Erratum On The First Thursday In Lent

IN THE POST I DID THE OTHER NIGHT in which I talked so enthusiastically about the poetic parphrase of Scripture,  The Message,  I said it was composed by Edward Patterson, mixing up the novelist I knew of with the actual translator,  Eugene Peterson who is also a novelist and poet.   That's what comes of relying on hearing a name spoken instead of reading it on a page and writing before doing much real research.    I apologize for that lapse in my usual practice.    

I've been looking more at The Message and the man who produced it and am even more encouraged after hearing him and reading some interviews with him.   

Here's one of the best of the recorded interviews, one with the ever reliable Krista Tippett.  

I was especially interested to see that he shared one of my enthusiasms,  for the poetry of the too little remembered Denise Levertov.   Here is what some of the program notes say.

“Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.” These are the words of the legendary pastor and writer Eugene Peterson, whose biblical imagination has formed generations of preachers. At the back of the church he led for nearly three decades, you’d be likely to find well-worn copies of books by Wallace Stegner or Denise Levertov. Frustrated with the unimaginative way he found his congregants treating their Bibles, he translated it himself — and that translation has sold millions of copies around the world. Eugene Peterson’s down-to-earth faith hinges on a love of metaphor and a commitment to the Bible’s poetry as what keeps it alive to the world.

I will be interested in reading his rendering of the Psalms, which even in the translations I like many of the just don't do it for me like they're supposed to.   

Remember My Post Last Week Confronting The

guy who was asking why "Jews aren't addressing why so many of the Epstein circle are Jews?"   Rememer my answer asking why he wasn't asking why rich, straight, white men aren't addressing why almost everyone in the Epstein child trafficking club were rich, stright, white men?  

Here's an interesting and short video that, while it talks about her expereince at Harvard, could as easily be made about MIT, Stanford (where that Altman guy mentioned below went),  and the rest of the elite Ivys and Ivy equivalent schools that turn out the goddamned ruling class,

My year at Harvard with the Epstein class

You May Be Dust But Not Only That - Another Idea For Lent

RISKING VIOLATING FAIR USE I'm going to give you a big chunk of this article by Scott Hurd, without links, so you should definitely read it at the one I'm giving you the link for. 

This Lent, will you "unplug " and "recharge" your religious "batteries"? Try to find the "bandwidth" for daily Mass? "Rewire" your prayer life or "reboot" your spiritual reading? Lent is, after all, a chance for an "upgrade" to a better, holier you: "Version 2.0," if you will. 

Sound weird? That's because I've described typical Lenten goals with the computer jargon that's crept into our everyday talk. And I'm just as guilty of using it as anyone else. Which is why I'm making an appeal: This Lent, let's give up referring to ourselves as if we're machines. Because we aren't! But plenty of people think that we are — with serious consequences.  

Pope Leo XIV seems to appreciate the threat, especially as AI creeps into more corners of our lives. In asking why life's busyness often leaves us feeling exhausted and empty, he said: "Because we are not machines, we have a 'heart.' " And he pointedly reminded the Italian bishops that "the person is not a system of algorithms: he or she is a creature, relationship, mystery." 

This is all a consequence of the conscious adoption of materialist ideology as the default of academically, culturally and conventionally respectible life - so much of a default in the dim modernist past that even many of those who would claim they aren't materialists don't have any idea that is how they think about other People.  Which, by the way,   is the reason that I started capitalizing words that refer to People and other living Creatures a number of years ago, fall out from the atheist-materliast fad of the '00s.   I suppose it's more of a personal discipline to remind myself not to revert to that materialist habit of thought than something I've advocated everyone do.  Though maybe I should. 

This part of the article, which is why I had the idea to write this,  raises some questions I don't think the tweeting CEO below would like us going into very far.

But not everyone shares this understanding of the human person. To some — especially in tech circles — we are in fact "machines" driven by a "system of algorithms."

Consider the response made by Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI, to an influential academic paper's claim that, unlike humans, AI chatbots don't understand what they generate because they're simply "stochastic parrots" that mimic their training data.

Altman didn't buy it. To mock the authors' conclusion, he turned to "X", the social media platform owned by his OpenAI co-founder, Elon Musk. "i am a stochastic parrot," Altman tweeted, "and so r u."

In other words, according to this billionaire tech titan, human beings are really no different from unthinking machines. You and I are simply computers whose output parrots our input. And nothing more.

While I'm sure it would be news to Altman and his, no doubt philosophy disdaining fellow CEOs,  if we are just "stochastic parrots" as are the atomated "AI" content-theft and plagarizism machines he makes what I'd bet are billions from - WHAT IS THE PRINCIPLE ON WHICH COPYWRIGHT AND PATENT LAW BASED IN?   It must be entirely make believe and nothing real if what he claims is true, especially for the things he makes his billions from.   It is allegedly based on the rights to intellectual content by their HUMAN creators.  Rights which do not inhere to machines or algorithms, themselves BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE SELVES.   If all content is merely the parroting of previously existing content, which is stolen and monatized by those tech billionaires then there is no intellectual basis for the laws which allow them to amass the billions they have - NOR IS THERE ANY REAL AGENT WHICH WE HAVE ANY KIND OF PRINICIPLED,  "ETHICAL" OR MORAL OBLIATION TO ALLOW THEM THE  PRIVILEGES TO MAKE THOSE BILLIONS OR KEEP THEM.  

Altman's arrogant confession that that's all there is to the creation of algorithms and programs and higher structures that corporations (imaginary entities given "personhood" by the corrupt lies of Supreme Courts and the corporpate lawyer who invented such artificial "persons) and those who are merely said to own them make those billions from . . . . all of that is something that we have eveyy right to use to mow down the kudzu of legal fiction that his entire professional life is founded in. 

NOT that I expect that any part of the sleaziest part of the system of "justice" or the lawyers that service and man it would ever want to address such claims if they were ever made in a lawsuit by or against such a corporation and the billionaire eliminative matrialists like this Altman as to the most fundamental of consequences - lawyers, judges and "justices" are trained to lie on behalf of the super-rich and the corporations that such "justices" have endowed with "personhood."   But I believe that, as the article points out,  that it's high time we consider these things very, very seriously because we are beyond the tipping point in them treating us not only as individual objects but as specs and drops collectively considered as raw material resources FOR THEIR USE AND DISPOSAL.  

"Remember you are dust and to dust you will return,"  may be the formular used to anoint a Person with ashes in some liturgical traditions but the intellectual basis of that, at least in Catholic theology, only refers to the material body, not the real person which is much more than the sum of its material parts .    Secularism has no such basis,  matrialist-atheist-scientism must negate it,  though without applying their ideological claims to those artificial and profitable entities that they enjoy which their ideology has to,  if honestly considered,  impeach.  

Praying with the Bible during Lent | The Spiritual Life Podcast

 

The prominent James Martin the editor at large of the Jesuit magazine,  America, who has long served a ministry to LGBTQ+ People is, you won't be surprised to hear,  a frequent target of right-wingers and the "trad cath" cult.   I don't listen to all of his podcasts though I probably should,  his fine  interview with Anthea Butler was linked to here over the weekend.  

This is an interview with the greatly respected Methodist Bible scholar Ben Witherington that covers many things, including how to pray the scriptures during Lent.    There is a lot of practical information about that.   One of the things that surprised me is his advice to those who are familiar with the scriptures,  especially for Catholics those readings that recur in the three-year cycle of liturgical readings.   He suggested reading them in a translation you're not familiar with.   Something I've found useful, myself, was listening to the daily mass in another language as a way to keep up my French.  

But his advice to read The Message by Edward Patterson really surprised me.  Patterson,  he noted was a Biblical scholar in his own right which I hadn't know, I'd only seen him described as a novelist which made me kind of suspicious on the basis of nothing but my own prejudice.   

I'd known about The Message which goes beyond the so-called dynamic equivalence method of translation instead of the so-called word-for-word method of translation to put the content of the Bible into vernacular English.   There are lots of good English vernacular translations,  I like the Common English and Good News translations so I'd never thought to look at The Message.   

It being late in the evening when my eyes give me trouble and I don't want to watch a screen,  I looked for readings of it online.  After trying a recording of the Message book of Mark which had music in the background -yuck!-  I found a good one of a man with a working class English accent reading it very well.   I was really surprised at how big the impact of hearing a close but not "literal" telling of the familiar content was.   I don't know if reading the same on the page would have as big an impact on me - I'll be ordering it when I get around to that.  

In his far more traditionally "literal" translation of the New Testament,  David Bentley Hart said that Mark which was originally written in hardly sophisticated Greek is something he translated into the equivalent of that in English,  including the use of the highly vernacular historical present tense when that's how it's said in the Greek.  That kind of thing which even scholarly revieweres have noted gives his translation a bracing freshness, something I can attest to.   The way that Patterson translated it has an even more bracing effect.  

I wouldn't  consider replacing a more scholarly and direct reading of the texts with The Message but it's as good  as reading a good study bible commentary and more direct than consulting a more extensive learned commentary.  

Also, I tried his youtube of Romans and even in that great theological, not narrative book, and found the same was true.  I will be buying that and use it as I would a commentary.  It's not hard to imagine someone finding that starting with The Message might be the most useful thing for them to do. 

Never looked into Ben Witherington before but I'll try to get to him.   One of the problems is that there are so many very fine Bible scholars, theologians, spiritual writers (as well as so many who are far less good) that it's impossible to read or listen to all of even the best of them.  

Reese Waters On The Death Of Jesse Jackson

 

His entire off-the-cuff discourse is worth listening to,  it is pitch perfect.  I will give you this passage that came after he noted part of what Jesse Jackson was doing in the 1990s after he started to be ignored by mainstream media.

I cannot allow it to go unmentioned that the man who lost the presidential electio spent his time after the election get securing the release of a US Navy pilot, 16 Americans in Cuba, 700 women and children in Iraq and two Gambian Americans from prison.

Our current president, after he lost in 2020, spent the entire four years trying to burn the country to the ground and we let him back in.

Jesse Jackson literally did more having not never been a president at all. Let's make that clear. And he wasn't out here begging for the Nobel Peace Prize.

How about that?

What The Hell Was Noam Chomsky Thinking - His Epstein Link Explained

THIS INTERVIEW OF CHRIS KNIGHT who has written about Noam Chomsky critically from the left,  someonen who revealed things about his extensive ties to the milirary industrial complex as well as being supportive of his leftist politics AND, also knowing a good deal about the collapse of Chomskys theory of universal grammar, is the closest I've come to hearing or reading anyone come up with an explanation of how he could associate with and write supportively of the most notorious child rapist, trafficker and almost certainly blackmailer perhaps in human history.    Owen Jones chose the one to come up with something like an explaination well.   

I would like to read or hear someone go in to the deep relationships that a smart though hardly qualified con-man had with many of the figures in real as well as pseudo-sciences (and linguistics is, actually one of the latter) because I think that would not only tell us a lot about how someone like Chomsky could be successfully courted and compromised by him but how so many within the post-WWII materialist-atheist-scientistic academic world were far less confusingly compromised by him.   I think that that relationship tells us a lot about the character and nature of that ideology and how it melds so easily with the world of anti-democratic politics, high finance and the modern cult of media driven celebrity. 

One of the more insightful things I recall hearing Chomsky explain was how the French cultural and establishment that made figures such as philosophers promoted and brought to fame and inluence and celebrity - as I recall he called it "vedette culture,"  movie-star culture.   And a lot of those who Epstein wooed and won, to some extent, fall into that category here as well as in Britain.   Even some of those who had actual academic and even scientific careers.   Some, such as those within the old Scienceblogs crowd were made such stars with Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner money.   

As for the failure of Chomsky's "universal grammar,"  since it was based on the wildly over-sold and over-imagined ideas of mid-20th century evolutionary biology,  including the things that evolutionary-psychology and sociobiology were based in,  it's no wonder that it was just another of those edifaces of unevidenced science that grew, matured, decayed and was abandonned as academic pseudo-science went on to the next big thing.   If Chomsky had died in his sixties or seventies instead of approaching a centenniel, he might have avoided witnessing that.   E. O. Wilson is a similar case in that he came to publicly doubt kin selection, one of the the bases of his own claim to fame, Sociobiology, the extent to which a flock of his evolutionary-psychology academic heirs howled in protest when he expressed those doubts,  some of whom also were charmed or came near to the orbit of Jeffrey Epstein,  Richard Dawkins being foremost among those.   

I will note that I'm skeptical of all theories deriving from natural selection which I think is an ideological theory and was never properly scientific due to the impossibility of observing the actual evolution of species.    As with the the acquisition of and use of language being an undeniable phenomenon,  the evolution of species is abundently supported by the geological and genetic record, its reality is not currently credibly denied.   Someone may want to do basic science about how evolution happened,  the strength and universal desire of biologists to have knowledge of how it happened,  in the worst cases insisting that there must be one universal mechanism by which that happened.   That doesn't stop almost all of them from pretending that they've got that mechanism when they have no such a thing.   Chomsky's desire to find the equivalent in his chosen field of linguistics - which is as opaque as the billions of years of the history of the evolution of speices - cannot be made truly scientific for similar reasons.   There is no way to make the necessary observations, measurements and honest analyses needed to produce science, no matter them making believe they can at MIT or the Pentagon. 

Chomsky owed us an explaination of this and, if Knight is correct, he is too disabled to be able to give us one even if he was willing to do so.  It is sadder than the implosion of his academic theory that his legacy as one of the major figures of moral criticism of governmental and corporate and oligarchic evil in our lifetimes fell under the sway of an evil, likely Israeli intelligence connected con-man who certainly was nothing like a friend to him.   It is shocking that Noam Chomsky couldn't see through him even at close proximity to his evil doing.  That's his tragedy and a tragedy of the secular left.   

In The Spirit Of Experimentation

 I decided to post the rest of this morning's post that came after what I successfully got posted this morning.    I did so at my alternative, seldom posted to (originally more tabloid type content) blog.   If you're curious to see what Blogger didn't like this morning or can try to figure out why it, combined with what I did post from it below, didn't get approved,  you can read it here.

For the life of me,  I don't get what happened.  

Wondering if it's this part of what I wrote that Blogger didn't like

It's The World Of Appearances And Illusions And A Sign Of Why That Is So Morally Risky

I HADN'T HEARD about the revelations of the Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner child-trafficking, rape-blackmail ring and the supermodel so famous that someone like me who detests that world has heard of,  Naomi Campbell, until yesterday.  

Given the extensive, perhaps pervasive connections of the modeling and fashion and pagent industries to the most notorious child-rape and trafficking gang,  I don't think I'll be able to think of any of those without thinking they're all just fronts for such things.   Oh, and throw in the movies to that mix too.  If someone who was at the top of the modeling racket like Campbell was in that sewer,  I figure most of it must be, to some extent, that kind of thing. 

I'd come to have some sense of that when I heard of the perverted and depraved world of beauty pagents using very young girls, such as the murdered J. B. Ramsay.   Seeing the nauseating pictures and video of her dressed like a prostitute and vamping like one,  it should be a crime for anyone, including parents,  to present young children in such sexualized ways.   But that is ubiquitious, not only here but in other countries.   

In the past I'd have said that while that should be considered criminal abuse of minor children,  it's clear from the reaction of many who want to minimalize the crimes of the billionaires, millionaires and others involved with the Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner ring,  everyone from the piece of trash Megyn Kelly to the evolutionarly psychologist Robert Trivers and theoretical physicists and those in computer science that making allowances for the agency of older children of the absurdly low age of "consent" and adults "consenting" to becoming comodities in that trafficking is an invitation to go ever lower.   

---------------------------

If this posts note that most of the rest of it was a transcription of the part of this video in which Norman Finkelstein dissects the "civil liberties lawyer" career of noted "civil liberties" lawyer-liar Dershowitz.  

This Is A First

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER,  my morning post has apparetly gotten some kind of content warning notice from Blogger.   At least there's a red triangle next to the index listing of it which I've never seen before saying that's what that means.    I went and looked, for the first time ever, at its guidelines and can't see how what I wrote is covered by any of it.   I don't have time to argue with Google about that right now,  if you have trouble reading what I wrote,  please let me know.

AM

Footnote On The Morning Post

FROM THE ESTIMABLE PETER WOIT'S blog:

For now, a math item and a physics item, maybe more later…

Four years ago, after the decision to have the 2026 ICM in the US was announced, I wrote:

"With the 2022 experience in mind, hopefully the IMU will for next time have prepared a plan for what to do in case they again end up having a host country with a collapsed democracy being run by a dangerous autocrat."

We’re very much in that situation now, and as far as I can tell the IMU is still planning for a normal, in-person event this July in Philadelphia.

The French mathematical society (SMF) announced yesterday that they would not participate (in the sense of not having a presence such as a booth) in the ICM this year. I’m hearing that other national math societies have taken or are considering similar action.

Setting aside the problem of lots of people for good reason not wanting anything to do with travel to the US right now, even those who do want to come here are facing serious problems getting a visa, in particular not being able to even get an appointment for a visa interview at this time.

The murders and Gestapo tactics now going on in Minneapolis surely influenced the SMF decision and may cause people now planning on attending the ICM to change their plans. The nightmare scenario for ICM organizers is having ICE and its thuggery move on to Philadelphia, which unfortunately seems possible.

Hell, my entire family, apart from one ex-sister-in-law were born here, white, working and middle-class and I don't like it when my family is traveling in the USofA during the turd reich.  

The Fairy Tale That The Ship Of State Is Going To Magically Right Itself When It Has Sunk In The Cesspool

THIS DISCUSSION between Michael Popok and Anthony Davis about how Trump and the Republica-fascists have led to the eclipse of America as the dominating super-power among putative democracies should be listened to by everyone.  One of the problems I have with such entities as Popok's channel is that they put out so much content that the real gems in it get swamped, I hope that doesn't happen with this one.  I think of the two Anthony Davis certainly has the more realistic view of the consequences of Trump II, that America's position has been permanently and fatally damaged.  In the end of the discussion when Popok is giving what I think is a rather naive, lawyerly, panglossian view of how America could regain that position,  Davis said something very interesting to me,  something which I've been saying here for years.  I've done a rough transcription of the discussion starting at about 7:22 in the video, Davis is a lot easier to transcribe than the meandering Popok, trying to consolodate the ideas through the verbiage. 

P:  Let me ask you a question because you and I had a little bit of a debate, a soft debate . . when I was on your show last week. . . . There's a premise to my question,  which is I said to you, that just as Biden was able to heal a lot of these [international, etc.] relationships after Trump I.  And through diplomacy and civility, you know, through a combination of carrot and stick, which is always present with the United States since Teddy Roosevelt or before . . . he was able to fix a lot of scarring that Trump had done in the global relationship the first time around.  But I guess implicit in my question was that is a good thing and that the next president, Newsom or otherwise, will and should do the same thing and your response was a version of "it's too late these are techtonic plates that are premanently shifted that are creating new mountain ranges and you're not getting them back."  

Two questions:

1. Should that be a goal of the Americans and is important to American interests and that the next president fix everything that Donald Trump Broke and

2 is it possible.  I think it is. to at least try.

AD: Well, it's a little bit like the relationship between Canada and the US, isn't it.  It's like family, you don't choose your family so you put up with your family.  But your friends you can choose, you can have far better friends than you can family.  We just learn to live with our family and I think with Europe and the rest of the world verses America the best that they'll be able to do is turn it into a situation where there might not be animosity but they're certainly not going to do business together.  I think that's the best that Newsom or any future Democratic president could do, yeah, we could resign a few treaties, the Paris Climate Accord and various things but in terms of infrastructure, no. It's done now,  I honestly think that's the case because unless they make a change to the Constitution, to the Bill of Rights, to the way that the system works in America, there is nothing to stop a future Donald Trump from becoming king again.   

Popok:  See, I think if we get eight years of civil discourse back led by a leader America respects and the world does, that's a true banner holder for American values as they do exist in both our aspirational Declaration of Independents and in our governing document of the Constitution, and in combination with reengaging with the world, in a way that Donald Trump has pulled in all the orrs, right forget about America First get back to our global interests we start resigning all the peace accords for the United Nations       and go into the World Court, who knows, maybe what and get the money flowing, right, reestablish money as soft power deplomacy.  The US is great for rescuing People . . . 

I will spare you more of the panglossian 2008 Obama campaign style aspirational drivel.  While Micheal Popok is hardly the worst of the media lawyers, he is, to quote my late father, 'full of soup" about this.    Needless to say, Anthony Davis is almost as skeptical as I am about that working.  You can listen to the entire discussion here.  

Notice that Popock resorts to citing the thing which has zero legal power to do anything, the "aspirational Declaration of Independence" which, if he'd paid attention to that base-level knowledge of recent  truth telling about Amerian history, he would know that The Reverend MLK jr. cited in his Dream speech, noting that it was an unpaid promissory note.  Here's news for him, after payment started to be made through the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts,  the Roberts Court stopped payment on it yet again as has been done continually through our history.  AT NO TIME SO MUCH AS THE WRITING OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS WHICH WERE NOT MEANT BY THE FRAMERS TO EVER REALLY DELIVER THE THINGS PROMISED IN THE DECLARATION.  As I've noted here, even the great Civil War Amendments which aspired to make those Constitutional law had that payement stopped by a series of Supreme Court rulings which had them twisted, distorted  and, as recently as two years ago, anulled by the Supreme Court.  You would think he, as a practicing lawyer and commentator on current events would know that everything Davis said about what it would take to make others in the Americas - including a majority of those in the United States - Europe, Africa, Asia trust the United States again WOULD REQUIRE BASIC CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE AND BASIC STRUCTURAL CHANGE of a kind that an American lawyer just can't imagine ever being possible.

Trump is certainly the one who brought the "American Century" to a definitive end in Trump II BUT THAT HAS BEEN AN ONGOING PROJECT OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTS, CONGRESSES AND COURTS ALL DURING MY LIFETIME.  That ending is now, indeed, definitive, and the world outside of the United States was not a party to that ending it or even a party in favor of ending it.  

There is a reason that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee gave Barack Obama a Peace Prize JUST FOR WINNING THE PRESIDENCY IN 2008, it is because he ended the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Neo-con disaster that brought about many evils, the greatest of them the Iraq debacle which is still playing out in the Middle East, Asia and Africa as well as Europe.  They really believed in 2009 that Obama was the promised one who would embody the fulfillment of the claims of American democracy, not in the least part because he did something no one believed was possible, having a Black American president, overcoming our more than two and a half century old regime of white supremacist hegemony, itself embedded in the Constitution in structural ways that the Civil War Amendments didn't address.  

It is the plain as day, clear as air truth that cannot be mentioned that LIES IN THE MEDIA is what Trump as a politician is made of, you will notice that the erudite Anthony Davis included the holy of holies, the sacred idol, the Bill of Rights among those things that would have to be changed, fundamentally, to make America trustworty again.   Lies are behind the success of the ever worsening presidents and congresses that we have suffered ever since the Sullivan Decision took full hold - which I would date to about 1966 and certainly the media lies for the profits of its owners were what determined the 1968 election that brought us what was then the landmark of corrupt presidencies,  Richard Nixon.  It has given us ever worse presidencies with weakend Democratic ones whenever the Republicans policies crashed the economy.  Certainly that is what got Clinton in office in 1992, Obama in office and Biden after the disaster of Trump I.  Americans may have media and entertainment induced amnesia but the rest of the world does not.  

The world wanted so to believe that first Obama, then Joe Biden had righted things and the United States would be what it had been before Trump and George W. Bush had made it in the period after the Rehnquist Court installed him in 2000.  They really wanted that to happen only to see the American Constitution AS IT REALLY IS IN REAL LIFE AND PRACTICE INSTEAD OF HOLLYWOOD-CIVICS TEXTBOOK BULLSHIT CLAIMED IT WAS.   There is no way that they are going to believe it again with the Constitution as it is now,  nor should they NOR SHOULD ANY AMERICAN WHO IS AN EGALIATARIAN DEMOCRAT OR EVEN JUST A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT (AND BY THAT I DON'T MEAN A CAPITALIST CROOK).   The faster we drop that bull shit the faster something will be done about amending the goddamned thing, getting rid of the Electoral College which brought us the two worst presidents in our lifetimes, both Bush II and Trump,  the Supreme Court which has been the major engine of the corruption of our politics on a blatantly Republican-fascist partisan basis,  the First Amendement which has created the lie that there is such a thing as a "right to lie" and that mass media, corporate media has that right to lie the oligarch's tools into office.   And that's not to mention that other opportunity for the most corruption,  the anti-democratically constituted Senate and its absurdly allocated powers to thwart democracy.  

I Was Thinking Of Spending Lent

 on a series in which I critique one of the stands of one of the New Testament Scholars and Catholic theologians I've been reading a lot over the past two years,  Luke Timothy Johnson's long standing and, perhaps even obsessive rejection of and criticism of liberation theology.    

While I strongly agree with him when he focuses on the ways of "living Jesus," especially in his book of that name,  I have to say that his rejection of liberation theology is especially surprising in that he puts so much emphasis in that book on the continuation of prophesy in the church as the experience of the Living Jesus which is inevitably informed by the experiences of People in every moment since the beginning of his public ministry right down to the time we are living in.   The diversity of that prophesy depending on different experiences of life, of living in communities, in societies, in churches, in cultures and under legal structures will certainly bring about aspects of what that experience of Jesus which were different from those of the first century Mediterranean world.   

If such ever newer and different ways of understanding the Living Jesus were not happening and meant to inform those whose lives are radically different from those who Jesus, Paul, James etc. addressed you have to wonder why the subsequent two thousand years of human history happened.  

In one of the reviews of a book in which Luke Timothy Johnson develops his criticism of liberation theology,  his rejection based on what he says is the "elitism" of those of HIS FELLOW THEOLOGIANS who were educated and lived at least some of their lives as those who were not destitute, impoverished, working poor,  the reviewer.   Joseph Quinn Rabb asks a crucial question:

Constructing such a stark contrast requires some oversimplifications.  Johnson's default position strongly favors the traditional view and he is clearly suspicious of and uncomfortable with the "social gospel/liberation model,"  seeing it as "elitist" in its origins and alien to the ones it aims to liberate.  It is elitist because the authors who developed and explicated it were trained in universities and were not themselves abjectly poor (134-34).  I wonder, though, who among all of the authors of the hortatory literature he surveys throughout the centuries were uneducated and abjectly poor?

If I were questioning Luke Timothy Johnson,  who I deeply respect and rather like,  about this I would bring up his own description of how his partly scripturally based and former homophobic attitude and beliefs about LGBTQ+ People changed to him considering their rights, their lives and the possibility of those of us living lives of both sanctity and integrity about who we are - INCLUDING HAVING LOVE WITHIN A SACRAMENTAL SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP - which he said was informed by his personal experience of coming to know LGBTQ+ students and having his beloved daughter being a Lesbian in a stable, settled relationship producing a grandchild.   He, himself, admits that his developed belief based on that is not founded in his understanding of Scripture which he claims - against the reading of other scholars - doesn't support his new belief.   Why shouldn't those living under horrible, unjust, anti-egalitarian,  economic regimes and the legal and police and military that enforces those with the violence that all of those require develop theological positions and ideas based on their experience?   

It is one of the most basic aspects of Latin American, Black, Womenist, etc. liberation theologies that those whose liberation is the focus of that theology,  what they say about their experience of living is to be consulted and considered important in that theology.   

Given his critique of those theologians of Latin America,  many of whom have made common cause with those "uneducated and abjectly poor" People in their own societies - to the extent that many of them have knowingly made themselves targets along with those uneducated and abjectly poor People and many of them are, in fact,  martyrs and saints due to that martyrdom,  what does a straight, white male from the United States who has a career as a teacher at elite American schools,  not endangered by his own writing, have to say about that which even rises to the level of the kind of basic credibility he demands of them?   I will point out that many of those very theologians he makes that criticism of have a far closer and respectful relationship to the "uneducated and abjectly poor" than he would seem to have among the associates of his I've read and heard him talk about.  

Given the life of Jesus and those he addressed,  given the earliest experiences of the church,  such People have lives today which are a lot closer to the life Jesus and his followers led than that of a middle-class, white, male, straight Christian in the United States knows based on their experience and what they say might be suspected to have deeper relevance to the New Testament than what academic theologians write.  

As I said I have deep respect for much of Johnson's writing and speaking.  It's a novel concept to a lot of, especially, college-credentialed lefties and liberals,  but you don't have to agree with everything someone says and holds with to respect them and think the balance of their ideas are worth reading and engaging in.   You can even disagree strongly with someone and make the most exigent criticisms of what they think and still respect and like them.   THOUGH THERE ARE SOME THINGS ABOUT WHICH YOU MUST MAKE A BREAK.  

I had considered, instead of going through a book like Living Jesus (which I highly recommend) for Lent,  I had considered going through the American Black Liberation theologian James Cone's book which he said (at least at one point) presented his more developed theological position,  God of the Oppressed,  which I also recommend highly.   But I don't have the time for that, it would require me to type out many long passages from the book and right now I just simply don't have the time for that.   I hope to some time in the future. 

I will, though, share with you someone who I'm not sure would call herself a liberation theologian but who is still with us and who is the intellectual and academic equal of just about anyone,  someone I didn't become aware of until just recently,  Dr. Anthea Butler.  She is so good and I can't listen to her for long without finding dozens of things she says that I could follow up on.   If I was cursed to be 20 again,  I'd try to get into her classes.  

Here is a very good introduction to her,  an interview with Blake Chastain discussing her book White Evangelical Racism.  It is the best thing I've heard on the topic so far.  She knows the topic because she had a temporary sojourn into Evangelicalism, even attending one of the largest Evangelical seminaries,  before she returned to the Catholicism she was raised in (more on that at this link).   I have not read the book yet but I hope to get to it.   I think I will concentrate on what I find from her online, which is available with links this Lent.   One of the things I really, really like about her is that she understands that the issues she deals with are so important that making nice and polite is not an option,  she tells the harsh, terrible and blunt TRUTH.   

Coming Clean

YEAH, I'M A BAD EDITOR.   Some of that is bad eyesight, some of it is the bad habit I've gotten into by relying on automatic spell-check whereas before I'd carefully read what I wrote and possibly notice that I'd typed out a word but it wasn't the right word.  I am trying to break that habit.   Another problem is that when I'm editing I sometimes delete too much and a noun or verb that agreed before editing doesn't agree anymore.  When something isn't underlined in red I have gotten too reliant on the technology,  my ever greater exposure to "AI" is making me wish I could turn some of that off.  

On top of that I don't have the time to spend hours writing and rewriting most days so what you get is like TV production,  quick and dirty - as a fine Canadian actress once said it. 

One Of The Biggest Reasons That "Equal Justice Under Law" Is Among The Biggest Lies In The World

Nothing has changed in 2,000 years.  We just have to read the newspaper and we see all these court cases where laws made to protect people,  they can be easily broken.  And the more money you have, the more lawyers we can buy.  And the more we can manipulate the rules and, quote "Bring justice our way."  And actually it's immoral.

Fr. Henk van Meijel, S.J. from last Tuesday 

DONALD TRUMP AND HIS SCUMBAG LAWYERS have openly, clearly, obviously and undeniably manipulated that evil which Hamlet listed among those unbearable things in life which he gave as a good reason to consider suicide,  "the laws delay."  And he did that by doing what Fr. van Meijel identified, buying lots of lawyers whose profession it is to manipulate not just the law but the very scheduling and work habits of courts and clerks and the entire system right up to the Supreme Court.  He did it to steal and cheat from those who contracted to do work for him, he did it to get away with some of the most serious crimes ever committed by a president of the United States,  he did it to avoid being declared unqualified to run for the disastrous term he's carrying out even as he led an insurrection against the goddamned Constitution which has proven just how useless it is when such a determined and practiced rich crook who can buy enough lawyers is determined to break the law and get away with it.

THE FUNNIEST THING ABOUT THAT, IF ANY OF THIS CAN BE SAID TO BE FUNNY,  IS THAT DONALD TRUMP IS, BEYOND MEASURE, THE STUPIDEST, MOST IGNORANT AND NOW DEMENTED PRESIDENT IN OUR HISTORY AND HE'S PLAYING COURTS FROM BOTTOM TO TOP, FILLED WITH THE GRADUATES OF THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS LAW SCHOOLS LIKE SECOND GRADE PLAYGROUND CHUMPS.   And the goddamned crooks at the top of the judiciary have not only played along with him,  they've rewritten the rules to legalize everything he's gotten away with.  The Roberts Court is singularly crooked in our history and singularly dishonest, in so far as its majority is concerned.  And, of course, nothing will be done to fix that.   As I have predicted,  the lawyers among the Democratic lawmakers will probably be the last hurdle that such lawmaking will have to jump over.   Don't get me started on the hurdles a Constitutional amendment that ended Supreme Court criminality will have to overcome.  

This what he does the rich and super rich do regularly.   One of the 19th century robber barons laid out that regular practice of the legal profession plainly,  he told a lawyer who had told him what he wanted to do was illegal that he didn't hire lawyers to tell him what the law was but how to get away with breaking it.  And by training and by the actual practices of that profession,  he certainly wasn't unable to find lawyers or, for that matter, judges who would do that for him.   Elon Musk and Peter Thiel probably have a far easier time with doing that.   Trump has, he doesn't even have to hide his intention to break contracts and the law right in front of the judges and he knows he can count on the majority on the Supreme Court to let him do it AS THEY HAVE BEEN DOING.  

The Republican Party has used the same thing as a weapon against their critics at least since the interminable hearings against Democrats during the Clinton administration.  I used to marvel at how the Democrats hauled before them, private citizens always had to have lawyers with them, wondering how much their command performance cost them.   When one woman, as I remember her a secretary appeared without a lawyer it was remarked on by one of the House members because it was so singular.  

And that is true for anyone without funds in any civil case who cannot be expected to win a big settlement from someone with deep pockets.   And it's also true of those without a lawyer or one who is inadequate whenever they are bought before the court in any criminal matter in which they're up against the police, the prosecutor, the state and not infrequently a judge who wants to demonstrate how tough they are on those accused of crimes. 

There is no equal justice under the law of the United States because those with lots of money can do what the priest identified, they can buy lawyers and if they can't find a lawyer who will do it,  they will find one who will lie for them and outrageously manipulate the habits of courts.   The rich start out with that kind of mercy that you can buy,  not to mention the prejudice in favor of the rich which is rampant in the world, no place more so than the United States and in few venues so much so as those run by and staffed by those who were educated into the lore of the civil law and the Constitution of the United States.  

I gave you a link to the video of the sermon which led to me writing this, with the Gospel it is on.   His Dutch accent might take a little getting used to and his use of English but he is a very good homilist.  I think what he said last Tuesday is more useful than anything I've heard from the lawyers of MS NBC or Meidas Touch. 

I've Been Telling People For Years That The Maine Media Is Uniformly Republican And Have Been Carrying Susan's Water For Decades

 AND HERE'S JUST THE LATEST PROOF.

Pam Bondi Should Remember What Happened To Her In Her Last Life

 

She got sent to Willy Wonka's furnace 

Update:  And then there's who Megyn Kelley was in her last life. 

I Think From Now Until Further Notice

I'm going to assume that the Trump goons have gay compromat on Little Mike Johnson and that's the reason he's building his resume as the lowest point in the history of the House Speakership.  While his clear stupidity and, even more so his typical Southern Baptist amorality* could produce the same,  I think they've got pictures, videos and names.    I have looked at the rumors in and around the gay culture of DC and I think there's something there.  Not to mention Johnson's own demonstrated sexual weirdness.   

I'm certain that they've got it on "Lady G,  Lindsey Graham.   Miss Lindsey, another Southern  Baptist,  burned the tatters of his moral credibility long, long ago,   And he never had but those tatters of it. 

I have seen some saying that Epstein and Maxwell provided young boys in their sex-trafficking-blackmail operation.  I don't know if that's true but I have absolute certainty that there have and has been more than one such operation feeding off of the degeneracy of the rich and, so, powerful.  And as the intelligence services of the United States,  Britain, Russia, Israel and, now I'll add to that list, Norway were certainly aware of if not involved in the Epstein child trafficking ring, I'm sure they're aware of and permitting the continuation of that.  The Kincora "Boy's Home" in Northern Ireland was certainly known to those at the top of the British establishment,  that's certain because Lord Mountbatten was one of those who regularly raped boys from it.   There is no way that British and probably all of those other intelligence agencies above were not keeping track of Mountbatten,  someone who had plotted to conduct a putsch against the Wilson government and was fully involved with loads of such stuff.   

I would be more than just curious to know the extent to which human trafficking and rape figures into the daily activities of governments, especially those deputed to be democracies or republics or constitutional monarchies.   Not to mention the obvious widespread practice of it by billionaires and millionaires [LEVEL THEM OUT OF EXISTENCE, THEY'RE THE BIGGEST CRIMINAL CLASS OF THE WORLD].    I think it's fitting that the child raping, royal grafting-grifter Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's new name will be a constant reminder that raping children is a family tradition among the British Royals.   

I would really like to know the extent to which Elizabeth II was aware of her second-cousin and her husband's uncle's long history of raping children as well as her son's.   It's certain she knew about her son's participation as she bailed him out when he was sued by Virginia Giuffre.   I hope if the monarchy out-lasts Charles, who seems to have finally realized that his mother's generation's handling of such a family scandal won't wash, anymore,  that his son exposes all of the filthy family linen if for no other reason than that it's all bound to come out.  

I have no doubt that randy Andy was NOT  the last of those skeletons in their cupboard.   If William wants the monarchy to continue he will have to do a full nostra culpa on that and other issues of corruption. 

But who am I, as an American,  to gloat about that?   While it's very likely that the Epstein revelations might topple the complicit Starmer government (McSweeney** was the brains behind the corrupt Starmer project and he's gone) and it could possibly end the British monarchy,  the corrupt and obviously even more corruption permitting American system isn't even spitting out the fourth leg of the Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner child-rape and blackmail ring,  Trump.  It hasn't even spit out the Epstein rapists and associates in his cabinet.   I think those who claim that the unwritten British Constitution is less dangerous than our written one should be heard and studied because ours has proven to not be able to get as far in deposing such criminals from power as the Brit's has been.   

The American "free press" is complicit in all of this, apart from some of the small new media which are, in fact, the only part of it that counts as news organizations.  The legacy media, from top to bottom, is complicit,  including the New York Times and the other billionaire and millionaire owned propaganda entities.  See comment on Big Money, above.  

* You might well ask why someone who still calls himself a Catholic would say that, considering how much criminal scum there is in the Catholic Church.   Well, in the United States that's mostly among those who identify as "white Catholics" and members of the hierarchy while Catholics of Color generally are less so.   I have certainly not held back in condemning Catholics who do evil, from the daffiest Latin Mass cultist right up to Popes such as JPII and Benedict XVI.   Nor have I held back in criticism of those I respect such as Francis and Leo XIV.   In American politics "white evangelicals" perhaps most of all the Southern Baptists and various sects of Calvinists and Pentacostalists have been firmly in our indigenous fascist tradition, white supremacists.   Southern Baptists were founded on their support of slavery and they have never not been mostly about that from the top down.  I will acknowledge that there is a significant percentage of those who are Southern Baptists who have voted against Republican-fascism but the culture of that denomination is white supremacist and, like all white supremacists, they readily tack on misogyny and other hatreds.    And I'm done with ignoring that just as I'm done with ignoring the sins of the Catholic hierarchy and the "trad" cults within it. 

If Christianity is to continue it has to stop being so polite about calling out the corruption in it and those denominations that are full to the top with it.  I'm done being polite about that.  Throw the money changers out,  there's a Scriptural precedent for doing that. 

** Morgan McSweeney is a Steve Bannon, Steve Miller level piece of shit.   Keir Starmer, who was McSweeney's creation,  the famed "civil liberties" lawyer,  is as bad.   I just can't keep from pointing out the true nature of such "civil libertarians."   Equality is the true basis of real democracy,  not "liberty."    I would love to see a total exposure of McSweeney and his connections, especially to big money and big media.  

Someone Showed Me An "AI" Retaliation of Trump And Melania As Pink Skinned Apes

IF IT WERE ME  they'd be Porky and Petunia pig.  But I don't do AI so I'll just let you make your own mental image.  Trust me, it'll be better. 

The Inherent Corruption Of Our Presidential System Permits Trump To Steal Billions From Us

IT ISN'T POSSIBLE to assess how valuable that Senator Ruben Gallego may be to the citizens of the United States but his exposure of what should be a criminal scheme among Trump, Bondi-Blanche and the guy who you want to wipe the smug look off his corrupt lying face,  Bessent, to hand over ten-billion dollars to Trump was invaluable.  That exposure leaves a slim and faint hope that exposure may have delayed the money grab just long enough. 

Trump's ten billion dollar theft (on top of tens of millions already stolen) will be facilitated by HIS Department of "justice" and HIS Department of Treasury unless the worst president in American history dies before he completes the theft,  THAT BECAME APPARENT IN BESSENT'S FILIBUSTERING NON-RESPONSE TO SENATOR GALLEGO.   I hope a future Democratic House or Senate gets that piece of crap before them again to force him to answer questions and to hold him in contempt - the kind that doesn't depend on the corruption of a Republican-fascist "justice" department or the cowardice of a future Democratic Department of "justice" to send his billionaire ass to prison.   

And I hope if he goes to prison it's not on of those country-club ones which, by the way, should be abolished.   White collar criminals are some of the worst there are and they should do time as hard as the most destitute person convicted.

Before going on "HIS" above is to point out the fact that if the Attorney General is appointed by the sitting president and who can fire them at will,  the lie that the Department of Justice is in any way reliably not the sitting president's law firm depends entirely and absolutely on that president acting as Biden did in not exercising that control.  Republicans since Eisenhower have shown that they, consistently, will use the it as, if not the president's personal law firm, then the Republican parties and the oligarchs and, now, the white supremacists who are essential to their party's success.   The pious notion to the contrary is a piously told and transparent lie. 

But back to topic.  Now that the Trump crime spree has set up this scheme for Trump to grab ten billion dollars you can't ever depend on some future change in the mere law to stop it.  After the Nixon crime spree, including by the Department of "justice" under the Attorney General who eventually went to prison for his part in it, some very good anti-corruption laws, through restricting political money were adopted and destroyed by the Supreme Court, in a case brought by the overtly fascistic James Buckley.   There will never be such a thing as an honest Republican administration, again, that party has become so entrenched in oligarchic corruption that every future one will be open to the same practices.   That is unless the basic form of government of the United States is changed in the Constitution - those changes including taking the power to nullify federal laws from the almost certainly guaranteed to be corrupt or cowardly or just plain stupid Supreme Court.  

Under our system the Department of "justice" is only as clean as those in it choose to be, being staffed by the president and acting at his whim,  we have seen through successive Republican administrations since Nixon that they will generally be corrupt, in a line of Do"j" officials, starting with John Mitchell,  William French Smith, Ed Meese,  William Barr,* John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, Michael Mukasey,   Jeff Sessions,  Matthew Whitaker, William Barr (again) and on to Bondi with slightly lower levels like Blanche in all of those Republican administrations,  that pattern is firmly established with a few, arguably less corrupt examples in between.    I would be tempted to site Gerald Ford's Attorney General, Edward Levi as an exception to that rule if it were not for the fact that he had Rudy Giuliani, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia working under him.  No truly honest person would have such consistent bad judgement as that. 

LOOK AT THAT LIST OF DULY, CONSTITUTIONALLY APPOINTED AND SENATE APPROVED (WITH THE EXCEPTION OF WHITAKER) CRIMINALS AND SLEAZEBAGS.  Look at it and the more than a half-century of American history they represent with the knowledge what has been permitted under the Constitution is, in fact, what the Constitution is in reality instead of law-scholar, civics-text book lies.  

Any system in which the criminal investigations and prosecution department is under the control of a self-interested, guaranteed to be partisan branch of the government is open to direct corruption of the kind that has flourished under every Republican president since Eisenhower and that corruption could be matched with the lack of courage and judgement of a number of those under Democratic administrations,  Reno, Garland, . . . 

I was curious to know if there was ever another instance like Trump's ten billion dollar grab by a sitting head of state in a modern democracy and found no instance of looking all weekend.   The closest I found was when the ex- Prime Minister of Canada,  the one often cited as the worst PM in Canadian history Brian Mulroney sued when the RCMP accused him of corruption in the infamous Airbus scandal which, from everything I can see Mulroney was guilty of corruption in.  The Jean Chrétien government settling with the criminal was, no doubt, an act of short term political expediency when taking a chance on defending the case would probably have served the country and history better in the long term.   I wish I'd written down in my notes who it was who, after he had left office, said they'd never believe a word that Mulroney said because he was an habitual liar,  but going into that will only get me into the permissive handling of lies under our system of government.   By American standards, by the way,  Mulroney would have never come close to being the worst president, he'd have lingered somewhere in the middle. 

The framers of the Constitution,  a pretty corrupt lot, themselves, probably didn't believe there would come a time when the regime of corruption represented in that list of Attorneys General above would become the norm for the government they were forming,  they certainly couldn't imagine a Supreme Court - armed with a self-created power that they never put in the Constitution - would turn the American president into a criminally impune monarch of the kind they'd explicitly thrown off in the Revolution.   But such is the inherently wrong assumptions they had about government, to start with in their novel scheme of "balanced powers" and the country continuing in the direction of good governance under a republic they believed, wrongly, that they'd sent the ship of state in that the very things they created have been corrupted UNDER THE VERY RULES THEY ESTABLISHED.  

There is always a potential of corruption under any scheme of governance but one that puts the investigation and prosecution of crimes AND THE SETTLEMENT OF CIVIL CLAIMS BY THE SITTING OR PAST EXECUTIVE in the hands of POLITICAL APPOINTEES BY THE VERY MAN WHO COMMITS THOSE CRIMES OR BRINGS THOSE CLAIMS, is a guarantee of corruption and theft.   I can't believe they couldn't imagine such corrupt partisans as Bondi,  Blanche and Bessent being a possibility - along with such criminals having the power to hollow out experienced, career investigators and prosecutors as has come to maturity and instant rot in Trump II - but that is the consequence of the presidential system they set up.   I have not taken the time to see if such consequences were predicted by the Anti-federalists but it is such an obvious problem with how the Department of "justice" and other agencies under the presidential system that someone could not have noticed it as a possibility.

Depending on the. . . um. . . "honor" of lawyers and politicians to avoid the kind of corruption that Trump has installed and will certainly profit from, unless he dies before Bessent gives him the ten billion, can't ever be depended on again.  Like the corrupt Rehnquist and Roberts Court, once a road has been cut through the make-believe lore of the Constitution and through those most stupidly depended on entities such as "norms" that road will ever remain open UNTIL THE CONSTITUTION IS EFFECTIVELY CHANGED TO PREVENT A FUTURE COURT TO OPEN THEM UP AGAIN.   To prevent that the Marbury power-grab of 1803 has to be forever nullified in the clearest and most effective ways.   I think to do that there will have to be a fixed an limited term or membership of the Court with a lifetime ban on ex-"justices" profiting from rulings they've made from the bench.  One with real prison terms attached, to be served in real prisons. 

Our system is totally corrupt,  this scheme of Trump to give himself (and he's said it in those terms, himself) ten billion dollars through his corrupt appointees is the total and final collapse of the "honors" system that has, so far, kept that level of corruption at bay.   From here on if we don't override the cowardice and corruption of the lawyers, and those in the House and, especially, the Senate will be a major hurdle to ending that corruption, and the witless foolishness of the "balance of powers"  the American Republic will be destroyed by the things already proven to be possible "under the Constitution."  The first step is we have to stop worshiping it and the slave-holders and corrupt financiers who wrote it and the corrupt "justices" that amended it at their whim, starting with the Marbury power grab.

I live to, among other things, be able to report the happy news that Trump has died and gone to hell,  that, among so many others, his thugs like Todd Blanche are disbarred and behind bars and that that monumental FAGA asshole Bessent has the smug smile wiped from his stupid billionaire face as he is perp walked.   I doubt it will happen, the American "justice" system seldom does to hold the biggest, white collar criminals accountable.  Probably only the first one will happen, divine justice being what "justice" under our system is not.  But I live in hope. 

* It should never be forgotten that even as his partisan, Republican corruption was in full flower, the man held up as being the white knight of American lawyers was best friends with the putrid, corrupt, fascistic William Barr.  The lavishly over-sold Robert Mueller, oversold in terms of integrity and honesty and devotion to the non-partisan application of the law played a huge role in my final disillusionent about the law and the legal profession.   

Since The Republican-fascists Don't Want The Clintons To Testify In Public

maybe the Democrats in the House should hold no-holds-barred hearings with them in public, live, online.    Of course it would only work if they asked them really tough questions.   I don't know if there is any legal-lore superstitious rite that would allow them to do that having them sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to give it that false aura of TV lawyer show reliability.   I have yet to see the liars of the Republican-fascist party who lie their asses off under oath held to any kind of account.  But such a hearing would produce public claims by Bill and Hillary Clinton which could, then, be used by the Republican-fascists though the same is true of any testimony on the record that they give. 

The Democrats on the relevant committees could invite the Republican-fascists on those committees to ask questions - THOUGH THEY SHOULD NEVER DO THAT WITHOUT THERE BEING RULES THAT THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS HAD TO, THEMSELVES, BE HONEST AND RESPECTFUL.   My guess is if they had to abide by honesty and fairness rules the fascists would choose to not participate because that wouldn't serve their purpose. 

I am curious to hear Bill Clinton explain his relationship with Epstein outside of the kind of lawyerly truth shaving that his 1990s sworn testimony about his marital infidelity demonstrated.  He has no political career or presidency to worry about and, if he's truly innocent of crimes,  he doesn't have the same kind of worries about a crooked prosecutor and judge that he rightly had to consider three decades ago.   

Of course he could have, well before this, given a full, public account of his relationship with Epstein, Maxwell and the others involved with the child trafficking and rape and, I have absolutely no doubt, compromat and blackmail ring.   I say the same about George Mitchell or any others who appear in the Epstein files.

Looking at the online list of those whose names appear in the Epstein material,  I was pleased to see only three names of musicians,  Michael Jackson,  Mick Jagger and,  for pity sake,  Itzhak Perlman.  I take it from that that Epstein wasn't a music lover.  You can contrast that with the names of those in the movie racket or other degenerate media.   I think that other than the super-rich and political, perhaps neo-Darwinists and theoretical physicists and other such orthodox materialists account for a lot more of them than could be considered by chance.  I'm tempted to go into the Pinkers and Dawkins and the old ScienceBlogs crowd and their relationship with Epstein along with the recently posted podcast of one of their own Rebecca Watson pointing out what a boob Larry Krauss is but that's more an indulgence than something important.   I still might do it.  

-------------------------------

A lot of what went on in those circles were a direct result of the Supreme Court knocking down the post-Watergate clean-elections laws in the Buckley v Valeo decision that opened the floodgates of dirty money, influence and law buying that the idiot "civil libertarians" did in that and subsequent "free speech-press" rulings by the idiot ridden Supreme Court.  You would have to be a totally callow idiot who had spent a lifetime in the general make-believe of "the law" to not realize what the result of knocking down those laws would be, EXACTLY WHAT THEY WERE ADOPTED TO STOP. 

Fifty six  years after the crimes of Nixon horrified those who wanted clean government,  our politics AND SO THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT is dirtier than it's ever been.   

Trump is a direct result of those "first amendment" rulings.  The Epstein money operations and those like it,  known and yet to be revealed, may well have never found the foothold they did in our politics without those rulings and with the clean elections laws that the ELECTED OFFICIALS OF THE 1970s adopted in order to clean up our politics and government.   The Roberts Court, a product of such money corruption in our politics is also a direct result of those "first amendment" "civil liberties" rulings.   

I think its notable that the present British  "Labour" government that may well fall due to the corrupt links to the Epstein crime gang is led by the hypocritical and corrupt Kier Starmer,  who made his reputation as a "civil liberties" lawyer.   That fact did nothing to dissuade me of my complete skepticism of that pseudo-liberal lawyer racket on either side of the Atlantic.