Louisiana Rewrites Scripture

By now you will have heard that the legislature of the State of Louisiana has decreed that all state schools shall prominently display the Ten Commandments. I don’t expect this to survive, but with the corrupt Supreme Court now sitting, who can say?

And, the Ten Commandments listed in the law are not to be found in any Bible. You see they made a few editorial tweaks to make them better, don’t you know.

The Founders claimed that not separating church and state would keep both politics and religion pure. Here we see the repercussions of religions wedging themselves into politics, with politicians wedging themselves into religions.

As the article in Forbes magazine asked “What students in Louisiana will get is the Louisiana legislature version of holy scripture. While the rewrite is not radical, it sets a troubling precedent. Should we welcome legislators editing anyone’s scripture?”

This state legislature has been banning “indoctrinations of students” in public schools galore, but can’t seem to be able to resist a bit of indoctrinating themselves. When people start complaining “You got the Ten Commandments wrong!” they will probably be inclined to declare them to be part of the State of Louisiana Bible and soon to follow will be the Church of the State of Louisiana.

By the way, the “Holy Bible” (not the Louisiana version) has three different lists of the “Ten Commandments” and almost 600 more commandments that these Holy Rolling Legislators are ignoring.

Go Wales! It Is a Start!

According to an article in The Conversation (“Wales could become world’s first country to criminalise politicians who lie,” June 19, 2024).

“Research published in 2022 showed the British public overwhelmingly wanted lying politicians to face consequences.

“And while the UK’s general election is grabbing the headlines, a proposal in Wales’ Senedd (Welsh parliament) is seeking to address this issue by introducing new legislation that would criminalise politicians who lie. If passed, Wales would become the first country in the world to introduce criminal sanctions for lying politicians.

“Under the proposals it would be a criminal offence for a member of the Senedd, or a candidate for election to the Senedd, to willfully, or with intent to mislead, make or publish a statement that is known to be false or deceptive. Proceedings would have to be brought within six months from the date on which the statement was made.

“It would be considered a defence if it could be “reasonably inferred” to be a statement of opinion, or if it were retracted with an apology within 14 days. Being prosecuted for such a law would disqualify a person from being a Senedd member.

“The proposals are not yet law, and the bill has further debate stages yet to go. Price’s amendment is supported by Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Conservatives and the Welsh Liberal Democrats.”

(Source: All quotes are from the article referred to.)

Can you imagine Trump trying to function under such laws? His speeches would devolve to “I . . . uh . . . well, . . . but . . . surely . . . and I’ll bet you agree.”

And I think it would also be just to prosecute those who “modify” videos to show something untrue.

What Happens When Supreme Court Justices Lie on the Record?

Nothing, absolutely nothing.

Why Klay Thompson Should Give the Warriors a Home Team Discount

I think the Warriors need Klay and Klay needs the Warriors. And I base my request from Mr. Thompson for a home team discount on his recent injuries.

On June 14, 2019, the Warriors announced that Thompson underwent an MRI which confirmed that Thompson had suffered a torn left ACL. (Note—In the past this was a career-ending injury.)

On July 1, 2019: Thompson agreed to a five-year, $190 million deal with the Warriors even though a torn ACL basically meant Thompson wouldn’t be playing for a year of that contract.

So, Klay rehabs, comes back and disaster strikes again: on Nov. 25, 2020 Thompson suffered a torn right Achilles tendon and underwent successful surgery in Los Angeles. Golden State noted that he was expected to miss the entire 2020-21 season.

So, out of that five year contract, for $38 million dollars per year, Thompson got paid while the team got nothing for two of those five years. The team stood by Klay, gave him a good contract, knowing that he would be out for a year and then ate another entire year without complaint.

Klay is not the same player he once was, but no one is after a two year layoff, certainly not after having two potentially career ending injuries. (Sport medicine has made amazing strides.) Still he is an important piece in the Warrior’s lineup. Certainly a three year contract for less than he made in his prime is in order, and yes, that would be what is called a home team discount, because the home team stood behind him and now he should stand behind it.

It is said that professional sports is a business, that players don’t “owe” their team’s ownership anything. In this case, maybe that is not true.

And, realize, I earned around two million dollars in my 35 years of service as a college chemistry professor. If you adjust that for inflation, that is about four million dollars today. So, when players who have already earned hundreds of millions of dollars talk about being respected when they enter salary negotiations, I understand that but only to a certain degree. I think that respect is a two way street. When people treat you well, some reciprocity is warranted.

And, I think both parties will be better off together than separated.

Clarence Thomas is a Shill, a Lying Shill

Once again, a Supreme Court Justice has professed expertise he does not possess and lied about the topic at hand to get a decision he wanted.

This is about the “bump stock case” which was a challenge to an executive order of a Republican president outlawing them.  The key point was whether those devices could result in a semi-automatic weapon to be converted into an automatic weapon, commonly called a machine gun. While a semi-automatic weapon requires the shooter to pull the trigger for each shot, a weapon modified with a bump stock does not. “As long as the shooter keeps his trigger finger on the finger rest and maintains constant forward pressure on the rifle’s barrel or front grip, the weapon will fire continuously.” See 83 Fed. Reg. 66516.

The 1934 Firearms Act prohibits civilian ownership of machine guns, defined as a weapon that can shoot “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” 26 U. S. C. §5845(b)

Justice Thomas claimed that a shooter had to pull the trigger for each shot fired from a bump stop fitted semi-automatic weapon and that is a bald-faced lie. It is not something even a beginner would mistake. Plus, what value does a bump stock have if it requires the shooter to pull the trigger for each shot. That is no advantage over the plain semi-automatic weapon, and every moderately informed gun person knows that.

How is it that there is no correction available to lies claimed by Justices? Should there not be an appeal process available for such errors/lies?

There is something rotten and it is not in Denmark, it is in the SCOTUS.

And what possible reason could there be to lie about this? Are bump stock manufacturers promising Thomas a lavish vacation? Is it retribution for slavery, causing a hellish stay on Earth for sinful Americans? What?

The Settler Scam

I have written more than once with regard to the use of the word “settlers” during the “Taming of the American West” episode of U.S. history. The word implies that the land those people were stealing wasn’t already settled, by millions of Native Americans.

The same trick is being used now in referring to the “settlers” in Israel, who are invaders of lands not their own, with the intent of ending up with the land belonging to the “settlers’ and not the people originally there. (Possession being nine tenths of the law, don’t you know.)

At least when the Spanish sent people to the “New World” to raid, pillage, rape, kill, and convert to Christianity, they were called “Conquistadores,” what they really were: conquerors.

 

 

Why Did SCOTUS Take the “Mifepristone Case”

Religious conservative troglodytes want the federal government to ban the shipping of the drugs used to cause the majority of abortions in this country, the most common one being mifepristone. The SCOTUS took the case on offer only to point out, with a 9-0 ruling, that the people bringing the case had no standing as those doctors had never prescribed the drug and so neither they nor their patients suffered any harm and so could not bring such a case.

So, why did SCOTUS accept the case in the first place, if the people bringing it had no standing?

Ah, interesting. This was basically a giant waste of the court’s time, so why did they agree to take it in the first place (it only takes four justices to agree to take a case)? The only reason I can see is that they are guiding the litigants in making their next attempt. They are telling then “next time, make sure you have someone being ‘harmed’ when you bring your case.” I say “harmed” because recently the SCOTUS took a case that was entirely fictitious, naming people to have been harmed and the people so noted denied that any harm was done to them.

Not all that subtle, but the court gets what it wants, a violable case to ban abortion drugs being shipped in the U.S. and they get the appearance of being reasonable people in denying this case.

Be on notice. There will be another case attempting to ban the shipping of abortion drugs. It will have someone “harmed” and the conservative justices will jump on it like a dog in heat.

Note—The “news organs” are claiming that SCOTUS “preserved access to the mifepristone drug.” They did no such thing. They didn’t even address the subject as the plaintiffs had no standing so off they were sent.

They Think We Are Stupid

The Republicans think you and I are stupid. They are dusting off “trickle down economics” for another go around.

Trickle down economics was the scheme advanced by Ronald Reagan that if America only made rich people massively richer with staggering tax cuts, ending anti-trust regulation, and government subsidies for their industries, they would use all that extra free money to build new factories, hire people, and the abundance would trickle down to the average worker.

It was a lie, but it wasn’t the first time the GOP had tried that lie. Then knew exactly what they were doing, and what outcome it would produce. Instead of raising the pay of their workers, the rich people on the receiving end of Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s tax cuts simply added the cash to their investments.

In the Reagan go around, even the rich were skeptical, stating that the owners weren’t “job creators,” (Remember that ploy?) in that it was customers who were the job creators. Any time the number of customers for your product increased, that is the demand for your product increased, production had to increase to meet the demand and so more workers needed to be hired. Any business owner who expanded production in the hope that demand would grow to buy those products was usually soon out of business.

But then again, maybe we are stupid. When Trump proposed his huge tax reductions, mostly for the wealthy, pundits point out that the last time that had happened, there were no new jobs created and the wealthy used their increased wealth for stock-buybacks and other investments that were to increase their wealth even more. There was no outrage raised against the Trump tax cuts, so they were pushed through and what was predicted by the naysayers is actually what happened, again.

The GOP exists to serve the morbidly rich and no one else. And they have been doing it for a long time. Back in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century there was the “horse and sparrow” theory of taxation.

“The sales-pitch was that if you fed horses extra oats, more than they could normally digest, they’d pass through all that undigested oat into their manure for the sparrows to pick at; rich people’s excesses, in other words, would spill over to the average “sparrow” working person. It was embraced by Republicans in Congress and not only didn’t it work; it was blamed, in part, for the ‘Panic of 1896.’” (Thom Hartman)

Then the same scheme was advanced in the 1920s, leading the the famous stock market crash in 1929 and the Great Depression worldwide.

Then Reagan advanced his “supply side economics,” exactly what you should not do in a demand-side economy.

And, of course, the morbidly rich were convinced that politics did not sully their reputations and so they proceeded to buy the Congress, the Supreme Court and even the Presidency.

The rich have been fighting against paying their share of the tax burden in this country since Thomas Jefferson’s time. Giving them more money just fuels their efforts to pay less and less and less.

Oh, and the states are performing their role as the “laboratories of democracy” for the nation as a whole.

“Republicans have been hustling this scam for over 150 years, and in the states they control educational outcomes are plummeting, child and infant mortality is skyrocketing (along with homicides), and infrastructure threatens to disintegrate as funding cuts come online.” (Thom Hartmann)

The Republicans want a return to the conditions of the Gilded Age; they haven’t had servants to serve them since that time, so a new under-class is needed and they are creating one. The middle class is shrinking rapidly and soon there will only be the rich and the poor left, with the poor having to take any job they can get, which often means the same thing as industrial servitude, or personal servitude as “house staff” for the rich.

I end with another quote from the inestimable Thom Hartmann—

“Their sales pitch was effective, so we’ve now had 43 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.

“It’s time to simply say out loud that it hasn’t worked. For example: Republicans told us if we just cut the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was in 1980 down to 27% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else because, they said, the “job creators” would be “unleashed” on our economy.

“Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the developed world, as over $50 trillion was transferred over those 43 years from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 60% of us to fewer than half of us. Because of 43 years of Reaganomics, it now takes two full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.”

Questions to Ask Sincere MAGA Republicans

Q1 Is America a great nation? If the Answer is yes, ask what “Make America Great Again” means. If the answer is no . . .

Q2 If America is not a great nation, which nation or nations are greater and why?

* * *

One cannot declare any status of national greatness without comparisons to other nations. I would be interested in the names of countries mentioned as well as the criteria used to compare them.

I would also be interested in providing a series of descriptions of other countries, without their names, and see if they would judge them to be greater or less great. Imagine descriptions of Norway, Costa Rica, North Korea, Venezuela, Switzerland, and Türkiye on that list.

“Isn’t That Special?”

The Church Lady was a Saturday Night Live character, and with all such characterizations there is a grain of truth at its core. And she came to mind as I was just viewing a post on Medium.com with the title “Like Israel of Old, Is The United States God’s Favored Nation?” While people debate this point I have to ask two things. One, why would people want to be considered “God’s Chosen People,” and two, why would such a god even have a chosen people?

The Church Lady had a catchphrase of “Now, isn’t that special!”

I will start with the second question. It is clear from the Bible that Judaism, the parent religion of Christianity, started out polytheistic or at least henotheistic. Yahweh was part of a panoply of gods. In fact, Yahweh was a Canaanite god, along with El, Ba’al, Asherah, and over 70 gods in total. The Hebrews whittled down all of those until there was only one. Interestingly, Asherah, Yahweh’s mother, was described as Yahweh’s “consort” at one point. She often went, in the Bible, with the sobriquet of “the Queen of Heaven.”

The point here was that Yahweh had to be sold to the Hebrews as their one and only god (and Asherah worshipers didn’t want to abandon her, amongst other roadblocks for this happening, for example the Ba’al worshipers who worshipped via a bull or calf icon). One way of selling the Hebrews on Yahweh as their sole god was to declare that that god considered the Hebrews to be his sole people, which makes no sense whatsoever.

Yahweh was declared to be the creator god and people were his creation. Why would Yahweh single out one small group of people off in a backwater of civilization to be the only group he favored? Were there no other people anywhere on Earth he would show favor to? If so, there is no record of that happening. So, this god creates people, declares them to be “good,” then changes his mind shortly thereafter and kills 99.99999% of all of them, leaving only Noah and his three sons and their wives to start over. Again, a short time later, this god declares the Hebrews to be his “Chosen People” and authorizes them to exterminate any group which is in their way. WTF? The rest of Noah’s descendants? Chopped chicken liver I guess.

Returning to the first question, it is clear that religion is a mechanism by which people claim to be “special.” And Americans have been bragging on their specialness for centuries. Lately we have the claim of American Exceptualism, which is the belief that the United States is either distinctive, unique, or exemplary compared to other nations. We are better than those “shit-hole” nations and everybody knows it. Well, except the MAGA Republicans who insist that America is not a “Great Nation.” They can’t insist that we are great and claim they can make America “Great Again,” well they are bat-shit crazy, so I guess quite a few could and just not see any contradiction.

We seem to have this deep-seated desire to be recognized as being special . . . well, not just by the Church Lady, but by one and all. Our religions must stoke the feeling of being special or we are changing churches, by God! This is a far cry from churches in existence at the beginning of this nation which thundered from pulpits that we were miserable wretches, sinners, doomed to eternal damnation. I guess the church’s marketing departments decided that was a message that wasn’t going to have legs.

Establishing that “’Merica is God’s favored nation” would certainly make us all special, but be careful what you ask for. Yahweh also pummeled Israel and Judah from pillar to post, empowering invaders to trample those countries into dust over and over because the Hebrews wouldn’t “accept the yoke” Yahweh was offering. (If we aren’t cattle to this god, we are sheep or goats . . . now that’s special.)