Showing posts with label Teenagers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Teenagers. Show all posts
Thursday, April 9, 2026
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
Chiles v. Salazar.
A victory for free speech, rational thought, and science.
Only one dissenting vote.
Only the synopsis is provided.
Thursday, March 12, 2026
Movies (Television) in History: Dawson's Creek.
Over this past weekend I was horrible sick with what was probably the "stomach flu". My wife is now. I'll write more on that latter.
Anyhow, I woke up in a bad state (I'll spare the details) and spent most of the weekend on the sofa, falling asleep.
A lost weekend.
Anyhow, my wife had Dawson's Creek on, which was on as one of the major actors, James Van Der Beek recently tragically died of colon cancer, something I relatively recently dodged the bullet on myself. FWIW, quite a few actors who were on the series have passed away, although he's the youngest (although barely so) to do so. It was a tragic death.
Dawson's Creek, 1998-2003, sucks.
The question would be why I put it up here at all, and I don't have that much of a good reason, but it reminds me of how television shows featuring teenagers of recent years fit a pattern. The other one is One Tree Hill.
Their nighttime soap operas, but they're bad, and at worst, perverted.
All the characters, even the supposedly poor ones, are fantastically wealthy living in really good conditions. They have nearly unlimited access to wealth that most middle class families in the real world struggle for and their lives are more or less unhindered by their parents, who are portrayed as a sort of older siblings, even in their appearance. Nobody in this world has been worn down by age and responsibilities. They're all beautiful. There's now an ugly duckling girls or awkward boy amongst them. Their entire lives involve endless love triangles, and at least in Dawson's Creek's case, statutory rape. They're maudlin in the extreme.
All in all, they're a really weird look at the teenage years of Americans, and its weirder than people want to look back at teenagers that way. It says something about our society, and not in a good way. That millions of adults would follow a series that deals, at least in part, with sexual encounters of minors, is weird. Dramas, and comedies, focusing on youth have always been a thing, but not ones that focus on youth as well funded adults lusting or longing for each other.
As a complaint about television scripts, I suppose, it's interesting that television likes to keep a couple that should obviously be a couple nearly being a couple for years, and then conclude with them not being a couple. This can be a legitimate dramatic element, as in the Western drama Wil Penny, but if its going to be done it ought to serve some purpose. In television dramas, it simply tends not to. The Wonder Years, well worth watching, provides another example.
On material details, this is set on the Eastern Seaboard which I don't know much about, but nearly 100% of the people depicted are white, which I don't think realistic. Maybe my view of the Eastern Seaboard is off, however. Made when it was, an obligatory sympathetically portrayed homosexual couple is included.
One thing I'll add to all of this is that this entire series' view seems summed up by its horrible theme song, which wasn't written for it, I Don't Want To Wait by Paula Cole. Sung in such a muttering style that it hard to understand, the song is a lament that the singer's grandparents had to endure World War Two and her grandfather came back physically and mentally scarred by the war, and then seemingly implied that they had not lived their lives for the moment. The lyrics are, in part:
o open up your morning lightAnd say a little prayer for IYou know that if we are to stay aliveThen see the peace in every eyeShe had two babies, one was six months, one was threeIn the war of '44Every telephone ring, every heartbeat stingingWhen she thought it was God calling herOh, would her son grow to know his father?I don't want to wait for our lives to be overI want to know right now what will it beI don't want to wait for our lives to be overWill it be yes or will it be sorry?He showed up all wet on the rainy front stepWearing shrapnel in his skinAnd the war he saw lives inside him stillIt's so hard to be gentle and warmThe years pass by, and now, he has granddaughtersI don't want to wait for our lives to be overI want to know right now what will it beI don't want to wait for our lives to be overWill it be yes or will it be...
The I deserve happiness right now and can obtain it without repercussion sort of view was a common one with younger people at the time, memoirs of Gen X. Indeed, the show is sort of Gen X Romeo and Juliet and the ballad fits that. That sort of vapid view has really passed into the the rear view mirror and younger generations don't have it, been afflicted, as they are, by the real world. The shallowness of the views expressed in Dawson's Creek, One Tree Hill, and Beverly Hills 90210 help explain the big turn towards inward conservatism in the generations that have followed.
Anyhow, just skip this and watch 5-25-77 instead.
Saturday, January 17, 2026
Monday, January 17, 1916. Female marksman.
There was dramatic news on the cover of the Casper paper:
But I'm actually posting this one for the story on the champion teenage female marksman.
Last edition:
Thursday, November 13, 2025
Blog Mirror: You Can’t “Protect Children” While Defending a Predator. And, also, What's in those files?
You Can’t “Protect Children” While Defending a Predator
How much longer can Republicans pretend not to see?
We of course also wrote on this just yesterday.
Lex Anteinternet: The dog that hasn't barked.: By the way, by odd coincidence, they've given Ghislaine Maxwell a therapy dog. None of this will matter. People will say this doesn...
What is going on here? Something sure is. Trump's called out all the stops, even bringing in Lauren Boebert to the Situation Room to pressure her. Beobert, who is somebody in the MAGA camp, is apparently refusing to go along with Trump.
That in and of itself is remarkable.
What we know is that up to 1,000 girls were raped in association with Epstein. We don't know all of the details of that by any means. Some of the rapes were pressured "statutory rapes", but others may have been physically violent rapes of female minors, based on what little we know. In either instance, the entire thing is horrific.
Was Trump a rapist? So far we have no reason to believe that, other than the "where there's smoke there's fire". Trump has, a long history of hanging out with those who have an interest in screwing teenagers and who have carried out their interest. Epstein wasn't the first in that category. The first that we know of, and probably the first significant person, was John Casablancas, who owned a modeling agency. Frankly, modeling agencies tend towards being morally dubious in some instances, but Casablancas was personally so. He divorced his first wife due to an affair with model Stephanie Seymour whom he began seeing when she was 14 years old. At age 50 he married 17 year old Aline Mendonça de Carvalho Wermelinger.
Casablancas represented Ivanka Trump when she became a fashion model at age 15.1
It's worth remembering here that Trump is nearly 80 years old. He was born in 1946, which means he turned 20, as a rich man, in 1966, and 30, in 1976. Trump, therefore, had wealth right in the era in which American sexual morals really began to plummet and he was in his 70s when the clubbing scenes in New York was in full swing.2 People complain about the US being a moral sewer now, but that's because their memories are bad. The 70s were really a decade of rank libertinism.3
They were also one which winked at Hebephilia and Ephebophilia, or rather, more accurately accepted the gross sexualization of early teenage girls and men preying on them, with that getting advanced at first by Playboy which really flirted with the lines of illegality with its centerfolds.4 Advertising in the era really dipped down into the younger years, for girls, in a way that you couldn't and wouldn't now, for instance:
How old do we think that girl is? Not old.
Brooke Shields as a young woman was shown only in her "Calvin Klein's" and portrayed a 12 or 13 year old prostitute in the 1976 film Pretty Baby (which she now detests) and a castaway in Blue Lagoon who grows into, I guess, a teenage common law marriage portrayed as the natural ideal. Shields regards herself as having been exploited, which she truly was. Only slightly older, 1968's Romeo and Juliet by Franco Zeffirelli featured Olivia Hussey' topless visage, albeit briefly, in a quite sexualized portrayal of the Juliet character. She was 14 years old and later sued.5
In spite of the horrors of such things as transgenderism, the re-creation of the lower class Victorian "common law" marriage arrangement in a new form in the American lower middle class, and the overall breakdown in sexual standards in the Western world, the outright aggressive exploitation of women sexually has really retreated. Retreating with it was a fairly open acceptance of what we'd now call "date rape". The concept that pressuring women into sex by way of position and power constituted rape flat out didn't exist. Even as a teenager myself in the 1970s, I can recall that jokes based on "get 'er drunk" were really common with the suggestion that happened relatively commonly, and that it wasn't regarded as rape. For that matter, as early as the early 1980s, I can recall instances of men in certain positions being caught in sexual relationships with underaged teens and simply losing their positions, quietly, over it.6
The point of all of this is that maybe a person could party down with John Casablancas while being a self admitted libertine and avoid picking the teenage fruit that others were picking, but most people who would find that morally reprehensible, which would be most people, would avoid hanging out with such people pretty quickly. For one thing, the behavior is gross and disgusting. For another, hanging out with kiddy diddlers would cause a person to run the risk of being regarded as a diddler.
Be that as it may, Trump went from Casablancas on to Jeffrey Epstein, whom he started hanging out with in the 1990s, some twenty, more or less, years after Casablancas. Epstein shows up in a Mar A Lago party's video footage in 1992. That party featured NFL cheerleaders. Trump flew on Epstein's private jet at least seven times in the 1990s. In 1997 Trump and Epstein were photographed together at a Victoria's Secret "Angels" party in New York. In 2002 Trump made his now infamous comment that Epstein was a "terrific guy" they shared interest in "beautiful women". Trump noted that Epstein's interests were in women on the "younger" side. In 2003 Trump drew a nude figure, with oddly small breasts, in a birthday card for Epstein, with a really enigmatic comment, and signed his name as, basically, pubic hairs.7
Now we know that Epstein had commented that Trump knew about the "girls" and that Epstein claimed, in a private email, that Trump knew this due to Virginia Giuffre, the teenager who would be supplied to Prince Andrew.. Giuffre's father worked as a maintenance manager at the Mar-a-Lago property and helped Giuffre obtain a job there. Maxwell recruited her to Epstein from Mar A Lago.
None of this proves in any fashion that Trump was diddling. Indeed, Giuffre states that Trump never touched her. Other women who were associated with Epstein have claimed that, but all of those claims have remained basically on the fringes of this story. So all that can really be said is that Trump has lead a life of moral dissolution with adult women, and he's hung around with men who had an extremely creepy attraction to girls in their teens, but there's no evidence that Trump personally crossed that line.
But there sure is a lot of evidence that he doesn't want the Epstein files released.
Indeed, he's downright desperate about it.
Why?
Earlier on Trump indicated he wanted the files released. Releasing the files became sort of a MAGA crusade, with MAGA's convinced that they'd provide damaging information on Bill (and maybe Hillary) Clinton. Indeed, as recently as a couple of months ago a MAGA I know maintained that the files were being kept secret due to what they'd show about Clinton, and maybe Obama (who is in no way implicated in any of this), thereby making the bizarre assertion that the Republicans are keeping material secret to protect a former Democratic President they detest.
Eh?
Given Trump's change in tune, what probably is in there is one of two things. One, the most likely, is that it's been pointed out that some rich and powerful person in the Trump circle is implicated, and badly. Trump may be protecting that person or persons, and if he is, there's some connection either with Trump or the GOP that must really be needed for protection.
The other possibility is that he knows, which he didn't before, that he's implicated as somebody who really knew something grotesque. Epstein himself, in his emails, noted that he apparently told Ghislaine to knock something off, and Trump has maintained that had to do with raiding staff from Mar A Lago. But what if what he knew is something worse, that women were being recruited to be sex slaves, which is basically what these poor girls were.
Whatever it is, we don't know.
The files are going to be released, which brings up these two things.
Trumps willingness to act illegally is now so pronounced that there has to be a strong suspicion that the files are being scrubbed. When they are released, and they will be, there's a good chance that some of the contents will be gone. This did occur to some extent with the files on the Kennedy Assassination, although I personally don't believe in the various conspiracy theories in that area, so it can definitely be accomplished.
For that reason, and for others, I also feel that the files should be released as is, complete with names of the victims. I know that's not the norm, and why, but the whole truth here is never going to come out if we don't know who was subject to this barbarity. And, ironically, in this instance releasing the names protects them. As noted earlier, Trump was sued by an anonymous woman who withdrew her suit after being subject to much pressure. There may perhaps be nothing to those claims, but the fact is, at this point, that we're dealing with men who are enormously wealthy and powerful, and have the means to threaten their victims as long as their identities remain unknown.
Footnotes:
1. On this, Trump has famously remarked about going back stage in, I believe, Miss World, competitions, or some such competitions, while the competitors were topless. These young women would, however, be of age. This is still pretty creepy.
2. The New York club scene was famously a cesspool, and heavily associated with drugs. There is, however, no reason to believe that Trump has ever taken illegal drugs. Indeed, due to the exposure to alcoholism provided by his brother, Trump does not drink.
3. As a minor note, the culture of the times reflected back in the form of music.
Rock music has been regarded, probably pretty inaccurately, as sort of countercultural. More accurately, when it was really popular, it reflected the cultural influence of people ranging from their teens into their thirties. Real rock music is pretty much dead now.
The 1970s and early 1980s saw a fair amount of rock music that outright endorsed ephebophilia and hebephilia. Ted Nugent's 1981 Jailbait outright did, with the female subject (victim) declared to be 13 years old. Kiss' 1977 subject was a bit older in Christine Sixteen. The Police hit the subject with Don’t Stand So Close to Me in 1980, which involves a teacher being attracted to a female student. That song is particularly creepy given its reference to Lolita and due to the fact that one of the members of The Police had been a teacher who admitted to having been attracted to female students, but not having acted upon it.
ABBA, which is regarded as sort of a bubblegum rock band, touched on the topic in 1979's Does Your Mother Know?, with the protagonist outright expressing torture over the advances of an underaged girl. The Knack's 1979 song Good Girls Don't at least kept the behavior down at mutual teenage level. Aerosmith broke into popularity with 1975's Walk This Way which is a tour de force of sexual double entendres all celebrating teenage sex. The story was flipped in Rod Stewart's 1971 Maggie May in which a teenage male regrets being seduced out of school by an older woman.
So that's a bunch of song, but were they that popular? Some really were, at least by my memory. I don't recall Nugent's song at all, but the only song of Nugent's I recall being popular wsa Cat Scratch Fever, which is about prostitutes. And Kiss was regarded, where I lived, as sort of juvenile joke more popular with junior high kids than us mature high schoolers, so I don't remember their song either.
The Police's Don't Stand So Close To Me, however, was hugely popular, although not with me, mostly because I can't stand that band. ABBA's Does Your Mother Know? was also big. Walk This Way was so big that even though it had been released in 1975, it was still really popular in the early 80s, which at the time was amazing as songs aged quickly. Maggie May shares that status as it was popular over a decade after its original release. Good Girls Don't didn't age well at all, in contrast, but it was huge in 1979.
Almost all of these songs, or maybe all of them, are outright reprehensible, which is the point. Amazingly, they were heard all the time in the 70s and 80s, and nobody really said anything about it. The only time I recall anyone condemning the lyrics of a song was in 1977 when a Parish Priest lambasted Only The Good Die Young by Billy Joel from the pulpit. I don't know where he'd learned of the song, but the Church was associated with the school, which went up to 9th Grade, and I now wonder if it was there. I was in junior high myself at the time and I had no idea what he was talking about. My father didn't either, and asked me about the song after Mass. It'd be years before I heard it, and like every Billy Joel song, I was underwhelmed.
4. We've touched on this before, but Playboy got in trouble in Europe as it was viewed as encouraging ephebophilia and hebephilia, and moreover being in that category while barely disguised as not being. It actually changed some of its content, notably its cartoons, as a result. Nonetheless, some Playboy models, such as Frances Camuglia were barely legal teens when photographed, and in fact a few were younger than 18 years old. One model's photographs went to press when she was still 17, with it apparently being the case that Playboy was unaware of her actual age, while it still played up that she was just out of high school. Another was outright known to be 17 when she was photographed with the magazine holding her photos until she turned 18.
5. All the then teenage actors in these films later maintained, probably correctly, that they suffered lifelong emotional trauma for having been in these films. Shields has been particularly critical of her mother for pushing her into them.
6. More specifically, I can recall three high school teachers in this category. Neither was arrested, they were simply let go. Another was a National Guard officer who was a local businessman. He was quickly discharged from the National Guard and there was as criminal proceeding, but the charge never hit the news and the resulting sentence was minor.
7. Trump has denied this, of course, but there seems to be no doubt. Assuming that it is Trump's, it's impossible not to conclude that he at least knew of Epstein's unrestrained lustful conduct. There was at least one other drawing, by somebody else, that alluded to the same thing. The thing here is that Epstein was strongly attracted to teenage girls, and if you know that the guy is strongly attracted to females sexually, and his targets are. . . well.
Postscript:
I thought about predicting this, but thought it too icky.
The last few days, as this has been breaking, I thought that, at some point, MAGA commentors would come out and basically start excusing ephebophilia. I should answer the question, first, on "what's that" although its been explained here before. According to Wikipedia:
Ephebophilia is the primary sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19 and showing Tanner stages 4 to 5 of physical development.
And now its happened.
Megyn Kelly "There's a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old…”
Well, yeah, there is, in more ways than one. A 5 year old is particularly gross as a victim and technically that's pedophilia. But ephebophilia is pretty darned disgusting as well, and rape in that context, which much or all of this would be by modern definitions is horrific. Moreover, according to some of the testimony, some of these girls were 14, or even 13, which is hebephilia and creeping right up n the edge of pedophelia.
And it's being excuse. That's what I thought would start to happen.
So, what we're starting to see, so that it's clear, is "yeah. . well, sure, they were jumping little teenage girls, but that's okay. . "
It's not okay.
And not only is it not okay, these people are starting to make the excuses now, without anything actually saying that Trump did that. We know of course that somebody was. . . but we don't know who.
What a moral sewer.
Related threads:
The dog that hasn't barked.
Labels: Donald Trump, Ephebophilia, Epstein Scandal, Hebephilia, Monarchy, Oligarchy, United Kingdom, United States
The Epstein Files. What's in them that Trump wants to keep them hidden?*
Labels: Donald Trump, Ephebophilia, Epstein Scandal, Hebephilia, Sex, Teenagers, The Second Trump Administration, Women, Zeitgeist
Labels: 25th Amendment Watch List, Donald Trump, Epstein Scandal, Ezra Klein, J. D. Vance, National Conservatism, Populism, Republican Party, Scandal, Stupidity, Teenagers, The Madness of King Donald, The written word, Women, Zeitgeist
Thursday, October 30, 2025
Tuesday, October 30, 1945. Rushing the Nationalist North.
The Sheridan Press reported that the Nationalist Army, whom they reported as "regulars", were being rushed to Mongolia to fight the Communists.
That was correct. The U.S. was aiding in that effort through air lifting.
A local brewer that no longer exists advertised in the issue:
The common belief is that most local breweries didn't survive the Great Depression, but Sherida Brewing did. Casper Brewing did as well.
Out Our Way for this day:
This shows how rural the country remained at the time. Out Our Way was a nationally syndicated cartoon, but you'd have to be a hunter to really understand the cartoon.
Finally, from that front page:
Father 31? Son 18.
That would mean the father was 13 when the son was born. . .
Shoot, the father was well within the conscription age himself.
Monday, October 29, 1945. Noting the Chinese Civil War.
Labels: 1940s, 1945, 1945 Election, Chinese Civil War, It was because of World War Two, Wyoming (Sheridan), Wyoming Municipal Governments, Yeoman's First Law of History
Tuesday, September 30, 2025
CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 104th edition. Buy the Big Ugly or we'll shoot this government. An Epstein offer somebody can't refuse. Ignoring Trump's dementia, Not knowing the details, Religious and Cultural appropriation, Why Wounded Knee?
Buy the Big Ugly or we'll shoot this government.
Headline says it all:
It's a game of chicken.
If this all seems familiar, it's because we went through this once before with under the Trump regime. Chuck Schumer, in his political dotage, didn't really know what to do, which has characterized his leadership of Senate Democrats since Trump's illegitimacy in general. The basic hope was that Trump would suddenly start acting semi normal. Since that time, he's acted more abnormal.
The GOP rails against Democrats being Marxist, Socialist, Communists, Fascist, Monarchist, Muslims most of the time, but now wants them to pay nice on a continuing funding resolution that, they say, will give them seven more weeks to work out a budget. The last budget, The Big Ugly, is so unpopular that the GOP is working on changing its name.
The risk here is who the public blames the looming government shutdown on. Republicans are already trying to blame the Democrats, even though they refuse to give the concessions the Democrats are seeking. Trump, whose "art of the deal" style of business tends to be all pressure base, is responding by saying he'll fire Federal workers.
Quite a few members of the populist far right will cheer that, at least up until it impacts them.
Democrats are accusing Trump of acting like a mob boss, and not without reason. His negotiation style often seems to resemble one.
Somebody is getting an offer they can't refuse.
And speaking of that. . .
This is a nice look at a grim topic.
Trump isn't supporting releasing the government's files on Jeffrey Epstein as somebody is getting protected, and that somebody is afraid. We don't know who it is, but that's fairly clearly what's going on.
Somebody close enough to the Oval Office to impact it was screwing underaged girls provided by Epstein. Maybe it's a collection of somebodies. Or/and somebody is being blackmailed.
On this, efforts that seem designed to divert attention from this are getting just sillier.
Whoever the somebody is, they're wealthy.
The Democrats did release a new list of names of people who were pondered as flight passengers to Epstein Island, which included Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon. Musk has denied every going there, and his denial is likely completely backed up. It may be the case than none of these individuals went there, or if they did, they didn't do any kiddie diddling.
Still, it's clear that Epstein got rich as a procurer and it's nearly impossible to believe that everyone who went there didn't know something was going on. Epstein was targeting the rich. The video claims he was blackmailing them. Somebody is being protected right now, or perhaps blackmailed.
More and more unsound
Robert Reich posted this item the other day
Having seen dementia up close, I keep wondering the same thing. Trump is increasingly demented.
Have you ever been in the house of a demented person? It's demented. And that's what's occurring to our entire government right now.
Again: Why isn’t the media reporting on Trump’s growing dementia?
Trump’s increasingly bizarre behavior can no longer be attributed to a calculated “strategy.”
We are on increasingly dangerous territory. Those on the right largely want to keep claiming that we're just not used to Trump's unconventional management style, which is correct as he's slipping into dementia and we haven't had to contend with that in any fashion since Ronald Reagan, who was demonstrating signs of it in his last term. Reagan seemed ancient at 77, two years younger than Trump is now, when he left office.
A sign that we're in a dangerous area is the increasingly obvious fact that other people are suddenly really prominent in a way that they were not before. Steven Miller is an example. Miller is impossible to like but he's now very much in the forefront. J. D. Vance has reemerged quite a bit as well.
Some have asserted that in Reagan's decline Nancy Reagan took over some of his roles behind the scenes. This definitely happened when Woodrow Wilson had a stroke and Edith stepped up to the plate. As Franklin Roosevelt declined nothing like that happened, but then he didn't have mental lapses.
We can be rest assured that Melania isn't going to step in. The question is who is, and what are they doing right now.
Stake Center Shooting
We've become so acclimated to bizarre murders that it seems the news on the LDS Stake Center shooting in Grand Blanc, Michigan, has already cycled. Maybe it should have, as stories like this are local stories.
While we really ought not to notice it, we'll go ahead and note anyhow that in stories involving the LDS the Press, and politicians, clearly shows it knows nearly nothing about them. Almost all the Press reported the attack as being on a church, which isn't the way the Mormons characterize this, the most common variety of their religious structures. That probably doesn't matter but it'd be sort of like calling a synagogue or a mosque a church.
Some politicians were quick to claim it demonstrated increasing violence against Christians, which they've wanted to claim about the Kirk assassination as well. Trump, for instance, stated ""yet another targeted attack on Christians in the United States of America". Kirk seems to have been murdered because he spoke against transgenderism, not for an expressed religious position, but I suppose you could argue that his opposition to transgenderism was based on his faith, although that would be a rather underdeveloped argument.
The thing is, at least right now, is that we seem to have no idea whatsoever why this guy attacked the Grand Blanc stake center. Mormons actually are not regarded as Christians by at least Apostolic Christians, who are the first and original Christians, as their theology doesn't support it. Mormons do assert they're Christians, but they certainly do not believe in a Trinitarian God like Christians do. Indeed, their belief is so significantly different that an informed Christian really can't regard them as Christians, which doesn't have much to do with how they view themselves.
Anyhow, if the location was picked out more or less at random, well then it might have been targeting Christians. Or it might be an act targeted specifically at Mormons for some reason. Or this guy may just have been flat out insane.
As an aside, however, it's interesting to note the degree to which outside of the West, and more particularly outside of the Jello Belt, most people sort of assume that the LDS are sort of just very clean dressing Protestants or something. This isn't casting aspersions, but it reminds me of the occasionally questions I'll hear directed as Jews by really ill informed Americans which assumes that Judaism is basically a Christian religion.
And the speculating probably ought to cease until we have an idea about what was going on, which might never occur.
The first storm
The first of the storms we wrote about on Sunday will hit Quantico today. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will address the flag officers.
Reporting so far is that Hegseth is just going to deliver a pep talk, in which case this is the most expensive example of boring people for no reason in the history of mankind. I continue to suspect that more than that will occur.
Probably not what Hegseth will sound like later today.
We want our symbols back, dude.
Speaking of the wannabe War Secretary, we've noted here before that Hegseth is all tatted up. Indeed, we noted that in an earlier version of this trailing thread, in which we stated:
We also very recently had an article on Christian Dominionism.
Because of that I'll note use of these symbols by far right Evangelicals, and frankly Protestants in general, is cultural appropriation. If you dig what these convey, look into what the originally conveyed and study up. You won't remain in the New Apostolic Reformation camp for long.
Persistent cultural appropriation.
Bai-De-Schluch-A-Ichin or Be-Ich-Schluck-Ich-In-Et-Tzuzzigi (Slender Silversmith) "Metal Beater," Navajo silversmith, photo by George Ben Wittick, 1883
While I'm at it, I'll note that there's a politician I'm aware of who consistently angles for the Navajo jewelry look.
I guess that's the person's look, its just so persistent, black clothing with turquoise jewelry, that it's hard not to notice. Perhaps its meant to look Western, which if that's the case, it sort of does, but it looks Southwestern. And a person in this era needs to be, or should be, careful about that as the gulf between the regions Republican politics and Reservation views is growing a great deal.
Indeed, I've been wondering if we'll see Lynette Gray Bull run again for office locally. My prediction is that if she does, Harriet Hageman will not debate her.
My further prediction is that if Hageman is challenged from the center of her party, which is admittedly on the decline, she'll suffer a whopping defeat.
Remember Wounded Knee
Finally, Wounded Knee has certainly been back in the news, thanks to Hegseth.
What's going on here anyhow? It seems like an effort to turn back the clock in a way, but to what point on the dial? 1915? 1945? 1955?
Finally, some really important news.
Blackpink member member Lisa went to the Louis Viton fashion show in Paris.
Why can't se have Congress people who look like Lisa from Blackpink? Shoot, if we're aiming for cultural appropriation, given Kawaii a chance.
And Bad Bunny will sing at the Stupor Bowl.
I'm sure I will not watch that, but a coworker of mine loves Bad Bunny. I don't know why he's a bad bunny, and I'm not particularly inclined to find out, but I guess the Hispanic singer has been avoiding the mainland US due to the Sturmabteilung so it's a big deal to his fans.
Postscript:
Watching Patton one too many times.
Behind the stage on which Hegseth and Trump were expected to speak was a large American flag, with banners showing the words "strength, service, America" and the various flags of the armed services on either side.
Oh geez, now Donald Babbler is making an appearance and the stage is seemingly decked out like the opener of the movie Patton.
This just piles absurdity upon absurdity.
My prediction is the Trump speech will sound something like this:
And Hegseth's? It'll be rah rah, but when it falls flat, the next speech will be:
On a matter of serious concern, however, this is extraordinarily weird, but then much of what this administration does is extraordinarily weird. Still there's a little reason to worry that this regime is concerned that the military's senior leaders are not going to endlessly back illegality.
I have to wonder what it's like to get a rah rah speech from a guy who, when his country was calling, when to the doctor's office. Oh well.
More Kirk
I meant to put this up above, but I thought this interesting:
Because I paid so little attention to Kirk when he was alive, I still don't know what to make of the post mortems
Fr. Joseph Krupp, whose podcast and blog I follow, was a Kirk fan and had an interesting episode on him. He stated that Kirk was basically a middle of the road Republican by most measures up until our current times, when middle of the road, in his view, is regarded as right wing extreme. I'd agree that Kirk's views on things like transgenderism are in fact pretty average, up until quite recently.
Having said that, I also heard Kirk say that somebody should raise the bail money to bail out the person who attack Nancy Pelosi's husband, back after he was attacked. That's a flat out evil thing to say.
At any rate, I really think Cardinal Dolan let things carry him away. Kirk a modern day St. Paul? I don't think so. I suppose Cardinal Dolan meant that Kirk was killed for saying things that are true but unpopular, but St. Paul never excused violence.
As noted here the other day, I think that Catholics have to be really careful about embracing figures from the Evangelical right, which Kirk was. Kirk was headed into Catholicism pretty clearly, but hadn't yet made it there. Assuming he was a Catholic figure may be assuming too much and embracing Dominionism is assuming too much.
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