I haven’t been writing as much about current events of late, other than an occasional nod and link. Truth be told, I don’t feel up to it anymore. The firehose of bullshit gets me down, and as many others have noted, no mere mortal can keep up.
I’m in awe of people like…oh, Aaron Rupar, who spends all day every day watching right-wing media and clipping it for the rest of us. His Substack is well worth the money, too. Many Substacks are, in fact, but I still don’t know how the hell they do it. If a kid asked what it takes to be a journalist these days, I don’t know if I could even answer. The circus has passed me by. And every young journalist I know is working 10 times harder than I ever did.
For some reason, this makes me remember a reporter in Columbus, who, when called one evening by an editor with a question about something in his story for the next day, snapped back that he didn’t appreciate being bothered at home and don’t do it again. Ha ha ha ha ha. A very different time.
That said, there are days when I simply cannot believe what’s happening in the world. The good days are when I can be simultaneously agog and almost helpless with laughter, like today, with the spectacle of the vice president of the United States, a Catholic convert of seven years, lecturing the Pope on Catholic theology. Of course, he’s doing so on behalf of his boss:
President Trump has appeared stung by Leo’s condemnation of the war, criticism that has highlighted the challenge the administration faces from the coalition of conservative and religious voters who helped elect Mr. Trump in 2024. The president lashed out at the pope on Sunday in a social media post that called the first American-born pontiff “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”
…The back-and-forth has presented a particular quandary for Mr. Vance, a convert to Catholicism who is publishing a book about his path to the faith and who has long courted the Republican religious base. Asked about the debate between Mr. Trump and the pope at an Athens, Ga., event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point USA, Mr. Vance admonished Leo, saying that if he was “going to opine on matters of theology,” his comments needed to be “anchored in the truth.”
Holy shitballs. I’m no believer in papal infallibility, but I do believe in papal competence on matters of theology, certainly competence above that displayed by this sleazy grifter.
As Lily Tomlin said, “No matter how cynical I get, I can’t keep up.”
In other actual news at this hour, an influencer was sentenced to a six-month stretch in prison in South Korea, and for once, I’m sorry the sentence wasn’t harsher, or maybe in North Korea instead:
(Johnny Somali) was convicted by a court in Seoul on several charges, including obstructing a business and distributing sexual deep fakes, according to local news media. A court official confirmed the sentence but the verdict was not immediately available.
Somali, 25, whose legal name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael, is an online personality who specializes in producing “rage bait” — chosen as 2025’s word of the year by the Oxford University Press, and defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive.”
His stunts involved blasting music in public, yelling at strangers and vandalizing a small business in Seoul. He was arrested in Japan for trespassing on a construction site in Osaka in 2023, and was fined the equivalent of about $1,000 for disrupting a restaurant there with loud music.
MIAMI — Controversial influencer Clavicular was hospitalized in Miami on Tuesday night after suffering a suspected overdose during a livestream.
Few details have been released, but Miami Fire told CBS News Miami that crews were called to the corner of 9th Street and South Miami Avenue in Brickell after getting reports of a possible overdose of a 20-year-old man.
A source close to Clavicular told CBS News that he was suspected to have had an overdose.
Video from Clavicular’s livestream on Tuesday night caused concern for his hundreds of thousands of followers, saying that he seemed out of it.
Then the video abruptly ended.
I watched part of this; a friend sent me the video. Miami is a sewer at this time of year.
OK, this is the last entry for the week. We’re off for a long weekend of R&R in a major American city that you will probably recognize when I post photos, which I hope to do later this week.
Brandon said on April 15, 2026 at 6:12 pm
One good thing about Clavicular is his apparent friendliness toward animals.
https://www.tiktok.com/@_entertainmentclip/video/7628777304608476438
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nancy said on April 15, 2026 at 7:33 pm
Loves dogs, hates women.
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Mark P said on April 15, 2026 at 8:03 pm
I consider being a dog person as a fairly reliable indicator of character, although there are several notable exceptions. Hitler comes to mind.
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Sherri said on April 15, 2026 at 11:04 pm
I saw a video where a gay guy pointed out that Clavicular et al were just adopting the toxic parts of gay club culture with the misogyny of incel culture. All of their “looksmaxxing” is aimed at men, but they aren’t (or can’t admit) attracted to men, and their whole ideology is that women are trash. His claim is that since none of this energy can thus be sublimated in sex, it will necessarily be discharged in violence.
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Gretchen said on April 16, 2026 at 12:27 am
During my Irish-Catholic midwestern upbringing, “He’s holier than the Pope” was the ultimate dis. Arrogance, hubris, self-importance, combined with ignorance was the implication. Nothing in that culture is more reviled than thinking you’re more special than you are. “WHO do you think you are???” Was immediately followed by a summary of how you’re not all that. Too bad JD didn’t have an Irish grandmother asking him why he thought he had anything to say to the parish priest, never mind the Pope, about Catholic doctrine.
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Deborah said on April 16, 2026 at 5:46 am
Gretchen, that is perfect. JD definitely acts like he’s bigger than his britches, a meany too, like the kid villain in a Little Rascals movie (Lordy that dates me, I remember those reruns on the black and white TV in the 50s).
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Suzanne said on April 16, 2026 at 10:51 am
Speaking of JD (not his birth name) Vance:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/pope-jd-vance-iran/686826/?gift=F58N5IOcUo4qAP_lFh-H9znaYiF7sX74JIZzGgHQcj8&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
“Vance just told the bishop of Rome that theology should be “anchored in the truth”? What does that even mean? Whose truth? Somewhere in the nether gloom, Pontius Pilate is rubbing his aching temples and thinking he’s heard this one before.”
“… his attempt to enlighten the pontiff revealed not only his arrogance, but his lack of knowledge about the just-war tradition itself. No matter what the vice president thinks, it’s not a set of rules that tells Christians when God is on their side.”
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Jakash said on April 16, 2026 at 2:21 pm
Thanks for that gift link, Suzanne. I’m too cheap to subscribe to “The Atlantic,” but am on their email list. So, I’ve read lots of opening paragraphs to articles where the type slowly fades to nothing and subscribers can click to read further. Not very satisfying, but it saves a lot of time! 😉
Yes, that reference to truth does recall Pilate in “J. C. Superstar”:
J.C.: “I look for truth, and find that I get damned.”
Pilate: “We both have truths. Are mine the same as yours?”
J.D. Vance: “…you’ve got to be careful; you’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth, and that’s one of the things that I try to do…”
Which recalls Pilate’s warning a bit later: “You’ve got to be careful – you could be dead soon – Could well be.”
J.D. Vance’s helpful admission, while famously defending both himself and his orange guru with regard to Haitians eating dogs and cats: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Not very concerned about being “anchored in the truth” in that instance, nor dozens of others.
Of course, nobody but nobody in American public life has lied more openly and more often that the orange felon. J. D. is doing his best to catch up, but it’s an impossible quest. Vance suggesting that he’s interested in the truth, while the Pope needs to be careful, would be astonishing, if it weren’t simply as stupid as almost all the pronouncements of those who try to make the FIFA Peace Prize recipient seem like he isn’t completely unhinged.
And comparing a war started impulsively by President “gut feeling” to World War II? Uh, that’s a preposterous analogy, whatever one thinks about the Pope, J.D. Vance, OR just-war theory.
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Julie Robinson said on April 16, 2026 at 4:45 pm
The news is an exhausting river rapids. I only dip into to the shallow portion most days in order to protect my mental health. I’m far too busy trying to hold my family together–Maslow’s hierachy of needs applies here. I’m far more interested that we are getting a hot tub, and that we got my mom in the pool for the first time since we’ve lived here. And that most of our plants that froze in February are coming back and our front yard garden is serene and beautiful again.
Also, is this rape academy that CNN has reported a true thing? Because that would be horrible beyond belief. I read the French woman Gisele Pelicot’s book wherein she learned she’d been drugged by her husband and raped by him and some 50 other men. Could this be one of the sites he uploaded to?
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Jeff Borden said on April 16, 2026 at 5:32 pm
This is just too good. At a Pentagon prayer service, Plastered Pete Hegseth included the fake Biblical quote Jules Winfield (Samuel L. Jackson) tells to someone right before he and his partner perforate them with bullets in “Pulp Fiction” So, yeah, ol’ Pete is a real religious scholar.
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Sherri said on April 16, 2026 at 6:05 pm
I think that Hegseth and Mike Johnson and their ilk hear “just war” and think that it means “just as in only”, and are totally cool with that. My experience with conservative white evangelicals is that they never saw a war they didn’t think America shouldn’t be fighting. Deep down, they feel that Christians in America have taken the place of Jews as God’s Chosen People.
But of course, only the right sort of Christians. Though they made common cause with Catholics over abortion, white conservative evangelicals don’t really believe that Catholics are Christians.
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Jeff Gill said on April 17, 2026 at 7:35 am
Just for fun, as I cackled grimly on the news of Hegseth’s Google-fail (or to be fair, the chaplain he claimed to be citing could have made the error), here’s the “verse” Jules recites from memory in “Pulp Fiction,” and the actual words in the Bible:
Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules says:
“Ezekiel 25:17. “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.”” [then he shoots an unarmed man]
That’s from Tarantino’s script. The actual Bible verse reads simply:
“I will execute great vengeance on them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I lay My vengeance upon them.”
The triple twist is a) the “Pulp Fiction” citation is actually taken from a 1973 Japanese martial arts movie starring Sonny Chiba, where the “extended version” Bible verse is used to explain the main character’s motivation, and Jules is likely meant to have been inspired by that on-screen epigraph; b) in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” we see Ezekiel 25:17 on Nick Fury’s tombstone, played by Jackson; but c) the major arc of “Pulp Fiction” is that Jules realizes in the diner scene he has been misinterpreting his favorite verse the whole time, he renounces violence, and then is put to the test by two armed robbers whom he could kill, but does not (you have to see it to appreciate the full irony).
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alex said on April 17, 2026 at 11:45 am
Though they made common cause with Catholics over abortion, white conservative evangelicals don’t really believe that Catholics are Christians.
Not only that, but evangelicals didn’t even give a fuck about abortion until Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich realized that crusading against racial equality had become politically untenable so they pivoted and made feminism their new whipping boy.
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Julie Robinson said on April 17, 2026 at 3:03 pm
The church I grew up in, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, also didn’t believe Catholics were true Christians. Just one of many, many reasons I left. Also, Fort Wayne is full of LC-MS churches.
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Dexter Friend said on April 17, 2026 at 3:18 pm
I need to vent my thoughts so I have been live-streaming as a participant on Craig Crawford’s YouTube channel. He’s also now on X, Facebook, and several platforms. We’re mostly a bunch of men and women from about 35 to 82, all never-Trumpers and we treat trolls with respect, mostly. It’s on Streamyard, and available at Trailmix.cc. I have a hard time connecting so good luck if you care…11:00 AM to noon in the East.
I am still waiting for the contractor to come here for a second eval of my massive hail damage from 3 weeks ago. So much city-wide damage, hard to get a contractor,
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Jeff Borden said on April 18, 2026 at 9:51 am
Mr. Art of the Deal awakens today to learn Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz. Or, as Scott Bessent described it, the Strait of Vermouth. These people. . .
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alex said on April 18, 2026 at 12:36 pm
Just how were Hungarian elections rigged under Orban? The American press has absolutely failed to elucidate in its reporting on this subject, and what’s amazing to learn at this juncture is that is that Orban’s popularity was never above 35 percent, roughly the same as Trump’s base.
You might say that Peter Magyar is sort of a consensus candidate like Joe Biden was in 2020; you didn’t have to like him or agree with his politics when your overriding concern was getting rid of someone infinitely worse.
A wild-ass story, courtesy of Paul Krugman and Kim Lane Scheppele: https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkrugman/p/kim-lane-scheppele-on-hungary?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
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susan said on April 18, 2026 at 4:00 pm
I concur with Alex. That conversation between Krugman and Kim Lane Scheppele (about 90% her talking) is incredibly elucidating. She sure knows about so much going on in Hungary. Seems like she is fourteen different scholars and investigators in one person. A talking thinking encyclopedia of Hungarian intrigue and corruption. She is amazing. And so succinct and clear in her recounting. And TFNYT… There’s a reason Krugman quit working for that rag. He was quite circumspect when he referred to that org. in this video.
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Colleen said on April 18, 2026 at 7:06 pm
We were married at St Paul’s in Fort Wayne, which is LCMS. We chose that denomination mainly because it was husband’s family’s religious affiliation, and I had not yet reunited with the Catholic Church i was baptized into. (We later got the official Okey dokey of our marriage from them as well). Anyway…we attended St Paul’s for quite awhile before our wedding. When we started going to Mass, I was surprised to find the order of service and liturgy were so similar as to be nearly identical in parts. So I have never really understood why LCMS people are so adamantly anti Catholic.
Husband has three sisters, two of whom have converted to Catholicism. This did not please his mother, who was concerned about their immortal souls. It was a big enough deal that the second sister kept it from her parents as long as she could.
So yeah. LCMS are not fans of the Catholics.
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alex said on April 19, 2026 at 7:53 am
LCMS aren’t fans of anyone. Their clergy won’t even participate in ecumenical or interfaith events lest their peers be seen as their equals and not as heretics. Of course, Catholics have often been guilty of the same sin. My dad tells a story about his cousin who was raised Catholic and who was deeply troubled because the nuns at school told him that his non-Catholic family members were going to burn in hell. That’s just plain emotional abuse of a child, and if there really were a hell it’s where the nuns belong.
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Deborah said on April 19, 2026 at 8:44 pm
Yep, can confirm all that has been said here about the LCMS church, been there, done that, got away with no regrets. It seems worse than ever from what I hear remotely, best thing I ever did was getting away. I was in it up to my ears when I was younger, was completely propagandized for many years, I’m kind of astounded sometimes that I was able to see the light.
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