us so many miracles of medicine — even if it hasn’t yet cured the miasma of misinformation.

I suppose the miasma of information took different routes in those days: snake oil type charlatans, religious leaders etc rather than broadcast journalism and social media today. but the impulses are the same. Opportunists lie, people die. Oldest story in the book.


Did Trump order the code red?

Published by digby on December 27, 2021
You’re goddamn right he did

Did Donald Trump plot coup strategy with his generals at the Willard hotel headquarters on January 6th? Was there any discussion of possible violence? The Guardian reports that the January 6th Committee thinks he may have:

Congressman Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, has said the panel will open an inquiry into Donald Trump’s phone call seeking to stop Joe Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January hours before the insurrection.

The chairman said the select committee intended to scrutinize the phone call – revealed last month by the Guardian – should they prevail in their legal effort to obtain Trump White House records over the former president’s objections of executive privilege.

Thompson said the select committee could not ask the National Archives for records about specific calls, but noted “if we say we want all White House calls made on January 5 and 6, if he made it on a White House phone, then obviously we would look at it there.”

The Guardian reported last month that Trump, according to multiple sources, called lieutenants based at the Willard hotel in Washington DC from the White House in the late hours of 5 January and sought ways to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January.

Trump first told the lieutenants his vice-president, Mike Pence, was reluctant to go along with the plan to commandeer his ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress in a way that would allow Trump to retain the presidency for a second term, the sources said.

But as Trump relayed to them the situation with Pence, the sources said, on at least one call, he pressed his lieutenants about how to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January in a scheme to get alternate slates of electors for Trump sent to Congress.

The former president’s remarks came as part of wider discussions he had with the lieutenants at the Willard – a team led by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Trump strategist Steve Bannon – about delaying the certification, the sources said.

House investigators in recent months have pursued an initial investigation into Trump’s contacts with lieutenants at the Willard, issuing a flurry of subpoenas compelling documents and testimony to crucial witnesses, including Bannon and Eastman.

But Thompson said that the select committee would now also investigate both the contents of Trump’s phone calls to the Willard and the White House’s potential involvement, in a move certain to intensify the pressure on the former president’s inner circle.

I always come back to this passage from the Woodward and Costa book “Peril” and the January 5th exchange between Trump and Pence in which Trump, listening to the crowd outside the White House cheering for him, told Pence that he wanted him to let the House of Representatives decide the election. Pence responded that he didn’t have the authority and Trump gestured to the crowd outside the window and said to him, “Well, what if these people say you do?” As we know, Pence refused, but according to the book Trump later commented to others that there was a lot of anger “out there” and we all know what he said the next morning to his ecstatic and worshipful crowd.

Marcy Wheeler has some interesting ideas about how this may play out. She thinks Roger Stone may be the weak link — the same Roger Stone with very close connections to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

I don’t know what it all means, but if they are seriously contemplating a criminal referral to the DOJ for obstruction of congress by Trump this could be a key.

Again, I’m not getting too overheated about any of this. After all, Trump got away with multiple counts of obstruction of justice in the Russian probe, some so egregious they would make Richard Nixon blush — and we all watched it happen in real time. When he said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any votes I believed it. I didn’t realize at the time that he could shoot someone of 5th Avenue and not get prosecuted but I’m afraid that’s true too.


Heathens

Published by digby on December 27, 2021

The Atlantic’s Peter Wehner, who covers the religion beat, points out just how irreligious the allegedly pious Trumps really are:

Donald Trump Jr. is both intensely unappealing and uninteresting. He combines in his person corruption, ineptitude, and banality. He is perpetually aggrieved; obsessed with trolling the left; a crude, one-dimensional figure who has done a remarkably good job of keeping from public view any redeeming qualities he might have.

There’s a case to be made that he’s worth ignoring, except for this: Don Jr. has been his father’s chief emissary to MAGA world; he’s one of the most popular figures in the Republican Party; and he’s influential with Republicans in positions of power. He’s also attuned to what appeals to the base of the GOP. So, from time to time, it is worth paying attention to what he has to say.

Trump spoke at a Turning Point USA gathering on December 19. He displayed seething, nearly pathological resentments; playground insults (he led the crowd in “Let’s Go, Brandon” chants); tough guy/average Joe shtick; and a pulsating sense of aggrieved victimhood and persecution, all of it coming from the elitist, extravagantly rich son of a former president.

But there was one short section of Trump’s speech that I thought was particularly revealing. Relatively early in the speech, he said, “If we get together, they cannot cancel us all. Okay? They won’t. And this will be contrary to a lot of our beliefs because—I’d love not to have to participate in cancel culture. I’d love that it didn’t exist. But as long as it does, folks, we better be playing the same game. Okay? We’ve been playing T-ball for half a century while they’re playing hardball and cheating. Right? We’ve turned the other cheek, and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference—I understand the mentality—but it’s gotten us nothing. Okay? It’s gotten us nothing while we’ve ceded ground in every major institution in our country.”

Throughout his speech, Don Jr. painted a scenario in which Trump supporters—Americans living in red America—are under relentless attack from a wicked and brutal enemy. He portrayed it as an existential battle between good and evil. One side must prevail; the other must be crushed. This in turn justifies any necessary means to win. And the former president’s son has a message for the tens of millions of evangelicals who form the energized base of the GOP: the scriptures are essentially a manual for suckers. The teachings of Jesus have “gotten us nothing.” It’s worse than that, really; the ethic of Jesus has gotten in the way of successfully prosecuting the culture wars against the left. If the ethic of Jesus encourages sensibilities that might cause people in politics to act a little less brutally, a bit more civilly, with a touch more grace? Then it needs to go.

I think it’s been pretty obvious from the beginning that the Trump’s aren’t exactly sincere in their supposed Christianity. But let’s face facts, many of the supposedly real followers of Jesus have shown themselves to be equally phony these last few years. The ethos of the Trump cult is what really moves them: grievance, revenge, trolling, bigotry and blind devotion to craven orange idols.


A pandemic of delusion

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 27, 2021
Trump supporters massed for a rally in Washington, D.C., November 2020. Photo by Geoff Livingston via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

If you have long thought that the country was in the grip of mass psychosis, you are not alone.

Patty Mulcahy recounts her descent into paranoid psychosis for Salon. The Boston-based filmmaker began to believe Fox News hosts on her father’s television were speaking directly to her, and that the Russia investigation was a global, mind-control conspiracy:

I was a forty-six-year-old filmmaker when I suddenly began to have paranoid thoughts that people were following me. When I lost my day job due to bizarre behavior, I lost my excellent health insurance. I was dumped into America’s broken mental health care system that offers substandard psychiatric care to patients on Medicaid, while spending vast amounts of taxpayer money. Misdiagnosed and neglected at the county hospital, I got sicker and sicker … until the TV started talking to me.

She is just grateful she did not end up homeless or in prison.

People with paranoid schizophrenia see patterns that don’t actually exist. Just like conspiracy theorists, they are constantly scanning the news for pieces of information to connect the dots about unseen forces controlling events. Both groups believe they are being persecuted by others. I had grandiose beliefs that I was at the center of every news story on TV. My mind was looking to cast a villain to account for the symptoms of a brain disease. The media handed me a culprit to blame.

If not several. Just over one percent of the U.S. population aged 18 and older are affected by schizophrenia. An estimated 40 percent of individuals with the condition are untreated in any given year.

“Greater than all physical dangers are the tremendous effects of delusional ideas …”

In light of the mass delusions held by large segments of the population, Nicole Karlis offered two weeks ago that Carl Jung saw delusional ideas as a societal threat, and particularly in the United States. “Greater than all physical dangers are the tremendous effects of delusional ideas, which are yet denied all reality by our world-blinded consciousness,” Jung wrote. “Our much vaunted reason and our boundlessly overestimated will are sometimes utterly powerless in the face of ‘unreal’ thoughts.”

Karlis writes:

Some psychologists believe that this is what the country is experiencing right now — more or less.

“Something’s definitely happening, and I think COVID amplified it to a painful point, you could say,” Katharine Bainbridge, a Jungian analyst, tells Salon.

[…]

“Jung said man cannot live without religion — so you make it up,” Bainbridge said. “You can’t not have a central myth to live by. He would say maybe in this time that we’ve lost that — we don’t have a collective unifying principle.”

Cultural theorists often describe the history of human civilization as one of a transition between different central guiding myths. In the Western world, Christianity undergirded everyday existence and society for over a thousand years. After the Renaissance, the central guiding myth became a belief in rationalism; then, in modernity, a belief that technology might improve the lot of all humans.

That’s all falling apart now.

“Carl Jung noted that ‘the wolf inside’ man was far more a threat to human existence than external forces,” Dr. Carla Marie Manly, a clinical psychologist and author of “Joy From Fear,” told Salon. “When mental forces become so toxic as to harm our overall well-being on an individual and collective level a ‘psychic epidemic’ can result.”

So, too, with a viral one.

Thirty years go, about the time I was assembling a mock New Age trade journal, I speculated that if there is, as Jung believed, a collective unconscious, it is perhaps not as quick to adapt as our technologies. I wrote, “Stripped of our myths by science, people have scrambled frantically to reconstruct the interior landscape from a pastiche of mystical icons – from pyramids to crop circles to UFOs – and a faith in beneficent higher beings that reassures us that someone is in control, even if that someone is not us.” Simply put, we are trying to cope with a collective unconscious that lags external reality by a few centuries by recreating new myths.

Things could get worse before they get better, too:

Space agencies like NASA and ESA have long been searching for extraterrestrial life in other distant nooks of the universe. However, until now, neither of these space agencies have succeeded in finding strong evidence of alien life. And now, NASA is apparently hiring priests to make human beings prepare for a possible alien first contact in the future. 

According to reports, NASA is apparently hiring 24 theologians as part of a plan to work out how different religions will react when humans make their first contact with aliens. British clergyman Reverend Dr Andrew Davison who works at the University of Cambridge is one among those experts who will be a part of this team.

Could we get even more psychotic? Yes. Or maybe we will just not look up.

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Whither democracy?

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 27, 2021

“American democracy frayed in 2021,” writes The Washington Post Editorial Board. Multiple states passed legislation on party-line votes making it harder to vote. But the opening construction underplays the dynamic at work. Democracy did not “fray” itself. Republicans in state after state did that. Deliberately. Methodically. Hastily. Their efforts to re-Jim Crow not just the South but every state Republicans control did not start in 2021. But it did accelerate in alarming fashion. What then do Democrats plan to do about it besides making aspirational statements about bills they would like to pass?

Neither voting bill that Democrats seek to pass should be controversial. One, the Freedom to Vote Act, would permit all voters to cast mail-in ballots in federal elections and require drop boxes. Led by former president Donald Trump, Republicans have trashed these voting methods as fraud-prone; in fact, absentee voting has a long record of convenience and security. The act would make Election Day a holiday, mandate early-voting periods, create automatic voter registration systems and provide same-day registration. It would also curb partisan gerrymandering and limit the extent to which politicians could pressure local election officials. There is no credible argument against any of these provisions, yet every Senate Republican has united against the legislation.

The other bill Democrats want to pass, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, has bipartisan buy-in — if you count that a single GOP senator, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, supports it. This bill would repair the 1965 Voting Rights Act, after the Supreme Court declared in 2013 that Congress would have to revise the law for its strongest provisions to once again apply. Crucially, it would reimpose “pre-clearance” on states with a history of racially discriminatory voting laws, obligating such states to submit proposed election rule changes for federal review before phasing them in. Pre-clearance for decades discouraged state and local officials from seeking to tilt the playing field against racial minorities, recognizing that discrimination could be as obvious as a poll tax or as subtle as a seemingly small shift in polling place locations. Immediately after the court’s 2013 ruling, Republican-controlled states began passing anti-voting laws.

I live in one of those states. Regular readers have heard plenty about that.

Reimposing pre-clearance would make them think twice, which helps explain why nearly all Senate Republicans oppose the John Lewis bill, too. The underlying principle is that voting should be easy, convenient and fair, enabling all Americans to cast ballots without unnecessary difficulties. Over the past year, Republicans have proved that they oppose this principle, raising barriers that discourage people from voting because some calculate that more Democrats than Republicans will be suppressed. Not only is their position morally indefensible; it is not even clear it is politically sound. Republicans just claimed big victories in this year’s Virginia gubernatorial and legislative elections, amid massive turnout. Instead of seeking to depress voting, Republicans should be running more popular candidates and campaigning on more attractive policies.

The Editorial Board urges Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to renew efforts at passage, and to reform of the filibuster if Republicans resist.

Fine. Except the elephant(s) in the room is not a Republican. I’ll not spend more electrons on him/them just now. Rep. Pramilla Jayapal (D-Wash.) does that in a separate op-ed on stalled efforts to pass the president’s Build Back Better (BBB) package. As does E.J. Dionne who writes:

Democrats have a narrow window to get a lot done. They face a nearly unified Republican opposition. They have the slimmest of majorities. And at moments last week, it looked as though they were eager to spend the next year trashing each other.

They can’t afford the luxury of recriminations.

Nor can they afford to not to pass the two voting rights bills if Democrats expect small-D democracy to survive.

Yet, Democrats’ focus on BBB increasingly resembles the sunk cost fallacy. They have poured so much sweat and tears into its passage, both to help the president deliver on his agenda and to have solid legislative accomplishments to run on in 2022 and 2024, that they keep straining to reach that Holy Grail even as the earth cracks and threatens to swallow them.

Preserving the union is more critical. Surviving to legislate another day must be paramount. Is there something for everyone in BBB? Sure. Are its provisions popular? Sure. But Democrats seem to exist in another time, a time in which a political party can expect to see rewards at the polls for good governance and for delivering for constituents. They need only to look across the aisle in both houses of the national legislature and in the states. Their rival party is committed to non-governance and culture-war issues. In many states, they are winning majorities on those.

Republicans are no longer committed to democracy, much less to good governance. Their commitment is to preserving their own power. By nominally legal means, for now. If Democrats lose sight of that larger picture and squander the chance to save democracy first, they, and we, and the world, will come to regret it.

The plane has decompressed. Oxygen masks are hanging from the ceiling. Before Democrats can save their legislative agenda, they first have to put the mask on democracy.

2021 was the year that America’s democracy came under attack from within.

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The New King of the Fox News Trolls

Published by digby on December 26, 2021

I can hardly believe this, but it appears that Tucker and Hannity are on the run from … Greg Gutfield:

Is the former editor of Stuff  magazine who used to host a 3 a.m. talk show now poised to become a top dog at Fox News? If recent viewership numbers are any indication, that may just be the case.

Greg Gutfeld, the 57-year-old self-described “libertarian” known for his right-wing humor and increasingly hostile politics, currently hosts two of the most-watched shows on cable news.

In the process, Gutfeld has played a key role in relegating Sean Hannity—whose name was once synonymous with Fox News—to third-place status at the network. And he is seemingly on the verge of overtaking Tucker Carlson as the king of Fox News ratings, even though both of his programs sit outside of the highly viewed weeknight primetime hours.

Between the recent ratings victories of The Five and the high viewership numbers of Gutfeld’s eponymous late-night talk show, the former Red Eye host is a Fox News juggernaut.

Since this past summer, The Five—the late-afternoon talk show Gutfeld has co-hosted since the program’s debut in 2011—has overtaken Hannity’s eponymous 9 p.m. as the second-most-watched show in all of cable news. At the same time, the show has nipped at Tucker Carlson Tonight’s heels, at one point surpassing the primetime star in October as cable’s most-viewed program. (In fact, for both the month of December and the final quarter of the year, The Five actually placed first in total viewership, topping Carlson by a slim 6,000 viewers in the final quarter of 2021.)

Hannity was king during the Trump years and Carlson has since become a juggernaut at the network. Throughout Gutfeld was slowly climbing to the top:

Over the past few years, he has transformed from irreverent satirist to acerbic ideologue, spending much of the Trump years actively boosting and rooting for the then-president while basking in the TV-addicted president’s adulation.

But much like Carlson, Gutfeld’s MAGA adjacency never became his overarching identity. In a post-Trump world, in which Fox News has pivoted to culture-war grievances, right-wing outrage bait, and incessant anti-Bidenism, Gutfeld’s broad ideology of being decidedly anti-liberal has undoubtedly helped elevate his profile. Meanwhile, Hannity, whose wagon was firmly hitched to all things Trump fandom, has struggled for an identity.

By the 2020 election, the Gutfeld-led daytime talk show The Five already rose to third place in Fox News viewership, supplanting Laura Ingraham, another Fox host whose identity seems firmly attached to Trump’s. For the first half of 2021, Hannity was able to hold off Gutfeld & Co. from taking the No. 2 slot—but only barely.

As 2021 dragged on, Gutfeld’s stock only continued to rise at Fox.

He was awarded his own nightly 11 p.m. broadcast as part of Fox’s effort to ditch more of its “straight news” broadcasts for opinion programming. Debuting in April, the “comedy” hour, titled Gutfeld!, replaced Fox News @ Night—which was pushed to midnight—and immediately became a hit, easily accruing the most viewership for its cable timeslot and eventually besting most of the broadcast networks’ late-night talk shows.

The late-night show consistently remained in the top 10 of all cable news programs, pulling in an average of nearly 2 million viewers in November. And despite comedians and reviews initially panning the show’s attempts at right-wing humor, Gutfeld soaked in the praises of fellow anti-”woke” panel host Bill Maher.

Gutfeld also cemented his status as the dominant presence on The Five. His clout at the network and within the panel program has been apparent not just on camera, but behind the scenes when he reportedly played a part in getting liberal colleague Juan Williams booted from the show. (Fox News has denied this was the case.) By the end of the year, Gutfeld seemed to drive most of the headlines generated by the 5 p.m. gabfest.

Hannity’s fallen far behind and now it looks like it’s a cage match between Gutfeld and Carlson. Might as well throw two poisonous snakes into a bucket and let them fight it out.

What a race to the bottom. I can’t even begin to understand the attraction to either of those guys. Tucker Carlson has an ideology and an agenda and they’re very dangerous. Gutfeld is a nasty piece of work and not a benign influence by any means, but I don’t think he’s a neo-fascist true believer as Tucker is.

This is what it’s come to. A nazi or a troll, pick your poison.