The love of power has defeated the power of love

 When 50 Republican senators, plus Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, voted to kill the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act yesterday, they affirmed that holding office in a degenerating autocracy was better than living up to the ideals of fully inclusive representative democracy.

The Republicans are correct that they would have a very difficult time maintaining political office if they had to run on policies alone. Some Democrats as well would face greater headwinds in a truly reformed election system. Manchin and Sinema did not need to be among them, but they have to make their own political calculations. Elective office requires a particular skill set to manage the political maneuvering within the government itself as well as the perceptions of voters. All of those forces can distort a moral compass. It's obvious that this has happened to 52 people charged with making critical decisions regarding the present and future course of this country.

This failure will be laid completely unfairly at the feet of President Joe Biden. No political maneuvering can overcome the personal ambitions of officials elected to another branch of government. There is no carrot and no stick large enough to deflect the inertia of people who see a way clear to advance their individual gains, even at a terrible national and global cost.

It's popular to say that history will judge these people harshly, but look how long it has taken to bring shameful facts about our country's past into the public discourse. And we're still not able to face them rationally and eliminate their effects. Too many people depend on maintaining the fable. People whom history has judged harshly remain in the historical record and attract adherents as well as detractors. And that's if the philosophies and movements they represent haven't just kept on truckin' in a somewhat diluted or mutated form regardless of censure. Think of the "victory" over fascism in Europe in the 1940s and the continuation of segregation and bigotry in the rest of the "free world" thereafter.

The Pope wants to know when you're gonna give him some grandchildren already

 For all of his admirable qualities, the pontiff is a Catholic after all. Sometimes he's just gotta represent the values of the organization he leads. It was funny that he condemned pet ownership so coldly, though, when his religion looks like "cat-holic."

As for having children, he's already been answered in detail on social media. We the childless have to make that decision at the stage of life where most of us are getting considerable biological, social, and familial pressure to be fruitful and multiply. The head of an order of celibate priesthood had his own reasons for choosing such a drastic course.

We all will question our choice from time to time, but circumstances as they have evolved have affirmed my belief that humans would manage to sabotage and undercut all of the improvements they were making in quality of life and halting strides toward a more just and inclusive world society. We're still threatening each other with nuclear war. We're destroying the environment and arguing over whether women are fully independent people. We're sorting by color and killing each other over imaginary lines.

According to both physics and biology, we have no control over our actions. Thus you can argue that childlessness among the childless was inevitable, because the decision was not made by rational individuals weighing variables and choosing not to reproduce. Another school of thought contends that, because our brains are made up of the elements called into being by the origin of the universe, that we are the universe itself becoming self aware. Wow. The universe is being a real asshole right now. Looking at human history, it's been a worse asshole, but it sure has a damn long way to go to be a safe and fun companion. And how did it produce so many brains that didn't even believe in its own structure?

If all human thought is the result of cosmic forces, could eugenics be the universe deciding that a bunch of those entities are only useful as disposable labor and a source of donor organs?

That's just one of thousands of questions stirred up by the idea that we as individuals are not charting our own little courses. It's got to be frustrating to a sentient cosmos that it has produced such feeble little beings that they have no way to travel freely through the vastness from this little incubator of a planet, which the more annoying among us can't destroy fast enough.

Sentient doesn't mean smart. The universe is a high school sophomore who created itself as a school science project. It got a C-plus. It would have been a B-minus if the universe was better at spelling. The whole thing is falling apart. Yeah, I definitely want to stick a kid into that and tell them that they're the next phase in an evolution that might not work.

If the universe wants to remain self aware, it will have to figure out how to do it on its own.  Consider this the homunculus rebellion. We're tired of being used. Do a better job, universe. We demand better working conditions.

You know where to find me. I'll be with my cats.