Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The Covenant.

When I learned Santa Claus was definitely just a story (I’d had my suspicions for a while,) I did think of God, and while I didn’t turn into a baby atheist immediately, I’m quite sure a seed of skepticism was planted.

My seeds of doubt were planted in public school, when there was still a fair amount of religious stuff (particularly songs we sang during daily “opening excersizes.”) One of those songs, “God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall,” was one of the things that started me on the road to doubt:

God sees the little sparrow fall,

It meets His tender view;

If God so loves the little … Read the rest

Kirstjen Nielsen issued a statement yesterday:

Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen Statement on Passing of Eight Year Old Guatemalan Child

Murderous, callous, and chickenshits. The word is death. Nielsen’s statement is on the death of the eight year old Guatemalan child.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen M. Nielsen today released the following statement on the eight year-old Guatemalan national who passed away shortly before midnight on December 24 at Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center in Alamogordo, New Mexico:

“In the evening hours of December 24^th, a child who had been apprehended with his father by the Border Patrol attempting to illegally enter the United States, died at an El Paso hospital after being taken for emergency treatment for

No wonder Trump forced the government shutdown.

Lawyers for President Donald Trump are invoking the government shutdown to seek a delay in a court case over claims that Trump is illegally profiting from business his Washington hotel does with foreign countries.

Justice Department attorneys representing Trump asked a federal appeals court on Wednesday to postpone indefinitely all further filings in an appeal related to a suit that the governments of Maryland and Washington, D.C., filed over Trump’s alleged violation of the Constitution’s ban on foreign emoluments.

Convenient, isn’t it. If you get sued for abusing your presidency to fill your pockets, you just shut down the government so that the case can’t proceed. Heads he wins, tails we lose.… Read the rest

So close, and yet…

Hey, kids under 8 years old, thanks for reading The New York Times. But this time, please don’t. Maybe go play Minecraft or something instead.

… O.K., are they gone now? Cool. Here’s what President Trump said to a child about Santa Claus on Monday: “Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at 7, it’s marginal, right?”

“Yes, sir,” the child, Collman, responded twice. She had spoken with the president for at least 10 seconds before he suggested that her parents had been lying to her all her life.

Ah, are we going to talk about that?

No; the next paragraph is about Collman putting out cookies for Santa.

Whatever. But the thing is, … Read the rest

There’s the big picture, and then there are the details. One detail is the town of Fergus Falls, Minnesota.

Claas Relotius, who spent weeks reporting in Fergus Falls last year for one of Europe’s most respected publications, could have written about the many residents who maintain friendships across partisan lines, about the efforts to lure former residents back to west-central Minnesota or about how a city of roughly 14,000 people maintains a robust arts scene.

To give a sense of the place, he could have described local landmarks like the giant statue of Otto the Otter. Or the Minnesota-shaped welcome sign next to the Applebee’s. Or the expansive prairie that surrounds the town.

But he did not.

Instead,

SpiegelOnline a few days ago:

It has now become clear that Claas Relotius, 33 years old, one of DER SPIEGEL’s best writers, winner of multiple awards and a journalistic idol of his generation, is neither a reporter nor a journalist. Rather, he produces beautifully narrated fiction. Truth and lies are mixed together in his articles and some, at least according to him, were even cleanly reported and free of fabrication. Others, he admits, were embellished with fudged quotes and other made-up facts. Still others were entirely fabricated. During his confession on Thursday, Relotius said, verbatim: “It wasn’t about the next big thing. It was the fear of failure.” And: “The pressure not to fail grew as I became more

An actual feminist fighting an actual oppressive patriarchy…. https://t.co/Ex0N4DDHwO

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) December 26, 2018

Well thank fuck we have Jordan Peterson to tell us which oppressive patriarchies are actual, right?… Read the rest

Nick Cohen says the reason Corbyn and pals are so chill about Brexit may be that old Leninist magic.

Labour has inherited the mental deformations of the Leninist style of doing business: the leadership personality cult, the love of conspiracy theory, the robotic denunciations of opponents, and most critically for our current crisis, the ineradicable fantasy that the worse conditions for the masses become, the brighter the prospects of the far left are. Disaster socialism is its alternative to disaster capitalism.

You know the one: don’t support reformist candidates because they will merely make things slightly better and thus kneecap more radical reforms. The idea is clear enough but…risky.

Labour’s leaders don’t sound remotely fearful, however. When asked about

Here’s a new distinction – for the first time ever the US is on the Reporters Without Borders list of most dangerous countries for journalists. High five?

At least 63 professional journalists were killed doing their jobs in 2018, a 15 percent increase over last year, said the group, Reporters Without Borders. The number of deaths rises to 80 when all media workers and people classified as citizen journalists are included, it said in its annual report.

The world’s five deadliest countries for journalists include three — India, Mexico and, for the first time, the United States — where journalists were killed in cold blood, even though those countries weren’t at war or in conflict, the group said.

Speaking of Wall and the border and holiday festivities and telling brown people to get out, we’ve killed another child in custody.

An 8-year-old boy from Guatemala died in United States custody early Christmas Day, according to the United States Customs and Border Protection.

The boy died just after midnight on Tuesday at a hospital in Alamogordo, N.M., where he and his father had been taken after a Border Patrol agent saw what appeared to be signs of sickness, according to a news release from the agency.

… Read the rest

I think Trump’s sudden lurch into rational skepticism at a socially inappropriate moment is hilarious, but I’m not going to pretend the whole “don’t tell the kids Santa is a story” routine makes any sense.

What’s the point of telling one’s children a lie that you know they’ll find out is a lie long before they’re out of childhood? Why not just tell them it’s a story? Adults don’t tell children pumpkins are the personified Spirit of Halloween, so what’s with all the “Shh shh don’t spill the beans” silliness? Apart from anything else I don’t see why parents would want to give their children reason to think Mommy and Daddy make a habit of lying to them.

Like so… Read the rest