Category Archives: Uncategorized

Sorry, a bit overblown on the post title there. I’m just deeply amused by this NewScientist (28 July 2018, paywall) article on imminent cyber-disaster in Japan (apologies to any Japanese readers of this blog):

JAPAN has an impending millennium bug problem.

In the lead up to the turn of the millennium, few computers were able to properly represent the year 2000, leaving people worried about what would happen when midnight struck on New Year’s eve 1999. Now the same issues could arise in Japan when the current emperor abdicates in April next year.

The Japanese calendar is based on era names that coincide with the rule of its emperors. We have been in the Heisei or “peace everywhere” era since Japan’s current emperor, Akihito, took the throne in 1989. This period has covered the majority of modern computing, so most software has never needed to change to reflect a new era.

Almost every part of society, from payrolls to parking tickets, relies on recording dates accurately, so the change could break systems that rely on Japanese era naming conventions.

The cyber-era would be so much more efficient if humans weren’t part of the equation.

Preternatural:

Beyond what is normal or natural.
‘autumn had arrived with preternatural speed’ [Oxford English Dictionaries]

Noted in an article about a 14 year old running for governor of Vermont, “This 14-year-old is running for governor before he can even vote,” Kayla Epstein, WaPo:

Sonneborn thinks he can do it [be elected Governor of Vermont]. “My campaign transcends age,” he said. He possesses a preternatural self-assurance that’s not uncommon among politicians, but certainly is among teenagers who typically navigate the cutthroat politics of high school, not state government.

I ran across this pine tree (I presume) in Loring Park in Minneapolis, and I just happen to like how the picture turned out after my Arts Editor “adjusted” it.

The Rachel Maddow Show was gifted with a secret recording of a recent private fundraiser hosted by Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA), chairman of the House Intel Committee, who, instead of taking his job seriously, has been a knight-defender of the President, extending himself to releasing memos that purported to clear the President of wrong-doing, while not paying a whit’s attention to his bailiwick.

Or so, at least, it seems to me.

TRMS has released transcripts of selected portions of the recording, which I found interesting.

Clip #1:

REP. NUNES (R-CA): “So therein lies, so it’s like your classic Catch-22 situation where we were at a – this puts us in such a tough spot. If Sessions won’t unrecuse and Mueller won’t clear the president, we’re the only ones. Which is really the danger. That’s why I keep, and thank you for saying it by the way, I mean we have to keep all these seats. We have to keep the majority. If we do not keep the majority, all of this goes away.”

Clip #2:

REP. NUNES (R-CA): “They know it’s ridiculous to go after the president for obstruction of justice. But if they tell a lie often enough and they put it out there and they say, ‘Oh, we’re looking at the tweets,’ cause you know you’ve got a mixed bag on the tweets, right? Like sometimes you love the president’s tweets, sometimes we cringe on the president’s tweets. But they’re trying to make a political, this is all political as to why that story ran in the New York Times on the tweets.”

So that confirms the impression. One might wonder if, as he asserts, this is really the Democrats engaging in a political lynching, and that might be reasonable if the situation were considered in isolation.

But once we consider the deceit and venality of Nunes, of Trump, of various Cabinet members, then it’s hard to consider Nunes’ contention to be reasonable.

So that’s our lesson for today. The Big Lie paradoxically works very well, and not well at all, in the Age of the Internet.

Readers comment on the latest special election results and my conclusions:

I was Republican for roughly the first half of my life, until the party was grabbed by the venal, the hypocrites and the plunderers. I’ve drifted left in some of my thinking as I’ve gained wisdom, no doubt. But the whole political spectrum has gone so far right — in so many words, because the corruption and amorality is less a political left/right thing than it is a tribal thing.

I have a few friends who used to be Republicans and are now independents or even progressive Democrats. The right side of the spectrum, for all that it wears the clothing of religion, is the more materialistic end of the spectrum, and I believe we see that in the behaviors of the current Administration and its allies in Congress and across the Nation. I’ve speculated in the past that there is effectively two factions on the conservative side of the spectrum, the truly religious and the less authentically religious, and that the latter preys on the former’s credulity, which is greater than on the left side of the spectrum (which has its own set of problems) because of a pre-disposition to credulity brought on by that religiosity which defines them.G

Another:

It’s not enough that many incumbent Rs should lose. Equally important is that challenger Ds should win. Convincingly and for good reasons, not simply the lesser of two evils.

I completely agree. The Democrats must field competent and ethical candidates who can communicate with their constituents. But what’s to be done with those still addicted to Fox News and other media which fails to serve up the information available? That’s a hard question.

I’ve mentioned Kansas Secretary of State Kurt Kobach a few times over the years. He was on the President’s defunct commission concerning fraudulent voting (despite his vociferous insistence that it was endemic, they found no evidence of same), he was on the answering end of a lawsuit requesting raw electoral data from voting machines by Professor Clarkson (he won).  More recently, well, there’s been some unsavory stories which I shan’t repeat. His most recent venture? The Kansas governorship, the Republican primary for which was last Tuesday. We’ll pick this up from Steve Benen, for one very good reason:

One of the most closely watched Republican primaries of the year was held in Kansas this week, where incumbent Gov. Jeff Colyer faced off against Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Everyone expected it to be a close contest, and the results didn’t disappoint: Kobach currently leads by 191 votes out of over 311,000 cast.

It’s not over just yet, though, and in the coming days, officials will still have to count provisional and mail-in ballots. The prospect of a recount is very real.

And that’s where this is likely to get tricky.

As Secretary of State for Kansas, Kobach and his team have supervisory responsibility for his own recount. He’s refused to recuse himself (although Steve later notes he’s hedged that position), which Steve thinks is outrageous:

The Kansas City Star reported yesterday, “No law requires Kobach to recuse himself, but legal and political experts said that he should do so to maintain trust in the election.”

And yet, as of yesterday, Kobach – the state’s top elections official – said he has no plans to recuse himself from the process, despite the apparent conflict of interest. The far-right Republican said his office “serves as a coordinating entity overseeing it all,” but since his team wouldn’t literally count ballots, Kobach is satisfied that he’s detached enough.

To my mind, this is not scandal – it’s a test. Kobach fails the first part of the test, that of recognizing when it’s necessary to take action in order to preserve trust in public institutions. However, he has not yet had a chance to test whether or not he’ll actually try to interfere with the recount for his benefit. If he does, and he’s caught, the citizens Kansas will know they have a real scumbag on their hands.

And they can kick him right out of public service as someone who doesn’t understand how government service should be conducted.

Sometimes, ya gotta give folks a bit of rope just to see if they hang themselves with it.

In NewScientist (28 July 2018, paywall) Clare Wilson reports on a the theory that obesity might be caused by a virus:

In humans, adenoviruses usually cause colds, diarrhoea or eye infections. For ethical reasons, we can’t just inject adenovirus-36 into people and see if they put on weight. Instead, Dhurandhar and other groups looked to see whether people who are overweight are more likely to have antibodies to this virus – a sign that their immune systems have encountered it. They found that they did: one US study, for instance, reported that 30 per cent of obese people had these antibodies, compared with 5 per cent of those who were a healthy weight.

Now Wilmore Webley at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has searched for the virus itself in people, rather than antibodies. His team looked at 80 biopsies taken from women with breast cancer. Analysing healthy breast tissue from them, the team found that 81 per cent of the samples from overweight women contained the virus, while just 19 per cent of samples from healthy-weight women did. “That is a big difference,” says Webley. The findings were presented at a conference of the American Society for Microbiology in Atlanta, Georgia.

It’s interesting that the focus is on the virus. Is it not possible that the cause of the obesity is the antibodies themselves?

Source; Wikipedia

A couple of days ago I mentioned the special election for House seat Ohio-12 between Balderson (R) and O’Connor (D). As of just now, Balderson leads by less than a percentage – and absentee votes amounting to far more than the margin are still to be counted in 10 or 11 days. O’Connor is not conceding, despite Republican crowing.

As I mentioned in the prior post, the Republican claims of victory, accurate or not, are really hollow. The fact that this is close is shocking, because this seat leans heavily Republican, and went for Trump in the Presidential election. But a facet I have neglected in all the special elections is this: Republican and leaning voters are, to some extent, going to be aware of the history of this seat, and the overwhelming margins by which it has been won by the GOP.

It has to be going through their minds: What The Fuck?

And, for those not irrevocably wedded to Trump or extremist ideology, that must eventually lead to the question: What does everyone who used to vote Republican but didn’t this time know that I don’t?

It’s gotta be eating away at them. The high profile resignations, accompanied by epitaphs for the Republicans. There’s been a lot of them, and for the extreme wing of the Republicans, it can’t happen fast enough. But for the moderates, the enablers of the extremists, those are signals that something is going seriously wrong.

Will we see a migration of moderate Republicans to the independent ranks as their consciences are struck by the venial nature of so many of their candidates? I don’t know for Balderson, and I have no intent to tar him with allegations and innuendo. But if he’s a moderate, then he’s become an object lesson to the balance of the Republicans, even if he wins, because he should have won in a landslide.

And, instead, he’s crawling underneath the barbed wire in hopes of winning.

Like Bartlett, I think first the GOP has to be dismantled, and then rebuilding a sane party can begin.

Know hope.

The damn stuff may be pretty but it’s too damn aggressive. Here, have some phrickin’ pictures.

In WaPo Charles Lane is horrified at the idea of child euthanasia:

Deliberately taking a small child’s life is unlawful everywhere in the world, even when the child is terminally ill and asks a doctor to end his or her suffering once and for all.

There is an exception to this rule: Belgium. In 2014, that country amended its law on euthanasia, already one of the most permissive in the world, authorizing doctors to terminate the life of a child, at any age, who makes the request.

For a year after the law passed, no one acted on it. Now, however, euthanasia for children in Belgium is no longer just a theoretical possibility.

Two under the age of 12.

Everywhere else in the world, the law reflects powerful human intuitions, moral and practical: that it is wrong to abandon hope for a person so early in life, no matter the illness; that it is absurd to grant ultimate medical autonomy to someone too young to vote or legally consent to sex; and that even the best-intentioned fallible human beings should not be entrusted with such life-and-death power.

In Belgium, a kind of libertarian technocracy has conquered these qualms. Euthanasia advocates insist that some children, even very young ones, may possess the same decisional capacity as some adults, and it’s therefore discriminatory to deny them the freedom to choose euthanasia based on an arbitrary age limit.

Except Lane is actually a trifle misleading. As he also states, the Belgians employ psychiatrists and other doctors in hopes of ensuring the diagnosis and prognosis are correct, and the child is as rational as a child might be. This is not ceding adult authority to children.

And I’d like to go back to his “moral intuitions.” Disregarding the questions raised by such a question, such as the discarding of rationality in favor of mysticism, my intuition is that, since the medical doctors are verifying that the children are in the grip of unendurable agony, with no hope of relief, mitigation, or cure, then prolonging their lives in opposition to their wishes has deep moral risks.

Certainly, Lane may be concerned about the “slippery slope” argument, but this is not an argument of theory, but of implementation.

And, finally, for those fans of natural morality, by which I mean those who prefer to look to nature for moral systems, I should point out that illnesses in this category in Nature, which is to say a world without human technology, would lead to a swift demise for the unfortunate victims. Someday I want to talk a little bit about the clash between social moral systems and nature’s moral system, but not today.

Gary Sargent on The Plum Line is looking forward to a Kavanaugh ruling on a subpoena of President Trump’s testimony:

The battle over whether President Trump will sit for an interview with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III could end up running headlong into the confirmation fight over Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, that’s set for this fall. …

What this means is that, in advance of Kavanaugh’s hearing, we may already know that Kavanaugh could end up being the deciding vote on the question of whether a president (Trump) can be compelled to testify to a grand jury. Now, it is possible that the current court could rule on such a matter sooner (the eight justices might deadlock, defaulting to a lower court). But it’s also perfectly plausible, depending on how long Trump’s team takes to make a decision and what happens in the courts afterward, that this could be headed for a showdown in front of a high court with Kavanaugh on it.

But this presumes the conservative SCOTUS justices will automatically vote for President Trump’s interests. But that’s not their job. Their job is to interpret the Constitution’s statements on cases brought before them, and if the Constitution does not forbid the subpoena of a President, then they should permit it unless they can come up with some overwhelming national reason to not do so.

In other words, they have a job to do and, while I don’t much care for some decisions made by the Court, I think that most or all of the Justices do vote in accordance with their understanding of that job.

The conservative faction of the Court is not, in any reasonable manner, dependent on the good graces of President Trump. They are politically independent of the whims of the electorate, just as the Founding Fathers intended.

Let’s assume the Court does rule the President must submit to such a subpoena. Then watch the storm arise for the selection of Justices through the popular vote. The conservative media will raise a firestorm in its relentless urge to politicize everything.

And, I suspect, the left will join them in the call. Ideologues hate that which is out of their control.

And that’ll become an issue of national, if understated, importance.

Equipoise:

Emails published as part of the NIH report suggest that backers of the trial expected to show that moderate drinking has a health benefit. Researchers are supposed to have what is known as “equipoise” going into a trial. That means “you are approaching a question with a completely neutral attitude,” [cardiologist and deputy director for extramural research at NIH Michael] Lauer said.

From “A huge clinical trial collapses, and research on alcohol remains befuddling,” Joel Achenbach, WaPo.

Most of my observations of the BREXIT debacle have been political in nature, but there’s more to it than that. I have to go with Dylan Matthews at Vox, as his source at Prospect Magazine seems to have disappeared:

So what happens if [British Prime Minister] May leaves [the EU] without that kind of deal [i.e., free trade]? That’s what Lis’s piece addresses. Here’s one of its extremely normal paragraphs:

4. Food will rot. We import about half of our food and feed, and 70 per cent of that comes from the EU. The bosses of Calais and Dover have warned of 30-mile tailbacks and possible infrastructural collapse. Experts have already warned that supermarkets will soon run out of supplies. (Hence the stockpiling.)

Stockpiling! A cursory look through the British press reveals that the entire nation of the United Kingdom is acting like a town on the eve of a massive blizzard. “Stockpiling is the talk of Britain!” the Economist proclaims, while raising doubts about whether people are actually piling up the food or just talking about it to be trendy. The Guardian asks readers, “What would you stockpile to prepare for no-deal Brexit?” and columnist Ian Jack observes, “As Brexit looms, stockpiling food seems the only sensible response.”

You get the feeling the Brits are about to find out what happens when amateurs are let into the cockpit. Hope they enjoy the ride. And, as May could have just ignored the referendum, this is all avoidable.

Lawyer Kenneth Jost has little use for the Republicans when it comes to the management of the Kavanaugh nomination:

Senate Republicans are neck-deep in political hypocrisy as they move toward confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh without a shred of bipartisanship or principle. With Republicans having lost any capacity for shame, the Republicans’ prime movers on judicial confirmations — Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley — are adopting tactics that flatly contradict their stances on President Obama’s last two Supreme Court nominations.

Regarding nominee Elena Kagan:

Grassley, then in his thirtieth year as U.S. senator from Iowa, began his remarks by telling his colleagues that he had “always been of the opinion that the Senate needs to conduct a comprehensive and careful review of Supreme Court nominees [emphasis added].” For the Senate to fulfill its constitutional responsibility, Grassley elaborated, “we must get all of her documents from the Clinton Library and have enough time to analyze them so we can determine whether she should be a Justice.”

And, as many readers already know, the same standard is not applied to Judge Kavanaugh.

Hypocrisy is all about trust – not only for the other side of the aisle, but for the voters as well. If we cannot trust such leaders as Senators McConnell and Grassley will treat all nominees with equal gravity, but find their thumb on the scales for their ideological allies, then how can we trust them in other situations? Their duty is to ascertain whether or not Kavanaugh is fit for the position; wilfull blindness to the possible defects of his intellect and personality, their refusal to follow their own rules, strongly suggests they are unfit for their offices.

To be blunt, boot those two bums out, voters.

Representatives Sarbanes (D-MD) and Price (D-NC), in response to various problems with Big Money and gerrymandering, have put together a legislative proposal for the future. One of the facets of their proposal is public financing for smaller candidates:

Protect every American’s voice from being drowned out by big wealthy and well-connected donors, and allow citizen-funded candidates to combat Super PACs and outside groups by earning additional public matching funds within 60 days of an election.

I suspect that if this is funded from taxes rather than donations, it’ll break up on the rocks of SCOTUS. Free speech rights should include the right not to fund the speech of someone I don’t like. If it’s funded through donations, well, I suspect donations will be anemic. Why give to an anonymous fund which will fund people I may not like, when I can just give the money to the candidate I prefer?

A random selection of the endgame for plants. A leaf noted on our front step, sadly out of focus.

And this dry rose, seen at local deli Kramarczuk’s. Again, the focus of the smartphone ruins what might have been a lovely picture.

On Right Turn, Jennifer Rubin pastes^[1] the GOP for its continued support of President Trump:

The political implications of Trump’s latest confession are quite stunning. Will the rest of the GOP go along with the position that it was perfectly fine for Russia to help Trump? That would sure be a change from “No collusion” (to “Collusion, so what?!”). I don’t know how a major political party can maintain the view that hostile powers have carte blanche to influence our elections. Every Republican in elected office or on the ballot should be asked his or her view on the matter.

The notion that collusion with a hostile power is no big deal is so preposterous and unpalatable, you would think Republicans would not dare try to defend Trump on this point. But this crowd? They might just try it.

This reminds me of a recent report on the political elite of Britain of which I wrote about here. It’s beginning to appear that Putin has been trading on the lust for power of the conservative wing of the democracies confronting him, buying himself influence with cash and riding the wave of research in political marketing.

The line of strong anti-Russian hawks has finally been broken here in the United States with the election of President Trump, and the selection of John Bolton as his National Security Advisor. In Britain, as I noted in the above post, the opposition leader appears to have sympathy for Russia and President Putin, but Prime Minister May, whatever her defects as leader, at least does not appear to have that particular ill.

While this is greatly damaging to the reputation of Democracy throughout the world, there is one saving grace: Democracies change leaders. The selection of a new class of leaders can easily result in the return to the proper attitude towards Russia: an honest wariness, a willingness to punish transgressions of international agreements, such as the annexation of Crimea, and honest assessments of Russian ambitions and how they’ll impact American interests.

This is what much of the GOP members of Congress are failing to do.

¹“Pastes” was slang from, I think, my parents’ youth, meaning to destroy beyond any hope of recovery.

WaPo reports on a scandal in Japan:

One of Japan’s top medical universities has been systematically blocking female applicants from entering the school for at least eight years, local news agencies reported on Thursday.

Tokyo Medical University, a private institution consistently ranked among the country’s best for clinical medicine, has been automatically lowering the entrance exam results of female applicants for the past decade, an attempt to keep the ratio of women in each class of students below 30 percent, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported. A specific coefficient was reportedly applied to the scores of all female applicants, lowering them by 10 to 20 percent.

Amazing. Of course, they have excuses for their bad behavior, including the worst: Everyone else is doing the same.

But – if I were a citizen of Japan – I’d call them traitors and boot their hairy asses right off the islands. Why? As I’ve mentioned before, nations prosper or not on the genius of their citizens, legal or not. By suppressing the potential careers of those women, they’ve deprived the nation of the genius for medicine they may have developed.

Worse yet, they were treated unjustly. Why should these women, who may have already suspected something fishy was going on, continue to have faith in their society? Unless the injustice is corrected to each and every one of them, they have every right to become disaffected.

Poor Japan. Their devaluation of women negatively impacts the entire nation. And will those responsible be held to punishment?

I know I said that I wouldn’t be reviewing Fringe shows unless they were extraordinary, and while I might not go so far as to say What To Do In Case Of Dinosaur Attack is extraordinary – it’s more of a novelty piece – it was a huge amount of fun and worth the time, at least if you like dinosaurs of the real or cinematic sort.

And, if you’re on a tight schedule, well, don’t be. Get there early and be prepared to stand in line outside.

The next in a line of special elections is coming up this Tuesday in Ohio as, due to the resignation of Representative Patrick Tiberi, the OH-12 seat in the House of Representatives has become available. According to Ballotpedia, this is a safely Republican seat, as the Republicans won the seat by 36.8 points in 2016, and previous to that margins of 40.3, 27, and 14.8; previous elections are not valid for this comparison due to redistricting. It’s been Rep. Tiberi this entire time, which may skew the results if voters connect with him, but in the end, this looks like a safe Republican seat.

So why are Speaker Ryan, President Trump, and Vice President Pence actively campaigning for the Republican candidate, State Senator Troy Balderson, and why has President Trump found it necessary to endorse Balderson?
[tweet https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1020811550771294211]

Because of this Monmouth poll result:

The race to fill the open seat in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District has shifted from a Republican advantage last month to a toss-up now, according to the Monmouth University Poll. Different voter models suggest that the race could go either way. The underlying GOP-lean of this district benefits State Senator Troy Balderson. But an increase in Democratic enthusiasm and a shift in independent voter preferences have boosted the standing of Franklin County Recorder Danny O’Connor.

That must be a shocking poll for Republicans who considered this a safe seat. Looking at the Balderson campaign website, he’s not a invoking the Trump name at all on the front page – at least not now. If he does not win, we know where Trump will go with his defense of his failure to drag Balderson across a finish line that should have been easy for a Republican who has a long record in the State House and doesn’t even appear to be an extremist, although he does sing the “no new taxes” theme song of the Republicans. He’ll blame Balderson for not embracing the Trump agenda.

But even if O’Connor fails, but only fails by a small margin, this will be an indictment by the American people of the Republican ideology of Trump, because Balderson bears the brand name on his shoulder, without a slavish devotion to Trump. So even without the name of Trump to remind independents of an ideology which is looking increasingly like madness, the polls – including the most important one, the last one – appear to show an overwhelming advantage for the Republicans going right into the shitcan.

That has to be a big red warning sign for Republican leaders who continue to act as if they’re convinced they have a winning political message for the upcoming elections.

From WaPo’s interview with North Texas sportscaster and occasional commentator Dale Hansen:

So how about now? Will you vote in the midterm elections?

I’m going to start again. Because I was wrong. I wanted the perfect candidate, and I didn’t want to be the guy who voted for the lesser of two evils. But I’ve learned that when you don’t vote for the lesser of two evils, sometimes the more evil guy wins.

In winner-takes-all elections, this is the message that every voter needs to consider.

And I loved the interview.

Salwa Samir in AL Monitor reports on an appalling subject in Egypt – female genital mutilation (FGM):

FGM was banned in the country in 2008, and in 2016 it was criminalized. Nevertheless, a 2016 survey by the UN Children’s Fund revealed that 87% of women and girls ages 15-49 in Egypt have undergone the procedure. Even after the criminalization, families in poor villages in Upper Egypt force their girls to undergo FGM, because they believe it promotes chastity.

A distressingly high percentage, given that it was banned a decade ago, and it’s beginning to look like it’s going to point up that in clashes between the law and tradition, the latter is often the victor.

Not being religious myself, I am sure I’m missing a lot of nuance, yet I’m left with this question running through my head for those who would advocate for FGM and happen to be religious: It should be clear that the human body is a gift from your deity(s), and mutilation that destroys the sources of pleasure in an often bitter life would seem to be an insult to that deity. How can you possibly hope to reside with your deity when you die after committing such a terrible crime against them?

For those wondering about circumcision, yep, it also applies. Sure, some will point at the Bible and claim it was commanded by Jehovah, but this merely underlines the question of the authenticity of the Bible.

If you feel like you’re stumbling into the spider’s web, that’s one good reason to discard divinities and look for better explanations.

Also noted in Samir’s article was the increase in the Egyptian population:

The population of Egypt has nearly doubled since 1985, which is a serious headache for the Egyptian government. In May, the government earmarked 100 million Egyptian pounds ($5.5 million) to bolster a family planning program entitled “Two is Enough.”

“Simply imparting information and increasing knowledge is not sufficient: The messaging must target the beliefs, ideas and feelings that drive behavior and that can remove social barriers and empower people to act. If we can shift these ideational factors — for example, if we can shift perceptions of what people believe other people will think of them if they use contraception or shift an individual’s belief that their peers are using contraception — then the behavior will subsequently change,” Bodiroza said.

The general thrust of Samir’s article was the use of celebrities and songs in influencing the sexual mores of the Egyptian state, which I should think should have been employed a decade ago.

A transcript of a AG Sessions speech from the Department of Justice website:

But in recent years, the cultural climate in this country—and in the West more generally—has become less hospitable to people of faith. Many Americans have felt that their freedom to practice their faith has been under attack.

And it’s easy to see why. We’ve seen nuns ordered to buy contraceptives.

We’ve seen U.S. Senators ask judicial and executive branch nominees about dogma—even though the Constitution explicitly forbids a religious test for public office. We’ve all seen the ordeal faced so bravely by Jack Phillips.

Americans from a wide variety of backgrounds are concerned about what this changing cultural climate means for the future of religious liberty in this country.

Under attack? How many of my readers have felt their freedom to practice their faith has been under attack? The intellectual flaw here, both in Sessions’ remark and my question, is to lump the religious into one group, rather than realistically acknowledging the differences, sometimes antagonistic, between the various faith groups, including those of no faith. Does a Christian feel threatened? A Satanist? A Jew, a Muslim, and the atheist down the street?

A mixture of answers will ensue if you ensue if you pursue persons of each group.

Given Sessions’ background, it’s not difficult to assume this is code for Christians are not as dominant as they used to be, and people are still taking seriously the idea of government not being dominated by religion! And this puts Sessions in the place of practicing subterfuge in order to promote his agenda, which appears to be Dominionist.

And I cannot take the paragraph regarding judicial & executive nominees being asked about dogma seriously. The rebuttal lies in his very words – government is not a vehicle for religion, so it is incumbent to ask if those who embody government will bring their religious prejudices into government, or if they’ll be faithful to the law of Man – not the many religions which those nominated practice.

Still, how many of the religious really feel under attack – and how many are just being stirred up by those fell power-mongers of the right?

A reader writes about disobedience to higher powers:

I spent a 30-year career working for 60,000 employee, $12 billion global financial services firm. It didn’t take long for those of us in the field offices to learn to ignore policy/procedure edicts emanating from the mothership in NYC, most of which we viewed as being untethered from reality and counter to good client service.

We knew, based on multiple experiences, that senior policy maker turnover occurred so frequently, that merely giving the appearance of partial acceptance of mandated changes was sufficient to survive until the next idiot assumed the helm.

I work for one of the larger engineering firms out there, and my group just basically does our thing and lets management tell us when that’s not what they want. We take care of our customers and prepare for the future.

And try to ignore HR as much as possible.