The Birth of a Notion

 Anne Applebaum traces our continuing discontents to The Don's birtherism, that bit of comic opera that she says “all of us including me, underrated.” I think she is right.

 You can hear and read her saying it in the New York Times podcast here, in response to a question about the 22 minute mark, and also, more briefly, on National Public Radio here.

 

Trump Floats Election Delay - Updated

Please tell me he can't do this:

From the article on HuffPost:

President Donald Trump on Thursday suggested delaying the November presidential election while baselessly warning that mail-in voting will lead to “the most inaccurate and fraudulent election in history.”

States are increasingly offering mail-in ballots due to concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic, but Trump has repeatedly tried to dissuade people from voting by mail, claiming — without any supporting evidence — that it will lead to voter fraud. 

Trump has no power over the election schedule; moving it would require changing federal law. The Constitution states the exact date and time when a president and vice president’s term ends. There is no clause that would allow a president to remain in office beyond that date, which is the Jan. 20 following the presidential election.

"...His likely Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, has previously suggested that Trump may try to delay the election in an effort to win."

“I think he is gonna try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held,” Biden told supporters in April. 

“This is simply not true, and it’s dangerous for our democracy. The President cannot delay the election,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) tweeted, while urging his Republican colleagues to “publicly and forcefully refute the President’s alarming suggestion that he can.”

“The USA held an election during the Civil War, and we will hold one in 96 days,” tweeted Pete Buttigieg, the former Democratic candidate and mayor of South Bend, Indiana."

Updated:

I see that Hong Kong has postponed its election for a year, ostensibly because of the pandemic, but more likely for more cynical political reasons. It is unclear to me whether that announcement came before or after Trump's Tweet suggesting ours be delayed. The timing doesn't especially matter, because we know he was thinking about it anyway. It just adds another layer to the reasons a delay should be resisted with all our strength, since it echoes the actions of a totalitarian government (if there was any doubt about Hong Kong's status under the People's Republic.)

Our Lady of Good Help

Perhaps foolishly, in light of the coronavirus*, my wife and I got away for a few days to Door County, WI.  While there, we visited a Marian shrine. 

Holy Fan Fiction

Please bear with me as I indulge in a small rant.  I am going to scream if I ever hear another homily based on the Protoevangelium of James.  The occasion was the feast day of Saints Joachim and Ann, which falls on July 26.  Of course this year it fell on Sunday, which takes precedence. So the priest decided to give some reflections on the feast today. He did make clear that the Protoevangelium was not a canonical gospel and that one was not obliged to believe in it. But he went on to repeat some of the legends surrounding the birth and childhood of Mary.

Test of New Interface

I am testing the new interface.

New Interface

Is the transition complete? Posts there don't seem to have comments.
Anyone mastered the beast?
As my mother used to say: "Why don't you leave well enough alone!!"

Margaret Sanger erased

Ross Douthat in today's Times:

"This week, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York announced that it would remove Margaret Sanger’s name from its Manhattan Health Center. The grounds were Sanger’s eugenic ideas and alliances, which for years have been highlighted by anti-abortion advocates and minimized by her admirers. Under the pressures of the current moment, apparently, that minimization isn’t sustainable any more.

"This is an interesting shift from just a year ago, when Clarence Thomas faced a wave of media scorn when he took note of Sanger’s eugenic sympathies. But Thomas was citing Sanger’s writings to suggest that abortion in America today reflects a kind of structural racism — an inherited tendency, which persists even without racist intent, for pro-abortion policies to reduce minority births more than white births. Whereas the removal of Sanger’s name, presumably, was intended to drive home the opposite point — to establish a clear separation between past and present, between racism then and abortion rights today.

"But the difficulty is that according to current thinking on how structural racism lingers and what anti-racism requires, Thomas still seems to have a reasonable case....."

And Douthat shows how. This is an argument that anyone who has ever read a biography of Sanger can hardly deny. It has now been cast in the BLM/structural racism mode of analysis and will perhaps get more attention.

The "Karen" Meme - UPDATED

I'm sure you've all encountered it by now if you spend any time on social media.  The "shares" or captioned pictures, starring a lady of a certain type, of a certain age, named Karen. I first came across it on Facebook, a few years back. At first it was mildly funny, for about five minutes.  Some of the captioned pictures were "Karen's" pets; the dog dressed up in a Santa's elf suit with a pained expression on its face, that kind of thing. Or a story about a woman who was annoying and a bit bossy, kind of a church lady type.

Back to school?

Should students return to classrooms this fall?  If so, what accommodations should be made for them, teachers and other staff?  Should extracurricular activities be permitted?  If students don't return full-time to the classroom, what expectations for parents are reasonable?

Interesting Ohio politics & November Election

Interesting Ohio politics which might ultimately have a bearing on November Election

Here is the link to the Ohio Dispatch which is covering the issue in detail. However you might find it difficult to deal with their website.

Ohio house speaker arrested in FBI $60M bribery investigation:

Basic facts:

1. Ohio has two nuclear plants along Lake Ohio, one here in Lake County. Both have been taking a  hit from the energy situation and were like to go under.  There were good reasons for  maintaining them. They provide jobs and also tax revenue for local government. The huge tax from our nuclear plant funded things such as our local  mental health levy for not only us but all the surrounding counties served by the plant.  Nuclear is the only present alternative to coal; its advocates see it as a way station toward carbon free energy (e.g. wind and solar).

2. Enter Larry Household a former House Speaker who wanted his job back.

3. Householder through an associate  formed Generation Now to funnel money from Company A to his efforts to regain his leadership post and move a billion-dollar bailout bill. As a 501(c)(4), Generation Now did not have to disclose its donors and was free of regulation by the Federal Election Commission. It was supposed to focus its efforts on social welfare and was not supposed to financially benefit a shareholder or individual or engage primarily in political activities or campaigns, It did none of what it was supposed to do, and much that it was not supposed to do.

4. Company A directed $61 million to the nonprofit over a three-year period. The funds were then used to back Householder-supporting legislative candidates so that he could secure the Speaker’s seat, for advertising to build support for HB 6, and to ensure opponents did not gain sufficient signatures in their attempt to overturn the resulting state law changes.

5. Investigators said Generation Now used funds from the company to support 15 candidates in the 2018 primary (including Householder) and six others in the general election to ensure sufficient votes for Householder to win the Speaker’s seat. According to court documents, Generation Now paid more than $1 million in the fall of 2018 alone “to flood the airways with negative ads against” Householder’s opponents. “All of the individuals in Team Householder that were funded by Company A, via Generation Now, all voted for Larry Householder to be Speaker of the House. Ultimately, only one voted against HB 6.”

6. House Bill 6 Most of the money that was funneled through Generation Now was used for campaign ads and other efforts to ensure passage and ultimate enactment of the nuclear bailout legislation that included “a monthly charge on all Ohioans’ energy bills” to subsidize the company’s two failing nuclear power plants, according to court documents.

My Comments

Addendum

This goes along with my previous post on the Hagia Sophia. Two engineers in the 6th century AD figured out how to construct a building in an earthquake zone which would be resistant to earthquakes for nearly 1400 years, and which withstood a quake in 1999 which was 7.5 on the Richter Scale. Two of their secrets were building flexibility rather than rigidity into the design, and a special mortar which has rarely if ever been duplicated. If you want to hear how they did it, you can watch this video .

Demography and Rankings by GNP in 2017, 2030, 2050, 2100

Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: a forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study

Predicting births and therefore the demographic structure of a society is very difficult, but it is important since often things which we think of as cultural are really about birth rate.

For example here in the USA evangelical Protestants in recent years have a reputation for growing by converting people. But Andrew Greeley many  years ago showed that most of the relative growth of Evangelical Protestants in comparison to Catholics and mainline Protestants was do the slightly higher birth rates of Evangelicals. It all came down to mainline Protestants adopting birth control earlier and more often than Catholics who adopted it earlier and more often than Evangelicals.

These researchers put their better predictor of fertility along with mortality, and migration trends to estimate what the working populations (the people who actually produce GRP, not the billionaires who claim as much of it as they can).

Green indicates countries that move up in rank, yellow those that fall. Remember all this is relative so when some countries such as India, Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria and the Philippines rise others much go down at least a notch or two.  They probably will not actually fall in GRP but will have the psychological impact of seeing themselves overtaken by other countries.

Rank by Size of GDP	2017	2030	2050	2100
1	USA	USA	China	USA
2	China	China	USA	China
3	Japan	Japan	India  +1	India
4	Germany	India   +3	Japan	Japan
5	France	Germany	Germany	Germany
6	UK	UK	UK	France
7	India	France -2	France	UK -1
8	Brazil	Brazil	Brazil	Australia +3
9	Italy	Italy	Turkey +3	Nigeria +8
10	Russia	Canada  +1	Canada	Canada
11	Canada	Russia -1	Australia +1	Turkey -2
12	Australia	Australia	Indonesia +2	Indonesia
13	Spain	Turkey +5	Russian -2	Brazil -5
14	South Korea	Indonesia +2	Mexico +2	Russia -1
15	Mexico	South Korea	South Korea -1	Mexico -1
16	Indonesia	Mexico -1	Italy -5	Israel +20
17	Turkey	Spain -4	Nigeria  +4	Sweden
18	Netherland	Netherlands	Spain -1	Philippines +6
19	Saudi Arabia	Saudi Arabia	Netherland -1	Netherlands
20	Switzerland	Switzerland	Saudi Arabia	South Korea -5
21		Nigeria +7	Sweden
22	Sweden		Switzerland -2
23		Sweden
24			Philippines +4
25				Italy -9
26				Switzerland -2
28	Nigeria			Spain -10
32				Saudi Arabia -12
35		Philippines	Israel

My commentary after the break.

Worship mediated by technology

I'm interested in your experience, during the pandemic, with televised/live-streamed/pre-recorded masses, a collection of possibilities for which I've coined the term "technology-mediated worship" (or if I'm not the one to coin it, it seems accurate).  Televised masses have been around for decades, but the pandemic has forced tech-mediated worship across American Catholicism on a scale which, to the best of my knowledge, is unprecedented (and for many people, continues today).

I'm interested in any and all thoughts and feedback, positive and negative, about your tech-mediated worship experience.  Here are some questions which may stimulate conversation, but please don't relegate yourself to these topics.

"There's Never Been Anything Like It."

You probably know what that headline is talking about. The 46th president of the U.S.
We can't absolutely conclude that 46 is unprecedented among presidents, "never been anything like it."   But in living memory....say from FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, to Obama, has their been a president so woefully incompetent and so certain of himself and his policies?

This morning's NYTimes brings the matter to the fore: stories of ICE agents beating protestors in Portland; of threats by 46 to send more paramilitary types to cities run by Democratic mayors; and of fears by Republican operatives and donors that they're wasting their time and money at the top of the ticket and are thinking of shifting resources to the Senate races.

Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman report that given the failure of his crusading rallies, 46 will resume his corona virus briefings to the trepidation of many of his own staff and almost certainly to the medical and scientific officials who will be dragged onto the TV screen.  46: “I was doing them and we had a lot of people watching, record numbers watching in the history of cable television. There’s never been anything like it,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “It’s a great way to get information out to the public as to where we are with the vaccines, with the therapeutics.”

If you get beyond the Times paywall, there are stories about Portland and the fascistic behavior or U.S. federal officers, about mayors and governors of threatened states pleading with Washington not to send the armed feds, and there is Michelle Goldberg quoting from Timothy Snyder's 2017 book "On Tyranny."

“Be wary of paramilitaries.” He wrote, “When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.” In 2017, the idea of unidentified agents in camouflage snatching leftists off the streets without warrants might have seemed like a febrile Resistance fantasy. Now it’s happening."

Andrew Sullivan says Farewell to the New York magazine

I was a fan of the Dish, and so registered for Andrew Sullivan's e-mail list so that I could follow his writing when he closed down the blog.

Today's e-mail contained his farewell letter to the New York magazine.

See You Next Friday: A Farewell Letter

Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.

You might want to compare it with Jim's article on the Parting Shot at the NY Times of Jim's recent post,

The good new is that Next Friday Andrew Sullivan promises to deliver to my inbox the first issue of his new Weekly Dish

So, yeah, after being prodded for years by Dishheads, I’m going to bring back the Dish.
I’ve long tried to figure out a way to have this kind of lively community without endangering my health and sanity. Which is why the Weekly Dish, which launches now, is where I’ve landed.

 The old  Dish is still there.

We’re determined to keep the site up in perpetuity for research and just memories. It’s like one huge encyclopedia of early 21st Century videos, arguments, quotes, poems, essays and so on. It will cost a little, but we will do what’s needed. 

A new layer of police misconduct

As Tom continues to call attention to the election-year resumption of federal executions, let me add this to the election-year mix: a friend of mine shared this WaPo story about federal law enforcement officials who have inserted themselves, apparently uninvited by local authorities, into the nightly protests on-going in Portland, OR.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Laws

 As ever, the Trump Justice Department demonstrates that it thinks the best way to defend the public from lawbreakers is to ignore the law. From the Kansas City Star:

  A Kansas man executed Thursday by the U.S. government did not receive proper notice of his new death date after his most recent execution warrant expired, a death penalty expert said.
  Wesley Purkey, 68, was put to death at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, years after he admitted to killing 16-year-old Jennifer Long, a Kansas City teenager.
 The question at hand isn’t whether Purkey should have been executed, but rather if his death was constitutional, said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
  He said the federal government’s decision to proceed with administering a lethal injection to Purkey hours after the most recent attempt to stay his execution was struck down was “extremely disturbing.”

The Hagia Sophia

I have long been fascinated by the Hagia Sophia. It was built as the patriarchal cathedral of Constantinople between 532 and 537 on the orders of Justinian I. It was used by the Eastern Orthodox church, temporarily by the Roman Catholic Church, and then as an Ottoman mosque before becoming a secular museum. It was dedicated to the Wisdom of God, and is not connected to Sophia the Martyr, even though it is sometimes referred to as Sancta Sophia. At the time it was built, it was the largest building in the world. it was completed in a little under six years, and is considered a feat of engineering genius. 

Of course by now you have probably read that sometime in 2020 it will be reopened as a mosque, by a decision signed by Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Parting shot

Bari Weiss delivers a blistering public letter to her New York Times bosses on her way out.

A Most Catholic Execution. Amen

 Daniel Lewis Lee was eliminated by the Trump Administration today.

 From the Washington Post:
 

The Supreme Court said early Tuesday morning that the Justice Department can resume federal executions this week, overturning a D.C. judge’s last-minute order that had temporarily halted the lethal injections.

In an unsigned, 5-4 opinion issued around 2 a.m., the Supreme Court found that the prisoners on death row had “not made the showing required to justify last-minute intervention.” Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor each wrote dissents, which Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan joined.

A couple of other back-to-church observations

I reported last week that our parish has resumed Sunday mass.  That first weekend, we were limited by the archdiocese to 40 people per mass, and we filled every seat.   For the next weekend which just ended, the archdiocese had certified us to move to the next phase of reopening: now we can welcome as many as 100 per mass.  And so this weekend we drew ... about 40 people per mass.