William Bolcom Piano Quartet

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)

III. Intermezzo 

IV. Marcia risoluto

Jerome Jelinek, cello

Charles Asharian, violin

David Ireland, viola

Joseph Gurt, piano

I Am Trolled Over Trans People

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. 

A Woman I Know

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.   

An Antidote To The Anecdotal History According To Ken Burns

 and his PBS conventional POV bullshit.  

I'm pre-ordering his book today.   

PBS could disappear and I don't think it would matter, at all. 

If The Republican-fascists Had Any Courage Or Intelligence Among Them

 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. 

And Here I Thought He Didn't Understand What "YMCA" Was About

 POSTED WITHOUT APOLOGY 

Sex Lies Social Science And Complete Hypocrisy In The New NAMBLA Of 2025

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.   

* I'll remind you that I've stopped with the dishonest convention that there is "real science" and "pseudo-science" the later violating the supposed ideal standards of "real science" because that's not what the word "science" as used in real life means.  Science is whatever the gatekeepers of science let in, no matter whether or not it practices the defined methods of science or, as in the case of every one of the social sciences and even many of those regions of science firmly embedded in the "harder sciences" these days much of science as so accepted doesn't begin to fulfill those requirements.   I think the theory of natural selection was something of a watershed which permitted everything from ideologically, economically self-interested conjecture get directly into the university based-scientific publication literature and liturgy of science though there was much allowed in even before then.   As Marilynne Robinson said, if religion is saddled with bad religion then science should not be allowed to variably and self-interestedly escape the consequences of bad science. 

** I think that sociology was an obvious creation of the ideology of materialism which was allowed to become academically respectable (though it has never been truly intellectually respectable) through that ideological license.   I suspect it was the first camel of social and behavioral science to get its nose under the tent, though economics may precede it in terms of chronology.    

** 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.  

I Heard Someone Wonder How Mike Johnson Could Live With Himself Knowing What Trump Did As Part Of

 the Epstein pedophile rape gang.  Here's my answer. 

Mike Johnson is a product of affluent, white supremacist-slaver culture in which those considered "little people" are objects to be used and disposed of at the pleasure of those like him, the affluent, white, males,  and  it being him, specifically,  I'll point out that historically plenty of affluent, white, gay males brought up in that and educated in that and in a white-supremacist pseudo-Christian church (one founded in supporting slavery) they're as willing to practice that kind of privilege as the straight ones. 

It's not even necessary to be an affluent, white male brought up in Louisiana slaver culture and a member of the Southern Baptist heresy.   The secular Brit bitch Ghiz Maxwell told other women in her class and circle that the girls she procured for her and Epstein's  rape-blackmail racket were just "trash,"  poor girls who were there to be lured in and used by them and the men they sold them to,  filmed and certainly either blackmailed or who they exposed to those who would blackmail them who certainly paid for that information.  Affluence corrupts no matter what other cultural and historical trappings it arrives in. 

 A creepy daughter-daddy chastity ceremony perv, Louisiana lawyer-liar,  Republican-fascist and Southern Baptist would have no qualms about doing that because literally everything about his "Christianity" is certainly what the Revelation of John identified as the "Antichrist".  It is a product of the past fifty years of the filthy American media identifying that heresy as "Christianity" that has led to it being identified with the exact opposite of the teachings of Jesus.   Mike Johnson is just such a total hypocrite of the kind who is rampant in the Republican-fascist party,  more prevalent in the South and mid-west and Rocky Mountain states but the kind who isn't segregated to those regions,  we've got them here in Maine and they're in every state.  And, as I said, you don't have to come with those flavorings to cover the rot, he's just one variety of them. 

From Megyn Kelly and Jesse Watters PoohPoohing Pedos

to almost the entire Republican-fascist caucus in the Congress protecting the billionaire Pedophiles in the Executive (and beyond) and the Supreme Court's Republican-fascist majority enabling Trump at almost every turn 

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS THE 

NEW NAMBLA OF 2025.

Would You Bet On The Integrity Of J. D. Vance?

IT IS SATISFYING to at least imagine that Trump feels something like we imagined  Jonny Rocco as played in Key Largo by  Edward G. Robinson trapped below deck by Frank McCloud (Bogart) only Trump wouldn't be as skilled at saving his own ass with a gun as Rocco was.    I hope Trump's dementia hasn't gotten so far that he doesn't appreciate how close he is to total exposure and ruin but I think even the demented Trump must realize one thing,  he very likely made a mistake in putting his needed pardon in the hands of J. D. Vance.   

Vance, on his part, is probably at least a good enough student of history to realize that the pardon that Gerald Ford certainly promised Nixon was what led to his inability to ride the absurdly favorable press he got to electoral victory in 1976.   If Vance isn't that smart, the man whose bitch he is,  Peter Thiel is certainly smart enough to realize his chief asset in government would diminish his value to him enormously by giving Trump the pardon he needs.   The story that Donny jr. was the one who sold his idiot father on choosing Vance might figure into this, and it makes the folly of it more satisfying.  Anyone who was in any doubt that Vance would fail to fulfill a promised pardon should recall how he sold out those he claimed as "his people" the white working class of Appalachia. And if they forget that as an example of how he would sell out anyone is certainly watching him throw his own wife under the bus as he publicly kissed and handled the widder' Kirk,  who he certainly must have expected would be considered a goddess by the white supremacists he threw his wife and, certainly by implication, his own children under the bus of his ambition.   Little did he know that she would have undercut her own status so fast by her own behavior. 

I think if Trump is driven from office the matter of Vance pardoning him or any of those who Trump has not pardoned, whether it be Bondi and Blanche or Patel or any of a list of obvious criminals in his regime is certainly something none of them would bet their lives on if they thought that far ahead.  Any pardons Vance considers would be granted only if his and Thiel's calculations were that the cost of those outweighed the benefits to them, or rather 

TO THEM 

made that worth the cost.   Frankly, I wouldn't bet on them even noticing those who it wouldn't cost them a thing to pardon getting one unless there was a benefit to Thiel and his bitch.  Which is how a "President Vance" should be thought of as Trump should certainly be thought of as Putin's bitch 

Trump must certainly have a vestigial sense that that's exactly how he'd deal with it.   I mean, they say that dementia only exposes the person who was there all along.  

If Elon Musk and his incel-boy army don't have pardons, already,  I can imagine Vance ordering the AG he appoints to go after them so that Thiel and his cronies can pick through the pieces of Elon's empire as he goes to prison or worse. 

These are just the ruminations of someone who isn't entirely sold on a lot more of the Epstein files getting made public as a given.  Though I will say that the Democrats who have the stuff that they subpoenaed from the Epstein estate have been playing a remarkably cool hand in judicious releases of what they have.   I think it's certain that if there is to be a next shoe to drop, it's going to be even more damning than what got released the other day.   I think Thiel must be confident of one thing,  there is nothing that ties him to the rape of young girls.  I wouldn't bet on any of the other billionaires in and around the Trump orbit other than Bessent knowing that their names don't appear in the files and that's only because,  like Thiel, he's not interested in raping young girls.   While it would be hard for any gay Republican asshole to replace Lindsay Graham and a sitting member of the Republican faction of the Supreme Court as most loathsome living gay man,  Bessent is close to being a contender of that if the other two die before he does. 

Do I Think Chuck Schumer Should Be Replaced?

I DON'T KNOW,  maybe what he managed to do was the best that a Democratic Leader in this Republican fascist dominated Senate could get.  Listening to Sheldon Whitehouse with Lawrence O'Donnel last night what he said made good sense.   Sheldon Whitehouse always makes good sense.   If I were posing the question it would be maybe we should do what should have been done and scrap the entire Senate.   The Senate has been the killing floor of democracy only second in that position to the entirely anti-democratically chosen and staffed Supreme Court.  

I agree with one thing he said above all WE HAVE TO MAKE THE PROMISED VOTE ON THE ACA PREMIUMS AS HARD AND COSTLY TO REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS AS POSSIBLE.   I will be doing everything I can to put the heat on the eternally concerned but never responsible Susan Collins and not on the retiring Angus King.   That skank is running for reelection in a state in which there are many Republicans and independents who are on subsidized ACA.    If I were in his district I'd be putting pressure on Jared Golden who, now that he has announced he will not seek reelection can be the Republican- he has been suspected of being.   If he'll vote to extend the subsidies is not something I'd bet on with any confidence. 

I think there is a case that Schumer should consider retiring to make room for a younger politician,  of course I'd like someone with AOC's politics in that seat though if she could win the seat is far from clear.  I agree with those who point out that there are too may octogenarians who haven't done enough to bring along their successors in the party.  I think one of our problems in Maine is that the adoption of term limits in the legislature and state Senate (and why we need to have one of those in the state government is a good question, too)  has left us with some pretty sparse choices for higher office.  You don't develop enough tested and experienced politicians with term limits,  it's absurd that the alternative to Graham Platner, the troubled neophyte against Susan Collins is our 78-year-old incumbent governor.   I say that acknowledging both that Janet Mills has been one of our better governors of my lifetime (though she was no Ken Curtis and who knows how he'd fare half a century later) and that I have had some large areas of disagreement with her.    But it's far from optimal to have someone who will be 78 when the election is held running against the aged Susan Collins.*   But there should be at least a handful of more obvious and younger choices.   It doesn't matter much in Republican politics because all Republicans stand for is the further enrichment of the rich and throwing bones to the white supremacist-fascists.   Any Republican is pretty much replaceable with any other one.  Democratic politics is far more complicated.   Also simplifying things for Republican-fascists is that the media everywhere, especially in Maine, will support the worst of them as a totally reliable practice, including that of  "Maine Public" the alleged public broadcaster of both radio and TV the only state-wide media here. 

But, on the other hand, if I lived in Massachusetts I'd be supporting the veteran Ed Markey over Seth Moulton (from the Jared Golden-Rahm Emanuel wing of the party) who is doing what a self-entitled Kennedy tried to do before him.   I don't know if Markey has been cultivating younger politicians who would be as good as he has been in the Senate but I'm pretty confident that Moulton wouldn't do that,  he'd be one of the three like Fetterman who voted with the Republicans to start with on the shutdown. 

I do think Schumer owes the party a full and honest discussion of what happened.   Keeping that quiet serves no one but the gossipers and off the handles fliers.  

*  If Mills is the nominee,  she should pledge that this will be her last political office sought,  reminding Mainers that Susan Collins lied through her teeth when she originally promised Maine voters she would not run for more than two Senate terms.    Collins has been a liar from the start.  

At risk of making my enemies happy

and at this time I don't care if they are or not,  what ails me isn't exactly life threatening,  that is unless longing for death in the midst of a spasm is in any danger of overriding my nearly congenital Catholicism.  

Like many a geezer my age I've got a flare up of my sciatica.  Oddly, it didn't come from the wood stacking I did, it was just bending the wrong way to sit down.  One wrong move and you trade a moment of convenience for a month or more of pain and debility. 

I won't say its getting better because my experience is that's jinxing myself.  

THANK GOD! SOMEONE ELSE SEES IT AND HAS GOT THE FULLER EVIDENCE!

PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING I've been saying for the past fifty years!

How Bribery Was Legalized In America

It Occurs To Me

that in my challenged health when I don't feel up to writing new stuff that I could offer you parts of what I type out from others. 

One of the things I started doing when I learned to use a computer was to type out long passages or even entire books as a means of studying their content more closely.  I've typed out a lot of books over the years, many which I kept a copy of in some now antiquated format (floppy discs) or lost some other way.   Keeping a typed out copy wasn't the point of it.   

While typing out this passage from Luke Timothy Johnson's great but too little known book Living Jesus I thought of all the parallels of the problem of needing authority but that reliance comes WITH THE GUARANTEE THAT NO AUTHORITY, EVEN THE BEST OF IT IS ENTIRELY RELIABLE.   Of course I thought of all the other areas in life aside from organized Christianity that that is true of AS WELL AS THE OBVIOUS TRUTH OF JOHNSON'S CONFESSION ABOUT THE ENTIRELY FALLIBLE AND TOO OFTEN CORRUPT AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCHES.    

Academia, and I don't even consider the one and only one that most academics seem to care about,  actual and alleged and often quite dubiously attributed plagiarism.    The replicability crisis scandal in science,  the amazing record of outright fraud,  misfeasance, nonfeasance such as is regularly recorded by that great and too little known reporter of it,  Retraction Watch.  

The legal profession, which is saturated with lies, corruption, the institutional creation of lawyerly deception, dishonesty, greed, graft, grift in which only the paying clients interest is the measure of professional practice and ethics and the higher and higher consequences of that as lawyers are elevated - often by corruptly motivated politicians, executive and senatorial - into the judiciary and on to that most corrupt branch of the U.S. government,  the Supreme Court. 

The "non-profit" groups which are,  I suppose, something that is supposed to act as a secular replacement for all of the (sometimes all to human and fallible) religious charities.    There are so many examples of the various defects of those groups,  from the incredibly dubious identification of some of the most grotesquely wealthy and endowed legal entities in the world,  Harvard, Yale, Princeton, other private universities,   incredibly wealthy museums holding vast and often artistically or intellectully dubious collections of enormous and fungible value.   There are interest groups that serve the most corrupt and evil of governments - the ADL these days is a signal example of that - and the interests of millionaires and billionaires - so many obscenely endowed think tanks and public interest group.   Evil industry advocacy groups,  the gun industry, pollution generators,  etc.   And so many daffy, hypocritical groups on the alleged progressive to liberal to lefty identity.    All given tax exempt status as they serve the most corrupt interests and, through their having been granted the "non-profit" label, treated with an absurd and dishonest reverence by the media.

And don't get me started on the "free press" as the more often than not oligarchic knocking shop that it is. 

Here is what Luke Timothy Johnson wrote about the vicissitudes of the necessity of Christian teaching authority within The Church (the entire Church) at the end of Chapter 2 Learning Jesus Through Tradition

The Teaching Authority of the Church

The commitment to learn the living Jesus within the context of the church's tradition means coming to grips also with the leaders who from the beginning have been entrusted in a special way with maintaining the tradition.  It is this aspect of tradition - namely, its explicitly institutional character - that both the scholarly questions after the historical Jesus and the televagelistic marketers of Jesus most despise.  Academics resist authority in the name of intellectual freedom and integrity  freelance preachers reject ecclesial authority in the name of charismatic freedom and power. 

Those who commit themselves to tradition can scarcely miss the same inadequacies of human leadership that have been so brilliantly and consistently displayed in the history of Christianity.  They know that ministers of the gospel are often not as holy as they should be, are seldom as intelligent as we would like them to be,  and all too often identify the tradition with their own self-interest.  No matter how egalitarian the leadership of a community, or how hierarchical, the same human frailty and pettiness appear.  

Yet there can scarcely be tradition without institutional leadership.  Christianity is not simply a loose assemblage of those who at any time prefer to associate with each other;  it is a people with a history and a mission that must be articulated in specific social arrangements and dynamics.  The witness of leaders in the community, furthermore is at the heart of this tradition itself.  Those commissioned by the risen Lord as apostles were the first in a long line of shepherds for this flock  If every pope and bishop and presbyter and pastor and preacher has been unequal to the task,  that inadequacy has not made their role in maintaining the living thread of tradition any less essential.

The teaching authority remains essential today,  however difficult it is to reconcile with the egalitarian and anit-establishment urges of our age.  No more than the canon or the creed can the leadership of the church arrogate to itself the loyalty that is owed only to the living Lord;  no more than the canon or the creed does this leadership adequately express the meaning of the tradition, much less the Lord in whose name the tradition exists.   The teaching authority of the community functions best when it is not isolated.  The teaching office of the church requires the voice of prophecy to be alive if it is not to grow distended;  through prophets the living Jesus can speak in new ways.  And the preservers of tradition need also to hear the voices of theologians whose task is not so much to preserve as it is to extend the boundaries of our understanding of the mystery of Christ.  The tradition is impoverished if the voice of prophecy is stilled and if th teaching of theologians is, for whatever reason, made an enemy rather than an enricher of the tradition.

Like the canon and the creed,  the teaching authority of leaders helps provide a framework for learning Jesus in the community.  From generation to generation from the beginning hands have reached out to select,  hands have been laid on heads,  words of commission have been whispered in the ears of those whose mission is defined by the task of preserving and protecting the tradition within which Jesus can continue to be learned.  

I doubt that there has ever been a more honest assessment of the necessity and danger of maintaining authority within human institutions and human life than that.   People are always going on about his book The Real Jesus, his take down of the quest for the historical Jesus, but I think this book in which he explores the real consequence for Christians believing in the Living Lord Jesus and the continued experience of the Living Jesus in our lives is far, far more valuable.  

Phil Moore Takes Apart Elon "Space Karen" Over His Ignorant Blather About Tolkein

 

I am not that hot on the Hobbit or the rest of it but I'm always glad to have someone point out what an idiot a billionaire is.  Especially Elon.  Just Phil's name for him,  "Space Karen" is worth it.   I commented on his conclusion that Space Karen had clearly watched the movies but never read the books was that it was like Trump's "Gatsby" party.    I thought it was obvious they had never understood the novel which was about the futility and ruin that wealth carries,  I thought they'd probably watched the Redford movie and never read the book,  RMJ said it was probably the more recent one which was even farther from the book. 

Democrats Should Read

The Sudden But Well-Deserved Fall of Rahm Emanuel by Rick Perlstein for a few of the reasons that he is not to be trusted and certainly not to be voted for.  Here's an example:

. . . The legend continued through this past April, when Rahm—in Chicago and D.C., he’s known by that single name—won a second term as the mayor of Chicago in a come-from-behind landslide.

Nine months later, Chicagoans—and Democrats nationally—are suffering buyer’s remorse. Last month, a Cook County judge ordered the release of a shocking dashcam video of a black seventeen-year-old named Laquan McDonald being shot sixteen times by a policeman while he was walking away. Five days later, the officer was charged with murder. The charge came after four hundred days of public inaction, and only hours before the video’s release. Of almost four hundred police shootings of civilians investigated by the city’s Independent Police Review Authority since 2007, only one was found to be unjustified. So the suspicion was overwhelming that the officer would not have faced discipline at all had officials not feared a riot—especially after it was learned that McDonald’s family had been paid five million dollars from city coffers without ever having filed a lawsuit. Mayor Emanuel claims that he never saw the video. Given that he surely would not have been reëlected had any of this come out before the balloting, a recent poll showed that only seventeen per cent of Chicagoans believe him. And a majority of Chicagoans now think he should resign.

There are many examples in the article of how Rahm was an opportunist and traitor to Democrats and how his alleged achievements and gambits (I don't think he's really a strategic thinker, he goes on his own right-wing gut feelings) were disastrously wrong.

Victory, like defeat, can have a hundred fathers, and we can’t know what was ultimately responsible for the Democrats’ success that November. Anger at Republicans for the Iraq War (which Emanuel supported) certainly drove many voters’ decisions. What is indisputable is that the 2006 majority proved to be a rickety one. Critics argue that, even where Emanuel’s strategy succeeded in the short term, it undermined the party over time. One of his winners, the football star Heath Shuler, of North Carolina, would not even commit to vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House, and was one of many Rahm recruits to vote against important Obama Administration priorities, like economic stimulus, banking reform, and health care. Many are no longer congressmen. Some Democrats now argue that, in the long run, 2006 might have weakened the Party more than it strengthened it. “Rahm’s recruitment strategy” was “catastrophic,” the retired record executive Howie Klein, who helps run a political action committee that funds liberal congressional challengers, said, and it contributed to the massive G.O.P. majorities we have now, the biggest since the nineteen-twenties.

Obviously, that conclusion wasn’t shared by Barack Obama in 2009, when he named Emanuel as his White House chief of staff. There, however, Emanuel’s signature strategy—committing Obama only to initiatives they knew in advance would succeed, in order to put “points on the board”—nearly waylaid the President’s most historic accomplishment: health-care reform. Emanuel wanted to scale it back almost to the vanishing point. It took a concerted effort by Speaker Pelosi to convince the President otherwise. This time, it was Emanuel who apologized: “Thank God for the country he didn’t listen to me,” he said after the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, in 2012.

Rahm Emanuel is a creation primarily of his own PR and the callow unsophistication of those like the governor Bill Clinton and the two-year Senator Barack Obama.  Imagine how Obama would be remembered today if he didn't get as much of the reduced stimulus he got through Congress or if Rahm Emanuel had succeeded in killing even the impaired ACA that NANCY PELOSI WAS THE ONE RESPONSIBLE FOR PASSING.   Obama and Harry Reid had given up on it, it was Nancy Pelosi who got it through.  It should rightly be called Pelosi Care.  

Rahm Emanuel is someone who should have been driven out of politics by the more scandalous aspects of his career.   If he were a Woman or Black he would have probably been sent into obscurity by only a few parts of his record.   Democrats should be reminded of what a treacherous little piece of shit he has been and certainly still is. 

There Are Democrats Who I Really Don't Like

and a few I come close to hating. 

But there aren't many I loathe as much as I loathe most Republicans.   Rahm Emanuel is one on that short list.  Hell, he's the first on that list.   And he's announcing a run for president. 

Does he really want a full investigation of his time as Mayor of Chicago?  Because I'd really like there to be a full investigation of his time as Mayor of Chicago because I suspect he is as much of a sleaze and crook as the worst of them.   

Not to mention his time in the Obama first administration selling us out to big pharma and generally convincing Obama to waste the best situation a Democrat had been given since 1964.    Not to mention what all of the myriads of Democrats he has screwed over the years will have a lot to say about the little piece of shit.  He'll run a dirty campaign and will damage any far better and more credible candidate along the way, he should be considered a Republican spoiler.   Which I would not be surprised if that is his intention and part of one of his backroom deals.  

Hate Mail - For All I Know

 the worst chief "justice" in the history of the corrupt Supreme Court,  John Roberts, really believes he's "just calling balls and strikes"  or, since he's a professional liar and conman,  maybe like many such he's convinced himself that he really believes that's what he's doing as he so consistently finds for the team he is so obviously a member of as he plays umpire.   Though I doubt he's that unreflective about that thing which all conservatives are most concerned with, HIS OWN SELF, to not realize the game he was playing as he told that one lie among the many he told during his confirmation hearings.  

I've never been stupid enough to buy any of the sports metaphors applied to the law or politics or the alleged news business or public life in general.   Trump is the triumph of that stupidest and most dishonest innovation in stupidity as entertainment, "reality" TV.  Such reality being entirely unreal and entirely stupid and nothing to do with reality but which is  as cheesy and planned as a soap opera script or the originally male version of that, the phony sporting events known as "professional wrestling."   All sports, even the real stuff, like all TV (including, as Keith Olbermann has said, TV "journalism") is show biz. 

Sports have nothing much valuable to tell us about reality, in real life.  Real life doesn't go by a rule book that calls for a "level playing field."  The whole reason that the totally planned, totally fake event and results of pro-wrestling are taken for a sport is because it really doesn't matter in the slightest bit in real life who wins and who loses even a genuine sports event.  If it does matter, as it does so often for gangsters engaged in sports gambling, you can bet that those rules get bent AND IT ALWAYS MATTERS IN REAL LIFE IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY TO OUR INDIGENOUS GANGSTERS, THE RICH AND THE RACIST.   But, as in the case of "reality" TV, mistaking such phoniness as real can have real consequences in real life or why is the total idiot and, or so I read, lousy football coach Tommy Tuberville blighting American life from a Senate seat from Alabama right now.   Why is Jim Jordan, sex-molesting doctor enabling assistant somewhat real wrestling coach and never practicing lawyer the chair of the House Judiciary Committee?   Why did so many who he has harmed, killed, maimed, believe that big-boss Trump had their backs when he only had his hand in their wallets?  

I think I've said enough on that count so I'll answer the point brought up to me.   IN THE CHOICE BETWEEN EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY,  ECONOMIC JUSTICE,  SOCIAL JUSTICE, JUST PLAIN JUSTICE OF ANY KIND AND OLIGARCHIC-WHITE-SUPREMACIST FASCISM ANYONE WHO THINKS A "LEVEL PLAYING FIELD" IS DESIRABLE OR ETHICAL IS A TOTAL AND ABSOLUTE CHUMP FOR OLIGARCHIC-WHITE-SUPREMACIST FASCISM.   This isn't a goddamned game, it's reality.    Far from giving any moral or rational or even somewhat tethered to reality senator a reason to vote for him when he lied out his "balls and strikes" lie,  THAT ROBERTS EQUATED THE ENTIRELY SERIOUS MATTER OF EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY OVER THE INJUSTICE THAT ALL OTHER FORMS OF GOVERNANCE AND LAW GUARANTEE WITH A FRICKIN' GAME SHOWED HE REALLY DOESN'T CARE ABOUT EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY.    I know that in doing that he was doing, what the fascists have done over and over again,  they've used the language that was first thought up by the kind of generally affluent, generally professional (generally lawyers) liberals who played us for suckers by such advocacy, whether from the ACLU or Common Cause or other of the playing-field-levelers who clearly never cared about those who are inherently saddled with an inability to get any fair treatment because they have nothing or little and none of the resources or power that the side they'll go up against have INCLUDING THE FACT THAT THOSE WHO ALREADY HAVE WEALTH AND POWER WILL BE THE ONES PLAYING GODDAMNED REFEREE. 

I'm done with the kind of affluent play-liberals, professional lawyers who play that game because politics, the law, journalism (the real thing, not what we get under the frickin' First Amendment) isn't a game and no one who mistakes it for one has any business pretending they're in it for anyone but the oligarchs and their tools, America's indigenous and very powerful fascists.   

Don't Be Fair To Fascists, Don't Be Nice To Nazis, Being Fair To Them Enables Them

THANK GOD MAINERS VOTED DOWN REPUBLICAN-FASCIST'S ATTEMPT to bring Jim Crow style voter suppression to Maine and they finally voted for the minimum standard of sanity on guns, a red-flag law.   I know a young mother in Maine whose former boyfriend is a paranoid schizophrenic who has a gun who the police and a court have not taken it from on the basis that we had no red-flag law.   It might not make her as safe as she needs to be from him but it's something whereas the hunting-gun industry in Maine has defeated previous attempts to impose the minimum of sanity on our state which has had one horrific mass shooting, a direct result of the libertarianism of our gun laws before now. 

I'm sure those who want to bring Jim Crow to Maine will try again as will the gun-hunting industry who have way too much influence in this rural and often benighted state.  Our insanely lax 1970s liberal era ballot access laws will give them and the millionaires and billionaires who are funding our return to Jim Crow - they bought themselves a Supreme Court to do it for them so even a referendum isn't a safe bet to prevent it.   I'm sure the 1970s era liberals figured that things were just going to get progressively better, such was the callow, ahistorical sense of that rather stupid decade among such liberals. 

I TOTALLY APPROVE OF THE CALIFORNIA INITIATIVE TO GERRYMANDER THEIR CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICTS TO KEEP REPUBLICANS OUT OF THE HOUSE.   I say that as someone who is morally opposed to gerrymandering but am even more opposed to the idiotic liberalish-libertarian  proposition that we are to play totally stupid in the face of Republican-fascists,  the millionaire-billionaire and white-supremacist (fascist) coalition of the greedy and hateful using every defect in the Constitution, the structure of government and those put there by that most corrupt of all the branches of the government,  the Supreme Court to destroy equality and democracy.

The real American liberals, based in such things as egalitarianism and economic as well as social justice need to dump that idiotic rule that they are to always play dumb, roll over and let the fascists win to maintain some minor or even just relatively less important point of scrupulosity.   That stupid idea in 1970s era ballot access that Maine liberals in the legislature adopted because it would theoretically perform that stupidest of all desiderata in the "Code of Liberal Ethics"  create a "level playing field" even as it gave us several of the worst governors, senators and house members in our history who were aided by Green Party and other Republican spoilers is just such a stupid idea of such liberalish-libertarian scruples.  

When you're fighting against millionaires, billionaires and their violent allies in America's already empowered and enabled fascists - they have governed several states for their entire history as well as a majority of states at least at some times - including Maine -  preening in your own private moral purity isn't a virture,  it's an act of the grossest immorality and, most likely even more often, TOTAL COWARDICE.   I know for a fact that in my state, such acts of "principle" have been sourced in those who are professional or at least trained lawyers,  a profession whose inbred surrender to the fascists and, especially, the rich on such "principle" I'll wax at length on the least provocation these days.   To such principle I say go fuck off and die,  your theories have been tested in time and produced disaster.    Just go away and shut up.  I don't want to hear it anymore. 

Dick Cheney's Death Comes Fifty Years Too Late

HE LED A LIFE OF EVIL and shares responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men, Women and Children,  the enslavement and oppression of many millions of others and a lifetime of self-seeking and personal enrichment.   He can't take the loot he got with him but he can take the responsibility for what he did to get it.   He helped to destroy the American republic in the first mainstream blow of the wrecking ball to it,  the Bush v Gore suppression of the vote to install the boy-king,  Bush II as he governed as unofficial regent,  he exploited the attack that came about during the Bush II years,  an warnings of which the team that Cheney-Bush II put into place incompetently and insouciently ignored (I still want to know how Condi Rice's little star turn recital with YoYo Ma figured in that nonfeasance) in order to lie us into the total disaster of the invasion of Iraq.   I don't know what role he played in putting the worst Supreme Court chief "justice" in American history into place, the corrupt John Roberts or the equally corrupt Alito but I have every confidence he had a hand in that continuing and likely fatal attack on American democracy and even its existence as a republic.   And there is no possible honest appraisal except that Roberts is the actual worst chief "justice" in U.S. history.  

And that's only what he did in this century.  

If anyone deserves to go to hell,  it's Dick Cheney.   Like the woman in the Irish joke who tells the priest she doesn't want her late husband out of purgatory but to spend a good long time there,  I will admit that I hope Cheney is finally getting the corrective justice he earned.    If that's determined by the seriousness and number of sins,  he's got a hell of a hell to go through, yet.    

I'll get back to you on this if Bush II dies before I do.