The Multi-Millionaire Asshole Eliot Cutler Has Struck Out Five Times Now, How Many More Times Does A Millionaire Convicted Pedo Get?

POSTED WITHOUT FURTHER COMMENT except to point out that as a two-time millionaire spoiler independent candidate for governor of Maine he twice helped get us the degenerate Paul LePage in office with less than a majority of the vote.   So, of course, I hate him for that alone.   Here's what it says in the Press Herald. 

Eliot Cutler is facing a fifth accusation that he violated the terms of his probation, according to court documents filed Tuesday.

The disgraced two-time Maine gubernatorial candidate and convicted sex offender is accused of giving authorities incorrect passwords to his electronic devices, which are subject to searches.

Cutler, 79, was sentenced in 2023 to nine months in jail, followed by six years of probation, after he was convicted of possessing thousands of sexually explicit images of children. He was let out of jail two months before his scheduled release date for “good behavior.”

Since September, he has been accused several times of violating court-ordered conditions and remains in custody without bail at the Hancock County Jail.

Eliot Cutler to remain in Hancock County Jail without bail
Cutler’s attorney, Walter McKee, said Wednesday that Cutler denies the new allegations. He has also denied all past allegations of violating his release conditions.
Cutler is scheduled to appear in Hancock County Superior Court next month to address the allegations.

Cutler’s probation officer, Sam Payson, wrote in recent court filings that the passwords that Cutler provided for his electronic devices didn’t work, meaning a state police investigator could not access them.

He also accused Cutler of having encrypted files on a computer without permission.

Payson wrote that this is “another example of Mr. Cutler demonstrating that he has no intent of following his ordered conditions.” He again asked a judge to consider revoking his probation entirely.

Five frickin' violations?  FIVE?   I'd like to know how many poor people are in Maine jails for violating parole once, and for crimes a lot less serious than what Cutler was convicted of.   

Update:  I forgot to mention he's a prep (Deerfield Academy) to Harvard to Georgetown Law product.  Yep, a lawyer felon an associate and partner of the the white shoe law firms.  From his, probably self-curated Wiki page:

He then worked from 1980 to 1988 for the law firm Webster & Sheffield, focusing mostly on environmental and land use issues.

He was a founding partner of Cutler & Stanfield LLP, with fellow Webster & Sheffield associate Jeffrey Stanfield, which became the second-largest environmental law firm in the country, eventually merging that practice with international firm Akin Gump in 2000.

If ignorance of the law is no excuse, knowledge of the law should certainly be considered as compounding the crime.  He should have gotten life without parole. 

Can Someone, Anyone, And I Don't Mean "AI" Explain The Reason That Youtube And Other Online Automats Of Info

 have programmed their bots to remove content that leads those who want to avoid that talking about "PDF files," and using what seems like an ever increasing number of euphemisms?    I'm not necessarily complaining about it but I don't get the point of it.   Not when so much racism and other coded calls to violence and hatred flourish, as noted below.  

I think their banning bots can only be, at most, as smart as those programming them and I don't think they're likely to be very smart, to start with.   But they can be a lot stupider, as bots really are. 

Hate Mail - On The Contrary, I Think Real Hatred Of Jews Is A Rising Problem

Note:  None of these things is simple and reducible to even one blog post and I won't make believe it is,  there aren't two sides, that stupid question as sung by The Weavers is as much a part of the problem as choosing a bad side of it.   That is what is demanded of me AND I WON'T DO IT. 

I should also note that the "hate mail" didn't come from one of my regular trolls, it came from someone else.  I don't want anyone to attribute it to them.  

AND THE RECENT DISTORTION OF "ANTISEMITISM" as a tactic of inhibition among those with any sense of propriety is aiding in that rise.   I warned of that the first time I slammed the transparent dishonesty of the so-called International Holocaust Remembrance Association's mounting and political-legal promotion of a legal cover-up of the crimes of the Israeli government.   I predicted that that world-wide, obviously very well funded campaign to cover-up for the apartheid and genocide of Israel would backfire and empower the Jew haters.  Those haters are generally also haters of many other groups and many of those hatreds are even far more dangerously rising right now.   

I don't recall the many so-called experts on the Holocaust, many of them with superb academic credentials,  who were a part of that cover-up effort having the foresight to predict that reaction which is setting in so dangerously here in the US and around the world.   But, then, my view of such credentialing is among those things that has lowered, drastically, too.   I don't have any respect for those who make a career and living off of the now 80 year past genocide by the Nazis who refuse to identify and condemn genocides that are happening right now,  not even those who were successful in defending themselves against what is in effect a SLAP lawsuit in Britain.   Not anymore, I don't.   Unless such a study is done in order to inform and change the MORAL lives of People moving forward in order to prevent and stop such mass murder no matter who commits them, they reduce the subject of it to a morbid and pointless antiquarian vulgarization of that study in ways that dishonor its victims. 

It has certainly not helped that in the same period in which the so-called IHRA and the Israeli government are bringing about the conditions that have given rise to much of the increase in antisemitism we are witnessing - which is part of a general rise in racism in many places and against many groups.  It certainly doesn't help at all that the notorious Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and their various millionaire and billionaire associates have been exposed as crude, vulgar racists and what Norman Finkelstein has aptly called "Jewish supremacists" even as their associations with and suspected agency for the Israeli government has gained currency.   The responsibility for the consequences of that certainly don't fall on those who notice that documented expression of it. 

Not a little of the snark and angry citation of the phrase "chosen people" has been in response to the Jewish supremacy expressed in the dribs and drabs of e-mails from those criminals and their expression of it as testified to by their victims.   The misunderstanding of any Scriptural notions of "chosenness" as some kind of intellectual or spiritual superiority that is inherited as this or that cluster of genes might be is widespread.    Whatever "chosenness" came with some of the most onerous of moral obligations ever claimed by any People, anywhere.   The idea that that "chosenness" was some free ride is, perhaps, to be expected among the fallible vessels that human beings are,  and if that's forgotten the rest of the Jewish Scriptures are nothing but a record of those so "chosen" falling entirely short and losing everything because of it.   It would be interesting if the Jewish Scriptures had held more of the documentation of the Hasmonean dynasty, both the ever more corrupt rulers and the corrupted Temple than were chosen to include in it but, then, the same can be said about the cut-off of Christian Scriptures at the late 1st century.*

It is rather hilarious for many white gentiles who snark about and angrily accuse Jews of believing in that, as a blanket accusation because if there is one thing that such tend to be it is believing in their own "chosenness" on other basis, such as a crude and vulgar conception of nationalism, ethnicity, superstitions developed from 19th century romantic linguistics and all of those mixed with a superstitious belief in natural selections and the pastiche of that current in the mid-20th century neo-Darwinian synthesis and, in the case of the United States,  show-biz, hagiographic civics bullshit about American exceptionalism.    If there is one thing about the Trump era, it is that any such notions based on anything should be entirely and forever obliterated and such claims banned from popular entertainment and suppressed in what passes as academic or journalistic scribblege and babbleage.  

The worst of them, especially the dispensationalist-evangelical white-supremacists of the English speaking (and unfortunately more and more Spanish speaking ones) believe in it on an especially wacky reading of Scripture,  or, rather, their distortion of the text of the KJV even as their Zionism is in order to get all of the Jews in one place, the better for them to be forced to convert or obliterated  - something they have in common with Jewish Zionists.   I will point out that at least they don't figure that Jews should be murdered on the basis of biology as the Nazis believed,  though they want them to stop being Jews - which has quite a history of intersection with Zionism as elucidated by the theoreticians of Zionism.    

I certainly don't think that either Epstein or Maxwell or others in their orbit held their ethnic, racist sense of superiority on the basis of Scripture but on the typical, post-WWII vulgar conceptions of biology which never had any scientific validity though its basis was the required framing of biology from at least the 1920s onward.   I'm sure if they ever expressed themselves on what their beliefs were founded in they'd have explained it as genetic superiority, though that is entirely a matter of college-credentialed superistition as much as the superstition of "Aryan" supremacy as biologically explained by the Nazis was.   Not an insignificant part of that was based, firmly, on the entirely conventional science of such giants of pre-war Darwinism as Karl Pearson,  Eugen Fischer and Charles Davenport.   That such superstition in science didn't die with the revelations of the crimes of the Nazis is far more telling about the problems of science than it is of Scripture.  

The extent to which some Jews have expressed and hold that kind of supremacist view of themselves may be annoying but until it becomes a problem for those in other groups, it is merely that.   Though it should never be forgotten that People who are the target of such arrogance will react badly towards it.    Just as the superstition of white supremacy is a problem because of how those who hold that superstition act towards other People,  it's to be expected that those who come up on the short end of that stick will react with anger towards it.   And you can count on that to tend towards over-reaction and,  People not generally liking to deal with complexity, in an over-general and unjust way.   The reaction to injustice tends, in my observation, to trend towards injustice, too.   I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Jewish supremacy, when not a consequence of biological superstition,  was not an over-reaction to antisemitism on the part of non-Jews.   But those who are the focus of such chauvinism and bigotry can, also, use it to avoid that over-reaction and that should be encouraged. 

Though this is all intimately related to the crimes of the ethno-apartheid democracy of the Israeli state, it is far more complicated than just that.   I have every confidence that the Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner pedophile rape and, certainly, blackmail ring is related to at least a couple, if not several nations intelligence services - THEY'D CERTAINLY SELL WHAT THEY COULD TO ANYONE WHO WOULD PAY THEM FOR IT - the suspicion that the Israeli intelligence services were involved is entirely rational and understandable.  But the problem, as with notions of American exceptionalism,  Aryan supremacy,  many varying species of "blood based" national supremacist chauvinism are certainly reproduced in Zionism as, in that massive irony, the bloody crimes of all of them.   That is inevitable when such supermacist superstition is current in any given place.   Israel's is just another species of that AND IT IS NOTABLE THAT MANY, MANY JEWS REJECT THAT AS DO MANY GENTILES WHEN IT COMES TO THE RELEVANT SUPERSTITIONS THAT THEY MIGHT FALL INTO EVIL UNDER.  

The overarching sin in this is the sin of generalization which is related to the sins of pride, arrogance, bearing false witness and prejudice.  All of those are encouraged these days in the media, in popular entertainment and by the amorality of modernism.   Modernism has encouraged that as did previous amoral or immoral framings.   It needs to be overcome as much as any framing of the past which produced evil needs to be.   I have enormous regard and affection for the sadly gone Jewish Labour Bund and its allies,  though its modernist tendencies give me pause just as some of the modernist tendencies in Christian theology have.    

That aside,  I certainly wish the like of the Workers Circle and its allies well in their attempt to revive the Yiddish language and culture,  if I were younger I might learn the language, myself.  I think the Yiddish theater as much as the later Federal Theater Project is what made the best of mid-20th century theater and whatever few adult tendencies in the movies and TV happen, happen.   I think the lack of both of those in the past seventy years is why so much popular culture in the United States sucks so much.   I wish the Labour Bund had succeeded and not gotten so fragmented and sidelined into Marxism and blindsided by Zionism but it ran full into Bolshivism, Stalinism and Nazism so that's in the past.  We move forward whether we like it or not.   I have some hope for a successful alliance of anti-Zionism in both its religious and secular sides.   Though not under a modernist framing of secularism   I don't trust that, at all. 

* I've pointed out before that the eminent American essayist Marilynne Robinson, addressing the popular and modernist slamming of the Jewish Scriptures has asked what the superficial regard of the Christian Scripture would be if it covered as many centuries of Christian history, including such ignominies as the Crusades,  the crimes of the age of conquest, etc.   And I'd ask about such a compendious view of the real nature of secular modernism collected into one place.   Though one thing is certain, modernism has, by far, the largest death toll associated with it. 

Scumbag Lawyer David Markus Whines When Experienced Public Defender Calls Out The Special Treatment He Got For Ghiz Maxwell

 She requested that I share it so I am posting it. 

Hate Mail

I HAVEN'T SAID A SINGLE THING about the IDF thug attacking a crucifix in Lebanon, despite what you seem to believe.  I've said a lot about the Israeli military,  the organized criminals who are the "settlers" and the Israeli government and Zionists in general murdering thousands and thousands of Palestinians and others, of attacking Palestinians and others etc.   Attacking a statue is a minor incident,  murdering, maiming and attacking People and other living beings is absolute evil.  

Where did you ever get the idea that I can't tell the difference in scale between a minor incident and mass murder?   Some boob on the Baby Blue Blog?  

Got To Get A Bigger Monitor

 I LOOKED AT MY POST from yesterday on a big screen and reedited it.   My eyes are bad enough so I miss it when my editing unintentionally drops words or I fail to change the subject and verb agreement when I change a singular to a plural or the other way round.   The editing window in Blogger is so tiny on my monitor I need to blow it up more than I can on my daily driver.   I wish one of my siblings or younger relatives would get a bigger TV and drop their old one on me.   I only use them for computer screens, I hate TV and most movies. 

Which reminds me,  I've got to go see what new horrors await me in the news. 

I Have Always Had The Feeling

 that Trump's tariff insanity was probably the product of hearing his Nazi gangster daddy spout the nonsense I remember from what were already paleo-Republicans of the 1950s and 60s who claimed that if they had tariffs they could get rid of the income tax.  It went along with the more durable desideratum of them funding the federal government through a sales tax,  the more regressive the better, the better for the rich to keep the money they made through unillegalized theft.    I'm sure that the infant Trump who I imagine already sounded and looked like Baby Huey * repeated such stuff and never learned what a tariff was or who paid it.   I think most of his firm beliefs are things he learned in his childhood as a rich brat of a racist real estate gangster, imbibing the racism, the stereotyping of other groups, etc.  and, like rich and stupid people generally don't, he  didn't change much over the decades.  I'm sure he could have easily imbibed the hatred of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos in Queens in the period he grew up there.  Even when I was first familiar with NYC,  the levels of racism among even the college credentialed there rather shocked me even as Trump was already engaged in his daddy's crime organization. 

In his war against Pope Leo I remembered that his fascist gangster father and mother were members of Norman Vincent Peale's church - the positive-thinkin'-prosperity gospel peddler married Trump to his first wife - and I wondered if, as I suspected,   Peale may have been one of your common anti-Catholic Protestants which I found is something that occurred to others, enough for them to document that he was, in fact, one of the more prominent anti-Catholic Protestants of the period.   He led a right-wing pastors group who issued their opposition to John Kennedy's candidacy on the basis of his Catholicism.   As one of the more prominent of the media pastors of the time, his opposition was quite significant.    I have no doubt that he probably would not have liked many of Kennedy's announced positions and those which a progressive Democrat of the period might be suspected to support. 

Peale also opposed FDR and the New Deal,  America's involvement in WWII (he was an America Firster), he told Robert Shaw that he didn't want Black People, Jews or Catholics in the choir at his church - something he reportedly regretted saying late in life - maybe like the Mormons deciding that Black People weren't second class as it became legally and so financially  problematic for them to hold that doctrine.  

I had known that Peale was a Presbyterian, a Calvinist, I hadn't known that he started out as a Methodist who turned "evangelical."   Which didn't surprise me.   I haven't got Anthea Butler's book on white evangelicalism yet but I'd like to know if she mentioned him, at all.   I do remember that when Trump was running in 2016 and he went to his childhood church he asked the pastor if they were Christians, he doesn't seem to have imbibed any idea of that when Peale was the pastor there. 

It's not a huge point but it might be a window into the vacuous soul of Trump as he targets Leo and his family for his goons to threaten and perhaps leads them to plot violence against. 

* He certainly does now, especially in the pictures of the insufferably annoying cartoon duck with orange fluff on him.  And that voice! I can't stand the sound of it.

If I Can't Tell The Truth

that Megyn Kelly is a skanky skank,  I don't want to be part of your revolution. 

More On The Hate Mail

OK, I'LL DISCUSS IT TO THIS EXTENT.    The genocide of Israel against Palestinians in Gaza,  the West Bank, in Lebanon, inside of the allegedly legal borders of Israel forces Americans and others to confront the fact that to be a Zionist in 2026  is to support genocide.  To support genocide is to think and, worse, act like a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer in the period of 1939-1945.   I will not do that.   I will not tacitly support that by not protesting it, to be silent about ongoing genocide is as bad if not worse than actively supporting it. 

The tactics and strategies of the supporters of Israel to control the discourse in the United States and ruthlessly suppress non-racist critics of Israel have led to the kinds of dangerous consequences I warned about ever since I first posted on this topic in 2006.   At any rate, other than among an ever decreasing number of old line liberals and moderates whose cowardice was never their strong suit or most attractive feature, that status quo of intimidation is crumbling in the realities that we face.  And that's not all for the better. 

I am hearing increasing numbers of those who are horrified at the support of the United States for the Israeli genocide in Gaza,  blaming "Jews" for it.  And that's along side Israel's other attacks on Palestinians and neighboring countries that go along with the ultimate expansionist programs of the most fascistic of Zionists from before the declaration of the state of Israel to today.

And it is impossible to avoid the fact that that blanket blaming of "Jews" is tied firmly to the claims that the Israeli state and its fascist leaders have claimed that they are the legitimate representatives of all Jews, everywhere, whether they support the ethno-apartheid democracy there or not.   That is a point I've heard most reasonably and well refuted by Rabbit Yaakov Shapiro.  In both the European and, especially, American contexts, such insistent and illegitimate conflation is used to assign responsibilities of the crimes of the Israeli state and Israeli citizens with the active support of the state, the IDF, the Israeli police AND NON-ISRAELI ZIONISTS that conflation placed there for those inclined to racism an ignorance, is extremely dangerous, a danger which is coming to full maturity here as the likes of Tucker Carlson,  Candice Owens and even Nick Fuentes are harnessing and using it to promote their careers in hate to gain power. 

The realities of America, its permanent native fascists, the white supremacists,  the "free press" that promotes everything from the most genteel of Republican-fascism to outright Nazism and other genocidalists the better for the millionaires and billionaires to make money out of the congresses and presidents we know they and their legions of white supremacists put into power has gone far past where those who were idiotic enough to be OK with that status quo, believing that it couldn't happen here.  They are now faced with the reality THAT IT IS HAPPENING HERE.  

I'll repeat and expand my point.  When the likes of  Marjorie Taylor Greene,  Tucker Carlson, Joe Kent, . . . and right on down to the level of actual Nazis like Nick Fuentes are gaining credibility due to their often actually and blatantly expressing the blaming of Jews instead of the supporters of Israel,  things have gotten even more dangerous than I was predicting twenty years ago.   The casual and dishonest flinging around of accusations of "antisemitism," a word whose biggest fans of its use and as expanded under that mendacious, political, Zionist distortion of it by the IHRA, have made mean nothing.  And the conflation of it with entirely honest and entirely legitimate criticism of Israel has played an enormous role in accelerating this trend.   

I won't overlook anyone's role in any of this, from the support of genocide,  which is what Zionism 2026 is, to the thousand and one lies told in support of that position to the enhancement of the Jew-hating critics of Israel through the suppression of the non-hating criticism of it which has a direct role in the elevation in prominence of the Jew-haters.    And those Jew-haters are nearly uniformly haters of the entire list of those who are far more at danger in the United States than Jews have been up till now. 

Those tactics of dishonest protection of Israel from the normal kinds of criticisms of a government which does terrible things have all failed as has, in fact, the program of Zionism in exactly the ways that the Jewish opponents of Zionism and some gentiles as well, predicted from the late 19th century until today. 

Eventually a serious person has to face the hard truth and it doesn't get much harder than the Israeli genocide SUPPORTED BY THE UNITED STATES, and now the Israeli-Saudi-etc. fomented war that they bribed Trump to bring on and the consequences of that.    MAGAts don't care about the lives of anyone anywhere, not in the Middle East, not in the Gulf, not in Israel, not in Minnesota or Chicago,  but they do care about the price of gas and I've notice a lot of them are blaming Jews for that which comes with the Israeli-American war on Iran.   If you don't think that's dangerous going forward,  they got Trump in the presidency,  some are predicting they'll put Tucker Carlson into it. 

Israel was the disaster that it was predicted to become by figures such as Asher Zvi Ginsberg, Hannah Arendt, Marek Edelman, Albert Einstein (most of whom had supported various forms of Zionism until it took a hard, nationalist, supremacist turn, the "socialists" seeming to have adopted the Jabotinsky fascist line in the early 1940s (See my recent post about Hannah Arendt for a link to her "Zionism Reconsidered").   And there have always been those who never thought it was a good idea, the religious figures like, the Satmar Rebbe,  right on down to those who are still living such as Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, and the secularists such as in the Jewish Labor Bund movement.   

It has not been what was claimed it would be by the Zionists except for the fascists of the pre-Isreali state years.   It is the anti-Zionists among respectable People who turned out to be right about that, which is now a fact of history.   And there have been enormous numbers dead in that working out of the history.   Americans here have the luxury of amorally ignoring those many tens and hundreds of thousands of dead,  those deaths inform the opponents of Isreal as much as those murdered under Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, inform those who have that as part of their personal history.   

I don't have any right to ignore that because some ass in the States is going to call me names and lie about me on an ever more obscure blog to be believed by those too lazy and morally otiose to fact check him.   I don't care what People like that think of me. 

Hate Mail

 IT'S THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM to ignore what gets said about you at Eschaton.   Literally no one who posts comments there ever reads what they comment on, it's the reason Duncan gave up writing.    

Tabitha's Commentary On The Scandal Of Them Feeding The Military Crap as Trump And Kegbreath Are Stealing And Grifting Millions and Billions

 

That shame of Maine,  Jared Golden is the only "Democrat" who voted with the Republican-fascists on continuing the Trump-Netanyahu war that they may still send American Service People into a blood bath for.   Thank God that piece of garbage is bailing to, no doubt, make a bundle off of his betrayal of his constituents an those he has helped harm and get killed. 

I'm Asked What I Think Of John Fugelsang's Book

I HAVE NOT READ John Fugelsang's book so I have not commented on it and won't until I've read it but I have heard him blame what's wrong with Christianity on Paul enough times to say that while I can understand him believing that,  I used to believe something like that, myself, I can't agree with it, having read Paul far more than I had when I shared that opinion with him.   He, like many, contrast the several passages in the Pauline material which are cited to support slavery, to support the subjugation of Women, to lead the supporters of fascism, absolute monarchy, the American version of that,  white supremacist-male supremacist government with the words of Jesus recorded in the Gospels. 

It would be impossible to honestly claim that those passages in Paul have not been used that way because they have.   What is possible to say is that all of them, as stand-alone proof-texts is deeply problematic and that Paul, himself, said things that contradict them being used as the enemies of slaves, Women and dissidents of good will use them.   

It is undeniable that Paul, even as he said that Women shouldn't speak prophesy in church, entrusted Women to act as missionaries spreading the Gospel (which, as Paul was writing what he wrote was largely if not exclusively an oral Gospel),  he entrusted them with carrying his most important correspondence and, certainly, once delivered, reporting and answering questions.   I find those scholars who identify Women that Paul identified as performing what would certainly evolve into the priesthood and ministry, even as heads of churches in his very own words, far more credible than those who use his letters to support male supremacy. 

In advising a slave WHO HE IDENTIFIED TO THE CHRISTIAN MASTER OF THE SLAVE AS PAUL'S RELIABLE AND VALUED COLLEAGUE, to return to his "master" ALSO TOLD THE MASTER TO TREAT HIM AS HIS BROTHER, AS AN EQUAL.    "Masters" who treat slaves as brothers and equals are not acting as their masters.    That was a specific application of the Golden Rule as given by Jesus.    No one who was a follower of Paul who had heard any of the Gospel which certainly would have carried that idea in those or other words would have credibly believed they were following the Gospel while lording it over those held in legal slavery.   It is too bad that we can't know the extent to which Paul may have been hoping that someone who was legally a slave would have been safer with a "master" who took the teachings of Jesus AND OF HIMSELF seriously than he would have on his own with no legal status as a person, which is what slaves in the Roman empire AND THE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AS IT WAS FOUNDED would have been.   I can point out that under the U.S. Constitution, as it existed until the passage of the Civil War Amendments, such free slaves AND EVEN FREE BORN BLACK PEOPLE were at risk of being abducted into slavery BY SUPREME COURT RULING.   Indeed, under the Constitution as the Supreme Court interpreted it in the Dred Scott decision, there were, in effect, no such a thing as a free state.  If you're going to slam Paul,  you've certainly got to slam the Founders and "justices" who produced far worse than what Paul advocated.

As for him advising his vulnerable, fledgling, easily crushed churches to not make waves against an, up till then, inclined to ignore Christians, that was certainly good advice AND IT SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN THAT PAUL WAS ALWAYS WRITING TO SPECIFIC CHURCHES AND, POSSIBLY, INDIVIDUALS, ADDRESSING THEIR SPECIFIC ISSUES.   For those, such as in antebellum or Jim Crow, who were in the position of the Roman state as against those who had more in common with those who Paul was writing to using Paul's advice against them,  well, Paul wasn't writing to them.  

Paul was not responsible for those who misused what he said IN THE CONTEXT HE SAID IT IN.   Far, far less than those in power who misuse the texts of the Constitution and its amendments to do evil in ways that Paul's words have never been used, to make and enforce law.  

I have pointed out before that Paul's statements about men who have sex with men and Women who have unspecified unorthodox sex is always taken out of context in Romans.  Much of that is due to the ill-placed chapter break WHICH HE DIDN'T PUT THERE, which breaks up his longer argument that even if the Romans he was writing to found that icky THEY DID THINGS THAT WERE AS OBJECTIONABLE.   And it is certain that Paul doesn't seem to understand such a thing as exclusive same-sex attraction and the possibility of faithful, loving relationships among such couples.  He imagined same-sex-sex in terms of promiscuity and faithlessness.   Certainly he thought of it in terms of the extremely abusive practice of pagan prostitution, in and out of pagan cults and temples

I'm sure John Fugelsang and I share many if not virtually all opinions about current affairs in the United States and the world.  We probably share pretty much the same view of Christianity.  

We certainly agree that Christianity started taking a wrong turn, at least in terms of its moral status, when it became the state religion in various regimes in history.   I think one of the most important tasks of Christians and Christian churches in the present and future is to get rid of the junk it obtained over the centuries, during the late classical period, the medieval and early modern and later modern periods.   I think a lot of that was codified during the Reformation and Post-Reformation Protestant and Catholic churches, much of the worst of it in the American context in what developed as "evangelicalism" under the influence of Calvinism and some of the most establishment denominations of anabaptism and the worst of the Pentecostalists.   But for all of that there is much that was and is faithful to the Gospel.   And much of that gospel is contained in the Epistles, many of them by Paul or his "school."  

There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3:28  Common English Bible

Maybe this is the reason that Onesimus [Phileomon's slave] was separated from you for a while so that you might have him back forever—  no longer as a slave but more than a slave—that is, as a dearly loved brother. He is especially a dearly loved brother to me. How much more can he become a brother to you, personally and spiritually in the Lord!

So, if you really consider me a partner, welcome [the slave] Onesimus as if you were welcoming me.  If he has harmed you in any way or owes you money, charge it to my account.  I, Paul, will pay it back to you (I’m writing this with my own hand). Of course, I won’t mention that you owe me your life.

Philemon 1:15-19

If I had time I'd quote the passages in which Paul named Women in ways that contradict the claims made about the passages in the letters used to suppress Women.  I'll list some of them and how Paul identified them.

Phoebe (who he identified as a deacon who Paul gave the responsibility and honor to bring his letter to the Romans and explain it), Prisca (Paul called her a teacher), Junia (given the same status as an Apostle and was likely the head of a church), Euodia and Syntyche (who he said were advocates of the Gospel), and Mary, Tryphena and Tryphosa (probably sisters who, also, were teachers of the Gospel), and Persis (who was also worked to spread the Gospel).   It's impossible to believe that Paul had a blanket policy that Women were to keep their heads covered and not speak in Church.  Elizabeth Johnson has pointed out that the Women Paul said shouldn't talk in church were certainly talking in church and that history doesn't record what they said in response to Paul's letter.  We don't know if they stopped talking in church or not but it's certain that Paul didn't expect Phoebe or the others to not talk. 

I don't think the solution is to get rid of Paul and the other Epistles and only to rely on what the Gospels say Jesus said.  By the way,  Jesus didn't address slavery much at all in the Gospels, perhaps expecting that those he taught the Golden Rule to would have realized that it, alone, made slavery forbidden to his followers.   I think it's a really bad idea to limit the considerations of Christianity to any text, even those most authoritative though not necessarily normative texts.   Much in the way of Christian life has developed in the past two thousand years,  including the abolition of slavery, the liberation of Women, justice for workers, loving care for animals and the environment, etc.   A lot of that is supported in the Epistles and in the later Christian literature, though none of it can be taken as authoritative without measuring it against love of God and love of others. 

Will The United States Reach Idi Amin Dada Level Decadence Or Are We Past That Already?

IF DONALD TRUMP is still president of the United States by Wednesday we have already reached the stage of decadence that Uganda reached at the height of Idi Amin Dada's lunatic dictatorship (for those who don't remember him,  the wikipedia sketch contains many of the eerie similarities between his rule and the Trump regime).  

What he has done in the past month has disqualified him from holding any level of power,  that he is still in the presidency proves that our Constitution as it really and truly exists, under the partisan corruption of a Senate that twice failed to convict him of some of the most serious crimes an American president has ever committed,  the Supreme Court failing to enforce the 14 Amendment provisions barring insurrectionists - as he blatantly, obviously was, EVEN AS IT WAS CLEAR TO EVEN "justice" BROWN THAT IT WAS EXACTLY AND SPECIFICALLY TRUMP THEY WERE READY TO GREEN LIGHT FOR A SECOND BITE AT THE APPLE - all of it proves the ultimate decadence and decay past the state of mere rotting that the American Constitutional system is in.   And that doesn't get to the Electoral College that put him, the loser of the 2016 vote, into the office to start with,  the Garland Department of "justice" that failed to prosecute and convict him of the many felonies he committed,  the decades of lower courts and countless prosecutorial offices that failed to nail him when he was just a real estate gangster in NY, NJ, Florida and elsewhere.    

Don't get me started on the bulwark that the "free press" loves to tell us they are against tyranny and insanity in a president - they didn't report on Reagan's senility and they're covering for Trump even now - though the NYT is trying to sell Vance to a reluctant country even as Trump is showing signs the rotten fruit might fall off the twig any time now. 

Over the going on twenty years of my posting pieces online I've adopted many a theme that I never expected to when I first started - I wanted to avoid the topic of religion, the topic of natural selection (which I was already a thought criminal about),  of attacking many institutions, the Constitution and, especially the First Amendment,  . . . I thought my primary target then was going to be the stinking dirty media.   I didn't want to turn into a full time critic of the Constitution as it really is under the Courts and Congress and with the total failure and even unwillingness to remove the worst would-be dictator and total nut job thug in our history (Bush II was that for the first years of me doing this).   But here we are,  worse than under Bush II who gave us the Iraq and Afghan wars and myriads of crimes,  worse than the failures of Bill Clinton and Obama, worse than Bush I and Reagan. 

I won't post the pictures that Trump posted of him as white evangelical Jesus - ODDLY, HE APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN LISTENING WHEN THE "PASTOR" HE CERTAINLY WANTS A BJ FROM WAS ANOINTING HIM AS THE SECOND COMING A FEW DAYS BACK - but those along with his threats against Pope Leo should be the last thing he ever did. 

But they won't be.  He won't be 25th Amendmented any more than he was convicted in the Senate or blocked by the 14th Amendment as nullified by the Roberts Court. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Roy Williams - The Interrogation

 

Hard-hitting BBC Radio crime drama, comprising three contemporary crime stories that probe some of today's most complex moral issues.

Starring Kenneth Cranham as Detective Inspector Max Matthews and Alex Lanipekun as Detective Sergeant Sean Armitage.

Episode 1 - Ross 00:00

The detective duo interrogate a young prisoner about an attack on another inmate, but there's something else they want help with.

Harry ... Rupert Holliday Evans

Ross ... Billy Seymour

Directed by Mary Peate

Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 4 June 2018

Episode 2 - Jack 43:16

While Max and Sean interview respectable writer Jack - who insists he's innocent of shoplifting - they discover something more serious.

Julie ... Georgie Glen

Jack ... Michael Shaeffer

PC Kerry ... Kerry Gooderson

Directed by Mary Peate

Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 5 June 2018

Episode 3 - Heather 1:26:43

A man is brutally attacked in his own home, but the detective duo are at a loss to find anyone with a motive. When they do find a suspect, her years of pent-up anger burst out, along with the motive.

Heather ... Jo Martin

Clare ... Claire Rushbrook

Directed by Mary Peate

Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 6 June 2018

Betty Carter - I Remember You

 

Live performance recorded in Lisbon, Portugal (1982) 

Unfortunately I can't tell you who the musicians are. 

"Imagine having to change your reality every three to six hours?"

 With the fire hose of bullshit that comes out of the Trump regime I hadn't realized that my passing and transitory  skepticism over the "pilot rescue" was being supported.  I hadn't paid attention to the bullshit so I didn't realize how absurd the Trump regime claims were.  Many who make sense are saying it was, actually, a catastrophically failed op to grab the enriched uranium becomes ever more credible.   

If there weren't many, many casualties, either injuries or deaths that we haven't been told about yet,  I'd be very surprised.   What is the big tell is that Trump and Kegbreath haven't named and paraded the rescued airman all over the place.  That's entirely less probable than the speculation about the failed op that includes that Iran was who destroyed all of those planes and helicopters being spot on. 

Kegbreath's Insider Trading On The War He Was About To Launch Will Go Unpunished

JUST REMEMBER THIS PREDICTION  which I admit I don't know if it will come true, there always being at least a theoretical chance of any prediction being wrong,  but I think the chance it will approaches 100% likelihood. 

I don't know but anyone who suspects that Trump or whoever is operating his Autopen - I'd guess Steve Miller but who knows - has NOT already issued a form pardon for everyone who agreed to be in Trump's criminal organization is probably wrong.   And I wouldn't be shocked if any of them haven't bought one from him as part of their plans of "serving" as a means of self-enrichment in the Hegseth manner.  

And I will predict that if any such crime conspiracy originating presidential pardons  are challenged in the courts that the Roberts Court or those on a lower level would OK them and enforce them on some legal pretext or even just on the absurdly stupid general language on that in the Constitution is, as well, a near 100% certainty.   IF THE ROBERTS COURT NULLIFIED SUCH CORRUPT PARDONS IT WILL CONSTITUTE THE GREATEST SURPRISE THAT COURT HAS EVER GIVEN ME.

The pardon provision, alone has increasingly been used to cover up presidential criminality,  certainly the pardons of those in the Reagan and Bush I administrations who were deeply involved with the Iran Contra crimes by daddy Bush to protect, among others, HIMSELF, was an example of the kind of thing that has probably reached its, so far, historical apex in the Trump regime.   Combined with the corruption legalized by the Roberts Court (which is certainly a self-interested ruling based on what we know about the corrupt practices of its majority members) and the obscenity of Trump v USA turning any presidents so inclined into an absolute mafia boss,  the corruption is completed by the pardon provision which has been there as a potential tool of a criminally inclined president to get his goons out of prosecution all along.   That we haven't had prominent cases of such insider trading on this level within other presidencies AND ON THE MOST DANGEROUS OF MOTIVATIONS IN ORDERING UP WARS TO PROFIT FROM may have been something of a barrier which has certainly been smashed under Trump and the Roberts Court.   And one thing is certain in American history, under the Constitution as defined by Supreme Courts,  it is that once such a barrier has been crossed, it never will hold in a criminal of any rank, least of all a president.  And that was before Roberts et al issued Trump v USA.  

And look at the levels of criminality and thuggery we are just beginning to scratch the surface of.  Elbridge Colby [The Grandson of William Colby, the famous (or infamous) "Catholic-warrior" of OSS then CIA infamy] threatening Pope Leo like a mafia thug.   His threat, made to the French Cardinal Christophe Pierre,  including a reference to the Avignon Papacy mentioning the power of the American military was certainly a threat of violence if Leo didn't play along with Trump.   The threat of the attack on the early 14th century Pope, Boniface VIII included the kidnapping and violence that led to his death, has to mark a modern treat on the same level as that which faced Pius XII under Italian fascism and Nazism.   Anyone who thinks that Colby didn't understand exactly what he was threatening the Pope with has to understand he's a product of Yale and Harvard and wouldn't have come up with that historical example without understand exactly what he was threatening.   The French cardinal would certainly be aware of it, "Bridge" Colby would have expected that he would understand it,  and it's pretty certain that Leo would have, too.   

I am not expecting that even the Trump regime is going to force the reform of our ever more dangerous Constitution because that document is such a false god to our "civic religion" our popular kulcha and our corrupt oligarchy.   And if there is any reform without changing, drastically, the role of the Supreme Court in dictating what it means at any given time, any amendment to it is going to be as nullified as the Roberts Court has nullified provisions that would have kept Trump from power.  We are really and truly screwed by it as, in fact,  Black People, other People of Color,  Women and that largest of all minority groups in the US,  the economic underclass have been the entire time it has been in place.   I used, from time to time, to shake my head at seeing how servile the subjects of the British crown were in putting up with the rule of their oligarchy but seeing how even the large majority of Americans rejecting Trump cannot manage to depose him,  I don't think we're that far above them and largely because of the ahistorical, superstitious regard we are taught to have for the Constitution which the radical abolitionists correctly noted was a pro-slavery compact.   

The true history of the Civil War and its aftermath proves that even that national catastrophe brought on by the Constitution as the Supreme Court defined it and the, then, oligarch class of slave-holders, is that even that hardest of hard lessons of our history did not reform the thing to make it safe for subsequent generations.    Ken Burns won't tell you that,  but it's the real history of the thing and our government under it.   It is the reason that the decades and centuries of resistance, making periodic progress against it with enormous work, toil, blood of martyrs and hopes dashed,  always has the institutions under it, the Supreme Court worst of all, roll that enormous boulder back down the hill.

Watch, even if the next Democratic president appoints an attorney general courageous enough to test whether the corruption of a Trump pardon of Hegseth will stand in courts - and almost no prominent lawyer would have the kind of courage - the Supreme Court would OK that corruption.   And despite what the lefty lawyers will say, THAT IS WHAT THE CONSTITUTION REALLY MEANS IN REAL LIFE AND NOT IN LAWYERLY MAKE BELIEVE.  

As Seen At RMJ's

 

There's No Reason To Be A Thought Criminal If I Don't Tell You The Forbidden Truth

ISRAEL WILL TRY TO BLOW UP THE IRAN DEAL.   I call it "the Iran deal"  because, as is being pointed out,  Trump caved on all 10 of Iran's demands.   Trump has proved that the man who has, his whole life, mastered and controlled the American judiciary and legal system,   couldn't master the Iranian government.   No, he was the one who was mastered by, first the Israeli, Saudi and other governments who bribed him and, I'm certain, blackmailed him into making this war on Iran and, who in the end ended up caving to the Iranians.  It is to be hoped that Trump and his goons will be more afraid of the economic consequences of renewed fighting than they will be of what Israel has got on them.  And if there is one thing that you can take on faith with little danger of being wrong, it is that Israel has got stuff on them. 

Iran's government goes from being in some real danger of internal overthrowing earlier in the year to being in the strongest position it has ever been in since the revolution that brought it to power more than four decades ago.    THAT IS THE PRODUCT OF US HAVING A REALITY-TV PRESIDENT WHO HAS BEEN ENABLED BY THE SUPREME COURT,  REPUBLICANS IN THE CONGRESS, THE CORPORATE MEDIA AND OUR INDIGENOUS FASCISTS, THE WHITE SUPREMACISTS.   

Indeed, it is a product of all of the 18th century, "classical" liberal democratic theories and institutions, complete with the amorality of that,  the enablement of lying as a "right," the elevation of property over People,the "liberty" of the privileged over the lives of the underclass, the legalizing of quid-pro-quo corruption and the enthronement of the American presidency by the Roberts Court, and all the rest of it.  

One of the most startling of realities of this five week war has been the shocking conclusion that has to be reached that it was the dictatorial, theocratic regime of Iran who acted more responsibly, in a more adult fashion, with whatever moral restraint and measurement of response there was demonstrated in their choices of targets made in proportional response to the Israeli and American attacks on Iran and its allies.   As a full and total egalitarian democrat, that disturbing reality is something I'm having to come to terms with. 

I would not, for a second, say that they proved their regime to be superior to a true democracy but they have proved that their regime is, at most morally superior or at least more adult than the apartheid, corporatist, oligarchic democracies of Israel and the US.   

I doubt, very strongly that anyone but myself will notice the role that the Supreme Court majority played in producing this disaster - most of that on the basis of their First Amendment rulings - but they had a bigger hand in this than much of anyone will notice or, if they do notice that, admit to it.   IT ALL STARTED WITH LIES BEING GIVEN LEGAL PROTECTION, LIES TOLD BY TRUMP SINCE AT LEAST HIS CENTRAL PARK 5 NEW YORK TIMES AD BUY, LIES TOLD IN THE MEDIA, LIES THAT THE NEW YORK TIMES STILL BRAGS ABOUT HAVING HAD SUCH A HAND IN ENABLING.   Apart from that the revival of Jim Crow under the Rehnquist and Roberts Court, the overturning of what would have been the first achievement of the United States of true democracy, egalitarian democracy under the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts had almost as much of a role in producing the Trump disaster.  

The other big loser in this war,  Israel, may have, finally, suffered its greatest defeat since its founding in that for the first time very large numbers of Americans have had enough of it, exactly as I predicted would happen twenty years ago during a previous invasion of Lebanon by Israel.  It opened my eyes as to the real nature of what was sold to us lefties in the early years of as progressive, quasi-socialist experiment in democratic governance.    The extent to which the PR nonsense sold in the measured, eloquence of Abba Eban was always a lie gradually broke through.   I think that at least a large minority of Israelis now realize what a disastrous mistake that colonial settler project was.  As I understand it the Israeli government is trying to prevent as many Israelis fleeing as possible.  It would be ironic if the expansionist Israeli apartheid state ended up using its Palestinian-containment walls to keep Jewish Israelis in like the Berlin wall did. 

A winner in this is the growing Jewish anti-Zionist movement, both its always present religious side and the secular-leftist side.   The Rabbis who have always been anti-Zionists have now got a status they never had in the United States and elsewhere.  The credibility of the opposing Rabbis and secular scholars has risen enormously in the past five years, first from the Gaza genocide and now with this disaster war that Netanyahu and his fascist government have finally suckered the stupidest, most corrupt and now certainly senile American president into bringing on for the Israeli government.   

If this finally forces the break between Israel and its major lifeline to the US and its lesser ones to Europe, that would be a good thing.   Twenty years ago I said that if the collapse of Israel I thought was inevitable happened,  I'd be in favor of the US taking in the Jewish population of Israel.   Now, given the war crimes, the crimes against humanity and the well over 90% support for those among the Israeli population,   I wouldn't favor that anymore.  I want there to be a full ban on emigration of war criminals and fascists from anywhere, including Israel now.  Where they would go is not a moral burden that the United States has a responsibility to shoulder.   I would, of course, welcome any Israelis who could demonstrate that they opposed the fascist-apartheid-criminal government in any real way.   We can always use People of high morals, we have no use for more racist-apartheid-fascists and criminals,  we have way, way too many of those now and have from before the founding of the country.   

To a lesser extent the credible, non-Jew-hating, anti-Zionist population among non-Jews has gained in credibility as they have weathered the smearing of them by the Israel lobby, both its professional and media and its academic and popular followers.   That accusation has lost an enormous part of the hold it once had over those who faced the reality of what a moral and political and humanitarian disaster the Israel project has developed into.  If anyone wants to discredit them,  I'll point out that to do that will only enhance the antisemitic anti-Zionists who have also gained something that will be made to pass as credibility through Israel's criminal conduct as the embargo on exposing that has fallen. 

Israel's apartheid, racist, gangster democracy will do everything it can to blow up any peace and certainly will this one on Iran's terms.  It is already saying it will not stop its expansionist program in Lebanon,  it will certainly continue its genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and into Lebanon.   They will do everything they can do to get the attacks on Iran to resume.   All they will have to do is remind Trump of the texts, photos and videos that they certainly have on him, certainly a lot of that having come from Epstein and Maxwell. 

What the United States will pay for this will be going on decades if not from now on.   I'm not predicting that that will result in any kind of moral and intellectual reform of the country,  nor am I predicting that the close call WHICH MAY NOT BE OVER in which we face the real prospect of our worst president in American history starting a nuclear war to cover up his pedophile crimes and with the bribery of the Israeli and Saudi and other governments.   There has been no change that would keep a Trump from carrying out a nuclear attack without the Congress, the judiciary or the military stopping him.  ANYONE WHO WASN'T PRAYING FOR A MILITARY COUP TO PREVENT TRUMP NUKING IRAN LAST NIGHT IS A MORALLY DEPRAVED PSYCHOPATH.   And I am totally opposed to military coups, but using nuclear weapons is a greater and super-mortal sin.  

I am sure that as I say this the MS-Now and other liberalish lawyers are making claims about the "unconstitutionality" of what Trump and his gang of oligarchic criminals have done, of it being in some way a violation of the sacred Constitution.  Which is bullshit.   He's gotten away with it and will continue to get away with it,  Hegseth, Rubio, Kuschner, etc. will all get away with it.  JUST AS THE RAILROADING OF BLACK PEOPLE BY THE COURTS WAS WHAT THE CONSTITUTION REALLY, TRULY WAS AND IS, THE PERMISSION OF RICH, WHITE, FASCIST, OLIGARCHS BY THE LEGAL SYSTEM AND THE JUDICIARY TO COMMIT THE GREATEST CRIMES EVER COMMITTED BY AMERICANS AND GET OFF WITH TOTAL LIBERTY AND THE MONEY THEY STEAL IS WHAT THE REAL MEANING OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION IS.  The claims of the Meidas and MS Now lawyers other than to that effect are pious lies. 

I doubt anyone else anywhere is going to tell you that truth but I won't stop pointing it out. 

That Trump Is Still In Office Proves That The Constitution Has Failed, Utterly And Completely

ANYONE WHO IS PUTTING their hopes on that fraudulent and quick fix, the 25th Amendment, is as much of a sucker as those who put their hopes on the impeachment myth.  

It is one of the fatal defects in the presidential system that those who are assigned the choice of removing the most criminal or dangerous presidents in our history have the most personal, selfish, self interested reason to keep them in office.   And the worse the president, the worse those he puts around him that the 25 Amendment gives the responsibility to make that responsible decision and the worse the members of his party, IN OUR CASE THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS IN THE HOUSE AND SENATE who will block their removal.

It is one of the features of democratic parliamentary systems that those who have those choices,  whether as part of a failing an disastrous prime minstership or those in such a disasters' party are those with a real and important self-preservation interest in removing a Trump level disaster.   

Our Constitution has repeatedly failed to remove the worst presidents in our history,  and now we have the worst example of that in our history.   It failed to remove him and, thanks to the Roberts Court, the means of preventing his return to power in the 14th Amendment was nullified by the Republicans with help by a Democratic appointee.    Never, ever put your hopes on the Supreme Court, especially the Ivy League Law school class of them. 

I pray and hope that the rest of the world,  the free and aspiring to be democratic countries and forces tell us to change it or they're cutting us off,  that the boycotts will continue and increase,  that they can't trust us at all until the goddamned presidential system we have now is drastically altered to really, basically protect the world from another Trump.  

Our system is entirely,  completely, catastrophically failed.  THAT ANYONE IS EVEN TALKING ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF TRUMP USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS THIS WEEK PROVES HOW DANGEROUS OUR CONSTITUTION IS.    I fear that even that won't be enough to overcome the putrid, lying founders fetish that protects our failed Constitution.   Maybe if Lin-Manuel Miranda makes it rap and boogie on Broadway,  something might be done.   But he'll never do that.   If he did the NYT and the NY based funding agencies that gave his founders fetish show its legs would never back him.