Sunday, December 21, 2025
Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year
1948, the State of Eire (formerly Irish Free State) declared its independence
1956 Montgomery bus boycott ended after the Supreme Court ruled segregated buses unconstitutional
1970 Oregon v. Mitchell Supreme Court case was decided, lowering the minimum voting age in U.S. federal elections to 18
1978 Police in Des Plaines, Illinois, arrested John Wayne Gacy for murder
1988 A terrorist bomb destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 mid-air over Scotland, killing all 259 passengers and crew on board and 11 people on the ground
1991 Soviet Union formally dissolved as 11 of 12 republics signed a treaty forming the Commonwealth of Independent States
2016 Carl Icahn was announced as Special Advisor to the President on Regulatory Reform, under President Donald Trump
2017 UN General Assembly voted 128 to 9 to denounce US decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital
2024 The United States Senate passed a funding bill, with President Joe Biden subsequently signing the bill into law, thereby averting a government shutdown.
In bed at 9:30, up at 6:40 from a distressing dream about TSJ, MLS, and me. 12°, wind chill 4°, high 27°, low 12°, clear skies all day.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at 11 a.m.
Christianity Is a Dangerous Faith, an op-ed by David French in this morning's New York Times. Excerpt:
Religion is one of the most dangerous forces on earth.
If you’ve ever encountered true fundamentalists, you know why. When you combine eternal stakes with absolute certainty, it produces the kind of people who are happy to be cruel in the name of God.
In fact, they can view their cruelty as a form of kindness. If they treat you with decency, doesn’t that make you comfortable in your sin? It’s important for them to take opportunities to confront people when you can — in other words, to tell people that they’re wrong, often in the most strident of ways. How else will they understand the gravity of their own sin?
To the fundamentalist, disagreement is proof of apostasy. But it can be even worse than that — if you’re wrong, then you might lead other people into error, and that makes you dangerous.
That’s one reason fundamentalists of all stripes are often such zealous censors. A fundamentalist can see every person who’s wrong as a kind of Patient Zero in a potential pandemic of paganism. And don’t think for a moment that fellow believers are spared the fundamentalists’ ire. They’re a chief target. They have no excuse for their errors, and they receive the most vitriol of all.
The same principle can be applied to secular fundamentalists. Perhaps you’ve met them — the people who define themselves through their individual politics, who show a kind of sneering contempt for dissent, and are very, very concerned with who is platformed and who is not.
Nothing I’m saying is original. I’m relaying an observation that’s been true since the first spark of faith in the human heart. There is a quiet, dark voice that whispers: “You are right. They are wrong. It is best for everyone if you rule.”
I plead guilty, to the secular part. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Aleksander Solzynitisin: "“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years."
David French is a believing, practicing Christian who is on the faculty of Lipscomb University in Nashville. Lipscomb is a Christian university affiliated with the Churches of Christ, not to be confused with the United Church of Christ (my favorite Protestant denomination)😇). Until 2024, he was a member of the Presbyterian Church in America. Due to conflicts with his church and its members over political issues, and after personal attacks against him and his family, they switched to another church in Nashville.
I enjoyed this excerpt from his essay:
When I think of the contrast between Jesus’ life and ministry and the will to power that has consumed so many Christians, I’m reminded of the words usually attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
That’s a fair critique. And by that metric, every single one of us will fail. Who among us is truly like Christ? But Gandhi’s critique contains a potential fallacy. There is an unspoken implication that people would actually like Christians if we behaved more like Christ.
But no. That’s demonstrably wrong. It’s true that people want to receive love and compassion, and that when they encounter Christians who love them and serve them, they tend to like them.
Many people do not, however, appreciate it when a Christian loves and serves their enemies. They absolutely do not like it when a Christian refuses to join their political crusade.
Venezuela, Trump, Oil, and Imperialism. Smedley D. Butler was a U. S. Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor winner who retired in 1931. After retirement, he toured the U.S. giving speeches entitled "War is a Racket." The speeches were so popular that he expanded his remarks and turned them into a short book with the same name. The theme of his book is that American corporate business interests profit enormously from America's wars. He wrote:
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
and
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. [Emphasis added.]
I read Butler's book a few years ago, more interested in it than most people because of my years in the Marine Corps, though reading it did not instill any feelings of pride in my Marine Courps heritage. My last duty station in Asia was at Camp Smedley D. Butler on Okinawa. What mainly triggered my memories of Smedley D. Butler and his War is a Racket was President Trump's comments on Wednesday:
“You remember they took all of our energy rights. They took all of our oil not that long ago. And we want it back. They took it — they illegally took it.”
and
The blockade will remain, he wrote on Truth Social, until the South American nation returns “to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”
This claim is a typical Trump lie. Venezuela (following Mexico, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia) did nationalize its oil in 1976 and again in 2007, but the oil interests - Exxon, Mobil (Chevron), Shell, ConocoPhillips, and others - were compensated. There was no 'stealing.' It was all a part of formerly economically colonized countries attempting to free themselves from Western, i.e., primarily US, economic imperialism. So here we are again, with US Marines on US Navy ships, and in Puerto Rico, awaiting a call to attack a South American country in the interest of acquiring ownership and control of its natural resources. War is a Racket, and Donald Trump is happy to serve as Racketeer-in-Chief. The rest of us should be ashamed of our country.
If I had a 'bucket list,' I think Stonehenge would top the list. Sarah and I visited Newgrange many years ago in December, year unremembered. We flew to Dublin for a long weekend visit using bargain-rate Aer Lingus tickets purchased at IrishFest the prior summer & spent the first day in the Boyne Valley at Newgrange and the Hill of Tara, which tradition holds as the inauguration site of the ancient High Kings of Ireland.
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