Civil Commotion

The folk at the ‘official’ Twitter feed of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, for instance, are having great fun.

And this:

My strategy for the next four long years:

I don’t, as the old expression goes, have a dog in this fight: I’m not a Christian, and I think Baptists are the low and cult-ish bottom of an untrue and affirmatively harmful belief system.

I do take some pleasure in noting the creeping fulfillment of a prediction that I made a long time ago: Same-sex couples are going to become theologically acceptable throughout Christianity, because the public that churches serve have (by and large) accepted same-sex couples. What is more …

• Pastors aren’t very intelligent as a class, but neither are they suicidal. They’re going to go along and accept gay couples when their congregations do. Matthew Vines has given them all the cover they need.

• This is going to be easier for most seminary-educated pastors than might be widely expected, because anybody who has been to a bona fide seminary knows perfectly well that the jive about ‘inerrancy’ is a marketing lie; most pastors will be relieved when their congregations stop demanding to be told that lie.

• Except Southern Baptists, who will go down with the ship.

As the grim reality sinks in that a widely distributed minority of Americans — most of whom, strange as it sounds, identify themselves as ‘values voters’ — have successfully elected a buffoonish, narcissistic megalomaniac as the President of the United States, sane and decent-minded Americans are rallying for a fight.

The latest? After Meryl Streep’s speech at the Golden Globe Awards last night, the Committee to Protect Journalists received almost 700-donations, 695 more than the Sunday average.

Donations are pouring in to the Committee to Protect Journalists after Meryl Streep urged viewers to support the non-profit at Sunday night’s Golden Globe Awards.

Streep used her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement to denounce President-elect Donald Trump for mocking a disabled reporter in 2015. She went on to encourage the audience to support the press in holding Trump accountable “for every outrage.”

Recall, now, The Donald’s anti-First Amendment promise during the campaign to curtail freedom of the press.

During an interview with CBS Miami, Donald Trump said he’d like to change the nature of the First Amendment in order to make it easier to file libel lawsuits against the media.

Trump spoke with Jim DeFede on Sunday, and he was asked about whether he feels that “too much protection” is given to the free press. Trump affirmed his belief on this issue, stating that America should lean towards the United Kingdom’s system for libel because it gives people who sue media agencies “a good chance of winning.”

When we add in the promise to impose a religious test as a condition of admittance to the United States, it becomes clear that Trump isn’t exactly a fan of the Bill of Rights.

And a decisive majority of Americans — YAAAY us! — are not fans of him. It’s just as I keep telling y’all: This is as good as it is ever going to get for Trump; from now forward, as more and more Americans see Trump for what he really is, the tide goes only … out. He cares not a hoot for anything but his own power and aggrandizement, he is a proto-fascist authoritarian, and he will try to bend the country to his self-serving will — and he will lose.

The Associated Press is running a story which reminds that much of the nation’s infrastructure is underground, where it is out of sight and out of mind — until it fails.

The latest string of sinkholes started in the Detroit suburb of Fraser on Christmas Eve. Of 22 houses affected by the sinkhole, three have been condemned. Officials temporarily evacuated 19 others because water and gas service had to be shut off. About 400,000 people in nearby communities were asked to take shorter showers and wash only full loads of clothes as part of a voluntary water conservation plea until a fix is completed.

I dislike seeing the word ‘sinkhole’ used to describe a non-natural subsidence associated with infrastructure failure, but the underlying point is legit: There is a lot of pipe buried under America’s streets, a lot of it has corroded away, and a lot of dirt is washing into it — undermining the structures at the ground surface. It’s a grim, costly, painful reminder of how old and decrepit a lot of America’s infrastructure actually is.

At last night’s Golden Globe awards, actress Meryl Streep made a few remarks about the president-elect.

“There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart,” Streep said as she accepted the Cecil B DeMille award. “Not because it was good, there was nothing good about it, but it was effective and it did its job.

“It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it and I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie, it was real life.”

Streep was referring to this odious display.

The Donald, y’all will not be surprised to learn, ain’t the kind of guy who takes a reproach like that lying down.

The election of this man is a national disgrace.

UPDATE:   The satirical news outlet of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea updates with this: