News, Notes, and Notions for 31MAR24
Your faith should be stronger than clickbait and other deep theological thoughts, plus things worth reading, watching, and listening to
Maybe it is because this is Easter weekend for folks of the Christian persuasion, but the American online news experience has been awash in debates over faith this week.
Via video, there was Donald Trump hawking the Lee Greenwood branded “God Bless the USA Bible.”
“I’m proud,” Donald Trump begins his three minute video pitch, “to be partnering with my very good friend Lee Greenwood, who doesn’t love his song God Bless the USA, in connection with promoting the God Bless the USA Bible…” The former president then sells the God Bless the USA Bible for the low, low price of $59.99 in his usual start-and-stop circular style using the words “God” twenty times, “Bible” ten times, “religion” four times, “Christianity” twice, and “Christian values” once.
Trump’s offhand rhetoric of “who doesn’t love his song God Bless the USA” is as good a place to start with this hot mess of Trumpian doctrine as any. I do. I hate that song. I can’t stand it. Loathe it entirely. I didn’t like it in the 1980s when politicians put it in heavy rotation for all things pomp and circumstance. I hated it during the Gulf War. I hated it in basic training when Staff Sergeant Perez made us stand up for it. I hated it after 9/11. I have hated it since the Trump/MAGA folks treat it like a second national anthem.
Hi, Donald. It’s me. I’m one of those who doesn’t like Lee Greenwood’s star-spangled lyrical equivalent to shooting Rah-Rah American Redi Whip right out of the can directly into your mouth to get a patriotic sugar high. The fact Greenwood made a Canadian version of the same song without changing too many of the lyrics ought to bring this whole farce down from the national hymn pedestal too many folks have put it on.
But Donald Trump hawking a Bible just feels gross. For many reasons. The four major events involving Trump and a Bible are his inauguration, the “Two Corinthians” Liberty University Speech, holding up a Bible after having the streets cleared in front of St John’s Episcopal Church near the White House, and now this.
Not exactly the modern William Tyndale bringing the Word to the vernacular.
Then, in an incident that really got the Tweeters all up in their theological feels, the White House and President Biden issued “A Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility” for March 31st. Which is also Easter Sunday. Which is what a bunch of content mills on social and news media blasted out with variations on “an ATTACK on CHRISTIANITY” even though this particular event and Biden proclamation thereof is on this same particular day last year. And the year before that. And the year before that.
To cut through the noise of this latest flare up of faith-based engagement farming, a reframing of basic principles will suffice. Oh, I have studied theology both academically and just because I like it for over twenty years, but you don’t need any of that to understand what the right move is in response to the Trendy McTrenderson School of Internet Theological Outrage.
Just keep your bearing.
Since folks in my DMs on Twitter started slinging Bible verses coupled with bad words when I pointed this out, here is a verse for them.
“Fools give full vent to their rage, but the wise bring calm in the end.” - Proverbs 29:11
“Keep your bearing” usually works in most circumstances, and almost always is the right course of action, especially if one is not completely sure of the right course of action. What does it say about my faith - and how seriously I take it - if my faith is completely submissive to my emotions just because someone waves a social media post or headline in front of me? What does it say about my faith if the prime mover of my public professions thereof online is outrage and vitriol in response to carefully choreographed, search engine optimized, highly monetized content?
God is ok with me not making a fool of myself in His name over clickbait.
“Fools give full vent to their rage” is a good litmus test for social media posts and news media headlines of all kinds, but especially involving stories aimed at stirring up the passions of folks online. “Why are these folks upset about this in the first place” should be followed by “Why should I be upset with this anyway” and, before you know it, a plethora of potential responses no longer get the send button smashed on them.
Unleashing rage is easy. Bringing calm is hard. It is obvious, even without deep theology, which of those two is of the flesh and earth, and which is a desire for more, better, more spiritual things beyond just the temporal and temporary.
“The one who is faithful in a very little thing is also faithful in much” the Bible says, including the one Trump is hawking for the sixty bucks. “And the one who is unrighteous in a very little thing is also unrighteous in much.” Goes for social media and news media consumption as well. Just stick “Facebook,” “Twitter,” or “Instagram” in there and it still works with just as much truth. Amplifying clickbait headlines might not be one of the seven deadly sins, but it surely - or is it verily? - is not righteous to keep boosting the noise, the nonsense, the not-in-the-least-bit holy stuff just because it has faith nomenclature as the key buzzwords.
Then again, the guy that said that about being faithful in the little things was killed by the government under the charge of wanting to become a king, which is the point of the observance Christians are celebrating right now in the first place. Faith can be complicated like that. What is not complicated is working your own faith out as best you can, and skipping the karaoke of sameness trending faith outrage seems to congregate around these days.
From Me:
It’s a special section of the local WV newpaper I have the privilege of working with, and is a PDF so I can’t embed it here, but if you would check out the Progress 2024 special section - which includes my piece on the West Virginia Waterfall Trail - I’d appreciate it. Clicking supports local print media, and only costs you a click. I even got a photo credit this time!
Click here:
https://www.register-herald.com/progress-2024/pdf_21420574-edf4-11ee-bdc8-8fb77e083597.html
I had some brief comments on the FTC investigation into TikTok that were included here for our Canadian friends at The News Forum. My bit at about the 20 minute mark if you click here:
Worth Reading:
A fun break from the campaign cycle as our friend Sarah Stook takes a look at major campaign gaffes, misteeps, and mistakes, including the now-constant “which candidate would you rather have a beer with” test that has its origins in the 1840 presidential campaign, which kicks off this list:
An attempted attack on Whig candidate William Henry Harrison backfired spectacularly on the Democrats in 1840. A Democratic-leaning journalist published the following:
‘Give him a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and my word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin by the side of a ‘sea coal’ fire, and study moral philosophy.’
Other Democratic-aligned papers soon ran with it, but it soon backfired when the Whig party seized the opportunity. William Henry Harrison was soon portrayed as a down-to-earth, ordinary man who lived in a log cabin and drank hard cider like many working people. This was perhaps ironic, considering Harrison came from an illustrious Virginian political family- his grandfather had signed the Declaration of Independence. He’d nevertheless cut his teeth as a decorated military officer, and he was no rich wimp. Martin Van Buren had enjoyed a storied political career, including spells as Governor of New York, Secretary of State, and Vice President. Unlike Harrison, he’d come from relatively humble beginnings, and was seen as an effeminate, weak man.
Whilst this remark did not necessarily kill Martin Van Buren’s campaign, as other factors were at play, it’s often remembered. The idea of choosing candidates who you would have a beer with seems to have come from this.
This is facinating, and more than a little sad, from Default Wisdom (paywalled past intro)
I spoke to 23-year-old reality shifter Maddie about her experiences traveling to other timelines.
You may have heard of reality shifting before—probably through the lens of the now-familiar genre of ”this dangerous TikTok trend is endangering your kids” clickbait. ‘Reality shifting’ is, simply put, when people shift their consciousness to another timeline—an alternate reality—including ones with fictional elements. My friend Esmé Partridge has written about reality shifting extensively through the lens of occult studies, and contributor Clinton has touched on it (though unintentionally) through the lens of media studies in some of his articles on this very website.
The more I talk to people with these types of unconventional experiences, the more I believe that we’re experiencing a fundamental shift in our perception. It’s one that the scholar Patrick Galbraith has documented extensively in Japan—I highly recommend his work, too, for people who want to gain a deeper understanding of how one might experience the shifts in their consciousness or fall in love with a fictional character like I’ve been documenting here.
This shift in perception is something that I think too many people write off as “mental illness,” a “fake” mental illness people use to differentiate themselves or get attention, or a pernicious, TikTok-specific form of brainwashing.
This enrages me in ways I can’t explain, not the least because we once again have “the system is broken, but no one is at fault for it” doom looping. From Amelia Knisely at West Virginia Watch, who is as impactful a reporter as you will find anywhere:
A federal judge has ordered sanctions against the state health department for its role in failing to preserve emails for an ongoing lawsuit over alleged mistreatment of thousands of foster children.
The sanction was less harsh than plaintiffs have sought against the state, as U.S. Magistrate Judge Cheryl Eifert noted in an order issued Thursday that she didn’t find the state had intentionally deleted the evidence.
Eifert required the state health department to pay an undetermined amount to reimburse plaintiffs for their attorneys fees and other costs related to bringing the request for the sanction.
The judge acknowledged that the prior top officials with the Department of Health and Human Resources didn’t do enough to ensure that the state’s Office of Technology kept emails belonging to former foster care leaders. A former top DHHR attorney resigned in the wake of the deleted email scandal.
Eifiert’s order follows a hearing in January at Huntington’s federal courthouse where attorneys for both sides discussed the issue.
The emails were requested as part of a 2019 lawsuit filed on behalf of foster children against DHHR and Gov. Jim Justice. The sweeping class-action suit outlined both documented and hardly-known problems in the system: overburdened Child Protective Services workers, children sent to unsafe and abusive group homes, a failure to find kids permanent homes and more.
The deleted emails came to light last fall, when plaintiffs, led by legal nonprofit A Better Childhood, said the state had failed to preserve thousands of emails that they’d requested in 2020. They argued that the emails could have shown how foster leaders responded to child welfare crises.
Plaintiffs also argued that the failure to preserve the emails was intentional amid growing transparency concerns about how DHHR ran its overburdened foster care system.
While Eifert acknowledged shortcomings in the state’s steps to preserve the emails, she said that the deletion was tied to a misunderstanding between DHHR and the state Office of Technology.
“ … A classic example of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing,” she wrote.
Our scientist friend Michael Siegel isn’t having it with conspiracy theories and the collapse of the Key Bridge in Baltimore:
In the wake of the disaster, there’s been a lot of irresponsible speculation about what happened and the usual suspects running around either claiming conspiracies or some indictment of the government, corporations or both. So I thought I’d turn a scientific eye to this and explain, in layman’s terms, why a ship was able to take out such a massive and critical bridge.
Here is a short list of things that did not destroy the Francis Scott Key Bridge:
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives.
Terrorists.
Joe Biden.
Pete Buttigieg
Illegal immigrants.
Here is a list of things that did:
Physics.
The MV Dali is a gigantic ship, nearly a thousand feet long, just shy of Chrysler Building in length, and with displacement of 146,000 tons. At the moment it hit the bridge, it has a speed of about 8 knots. The kinetic energy it delivered in that shot burst of time was the equivalent of a precision hit from a thousand pound bomb, all directed in one direction against a support beam. Very few structures would hold up under that
Worth Listening To:
I’ve really been chewing on some of the stuff covered in my Twitter buddy Dr. Robert Greene II’s series OUR NEW SOUTH PODCAST he hosts along with Kevin Blackistone.
Our New South offers a unique look at the evolution of the New South and how historic Southern cities, including Charlotte, North Carolina, are confronting complex issues, ranging from equity in education and immigration to civil rights, racial equality, and socioeconomic mobility.
Good coverage here from Josh Barro and Ken White on the week that was in Trump legal goings-on:
A panel of New York appellate judges has reduced Donald Trump’s bond in the New York Attorney General’s civil case to $175 million. Based on past disclosures we’ve seen about Trump’s finances, he likely will be able to post a bond in this amount, and efforts by AG Letitia James to collect the judgment will be paused pending an appeal. Ken and I discuss possible reasons the court took this surprise action — as is typical for this kind of decision in New York, the judges didn’t really explain their reasoning — and the likely course of Trump’s appeal to come later this year.
Meanwhile, in New York Supreme Court (which is the trial court), Trump’s criminal trial over falsification of business records has been scheduled for April 15. Judge Juan Merchan wasn’t impressed by Trump’s arguments that late document production by the US Attorney constituted misconduct on the part of the District Attorney, and he also slapped Trump with a fairly narrow gag order patterned after the one Judge Tanya Chuktan imposed in one of Trump’s federal cases.
David Lat has an interesting story about Judge Aileen Cannon’s chambers. Over the last two years, Cannon has had two law clerks quit in the middle of their one-year terms, while a third withdrew from a clerkship she had previously been awarded. This is highly unusual…
Worth Watching:
In 2015 Ryyan Alshebl fled Syria. Now, he’s the mayor of a German village. When he arrived in his adoptive home after a dramatic escape, he didn’t speak a word of German. How did he make this remarkable transition? Syrian national Ryyan Alshebl was elected mayor of the southern German village of Ostelsheim in early April 2023, at the age of 29. The appointment sparked great international interest. He says he was approached for interviews by more than 100 media outlets, including the BBC. Alshebl fled Syria in 2015 to avoid military service. Once in Germany, he began to learn the language, trained as an administrative assistant and took German citizenship. After working for seven years at the town hall in the neighboring village of Althengstett, he decided to run for the post of Mayor of Ostelsheim - and won the election with an absolute majority of 55.41 per cent. The documentary tells the story of Alshebl’s escape from Syria and his political success in Germany.
From our friend Jim Lokay on Fox5 DC, Former Baltimore prosecutor and assistant Maryland Attorney General Debbie Hines is telling her stories from the system in the new book "Get Off My Neck." She shares her ideas to improve race relations in the criminal justice system and more with Jim on "The Final 5."
My friend Stephen Kent is doing really cool stuff with Geeky Stoics, meshing philosophy, pop culture, politics, and Sci-Fi/fantasy. This is from a speech he gave at Liberty Con
The clips from this were all over social media, but the full interview of New York City Mayor Adams on The Breakfast Club, especially his back-and-forths with Olayemi Olurin, are interesting: