A commenter suggested that if I want to know why people support the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, I should ask them. For some reason this particular individual did not propose an answer. However, Jordan Klepper has gone to many Trump rallies and asked the question.   So, now you have your answer. They are blithering idiots.   ..read more

 Psalm 104 is historically important, because it is among the biblical passages the church used to convict Galileo of heresy. He wrote to the Grand Duchess Christina "Astronomers seem to declare what is contrary to Scripture, for they hold the heavens to be spherical, while the Scripture calls it "stretched out like a tent." (v. 2) He argued that such passages should not be taken literally as scientific findings might discredit them. In fact, verse 5 was specifically cited at his trial.  We know now that God is not the explanation for any of the natural phenomena described here, whe ..read more

Chris Quinn, editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, wrote this now famous editorial a couple of weeks ago. It is a sad day when the editor of a big city newspaper is forced to go on the record defending the concept of reporting the truth. I'll just give an excerpt, in case you haven't read it. The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information. The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himsel ..read more

You may recall that an earlier psalm purported to be the last Psalm of David, but as we know, the current Book of Psalms is actually a compilation and the editors just didn't delete that. There are more psalms attributed to David and we've come to two of them today. Psalm 101, attributed to David,  is a sort of oath of office. Psalm 103 is a song of praise, which gives God several attributes that he clearly doesn't have. No, he doesn't heal all diseases (v. 3), doesn't renew youth (v. 5), doesn't work vindication and justice for all who are oppressed (v. 6) and most certainly is not ..read more

That's actually the name of a street in Philadelphia where my paternal ancestors lived, but it seemed like a good title for this post. If I still had the energy to keep up the Windham County blog I would have put it there, but for now I'll just leave it here. Living in the temperate zone we do have to get through the winter, but our reward is spring, which you can't have otherwise. I got a load of horseshit from my neighbors last fall and now I'm starting to spread it around. I planted a Concord grape next to my front porch, with a decent scoop of manure in the hole, and my idea is that it wi ..read more

We now get a run of (mercifully short) songs of praise. Again, there are multiple gods but our god is the biggest and baddest. Yes, he is also the creator, but that's sort of a contradiction. If the Big Y created the heavens and the earth, where did all these competing gods come from? This is never explained. There is some weird imagery in these, with geographic features engaging in anthropomporphized activities. As a final note, these were evidently written during times of victory and prosperity. They obviously don't pertain to the exilic situation in which the book was compiled. 98 O ..read more

In the previous post I listed some structural and contingent reasons why the relationship between voting and any idea of popular sovereignty is problematic. I didn't even mention some of the specific kludgy features of the U.S. system, such as the overrepresentation of small states in both the Senate and the Electoral College, which is itself an unwieldy and dangerous anachronism; gerrymandering; and obstacles to voting. However, let's assume we had none of those problems. In fact, propose a fantasy world in which we either had direct democracy -- all legislation by referendum -- or that repre ..read more

This post will be in two parts -- or maybe I'll just get to one part now and do the second part separately, we'll see how it goes. The first part is some empirical true facts about elections and electoral democracies, or republics if you prefer to use that term for representative systems such as ours. I don't want to get hung up on vocabulary. The second is philosophical -- how should we understand democracy, popular rule, We The People? How does that work and how can it work and how should it work? So, Part One. Many people assume that elections and the resulting legislative and executive (a ..read more

I always do my best to write clearly and precisely, but it seems I don't always manage to get my meaning across. So let's try a couple of ideas again. Please read carefully, and think about what I actually write, not what you think I might think or what other people think.   The First Amendment applies only to government. It constrains what government can do, it does not place any constraint of any kind on any other entity. The courts have interpreted it a bit more broadly than its literal language. If "congress shall make no law . . . " then the executive cannot have any legal authority ..read more

Now we get some (mercifully short) songs of praise. The fun thing about these is that they cast Yahweh as the greatest among a pantheon of gods. That's how people thought about gods in the time most of the Tanakh was written. You've got your god, we've got ours, but ours is the baddest baddass of all the gods. This is somewhat different from polytheistic religions. All the Roman or Norse gods were gods of the Romans or Norsemen, although Jupiter and Odin were the head honchos.  So the basic structure of the Deuteronomistic history is that when the Israelites please God, he gives them vic ..read more