MY VERY OLD CAT and my sister's puppy (14 months old) who I'm watching have figured out that if one of them makes noise at 2:30 in the morning, the other one will join in and I will have to get up to bring the dog out and, once awake, can tend to the cat's desires. Apparently a new dog can teach an old cat new tricks.
I typed out and posted yesterday's post without full editing. I think I've taken care of at least the worst of it. I'm not ga-ga, just tired.
BACK DURING THE ATHEISM FAD OF THE OO'S, after the sci-ranger-neo-atheists were disappointed to find out that I believe in evolution and even the speculation that all life is descended from an original organism (though they just hated to have it pointed out that that last one was based on absolutely no evidence because you would need the remains of that, specific individual organism to know anything of the sort, they'd get on the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth.
I could have, to annoy them, said that there is actually more evidence for both of those than there is any statement made about the conjectural first organism in the line of life on Earth. If I really wanted to piss them off I could have pointed out there is actually more evidence for the them than there is for any contention that even one species evolved by natural selection. There is massive physical evidence that life evolved, the actual reason for that happening is simply not in evidence because it happened over too many millennia, with too little evidence to show why and how it happened in even one actual species evolving from another one and there is absolutely no way to know if there was one reason and way it happened or if, perhaps, the evolution of every species is sui generis.
As it's the second day of Advent I'll say that I choose to believe that something happened to give rise to the stories of the Virgin Birth of Jesus because no one wanting to get a new faith accepted would invent such a story which was bound, from the start, to provoke ridicule and mockery and the kind of 12-year-old boy stuff that is probably still popular among the sci-rangers and out of fashion neo-atheists though I'd guess that even among their stunted sensibilities, that got old as, in fact, the new atheism got old fast.
Of the two canonical stories, I like Luke's better though that one and the one found in Matthew are not incompatible, they deal with different events. There's no reason NOT to believe the Shepherds got the news first and they are the first to go pay regard and respect to Jesus and his mother and father and that, depending on their astrology, the wise-men came far later. I would not be entirely unprepared to find that the paternity of Jesus was unique and the consequence of God choosing to enter directly into human history as a Human. I choose to believe that because I think Jesus was unique among human beings even as he was truly one of us - Paul says like us in everything but that he didn't sin, something I'm ready to believe, as well.
Why do I choose to believe that? Because I choose to believe we are divinely ordered to do so many things that are against our natural or humanly chosen desires but which have the result of making things better. Loving our neighbors as ourselves, loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us (you can do it if you choose to practice those, it takes a lot of years to start for it to work but it is possible), to feed the hungry, clothe and house those without clothing or housing, treat the sick, visit those in prison (I'm without transport so those are kind of out for me) and, if we really want to be perfect, to sell everything we have and give the money to the poor and take up a cross and follow. I'd like to live that way knowing it would probably get me killed, I'd like to be that courageous as Jesus was when he went to Jerusalem knowing what was going to happen there, as the Scriptures told him and his followers what happened to Prophets in that city. If you can't do it all you should at least do as much of it as you can. And I'm still working up to it.
In the late John McNeill's memoir, Taking a Chance On God, in the first chapter where he talks about his experience as a WWII soldier fighting against Nazism and fascism and as a prisoner of war under the Nazis he tells this story: taken from Heinz Heger's book The Men With The Pink Triangle
"Toward the end of February, 1940, a priest arrived in our block, a man some 60 years of age, tall and with distinguished features. We later discovered that he came from Sudetenland, from an aristocratic German family.
He found the torment of the arrival procedure especially trying, particularly the long wait naked and barefoot outside the block [remember this is in a German winter]. When his tonsure was discovered after the shower, the SS corporal in charge took a razor and said; "I'll go to work on this one's head myself, and extend his tonsure a bit. " And he shaved the priest's head with the razor, taking little trouble to avoid cutting his scalp. Quite the contrary.
The priest returned to the day-room in our block with his head cut open and blood streaming down. His face was ashen and his eyes stared uncomprehendingly into the distance. He sat down on a bench, folded his hands in his lap and said softly, more to himself than anyone else: "And yet man is good, he is a creature of God!"
I was sitting beside him, and said softly but firmly: "Not all men; there are also beasts in human form, whom the devil must have made."
The priest paid no attention to my words, he just prayed silently, merely moving his lips. I was deeply moved, even though I was by then already numbed by all the suffering I had so often seen, and indeed experienced myself. But I had always had a great respect for priests, so that his silent pray this mute appeal to God, whom he called on for help and strength in his bodily pain and mental torment, went straight to my heart.
Our block Capo, however, a repulsive and brutal "green," must have reported the priests praying to the SS, for our block Sargent suddenly burst into the day-room accompanied by a second NCO, seizing the terrified priest for from the bench and punching and insulting him. The priest bore the beating and abuse without complaint, and just stared at the two SS men with wide, astonished eyes. This must simply have made them angrier, for they now took one of the benches and tied the priest to it.
They started to beat him indiscriminately with their sticks, on his stomach, his belly and sexual organs. They seemed to get more and more ecstatic and gloated; We'll drive the prayer out of you! You bum-fucker! bum-fucker!"
The priest collapsed into unconsciousness, was shaken awake and then fell unconscious again.
Finally the two SS sadists ceased their blows and left the day-room, though not without scornfully calling back to the man they had now quite destroyed: "OK, you randy old rat-bag, you can piss with your arese-hole in future."
The priest just rattled and groaned. We released him and laid him in his bed. He tried to raise his hand in thanks, but he hadn't the strength, and his voice gave out when he tried to say "thank you." He just lay without stirring, his eyes open, each movement contorting his face with pain.
I felt I was witnessing the crucifixion of Christ in modern guise. Instead of Roman soldiers, Hitler's SS thugs, and a bench instead of a cross. The torment of the Saviour, however, was scarcely greater than that inflicted on one of his representatives nineteen hundred years later here in Sachsenhausen.
The next morning, when we marched to the parade-ground we had almost to carry the priest, who seemed about to collapse again from pain and weakness When our block senior reported to the SS bock sergeant the later came over to the priest and shouted: "Can't you stand up, you arese-hole," adding: "You filthy queer, you filthy swine, say what you are!" The priest was supposed to repeat the insults but no sound came from the lips of the broken man. The SS man angrily fell on him and was about to start beating him again
Suddenly the unimaginable happened, something that is still inexplicable to me and that I could only see as a miracle, the finger of God.
From the overcast sky a sudden ray of sunshine that illuminated the priests battered face.
Out of the thousands of assembled prisoners, only him, and at the very moment when e was going to be beaten again . There was a remarkable silence, and all present started fixedly at the sky, astonished by what had happened. The SS sergeant himself looked up at the clouds in wonder for a few seconds then let his hand raised for a beating, sink slowly to his side, and walked away wordlessly away to take up his position at the end of our ranks.
The priest bowed his head and murmured with a dying voice; "Thank you Lord . . . I know that my time has come. . . "
He was still with us for the evening parade But we o longer needed to carry him, we laid him down at the end of the line with the other dead of the day, so that our numbers would be complete for the roll-call no matter whether living or dead."
Heinz Heger The Men With The Pink Triangle, translated by David Fernbach Alyson Publications 1980
You can choose to believe that story, told from eye witness, or you can choose not to. I believe it. Just as we choose what we believe in, we also choose what we don't want to believe in - though that's not a point I ever remember an atheist admitting.
John McNeill, the former Jesuit, kicked out of his order for writing controversially on the Bible's mentions of same-sex sex, recommended this anonymous priest-martyr and ended with a prayer:
We gays and lesbians have a model and a patron in this anonymous priest who was martyred because he dared to be both gay and a man of prayer.
Almighty God, help us, your lesbian daughters and gay sons, to grow and mature in our faith. Free us from the spirit of fear and cowardice. Grant that all the suffering and pain experienced in the past by those who were persecuted because they were gay or lesbian will not have been in vain, but will help win for us and for all our people in the future the grace of true liberation. Fill our hearts with a deep awareness of your love for us so that we may be free to love one another in the spirit of gratitude. Amen
Later in the book he said:
We lesbian and gay believers must ask for the grace to be intensely aware that in all human encounters God is present. We must keep in mind Mary's fiat: Let what you have said be done to me [You never get far from the Advent literature, in which the baby was born on his way to the cross.] It lies in our power to put God into our lives or to deny God's presence God will be in our lives insofar as we are ready to live lives of unselfish love as a response of gratitude for the love God has shown us in Jesus.
but here is something I asked in a Lenten post called How "It Works" To Really Believe In The Christian View Of Reality As Opposed To The Materialistic-Scientistic-Atheist View Of It
Who would you rather live next to, someone who believes that the morality of the Gospel is something they are going to have to answer for, if not now then in the life after death, or someone who believed they didn't need to do unto others as they would do unto them, to do for the least among us what we would do to God, to love their enemies and pray for them, to love their neighbor as themselves, so long as they could rig things to act accordingly and get away with doing it? Who would you rather have conduct national policy in this pandemic? Someone who believes in the Gospel and that there will be consequences for our conduct in an afterlife, or in the people who are in charge in the United States?
"She sounds like Alex Jones."
My only reservation about this video aren't the observations that Sarah Hurwitz was acting as more than an apologist for genocide by pulling the IHRA style "antisemitism" lie it is that the focus on only her lets off the others like Melanie Phillips who said things as immoral and degenerate. It's also that more focus should be on the Jewish Federation of North America for holding what should be seen as the moral equivalent of a German American Bund rally in 2025 as the most contemporaneously reported genocide in history is taking place as they support it.
One thing, that lying pro-scribbler who wrote for Hillary Clinton, Michelle and Barack Obama and other Democrats should never work for any Democrat anywhere or have any kind of respectable status among anyone who is opposed to genocide. Her continuing status as a member of tje U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council discredits the Council and the current such efforts as what Norman Finkelstein accused them of in his book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.
Any study of or mention of or remembering of the Shoah that isn't directly and completely tied to the condemnation and exposure of genocide anywhere it is happening is the ultimate in "Holocaust denial" and there are none more prominent in that denial than many of those who have made it either their career or their sideline. And that always goes back to their Zionism which is as tied to the genocide of the Palestinian People and the other moral degeneracies of the state of Israel as any other ideology with ties to genocide and moral atrocity are. That ideology should be as rejected as that which committed the Shoah and the Soviet, Chinese fascist etc. genocides. I would say that that extends to US and British and French, etc. imperialist ideologies. I don't play favorites for my own country and its citizens. I have no intention of doing so for Israel.
Katie Halper's Youtube channel is one of those I listen to regularly.
everybody else gets my services or, food I grew or things I've made without spending money as a present.
I am participating in the anti-Trump, anti-billionaire, anti-Republican-fascist, anti-Roberts Court fascist, etc.
BLACKOUT
saying that Bob Dylan has no talent.
I answered, Who's Simon Cowell?
As soon as I heard he had something to do with American Idol - which I'm sorry to say I've been exposed to I felt like saying it should have been called "American can caterwaul" He's also the ears behind several other such franchises which I'm somewhat aware of and avoid even more rigorously than I avoid Hallmark Christmas Movies.
Bob Dylan has probably not been paid such a huge complement in decades, I'd never want the likes of this Cowell creature to be a fan. I said something more toned down because I knew one other at table likes that kind of crap and I didn't want to hurt her feelings.
I'M OLD AND DON'T follow every flash in the pan of crap that is American journalism so I was only vaguely aware of Olivia Nuzzi before now, I'd known about her scribblage about RFK jr. even before their epically gross and vulgar sexting became public in the early phases when her jilted fiance started spilling the beans on her. I didn't have a real idea of how she's weaponized being a skank to get ahead in the journalism racket until I heard Keith Olbermann talking about his history with her (she was a legal adult when they started living together so what they were doing is officially none of my business). But it wasn't until reading this article in The New Republic that I had a real appreciation for how sleazy and slimy she AND THE MEN WHO WERE INVOLVED WITH HER have been. It is one of those rare pieces of journalism about someone in the racket which admits that what they do can lead to catastrophe in real life.
It’s all scintillating, and it’s all a distraction. The only thing you need to know about Olivia Nuzzi is that she used her position of power, as a journalist, to advise and elevate the world’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist to the most influential health position in the United States. The latest bombshell revelations about what they did or didn’t do together risk obscuring the important part of the story: The beliefs RFK Jr. espouses kill people. These beliefs have already killed people. As secretary of the Department of Health and Human services, he now holds the well-being of millions of Americans in his hands. And Olivia Nuzzi is joking about it in The New York Times.
“All I think about is how this woman was part of mainstreaming this guy,” Aparna Nair, professor at the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto, told me. RFK Jr. “will do profound damage on a global scale—that’s all that matters,” she said. The global health program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was among the first to be cut under RFK Jr.’s tenure, and outbreaks of illnesses like Ebola, Marburg, and mpox are now expanding across countries and borders.
As the public fixated on fresh Nuzzi scandals last week, RFK Jr. was instructing the CDC to add language on its website about the possibility of vaccines leading to autism. It’s the latest in his expanding focus on autistic individuals; he has also overseen the creation of a national autism research registry and blamed parents for taking Tylenol during pregnancy.
“In elevating someone who has now become essentially the most powerful person in public health in the country and who is taking a wrecking ball to public health institutions, she has done untold damage,” Gavin Yamey, professor of global health at the Duke Global Health Institute, said of Nuzzi. “She certainly contributed to his rise.”
Yes, she did and she did it knowing full well how dangerous it would be for him to have any role in public policy - as bad as he is in charge of HHS imagine an RFK jr. presidency.
I want to in no way diminish the moral atrocity of Olivia Nuzzi and what she did but it's necessary to point out that she was hardly the only one in the journalism racket who is responsible for all of the above LITERALLY THE LARGE MAJORITY OF THOSE WITH A WIDELY RECOGNIZABLE NAME IN THE AMERICAN JOURNALISM RACKET HAD AS MUCH AND MANY HAD MORE OF A HAND IN THIS. Jake Tapper and Dana Bash and many others at CNN, those at every one of the other networks, cable, TV, radio, the goddamned New York Times, the WaPo the LA Times and many of the surviving ink on paper entities. Virtually the entire American media of any size and influence had a hand in the sandbagging of Joe Biden which led directly to Trump II and with full and absolute knowledge of who he was, what he intended, the Heritage goons of Project 2025 who had laid out the plan for his destruction of democracy and the country.
It isn't something you'll get from Ken Burns or any "public intellectual" but one of the greatest and most horrifying lessons that should but almost certainly won't be learned from the decade of Trump is that the free press, those whose free speech is magnified the most by money and technology and, so, influence, is not anything like an asset of democracy, certainly not of egalitarian democracy. It has served as a total and willing part of the fascists' attempt to destroy democracy.
The real history of the American "free press" isn't honestly told in the fable of Elijiah Lovejoy or Peter Zenger it's more honestly told in terms that we are being force fed in the bio of Olivia Nuzzi, THAT, PERHAPS USUALLY MINUS THE SEX, IS THE REAL CHARACTER OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM.
As I must always point out this has been made ever worse by the Supreme Court starting with the Warren Courts carte blanche issued to the media to lie about politicians and other public figures with impunity. Though I've come to think that there is no more obtusity encouraging a professional training than one in the law - that pose of obtusity directly related to the ubiquitous professional practice of lying with impunity by lawyers - there has never been a stupider ruling than the one that ended up profiting the wealthy oligarchs who owned and ran the media and the oligarchs who could buy media companies and lie to their own profit. I don't believe for a second that any of the Warren Court members who issued that ruling were not fully competent enough to understand that would be the result of it, though they pretended that wasn't a fully and confidently predictable consequence of that "free speech" ruling, and ever more so the Buckley v Valeo ruling that was the first to call the corruption of money in our elections "free speech." If I slam the scribblers and babblers AND PUBLISHERS of the free press, I slam the lying-lawyers even more so.
Only a press that tells the truth is an asset and necessary part of egalitarian democracy. One that lies will destroy it.
I wasn't imposing my interpretation on William Bolcom's Piano Quartet I was honoring what he said about it at the time the original recording I posted was issued:
Both my major commissions for the 1976 bicentennial observance took for their themes what I think of as a tragic flaw in the American psyche that seems to lead inexorably towards violence. While the Piano Concerto’s last movement was a cavalcade of brutal clichés and naïveté in constant juxtaposition, the impulse that leads the Piano Quartet to a (to me) terrifying conclusion is internal and psychological, having as much to do with the inner forces of the previous movements as with the overriding contrary principle. I plead guilty here to writing ‘program music.’ I am passionately concerned with, even frightened by, the American psyche and I deeply believe that, as we enter what may be the most perilous passage in our history, we need to understand ourselves better – otherwise certain disaster will follow. The contrary principle in the quartet derives as much from my own emotional fix on our nation's spiritual state as from Blakean philosophy.
“I find that this piece has grown with time even in my understanding of it, and now I can indicate more clearly to performers what I meant. The present recording reflects my intentions as well as any performance can and I endorse it heartily.”
Apart from the Quartet and William Bolcom's wonderful First Piano Concerto, I can think of exactly two other such compositions as significantly controversial related to national birthdays, one was Roy Harris's Bicentennial Symphony and the other is the Canadian Opera Riel by Harry Somers to a libretto written by Mavor Moore and Jacques Languirand commissioned by the CBC for the Canadian centennial.
I think this piece and the Concerto are only two of the certain signs of Bolcom's greatness as a composer and as a thinker. I think he is, after or along with Charles Ives among our greatest composers.
many years my senior told me about ten years ago that he couldn't support LGBTQ+ equality because of anal sex and his disgust for it. I usually wouldn't discuss sex with him because I because I was brought up with a particularly old fashioned habit of not talking that way in front of my elders. It took me a long time to get used to calling him by his name as he asked instead of "Mr." It still feels strange to me to call people significantly older than I am by their names.
Anyway, he annoyed me enough with that that I pointed out that considering the percentage of Gay Men there are in the population and the significant percentage of gay men who seldom or never engage in anal sex that most of the anal sex that happens probably happens between men and women. Not to mention virtually every description of sex acts that straight people think of as "gay" but which are engaged in by straight People in no small numbers. He was surprised by the statistics I cited to him at the time - I wouldn't argue from them the same way today. He didn't realize how many straight men and women did anal.
So the revelations of the porn-poetry of the incumbent Sec of Health and Human Services in which Little Bobby seemingly tried to entice an alleged journalist gal decades younger than him to engage in the repulsive act of feltching (repulsive because it is disgustingly anti-hygienic and, so, degrading) and force being used by him in the act shines a light on what many may have figured was a "'gay thing" being very much a "straight thing." It's clear it was certainly part of at least his active sexual imagination as something he'd want to do.
It certainly did nothing to make me think of my life experience - I'm ever more respectful of other People and their health than just using a honorific title with them - it made me think of the media and political treatment of one of my heroines the Clinton Administration's first Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders when she was asked if Children should be encouraged to masturbate so as to delay the dangers of them engaging in sex with others. She took the question and bravely answered that she thought that should be considered as a possibility and she was vilified and fired for that great service to public health. Dr. Elders is, I'm glad to say, still with us, though I don't know if she's still practicing in one of the finer examples of public health careers I know of. I hadn't known of her stellar record in preventing prengancy among her patients in Arkansas, especially girls with diabetes. For that, alone, she's a heroine.
It is an example of the pornographication of America (thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Gingrich era Republican caucus in the House an, particularly, the scumbag Henry Hyde) that RFJ jr. isn't being raked over the coals in such a pursuit of something so grotesquely health and dignity destroying an act - I'm sure he's done it if he's broken out all poesy about it. If he's writing like that, he's almost certainly doin' it." We're a long way down the road from the hypocrisy of Newt and Hyde and the 1990s media. And about that, shouldn't sexting be considered adultery these days? I don't mean the law, the law shouldn't get to define such things because the law tends to rather favor the guys.
If you're waiting for the media and the hypocritical morality police to drive him from office over this? Well, what? Do you think they're going to hold the CDC destorying rich, white, straight ambulance chaser lawyer who should never have been allowed to hold that office to the standards they held for a fully qualified Female-Black-Physician suggesting we consider what would be responsibly given sound medical advice? Not when you can have an incompetent, dishonest, ambulance-chasing rich, straight, white, male Harvard Law oligarch who promotes the most dangerous of self-profiting medical quackery instead. This is America where someone like the total scumbag Little Bobby will get away with everything as the most responsible and honest and competent Black Woman won't get away with doing what's right. Our free press would certainly never hold him accountable, even as it's probably (and properly) cost his sexting partner her career in "journalism."
And while I'm at it, Hey, hey, RFK. How many kids did you kill today?
MY RECENT CRITICISM OF KEN BURNS isn't specifically about that series, it's about his stuff I've seen in the past and the idea that you can replace READING HISTORY from books and, especially, reading entire primary documents with something as limited and expensive to produce (and so the limits) aimed at a popular audience. IF and that big if is too small, it led viewers to think of the movie as a brief intro and if the movie led them to the primary documents - many of which are easily available for free online (I haven't looked, have Burns of PBS made such available in an easily used form online?) a lot of my criticism would be answered. Certainly it would cost them little to do such a thing, though if they didn't give enough emphasis to, for example, the anti-federalists and the opponents and critics of the revolution and the activities of the oligarchs and enslavers that proved their hypocrisy and hatred of equality and democracy, they shouldn't bother. We've already got that kind of bullshit history everywhere and don't need PBS pushing it any more than they do.
But the problem with even that is that you can lead only a few to viewing and, even those being "information age" People, you can't make them read, it's not going to be effective. I don't know if his self-admittedly flawed magnum opus which I did see all of, The Civil War, had been effective we would not be living through the Republican-fascist, Roberts Court effort to reestablish the Confederacy generally in the exact way that those who wrote and signed onto the Dred Scott decision tried to do in 1857, I don't think that was due to his reliance on the folksy-drawling Confederacy romanticism of Shelby Foote, it was because the ambition to maintain the lies set in motion by those who were following Lewis Powell's road-map to American oligarchy from Hollywood to NYC to DC to Atlanta in those years had the bigger megaphone, including that most dangerous of all venues for such lies, entertainment media.
I think Burns has a habit of relying on celebrity pop historians and writers which doesn't help much. Pop history becomes pop history because it supports existing, established narratives. If his use of easily identified Hollywood actors for reading stuff helps, I don't know but sometimes I have found it distracting and occasionally annoying. I don't recall who pointed out that part of Burns' method is to find appealing characters such as Foote was (to many, I found him unappealing) and to feature them based on that. I think that criticism was true in his case and perhaps in others.
He's hardly the worst of the type, that may have been Frederick Wiseman, whose movies teach nothing and seem to try to teach nothing. I think part of my problem with documentaries in general is that compared to real research into a subject, especially viewing a large range of primary documents, it gives a false sense of having learned about a topic when reading a range of relevant articles in the old World Book Encyclopedia would probably give you more actual knowledge of it and would certainly give you more lasting clues of what to search for online or in a good library. It's the old "I saw the movie" approach as compared to reading the book. When it's fiction, that doesn't matter much. When it's history, you end up with Confederacy romantics and idiots who believed the founders and framers were gods whose ideas and Constitution should regulate our lives and laws in ways that no fundamentalist Baptist or Pentacostalist would ever try to use Scripture for (except to regulate and control OTHER PEOPLES' LIVES). If Burns' series turned into a rejection of Roberts Court "originalism" and "textualism" bullshit it would be useful though I doubt it could be effective for that and still get the NYT media mainstream approval and do anything for eventually, getting PBS's funding restored.
YOU DON'T "SOUND OBSCENE" when you try to cover up GENOCIDE BY THE ISRAELI APARTHEID STATE
YOU ARE OBSCENE.
You have placed yourself not only at the same moral level as David Irving who lied about genocide carried out decades before he denied it had happened, you place yourself at the moral level of those who knew about the genocide while it was happening and they covered it up or tried to dismiss knowledge of it as it came out.
I don't know the name of the man who was interviewing her who called the reality of Israel murdering children "emotional blackmail" but his name should be as infamous as hers deserves to be from now on. As, in fact, the combined Jewish Federations of North America who don't do far more than disavow what was said at that conference where she said this. They are the equivalent of the American Bund in the face of the genocide Israel has been carrying out for years and which has intensified since they agreed to the phony "peace deal" announced several weeks ago. Israel is a moral atrocity.
She's a product of Harvard and Harvard Law, to tell you where she got her credentials in lying and her connections that got her the Obama job. Harvard and, especially Harvard Law are vile institutions.
THE DEGENERATE LIAR-LAWYER ALAN DERSHOWITZ is crying "McCarthyism" because Ana Kasparian has succinctly and memorably and so, perhaps virally articulated his history with Jeffrey-Epstein, including his role in getting the perverted child-rapist-child-trafficking-almost certain intelligence service and who knows who else peddling blackmail collector a sweetheart deal that allowed him the freedom to carry on as before and, etc. etc. etc. I'd add to the indictment, literally everything the shame of Harvard Law has done in support of his fellow Epstein-Maxwell sleaze, Trump, which becomes entirely understandable just in terms of his confidence that Trump in power would do everything he could to suppress the Epstein evidence and crimes BECAUSE HE HAD GOOD REASON TO BELIEVE MAKING THAT PUBLIC WOULD EXPOSE HIM.
About the promiscuous use of the "M" word including by those who are full blown imitators of Wisconsin's worst senator before Ron Johnson.
No one is accusing the Dersh of being a fucking commie, he'd never do something so unprofitable for himself or to put him at any real risk. BUT HIS ROLE IN THIS IS - WITH THAT KIND OF MEDIA PERPLEXING IRONY THAT THE GODDAMNED AMERICAN FREE PRESS ALWAYS FALLS FOR AND NEVER NOTICES - COULD HONESTLY BE CALLED "COHNISM."
Like Roy Cohn Dershowitz has been an ambulance chaser for the rich, the powerful, the criminal, a series of scumbag millionaire-billionaire rich white men, he has never been what McCarthy and Cohn and HUAC went after. It should be a rule that no one who has been a whore of a lawyer for the likes that Dershowitz has and who has been a supporter of genocidal fascism and neo-apartheid gets to claim the role of the victim of those who were nothing like that in history. Am I not remembering correctly but didn't he claim somewhere in the media that Epstein didn't pay him which the records of him being paid millions reveal to be a frickin lie?
Alan Dershowitz is playing the Roy Cohn role in what could be a new spin-off franchise of the longest series of sequels to every Hollywood-Broadway-Made for TV movie about the red scares of the late 40s to early 69s. I'm saying that because I hope that someday Hollywood will pull it's head out of the asses of those first few producers, directors and writers who started the interminable sequels of red scare shows* AND GOD NO, I DON'T MEAN AARON SORKIN OR GEORGE CLOONEY , some competent and honest playwright or script writer they might profitably give the same kind of treatment to the career of Dershowitz. Hey, Kushner, you might do it before the degen-liar-lawyer croaks. Just don't go all sympathetic to Dershowitz, though, he doesn't have even the claims to possible sympathy that Cohn might be imagined to have as a self-hating faggot. Dershowitz hasn't risked anything more than being denied service at a pirogi stand on the Vinyard,
Considering how many lawyer-liars and liar-lawyers have public roles that are far, far better identified as like that of Trump's first brain, Roy Cohn, you have to wonder why that hasn't come to be called "Cohnism" because the Dersh isn't the only one who has modeled his public career on him.
* At this point they're just bouncing the rubble without revealing much new. I mean, what's been discovered since it was revealed that Julius Rosenberg was, in fact, a Stalinist Stalin-era spy? That was like 30 years ago. If someone like Cloony wants to deal with the disaster that Trump and Republican-fascism are, raking over the early 1950s is about as stupid a way to do it as exists outside of a Broadway musical,
It was an accident of my ordering the recording of this piece and it arriving two days before Thanksgiving that year - of course I listened to it immediately and repeatedly for the next several days - that accounts for why I associate it with American Thanksgiving. Like others of his pieces, such as his first Piano Concerto, it is topical in its prophetic warning of disaster under the American system and culture. Only its topicality has only grown through the years. I am grateful the pianist has posted these videos.
I. Barcarolle / Ketjak
II. Largo fantastico (Nachtstuck)
Jerome Jelinek, cello
Charles Asharian, violin
David Ireland, viola
Joseph Gurt, piano
I RECALL LISTENING TO A THEOLOGICAL LECTURE by Luke Timothy Johnson in which he gave an estimate based in medical reporting of the number of those born with inter-sexual bodies in the Atlanta area, he was delivering the lecture at the Chandler School of Theology Emory University where he worked. I can't find the notes I made on the lecture so I don't know what figure he gave though it was rather surprisingly large - the lecture was in favor of the possibility of living a moral life as an LGBTQ+ Person. When you do the math a seemingly small percentage of a large population adds up very fast, even if the factor is 1% of it.
So in answering you I've looked up the estimates of how many biologically Intersex People there are as compared to how many People self-identify as Transgender. Certainly the biologically intersex population is relevant to any discussion of the question, though I hardly ever see it included in that discussion.
As I pointed out the other day, such estimates are of wildly varying and ultimately unknowable reliability due to the same problems that all self-reporting is liable to, though I doubt anyone would self-identify as "Transgender" unless they really thought they were transgendered given the social and, thanks to the goddamned Roberts Republican-fascist Court legal problems it brings. For that reason I'd guess it may be among the more reliable of such statistics.
You would think that the medical statistics on those born with indeterminate gender based on the genitalia they are born with is probably more reliable. You would be wrong about that, though I suspect that's probably largely due to political-professional reasons rather than it being inspecific as to what that indeterminacy is. The widely given statistic of 1.7 percent of the population who are born "Intersex" and the range often given of more than 1 to 2 percent are disputed. Though a lot of that dispute comes from psychologists and psychiatrists with a clear political-professional motive in pushing a far, almost certainly ridiculously low number for that. One of the worst of those a prolific LGBTQ+ hating shrink with a bad record of publishing nonsense far, far outside of their area of alleged expertise.
I will say that based on what I think is probably the most believable range of percentages that between more than about 3.5 and 7 million Americans are biologically intersex. Though if that number was 1000 or less that wouldn't make their own self-identification any less a matter of their right to self-determination in the face of the whipped up ignorant bigotry against them which is rampant on the Republican-fascist and in the media pushed shrink-professional hater racket. There are a number of those out there, often featured in Republican-fascist media and organizations and published by them. You can take your pick of which of them I mean as I type this. I won't give you the gender because they come in both of the standard ones, though most of those I'm seeing are male.
The UCLA Law School's Williams Institute gives an estimate that 2.8 million Americans identify as Transgender. One third identify as Transwomen, one third identify as Transmen and one third self-identify as Nonbinary. 724,000 of those Americans are between the ages of 13 and 17 who as children are the only ones that any legal consideration has any business discussing. I won't even begin to address any claims about anyone else having any business telling adults who they are or how they interpret their own bodies and minds, that's their business, not yours or the goddamned Trump regime or the fascists on the Roberts Court. I will note the hypocrisy of those who claim to figure their concern about the welfare of Transgender People below the age of adulthood is cruelly hypocritical given the known damage of Transgender hate to them. whipped up by the fascists' campaign to make a political target of them as they proclaim their concern for them. As if they and their parents and their own physicians decisions about their welfare are not more valid than those of right-wing, often professional haters who whip up hatred of them for their own profit and gain. Many of those paid millions in the media and those who have made billions of dollars, not a little of that made from selling books to Transkids.
I don't buy the validity of concern of the small percentage of anti-trans feminists whose reaction to he very small percentage of Transwomen* in the population is far, far larger than their reaction would warrant if mere principle was at stake. Most of the feminists I know of have no problem with Transwomen. But, then, most of them aren't billionaires who have way too big an idea of their own opinion and too much money to spread that around with.
The Williams Institute figures indicate that there is considerable regional variation in the percentage of those who self-identify as Transgender, though in almost every state for which a figure is given, they are well within and often far fewer than those who are medically, biologically identified as Intersex. What to make of that, I have no idea and I doubt anyone else does, either.
As I said above, if there were fewer than a thousand biologically Intersex People in the United States, their right to define their own identity is as absolute as a biologically cis-gendered, straight, white male or female to define their identity. I am 100% in favor of the right of all People to come to their own conclusions about their bodies, their minds, their lives TO THE EXTENT THAT THOSE DECISIONS DON'T IMPINGE ON THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS TO DO THE SAME. That's the basis of my thinking on this. You don't need a medical statistician or a legal theorist to come up with a percentage of the population to figure that out. You don't need to trust anyone's' self-interested, professionally advantaging claims about that to come to the conclusion on that. The self-proclaimed defenders of "biological gender" will always have the issue of those who are not assigned a "biological gender" at birth based on their "ambiguous" genitalia or other reasons will always have that as an issue either that they won't or don't address but those very real People are still there as are those who have a right to the self-knowledge of their own minds. That's something the hating cis-gender, straight, white males and females claim as their right even as they also claim it as their right to make that decision for other People. That's the difference between egalitarian democracy and the varying degrees of fascist trending tendencies apart from that.
* The Republican-fascists here in Maine were collecting signatures from the haters at the polls this month to ban Transathletes from playing sports in the state. Since their signs claimed they wanted to protect women's sports they clearly were targeting Transwomen. I asked one of them how many there were on school sports teams in Maine, they had no idea. I asked someone who knew the issue and he told me no more than two in the entire state, if that.
I told the ass that if it were up to me I'd get rid of sports in the public schools because it was dangerous in the case of many of the major school sports. I'll bet that the injuries from sports are far more of a health and life endangering for thousands of athletes to the number of Transchildren in the state. Not getting to the fact that sports take resources from the major business of schools, teaching. Phys-ed should be teaching children to exercise and eat sensibly and getting medical care, not now to play games.
who was a 19-year-old wife of a Marine in 1987, during the sixth year of the military cult of the Reagan administration told me yesterday that when she heard the Marines at her husband's base weren't served Thanksgiving dinner because the base more or less shut down for the holiday, inexperienced and with a baby less than a year old ended up making traditional American Thanksgiving for a bunch of her husband's colleagues not knowing how to do it. The story had its funny aspects because she had never learned how to do it and she, determined to give as many of them the kind of thing she imagined they'd eat - from all over the country with all kinds of backgrounds - ended up making all kinds of stuff ALONE. And that she ended up doing the same at Christmas though she told them they'd have to do more pot-luck for that one.
But the news for me is that at the height of the cult of the military as an idol, the government, the Pentagon, the Department of Defense thought so little of its cannon fodder that they didn't even think it was the bottom floor of respect for them that they would provide them with a meal on America's major food holiday and leave them to fend for themselves at a fast food joint which was their alternative in their location in the major homeland of the cult of the military - a location in the American South I will not reveal - and at the height of the Hollywood - DC - NYC - Atlanta created cult of the military.
America's conservative establishment has always been full of shit about respecting the military. Which is why a fat-assed, rich-boy, war supporting draft dodger can call for the murder of six veterans who tell their fellow military and intelligence colleagues that they have a moral and legal obligation to refuse to carry out his illegal orders and the news media, especially the conservative news media, is on the side of the fat-assed, rich-boy, war supporting, draft dodger.
and his PBS conventional POV bullshit.
PBS could disappear and I don't think it would matter, at all.
or even the strong desire to do more than get the money and perks that being in the Congress get them that THEY WOULD BE AS DESIROUS OF BEING RID OF TRUMP AS ANYONE. If only or those ignoble reasons.
But that's the nature of the kind of materialistic, lazy cowardice that is typical of America's conservatives, who are inevitably caught up either directly or by chosen association with our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy and the slaver culture that persists among our fascists. It's why conservative voters are perfectly OK with having do-nothing or little congresses, which has been the typical mode of Republican led congresses who are only enthusiastic in giving more money to the billionaires who bought them or destroying things and harming even their own consituents. That's certainly true of those in the House led by Johnson, McCarthy (one of the rotten Republican McCarthys), Ryan, Boehner and Hastert. You have to go back to the inept Tom Foley to find as ineffective a Democratic Speaker of the House. You could say the same thing about the Majority Leaders of the Senate, though, as Sheldon Whitehouse and Lawrence O'Donnell have pointed out recently, that's a far harder case to make because, other than Mitch McConnell and slime like Chuck Grassley packing the courts with corrupt, inept fascists where it's impossible to remove them, Senate Majority Leaders of either party haven't gotten much done.* The Senate, insulated as the corrupt founders and framers made it from the Voters and the house of larger egos is a harder body to discipline. By contrast as I have been pointing out for almost twenty years, Nancy Pelosi was probably the most masterful Speaker the house has ever had, something that Senator Whitehouse also pointed out on O'Donnell's show a while back. Not that many Democrats, especially those on the "left" noticed.
Anyway, I think one of the ironies of this period is that those handful of Republicans who pushed for a vote on releasing the Epstein files may have given their careers an enormous boost by doing what they knew would hurt Trump and some of the child-raping billionaires who have funded their corrupt party. They may lose their seats, in which case they can walk away from the disaster that the Republican fascists are setting up, I suspect a crash is coming on fast. There will be a reckoning and, perhaps, if they don't move on to something in the private sector, they an say I told you so and profit from that. I think that's the reason that so many of those in the House on the Republican-fascist side caved when they got the chance, they suspect that the garbage scow they've had as a mother ship for the past decade is about to go down and they don't want to be pulled under with it. I don't know exactly what Trump's motive in ordering them to do that was, whether some attempt at guile or senility but if I were among the Republicans in the Congress, I'd bet on hitching my wagon to Massie or someone like him, to mix metaphors. I would feel enormously relieved by the end of Trump, but, then, I'd want something more than to just keep the hand-job that being a Republican in Congress has been for the entire time.
I do wonder what will become of the "never Trumpers" who were Republicans who jumped even before 2016. I was talking with my sister about some of them the other day and she agreed with me that she has not heard a single one of them admit that there was something wrong with the Republican Party and the American conservative ideology that led to Trump and, before him, to Bush II and the Rehnquist-Roberts courts that guided America into Trumpian fascism. If they've learned the lesson that there was something wrong with their ideology as I've admitted there was something wrong with 1960s-70s secular liberalism, liberal democracy and huge swaths of liberal ideology I have yet to hear it. I would recommend that they do what I did and look at the consequences of their ideology in real life AND AS IT TRULY IMPINGED ON THE LIVES OF THE LEAST AMONG US AND THOSE NOT MUCH HIGHER THAN THEM ON THE ECONOMIC SCALE. The idiotic liberal-libertarianism that led even intelligent liberal lawyers to believe there was a "right to lie" especially in the mass media led as much to Trump as the collusion with fascism which has always been present within the Republican Party, certainly as Goldwater and Nixon implemented the "Southern Strategy" of welcoming our indigenous fascists, the white supremacists into it. And, I'll point out in fairness that there were plenty of those white supremacists in the North, too, especially those such as are concentrated in Maine's second district who have no connection to anything Southern.
I strongly suspect that there are few to none who will try to hitch their wagons to Vance, who is probably at least as detested as Ted Cruz and trusted even less. We will see the extent to which Vance is promoted to victory by that most corrupt force in the United States, the corporate media, the authors of the corruption of America in the wake of the Sullivan Decision that gave the media the permission to lie about politicians with impunity. As I pointed out they couldn't get Gerald Ford elected after he gave Nixon the pardon, though they certainly did what they could for him. If I were a Republican who wanted Vance to succeed or at least hold the office past '28 I'd caution him on pardoning any of the criminals in the Trump regime. If I were one of Trump's criminals who didn't have a pardon in my pocket already I wouldn't expect that they'd get one. Rudy Giuliani had to wait for his until just a while ago and he was totally exposed. I wonder if someone tests the pardons Trump handed out to those criminals who tried to help him steal an election how the rotten Roberts Court will deal with the fact that Trump's pardons were in aid of his own criminality WHILE HE WAS OUT OF OFFICE. I wouldn't bet on the Roberts Court Republican-fascists nullifying those corrupt pardons. We need a Constitutional Amendment to reign in the idiotically broad powers of pardon those founding fat-heads put in the hands of corrupt presidents. And that's along with the one nullifying the Roberts Court making a Republican-fascist president a dictator - which was their clear intent, knowing that the most stupid and corrupt and only convicted felon in presidential history was going to be the defining figure in their conception of a unitary executive. We probably need a vast restructuring of the Supreme and federal courts even more than we need to beat back the Roberts Court framing of presidential fascism.
* I remember being enormously frustrated with my Senator, George Mitchell in that regard as he and the Senate Democrats lost opportunity after opportunity to humiliate and force their Republican colleagues to take extremely unpopular votes that would have certainly lost them support even in Republican controlled states. I don't know how much of the case for Schumer doing a good job with the hand he was dealt is true and if his problems come from his lack of communications skills. I do think he could have made a lot stronger case for Democrats than he has, though if Democrats in the Senate would have gone along with that is far from a given. We do have a problem with Quislings in the party, some in the house where their effect is more diffused but far more in the Senate. I hate the Senate as a matter of experience and principle.
AS THE REAL BIOLOGIST RICHARD LEWONTIN pointed out, the alleged scientific study of human sexuality is faced with an insurmountable hurdle, it is totally dependent on the self-reporting of human behavior and, worse, human mental states by the entirely unreliable and only possible source for that information, the person who is telling on their own self.
And about an area of human behavior and thought that is rife with both deception of others and about their own lives. And that's not to start in on the motivation of the deputed scientists in their collection, analysis, quantification of and reporting on their supposed findings, or rather sifted through entirely unreliable self-reports in which literally not a single one of their myriads of data is of reliable veracity.
There remains, however, one realm of self-report that seems utterly resistant to external verification. Given the social circumstances of sexual activity there seems no way to find out what people do “in the bedroom” except to ask them. But the answers they give cannot be put to the test of incredulity. Surely we believe that there is no sexual fantasy so outrageous and bizarre, no life of profligacy so exhausting, that it has not been realized by someone, somewhere, perhaps even by a reader of the New York Review’s personals. But if by someone, then why not by 17.4 percent of white males with two years of education beyond high school and with an annual income of $43,217? What behavior that is credible in individuals becomes incredible in the mass? The problem is to turn biography into science. If research produced by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), the organization that epitomizes modern objective statistical social science, designed and analyzed by two distinguished service professors and a past president of the International Academy of Sex Research, carried out by a full time project manager in charge of 220 interviewers, and resulting in a book of 718 pages, including 178 tables, 34 graphs, and 635 references, does not crack the problem of knowledge from self-report, then not just “sexology,” but all of scientific sociology, is in deep trouble.
"Sexology" as science* could serve as the primary evidence in the decadence of science starting in the last half of the 19th century as all manner of junk that shared the same defects and I would controversially note that that includes the alleged scientific status of literally everything claimed about how species evolved apart from the far more reliable claim that species did, in fact, evolve from other species. Though I would say that sociology, among the most dubious of all of the so-called sciences, predates Darwinism as science.**
The bottle blond bimbo Megyn Kelly trying to soft-peddle the pedophile rape of Donald Trump by claiming that his pimp and pimpess weren't pedophiles but were devotees of "ephebophilia" which is a word, like "antisemitism" which was invented by dirty old men who lusted after teenagers to bathe their perversion in the conventionally sanctifying aroma of science, as I indicated last weekend, I think that was in no way different from the activity of those who founded NAMBLA and such academically ordained promotions of pedophile rape as Paidika was.***
The fact is that in 2025 the Republican Party plays exactly the same role that NAMBLA and its associated promoters of the extreme reduction of or elimination of age of consent laws, the better to facilitate the rape of children by the class of men who like to rape children (and women, don't forget that Ghiz Maxwell sexually used the girls she lured into their power) especially the privileged, the white, the rich and so powerful, etc. Only it's likely the entire membership or associated perverts of NAMBLA are far, far fewer than even those in the sex club that Trump frequented. I think the Epstein-Maxwell sex circle may be one of the largest in the Western world, though it's probably far smaller than the ones that operate elsewhere such as the sex tourism industry of Thailand. That's what the likes of Kelly and Jesse Watters are trying to peddle to those who are suckers for the patina applied as "science" and the ideological belief that "nature" - so called - sanctifies everything no matter how clearly perverted it is.
The superstition that "sexology" from which such terminology as Megums peddled last week come is actually scientific is, in fact, dangerous because so many in the media, in politics, in that intellectually deficient but enormously powerful profession, "the law" are such total suckers for such stuff. As an LGBTQ+ person, such stuff is entirely unreliable as a basis for our freedom, it is far more reliably founded in the egalitarian exercise of rights in which that exercise is always limited by the rights of those our lives impinge on, which is not a scientific concept but one of revealed morality. If gay liberation had developed only as another of the many non-egalitarian-libertarian assertions of liberty, I wouldn't have seen that as any kind of progress from what always was. With few exceptions those who were privileged were always able to have sex with whoever they wanted, as long as they weren't members of a privileged class. The Epstein-Maxwell rape ring got away with it for a long time, when it was discovered the legal system under the Bush regime let Epstein off on most of it and the thugish lawyers who were in on that deal prospered from it. Many privileged gay men got away with leading elaborate and, at that time, entirely illegal sex lives, Roy Cohn did even as he served as the lawyer for the Archdiocese of New York, then led by the notorious and rumored gay sex predator and opponent of LGBTQ+ rights Francis Cardinal Spelman (AKA "Fanny") and his successors. And all of that was an open secret.
** That is what "Darwinism" came to mean after 1860 when it referred to the theory of natural selection. Before then it referred to the theory of Charles' grandfather Erasmus Darwin though I'm unaware of that ever having been taken as more than an abstract idea that had no actual status as science, though I might be wrong about that. The consequences of his grandson's theory and its ideological-class-based insertion in the heart of biological sciences hadn't yet achieved its fuller effects. Though much of the success of it was based on the desire among those who wanted to study the fact of evolution to pretend that they could find a force in nature that drove evolution. The fact is that apart from the clearly founded belief that species evolve from earlier species, there is no real way to scientifically study that as a unified phenomenon or, really, even in the case of any naturally evolved species. The physical evidence is simply too sparse and incomplete to do that. Which may make biologists frustrated and angry but it doesn't require anyone who is honest to lie about that.
*** The denials of several of the academics that their "Journal of Pedophilia" was unrelated to the legalization of and promotion of pedophile rape are about as convincing as the claims of Trump that he wanted to get to the bottom of the Epstein pedophile rape circle he was a member of.
Note: For some reason Blogger has put a new button next to the scroll bar that will perform the entirely unwelcomed act of it automatically inserting Google search links in my writing. If I hit it by accident and it fills one of my pieces with such junk, I'll try to remove all of them so the links I mean to put there will be the only ones.
Also note that blogger has been screwing with the text size and formatting in ways I can't figure out. I really don't want to go wading through the html to try to figure out how to fix that these days. Sorry for the eccentric appearance of the text.
