Civil Commotion

What do you know? North Carolina — where Holy Men mulct the regular folk so casually and confidently you’d think it was a birthright — has its very own Boss Hogg: Senator Richard Burr.

Briefed that the CoronaVirus would provoke a major, disruptive, life-threatenining event, did the Senator warn his constituents to get ready? He did not. He warned big donors, though.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee warned a small group of well-connected constituents three weeks ago to prepare for dire economic and societal effects of the coronavirus, according to a secret recording obtained by NPR.

The remarks from U.S. Sen. Richard Burr were more stark than any he had delivered in more public forums.

And he unloaded a lot of stock.

Soon after he offered public assurances that the government was ready to battle the coronavirus, the powerful chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, sold off a significant percentage of his stocks, unloading between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 separate transactions.

As the head of the intelligence committee, Burr, a North Carolina Republican, has access to the government’s most highly classified information about threats to America’s security. His committee was receiving daily coronavirus briefings around this time, according to a Reuters story.

Clearly, Burr should resign. He should also face an insider trading investigation, and prison.

Always, invariably, inevitably, reality gets the last word. Could we please abandon the Happy Fantasyland spun by idiot preachers and start paying attention to the experts?

If there is to be any chance of mitigating the disaster now looming over the world, it is science, and only science, that will provide it.

Infidel753

Yep. Pastor Bubba’s and Auntie Griselda’s prayers aren’t going to summon a fix; that geeky kid from high school is who everybody has to count on now.

Playboy magazine announced yesterday that its current issue will be its last.

A new Playboy magazine is being published this week — both on newsstands and as a digital download — and it will be the last one this year.

In a lengthy letter posted Wednesday on the blog platform Medium by Ben Kohn, CEO of Playboy Enterprises, he details the decision and outlines his plans for the iconic publication moving forward. It remains unclear if the magazine will ever return to newsstands.

It’s a sign of the times, I suppose, that the risqué monthly magazine of the 1950’s has degenerated into a boring quarterly in the Internet era.

Famous for the playmates, the magazine never quite got the recognition it deserved for its journalism and its interviews. I have in a box somewhere the 1963 issue featuring the Bertrand Russell interview.

Basically, Hefner used the pictures of naked women to enable him to earn money producing the content that actually interested him. It wasn’t Playboy that signaled decadence; it’s that Playboy’s often very smart content couldn’t have been published without the playmates.

Here in Wake Forest, the home of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, you can scarcely go outdoors without tripping over some yahoo that believes Charles Darwin and Satan were regular pals. Indeed, evolution was one of the big issues that triggered the so-called Conservative Resurgence 40-years ago. Then, seminary faculty tended to be accepting of evolution, and were seeking theological workarounds that enabled them to uphold Original Sin without making fools of themselves when they were among educated non-Baptists. That annoyed the Ma and Pa Kettle faction — by far the largest in the SBC — who were just fine with the simplistic, uncomplicated Genesis narrative.

Thus began an intradenomination civil war that lasted 20-years and drove off everybody with an IQ higher than room temperature, and resulted in Albert Mohler representing Baptist intellectualism.

The case can be made, I suppose, that this conference at Thomas Road Baptist Church (SBC) exhibits the very modest virtue of being consistent with what they claim to believe.

Though fear of the rapidly spreading coronavirus has driven many indoors, and caused countless events to cancel across the region, the energy outside of Thomas Road Baptist Church was closer to that of a tailgate.

Thousands gathered for the annual Ignite Men’s Impact Weekend on Saturday morning, and the parking lot was teeming with people cooking meat, manning booths and playing a few spirited games of cornhole.

While the virus was on many people’s minds, indicated by a noted avoidance of shaking hands and an abundance of travel-size hand sanitizers, men in line outside of the worship center largely were offering a single refrain: They weren’t worried enough not to come.

Because Jesus takes care of His People, et cetera, et cetera. No word about the effect upon the people they carry it to.