Category: Politics, Religion, and Social Commentary

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Fun Fact

Now it’s immediately turned into a meme that’s shared, laughed at, and then ultimately forgotten in 72 hours.

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Where Is Your God Emperor Now?

I was driving home this afternoon after picking up the doggos from day care, and on the corner of 7th Avenue & Osborn there was a panhandler wearing a red MAGA cap. You’ll have to take my word for it. Traffic was moving so I couldn’t snap a photo.

I mean, cognitive dissonance anyone?

 

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Once Again, John Pavlovitz Nails It

To Our Loved Ones,

To Our Grandparents, Parents, Uncles, Aunts, Cousins, and Older Siblings,

We’re aware of what you think of us, either because you’ve told us during explosive, room-clearing conversations, over terse Cold War text exchanges, or in second-hand words passed through the people who now serve as the sole intermediaries between us.

You believe that we’re lost.

You believe we’ve changed.

You think we’ve become radicalized.

You think we’ve abandoned our faith, our families, and our nation, and you’re disappointed with us.

And we need you to know that you’re largely responsible.

Much of this is your fault.

You say that we’ve changed, and we have: we’ve become the people you taught us to become when we were growing up.

people who are deeply offended by inequity,

people who look out for the underdog,

people who grieve the suffering of others,

people who find the beauty in the diversity around us,

people who want others to have enough,

people who are aware of how fortunate we are to live here,

people trying to love our neighbors as ourselves,

people who detest liars, predators, and con men,

people who abhor bullies and bigots and braggarts,

And the people that we’ve become, in large part because of the wisdom and compassion you poured into us as children, can’t fathom, as adults, how you’ve voted for Donald Trump three times and how you still support him now.

It would have been unthinkable to those younger versions of us (and the younger version of you, for that matter), that you would have embraced this man: his cruelty, his depravity, his petty, vengeful, unloving heart.

That’s not the way you raised us, and so whatever issues you have with us now, you need to understand:

You made us this way.

You have radicalized us into loving, compassionate human beings, and we can’t fathom how that can be a problem for you.

We’re really proud of the people we are today, and grateful for the time you spent with us; the lessons you taught us about seeing all people as inherently valuable,

about being a person of your word,

about telling the truth even when it’s costly,

about admitting your mistakes,

about taking responsibility for your actions,

about valuing people over money,

about how we treat people, being what defines us,

We were paying attention in history class.

We were paying attention in Sunday School.

We were paying attention around the dinner table.

We were listening.

We believed you.

We did what you told us to do and became who you told us to become—and so now we care about the world, and we despise evil, and we live open-hearted and open-handed.

And that’s why we’ve found ourselves standing here wondering how you’ve become people we no longer recognize, how you’ve embraced the embodiment of the ugliness you warned us to avoid, how you stopped taking your own advice somewhere along the way.

You say that you only support the party or the policies and not the man—but we remember you telling us that we are known by the company we keep, that the ends don’t always justify the means, and that we can’t gain the world (or a Supreme Court seat) and lose our souls. Back then, you wouldn’t have tolerated those flimsy excuses for aligning with someone horrible, and we won’t tolerate them from you now.

As children, we looked up to you, and that part of us will continue to love you dearly and be grateful to you.

But as adults, we now see you eye to eye, and we grieve the loss of the people we imagined you were when you were teaching us how to be good human beings.

By continuing to support this man, you have gone against everything you told us was important growing up: decency, honesty, fairness, maturity, and empathy.

Either you were lying then, or you’re wrong now.

Which one is it?

The children we were and the adults we’ve become both want to know.

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Holy Shit…Are They Thinking About The People Instead Of The Oligarchs For A Change?

The U.S. Department of Energy has ordered AI data centers to stop drawing electricity from the grid to prevent widespread blackouts.

As temperatures spiked past 100°F across the eastern United States, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued an emergency directive to ease unprecedented strain on the PJM Interconnection power grid.

The order targets large-scale electricity consumers—most notably the dense cluster of artificial intelligence and cloud computing data centers in Northern Virginia, home to the world’s largest concentration of such facilities.

By forcing these high-demand tech centers to temporarily disconnect from the public grid and rely on their own backup energy resources, officials successfully freed up crucial megawatts so millions of homes could keep their air conditioning running without triggering severe power failures.

However, this quick-fix solution highlights a looming conflict between the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure and local environmental goals. Most industrial backup systems rely on diesel or natural gas, which emit significantly higher levels of local air pollutants than centralized utility plants. Furthermore, with the Mid-Atlantic region lacking the robust battery storage capabilities found in states like Texas and California, grid operators remain highly dependent on fossil-fuel-powered alternatives during sudden demand spikes. As the energy demands of artificial intelligence continue to skyrocket, experts warn that similar emergency measures may become a routine test of America’s aging energy infrastructure.

source: Nilsen, E. (2026, July 2). Energy Dept. directs data centers to use backup generators during heat wave, freeing up power for AC. CNN.

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Listen Up ICE Employees, Lawyer Here…

You can and will be charged for murder, kidnapping and child endangerment.

The question is not if, but when.

Prosecution can occur years later, under an entirely different political climate.

You may have a defense (i.e. imminent threat of death) but it will be up to a jury to believe you.

A jury of the public you’ve been brutalizing. Good luck with that.

State homicide, kidnapping and child endangerment statutes remain operative even for federal agents.

The federal supremacy clause may delay immediate arrest, but does not erase state jurisdiction or remove prosecutorial discretion.

And if you’re in a state like Minnesota? You’re cooked.

You should know the law protects those who have moral integrity. Federal civilian employees are protected from retaliation when they refuse illegal orders.

That’s Whistleblower Protection Act, 5 USC 2302(b)(8).

Translation: the law gives you an exit ramp. If you choose not to take it, that’s on you.

Obedience is not a defense when the order was unlawful.

The “I was just following orders” defense died at Nuremberg. The US helped bury it, and domestic law reflects it.

There’s US v. Calley (1976) re the My Lai massacre: obedience to unlawful orders does not absolve criminal liability.

Murdering civilians, abusing detainees, and kidnapping children is illegal under both federal and state law.

You don’t need a JD to know that.

There are also standards under your own field manuals and policies. The ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Policy Manual, Use-of-Force Continuum, and Rules for the Use of Force (SRUF) all establish limits.

You have signed that you reviewed them.

“I didn’t know” is not a defense when your policies spelled it out for you.

There are also standards under your own field manuals and policies. The ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Policy Manual, Use-of-Force Continuum, and Rules for the Use of Force (SRUF) all establish limits.

You have signed that you reviewed them.

“I didn’t know” is not a defense when your policies spelled it out for you.

“Everyone was doing it” “We didn’t have a choiceẠỊ

Well let me introduce you to some more recent history:

During the 2018 family separation directives, some federal employees refused to participate and were protected from retaliation.

Those who complied are now on the wrong side of history, and some of them will likely end up on the wrong side of future investigations.

Pausing in the face of legal ambiguity is not insubordination. It’s prudent self-preservation and self-protection.

This administration will one day collapse. They all do.

Your bosses will resign or retire. DOJ priorities change constantly.

Indictments outlive presidencies.

You can also be sued in civil court for a whole bunch of torts: wrongful death, false imprisonment, intentional

inflection of emotional distress, the list goes on.

Payouts on these claims run in the millions of dollars. The lawyers are already strategizing.

The law will outlast your recklessness.

The people will remember the terror you inflicted on them.

They will be sitting in the jury box.

Act accordingly.

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There’s A Story We All Tell Ourselves

In those internal autobiographies, we all tell ourselves that we’re one of the good ones, that our presence on this planet is yielding something beautiful, something that will leave this place better than when we arrived. In those stories, we are the heroes, the helpers, the saviors, or at the very least, we’re decent people just doing our best.

That self-reverential story has a way of bleeding over into the place we call home, the nation we claim as our own. There is a poisonous exceptionalism that most of us were born into; a curated mythology inherited by our parents, our politicians, our pastors that convinced us that as a collective, we were good or godly.

Some of us live our entire lives believing we’re better than we are, that our nation is better than it is, until we are faced with irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Suddenly, we realize that we might be the villains, the terrorists, the monsters, the accomplices.

We all grew up in this country learning of the horrors of the Holocaust, reading stories of Hitler’s unthinkable brutality against the Jewish people. We stared in disbelief at the images of walking corpses, emancipated from the concentration camps at the very precipice of death. We nearly vomited seeing jittery black and white newsreels of naked, indistinguishable human beings, stacked like cord wood. We read of an unrelenting barbarism against an entire group of human beings, whose only crime was existing in their skin.

And when faced with this sprawling inhumanity that defied our ability to hold it all, invariably we all thought about the German people, and we all asked ourselves, “What kind of human beings would allow this?”

We wondered what kind of morally broken people could stand by and watch generations of mothers, fathers, and children eradicated from existence, their communities razed to rubble, their cultures erased, their very humanity discarded.

From the safety of hindsight and the buffers of our own false stories, we’ve interrogated ordinary Germans from eighty years ago, lamenting their silence and inaction in the face of such horrors; condemning them as, at best, gutless cowards, and at worst, willing collaborators.

With stratospheric arrogance, we’ve told ourselves that we’d never have consented to such evil, that we’d have pushed back against it, that the abject terror unleashed on the Jewish people would never have happened on our watch.

And yet, there is Gaza.

Day after day, she testifies against us, documenting our indifference, recording our apathy, inventorying our inaction. She lifts our hands in front of us and shows us that her blood is all over them. She burns up the fictions of our goodness. She reminds us how easy it is for a nation to abandon its humanity, silence by silence, justification by justification, averted eye by averted eye.

Gaza is indicting the American people, and Iran and Lebanon are joining her. They are holding a mirror up to us as a nation, revealing exactly who we are— the truth about what we believe, about what we will abide, and what we will not stand for— and we should be ashamed and driven to our knees in repentance.

It would be damning enough to declare that many Americans now are as reprehensible as many Germans in the 1940s, but that wouldn’t be accurate; we are far worse.

We have access to America’s and Israel’s every vile deed in the palm of our hands. Donald Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s sociopathy floods our timelines. With the swipe of a finger, we can traverse thousands of miles and see the annihilation of a people in real-time. Unlike the German people in the shadow of Hitler, we cannot even attempt to plead ignorance. Through tiny screens that we are rarely more than inches from, we are 24-7 bystanders to the slaughter of children, to the bombing of hospitals, to the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people. We know exactly where the money is going, the politicians whose empires have been funded by terrorism, and the scale of the mass murders our tax dollars are funding.

And we are culpable for all that we allow or refuse to oppose.

One day, eighty years from now, generations of children all over the world will ask what kind of people would have allowed the genocide in Gaza to happen.

And it should break our hearts and boil our blood to know that unless we alter our course immediately and fiercely, we will be that kind.

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🙄

From Mock Paper Scissors:

Told ya he rushed it and the plane doesn’t have all the defense bells and whistles it is supposed to have, and now that we are in a shooting war with Iran (AGAIN!), he cannot fly this thing home, hence another older AF-1 is going to pick him up. So we get to pay for the fuel X2.

The Affordability Prznint.

Anyway, here’s the dopey liar try to gild the turd:

To honor our brave men and women of the Military, we are
sending the brand new, and truly spectacular, Air Force One to
Mildenhall Air Force Base, in the United Kingdom, to give them a
chance to tour the Aircraft – Everybody is so excited, and we
thought that they should be the first. For old time’s sake, we’ll be
taking the former Air Force One, from Turkey to Mildenhall, a
short trip that is totally worth doing in order to give our Great
Military Heroes a chance to appreciate our beautiful new addition
to the Air Force Fleet! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Yeah, I’m sure that they will be thrilled to tour this thing.

OK, Congress: time to make sure he knows that this bird is not his personal toy, and if he wants to keep it, he has to pay for this $400M bribe + upgrades himself, out of his own pocket. I defy the Republicans to try to make it some sort of tribute to the Grifter-in-Chief.

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What The Fuck Are We Doing?

Every single day another line disappears. Something that should stop the country in its tracks becomes another headline, another debate, another argument, another excuse. We barely have time to process one outrage before another one arrives. The news moves on.

Social media moves on. The people responsible move on. Somehow we’re expected to move on too.

Every morning starts to feel the same. You open your phone wondering what it will be today.

What rule will no longer matter?

What institution will be tested again? What norm will quietly disappear? What will happen that would have dominated every front page in America ten years ago but now barely survives a news cycle before the next impossible thing replaces it?

It isn’t one moment. It never is. It’s watching the impossible become ordinary. It’s watching behavior that once would have ended careers become another argument on television. It’s watching accountability become optional, corruption become background noise, and abuses of power become something people debate instead of reject. Somewhere along the way, the unthinkable stopped feeling unthinkable, and that’s the part that should terrify every one of us.

Every day feels like it should have been enough. Instead, another justification appears, another distraction takes over, and somehow the bar gets raised again.

What should have been the breaking point simply becomes the starting point for whatever comes next.

It leaves you looking around wondering whether everyone else is seeing the same country you are.

Not because this is complicated.

Because it isn’t. There is nothing complicated about corruption.

There is nothing complicated about cruelty. There is nothing complicated about abusing power and expecting everyone else to pretend it’s normal. The most bewildering part isn’t what is happening. It’s watching people argue over whether it deserves to matter at all.

People are suffering while the people with the power to change it argue about talking points. Children are falling asleep to the sound of bombs. Parents are wondering whether they can keep the people they love alive. People with disabilities are watching decades of hard-won protections being dismantled piece by piece. Older adults are wondering whether dignity has become too expensive to protect. Families are carrying burdens that grow heavier while those with the power to change course keep finding new excuses not to. Communities are paying the price while power protects itself.

There is something deeply unsettling about watching a society lose its ability to be shocked. Not because shocking things stopped happening, but because they started happening so often that they became part of the routine.

Institutions bend. Accountability shrinks. Excuses multiply.

Eventually we aren’t asking whether a line was crossed. We’re arguing over whether the line ever existed.

That may be the cruelest part of all.

Normalization doesn’t ask

permission. It doesn’t arrive with a warning. It quietly reshapes our expectations until outrage becomes exhaustion, exhaustion becomes routine, and routine becomes acceptance.

So I’ll ask it again.

What the fuck are we doing?

Too many people have hidden behind the word ‘politics.’ It has become the excuse used to avoid making moral judgments. Calling out cruelty, corruption, dishonesty, abuses of power, or the erosion of democratic norms isn’t just another political opinion. It never was.

This has never just been about politics. It has always been about morality. About what kind of people we choose to be when power rewards cruelty instead of compassion, loyalty instead of integrity, and blind allegiance instead of truth. Every generation likes to imagine it would have recognized the moments history now condemns. The truth is that history isn’t written by people who recognized those moments afterward. It is written by the people who refused to normalize them while they were happening.

Every time people in positions of power excuse something because it’s politically convenient, the line moves. Every time institutions decide that character matters a little less than power, the line moves.

Every time leaders explain away corruption because it benefits them, the line moves. Every time cruelty becomes entertainment instead of a moral breaking point, the line moves. We keep telling ourselves someone, somewhere, will finally draw the line, while watching the line disappear in real time.

So no, I’m done pretending this is complicated. Some things are simply wrong.

The world only becomes this way when people allow it to. Not all at once, but one excuse at a time. One compromise at a time. One rationalization at a time. One institution deciding accountability can wait. One leader deciding loyalty matters more than integrity.

One person with the power to draw the line deciding not to. Then something worse happens, built on every excuse that came before it.

The people excusing corruption don’t get to redefine what corruption is. The people defending cruelty don’t get to redefine what cruelty is. The people justifying dishonesty don’t get to redefine honesty. And abuse of power doesn’t become leadership simply because someone found a way to explain it away.

The moment a society starts rewriting its morality to fit its loyalties, it has already started losing something far more important than politics.

So I’ll ask it one last time.

What the fuck are we doing?

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“These Are Not Very Bright Guys And Things Got Out Of Hand”

From Palmer Report:

One of the great ironies of the Watergate scandal is that the most famous quote to come from it – “These are not very bright guys and things got out of hand” – was never actually said by anyone involved. That line only existed in the stylized movie version of events. It doesn’t matter. By all accounts the quote accurately sums up what the real Deep Throat was trying to convey to the real Bob Woodward about the real Nixon and his henchmen. But it’s somehow fitting that, like everything else about the scandal, even the pull quote is fake.

What does this have to do with Donald Trump? In a way, everything. His entire life has been one long series of overlapping scandals. Nothing about the man is what he purports it to be. Trump the savvy businessman was a fictional creation. Trump the billionaire was a fictional creation. Trump on the Apprentice was a spliced together fictional portrayal. Trump the politician has been such a work of fiction that… well, you know.

But do we really know? For a decade, one seedy, corrupt, evil, criminal, unhinged, and often outright filthy aspect after another of the real Donald Trump has been exposed. A disturbing number of people didn’t care. Some still don’t. Some didn’t start caring until it was too late. At this point it feels like any additional scandal that comes out about Trump is only going to move the needle incrementally. After all, literally every inch of this piece of crap’s life has been a hideous scandal.

But then there’s Jeffrey Epstein. In his own way, an even more psychotically evil villain than Donald Trump. Epstein committed the one kind of crime that just about everyone on earth agrees is pure evil. It’s the one crime that other criminals all think is evil. It’s the kind of evil that can instantly end any public figure’s public life if it’s exposed that they even so much as knew what Epstein was doing to those girls.

Which of course is why Trump is willing to burn it all down – even his own failing presidency – in a desperate attempt at keeping his connections to Jeffrey Epstein under wraps. And it’s why Trump’s henchmen have been trying to help Trump keep it all a secret. Even as psychotically evil as they are, they understand just how evil Epstein’s crimes were, and how thoroughly Trump will be finished in public life if the public finds out that Trump even knew what Epstein was doing. And frankly, Trump’s own mouth has gotten the public halfway there.

Yet the effort to cover it all up continues. The federal court systen ordered the Trump regime to turn over all relevant information about the Jeffrey Epstein files. But yesterday the Trump regime basically said “nah.” Instead it’s asking for a sixty day delay for no coherent reason. The court won’t grant any such delay. The Trump regime is buying itself a few days at most, waiting until Friday on a holiday weekend to file something that will surely be rejected once the courts reopen. That’s just how desperate Trump’s Department of Justice is to stall this for even so much as a long weekend.

Of course this is the same Trump Department of Justice – the dumbest four words ever strung together – just yesterday admitted to the court that it accidentally sent a copy of Jack Smith’s report to the defense attorney for someone the DOJ has criminally charged with having improperly obtaining a copy of said report. If that sounds insanely confusing, that’s because it is. It’s incompetence on a level that’s so thoroughly on the nose, you have trouble believing it even as you’re reading the news report about it. Except you do believe it, because these people really are that stupid in how they go about trying to be evil.

These are not very bright guys and things got out of hand. These words may have never been spoken during the Watergate scandal, but they perfectly conveyed the entirety of the scandal. And now, just as accurately, just as stunningly, just as absurdly, just as perfectly these same words apply to an attempted coverup that’s so evil and so stupid that it makes Watergate look like a day at the park. These are not very bright guys and things got out of hand.

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Lucius Pham/iowa Public Radio

Life is exhausting these days for lots of us, and I think I’ve figured out why. I think it’s having to sit through the pretending.

You see, it’s bad enough watching over a third of our nation becoming fully indoctrinated into a sycophantic cult of personality of the very worst kind of person, to see once reasonable people abandon any semblance of benevolence toward diverse humanity.

It’s rightly heartbreaking to see those we love so seduced by power, addled by racism, and deluded by tribalism that they’ve declared war on immigrants and, vaccines and gay kids and the electoral process.

And yes, it’s infuriating witnessing tens of millions of Americans having their minds slowly poisoned by Fox News and Franklin Graham to the point they defend a domestic act of terror on our Capitol or take the side of a murderous regime’s genocide or celebrate their neighbors being thrown into concentration camps.

As wearying as all that is, it’s so much worse having them invoke love of God and country in the process.

That’s what makes these days so difficult for so many of us: not merely coming to terms with the beliefs and prejudices and phobias of those we are daily surrounded by here, but having to contend with their constant projection about us and their refusal to simply own who they are. It’s the nonstop, hypocritical, farcical performance art.

Good people are so tired of traitors masquerading as patriots, of the treasonous continually waving the flag, of hateful people peddling a God of love.

They’re tired of human beings with no empathy pretending they care about the sanctity of life, of the loudest prophets of America First having the least regard for so many Americans, of the self-righteous sermonizers defending a predator.

Where are the selflessness, generosity, and hospitality that were supposed to mark the lovers of God and country?

Where are the lives that replicate the embrace of the poor, huddled masses affixed to the foundation of Liberty?

Where are those who emulate the love of disparate neighbors at the heart of the Gospels?

Patriot. Christian. American.

These words have all lost their meaning: words that used to cost something to claim, labels that once came with even a modicum of transformation, and self-identifiers that had previously required a measure of evidence displayed in one’s life.

The flag and the cross that used to hold such meaning to so many of us are now just stolen iconography wielded by the immigrant-hating wall-builders and the violent anti-abortion zealots.

Using these words and wearing these symbols has become more and more difficult for us, as they now align us with the very antithesis of our moral convictions and guiding principles.

People who truly love this country, those who earnestly seek a faith expressed in love, human beings who are burdened to make America worthy of the speeches and anthems—we find ourselves branded heretics and traitors and apostates, forcefully displaced from religion and country by these angry squatters who have taken up residence in them.

True patriots should want all Americans to vote, they should oppose would-be dictators, they should yield to the Constitution, and they should demand a nation that is offered to everyone equally.

Actual followers of Jesus should defend the vulnerable, they should give comfort to the sick, food to the hungry, welcome to the immigrant, and love to the least among us.

And while the masqueraders and pretenders parade around in grand performative acts of love of God and country while willfully betraying both—the rest of us are going to have to fight to hold on to our nation and our religion, and to care for a world that needs desperately authentic people of faith, morality, and conscience who simply live a love that doesn’t need to declare itself loving.

As far as patriotism and faith go, this nation needs the real thing again.

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