Civil Commotion

We all have watched one of those creepy World War II movies: A Jewish family is on a train destined for a German border town, planning to escape; we hear heavy-booted footsteps in the corridor, followed by a knock on the door; a Gestapo officer demands to see their travel papers …

Apparently, that’s the new reality in south Florida — today, in this country, if your appearance might cause a CBP officer to wonder if you’re here lawfully.

Federal immigration agents are beefing up their efforts to apprehend undocumented immigrants in South Florida as part of a nationwide effort to “keep communities safe.”

The target: transportation hubs.

In the past few weeks, Customs and Border Patrol officials have been spotted by commuters at Greyhound bus stations across Miami-Dade and Broward counties, asking riders on board, or in the process of boarding a bus, for proof of legal status.

[ … ]

CBP agents, according to federal law, don’t need a warrant to “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States … board and search for aliens in any vessel within the territorial waters of the United States and any railcar, aircraft, conveyance, or vehicle.”

The law defines a “reasonable distance” as 100 air miles from the coastal border — which covers the entire state of Florida.

This amounts to accosting people in public thoroughfares and demanding proof that they aren’t breaking any laws — and so much for the Fourth Amendment.

Organized Religion Is Having a Bad Few Decades

The last few decades sure have been bad ones for organized religion. Conservative Christians have decided that the sum total of the Bible is about reestablishing the sex and gender mores of the 19th century. Liberal protestantism is so gutless that hardly anyone even remembers it exists. The Catholic Church has been responsible for the deaths of millions in Africa thanks to its mindless belief that God hates condoms. Much of Islam has been taken over by the toxic Saudi strain. Israel has turned into an apartheid state. Hindus in India are apparently now dedicated to creating a religiously pure state. And even Buddhists have been acting badly lately.

Meanwhile, science keeps churning out new wonders. Cell phones. The internet. Cures for cancer. Robotic prosthetics. Solar panels on rooftops. Talking computers. Antidepressants. Google Maps. Cheap genome sequencing. Virtual reality. Machine learning. Meatless meat. Missions to Mars. Electric cars. Fiber optics.

Seems like no contest to me.

Kevin Drum, Mother Jones

Israel has subsequently forbidden Reps. Tlaib and Omar to enter the country.

I don’t know what surprises me the most: that Donald Trump would actually connive abroad at injuring a domestic political enemy, or that Netanyahu yielded to the crude appeal to his manhood. Where have the grown-ups gone? Whatever happened to at least the pretense that partisanship stopped at the waters edge?

Most evangelicals, of course, are thrilled. Though evangelical leaders tend to downplay the eschatological (End Times) connection, because it’s totally nuts, the stouthearted morons in the pews can read the Inerrant Bible for themselves — and it says right there in Revelation that there will be an apocalyptic fight in Israel at Armageddon, and then Jesus will return and all those smartypants who laugh at them will get their just desserts. Therefore, anybody who isn’t a full-throated supporter of Israel must hate the Baby Jesus, probably kneels during the national anthem, and most likely gets extra-friendly with unauthorized persons. So there.

Or … something like that. It’s kind of muddled, but these are Evangelicals and muddled is the best they can do.

Some of you will recall that, in June, the Trump administration announced a severe tightening of medical and related research that uses fetal tissue. The details of the revised regulations are beginning to emerge — and the news is not good (link might be paywalled).

On 5 June, the Trump administration banned fetal tissue studies by in-house NIH scientists and said extramural proposals must go through an ethics review lasting up to 6 months (Science, 14 June, p. 1016). The review will be performed by a board composed of 14 to 20 people, including at least one theologian, one ethicist, and one attorney; one-third to one-half of its members must be scientists.

I understand the point of seeking the opinion of a lawyer, and an ethicist — but what on earth can a theologian offer?

Seriously: theology is not a branch of knowledge. Theology is “the study of god and man’s relationship with god,” so it should not be taken seriously until (1) the existence of an infinitely powerful supernatural being has been proved, and (2) a reliable way of knowing the wishes of that supernatural being has been proved. Until that groundwork has been laid, theologians are just spinning cotton-candy fairy-castles.

Probably, the theology representative on that committee is going to be a Christian. But what does that actually mean? Albert Mohler is a Christian theologian, and so is Bishop John Spong — and is there anybody acquainted with the work of both men who wouldn’t expect carnage if they were locked in the same room for half-an-hour? And what about Muslim theologians, and Hindu theologians, and Mormon theologians, et cetera, et cetera?

This regulation is nothing but a sop to the Evangelical Right, and almost certainly assures the existence of bureaucratically embedded below-the-radar opposition to all fetal tissue research. That is, the stupidity of these regulations will probably outlast the Trump administration, along with the needless deaths.