Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Good morning on CaturSaturday March 30, 2024, cat shabbos, the penultimate day of the month, and National Hot Chicken Day. By “hot,” they mean “very spicy”: this form of incendiary pullet is well known in Nashville, Tennessee, where Prince’s Hot Chicken is its Mecca. The menu is here, and by no means should you ever get “XXX hot”.
Hot chicken (or Nashville hot chicken) is a type of fried chicken that is a local specialty of Nashville, Tennessee, in the United States. In its typical preparation, it is a portion of breast, thigh or wing that has been marinated in a water-based blend of seasoning, floured, fried and finally covered in a paste or sauce that has been spiced with cayenne pepper. This method of preparation originates within African American communities in the Southern United States. A richly pigmented seasoning paste gives the fried chicken its reddish hue. Spice blends, preparation methods and heat intensity vary from recipe to recipe or depending on the chef.
It is served atop slices of white bread with pickle chips. It is both the application of a spicy paste and the presentation that differentiates it from similar dishes, such as Buffalo wings.
Here’s a sample from Prince’s. Sadly, I’ve been to Nashville only once, and didn’t have the chance to eat it. Soon, I hope!
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 30 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*According to the NYT, Israel has attacked Syria, going after Iranian backed militia and Hezbollah, but this is in response to those groups having fired missiles at Israel after October 7 (Israel doesn’t strike first in such cases). I’m not sure whether the “militia” constitutes al-Assad’s army or is a freelance body like the Wagner group.
Airstrikes near the northern Syrian city of Aleppo early Friday killed a number of soldiers, Syria’s state news media and an independent organization reported, in what appeared to be one of the biggest Israeli attacks in the country in years.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group that tracks the war in Syria, said that the overnight strikes killed at least 44 people — at least 36 Syrian soldiers, seven members of the Lebanese group Hezbollah and one member of a pro-Iranian militia — and that the toll could rise. The group said the attack appeared to have hit multiple targets, including a weapons depot belonging to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia that also has a presence in Syria.
Israel’s military did not immediately comment on the strikes, but it has previously acknowledged carrying out hundreds of assaults on Iran-linked targets in Syria. Iran supports and arms a network of proxy militias that have been fighting with Israel, including Hamas — whose political leader was in Iran for high-level meetings this week — and other Palestinian groups.
Attacks across borders have escalated since Israel’s intense aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack, in a sign of the rising tensions in the region.
The Israeli military said this month that its forces had struck more than 4,500 Hezbollah targets in Syria and Lebanon in that time period, assaults that it said had killed over 300 Hezbollah members, though that could not be independently confirmed. Hezbollah’s official website and spokesman said that “more than 200” of its fighters had been killed to date.
And remember, a war against Hezbollah to the north is looming; I hear rumors that Israel is conducting training exercises in the northern part of their country, perhaps anticipating a genuine war. That would surely stretch Israel’s military capabilities to their limit.
*You may not know that ultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredi Jews) have been exempted for years from being drafted into the Israeli military on religious grounds. They have to study their Torah and Talmud! Not only that, but they get a stipend while they’re studying! This, of course, is incompatible with a secular society, which is what Israel is officially, and so the government has finally eliminated this advantage accruing to the Haredim.
In a step that could have deep political and societal ramifications, the High Court of Justice issued an interim order Thursday evening barring the government from providing funds to ultra-Orthodox yeshivas for students eligible for IDF enlistment — as the legal framework for deferring their military service will no longer exist.
A government resolution from June 2023 instructing the IDF to temporarily not draft Haredi students despite the expiration of a law governing the matter will itself expire at midnight on March 31.
The court decision, which goes into effect April 1, comes after the government delayed for days the submission of a proposal to the court for plans to increase ultra-Orthodox military enlistment, and constitutes a sharp indication from the judges that their patience with repeated attempts to put off decisions on the matter is finally running out.
The political battle over enlistment has thrown Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition into disarray, with National Unity’s Benny Gantz threatening to bolt if the Knesset passes a bill allowing blanket exemptions to remain — even if it does satisfy the court — while the Haredim have said they will quit if the government fails to pass legislation to prevent the draft.
Haredi parties lambasted the High Court’s decision, with the head of United Torah Judaism, Housing and Construction Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf, describing it as constituting “severe harm to those who toil in Torah” and “a stain and a disgrace.”
. . . By March 31, the government was supposed to have found a way to comply with a court ruling from 2017, which determined blanket military service exemptions for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students to be discriminatory and illegal. But it told the court in February it had been unable to do so because of the October 7 atrocities and the outbreak of war with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Now there is an alternative service program, called Sherut Leumi, for conscientious objectors and those who don’t qualify for the military, and I presume that the Haredim might be able to avoid the army that way, but they can’t avoid service. The program, says Wikipedia, was designed mostly for young women:
The majority who receive an exemption from the obligatory conscription in Israel are Jewish women from the Religious Zionist sector, and they receive it by declaring religious observance, as they maintain that a large number of religious observances for women cannot be upheld in the military, such as dress codes to keep modest in Judaism. However, there are also a small number of men who serve in Sherut Leumi.
Arab Israelis are also exempt from mandatory service because of a perceived conflict of interest, though many do decide to serve. That I can live with, but I see no reason for Haredim to be exempt from either the military or alternative service given that nobody else is. It’s an unwarranted truckling to religion.
*As always, I enclose three items from the incomparable Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary on the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: Make American pray again” (reference is, of course, to the Bible Trump is selling.
→ Mexico enjoying the upper hand: With docile, slightly senile Biden in office and his extremely sharp Open Borders Now staff running the border with ruthless efficiency (i.e., always open, 24/7, jobs lined up at the factories that fired all their subversive, Trump-curious American workers), Mexico realizes that it’s in a rare and very special position: that of the upper hand. Mexico can finally start to dream a little dream, one in which American taxpayers not only take anyone in Mexico who wants to move north but also pay a lot of cash to the area around Mexico and also embrace all the corrupt communist regimes nearby.
The longer I consider this, the more I think Mexico is right and we need to go even further: the solution is to eliminate the border between America and Mexico. What am I talking about? I’m talking about the true open border: America taking over Mexico. I’m talking about old-fashioned land expansion. If the border is so cruel, then how about we absorb that nation like an amoeba, take their beaches, make their rich pay taxes to us, and put Texas in charge of the transition. Consider it!
→ Oh yeah, we told Iran who’s boss this time: In an effort to combat toxic masculinity, our foreign policy and military leaders have adopted my preferred parental method of conflict escalation: exhausted annoyance. Here’s our real-life secretary of state, Antony Blinken, speaking about the Houthi attacks: “We would like to see Iran exert the influence that it has, because it’s the primary supplier to the Houthis of weapons, of information, of technology. We would like to see them tell the Houthis to stop.” I’m not counting, but I did get the baby the last two times in the middle of the night. Antony Blinken has done the dishes a lot this week and it would be really nice if someone else did them tonight. And not to point fingers, but to point one, maybe Iran could stop dropping bombs. In other words, our secretary of state’s big military move this week is literally to ask Iran nicely to stop doing proxy war against us. (Where are you, Hillary, my president, my war queen? My scary mom? You would never.)
I don’t understand Nellie’s overweening admiration for Hillary, though I did vote for her. However, Blinken is an idiot. But I digress. . .
→ I love Kamala for doing this: Vice President Kamala Harris went to Puerto Rico and the native Puerto Ricans sang a sweet song to her. So she clapped and danced to show her appreciation of their local ditty. It turns out that it was a protest song. An aide whispered something, and our vice president stopped dancing.
The song: “We want to know, Kamala, what did you come here for? We want to know what you think of the colony.” And: “Long live Free Palestine and Haiti, too.” And: “We want to see if you’re going to talk about Law 60 or about the fiscal control board,” which doesn’t roll off the tongue but whatever. One local held a sign that said “Kamala Harris War Criminal.” Another sign said that America was “genocidal.”
The conservative press pretended this was some big gaffe, since Kamala was smiling and laughing and didn’t read the situation. But the only gaffe was that Kamala stopped clapping along at all. Puerto Rico relies entirely on American generosity. The protest is funny! Kamala, I’ve come the whole way around on you.
*In his latest piece, “The intensification of Christianism,” Andrew Sullivan calls out the extreme right for what he calls the corruption of Christianity. While I find it hard to agree that any religion is “corrupted” by extremism, for extreme Christianity is no more or less “true” than liberal Christianity, it’s clear that right-wing Christians seem off the rails.
If you thought there would ever come a time when evangelical Christians might draw the line at the Orange Herod’s antics, surely “the only Bible endorsed by President Trump!” for $59.99 a pop might have qualified. But apparently not, as we have come to accept. He’s getting a cut, of course — not that that would trouble Joel Osteen and his “prosperity Christians.” And Trump’s pitch is the familiar melange of lies and graft: “All Americans need a Bible in their home and I have [pause to acknowledge lie] many. It’s my favorite book” of all the countless books he has never read. For added value, it includes a “handwritten chorus to ‘God Bless the USA’ by Lee Greenwood,” alongside a copy of the US Constitution. As if the Almighty is a Republican.
. . .When I first wrote about “Christianism,” I saw it as a politicized version of Christianity, a form of theocratically-motivated illiberalism. It still is, of course, and now the guiding philosophy of, for example, the Heritage Foundation. And the fusion of religion and politics is a potent and volatile thing, as the Founders well understood. Hence my concern about George W Bush’s desire to place a prohibition on gay marriage as an amendment to the very Constitution of the United States.
But the current iteration — a new intensification — is more radical. It’s an explicit fusion of a particular strand of Christianity with the identity of the entire country and the transformation of a secular politician into an anointed instrument of God’s will. It makes voting an act of religious faithfulness, not democratic deliberation.
And there you have it. The constant refusal of mainstream and online conservatives to break from the ever-crazier fringes to their right is an exact mirror of the cowardly toleration of the woke fanatics on the center-left. But while the left now draws on the energies of the new religion of neoracism, the right still has the depth and range of Christianity to plunder, use and abuse its opponents with. And as the extremes strengthen, it was only a matter of time, I suppose, before the Trump right embraced old-school anti-Semitism, just as the woke left has now adopted the new-school anti-Semitism of neoracism.
And it’s not just Trump, either:
The departure of Candace Owens from Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire is not just a minor media story. It marks a rapid curdling on the extreme right. Owens has responded to the Gaza War with familiar tropes of a Jewish cabal calling the shots, and in the heat of online battle she deployed the term “Christ is King,” a reference to a minor part of Christian doctrine and a Catholic feast day. Andrew Klavan, another online conservative, called this out as an anti-Semitic dog-whistle — and before you knew it, X was aflame with #ChristIsKing and crude Jew hatred, led by Trump’s former dinner companion, the execrable Nick Fuentes. One of the ramparts of neoconservatism was the shift in the 1980s to refer to the “Judeo-Christian tradition” with respect to the West — a way to mute any tensions between evangelical Christians and Jewish intellectuals. It was always a bit of a sham — Jesus was either the Messiah or he wasn’t — but it worked in that Bill-Kristol-style, principle-free, whatever-gets-us-elected way.
Here’s Owens on some of her anti-Jewish rants (interspersed in the video). By the way, Ben Shapiro finally fired her.
Owens is a bull-goose looney. And the relatively pious Sullivan (I still can’t understand why he’s a believer) is worried. We’re all worried, but for not for the same reasons. It is a Time to Worry.
The nationalism and racialism inherent in Christianism is, of course, profoundly blasphemous. But if you can persuade enough people that their very existence as a culture is at stake, which Trump has successfully done, then the blasphemy becomes part of the point, proof of your dedication to the cause. Watching all this rapidly unfold on Elon Musk’s X — which now shows me endless loops of racial crime videos and ever more graphs of racial IQ bell curves — is like watching the right radicalize and polarize itself in real time. The fervor here is as intense as that of the woke, because it is rooted in misplaced religious zeal.
. . . . I pray this week that this tradition survives this awful era, as it has done in some of the more hideous episodes of the past. But I have rarely felt less hope behind that prayer. Or sensed so much darkness coming toward us.
Now we know what Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who predicts whether an early spring will arrive each Feb. 2, does on the other 364 days.
The Pennsylvania group that handles Phil, and his groundhog wife, Phyllis, says the couple have become parents.
The Punxsutawney Groundhog Club said in a Facebook post Wednesday that Phyllis recently gave birth to two healthy babies. It did not specify their sex or give names for either one.
“We’re pleased to announce that Punxsutawney Phil has had his first children; we believe there are two baby groundhogs and that Phil and Phyllis have started a family,” Thomas Dunkel, president of a tuxedo-clad group called The Inner Circle that carries on the groundhog tradition each year, said at a news conference Wednesday. “We’re pleased about it, and I talked to Phil with my cane, which lets me speak Groundhogese, and Phil could not be more excited that he started a family.”
Dunkel said a club member discovered the babies Saturday when he came to feed their parents fruit and vegetables.
Phil emerges from his burrow each year the morning of Feb. 2. If he sees his shadow, tradition holds, there will be six more weeks of winter. This year, he did not see his shadow, heralding an early spring.
Here they are, posted only two days ago:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a question, one that I also have:
Hili: Why do so many people think that when you criticize the Left you are uncritical towards the Right?
A: I don’t know but I have an impression that the higher the education the stronger the groupthink.\
In Polish:
Hili: Dlaczego tak wielu sądzi, że jak krytykujesz lewicę to jesteś bezkrytyczny wobec prawicy?
Ja: Nie wiem, ale mam wrażenie, że im wyższe wykształcenie, tym silniejsze myślenie stadne.
From Masih; this brave woman lost not her eye, but her entire arm, shot off by Iranian police during a protest against the regime. Sound up, and there are English subtitles:
I'm thrilled to announce that one of my personal heroes has joined our campaign, #UnitedAgainstGenderApartheid. A poignant plea to the leaders of the free world from a courageous young Iranian woman, Sima Moradbeygi, who lost her arm to over 300 shotgun pellets fired by security… pic.twitter.com/w2bzRkwdDH
Berkeley, at least according to this, seems to be a hotbed of hatred, antisemitism, and anger. Look at those people!
WATCH: Yesterday, the Berkeley City Council held its final meeting before a one-month recess. The agenda of the meeting included an item on marking Holocaust Remembrance Day and funding educational programs around this commemoration. There was nothing on the meeting agenda about… pic.twitter.com/dQdmmuI2Ad
A scene from the same meeting at Berkeley as above. I’ve never gotten so much engagement on a tweet as this one that I reposted. And, surprisingly, most of the comments were favorable, though I blocked three haters.
This is what we've come to: vicious ideologues heckling a old Holocaust survivor who was in Dachau, all for supporting Berkeley's Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation. https://t.co/8MyIYkO6GM
Tweets from Matthew. This is like Honey adopting 7 of Dorothy’s babies, but this mother takes on another ten!
These ten ducklings were found orphaned, so they were brought to a duck named Stella, who had just hatched nine of her own two weeks earlier. She immediately claimed the ten as her own. 🦆❤️ pic.twitter.com/DYVzGxi5ov
The church in Russia was supposedly an important target for communist revolution.
The only book I have found so far is from a U.S. perspective (hasty copy/paste):
Series :
Communism in American Life
Harcourt, Brace, & World, New York
Communism & The Churches
Ralph Lord Roy
1960
429 pages w/ Bibliographic essay, notes, and index.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 60-10941
Also a Gramsci paraphrased quote is that Socialism is the religion that has to replace Christianity. But I don’t have the book ref.
… what I’m suggesting is, like an appendix perhaps, religion is a part of society, and – say what we will – churches have been infected with the disease of communism before.
+1
On this day:
1815 – Joachim Murat issues the Rimini Proclamation, among the earliest calls for Italian unification.
1818 – Physicist Augustin Fresnel reads a memoir on optical rotation to the French Academy of Sciences, reporting that when polarized light is “depolarized” by a Fresnel rhomb, its properties are preserved in any subsequent passage through an optically-rotating crystal or liquid.
1822 – The Florida Territory is created in the United States.
1842 – Ether anesthesia is used for the first time, in an operation by the American surgeon Dr. Crawford Long.
1856 – The Treaty of Paris is signed, ending the Crimean War.
1861 – Discovery of the chemical elements: Sir William Crookes announces his discovery of thallium.
1867 – Alaska is purchased from Russia for $7.2 million, about two cents/acre ($4.19/km2), by United States Secretary of State William H. Seward.
1870 – Texas is readmitted to the United States Congress following Reconstruction.
1899 – German Society of Chemistry issues an invitation to other national scientific organizations to appoint delegates to the International Committee on Atomic Weights.
1900 – Archaeologists in Knossos, Crete, discover the first clay tablet with hieroglyphic writing in a script later called Linear B.
1939 – The Heinkel He 100 fighter sets a world airspeed record of 463 mph (745 km/h).
1944 – Out of 795 Lancasters, Halifaxes and Mosquitos sent to attack Nuremberg, 95 bombers do not return, making it the largest RAF Bomber Command loss of the war.
1945 – World War II: Soviet forces invade Austria and capture Vienna. Polish and Soviet forces liberate Danzig.
1949 – Cold War: A riot breaks out in Austurvöllur square in Reykjavík, when Iceland joins NATO.
1959 – Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, flees Tibet for India.
1979 – Airey Neave, a British Member of Parliament (MP), is killed by a car bomb as he exits the Palace of Westminster. The Irish National Liberation Army claims responsibility.
1981 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest outside a Washington, D.C., hotel by John Hinckley, Jr.; three others are wounded in the same incident.
2017 – SpaceX conducts the world’s first reflight of an orbital class rocket.
2023 – Donald Trump becomes the first former United States president to be indicted by a grand jury.
Births:
1432 – Mehmed the Conqueror, Ottoman sultan (d. 1481).
1632 – John Proctor, farmer hanged for witchcraft in the Salem witch trials (d. 1692).
1746 – Francisco Goya, Spanish-French painter and sculptor (d. 1828).
1811 – Robert Bunsen, German chemist and academic (d. 1899).
1820 – Anna Sewell, English author (d. 1878). [Her 1877 novel Black Beauty, her only published work, is considered one of the top ten best-selling novels for children, although the author intended the work for an adult audience. Sewell died only five months after Black Beauty‘s publication, having lived long enough to see her only novel become a success.]
1844 – Paul Verlaine, French poet (d. 1896).
1853 – Vincent van Gogh, Dutch-French painter and illustrator (d. 1890).
1863 – Mary Calkins, American philosopher and psychologist (d. 1930). [Her work informed theory and research of memory, dreams and the self. In 1903, Calkins was the twelfth in a listing of fifty psychologists with the most merit, chosen by her peers. Calkins was refused a Ph.D. by Harvard University because of her gender.]
1882 – Melanie Klein, Austrian-English psychologist and author (d. 1960).
1895 – Carl Lutz, Swiss vice-consul to Hungary during WWII, credited with saving over 62,000 Jews (d. 1975).
1905 – Albert Pierrepoint, English hangman (d. 1992).
1910 – Józef Marcinkiewicz, Polish soldier, mathematician, and academic (d. 1940). [Known for the Marcinkiewicz multiplier theorem, Marcinkiewicz interpolation theorem, and Marcinkiewicz–Zygmund inequality. He was a prisoner of war when it is believed he was murdered, aged 30, by the NKVD in Kharkiv. His parents, to whom he gave his manuscripts before the beginning of World War II, were transported to the Soviet Union in 1940 and later died of hunger in a camp. The manuscripts were never found.]
1913 – Frankie Laine, American singer-songwriter (d. 2007).
1914 – Sonny Boy Williamson I, American singer-songwriter and harmonica player (d. 1948).
1926 – Ingvar Kamprad, Swedish businessman, founded IKEA (d. 2018).
1928 – Tom Sharpe, English-Spanish author and educator (d. 2013). [He was an enthusiastic user of a little-known word processing package called VizaWrite, which I was supposed to give technical support for back in the ’80s.]
1930 – Rolf Harris, Australian singer-songwriter (d. 2023). [And convicted sex offender for his assaults on four underage girls.]
1937 – Warren Beatty, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter.
1938 – Klaus Schwab, German economist and engineer, founded the World Economic Forum.
1945 – Eric Clapton, English guitarist and singer-songwriter.
1948 – Eddie Jordan, Irish racing driver and team owner, founded Jordan Grand Prix.
1950 – Robbie Coltrane, Scottish actor (d. 2022).
1962 – MC Hammer, American rapper and actor.
1964 – Tracy Chapman, American singer-songwriter and guitarist.
1968 – Celine Dion, Canadian singer-songwriter.
1979 – Norah Jones, American singer-songwriter and pianist.
One lives in the hope of becoming a memory. (Antonio Porchia):
1526 – Konrad Mutian, German humanist (b. 1471).
1783 – William Hunter, Scottish anatomist and physician (b. 1718).
1806 – Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (b. 1757). [Famous for her charisma, political influence, beauty, unusual marital arrangement, love affairs, socializing, and notoriety for her gambling addiction, leading to an immense debt. She was the great-great-great-great aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales. Their lives, centuries apart, have been compared in tragedy.]
1842 – Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, French painter (b. 1755). [Created a name for herself in Ancien Régime society by serving as the portrait painter to Marie Antoinette. She enjoyed the patronage of European aristocrats, actors, and writers, and was elected to art academies in ten cities. Some famous contemporary artists, such as Joshua Reynolds, viewed her as one of the greatest portraitists of her time, comparing her with the old Dutch masters.]
1925 – Rudolf Steiner, Austrian philosopher and author (b. 1861).
1965 – Philip Showalter Hench, American physician and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1896). [Along with his Mayo Clinic co-worker Edward Calvin Kendall and Swiss chemist Tadeus Reichstein, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1950 for the discovery of the hormone cortisone, and its application for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.]
1986 – James Cagney, American actor and dancer (b. 1899).
2004 – Alistair Cooke, English-American journalist and author (b. 1908).
2012 – Janet Anderson Perkin, Canadian baseball player and curler (b. 1921).
2013 – Phil Ramone, South African-American songwriter and producer, co-founded A & R Recording (b. 1934).
2014 – Alice Raftary, American educator of blind adults (b. 1927). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]
2015 – Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld, Dutch astronomer and academic (b. 1921).
2018 – Bill Maynard, English actor (b. 1928).
2020 – Bill Withers, American singer-songwriter (b. 1938). [Four years ago already?!]
2021 – G. Gordon Liddy, chief operative in the Watergate scandal (b. 1930).
Woman of the Day:
[Text from Wikipedia]
Alice Geisler Raftary (born September 2, 1927, died on this day in 2014) was an American educator, based in Detroit, who specialized in education and rehabilitation for newly-blind adults.
Alice Therese Geisler was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Anthony Jerome Geisler and Florence M. Geisler. Her father was a plumber, and president of the Michigan Association of Plumbing Contractors.
Geisler earned a bachelor’s degree in nutrition at Marygrove College in 1949. She had vision issues from her youth, from macular degeneration, and became legally blind in 1960. “I knew that I would do something that would insure that none of my children would ever think that blindness must ruin their lives,” she told an interviewer in 2014.
Geisler married Raymond H. Raftary in 1950 and returned to Marygrove as a married mother of eight, where she earned a master’s degree in education in 1967, focusing on blindness and rehabilitation.
She became a rehabilitation teacher at the Greater Detroit Society for the Blind’s Upshaw Institute in 1968, was promoted to supervisory and coordinating jobs, and eventually became the institute’s associate director. She spoke at conferences and wrote promotional and educational materials for the Upshaw Institute, including an award-winning filmstrip, “Valentines for Grandpa Raub” (1980). “Helping people to progress from hopelessness to confidence and competence is a thrill and a joy,” she explained.
In 1982, Raftary received an award from the American Association of Workers for the Blind. Other awards for Raftary came from the Michigan chapter of the Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired in 1991, and the Charlyn Allen Award from the Mid-America Conference of Rehabilitation Teachers (MACRT) in 1992. In 2002, she was inducted into the American Printing House for the Blind’s Hall of Fame. She was also named a distinguished alumnus of Marygrove College.
Alice Raftary was a widow when she died in 2014, aged 86 years, in Detroit. The Association of Vision Rehabilitation Therapists established an award in her name, for emerging leaders in the field.
Christianity not only doesn’t make its followers good, it makes them bad – Trump supporters. It’s a bad influence.
I am disconcerted by this paragraph in the post:
Quote:
“The nationalism and racialism inherent in Christianism is, of course, profoundly blasphemous. But if you can persuade enough people that their very existence as a culture is at stake, which Trump has successfully done, then the blasphemy becomes part of the point, proof of your dedication to the cause. Watching all this rapidly unfold on Elon Musk’s X — which now shows me endless loops of racial crime videos and ever more graphs of racial IQ bell curves — is like watching the right radicalize and polarize itself in real time.”
Nationalism and racialism is inherent in Christianity? I thought “Love Your Neighbor As Yourself” was advocating exactly the opposite of the multiple “isms” we cling to – mostly to make a self-serving point.
Also, I find “Elon Musk’s X” far more palatable than its predecessor, the “bird”. True, X has more insane postulations (Alex Jones for example) and disturbing conspiracies running rampant through its veins than did the bird. But. it doesn’t clamp down on opinions that are reasoned and important. I can say -for example- that men/males should not be in female sports despite being called “hateful” or phobic. And you Jerry, can advocate for Israel despite being called a “Nazi”. Your opinion, along with (yes) all the other -not as thoughtful, nor reasoned- opinions are permitted to stand. This particular programmatic paradigm represents the rights conferred by the 1st amendment far better than the “bird” (twitter) did. Community notes have been a brilliant addition. They do temper the more radical posts with checks – driven by public opinion/facts.
And we don’t need Trump (you give him too much credit) to convince us that western civilization is at a crossroads: when a young girl of 15 can get her breasts removed with the blessing of the American Pediatric Society (because she thought she was a boy) and Algebra is removed from school curriculums because a woke-PHD preached it was the best option for most students (except her own children of course) in California, when we have the binary and dimorphic nature of sex (in humans) questioned by “scientists”, when indigenous ways of knowing (God bless indigenous ways of knowing) are conflated with the empirical understanding of nature (science), when a man is toxic simply by virtue of being white, when elite universities lean heavily to antisemitism and plagiarism is found to be rampant among DEI hires (see Aaron Sibarium’s/Free Beacon findings), when millions of humans (and yes, they are tragic figures fleeing unsavory circumstances) are permitted to cross our borders with impunity and with no meaningful assimilation, yes, of course, I question the viability of western civilization. We all should.
We don’t need Trump to convince us:
“Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”
Civilizations can and do fall. It can happen.
Also, X represents a microcosm of America’s thinking; it, by no means represents the vast swathes of people who go about their business (as Atheists, Agnostics, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists or otherwise), living their lives, trying to live their lives. Doing their best.
Batya Ungar-Sargon’s book “Second Class” is an important work; worthy of a read. It speaks to the concerns of working class Americans who are not as obsessed about the various *ism* – certainly, not as much as we are. Many of these folk (including larger numbers of hispanics and an increasing number of black men) are turning to Trump not because he has convinced them that armageddon is at hand, but because they have nowhere else to turn and they can “see” (just as I can) what’s happening around them.
Like Islam, Christianity can be toxic, it depends on how a religion is practiced, for some (like many of the people I work with in Africa) religion can bring peace and comfort and breed goodwill, for others these religions can represent a convenient vehicle to promulgate radicalism. Yes, an argument can be made that religions are inherently toxic (I agree), an argument can -also- be made that Atheism is inherently nihilistic, and therefore -also- toxic because it breeds unconstrained “freedoms” that force “new religions/fantasies” to take the place of the old ones.
I think you misread Christianism as Christianity.
Thanks FX, I missed that.
Yes, that does make a difference.
“Second Class” sounds like an interesting read and you are correct about hispanics and blacks turning to Trump. There is a political/social realignment taking place in the US. “Civilizations can and do fall”. You said it. We’re witnessing that right here right now. The issues you raise are real indeed
Thanks Debi, I worry about Western Civilization and its ability to evolve (unscathed?) amidst the onslaught – from all sides.
Rosemary,
Andrew Sullivan, himself a Catholic of sorts, has used the term “Christianism” for nearly 20 years. Here is a piece where he introduces it.
Regarding Twitter / X: I quit reading Twitter when Elon Musk scrambled the tweets so that lurkers like me couldn’t follow anybody’s daily posts without setting up an account. I have recently given in and opened an account, primarily to judge for myself the changes he has made. I still find much of it to be mindless and repetitive, but no more so than before. I can already see how those who are authoritarian-minded and want to control “misinformation” and its various permutations would abhor it. The people I cannot understand over these last few years are those who, while not being ideologically driven themselves, seem entirely comfortable giving governments and corporations the power to curate their news, opinions, and information. The apparent docility, conformity, and compliance with authority among many in our credentialed class still amazes me, even though I have long suspected that is an unfortunate byproduct of professions in which the chief currency for advancement is praise of peers.
Thanks Doug, I missed that: “Christianity vs Christianism”; yes, that does -indeed- make a difference.
I was also thinking -this AM- that Christianity has experienced a form of reformation -via the the new testament- which Islam hasn’t; a case can be made that Islam needs a reformation, moderate muslims need a faith that leans to moderation more than it does to fundamentalism. It’s profoundly worrisome to witness the current unravelling in London and Scotland, we are privileged to be subject to the 1st amendment in the US.
Thanks for the link. Marked for reading.
I feel the same as you do about twitter. It can be mindless, and, often ugly, but no worse than before. In my estimate somewhat *better* because “taboo” topics (specifically gender ideology) can be discussed at will without a ban – of course the “new openness” breeds and amplifies conspiracy theories and mis/dis/mal/information as well. Still, I would rather have today’s twitter than the authoritarian platform that was a proxy for various government entities to set social media policy and ban countless numbers of people who came to the conversation in good faith.
Thanks for the catch.
In this column you had the young Iranian woman injured in fighting for her rights followed by the elderly Holocaust survivor being heckled. They are connected.
Congratulation to the new parents, Phil and Phyllis!
And, Candace Owens, is three screws short of a nut. Just imagine how looney her followers must be.
So it’s clear now that the “Christ is King” noise is the intended reaction to the Woke Marxist provocations, in particular, the declaration from the White House that tomorrow, March 31st 2024 – Easter Sunday – is “Transgender Day of Visibility”.
This is 100% gnostic-hermetic cult action – read Paulo Freire’s explicit use of Easter for rebirth – transformation – into critical consciousness in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and maybe Politics of Education. Freire writes the word “Easter” over and over, and “rebirth”. Transformation is a core principle of Hermetic alchemy.
Churches are being intimidated into absorbing Woke Marxism in order to escape the political attack – which is to categorize them – dialectically, I wager – as “Christian Nationalism” (CN). CN is a previously nonexistent decoy religious sect (or whatever) synthesized by Andrew Seidel at the FFRF. In other words, an “op” or “psyop”. All the enthusiastic “Christ is King” noise promotes the destructive dialectical political warfare which will advance communism in the United States.
Addendum:
The White House first announced the “Transgender Day of Visibility” on March 31, 2021.
And
“The event was created by transgender activist Rachel Crandall of Michigan in 2009 […] The first International Transgender Day of Visibility was held on March 31, 2009.” (Source: Wikipedia).
Cute rabbit joke, but disappearing lettuce is most likely the work of a pocket gopher, have seen Thomomys do that.
The church in Russia was supposedly an important target for communist revolution.
The only book I have found so far is from a U.S. perspective (hasty copy/paste):
Series :
Communism in American Life
Harcourt, Brace, & World, New York
Communism & The Churches
Ralph Lord Roy
1960
429 pages w/ Bibliographic essay, notes, and index.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 60-10941
Also a Gramsci paraphrased quote is that Socialism is the religion that has to replace Christianity. But I don’t have the book ref.
… what I’m suggesting is, like an appendix perhaps, religion is a part of society, and – say what we will – churches have been infected with the disease of communism before.
+1
On this day:
1815 – Joachim Murat issues the Rimini Proclamation, among the earliest calls for Italian unification.
1818 – Physicist Augustin Fresnel reads a memoir on optical rotation to the French Academy of Sciences, reporting that when polarized light is “depolarized” by a Fresnel rhomb, its properties are preserved in any subsequent passage through an optically-rotating crystal or liquid.
1822 – The Florida Territory is created in the United States.
1842 – Ether anesthesia is used for the first time, in an operation by the American surgeon Dr. Crawford Long.
1856 – The Treaty of Paris is signed, ending the Crimean War.
1861 – Discovery of the chemical elements: Sir William Crookes announces his discovery of thallium.
1867 – Alaska is purchased from Russia for $7.2 million, about two cents/acre ($4.19/km2), by United States Secretary of State William H. Seward.
1870 – Texas is readmitted to the United States Congress following Reconstruction.
1899 – German Society of Chemistry issues an invitation to other national scientific organizations to appoint delegates to the International Committee on Atomic Weights.
1900 – Archaeologists in Knossos, Crete, discover the first clay tablet with hieroglyphic writing in a script later called Linear B.
1939 – The Heinkel He 100 fighter sets a world airspeed record of 463 mph (745 km/h).
1944 – Out of 795 Lancasters, Halifaxes and Mosquitos sent to attack Nuremberg, 95 bombers do not return, making it the largest RAF Bomber Command loss of the war.
1945 – World War II: Soviet forces invade Austria and capture Vienna. Polish and Soviet forces liberate Danzig.
1949 – Cold War: A riot breaks out in Austurvöllur square in Reykjavík, when Iceland joins NATO.
1959 – Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, flees Tibet for India.
1979 – Airey Neave, a British Member of Parliament (MP), is killed by a car bomb as he exits the Palace of Westminster. The Irish National Liberation Army claims responsibility.
1981 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest outside a Washington, D.C., hotel by John Hinckley, Jr.; three others are wounded in the same incident.
2017 – SpaceX conducts the world’s first reflight of an orbital class rocket.
2023 – Donald Trump becomes the first former United States president to be indicted by a grand jury.
Births:
1432 – Mehmed the Conqueror, Ottoman sultan (d. 1481).
1632 – John Proctor, farmer hanged for witchcraft in the Salem witch trials (d. 1692).
1746 – Francisco Goya, Spanish-French painter and sculptor (d. 1828).
1811 – Robert Bunsen, German chemist and academic (d. 1899).
1820 – Anna Sewell, English author (d. 1878). [Her 1877 novel Black Beauty, her only published work, is considered one of the top ten best-selling novels for children, although the author intended the work for an adult audience. Sewell died only five months after Black Beauty‘s publication, having lived long enough to see her only novel become a success.]
1844 – Paul Verlaine, French poet (d. 1896).
1853 – Vincent van Gogh, Dutch-French painter and illustrator (d. 1890).
1863 – Mary Calkins, American philosopher and psychologist (d. 1930). [Her work informed theory and research of memory, dreams and the self. In 1903, Calkins was the twelfth in a listing of fifty psychologists with the most merit, chosen by her peers. Calkins was refused a Ph.D. by Harvard University because of her gender.]
1882 – Melanie Klein, Austrian-English psychologist and author (d. 1960).
1895 – Carl Lutz, Swiss vice-consul to Hungary during WWII, credited with saving over 62,000 Jews (d. 1975).
1905 – Albert Pierrepoint, English hangman (d. 1992).
1910 – Józef Marcinkiewicz, Polish soldier, mathematician, and academic (d. 1940). [Known for the Marcinkiewicz multiplier theorem, Marcinkiewicz interpolation theorem, and Marcinkiewicz–Zygmund inequality. He was a prisoner of war when it is believed he was murdered, aged 30, by the NKVD in Kharkiv. His parents, to whom he gave his manuscripts before the beginning of World War II, were transported to the Soviet Union in 1940 and later died of hunger in a camp. The manuscripts were never found.]
1913 – Frankie Laine, American singer-songwriter (d. 2007).
1914 – Sonny Boy Williamson I, American singer-songwriter and harmonica player (d. 1948).
1926 – Ingvar Kamprad, Swedish businessman, founded IKEA (d. 2018).
1928 – Tom Sharpe, English-Spanish author and educator (d. 2013). [He was an enthusiastic user of a little-known word processing package called VizaWrite, which I was supposed to give technical support for back in the ’80s.]
1930 – Rolf Harris, Australian singer-songwriter (d. 2023). [And convicted sex offender for his assaults on four underage girls.]
1937 – Warren Beatty, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter.
1938 – Klaus Schwab, German economist and engineer, founded the World Economic Forum.
1945 – Eric Clapton, English guitarist and singer-songwriter.
1948 – Eddie Jordan, Irish racing driver and team owner, founded Jordan Grand Prix.
1950 – Robbie Coltrane, Scottish actor (d. 2022).
1962 – MC Hammer, American rapper and actor.
1964 – Tracy Chapman, American singer-songwriter and guitarist.
1968 – Celine Dion, Canadian singer-songwriter.
1979 – Norah Jones, American singer-songwriter and pianist.
One lives in the hope of becoming a memory. (Antonio Porchia):
1526 – Konrad Mutian, German humanist (b. 1471).
1783 – William Hunter, Scottish anatomist and physician (b. 1718).
1806 – Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (b. 1757). [Famous for her charisma, political influence, beauty, unusual marital arrangement, love affairs, socializing, and notoriety for her gambling addiction, leading to an immense debt. She was the great-great-great-great aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales. Their lives, centuries apart, have been compared in tragedy.]
1840 – Beau Brummell, English-French fashion designer (b. 1778).
1842 – Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, French painter (b. 1755). [Created a name for herself in Ancien Régime society by serving as the portrait painter to Marie Antoinette. She enjoyed the patronage of European aristocrats, actors, and writers, and was elected to art academies in ten cities. Some famous contemporary artists, such as Joshua Reynolds, viewed her as one of the greatest portraitists of her time, comparing her with the old Dutch masters.]
1925 – Rudolf Steiner, Austrian philosopher and author (b. 1861).
1943 – Maciej Aleksy Dawidowski, Polish sergeant; WWII resistance fighter (b. 1920).
1965 – Philip Showalter Hench, American physician and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1896). [Along with his Mayo Clinic co-worker Edward Calvin Kendall and Swiss chemist Tadeus Reichstein, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1950 for the discovery of the hormone cortisone, and its application for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.]
1981 – DeWitt Wallace, American publisher, co-founded Reader’s Digest (b. 1889).
1986 – James Cagney, American actor and dancer (b. 1899).
2004 – Alistair Cooke, English-American journalist and author (b. 1908).
2012 – Janet Anderson Perkin, Canadian baseball player and curler (b. 1921).
2013 – Phil Ramone, South African-American songwriter and producer, co-founded A & R Recording (b. 1934).
2014 – Alice Raftary, American educator of blind adults (b. 1927). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]
2015 – Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld, Dutch astronomer and academic (b. 1921).
2018 – Bill Maynard, English actor (b. 1928).
2020 – Bill Withers, American singer-songwriter (b. 1938). [Four years ago already?!]
2021 – G. Gordon Liddy, chief operative in the Watergate scandal (b. 1930).
Woman of the Day:
[Text from Wikipedia]
Alice Geisler Raftary (born September 2, 1927, died on this day in 2014) was an American educator, based in Detroit, who specialized in education and rehabilitation for newly-blind adults.
Alice Therese Geisler was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Anthony Jerome Geisler and Florence M. Geisler. Her father was a plumber, and president of the Michigan Association of Plumbing Contractors.
Geisler earned a bachelor’s degree in nutrition at Marygrove College in 1949. She had vision issues from her youth, from macular degeneration, and became legally blind in 1960. “I knew that I would do something that would insure that none of my children would ever think that blindness must ruin their lives,” she told an interviewer in 2014.
Geisler married Raymond H. Raftary in 1950 and returned to Marygrove as a married mother of eight, where she earned a master’s degree in education in 1967, focusing on blindness and rehabilitation.
She became a rehabilitation teacher at the Greater Detroit Society for the Blind’s Upshaw Institute in 1968, was promoted to supervisory and coordinating jobs, and eventually became the institute’s associate director. She spoke at conferences and wrote promotional and educational materials for the Upshaw Institute, including an award-winning filmstrip, “Valentines for Grandpa Raub” (1980). “Helping people to progress from hopelessness to confidence and competence is a thrill and a joy,” she explained.
In 1982, Raftary received an award from the American Association of Workers for the Blind. Other awards for Raftary came from the Michigan chapter of the Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired in 1991, and the Charlyn Allen Award from the Mid-America Conference of Rehabilitation Teachers (MACRT) in 1992. In 2002, she was inducted into the American Printing House for the Blind’s Hall of Fame. She was also named a distinguished alumnus of Marygrove College.
Alice Raftary was a widow when she died in 2014, aged 86 years, in Detroit. The Association of Vision Rehabilitation Therapists established an award in her name, for emerging leaders in the field.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Raftary
Christianity not only doesn’t make its followers good, it makes them bad – Trump supporters. It’s a bad influence.
I am disconcerted by this paragraph in the post:
Quote:
“The nationalism and racialism inherent in Christianism is, of course, profoundly blasphemous. But if you can persuade enough people that their very existence as a culture is at stake, which Trump has successfully done, then the blasphemy becomes part of the point, proof of your dedication to the cause. Watching all this rapidly unfold on Elon Musk’s X — which now shows me endless loops of racial crime videos and ever more graphs of racial IQ bell curves — is like watching the right radicalize and polarize itself in real time.”
Nationalism and racialism is inherent in Christianity? I thought “Love Your Neighbor As Yourself” was advocating exactly the opposite of the multiple “isms” we cling to – mostly to make a self-serving point.
Also, I find “Elon Musk’s X” far more palatable than its predecessor, the “bird”. True, X has more insane postulations (Alex Jones for example) and disturbing conspiracies running rampant through its veins than did the bird. But. it doesn’t clamp down on opinions that are reasoned and important. I can say -for example- that men/males should not be in female sports despite being called “hateful” or phobic. And you Jerry, can advocate for Israel despite being called a “Nazi”. Your opinion, along with (yes) all the other -not as thoughtful, nor reasoned- opinions are permitted to stand. This particular programmatic paradigm represents the rights conferred by the 1st amendment far better than the “bird” (twitter) did. Community notes have been a brilliant addition. They do temper the more radical posts with checks – driven by public opinion/facts.
And we don’t need Trump (you give him too much credit) to convince us that western civilization is at a crossroads: when a young girl of 15 can get her breasts removed with the blessing of the American Pediatric Society (because she thought she was a boy) and Algebra is removed from school curriculums because a woke-PHD preached it was the best option for most students (except her own children of course) in California, when we have the binary and dimorphic nature of sex (in humans) questioned by “scientists”, when indigenous ways of knowing (God bless indigenous ways of knowing) are conflated with the empirical understanding of nature (science), when a man is toxic simply by virtue of being white, when elite universities lean heavily to antisemitism and plagiarism is found to be rampant among DEI hires (see Aaron Sibarium’s/Free Beacon findings), when millions of humans (and yes, they are tragic figures fleeing unsavory circumstances) are permitted to cross our borders with impunity and with no meaningful assimilation, yes, of course, I question the viability of western civilization. We all should.
We don’t need Trump to convince us:
“Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”
Civilizations can and do fall. It can happen.
Also, X represents a microcosm of America’s thinking; it, by no means represents the vast swathes of people who go about their business (as Atheists, Agnostics, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists or otherwise), living their lives, trying to live their lives. Doing their best.
Batya Ungar-Sargon’s book “Second Class” is an important work; worthy of a read. It speaks to the concerns of working class Americans who are not as obsessed about the various *ism* – certainly, not as much as we are. Many of these folk (including larger numbers of hispanics and an increasing number of black men) are turning to Trump not because he has convinced them that armageddon is at hand, but because they have nowhere else to turn and they can “see” (just as I can) what’s happening around them.
Like Islam, Christianity can be toxic, it depends on how a religion is practiced, for some (like many of the people I work with in Africa) religion can bring peace and comfort and breed goodwill, for others these religions can represent a convenient vehicle to promulgate radicalism. Yes, an argument can be made that religions are inherently toxic (I agree), an argument can -also- be made that Atheism is inherently nihilistic, and therefore -also- toxic because it breeds unconstrained “freedoms” that force “new religions/fantasies” to take the place of the old ones.
I think you misread Christianism as Christianity.
Thanks FX, I missed that.
Yes, that does make a difference.
“Second Class” sounds like an interesting read and you are correct about hispanics and blacks turning to Trump. There is a political/social realignment taking place in the US. “Civilizations can and do fall”. You said it. We’re witnessing that right here right now. The issues you raise are real indeed
Thanks Debi, I worry about Western Civilization and its ability to evolve (unscathed?) amidst the onslaught – from all sides.
Rosemary,
Andrew Sullivan, himself a Catholic of sorts, has used the term “Christianism” for nearly 20 years. Here is a piece where he introduces it.
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,1191826,00.html
Regarding Twitter / X: I quit reading Twitter when Elon Musk scrambled the tweets so that lurkers like me couldn’t follow anybody’s daily posts without setting up an account. I have recently given in and opened an account, primarily to judge for myself the changes he has made. I still find much of it to be mindless and repetitive, but no more so than before. I can already see how those who are authoritarian-minded and want to control “misinformation” and its various permutations would abhor it. The people I cannot understand over these last few years are those who, while not being ideologically driven themselves, seem entirely comfortable giving governments and corporations the power to curate their news, opinions, and information. The apparent docility, conformity, and compliance with authority among many in our credentialed class still amazes me, even though I have long suspected that is an unfortunate byproduct of professions in which the chief currency for advancement is praise of peers.
Thanks Doug, I missed that: “Christianity vs Christianism”; yes, that does -indeed- make a difference.
I was also thinking -this AM- that Christianity has experienced a form of reformation -via the the new testament- which Islam hasn’t; a case can be made that Islam needs a reformation, moderate muslims need a faith that leans to moderation more than it does to fundamentalism. It’s profoundly worrisome to witness the current unravelling in London and Scotland, we are privileged to be subject to the 1st amendment in the US.
Thanks for the link. Marked for reading.
I feel the same as you do about twitter. It can be mindless, and, often ugly, but no worse than before. In my estimate somewhat *better* because “taboo” topics (specifically gender ideology) can be discussed at will without a ban – of course the “new openness” breeds and amplifies conspiracy theories and mis/dis/mal/information as well. Still, I would rather have today’s twitter than the authoritarian platform that was a proxy for various government entities to set social media policy and ban countless numbers of people who came to the conversation in good faith.
Thanks for the catch.
In this column you had the young Iranian woman injured in fighting for her rights followed by the elderly Holocaust survivor being heckled. They are connected.
Congratulation to the new parents, Phil and Phyllis!
And, Candace Owens, is three screws short of a nut. Just imagine how looney her followers must be.
So it’s clear now that the “Christ is King” noise is the intended reaction to the Woke Marxist provocations, in particular, the declaration from the White House that tomorrow, March 31st 2024 – Easter Sunday – is “Transgender Day of Visibility”.
This is 100% gnostic-hermetic cult action – read Paulo Freire’s explicit use of Easter for rebirth – transformation – into critical consciousness in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and maybe Politics of Education. Freire writes the word “Easter” over and over, and “rebirth”. Transformation is a core principle of Hermetic alchemy.
Churches are being intimidated into absorbing Woke Marxism in order to escape the political attack – which is to categorize them – dialectically, I wager – as “Christian Nationalism” (CN). CN is a previously nonexistent decoy religious sect (or whatever) synthesized by Andrew Seidel at the FFRF. In other words, an “op” or “psyop”. All the enthusiastic “Christ is King” noise promotes the destructive dialectical political warfare which will advance communism in the United States.
Addendum:
The White House first announced the “Transgender Day of Visibility” on March 31, 2021.
And
“The event was created by transgender activist Rachel Crandall of Michigan in 2009 […] The first International Transgender Day of Visibility was held on March 31, 2009.” (Source: Wikipedia).
Cute rabbit joke, but disappearing lettuce is most likely the work of a pocket gopher, have seen Thomomys do that.