Three Dems on SCOTUS, no environmentalists

This is yet another reason why I'm not a Democrat and why "oh, but the Supreme Court" chants every four years fail to move me. SCOTUS has UNANIMOUSLY gutted the National Environmental Policy Act. 

Here's the basics:

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion for the court and there were no dissents. Ultimately, both liberal and conservative justices agreed with the bottom line decision.

Then the libruls trying to nuance the issue:

The court’s three liberals – Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – agreed with the outcome of the case but had different reasoning. Writing for the three, Sotomayor said that such environmental reviews conducted by federal agencies should be limited to their own expertise. The Surface Transportation Board, which conducted the review in this case, is primarily focused on transportation projects, not oil refining.

“Under NEPA, agencies must consider the environmental impacts for which their decisions would be responsible,” Sotomayor wrote. “Here, the board correctly determined it would not be responsible for the consequences of oil production upstream or downstream from the railway because it could not lawfully consider those consequences as part of the approval process.”

Uh, sure! That's Jesuitical.

So, under this standard, BLM, USFS etc should no longer be allowed to consider climate change for drilling permit leases, etc.

I first mentioned this in the 2016 election with "Notorious RBG," aka Ruth Bader Ginsberg, after her death, noting her flag-burning love / First Amendment hatred and other things. 

Actually, I mentioned it earlier that year with Breyer being a squish on a Fourth Amendment case.

I followed up a year later and noted how the Supreme Court has generally hated third parties.

Two years later, when Dems whipped out "Oh the SCOTUS" on Tony the Pony Kennedy's retirement, I noted not just Breyer but Sotomayor at times being Fourth Amendment squishes along with Ginsberg's problems etc.

A year later, Breyer (to preserve an earlier ruling by him as a precedent) and Kagan, in the Bladensberg Cross case, helped gut the First Amendment.

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The libruls, per SCOTUSblog, also declined to review a case from Aridzona that will expedite copper mining in an Apache sacred site.  Once again, think of him what you will otherwise, Justice Gorsuch continues to show full consideration for American Indian legal rights and general issues.

More on who Elias Rodriguez is

Ken Klippenstein, a week after posting the manifesto of alleged Israeli embassy shooter Elias Rodriguez, then getting visited about that by browbeating (and lying) FBI agents, posted a transcript of various online chats of his, along with pulling out highlights of them.

Kudos to Ken for posting this, and showing clearly that Elias Rodriguez was anti-Zionist but certainly not antisemitic.

That said, he WAS thrown off in other ways. His youthful Communist purity rants remind me of a more intense version of a Rainer Shea from the People’s Republic of Humboldt County. Even if China is no longer doing slave labor in Xinjiang, it once was. And, it does have poverty, and other social problems, like homelessness.

And Rodriguez' attitude toward an online friend whose brother has schizophrenia is repulsive. There’s no other way about it.

So, beyond the violence itself, there’s other reasons not to glorify Elias Rodriguez.

Also? Beyond its trying to browbeat Ken, there’s trillions of other reasons not to glorify the FBI, which can in general fuck off.

There's also another reason to hate on Elmo Musk. A full week after the shootings, he is having Shitter censor searches for Rodriguez by name or Shitter handle. The Dissident has details. And, given that Musk, via DOGE, is a quasi-governmental actor, this is censorship in the narrow, legal First Amendment version, per my take.

Texas Progressives

The awl bidness barons want you in West Texas to use treated "Produced" water, but at the same time, they also want legal indemnification.

Off the Kuff is ready for the big redistricting trial to begin.

SocraticGadfly says Cactus Ed Abbey would cringe about Texas population growth.

Dannie Goeb has finished crushing the Texas House. #fify Trib. 

WHOSE Ten Commandments is part of why the Tex-ass Lege's bill will surely be ruled unconstitutional like that in Louisiana — which, like Tex-ass, is under the purview of the Fifth Circuit. 

The Lege doesn't understand chromosomes 45 and 46, or that there is sometimes 47, sometimes just 45, or other issues.

I would love to see a constitutional amendment allowing a self-convened Lege session being assembled to override gubernatorial vetoes. (The current system also shows that, even before Strangeabbott, even before Tricky Ricky Perry, claims that Texas has "a weak governor system" weren't true.)

MAHA mental midgets deeply planting their flag in Austin is something I could have foreseen a full decade ago and why the idea that Austin is incredibly librul, or even leftist, is kind of laughable. Austin IS incredibly tech dudebro, broligarch, or whatever term you prefer. And like their California compatriots (many came from there, in fact), there's also a high degree of sexism.

"Shock me" pseudoskeptic Jeff Wagg is writing for pseudoskeptic Brian Dunning

And, shock me more than he's writing about something related to James Randi without mentioning Randi's own likely fraud.

The piece is about whether or not paranormal challenges, for money, like Randi's, are successful. As for whether they are or not, not my ultimate concern.

As for Wagg? His pseudoskepticism included a personal attack, accusing me of both "chemophobia" (which sounds like something coming from the Dunning, Michael Shermer and others libertarian pseudoskepticism world) and "mansplaining," which came off as cancel culture, especially when he didn't have any actual skepticism toward the Houston pseudoskeptic who first made the claim.

As for Dunning? He was a grifter along with being a fraudster. It's shocking that Donald Trump hasn't pardoned him yet. He's also a libertarian when he goes pseudoskepticism.

For that matter, arguably, Randi was too, which makes me further wonder about Wagg. (I will give him credit for trying to clean up some of the post-Randi mess at JREF. OTOH, that makes it more perplexing that he cites Randi's specific example rather than something more generic.)

As for Randi and his identity-thieving lover, Devyi Peña, go to this piece about the "mess" that included Shermer.

As for the matter at hand? $1 million paranormal challenges are effective at preaching to the converted; I doubt they're that effective for anything else, and certainly not for converting paranormal true believers.

Memorial Day thoughts

First, per past blogging, let's remember what war Memorial Day was about — and what the war was ultimately about from the start, namely, slavery. (Note that John A. Logan also called out treason; note also that Black Americans were shoved aside after not too many years.)

Second, also per past writing, let's remember that it was about war dead, as in killed in action, and as in, war dead, not "first responders."

In light of one and two, I would be fine if, like with the short-lived Veterans Day experience, we ended the Monday holiday and moved it to May 30.

Third, can we remember that, other than being less aggressive about the Klan, Knights of the Camellia, etc. than Lincoln presumably would have been, that Andy Johnson was largely following Lincoln's "rosewater" Reconstruction? Even more, can we remember that, just a week before his assassination, Lincoln was STILL interested in colonization of free Blacks, even if many modern historians lyingly deny that? And, contra them, Lincoln may never have spoken in public about colonization after Jan. 1, 1863, but he never publicly repudiated it, either.

To summarize? Here's your two most important links on Lincoln and colonization.

Phillip Magness, in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, talks in detail here, about the likely reality of Lincoln holding on to colonization ideas until the end of his life. MUCH more, about that April 1865 meeting between Lincoln and Butler, which did in fact happen. He also notes that Carl Schurz and George W. Julian both say that Lincoln continued to push colonization after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. 

 

Magness expands on some of these thoughts in an edited and condensed version of his Lincoln journal thoughts, at his own website, in 2015, seven years later. 

 

Now, Magness may need to be taken with a grain of salt. Teaches at James Mason, and while not a Lincoln-libertarian hater like Lerone Bennett, does teach at James Mason, and per his personal website, likes to throw elbows at libruls. He's the research director of the American Institute for Economic Research, located in (drumroll) Great Barrington, Massachusetts, of recent COVID herd immunity promoting fame and, per Wiki, even supported the Great Barrington Declaration. But, he cites Michael Lind, no wingnut, in addition to Bennett, as keeping the door open on this issue.

 

Facing some weird antizionism, politicized wrongly, on Substack

NOTE: As regular readers know, I am of course very much a Zionist myself. I am also a political leftist, albeit a skeptical one, including of claims of leftists at times. Finally, I'm a secularist with a graduate theological degree, which gets us to the facts of the matter.

I had decided to follow this Emmanuel Goldstein, which surely is not his actual name, but rather lifted from "1984," per Wiki, after some comments by him on The Dissident, followed by him following me.

I noticed many of his posts were rants without coherence. Then, a May 15 piece about Zechariah 9-14 dropped other masks, namely:

It is important to study chapters 9-14 of Zechariah as a cohesively unified narrative and not as two further-subdivided designations of “Deutero-Zechariah” and “Trito-Zechariah” argued by scoffing “higher critics” denying divine inspiration. ...

The fact all of Zechariah was authored by Zechariah the (grand)son4 of Iddo is provable, but unfortunately for brevity’s sake that’s not a topic for today. The specific canard peddled by the “higher critics” worthy of refuting here is their “Trito-Zechariah” theory positing” chapters 12-14 is completely different from 9-11.” ...

The mainstream realm of bogus “hermeneutical study” paving the way for a racially literalized Zionist-Nazi misapplication of Zech. 13:8-9 necessitates these escalating steps of unbiblically outrageous total disregard for the Hebrew Jewish scriptures inspired by the direction of Almighty God

OK, this secularist with a graduate theological degree isn't standing for that. Beyond this fundagelical being wrong (the piece comes off like he swallowed a fundagelical commentary or a non-KJV version of something like a Scofield Reference Bible), the last paragraph claiming that critical scholarship is all in the service of Zionism is bullshit.

BULLSHIT.  I did not "restack with a note," but instead, independently posted, this, with link:

I am one of those scoffing “higher critics,” and this piece may be the last straw in leading me to unfollow Goldstein again. That’s even more true where, at the end of the piece, he shows himself to be a fundagelical Christian of some sort, and “May be” has now become “will.” His writings on the current situation in the Middle East use language more turbulent than in this piece (seriously) and that last paragraph puts some of them in a new light. I suspect that he’s one of these Messianic Christians, like Joey Dauben of my long-ago knowledge, who does things like Jesus-based Passover Seders even though seders didn’t exist at the time of Jesus and also that, per some scholarship, he might not have been killed on Passover week anyway.

It drew comment from him, to which I doubled down (NOT quoting him here):

I am actually one of “those people” myself. I’m a secularist with a graduate theological degree, undergraduate degree in classical languages. Hebrew today is quite rusty, but biblical Greek not totally so (nor classical or ecclesiastical Latin).

This is not to argue that Zionism is not somewhat distorted. It is to argue that fundagelical Christianity is just as much so, to put it bluntly, without getting into arguments about various types of millennialism, or amillenialism or anything else (per fundamentalist versions of old mainline Calvinists and Lutherans vs modern evangelicals).

And, that's that.

I had, even before the "unfollow" decision, noted that the actual URL is "adversusbabylon." So, is Zionism the "beast"? Or is this guy a fundamentalist Calvinist or Lutheran for whom the papacy is the beast? I discounted that because he has nothing along those lines, at first. But I looked again. Take this piece:

The Jesuits used Freemasonic British intelligence to propagate the “Christian Zionist”/dispensationalist doctrine to the Protestants that “the Jews” must collectively gather in Palestine as a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ

So, he doesn't attack the papacy, but Jesuitical thought? Even though the Jesuits weren't created until after Brother Martin Luther's death, otherwise, that's exactly the type of shit he said. And, having seen the Lutefash eruption in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, while this guy bashes what he calls "fascism," he might actually like certain elements of actual fascism. (Actually, per this piece blathering about dialecticist issues, he's as likely, or more likely, to be a thrown-off Trot, or Hoxha-ist [think about it] as anything.)

And, while he differs from Luther and Calvin in calling the papacy the antichrist, he fuses that with elements of their thought and modern American fundagelicalism:

This second beast/False Prophet, by the way, is the United States (the first beast is the Holy Roman Empire)

And that is followed by this:

All roads lead right back to Rome.

OK, at this point, he is all over the milennialist map. That said, Luther missed a beat, with his antisemitic ravings plus his claim the papacy was antichrist, by not claiming the papacy was under Jewish control. Call this "Jewish incense burners" or "Jewish Mass transubstantiation bells" instead of "Jewish space lasers."

I am trying to relate this to his broader political stances. My best guess, per this piece, is that if you take old time paleoconservative Walter Karp and ran him through some type of libertarian political filter plus a millennialist theological filter, you'd get this guy. And, that's a hugely toxic brew.

And, per the people he recommends? Michael Ginsberg follows 9/11 "truthers." "The Straight Juice" has a "plandemic" type note at the top of their feed as of May 15.)

Beyond that? Per this piece, I don't know what he "is," but he's anti-third party. (And, Ken Silverstein accused ME of political moral purity.)  And, the rest of that piece is scary / batshit crazy, starting with the claim that "Luigi Mangione" (his scare quotes and yes he means them as such) is controlled opposition.

And, other than the above? A few additional notes.

First, posting THIS at this length at this piece:

For simplicity sake—because the philosophical word salads of Marxist and Fascist rabble-rousers are too headachingly atrocious to further sift through and dissect—all you need to know is that Hegelian dialectic is grounded on preservation of the status quo and therefore fundamentally “right-wing,” preserving the core of a reactionary construct perpetually. (this is why Fascism is based on “regular” Hegelianism in contrast to Marxism which inverts it—the two are ideologically opposed in their structural application of the dialectic) If the “standard” trajectory of Hegelian dialectic as represented in Fascism points “rightward,” then an inversion turning it “right side up” therefore points “left” on the political spectrum.

When everything you write yourself is word salad, is pots and kettles.

Second, neither Marx nor Engels was Zionist, nor religiously observant Jews. Lenin has bits of Jewish ethnic heritage, but never claimed to be Jewish either religiously nor ethnically. Stalin was totally NOTA on this. 

Third, back to the Zechariah piece? Calling the Magen David a "hexagram," by appearing to me to play on "pentagram," probably goes past anti-Zionism and into antisemitism.

And with that, I've wasted more than enough time on this dude and will probably block him at some point in the near future. (In case his degree of cyberstalking is more than it first appears to be, I didn't do that immediately.) 

Dude never did answer about his actual religious beliefs, but, yeah, I could see him being in the same neighborhood as the Lutefash.