Q1: Do you believe everything we’ve ever experienced is imprinted
on our brains? If yes…
Q2: Once imprinted, barring injury (think “needle scratching
a vinyl record”), can it ever be deleted/erased? Or, is it there for good?
Make your case(s).
(by PrimalSoup)
Unless, of course, you don't find any of the following amusing.
Bill Maher said the lack of Republican National Convention speeches from former presidents or vice presidents indicates the GOP has made a “clean cut” with its past.
“It’s a little odd, isn’t it? That the Republicans had no former president, vice president. There was no Mitt Romney there, no Bush, no Dick Cheney,” Maher said Friday on “Real Time with Bill Maher.”“It’s a little like Tom Cruise with his daughter,” Maher said, to laughter from the studio audience. “You know, ‘I don’t know you anymore.’”
“I feel like I’ve never seen a convention where the party just disowned its complete past like that,” Maher added.
The discussion took place on a panel with CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, Democratic strategist James Carville and Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw (Texas).
Crenshaw started to push back, noting it “doesn’t really matter” if Republicans “put on the best show,” adding, “I know we have better policy.”
Maher shot back, “It’s an indication that you have made a clean cut with what Republicanism was up until Trump.”
‘Barely surviving’: Some flight attendantsare facing homelessness and hungerWorking “on reserve” with hours of unpaid labor makes it difficult for new flight attendants to turn the job into a career.Kay had already worked a full day when Frontier Airlines called her to pick up a shift. The recently hired flight attendant had been awake since 4 a.m. driving Lyft, one of the few side gigs she could manage with her unpredictable schedule.
Her new career was off to a rough start. There were three-and-a-half weeks of unpaid training. Her first few paychecks were lower than she’d anticipated. She gave up her apartment in Atlanta, where median rent is about $1,500, and had been renting a room from a friend.
The only way to make ends meet, she said, was to juggle all the gig work she could find: Instacart shopping, pet sitting, Lyft driving. The ride-share company was offering a $500 bonus for completing 120 rides in four days. With her projected pay of $23,000 a year before taxes and insurance, chasing the extra money felt necessary.
So after working for Frontier from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m., Kay turned back to Lyft. By the time she reached the bonus, she’d gone nearly 24 hours without sleep.Kay is not alone. Most new flight attendants work “on reserve,” spending days waiting to be assigned flights. It’s common for them to take side jobs — bartenders, semi-truck drivers, makeup artists, church musicians. Some say they are struggling to feed their families and are living out of their cars.
A: The American middle class is indeed shrinking, according to recent data and analyses. Here are the key points:Declining Middle Class PopulationThe share of American adults living in middle-class households has steadily decreased over the past five decades:The middle class is being squeezed from both sides:
- In 1971, 61% of Americans were in the middle class
- By 2021, this had fallen to 50% of the population
- The latest data from 2023 shows 51% in the middle class
- Some middle-class households have moved into the upper-income tier
- Others have fallen into the lower-income tier
Specifically:As the middle class has contracted, its share of aggregate income has declined significantly:Income and Wealth Distribution
- The share of adults in the upper-income tier increased from 14% in 1971 to 21% in 2021
- The share in the lower-income tier grew from 25% to 29% over the same period
Meanwhile, upper-income households have seen their share of aggregate income rise from 29% to 50% between 1970 and 2020.
- In 1970, middle-class households accounted for 62% of aggregate U.S. income
- By 2020, this had fallen to just 42%
Some demographic groups have fared better than others:
- Older Americans and Black adults made the greatest progress up the income ladder from 1971 to 2021
- However, Black and Latino Americans are still more likely to be in the lower-income tier compared to white Americans
While the shrinking middle class partly reflects upward mobility for some, it also signals growing income inequality and polarization in American society. The trend has significant economic and social implications, potentially affecting economic stability, consumer spending, and social cohesion.
The Christian Persecution Narrative Rings HollowThis June, I was invited on a friend’s podcast to answer a question I’ve been asked over and over again in the Trump era. Are Christians really persecuted in the United States of America? Millions of my fellow evangelicals believe we are, or they believe we’re one election away from a crackdown. This sense of dread and despair helps tie conservative Christians, people who center their lives on the church and the institutions of the church, to Donald Trump — the man they believe will fight to keep faith alive.
As I told my friend, the short answer is no, not by any meaningful historical definition of persecution. American Christians enjoy an immense amount of liberty and power.
But that’s not the only answer. American history tells the story of two competing factions that possess very different visions of the role of faith in American public life. Both of them torment each other, and both of them have made constitutional mistakes that have triggered deep cultural conflict.
One of the most valuable and humbling experiences in life is to experience an American community as part of the in-group and as part of the out-group. I spent most of my life living in the cultural and political center of American evangelical Christianity, but in the past nine years I’ve been relentlessly pushed to the periphery. The process has been painful. Even so, I’m grateful for my new perspective.
When you’re inside evangelicalism, Christian media is full of stories of Christians under threat — of universities discriminating against Christian student groups, of a Catholic foster care agency denied city contracts because of its stance on marriage or of churches that faced discriminatory treatment during Covid, when secular gatherings were often privileged over religious worship.
Combine those stories with the personal tales of Christians who faced death threats, intimidation and online harassment for their views, and it’s easy to tell a story of American backsliding — a nation that once respected or even revered Christianity now persecutes Christians. If the left is angry at conservatives for seeking the protection of a man like Trump, then it has only itself to blame.After living inside and outside conservative evangelicalism, I have a different view. While injustice is real, the Christian persecution narrative is fundamentally false. America isn’t persecuting Christians; it’s living with the fallout of two consequential constitutional mistakes that distort our politics and damage our culture.
First, for most of American history, courts underenforced the establishment clause of the First Amendment. It wasn’t even held clearly applicable to the states until 1947. Americans lived under what my colleague Ross Douthat calls the “soft hegemony of American Protestantism.” It was “soft” in part because America never possessed a national church on par with European establishments, but it was certainly hard enough to mandate Bible readings and prayer in schools and to pass a host of explicitly anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments that were intended to blunt Catholic influence in the United States.This soft hegemony wasn’t constitutionally or culturally sustainable. Mandating Protestant Scripture readings is ultimately incompatible with a First Amendment that doesn’t permit the state to privilege any particular sect or denomination. Culturally, the process of diversification and secularization makes any specific religious hegemony impossible. There simply aren’t a sufficient number of Americans of any single faith tradition to dominate American life.
In the 1960s the Warren court began dismantling the soft Protestant establishment by blocking school prayer and Scripture reading. A series of cases limited the power of the state to express a religious point of view. But then state and local governments overcorrected. They overenforced the establishment clause and violated the free speech and free exercise clauses by taking aim at private religious expression.
The desire to disentangle church and state led to a search-and-destroy approach to religious expression in public institutions. Public schools and public colleges denied religious organizations equal access to public facilities. States and public colleges denied religious institutions equal access to public funds.Conservative and liberal justices have created a different, sustainable equilibrium, but the religious liberty culture war rages on anyway — in part because millions of Americans don’t want to strike a balance. They actually prefer domination to accommodation. Many conservative evangelicals miss the old Protestant establishment, and they want it back. This is part of the impulse behind the recent Ten Commandments law in Louisiana, for example, or the recent effort in Oklahoma to establish a religious charter school, a public school run by the Catholic Church.
Combine these efforts at religious establishment with red-state legislation aimed at progressive and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, and one could fairly assert that Christians are persecuting their opponents.
But there’s more to it than that. There are secular Americans who do take aim at Christian expression and at Christian institutions. They don’t want separation of church and state so much as they seek regulation of the church by the state, to push the church into conformance with a secular political ideology.
Thirty-three students filed a class action complaint against the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon on March 29, 2021. The students challenged the Department’s alleged complicity in abuses perpetrated against LGBTQ+ students at taxpayer-funded religious colleges and universities. The students sought to represent a class of “more than 100,000 LGBTQ+ students who attend taxpayer-funded religious colleges and universities that openly discriminate against them in both policy and practice.” At the religious institutions, plaintiffs alleged being subjected to conversion therapy, expulsion, denial of housing and healthcare, sexual and physical abuse and harassment, and other stigmatic harms. [That's Gods infinite love in plain sight] The students alleged that the Department of Education was wrongly using the religious exemption under Title IX to breach its obligation to protect students from abuse based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. The students brought a constitutional claim against the DOE under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for violating the Establishment Clause, Equal Protection and substantive due process. .... The case was assigned to District Judge Ann L. Aiken on March 30, 2021. (emphasis added)
