Average American

 

Averages

I have some questions.

            Does the average American care about Democracy?

            Is the average American a gun-totin’, conspiracy-believing, anti-government, anti-mask, anti-science, anti-vaccine, bible-thumpin’, violence-promoting Trump lover? Then what’s the other side? Can two diametrically opposed opposites both still be comprised of average Americans?

And we’re off!

Do appearances matter?

            What is the average American anyway? What do they look like? What’s their makeup; their demographic? Are they white? Does a Republican or Democrat represent the average American? Is the average American Christian? Is the average American rich or poor? Can a poor American wear two hats and be average as well as poor? Is the average American anti-government? Does the average American like coffee? Could coffee be the great unifier?

Do they like their coffee strong?

Average Christian

            The majority of the population of the United States self-identifies as being Christian. However it would appear that the majority of Christians don’t attend church much. So are one day a week, twice a month Christians average Christians? Do they care about democracy as much as they care about their religion? Or is there no average Christian?

It’s complicated.

Unbelievers

            Now I need to add here that the average Republican doesn’t believe in our current form of government because the majority of Republicans falsely believe that the election was stolen from their idol the “Chosen One.” Does not believing something mean that it didn’t happen?

            If you’re a Republican that believes the election was legitimate are people hearing that from you? Are you standing up for your country? Because I’ve got to tell you that the Republicans that I know that do believe the election was legit are keeping their heads down and their beliefs to themselves. They’re saving themselves from the cancel culture purge of the majority of their brethren.

            Does it matter to the minority of election-believing Republicans that Ex-President Trump and the Republican Party tried to stage a coup and overturn the results of a the legal and lawful election that made Joe Biden President? I’m going to say no. Because if they did, they would be speaking out.

They aren’t!

Commonplace

            Perhaps there is no average American. Perhaps there are just millions of people going about their lives. Some struggling. Some not struggling. People that just get up and go to work or not. People that want to just be able to take care of their families; keep a roof over their heads. People that would like to be left alone and not have to worry about where their next meal is coming from. Old. Young. Retired. Men. Women. Children. Humans wanting the same things out of life including those that want more.

Everyday people.

 What do we know?

            Most of those living in our society aren’t wealthy. We start off with a baseline of 40 million people living in poverty in the United States of America. Not a good start. The majority of our country is just trying to make ends meet and living paycheck to paycheck. The system isn’t designed for everyday people to get more than so far ahead. We can see the brass ring but can’t quite grab it.  Who or what is holding us back if it isn’t the government?

This is how conspiracies are born.

It’s a wonderment.

            The Republican Party has been steering this ship to where we’re at for decades. It started out innocently enough. All the elements, the natural tendencies, the building blocks were already there. They just started stacking them. Dirty tricks. Misinformation. Misdirection. Conspiracies. Lies. Fear. It isn’t that Democrats haven’t done it as well. They just aren’t very good at it whereas Republicans excel at it.

            The Republican base was carefully laid out. They made a discipline out of “there’s a sucker born every minute.” The groundwork was already well trodden historically. The Russians were masters at understanding how to manipulate the gullibility of the masses. They quite literally weaponized ignorance.

            The majority of the Republican base will quite literally believe any concoction put forth, and has.

Then it got strange.

Right Field

            Traditional right wing conservative Republicans lost control of the base as it has swung even farther to the right. The base that they had cultivated was ripe for the taking. Racist organizations climbed on board. They recognized their agenda from the very beginning. Confederate lost cause believers, Neo Nazis, White Nationalists, et al recognized that they had a kindred spirit in Trump that would advance their ideals.

            The new Republican Party advocates violent rhetoric to their militarized base on a regular basis.  They actively seek to overthrow our government. Their coup attempt on January 6^th came close to succeeding. Their next attempt is already being successfully staged in front to the world. They call themselves patriots.

In reality—they are traitors.

Instructions for abortion. Numbers 5: 19-22.

WARNING:  This piece is about abortion and miscarriage. If that upsets you—don’t read it.

Does the bible prescribe abortion?

Multiple personalities

            I know that “Instructions for abortion. Numbers 5: 19-22.” is kind of a lengthy title but it conveys what I’m going to be talking about. I swear that I did not remember these passages in my readings of the bible. First I’m going to present the wording from Numbers 5: 19-22 from the New International Version (NIV). Different bibles use different words some being vaguer than others. The NIV provided straightforward language.

19 Then the priest shall put the woman under oath and say to her, “If no other man has had sexual relations with you and you have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this bitter water that brings a curse not harm you.

20 But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”—

21 here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse[b] among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell.

22 May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.”

“‘Then the woman is to say, “Amen. So be it.”

             Next I’m going to provide one example of a biblical reference of God killing a child. It’s from 2 Samuel 12:14, NIV.

“But because by doing this you have shown utter contempt for the LORD, the son born to you will die.”

            In the above verse David had an adulterous affair with Bathsheba so God punished them by killing the baby. (Without looking it up I think that the child was a week old when it was killed. Not an abortion or miscarriage.)

            The Old Testament God would kill men women and children—lots of them. God would also kill pregnant women. (Hosea 13:16) We’re talking rip kids out of the womb killin’. So if the woman wasn’t killed before the baby was ripped from her womb does that count as abortion? It certainly would today.

            New Testament Jesus God—not so much killin’. Loves kids.

Loves people.

 Context is everything

            Now you will find lots of commentary out there in World Wide Web saying this is completely wrong and that people have to know some really smart stuff to know what all these verses actually mean and how ‘other people’ have the translation completely wrong and those ‘other people’ are saying the same thing. Clear? You have to be really smart to read the bible and know what it means or hang out with smart people.

Or not.

No fault. No foul

            There are interpretations that I kind of enjoyed reading. One such interpretation says that since curses aren’t real and the potion was powerless they couldn’t possible have caused an abortion. People at the time though kinda believed that they were real. The implication there is that the bible is make believe in places. Another explanation is that if the “curse” causes a miscarriage a miscarriage is not actually an abortion. There’s another example in the bible about God causing miscarriages but I’m not going to bother looking it up. I’ve written about this topic before  here, here, and here.

            Okay, here it is. “Give them, O LORD--what will You give? Give them wombs that miscarry and breasts that dry up!” Hosea 9:14, NIV

            Several defenses offered up maintain that miscarriages aren’t actually abortions even if God causes them. In today’s climate a woman taking a morning after pill is considered wrong by Evangelicals even though it’s only to prevent conception.

            However if a woman does anything to cause a miscarriage it’s considered an abortion unless what she does is an accident that causes a miscarriage if she didn’t know the accident would cause the miscarriage. So that wouldn’t be an abortion.

Or would it?

 

Too much base

 

Personal comments

            I’m going to share here that I have regular readers of my blog numbering in the dozens and that’s on a good day. Since I have been unable to figure out how to enable comments I haven’t had to worry about trolls (thug wannabes). BTW I have checked with the help boards and I am doing all the correct settings to no avail in regards to enabling comments.

            What I have noticed on the comments posted to other people that I follow is the level of outright threats made in addition to all the name calling. I follow both conservative and liberal posts, Conservatives without a doubt own the low ground when it comes to threats, intimidations, thuggishness and all around ugliness. The same holds true with email that I have received over the years when I circulated in conservative circles. During the Obama years the amount of outright racist email that I received was phenomenal.

            So, why am I sharing this now? Whenever I mention Putin Russia shows up in my tracking statistics. (Probably a bot.) I’m too small potatoes to mess with. My following isn’t big enough and my writing isn’t strong enough.

             And yes foreign governments are active and involved in our country with China and Russia both being very active—especially when Trump was in office.

            I waver when it comes to doing things that will boost my readership. Why invite the ugliness of the world in? This is especially true as we observe daily the purges the Republican Party enacts against anyone that speaks out against glorious leader and his policies of hate.

            Given the seriousness of what’s going on in the world though I will probably continue to ‘write out’ from my little corner of the internet.

            Now on to a hodge-podge of comments.

~~~

Grab bag

~~~

Bullseye

            There is an article from The Atlantic titled “The Bad Guys Are Winning” by Anne Applebaum. The piece is probably behind a paywall so the link won’t do much good. It’s an excellent article. Here’s the link just in case. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/12/the-autocrats-are-winning/620526/ It’s a well-researched, well-thought-out half hour read.

            The gist of the article is about authoritarians being on the rise worldwide and that it isn’t by accident. Men like Putin, Lukashenko, Xi, Maduro, Erdogan, Un, Burmese Junta, MBS, Santos, Akhundzada, Bolsonaro, Khamenei, and so on. The list would be waaaayyy too long for my purposes. I didn’t bother listing their country by their name. Keep in mind that these men are just the tip of the iceberg. They are supported by a cabal of wealthy, make that ultra-wealthy, elite. They “govern” through fear, intimidation and acting upon their threats by those that benefit through their association with them.

Ex-President Trump seeks to join this crowd.

~~~

Fascism

            Before WW2 there was a pro-Nazi movement within the continental United States. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/americans-hold-nazi-rally-in-madison-square-garden

They’re back.

~~~

SAP PAC!

            Know what SAP stands for? It’s Trump’s PAC. It stands for Save America PAC. It’s a profit center started by Trump to funnel SAP money into his pockets. His family as well but mostly his.  Trump supporters have a wonderful opportunity to be SAP donors.

Can’t make this stuff up.

~~~

Defeat from the jaws of Victory

            It’s kind of amazing really. Democrats manage to do this on a regular basis. Replace a megalomaniac narcissistic wannabe dictator that staged a coup with a good decent honorable man and then fight amongst themselves gaining all the negative press that they can right before critical elections and take a drubbing at the polls.

            President Biden managed to tank his favorability rating after saving countless lives through his handling of the pandemic and get negative ratings for his handling of the pandemic at the same time while Republicans do everything within their power to make the pandemic worse.

Impressive.

~~~

Practice test

            Remember in school when we would be given a practice test to help us prepare for the real test? The current pandemic (with its relatively low mortality rate) was like the practice test, except that there were, are, and will continue to be real world consequences. It’s a test that has cost us 770,000 lives so far and we still have a ways to go. We could hit 800,000 by the end of the year. The real test will be a really bad pandemic with a high mortality rate.

We have already learned some things though:

            Vaccines work.

            Masks work.

            Social distancing works.

            Ivermectin doesn’t work.

            Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work.

            Drinking bleach doesn’t work.

            Ignorance knows no bounds.

We failed this test.

~~~

Hail Mary Vaccine

            I watched a video of an ER nurse saying that she wasn’t going to take the vaccine because she felt that it was rushed too fast. She said that after witnessing deaths from Covid 19 firsthand.

            One of the reasons if not the main reason that so many vaccines were developed so quickly is that the corona virus was already well known and studied. Several breakthrough technologies have been developed over the years that made rapid development of effective vaccines possible.

Science.

            It also helps that a couple of billion vaccine doses have been administered with adverse reactions kept to 4 decimal points. Not unusual results for a vaccine. We were fortunate to have enough months available for vaccines to be tested in target populations. This wasn’t fortunate for all those that died while waiting for the trials to finish.

            These weren’t ‘Hail Mary’ vaccines. Such a vaccine is what would be necessary for a virus moving through a population so quickly affecting everyone exposed and that acted fast enough to kill people within hours. The kind of virus that has people dropping dead in the streets. A virus that didn’t leave enough time for testing other than in a lab. A virus that violates non-existent constitutional rights.

A species-ending virus.

~~~

Christian Sharia

            Remember when the Evangelical Party and Republicans went around states warning that Muslims were going to impose sharia law here in the United States? Just Google “Republican Sharia Opposition” and go trippin’ back to 2011. It was a totally made up threat but that didn’t stop their base from going totally off their nut about it. Republican leaders went on stages across the country declaring their opposition to sharia law being implemented in our great nation.

            Now ex-convict pardoned by Trump General Flynn has come out and said the quiet part out loud. He said that our nation needs one religion. This is what the Evangelical Party and Republicans have been saying all along. When they say they want prayer in school they mean Christian prayer. When they say “One nation under God” they mean a Christian god. They want a faux theocracy governed by a dictator. Then they can throw abortion seeking women in jail and try those that have had abortions for murder.

             Will they fulfill the desires of their black hearts?

They’re close. Very close. Too close.

~~~

The Beast

 

The Beast is awake now

For everyone

                                    to see

It sees itself as well

And admires what it isn’t

It preens.

It attracts,

it is.

 

The Beast is hungry

~~~

To the movies

            When my wife is gone I like to watch shoot ‘em ups. According to that little disclaimer that proceeds a movie before it’s watched making a copy if caught by the FBI is punishable with up to 5 years in jail and a $250,000 fine. Seditionists attempting a coup by storming the Capitol and trying to overturn the election have been given zero time and a $500 fine. Good thing that they didn’t try to illegally copy any movies while they were in there.

They’d really be in trouble then.

~~~

Reap what they sew

            I watched a video of Senator Lindsey Graham addressing a crowd of supporters where he told them that he had got a vaccine and said that they should think about getting one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i12qBRhtwEI  Hoo boy! For what it’s worth Trump got booed at his own rally for suggesting that people vaccinate.

            These people believe the conspiracy theories that they have been fed by the Republican and Evangelical Parties for the last couple of decades. They do NOT operate in the real world. They believe that they have the constitutional right to endanger and kill others in the name of liberty. They revel in their ignorance. They threaten just like they have been taught. They want to overthrow our democracy for not being in their anti-mask, anti-vaccine, anti-Muslim, anti-brown people anti-science, anti-government image.

            Elected officials and leaders of the Republican Party play to this base. These people appreciate the name calling thuggery. It’s why so many conservatives don’t talk about getting vaccinated willingly. They are in the minority of their party. This is why they don’t voice negative opinions about Trump or what he does. They don’t want to alienate HIS base. The Republican Party suffers from…

…too much base.

Book Review: Unclobber by Colby Martin

 

Coming out.

            Colby Martin presents insightful ways to deal with what are commonly called the “clobber” passages in the bible. He does this in the even numbered chapters of the book. In the odd numbered chapters he tells of his personal struggles in life because of his changing alignment in getting his real life to reflect his spiritual journey. He shares the personal costs and trials that his coming out of the closet theologically brought to his family and friends. It’s thought provoking and challenging but one doesn’t need to be an academic to understand what he’s saying.

             If you’re a hard core member of the Evangelical Party or your mind is already made up about LGBTQIA+ people and you aren’t about to be dissuaded this book isn’t for you. It’ll just make you mad. I made it a point to read critiques from a number of conservative reviews and they were what I expected. One day I hope that they will surprise me and deal with the world from a position of Love rather than punishment and hate.

I won’t hold my breath.

Short list.

            And what are those clobber passages? Here’s a list of those verses for folks that like lists and bullet points. (I know I do!)

• Genesis 19:1-38
• Leviticus 18:22 & 20:13
• Romans 1:26-27
• 1 Corinthians 6:9-11
• 1 Timothy 1:9-10

            It seems like if homosexuality is such a big deal, there should be more verses than that on the subject out of the over 31,000 verses that are in the bible but there you are. If you throw in marriage there would be more, but Colby Martin deals just with the issue of homosexuality in the bible.

            I have read other papers dealing with the clobber passages and they weren’t nearly as easy to read as the analyses presented in this book. Not only were they easy to read but they made sense. If your mind is open on the subject this is an excellent book to read. If nothing else seeds will be planted that things aren’t quite as cut and dried as some would have us believe. After all we’re dealing with interpretations of text from an ancient language.

It’s all Greek to me.