Sunday, March 17, 2024

Comedians Not In Cars Getting Cancer

 “Unbelievable” is one of the podcasts that I listen to regularly. I almost didn’t listen to this episode. When I saw the title “Where is God in a terminal cancer diagnosis?” my first thought was that I didn’t want to hear it. In the end, I did listen and I’m glad I did.

“Unbelievable” is a podcast series that offers theological discussions in a pro and con format. Many episodes include debates and discussions between opposing viewpoints. If you’re interested in Christianity and whether it is a true and accurate representation of God, it’s a good podcast.

This episode was a bit different. Steve Legg and Allan Finnegan are both Christian comedians and both are living with terminal cancer diagnoses. In the podcast, both men discuss their stories and how they are coping with a disease that will probably soon end their lives.

While my diagnosis is thankfully much better, I can empathize with a lot of what they say. You never quite forget that you have cancer. It’s always in the back of my mind, but I’ve come to the conclusion that, although I still pray daily for healing and that my cancer will never return, it’s important to be thankful for every day that I have. It’s much better to go through life being grateful than afraid.

As Steve and Allan said, I’ve also developed an attitude of not procrastinating… at least not much. For them, it’s a matter of not having much time left, but for me it’s also financial. If my cancer does return, I may not be able to afford to do many of the things that I want or need to do now. It’s a good idea to handle things while I still have a paycheck.

They also address how they’d like people to interact with them. I agree on a lot of these points as well. If you're a friend or family member of a cancer patient, don’t continually ask about the disease. It’s okay to ask, but if they imply that they don’t want to talk about it, don’t be nosy.

Don’t tell cancer patients about everyone that you know who has cancer, especially if the story doesn’t have a happy ending. I remember early in my journey when a well-meaning person came up to me and told me how his brother had prostate cancer years ago and his PSA levels had just started rising again. That was something that I did not need to hear at the moment and I think my face showed it.

Don’t tell them about miracle cures that you saw on the internet. If miracle cures worked, they would be in widespread use. I don’t believe that Big Pharma is covering up cures so that they can make money on conventional treatments. Can you imagine how much a cure for cancer would be worth?

Likewise, don’t attribute cancer to whether someone got the COVID (or any other) vaccine or not. Even if this was true (and the data does not support such a link), it’s a crass and tone-deaf thing to say. Some cancers are related to lifestyle choices, but my research indicates that prostate cancer is largely a matter of genetics.

At any rate, I recommend the podcast, both this particular episode and the series more generally. You can find the episode at the links below or on streaming services such as Spotify.

Podcast:

https://pod.link/267142101/episode/41015429237e8d02991879c3493bbb76

YouTube:

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Note: If you’re wondering what the title of this piece means, it’s a reference to a web series by Jerry Seinfeld called “Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee.”


From My Prostate Cancer Journey. Click the link for previous installments. 

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Fani Willis is not thrown out on her....

 The country was waiting for a decision from Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee on whether District Attorney Fani Willis would be removed from the Trump election conspiracy case in Georgia. That order reflecting the judge’s decision came in a classic Friday afternoon news dump. To make a long story short, as you’ve probably heard, Willis has not been removed from the case as Trump and his allies had hoped. 

The longer version is that McAfee ruled that Willis could stay on the case if Nathan Wade, the investigator with whom she allegedly had what is euphemistically called “an intimate relationship,” was removed from the case. Wade promptly submitted his resignation after the order was handed down. 

To back up a bit, lawyers for Michael Roman, one of the defendants in the racketeering case, alleged that Willis’s sexual relationship with Wade constituted a conflict of interest. While Willis did admit the affair, how her behavior affected the election case was always a bit tenuous and speculative. Now it seems that Willis’s misconduct did not meet the grounds for removal from the case. 

But Willis did not emerge unscathed. A bruising public hearing became national news and Willis and Wade came across as shady and possibly dishonest about how long their affair had continued and whether Willis had benefitted financially from hiring Wade. The two argued that the expenses on their romantic trips had been “roughly divided equally” and records showed that Wade’s rate for legal work was “a relatively low amount by metro Atlanta standards.”

In the order, Judge McAfee wrote, Willis and Wade’s “testimony withstood direct contradiction, was corroborated by other evidence (for example, her payment of airfare for two on the 2022 Miami trip, and was not so incredible as to be unbelievable.”

McAfee also dryly noted, “Defendants argue that the financial arrangement created an incentive to prolong the case, but in fact, there is no indication that the District Attorney is delaying anything.”

It seems to be the defense that is interested in delaying the process. 

In the end, the defense was not able to prove that Willis had broken the law or that her actions affected her ability to objectively prosecute Donald Trump and his codefendants. The dots were never convincingly connected under the law to prove that even if the two lovers did share expenses that it would affect the fairness of the trial. 

The judge did have strong words for Willis in his order (which can be read in full online here), noting that there was the appearance of impropriety in her sexual relationship with a subordinate and the sloppy accounting of their shared expenses. 

“Reasonable questions remain about whether the District Attorney and her hand-selected lead SADA [Special Assistant District Attorney] testified truthfully about the timing of their relationship,” McAfee conceded, but continues, “Ultimately, dismissal of the indictment is not the appropriate remedy to adequately dissipate the financial cloud of impropriety and potential untruthfulness here.”

In other words, Willis and Wade were sleazy and may be lying, but the evidence didn’t confirm that their sleaziness would affect the trial. 

The order also addresses forensic misconduct, the public statements that Willis made about the trial, and her claims of racism. The judge called Willis’s remarks “legally improper” but said that they did not cross the line that would require Willis’s disqualification or would prevent a fair trial. 

The bottom line here is that Fani Willis is probably not a good person and her behavior was unprofessional and unethical, but she wasn’t so far out of line that it destroyed the case or her ability to prosecute it. If being a bad person precluded lawyers from doing their jobs, the legal system would be paralyzed. 

The interesting and ironic thing is that people on the side of the defense who are up in arms over Fani Willis and Nathan Wade’s lack of ethics and morals are using the DA’s corruption as a cudgel to try to defend Donald Trump and his associates from even greater charges of corruption. Which is worse? Engaging in an extramarital affair and lying about it or trying to steal an election and lying about it? 

I don’t blame the lawyers. It’s their job to offer their client the best defense they can. 

I do blame the people who think that Willis’s actions somehow invalidate Trump’s crimes. They do no such thing. Regardless of what Willis and Wade did, Trump and his cohorts need to be held accountable for their actions. 

But Willis and Wade do underscore the truth that neither side is innocent. Both Republicans and the Democrats have corrupt and self-serving officials in their midst. For too many public officials on both sides, it really is a racket. 

A further irony is that Willis had her day in court - just as Donald Trump will eventually - and now will face the same test that Trump supporters have advocated for the former president. The voters will determine Willis’s fate. Maybe Fulton County voters will have had enough of Willis’s bad behavior and send her packing at her next election. 

Or maybe they won’t. Maybe Fulton County voters will rehire Willis because it’s a Democratic stronghold and she is an incumbent with the letter “D” after her name. 

If that’s the case, are they really any worse than the Republicans who are determined to return Donald Trump to office despite the overwhelming evidence of his complicity in much greater crimes?

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Hail to the champs

 It’s official. The rematch that nobody wanted is going to happen.

No, that’s not true.

Photo:Ameer Basheer on Unsplash

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The rematch is going to happen, but people definitely wanted it despite protestations to the contrary. In large part, Trump supporters wanted it. Republicans passed over a number of better-qualified candidates with less baggage. Republicans clearly want Trump.

The matter isn’t as clear cut for Democrats. Biden remains unpopular, but incumbent presidents are hard to beat in a party primary That’s especially true when no one challenges them. Well, no one with a shot at winning anyway.

Personally, I’d say that Biden remaining in the race is a blessing in disguise. Consider who the Democratic nominee might be if Biden hadn’t run for reelection. Kamala Harris? Gavin Newsom? My suspicion is that any non-Biden candidate would be much further to the left than the incumbent.

Even though Trump currently leads in the polls, I will predict today that the situation reverses by Election Day and Biden wins a second term. There are a few reasons for this aside from my inherent anti-Trump leanings.

First, Biden already has a healthy fundraising advantage. The Biden campaign has far more cash on hand than Trump and that’s unlikely to change. A few days ago, Trump allies took control of the RNC and engaged in a massive purge of staffers. The late changes to Republican infrastructure don’t bode well for increasing cash flow in the late stages of the campaign, and that’s not even considering the possibility that the RNC will shift money to Trump’s legal bills rather than funding campaigns for The Former Guy and down ballot races.

By November, Biden and Democrats might well be dominating the airwaves. It could get ugly for Republicans up and down the ticket.

Second, one reason Biden is polling poorly is that Democrats think he’s too moderate. A lot of discontent on the left comes from those who prefer a more liberal candidate. These people are likely to come back into the fold before the election because no one unites Democrats like Donald Trump.

The same goes for sympathizers of Palestine. Many of these people are hesitant to vote Biden because of his support for Israel. These people may not vote Biden, but they definitely aren’t going to vote Trump. The best hope for Republicans is that they and other progressives stay home.

That’s unlikely because Donald Trump is Biden’s best campaigner. The Former Guy can’t shut up and he can’t not be crazy. So far, his zaniness and malevolence is ramped up in 2024 over previous years. It’s going to get worse.

At the same time, Trump is dividing his own party. A great many Republicans won’t vote for Trump again. This happened in the past when Trump underperformed other Republicans on the same ballot and it it will happen again. Driving voters out of the party is no way to win.

Michael Medved, my favorite conservative radio talker, used to say that voters tend to reject crazy, scary candidates. That rule of thumb often holds true unless a candidate forgets to campaign in the Rust Belt or makes similar errors.

The moderate and independent voters who will decide the election aren’t paying attention yet, but they will. As the election nears and people start listening to Trump, Biden will sound better and better.

The election isn’t over. We’ve barely started, but the die is cast. I won’t say Trump can’t win, but Republicans have an uphill struggle due to the choice to run a deeply flawed, unpopular candidate with tons of baggage.

My hope is that the Republican Party will see the lesson in the loss and reverse course away from Trumpism rather than resort to violence again. The odds for for that are long so the best hope for conservatives may be to attempt to influence the Democratic Party to move toward the center. Either way, it’s going to be a long eight months until the election and a long four years.

from the Racket News

Monday, March 11, 2024

Racket News podcast: Trump eschathology

 


https://www.theracketnews.com/p/racketeer-podcast-trump-eschatology

The new right-wing leftists

 A lot of my writing inspiration comes from my journeys around that Al Gore-created miracle of modern technology, the interwebs. That was the case again over the weekend when I ran into a post by a former Daily Wire reporter and current Lead Editor at the Republic Sentinel, Ben Zeisloft.

Zeisloft reminded me how much the political landscape has changed in a few short years. I’ve said more than once that we are undergoing a political realignment. As it turns out, Donald Trump, Jr. agrees with me.

brown brick wall with no smoking sign
Photo by Alison Pang on Unsplash

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Speaking on Newsmax, Don Jr. said, “That Republican Party no longer exists outside of the DC beltway…. People have to understand that MAGA is the new Republican Party. That is conservatism today.”

We see that truth on many issues ranging from foreign policy and national defense where Republicans are increasingly isolationist and protectionist. The MAGA indifference and even outright hostility to allies such as Ukraine, NATO, and even Taiwan and Israel is well-established but less known is Trump’s plan to reignite the trade wars with a 10-percent tariff on all imported goods if he is returned to office. Trump’s first round of tariffs represented one of the largest tax increases in decades and led directly to a manufacturing recession that cost thousands of jobs and required massive bailouts for farmers.

There was a disconnect in Republican circles between income taxes, which they hate, and tariffs, which many of them love. But tariffs are just another form of tax and despite claims that China and other countries were paying the tariffs, the reality is that tariffs, like any other tax, are paid by the end user. In the case of tariffs, that would be American consumers who buy imported products and American businesses who need imported components or raw materials for their goods.

The common ground between noninterventionism/isolationism and protectionism is that these philosophies were leftist points of view in my formative political years. It was always the Democrats who were trying to get America to abandon people fighting for freedom or to look the other way at Russian aggression. To a great extent, the parties have reversed on these issues. I wrote about this in a bit more detail a few weeks ago when I discussed how the MAGA right sounds a lot like the old peacenik left that Rush Limbaugh used to call the “Blame America First Crowd.”

There are other similarities between the MAGA right and the left as well. That brings me to Ben Zeisloft. Over the weekend, I noticed a long-form post by Zeisloft on the platform formerly known as Twitter. I’ll repeat the entire post here:

I have no problem forcing my beliefs on others.

Because I am a Christian:

I believe preborn babies should be protected from murder and born children should be protected from mutilation, and I am willing to support laws banning both accordingly.

I believe sodomy is an abomination, and I am willing to support laws banning same-sex mirage.

I believe IVF and abortifacient birth control disregard the image of God in man, and I am willing to support laws banning both.

I believe our flippant divorce system is a culturally destructive travesty, and I am willing to support laws banning no-fault divorce, except for adultery, abuse, and abandonment.

I believe pornography is a scourge, and I am willing to support laws banning pornography.

I will only force my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ on you in the sense that I will plead with you to repent, flee from the wrath to come, and believe in his name for forgiveness, life, and peace.

But the state is an institution which God has ordained to be his servants, to be a terror to the evildoer and a rewarder of the one who does good. There should certainly be a separation of church and state in that both have distinct mandates in serving God, but there should never be a separation of God and state.

Because I am a Christian, if you continue in your rebellion, I will love my neighbors and honor my God by calling on the state to protect their lives and our civilization from your madness.

This is Christian Nationalism. At its core, it is both un-American and unchristian. It is also Big Government in priestly robes.

You might like a lot of what Zeisloft proposes. I’m a Christian and on a moral and ethical level, I agree with quite a few of his goals. However, if you think about what he’s proposing, there are a lot of problems.

First, many of Zeisloft’s points are not based on accepted Christian doctrine. For example, when it comes to in vitro fertilization, there are Christians on both sides of the issue.

What gives Zeisloft the right to impose his version of Christianity on Christians who believe differently? Which Christian denomination gets the final say? I’m guessing not one of the liberal ones. Was Ben Zeisloft elected as the American pope and I missed it? Why should nonchristians - or Christians of different denominations - stand by while Zeisloft and his cohorts attempt to impose their version of a theological utopia on the country?

The answer, of course, is that they wouldn’t. Americans are not going to let a minority religious faction crack down on personal freedoms like a modern-day Oliver Cromwell. But Zeisloft and his cronies have an answer for that as well.

meme shared by Zeisloft gives a clue as to their strategy. The meme is a biblical allusion to the story in the book of Daniel in which Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to worship a golden idol of King Nebuchadnezzar and were thrown into a fiery furnace as punishment. If you’ve ever been to Sunday School, you’ve heard the story. If you haven’t, stop now and flip to Daniel Chapter Three. I won’t spoil it for you and I’ll wait.

In the meme, the golden statue is labeled “Democracy” and has three flags and a syringe on it. The flags are the gay rainbow flag, one that I didn’t recognize but that turned out to be a trans flag, and the Ukrainian flag. The syringe is obviously meant to symbolize vaccines. This isn’t a biblical list of abominations, but is more of a list of “Things Christian Nationalists Don’t Like.” Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are labeled as “Christian Nationalists,” and the caption to the tweet reads, “Democracy is a sacred idol that must be torn down.”

Screenshot from @smashbaals on Twitter, retweeted by @benzeisloft

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Folks, as I‘ve said before, when they tell you what they want to do, believe them.

This is a blatant call to overturn America’s democratic institutions and replace them with a Zeisloft-approved theocratic regime. It rarely ends well when a minority attempts to force its will on the majority.

That’s the unamerican part.

[For what it’s worth, I did look at both Zeisloft’s account and the @smashbaals Christian Nationalist account that originally posted the meme to make sure that they weren’t satire pages. My rule of thumb is that if it sounds too stupid to be true, it probably is, but that rule is increasingly obsolescent these days. In this case, both pages seem to be what they say they are.]

The unchristian part is that this is not what the Bible tells us to do. I can’t find anywhere in my Bible that says to go forth and make laws to make the unbelievers adhere to Christian principles.

Biblical teaching on the issue seems to run counter to what Zeisloft preaches. Jesus was offered political power but refused it. Spoiler alert: The offer of power was actually a temptation directly from Satan.

Where Jesus did provide instruction on how Christians should interact with unbelievers, he said to “Love your neighbor as yourself,” which he called the second-greatest commandment, and to “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

Jesus put these lessons into practice by sitting down and socializing with the dregs of his society: Tax collectors, prostitutes, and Samaritans. While Jesus might have lectured them in at least some cases, he didn’t try to force them to do his will. He always showed up with love.

Christian Nationalists are fond of pointing out that Jesus got violently angry. But what they fail to see is that Jesus’s righteous anger wasn’t focused on unsaved sinners. In Matthew 21, Jesus aimed his anger at the grifters who were profiting off those who came to worship at the temple. In other passages, Jesus condemned the hypocritical religious leaders who concentrated on publicly keeping the letter of religious law without exhibiting God’s love.

One of the things that the Pharisees, the religious leaders of Jesus’s day, did wrong was to keep adding their own amendments to God’s law. If this sounds familiar, it reminds me a lot of Christian Nationalists unilaterally deciding that things like vaccines and support for Ukraine are sinful.

Christians are fond of saying that Christianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship. That’s true, and Zeisloft misses that point completely. He and the other Christian Nationalists are reducing Christianity to a set of rules, many of their own making. But following the rules doesn’t bring salvation and following Christ has to be a personal choice rather than a response to a government mandate.

What Zeisloft and the Christian Nationalists are proposing is a theological version of the leftist vision of the nanny state, another something that conservatives used to be against. It may be with the best of intentions that people try to force good choices on their fellow countrymen, but what happens when the country does not want to comply? Government power is always based on the use of force and the ultimate answer is that dissidents will be persecuted for their own good.

As Christian author C.S. Lewis once wrote, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of Earth.”

What the proponents of nanny states on both sides of the political spectrum fail to grasp is that freedom must include the freedom to fail on one’s own terms. If you aren’t free to make bad decisions then you aren’t truly free. Often, failure is how we learn and grow.

The omnipotent moral busybodies may have the nation’s best interests at heart, but Americans are proud and individualistic people. We don’t like to be told what to do and will often do the opposite or fight back out of spite when we are given orders. That’s true even if the orders are in our best interests.

So yes, there is a political realignment going on. In some areas in which Republicans are abandoning traditional conservatism, Democrats are adopting conservative positions. These include maintaining strong alliances and helping allies to defend themselves against Russia, China, and Islamic terrorists.

In other areas, however, neither party is going to represent traditional conservative principles as the new right-wing leftists complete their takeover of the Republican Party. Both parties are now unashamed advocates of Big Government and are quite happy to restrict the rights of the other side when the mood strikes. Increasingly, the New Right is indistinguishable from the Old Left in many respects.

One of the worst aspects of the ongoing political shift is the growth of Christian Nationalism. Further politicizing Christianity is not going to be good for the country, conservatives, or the church.

From the Racket News