The Phony Miracle of the Oily Bible

A strange case has emerged from Dalton, Georgia. One Johnny Taylor claimed that on 1/20/2017, the day Trump was inaugurated, oil stains began to appear on his bible. The oil continued to increase until he started collecting them in vials. Taylor's oil soon became the center of a cult, with people claiming it could cure everything up to and including cancer.

Then on January 10, it turns out that the bible has stopped producing oil. Then it emerged that Taylor himself was buying a type of oil from a tractor supply store. Anybody with a brain should see that Taylor was pulling a scam.

This shows how religious fundamentalism is connected with Trumpism. It is all about pandering to stupid, ignorant people who are ready to believe anything.

Christopher Caldwell Speaks With Forked Tongue

A really bad article recently appeared on Vox. It is titled "Christopher Caldwell’s big idea: The civil rights revolution was a mistake." Christopher Caldwell is better known for writing about the supposed dangers of Moslem immigration to Europe, which shows where he's coming from. The peace is Vox is cast in the form of a debate with Sean Illing, concerns Caldwell's latest book "The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties." Caldwell's point is that because of the civil rights movement White Americans “fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”

Let's take this sentence apart. First, white people did not build America by itself. It was also built by African-Americans, much of the time as slaves. The building of America also required lots of labor from Hispanic and Asian immigrants. Second, in what way are Whites at the "bottom" of any racial hierarchy? The fact that working class whites saw their situation deteriorate after the 1960s was caused by economic changes that had nothing to do with the civil rights movement and the drive for social equality.

Caldwell tries to hide his ethnocentric stance by claiming "This book is in no way a defense of Jim Crow or segregation or anything like that." In reality, we always had a system of racial preferences, for Whites, that dated all the way back to the colonial era. One of the big tricks of racists is to deny the problem of race and to claim that they are the victims of racism. Caldwell's most telling remark comes toward the end of the article
"I do not think the Trump movement or the Republican Party more generally is a racist movement." For Caldwell to make a statement like that suggests he is either obtuse or deceptive.

Mexicans Find New Way Over Trump's Wall

In an earlier post I mentioned that border crossers were cutting through the border wall. They have now found a new way to defeat the wall: climb over it with ladders. In some cases not even actual ladders, just makeshift ladders made out of rebar. It seems that Trump didn't know what it would take to build a wall. He's now raiding the Pentagon budget to pay for his stupid idea.

This is information from the article "Brilliant New $5.34 Ladder Defeats Not So Brilliant $2.5 Billion Trump Fever Dream"


by

Abby Zimet, Further columnist commondreams.org.

The article ends with an apt quote:

"A wise man lets a fool build a wall before choosing the height of his ladder.” - Socrates

Feminist "Woo" and What It Is

The New York Times recently published an opinion piece by Elisa Albert and Jennifer Block titled "Who’s Afraid of Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop?" This not only defends Paltrow and her quackery but repeats the standard rhetoric of feminist anti-science. The piece is full of feminist rhetoric about "intuitive measures" and "classic patriarchal devaluation." Absent from the discussion are certain facts like that Paltrow herself is a privileged white female. Albert and Block also ignore that Paltrow and Goop embody the same kind of obscurantism, worship of wealth and celebrity that led to the rise of Trumpism.

It is true that the piece was labeled as opinion. We have to ask ourselves about the decision by the New York Times to publish something like that. The New York Times claims to be the "newspaper of record." Are they going to start publishing articles in support of flat earthism and the anti-vaxxers? Pieces like those make us wonder whether the NY Times is really as credible as it claims to be.