Justice Barrett SHOCK Recusal BACKFIRES on MAGA?!?

Espinoza v Montana is the ruling precedent. I doubt that the school you mentioned will use funds to do catechism.  The reality is that the Blaine Amendments that are falling one after the other were the result of anti-Catholicism. It is bias against Catholics and deserved to fall. The reason anti-Catholicism is a thing now is because these schools don't won't let in unions because of their support of legal abortion.   

Supporting the history of anti-Catholicism is not a good look for your channel. You are siding with protestant bigots. They preached Protestantism is public schools - part of which was stopping the funding of parish schools. You are siding with the Know-Nothings. Again, not a good look.

Espinoza will remain ruling law - this case is just extending that decision. The Court is hearing this because states have not complied with Espinoza. The Supremes will keep going until states get the hint that Know-Nothing Protestantism is bigotry.

Every school that can get regional accreditation should be funded (save for their religious education activities). In DC, there are already Catholic Charter schools - or rather, former parish schools that are now chartered to serve neighborhood kids. 

The reason there is a home school movement is because schools that teach "creation science" cannot be accredited. That is the correct filter.  There are not enough Wiccans or Satanists to have schools. Regardless, Satanism is a form of deprogramming, not the actual worship of the devil. Satanists don't actually believe a devil exists.

The key fact in this analysis has to be the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic origins of the Blaine Amendments that are still on the books, including in Oklahoma, even after Espinoza - which overturned Montana's Blaine Amendment and its prohibition on public funding of scholarships for students in Catholic schools. As the name suggests, Latino students.

The Blaine Amendments are part of the America First movement that gave us Trumpism. Which side are you on?  And yes, Hebrew Schools should get education funding. They do good work. My wife's cousin's kids went there in Maryland and got great educations. David could afford the tuition with no problem, but not all Jewish kids are rich.

The reason for the separation of church and state rulings was because public schools started out as hegemonically protestant. Kudos to the Jewish and Atheist parents using the ACLU to break that monopoly - but funding high quality schools with a parish sponsor - most often run by a parental school board - not the clergy - is no danger to "religious freedom." The context and history are important.

Want a Ukraine Deal to stop the fighting? NATO membership

When the war was about to begin, I sent President Biden a message that the way to stop Russian aggression was NATO membership in exchange for disputed land. This is still true. Indeed, once Ukraine is in NATO, it will have to stop fighting because it is doctrine not to invade Russia. Zalensky's best move is to fight to gain back land until membership is achieved. Especially because he is outlasting Russia (whose nukes have no hope of working). 

The only reason for the doctrine to not invade Russia is that, if NATO takes it, NATO has to fix it. No, thank you. Their security services will either resist or we will have to protect them from the public at large. We lose either way.

White Shirt Video - More on Tariffs

Over the past few weeks, I have been writing about the tax aspects of tariff policy - how because we do not have a Value Added Tax, we need either a generalized tariff based on the amount of VAT that is zero rated by exporting countries or a specific tariff to match the rates our trading partners have. Germany has a 13% VAT, so we need a 13% tariff to establish equivalency.

To make VAT, Carbon taxes and tariffs available, as well as life in general, we need a subtraction VAT on employers which they can offset by paying $700 or so per child or non-working parent per month - or more (whatever amount they pay to Social Security dependents - with wages or on top of any basic benefits paid by government (from UI to a potential long term UI that is no fault and would replace disability insurance and would be equal 75% of full-time minimum wage work -which also needs to be raised to $13/hour).

There is another reason to do tariffs. It is because standards of living vary for workers from country to country. In many cases, comparative advantage is really comparative slavery. This gives us a hint as to why we have a trade surplus with Europe. Their standard of living for workers is better than ours - much better if you include social benefits. They give us Euros to get stuff made by our workers.

In a cooperative economy, employee-owned firms would pay all workers the same wage in terms of standard living, even if they take a loss on the transfer price. This is probably illegal now, because it trades worker justice for fiduciary gain.

The tariff, therefore, must provide overseas workers and suppliers with the same standard of living overall - as productivity differences between goods should even out. If they do not, the tariff must fill in the gap.

This type of adjustment is what Donald Trump is unconsciously attempting, although if he thought it through, he would see it as socialist (because it is socialist - or at least anti-capitalist. This type of tariff adjustment is the ultimate cure for the neo-liberalism that populists hate. 

Let's do it - and if we don't do it, we should at least calculate and publish the difference between standards of living of workers in similar jobs and how that calculation interfaces with both tariffs and currency prices.

White T Shirt Video - Food Insecurity

First of all, food stamps and social security benefits are too low. Indeed, if you get the latter, you likely need the former. Even then, it's not enough. I need a secondary source of credit - an Amazon store card - to have access to Whole Foods when the money runs out (at almost 30% interest - hello trap). Safeway does not even have store credit - just discounts. Note to Albertsons - you need to provide this service.

Second, aside from increasing benefits, stores could - through either discount cards or store cards - provide an extra subsidy to those of us who use SNAP (and Toilet Paper should be payable with stamps). These would be funded by private contributions from other shoppers and as part of the general charitable work of the company.

Of course, there is a moral hazard - not so much that people are less likely to work (of course they are), but that the government will take advantage of the existence of private charity to cut benefits. Conservatives are worse freeloaders than poor people.

The other moral hazard is the perpetuation of racism. Food deserts go hand in hand with historic discrimination in housing (redlining) and because in some neighborhoods, teenage boys really do rob people - whether out of economic or social needs (gang membership). White kids do burglary, not robbery and all sell drugs if they use them - more often the White ones. Solving the food desert problem needs to go hand in hand with giving extra funds to poor shoppers. Note that this will also decrease theft for economic reasons (although entitled White kids with issues still shoplift).

Now that we know how to do more - it is now up to the food chains to actually do more.

Steve Kornacki: Pope will be chosen by secret vote. Here's what we know.

The next pope, if Malachy is to be believed, will be Peter the Roman (since Francis was a substitute for Benedict - the Glory of the Olive). We have 3 in the top tier. Spooky.

Montgomery County Schools Parental Rights Case

I am no fan of large school systems when school based parent-teacher boards may be better at these decisions.

We need to teach more civics - but not in a way that people who find it hard shy away from voting - because sometimes they fight back. It is why we have Trumpism and calls for parental rights.

Rights and power are two different things. When the powerful demand rights, something is going wrong. This leads to dangerous moral attitudes, like original sin, vengeful gods and honor killings.

There is no need to worry about educating young kids, but in middle school (which I would have be from grades 5 through 7 - with high school 8 - 10 followed by associates degree and vocational programs) and after, tolerance needs to be taught - regardless of parental opinions. Why do teachers want to go there?

Because kids who are rejected by moralistic parents or bullied at school sometimes kill themselves. It is the most likely cause of death for this age group. Parents may or may not face this - or have their friends face this. A teacher at this level is almost assured of exposure to such circumstances. 

They need to be given the power to care and have that seen as a good thing.

Gulf of America - It's for Real

I looked up the Trump order (really a memo) on the Gulf of America naming (I would prefer the Gulf of Louisiana because it is the major water source), and all the correct agencies and legal authorities were referenced.

For those that don't know, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names is now the point of contact on this. It will take time to coordinate, but it will happen - unless someone cares to stop it. The people who do this work have an annual conference. This year it is in August in Golden Colorado. Here are the links to both:

https://www.usgs.gov/us-board-on-geographic-names/geographic-names-faqs

https://cogna50usa.org/

Smoothing out Trump and a new Soviet

Apparently, Trump has decided to no longer tempt his fate regarding contempt of court - which saves him from personal ruin with a renewed January 6 prosecution. So much for using immigration and DOGE to kick the hornet's nest.

His relationship with Putin is not so dangerous as Vlad realizes that his back is against a wall.  Indeed, his idea of pulling together the old soviet team for growing grain and doing space exploration is not bad, as long as his czarist government is not part of the equation. The nobles became the commissars who became the oligarchs, just as he can trace back through Yeltsin to Brezhnev to Stalin and their neo-czarist tyranny. The Soviet Union is not so bad without the terrorist security infrastructure.

The best thing that could happen to Russia or for a soviet confederation is for Ukraine to either win or lose, because the people of Ukraine could never be like the current Russian peasantry that is cowed by Putin's security state. They need to learn from Ukrainians what it is like to be free people - something Putin will never let them do. If either Russia or China let the democratic yeast from Ukraine or Taiwan into their system, their security tyrannies could not survive long. Or they will simply crumble from their own authoritarian stupidity (when underlings lie to keep face).

Trump needs to put together a team from some of his crew and the best on the revenue committees and work out - with the Democrats - a decent tax system. One that looks at tariff/VAT issues logically, raises enough revenue - mostly by no longer letting failure be a rewardable tax deduction - which an Asset VAT rather than capital gains or wealth/estate taxation does.

In other words, look at my stuff and pick up the phone. There is a way to get out of what looks like economic disaster - but you cannot use supply side/feed the rich/trickle down economics to get there. It has reached its limits. We can get there easy or hard. Easy takes a phone call. I'm open 24/7.

Happy Easter and Finding the Bones

Reporting what James Tabor found regarding a certain ossuary and why it should not shake your Faith, even as it challenges your beliefs in the organization of the Church.

Happy Easter with a side of Heresy Part Two

Some of what is in the description was in the other video. Look at the transcript if you care - or if there are things I left out. Some things are also added, but most of it was said on one vid or the other. Watch them both.

This is what else I have heard on YouTube Theological Seminary concerning the evolution of the Jesus story and surrounding mythology - as well as how we know the reality of His divinity - regardless of who is father was.

The God question first. There are those who think Jesus was a rip-off of Hercules. It is the other way around. Rome got the legend from the Greeks who got it from the Phoenicians who got it from the other Canaanites who got it from Sumer - the birthplace of agriculture and western civilization. The God-Man myth came first there, not in Rome. Jesus was the source, not the result. Kronos came from Baal who was El. Zeus was Yahweh legend. Look at when things were written if you doubt it. Greece came after Canaan, not before - by thousands of years. Doh!

Matt Baker did a genealogy. It seems that on the Joseph side of the story, the name of Joseph's father is different between two gospels and could be equated with an exiled Herodian prince. In other words, Jesus may not have been a distant son of David, but an actual claimant to the Herodian monarchy with a claim on the rulership of Judah, with Holy Week being an assertion of that claim (as reported by James Tabor).

We also know that Mary was of the priestly caste. She was related to Joseph of Arimathea and her cousins Zachariah and Elizabeth. So when Jesus was in the temple after he entered Jerusalem, as well as what he taught in the temple condemning the Sadducees - he was betraying his own family - a family who knew of his connection to them. He believed in universal resurrection as a pharisaic rabbi. When he dined with those people, whose main attribute was that belief, he was dining with comrades. 

According to Tabor, the belief in the resurrection was about having a spiritual end rather than sleeping in the soil (as the Sadducees believed). It had nothing to do with animating corpses. 

Jesus may have believed that God would rescue him from the Cross and affirm both his message and his heritage as rightful king. The entry and protest in Jerusalem were prophetic - consciously so. It is the suffering servant prophesy that actually came true - that Jesus had to empty himself of his vision of a new kingdom (having his last follower take care of Mary, not the Church) and abandoning the source of the stories of his divinity to him by saying he is dead to her. Our salvation is the result of that vision quest - and it is a very real comfort for our lives on earth - as is the morality of the kingdom: universal forgiveness, everyone is neighbor in whom to see as Christ and serve as if Christ. God is gentle and humble of heart, whose yoke is easy and burden light. A good message that we should try sometime. Very Spinozist before Spinoza was born.

We know of the truth of the message - even if Jesus did not have it exactly until the end - because of the Eucharist. We can experience him internally - although it only shows (or does not) through how we treat people. Empirical measurement is impossible.

The message really is good news - so Happy Easter!

Happy Easter with a side of heresy - part one

This is not orthodox belief. It comes from my studies at YouTube theological seminary. Here are the high points:

Belief is social, not absolute. It is the only way to know those things which are mysterious, meaning they cannot be empirically proven. The Holy Office no longer condemns heresy or books - it helps book sales too much. Unless it is about sex, heresy is ignored.

Most of the best stuff cannot be empirically tested with control groups, etc. Too many factors. The Eucharist, other experiences of God - especially Near Death ones, Astrology and other personality systems like Jungian personality typing. Sometimes you have to believe people and trust what they commonly believe - as well as the fact that such believes can evolve.

Whether God is entirely transcendent, in Orthodoxy as Father, Son (the Word) and Spirit, or Mother Earth, Sophia and Shekinah - or in science the Universe, the knowledge of it (the only way we know and experience it) - also known as the standard model of particle physics or the space-time, and the actual experience of life, love and time. Just as electro-magnetism are two joined concepts, so is space-time. In metaphysics, the Father can be seen as space, or being, with the Spirit as Time. Without Time, there is no space beyond one point. You cannot have one point going to another without an idea of time, or the addition of a third dimension forming a plane. Indeed, all the higher dimensions are really lower dimensions that give us that one universal point - which we can only know using time.

So Einstein believed in the God of Spinoza - which is pantheistic - the God in Nature of Bill W. of AA, which is essentially what Jesus taught (judge not, the Word, see God in others/be God to others). 

It's all the same, only the politics get in the way.

They won't always. The Pope is old and the Cardinal Electors are liberal. A successful conclave will give us a liberal pope and an unsuccessful one a schism. Some may go toward the Ecumenical Patriarch - indeed, both sides should, but one hundred some years ago, the OP and the Great Synod declared that Anglican succession is valid. They need a seat at the table because in order for any kind of high church orthodoxy to survive, it needs to accept that the Spirit lives in the demand for change in sexual teaching on both ordination and conduct (divorce, gay marriage, female ordination, open Communion). Finally, the site of the Ecumenical Patriarchy should be the center of political power - which is Washington, not Moscow (especially since Putin destroyed the Russian military and civil society) or Rome (Europe is more apostate than the US) and Constantinople (where the Church is no longer in persecution and the Ottoman Empire is no longer a hegemon). 

That is the easy stuff. The real fun stuff is where we got God and the story of the Man of Easter, which is part of this video and part of the next. See the next for that description.

The Courts Are Upholding the Rule Of Law, And Donald Trump's Power & Inf...

In a one a.m. filing on Saturday, the Supreme Court stopped flights to El Salvador until further notice. This time, Trump is a named plaintiff - so he can now be held in criminal contempt if he does not geek. If he geeks and brings the prisoners home, the situation ends. If he goes forward, the question of prosecuting a sitting president will eventually come up in this action, which reopens the question of the January 6th prosecutions. Interesting times. Is it better to avoid the crisis or get Trump now? He cannot win. The question is how we want him to lose.

VAT, Tariff and industrial policy

Trump and his supporters have, as a matter of policy, rejected what was the Neoliberal consensus. Elections matter. See my video on this at

https://youtu.be/ELEjSnXOmpQ 

The question then arises on what tariff rates should be. If we wish to go country by country, the tariff should at least be equal to the exporter's value added tax rate that was zero rated at the border. Canada has a Goods and Services VAT at the Dominion and Provincial levels. The tariff needs to be that much.

If we want a general tariff, simply count up the benefit all countries extend when exporting to us by zero rating and divide it by total imports. Canada, China and Mexico would have biggest weighted impact.

Exempt form tariffs those products which we simply cannot make here at any time during the year. If we don't make something but could do so, then the tariff needs to be set high enough to make cost a wash - with the tariff funding subsidies to develop the industry - say growing cherry trees in California and Florida on a year round basis rather than importing them from Chile in the winter.

Tariffs (or a VAT replacing them - and exclusions can be used to do industrial policy as is suggested above - or could be policy free - should pay for health care subsidies that go beyond what employers could be incentivized to provide - say coverage of their retirees or long term care. Obamacare is crap - premiums and deductibles are too high for the working poor. Medicaid, Medicare and a cost-free public option to cover care for pre-existing conditions should all be VAT or tariff funded.

Domestic military (non-nuclear) basing should be tariff or VAT funded. If people want lower tariffs, they need to quit seeking defense facilities and contracts. This would be more useful if tariffs and VAT could be regionalized rather than uniform in all 50 states.

The portion of Social Security Old Age, Survivors and Disability premiums now paid by employers should be funded by tariffs or a value added tax and be credited to each eligible worker on an equal dollar basis (which removes an objection to personal retirement accounts).

A subtraction VAT should fund childcare and child tax credit subsidies so that employees need not file personal income taxes - with a VAT surtax collecting revenue in lieu of progressive rate structures for income from salaries, interest and dividends.

Capital gains taxes should be replaced by a separate value added tax at an internationally agreed upon rate (to prevent exchange arbitrage) and end the distinction between long and short term gains - as well as letting people hide profits by offsetting them with losses. That rewards failure and automatic trading scams that verge on insider trading.

Some of this has likely been heard before by policymakers. The question of using tariffs to account for the lack of a domestic VAT  should be discussed in the media. Ask members of the administration if this is part of the agenda. If not, it should be. This kind of policy should not be spit-balled. I suspect that part of the tariff calculus includes a VAT question. If not, it should.

And that is how to set tariff rates and what to spend them on.

Why the Chinese Tariffs?

Two possibilities, both involve the probability of pain for WalMart:

1. Trump wants them to fail to revitalize local small businesses and malls.

2. Trump is shaking down the Walton family.

East Russian Infrastructure

The vast majority of Russia has no infrastructure. Neither does Alaska or northern Canada. Cities have roads, but are not interconnected. There is a reason for this - no people.

Russian and Chinese population figures are not honest. They don't have the same census infrastructure found in the United States - and overestimation is endemic. The only obstacles to freedom for Russia Asia is for the ethnic Russians to leave (the inevitable result of the war on Ukraine) and the expense of food. If American style lab grown meat and Dutch green house technology is developed from the Urals to Greenland, this obstacle is overcome - provided resource extraction income is adequate until an independent economy is developed - which takes people to do. Lower food prices will mean more population - especially if jobs are created.

South Asian Russia, which is Muslim, needs to be set free for Turkic and Persian nations to absorb. Inuit, Mongolian and First Nation peoples can reunify to an ethnically similar nation, provided they are allowed a fair share of extraction income. They could be the Saudis of the north. 

Trump Ends Neoliberalism

Trump has broken the back of neoliberalism - as his voters wanted. He mimics their social biases (which he does not believe privately - except the racism) and has essentially thrown the wealthy and upper middle class under the bus. 

He has also created industrial policy, with tariffs which, with correct support, can be used to provide what his voters want while making prices rise for everyone else. He has also created conditions for value added taxes. The question is whether he or a successor adopt this solution and the extent to which exemptions and exclusions from the VAT are allowed and, if so, who controls them. The Congress cannot really do the fine work on doing this fairly that the executive branch can - like tariff policy.

The question is whether or how to give more money to the bottom third of income holders - which is about 77% of the population - either through a higher minimum wage & higher child tax credits - distributed through wages rather than either the IRS directly or indirectly through individual tax filing.

Also, the financial assets that hold pensions are not doing poorly. The speculative side is losing money. His voters don't care. I don't either. The bottom 77% of households have tax free income (and if they are invested in speculative assets, they are getting what they deserve) or are temporarily poor because they have had business losses - including those carried over. Switching to a VAT economy eliminates these advantages - especially if an ASSET VALUE ADDED TAX allows for employer based taxation of high wages, dividends and interest and ignores individual capital gains and losses. The latter can also lead to employee ownership - an essentially cooperativists concept that libertarian socialists support.

A tariff policy favors workers (and by implication overseas workers) over capital. Because it (or VAT) can be manipulated by the executive branch, using them (or VAT exemptions) creates industrial policy that the Soviets and Chinese would envy. 

While Trump voters do not understand this, the Russian and Chinese systems where the connected have the power are the same as the old Soviet system. Oligarchs and senior party members have the some crony relationships with the supreme leader  (and his secret policy) in either case. For some reason, American conservatives don't get the joke. Too funny.

How The Finance Industry Destroys Economies

Capital is the stock of productive equipment. The capital your chart refers to is wealth. Wealth uses finance to allocate value. Wealth increases are under taxed in Trump world and his donors want this to continue. The way to overcome this is an Asset value added tax that can be adjusted to regulate the velocity of finance. 

The problem with the wealth I'm balance is the power the wealthy have over workers/consumers. The only real cure is the rise of a cooperative system that abandons finance by having worker controlled firms provide non-financial debt and democratic control of the means of consumption (make v buy).