Saturday, July 12, 2025

Israel Is Reproducing At Scale The War Crimes Of The Nazis

 and the United States is on the side of the genocidalists, now.   But first, listen to what's being said about the Israeli's intention to set up a huge concentration camp in Gaza at the EU Parliament.


The tragedy of Joe Biden ending his political career supporting the Israeli fascist government in its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and elsewhere is a small personal tragedy for him,  the crime his administration supported only to have the Trump II regime giving them complete permission and support - no doubt so the Trump family can snap up some seaside property once the native population has been destroyed - is among the worst crimes of the 21st century.   I will never forgive those who have brought my country so far from the country my parents and grandparents lived in WHERE THEY JOINED THE MILITARY TO STOP THE NAZIS AND IMPERIAL JAPANESE GOVERNMENT FROM COMMITTING to the U.S. being on the side of the genocidalists, now. 

Now the Israeli fascists have said they were going to set up a large concentration camp, something which they present as a right to declare all Palestinians who will not go there are enemies who can then be wiped out - essentially what they've been doing all along - is more than an irony,  it is about as cynical as it gets considering the use that Zionists have made of the genocides of the Nazis when they sought to wipe out Jews,  Romas, Poles, and others in blackmailing Western governments and the consciences of those of good will. 

It will certainly be a fact that is noted that it was the so-called International Holocaust Memorial Alliance that set up the cultural preparation for this in declaring that any comparison between the actions of the Israeli government and the Nazi government is "antisemitism."   I can't for a second believe that that preceded the actions of the Israeli government in the past two years was a coincidence,  it is too specific to have been hit upon by chance.   Except for any of those involved in the drafting of that cover-up for genocide after it was published,  I know of exactly one who did,  those who supported that definition have to be considered all-in on this crime.   The chance for them to escape that judgement is over. 

Israel is a genocidal ethno-fascist democracy,  we are all learning the terrible truth that a majority population can vote and maintain such a counter-intuitive "democracy" in place when we were all told that that is exactly what democracy was meant to prevent.   As Rabbi Shapiro said in that interview I posted earlier this week points out,  the definition of Israel as NOT BEING THE COUNTRY OF ISRAELIS BUT "the country of the Jews" is a declaration that any Israeli democracy was never going to be egalitarian but was guaranteed to be an apartheid state, to start with, and a calumny against Jews who did not and did not want to live there by feeding into many of the worst tropes of antisemitism.   It leaves Jews around the world vulnerable to misplaced responsibility for the crimes of a country they don't live in,  do not want to live in AND MAY NOT HAVE EVER SUPPORTED AND EVEN OPPOSED in the minds of those who are predisposed to dislike Jews and to those who such antisemites can convince to hold them responsible for crimes and evils they have no responsibility for.   

Zionists have skillfully played that game along with taking advantage of gentiles who detest antisemitism and all forms of inequality by making the trope that anything they wanted to call "antisemitism" suspect in the minds of the middle-and-low brow culture of places such as the U.S. and Britian.  As I noted the other day,  Rabbi Yakkov Shapiro's refutation of that is more complex than the lie that has been actively promoted by Zionists that conflate opposition to the crimes of the Israeli government with antisemitism,  noting both that there are, indeed, antisemites who also oppose the crimes of the Israeli government and antisemites WHO ARE, THEMSELVES, ZIONISTS WHO WANT ALL JEWS OUT OF THEIR COUNTRIES.     That was one of the earliest objections to Zionism among Jews who lived in democracies in North America and Western Europe,  that it would exacerbate antisemitism and suspicions against Jews as, in fact, the creation of Zionism did inspire a significant part of the antisemitism that was manifested after its announcement and promotion. 

That game of blackmail is rampant among us, today but may of us are not playing it anymore.   I was pretty much done with it with the invasions by Israel of Lebanon during the Bush II regime when I knew that the crimes of the Israeli fascists had to be condemned, that to remain cowed into cowardly silence was to be complicit in them.   It is my moral failing that I didn't keep on the topic then.  That is my confession of guilt. 

The filthiness of the intimidation, the moral blackmail that long ago ceased to have any atom of morality to it can't be allowed to keep anyone who has any morality silent about this, anymore.

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Greg Brown - Cheapest Kind

 


We travelled Kansas and Missouri spreading the good news

A preachers family in our pressed clothes and worn out polished shoes

Momma fixed us soup beans and served them up by candlelight

She tucked us in at night

Oh she worried through many a sleepless night

Dad and me would stop by the store when the day was done

Standin at the counter he said "I forgot to get the peaches, son."

"What kind should I get?" I said to him there where he stood in line

And he answered just like I knew he would "Go and get the cheapest kind"


[Chorus:]

But the love, the love, the love

It was not the cheapest kind

It was rich as, rich as, rich as ,rich as, rich as

Any you could ever find


I see the ghost of my grandfather from time to time

In some big city amongst the people all dressed so fine

He usually has a paper bag clutched real tight

His work clothes are dirty

He don't look at nobody in the eye

Oh he was little, he was wirey, and he was lots of fun

He was rocky as Ozark dirt that he come from

And they was raisin seven children on a little farm

In not the best of times

The few things that they got from the store

Was always just the cheapest kind

[Chorus]


Fancy houses with wealthy people I don't understand

I always wish I could live holdin on to my grandpa's hand

So he could lead me down that gravel road somewhere

To that little house where there's just enough supper

For whosever there

My people's hands and faces they are so dear to me

All I have to do is close my eyes and I see 'em all so near to me

I have to cry I have to laugh

When I think of all the things that have drawn those lines

So many years of makin do with the cheapest kind

[Chorus ]



RMJ Has A Post

commenting on the New York fucking Times rehashing lies about the most demonstrably competent President we have had since LBJ being an addled, senile old man, while it covers up and enables the addled, senile old man who is also an idiot to start with and a criminal who the New York fucking Times did so much to put there, starting well before 2016 when they sandbagged probably the most qualified candidate to have ever gotten a major party nomination to put him there. 

Along with those myths about the Supreme Court, the Constitution and other dearly cherished myths of American life,  the myth of the "free press" being a bulwark of American democracy is a pile of shit with a few quarters thrown into it.   You have to mine loads of shit to find those things that have really been valuable, only shit will eventually turn to compost which has a good purpose,  most of journalism has no purpose except to bury democracy on behalf of oligarchs such as who own outfits like the big papers like the WaPo and the NYfT.    I wish someone would do an in-depth investigation of the financial and personal motives of the owners of the NYfT to expose their motives in doing so much to sink democracy while posing as the defenders of democracy.    I know why they strike the pose,  to gull the affluent idiot-moderates and liberals who can afford the goddamned thing.  What I want exposed is the real motives behind why they an their brothel of media whores do what they do.    It's far more transparent in the case of the owner of the WaPo and the LA Times but the Ochs-Sulzbergers and those who cling on them is not as obvious or transparent.   I always had the feeling that the previous publisher - I forget, was it "pinch" or "punch" or maybe "putsch" - had felt some social slight by Bill Clinton that caused the Times three decades and counting war against him and Hillary Clinton,  much as I always figured Christopher Hitchens resented Bill Clinton from Arkansas being more successful with girls at Oxford than tubby, oily little Hitch was.   

But I think to really continue as they have, sandbagging Joe Biden, there has to be money at the bottom of it.  Could it be as simple as they wanted the Trump millionaire-billionaire tax bonanza to continue?  I wouldn't be surprised if it were that simple.  

I'm going to remember everyone,  from the alleged left to the moderates to the right who had a hand in handing the country over to Trump and Republican fascists,  from the owners of the media brothels to the hired talent right on down to the alleged comedians who made "Old Joe Biden" jokes.   The consequences for us and the world of what they did is as serious as those who aided the rise of Hitler and other of the kind of worst criminals who the modern era has given rise to.  I've told before how, when Ronald Reagan died I gave scandal to many a lefty blogger by telling the terrible truth about him and the many thousands he killed only to have them give me the "speak only good of the dead."  My answer was that the forgiveness they needed wasn't mine to give,  that I'd consider it after those tens and hundreds of thousands or more before me in line uniformly gave him theirs.   I will never overlook what they've done to us.   The consequences for other People and living beings is too great for that.   May they spend a long, long period in hell for what they've done. 

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Rabbi Yakkov Shapiro Demolishing The Lie That Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism



WHILE I'M CERTAIN that there are things Rabbi Shapiro and I would disagree about,  a few,  and I'll note that again A FEW aspects of sexual morality,  gender roles and, of course, that I'm a Christian and he's an Orthodox Jew,  his honesty and clarity of thought as well as his clearly diligent scholarship and reasoning impresses me ever more every time I listen to one of his talks.  Unfortunately his book, "The Empty Wagon: Zionism's Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft"  is outside of my budget and longer than I'd feel capable of taking on right now. 

In looking more deeply into the lie that anti-zionism is antisemitism, the clearly dishonest though largely successful lie campaign to equate the two to the extent that,  as Rabbi Shapiro points out,  someone taken as being as credible as Deborah Lipstadt is taken to be,  can call Jews "antisemites" because they oppose zionism and are critical of the state of Israel.   Lipstadt tap danced around an answer to that direct question in a weasely way by claiming that "the jury was out" on that issue,  so as to say that not only Jews but the most observant of Jews, the most dedicated to Judaism can be anti-Jewish which should impeach her as an honest voice in the discussion but, as he also shows,  she's far from alone in being so dishonest.   

If zionism were an honest ideology,  its defense wouldn't force scholars who certainly know when they are lying to lie through their teeth, in public, on the record.  If academic credentials carried an obligation to tell the truth there would be some mechanism for removing university credentials from those holding those credentials who use their alleged authority to lie so flagrantly and maliciously though, from the start, academia was never much a moral proposition outside of some seminaries attached to specific denominations - and a lot of them were no more honest about guaranteeing the validity of the credentials they issue.   They didn't remove the academic credentials but they, sometimes, removed other credentials from them.    I have to say that academic credentialing is something that has plummeted in my regard since the turn of the century and I went online to read more of the babble of such college grad. 

I can't claim that Rabbi Shaprio's answers to the many aspects of the question brought to him by the interviewer are neat and succinct in the desired modern American mode - which is unfortunate because Americans aren't, by and large, deep thinkers with great powers of concentration or even a long attention span,  and I am directly talking to a couple of the jerks who troll me when I say that.   

But his answer is the best one I've yet heard so I'm posting it.  The definition of "antisemitism" he comes up with as opposed to the phony, polemical one that the IHRA has pushed so as to protect the criminals of the Israeli government and military as they commit genocide and crimes against humanity is vastly superior to that one which has been made de facto law of the land and the lying corporate media.   As he points out,  it was the genuine definition of the word,  one that not only appeared in dictionaries of the English language BUT WAS SET OUT IN AT LEAST ONE HANDBOOK OF CAMPUS PRO-ISRAELI PROPAGANDA BEFORE THE NEW ONE WAS ADOPTED.    He also says something that I've pointed out here a number of times,  states don't have rights, human beings have rights,  no state has a "right to exist."   I feel especially vindicated in what I said because he is such a deep and honest and rational thinker and I don't get much occasion for having my ideas vindicated so authoritatively. 

I would recommend listening at least once,  I intend to listen a number of times and may go to the effort of editing the entire machine made transcript for posting in the future. 


The More I Think

 about the point in yesterday's post about the Roberts Court creating an extra-Constitutional means of law making in the United States, the more convinced I am that I am right about that.  The Roberts Court isn't the first court to amend the Constitution by Supreme Court majority fiat,  they've been doing that with increasing frequency and increasing recklessness since 1803,  but it is the first one to have gone so far as to basically and drastically alter the very form of governance that is the entire basis of the United States Constitution WHICH BEGINS BY MAKING THE CONGRESS THE ONLY BODY ABLE TO ACTUALLY MAKE LAW.   The Supreme Court, starting with the modest nullification of a provision in the Judiciary Act - actually drafted by and voted on in Congress by actual framers of the very Constitution - and next and far more catastrophically in the Dred Scott decision,  even those entirely outrageous oversteps by the most compromised and corrupt Court in the land hadn't gone so far as to, in effect, nullify the First Article in the Constitution. 

And that is exactly what the Roberts Court did starting just over a year ago by making their future Republican-fascist king,  Trump, immune from the law and which they have been reinforcing with increased intensity - especially for the lazy, Ivy Leaguer slackers on this court - and devotion to destroying the United States as a government of laws and not of one Republican-fascist man.  They have nullified laws and even sections of the Constitution to put what is indisputably the most corrupt, most criminal, stupid and the most dishonest liar and . . . to remind you CONVICTED CRIMINAL to have ever held the Presidency in the position above laws duly enacted by Congress and previous presidents - allegedly the only legitimate means of making law in the United States.    And, as I pointed out, combined with the foolish absolute pardon power that is actually in the Constitution,  they have made it certain that Trump and whatever future presidents who are of his criminal nature will be able to enact their laws made by monarchical fiat through pardoning their henchmen and storm trooper armies to enforce their will with violence and even death.   

So the Supreme Court which was supposed to interpret the law, has, in fact, nullified not only laws, some of the most important ones ever made such as the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, but have by 5-4 and 6-3 PARTISAN MAJORITIES on the Supreme Court nullified the very form of government which the Constitution set up.

I pointed to the Dred Scott decision in which the infamous Taney Court - before now generally held to be the worst Court to have ever sat in . . . "judgement" which nullified the citizenship of Black People and nullified all of their rights under the Constitution.   They did that along with nullifying a long-standing law made by Congress,  the Missouri Compromise, to do that.    Proving that not only could the Supreme Court make real human beings non-persons,  it could create not only "persons" but grant them de facto citizenship in the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case in which the Court created corporations as "persons"  using a forged and plainly dishonest claim by a Senator who then became a corporate lawyer,  lying that into the 14th Amendment where it has gone on to let later courts turn their artificial "persons" into Übermenschen with even the rights baked into the First Amendment but with more power than thousands and millions of real human citizens.   The 1976 Buckely vs Valeo,  made on behalf of one of the premier fascist elite family which also transmuted money into "speech" thus giving billionaires, millionaires and corporations millions and billions more "speech" than any citizen or even their measly non-profit corporations could ever wield.   And all the time, as they expanded farther and father on that,  creating junk that was never in the Constitution nor ever adopted as law by the due processes of Constitutional government,  they have been stripping actual human beings of their rights - the Roberts Court has gone farther in that than any previous court or,  I'd argue, ALL PREVIOUS COURTS TOGETHER HAVE.   The Taney Court settled on stripping Black People of their rights and person hood and even citizenship,   the Roberts Court has done that to whoever Trump and their own Republican-fascist Party targets for that dehumanization.   White People, even white men, for the first time in our history could stand a chance of finding out what life in these United States has been for People of Color, Women and others targeted by the law and the Court as lesser beings in ways that previous generations never had to face   Of course workers have been treated that way for almost the entire career of the Supreme Court, especially under their invention of "corporate person hood" through their from the bench amendments to and nullifications of clauses in the 14th and other Amendments. 

I have a nightmare that the United States, by a miracle, at this point, pulls out of this and a Democratic super majority under a Democratic president takes power and is in a position to stop this Court led plummet into the fascism we are actually in the beginning stages of.   My fear is that the Constitutional scholars and civil liberties lawyers and milquetoast moderates will be too goddamned chicken to make the changes needed - starting with stripping the Court of the very Marbury power that they stole to start with,  putting sufficently short term limits on the tenure of the members of the Court (they should be stripped of the lying title "Justices" too) and making it far easier to remove them than the impossibility of doing that now.   And those are only some of the necessary limits on the Supreme Court.   They also need to make it clear by Constitutional Amendment that no person in the United States - INCLUDING MOST OF ALL A SITTING PRESIDENT WITH SO MUCH POWER - is immune from prosecution for crimes committed while AND AS PRESIDENT.   They should also remove the idiotic absolute pardon power when it comes to those in and out of their administration whose actions impinged on their election and holding the office of president,  Vice Presidents who take power on the resignation of a President should explicitly NOT be able to pardon the president who is in a perfect position to make a Nixon-Ford corrupt deal to that effect.    And it must also make it clear that no Supreme Court has the power to nullify or amend the Constitution.   Without those,  I wouldn't bet a dime on American democracy in even its imperfect and unequal form surviving.   Once those Ivy Leaguer lair-lawyers have made innovations and published them,  that is a trail for them to always follow ever after until those trails are destroyed, utterly.     

I've grown used to people who read what I post thinking I've gone too far,  twenty years ago I used to have idiots on blog comment threads scold me for saying the Republican Party was a fascist party - Bush v Gore was the tipping point in that for me.  I've been scolded for condemning the Supreme Court by those who got the vapors and accused me of being like the segregationists who put up bill boards calling for Earl Warren's impeachment.   I had more than one mid-brow, college-credentialed, media addled dolt saying "The first person to say "fascist" (or "Nazi") loses."   I always hear Susan Stamberg's smarmy NPR voice saying that when I hear it in my mind no matter who typed it into the comment thread.   But I'm getting used to even some of those who mocked that saying the same thing, sometimes years later.    Generally, in the past I hoped they were right and I was wrong.   But I don't bother hoping that anymore because I'm certain I'm right.   And I don't feel any happiness in being right about these things.  

Monday, July 7, 2025

Leo Parker - Bad Girl


Leo Parker - baritone saxophone

Dave Burns - trumpet

Bill Swindell - tenor saxophone

John Acea - piano

 Al Lucas - bass

Wilbert Hogan – drums

What Ever Happened To J, K. Rowling? And Lying By Editing, A Common Practice Among Those Who Can't Rely On The Truth Doing It For Them

THE BRILLIANT British commentator Owen Jones has been vilified online by J. K. Rowling and I have to say his answer asking her,  the epic anti-trans avenger of feminism (though I'd like to know how she treats feminists who have no problem with TransPeople) has been entirely silent over the murders, rapes, sexual abuse,  torture,  and the health, nutritional, family and personal catastrophe that has been ongoing for going on two years against Palestinian WOMEN,  only, as he shows in his video defense of himself and turning the question on her.  Or maybe it's only Women in the West she cares about or Women who want to do things like compete in sports or play roles in movies.   She clearly hasn't been bothered to say anything about the hundreds of thousands who have been the victims of Israel's genocide in Gaza and elsewhere. 

But  she wasn't exactly silent, having early on condemned those who were calling for a cease fire.    I was pretty much done with Harry Potter well before this but I'd never have taken it up if I knew how things were going to go.   You might want to listen to how he takes her apart. 


I'm going to post the video again from later in it where he exposes the libel against himself committed by the Israel right-or-wrong and even in Nazi mode crowd, including the war criminal Netanyahu's former press flack.   He shows how a dishonestly clipped question he asked of the odious Piers Morgan was presented as him excusing the acts of Hamas on October 7th,  when he was pointing out that what Morgan was saying about Israels' ongoing genocide WOULD BE EXACTLY LIKE EXCUSING THAT CRIME DUE TO ISRAEL'S TREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS.  The Liars for Israel clipped it to make it seem like he was excusing the crimes of October 7th and it's gone viral with the apologists for genocide and mass slaughter.

Only, the fact is that it is the Israel apologists who are doing exactly what they are accusing Owen Jones of doing WHEN HE DIDN'T DO THAT.  

Back to Rowling.  

Maybe what happens to Rowling happens to most if not all of those who become billionaires and believe they got it by being a lot smarter or better than they are.  In her case probably exacerbated by her knowing that without her imagining the books,  none of that would have happened.   She didn't hire the writing job out like most billionaires have gotten rich off of other Peoples' ideas.  If that's the case she should have gotten over that by now. She wrote a series of kid's books that became wildly popular,  it isn't as big as all that.   Seeing what she's up to these days,  I don't think I'd read her books to children again,  I don't think I'd defend her against her dishonest right-wing fundamentalist critics, as I used to.   If she were as good and smart as she seems to like to believe she is,  she'd listen to as honest and exigent a critic as Jones is and do a little of that self-reflection that I believe is also recommended in even her Presbyterian tradition. 

While Thinking About The Roberts Court Making Us A Republican-fascist Monarchy

 something occurred to me that I haven't heard anyone address.    Their un-constitutional declaration last year that presidents are immune from prosecution when they break the law as an "official act" of the presidency mixed with the idiotic provision that is actually and dangerously IN THE CONSTITUTION means that the president, on his own, can effectively make laws that, if future presidents chose to take them up and continue or even expand them,  they could put into effect in perpetuity without the Congress doing it,  that continuing as long as the heretofore and likely never will happen removal of a president by impeachment doesn't stop it.   And no one he orders to implement said law would be prosecuted if he gave them a pardon for it,  even the courts would be disempowered by the Roberts Courts actions to stop that law ever being the real law of the land,  in concrete fact instead of Ivy League lawery-liarly non-reality.  

If you have any faith in the Supreme Court, especially this corrupt Roberts Court overturning a president pardoning himself or corruptly making a deal with the VP to pardon him on his stepping down from office - as I have always believed Gerald Ford made with Richard Nixon - you are as stupid as an old line "civil liberties" liberal.  

Since the Roberts Court has said that Trump could violate the law and even deport People without any judicial review preventing that from happening - even to third countries where the People being deported, to their almost certain torture and likely risk of death with the blessings of Roberts,  Alito,  Thomas (the RAT in this court) Goresuch, Kavanaugh and the fradulent "moderate"  Amy Coney Barrett clearly they are all in on that actual,  concrete,  presidential law making stuff, 100%.  

I will be writing a post on the uses of negative stereotypes, the condemnation of those as an abstract proposition running up against the reality of those members of groups who actually do the things that the stereotype contain,  seemingly giving some TRUTH TO IT and why objecting to calling that out is a massive and currently very dangerous practice of alleged "civil libertarians" and others such as who pose as that while promoting some of the greatest evils of our day - but as you can see from that description of the very real phenomenon,  laying it out is rather complex and getting out of that complexity towards clarity is not the easiest thing to write.   But I do have to ask, as an Irish Catholic of the kind who takes both the The Gospel, foremost, and the Law and the Prophets and the best of the Christian tradition extremely seriously,   what kind of Catholicism formed the six fascists who are sitting on that Court right now.   ALL OF THEM had an alleged Catholic formation, if my memory of their bios is correct,  ALL OF THEM ARE DESTROYING EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY TO SET UP THE MOST IMMORAL, AMORAL, CROOKED AND STUPID PRESIDENT OF OUR LIFETIME TO BE SUCH A DICTATOR AS I DESCRIBE ABOVE AND TO KEEP THEIR CROOKED FASCIST PARTY IN POWER FOR PERPETUITY AGAINST THE WILL OF THE MAJORITY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.  

I have no problem with someone asking that question,  a question which,  I will point out,  anti-Catholic bigots have pointed out in the past - leaving out such as "justice" Sotomayor who are more in line with the Catholic tradition than those six whited sepulchers in black robes.   THAT question will come into play in that post I'm undertaking but want to say just right.   

Sunday, July 6, 2025

"La arenosa" (Leguizamón/Castilla) -) Hernán Ríos (piano) / Facundo Guevara (percusión)

 

 

Update: Mercedes Sosa live 1995




Now, This Is My Kind Of Socialism

I FIRST LEARNED of the wonderful writer and actor Wallace Shawn from watching My Dinner With Andre.  At first I thought I was going to hate the movie because of Andre Gregory's long stream of bullshit semiconsiousness of a kind I'd gotten my fill of during my college years - for its devaluation of mysticism into that kind of bullshit, too.   

But then "Wally" took over and I liked the movie a lot more after that.   I have, from time to time, looked at what Wallace Shawn has been up to, some of his plays have been the kind that I think are the most important,  disturbing, troubling, questioning, forcing uncomfortable situations to conscious consideration.  Aunt Dan and Lemon, for example.   

Here he presents why he calls himself a socialist,  it is one of the best short essays I've heard or read in a long while.   I don't call myself a "socialist" for the same reason I rejected the word "Christian" for myself, though I certainly believe in the Gospel of Jesus and most of what is said in the rest of the New Testament and by a good part of the Christian tradition that takes those seriously.    I think the word, itself has lost its meaning and any positive usefulness  through its appropriation by some of the most vile of political ideologies,  Fabianism,  Marxism, various right-wing "socialisms" and, of course, the contradictory claim of a form of it as "National Socialism" (which makes almost as little sense as "Christian nationalism").    The term "antisemitism" (which I have heard applied to Mr Shawn) has lost its meaning through a similar appropriation by those with evil ideological intent and it is not only meaningless but has been weaponized by fascists around the world,  many of them actual antisemites.  

But here is a voice of reason for the last day of the long American weekend 



No, That's Not How I Heard It - Hate Mail

MERCEDES SOSA WASN'T an atheist as you claim,  I have no idea if Silvio Rodriguez is or not, he is a fine poet and not a bad song writer.   And I did post that song of his because his covert message was fitting for July 4th in the United States. 

Here's what I found online about her religious orientation.

Dos días antes de morir, Mercedes Sosa recibió la unción de los enfermos (sacramento también llamado extremaunción) de manos de un sacerdote amigo, el padre Luis Farinello.

La muy querida intérprete, de profunda voz y raigambre popular, en buena parte de su vida circuló en ambientes artísticos y políticos muy ligados al Partido Comunista y a sectores de izquierda afines.

Quizá sean poco conocidas algunas manifestaciones suyas que revelaron un proceso de acercamiento a la fe católica de sus mayores, y una reconsideración de algunos enfoques, como el trato que se dio a la gente de fe ortodoxa en Rusia.

En una conferencia de prensa, en julio de 1999, en San José de Costa Rica, donde estaba en una gira centroamericana, Mercedes Sosa declaró haber encontrado a Dios, luego de atravesar un agudo proceso de depresión. "Estuve perdida y encontré a Dios", reconoció en esa ciudad.

Confesó estar saliendo de "un agudo proceso depresivo", que había comenzado varios meses antes y que en algún momento le impidió cantar pues "lo único que quería era dormir".

Entonces, declaró ante la prensa costarricense que los rezos de su familia y de muchas otras personas contribuyeron a su recuperación.

"Tengo tíos curas y tías monjas que rezaron por mí cuando estuve enferma. Vengo de una familia muy católica", dijo. A la vez, reconoció entonces que su proceso de encuentro todavía se encontraba "a medio camino".

En una ocasión, la intérprete cantó ante el papa Juan Pablo II en el Segundo Concierto de Navidad en el Vaticano.

El padre Farinello atendió a la madre de Mercedes, de fe católica arraigada en su familia tucumana, hasta su muerte. Allí, la artista empezó a mostrar fuertes inquietudes espirituales. Y le dijo al padre: "Cuando llegue el día en que esté así, no se olvide de mí".

A juicio del sacerdote, ella "fue madurando y abriéndose al misterio".

Mercedes cantó gratuitamente para la fundación del padre Farinello y sus chicos. Y le decía que "el hambre de los pibes es obsceno". Hace unos dos años le había pedido al sacerdote una imagen de la Virgen de Luján. "Siempre que hablábamos, conversábamos mucho sobre Dios y la Virgen de Luján", comentó él.

Cuando el sacerdote la visitó, la artista estaba inconsciente. El le dio la unción y sintió un estremecimiento. Le habló al oído. A su entender, "ella se conmovió". Y entiende que ante la muerte se ve eso: "Es entregarse a una ternura invisible, que uno presiente".

The well known radical Argentinian Fr. Luis Farinello certainly knew her, he clearly was satisfied with her standing as a Catholic, enough so he administered the Sacraments to her.    If she had a devotion to the Virgin of Lujan, I don't know how much more Catholic you get than that.