1.
You were probably asking yourself just this morning, “Self, when did the Guinness Book of Records start, and why?” Since it began in the year of my birth my inclination has been that it’s always existed, time eternal, like fish sticks or VELCRO®. (VELCRO® was patented in the same year) The idea came about in the early 1950’s when Sir Hugh Beaver (1890—1967), Managing Director of the Guinness Brewery, attended a shooting party in County Wexford. There, he and his hosts argued about the fastest game bird in Europe and failed to find an answer in any reference book. In 1954, recalling his shooting party argument, Sir Hugh had the idea for a Guinness promotion based on the idea of settling pub arguments and invited the twins Norris (1925—2004) and Ross McWhirter (1925—75) who were fact-finding researchers from Fleet Street to compile a book of facts and figures. We either had a copy from the 1960s at home growing up or I checked one out at the library. Fascinating stuff for a kid.
These days, the business has changed its name to Guinness World Records but if you have an interest in a deep-dive of the origin of it all, check out the article in the Guardian published this week wherein the author, Imogen West-Knights, posits the question has it gone from being about the pursuit of knowledge to simply another big business?
2.
Kansans beware as politics and religion are swimming in the same salty pool these days. The Kansas Reflector, a dang good digital rag, has been digging into the influence of religion in the state legislature. We all know Topeka is the home of the Westboro Baptist Church founded by the infamous Fred Phelps (1929-2014) of ‘God Hates Fags’ fame. Now we have Rep. Emil Bergquist, Wichita, along with state Treasurer Steven Johnson and Wellington Republican Rep. Bill Rhiley, leading prayers during a ceremony on May 4th, asking God for more religious influence in society at large.
According to the Reflector article the House and Senate open each daily legislative session with a prayer to God as lawmakers seek spiritual guidance before turning their attention to policymaking. On one of the last days of the regular 2023 legislative session on April 6, Bergquist sang “The Lord’s Prayer” to his fellow House lawmakers shortly before voting on a bill that would allow parents to pull their children from classes that didn’t align with their moral or religious beliefs, and a bill separating students by sex assigned at birth for overnight school field trips.
And Sen. Mark Steffen, a Hutchinson Republican, offered to convert a Muslim woman and a news reporter when asked in March how he represented his non-Christian constituents.
Behind closed doors at Riverside Baptist Church in Hutchinson, Steffen and other Republicans strategized ways of evangelizing Kansans. A secret audio recording of their March 2 meeting was shared with Kansas Reflector. Reno County Commissioner John Whitesel, Reno County GOP chairman Ryan Patton, Rep. Mike Murphy and Ellis County GOP chairman Adam Peters emphasized the importance of spreading Christianity. Peters said more of his fellow Christian Republicans needed to run for government positions to counteract liberal influence and pass bills such as parental rights legislation as a first step toward “healing” the country.
I’m all in for people believing in whatever wacky higher power that gives their life meaning, but this trend all across the country using Christian nationalism to legislate civil and criminal laws that reflect their view of Christianity is quite disturbing and is directly tied into the banning of books that I wrote about earlier this week.
And in Texas, of course, the Texas Tribune reported that opponents of church-state separation have been emboldened by recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions and the growing acceptance of Christian nationalism on the right. David Barton of Wallbuilders, appearing before a Texas Senate Education Committee last month, argued that Christianity has always formed the basis of American morality and thus is essential to Texas classrooms. He said, “This is traditional, historical stuff. It’s hard to say that anything is more traditional in American education than was the Ten Commandments.” Already this legislative session, the Texas Senate has approved bills that would require the Ten Commandments to be posted in all public school classrooms and allow unlicensed religious chaplains to supplant the role of school counselors. Meanwhile, there are numerous efforts to eliminate or weaken two state constitutional amendments that prohibit direct state support of religious schools and organizations, a key plank of the broader school-choice movement.
The Tribune went on to report that February polling from the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than half of Republicans adhere to or sympathize with pillars of Christian nationalism, including beliefs that the U.S. should be a strictly Christian nation. Of those respondents, PRRI found, roughly half supported having an authoritarian leader who maintains Christian dominance in society. Experts have also found strong correlations between Christian nationalist beliefs and opposition to immigration, racial justice and religious diversity.
These people, Republicans, are much louder and more insistent than you or me and are on a crusade. Will you please JUST. VOTE. BLUE?
3.
Heard of the Robinson-Patman Act? Me neither until this week. The Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 (RPA) is a U.S. antitrust law preventing large franchises and chains from engaging in price discrimination against small businesses. If a wholesaler supplier sells products to a franchise at a discounted price not available to a smaller business, such as a volume price, they could be in violation of this act.
Cut to: why are our grocery prices so danged high? According to the New York Times, for roughly four decades, the Federal Trade Commission vigorously enforced the act. From 1954 to 1965, the agency issued 81 cease-and-desist orders to stop suppliers of milk, tea, oatmeal, candy and other foods from giving preferential prices to the largest grocery chains. Supermarket chains like Safeway and Kroger also thrived. This dynamism fed a broad prosperity. Even the smallest towns and poorest neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store. And the industry’s diffuse structure ensured that its fruits were widely distributed.
Then, in the late 70s, the law fell into disfavor with regulators, who had come to believe that allowing large retailers to flex more muscle over suppliers would lower consumer prices. For the most part, the law hasn’t been enforced since. As a top Reagan administration official explained in 1981, antitrust was no longer “concerned with fairness to smaller competitors.”
Actual glaciers are moving faster than the resurrection of the Robinson-Patman Act but last year an unusual coalition of Democratic and Republican lawmakers sent a letter to the F.T.C. urging it to blow the dust off the act. In the meantime, if you’re wallet is hurting anyway, spend it locally if possible as I wrote about in my post of May 19th.
4.
And in a short follow up of my post earlier this week on book banning I was encouraged to read in the Washington Post yesterday that nine Democratic governors representing nearly 9 million students have sent a letter to leading textbook companies decrying “the negative impact that censorship and book-banning has on this nation’s students.” The letter indicates that the governors are watching closely to see if attacks on the companies by right-wing governors — such as DeSantis — are producing books that are “inappropriately censored.” Phil Murphy, governor of New Jersey and the head of the Democratic Governors Association, says these governors will be modeling an alternative to right-wing censorship going forward. Hopefully the attacks toward the liberal, but mythical, “woke ideologies” and “woke agenda” that have right wing Moms for Liberty clutching their Guccis have roused a sleeping giant.
Tiny Tidbits of Goddamn!
1. Charlie Pierce writes, As part of the proposed debt-ceiling extortion, a provision was inserted that would green-light the approval process to finish the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a natural-gas delivery system beloved by Senator Joe Manchin (also a natural gas delivery system) and despised by people living along its proposed route. House Natural Resources ranking member Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who helped lead the opposition to previous attempts at energy permitting, said, “Mandating approval of the Mountain Valley pipeline is a disturbing and profoundly disappointing addition to this bill. Condemning Appalachian communities to generations of pollution and pain is a legacy that no one should be forced to vote for.” Thanks for nothing, Joe Manchin. And thank you, Tucsonan Raúl Grijalva, for speaking out. Goddamn.
2. The usurpers involved in the January 6th debacle are eating their own. Heh. According to Politico Roberto Minuta, one of more than a dozen Oath Keepers who surged with a mob into the Capitol on Jan. 6, lashed out at the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes, on Thursday as he prepared to face sentencing for his conviction on seditious conspiracy. Minuta said Rhodes was part of a “deranged leadership” that turned the Oath Keepers “into a political ‘rah-rah Trump’ disaster” that duped many of the group’s members into criminal activity. U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta sentenced him to 4½ years in prison. Chomp Chomp. Tastes good. Goddamn.
3. Mob family, responsible for over 500,000 overdose deaths in ‘merika, ruled not personably liable for retribution by the second US circuit court of appeals in New York. Them rich, white drug dealers get all the breaks. Goddamn.
"Poverty is not caused by men and women getting married; it's not caused by machinery; it's not caused by ‘over-production’; it's not caused by drink or laziness; and it's not caused by ‘over-population’. It's caused by Private Monopoly. That is the present system. They have monopolized everything that it is possible to monopolize; they have got the whole earth, the minerals in the earth and the streams that water the earth. The only reason they have not monopolized the daylight and the air is that it is not possible to do it.
If it were possible to construct huge gasometers and to draw together and compress within them the whole of the atmosphere, it would have been done long ago, and we should have been compelled to work for them in order to get money to buy air to breathe. And if that seemingly impossible thing were accomplished tomorrow, you would see thousands of people dying for want of air - or of the money to buy it - even as now thousands are dying for want of the other necessities of life. You would see people going about gasping for breath, and telling each other that the likes of them could not expect to have air to breathe unless they had the money to pay for it.
Most of you here, for instance, would think and say so. Even as you think at present that it's right for so few people to own the Earth, the Minerals and the Water, which are all just as necessary as is the air. In exactly the same spirit as you now say: ‘It's Their Land,’ ‘It's Their Water,’ ‘It's Their Coal,’ ‘It's Their Iron,’ so you would say ‘It's Their Air,’ ‘These are their gasometers, and what right have the likes of us to expect them to allow us to breathe for nothing?’ And even while he is doing this the air monopolist will be preaching sermons on the Brotherhood of Man; he will be dispensing advice on "Christian Duty" in the Sunday magazines; he will give utterance to numerous more or less moral maxims for the guidance of the young. And meantime, all around, people will be dying for want of some of the air that he will have bottled up in his gasometers. And when you are all dragging out a miserable existence, gasping for breath or dying for want of air, if one of your number suggests smashing a hole in the side of one of the gasometers, you will all fall upon him in the name of law and order, and after doing your best to tear him limb from limb, you'll drag him, covered with blood, in triumph to the nearest Police Station and deliver him up to ‘justice’ in the hope of being given a few half-pounds of air for your trouble.”
— Robert Tressell , The Ragged -Trousered Philanthropists (published 1914)
And now…
Maybe there really is a silent majority and it ain't them. Looks like so-called Christian so-called nationalists are getting pretty far out over their skis.
Those Kansas Republicans aren’t just louder and more insistent, they’re effing nuts