Far too few fraudulent votes to change 2020 election

Posted by on

There were fewer than 475 potential cases of voter fraud in the six battleground states that former President Donald Trump disputed, far too few to change the results of the 2020 presidential election, The Associated Press reported Tuesday after a review of every flagged ballot. President Biden beat Trump in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by a total of 311,257 votes. The allegedly fraudulent votes weren’t all for Biden, but most were spotted and never added to official vote counts. The AP also found that there was no collusion among the people who cast the fraudulent ballots.

Trump responded to the AP report by repeating his baseless claim that the election was stolen from him through voter fraud. [The Associated Press and The Week, 15 Dec 2021).

My comment: Epicurus loathed politics and wouldn’t discuss them. But there comes a time when you have to accept the truth and stand up for honesty and integrity in public life. The so-called “fraudulent” election. is a glorified vanity project, but it affects every American citizen and is extremely dangerous.

The Rhyme

Posted by on

Poetry (when calming and evocative) is very Epicurean. All the more so, I maintain, when it is rhymed. Why is that? Is it personal preference?

Poets now despise the rhyme,
Or that’s the affectation.
But nonsense is as nonsense does
And what is worse
Than bad blank verse? –
Gibberish strung a word a line,
Conforming to the fashion?
The wish being father to the thought,
It’s promptly
Found
To
Be
Profound.

Rhymes outdated? That’s just rot!
Some can rhyme, and some can not.

It’s content, not the form, that counts,
And mastery of meaning.
A certain discipline of mind
Is requisite when using rhyme.
So don’t reject the tools at hand,
Misused as they may be.
The means can justify the end.
My point is
Penned.
Enough!
The End!

(Robert Hanrott, sometime in the last half century)

Opus Dei

Posted by on

Opus Dei is an (extreme) organization within the Catholic Church, dedicated to “seeking holiness” in every aspect of the lives of its adherents, especially at work. Its members are supposed to follow a daily two hour ritual of wearing a spiked metal chain on their thighs. This is intended to remind them of the suffering of Jesus. They believe that this life is a vale of tears, that homosexuals are so by choice, that family planning is the work of the devil, and along with it abortion. They reject the part of the constitution that separates church and State and believe that the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church was caused by the relaxation of church dogma in the 1970s. There is no such thing as over-population; on the contrary: misery and poverty are nothing when you contemplate the angelic trumpets and the glory of the afterlife. Satan, says one prominent member of Opus Dei, has used the vices of pride, vanity and sensuality to corrupt universities, politics and Protestant churches. The Roman church is all that stands in the way of wholesale damnation.

My comment: I think he has a point.  Where can I buy an iron belt with spikes, anyone?

I think we are lost!

Posted by on

Drivers drove their vehicles into protestors at least 139 times between late May 2020 and the end of September 2021, killing three people and injuring at least 100. A nationwide analysis indicates that only 75 of the ramming cases led to any charges, with only 4 drivers convicted of felonies. (The Boston Globe).

My comment: To drive recklessly and deliberately at pedestrians raises hatred and inhumanity to levels more appropriate for the Nazi regime than for USA 2021. And not to charge the perpetrators?! I don’t have the detail, but suspect that the demonstrators may have been black. But race and color are not the main point – it is humanity, respect and decency that does, and these civilized aspects of human beings appear to be sidelined and subsumed by political hatred and cruelty.

Epicurus would utterly condemn such attitudes and gladly incarcerate the perpetrators,sine die.

Discrimination under the guise of religion

Posted by on

The Trump administration created a regulation that vastly expanded religious exemptions for taxpayer-funded contractors in two ways: (1) it expanded the type of organization that can claim a religious exemption to even include for-profit businesses, and (2) it expanded who can be discriminated against in hiring.

What this means is that a much larger swath of federal contractors—which employ more than 20% of the American workforce—can now claim religious exemptions to discriminate even more egregiously in who they employ. The policy is particularly damaging to LGBTQ people, women, religious minorities, and humanists.

The harm is real. It means a taxpayer-funded refugee resettlement program can fire an unmarried woman after she becomes pregnant. It means a building contractor can refuse to hire a transgender man because of the discriminatory religious beliefs of the company’s owner. The bottom line: it distorts the concept of religious freedom to allow someone to weaponize their beliefs against workers.

The Biden administration has proposed a rule that would rescind this carte-blanche to discriminate. The new proposed rule would return the government’s policy to the narrow and discrete religious exemption in place before Trump, and restore the equity, fairness, and, of course, religious freedom that previously existed. (American Humanist Society)

My comment: The religious beliefs and sexual orientation of employees have absolutely nothing to do with employers, unless they affect the smooth running and profitability of the company. This pandering to the views of religious extremists is no doubt a vote-winner among some evangelicals (not all!) but is perverse and cruel.

In my old company we had unmarried women pregnant, homosexuals, etc, a cross-section of humanity; and they were all treated – with humanity. Epicurus is famous for thinking, and acting, likewise. It is called understanding and civilized behavior.