Do you think I mean country matters?

Patrick Chappatte with a cartoon so wonderful that I don't mind that it may well be obsolete by the time you see this.

With the US not qualifying, I've been picking teams throughout World Cup only to have them disappear, and I'm reluctant to say that I'm rooting for France today, not simply because there's a chance they'll be gone by the time you read this, but because, much as I am willing to look silly in public, I'm a bit embarrassed to have the whole tournament come down to wanting to see an England v France final.

Particularly since I'm not the originator of "It's a rivalry that goes back to 1066!" but will say it several times should the match-up come to be.

 

Speaking of comics I'm a little reluctant to feature, I just recommended the current storyline in Doc and Raider on Sunday, and so I wouldn't bring it up again so soon if today's didn't raise an issue worth pondering.

Here we are in some tiny village -- outside some tiny village -- in the Outaouais, and it's hard enough for farmers to find a mate who wants to live a hard life out in the boonies without adding the issue of being gay.

Antoine refers to himself as the "Crazy Cow Lady," suggesting that his sexuality is no secret. Rural Quebec is hugely Catholic and socially conservative, but, no, there aren't a lot of secrets out in the country. 

You've got a small contingency of gossipy nasty people, but the rest are decent folks, and, just as everyone knows who's gay, everyone knows who the nasty people are and to take their toxic vitriol with a large grain of salt.

At the paper in Plattsburgh, one of the backshop guys was gay and the others -- hard-ass blue-collar though they were -- didn't make a big deal over it.

On the other hand, his Significant Other was a cook who spent half the year in Antarctica.

Which I guess is one alternative to moving to the middle of nowhere.

 

In any case, when Antoine walks outside at night, he'll get a canopy of glory overhead, as opposed to this delightfully ridiculous look at the heavens in xkcd. 

Here's the thing about living out where the stars are: You don't get tired of it or even used to it. Certainly, there are times when you're preoccupied with one thing or another, but there are other times when it takes your breath away.

And, when we were learning about constellations in Earth Science, it wasn't some arcane thing we just had to memorize, because that night I'd take the dog out for her walk and there they'd all be, right there.

Picking out Gemini and Cassiopeia at night was no more difficult than learning to identify a robin or a bluejay in the daytime. For those who took a particular interest in the stars, it was a continuous feast.

And I'm embarrassed to admit how old I was before I learned that most people have never seen the Milky Way.

But then I began to pay more attention and, yes, the "stargazer" in the cartoon is a satire, but she isn't nearly as off-base as she could be.

 

And as long as we're discussing country matters, BC got a laugh today because I've known city people who won't eat wild berries for more or less this reason.

My temptation is to point out to them that the berries in the store are spider-pee free because they're covered with neonicotinoids and other toxins, and that, in any case, the people who pick them use the same sort of outhouses they refuse to take advantage of and have the same no handwashing facilities available afterwards.

Meanwhile, the berries out in the woods are organic and gluten-free and locally sourced and all that good stuff.

But I'm afraid they'd simply stop eating anything at all and starve to death waiting for the mass production of completely artificial food to kick in.

 

Though perhaps I should soft-pedal my advocacy of nature-based food stuffs, considering, as Steve Benson notes, it's against official gummint policy.

I was giving a teenaged granddaughter a ride to work yesterday when something about this ridiculous story came on the radio and I had to explain to her the origins of everyone hating Nestle.

It goes back to the mid-70s, when, as this excellent write-up recounts, they were exposed for going into Third World countries with sales people often dressed as health professionals, persuading women that formula was better for their babies than breast milk, despite the fact that (A) it isn't, (B) these women couldn't afford formula and (C) were apt to mix it, and even dilute it, with the contaminated water in their slums.

So here we are with the Americans rejecting an international resolution to support breastfeeding because it might hurt the feelings of women who cannot breast feed.

Which is apparently more hurtful than snatching their children away and putting them in cages.

The President, predictably, was quick to leap into the fray and mischaracterize the resolution in order to insist that we do support breastfeeding but that those sunsabitches at the World Health Assembly want to ban formula.

Again raising the issue of how to draw his Venn diagram of ignorance and dishonesty.

 

Theocracy In Action:

I'll leave you with Ann Telnaes' commentary on the Religious Right, but I want to see more Kavanaugh cartoons before getting into last night's announcement.

Still, I was appalled to see another mackerel-snapper added to the Court, since every Justice named by a Republican has been Catholic, though Gorsuch, raised Catholic, now considers himself an Episcopalian.

But makes up for his apostasy.

Given that most Evangelicals think Papists are Hell-bound, naming them to the Court puts me in mind of the Buddhists who have lower-caste people butcher animals so they can enjoy the meat without paying the karmic price.

Not exactly an ecumenical embrace.

 

Now here's your moment of natural zen:

Comments

[Robert H Cunningham]

Not only is mother's milk healthier , I like the container it comes in.

[Sean Martin]

Thank you for the nice plug, Mike. I didnt see the mention on Sunday, and I apologize for that. Thanks for that as well.

[Blinky the Wonder Wombat]

Mackerel-snapper? I thought you'd be above petty religious name-calling. And no comment on the fact that three of the four the Clinton/Obama appointees are Jewish and the other is Catholic?

[Mike Peterson]

It's like the N-word, Blinky -- You can use it if you are one.

I'd have commented on the others if I felt the problem was a president reaching for liberals. But I don't at the moment, and I'm more comfortable making generalities about my own people anyway. I'll defend this one.

[Blink the Wonder Wombat]

I don't understand why it's ok for one group to use derogatory terms for themselves. Furthermore, isn't the exception for ethnic groups and only then among themselves? Catholics are not an ethnic group and this is a public space, so I don't think the exception applies in this case.

You don't think the Supreme count nominations over the past 40 years have been reaching out to the sitting presidents base? The years of selecting a sage jurist for the highest court in the land has long past. Besides, Trump's base is Evangelical Christians, his support among Catholics is tepid at best, especially as Latinos are the fastest growing segment of American Catholics. Given the traditional distrust if not outright hatred Evangelicals have for Catholics, it would seem Kavanaugh would not go over as well as a Conservative Evangelical jurist.

I wonder if the Catholic/Jewish dominance of the SCOTUS is somehow a modern version of Catholics and Jews entering the police force because other career paths are closed to them. In some parts of the country it is hard for Catholics and Jews to get elected to public office, so they drift towards the Judicial Branch?

[Mike Peterson]

Not sure why you'd need to understand it. It's a social convention of some long standing. (I also refer to my fellow Irish as "Micks." There are other terms I would not use for either group.)

Catholics may not be all from one country but they're much like an ethnic group. I had a professor who scoffed at the idea of being "ex-Catholic" for that reason -- he said it was so strong an identity that you could no more be ex-Catholic than you could be ex-Italian. James Joyce and others would concur.

As for why they are so popular as conservative jurists, I covered that, albeit sarcastically.

There are a lot of moderate and liberal Catholics who like the fact that the Pope smiles but wish he would ordain women and, if he won't do away with clerical celibacy, at least come up with more rulings that indicate a sympathy with non-celibate people.

However, there are a large and dominant number of Catholics who can be relied upon to be militantly pro-Life, even anti-contraceptive, and Thomistic in whatever casuistry is needed to push forth a conservative agenda. Whether you consider them bound for Hell because they follow the Bishop of Rome is irrelevant if they carry the right water and hew the proper wood while on this Earth.