I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
Flannery O'Connor
Wyoming Senators vote to defund public media based on long held right wing myth that all disturbing news must be liberal propaganda, apparently.
Ranch owner asks Supreme Court to decide corner crossing’s legality, says lower court ‘inverted’ law: Fred Eshelman’s petition for high-court review asserts that 10th Circuit victory for hunters and the public to access public land constitutes an unconstitutional taking of private property.
An American Apollo spacecraft and Soviet Soyuz spacecraft docked in orbit, marking the first such link-up between spacecraft from the two nations.
Occurring at 3:19 Eastern Time, Colonel Leonov welcomed General Stafford with the English words, “Glad to see you.” General Stafford, replyied in Russian,“A, zdraystvuite, ochen rad vas videt” (“Ah, hello, very glad to see you.”).
Protestors thew a Molotov cocktail and Crown Prince Akihito, and his wife, Princess Michito, on Okinawa.
Last edition:
The Potsdam Conference between Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman commenced.
The immediate topic was the governance of postwar Germany.
The British participated in a carrier raid on Tokyo.
German Field Marshal Busch, the former commander of Army Group Center on the Eastern Front, died at the military hospital in Notts at age 60 due to a heart attack.
The King, Queen and Princess Elizabeth visited Ulster.
Last edition:
REPORTER: Why do you think your supporters in particular have been so interested in the Epstein story?
TRUMP: I don't understand it. He's dead for a long time. He was never a big factor in terms of life. I don't understand what the interest and fascination is. The credible information has been given. It's pretty boring stuff.
Uh huh. He doesn't understand it. . .
Oh yes he does.
Let's start with this. There may be more on the Trump/Epstein connection that I had known. Ed Krassenstein reports on Twitter, with some comments by me, note the following:
Trump personally hosted a private party at Mar-a-Lago in 1992 attended only by himself, Jeffrey Epstein, and 28 young women, according to Trump associate George Houraney. (Which wouldn't necessarily mean that they were underaged).
Trump’s name appeared in Epstein’s black book with at least 14 phone numbers, per Vanity Fair.
He flew on Epstein’s plane at least seven times, and Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell flew on Trump’s jet in 2000—alongside a very young girl brought by Epstein. (But Trump was not on the plane at the time).
A 14-year-old girl, groomed by Maxwell, was introduced to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, per sworn testimony from an Epstein victim. (Which is super creepy, but doesn't mean that Trump bedded her).
Another woman accused Trump of raping her at age 13 during an Epstein-hosted party, even claiming Epstein and Trump argued over “who would take her virginity.” She later dropped the suit after alleged threats. (But this might not be true, and isn't verified).
In 2000, after Epstein was accused of propositioning another underage girl at Mar-a-Lago, Trump still told New York Magazine that Epstein was “a terrific guy.”
Trump publicly wished Ghislaine Maxwell “well” after her arrest for trafficking minors.
Epstein called Trump his “wingman” in a recording, saying they shared a taste for young women. (But that isn't Trump acknowledging the same).
Former model Stacey Williams says Trump groped her in 1993 during a meeting arranged by Epstein.
Trump and Epstein were frequently seen together in New York and Palm Beach throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
And it doesn’t stop there—Trump surrounded himself with others deeply tied to Epstein:
Alan Dershowitz, Trump’s impeachment lawyer, was accused of sexual misconduct by Virginia Giuffre, who said Epstein forced her to have sex with him. Dershowitz also defended Epstein in court. (Dershowitz denies the rape).
Alexander Acosta, Trump’s Labor Secretary, was the prosecutor who gave Epstein his sweetheart deal in Florida—granting him and his co-conspirators immunity. Trump later rewarded him with a Cabinet post.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, worked on efforts to rehabilitate Epstein’s public image after he was accused of trafficking minors.
Roger Stone, one of Trump’s closest advisors, defended Epstein publicly and downplayed the abuse allegations.
George Nader, connected to Trump’s 2016 campaign, was later convicted of possessing child pornography and linked to Epstein investigations. (That doesn't really mean anything in regard to Trump).
William Barr, Trump’s Attorney General, has no direct link to Epstein—but his father hired Epstein to teach at a private school despite Epstein having no degree, raising long-standing questions. (This also means nothing).
What's it all mean? Perhaps nothing whatsoever.
But there's a really severe smoke situation going on here, so no wonder people are looking for a fire.
Trump, with his GOP Senatorial lackies, is fighting tooth and nail to keep secret something they formally accused the Democrats of hiding. The Democrats indeed introduced a bill to open the files, and its going down in defeat.
There's some reason for that.
Okay, now the Democrats are trying to open the files up.
The old Republican story, which I heard from a loyal Trumpy just this past week, was that the files were hidden by Biden as they showed that Bill and Hillary Clinton had improper relations with Epstein. It all fit into the Q Anon conspiracy theories.
Donald Trump, who wants the press to quit paying attention to this, advocated for the files to be opened, but now wants to keep them closed.
Maybe Bill (I doubt Hillary) had some dalliance on Epstein Island, although there's no proof of that whatsoever. But Trump's connections with Epstein are really clear. Trump's desire that people look away also speaks volumes.
Trump (and fwiw Bill) fit into the statistical group of men that are more likely to fish in the shallow end of the pool, that being men who have had more than eight sexual "partners". I can't recall where I read that, and I'm not going to look it up, but with each added partner over one a man's sexual drive becomes more disordered, and after that point, no doubt varying by individual, the drive really becomes totally self focused and there's a heightened incidence of screwing teenage girls.
And Trump has in fact acted in a rather direct manner in this category once before, when at age 1997 he walked into the Miss Teen USA dressing room and stated: "Don't worry, ladies, I've seen it all before."
I'm sure he'd seen it all before, that's not hardly the point.
Indeed, Trump reported on the incident.
I'll go backstage before a show and everyone's getting dressed and ready and everything else. And you know, no men are anywhere. And I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant. And therefore I'm inspecting it.
* * *
Is everyone OK? You know they're standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.
One of the former contestants said Trump groped her.
Of course, Trump denies all of this, and the pageant has somewhat too, saying that it was exaggerated.
But here too, odd associations creep in. When Trump became involved in pageantry, in his 30s, John Casablancas was a figure in the whole thing. A personality in the modeling profession, Casablancas hosted events where he and others allegedly propositioned teenage models, although nobody says Trump did. Casablancas was married three times, all to models, and at the time of his third marriage he was 50 and the bride. . . 17. She was close, it might be noted, to the age of his children, who were 22 and 14 at the time. And it seems relatively well established that he'd had an affair with another teenager before that, who was 16.
So here we have Trump, who is on his fourth marriage, and a marriage to a model, who has a sexual track record that's not admirable, and who hung out, since his 30s, with men who were into screwing teenagers.
So why the focus on Epstein?
Well, it raises questions about Trump.
And he's sure acting like a man who has something to hide. . .
Maybe he doesn't. But opening up the files at this point is the only way to show that.
Last edition:
The name is nearly blasphemous. The device itself was called the "Gadget".
Nuclear power, sadly, arrived in the form of a weapon. It had not, however, yet been used that way.
British soldiers were taking advantage of the relaxation of the fraternization rules by chatting with German women. We often hear of the calorie deprivation of the Second World War, but, while not seeking to be vulgar, the young woman on the far right clearly hadn't been too calorie deprived in the late stages of the war.
Related threads:
Last edition:
This looks really good to me, even though the host wasn't impressed.
The U.S. surface naval raid on the Japanese home islands continued with the bombardment of Muroran, a steel making location. Air Force and Navy air raids also continued.
Australian troops captured Mount Batochampar on Borneo.
Blackout restrictions on London's West End were lifted.
Belgium's King Leopold III again refused to abdicate.
Last edition:
Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, and Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt, began correspondence on steps to achieve Arab independence from the Ottoman Empire.
Last edition:
Frankly, even the proposed change really means a person can get a landowner tag with fewer acres than should really be the case.
Eisenhower announced the closure of SHAEF.
Eisenhower also eased the fraternization rules between Allied troops and German civilians allowing Allied soldiers to chat and speak to German civilians.
By September nearly all of the rules would be removed.
Fraternization in this context does not mean what people commonly assume it does, but it is more in line with the etymology of the word's origins, from Latin through French: "to sympathize as brothers". Eisenhower, who was first of all an administrator, and highly intelligent, recognized that contact between the Western Allies, and with Americans in particular, would help have a corrosive impact on Prussianized and Nazified German culture. Bans on contacts had already been lifted as to contacts with children, which were impossible to prevent between oversupplied American troops and German children anyhow. The British, contrary to what is often reported in regard to the development in policy, followed suit.
There was really no danger that French troops were going to fraternize to any significant degree with Germans, nor those of any country the Germans had overrun. And of course in Russian controlled territory, where Eisenhower's orders didn't apply rapine Red Army troops simply terrorize and brutalized civilians, and not only Germans.
Be that as it may, the inevitable problem that existed with American troops in particular fraternizing in the wider sense was already there. It had been a problem after World War One during which the American Army had taken steps to stop friendly contacts between Germans and Americans with limited success. At that time, Americans already were noting in letters home that Germany looked more like the US than France did, in that it was more technologically advanced and cleaner. By the end of World War Two this was much more the case, with Americans being shocked by what they deemed the primitive conditions the French and Italians lived in, and impressed with the more advanced state of German municipalities. While its often little noted, a non insignificant number of GIs found themselves not really liking the French and outright horrified by the conditions Italians lived in.
With things being the way they are, even before the end of the war the U.S. Army had trouble keeping soldiers away from German women, which is not to say that all such contacts had only one thing in mind. Having said that, the conditions that followed the havoc of the Eastern Front and the war in general were having a massive impact on German culture even without Eisenhower seeking to step in and direct it. The German military had been huge with a very large number of German men in it. Many of them were killed during the war and many were simply missing by 1945.
A vast number of German men were held as prisoners of war as well. The Western Allies held over 3,150,000 by April 30, 1945. By the end of the war that number was over 7,614,790,with the 425,000 German POWs in 511 main and branch camps. The Soviet Union also held at least 2,733,739, fewer than a person might suspect, actually, reflecting the nature of the combat in the east.
The Western Allies did not, and could not have, repatriated German POWS immediately. The US held German prisoners until 1946 in the US, with it notably being the case that many went from disciplined Nazi soldiers to actually enjoying the last year of their captivity. Reeducation proved unnecessary as they rapidly evolved into democratic Germans in the last months of their captivity.
The point, however, is that with over 10,000,000 German men in captivity, and with millions of German men killed during the war, and with the German citizenry in the east put to flight, nature began to play a role in things very quickly. Hundreds of thousands of German women were left without support in a country that had largely resisted imposing female labor on its citizenry during the war. Man young women knew at an instinctive level that the normal path of finding a lifelong mate had been destroyed. And the collapse of the Nazi system proved to be a bit like tearing a scab off a wound as even the Nazifield population proved capable of abandoning Nazi propaganda pretty rapidly, even if only superficially in some instance.
Added to this, the war itself had damaged domestic life globally. This has been noted in the context of World War Two marriages in the US on this site already. While the German situation was different, it was found that after the war an appreciable number of Germans, both male and female, simply changed identities up to and including abandoning a spouse, missing or not. In some instances German women became outright disgusted with German men and blamed them for the war and the fate they'd suffered, something that was also the case with Japanese women.
By June of 1944, Life magazine was noting:
There’s one blonde Fräulein with braided hair who always walked past two MPs every day on her way to do shopping, swinging her hips from side to side even more noticeably than usual. As she passed she would look slyly at the MPs, tap one hip and utter the word, ‘Verboten.’ […]
In Germany fraternization is officially a matter of high policy. But for the GI it is not a case of policy or of politics or of going out with girls who used to go out with the guys who killed your buddies. You don’t talk politics when you fraternize. It’s more a matter of bicycles and skirts waving in the breeze and a lonesome, combat-weary solder looking warily around the corner to see if a policeman is in sight.”
Ultimately somewhere between 14,000 to 20,000 German women would marry American soldiers after the war, something that stands in remarkable contrast to the French, as only 6,500 French women married US soldiers. Between 10,000 and 100,000 Italian women married U.S. soldiers. 70,000 English women did the same.
If all of this seems a bit odd, it's probably a lot more human than people might suppose. Germany had been heavily propagandized during the Nazi era, but the era was a lot shorter than people like to recall, which is frightening in that Germany descended into madness so quickly. Be that as it may, DNA tends to rule at the end of the day and the Japanese and German examples tend to show that, with the German one perhaps being the most consequential. Nazi Germany had very distinct concepts of what women were to do, which were more than a little perverse. Germany itself was, of course, a Christian nation which the anti Christian Nazi party was seeking to transform into something else, and which it was surprisingly successful in doing in its short period of rule.
The Nazis were heavily invested in an exaggerated martial concept of manliness which failed. By late 1944 the Allies were on Germany's doorstep. Fairly soon German soldiers in the East would outright be fighting to the last man to try to protect German civilians from the Red Army, which is much of the reason that the fighting in 1945 was so much worse in the East than at any time prior to that. German troops did in fact go down fighting in many instances to attempt to give German civilians, including women, the chance to get away, but to a large degree they failed. German men, in other words, were unable to protect German women from rape and death in the East.
In the West, the German military failure had less severe physical consequences, but German manhood failed there too. Cities were destroyed and lives wrecked. The irony, however, was that in the West, the Allies themselves became the protector, and indeed the liberator, of German women. By making them temporarily Verboten, they gave them independence in a way that they had not had since 1932, if ever.
Italy declared war on Japan.
The French flag was formally unfurled at the summit of the Victory Column in Berlin.
The monument celebrated the German victory over France in the Franco Prussian War.
Japanese destroyer Tachibana was sunk in Hakodate Bay by aircraft of the U.S. Navy. The battleships South Dakota, Indiana and Massachusetts, plus two heavy cruisers and 4 destroyers, bombarded the Kamaishi steel works in the first naval gunfire directed against the Japanese home islands.
The Simla Conference ended without a positive result.
Last edition:
French and Belgian troops began to depart the Ruhr.
The Tân Việt Revolutionary Party, which advocated independence from France of a "New Vietnam", was founded by Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai. It was not a communist party at the time, but by 1929, would become so.
It's notable in that its founder, Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai.was a woman. She was executed by the French in 1941.
Last edition:
After a flurry of cables from Japan, Japan's Ambassador to the Soviet Union Naotake Sato met with Molotov in a peace feeler through the still neutral Soviet Union.
The Berlin municipal council confiscated all property held by members of the Nazi Party.
The U.S. took responsibility for the sinking of the Japanese hospital ship Awa Maru on April 1, but cited it as an error, which it was.
Gen. Eisenhower issued a farewell message to the AEF.
World War Two American internment camps were shutting down.
Today in World War II History—July 13, 1940 & 1945: 80 Years Ago—July 13, 1945: US War Relocation Authority announces all but one internment camp for Japanese-Americans (Tule Lake) are to close by December 15.
Ben Chifley was chosen as Australian Prime Minister
.webp)
