Meanderings, 28 September 2024

Good morning! May that coffee bridge your night into your day smoothly and slowly.

Photo by Jen P. on Unsplash

Professional pickleball — yes, it’s in Chicagoland. Our son got into playing pickleball. He loved it. So does Kris’s sister. Are you or someone you know playing pickleball?

CHICAGO — Cubs fans with tickets to Tuesday’s game will get a double-dose of major league sports as Chicago’s professional pickleball team will face off against St. Louis in an exhibition match at Gallagher Way ahead of the game.

Major League Pickleball’s (MLP) Chicago Slice will face off against the St. Louis Shock in a rivalry exhibition match that will be held outside of Wrigley Field on Tuesday, Sept. 17, ahead of the Cubs’ game against the Oakland Athletics.

According to officials, the match will take place between 4:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. at Gallagher Way and the event is free for ticket holders of that evening’s game.

The MLP format of Pickleball brings men and women together in four-game matches. The first two games are played as either women’s doubles or men’s doubles and the final two games consist of mixed doubles.

John Fea on court evangelicals and sycophants:

Six years ago I wrote about the court evangelicals in Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. I suggested that the evangelicals who frequented the White House while Trump was president were trading their prophetic voice in exchange for photo-ops and access to power. I also argued that they had failed to learn from history.

Perhaps the court evangelicals should spend some time studying what happened in the Oval Office on February 1,1972. On that day, following the National Prayer Breakfast, Billy Graham met with Richard Nixon to discuss the ways the famous evangelist might help the president win a second term in office. I recently listened to all ninety-four minutes of the recording of this discussion, which the Nixon Library has labeled “Conversation 662-004.”

When the tape of the Nixon-Graham conversation was released in March 2002, the news coverage concentrated on Nixon and Graham’s anti-Semitism. Most historians have focused on this section of the recording as well. The anti-Semitic language is bad—really bad, even for the 1970s.

But the tapes also reveal Billy Graham as a political operative. The most revered holy man in post-World War II America was a campaign surrogate for one of the most corrupt presidents in American history. Graham was not in the Oval Office that winter day in 1972 for a photo-op or a chance to influence policy. He was there for a political strategy session. …

Nixon also asked Graham to help him plan his speaking engagements in the months leading up to Election Day. Nixon said he could use some help securing voters in the swing-state of Pennsylvania. Graham was happy to oblige, proudly telling the president that his financial support was strongest in the commonwealth—he would “get a whole string of engagements” there in the fall. Graham told Nixon, “I want you to say, straight-out, ‘Billy, I think I need your help here.’ Don’t ever hesitate to call me. . . .” At one point in the discussion Graham asked the president to provide him with political surrogates who could help craft presidential talking points that he could “defend on television.” Billy Graham was asking Richard Nixon, a prince of this world, to direct his steps.

Graham intoned that he would do just about anything to get Nixon elected in 1972—even if it damaged his Christian witness. “If [the election] comes right down to the wire,” he told Nixon, “and it looks like I could help in a public way, even if I had to come out and say ‘I’m voting for Richard Nixon’ . . . I’m ready to put that on the line even though it would hurt my ministry . . . I’m fifty-eight [years old], I don’t know how long I have anyway, so I don’t care.” Graham was fully aware of the way his political work for Nixon would weaken his effectiveness as a preacher of the Gospel. That didn’t seem to matter. 

[SMcK: Franklin learned his art at home.]

Steve McAlpine parses “narcissist” and “arcissist” and gets to the heart of the issue in Christian orgs, and please do read Chuck DeGroat on the problems. Positions of power attract n/arcissists. And the series I did recently on this Substack about the new book by Ramani Durvasula.

So let’s not make it a therapeutic issue. Let’s make it a moral issue if it indeed is exactly that. Let’s make it a theological issue.  And let’s not be cowards. If you are someone supporting an “arcissistic” system, then perhaps ask yourself what might be the outcome of you addressing the concerns of others on their behalf with the offending person?

Chances are you’re worried about your own relationship with the “arcissist”. Chances are in your gut you know that to push back on them – in a moral and theological manner rather than a therapeutic manner – might see you kicked to the kerb.  Cowardice is a serious sin. Serious enough that the book of Revelation tells us that it bars entry to the city of God.

We’re very good at assuming we are braver than we are. That we have more courage. Yet for me, the courageous ones are those who are able to call out bad behaviour and put an end to the dreary treadmill of arcissistic  and yes, narcissistic – leaders who are a blight on the church and her gospel witness.

So narcissist, “arcissist”, whatever. I’m probably over the splitting and defining of terms. It’s behaviours and their results that I’m interested in. And let’s face it, it’s not hard to recognise bad behaviour. It’s not hard to see the difference between a muddy conflict between two colleagues, and a long term aptitude for being a self-centred and domineering leader.

It does seem hard though to call it out when you see it affecting other people, and especially if calling it out might come at cost to yourself.

[SMcK: whistleblowers of such will experience blowback.]

Wow, threats of violence:

On the morning of July 11, several employees of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA received an emailed bomb threat from someone unaffiliated with the university, specifically naming the university’s library and dining commons. It might be called a typical bomb threat in which no bomb was found: local police and FBI evacuated students and staff from the library and summer campers from the dining hall before moving the rest of the campus to safe sites. Law enforcement determined the threat was not credible, and the university lifted the evacuation order later that day. It was disruptive, but not violent.

What followed over the next two weeks, though, was unusual. Four days later, and two days after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, a university library six hundred miles away received a similar threat. This one came hours after Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY announced the suspension of Professor John James for an “offensive and unacceptable” social media post sharing a screenshotted article about the Trump shooting with the words “If you’re gonna shoot, man, don’t miss.”

This time, the email came with the subject line “My manifesto,” and was sent to more than 90 campus addressees. “In the name of Donald Trump I have hidden highly lethal lead azide devices in the library and cafeteria,” the email read. Once again, a college campus was evacuated, searched by local police, and soon given the all clear.

Three days after that, on July 18, Arkansas State University’s library and student union were named. Again, university and local police, K-9 units, the sheriff’s office, and counter terrorism unit evacuated and searched, finding no credible threat.

The fourth university bomb threat in two weeks came a week later, this time at Hampton University in Virginia. Again, a campus’s operations were disrupted as local law enforcement evacuated the campus until they were satisfied that once again, there was no bomb.

Nothing taller than baffling:

It started with a melting glacier that set off a huge landslide, which triggered a 650-foot high mega-tsunami in Greenland last September. Then came something inexplicable: a mysterious vibration that shook the planet for nine days.

Over the past year, dozens of scientists across the world have been trying to figure out what this signal was.

Now they have an answer, according to a new study in the journal Science, and it provides yet another warning that the Arctic is entering “uncharted waters” as humans push global temperatures ever upwards.

Some seismologists thought their instruments were broken when they started picking up vibrations through the ground back in September, said Stephen Hicks, a study co-author and a seismologist at University College London.

It wasn’t the rich orchestra of high pitches and rumbles you might expect with an earthquake, but more of a monotonous hum, he told CNN. Earthquake signals tend to last for minutes; this one lasted for nine days.

He was baffled, it was “completely unprecedented,” he said.

Seismologists traced the signal to eastern Greenland, but couldn’t pin down a specific location. So they contacted colleagues in Denmark, who had received reports of a landslide-triggered tsunami in a remote part of the region called Dickson Fjord.

The result was a nearly year-long collaboration between 68 scientists across 15 countries, who combed through seismic, satellite and on-the-ground data, as well as simulations of tsunami waves to solve the puzzle.

What happened is called a “cascading hazard,” Svennevig said, and it all started with human-caused climate change.

Just in case you have an interest in socialist political activities, here’s an essay about its golden age.