Besides the News - 04/18/25
Good Friday Edition
Good afternoon everybody! Well, it’s good Friday and we’re heading into the Easter weekend. We hope you all have a wonderful time with your family, but as usual, we’re here to bring you down with the latest nonsense from the news, and then bring you right back up again with some of our music and art recommendations. So, let’s get into it!
Jack’s Picks
Are you as confused as I am about the progressive outrage over DOGE’s efforts to access social security data? First of all, your social security number is probably out there already. I’m sorry to break it to you, but with the number of data breaches happening these days, nobody’s data is really safe. I had my first case of identity theft recently, actually - and I’ve only been in America for four years! Somebody used my social and credit card to apply for credit using Klarna to make a Samsung purchase. And as I write this, I’m realising I should probably follow up with the relevant agencies to make sure that’s all wrapped up. Oops.
My ramblings aside, it’s obvious that Musk isn’t engaged in some dark plot to access your personal data for nefarious means. He’s weeding out fraud, identifying illegal aliens, and more. The richest man on the planet doesn’t need your social security number, Sandra. Nor is he interested in your $40,000 savings account. His ability to access your private data is no more concerning than literally every other agency in government and various private groups doing the same. If anything, it’s probably safer in his hands. And I say that as somebody who is wildly critical of him.
In other news, Tulsi Gabbard and her family have been targeted by new death threats. This story is a few days old, but I wanted to offer some thoughts on what’s happening.
Gabbard has previously blasted her former party for creating conditions whereby leftists and progressives feel justified in attacking and targting conservatives. And I don’t think she’s wrong. I would, however, offer some advice for those who take this argument and run with it: don’t forget that conservatives play these games, too.
Yes, Antifa is wildly more violent, much more ideologically aggressive, and frankly more psychologically deranged than conservatives for the most part. But that doesn’t mean conservatives are innocent. We can certainly highlight the conditions progressives have created that have led to a rise in the violent targeting and canceling of conservatives across the board, but falling into the trap of blaming every single violent attack or threat on progressives is a mistake. The reality is that public figures and politicians face threats from deranged lunatics all the time, and it happens even during periods of more moderate political disagreement. It’s only a matter of time before a progressive politician is targeted by a deranged “conservative” activist, and when that happens, everything conservatives have previously said about liberals putting conservatives in danger may be easily dismissed as nonsense, or worse, their own argument may be used against them.
Let’s talk about this problem, but let’s be fair in every case.
Besides the News…
Because it’s Good Friday and I’m British, I wanted to lift your spirits a little and offer some culinary inspiration for this coming weekend. We have lots of great food over the spring/Easter period, and these are some of my favourite:
Roast Lamb
Lamb is my favourite meat, and it’s traditionally eaten over Easter in the U.K. There’s not much to say here other than that it’s a meat that is sorely overlooked in most of the United States. If you can buy it local, do so - there are lots of cheap New Zealand imports, and while perfectly delicious even after it’s frozen, many of New Zealand’s improts are Halal.
Simnel Cake
Simnel cake is an old recipe, but old doesn’t mean bad. This is a dense fruit case decorated with almost or marzipan. It’s fantastic with a cup of tea.
Hot Cross Buns
Hot Cross Buns are another Easter favourite - but beware! If you see them on the shelves in the States, the cross on the top is usually made of icing. Traditionally, it is made of wheat paste that is baked into the bread. I made the mistake of toasting an American hot cross bun in a vertical toaster recently, not realising it was iced. That ended in…disaster. If you’d like them the traditional way, click here for a recipe. I love them halfed, toasted, and buttered.
That’s it from me today, read on to see what Aaron’s been thinking about!
Aaron’s Picks
Happy Easter, everyone. I spent a late night listening to Paul Simon so I haven’t been terribly tuned in this morning yet to news but I wanted to drop a few by that really resonated with me.
The hit pieces on RFK Jr.’s interest in exploring science related to environmental exposures, including vaccines, will be endless over the coming weeks. We have a population that has become so accustomed to hearing how magical vaccines can save everything that unwinding that deeply held position will be akin to unwinding a religion. If there is one guy who can do it, I believe he is in the position now to make it happen. Here is RFK talking with Hannity about what he is hoping to accomplish in the coming months.
But I am sure, according to the sycophants in the press, that it’s because he’s a kook on all of this that he’s wrong about it, not that the whole system has been corrupted from the rotten core out.
In other Kennedy news, Tulsi Gabbard released the files today on the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Here she is explaining some of what is contained within the files.
The White House has repurposed an old, miserable website about Covid-19 as a trolling piece tribute to the horrid episode in our history.
(Click the photo to see it)
Finally, a piece that I had the chance to write for House In Habit about the long arc of RFK Jr. and his passions for the health of our nation.
Happy Easter everyone. I will leave you with a chapter from my book about faith in Christ that I hope sends good tidings to all who are reading!
From Careless In The Care of God
Chapter 3
Why the World Needs a Gracious Message
Years ago, I was on a bus somewhere between Jerusalem and Hebron when we passed a group of angry people burning tires and Israeli flags in the street. It was a surprising scene for an American kid, and it was permanently embedded in my mind because of the jarring violence and anger that it showed. These people’s frustration with their situation was palpable, and it had escalated to the place where they chose to lash out in anger and vandalism. In years since, I have wondered what has happened to those young kids in the streets. Were they able to overcome that anger, or did it advance further to the point where they were overcome with it?
Pain is hard. We all have it, and there isn't a solution on earth that can destroy it. The degrees of pain can differ, certainly. The pain experienced by a multimillionaire in the United States is certainly different than the pain of a child in Africa who is starving, but there are no gradients of pain that have any more or less impact on the soul. It is the burden that kills us. One of the most complex issues of our day is that media has made it easy to see many of the hardships and tragedies in the world through the accessibility of the internet and television. That ease allows us to assess for ourselves, from the comfort of our affluent surroundings and uninformed perspectives, what is just and righteous. The trap is that when we see suffering, we immediately find compassion in our heart and place a scale on the pain being experienced. I have no idea of what it is like to be hungry and an orphan, but neither does anyone know the pain that my dark secrets and life have caused me. When we spend our energy grading out the pain associated with what we see, we fail to heed what Jesus wanted us to comprehend about loving one another. The Prodigal Son is a wonderful parable about this temptation we all have to judge pain and justify our righteousness, grading one another’s issues on a scale of our own. In this parable, Jesus, as always, starts the discussion with several different examples demonstrating human responses, including in the case of a lost sheep, a lost coin, and then finally the lost son:
By this time a lot of men and women of doubtful reputation were hanging around Jesus, listening intently. The Pharisees and religion scholars were not pleased, not at all pleased. They growled, “He takes in sinners and eats meals with them, treating them like old friends.” Their grumbling triggered this story.
“Suppose one of you had a hundred sheep and lost one. Wouldn’t you leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the lost one until you found it? When found, you can be sure you would put it across your shoulders, rejoicing, and when you got home call in your friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Celebrate with me! I’ve found my lost sheep!’ Count on it—there’s more joy in heaven over one sinner’s rescued life than over ninety-nine good people in no need of rescue.
“Or imagine a woman who has ten coins and loses one. Won’t she light a lamp and scour the house, looking in every nook and cranny until she finds it? And when she finds it you can be sure she’ll call her friends and neighbors: ‘Celebrate with me! I found my lost coin!’ Count on it—that’s the kind of party God’s angels throw every time one lost soul turns to God.”
Then He said, “There was once a man who had two sons. The younger said to his father, ‘Father, I want right now what’s coming to me.’
“So the father divided the property between them. It wasn’t long before the younger son packed his bags and left for a distant country. There, undisciplined and dissipated, he wasted everything he had. After he had gone through all his money, there was a bad famine all through that country and he began to hurt. He signed on with a citizen there who assigned him to his fields to slop the pigs. He was so hungry he would have eaten the corncobs in the pig slop, but no one would give him any.
“That brought him to his senses. He said, ‘All those farmhands working for my father sit down to three meals a day, and here I am starving to death. I’m going back to my father. I’ll say to him, Father, I’ve sinned against God, I’ve sinned before you; I don’t deserve to be called your son. Take me on as a hired hand.’ He got right up and went home to his father.
“When he was still a long way off, his father saw him. His heart pounding, he ran out, embraced him, and kissed him. The son started his speech: ‘Father, I’ve sinned against God, I’ve sinned before you; I don’t deserve to be called your son ever again.’
“But the father wasn’t listening. He was calling to the servants, ‘Quick. Bring a clean set of clothes and dress him. Put the family ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Then get a grain-fed heifer and roast it. We’re going to feast! We’re going to have a wonderful time! My son is here—given up for dead and now alive! Given up for lost and now found!’ And they began to have a wonderful time.
“All this time his older son was out in the field. When the day’s work was done, he came in. As he approached the house, he heard the music and dancing. Calling over one of the houseboys, he asked what was going on. He told him, ‘Your brother came home. Your father has ordered a feast—barbecued beef!—because he has him home safe and sound.’
“The older brother stalked off in an angry sulk and refused to join in. His father came out and tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t listen. The son said, ‘Look how many years I’ve stayed here serving you, never giving you one moment of grief, but have you ever thrown a party for me and my friends? Then this son of yours who has thrown away your money on whores shows up and you go all out with a feast!’
“His father said, ‘Son, you don’t understand. You’re with me all the time, and everything that is mine is yours—but this is a wonderful time, and we had to celebrate. This brother of yours was dead, and he’s alive! He was lost, and he’s found!’”
This parable is often used to explain the grace of God, and it’s a good illustration of it, but I also think Jesus was asking us to look at one another for the pure value of our humanity. When a soul is in pain, redemption has unmeasurable value to the one who receives it. The story isn't just about the sheep or the coin or the son that is lost. It is also about the people who find joy in the restoration. The shepherd is glad to have his sheep among the flock, the woman is thrilled to have found the precious coin, and the father is overjoyed by the return of his son. Redemption is only one part of this story however and Jesus polishes the parable off by introducing the judgmental older son. The older son makes his assessments of the situation, decides what was fair and what wasn’t, judges the father and the son for their cavalier approach to it all, and proudly proclaims his resentment of the whole scene. The final lines of the parable seem to point to the idea that making these kinds of assessments about others’ pain and journey may not be what’s best in human relationships. “Don’t you understand you are with me all the time, and everything that is mine is yours,” the father says. He is asking the older brother not to grade the situation in relationship to his own. It is almost as if the father is saying to the older son, “You have your troubles and so does he. Can’t we agree that redemption belongs to both of you?”
We struggle as a society to reconcile that redemption is available to all. War and greed and violence demonstrate humanity’s incapacity to solve complex problems, and so we project that not all deserve to be redeemed. We all approach everything with bias. We bring our own baggage of pain and frustrations to every endeavor. Instead of working our way to being peacemakers, we utilize vehicles like politics, economics, and religion, to affirm the pain points we project on the situation for people we observe from a distance. No matter who is in charge of the social structure or governmental politics, it is impossible for these leaders to manage both the complex rubric of people’s individuality and our expectations that leaders create an orderly society. I think that is a huge aspect of why Jesus didn't come and spend His energy talking about politics or economic systems. He admonished people to love all—especially those that wear their pain on the outside. I think He wanted us to start from the position of graciousness to one another, regardless of circumstances. I don't think that He was under the illusion that humans could actually accomplish the feat of total peace given their natural core, but I do think that He was acknowledging that God’s plan for people is to care for one another. If you can embrace the love of God, you can then pour out that care for others and, in turn, break down initial resentments, misunderstandings, or differences. If we are starting from this premise, we might find ourselves understanding others’ troubles, choices, and hurts. Compassion in a face-to-face context diffuses so many of the issues we struggle with amongst others.
I am not a social justice warrior. I actually don’t think that utilizing politics or economics to validate others’ pain is the right path to helping one another, but I understand why it is attractive. People are horribly self-motivated, and so it becomes really tempting to solve inaction or lack of progress for the downtrodden by force. If we could only make people behave, this damn place wouldn't be such a disaster! Unfortunately, I think this scaled approach to pain only exacerbates the problem. Regardless of economic prosperity or resource exploitation, we fail to see the whole picture, and so we solve one inequity while we build resentment in another. Our temporary station as expiring human beings brings a sense of urgency to the whole story and makes us feel the need to “do something.” While I resonate with the need and the urgency, I have to temper the solution with the patience and long view that God has. Humanity will always be fallible. Our own capabilities at escaping hunger, lack of shelter, and the shortcomings of other basic needs in living does not change the fact that all humans experience life with the same depravity of goodness, inherent to their souls. Because, philosophically, at our core I believe we are corrupt, it then stands to reason that we cannot achieve any kind of utopia here. It isn't a fair expectation, nor one suggested by God, that we could work our way to excellence, happiness, or a rewrite of the human condition.
How Is Grace a Solution?
Because the world attempts to run on law and order, we have a difficult time being comfortable with the idea that grace and generosity can be an operable philosophy for living. God decided to send Jesus to change the overall relationship between Himself and His creation. He generously said in His wisdom that we needed a way to break the old system of reconciliation. The cycle that we found ourselves in was one of perpetual, temporary repentance. There was a schedule for how and when we had to restore ourselves to Him. At some point in the story, God wanted to take His creation and break the chains of this order to make reconciliation permanently possible. I believe that transformation was manifested in the person of Jesus. I believe His sacrifice at the cross was the act that changed all of humanity’s destiny. It takes faith to believe in this, and it isn’t always as easy as just nodding your head and blindly saying yes. There are bigger questions, like why God needed sacrifice and why He seemed forever engrossed by anger. Those don’t have simple answers and they require, at some point, a leap from the empirical to the ethereal. I don't pretend to have all the answers for all the questions and holes that can be shot into the basis of faith. If you have your doubts about the Jesus story, you are actually in good company. I believe that most of humanity struggles to understand the relationships between the tangible and the mysterious. We love to have things make sense to our minds—the rational is much more attractive than the conceptual. I think that is at the core of why we struggle so completely to believe that grace has value as a societal and relational tool. We cannot comprehend that this propitiatory act by Jesus, that was freely given, has applicable translation to our everyday lives. We don't see its application making sense in the mundane. So, while it might be a nice story in the atmospherics of intellectualism, it cannot have pragmatic translation across all human relationships.
However, now is the time in history to depend deeply on the idea of being graceful to one another. Without our willingness to suspend the mindset of order and righteousness, we will forever continue on the path of misunderstanding and conflict. We need to embrace the grace that God gave us, and then transfer that goodness to others. I feel convinced that by living in this cycle of operation, we can have much more compassion for one another. We can tolerate the differences between people, and we don’t have to spend our efforts building a construct that the famous classification scientist Linnaeus would be proud of. When something doesn't make sense, I don’t believe that God calls us to place order and value around it. We are inclined to quickly judge the things we can’t understand, and then spend years, if not generations, undoing the harm and frustrations we have caused others by our snap to judge.
There are things that are right and wrong; things that we know are damaging and deconstructive to the relationship between ourselves and God. Paraphrasing the apostle Paul, “Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial.” Paul instructs the faithful that it can be destructive to ignore the wisdom of God and the hundreds of generations that have lived in faith with Him. We are all the wiser to trust His goodness, mercy, and wisdom in all circumstances. Wisdom is timeless—it corrects our hearts, checks our spirits, and keeps us grounded in something much more significant than our feelings. The suggestion here is not to ignore that wrong things happen. However, I am convinced that it is the believers’ first job to recognize that in this story of living, pain and frustration have impacts so significant to people that if we cannot start from a place of understanding, no amount of wisdom will overcome the derision that comes between peoples who cannot stand on the mutual ground of human fallibility. The world needs a lot more compassion and care than it needs righteous crusaders who are convinced of their own perfect convictions. I recognize and believe fervently that God has standards, but relationships do not start in a spreadsheet. We would be wise to stop looking at people as if they were statistical science projects that need analysis before we mark off all the checkboxes to assure our own safety. Relationships tend to be messy and filled with conflict; this conflict cannot be solved by abdicating our responsibility for graciousness towards one another. It does not give us permission to sin in abundance, because that has its own negative consequences and can derail the mandate to love one another. But we, as individuals, have to recognize that living in grace is a superhighway in both directions that requires us to extend as much grace to others as we, ourselves, need. Our love for one another is predicated on the idea that we need to love them as we love ourselves. That takes effort and significant understanding. This kind of life is not suddenly a free-for-all in which we get to live without consequence and hope that everyone around us extends us the grace we deserve. Instead, the free gift of grace gives us the responsibility to embrace each other in love and to extend kindness and mercy through our actions.
We live in a tumultuous world. Politics and economics can be crushing. It feels like all of humanity is out of control, and so we spend a mountain of energy trying to find organized solutions to the world’s problems. We build massive bureaucratic systems designed to root out the globe's worst offenders and make a separate set of institutions we can put them into in order to minimize the harm we feel from their choices. Regardless of our political persuasions, we elect politicians every cycle that we think will do better than the last and fix the system to our likings. The United States has one of the most influential yet convoluted monetary systems across the globe, where dollars are fixed as a reserve currency - but those dollars aren't deriving their value from anything other than people’s good faith. The system seems to crush the undereducated; the poor struggle to escape poverty, the sick are financially burdened if they try to get healthy, and those that want to advance are destroyed by the complex systems built by the well-connected and politically influential. We continue to hope that somewhere out there is a great savior who can fix all the downward spiraling we find ourselves in as a species. Instead, what we find at the end of all those paths is a giant pile of disappointment. We enter the cycle of disillusionment, and not unlike our forefathers, we continue to hope that by electing the right people, by empowering the smartest amongst us, something will change and we will be set free from this horrible cycle.
Now, as we see the societal systems we have built crumbling in our hands, is the perfect time to re-orient our thinking about these problems by re-framing our understanding of them. If we are honest in the assessment about our natural inclinations as people, we can ascertain that we are inherently bent towards evil. There is no election, reorganization of systems or passing of behavior altering laws that will change the reality of our internal shortcomings. This reorientation of understanding will not change the unscrupulous nature of humanity—but with enough faithful penetration and persistence towards loving each other, I do think that we as people can live with much more compassion and understanding of humanity and its troubles. It is impossible to fix pain and suffering; those troubles will always be with us. However, I believe that kindness and compassion, birthed from that place of understanding about our human nature, will give empathy to even the most complicated of problems people experience. We have for generations hoped that this inherent issue within our souls was something we could overcome. We have built systems in the Church and society that we believe will make us "better" people. Without fail, those systems disappoint us. We gather ourselves together again and again and re-draft the bylaws or hire "smarter" people to fix the issues, only to see those efforts fail again. I think if we understood and admitted that our nature is corrupt, we could be much more caring for those around us. We wouldn't need to rely on our own capabilities to fix these massive issues. We could instead approach the people in our sphere of influence and exercise grace towards them — so that they could walk through their pain and suffering, not in condemnation, but in relief that there is grace from God and their fellow man for all their heartache and failure.
Have a lovely weekend everyone!