{"id":24303,"date":"2025-03-30T17:28:48","date_gmt":"2025-03-31T00:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=24303"},"modified":"2025-05-02T11:41:40","modified_gmt":"2025-05-02T18:41:40","slug":"i-read-the-news-today-oh-boy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2025\/03\/30\/i-read-the-news-today-oh-boy\/","title":{"rendered":"I read the news today, oh boy."},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>How mold is taken as a miracle, another example in an endless series throughout history;<\/li>\n<li>Short items about Trump, tariffs, and auto prices; lying about American history; how &#8220;make America healthy again&#8221; means the opposite; how a vaccine expert has been fired from the FDA; and how DOGE wants to privatize everything.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And in the news today, more lies, more reversals, from the Trump administration. He&#8217;s changed his mind. He doesn&#8217;t remember what he said. &#8220;Witch hunt&#8221; 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&#8217;s exhausting to try to keep up. We&#8217;re living in an upside-down, Alice in Wonderland world. And yet still he has fans.<\/p>\n<p>Let me post this. It&#8217;s more significant that it might seem at first glance.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0c1861a7-d864-428e-ab5c-122678ac9f4c_1280x720.png\" width=\"400\" \/><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 29 Mar 2025<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.friendlyatheist.com\/p\/its-mold-not-a-miracle-the-catholic\">It&#8217;s mold, not a miracle: The Catholic Church\u2019s latest eucharistic blunder<\/a>, subtitled &#8220;Another viral Catholic miracle turns out to be just bacteria and wishful thinking&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Once again, after suggesting a miracle had occurred and there was <em>tangible proof<\/em>, an investigation has discovered\u2026 that there was a perfectly sensible, scientific, non-miraculous explanation for it.<\/p>\n<p>About a month ago, an X\/Twitter account posted a story involving a \u201cEucharistic Miracle\u201d at St. Anthony of Padua in Morris, Indiana. The account <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/CUPforTruth\/status\/1894242489822765506\" rel=\"\">relayed a story<\/a> 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/CUPforTruth\/status\/1894242723428729186\" rel=\"\">put it in water<\/a> and &#8220;left it in the tabernacle to dissolve.\u201d He did the same thing to a second wafer that dropped later.<\/p>\n<p>When a staffer went to check on those wafers the next day to see if they had dissolved, there were \u201cspots of blood!\u201d The woman <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/CUPforTruth\/status\/1894242840814727277\" rel=\"\">added<\/a>: \u201cWhen I saw it today it looked like a very very thin piece of skin with blood on it.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>To those of us who&#8217;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&#8217;t understand and mapping them into the limited fantasy world they&#8217;ve been taught to believe in from childhood.<\/p>\n<p>In this case, it&#8217;s about mold. And similar explanations, we&#8217;re sure, explain all the so-called &#8220;miracles&#8221; from throughout history. Get a grip. Get real. But it won&#8217;t ever happen. Humans can&#8217;t bear much reality<\/p>\n<p>\\\\\\<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll reduce some other items to headlines.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>NBC News, Kristen Welker and Alexandra Marquez, 29 Mar 2025<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/politics\/donald-trump\/trump-says-couldnt-care-less-automakers-raise-prices-tariffs-rcna198731\">Trump says he \u2018couldn\u2019t care less\u2019 if foreign automakers raise prices due to tariffs<\/a>, subtitled &#8220;In a phone interview with NBC News, President Donald Trump also said he wouldn\u2019t fire anyone involved in the Signal group chat.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Bulwark, Thomas Lecaque, 30 Mar 2025<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebulwark.com\/p\/trump-big-new-propaganda-push-executive-order-history-smithsonian\">Trump\u2019s Big New Propaganda Push<\/a>, subtitled &#8220;Nothing says &#8216;restoring truth and sanity to American history&#8217; quite like lying about it.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Bulwark, Jonathan Cohn, 30 Mar 2025<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebulwark.com\/p\/when-make-america-healthy-again-actually-means-opposite-rfk-trump-opioid-overdose-hhs-samhsa-painful\">When \u2018Make America Healthy Again\u2019 Actually Means the Opposite<\/a>, subtitled &#8220;As part of a \u2018painful period\u2019 of cuts, Trump and RFK Jr. plan on dismantling the agency that focuses on substance abuse.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><strong>Salon, Natalie Chandler, 29 Mar 2025<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salon.com\/2025\/03\/29\/misinformation-and-lies-top-fda-vaccine-official-slams-rfk-jr-as-he-resigns\/\">&#8220;Misinformation and lies&#8221;: Peter Marks resigns from FDA, slams RFK<\/a>, subtitled &#8220;Marks, who oversaw the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, clashed with vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr.&#8221; Again: authoritarian regimes fire the experts.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Washington Post, 30 Mar 2025<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/technology\/2025\/03\/30\/doge-privatize-government-usps-trump\/\">DOGE wants businesses to run government services \u2018as much as possible\u2019<\/a>, subtitled &#8220;Elon Musk\u2019s effort is pushing privatization \u2014 a longtime goal for conservatives and for Silicon Valley alike \u2014 across federal agencies&#8221;. Comment: confirms what I&#8217;ve been thinking. Conservatives want to privatize everything so entrepreneurs can make more money. Everything will become, for the average consumer, more expensive. It&#8217;s happened before.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8220;make America healthy again&#8221; means the opposite; how a vaccine expert has &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2025\/03\/30\/i-read-the-news-today-oh-boy\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96,20,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-human-nature","category-psychology","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24303"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24584,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24303\/revisions\/24584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}