Hypocrisy?

Hypocrisy? Or just not really thinking things through?

As noted here before, although it might not always be very obvious, I'm conservative.

I do, however, think things through.

What about our legislators?  I wonder.

The bill to extend Medicaid, which only aids the poor, to mothers past 60 days to a year passed its committee, but barely.  

It was supported by Governor Gordon.

It was supported by physicians.

Deacon Mike Lehman, lobbyist for the Diocese of Wyoming, spoke in favor of it.

None of which kept some of the legislative guardians of public morals from speaking against it.  Jeanette Ward of Illinois spoke against it as an "entitlement program".

Eh?

Not hardly.

Deacon Lehman noted:“that not every government program is an inevitable slide into the fiery pit of Socialism.”  He further noted, according to the Cowboy State Daily: “We’re talking about a segment of the population that qualifies for Medicaid coverage while pregnant, then, when the mother and child are still extremely vulnerable, they no longer qualify.”

The physicians noted they were supporting it even though the program really doesn't pay them very well at all, just barely, in fact.

I don't know, I'd note, Ward's religious affiliation, but I’m sure she's some sort of Christian.  Prior to coming to Wyoming, she was very active in Illinois politics, where she was predictably controversial.  An example of that is as follows:

Do you know what your children are being taught: Muslims believe in the same God as Christians and Jews?

My 6th-grader came home with this assignment today. She was supposed to read the article and answer the questions. (She will not be completing this assignment). The full text of the article is below. Quiz questions are depicted in the pictures. This article is utterly incorrect and false on many levels. This is one of the many reasons I voted no on this curriculum resource.

Well, Christians, Muslims and Jews do in fact all worship the same God.  Their understanding of God's nature if quite different from each other, but they all worship the same God.

Are we really willing to deny this small class of women and their infants medical help?  Seems really mean.

It's also the sort of thing that causes some people to slam the Pro Life folks on the basis that they don't care at all once people are born.  That's actually completely false, and indeed many of the more dedicated pro lifers do indeed support helping mother and infant post birth.

Indeed, while often missed, there's a strong streak of liberalism in at least the Catholic pro-life crowd, which is not only opposed to abortion, but opposed to the death penalty as well.  It's not actually easy to politically pigeonhole it.

Which unfortunately doesn't appear to be the case for Ms. Ward.  She's pretty predictable.

So, frankly, this doesn't surprise me very much.

Without knowing more, I sort of guess that Ms. Ward is a fundamentalist of some type.  I don't want to pick on fundamentalist too much, as they are highly varied, and the term is one that is put on them, rather than one they adopt, but fundamentalist of any type, and there are Islamic Fundamentalist, Hindu fundamentalist, etc., risk reducing their religion to a set of sort of Pharisaic type rules and becoming mean thereafter.  Abortion is wrong because it is, premarital sex is wrong, aborting the results of premarital sex is wrong, but after that you are your own and if you get sick and die, well that's your problem.

I'm not saying that all fundamentalist of any type hold that view, but the fundamentalist of any stripe, and I'd note that for the Apostolic religions as well, run that risk.

Note, orthodox, and fundamentalist, are not the same thing.

There's a real element of solidarity and subsidiarity missing in that thinking.  Yes, just the other day I criticized free school breakfast and lunches, on the basis that it encouraged parents in irresponsibility, but here a different concern exists, which is helping the most helpless in the most efficient fashion.  I.e, both solidarity and subsidiarity apply here, and they argue strongly for extending Medicaid here.  To argue against it as an unwanted "entitlement" really misses the boat.

And then there's the gun them down bill on trespassing.

One of the sponsors of that bill is a devout member of my parish.  

Would Jesus really suggest that you can violently toss people off of land.

And it came to pass on the second first sabbath that, as he went through the corn fields, his disciples plucked the ears and did eat, rubbing them in their hands. And some of the Pharisees said to them: Why do you that which is not lawful on the sabbath days? And Jesus answering them, said: Have you not read so much as this, what David did, when himself was hungry and they that were with him: How he went into the house of God and took and ate the bread of proposition and gave to them that were with him, which is not lawful to eat but only for the priests? And he said to them: The Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.

Luke, 6.

Would the legislators have suggested that Jesus and the Apostles be roughed up for violating the law.

Probably.

McCarthy getting what he deserves.

America elected a new guy because they were sick of the old guy. This is also the most basic and obvious explanation for the crap show that's happening at the other end of this building right now.

Ben Sasses, January 3, 2023.  Speech on departing Congress.

The other explanation is this. When you offer yourself up for sale, sooner or later, the buyer is going to haggle over the price, particularly in a buyer's market.

McCarthy doesn't deserve to be speaker.  The alternatives the hard right want don't deserve it either. 

The irony of this all is that the very wind that he adjusted his sails for, now threatens to overturn him.

McCarthy has sought to be the Speaker of the House for a long time, and he's gauged his actions, by all appearances, accordingly.  Immediately after the November 2020 General Election, he backed the stolen election line being advanced by Trump.  After the insurrection, in the brief moment that it looked like the GOP was going to free itself of the caudillo, he stated, however, “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters, . . . He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action by President Trump.”

He got over that quickly, however, and went down to Mar-a-Lago to make peace with Trump, and has been his backer ever since.  Trying to bridge the gap between Trumpites and the rest of the GOP, he's taken the official line that the 2020 election is in the past and shouldn't really be looked at.  The mainstream GOP in general took that view, hoping against hope that Trump would just go away and things return to normal.

They did not, and not everyone in Congress was willing to allow the shades to be drawn.  That fact caused McCarthy to make Cheney a persona non grata, something the Trumpite heads of the Wyoming GOP followed and endorsed.  McCarthy was, by November 2022, planning on a "red wave".

It didn't materialize.

Ironically, now, his supporters are the more moderate members of the GOP and the complaint ones.  Harriet Hageman, elected in no small part on the election lie, has been supporting McCarthy, which given the Wyoming GOP at present makes utterly no sense whatsoever, but which might offer some slight hope that she never really believed the crap she was putting out.

But at least nineteen members of the "Freedom Caucus" really do, and they're not having McCarthy, as they know that he'll go the way the wind blows.

More ironically, the current pro McCarthy lien is "we don't know what they want" about the Freedom Caucus.  Yes, they very much do.  They want the stuff that the GOP has been shoveling to be its actual policy.  This mostly shows that the party really has no intentions of doing that, and actually does hope to return to politics as normal.

McCarthy is getting exactly what he deserves.

For the red dyed in the wool members of the Wyoming GOP, the question is, why aren't they urging Hageman to vote for somebody other than McCarthy?  This is a sincere question.  Hageman came into office as part of the "freedom caucus" branch of the GOP that is now seeking to terminate McCarthy's career.  She's voting for him.  Her Wyoming critics, not all of them Cheney fans, claimed she was just another Washington insider.  And now she's voting like one.

Not that I'd like a speaker from the far right.  But contrary to their critics, you can tell what they want.  They don't want McCarthy as he'll run away from them as the winds change, they fear, and probably with good reason. And they may legitimately sense that they have to strike while the iron is hot, with whatever little they have left to strike with.

Painted into a corner.

What does that statute really say? The Respect For Marriage Act, what it says, what it means, what it means behind what it means, and the reaction to Lummis voting for it.

There's been a lot of news about the Senate passing a "same sex marriage bill", and on Wyoming Senator Lummis voting in favor of the bill, thereby aligning her vote with that of Congressman Liz Cheney.

Did the Senate actually pass a bill expressly protecting same-sex marriage?

Well, not really.

Here's the statute:

Shown Here:
Placed on Calendar Senate (07/21/2022)

Calendar No. 449

117th CONGRESS 2d Session

H. R. 8404

To repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and ensure respect for State regulation of marriage, and for other purposes.

---

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

July 20, 2022

Received; read the first time

July 21, 2022

Read the second time and placed on the calendar

---

AN ACT

To repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and ensure respect for State regulation of marriage, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the “Respect for Marriage Act”.

SEC. 2. REPEAL OF SECTION ADDED TO TITLE 28, UNITED STATES CODE, BY SECTION 2 OF THE DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE ACT.

Section 1738C of title 28, United States Code, is repealed.

SEC. 3. FULL FAITH AND CREDIT GIVEN TO MARRIAGE EQUALITY.

Chapter 115 of title 28, United States Code, as amended by this Act, is further amended by inserting after section 1738B the following:

“§ 1738C. Certain acts, records, and proceedings and the effect thereof

“(a) In General.—No person acting under color of State law may deny—

“(1) full faith and credit to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State pertaining to a marriage between 2 individuals, on the basis of the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of those individuals; or

“(2) a right or claim arising from such a marriage on the basis that such marriage would not be recognized under the law of that State on the basis of the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of those individuals.

“(b) Enforcement By Attorney General.—The Attorney General may bring a civil action in the appropriate United States district court against any person who violates subsection (a) for declaratory and injunctive relief.

“(c) Private Right Of Action.—Any person who is harmed by a violation of subsection (a) may bring a civil action in the appropriate United States district court against the person who violated such subsection for declaratory and injunctive relief.

“(d) State Defined.—In this section, the term ‘State’ has the meaning given such term under section 7 of title 1.”.

SEC. 4. MARRIAGE RECOGNITION.

Section 7 of title 1, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:

“§ 7. Marriage

“(a) For the purposes of any Federal law, rule, or regulation in which marital status is a factor, an individual shall be considered married if that individual’s marriage is valid in the State where the marriage was entered into or, in the case of a marriage entered into outside any State, if the marriage is valid in the place where entered into and the marriage could have been entered into in a State.

“(b) In this section, the term ‘State’ means a State, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, or any other territory or possession of the United States.

“(c) For purposes of subsection (a), in determining whether a marriage is valid in a State or the place where entered into, if outside of any State, only the law of the jurisdiction applicable at the time the marriage was entered into may be considered.”.

SEC. 5. SEVERABILITY.

If any provision of this Act, or any amendment made by this Act, or the application of such provision to any person, entity, government, or circumstance, is held to be unconstitutional, the remainder of this Act, or any amendment made thereby, or the application of such provision to all other persons, entities, governments, or circumstances, shall not be affected thereby.

Passed the House of Representatives July 19, 2022.

Attest:

Well jeepers Yeoman, you may be thinking, there's no mention of same-sex marriage or homosexuality in there at all.

That's right, there isn't.

So what's up with those claims?

Well, those who have read the Dobbs decision know that Justice Thomas made a comment to the effect that Dobbs implicitly suggests that other areas where the Supreme Court has legislated on the topic of marriage may be just as invalid as when it did on abortion in Roe v. Wade. To some extent, at least in the case of Obergefell, he's correct.  I'd submit that this does nothing to the holding in Loving v. Virginia, on interracial marriage, but some people fear that Loving will now fall as well.  It is clear that if Thomas had his way, Obergefell would be reversed.

But if it were reversed, that would mean that a Dobbs like result would occur.  States would be free to allow for same gender unions if they wanted to, and some would, and some would not.

All this statute does is apply full faith and credit to the topic, to achieve the same result that the Wyoming Supreme Court did when same gender unions were not a thing in Wyoming.  If contracted elsewhere, the Wyoming Supreme Court held, full faith and credit would cause them to be valid here.

This statute achieves the same result.

Does that mean that this legislatively secures same sex unions across the nation?

Well, not directly, but maybe indirectly.  After all, if you can cross state lines to contract the union, you can still get there.

Years ago, that wasn't actually quite as clear, but it has been, except in the case of homosexual legal unions, for many decades.  At least in Wyoming, it became clear that this was also the case before Dobbs.

Lummis might point out, I suppose, that the statute also does the same thing for interracial marriages, but those aren't under any lingering threat anywhere.

Or at least it can be argued that this is the case, and that seems to be the case to me.  I.e., I don't think Dobbs endangers interracial marriages in any fashion. Others, including a speaker at the Wyoming Bar Convention, apparently, maintain otherwise, which is right about the point that Harriet Hageman walked out of the convention room and into the hall, although she didn't silence herself, apparently.

Well, not everyone was happy with this in the state.  The state GOP sent out this email:

Dear Wyoming Republicans and County Leaders,

Yesterday’s vote on the “Respect for Marriage Act” sadly saw our own Senator Lummis vote aye. This act threatens religious liberties and is opposed to the Wyoming Republican Party Platform which was ADOPTED UNANIMOUSLY at the May 2022 Republican State Convention by more than 400 delegates from across the state.

Well, this is interesting.

Lummis came back into D.C. in the 2020 election, during which she cozied up to the far right.  Prior to her running there was serious speculation that Liz Cheney was going to run for the same office, and in fact Lummis' early announcement may have been timed to jump the gun on Cheney and get in position first.  If that was her goal, it was a smart one, as Cheney ultimately decided to run again for the House, which she did, getting around 75% of the Wyoming GOP vote.  But there did seem to be some bad blood between the two, and frankly I can't quite blame Cheney for being upset, if she was, about losing, probably permanently, the chance to be in the Senate.

As soon as Lummis rolled back into town, she joined the Trumpsters in her vote to question the election, and seemed to be getting on the Ted Cruz Party Car.  I frankly wondered if she saw Cruz as the heir apparently to Trump, and Cruz seemed to view himself that way, throwing out candy to the far right with his position on the 2020 election.

Then came 2022.  If Lummis really held bad blood towards Cheney, she got her revenge as the inside baseball is that she's the one who told Il Duce that he ought to bestow knighthood upon Harriet Hageman, which he did.  Lummis later publicly endorsed Hageman, an extraordinary thing for a Senator to do against an incumbent of her own party.

Then came the 2022 election and the only red wave was the hemorrhaging of GOP hopes for the election.  In spite of his helping the GOP to turn in a really bad performance in 2022, and losing in 2020, and helping the GOP to lose both the House and the Senate in 2018, and being the President only due to the lunacy of the electoral college in 2016, Il Duce announced his renewed March On Rome last week.

But even before that, like a bloodhound sniffing the trail of a distant fugitive, Lummis sniffing the political winds endorsed Ron DeSantis as the head of the GOP.

And now she's joined Cheney in a vote which is contrary to the state GOP's platform, an act which in recent years has resulted in declarations of expulsion for improper thought.

Lummis has proven to be pretty savvy.  She gave the State Bar the middle finger salute in 2020, and she's basically giving the GOP Central Committee the middle finger salute right now.  

In the meantime, if a Republican columnist and sort of gadfly is correct, the hypocrisy problem that we've pointed out of the Illiberal Democrats in the GOP may have exhibited itself.  He came out with a column that goes after the Wyoming GOP with both barrels.  Indeed, with both barrels and all six cylinders.  It's really brutal.

I'm not going to repeat what he wrote there, as he's claiming real inside baseball knowledge that I certainly don't have and which is pretty personal.  But what it does point out is the really hypocritical nature of the Illiberal Democracy positions taken by the GOP, or at least Wyoming's GOP, at the present time.

I'm a social conservative, and I think Obergefell was wrongly decided.  I think Justice Thomas was right on that in Dobbs, and I think that Senator Barrasso's no vote on this bill was correct.

But I also think that in order to understand why you are or against something, you need to have that grounded in the existential and metaphysical.  And that's a really uncomfortable thing, particularly in the area of sex and marriage.

I don't expect everyone who olds the traditional views to be saints, far from it.  But I do expect people to be intellectually honest.

Indeed, that's why two French figures are so interesting in my point of view.  One I can unfortunately not recall by name.  He was a parish pastor who had numerous affairs with women of his parish, but when asked to renounced his faith during the French Revolution, he went to this death rather than do so, noting publically that he was "a bad Priest", not a non-believer.

Another example was Charles Péguy, the tortured French poet who had been a non-believer who came round to being a devoutly believing, but non practicing, Catholic, as he felt himself so burdened by his sins that he mistakenly could not overcome them.

Both of these examples are not to be followed.  Péguy should have gone to Confession and fully practiced.  But their intellectual honesty when it mattered is what really counts here.

Does Lummis have any?  While I disagree with Cheney's vote too, I know that she does. She's paying for it now.  And what about the Wyoming GOP?  Having cited to traditional values, will those who have not exhibited them in their personal lives now stop proclaiming themselves as the moral standard-bearers and retrace their steps to where they departed from the narrow path, or do they regard themselves as somehow personally exempt?

Verklepmt

This morning, I'd note, there's a pile of commentary that President Biden's speech was divisive.

Surely, this is absurd.

It might have been, but for a period of years now the GOP has been entertaining QAnon conspiracies and, running up to the election, the administration made an outright attempt to subvert it.  During this period, the leader of the party, Donald Trump, has been anything but conciliatory.  He's been mean, nasty and a liar.  Picking up on his lead, those who have run behind his flag have been as well.  This state will send into office, probably, two candidates who based their campaigns on his lies and were hardly nice in their campaigns.

For months around here, I've seen a few flags flying that outright state "Fuck Joe Biden", language that when I was growing up would not have been tolerated in this fashion about anyone.

And members of the GOP, like me, who have refused to follow in line are referred to by extreme right wing zealots, more than a few of whom started off as, and really still are, Rust Belt Democrats, as RINOs.

Well, have the vapors if you wish, but this would seem to demonstrate the old maxim that it's the stuck hog that squeals the loudest.

Lex Anteinternet: The Candidates and Office Holders, how much are we entitled to know. Eye Planks.

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Matthew 7:3-5

Lex Anteinternet: The Candidates and Office Holders, how much are we...: Earlier this past week, Wyoming's voters learned, if they're paying attention, a little about the personal life of a candidate that ...

We ran this just the other day, and then the WyoFile revealed:

August 7, 2022

WyoFile, the Trib reports, has revealed that a host of Wyoming candidates and political figures took PPP money in spite of their generally anti Federal Government positions. This includes Frank Eathorne, Robin Belinskey, Rex Rammell and Anthong Bouchard or their businesses.  There were more, but these were the ones for statewide offices that were notable due to their positions.

Harriet Hageman was not among them, but the WyoFile went deeper and noted that members of her family had.  A spokesman reacted accusing WyoFile of "journalistic malpractice". 

PPP money was in the form of loans, but generally they were loans that were subject to be forgiven and were more often than not.

Which gets back to our original point.

Indeed, that point was already sort of made in regard to Chuck Gray, who the news earlier revealed somehow exists on next to no reported income.  That does matter as right wing Republicans have a sort of rugged individualist, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, ideology, and if you are getting by without having to pull on those, your authenticity, as well as that of your point, is certainly in question.

And here we have something like that.

A whole host of candidates has been campaigning on the evils of the Federal government and its money.  But then they take it.  Earlier, Wyoming GOP head Frank Eathorne had been shown to take some substantial money from the Federal government in his livestock operation.  He declared that to have been a mistake and that he now eschews it. But it turns out that when PPP loans were there, the bulk of which have been forgiven, he was ready to take it as well.  And Rex Rammell, who is ready to expel Federal employees of some offices by force if he's elected Governor, which he will not be, didn't have to be forced into taking PPP money.

This gets to an interesting phenomenon that's evident in this race on all sorts of level of various candidates loudly proclaiming that the Federal government, and indeed all government, needs to get out of the way, unless they rely on the government somehow themselves, in which case that personal reliance is somehow fine.  Without getting into it too deeply, any candidate who is campaigning on the "hate the government" or "get the government out of the way" is really open to examination on this topic.  If they're backing a pet law, or rely on the government for enforcement of something that aids their personal interest, business, or well-being, well. . . . 

Indeed, there are entire industries in the state and nation which complain about regulation, but basically exist only because the country subsidizes them in one fashion or another. Agriculture gets slammed that way but really basically doesn't fit into this category, or at least not much, but other industries most definitely do.  We've dealt with it before, but we're so used to it, we can't recognize the subsidies but would be in a world of hurt if they were gone. For example, Wyoming couldn't pay for its highways and airports but for Federal funds, and it only just begins there.

And certain industries exist only due to Federal license, with those licenses having become more and more in the nature of private property over the years.  Work, in some fashion, at a family radio station?  Well that radio station exists only because the Federal government lets you treat it like property, rather than regulate it to keep it local, or open it up to bidding every few years.

Indeed, taking just one, radio licenses for commercial stations used to be subject to a set of regulations that, for competition purposes, basically required them to be local.  Not anymore.

Would Chuck Gray be for that?

In reading the article, the one anti-government crusader who didn't show up in the PPP list, as noted, was Harriet Hageman. Frankly, I thought the WyoFile article was a bit of a cheap shot, partially, in that regard, as it mentioned her husband's law firm, but that firm is a firm and the fact it took PPP money doesn't really say anything about him or her.  

Her family's ranching operations, on the other hand, taking PPP money. . . . 

Anyhow, Hageman is a lawyer, and she keeps campaigning on taking on the Federal government.  Mentioned in the list of Federal terribles are such entities as the U.S. Fish & Wildlife.  An article endorsing her by former Congressman Barbara Cubin cites that she's quick to sue.

Frankly, in many of these instances average Wyomingites would probably come down on the other side, if they knew the issues.  Agencies like the U.S. Fish & Wildlife help keep Wyoming what it is.

And Hageman hasn't limited herself to just matters such as that.  She represented Susan Gore in a lawsuit that included a claim against at least one local contractor.  Maybe the suit had merit, but we shouldn't really buy too much into the common lawyer propaganda that they only represent the innocent, just and virtuous.  A lawyer with a practice like that would starve.  Lawyers represent their clients and their interests.

The ultimate point on all of this is this.  At some point, a person has to be honest about these things, and a person can in fact be honest about taking government money while opposing it. That defense is, "well, this is the system and I have to operate within it, but I'll vote to take it down even if it hurts me."

And frankly, with some of these offices, that would mean basically destroying the highway system and wiping out airports.

Indeed, how far along on the "less government" path is anyone really willing to go?  Not all that far, I'd wager.  Wyoming didn't have driver's licenses until the 1950s.  Would we propose returning to a non license state of affairs?  Wyoming's liquor trade was unregulated right up into Prohibition, and the current licensure system only came about after Prohibition's repeal. Would we be willing to return to an unregulated liquor trade?  Wyoming was a pioneer in wildlife and hunting laws, but that means that there are laws. Would we want to go back to unrestricted taking of wildlife?

And on property "rights", they exist solely because the government says they do.  One candidate campaigning against the government is a significant landlord, an occupation that you actually can't have unless the government lets it happen.

Indeed, quite a few of the "anti-government" candidates that have a problem with the Federal government don't otherwise have a problem with the government at all. That shows in how they'd handle the Federal domain, they'd transfer it to Wyoming. Wyoming is a governmental body, rather obviously.

Of course, they feel that Wyoming would regulate things less than the Federal government does, which isn't all that much to start with.  Some of them would just transfer that domain to private landowners, with it often being the case that those in the agricultural sector think it would simply be given to them, rather than being sold to somebody with a rich hair dressing chain in New Jersey.

Which brings us to the point that most of us only feel the government is being too restrictive or intrusive if there's something we personally want to do that it's impinging on somehow.  Otherwise, we're fine with it.

Which also means that a person needs to be pretty careful what they wish for.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXXV. Griner and Russian Law, Senseless Destruction, No. 10 Cat to get new Roommate, Russia threats on Alaska, Where's the followup?

Don't be stupid out there

Russia is not the United States.

Brittney Griner is accused of bringing CBD oil into Russia, supposedly in vape pens.

Did she do it?  I don't know.

But what I do know is that Russia isn't the US, where a celebrated athlete would likely get a slap on the hands for a drug violation, and where this isn't one.

Americans seem to believe for some reason that if they fall afoul of the law in a foreign nation, the US should rescue them.  The US has no obligation to do that.

And like it or not, other nations have much stricter laws on a host of things than the US does.  The US in contrast has lots and lots of laws, which isn't necessarily a good thing either.  In part, that leaves Americans with a sort of combined quite contempt and ignorance for the law. We don't know what all the laws are, so we don't tend to worry about them overly much.  And people can do some pretty bad stuff and not get punished all that much.

In contrast, there can be real penalties for things in foreign countries.  In one Southeast Asian country, for example, people get beat with canes for spitting gum on the street.  When I went to South Korea with the National Guard in the 1980s I recall us all being warned that you could be jailed for possessing a Playboy magazine, which didn't bother me as I wasn't going to be running around the Korean Peninsula with one, but that's a much different approach to pornography that the US has.

You get the point.

On Griner, my present understanding is that she plays basketball in Russia as women basketball players make less than male ones in the U.S.  So she goes there on the off season, where apparently they are then running their leagues.  I get that, and that's not just, but that's not a reason to be careless, if she was.  Her minority status, her numerous tattoos, her homosexual status, and her American citizenship all made her a target in a nation where all of those are either very unusual or not at all tolerated.  On top of that, there's a war going on.

There's not much the US can do to spring her.  The Russians will let her go when holding her no longer serves a purpose.

Senseless Destruction.

Somebody blew up the Georgia Guidestones.

For those who are not familiar with them, there's a really good episode of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World about them, identifying the builder and why he did it.  For a really brief synopsis, based on memory, a physician who lived in another state built them out of concern that things were going down the tubes and giving his own personal guidance and thoughts on how to avoid going down the tubes in the future.

Frankly, they were very 1970ish.

Why would somebody blow them up?

Apparently, some people believed they were evil, which is silly.  

Regarding guidestones, with all the crap going on in the US right now, the builders thoughts probably wouldn't be altered if he were around right now.

Boris Johnson falls.

Americans tend to be so self focused on their own politics, which are distressingly weird right now, that they miss the politics of other nations.  On top of it, the American press is phenomenally bad on reporting political events in other nations.  Added to that, the press of the subject nations tends to be no better, so you are only left with the suggestion that he did something horrible, with nobody ever telling you what it was.  An article in the Guardian, for example, calls him the worst leader the Tories every had, but won't say why.

Canadian changes of power, by the way, are completely that way.  It's like the entire topic of the election is a big secret.

Anyhow, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has resigned.  He will briefly remain Prime Minister until his replacement is chosen.

Usually this happens following an election with the party in control loses.  This, however, was due to an internal revolt in the Conservative Party.

Apparently a lot of this has to do with "Partygate", a scandal in which parties were held at No. 10 Downing Street (as if they were going to be able to keep that secret) which violated COVID restrictions in the UK.

I guess it says something in favor of the British that this would bring a Prime Minister down, whereas in the United States a sitting President would attempt to illegally retain power and nothing happen to him.

Russia threatens Alaska.

One of the Russian strategies to deal with its pathetic performance in Ukraine is to threaten everyone else.  Now it is threatening the United States, stating it might fight us to take Alaska back.

Seriously?

Usually, bullies have to win to be credible.

And now. . . ?

I'm not going to bother to name names, but there is a politician in Congress who came on Twitter nearly daily to blame Biden for rising gasoline prices.

Now gas prices have fallen for eight days straight.  So is he going on and giving credit?

Yeah. . . right.

Blog Mirror: Virgin Galactic and Richard Branson Take Hypocrisy to New Heights, Literally

Virgin Galactic and Richard Branson Take Hypocrisy to New Heights, Literally

Carbon Hypocrisy

Off to the side, in the blogs we follow section, is one called Buzzard's Beat.

"Buzzard" is a female rancher in southeast Kansas.  I know that everyone who isn't too familiar with Kansas thinks of it as one giant wheat field, but it isn't.  In actuality, there's a lot of ranch ground in Kansas.

I've had the opportunity to drive across Kansas twice.  People complain about places like Kansas and Nebraska being boring, but I really enjoy the states.  Moreover, I've driven across the back roads of those states in addition to the long, boring interstate highways.  This true of North and South Dakota as well.  I really love them, even though I'm not from there.

This isn't, however, a travelogue of the farm belt, but rather to point out two posts she makes.

One is entitled: Dear Richard Branson:  What's worse, a rocket or a steak?

It's pretty clearly the rocket.

What I want to point out here is hypocrisy, and not just the hypocrisy of Sir Richard Branson, although I do want to point out that.

Rather, what I want to point out is that in the discussion on global warming, everyone seems to feel free to blame others while their own conduct goes unnoticed.  

It's become trendy to blame agriculture, more particularly stock raising, for global warming.  That gets both to this post and another she's put up, that one being Raising Cattle for a Healthy Climate.  Both are well worth reading, as well as a number of other posts she's put up, including Dear Epicurious:  Your Meat-Free Resolution Confuses Me.

This also gets to the recent trend of the dim giving up meat as they think it helps the planet somehow.

Seemingly missed by the dim are some basic facts of animal production.  Every domestic meat animal can be raised on food, for it, that you can't eat.  You really can't eat prairie grass, for instance, but cows can.  You sure can't eat the crap that sheep do.  And even the finish grain that's used, unless you are buying "grass fed" beef (or simply eating a volunteer grass fed cow, like we are), that being corn, is a grain that you can barely actually eat.  I know that maize is a worldwide staple, but frankly unless its ground up and processed into something it's actually a human foodstuff that you can't really digest for the most part.  Corn on the cob may be delicious, and it is, but it, um, mostly passes through you. And we all know that it's really a vehicle for butter, salt and pepper anyhow.

As she points out, the greenhouse gasses that are produced by livestock globally are really small.  And contrary to what those self-declared non meat eating environmentalist may imagine, the carbon footprint of nearly everything produced by a "dirt" farm is massive.

Put another way, if you are dining on a big bowl of nice health brussels sprouts, unless you grew them yourself, they didn't get to your bowl during the annual brussels sprout migration.  No, they were grown by somebody using some pretty heavy-duty diesel powered things, and then trucked to market by a pretty heavy diesel powered thing, kept cool by something that was electric, and then you probably fired up your car and drove to the store to get them.  

Hmmm. . . .

Also, while we're at it, if you are  vegan or a vegetarian, you should be aware that production crop agriculture is a major killer of animal life, so you can pretend you don't have blood on your hands, but they're at least as bloody as somebody's who eats meat.  I'm not dissing farmers for this, it's just the way things are.  But if you spend a day on a combine you are going to mow down something, and that's just the start of it.

It's not that there aren't things everyone can do about this, but feeling sanctimonious about your own personal dinner plate isn't it.  The more you think that your bowl is planetary benign, the more likely it isn't.  Ideally, if we really wanted to be fully green, we'd grow our own vegetables, as much as possible (and it wouldn't be 100% possible) on our big urban lawns, and we'd buy a local beef or go hunting in the fall.  If you aren't doing at least one of those things, you aren't the least bit green and should quit pretending that you are.

And if you are so massively wealthy that you can afford to blast yourself into space, unless you are a neo Tolstoy living the peasant life, you're mere existence is carbon positive, let alone indulging yourself in being a space cowboy.