Almost on cue after my post yesterday on how ambitious politicians in the US have to fake religiosity, I came across this Tweet that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said that he is no longer an atheist and that religion is very important. He had said this last December but I had missed it.
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The fallout of the leaked transcripts of the phone calls between Trump and the Australian and Mexican leaders continues. In an interview with CNN’s Alisyn Caerota, former Mexican president Vicente Fox was brutal about Donald Trump.
One of the cardinal rules of American politics is that if you want to gain high office, you have to express religious beliefs. If you are not a believer or are lukewarm, then you have to fake it. Some fakers are better than others at conveying sincerity but it does not really seem to matter even if you are a pretty obvious phony. All that the religious base cares about is that you pay lip service to the Christian god. If you also push for the policies that the religious right favors (anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-LGBT, and anti-sex), then it does not matter even if you do not go to church regularly or mangle your religious references.
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I wrote recently about how the film The Room was so bad that it has acquired cult status and there is even a film made about the making of it. Thanks to reader Jeff at Have Coffee Will Write I learned about this article by Stuart Heritage about the qualities that go into getting a zero rating on the critics site Rotten Tomatoes, a rarity that means that not a single critic liked it.
Heritage says that there are factors in addition to bad writing, acting, directing, and other cinematic skills that will help you get that rare distinction.
The film War Machine (2017) that I reviewed recently is a satire on US efforts to win the war in Afghanistan that follows a cyclic pattern. A president gets increasingly frustrated with the fact that the war is just dragging along in a stalemate, decides that what is needed is a new strategy and new leadership, fires the existing military commander and appoints a new military commander who has a sterling reputation gained elsewhere, that person says that he needs more troops to deliver a crushing blow to the enemy, gets the troops but the blow fails to be effective, gets fired, and then gets replaced by a new commander and the process begins all over again.
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Today’s big news in White House leaks are the transcripts of the phone calls made by Donald Trump to other world leaders showing how what Trump says in private is in stark contrast to what he says in public. Much has been made of the conversation with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto as early as January 27 where Trump acknowledges that the wall is not important and that Mexico will not pay for the border wall but demands that Peña Nieto not keep saying in public that Mexico will not pay for it because it makes him look bad.
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I am of course aware of Alex Jones and the loony and even vicious ideas he promotes, such as that the Sandy Hook massacre of elementary school children and their teachers was an elaborate hoax. What is more incredible than what he says is that so many people seem to believe him. But I do not watch or listen to his show because life’s too short. So I was grateful to John Oliver for providing an in-depth look at the Jones phenomenon, perhaps telling us more about him that we may have wanted to know. Make sure you wait for the ‘infomercial’ that begins at around the 19:30 mark.
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It looks like the state of Arizona has become the breeding ground of the fake Maverick Republican. Now that John McCain has been diagnosed with brain cancer, he is unlikely to run again and senator Jeff Flake is staking his claim to becoming the Republican that the media fawn over for being willing to issue statements and quotes that seem to go against his party’s dogmas while voting almost entirely along party lines. Flake has come out with a new book that seems to say some things that deviate from Republican orthodoxy and is making the rounds of the media.
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The neoconservative magazine National Review has used the recent decision by San Francisco radio station KPFA to disinvite Richard Dawkins from an interview to publish an article by Elliot Kaufman that takes aim at atheists. It consists essentially of two points. Firstly it argues that ‘the left’ has ‘expelled’ the New Atheists like Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens because of their “insufficient deference to Islam” and secondly that their arguments against god’s existence are wrong. Kaufman even goes on to say that ‘the left’s’ dislike of Islamophobia has morphed into a defense of Islamic radicalism and thus have joined “a long line of left-wing apologists for murderous anti-Western regimes”. (Thanks to reader Jeff at Have Coffee Will Write for alerting me to this article.)
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Donald Trump is such a pathological liar that he lies even when he doesn’t have to or can be easily found out. We have shifted our ideas of normalcy in the president so low that almost none of the outrageous things that he does or says surprises us anymore. But there are some things that make me wonder if he is really unhinged. Take for example these two recent statements by him. They follow the predictable pattern where when he boasts about himself, he ‘quotes’ as ‘evidence’ somebody saying nice things about him. That person has to be someone notable, either named or usually anonymous (“This very successful businessman/farmer/executive… told me …”)
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