God’s Unalterable Design
In which we discuss circumcision, Tucker Carlson and the Edsel…
According to the following article from the NPR website, some religious leaders have rejected the concept of gender transition based on the idea that it subverts God’s will and if you were born a male (and/or female) you should stay a male (and/or female) because that’s the way God wanted it and changing anything is “contrary to God’s design.”
OK, got it: you’re stuck with the original equipment you were born with and shouldn’t change anything because that’s what God wants you to have.
So what about circumcision?
Seems pretty clear God wants us to have foreskins, so who are we to decide differently?
And what about repairing heart defects? Or cleft palates? Or wearing glasses? Didn’t God want me to go through Life seeing everything that was more than 10 feet away as a blur?
Or come to think of it, dying your hair; if God wanted you to be a blonde, why were you born a brunette?
Putting on lipstick, shaving any part of your body, breast implants, toupees, Viagra, aspirin, high-cholesterol medication, Xanax, sleeping pills, appendectomies (y’know, I could go on for a long, long time) liposuction, facelifts, psychoanalysis, etc., etc., etc., are all contrary to “God’s design” because apparently He wants us to go through Life as plain, hairy, flat-chested, bald, impotent, myopic, nervous wrecks with the occasional blinding headache and unresolved daddy issues.
Now here’s the deal on that:
At a very early age, one of the many things that turned me off about religion was the tendency to claim some rules were straight from God and Must Be Obeyed Without Question while other Biblical rules were OK to ignore like:
Not wearing clothes made from two kinds of material (Leviticus 19:19)
Or not eating shellfish (Leviticus 9:10)
And not sitting where a woman having her period sat (Leviticus 15: 19-20)
I think the obvious lesson here is Leviticus was a huge pain in the ass and not the kind of guy you’d want for a next-door neighbor because if you decided to mow your lawn, Leviticus would come outside to tell you how and why you were doing it wrong and lawn mowing is prohibited on alternate Tuesdays up to 10 days after your wife finishes menstruating and God was also going to smite you for trimming His hedges.
(Actually, Leviticus was probably written by more than one pain in the ass over a long period of time which is the exact same formula used to produce the Republican Party platform.)
If you want to read more weird rules Christians feel free to ignore because they’re weird and inconvenient, here you go:
https://www.salon.com/2014/05/31/11_kinds_of_bible_verses_christians_love_to_ignore_partner/
The above cartoon was inspired by all the Republican-controlled statehouses that are churning out anti-transgender bills and it makes you wonder why Republicans care (aren’t they the ones who think government should stay out of your life?) and I tend to think a whole bunch of Republican politicians really don’t care, they just want to suck up to the voters and donors that do.
And if making some poor kid’s already hard life harder is what it takes, they’re more than willing to do that.
Tucker Carlson will have a new show on Twitter which I didn’t know had shows, probably because I spend as little time on Twitter as possible. But according to the following MSNBC article, Twitter offers a paid subscription feature which allows users to charge followers a monthly fee, but it’s a feature most people don’t know exists, especially Carlson’s core demographic:
Old right-wingers, badly in need of hearing aids.
OK, that last bit was clearly ageist, but I’m now old enough that I’m “Talkin’ bout my g…g…generation” and if you don’t get that last joke you need to go back and listen to your old Who albums turned all the way up to 11, which is at least part of why I have tinnitus in my left ear (I played drums in a rock band) and sometimes turn on the caption feature when I watch TV.
I refuse to wear a hearing aid, mostly because I don’t believe the problem is the hearing in my left ear; the problem is everybody else in the world mumbling and if all of you would stop doing that I wouldn’t have a hearing problem. (Also, it would help if you stood to my right.)
Come to think of it, “God’s design” didn’t include hearing aids, so get thee behind me, Miracle Ear.
Anyway…
Apparently Twitter offered this feature in the past and it failed miserably, so Tucker Carlson trying to make this work is a bit like being the first passenger to be offered a ride by the Wright Brothers and I for one would travel to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina to watch that.
When Tucker announced this venture, he made it clear that Fox had been holding him back and now that he’s going to be on Twitter with fewer restrictions, he’ll be able to tell the world what he really thinks, so apparently he’s going to be even more obnoxious than usual.
We can only hope Tucker Carlson has just as much post-Fox success as Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/tucker-carlson-twitter-elon-musk-rcna83754
OK, so Clarence Thomas got caught taking all kinds of stuff from a wealthy Conservative named Harlan Crowe and when people wondered if the Supreme Court needs a Code of Ethics all nine of them said no.
Point of interest:
When I went to work for the Kansas City Star I was handed a Code of Ethics so apparently drawing funny pictures paired with lame puns is a more important job with higher standards than being a Supreme Court Justice.
Back in 2011 Chief Hypocrite John Roberts wrote that no Supreme Court Code of Ethics was needed because: “I have complete confidence in the capability of my colleagues to determine when recusal is warranted.”
Fast forward to 2023 and turns out Justice Sonia Sotomayor didn’t recuse herself from cases involving her book publisher which has paid her millions of dollars so it kinda seems like she might not be 100 percent objective and here’s another story about Justice Neal Gorsuch making money when a law firm that practices before the Supreme Court bought a piece of property he co-owned, so clearly I screwed up and didn’t go far enough in the above cartoon because I should have given Gorsuch a cookie jar of his very own:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/25/neil-gorsuch-colorado-property-sale-00093579
Now here’s the article on why Supreme Court justices think they don’t need a Code of Ethics:
It seems to me the only time politicians get worried about spending too much money is when politicians from the other party spend it and according to the Center for American Progress, Republican tax cuts over the past 25 years have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment.
According to the following article, the Republican tax cuts mostly favored the wealthy and profitable corporations and reduced federal revenues. According to the CAP, the Tax Cuts For The Already Rich are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in debt ratio (debt as a percentage a percentage of the economy) since 2001 and if you take out the costs of bills responding to the COVID pandemic and the recession that followed, it’s more than 90 percent.
So if Republicans are really worried about debt, maybe they should stop giving money away to their rich friends:
Call me a conspiracy theorist (but if you do, that probably means you’re a member of the Illuminati) but I believe one of the reasons there’s so much interest in Artificial Intelligence is Corporate America’s desire to fire even more workers and increase their profits because apparently CEOs just aren’t making enough money.
The ads for self-driving cars show happy motorists ignoring the road because apparently our deepest desire when traveling at high speeds is to be able to take our hands off the wheel and clap along with Queen’s We Will Rock You and trust that the same industry that produced the Edsel, Pinto and Corvair got everything right.
I don’t know anybody who actually wants to do that, so why so much interest in self-driving cars?
Because if they can make self-driving cars work, Corporate America can fire all the truck drivers, Uber drivers, and Amazon van drivers and keep the savings and the same goes for robot waitresses and factory workers and automobile line workers and I just read a story about a CEO that thinks he’s going to be able to fire 80% of his engineers and marketers and replace them with high school kids using AI and now that I think about it if AI can take existing facts and write articles, how long until newspapers fire all their reporters?
I don’t know who they think is going to buy their products after they fire everybody, but thinking ahead is not Corporate America’s best thing and if you don’t believe me, go take a look at what used to be known as the polar ice caps.
Also…
According to the following article from Newsweek, accidents caused by Artificial Intelligence are about to increase rapidly because we’re going to use AI a lot more often so get set to hear about a lot more accidents caused by Artificial Intelligence and just in case you decide not to read it, the article tells some horrifying stories like:
A Volkswagen plant robot killing a worker by crushing him
A Tesla running a red light and killing two people
Or an airliner crash that killed all 189 people aboard because a faulty sensor caused the piloting system to keep pushing the plane’s nose down.
And if that’s not enough to keep you from thinking computers ought to be in charge…
The world as we know it almost ended in 1983 when a Soviet missile warning system mistakenly decided that there were five U.S. missiles headed their way because the system thought sunlight glinting off clouds were actually missiles and the only thing that stopped the system from retaliating was a Soviet lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov who saved the world and just to say thanks, he got reprimanded and assigned to a less-important post for doing it.
I assume he was replaced by a high school kid.
(Y’know, I’ve seen every Terminator movie and I think the question we ought to be asking right now is what makes us think Artificial Intelligence killing people isn’t part of its plan.)
https://www.newsweek.com/ai-accidents-set-skyrocket-this-year-1795928
OK, once again that’s it for the week, so have a nice weekend and I know I will because apparently God wants me to watch a shit ton of sports or He wouldn’t have put so many baseball and NBA playoff games on my TV.
Love these low-attention span smorgasbords of yours!
I enjoy your stuff Lee. I also like that you attach links to your rants.
I got curious today and found this about Christians and Old Testament laws
https://www.nscfchurch.org/blog/20/Why-Dont-Christians-Obey-All-the-Old-Testament-Laws#:~:text=As%20followers%20of%20Christ%2C%20we,the%20redeeming%20blood%20of%20Christ.