John Fea, an evangelical and professor of American History and chairman of the Department of History at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, PA, has written an essay where he tries to understand why his fellow evangelicals have such a deep devotion to Donald Trump that they are willing to overlook and even celebrate actions that should revolt them because they contradict the basic values they claim to profess.
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Today comes news about how the US has attempted to thwart moves to encourage breastfeeding of children around the world. The benefits of breastfeeding are so obvious and well established that pretty much everyone expected this to be a no-brainer that would pass easily. But they did not anticipate that the US does not behave like a civilized nation.
A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly.
Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.
Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.
I have written before about the punitive prosecutions launched in Washington, DC against 234 people who were arrested during the anti-Trump demonstrations at his inauguration last year and charged with ‘felony rioting’. After a trial, a jury cleared six protestors of all charges. Then prosecutors were forced to drop charges against six others after the judge found that they had behaved unethically.
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Jim Jordan is an extreme right wing Republican (redundant, I know) congressman from Ohio who has shown himself to be a true and loyal Trumper. He has now been accused by multiple people that when he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University, he ignored rampant sexual abuse and harassment that included, but was not limited to, the wrestling team’s doctor who routinely molested the wrestlers, requiring them undress and fondling their genitals even if they came for something like a sprained thumb.
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As a follow-up to my post on how the alt-right hate groups are targeting young skeptics for recruitment, I want to point out how prominent atheists like Sam Harris are enabling this disturbing trend, something that Harvard secular chaplain Greg Epstein has already observed. This is because people like Harris say things that are rife with ambiguity. I and many others have noted before the disingenuous way that Sam Harris argues that enables him to be on both sides of an issue, something that I have labeled the Sam Harris two-step, though he is not the only one to use it. Charles Murray is also a master at it. They both seem to say outrageous things then, when challenged, point to other statements that seem contradict it.
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A man in a suit and tie was caught on a security camera kicking a homeless person in the head in a completely unprovoked attack. You can see him with a briefcase and hat making a point of coming back just to kick the person.
Tenderloin Station is seeking your help to identify this aggravated assault suspect. Anyone who knows who this man is should call (415)575-4444 and reference SFPD case 180387174. Warning: Graphic Video pic.twitter.com/R30PSEXvCk
— SFPD Tenderloin (@SFPDTenderloin) June 7, 2018
As promised in my review of Seymour Hersh’s excellent memoir Reporter, here is an excerpt that describes how he found out about Paul Meadlo, one of the people in the platoon that committed the My Lai massacre. Hersh had seen a small news item about a young journalist named Ron Ridenhour who had heard about the massacre and sent reports to the army top brass about what he had heard and been frustrated by the lack of action and feared a cover-up. After talking with Ridenhour, Hersh got the name of Michael Terry, a soldier in that same platoon, and went to see him.
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One of the biggest criticisms I had of the Barack Obama administration was that it was completely in the pockets of the big financial sector institutions, such as the major banks on Wall Street. Especially guilty of this were Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, who were the top two in the Justice Department and never prosecuted the executives of those firms. They both came into government from the law firm Covington and Burling that had those banks as clients, and they then returned to that same law firm after leaving government office, to reap the big rewards of their acts of obeisance to Wall Street. The other major figure in the sell-out to the banks was Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
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Some time ago, I wrote about how the alt-right coalition of fascists, neo-Nazis, and bigots was luring in young people by appealing to their sense of irony and fun, or ‘lulz’ as some say these days, acting as if the rhetoric of hate was not something to be believed in but was being used just to annoy and irritate those who were derisively labeled as ‘social justice warriors’ (though why that term is seen as an insult baffles me). The claim that they were ‘fighting political correctness’ was another shield used to deflect criticisms of this stance.
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In a previous post, I lamented the fact that much of the media jump straight from a glib interpretation of an actual news event to mindless speculations about the future and what actions are indicated. The main problem with that is wrong analysis leads to wrong actions, just like a wrong medical diagnosis leads to wrong treatment.
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