#So-called Recovering Fundamentalists

[wutbju]

Around 33:00, Pettit continues:

I never thought about going [to BJU], but I began to realize and .... there's so much to the story. It [will] take a long time to tell it. But, but short, short story was ... I really came under conviction that that separation from liberalism is a command of God. Come out from among them and be separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing. And so, I began to struggle. All of my friends and at the time were Southern Baptists, and they were great guys and they loved the Lord. And they they were in good Bible preaching churches. But at the time five out of the six seminaries were liberal. And that would include Southern Seminary, Southeastern Seminary, New Orleans Seminary. The only exception was Southwestern. I, I just, you know, I'd come out of liberalism, and I ... didn't want to have anything to do with it. So I actually ended up going to Bob Jones because they were a leading institution that had taken a separatist position against liberalism.

What's interesting about this is that Pettit's admitting that he feels bound to separation like I might feel about not eating sugar. Sugar's not a great evil. So-called "liberalism" is not a great evil. Really. It's not. But I feel better when I don't eat a lot of sugar. I have diabetes in my family, too, so I feel like I need to choose better to avoid a long-term problem.

Pettit feels better by respecting his younger self by choosing BJU's "stand" against "liberalism."

Remember -- ecclesiastical liberalism in the 1970s is women in the pulpit. That's what he's resisting.

[petrified-aspen]

there is a common misconception that our marginalized identities act as a sort of Shield of Principle™ or whatever, that prevents us from having fascist or racist leanings. but there are inconceivably (and subliminally) powerful forces that do the exact opposite, systems of white supremacy, cisheteronormavity, and class that galvanize us and our identities against one another.

There are examples of this everywhere; entire tomes have been written on it. But lately, I am noticing a particularly worsening problem among a lot of people in my Jewish communities. Aimless, usually incomprehensible vitriol sprayed at nebulously-defined "pro-palestine leftists", trying to paint them all as jihadists, religious fundamentalists, anti-Semitic.

It seems almost deliberate, scrolling through some of these tags, and watching the rhetoric evolve. First, someone finds an incredibly-specific, cherry-picked representation of something indefensible, either on the grounds of it being unproductive, or on the grounds of it being actual violent bigotry. It's usually the same 4 or 5 things, re-posted across thousands of blogs. What was once a shitty cardboard sign that, often times, was at a protest for all of 30 minutes before it was destroyed, or before the protest organizers removed it and denounced it at teach-ins and meetings, is now permanently saved on thousands of Tumblr blogs. What was once an easily-identifiable and fixable problem becomes a gut-punch that steels thousands of anxious, scared groups in preparation for violence.

These 4 or 5 gut-punches then get surrounded by the more on-the-fence statements. They are statements that, in my experiences having worked with pro-Palestinian demonstrators at 2 universities, are well-intentioned, but filled with pain, grief, and sometimes, anger. These statements challenge the validity of Israel as a state, or attempt to appeal to a mutual sorrow and grief by imploring people to learn from the Holocaust.

But chances are, as you came across that post, you're recovering from the violent, inflammatory post from earlier. And so your eyes see the same green, red and black colors, and you feel the upwell of emotion behind it, and by pattern-recognition alone, you're more likely to take it in bad faith. To assume that this person wants the safety of all Jews to disappear along with the Israeli state, rather than understand their ideological opposition to any state that thrives at the expense of the colonized. To conclude that they are co-opting your family's tragedy rather than recognizing that the same rhetoric, the same tactics, are being used to justify more death, according to actual Holocaust scholars.

Then it devolves even further, with completely benign statements, like "From the River to the Sea", a slogan that has been used to represent Palestinian-Jewish solidarity since before Hamas even existed, being received as though it's the 14 Words or some shit.

This is how communities manufacture outrage that only hurts us in the long run. Yes, the person who held up a sign saying "carpet bomb Tel Aviv" is wrong and they should be removed immediately. But when someone shows you that sign, then shows you a sign calling for solidarity between ethnic groups, and they try to tell you that those two are the same, that person is lying to you.

There's a very specific reason why a nebulously-defined "left-wing" is so often the first target of this manufactured outrage; because leftists have been historically united by ideals of solidarity, mutual aid, and community support and defense. To a regime built on imperial power--be that the U.S. regime, the Third Reich, whatever--nothing is scarier than that. By attacking the solidarity between the people you want to keep in line, you ensure that you will have fewer enemies should some of them have doubts about keeping in lock-step with their own oppression. This was the reason behind the Red Scare, and it was a key step in fascist Italy and Germany as well.

Our identities alone are not a bulwark against fascism. Our best tool to lead our communities forward is solidarity, and with that comes communicating, listening, and reflecting.

[libras-interactives]

Hi ! Just thought about something! What are the religious beliefs of the UtDM's characters ? (Your ocs specifically) You mentioned Flynn was atheist, I believe ? I just find those kind of information really interesting when you consider the time period !

Have a nice day !

Ooooh interesting question! Cut because this is long.

Marius and Eveline were raised Catholic. She still attends Mass and believes to ... some extent, though it's painful when she'd had so much tragedy and she feels God has allowed it to happen. It's more comforting rituals to her, and a familiar place to have peace and quiet in. Marius would say he believes in God, but does little in the way of prayer or action.

Jack was raised in a very puritannical, isolated and fundamentalist Christian sect. He's still very afraid of God and damnation and Satan, and wants to not believe to relieve himself of that fear, but ...

Flynn was raised very strict Catholic, and he was always defiant and iffy on the whole thing - WW1 sent him firmly into "God is dead and/or never existed, and if He's alive, he doesn't care about us" territory. Generally he believes organized religion is an excellent scam.

Lottie's family was Catholic, though didn't attend church often and as far as she remembers, weren't terribly devout. When they died, she became bitter and resented God. As an adult, she's mostly recovered from that, but still jokingly calls herself a bad Catholic and doesn't really identify as one.

Máire was raised Catholic ... ish? Her grandmother and mother were... eccentric about it, to say the least. Their true beliefs were much closer to the late 1800s spiritualist movement, with a weird mix of Saint reverence and old Irish folk medicine and teachings. Máire dislikes explaining herself to others, and Catholicism is deeply tied to her culture, so she allows others to assume and refer to her as Catholic.

Malwina was raised Catholic and still believes in God. She tries to attend Mass, but lately it's brought more guilt and shame than it's worth. She prays on her rosary when she feels disheartened, but moreso because it reminds her of her mama and sisters.

Polly/Paulie grew up Methodist, and isn't particuarly religious or interested, but the church still holds fond memories. He's especially sentimental during Christmastime, and will attend those services. She only prays if she's truly in distress.

Slyvester was raised Lutheran, though his parents were fairly open-minded for the time. His wife is Catholic, and he married into/converted to the Catholic Church for her sake. They don't attend Mass except for holidays, and only pray with family or before meals.

Krooks grew up Jewish, and tries not to think about what his family and God would think about his current situation. He still observes dietary restrictions and holidays out of tradition and missing his family. Ezra was raised in a fiercely Southern Baptist home, which put him off religion for a long time. A few times he's gone to Krooks' synagogue and found it comforting. Roxie is quite blunt about her disbelief in God, and claims she never stepped foot in a church, nor will she ever. She grew up in rural Utah, had four mothers and narrowly avoided a marriage with a much older man. She does NOT like talking about religion.

[emotionalsupportaudino]

So I started an actual blog???

I wanted to be able to put thoughts out into the word and Tumblr is my funtime space where I reblog shit and don't say anything, so you can find it here: https://battletoasters.wordpress.com/

However I do want to note that I want to say shit about my first posts because they were about the best bits of 2023, so if you're interested here's my best book, best movie and best album of 2023 I'll post them here!

But there was a LOT more in these posts, including why I love Another 2001, how Scott Pilgrim Takes Off shattered and surpassed all my expectations, and how Anne of Cleves from SIX is probably the hottest character I have ever seen in a musical lmao.

Best Book of 2023: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

It arrived to my address on release day. And it sat next to my bed for several days, staring at me. It dared me to read it. I couldn’t. What if Straight was a fluke? What if this story rejected me? What if it told me I wasn’t enough–wasn’t queer enough, wasn’t neurodivergent enough, wasn’t traumatized enough by my history in a fundamentalist cult? Or worse, what if its horror was rooted in re-traumatizing folks who had already been through the cruelty of fundamentalist Christianity’s intolerance? What if Chuck Tingle didn’t get it? This story was so personal to me, as a queer kid who grew up drowning deep in conservativism, who came out of it realizing that I wasn’t neurotypical, and who had taken more than a decade to recover enough to not physically recoil from street proselytizing. I spent a week giving the book a wide berth. And then I picked it up. Within two pages, I had called my partner to read out passages. Within 20 pages, I had to put it down, not because I was scared, but because I was all but reading my own story. I had annotated this book to hell and back, each color tab representing something else. “Oh, I’ve felt this in my queer experience!” “Oh, this hits very close to home for my religious experience…” “Oh, damn, I didn’t know that about root beer.” One scene sticks with me, especially: Rose watching a commercial for the conversion camp, the titular Camp Damascus, and thinking about how cool it would be to go there. I was instantly teleported to being 14 years old and begging my parents to let me go on a retreat, because it would be so cool to get closer to god. In reality, it was a weekend of love bombing and berating, over and over, in turn. It was a weekend that broke my spirit, made me feel like I was the lowest form of life, and that I could only be loved if I was in the church. But I thought it was so cool back then. I wanted to scream at Rose, I wanted to tell her what it was really like, wanted to fight every adult in her life, wanted to shake her and tell her how dumb she was to think that. But more than anything, I wanted to hug her, and tell her she was worth so much more, because maybe if this fictional kid could understand that, I could reach back to my teenage self and save her from the hell she was about to go through.

Best Film of 2023: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse

Everyone has talked about this film to hell and back, but there are some things that I really want to talk about that I didn’t see getting discussed a lot. First and foremost? I would die for Pavitr Prabhakar. I get why Hobie is the fan favorite. Love that guy, too. But PAV. And it’s not just because he’s hilarious and charismatic. There is a line in the Mumbattan scene that I think about a lot. “I can do both.” Pav hits us with the point of the movie in a throwaway line. While everyone else in the film (short of Hobie and Miles) believes in the importance of canon events and that you can’t save everyone, Pav is like Miles. He believes he can do it all. He’s wrong–but not for the reasons that Miguel thinks. Pav is wrong because he can’t do it all. But when he works together with Miles, Hobie and Gwen, they can do both. They don’t have to suffer, they don’t have to sit back and let the bad things happen. Does Mumbattan grow unstable after? Yes. But Spot was right there messing with the tech. It’s not Miles or Pav’s fault. It would have happened even if he’d let Inspector Singh die. (By the way, as someone whose partner’s dad is almost impossible to read, the “I’ve never seen him so emotional” line ruins me every single time.)

Best Album of the Year: So Much (For) Stardust by Fall Out Boy

The way I JUMPED out of bed the day this album released is not even funny. And I messaged everyone I knew who was even kind of into Fall Out Boy that they made a real FOB album. It’s an album I can’t listen to with anyone else in my apartment because I am compelled to sing and dance to it. There is not a single song on this album that I will skip over. (Song specifically, I don’t count “The Pink Seashell”.) The album has some range, but it doesn’t feel like the last three. It feels like they remembered what they loved about pop punk. With that they reminded me of what I loved about pop punk. This was my #1 album on Spotify this year, and I don’t even feel slightly bad about that. For months my discord status was “The stars are the same as ever, I don’t have the guts to keep it together.” If you ever liked Fall Out Boy, please come back for So Much (For) Stardust. You will not regret it. Also this year FOB released an updated version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” that encompasses literally my entire lifetime. That was a surreal experience to say the least.

I talk more about stuff, so if you want to read it check it out. Like and subscribe?? I guess??? lmao.

[knowyourbmovieactors]

OCTOBER HORROR MOVIES 2024 (DVD EDITION) #16 THE REAPING

Hey, it's our old friends at Dark Castle Entertainment again! This time with a completely original film. What have they got for us?

We are introduced to a militantly atheist college professor (played by Hilary Swank) whose life's mission is to aggressively debunk supposed religious miracles around the world and be a huge dick about it the whole time. She's accompanied by a fellow researcher (played by Idris Elba), a very kind, helpful, thoughtful guy who still believes in Jesus and occasionally attempts to call her back to religion, even as he helps her wield their mighty science against these fake miracles. Then, the two of them are called upon to investigate an incident in Louisiana where a river appears to have turned into blood. And then there's a rain of frogs. And a rapid infestation of flies. And, boy, it sure looks like the ten plagues of Egypt are being replayed. Swank's character is dumbstruck and angry at her inability to explain it all scientifically, and it's revealed that she actually used to be a devout Christian missionary until she experienced a terrible tragedy that drove her away from God...

Wait a minute. This sounds like it would be the plot of a Pure Flix movie. (You know, the guys that make those terrible, self-important God's Not Dead movies with Kevin Sorbo?) Swank sure talks and acts exactly like the stereotype of the rabidly god-hating scientist that pretty much only exists in the fevered imaginations of extreme right-wing fundamentalists (Richard Dawkins notwithstanding). What is this movie? I thought them Hollywood elite types were supposed to hate Jesus and America? Instead, we get a top-of-the-line actor (at least at the time) playing an atheist re-converted back into the faith after being shown the true nature of the holy struggle going on right here in the ol' USofA. Pure Flix should just buy the rights to this movie and remake it every five years or so.

This film was not good. And it also managed to piss off a lot of people in Chile. The opening scene, supposedly set in Concepción, depicts the city as a sprawling mass of decaying favelas centered around an ancient cathedral, surrounded on one side by treacherous oceanside cliffs and on the other by an ugly petrochemical plant spewing toxins into the air. The citizens are shown to be almost nothing but ignorant, destitute religious fanatics (who all speak Spanish with Central American accents). This was very confusing to the actual inhabitants of Concepción, a modern and decently prosperous inland city on a river, known more for its many universities than any chemical processing. The real Chileans were not pleased. The mayor at the time sent a formal objection to the producers, and theaters there pretty quickly stopped showing the film. So, on top of being weird Christian apologia, The Reaping is also xenophobic and completely ignorant of other cultures? Damn, maybe this film should run for president.

But I guess insulting an entire city was worth it to get this movie with an 8% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

THINGS I LEARNED FROM THE DVD EXTRAS -The movie was filmed in Louisiana in 2005, which means they were also slammed by Hurricane Katrina. According to their production manager, 80% of the local crew lost their homes. They decided to resume filming a week later. Do you want to spin that as the film industry being so callous that they would carry on with their little movie in spite of all the devastation that had been wrought on their employees, without giving them any time at all to recover? Or do you want to spin it the way the production company did and claim that they continued the shoot so quickly because of the job security and economic benefits it brought to the affected area? Either way, they wound up with a big abandoned Wal-Mart they were able to use as a cheap soundstage.

-There is a short feature on the DVD that explores the possible "scientific explanations" for the Biblical plagues of Egypt. Half of the experts they interview are biblical scholars, and none of the other half are archeologists (who could tell you that we have zero actual evidence outside of the Bible that any of this stuff happened). It's basically just a bad History Channel documentary. Or, given the state of that network today, just a regular History Channel documentary.

-There is another short feature that consists of nothing more than Idris Elba telling us how much he dislikes bugs. There are a lot of bugs in this film.

[lichen-soup-scribe]

My wife, my partner and I were just chillin doing our panning, up on Clear Creek near a busy trailhead, when three ladies, an older gent and a couple kids settled in next to us. They're wearing colorful, kinda hippy garb but nothing outside the norm. They were curious about what we were doing and all three of us love teaching skills/sharing info so we taught them the basics. They're asking Bonnie a couple questions about the area (she'd mentioned to them that she works for the parks dept) and I kinda got the impression that they were new to the area.

Then they mention that they live up in Boulder and there's this place called The Yellow Deli that makes great yerba mate. Now, The Yellow Deli is a whole chain of restaurants run by The Twelve Tribes, a fundamentalist cult that I went down a rabbit hole learning about a while back (cults are a special interest of mine, and this one was also likely a contributing cause to the the Marshall Fire, via a poorly extinguished trash fire).

Anyway, I'm like oh, maybe they don't know...? So very delicately I say "Oh yes, The Yellow Deli, the folks who run it are pretty interesting" And one of the ladies says something like, "Yes, I suppose we are, but you know, not everything they say about us is true..."

I do manage to recover from the conversational blunder and we continue having a pleasant chat. I give them a tiny garnet that we found and let them use my hand lens to look at the things they're sifting out. They tell me about how they believe in love and community and have this property up near the Flatirons that we'd be welcome to visit, and give me a coupon for a free yerba mate and some extremely memeable literature.

We bid a friendly farewell (since we were ready to head home) and manage to keep straight faces until we're out of earshot.

Genuinely friendly folks, would pan for gold with them again. HOWEVER, The Twelve Tribes as an organization has some really exploitative labor practices and a belief in communal property that make it hard to leave once you've been in for any length of time, plus some pretty gnarly corporal punishment practices for kids. (Also, not so cool with the queers or polyamory!) So, y'know, I'll pass...

I didn't plan on teaching cult members how to pan for gold today but you never know what's going to happen when you venture outside

[blakelywintersfield]

I am absolutely begging y'all to realize that "celtic" and "gaelic" are not interchangeable terms

[starlightervarda]

Not trying to be toxic at all, so I'm sorry if it appears that way, I'm just genuinely confused. Isn't TOG set in a bunch of different places? I saw the movie once when it first came out after I had some surgery, so I was little loopy. What is it people are culturally getting wrong? Feel free not to reply if this comes off rude, and I'm very sorry if it does!

Hi nonny <3

First of all, I hope you’ve recovered or are recovering smoothly.

Yes, the movie was set in at least three countries, but it’s less about the setting more about how the characters themselves, their relationships, backgrounds and histories are constantly looked through an American lens. And how it’s pushing out international fans from this fandom when they finally found a chance to engage in a popular topic and share/express/get excited.

There is so much stuff I can list culturally/religiously/etc. that are Yikes™. And I originally did, but the reply was like 4-pages long, so, I’ll spare you and try to minimize the rant.

Just...do you have any idea how many Italians and MENA people have been um akshually’d by WASP-y Americans? Or people (usually Western Europeans/Canadians) who’ve absorbed American online behaviour and tactics and utilize them to enforce their opinions? The responses that range from harassment to self-victimization to make us regret chiming in and many other give up and leave?

It’s why I avoided engaging in fandoms until I saw the dung-heaps being dumped in Joe’s fanon and the ensuing shitstorm of misinformation that mixes with Western Liberal overcompensation (see: Top!Joe is Racist, Joe is Bigger Than Nicky and Santa Hat Discourse) plus Orientalism and ‘positive discrimination’ fetishism that ends up veering into religious apologism sometimes.

Acting like he came out of the womb a Renaissance man while also holding fundamentalist ideals that weren’t widespread in his region until the 17th-19th Century. And unflinchingly devout despite being ancient and doing things like deferring to a woman? All while being artistic, liberal, romantic and gay? Did I mention he was a Fatimid from a Golden Age and would be open to changing his mind or partaking in others’ traditions and cultures and was probably way more into maths and wine-poetry than keeping a consistent prayer schedule? It makes no sense for him to be otherwise than it does for Catholic-born Nicky and Booker.

Also, Nicky. A lot of the jokes and widespread agreement that he was illiterate, filthy, useless, stupid, weak-willed or a mindlessly aggressive animal that had to be tamed and educated by Joe feed into ugly stereotypes Westerners have about Mediterranean people as hot-tempered, lazy, loud idiots. (Which, whether they know it or not, includes Joe.)

...Nicky was a priest from a maritime superpower...like how did they even communicate if he wasn’t at least bilingual? He didn’t go up to Joe like ‘Me Tarzan, You Jane’ stop it.

Plus, all the variations of ‘Joe was the only Brown Man in Europe/Nicky was the only White Man in the Middle East’ which are just -_- Sprawling empires with mixed populations have existed since Cyrus the Great. People all along the Mediterranean to this day range from Joe’s complexion and hair texture to Nicky’s. Medieval Italians weren’t discriminating against Joe for being olive-skinned with a black beard, and medieval Levantines during the Crusades weren’t horrified by Nicky’s green eyes literally what the fuck?

Also, the whole ‘White’ and ‘Brown’ thing didn’t even exist until recently.

The American definition of ‘Race’ makes no damn sense. Ethnicity/nationality/religion/sect take precedence over sharing a skin-tone. You can discriminate against your ‘own race’. To be blunt, in unpleasant parts of the Commonwealth both Nicky and Joe would be called wogs. Their differences are primarily about culture/location.

Don’t get me started on how so many act like Christianity wasn’t native to the Middle East because the world exists only in America where their basis is Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and its Puritan values are still expressed in the edgiest of atheists (which no doubt feed into how they treat Nicky), and Islam is somehow not an Abrahamic religion with over a billion adherents, multiple sects and levels of practice from lax to archaic and a laundry list of problems that should not be excused, ignored or whitewashed instead of the singular version they insist on portraying and defending.

Basically, the popular interpretations and the way they impose their beliefs and perceptions as Right are, more often than not, Bad and Ignorant.

[wutbju]

Sigh. . . .

At ~33:00, Pettit describes himself in a curious way:

I really appreciate [BJU's] commitment to the authority of Scripture and to say what the Bible says. Here's what it says. And so we were. ... I'm more of a, I'm more of a classic Bob Jones theologian, which means that you embrace tensions. You take the tensions. They're there. You embrace them.

A "classic Bob Jones theologian"? He's not wrong in the sense that there are tensions in the Bible. I have no problem with that. There are tensions in every group. It's necessary to function. Like tent stakes which hold up the tarp--you need the tension in order for that to happen.

But where is this "classic" idea from? That's new.

[lylahammar]

hey, I'm very excited about your comic and looking forward to seeing more of it. I saw you posted that it's going to be about a clinic for people to recover from demon possession, which sounds interesting but it also raised some worries for me. there's a history of stigma surrounding certain mental illnesses that specifically includes explaining symptoms as demon possession. I'm pretty sure this is also still happening in some religious fundamentalist circles. people who exhibited symptoms were denied proper care and exposed to abuse instead, in the form of "exorcisms", for example. so I feel like that's a story concept that needs to be approached with a bit of caution and a lot of thought. I don't mean to make any assumptions, you might already be thinking of that, but I wanted to send this message just in case it wasn't something you were already aware of. have a nice day!

Oh that’s completely fair to be concerned about, but don’t worry! That’s exactly the kind of trope I’m making sure to stay away from 😁 The entities prey on mentally ill people, but the symptoms people have aren’t because of their influence. That’s the reason for Robin and Teddy being therapists first and foremost - they remove the otherworldly possession, but ALSO (and more importantly) help deal with the mental illness itself that the patient has been suffering from. I’m very much aware of the abusive practices of exorcists, and what Robin and Teddy do is very different (which will become clear as soon as the comic starts 😉). In fact, Robin really hates being called an exorcist! I need to think of a better word for it 😅

They aren’t demons btw, I used that word as shorthand before but they aren’t associated with religion or anything like that at all! I’ve just been calling them “entities” for the moment in my planning doc, but they’re kinda just... an unexplainable threat. Horror is always more scary if you don’t understand the monsters!

[equinoxts2]

My mental health is a bit fragile at the moment. Kulo Seeri is semi-playable now, and I’m trying to use this first rotation as therapy. But the urge to post about what I’m going through is getting overwhelming... (problem under the cut, post tagged non-sims for my fellow paranoid neophobes, content warning for descriptions of every kind of bigotry under the sun)

For the past month or so, I’ve been trying a new strategy for dealing with my demons. When one of them comes into my mind saying something that it knows will make me upset or angry, I picture myself giving it a flower (a daisy, always a daisy for some reason) and watching it walk away. Then I feel better and can get back to whatever I was doing. However... it doesn’t work on memories from school. And the demons aren’t completely clueless, which means those memories - and the accompanying flashback panic - are getting much more frequent.

Primary school was bad enough. As if being an autistic girl in the 90s didn’t set me up for enough problems, I was also a fluent reader long before I even started, and probably more intelligent than any of my teachers. In my first few weeks, I’d corrected the headteacher on his spelling and made a lifelong enemy of him in the process. My second year teacher was constantly calling my parents into school to complain that I wasn’t every other kid in the class. (I don’t remember her much, I think I suppressed those particular memories. My mum says one incident involved her taking issue with me giving the robots I was colouring in female names... I wish I’d known the word gynoid in 1997.)

We moved closer to my extended family when I was halfway through my last year of primary. The school I was at for those last six months was a good one, where I wasn’t treated badly as far as I remember, but it was still only six months. After that, things got really bad. My first day at secondary school, I went off feeling really excited and came home crying because the prefects and the other new kids had all been picking on me. I think part of it was that I wasn’t ready to stand around talking instead of playing at break, but I don’t remember much of that either. My parents pulled me out of the school and I had home tutors for a year or so, before being sent to a place for kids who couldn’t cope with mainstream schooling, an hour’s drive from my home. I thought it couldn’t be worse than what I’d left. I was SO WRONG.

Now, I’ve always been a spiritual person, of the Pagan/Buddhist hybrid variety - and this “special needs” school was run by a Christian fundamentalist couple, who had an agreement with my parents to respect my beliefs and not force me to attend their religious study classes or the sermons disguised as assembly. They spent the next four years trampling over that agreement in stompy boots. It was obvious from day one that I wasn’t welcome there - most of the other inmates were boys who hated me because I was a girl, smarter than them, and not into hair and shoes and pop stars; I didn’t hang around with any of the other girls because they were into hair and shoes and pop stars and I never was; even the teachers picked on me (when the others deliberately provoked me, I’d be the one who got in trouble for reacting...) I got constant verbal, mental and sometimes physical abuse, and the principal, an ex-Royal Air Force member who enjoyed bullying vulnerable children, once chased me up the stairs and I cried for a whole hour. I danced out of the door on my last day there, and I hate dancing because they made me take dance lessons for a while when I was there.

After I left, I was terrified of all males for a while. I was scared to come out as asexual, aromantic and nonbinary, because everyone else at that place was homophobic and I got quite enough grief from them when they thought I was heterosexual. I was down in the depths of depression for several years, and when I began to recover, I tried to get back into all the things that they’d tried to beat out of me - my innate love of creativity, diversity and the supernatural - but their attitudes towards all those things leave a bitter taste in my mouth even now. I don’t want their approval - never did - but their hateful comments still mar those passions, and the memories still sting.

I don’t know what made me want to open up about all this. It took me a few sessions before I could even tell my therapists, and I’m well aware that the internet is home to multiple people as nasty as my former classmates and teachers. But I feel like I’ll pop if I don’t tell someone, and I have a lot of good friends here. I hope they will understand.

[vavuska]

Sister Molly (Kerry Bishé) from Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (2020 -?? ) || Sister Alice (Tatiana Maslany) from Perry Mason (2020 -??)

...

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels is set nearly 50 years after the original series, during the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s. It takes place in 1938 Los Angeles, a time and place "deeply infused with Mexican-American folklore and social tension". The characters are connected in a conflict between the Mexican folklore deity, Santa Muerte (Lorenza Izzo), the caretaker of the dead and guide to the great beyond, and her spiritual sister, the demoness Magda (Natalie Dormer), who believes mankind is inherently evil and aims to prove her point. Detective Tiago Vega (Daniel Zovatto) and his partner, veteran Detective Lewis Michener (Nathan Lane), are tasked with a gruesome murder case and soon become embroiled in Los Angeles's history as well as its present, while racial tensions, the looming threat of war, and Nazi conspiracies threaten to derail them at every turn.

Perry Mason is set in 1932, Los Angeles is prospering while the rest of the U.S. is recovering from the grip of the Great Depression. The series focuses on the origin story of famed defense lawyer Perry Mason: down-and-out private investigator Perry Mason (Matthew Rhys) is struggling with his trauma from The Great War and being divorced. He is hired for a sensational child kidnapping trial and his investigation portends major consequences for Mason, his client, and the city itself.

...

In both the show there are a female preacher character: Sister Alice (Tatiana Maslany in Perry Mason) and Sister Molly (Kerry Bishé in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels) are based on real-life celebrity preacher Aimee Semple McPherson. The leading fundamentalist evangelist of the glittering '20s,” Aimee Semple McPherson is one of the first religious entertainers of the 20th century.

A story made and set in Hollywood, Sister Aimee's celebrity reveals how little has changed over the last 100 years. Throngs of worshipers, media scrutiny, an allegedly faked kidnapping plot, divorce, multiple lawsuits, world tours, the claim she could heal the sick, and sermons with high production value all contribute to the continued fascination of this figure.

In the show, Molly and Alice primarily wear a white satin bias-cut dress with various stoles and collars switched out depending on the sermon. She does occasionally get to wear regular clothes, which are always light-colored and tastefully fashionable.

At this early stage in Perry Mason, Sister Alice appears to be a true believer not only in God but in her abilities. Unlike the real Sister Aimee or Sister Alice in Perry Mason, Sister Molly in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels doesn’t seem to believe she is an actual vector for God.

Often lacking agency — her mother controls her every move — Sister Molly's faith is put to the test throughout the series. She cannot be the virtuous woman everyone wants her to be and still retain a semblance of self. Her so-called gift from God is also a curse.

Special nod to Lily Taylor, who plays Sister Alice’s controlling mother, Birdy, who is always soberly dressed in blacks and dark colors in contrast to the pale colors worn by Sister Alice.

Miss Adelaide (Amy Madigan), Sister Molly's mother, is essentially a stage mom, shaping her daughter in an image that will draw a larger audience, which is why she is so concerned when Molly's sermon takes a chilling turn. Palpable rage and a warning is not the Joyful Voices Ministry brand, which saw her being introduced in Episode 2 as "In the battle with Satan, armed with but a song and a smile." Her mother tasks a bodyguard to follow her 30-something daughter to protect her “virtue.” The real monster in Sister Molly’s storyline is the woman who brought her into the world and forced this life of leadership on her.

Shea Whigham as Sheriff Eli Thompson in Boardwalk Empire (2010 - 2014) || Shea Whigham as P.I. Pete Strickland in Perry Mason (2020 -??)

...

Boardwalk Empire is an American period drama series from premium cable channel HBO, set in Atlantic City, New Jersey during the Prohibition era. It stars Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson. It is a period drama focusing on Enoch "Nucky" Thompson (based on the historical Enoch L. Johnson), a political figure who rose to prominence and controlled Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the Prohibition period of the 1920s and 1930s.

Eli Thompson is based on the historical figure of Alf Johnson, who was Nucky Johnson's brother and was a county sheriff in the 1920s.

As the brother of Atlantic County Treasurer, Nucky Thompson, Eli, not surprisingly, manages to find his way into the position of Sheriff. He and his brother are an effective duo when it comes to keeping a hold on the reigns of the city's corrupt government and underworld. Unspoken tension exists between the brothers however, with rivalry and resentment lurking just below the façade of smiling exteriors.

Both Shea Whigham characters shares a large number of similarities: they both have a large family, a lovely wife, problems with alcohol and gambling, have a work connected as public order, but act mostly over the law in shady or illegal business: Eli Thompson is Atlantic City's Sheriff and protect his powerful and corrupted brother smuggling of alcohol, while Pete Strickland was a policeman for the Vice Squad in St. Bernardino and actually works as a Private Investigator and uses shady tricks to get his informations.

SEE HERE FOR CONNECTION BETWEEN PENNY DREADFUL: CITY OF ANGELS (2020 -??) AND CARNIVÀLE (2003 - 2005):

[billehrman]

Compassionate Leadership

Compassionate Leadership

President Biden is out to repair relationships here and abroad that were fractured by Trump and his team. He walked through the White House's front door on Wednesday right after the inauguration, ready to work issuing several executive orders and reversing many moves of the Trump administration. The executive orders focused on the pandemic, enhanced food benefits, worker rights, immigration, climate change, racial and LGBT equality, a federal moratorium on evictions/student loans, the WHO, the Paris accord, and government accountability.

His focus will be on getting the economy going before introducing demand focused stimulus plans such as infrastructure. We expect at least an additional $3.5 trillion in stimulus programs this year on top of the near $1 trillion plan passed recently. This will boost our economy big time, especially as we get our arms around the virus. We still see a super-charged economy both here and abroad as we move through the year into 2022. Earnings estimates will be increased sequentially as management gets more confident that this recovery is sustainable. The Fed will also maintain an overly accommodative posture keeping the Fed rate near zero while purchasing $120 billion of bonds to suppress the steepness of the yield curve. Higher earnings plus low rates are the formula for higher stock prices. It is clear that better days are ahead as we get our arms around the virus, so stop looking in the rearview mirror and focus on where we are going over the next 12-24 months. There remains over $6 trillion in cash and money market funds looking for a home, so any correction, if one occurs, will be shallow, if at all.

The number of cases worldwide has grown to over 98 million, with deaths now over 2.1 million. We are still hanging our hat on the one dose J & J vaccine, which will be available once approved. Dr. Farci, who is leading President Biden's effort, had a very telling press conference yesterday. He said he felt refreshed once again under this new leadership and said that he believes that we all can get vaccinated by the summer. We are currently vaccinating 900,000 people per day, which is limited by supply and distribution. If we need to get vaccinated annually, J & J's vaccines, if effective, will be the vaccine of choice. We are optimistic that the coronavirus will be in the rearview mirror in a few months, so it's time to invest looking through the windshield.

We listened intently to his cabinet nominees as they appeared before the Senate to understand what they would emphasize in their roles. We were particularly impressed with Janet Yellen, who will assume the Treasury Secretary role, as she is not only smart but will be able to work with both sides in Congress, which is a necessity. She is focused on getting our economy going by supporting Biden's stimulus bill. Her comments on taxation were refreshing, as she mentioned it in the context of maintaining a globally competitive tax rate. In other words, she does not want our companies at a global competitive disadvantage. We have no issue raising tax rates on the very wealthy and closing loopholes, but we need to encourage capital investment, risk-taking, research, growth, and a globally competitive position. That seems to be Janet Yellen's position, which is good news.

Financial markets continue to fight a tug of war between current weakness due to a rise in coronavirus cases/death and a significant recovery on the other side supported by the trillions of stimulus added to the already over-liquified financial system the Fed relative to economic needs. Fortunately, corporations are doing a great job managing their businesses. So far, 95% of companies reporting have exceeded expectations for the fourth quarter. While managements were cautiously optimistic on their fourth-quarter conference calls, we fully expect numbers to rise as we move through 2021 into 2022 substantially. Inventories are low throughout the supply chain. We expect gradual builds throughout the year boosting production above end-market demand, increasing too, as the economy recovers. We expect utilization rates to increase, enhancing pricing power while costs stay contained, resulting in higher operating margins and profitability.

We are fundamentalists always looking for change that will impact valuations. One of our core beliefs is that operating margins will increase by over 150 basis points, rising to new highs over the next 18 months. Corporations have learned to do more with less focusing on their strengths while reducing their exposure to subpar businesses. Cash generation is at all-time highs, used to make bolt-on acquisitions, boost dividends and implement stock buybacks, which is all good for stock valuations.

Economic data, both here and abroad, have been mixed with strength in housing, autos, and general business activity offsetting weakness in consumer sales, hotels, travel, and entertainment. The industrial side is doing just fine, as evidenced by rail car loading and freight rates, which are improving sequentially. By the way, use any weakness in the rails to add to positions as this sector is a prime beneficiary of an economic recovery, improvement in global trade, an infrastructure plan, and reducing emissions.

Investment Wrap-up

We are getting closer to getting our arms around the virus, which will unleash a synchronous global economic recovery not seen in years. Investors are underestimating President Biden. He has set as his mission to heal this country by bringing us together, mend fences abroad, and rebuild our economy to be stronger than it ever was. He will act with compassion for all.

Over the next several months, we will have trillions in additional stimulus to take care of those most in need and promote growth. The Fed will remain all-in too. Net-net will have trillions more in excess liquidity, which will continue to find its way into the financial markets. We will watch rates carefully as the Fed attempts to keep a lid on the steepening yield curve as the economy improves with some inflationary pressures. Since valuation is based on 10-year rates plus a risk factor, we watch rates and bank capital/liquidity closely. Right now, we see earnings gains far outstripping a decline in multiple as rate rise, albeit slowly. Our primary concern out a year is much higher interest rates as economic growth accelerates as utilization rates/inflationary pressures build. We see potential shortages in some industrial commodities, agricultural products, and semis.

The bottom line is that we will be transitioning from a liquidity-driven market to one driven by substantial earnings gains on top of continued excess liquidity. We are emphasizing those companies leveraged to an economic recovery selling at a discount to intrinsic value. Areas of concentration include industrials/capital goods/machinery, commodities, transportation, technology, and special situations. Each company has superior management, a winning business plan, increasing operating margins and volume growth, and generates substantial free cash flow that will benefit shareholders. Clearly, we own no bonds and have sold most of our defensive stocks.

The weekly investment webinar will be held on Monday, January 25th, at 8:30, am EST. You can join the webinar by entering https://zoom/us/j.9179217852 into your browser or dialing +646 588 8656 and entering the password 9179217852.

Remember to review all the facts; pause, reflect, and consider mindset shifts; look at your asset mix with risk controls; listen to the earnings call, do independent research, and ….

Invest Accordingly!

Bill Ehrman

Paix et Prosperite LLC

Paixetprosperite1@gmail.com

917-951-4139

[arcticdementor]

In the David Fincher produced, 2017 Netflix series, Mindhunter, two FBI special agents travel the country interviewing serial killers in the 1970’s. The series, based on the non-fiction book “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit” by John Douglas, chronicles the beginnings of advanced criminal profiling techniques developed by the FBI in response to a number of high profile, and gruesome crimes carried out during the era, beginning with the Manson Family murders of 1968. Throughout the show the fictional special agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench meet with frequent resistance from other law enforcement personnel as they attempt to unravel the minds of the serial killers they meet. Everyone from their bosses in the agency to the local police officers they encounter along the way express extreme discomfort at the thought of empathizing or attempting to understand the killers Ford and Tench interrogate. These men are just evil. There’s nothing more to it. Nothing can be learned from them. No insight can be gained. They’re simply, purely evil, and attempting to say anything more on the subject is an affront to the victims, their families, and to human decency and capital-J Justice in general.

Fictionalized though the series may be, in our own time, in the era of mass shootings, one doesn’t have to go far to find similar responses to this uniquely contemporary category of violent crime. Media coverage of the killers oozes sensationalized language that depicts them as dark, evil, twisted, vile, abhorrent, insane. The public, in internet comment forms across social media, offer up their thoughts and prayers, and inevitably, the discussion devolves into a debate on the second amendment and the merits of gun control as politicians and journalists quickly move to steer the national conversation to more politically fruitful areas in order to amass momentum in passing various pieces of long desired legislation targeting gun owners or the NRA. The killers themselves, their personalities, their motivations, their worldviews, the experiences that shape them, every time quickly slip through the cracks of the conversation and are forgotten long before their respective cases are ever brought to trial.

…

Over the course of hundreds of hours beginning in 1959, Ted Kaczynski, the future unabomber, participated in an intense psychological experiment conduced at Harvard by Dr. Henry A Murray. During World War II, Murray had worked for the Office of Strategic Services in developing personality assessment techniques designed to test potential recruits on how well they would endure interrogation and torture by the enemy. At Harvard, Murray went on to further develop his method, transforming it from a diagnostic assessment of mental anti-fragility, into the basis of a radical personality modifying procedure he hoped could be used to forcibly evolve human consciousness in order to prevent the nuclear annihilation he feared was inevitable in light of mankind’s petty national prejudices and self-interest during the period of the Cold War. Kaczynski was among his unwitting test subjects, and though his personal, radical Luddite beliefs would ultimately diverge from the kind of technocratic globalism Murray intended to inculcate in Kaczynski, in a strange way, Murray was also more successful than he could have possibly anticipated.

…

No case provides better evidence of this possibility than that of Adam Lanza, the 2012 Sandy Hook shooter. After years of denied requests, more than 1,000 pages of evidence relating to the Lanza case were finally released to the Hartford Courant in December of 2018. Lanza, who killed himself following the attack, left behind no manifesto. He had even taken the precaution of smashing his devices’ hard drives prior to the shooting. In the end hundreds of pages worth of Lanza’s writings were ultimately recovered by the police, and it’s only from these scattered fragments that his beliefs and opinions emerge. Like Holmes in the weeks and months leading to the Aurora massacre, Lanza was no stranger to psychiatric evaluation. Throughout Lanza’s entire life, from the age of 3, when he was first diagnosed with speech and developmental problems, he knew little else but the offices of therapists and counselors and psychiatrists. A rotating cast of mental health professionals drifted in and out of his life. They all recognized the so-called ‘warning signs’ all too well, but even with a lifetime’s worth of treatment, they completely and utterly failed to prevent his transformation into mass murderer.

…

Lanza goes even further, and characterizes the years of psychiatric treatment he received since childhood explicitly as abusive: “I was molested at least a dozen times by a few different adults when I was a child. It wasn’t my decision at all: I was coerced into it… What do each of the adults have in common? They were doctors, and each of them were sanctioned by my parents to do it. This happens to virtually every child without their input into the matter: Their parents sanction it.”

…

The United States spends more per capita on primary and secondary education than almost any other country. As of 2014 the U.S. is in the top 5, below only Switzerland, Norway and Austria. Despite this however, year after year, a majority of Americans report dissatisfaction with the quality of K-12 education in their country. Alternative education remains a persistent source of controversy within the public consciousness. Private schools, charter schools, school vouchers, homeschooling, all are topics that filter in and out of the national political conversation. Democrats, on the whole, maintain an unyielding support for the compulsory nature of public education in America, while practices like Homeschooling are largely written off as the exclusive province of religious fundamentalists and political separatists. The same goes for the diverting of public resources to charter schools by means of a tax exemption or credit. The argument that has formed over time to circumvent these controversial alternatives boils down to a single word: Socialization.

Public schools not only educate students in facts and skills, the argument goes, but also serve to socialize children by serving as a microcosm of the pluralistic, diverse society in which these students will one day have to live and contribute to. A private, all male school, for instance, will fail to prepare its students for the modern workplace, where they’ll have to cooperate and even take orders from female colleagues or superiors. Likewise, desegregation busing is required to ensure students experience a sufficiently diverse environment. When it comes to a wide variety of controversies in public education, the socialization argument continues to form the backbone of liberal resistance to conservative attacks on the public schooling monopoly.At the same time, as liberals defend the practice and theory of socialization, the scourge of bullying has, on-again off again, served as a cause célèbre among many of the same people. Since 2010, October has become National Bullying Prevention Month, a campaign by the non-profit PACER organization in coordination with companies like CNN and Facebook, among others. Television shows and documentaries have tackled the subject, and celebrities like Ellen regularly champion anti-bullying causes. But what is bullying but the core of Socialization? In a sense the two can almost be considered synonymous. Bullying is, after all, the school of hard knocks which children undergo to learn the complex, unspoken rules of social game playing. Socialization is about instilling conformity, and bullying remains the core experience for many children in learning about all the ways the deviate from the norm. When children are unresponsive to bullying, that’s when things are kicked up to the teachers and administrators and school counselors, and that same unpliability and unresponsiveness is re-conceptualized by well-meaning adults as developmental disorders.

In 1975 Autism was diagnosed in children at a rate of 1 in every 5,000. Today that number has soared to nearly 1 in 100. This has ignited a public controversy over the source or cause of what by every definition deserves to be called an public health epidemic. 75% of children diagnosed with Autism today are boys. There’s no need to go searching for a cause. Vaccines aren’t behind the explosion in Autism rates. Teachers and school psychologists are. School psychology today is a booming industry, one which the US Department of Labor identifies as having some of the best employment opportunities across the entire field of psychology. 75% of school psychologists are women, with an average age of 46. It is this same group of people most empowered to conduct psychological monitoring of children across the country, and over the last 30 years, they have come to classify a larger and larger percentage of young boys as having developmental issues, to the point where it’s not clear whether there is anything wrong with these children at all, or if school psychologists have simply written off a wider and wider range of behaviors which they find problematic or incomprehensible as constituting autism.

…

In 2013, a Texas teenager named Justin Carter was locked up for threatening a school shooting. Whether or not the threat was legitimate is another matter entirely. In a bout of online shit talking over League of Legends Carter wrote “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts…” in response to a quip by a fellow gamer calling him crazy. He quickly rejoined: “lol jk,” likely realizing the fact he could get himself in trouble saying such things. Whether or not it was a good idea for him to make such a comment is immaterial, what matters is the violent, disproportionate response that followed. A Canadian woman, thousands of miles away, reported Carter. He was arrested and locked in jail. Bond was set at half a million dollars, which his family couldn’t afford to pay. He languished in jail, was assaulted by fellow inmates, and then locked up in solitary confinement for his own safety. After 4 months in jail an anonymous donor paid to have Carter released on behalf of his family. The state dragged out the matter for years, delaying the trial as long as possible on tenuous grounds. In the interim Carter was banned from using a computer. It wasn’t until spring of 2018 that a plea agreement was finally reached and Carter was let off with time served.

This is the paranoid system which today we entrust with rescuing at-risk young boys. This is what stands between us and more school shootings. Never mind the fact that as this system has grown, it has only led to a rise in mass shootings. Maybe the real cause of such cases is not guns, or a failure to identify and treat students, maybe the cause is these same students, following a protracted process of isolation and attempted psychological modification, learning to play the part the system has assigned to them, that of the security threat. When schools spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on active shooter drills and security systems, isn’t it just wasted money until someone comes along and gives them an excuse to use it? The complicated apparatus of psychological surveillance and socialization that prevails among schools today is, like the TSA checkpoint at the airport, nothing more than an elaborate piece of (psychological) security theater, and theaters require drama, and more importantly, villains. People like Adam Lanza and James Holmes are certainly killers of the very worst kind, guilty of evil, but on a larger scale, their evil is a only a reflection of our own, of the perverse societal mechanisms we’ve developed to give ourselves piece of mind, regardless of the children that must be fed to the machinery for it to function.

[kgstoryteller]

LOVE in the time of corona-possible prologue for “killing justice: the taste of knives”

Either you learn to live with paradox and ambiguity or you’ll be six years old for the rest of your life.-Anne Lamott

At 5:55 pm, on 3/30/2020 I do hereby declare, under penalty of perjury, that I am a child of chaos, and that my true name is scared kel. Strike that. May the record reflect that for the past 56 years, since my adoption in the spring of 1964 at the age of eleven months, my true name has been scared kel.

Of course I was scared. I had just been kidnapped from the only home I’d ever known, and taken away by two strangers to their little yellow house in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada. I cried, and cried, and cried, from dusk until dawn, but as the sun slowly began to rise, and I had not yet been returned home, I finally stopped crying. I would have to adapt to this strange new world, it seemed.

Paradoxical New First Name

These two strangers kept calling me by this strange new name I’d never heard before: “Kelly”. I resisted this name for the longest time, and kept calling myself Toddy instead. I would later learn that my oldest half-brother, who was born shortly after I was adopted, is named Todd. Go figure.

I would also later learn that my new name, Kelly, means “brave warrior.” But wait, that can’t be right. After all, my true name is Scared Kel. Put the two together, and it would seem that my complete true name must be Scared Brave Warrior. No wonder I was confused. No wonder I am a child of chaos.It seems that I have been wrestling with paradoxes and ambiguities like these my whole life. 

Yet my adoptive parents were conservative Christians, and my mom in particular seemed especially concerned that I learn the difference between good and evil, between right and wrong. And it seemed that a lot of my childhood was spent doing what was evil and wrong, as what I heard mom say more often than anything else to me was “Your will must be broken young man.” In other words, her will must be good. My will must be evil. How else to explain the fact that I’d been given up twice in the first year of my life? I knew that because, at the age of three and a half, on a ferry boat ride to go get my baby sister, I’d asked my mom why we weren’t going to the hospital. She had gently replied, “Because we’re choosing to adopt your baby sister, just like we chose to adopt you from a foster home when you were eleven months old.” Being “chosen” was a double-edged sword, it seemed. I would have to be really, really good if I wanted to make sure that mom #3 wasn’t going to give up on me too.

We moved around a lot in the first few years after I was adopted. Three times during my first six years with them. Every time we’d move, mom would say “Look how much I’ve sacrificed for you.” If my will was evil., then all Mom’s sacrifices must be good. If I was a child of chaos, it was clear that mom’s world was a world of order. And that mom’s God was a God of order. Once again it seemed as if I was just going to have to adapt to this strange new world.

If my true name was Scared Kel, but my new name meant Brave Warrior, I would simply have to bury my chaotic true name, and adapt myself to my orderly new name.

Now as luck would have it, (and with our first of many visits to my mom’s Irish dad, my grampa Bob, and Norwegian mom, my gramma Myrtle, I would learn that my mom was half-Irish), my new mom and pops not only gave me a new first name, they were kind enough to anoint me with a new middle name as well.

Paradoxical New Middle Name

Now what sort of middle name might you expect a young conservative Christian couple to choose for their newly adopted son? Perhaps they would name me after one of the Gospel writers, and I would be Matthew, Mark, Luke or John? Maybe they would aim higher, and I would be Michael, named after the archangel? Going Old Testament was another possible option, as Joseph may have been the name they settled on. Had I been the one to choose a biblical character to be named after, I would have gone for Moses, the tragic hero who was adopted by Egyptian royalty.

Going for the obvious was never Mom and Pops’s style, however. In fact, I have a theory that my practical joker Pops chose both my names, and then convinced mom to go along for the ride. Since I never thought to ask, I grew up believing they’d named me Kelly because it was a good Irish name. Mom was half-Irish, after all. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I finally learned that my new name was inspired by them having adopted me from a foster home on Kelly Street. Go figure.

But Pops outdid himself by coming up with Darwin for my middle name. Who knows, maybe he was secretly preparing me for a lifetime of wrestling with paradoxes and ambiguities. God knows how many of their conservative Christian friends they had to patiently explain to that no, they had not abandoned their faith in a Creator God, but instead had chosen the name so that I would challenge Darwin’s theories. At least that’s why mom said they chose it. Pops’ said they chose it because he’d heard that Darwin had converted to Christianity on his deathbed. Even though that story has now been widely dismissed as an urban legend, I still like Pops’ reason for choosing the name better than mom’s. Mom’s was a world where you had to be a brave warrior in the battle for truth in order to survive. Pop’s was a world where even the most hardened materialist like Darwin could be redeemed in the end.

My way of living out this Darwinian paradox was three-fold. First, when I would later become an adopted American, I chose to add Einstein, but keep the Darwin. The cover story I told anyone who happened to ask was that was my way of honoring my parents. The real reason: I just thought the initials K-EDG sounded way cooler than KEG.

Second, rather than challenging Darwin’s theories, I chose instead to defend my namesake against the blatantly false charge that his worldview amounted to nothing more than “survival of the fittest.” Bullshit. That worldview belongs to Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth century English philosopher. According to Hobbes, the state of nature is a "war of all against all," in which human beings constantly seek to destroy each other in an incessant pursuit for power. Life in the state of nature is "nasty, brutish and short."

The third way I chose to live out this Darwinian paradox was to adapt. For Darwin explicitly rejected the Hobbesian “survival of the fittest” when he declared that “It is not the most intellectual or the strongest species that survives, but the species that survives is the one that is able to adapt to or adjust best to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”

Fear and Love in the Time of Corona

As the coronavirus races madly around the world, in seemingly unstoppable fashion, from the way the mainstream media and the political establishment are chronicling its assault, it would appear that Hobbes was right. For the coronavirus appears to be primarily laying waste to the weakest members of our species, to those whose advanced age or compromised immune systems make them especially susceptible to its deadly rampage.As someone who’s been forced to wrestle with paradoxes and ambiguities his entire life, however, I have learned from painful personal experience, time, and time, and time again, that things are rarely as they seem to be on the surface of things.

My personal paradoxes and adaptations

As a terrified little eleven month old, I learned that crying would not take me back home to my mommy.

One way I adapted was by becoming a scared brave warrior, so my new mommy would see what a brave warrior I was and love me for it.

Another way I adapted was that despite mom’s best efforts to raise me as an anti-Darwinian Christian fundamentalist, after leaving home at the age of seventeen, I adapted and eventually became the Darwinian Christian mystic that I am today.

How my healing journey has helped prepare me for the Time of Corona

One of the most frightening things about the current coronavirus pandemic is that it is forcing our human species to finally begin to humbly acknowledge that WE ARE NOT IN CONTROL.It is a lesson that I have been forced to learn, and re-learn, time and time again, over the course of the past fifty six years, ten months and eight days.

When I was torn away from my birthmother Adele after nine months spent blissfully swimming in her amniotic sea, I WAS NOT IN CONTROL.

When I was torn away from my foster mom Grace, after eleven months of being pushed up and down on swing sets by her and my First Nations/Native Canadian foster sister Diane, I WAS NOT IN CONTROL.

When I told my adoptive mom Pat, when I was sixteen years old, that I’d learned in my careers class that day that I’d be a great hotel manager, and she said that I didn’t need to go to college for that, I WAS NOT IN CONTROL.

When I had a near nervous breakdown in my first semester at Pepperdine Law School at the age of twenty one, after I’d blown my scholarship, and was so driven by despair that I ended up taking three or four sleeping pills a night to get an hour or two of sleep, I WAS NOT IN CONTROL.

When my beloved adoptive dad Pops, who’d saved my life four years earlier after my near nervous breakdown, suffered a traumatic brain injury from a near-fatal car crash and was left with the cognitive capacity of a twelve year old, when I was twenty five years old and halfway around the world in London at the start of the first semester of my last year of law school, and I couldn’t come home that whole semester because I’d taken two years off to recover from my first year from hell, and once you start you must finish law school in five years, I was left with the emotional capacity of a terrified six-year old, better known as scared kel, because I WAS NOT IN CONTROL.

When I trusted a friend of twenty years and he betrayed that trust, and the life I’d tried to create for myself out of the ashes of Pops’ traumatic brain injury for those same two decades came crashing to the ground when I was forty six years old, I was left once again with the emotional capacity of a terrified six year old, whose true name is scared kel, because I WAS NOT IN CONTROL

For the past ten years, five months, and fifteen days, I have been attempting to love and parent scared kel, my terrified six year old self, back to life.And for the last eleven days that Los Angeles has been under lockdown, I’ve been wrestling with the question of why this coronavirus crisis has been so triggering for me.

And then just a few short days ago, my performance poetry instructor Rachel Kann hosted an online poetry crawl in which she performed her poetic masterpiece “Kindness/The Murmuration of Starlings”, in which a single stanza left my weeping and gasping for breath: “Behind every protective wall of defensiveness is a frightened child fearing for their very life.”

And then the masks slipped away, and it became so clear that for all those with eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts that can understand, and turn, and be healed (Matthew 13: 15b-16) that we hold this truth to be self -evident: we are now living in a world made up entirely of terrified six year olds.

The Time of Corona has Revealed a War for the Soul of Humanity

While the fear of God may be the beginning of wisdom, the love of God is the end of wisdom, and the spiritual journey is the journey from fear to love. The coronavirus pandemic has torn away the veneer of civilization to reveal that a war is now raging for the soul of humanity. This war however, is not the war that the mainstream media and the political establishment are trying so desperately to frame it as.

The war is between fear and love, between Hobbes and Darwin, and between chaos and order. But it is not about one defeating and destroying the other. It is about learning to live in the tension of opposites between fear and love, and between chaos and order. For as Solzhenitsyn wisely wrote: “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

While the mainstream media and political establishment are painting this war in Hobbesian terms, as a winner take all duel to the death between the forces of fear and chaos, that frame is far too small, and an illusion at that, the illusion of power and control.

For in one corner, we have the hypocritical legalists on the right. They are convinced that Trump and the forces of order and goodness must destroy the Deep State, which represents all that is chaotic and evil in our world. Yet the rules the hypocritical legalists insist we all must follow, so that order and goodness might triumph over chaos and evil, they are unable to fully follow themselves. For as Jesus reminds us, there is no one who is truly good but God alone.

In the other corner, we have the amoral rebels on the left. They are equally convinced that only the Deep State can defeat and destroy Trump and his followers, in order that chaos and freedom can finally emerge victorious over order and slavery. Yet the freedom the amoral rebels proclaim as the key to victory is simply a fear of order which is the mirror image of the hypocritical legalists’ fear of chaos.

In other words, both the hypocritical legalists on the right and the amoral rebels on the left are prisoners of fear. They simply cannot see the bars of their prison. As a result, both sides believe that their only option is to engage in a Hobbesian war of all against all. If Hobbes were right, then there would truly be no hope for our survival as a species. Nor, quite frankly, would we deserve to survive.

Spoiler alert: the war has already been won

However, the hope that sustains me, which I have seen embodied by my fellow deep souls time and time again throughout the course of my life, and time and time again over the past eleven days, is that even if two thirds or more of humanity have surrendered already, or will surrender at some point during the time of corona to the forces of fear, there will always be a remnant of deep souls, who will go to our graves knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that LOVE IS STRONGER THAN FEAR.

We are the Principled Rebels, my fellow terrified six year olds of planet earth, and this is the hope that sustains us: we shall never lose our humanity, no matter how much it may look like the forces of fear are going to strip it away from us.

For as I’ve been constantly reminding my own terrified six year old self for the past eleven days in the time of corona:

“Be still, and know, that you are loved.

Be still, and know, that you bring joy.

Be still, and don’t, abandon yourself.

Is the stillness, at the heart, of your chaos.”

So be of good cheer, my fellow terrified six year old principled rebels, for greater is the love that is in you, than the fear that is in the world. So please, please, please know that YOU ARE LOVED, please, please, please FEEL YOUR FEELINGS, and hopefully you won’t have to make all the mistakes I made by so often forgetting that I was loved, and by so often being too afraid to feel my feelings. For the hope that sustains me, and the hope that will enable us to survive as a species in this terrifying time of corona is that WE ARE ALL GOD’S BELOVED CHILDREN, and God does not wish for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.(2 Peter 3:9b)

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

President Trump’s approval rating has improved slightly amidst the coronavirus pandemic. But the short-term gains, reflecting a possible rally-around-the-flag effect at the time of national emergency, may not hold. On the contrary, the strong likelihood of a potentially very deep recession triggered by coronavirus puts Trump’s reelection chances in jeopardy.

Aggressive measures to slow the spread of the disease, and economic stimulus packages that soften the economic blow, could allow the United States to rev back up to speed in the second half of the year and improve Trump’s position. Without that — even though there isn’t any perfect analogy to coronavirus in recent electoral history — the bulk of what we do know suggests that he could be in trouble.

We’ve written a lot about the effect of the economy on presidential elections here at FiveThirtyEight, especially in the run-up to the 2012 general election, when the economic recovery was a major focal point in the contest between Barack Obama and MItt Romney. For that reason, I’m going to compress a very complicated discussion into under 3,000 words here:

First, I’ll explain my basic view on how to implement an election forecast based on economic conditions.

Next, we’ll see what a series of relatively simple economic models would say about Trump’s potential performance in the fall.

Finally, we’ll run through some possible objections — do econometric models really apply for a president like Trump in the case of something like coronavirus?

To be clear: This is meant to be an opening bid rather than a comprehensive evaluation of these questions, many of which will be worth exploring at greater length between now and November.

A bad economy makes life harder for the incumbent party. Beyond that, we don’t know much.

I’ve often found myself trying to carve out a middle ground between people who think that presidential elections are strictly predicted by economic conditions — and people who think it all boils down to idiosyncratic factors such as candidate charisma and campaign strategy.

It might surprise you to learn that I’m agnostic in this debate, rather than siding with the seemingly more data-driven economic “fundamentalist” approach. The problem with the data-driven approach is that … there just isn’t all that much data to work with. There have been only 18 presidential elections since World War II. (Before that U.S. economic data isn’t very robust.) To account for all of the various ways that the economy can impact people’s lives (for example, joblessness, inflation, take-home income, etc.) — plus all of the other factors that influence elections (such as incumbency, wars, pandemics, scandals, etc.) — is not easy to do with only 18 data points.

In particular, we don’t have enough data to make overly specific claims about the economy. That is, any time you see what you might call a “magic bullet” claim, such as that second-quarter GDP is crucial or that per-capita disposable income is the key economic variable, you should be wary.

In fact, magic-bullet models such as these don’t perform very well out of sample. That’s because they’re prone to suffer from p-hacking and overfitting because of the small sample size of post-WWII elections and the large number of ways to design a model. In practice, what this means is that people designing these models can twist enough knobs so that they fit the past data well, but they don’t actually predict future election outcomes effectively when the modelers don’t know the outcome in advance.

At the same time, it’s very likely that there is some type of meaningful correlation between economic performance and the performance of the incumbent party’s presidential candidate. If you look at a wide range of economic variables, you’ll find that most of the more obvious ones (GDP or employment numbers) indicate that a stronger economy predicts a better performance for the incumbent party.

The best approach in our view — and the one we’ve used in FiveThirtyEight’s presidential forecasts — is to combine various major economic variables into an overall index of economic conditions. To avoid overfitting, we choose variables that reflect a cross-section of economic activity rather than picking ones that happen to fit the results from a small number of presidential elections. In addition, FiveThirtyEight’s Economic Index averages how these numbers have changed at various points, instead of focusing on one particular time frame such as the second quarter.

Overall, the data shows a reasonably clear — although far from perfect — correlation between the economy and incumbent-party performance. Since 1968, the worst years for economic performance as of Election Day were 1980 and 2008, each of which were associated with steep losses for the incumbent party. The next-worst economic year was 1992, in which incumbent George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. The best years for the economy, 1984 and 1972, resulted in incumbent-party landslides, although another good year, 1968, produced a narrow loss for the incumbent Democrats.

A recession would probably make Trump an underdog — although not hopelessly so

OK, let’s plug in some numbers to our Economic Index and see what it says about Trump. The goal here is to predict Trump’s margin of victory — or defeat — in the popular vote; the Electoral College is another issue and a potential advantage for Trump; we’ll talk about that more in a moment. I’m going to run four versions of the model:

Model 1: Predict the performance of the incumbent party based on the FiveThirtyEight Economic Index as of Election Day. We’ve calculated the Economic Index back to 1968, so that’s the data we’ll use.

Model 2: The same as above, but using the data for incumbents only. That means we’d include 1972 (Richard Nixon), 1980 (Jimmy Carter), 1984 (Ronald Reagan), 1992 (George H.W. Bush), 1996 (Bill Clinton), 2004 (George W. Bush), and 2012 (Barack Obama) but exclude 1968, 1976 (Gerald Ford was an unelected incumbent), 1988, 2000, 2008 and 2016.

Model 3: Predict the performance of the incumbent party based on the FiveThirtyEight Economic Index as of Election Day and the incumbent president’s approval rating as of this point in the election year. For Trump’s approval rating, that’d be 45 percent — which is his approval in polls of likely or registered voters as of March 24 in the FiveThirtyEight presidential approval tracker.

Model 4: The same as above, but for incumbent presidents only.

And for each model, I’ll run through five economic scenarios:

If the economy looks like 1984, meaning booming growth.

1996, meaning above-average growth.

2012, meaning sluggish but positive growth.

1992, meaning a mild recession, although on the brink of recovery.1

Finally, 2008, meaning a severe recession.

All right, here’s what each economic scenario looks like under each model:

Even a mild recession could make Trump an underdog

Projected Trump margin of victory or defeat in the popular vote

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 IF THE ECONOMY LOOKS LIKE … 538 Economic Index 538 Index With incumbents only 538 Index + Pres. Approval 538 Index + Pres. Approval with incumbents only 1984 R+12 R+18 R+9 R+11 1996 R+5 R+9 R+4 R+5 2012 R+2 R+4 R+2 R+2 1992* D+5 D+6 D+4 D+5 2008* D+11 D+15 D+9 D+11

* 1992 and 2008 indicate mild and severe recessionary scenarios, respectively.

Note that the models are reasonably similar to one another. However, there are some differences. Namely, the predictions are more sensitive to economic performance when we use data for elected incumbents only (Models 2 and 4). That means incumbents like Trump get a larger share of credit or blame when they’re managing the economy, rather than when the torch is being passed, such as between Clinton and Al Gore in 2000 or George W. Bush and John McCain in 2008.

The economy also matters a bit less once you account for a president’s approval ratings (Models 3 and 4) since approval ratings gives us some sense for how popular the president actually is in practice, rather than how popular he “should” be based on the economy. In the pre-coronavirus economy, Trump was less popular than you might have expected based on economic conditions. That could limit his upside in the event the economy recovers or somehow manages to avoid recession. At the same time, he’s popular enough — and partisanship is strong enough — to potentially limit his downside in the case of a recession.

Nonetheless, in the event of a mild recession — with economic conditions tantamount to 1992 — all four models predict that Trump would lose the popular vote by a solid amount, by margins ranging from 4.0 percentage points (Model 3) to 5.7 points (Model 2). And in the event of a severe, 2008-style recession, they predict a potential landslide loss, by amounts ranging from 9.1 percentage points (Model 3) to 14.6 points (Model 2). However, Trump has two potential saving graces:

First, the Electoral College. In 2016, there was roughly a 3-point gap between Trump’s performance in the popular vote, which he lost by 2 percentage points to Hillary Clinton, and in the tipping-point state, Wisconsin, which he won by about 1 point. Losing the popular vote by 4 to 6 points would probably not be enough to save Trump in the Electoral College, but it would at least be an open question.

Second, these models have fairly high margins of error, which ranges between roughly 5 points and 10 points depending on which version you use. Thus, a model showing Trump losing the popular vote by 4 to 6 points wouldn’t have to be that far off for Trump to win the Electoral College (and perhaps even the popular vote) in the event of a mild recession. In the case of a severe recession, a popular vote win would be quite unlikely, but he’d retain some outside chances at drawing an inside straight in the Electoral College.

Will models like these really work in 2020?

Do models built on ordinary business cycle crests and slumps work in the midst of a global pandemic — something that the U.S. hasn’t experienced in any recent election year?

I’m reserving my right to change my mind on this subject upon deeper philosophical reflection — but the truth is, we can’t really know for sure. When we release the full-fledged FiveThirtyEight 2020 election model later this year, we may have it use a combination of several different priors, some of which use our Economic Index and some of which do not. All of this is still in the whiteboard stage at the moment.

At the same time, there are some objections that I don’t necessarily find compelling. Each of these could make for its own article, and we may cover some of them at more length later. But let’s run through them quickly in a lighting round:

Could voters give Trump a pass because coronavirus is the cause of the recession? Maybe. But even in the case of ordinary economic booms and busts, it’s never entirely clear how much credit or blame the president actually deserves — and the answer is, probably less than he typically gets from the public.

Does Trump deserve more blame for a coronavirus-triggered recession than Bush did for the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, or Carter did for the rampant inflation and the oil crisis of 1979 and 1980? Well, the Democrats will say yes — especially given Trump’s slow-footed, erratic response on coronavirus — and the White House will say no. But the more a recession brings hardship to families and communities, the more the Republican side of the argument will be pushing uphill.

But what about Trump’s approval rating improving since the coronavirus crisis began? Indeed, Trump’s approval rating has improved in recent days so that it’s among the highest ratings of his presidency. As I mentioned, his approval rating among voters is now roughly 45 percent, which is up from 43 or 44 percent since early March, while his disapproval rating has fallen from 52 to 53 percent to 51 percent.

However, compared with typical rally-around-the-flag effects that follow national crises, these gains are fairly meager. For instance, Bush’s approval rating improved from 51 percent to 86 percent following the September 11 attacks, and Carter’s approval rating nearly doubled in 1979 in the immediate wake of the Iran hostage crisis. (Granted, both of their ratings declined sharply from there.) But Trump is also not seeing nearly as much of an approval rating bounce as other leaders in Western countries, such as Italy’s Giuseppe Conte, France’s Emmanuel Macron, and the UK’s Boris Johnson. So it’s not clear that a small approval rating gain is a bullish sign for Trump.

Do “the fundamentals” even apply anymore? Isn’t everything different in the age of Trump? Sorry, but this is dumb. The 2016 election result — a narrow popular vote win for the incumbent Democrats given the mediocre economy — was actually fairly well-predicted by economic models. (These models don’t say anything about the Electoral College.) The 2018 midterms also went pretty much exactly how the fundamentals predicted given Trump’s middling approval rating and the typical midterm backlash against the incumbent party. Heck, even this year’s Democratic primary, in which Joe Biden is the very likely winner, has been good for the fundamentals-driven “Party Decides” view of the primaries in which the party establishment has a lot of influence.

Could partisanship dull the response to a recession? This is a better objection. With more polarization in the electorate and fewer swing voters, it stands to reason that Trump’s approval ratings will be less responsive to different news events than an earlier president’s might have been. And indeed, Trump’s approval ratings have trended within a narrow range so far throughout the course of his presidency, despite tumultuous events such as the Ukraine scandal and the impeachment proceeding against him.

There is an important catch, however. If the range of possible outcomes is narrower for Trump, that also means the margin of error is lower since the outcome is more predictable. Suppose that in less polarized times, a sharp recession would result in Trump being projected to lose by 12 points, plus or minus 10 percentage points. Given polarization, however, he might only be projected to lose by half as much, or 6 points — but the margin of error would also be half as much, or 5 points.

It’s also worth noting that Trump currently trails Biden in most general election polls by a wide enough margin that the Electoral College probably wouldn’t save him. So if higher partisanship means the outcome is more “locked in” and less likely to change, that isn’t great news for Trump.

Could an economic recovery in the second half of the year help Trump? Yes, it could. If there’s a sharp decline in economic activity over the next few months, and then a steep rebound, I wouldn’t want to have a model that only used second-quarter GDP and pretended everything that happened afterward didn’t matter.

At the same time, there is not a lot of certainty in how long the coronavirus crisis will last, nor how long the economic recovery would take. Moreover, a lot of epidemiologists worry about a potential second wave of the coronavirus in the fall, as occurred in the flu pandemic of 1918.

If I were Trump, I’d want to think six months ahead to the fall. That means I’d want a broad-based stimulus plan that helps ordinary Americans and small businesses to stay afloat during the weeks — or months-long shutdown. I’d want to stamp out the disease as much as possible — even if that means social distancing is in effect for a bit longer. And I’d want to have a Manhattan Project on treatments, testing and surveillance so that the coronavirus is more manageable until a vaccine is developed, which is unlikely until well after Election Day.

Frankly, this isn’t that complicated, and Trump’s incentives are well-aligned. The better off America is by November, the more likely he is to be re-elected.

Could A New Therapy Provide Immunity To COVID-19?

https://ift.tt/2JrdodT