Monday, May 19, 2025

The Biden Story Is Turning Into A Hydra-Headed Monster

Over the course of a weekend, we've moved from the Hur tapes to a remarkably hinky cancer diagnosis for Joe Biden:

Former President Joe Biden was diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer, according to a statement from his personal office Sunday, and it has spread to his bones.

“Last week, President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms. On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone,” the statement said.

Now, I'm just an old guy who in my own interest has acquired a general layman's knowledge of geriatric medical conditions. Prostate cancer, as I understand this, is the most common for men. I've been told it's actually slow to develop, so as soon as I heard this, I coudn't understand how a US president, who has a full-time physician right in the White House, could have prostate cancer metastasize to the bone and not have anyone notice. By this morning, I discovered it wasn't just me scratching my head:

Medical professionals are sounding the alarm and saying there is no way Joe Biden was diagnosed with Gleason 9 and metastasis as his initial diagnosis.

. . . Biden likely knew he had cancer while he was running for president in 2020 and lied about his health.

It appears White House physician Dr. O’Connor also repeatedly lied about Joe Biden’s health.

Via The New York Post:

Dr. Steven Quay flagged similar concerns, saying Biden’s type of cancer is the easiest to diagnose when it first starts and progresses.

“The PSA blood test shows the rate of cancer cell growth. For even with the most aggressive form, it is a 5-7 year journey without treatment before it becomes metastatic,” he said.

“Meaning, it would be malpractice for this patient to show up and be first diagnosed with metastatic disease in May 2025,” he continued.

“It is highly likely he was carrying a diagnosis of prostate cancer throughout his White House tenure and the American people were uninformed.”

This also raises suspicions that Joe's brother Frank knew more than the family would otherwise admit at the time Joe dropped out of the presidential race last summer:

Biden’s brother, however, said following Sunday’s announcement that the president’s health "absolutely" played a role in his decision not to seek re-election just weeks ahead of the Democratic National Convention.

"I'm incredibly proud of my brother. Selfishly, I will have him back to enjoy whatever time we have left. He is a genuine hero. Country over self. Sounds corny in our cynical political environment, but he nor I are cynical. The goal remains the same, defeat Trump and continue the work that Joe has done. My hope is that our party rallies around this heroic act," Frank Biden told CBS News on Sunday.

"In my humble opinion, absolutely," he said when asked if his brother's health played a role in him bowing out.

Following Frank Biden’s comment, a source close to the Biden family told CBS that the president’s brother is an alcoholic and his claims were "completely untrue."

"Frank Biden suffers from alcoholism and hasn’t spoken to his brother, the president, in weeks. What he said about President Biden’s health being a factor in his decision is completely untrue," the source told the outlet.

For the poor guy's own family to contradict what he said and engage in character assassination is pretty low, but it suggests how eager they were to stop any speculation about Joe's health.

What seems to be gradually emerging is a scandal with many heads. Joe's mental decline appears to be just one part of it, and if anything, a modified limited hangout:

Coined on the fly by Nixon lawyer John Ehrlichman in 1973, it's a very [sic] unique phrase. A modified limited hangout is the public admission of a wrong in an attempt to hide a more serious wrong, while the media and prosecutors are investigating related crimes. It's a defensive tool in trying to cover-up a conspiracy.

So far, the limited admission by legacy media is that Joe was kinda soft in the head around maybe mid-2024, when he nevertheless heroically decided to withdraw from the race. If people saw any coverup, well, OK, for a couple months anyhow. But now we're beginning to see the Biden family and the White House physician must have been aware of Joe's cancer for 5-7 years at minimum -- otherwise, informed medical opinion suggests Biden's doctors were guilty of malpractice.

And we're just starting to see investigation of how the White House autopen may have been misused:

And renewed investigations into Crossfire Hurricane:

Just now, I see that Dr Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm's brother, is confirming the White House was aware of Joe's cancer in 2021: If they're now doing a modified limited hangout over this, what on earth are they still covering up? Michael LeBron, who posts as Lionel on his YouTube channel, thinks the cancer diagnosis revelation is there to distract attention from the autopen investigation -- people will demand this be dropped now that poor Joe is trying to recover from stage 4 cancer.

posted by test @ May 19, 2025   0 Comments

Sunday, May 18, 2025

Jake Tapper Hires Crisis Management Team

In yesterday's post, I advanced the thesis that AI doesn't make people smart, and it doesn't make up for people not being smart, either. After I posted that, I heard that Jake Tapper's publisher (or Tapper himself) had felt the need to hire a crisis management team in the runup to the release of the book by him and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up and His Disastrous Choice, this coming Tuesday.

If Penguin Random House had fired Tapper and replaced him with an AI bot, they couldn't have made a worse decision. According to PR Week,

Tapper, who co-authored the book with Thompson, confirmed to outlets that Risa Heller, founder and CEO of Heller Co., was hired to offer advice as the authors plan to roll out the book “as smart as possible,” per reports. It is set for release on May 20.

. . . Some commenters in President Donald Trump's party were critical of Tapper and Thompson, saying Tapper and Thompson were complicit in a “media cabal” that protected Biden from public scrutiny of his age. Meanwhile, some defenders of Biden said the two authors have a vendetta against the former president and are focusing too much on his age and health.

Heller Co. did not respond to a request for comment.

Heller Co., previously known as Risa Heller & Co., represented former CNN chief Jeff Zucker, convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and former Rep. Anthony Weiner D-NY). The consultancy has offices in New York and Los Angeles.

Representatives of neither Axios nor CNN were available for comment.

Heller's website says it does crisis and reputation management:

We are trusted advisors to clients confronting and navigating complicated issues that risk long-term reputational harm. From high-profile institutions facing a daily onslaught of media attention to private citizens tackling problems that require narrowly targeted and bespoke communications, our clients value our proactive strategies and tactical advice.

Well, according to the PR Week link, Jeff Zucker, then-President of CNN Worldwide, was a client of Heller. His reputational crisis appears to have come from an office affair that led to his resignation:

On February 2, 2022, Zucker resigned from CNN. In his resignation letter, Zucker acknowledged that he did not disclose a consensual relationship he had with CNN's Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Allison Gollust, when it began. The relationship was made public in early January 2022 during the network's investigation into Chris Cuomo. Following his resignation from CNN, Zucker also resigned from his position as chief of WarnerMedia News & Sports.

A quick web search shows that Zucker's name is irretrievably attached to the MeToo phenomenon. This story concludes,

Since the modern #MeToo movement exploded in 2017 with the assault allegations against movie producer Harvey Weinstein, many observers have expressed fears that the attempts to root out sexual harassment in professional settings might devolve into a witch hunt. That's a fair concern. But it's also striking how fast the careers of Jeff Zucker, Andrew Cuomo, and Chris Cuomo unraveled once anybody subjected them to even a small bit of scrutiny. It makes you wonder how many other dominoes might yet fall.

So I'm wondering, if Zucker hired Heller to "navigate complicated issues that risk long-term reputational harm", whether hiring Heller did Zucker the least bit of good. But that's just one case. How about Elizabeth Holmes, also listed as a Heller client at the PR Week link? Holmes is now best known for her federal criminal conviction and prison sentence for fraud in the Theranos case, and her public image is connected with her phony baritone imitation of Apple folunder Steve Jobs, delivered wearing a Jobs-style black turtleneck . As to her current reputation,

The case of Holmes is said to have created a stigma for other female entrepreneurs, particularly in the sciences and health care industries, who are often compared to her. Writing in The New York Times, technology journalist Erin Griffith commented that "Holmes continues to loom large across the start-up world because of the audacity of her story, which has permeated popular culture", with female entrepreneurs reporting that "the frequent comparisons [to Holmes] are pernicious".

If Holmes had hired nobody at all to "navigate complicated issues that risk long-term reputational harm", could her reputation have turned out any worse? But how about Anthony Weiner, who only now is fading as a national dirty joke? PR Week lists him as another Heller client:

Our subject is Anthony Weiner, whose surname was a burden long before it became a curse—so fused with his disgrace that you can’t say it without triggering an avalanche of cringe. Weiner, who was caught texting pictures of his penis, first denied it, then admitted it, then resigned from Congress, then ran for mayor of New York City, at which point he sexted again under the alias Carlos Danger, was caught again, lost the election, sexted a photo with his young son in the background, sexted a minor, and forfeited a laptop with emails from his estranged wife that caused the FBI to reopen its Hillary Clinton email investigation, greasing the way for Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and hastening the possible end of the republic and democracy as we know it.

Why did he even bother to hire a crisis managment team? An ordinary cheap lawyer with a second-story office above a deli would have told him to stay off social media, drop his e-mail account, keep his mouth shut, and maybe not run for office for a while until it all blows over. As far as anyone can tell, Heller must not have even told him to do that, or if they did, they couldn't make it stick. Yet Heller apparently allows Anthony Weiner to be listed as a client whom they helped "navigate complicated issues that risk long-term reputational harm". How could Anthony Weiner possibly have emerged with any greater long-term reputational harm than he got with Heller's help?

This is why I think an AI bot came up with Tapper's strategy. He typed in, "It looks like my book launch is in crisis. What should I do?" The bot did a masssive search of all records everywhere, condensed it all, and replied, "Hire a crisis management consultant". Tapper tapped, "Which one?" The bot went back and reviewed all the people who'd had the worst crises for their reputation and hired a crisis management consultant. It came up with Jeff Zucker, Elizabeth Holmes, and Anthony Weiner.

I'm sure the bot checked but found out Hunter Biden never hired a crisis management consultant, but of all he ones who'd had the worst crises and hired a consultant, they all hired the same one -- Heller! So the bot replied, "Hire the Heller Company." I'm sorry, folks. That's how AI works. It won't make stupid people smart, and if you fire all the smart people, it won't replace them. I hope one day I can provide this insight to Pope Leo.

posted by test @ May 18, 2025   0 Comments

Saturday, May 17, 2025

Pope Leo, AI, And Cheating Your Way Through College

I've ventured into AI now and then here, mostly with a certain amount of skepticism. Late last year, I asked, "If AI Is So Great, Why Do I Get So Much Spanish- And Chinese-Language Spam?" Theoretically, AI should have been able to identify what languages I speak and direct ads in those languages to my e-mail, YouTube, and Facebook feeds, while avoiding the unnecessary waste of sending me ads in languages I don't speak.

I post frequently on Facebook in German and have several German and Austrian Facebook friends. So far, I haven't received a single German-language ad, but I get lots in Chinese and Spanish, neither of which I speak. The basic problem is that AI doesn't make people smart, and it doesn't make up for people not being smart, either. I think there's a misunderstanding of AI in the public imagination, and so far, It appears that remarks from our new Holy Father reflect this. Via the National Review:

Leo XIV views the current challenges posed by AI as analogous to those his predecessor faced 134 years ago. “In our own day,” our new Pope declared in one of his first public addresses, “the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.”

Cardinal Fernando Chomalí, the Archbishop of Santiago, Chile, elaborated on the new Pope’s vision by sharing what Leo XIV had told him the evening after the election: “He told me he is very concerned about the cultural shifts we are living through, a Copernican revolution really — artificial intelligence, robotics, human relationships. . . . There is a revolution happening, and it must be addressed seriously. The Church can contribute through its moral authority and also its academic strength.”

Pope Leo has a great deal of time to develop and refine his thinking on AI, and if he chooses to write an encyclical on the problems it poses for the human conditon, I'm confident that it will be incisive and well-reasoned. But I don't think AI will either make people smart or replace smart people, whatever else it may do, and it won't create any new set of moral problems. An article came out in New York Magazine last week, Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College:

In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. . . . Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education. Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays.

But sometime in the late 1970s, I ran into an op-ed by Gerald Seib at The Wall Street Journal entitled "Why Are They Cheating?" that covered exactly the same ground, except that since this was the late 1970s, there was no AI, no desktops, no laptops, no pocket phones, no online search, no word processing apps, not even any online text that could be copied and pasted. I was so taken by Seib's insight that I did the old fashioned thing, cut it out from that issue of the paper and saved it into a manila folder, which is long since gone. It's probably never been on line, and I'm sorry I can't quote from it now.

But there was just as much cheating, take it from me. In the early 1970s, still unsure of a career, I found myself studying Eng Lit in graduate school and teaching sections of English Comp as a teaching assistant. At the start of my first semester, the more senior TAs laid it out to me and the other new people: plagiarism was through the roof. No need for ChatGPT, the Greek houses had files of old essays that could just be retyped and resubmitted, there was Cliff's Notes, or heck, just Time magazine or the LA Times. The more industrious students could go to the library and find a book that they could copy half a dozen paragraphs from.

If anything, all ChatGPT does is save the need to retype manually what students had available in the 1970s and before. And it was nearly impossible to do anything about it then. You could find suspicious wording in a student paper -- archaic diction or phraseology, or just British spelling from a kid who'd grown up in Garden Grove, but to trace the actual source would have required hours in the library, if it could even be found there, time nobody could spend.

And to bring a case on the honor code, if that was what they called it, required "proof beyond a reasonable doubt", but nobody wanted to be on any board or committee that ruled on anything like that, so there were no real penalties, which is how everyone wanted it. The students and parents felt entitled to good grades and a degree -- that was what they paid for. The department knew that if anyone enforced plagiarism rules, any course that beecame known for doing so would instantly lose enrollment.

The New York Magazine piece pays lip service to the fact that this is old stuff:

It isn’t as if cheating is new. But now, as one student put it, “the ceiling has been blown off.” Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences? After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”

Oh, no! Generations of students will now emerge from university who are historically and culturally illiterate? O tempora! O mores! It wasn't that way when I was in school! I fell into that trap when I was a TA -- they might do this at USC, but I went to an Ivy, where that sort of thing is just not done. I was unbelievably naive; academic culture has tolerated this sort of corruption since time immemorial.

For that matter, of the two women I dated seriously in graduate school, both were also having affairs with their professors. Both eventually became full professors. Surely this was just a random coincdence?

There's an IT truism that predates AI by a couple of generations: garbage in, garbage out. All ChatGPT does is go to Cliff's Noes, which are now on line anyhow, and build clumsy essays that read every bit as badly as the students who turned in equivalent papers in the 1970s and surely long before that. AI will never make people smarter, and it will never replace smart people. In particular, I don't think it represents any moral problem that hasn't existed already, especially in the universities.

posted by test @ May 17, 2025   0 Comments

Friday, May 16, 2025

James Comey Gives A Whole New Meaning To The Term "Useful Idiot"

It wasn't until I got up this morning that I began to realize Comey's 8647 Instagram post hadn't just gone viral, it had metastasized. As both a true crime fan and a follower of the various lawfare cases against Trump, I have sort of a sketchy idea of what can happen if you get the feds on your case. James Comey, as a former FBI Director, should have had a much clearer idea -- but if he did, he apparently never thought it would apply to him.

Farther down in the tweet embedded above, Susan Crabtree quotes more from the former Secret Service agent Charles Marino:

"Look, here's the deal, they're sending agents out, and they're gonna talk to him, and he's not gonna have a choice. He's gonna have to talk to them, because this stuff about, well, I, you know, I found this on the beach. I didn't know what it meant. None of that makes sense."

Just as a true crime amateur who enjoys watching perps being interviewed on TV, I can imagine the questions he's going to have to answer (that is, unless he elects to remain silent, which would nevertheless be disastrous for his reputation):
  • "You said in your post that you saw the message in a walk on the beach. Where was that beach?"
  • "What time did you see it this morning?"
  • "Was anyone with you when you saw it?"
  • "Can you take us to where you saw it?"
  • "It sounds like you had your phone with you, and you took a photo of the message yourself. Did you in fact take the photo yourself, on your phone?"
  • "Can we look at your phone?"
Susan Crabtree, who made the post embedded above, has a much more complete and insightful report at Real Clear Politics that's the most comprehensive I've seen to date.

As an attorney and former top law enforcement official in the nation, Comey is well aware that he can decline an interview without having an attorney present, so he may refuse to cooperate with Secret Service agents’ questioning until he can hire a lawyer to represent him. On the other hand, Comey could agree to demonstrate how open and transparent he is and immediately cooperate and sit down for an interview.

The problem is, as the former Secret Service agent said, "None of that makes sense". Former FBI Director Comey was out for a morning beach stroll. He almost certainly wasn't alone, he likely had an entourage or maybe just a security guy with him -- he's 6'8" and clearly identifiable. Where was this beach? Where on the beach, exactly, did he see the message? Did he discuss it with anyone who was with him?

Oh, by the way, the agents are going to be scouring the area around the beach for security cameras that will confirm or dispute his version of events, which frankly strikes me as improbable.

If he doesn't answer questions, the Secret Servioce/FBI are going to get his phone via subpoena, not to mention video footage, and that will likely establish (or not) his location at the time he claims to have been on the beach. If he took the photo, it'll be on his phone with metadata as to the time and place it was taken. If he didn't take the photo, how did he find it? Did he discuss it with anyone? If he destroys or wipes his phone, he's in trouble for obstruction of justice or tampering with evidence.

If anything on the phone differs from what he's said publicly -- I actually doubt if he took the photo, or he was on the beach when he said he was -- he's got problems with PR and the prosecutor. If there are any contradictions, no matter how small, in what he may have told investigators, he's got the problem that lying to federal investigators is itself a crime, something he himself has used against Trump's advisers.

Just looking at what's come out this morning has me stunned at the incredibly poor judgment this displays -- this guy is presumably a top attorney and a former FBI director, and he's exposed himself to precisely the sort of legal and investigative trouble he was trying to create for people like Michael Flynn and Trump himself.

In January 2017, then-FBI director James Comey decided to send FBI agents to interview Flynn. Knowing that Flynn had asked Kislyak to ensure Russia did not respond harshly to U.S. sanctions and also that Vice President Pence, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, and Press Secretary Sean Spicer had all said Flynn told them he had not made such a request, Comey decided that Flynn needed to be interviewed as part of assessing whether Flynn was acting under Russian influence. The FBI discussed how to structure the interview, and then-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe called Flynn on 24 January, asking him to meet with two FBI counterintelligence agents; Flynn agreed. McCabe also asked if Flynn wanted a lawyer present, to which Flynn said no.

The two agents met Flynn at his office later that day and asked Flynn about his exchanges with Kislyak regarding the late December 2016 United Nations Security Council resolution regarding Israeli settlements. According to the FBI notes, Flynn told the agents he had not tried to influence Russia's vote on the resolution; in fact, he had asked Kislyak to have Russia oppose or delay the resolution. The FBI agents also asked Flynn whether he had asked Kislyak to avoid escalating the diplomatic conflict. According to FBI notes, Flynn responded: "Not really. I don't remember. It wasn't, 'Don't do anything'". After the meeting, the agents prepared an FD-302 form, a form used to summarize an FBI interview, for the discussion with Flynn.

. . . On 13 February, Flynn resigned as National Security Advisor, writing that he had given "incomplete information" of his conversations with Kislyak.

If anyone should be aware of the potential for getting into this sort of hot water, it's Comey himself, but here you are. The first thing I did was check Comey's age, and to my astonishment, he's only 64. He can't plead senility, as some did for his predecessor Robert Mueller, who was 74 at the time of confusing testimony to Congress in 2019.

Elsewhere in her RCP report on Comey's beach blunder, Susan Crabtree gives some details that might provide insight into Comey's state of mind:

Others on social media and cable news Thursday night questioned whether Comey was trying to gin up publicity in advance of the release of his new book, “FDR Drive,” a legal thriller, which will be out May 20. \

[Fox host Jesse] Watters asked [Director of National Intelligence Tulsi] Gabbard whether she thought Comey was trying to “goad” the Trump administration into investigating and prosecuting him to make him a legal martyr so he can regain political relevance.

I've learned enough about the publishing industry to know that when Washington figures like Margaret Truman, John Ehrlichman, or Jim Lehrer write thrillers, they're being paid to attach their names to books that have been ghostwritten by hacks. It sounds like Comey needs money -- his career seems to have lost momentum after Trump fired him as FBI Director in 2017, and he probably needed the new book and the book tour to try to rehabilitate himself.

While he's probably already received his advance, I wouldn't rule out his publisher canceling the release of the book in light of the current controversy, which rules out the book tour. But even if the book comes out and the tour is still on, Comey is going to have other things to worry about, and I would guess he's going to have to pay a whole set of lawyers much more than he'd ever earn from the thriller.

Which brings me to the queston: was James Comey ever all that smart? Scott Adams has always had insight into the potential of guys who are tall with good hair:

posted by test @ May 16, 2025   0 Comments

Thursday, May 15, 2025

Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe And The Episcopalian Mindset

I left The Episcopal Church behind a couple of years before I became Catholic, via a twisted path that involved an unsuccessful attempt by a "continuing Anglican" parish to enter the Ordinariate. On balance, that distance from my Episcopalian days has kept me from thinking very hard about the problems I saw with day-to-day Episcopalianism. An article from Last year in The Critic, which came well before the latest controversy from Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe's statement that it's "against what we stand for" to help Afrikaner refugees fleeing South Africa, gives a conventional picture of TEC's predicament:

The figures are stark. Only 12,000 people were confirmed into the Episcopal Church in 2022.

. . . As those confirmation figures imply, the statistics are far from rosy. In 2022, there were 1.6 million baptised Episcopalians, down 21 per cent from 2013. Attendance collapsed by 43 per cent over the same period, with almost 285,000 fewer churchgoers each Sunday — roughly equivalent to a city the size of St Louis.

But this neglects other trends, such as the increasing average age of the Episcopalian population. Another discussion goes into much more illustrative detail:

One of the most troubling things about the future of the Episcopal Church is that the average member is incredibly old. The modal age of an Episcopalian in 2019 was sixty-nine years old. With life expectancy around 80, we can easily expect at least a third of the current membership of the denomination to be gone in the next fifteen or twenty years.

. . . But, that doesn’t tell the whole story about the future of the Episcopalians. Churches need money to operate and on this measure there’s plenty of reasons to be optimistic. The Episcopalians calculate what they call “plate and pledge,” which is an accounting of not just money dropped in the offering plate, but also the amount that members have pledged to donate in the future.

. . . There’s little reason to expect that the money is going to run out for the Episcopalians anytime soon. In fact, the total amount of plate and pledge has actually risen between 2014 and 2019. In 2014, the denomination received about 1.3 billion dollars from their members. By 2019 that had increased by about fifty million dollars. That’s surprising given that the overall attendance in the tradition has declined during that same time period.

. . . Now, there are two possible explanations that I can think of to explain this trend. The first is that those that remain in the Episcopal Church are incredibly committed to the cause. . . . The other is that many Episcopalians have died in the last few years and they have given a portion of their estate to the church. This would obviously drive up the overall “plate and pledge” donations and possibly inflate these numbers. It may be the case that the average offering in the plate is actually smaller, but that is supplemented by these larger donations from the wills of those who have died in recent years.

The piece goes to ther heart of what isn't wrong:

But, that leaves a bigger question – can a denomination continue when it has money but no people? That’s the future that may be facing the Episcopal Church. According to their finance office, the denomination has $400 million in trust, $11 billion in a pension plan for retired clergy, and another $4.5 billion in assets held at the parish and diocese level. To put it bluntly, money is not the issue. This means that denominational leaders are not going to be forced to disband when the accounts hit zero[.]

What we're looking at -- and what we've been looking at for quite some time -- is a denomination that hasn't needed to worry about money. One thing that's always intrigued me about TEC is the extreme surplus of graduating seminarians each year vis-a-vis the available positions for new associate priests. This is largely because the Episcopal priesthood continues to be a highly prestigious and well-paid occupation, with relatively undemanding duties, especially considering the steady decline in membership, but there's always enough money to pay the clergy -- or at least, those clergy who can find jobs.

Contrast that with the perpetual shortage of Roman Catholic vocations. This spilled over into the Ordinariate; there was an equivalent surplus of Episcopalian seminarians and young associates who suddenly felt the call to cross the Tiber, especially when the Ordinariate was going to be open to married priests. Experience showed quickly enough that Episcopalian vocations don't produce the same quality of men as Catholic.

But reflecting on my Episcopalian days, I've begun to think more and more that money, and the attitudes of the monied, drove much of the Episcopal mindset. I began to see this as I went through confirmation at an upscale parish: at the time, I was working for a bank. I quickly discovered that Episcopalians look down on banks. They're connected with trade. One priest, when he learned where I worked, said, "Oh, I could never work for a bank. I'd just give away all the money!"

I briefly considered suggesting that if he did that, he'd actually be stealing from all the accountholders, but I quickly realized that wouldn't change his mind. Nor would it change his mind if I said the bequests in trust to to the parish, or the funds that will pay his pension, are also held in banks. The preferred job at that parish was with a respectable non-profit.

I met my wife at another Episcopal parish, and as we began to develop our plans to get married, we paid the necessary visit to discuss them with the rector. I'd since left the bank, so that wasn't what disturbed the rector. His problem wasn't so much that my wife was an attorney -- plenty of white-shoe law partners are Episcopalian, after all -- but that my fiancee was a lawyer for an insurance company. He actually believed that what an insurance attorney does all day is find ways to cheat policyholders out of their payments. He seemed sincerely worried that I was making a big mistake.

However reluctantly, he did let us continue with our plans, but this was a real revelation for me. At the first parish, I eventually wound up on the mission committee, which had a modest budget for donations to promote mission. The Episcopal chaplain at the University of Southern California came to make a pitch for his program: he said that given the current academic environment, a university campus should be considered mission territory, and he had concrete proposals for what could be done.

The conmittee had had no other such proposals -- as far as I know, it had just rubber-stamped an annual donation to end apartheid in South Africa, which went to heaven knew what halfway around the world. The committee chair told me that the same old-same old donation to South Africa was far, far more important, and that was that. Somehow I see this week's announcement from Presiding Bishop Rowe that it isn't the church's business to help white South Africans as coming from that same old-same old mindset.

Looking back, I have a hard time explaining to myself why I put up with this as long as I did, except that actually, I didn't. Our last parish, where we were for ten years, which is a third of my time as an Episcopalian, was largely gay, and its big advantage was that it wasn't as stuffy as the others. The plus to the gay part was that they didn't look down on people for working at banks or insurance companies -- they were much less inclined to look down on anyone. And they were Anglo-Catholic, which went a long way to soften me about Catholicism.

But I think the real Episcopalians only tolerate the gays and use them mainly to virtue signal, which the gays actually don't like. The real Episcopalians tolerate them as long as they don't interfere with the money, and that's not so much the dollars and cents, but the mindset. That's The Episcopal Church of which Sean Rowe is the Presiding Bishop. It will keep going until the money runs out, which is likely to be a long time.

posted by test @ May 15, 2025   0 Comments

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

An Obtuse Take On The Class Conflict

I ran into a remarkably obtuse essay by Joel Kotkin at Real Clear Politics this morning, Donald Trump has scrambled the old class allegiances. I don't follow Kotkin, but according to Wikipedia,

Kotkin is the author of several books. The New Class Conflict was published in September 2014 by Telos Press Publishing. In this book, Kotkin assesses the changing complexities of class in the United States, which he argues can no longer be understood in terms of traditional political divisions between left and right or conservative and liberal. For Kotkin, the new class order of the twenty-first century is marked by the rise of a high-tech oligarchy, a culturally dominant academic and media (both journalism and entertainment) elite, an expansive government bureaucracy, and a declining middle class.

So he's an expert on class, but in the current essay, Kotkin gets about half of everything wrong. He begins,

US president Donald Trump has disrupted the nature of class politics. In a reversal of long-standing allegiances, working-class Americans – including many minorities – have shifted towards the MAGA right. Meanwhile, the well-educated, the corporate elites and the government-dependent have generally veered leftwards.

This began long before Donald Trump. Labor leader Goerge Meany's refusal to endorse George McGovern in 1972 was much more significant. According to the New York Times on July 17, 1972,

The harsh opposition of George Meany to the Presidential candidacy of Senator George McGovern is creating widespread confusion, deep cleavages and spreading dissension within organized labor.

Labor leaders questioned since the close of last week's Democratic convention said that Mr. Meany was likely to have his way if he asks the executive council of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations at its Wednesday meeting to withhold endorsement of Senator McGovern.

. . . Meanwhile, in Rancho La Costa, Calif., the executive board of International Brotherhood of Teamsters voted today to support the re‐election of President Nixon. The leadership of the union has been close to the Nixon Administration, and the endorsement had been expected.

Nixon did a great deal to reshape the Republican alignment, including the Southern strategy and the overtures to labor. He carried 49 states in the 1972 election. Trump and Reagan simply continued strategies originated by Nixon. Kotkin goes on,

Rather than the relatively simple Marxist notion of a proletarian conflict with the bourgeoisie, we are seeing a more splintered and nuanced class politics across the West. These divisions are not simply driven by income, race or education, but increasingly also by how people earn their living, and how tariffs, policies and regulations impact their daily lives. These new class tensions threaten to push politics towards the fringes, both left and right. As society frays, the era of consensus politics is firmly at an end.

Kotkin invokes Marx, but only to say that Marx is irrelevant, things are much more complicated. But if we recognize that Trump is basically following Nixon's paradigm, exploiting an existing Republican alliance between the proletariat and the lower bourgeoisie, things actually become simpler. The working class broadly defined, a work force made up of both blue and white collar, forms a consensus at the center, pretty much the same thing Nixon called the "silent majority", except that beginning to recognize its power, it's become vocal as MAGA.

And in invoking Marx, Kotkin ignores Marx's insight that the Lumpenproletariat, the criminal and idle underclass, is the enemy of the proletariat. What's actually been taking place -- and this is a trend that also began generations ago -- is an alliance between the elites and the criminal-idle underclass. Think of Tom Wolfe's 1970 essay "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s":

. . . and now, in the season of Radical Chic, the Black Panthers. That huge Panther there, the one Felicia is smiling her tango smile at, is Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver that someone had, in a parked car in Queens at Northern Boulevard and 104th Street or some such unbelievable place, and taken to jail on a most unusual charge called “criminal facilitation.”

These are clearly the seeds of George Floyd in 2020, the canonization of a street addict by the elites, the social tensions surrounding which were a simmering factor that led to Trump's vindication in 2024. Kotkin does seem to sense one change:

Until last year, the oligarchy that dominates much of the world economy (and that of the US) reliably allied with the political establishment, whether in Davos, Washington, London, Ottawa or Brussels. They embraced many of the woke positions on gender, race and especially climate, while largely disdaining MAGA as well as more traditional Republicans.

. . . Now that some oligarchs, like X owner Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have come out for Trump, the woke left has started to finally push back against their power over US politics. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have launched a ‘fighting oligarchy tour’ to wild applause in the largely oligarch-owned mainstream media.

Except that Sanders and AOC are generally regarded as jokes -- both have been called out for flying in private jets on that same "fighting oligrchy" tour. They're the same thing as the Black Panthers in Leonard Bernstein's 1970 party, absolutely nothing new. Kotkin seems to miss this. He also begins to contradict himself. Of the college-educated bourgeoisie, he says,

Their numbers have expanded globally with the massive increase in college enrollment, which grew almost 80 per cent between 1970 and 2010. People who work as lawyers, environmental consultants and teachers are now reliably Democratic. This slice of the middle class often considers itself both enlightened and fit to lead, thanks to their high test scores and degrees. They tend to have little use for patriotism, family or religion, in comparison with working-class voters.

Yet a few paragraphs later, he says,

Many educated millennials face a world where the ‘good’ jobs are disappearing, while they have to cope with rising rents and exorbitant tuition payments. In the US, some 40 per cent of recent graduates are underemployed, meaning they work in jobs where their college credentials are essentially worthless.

. . . Increasingly, many with college educations (once seen as the ticket to a middle-class life) consider university a waste of time, with more seeking careers in the trades instead.

This has actually become a new feature of Trumpism, but Kotkin doesn't recognize it: the working class broadly conmsidered has come to recognize that college degrees don't pay off, and Trump is taking revenge by cutting federal grants, and likely tax exemptions, to prestige universities. He concludes,

The new class conflict is far more complex than the favoured narrative of the oligarchs vs the people, or the old Marxist battle between industrial workers and the bourgeois merchant class. The only way to address the shift to an increasingly extreme politics comes from finding ways to provide greater opportunities for income and ownership. If we fail in this, the results won’t be pretty.

I think the answer is simpler: the elites have followed the "radical chic" pattern that began in the 1960s and allied themselves with the Lumpenproletariat. Part of this alliance is performance art, as it was in the 1960s. Another part is much more serious, embodied in the Great Replacement theory behind the Biden administration's mass migration policies that appear to have favored deliberately resettling third-world gang members into the US heartland.

These aren't fringe conflicts. Kotkin seems to miss this, as he seems to miss what the actual majority is, and its history.

posted by test @ May 14, 2025   0 Comments

Tuesday, May 13, 2025

New Conspiracy Theories!

I'm not sure what this signifies, but I'm belatedly learning that between the death of Benedict XVI and the election of Leo XIV, several related conspiracy theories have emerged. Since I'm a Catholic convert, I should point out that if I thought there was a grain of truth to any of them, I would have to revert to my childhood Presbyterianism, but so far, that hasn't happened.

The most recent elaboration of this set of theories is contained in the hour-long YouTube post embedded above, in which Michael Lebron, who posts on the YouTube channel Lionel Nation, interviews Erik Thaddeus Walters, an adjunct associate professor at John Cabot University in Rome, which caters to English-speaking students who for whatever reason find themselves there. His D Phil is from the University of Vienna. Mr Lebron, who jokingly says he's not a conspiracy theorist but a conspiracy analyst, has had several interviews like this with Dr Walters in the runup to the just-concluded conclave.

The overall takeaway is a happy one, reflected in the title of the post: "Secret Move by Pope Leo XIV Restores True Papacy -- Why No One Is Talking About It". The underlying basis of the theory as it's reached its present stage of development is a version of sedevacantism:

Sedevacantism is a traditionalist Catholic movement which holds that since the 1958 death of Pius XII the occupiers of the Holy See are not valid popes due to their espousal of one or more heresies and that, for lack of a valid pope, the See of Rome is vacant. Sedevacantism owes its origins to the rejection of the theological and disciplinary changes implemented following the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).

This particular variant is more recent, and it doesn't appear to be unique to, or have been originated by, Dr Walters. In this version, the see has been vacant, or at least its true occupant has been unclear, only since the resignation of Benedict XVI:

His announcement of this plan to resign, just shy of a decade ago, shocked the world. In fact, in the aftermath of Benedict’s resignation came a strange phenomenon: Catholics claiming that he hadn’t really resigned.

Patrick Coffin, former host of Catholic Answers Live, suggested that Benedict’s “resignation” was some kind of elaborate sting operation, in which Benedict merely pretended not to be the pope to expose corruption in the Church. In Coffin’s words, “if his abdication was intentionally false, it was a masterstroke, pure genius, because it revealed all the corruption that he knew was simmering just below the surface of the Church’s life, but he was too weak to confront it.”

The death of Benedict in 2022, nine years after his resignation in 2013, simplified the problem, at least somewhat: if Benedict had been the true pope all along, the see was in fact vacant upon his death. The link just above calls this "Benevacantism". The putative remedy at this point should have been to call a conclave to replace Francis in early 2023. Again at the link:

Upon hearing of Benedict’s death, Coffin announced that he had become a sedevacantist, saying, “The pope has entered eternity, RIP. The impeded See is now vacant. May the pre-2013 cardinals do the right thing, and avoid yet another antipope.” Why is that so alarming? Because this line of reasoning makes for a clear collision course for schism and heresy. Here’s why.

Only cardinals under the age of eighty can vote, and Benevacantists don’t accept the legitimacy of the cardinals created by Pope Francis, since they don’t accept the legitimacy of Pope Francis. That leaves only forty-four of the 224 cardinals in the College of Cardinals who are old enough to have been made a cardinal by John Paul II or Benedict, but young enough still to be voting age.

Dr Walters, as far as I can tell, agrees that Benedict's papacy post-resignation was valid but impeded, but in his view, it was impeded because Benedict had resigned under some type of pressure and was being held prisoner. In any case, his conclusion is the same, that the cardinals created by Francis remain invalid and should not have voted in the conclave just concluded. But this leaves the problem that the conclave appears to have settled rather quickly on a seeming moderate consensus candidate in Cardinal Prevost.

If Francis had created such a majority of electors in his image, why didn't they just elect a straight-out Francis clone, like Cardinal Tagle? As best I can determine -- the discussion on YouTube is by no means clear -- Dr Walters feels that Cardinal Prevost, before he was elected, somehow convinced the Francis-created cardinals not to vote in the conclave, or the vote was secretly held before the Francis-created cardinals returned from a long lunch break, or something like that.

If this is the case, Prevost would have had to get this scheme past the camarlengo, who runs the conclave, Cardinal Kevin Farrell. Prevost would have had no special authority to do anything until he was elected pope, after all. Neither Mr Lebron nor Dr Walters explains how this could happen, but they seem more of less satisfied with the overall outcome, viz, the see is filled, and Leo XIV is a valid pope.

But this leaves open the question of why this would be a valid conclave, if, under the overall sedevacantist outlook, no cardinals created since Pius XII have been valid. We must assume that the last cardinal created by Pius passed away generations ago, so no conclave since then is valid, snd if the See of Rome is as vacant as it was before Francis or Benedict, what restored the legitimacy of the see after John XXIII?

Even so, there's yet another theory on the new Pope Leo: that he at least appears to be validly elected, but he will wear traditional garb and pray in Latin only to distract from his Francis-loyalist agenda, he is actually a heretic and can't be elected pope, and Cardinal Burke must call a new conclave made up only of John Paul II- and Benedict-created cardinals.

But that view must be argued with Dr Walters, who feels that this very election without Francis-created cardinals has already taken place. As I say, if I believed any of this, it would be back to the Westminster Confession for me.

In the real world, what seems to have become a general sigh of relief over Leo XIV leaves this sort of disgruntlement to the lunatic fringe, which strikes me as a very good sign.

posted by test @ May 13, 2025   0 Comments