Donation week is over. That wasn’t too painful, was it? Of course, you can donate any time the spirit moves you, not just during donation week.
Every contribution is much much appreciated, and I say that from the bottom of my heart.
I want to also thank the entire neo-neocon community. Without your comments and participation and readerhip, I doubt I’d have done this for so many years.
Here’s the way ballet dancers say “thank you”:
This one appears to have been an anti-Muslim retaliation by a man who is currently in police custody:
The man arrested on suspicion of carrying out the Finsbury Park terror attack is 47-year-old Darren Osborne from Cardiff, the BBC understands.
He was held after a van hit Muslims who had been attending evening prayers at a north London mosque.
They had been helping a man who had collapsed. He later died but it is not clear if it was because of the attack.
Mr Osborne was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder and later further arrested over alleged terror offences.
For years the media has been talking about hate crimes against Muslims. Well, this is a real one, all too real. The suspect, however, seems to have been an actual “lone wolf” rather than a “known wolf” or part of any organized group.
The modus operandi was the same as in the recent Islamist terrorist attacks: a vehicle. Fortunately, Osborne was somewhat less competent than his Islamist predecessors and role models—he seems to have failed to actually kill anyone. The sole death involved a man who had already collapsed, and who may have died of natural causes.
I hope that this is not the first sign of a trend. It should surprise no one that it happened, however. It feels like the entire situation is escalating, particularly in Great Britain and France, and these things are often contagious for people already on the edge of unhingement. That’s my guess about Osborne.
[NOTE: By the way—although I don’t monitor them all that closely—it seems to me that the BBC is less reticent about the use of the word “terror” here than in previous instances. It’s not even in scare quotes in the article about Osborne.
This is their general policy. I assume they would say that Osborne has been charged with committing terror offenses, and that’s why they decided to use the word in the present case.]
[NOTE: This a slightly edited version of a previous post of mine.]
It’s Father’s Day. A sort of poor stepchild to Mother’s Day, although fathers themselves are hardly that. They are central to a family.
Just ask the people who never had one, or who had a difficult relationship with theirs. Or ask the people who were nurtured in the strength of a father’s love and guidance.
Of course, the complex world being what it is, and people and families being what they are, it’s the rare father-child relationship that’s entirely conflict-free. But for the vast majority, love is almost always present, even though at times it can be hard to express or to perceive. It can take a child a very long time to see it or feel it; but that’s part of what growing up is all about. And “growing up” can go on even in adulthood, or old age.
Father’s Day—or Mother’s Day, for that matter—can wash over us in a wave of treacly sentimentality. But the truth of the matter is often stranger, deeper, and more touching. Sometimes the words of love catch in the throat before they’re spoken. But they can still be sensed. Sometimes a loving father is lost through distance or misunderstanding, and then regained.
There’s an extraordinary poem by Robert Hayden that depicts one of these uneasy father-child connections—the shrouded feelings, both paternal and filial, that can come to be seen in the fullness of time as the love that was always, always there. I offer it on this Father’s Day to all of you.
THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
[BUMPED UP FOR THE LAST TIME THIS CYCLE: please scroll down for today’s new posts, 6/17.]
Yes, indeed. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Time passes so quickly when we’re enjoying ourselves.
It’s been a while since I asked you to donate to a semi-worthy cause: this blog. And so I’m going to ask you again to use the “donate” button on the right sidebar beside the photo of the hat, and give whatever you see fit. Continue reading →
Please explain this NY Post article to me:
A “Breatharian” mom and dad of two have barely eaten for nine years as they live off “the universe’s energy.”
Husband and wife Akahi Ricardo and Camila Castello believe that food and water aren’t necessary and humans can be sustained solely by the energy of the universe.
Camila and Akahi ”” who have a 5-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter together ”” have survived on little else besides a piece of fruit or vegetable broth just three times per week since 2008.
I read the whole article waiting for the punchline, but there was none. Is every day now April Fools Day at the Post? This goes beyond “fake news” into “news so absurd that no one on earth, not even the people who believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, could believe it.”
Then again, I once met a Breatherian—or someone who professed to be one (he was a friend of someone I was close to). That particular Breatharian was, however, seemingly insane, and I say that not just because of his odd eating habits. He also—after telling us he was a Breatharian who barely needed to eat a thing to stay alive—proceeded to help himself to several of the barbecued ribs that we were eating that evening.
That’s a true story, and it occurred about thirty years ago.
That memory, plus the Post article, prompted me to look up Breatharianism, which apparently is some sort of actual movement originating in India:
According to Ayurveda, sunlight is one of the main sources of prana, and some practitioners believe that it is possible for a person to survive on sunlight alone. The terms breatharianism or inedia may also refer to this philosophy when it is practiced as a lifestyle in place of the usual diet.
Breatharianism is considered a lethal pseudoscience by scientists and medical professionals, and several adherents of these practices have died from starvation and dehydration. Though it is common knowledge that biological entities require sustenance to survive, breatharianism continues.
Apparently.
That Wiki entry I just linked to contains some astounding examples of people who claim to be Breatharians. Here is my personal favorite:
Wiley Brooks is the founder of the Breatharian Institute of America. He was first introduced to the public in 1980 when appearing on the TV show That’s Incredible!…
In 1983 he was reportedly observed leaving a Santa Cruz 7-Eleven with a Slurpee, a hot dog, and Twinkies. He told Colors magazine in 2003 that he periodically breaks his fasting with a cheeseburger and a cola, explaining that when he’s surrounded by junk culture and junk food, consuming them adds balance.
Wiley Brooks later claimed that Diet Coke and McDonald’s cheeseburgers have special “5D” properties. The idea of separate but interconnected 5D and 3D worlds is a major part of Wiley Brooks’ ideology, and Wiley Brooks encourages his followers to only eat these special 5D foods, as well as meditate on a set of magical 5D words…
Brooks’s institute has charged varying fees to prospective clients who wished to learn how to live without food, which have ranged from US$100,000 with an initial deposit of $10,000[40] to one billion dollars, to be paid via bank wire transfer with a preliminary deposit of $100,000, for a session called “Immortality workshop”.
I wonder if Brooks has ever had any takers. Then again, at those prices, he wouldn’t need all that many of them to make a rather nice go of it.
The Cosby jury has ended up hopelessly deadlocked and a mistrial declared. This is not a surprising result in a hesaid/shesaid case like this, in which many years have passed since the original alleged offenses. But the prosecution has declared it will go for another round.
There is little question that Cosby had some kinky sexual practices involving drugged women, but the all-important (and so far, unanswerable, IMHO) question was whether the activity was consensual.
No matter what happens to Cosby ultimately, his reputation is permanently shot. He could be convicted in a subsequent criminal trial, and certainly faces the prospects of many civil trials.
It’s a sad tale all around.
What’s Dennis Rodman doing in North Korea?
The current New York production of “Julius Caesar” in which Caesar is portrayed as a Trump-like figure is no ordinary propaganda.
Caesar is a particular figure with particular characteristics. Why was he assassinated? Because the assassins thought he had become a tyrant. They met a bad end themselves, as assassins often do, but along the way they felt they were doing Rome a service by ridding it of a dangerous leader. They considered it to be not an assassination, but tyrannicide:
Brutus began to conspire against Caesar with his friend and brother-in-law Gaius Cassius Longinus and other men, calling themselves the Liberatores (“Liberators”).
The assassination is portrayed in the play thusly:
The version best known in the English-speaking world is the Latin phrase “Et tu, Brute?” (“You too, Brutus?”); this derives from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599), where it actually forms the first half of a macaronic line: “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar.” This has no basis in historical fact. Shakespeare was making use of a phrase already in common use at the time. According to Plutarch, after the assassination, Brutus stepped forward as if to say something to his fellow senators not involved in the plot; they, however, fled the building. Brutus and his companions then marched to the Capitol while crying out to their beloved city: “People of Rome, we are once again free!”.
In actuality, the Caesar’s death precipitated a chain of events that led to the Republic’s fall:
The Roman lower classes, with whom Caesar was popular, became enraged that a small group of aristocrats had sacrificed Caesar. Antony, who had been drifting apart from Caesar, capitalised on the grief of the Roman mob and threatened to unleash them on the Optimates, perhaps with the intent of taking control of Rome himself. But, to his surprise and chagrin, Caesar had named his grandnephew Gaius Octavius his sole heir, bequeathing him the immensely potent Caesar name as well as making him one of the wealthiest citizens in the Republic…
[A civil was ensued and the chain of events] resulted in the final ascendancy of Octavian, who became the first Roman emperor, under the name Caesar Augustus, a name that raised him to the status of a deity.
Speaking of assassins who come to a bad end, the most famous American example is John Wilkes Booth. Booth was an actor, of course, and murdered Lincoln in a theater (Caesar was murdered in a place called Pompey’s Theater, but it doesn’t seem to have been a theater in the conventional sense). Not only that, but Booth’s motive for the assassination was also tyrannicide, and he is reported to have made a reference understood to be to Julius Caesar (in Latin, no less) as he leapt to the stage:
[John Wilkes Booth’s] father, the eminent Junius Brutus Booth, had been given a name that identified him with both the legendary founder of the Roman Republic (Lucius Junius Brutus) and the descendant who fought to preserve that republic half a millennium later (Marcus Junius Brutus). The elder Booth in turn had bestowed the same appellation on the oldest of his American-born sons, three of whom were destined to follow him into the theater.
You’ll recall that in Julius Caesar the example of the original Brutus is invoked as a symbolic conscience for Shakespeare’s brooding protagonist. Partly through the persuasions of Cassius, but mostly through Brutus’s sense of his own honor, the spirit of the ancient Brutus urges the inheritor of hrs virtues to circumvent a would-be king and thereby safeguard the liberties that have defined Roman dignity since the abolition of monarchy some five centuries before…
Like the Marcus Junius Brutus of Shakespeare’s play, John Wilkes Booth was keenly receptive to the promptings of ancestral tradition. He aspired to what “an antique Roman” would do in his place, and it is very likely that he was alluding to both Brutuses when he spat out “Sic Semper Tyrannis” (“Thus Be it Ever to Tyrants”) and slew a President he had frequently scorned as a “King.”
The rest, as they say, is history. It’s a history of which the directors of the current NY play may or may not be aware, although they should be aware of it. They are playing with fire—and probably considering themselves brave Romantic and/or classical heroes, much as Booth did, although they obviously aren’t going as far.
Here’s an example of someone calling for Trump’s death, this time by legal execution rather than assassination. And the author of the piece—originally published at HuffPo, although subsequently removed after the ballfield assassination attempt—doesn’t limit the call for execution to just Trump, he thinks his aides and VP should be executed, too:
Trump’s firing of James Comey to impede the investigation into an act of war against our nation, and his assistance to ISIS in the form of providing them with propaganda for recruitment, both provide “Aid and Comfort” to enemies of the United States. It would be difficult to find a more grave offense among those Trump and his team have already committed against this nation and its people. But all involved must face justice.
And that’s why the impeachment and removal of Donald Trump from the Oval Office are merely the first steps in what must be a long-term policy to redeem the United States in the eyes of the world. They are certainly important steps in restoring the credibility of our government, our standing in the eyes of the world, and our very democracy. But they must not be the only steps, lest we still be left with Mike Pence as the acting president after Trump’s removal. No, to quote our new fuhrer, we must “drain the swamp.”
Draining the swamp means not only ejecting Trump from the presidency, but also bringing himself and everyone assisting in his agenda up on charges of treason. They must be convicted (there is little room to doubt their guilt). And then”Š”””Šupon receiving guilty verdicts”Š”””Šthey must all be executed under the law. Anything less than capital punishment”Š”””Šor at least life imprisonment without parole in a maximum security detention facility”Š”””Šwould send yet another message to the world that America has lost its moral compass. In order for America’s morality and leadership to be restored, it must rebuke Donald Trump, his entire administration, and his legislative agenda in the strongest manner possible. And nothing would do more than to convict them of the highest offense defined by our Constitution, and then to deliver the ultimate punishment. Donald Trump deserves nothing less. Mitch McConnell, Steve Bannon, and Paul Ryan should also share Donald Trump’s fate, for they have done more than practically anyone to protect him and to throw our country under the proverbial bus. In order to survive, we as a nation must deliver the ultimate punishment under the law to all involved in its current destruction.
HuffPo is considered a relatively mainstream website, but the fact that this article passed muster there shows how acceptable it’s become to talk about and advocate Trump’s death.
People like the author of that HuffPo piece see themselves as heroes on a great stage. Their disagreements with Trump can’t be just the usual political dissension, because that would make them petty and ordinary too. No, the scale must be grand, and the remedy equally grand. There are a disturbing number of people around who feel this way, and some of them almost undoubtedly will try to act.
Camille Paglia has this to say:
“In an abject failure of leadership that may be one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of the modern Democratic party, Chuck Schumer, who had risen to become the Senate Democratic leader after the retirement of Harry Reid, asserted absolutely no moral authority as the party spun out of control in a nationwide orgy of rage and spite,” she said in the interview published Thursday. “Nor were there statesmanlike words of caution and restraint from two seasoned politicians whom I have admired for decades and believe should have run for president long ago ”” Senator Dianne Feinstein and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.
“How do Democrats imagine they can ever expand their electoral support if they go on and on in this self-destructive way, impugning half the nation as vile racists and homophobes?” she said.
The answer is simple. They think the charges will stick.
And if most of my friends are any indication, they have succeeded. It is accepted as a tautology that half the nation—not their half, and present company excepted (despite my unfortunate politics)—bears just that description of vile racists and homophobes.
I agree somewhat with Paglia about the rage and spite of elected officials such as Schumer, but Paglia makes it sound as though their accusations are hot-blooded. There is some of that hot rage and spite, because they fully expected to be in the driver’s seat after the 2016 election, and they are not. But their calculations are also quite cold-blooded and strategic; what they are doing is akin to the Two Minutes Hate described by Orwell:
The Two Minutes Hate, from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a daily period in which Party members of the society of Oceania must watch a film depicting the Party’s enemies (notably Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers) and express their hatred for them for exactly two minutes.
The difference here is that there is no two minute time limit.
Also, I believe that many garden-variety liberals (not elected officials) now feel tremendous fear as well as rage and spite. At least, quite a few of my friends seem to feel fear. They truly believe that Trump is a Hitler-like maniac who is bent on destroying the country and everything they hold dear.
When Representative Scalise was shot, the only reason many more people weren’t hurt and perhaps killed was that there were armed guards around who killed the would-be assassin. And the only reason there were armed guards around was that Scalise is House Majority Whip:
The only members of Congress who have security are those in leadership in both houses, which amounts to a handful of members. Surely, this type of security is expensive. It is, at some level, unnecessary. Most members of Congress have never had a serious, credible threat issued against them.
But many of us remember the assassination attempt on former Rep. Gabby Giffords in Tucson in January 2011. The Arizona Democrat survived being shot in the head in that attack, when six people were killed.
A 2011 Congressional Research Service report lists nine members of Congress who have been shot and 24 members of Congress who have been attacked since 1789.
I can think of three of those shootings without even looking it up. One is Gabby Giffords, who was nearly killed by Jared Loughner (as part of a massacre in which others were killed, but she was the target) and still is brain-damaged as a result. One was Leo Ryan, murdered in 1978 by members of the Jim Jones cult shortly before the mass murder/suicide. And one was the 1954 Capitol incident:
The United States Capitol shooting incident of 1954 was an attack on March 1, 1954, by four Puerto Rican nationalists; they shot 30 rounds from semi-automatic pistols from the Ladies’ Gallery (a balcony for visitors) of the House of Representatives chamber in the United States Capitol. They wanted to highlight their desire for Puerto Rican independence from US rule.
The nationalists, identified as Lolita Lebré³n, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irvin Flores Rodréguez, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and began shooting at Representatives in the 83rd Congress, who were debating an immigration bill. Five Representatives were wounded, one seriously, but all recovered. The assailants were arrested, tried and convicted in federal court, and given long sentences, effectively life imprisonment.
How many people today are aware of that little piece of history?
I was. But I had forgotten this addendum:
In 1978 and 1979, they were pardoned by President Jimmy Carter; all four returned to Puerto Rico.
That seems unconscionable to me.
You can read about their happy homecoming here:
Thousands of screaming Puerto Ricans tore down fences and surged against police lines today to greet four terrorist heroes of the nationalist movement returning to Puerto Rico after a quarter century in U.S. prisons.
The four, who were freed on Monday, wept as they embraced relatives and friends on arrival at San Juan Airport. Supporters, estimated at about 6,000 strong, madly waved a sea of flags and banners near a makeshift speakers’ platform, shouting, “Viva Puerto Rico libre” and “Jibaros si, Yanquis no.” Jibaros are native Puerto Ricans.
Their loudest cries were “Lolita! Lolita,” for the still-fiery Lolita Lebron, 59, the leader of a group that shot up the House of Representatives in 1954, wounding five congressmen. “You must know the facts,” she shouted at the crowd, her voice hoarse from two days of speeches. “The United States will repress anyone that tries to assert their birthright on nationhood.” The crowd roared its agreement.
Oscar Collazo, 67, who tried to assassinate President Truman in 1950, told the people to ignore the tears on his face. “I am so happy to be in a place where I am not afraid to express my emotions,” he said.
Why did Carter pardon the perpetrators? He did it against the wishes of Puerto Rico’s governor, by the way, who “stat[ed] that it would encourage terrorism and undermine public safety.” Well, yes. The reasons Carter gave for ordering the release was that they had served more time already than people who had committed similar offenses. Really? How does one define “similar”? I would say that an ordinary shooting is different from assassination attempts on public officials, committed by opening fire in the Capitol itself.
Carter also cited that “release of these four prisoners would be a significant humanitarian gesture and would be viewed as such by much of the international community.”
About that, I could not give a rat’s ass.
Seven percent of American adults believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to an online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy.
I’m not sure whether I’m more surprised that the number is so low, that it is so high, or that there’s something called “the Innovation Center of US Dairy.”
Then again, that 7% may just be people funnin’ with the pollsters. However, surveys of almost anything always seem to uncover a certain percentage of abysmally ignorant people, so none of this is any surprise:
When one team of researchers interviewed fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders at an urban California school, they found that more than half of them didn’t know pickles were cucumbers, or that onions and lettuce were plants. Four in 10 didn’t know that hamburgers came from cows. And 3 in 10 didn’t know that cheese is made from milk.
Even as a kid, I knew full well that chocolate milk came from adding chocolate to milk, because we made it regularly by adding Hershey’s syrup to milk and stirring. There was no ready-made chocolate milk when I was young; we had to work hard for our chocolate milk!
Actually, I stopped drinking milk altogether when I was very very young. Nasty stuff.
My heart goes out to his parents.