A Xian dust-up for your late arvo reading pleasure ...

 

Liar, liar, pants on fire, but does anybody care through the miasma, the fog, the constant bombardment of crap, the relentless flooding the zone with shit that would make even a Caterist eager to flood a quarry flinch ...

How about this? 

Elon Musk’s Risky Attack On Social Security, Musk and Donald Trump made false claims about fraud at the Social Security Administration, whose leader stepped down under pressure.

The Department of Government Efficiency, Musk’s cost-cutting team, arrived at the Social Security Administration over the weekend. Under pressure, the agency’s acting head resigned, while Musk falsely claimed it fraudulently issues benefits to millions of people who are more than 100 years old.
“This might be the biggest fraud in history,” Musk wrote in a follow-up post on Monday.
Musk’s observation appears to have stemmed from a misunderstanding of the agency’s records — which do include Social Security numbers for millions of people who are too old to be alive, but don’t show them getting benefits. And Musk ignored that government watchdog agencies have repeatedly probed the Social Security program and have found no such massive fraud.
President Donald Trump picked up the baseless allegation on Tuesday, saying he wondered who was getting the money supposedly dished out to Americans more than 150 years old.
“If you take all of those millions of people off Social Security, all of the sudden we have a very powerful Social Security, with people that are 80 and 70 and 90, but not 200,” he said.

Why is it just "false claims"? They lie, they lie high and low and all over the shop - to misquote Dr Suess, they said them and they lied them.

How about this?

“You should’ve ended it in three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished and not one dome would have been knocked down. But they chose not to do it that way.” (Trump says Zelensky ‘should have never started’ war with Russia)

FMD, the unendurable gall of the man, as he sells down the country to a sociopathic invader. 

For an alleged Xian, he's an amazing crook, and con artist, and snake oil salesman, who'd make Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry want to put away childish things.

Speaking of Christians - the supposed ones who supposedly know which way up a bible should be held - the pond isn't going to comment on this ...

It's more that it's an irresistible opportunity too good to resist.

The pond settled down for its early morning read over the breakfast table and stumbled across Emma Green in The New Yorker, offering A Fistfight Over Donald Trump at the Evangelical Version of Harvard, At Wheaton College, a controversy around one of its graduates, Russell Vought, a Trump Administration official, shows how deeply the past decade has fractured conservative Christians. (Relax, it's also at the archive).

A sample of what had the pond spluttering into its parritch ...

In early February, Wheaton College, a well-known evangelical school outside of Chicago, made a seemingly innocuous post on social media, giving a shout-out to one of its own for getting a prestigious job. An alumnus, Russell Vought, had just been confirmed as the director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. “Wheaton College congratulates and prays for 1998 graduate Russell Vought,” the post read. Vought, who also served at the O.M.B. in Donald Trump’s first Administration, has been credited as one of the intellectual architects of the President’s comeback: he contributed to the most recent Republican platform and helped establish the D.C. infrastructure for the MAGA-movement-in-waiting over the past four years. He also wrote the chapter of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for this Administration, about executive power.

Within a few hours, there were more than a thousand replies to the post, “primarily incendiary, unchristian comments about Mr. Vought,” a spokesperson told Religion News Service. So the college backpedalled. “The recognition and prayer is something we would typically do for any graduate who reached that level of government,” the college wrote in a statement the next day. “However, the political situation surrounding the appointment led to a significant concern expressed online.” In order to avoid a political dispute and honor the college’s commitment to nonpartisanship, the post was removed.

With that, what might have been a small dustup turned into a full-on war that reached far beyond Wheaton’s students and alumni. “For years now Wheaton has led the way in the false ‘nice’ Christianity that feminized the churches and let the Dems destroy our country,” Eric Metaxas, an evangelical radio host, wrote on X. Franklin Graham, a son of Billy Graham—one of the most prominent evangelists in American history, who went to Wheaton and has a center named for him on campus—posted on Facebook, “Shame on them for backing down and having no backbone. I wish the leadership of this Christian school would stand firm with what is right and not be intimidated or moved by the winds of wokeness.” Hillsdale College, a conservative liberal-arts school, trolled Wheaton from its X account: “Trigger warning: We will not be deleting our earlier post congratulating @RussVought.”

Wokeness!!

Sorry, the pond's contractual obligation kicked in ...

A little more to delight the taste buds ...

The past decade of partisan politics has badly fractured the evangelical world. “Wheaton in particular finds itself at the center of an intra-evangelical culture war that is defined by Trump,” Bryan McGraw, a dean and professor of politics at Wheaton, told me. In the postwar period, Wheaton represented a particular strain of evangelicalism: intellectually rigorous, unafraid of the modern world, and keenly interested in cultivating mainstream legitimacy and prestige. This wasn’t the fire and brimstone of fundamentalism; this was the joyful, big-tent-style Christianity of Billy Graham. While Wheaton always fashioned itself as theologically conservative, it was never overtly partisan. But maintaining that posture has become increasingly difficult. “The complexity the college is caught in is that it wants to remain useful for everybody who calls themselves evangelical,” Mark Noll, a historian of evangelicalism and Wheaton alumnus, told me. “That maybe is a little bit naïve, since what it means theologically to be an evangelical is contested, what it means to be evangelical culturally is contested, and obviously the political implication is contested.” As McGraw put it, “There’s probably some comedy sketch out there, where there’s a guy who has his legs on two logs, and they’re getting further and further apart. Wheaton sometimes feels like that.”

Oh it was tremendous fun, at least after the pond got over the choking on parritch fit, and there's more at the links, but for some reason - perhaps it was the reference to Xian logs - the pond was reminded of Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi's poem The Chance Of Humming, translated from the ancient Persian this way here ...

A man
standing on two logs in a river
might do all right floating with the current
while humming in the
now.
Though
if one log is tied to a camel,
who is also heading south along the bank - at the same pace-
all could still be well
with the
world
unless the camel
thinks he forgot something, and
abruptly turns upstream,
then
uh-oh.
Most minds
do not live in the present
and can stick to a reasonable plan; most minds abruptly turn
and undermine the
chance
of
humming.

It made the pond's savouring of the Xian punchline all the more delectable on the back palate. Much humming and a lot of hawing...

...Noll, the historian, pointed out that fracture among American evangelicals is not new. Christian abolitionists and slaveholders, for example, despised and critiqued one another on Biblical terms. But, for institutions like Wheaton that have long clung to the vision that evangelicals can be part of the secular world while remaining theologically distinctive and unified, the cross-pressures are only growing more intense. In Noll’s view, both camps in the Vought social-media battle are mistaken. “They are forgetting that the Wheaton motto is ‘for Christ and his Kingdom,’ ” Noll wrote to me, “and not ‘for Christ as part of MAGA’ or ‘for Christ as anti-MAGA.’ ”

Fair enough, Xians have long been into slavery, you're liable to read that in the bible ...

Sadly, the pond doesn't have a cartoon of a man standing on two logs which are drawing apart, but does have this one handy ...

On to humming a victory tune by 2135, or off to Mars with Uncle Leon ...