- How mold is taken as a miracle, another example in an endless series throughout history;
- Short items about Trump, tariffs, and auto prices; lying about American history; how “make America healthy again” means the opposite; how a vaccine expert has been fired from the FDA; and how DOGE wants to privatize everything.
And in the news today, more lies, more reversals, from the Trump administration. He’s changed his mind. He doesn’t remember what he said. “Witch hunt” is one of his favorite terms, from his limited vocabulary, to dismiss any accusation against his band of incompetents. I suspect he was no idea what the actual witch hunts were about. It’s exhausting to try to keep up. We’re living in an upside-down, Alice in Wonderland world. And yet still he has fans.
Let me post this. It’s more significant that it might seem at first glance.
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 29 Mar 2025: It’s mold, not a miracle: The Catholic Church’s latest eucharistic blunder, subtitled “Another viral Catholic miracle turns out to be just bacteria and wishful thinking”
Once again, after suggesting a miracle had occurred and there was tangible proof, an investigation has discovered… that there was a perfectly sensible, scientific, non-miraculous explanation for it.
About a month ago, an X/Twitter account posted a story involving a “Eucharistic Miracle” at St. Anthony of Padua in Morris, Indiana. The account relayed a story a woman had just sent to her family, explaining that a consecrated communion wafer had accidentally been dropped on the floor. Instead of throwing it away, a priest put it in water and “left it in the tabernacle to dissolve.” He did the same thing to a second wafer that dropped later.
When a staffer went to check on those wafers the next day to see if they had dissolved, there were “spots of blood!” The woman added: “When I saw it today it looked like a very very thin piece of skin with blood on it.”
To those of us who’ve been around the block, so to speak, this is just another in an endless history of gullible people seeing things they want to believe. Perceiving things they don’t understand and mapping them into the limited fantasy world they’ve been taught to believe in from childhood.
In this case, it’s about mold. And similar explanations, we’re sure, explain all the so-called “miracles” from throughout history. Get a grip. Get real. But it won’t ever happen. Humans can’t bear much reality
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I’ll reduce some other items to headlines.
- NBC News, Kristen Welker and Alexandra Marquez, 29 Mar 2025: Trump says he ‘couldn’t care less’ if foreign automakers raise prices due to tariffs, subtitled “In a phone interview with NBC News, President Donald Trump also said he wouldn’t fire anyone involved in the Signal group chat.”
- The Bulwark, Thomas Lecaque, 30 Mar 2025: Trump’s Big New Propaganda Push, subtitled “Nothing says ‘restoring truth and sanity to American history’ quite like lying about it.”
- The Bulwark, Jonathan Cohn, 30 Mar 2025: When ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Actually Means the Opposite, subtitled “As part of a ‘painful period’ of cuts, Trump and RFK Jr. plan on dismantling the agency that focuses on substance abuse.”
- Salon, Natalie Chandler, 29 Mar 2025: “Misinformation and lies”: Peter Marks resigns from FDA, slams RFK, subtitled “Marks, who oversaw the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, clashed with vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” Again: authoritarian regimes fire the experts.
- Washington Post, 30 Mar 2025: DOGE wants businesses to run government services ‘as much as possible’, subtitled “Elon Musk’s effort is pushing privatization — a longtime goal for conservatives and for Silicon Valley alike — across federal agencies”. Comment: confirms what I’ve been thinking. Conservatives want to privatize everything so entrepreneurs can make more money. Everything will become, for the average consumer, more expensive. It’s happened before.
