Civil Commotion

Ahhh — the sound of gunfire on a hot, humid, boozy summer night in Detroit.

The shooting at Meyers and Plymouth is about 1/2-mile from the elementary school I attended, back in the Pleistocene.

Living near a Southern Baptist seminary town, you meet a lot of … uhhh … interesting people.

A Durham man has been charged with 56 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor after a joint investigation by the Durham County Sheriff’s Office and U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Phillip Stephen Stallings, 40, was arrested Wednesday on 28 counts of second-degree sexual exploitation of a minor and 28 counts of third-degree sexual exploitation of a minor …

[ … ]

On his website philipstallings.com, Stallings is described as “a reformed Christian Apologist, Theonomist, Kinist and a former seminary student.” (Capital letters are all his.)

The content on the site includes Stallings discussing his belief that the Earth is flat and indicates he started the Biblical Flat Earth Society.

A “reformed Christian apologist” would be, I’m guessing, a defender of Calvinism. Theonomy is the belief that the Old Testament law given to Israel should be the civil law everywhere (death to gays, faithless wives, impudent children, et cetera, et cetera), and Kinists are “anti-immigrant, ‘Southern heritage’ separatists who splintered off from Christian Reconstructionism to advocate the belief that God’s intended order is ‘loving one’s kind’ by separating people along ‘tribal and ethnic’ lines to live in large, extended-family groups.”

“Kinism’ is derived from ‘kin,’ I’m speculating. I don’t know that, though, so don’t quote me; I’m just thinking aloud.

So, OK, this guy is weird and a pervert. Here is what you need to understand: He isn’t that weird by local piety standards; he is definitely no more than a single standard deviation off the mean. Many, many, of the local seminarians prohibit their children from having any association with the children of folk who don’t belong to their own theologically correct church, for instance, lest they be tainted by worldly cooties.

The day of automated delivery to consumers may not be here yet, but automated intra-system transport is already here.

Self-driving delivery is coming to Walmart — but not directly to customers

[ … ]

As the buzz about human-carting robo-taxis starts to short-circuit, an unheralded segment of the driverless future is taking shape and showing promise: goods-moving robo-vans. Rather than serving up hot pizza pies or deploying headless robots to carry groceries to the doorstep, robo-vans travel on fixed routes from warehouse to warehouse or to a smaller pickup point, transporting packages to get them closer, but not all the way, to consumers.

[ … ]

Ford Motor Co., testing many forms of driverless delivery, calls these repeatable routes “milk runs,” a throwback term to the days of household dairy delivery.

“Anything on driverless delivery that is a milk run is a good application for autonomy,” said Sherif Marakby, chief executive officer of Ford’s autonomous vehicles unit.

Some things will probably not ever be susceptible of automation; crawling under my house and repairing a plumbing leak, for instance. But a lot of routine manual labor is going to go the way of the Dodo within a generation. And thanks to advances in AI, a lot of engineering work is going to disappear, too.

We need to be thinking about those things, and their social implications, right now.

Religious freedom should be cherished by all of us. But the progressive socialists in our country want to strip us of those freedoms and regulate those freedoms. That’s the same thing Communism did in Russia and Eastern Europe, and is still doing today in places like Cuba and China. These people hate God and despise those who worship Him. This should be deeply concerning to all people of faith, whether you’re a Jew, a Muslim, or a Christian.

Franklin Graham

This remark comes in connection with the case of Aaron and Melissa Klein, another of those tedious bake-shop cases.

Bah. This is a reprise of the repeatedly-failed argument that southerners made against the civil rights movement: “My religion demands that those people be kept apart.” Sexuality is like skin color, however — an innate trait that cannot justify discrimination in a secular state. You can keep black and gay people out of your church, if you wish, and Southern Baptists generally still do. You can keep black and gay people out of your home, if you wish. You can operate a religious mission which refuses to provide services to black and gay people, if you wish.

But these bakeries are not churches or religious missions; they are ordinary businesses licensed by the public, and a sign reading “We sell cakes” has to mean “We sell cakes to everybody.”

Trump spiritual adviser says ‘demonic networks’
have aligned themselves against president

President Trump’s spiritual adviser, Paula White, said in the opening prayer before his campaign kickoff rally in Orlando, Fla., on Tuesday that “demonic networks” have aligned themselves against the president.

“Let every demonic network that has aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus,” she said to a crowd of Trump’s supporters before his rally began Tuesday.

“I declare that President Trump will overcome every strategy from hell and every strategy from the enemy,” she added, according to video of her remarks.

Someday, people will watch tapes of the serial lunacies and indecencies of Donald Trump’s America and wonder how it happened. How did he create a 1984-ish state media right in front of everybody’s eyes? How did an incandescent nutjob like Paula White become influential, instead of a figure of ridicule? How did the greatest nation on earth come under the control of a pack of plaid-suited carnival barkers?

To answer those questions, start with The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer.