• This is a sleep-schedule readjustment week for me at the Big Box, switching from the 5 am – 2 pm shift I’ve been working since July to the 7 pm – 4 am shift I started on Monday. My dog seems pleased to be changing from a too-early breakfast to a more civilized brunch hour.
And if the cold weather is getting you down, please note that patio furniture has begun arriving at your local Big Box — an annual sign of spring. Pitchers and catchers report to spring training in less than three weeks.
• In Trumpworld, there are grifters and there are true believers. The true believers write the checks, the grifters cash them.
The same is true for the religious right. The folks running “Intercessors for America” cash a lot of checks, so I suspect they’re firmly in the grifters category. I’m not sure whether that’s less or more damning for them, considering that their shtick involves riling up the true believers with fear of “witches and diabolical power” — by which they mean women and Jews.
• Speaking of grifters, Right Wing Watch offers a non-comprehensive round-up of “False Prophecies and Failed Predictions” from the Strang-verse of right-wing charlatans. These are all from veteran Charismanews goofballs, all of whom should have known better than to make the rookie mistake of offering concrete, date-specific, falsifiable “prophecies.”
These folks all went Camping (as in Harold). They went full Whisenant. Never go full Whisenant.
• Speaking of false prophets, Eric Metaxas is a very silly man.
The Milo-Metaxas love fest is amazing for many reasons, not the least of which is that Metaxas seems to think that he and Yiannopoulos are basically on the same page ideologically. (When Milo asks if Metaxas has seen his college talk on the fabulous capitalist origins of Christmas, or his treatise on Beauty, “Why Ugly People Hate Me,” Metaxas exclaims, “See, that, I don’t think that’s wrong! I think that’s perfectly fine.”)
Every bit of this — the utter comfort with white supremacy, the confused notion that “owning the libs” was indistinct from “conservative principles,” the fantasy epistemology of truth-is-what-I-prefer he shares with Milo and Breitbart — has been evident in this clown since well before, and during, his then-acclaimed anti-Obama speech at the National Prayer Breakfast years ago. Everybody who cheered that speech at the time was cheering this.
If you didn’t know, now you know.
• Speaking of Eric Metaxas …
“Fatbergs are giant lumps of fat, oil, and grease that congeal around a lattice of wet wipes, condoms, and other plasticky sanitary products into unholy blockages that clog, and sometimes burst, sewer pipes around the world. At least one is forming in your city right now.”
• Fundie circular firing squad alert. It seems a professor at Southwest Baptist University got fired for saying that other professors at the school should be fired for insufficiently strict adherence to the ancient historic doctrines of the 1998 and 2000 revisions of “Baptist Faith & Message.”
SBU added a deliciously dim flourish to this infighting by releasing a statement saying: “We believe that the result of this dialogue will be an SBU that is even more firmly grounded in the core values that have defined us since our inception in 1878.” That clarifies what it is that SBU seeks to preserve in the name of “theological integrity” — the core values of 1878 Missouri: white supremacy and violent resistance to Reconstruction. OK, then.
• On a bit of a Todd Snider kick of late, so the title of this post comes from his “Ballad of the Kingsmen“:
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