Civil Commotion

Of The Donald’s many offenses against ordinary decency, against this country’s ideals, this is surely among the worst.

President Donald Trump has proposed the introduction of a fee for migrants seeking asylum in the US, outlining the policy in a memorandum released Monday.

[ … ]

Among the series of new measures the president lays out in the memorandum is the imposition of “fees for asylum applications and work permit applications.” Monday’s memorandum did not outline how much migrants might be charged to claim asylum.

One imagines the Statue of Liberty with her palm extended, rather than holding aloft a torch. The squalor inside Donald Trump goes all the way down.

The New York Times (international edition) recently published a cartoon widely construed as anti-Semitic, and the newspaper has apologized. The cartoon is below.

Sorry, but I’m not seeing it. Granted, the cartoon offers unflattering and critical portrayals of Netanyahu and the First Felon — but how is it specifically anti-Semitic? Where is there an attack upon Judaism qua Judaism? The characterization of Trump as a blind man led around by Netanyahu is well within the bounds of acceptable criticism, however one might feel about the substance of the criticism.

The assumption implicit in the complaint is that any criticism of a Jew is anti-Semitic, which plainly isn’t so, and I can’t help wondering if the real point of the criticism is to foreclose discussion of the cartoon’s substance — the editorial point-of-view that America too-reflexively follow’s Israel’s lead.

The First Felon, always eager to slur somebody, uncorked a doozy at his latest rally.

As his raucous crowd booed and screamed, Trump described a hideous scenario that he insists Democrats approve of. “The baby is born,” said Trump. “The mother meets with the doctor, they take care of the baby, they wrap the baby beautifully” — at this, he seemed to mime rocking an infant — “and then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.” He made a chopping motion with his hand.

Trump was elaborating on the willfully misunderstood words of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, who, in a radio interview in January, responded to a Republican hypothetical about a woman requesting an abortion during labor.

The nightmare scenario promoted by Trump et. al. is grotesque and doesn’t happen. It does sometimes happen, albeit rarely thanks to modern technology, that a non-viable child is born; when it does, yes, the parents and the physician have a hard and painful decision to make.

As this Mother Jones graphic shows, those are a — literally — vanishingly small number of cases.

A bill undertaking to address this all-but-nonexistent problem was passed by the North Carolina legislature a few weeks ago and, properly, Governor Cooper vetoed it. But the anti-abortion lobby has found a potent tool for exciting ignoramuses, and it is all-but-certain that cynics will exploit the malicious trope of looming infanticide. Get ready.

If you’re anything like me, you have sometimes found yourself looking at your all-the-bells-and-whistles smartphone and asked yourself, “Why do I carry this goddam thing everywhere?” I don’t use, or even understand, about two-thirds of its applications; most of the times it rings it’s a robocall, and I rarely feel a need right then to talk to the people who make legitimate calls; and I affirmatively dislike carrying around its surveillance capability.

Now, a new problem has arisen: According to a gen-u-ine Holy Man, Apple’s Siri and all the others’ voice control systems are fronts for The Antichrist. I mean — bummer.

As technology becomes more and more a part of our everyday lives, we must consider theories about the Antichrist and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, Siri, Alexa, Watson, 5G and more, which are creeping into our lives on a daily basis and changing our perspective of how things could possibly play out even in the next few years.

And as the technology race continues, it is no longer difficult to imagine the Antichrist as some kind of hybrid human cyborg able to project himself all over the world at one time as a hologram that demands to be worshipped.”

I’ve suspected this for a long time.