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Tulsi And Her Guru

Published by digby on January 4, 2025

Wonkette took a look at Gabbard’s cult in its inimitable fashion:

The group is called Science of Identity Foundation (SIF), founded by an acid-dropping white surfer guy named Chris Butler, AKA Guru Dev Srila Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, AKA Jagad Guru, AKA Sai Young, in the 1970s, as an offshoot of the Hare Krishnas, AKA the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. 

Butler got his start as a guru teaching mediation and yoga, and was drawn to the Krishnas, but he didn’t want to shave his head or wear robes or do other Hare Krishna stuff. So he founded his own thing, which involved him living with two dozen 18-to-22-year-olds in a Quonset hut under a freeway, beating bongos and arranging his followers’ marriages.

Two of his hut-dwellers were Tulsi Gabbard’s parents, Mike and Carol, who joined the group in 1983. After they got married they built an altar to him in their house. According to Mike’s sister, they were “bowing and prostrating to this white surfer guy — it was bizarre.” Butler taught the group that outsiders were not to be trusted, and was paranoid that the mainstream Hare Krishnas were trying to kill him. Like Chuck McGill in “Better Call Saul” he had a fear of electromagnetic radiation, and places he stayed when he traveled were lined with tinfoil. He was a hypochondriac, and at one point he accused disciples of poisoning him through light bulb fumes. 

Followers were not allowed to learn from any other guru but him, and children in the group were homeschooled. Later SIF created schools in the Philippines, which Gabbard attended for two years. There the day began at 4:30 a.m. with a cold bucket shower, and the curriculum included “sexually graphic, deeply homophobic lectures,” and encouragement to worship Butler and his wife Wai Lana as messengers of God. Name sound familiar? She’s the yoga lady from public television! Maybe you’ve seen her videos before.

[…]

Here’s a description of the group from the New Yorker:

Defectors tell stories of children discouraged by Butler from attending secular schools; of followers forbidden to speak publicly about the group; of returning travellers quarantined for days, lest they transmit a contagious disease to Butler; of devotees lying prostrate whenever he entered the room, or adding bits of his nail clippings to their food, or eating spoonfuls of sand that he had walked upon. 

Ew. A former follower wrote on Medium:

I was raised to believe Chris Butler was God’s voice on earth, and if you questioned him or offended him in any way, you were effectively offending God, and because we believed in reincarnation, that meant that you would be reborn as the lowest lifeform imaginable and then have to spend eon’s [sic] working your way back into God’s good graces. 

Reported another former follower, Robin Marshall: “They told us: ‘We don’t associate with f**s’,’ using a homophobic slur. The hatred, the degrading language, it was just one thing after another.. […] They said he could read your mind. They were wholly and fully indoctrinated into this idea that Chris Butler was basically God.”

The group had financial ambitions: in Hawaii, group members worked on the group’s farm for free, and its financial arm, QI Group, runs the Hawaiian Down to Earth grocery store chain, which is registered as a 501(c)(3) religious charity. Internationally, member have been accused of ripping people off in illegal pyramid schemes in at least 10 countries.

And the group had political ambitions, running candidates for local office. Tulsi’s father Mike became a state senator, and an anti-gay-rights activist. Mom Carol was on the Hawai’i State Board of Education, even though Tulsi never attended public school.   

[…]

In 2019, writer Christine Gralow showed up to a Gabbard town hall and asked her some questions about Syria, and the sect members in attendance did not like that. Her site was bombed with DDOS attacks, and members of the group showed up at her home, taking pictures. Gralow’s reporting on the group is fascinating, and if you want more details, you should totally read it. 

Read the whole Wonkette story for the full rundown. Gabbard is a true weirdo, and not just because she belongs to a fringe cult, although that’s plenty weird. (It’s not a real Hindu sect, it’s a cult run by an American con man who is grooming people for political power.)

I just can’t get past the fact that a totally unqualified gadfly who also happens to be a serious member of a cult has been nominated to a job that oversees all of America’s intelligence agencies. It’s mind boggling.

Good Luck Mike

Published by digby on January 4, 2025

Via Raw Story:

Politico reported Friday evening that Johnson securing the 218 votes necessary to be speaker came with conditions. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who is a member of the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus, told the outlet that there would be potential “consequences” for the speaker if he failed to uphold his end of the bargain on certain sticking points

“Let’s make no mistake about it. There will be things that are, in fact, red lines that we need to deliver,” Roy said, referencing Johnson’s reliance on Democratic votes to push a must-pass government funding bill across the finish line in late December. “We can have no more of the nonsense that happened before Christmas.”

They changed the rule on the Motion to Vacate to require 9 votes to take out the Speaker. Roy pointed out that there were 9 votes that objected in one way or another to the speaker yesterday. He said there were more ready to join in if Johnson didn’t do exactly what they wanted him to do.

It’s not going to be pretty. But nobody deserves it more than this wrecking crew.

Mr Classy

Published by digby on January 4, 2025

Whiny baby actually induced someone to ask if Biden would rescind the order:

And then … what the hell? Is he on drugs?

What Does It Say?

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 4, 2025

On serving honorably

With deep irony, Phil Klay, a novelist and a Marine Corps and Iraq war veteran, describes Donald Trump as “the least hypocritical president of my adult life.” The flag-hugging con man holds nothing sacred, defends no American values or principles. Asked about the nation’s military policy in Iraq, Trump’s response was “take the oil.” Twice.

“A dumb answer, but a clear one,” Klay observes. “What a thing to ask soldiers to fight for.” But it was “bracing cynicism” that was “almost refreshing.” Even if it repudiates Americans’ belief, despite our failings, that when the country goes to war it must conduct itself and fight honorably.

Trump famously considers those who serve honorably “suckers.”

Klay recalls his Marine training (gift link):

When I started Marine training, our instructors constantly harangued us candidates about the core military virtues and told story after story of past heroes who had lived them. For men and women to trust their lives to one another in combat, you need a shared set of values and commitments, which is why all great militaries teach their recruits something closer to religious devotion than business calculation.

[…]

So the incoming Trump administration isn’t offering our military a moral purpose. “People will not fight for abstractions,” Mr. Vance claimed at the Republican National Convention; they’ll fight only to defend their homeland. It’s a smaller vision, fitting for a country that has lost faith in itself.

Naturally, Trump’s Fox News choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, troubles Klay. Especially Hegseth’s advocacy with Trump on behalf of “three men accused or convicted of war crimes.”

Klay provides details you can read for yourselves about the case of Clint Lorance, whom Trump pardoned. Seeing Lorance’s depravity celebrated by right-wing media broke the faith of another veteran from his unit. Some of Trump’s skepticism of overseas military adventurism is justified, Klay believes, but “a military with neither moral purpose nor a commitment to moral conduct is a military that fights without honor.”

But what deepened the unsettled feeling in my stomach was a Klay statement that recalled the dystopian comedy Idiocracy (2006).

Yes, we’ve often betrayed our faith, “but that’s not the same as saying that it should be or that it always will be,” Klay explains:

I choose to believe in an America that might honor that faith…. How else to respond to an age of cynicism than to point out, steadily, without undue histrionics, that Americans have proved capable of more in the past and they can prove capable of more in the future?

Idiocracy :

Pvt. Joe Bowers: [addressing Congress] … And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn’t just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!

God help us. Yes, we can and should do better. But we’ll never get better without a reckoning over the Jan. 6 insurrection and other structural –isms, without a truth and reconciliation commission process, as some recommend (and not the sort Trump wants), that comes to terms with the dark place where Trumpism and its cultural underpinnings have led us.

What Did You See?

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 4, 2025

What will you see?

Draft of Ann Telnaes cartoon killed by the Washington Post.

Perhaps you noticed?

C-Span operator swept their cameras about the U.S. House chamber on Friday during the vote to reelect Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as Speaker. A huddle of white Republican men gathered here. A diverse cluster of Democractic women gathered for a selfie there. The cameras opened up the proceding, untethered from their normally fixed gaze. This is typical during a State of the Union Address but not House business as usual.

Heather Cox Richardson took note in her Letters from an American substack:

Today a new Congress, the 119th, came into session. As Annie Karni of the New York Times noted, Americans had a rare view into the floor action of the House because the party in control sets the rules for what parts of the House floor viewers can see. Without a speaker, there is no party in charge to set the rules, so the C-SPAN cameras recording the day could move as their operators wished.

They did. Limiting what the public can can see of the House chamber will return soon enough. Limiting what you can see is already happening elsewhere.

Over at The Washington Post, editors were deciding what their subscribers would see. Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes announced her resignation after the opinions page rejected a cartoon depicting Post owner Jeff Bezos genuflecting with a sack of money before a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump. She’d worked at The Post for 16 years.

Telnaes writes on her substack:

I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.

The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.

Figures in the sketch represent Meta founder, Mark Zuckerberg; Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of The Los Angeles Times; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI; Mickey Mouse, the official spokesmouse of the Walt Disney Company; and Jeff Bezos, The Post’s owner.

David Shipley, The Post’s opinions editor, told reporters he disagreed with her interpretation of events (The New York Times):

“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Mr. Shipley said in the statement. “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”

Owners of press outlets “are responsible for safeguarding that free press— and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press,” Telnaes counters:

While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.

Efforts are already afoot by Trump and MAGA Republicans to rewrite recent history the way Sourtherners spread the Lost Cause myth. The proliferation of disinformation via social media and gimlet-eyed lying into cameras by “Christians” like Johnson further threaten to dissolve external reality under Americans’ feet until “Democracy dies in darkness.”

Men like those Telnaes depicts are lining up to be accessories.

"Moses David" and his Children of God authoritarian cult were "lying for Jesus" when Mike Johnson was still an infant. Wonder where Johnson came by it? web.archive.org/web/20120325…

— Tom Sullivan (@tmsullivan.bsky.social) 2025-01-03T01:32:12.071Z

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on January 3, 2025

A new internet star is born: Tupi the baby capybara!

I co-sign this:

Learning To Be Still Again

Published by digby on January 3, 2025

To all of you internet addicts like me, I hereby gift you with this marvelous piece by Chris Hayes in the NY Times. He talks about The Attention Economy”, which is the subject of his new book.

An excerpt:

In the wake of Donald Trump’s second electoral victory, a viral tweet from October 2016 once again started circulating: “i feel bad for our country. But this is tremendous content.”

That probably seemed funnier before child separation and Covid. (Indeed, in 2020 Darren Rovell, who wrote it, posted, “Four years later. There is nothing tremendous about this content. I’m just sad.”) But for many millions of Americans, perhaps including the crucial slice of swing voters who moved their votes to the Republican nominee in 2024, Mr. Trump is the consummate content machine. Love him or hate him, he sure does keep things interesting. I’ve even wondered if, at some level, this was the special trick he used to eke out his narrow victory: Did Americans elect him again because they were just kind of bored with the status quo?

I have no doubt about it! Yes, Trump voters are bored with normal politics (I think we all are to some extent, but most of us kind of like it that way.) That’s especially true of the “inconsistent” ones who only come out to vote for him, see him as a celebrity and they vote for him the way they would vote for “American Idol” or “Dancing With The Stars.” His star status is definitely a huge part of his special sauce.

But that’s not Hayes’ point. He’s talking about the feeling of boredom in modern life and I confess that I have never felt it in my life until the last few years and I think it’s solely a result of my massive amount of time spent on the internet. I can almost feel the neural pathways in my brain changing.

Yet we feel this restlessness; we lament our shrinking attention spans. But to focus on a relatively narrow question of technical measures of our attention span misses a deeper truth. The restlessness and unease of our times aren’t simply, in my experience, the vertigo of distraction and distractibility. No, that experience is itself a symptom caused by some deeper part of the unsettled self. The endless diversion offered to us in every instant we are within reach of our phones means we never have to do the difficult work of figuring out how to live with our own minds.

What follows is a rather beautiful, philosophical observation about the power that boredom has over us (and has had long before the advent of smartphones) and the benefit of learning how to find ways to feel comfortable inside your own head. Highly recommend. And I can’t wait to read the book. I have a feeling he has some interesting thoughts on how this relates to our current political predicament…

American Lysenkoism

Published by digby on January 3, 2025
Lysenko speaking at the Kremlin in 1935. Behind him are Stanislav Kosior, Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreyev and Joseph Stalin.

Gabriel Schoenfeld at the Bulwark makes a sharp observation about the impending nomination of RFK Jr. It’s not good:

At a moment when we should be thinking of this nomination in terms of the potential risk to human lives, all this muddled analysis about science and politics calls to mind a grim episode from the last century that is a cautionary tale for today: the career of the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko.

Born in 1898, Lysenko had accomplishments of great consequence to his name. Most of these occurred in the field of agronomy, where he advanced a revolutionary set of ideas—now known as Lysenkoism. His main contentions were that genes did not exist, that acquired traits could be inherited, and that heredity itself could be altered by “educating” plants.

One such form of education was called “vernalization”—the notion that crop yields would dramatically increase if seeds that usually died in harsh frosts were exposed to lower temperatures before sowing. “Insights” like that, derived ultimately from Marxist ideology instead of legitimate empirical research, were put into practice on a large scale, first in the USSR and then in Communist China. Widespread crop failures followed, and then famines in which millions perished.

Lysenko—a crackpot with the power of the Soviet state behind him—was the recipient of numerous awards, including, on eight occasions, the Order of Lenin, and on three occasions, the Stalin Prize. Lysenko died of natural causes in 1976.

This history of massive state-sponsored scientific fraud is pertinent to Trump’s attempt to install Kennedy to the highest-ranking healthcare position in the U.S. government. The secretary of health and human services has oversight of everything from food safety to medical research to private health insurance to epidemiology to Medicare and Medicaid and much, much more.

He points out that RFK Jr. likes to pretend that his views are based in science but like Lysenko, they aren’t. In fact, he explicitly rejects the proven scientific health benefits of things like pasteurization, fluoridation and especially vaccines. As he says, “a person with no medical or scientific training, RFK Jr. is evidently unaware that vaccines are one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments.”

Even if, unexpectedly, RFK Jr. did absolutely nothing to hinder the development and distribution of vaccines, the mere elevation of someone with such views to a position of national authority would undermine public confidence in vaccines and increase vaccine hesitancy, with severely deleterious consequences for public health. If vaccination rates decline sufficiently, diphtheria, measles, yellow fever, shingles, and many other infectious diseases now relatively dormant may roar back into prominence.

He notes that there are other Lysenko-esque figures being nominated, including Dr. Oz, an MD but also an actual snake oil salesman. The abandonment of reason can have serious consequences.

It may be hyperbolic to make any direct comparisons but tell me that this doesn’t at least seem a little bit possible:

The Soviet chiefs began to support Lysenko during the agricultural crisis of the 1930s. On the basis of rather crude and unsubstantiated experiments, Lysenko promised greater, more rapid, and less costly increases in crop yields than other biologists believed possible. Under Stalin, Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. (1940–65) and president of the then powerful V.I. Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. By 1948, when education and research in standard genetics were virtually outlawed, some geneticists had suffered secret arrest and death of undisclosed causes.

Lysenko’s doctrines and claims varied with the amount of power that he held. Between 1948 and 1953, when he was the total autocrat of Soviet biology, he claimed that wheat plants raised in the appropriate environment produce seeds of rye, which is equivalent to saying that dogs living in the wild give birth to foxes. His fundamental, continuing argument was that theoretical biology must be fused with Soviet agricultural practice. After Stalin’s death, this principle caused Lysenko some embarrassment, for efforts to improve Soviet agriculture brought the abandonment of measures to which his name and fame were tied. His “grassland” system of crop rotation was abandoned in favor of cultivation with mineral fertilizers, and a hybrid corn program based on the U.S. example was pursued (Lysenko halted the program in the mid-1930s, for he was opposed to the inbreeding with which it must begin).

During Nikita Khrushchev’s premiership, opposition to Lysenko’s programs was tolerated, and Lysenko lost titular control of the Lenin Agricultural Academy. After Khrushchev’s political demise, in 1964, Lysenko’s doctrines were discredited, and intensive efforts made toward the reestablishment of orthodox genetics in the U.S.S.R. Deposed as director of the Institute of Genetics early in 1965, Lysenko seemed to be at the end of his mutable career. He and his followers, however, long retained their degrees, their titles, and their academic positions and remained free to support their aberrant trend in biology.

And …

Soviet scientists who refused to renounce genetics were dismissed from their posts and left destitute. Hundreds if not thousands of others were imprisoned. Several were sentenced to death as enemies of the state, including the botanist Nikolai Vavilov, whose sentence was commuted to prison. Lysenko’s ideas and practices contributed to the famines that killed millions of Soviet people; the adoption of his methods from 1958 in the People’s Republic of China had similarly calamitous results, contributing to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961.

Obviously, that won’t happen exactly that way here. But allowing a phony like RFK Jr to further degrade people’s beliefs in vaccines and pushing the idea that climate change is a hoax is going to kill a whole lot of people. The right wingers are the Soviets in this new iteration of Lysenkoism.

America, Beacon Of Liberty

Published by digby on January 3, 2025

The United States used to be held up as a great example of a mature democracy under the rule of law. We had our issues, God knows, (exceptionalism!) but we weren’t seen as a lawless autocracy.

Today we are an inspiration for autocrats around the world:

The legal team of suspended President Yoon Suk Yeol claimed Friday that Yoon’s impeachment trial does not warrant a ruling as he should have immunity from prosecution, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Donald Trump.

In a document presented to the Constitutional Court in Yoon’s impeachment trial, the legal team said Yoon exercised his due presidential power to handle a “national emergency situation” while declaring martial law on Dec. 3.

“As martial law was lifted in six hours, it did not restrict the people’s basic rights,” the document read. “Things were fully restored so that there is no need to judge the declaration itself.”

Yoon’s side pointed to the U.S. court ruling in July last year that said Trump cannot be prosecuted for actions that were within his constitutional powers as president.

The Supreme Court majority must be so proud.

Yoon’s supporters chanted “Stop The Steal!” as did the supporters of jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2022. Trump’s an inspiration for weird, red-pilled wingnuts everywhere.

Only The Best People

Published by digby on January 3, 2025

I kind of doubt Pam Bondi or Pete Hegseth know how to spell it either. Not to mention Trump.

Update—

Lol: