Blessed art Thou, o Lord, teach me Thy statutes

"So you want more funding for the arts?"

As followers of my blog will know, I'm a big fan of English folklore, folk culture and heritage. As a kid, my standard weekend activities included "playing at the local Roman fort" and (after we moved) "hiking up the local Bronze Age hillfort" and "playing at the medieval castle".

I have a degree in archaeology, focusing heavily on British archaeology - my laptop has a homemade table with the differences between the British Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age taped to the back of it. Talking walks in the countryside is one of my main hobbies.

And then there's folklore! I have a bookshelf full of folklore books, I celebrate May Day and celebrated Halloween last year by carving turnip jack-o'-lanterns and singing "The Unquiet Grave" and the Lyke-Wake Dirge. I took St. George as my baptism saint when I converted to the Orthodox Church partly because he was the patron saint of England (he's also patron saint of Palestine, which makes the use of his flag by the EDL very funny and irritating to me), and I've visited Walsingham and Lindisfarne and walked multiple times to my local saint's shrine.

Now, I can't tell you that you should, for example, leave a comment about your concern for the way Grok has been promoting white nationalist beliefs, but public comments in the regulatory process are a key step and they shape what comes next. If the regulatory agency doesn't fully consider the comments and form a reasonable response to the ones it disagrees with, that can form the basis for overturning a regulation in court.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

@u-eat-people-ur-a-people-eater

This was too long to put in the tags so congratulations you get your own post <333

“Anyone who has read the Bible” includes everyone from Eastern Orthodox Christians to secular anti-theists. Try that one again. Please go tell Catherine of Siena, Angela of Foligno, Lutgardis of Aywieres, and Gertrude of Helfta that they were not worshipping God correctly. I didn’t even claim to experience half of what they have. 

On the note of worshipping God: I agree, I’m not worshipping God correctly. I attend and evangelical church against my will rather than the True Church of Eastern Orthodoxy. And until I renew my marriage vows with God and am baptized/chrismated into that church I unfortunately will not be able to properly worship God as we both desire I would. Until then, I do what it is within my power to: I love my neighbor and pray for the empowerment to love them more. For I know what my God has required of me: that I do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in their sight. 

I haven’t made anything up: the God of Israel does want to make out with me. He literally kissed me on the cheek Saturday and I fell asleep while he was holding me twice that night: once in his arms and then again in his lap. You don’t believe that? Skill issue. That’s not my problem. But to accuse me of making that up is honestly just laughable because you weren’t there. I KNOW that’s what I experienced. A hotel in Tennessee has security footage evidence of me reading a book and having a conversation with, from their vantage point, the air. You don’t have to believe that ANY of that like objectively happened, but to accuse me of not believing it happened is honestly ridiculous. I do believe it happened. Because, phenomenologically that’s what I experienced. 

There is almost nothing worse when one is psychotic then having someone near to you convince you that you are actually not unwell at all, but are in fact speaking to God, or that God is speaking through you, or that what you're experiencing is something good and revelatory and not a sign of a profoundly ill soul/brain. It's extremely dangerous to spread the kind of logic you're spreading, but only for actually schizophrenic/psychotic people.

You know what's a simple test? When you suspect that something you hear/see/feel/sense (that other people don't hear/see/feel/sense) might be from a religion's god, go to the holy book and see if it aligns with their character. In the case of Christianity and Judaism, no, being a "woman trapped in a male body" does not accord with what the book says and no, being insane is not a good or holy thing.

He isn't a sola scriptura Protestant, so "just read the Bible" doesn't hold here. He cited a bunch of historic mystics (medieval Catholic mysticism is a rabbit hole of crazy) and in the past has cited the African-American Christian ecstatic tradition.

The primary mistake is believing that to be childlike is to be naive and unquestioning. In reality, anyone who has been around children for more than an hour knows well that children ask "Why?" constantly. Curiosity is ingrained into them by nature and by the Lord, that they might learn the workings and nature of the world around them.

Crucially, these questions are asked earnestly and from a place of trust. Children are painfully sincere in their asks, and they ask because:

They trust that you know what they are asking.

They trust that you will tell it to them truthfully.

If a parent arrogantly dismisses the questions of a child, the questions cease, not because curiosity has faded - it's actually likely their curiosity will only be stoked by a deficit of answers - but because the trust has faltered.

The problem with that is what the Serpent actually said. "He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?" The correct answer to "Did God really say...?", at least in that instance, was "No, God never said that, and you're misrepresenting Him by claiming He did."

The primary mistake is believing that to be childlike is to be naive and unquestioning. In reality, anyone who has been around children for more than an hour knows well that children ask "Why?" constantly. Curiosity is ingrained into them by nature and by the Lord, that they might learn the workings and nature of the world around them.

Crucially, these questions are asked earnestly and from a place of trust. Children are painfully sincere in their asks, and they ask because:

They trust that you know what they are asking.

They trust that you will tell it to them truthfully.

If a parent arrogantly dismisses the questions of a child, the questions cease, not because curiosity has faded - it's actually likely their curiosity will only be stoked by a deficit of answers - but because the trust has faltered.

The problem with that is what the Serpent actually said. "He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?" The correct answer to "Did God really say...?", at least in that instance, was "No, God never said that, and you're misrepresenting Him by claiming He did."

A local paper had some great photographs, all taken by Nicole Hester:

The day before, Rep. Justin Pearson tries to attend a Senate Committee meeting and is barred access by the Sergeant at Arms.

Lawmakers and protesters link arms as the descend the capitol steps.

Once inside the chamber, Democratic representatives continued to stand together with arms linked.

They continued standing together with arms linked as votes were cast.

Democratic representatives take a group photo protesting the redistricting.

Rep. Justin Jones burns a photo of the Confederate flag with the words, We will not go back.

And stomps the ashes.

KeShaun Pearson being escorted from the building by the Staties.

KeShaun Pearson (left) being taken into custody. Rep. Justin Pearson (right) showing his support of his brother.

Additional information: State lawmakers have been gunning for Pearson and Jones nearly their entire terms. Most notably, in 2023, the House expelled them for participating in a protest at the Capitol. Their districts had to have special elections to have them reinstated.

Pearson is one of the plaintiffs of a lawsuit seeking an injunction against the redistricting.

Like, they may express that, even internally, as "i wish i could live in a village" but that's because saying shit is free and thinking out every half-formed desire into a fully-spun political program is tedious for most people. If you spend any amount of time playing it out, it's not really what they want. What they want is the opportunity to form community and connection, or networks of care outside the capitalist labor system, or exposure to people in otherwise non-overlapping spheres of life. They want whatever the opposite of capitalist atomization is, and they're pointing at a time and place that had that in order to say "see? I know it's possible, and therefore it's reasonable to want." It doesn't matter that other things in that time and place were bad, because that's not the part they're pointing at, and acting like they're trying to get everyone to hop in a time machine and go back to medieval europe or precolumbian america is being a little silly.

Notably, bigots and reactionaries do this too. Your average us republican fascist doesn't actually want to go back to the 1950s, no matter what he says. What he's gesturing at when he says it is a desire to recapture, in the present, the parts of the 1950s he considered "good" (segregation, enforced patriarchal family structure, more rigid gender regime) while keeping everything else.