The movie this week was…the Prairie Light Film Festival!

Yeah, it was a bunch of movies, and I saw most of them. My eyes! Need a nap now.

The only one I missed was The Rider, which looked good, but I did see the other four, listed here in ascending order of my appreciation.

4. Hereditary. You know, I heard a lot of praise for this movie, but I didn’t care for it much at all. It’s a supernatural horror film, which means that it is a succession of creepy/scary/gross events which don’t need to make much sense, because spooky/mystical reasons. It’s well-made, but I just didn’t see much point to it all.

3. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Mr Rogers! I like Mr Rogers! But you’ve probably heard—you shouldn’t find out about your heroes. A couple of things bugged me: 1) He was a lifelong Republican, and 2) while he was happy to support a black cast member (Officer Clemmons), on learning that he was gay, he warned him that he better not ever be publicly exposed. I guess there were limits to his tolerance. While he did good things, it’s clear he was a wealthy, privileged Christian who was locked into his comfort zone — he wasn’t going to support anything that made him uncomfortable.

2. Sorry to Bother You. Nobody told me that this was SF/fantasy/dystopian story! It was on the weird side, and enjoyable, even though it was taking a painfully humorous look at capitalism and racism. Fun! And grim! This is one I’d like to see again, because the first time through I was wrestling with trying to figure out what kind of movie it was.

1. 8th Grade. Best of the bunch. A fantastic performance by the lead, although maybe she was just living the real experience of being in junior high. It’s just a simple slice-of-life story, but it’s made compelling by the actor and the remembered awfulness of 8th grade. Yeah, it sucked. The movie brought it back to life.

We’re going right back to the popular cheesy stuff this weekend: it’s going to be The Meg! I guess I’ll have to go to bring some balance back to my movie-going.

He couldn’t even stammer out “states rights”?

It’s always nice to see a racist stunned into silence.

The dope with his jaw dropped is Andy Hallinan, a guy whose sole claim to fame is that he owns a gun shop where he publicly announced his refusal to sell guns to all Muslims, and sells targets with photos of Democrats. Now he has another stupid thing added to his reputation!

Pauline Hanson, pick on someone your own size, ya drongo

Wow. Australia has the same unthinking conservative dimwits we have over here. It’s like we’re sister countries or something. Of course, we also have some of the same thoughtful people of conscience, like Harper Nielsen.

Harper Nielsen, who lives in the state of Queensland, told CNN affiliate Nine News she sat during her country’s national anthem because she believed it was disrespectful to Indigenous Australians.
The anthem, titled “Advance Australia Fair,” …

Hold on a minute, I did not know the name of your national anthem.”Advance Australia Fair“? Unless the song is about promoting a seasonal carnival with farmers showing off their prize sheep, that title alone is stunningly racist. So racist that a 9-year-old school kid noticed. At least we Americans have the excuse that no one ever sang the third stanza of our national anthem, but you put the bigotry right up there in the title.

A plain-spoken people, those Australians.

… contains the line “Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free.”

“(But) when it says Advance Australia Fair, it means advance the white people,” the 9-year-old student told Nine News.

“And when it says ‘we are young’ it completely disregards the indigenous Australians who were here before us for 50,000 years.”

She seems like a thoughtful, principled young lady. Good for her. A healthy democracy thrives on an intelligent, informed citizenry that constantly questions and works to improve society.

But then…

This craven politician wants to “give her a kick up the backside” and have her expelled from school? And claims Harper Neilsen has been brainwashed? You know what’s brainwashing: it’s have repetitive patriotic platitudes recited at you every day, and being force to participate in mindless rituals. Hanson claims it’s “about who we are”. OK. You have a choice. You can be like Harper Neilsen and think about what it means to be a conscientious citizen of your nation, or you can be like Pauline Hanson and demand servile, thoughtless obedience to dogmatic loyalty oaths.

If you choose the latter, you get the bonus of being able to beat up little girls. This may appeal to many people, unfortunately.

Killing god in small town America

My colleague in the English department, Michael Lackey, published a letter in our local small town newspaper, the Stevens County Times. I think it needs wider distribution!

Atheism is coming to America, and it is conservative Christians who are bringing it here. During the Nazi period, around 95 percent of Germans identified as Christian. But today, just a little more than 75 years later, almost 60 percent of Germans identify as either non-religious or atheist. What happened?

On the surface, it might seem that atheists infiltrated society and persuaded Germans to dismiss or reject God. But there is little evidence to support this interpretation. More likely is the following: Hitler and the Nazis were self-described conservative Christians. When Hitler first came to power he declared in a speech: “It is Christians and not international atheists who now stand at the head of Germany.” It was through their conservative version of Christianity that Hitler and the Nazis were able to make the case for criminalizing, violating, and eventually exterminating Jews, Gays, Gypsies, Immigrants, and many Others. Germans today know what a fanatical version of conservative Christianity can lead to (not all versions of Christianity lead to horrific behavior), which, in part, explains why so many contemporary Germans reject God and religion.

I don’t believe that Trump will do in America what Hitler did in Germany, but the overwhelming support for Trump by conservative Christians will lead, I believe, to the same cultural transformation in America that occurred in Germany. Many (and I even believe a majority of) Americans will eventually say: “Look at Trump and his conservative Christian base. These people support perpetual lying, belittling the disabled, criminalizing immigrants, degrading women and minorities, supporting white supremacists, and so much more. In good conscience, not only must I reject Trump, but I must also reject the conservative version of Christianity of which he is a part.”

In thirty years from now, when people ask the question, “who killed God in America,” the answer will not be “the atheists.” It will be the conservative Christians who supported Trump.

Sources: For the 95 percent statistic of Germans who were church-affiliated Christians, see James Carroll’s book Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (28).

For the nearly 60 percent statistic of non-religious and atheist Germans today, follow this link to the Washington Post article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/14/map-these-are-the-worlds-least-religious-countries/

I’m slightly more pessimistic — one thing we’re seeing is how flexible Christian morality is, and while it’s obvious to some of us how hypocritical many Christians are being, the religion still has a lot of resilience. We shall have to wait and see if Trump finally breaks many peoples’ faith.

After that bit of pessimism, though, you have to read the other letter in the paper. The Morris community church is evolving, a rather ironic headline given that this is the local very conservative church, which does not believe in that heathenish notion of evolution. “Evolving”, in this case, means “Our attendance has plummeted and we can’t pay our pastor and we’re selling off our church building”. Yay!

After 30 plus years of having regular Sunday morning services, Morris Community Church is transitioning to a new model of doing church.

Over the last number years, there have been many changes to the paradigm of church life in America. Those changes and transitions have made waves in big cities, and we believe are now rippling to our small, midwest town.

MCC embraced this change by moving from weekly services to church as a lifestyle. Our focus is on discipleship, relationship, and being the body of Christ in and among our communities. Two major factors have brought us to this decision: spiritual and practical.

Spiritually, we feel it is time for our body to do something different in our community. We have the utmost respect for the other churches in Stevens County. In no way is our shift a judgment of them and what they feel God is leading them to do. We pray for blessing for each congregation that the kingdom can advance through their service to the community. At the same time, we feel God is leading us to a different model. Instead of brick and mortar, our foundations are relationships. In 1 Corinthians, Paul writes how we, the people, are the church. With that, church can be anywhere; a coffee shop, a garage, a basement, or at work. We will strive to bring the gospel everywhere we go and aim to serve those in need by being influences in our communities seven days a week.

Practically, our congregation size has dramatically decreased this year. Our senior pastor, Pat Franey, had to come off paid staff and currently is an IT Technician with Morris Electronics. We now meet as an corporate body twice a month; one Saturday for a potluck and worship service and one Sunday for a traditional service. We can continue to meet our financial responsibilities at this time, but it is clear that removing any debts would best fit our current situation.

Being true to the new model we feel God is calling us to, and embracing the practicals in front of us, we are selling our building in hopes to take the proceeds to bless those in need in our community and start from a clean slate.

Maybe Michael Lackey is a True Prophet.

Sorry, no vampire stories in Nature yet

If you can’t trust the Sun/New York Post, who can you trust? This is their summary of a science article.

Drinking young people’s blood could help you live longer and prevent age-related diseases, a study has found.

Blood factors taken from younger animals have been found to improve the later-life health of older creatures.

The study, published in Nature, was conducted by researchers from University College London (UCL), who said it could reduce the chances of developing age-related disorders.

Gosh, that sounds like fun, so I clicked through to read the source.

I was so disappointed.

It’s a review article titled “Facing up to the global challenges of ageing”, and it’s not about wealthy vampires bleeding young people dry at all. It’s also not a “study”. It’s a summary of prior published research.

The main concern of the paper is a survey of all of the factors that contribute to late-life morbidity — if we extend lifespans, what’s the point if those last years are spent suffering with diseases of the aged? There’s a brief mention of “blood factors obtained from young individuals”, but that’s kind of it — the rest is detailed information about lots of identified problems. Here’s a taste:

Lifestyle interventions, while often beneficial, can be insufficient to prevent the progress of age-related problems, partly because of failures in compliance, and also because of limited and variable responses. Drugs are an additional option, and are already in widespread use for the prevention of cardiovascular disease, by pharmacologically decreasing hypertension and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol in healthy individuals who are at risk of cardiovascular disease (primary prevention). Treatment of the elderly is complex, since the relation between cardiovascular risk indicators, such as high body mass index, blood pressure and blood lipids, and end points, such as mortality, can change and even reverse with increasing age. The changing correlation with age could indicate that pharmacological interventions should depend on age and the presence of frailty and multimorbidity. However, mortality may be selective, with those sensitive to classical risk factors dying before the age of 70, or reverse causation may occur, with age-related diseases leading to low body mass index and blood pressure, and further work teasing out causality is needed. The ageing process in animals shows evolutionarily conserved, parallel and interacting mechanisms, known as hallmarks, that have proven to be modifiable, and several of these are also well-documented in humans. They eventually lead to unrepaired damage in DNA, accumulation of misfolded and aggregated proteins (for example, in the brain and the retina) and senescent cells (for example, in joints and kidneys) as well as to an inappropriate and persistent activation of stress responses, such as in the innate immune system (inflammaging). To develop further interventions to compress morbidity, including drugs, we need a better understanding of the roles of individual ageing mechanisms in different tissues and at different stages in life, and their contributions to the aetiology of age-related diseases. To this end, animal studies are useful to inform more targeted studies in humans.

It’s really hard to make a horror movie with good jump scares out of this kind of thing, but the NY Post tried. I’m sorry to say there was no mention of “drinking young people’s blood” anywhere in the paper.

Come on, Nature, this is probably why more people read the NY Post and the Sun than Nature. I also notice that Nature has a terrible lack of scantily clad girls on page 3.

Evils and lesser evils

Does this sound awfully familiar to you: “Democratic politicians who constantly echo courageous populist themes in speeches, news releases and election ads, and then often uses the party’s governmental power to protect the status quo and serve corporate donors in their interminable class war”? David Sirota tears into the smug complacency of corporate Democrats. It felt good to see someone calling them out.

Amid an upsurge of populist energy that has alarmed the Democratic establishment, a new wave of left-leaning insurgents have been using Democratic primaries to wage a fierce war on the party’s corporate wing. And, as in past presidential primary battles, many Democratic consultants, politicians and pundits have insisted that the party must prioritize unity and resist grassroots pressure to support a more forceful progressive agenda.

Not surprisingly, much of that analysis comes from those with career stakes in the status quo. Their crude attempts to stamp out any dissent or intraparty discord negates a stark truth: liberal America’s pattern of electing corporate Democrats – rather than progressives – has been a big part of the problem that led to Trump and that continues to make America’s economic and political system a neo-feudal dystopia.

I’m not going to blame the Democrats for Trump — that’s all on the Republican party. But I will blame the Democrats for failing to provide a compelling alternative. Under the influence of big money donors, the current Democratic party is acting as if they only have to be slightly less insane than the Republicans to win, so they’ve been swirling down the same drain…just with a bit more lag.

He names names, and gives examples of Democratic failures.

Less than a decade ago, with Democratic majorities controlling both the House and Senate, it was the administration led by Obama and Emanuel that bailed out Wall Street, enshrined a too-big-to-jail doctrine for megabanks and – by its own admission – designed the Affordable Care Act to preclude Medicare for All. Obama’s administration did this while Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. It was Democratic lawmakers’ like Delaware’s Tom Carper and Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman who helped insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists make sure the ACA also excluded any public healthcare option that could compete with private insurers.

Today, it is House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, from deeply liberal San Francisco, insisting that Medicare for All will not be any kind of litmus test for her party and promising that budget-cutting austerity will govern Democrats’ legislative agenda should they retake Congress.

It is 16 Senate Democrats voting to help Wall Street lobbyists gut post-financial-crisis banking regulations. Those include blue-staters like Colorado’s Michael Bennet and Delaware’s Chris Coons, the latter of which then went on to make national headlines slamming progressives for supposedly pushing the party too far to the left.

It is 13 Senate Democrats, including 2020 presidential prospect Cory Booker of Democratic New Jersey, beholding skyrocketing drug prices – and then voting to help pharmaceutical lobbyists defeat Bernie Sanders’ initiative to let Americans purchase lower-priced medicine from Canada.

It is most of the Democratic Senate caucus recently voting to confirm 15 of Trump’s judicial appointees, and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, from Democratic New York, vowing there will be no punishment for Democratic lawmakers who vote to confirm Trump’s supreme court nominees.

I know the arguments: you need money to get elected in our plutocracy, so they need to pander to the wealthy in order to get the minimal, incremental reforms they’ve made. I think that reality is the other way around. They take tiny progressive steps to convince the people to vote for them, so that they can then get the big money from their corporate friends.

The party is too far to the right, not too far to the left. And it’s going to extremely difficult to change, because the Republicans are so goddamned evil that many of us (including me) vote a straight Democratic slate anymore, so they don’t need to change.

Dunning-Krueger, only for racists

Racists don’t know they’re racist, I guess, which is how they can deny racism when it’s right there in their face. Like this cartoon:

That caricature is racist as fuck. It’s not something you can reasonably argue over — there is no debate. It’s done. You can’t draw a black woman that way, in a way that doesn’t even vaguely resemble Serena Williams, except to make a racist point. It looks like something from the 1930s or earlier.

“It had nothing to do with gender or race,” the artist says. Bullshit, says I. He also claims to be completely unaware of the history of racist caricatures, so how was he to know? He’s a cartoonist, that’s how. He’s so completely uninterested in his craft that he never, ever studied cartoons from the past?

Michael Harriot has a few words to say about that.

And not only does Knight’s drawing portray Serena with undertones of classic racial stereotypes, including the apelike stance and oversized pink lips reminiscent of the coon caricature and Sambo cartoons, but he included a pacifier in the drawing, presumably to indicate Serena’s childish actions. You’d never know, from this cartoon, that Naomi Osaka is actually two inches taller than Williams.

It is also revealing that Knight chose to illustrate Osaka as a blonde, fair-skinned damn-near white woman whose complexion is the same as the umpire’s. Unintentional or not, the juxtaposition is clear: Naomi is the quiet, questioning protagonist who, along with the genteel official, is opposed by the brooding behemoth, Serena Williams.

It’s stunning how many people are trying to argue that the cartoon isn’t racist. Damn. Racist is as racist does. It doesn’t have to have the n-word scrawled in sharpie across the cartoon to be racist.

Harriot has a few things to say about American Republicans, too.

  • 52 percent of voters who supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election believed blacks are “less evolved” than whites, according to researchers at the Kellog School of Management.
  • In a 2018 YouGov poll, 59 percent of Republicans agreed: “If blacks would only try harder, they would be as well off as whites.”
  • The same YouGov poll revealed that 59 percent of self-identified Republicans believe blacks are treated fairly by the criminal justice system.
  • 70 percent of Republicans agreed that increased diversity hurts whites.
  • Republican-appointed judges give black defendants longer jail sentences, according to a Harvard study released in May.
  • 55 percent of white Republicans agreed “blacks have worse jobs, income and housing than white people” because “most just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty” according to the Washington Post’s review of data from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center.
  • Nearly twice as many Republicans than Democrats (42 percent versus 24 percent) believe that blacks are lazier than whites, according to the same NORC poll.

Every single one of those opinions are racist as fuck, too. The white people of America are a mob of racists, and the most racist of us gravitate to the Republican party, where they are welcomed with open arms.

What do Australia and the United States have in common? A history of displacing native peoples and justifying it by the claimed intrinsic superiority of the colonizers. Here’s a good summary from an Australian professor.

As Cheryl Harris wrote in her famous article Whiteness as Property, racial regimes based on the theft of native lands and the enslavement of black people produce an association between the fact of being white and the right of possession. Not only are white people given the legal right to take ownership of stolen land, but whiteness itself becomes property, having intrinsic value as a quality that only white people can possess. At the same time, under slavery, black people become property. The privileges that accrue as a result of being white come to be expected by white people so that any threat to their status or their reputation is perceived as illegitimate, particularly when it comes from the racially subjugated.

Both our countries are still dealing with that ugly history…or more accurately, failing to deal with it.