#D.C. Conservative Catholics

[jbaileyfansite]

Interview with Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer from GQ Hype

Filled with cozy, Hemingwayesque signifiers of midcentury masculinity (think: taxidermy and artfully-tattered boxing gloves), the restaurant seemed perfect for a breezy, late-autumn hang in the West Village.

But there’s one problem: Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey have burgers on their minds. And while this place boasts a surplus of dead animals nailed to the wall, it somehow only serves snacks and salads in the afternoon. And as Bomer points out, Corner Bistro—a pub that, in his opinion, serves some of the best burgers in town—is just a six-minute walk away.

The British-born Bailey—who, in his black sweater, floppy beanie and overstuffed backpack, looks more like a backpacker who just rolled out of his hostel rather than one of the streaming era’s top heartthrobs—waxes rhapsodic about In-N-Out, the California burger institution, which he recently tried for the first time.

He asks the suave, Old Hollywood-handsome Bomer, who spends most of his time in L.A. with his husband and three teenage sons, where In-N-Out falls on his personal burger index. “Our boys are really good judges of burgers,” Bomer says, and for them, In-N-Out is up there—but so is the burger at Corner Bistro. And how can we send Bailey—the Viscount of Bridgerton himself—back to London without tasting New York’s best?

Our location, midway between Stonewall Inn and Julius, two of New York’s most historic gay bars, is apt. The project we’re here to talk about—the epic new Showtime series Fellow Travelers, in which the pair star—tips its hat to the legendary 1969 riots that happened in Stonewall, but goes even further, telling the story of gay liberation in the second half of the twentieth century.

Part epic love story, part political thriller, Fellow Travelers begins in 1950s Washington, D.C., with an illicit affair between the strapping Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller (Bomer), a State Department official savvy to the ways of power, and the earnest, energetic Timothy “Tim” Laughlin (Bailey), the kind of wide-eyed idealist who goes to D.C. wanting to change the world. When they first meet, Tim is a conservative Catholic boy; his passionate, intensely erotic affair with Hawk both liberates him and throws him off his path.

Through the decades-spanning run of their relationship, the series takes us from the Lavender Scare of the 1950s—when a McCarthy-era policy that institutionalized homophobia expelled many “sexual deviants” from government, resulting at one point in a suicide a day—to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

The series is based on the Thomas Mallon novel of the same name. But where Mallon’s book generally focuses on the 1950s and the explosive romance between Hawk and Tim, the series expands the Fellow Travelers universe to reach through the decades and cover the Vietnam War protests of the '60s and the White Night riots of 1979.

���It's been taught that LGBTQIA+ history begins at Stonewall,” says Jelani Alladin, the actor who plays queer Black journalist Marcus Hooks in the series. “It’s a kind of false narrative. Queer people have been around taking a stand for themselves since the beginning of time.”

It feels like a disservice to call a series so sexy and so compelling as educational. But Fellow Travelers does serve as an important history lesson for younger generations who may not fully understand the battles fought before their time. “It was a really dark period in American history that obviously we're not taught in school,” says executive producer Robbie Rogers, who prior to his work in film and TV was the soccer player who became the first openly gay man to compete in a North American professional sports league. “We're not taught LGBT history.”

When the first episode of the series came out in late October, a viral clip showcasing Bailey and Bomer in a particularly kinky sex scene had Gay Twitter shuddering with excitement. In the scene, Bailey’s Tim uses his power as a sub to persuade Bomer’s Hawk to take him to an important D.C. party. “I’m your boy, right?” he tells Hawk. “Your boy wants to go to the party.” In surely one of this year’s hottest scenes on film or TV, we see Bailey hungrily suck on Bomer’s toes and gamely attempt to put his foot in his mouth. Earlier in the series, Hawk gives Tim the name “Skippy” after thoroughly dominating him in bed, a gesture of affection as much as of ownership.

Sex is a powerful, world-shifting force in Fellow Travelers, but it’s also a Trojan horse. While the early episodes bristle with erotic energy, every exchange between Bomer and Bailey is about power as much as it is about sex. And the further you go into Travelers, the more you realize what’s really at stake when these two hit the sack.

“Even in the ‘50s, they had joy,” Travelers creator and writer Ron Nyswaner, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Philadelphia, says. “You might be struggling, but that doesn't mean every moment of your life you're a victim of oppression. Behind closed doors they had a life—it's just that at any moment, the police could come through those doors and ruin that life.”

That unapologetic approach to queer desire is still pretty revolutionary in a big-budget prestige series on a major network. Gone are the days when gay characters were allowed to exist onscreen as long as they adhered to respectability politics. In Fellow Travelers, the queer characters are allowed passionate, unapologetically freaky pleasures.

“There's no shame attached to that,” Bailey says. “And I do think Matt's character detonates something in Tim. It's a gift to meet someone [who does the] radical act of helping you feel less shame and understand that intimacy that can be explored in so many different ways.”

Religion is a big theme in Fellow Travelers. Hawk is bound by covenant to his wife; Tim struggles with Catholic guilt. And like many queer people, Bomer and Bailey themselves have both had to negotiate religion within their queer identities.

“It took me a long time to dismantle it and to question what I was being told,” Bailey says. “Religion is interesting because it’s the voice of the shame but also [a source of] relief. There was this person that I could speak to—and I definitely did have that full conversation with a higher power. But the contradiction is brutal. To really lean into that as a gay kid who's not born into a gay family, you see both sides of what religion can provide, which is scathing judgment—as I felt it looking back—but also a real space for catharsis and nourishment.”

Bomer says he has an individualized approach to religion: “It's something that I've found for myself over years and years of exploration. It's just highly personal that way.” Bomer is proud to have raised his kids in a truly intersectional environment. “They go to an Episcopal school, but they're in school with Muslim kids, with Jewish kids,” he says. “We gave them that experience and then let them find their own way from there.”

On the way to Corner Bistro, Bomer gives Bailey a capsule tour of gay West Village. “That’s an iconic lesbian bar,” he says, pointing out Cubbyhole on West 12th street. Later, he asks if we’ve ever been to Fire Island. “You can have any experience you want there,” Bomer tells me, when I confess my anxiety around Speedos. “It's not just one thing.”

These streets bring up certain memories for Bomer. He tells us about coming up as an actor in New York in the early 2000s, at one point living in “a renovated crackhouse in Brooklyn.” Later, he worked two jobs to afford a one-bedroom apartment he split with a fellow aspiring actor—none other than Lee Pace, the famous, and famously tall (6′ 5″, if you don’t know), actor and Internet Boyfriend who Bomer has known since high school. “I’ll tell you how long I've known Lee Pace,” he says. “I’ve known him since he was shorter than me, when he was 14 and I was 15.”

As gay men are wont to do, trust that the group veered off-topic to talk about vocally-prodigious divas. Bomer has just seen the Broadway production of David Byrne’s Here Lies Love, which tells the story of the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos, the wife of the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. And when he finds out that I grew up in the Philippines, he tells me how much he loves Lea Salonga, the Tony-winning Filipino Broadway star who appears in the production.

We ask Bailey if he’s familiar with her. “Do I know Lea Salonga?” he asks. “She was Fantine!” he retorts, referring to her role in Les Misérables in Concert: The 25th Anniversary.

From there, we fall into a Filipino diva rabbit hole, talking about former Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger (currently appearing in a well-received West End production of Sunset Boulevard that Bomer tells Bailey they must catch together), Mutya Buena of the Sugababes (an iconic U.K. girl group that Bailey and I separately saw live recently), and Darren Criss (who Bomer directed on The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story—technically a straight male, but one who earns diva status for his formidable vocals and the dance he did in a red speedo on Versace).

As we near the pub, a thirty-something woman walking hand in hand with her man does a hilariously convincing impression of the Distracted Boyfriend meme at the sight of Neal Caffrey and Anthony Bridgerton casually strolling through West 4th Street.

“Her neck!” Bailey says, audibly concerned.

In Corner Bistro, with sandwiches and coffees in hand (Bailey decides on a classic burger and a grilled chicken sandwich), we settle down in a cozy booth and talk about the points in their careers where Fellow Travelers found the actors, the hard-won representation Hollywood’s queer community has been fighting for for decades, and the LGBTQ+ talents of color they’d like to support on their own projects.

Bomer, of course, has been famous since the early 2010s, when he became a star on the series White Collar, and along with Neil Patrick Harris, proved that openly gay actors could become leading men. Since then, he’s conquered Broadway (The Boys in the Band), won a slew of awards (Golden Globe and Critic's Choice trophies for The Normal Heart) and become a producer and director.

In the past, Bomer has discussed the way doors closed on him even as he was being celebrated for being an out gay actor. When asked about that now, he says, “I choose just to never look back in anger about anything. Ultimately, my career is a lot richer because I decided to be open with who I am.”

“It’s a wave of progress that Matt's been surfing and is at the front of,” says Bailey. “And it's been a real honor to be able to get on my boogie board next to him.”

Before he became a global star mid-pandemic playing the grumpy, furry-chested Anthony Bridgerton on the Netflix juggernaut Bridgerton, Bailey was an award-winning actor in both the West End and British television. Huge fame didn’t find Bailey until his early 30s, so when it did, he had a clear idea of what he wanted to accomplish with his platform.

“I feel the responsibility immeasurably,” Bailey says. “I get it when people are saying you create a chair and bring people [to the table].” He talks about the connection between the civil rights movement and the queer liberation. “The Black queens are the ones who really started to fight,” he says. “It's amazing to feel politically activated. And if there's any project to do that, it's going to be Fellow Travelers. It will change the way I see myself in and the world I live in.”

The intersectionality makes the story Travelers is trying to tell even richer—most of all in Alladin’s scene-stealing portrayal of the conflicted Marcus Hooks, a pioneering Black journalist who pushes against segregation as he grapples with his own sexuality. “When I look at older men today, I'm like, You guys have endured so much,” Aladdin says. “From the Second World War all the way through to the AIDS crisis, it was nonstop life crisis after life crisis. To have been able to survive through all that, there needs to be a real, solid weight on the feet of [these characters].”

Part of the pleasure of watching Fellow Travelers is picking up on the cinematic references hidden in each scene. Hawk and Tim’s first interactions evoke the forbidden affair in David Lean’s 1945 classic Brief Encounter. When Hawk’s family settles in suburbia, the show evokes the Technicolor repression of the great Douglas Sirk melodramas. When Hawk and Tim run through the beaches of Fire Island in the ‘70s, that iconic image of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kissing on the beach in From Here to Eternity may flicker in your mind. And in some ways, the series plays like a gayer, hornier The Way We Were—an epic love story tossed on the tides of political change. (In this version, of course, the Barbra Streisand character is an eager foot-licking sub and Redford’s Hubbell Gardiner is a daddy with a pit fetish.) Fellow Travelers allows us to imagine an alternate timeline where queer love has always gotten as much screen time as cinema’s great heterosexual romances, giving other kinds of stories the chance at celluloid immortality too.

In the book, Hawk is described as being more handsome than Gregory Peck. But seeing Bomer in period-appropriate clothing, the Old Hollywood leading man I thought of was Montgomery Clift, the talented and ultimately tragic gay actor who starred in classics like Red River and A Place in the Sun. For a time in the mid 2010s, Bomer was attached to star in a Montgomery Clift biopic for HBO, to be directed by the great gay director Ira Sachs. “Ira is a genius,” Bomer says. “[But] I think that ship may have sailed.”

Still, when I press him about doing it in the future, he lights up. “You know, I’m [now] the same age Monty was when he passed away,” Bomer says. “I always thought it'd be really interesting to do a play about the last night of his life, when he's watching one of his old movies on TV. And he had this man who lived with him and took care of him for the last chapter of his life.There's an interesting play in there somewhere…. Maybe Liz Taylor swings by.”

What’s changed since the mid 2010s is that a lot of Hollywood’s current gatekeepers are queer people who were fighting from the bottom a decade ago. “It's the people, the gatekeepers who are now going, ‘We are going to make this [queer] story,’” Bailey says. “This narrative that gay people have to be closeted in order [for a project] to be commercial and in order for things to be interesting to people—it's been dismantled. But it's slow because it's not just straight people who think that—I think everyone believed that in the system of Hollywood.”

Nyswaner, who has been working in Hollywood since the early ‘80s, has seen that shift up close. “When I grew up in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, I never heard the word ‘homosexual’ spoken aloud,” he says. “There was no conversation that I ever had with anybody about homosexuality. It was not just bad, it was the unspeakable thing—that's how terrified people were of us.”

And while he agrees that, in some ways, it feels like the LGBTQ+ community is once again losing ground on some rights, Nyswaner refuses to accept that there hasn’t been change. “Sometimes I hear people say, ‘Well, we haven't gotten anywhere.’ And I'm here to say, ‘Oh, yes, we have.’ Because actually you can turn on the television and find gay characters.”

Fellow Travelers is the culmination of a dream for a number of the men involved in the series.

“When I met Ron, he was talking about how he thinks about this as his lifelong legacy project,” Bailey says. “And I just said to him, ‘Whoever ends up going on this journey with you, I think it'll be the same [for them] probably.’”

“In some ways, Fellow Travelers is a span of my life,” Ron Nyswaner says. “I was an infant in the McCarthy era. And then I came out of the closet in 1978 and just danced and did cocaine and had multiple sexual partners—we didn't know what was coming, which was the AIDS crisis.” Nyswaner was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 1993 for Philadelphia, the landmark drama about an AIDS patient who sues his employers for AIDS discrimination. In a way, the historical span of Fellow Travelers gives the battles fought in Philadelphia their context.

Rogers remembers being a closeted soccer player in the late 2000s, watching Tom Ford’s A Single Man and hoping one day to be able to find love and take control of his own narrative. And Bailey recalls, post-Bridgerton, realizing that he could suddenly write his own destiny and vowing to seek out “a sweeping gay love story.”

Bomer, meanwhile, says—laughing, but seemingly dead serious—that it’s his goal to play a queer character from every decade of the 20th century. “A queer Decalogue,” he says, referencing the Krzysztof Kieślowski classic.

Bomer’s next project might just help him do that. He’s currently producing a Steven Soderbergh film on Lawrence v. Texas, the case that overturned the sodomy laws in Texas in 2003 but started in the 90s.

There are many more stories to tell. And as our interview winds down, Bomer and Bailey start spitballing dream projects.

We talk about All of Us Strangers director Andrew Haigh, who’s revered for his portraits of gay intimacy. “Andrew Haigh has been a special filmmaker for years,” Bailey says. “I think [his film] Weekend informed actually how I approached the sex scenes in [Fellow Travelers].”

“I’d love to play Jessica Fletcher's queer grandson who moves back to Cabot Cove,” Bomer says, referencing Angela Lansbury’s iconic role in Murder, She Wrote. “He's inherited her house and he finds an old journal in her library, and it's a case she never saw and he takes up her mantle.”

And moments before the restaurant speakers suddenly start blaring George Michael’s “Freedom ’90,” Bailey comes in with a killer pitch: “I’m obsessed with the Sacred Band of Thebes, an army of 300 gay lovers in [ancient] Greece. They partnered in pairs, this gay army, and they overthrew a Spartan army… I want to do that as a comedy.”

“Oh hell yes!” Bomer says.

“Just get all the queer actors together,” Bailey says, laughing.

“Lee Pace, everyone,” Bomer says.

“Where would we film it?” Bailey asks.

“Mykonos?” Bomer suggests.

“Flaming Saddles, down the road,” Bailey counters with a chuckle, referring to a gay bar in midtown.

“Oil us up and let’s go!” Bomer says.

Source

[collapsedsquid]

Gore says that almost from its beginnings in Spain, Opus Dei aimed to target the most powerful people in society. The conversion process was systematic. “They identify ‘the intellectuals,’ as they call them,” Gore said. “They invite them to Mass, to talks for spiritual guidance sessions, and to Opus Dei retreats. They tell them that they are just trying to help ordinary Catholics to live out their faith. But, the whole time they are courting you, the numeraries and priests are collecting information.” During his research, Gore learned the organization keeps detailed records on priests and numeraries to gauge how serious a potential convert or member’s Catholicism is, who is in their networks and families, and how much money they’ve got — information even gleaned sometimes, he said, from Confession, which officially is under seal of confidentiality. “Opus Dei has more in common with the KGB or the Stasi than it does with other parts of the Catholic Church,” Gore said. “It has this meticulous recordkeeping. I spoke to one prominent D.C. conservative who said he had incontrovertible evidence that McCloskey had collected deeply personal and compromising information about him during Confession and then passed it on to senior members of Opus Dei.” (One actual American spy is known to have been Opus Dei: FBI agent Robert Hanssen was a notorious double agent arrested in 2001. He died last year in prison, where he was serving a sentence for sharing national security secrets with the Soviets, including names of collaborators who were killed. Hanssen had confessed his role to an Opus Dei priest 20 years before he was arrested.)

[haveyoureadthispoll]

Burning Butch is the courageous story of a trans / non-binary butch on a quest to survive conservative, religious, American culture while questioning if there is room in their heart for the traditional faith they were raised with, and what it means to come home again. When divorce moves young Rebecca Mertz away from rural Pennsylvania and their abusive father, Mertz and their mother find a new life in a conservative Catholic subculture outside of Washington, D.C. There, Mertz's adolescence is dominated by fundamentalist Catholicism. Life becomes God, saints, and babies – except, of course, for the showtunes they latch onto, voices that permeate their childhood boundaries, singing about different worlds. Mertz spends their childhood split between Pennsylvania, and Maryland – between mother and father, between Catholic homeschooling and secular Americana, between safety and violence, between their real life and the "world" they keep being warned against. It’s in homeschooling that Mertz learns what good, Catholic values are: anti-feminist, pro-life; anti-queer, pro-Jesus. The more babies, the better, so as to prove a stronger devotion to God. In an attempt to get away from their father, to interrogate their faith, and to repress the growing feelings Mertz has about a woman in their community, Mertz chooses the Franciscan University of Steubenville, a conservative Catholic school in Ohio. As Mertz comes of age at an oppressive, gender-dependent Catholic college in the early aughts, they grapple with attractions, sexual encounters, and relationships with friends and teachers – men and women whom they trust and admire, who romantically engage with them while in the same breath renounce the sacrilege of Mertz’s identity. Ever the outcast during their college years despite their affinity and aptitude for poetry, Mertz is forced to face their sexuality and what it might mean within the confines of their strict faith. As Mertz struggles to navigate this repressive environment, and questions what role they could play in this community, the vulnerable identity they create begins to threaten the life they know in potentially irreversible ways.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Greg Owen at LGBTQ Nation:

Pope Francis, head of the worldwide Catholic Church, recently excommunicated Carlo Maria Viganò, a virulently anti-LGBTQ+ U.S. archbishop who denied the pontiff’s authority and spent years publicly attacking him. Viganò, a religious ultra-conservative who has also been a vocal supporter of former president Donald Trump, served as the Vatican’s top diplomat to Washington D.C. from 2011 to 2016. Last month, Archbishop Viganò was formally accused of schism, “the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him,” according to the Vatican. The violation is one of the most serious offenses in Catholic canon law. Viganò has called Francis a “false prophet” and a “servant of Satan” and espoused conspiracy theories centered on the COVID-19 pandemic, the “deep state”, and an “orchestrated media narrative” targeting the 45th president. The disgraced priest’s activist agenda focused on Francis’ LGBTQ+ outreach and his own toxic views on homosexuality.

[...] Years earlier, Viganò used his position as papal nuncio to promote his anti-LGBTQ+ views during Francis’ 2015 visit to the U.S., arranging for Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis to join a reception for the Pope. The Vatican later said Davis was not included in the private audience that day, while a gay couple was. After years of Viganò’s provocations, the Vatican finally had enough. “His public statements manifesting his refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff, his rejection of communion with the members of the Church subject to him, and of the legitimacy and magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council are well known,” the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith said in a press release. The Catholic governing body confirmed that Vigano was found guilty and excommunicated, citing more than a dozen instances in which Viganò had criticized or repudiated Francis or challenged the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

Pope Francis excommunicated far-right schismatic archbishop and former Apostolic Nuncio to the USA Carlo Maria Viganò.

[haveyoureadthistransbook]

Burning Butch by R/B Mertz

goodreads

When divorce moves young Rebecca Mertz away from rural Pennsylvania and their abusive father, Mertz and their mother find a new life in a conservative Catholic subculture outside of Washington, D.C. There, Mertz's adolescence is dominated by fundamentalist Catholicism. Life becomes God, saints, and babies – except, of course, for the showtunes they latch onto, voices that permeate their childhood boundaries, singing about different worlds. Mertz spends their childhood split between Pennsylvania, and Maryland – between mother and father, between Catholic homeschooling and secular Americana, between safety and violence, between their real life and the "world" they keep being warned against. It’s in homeschooling that Mertz learns what good, Catholic values are: anti-feminist, pro-life; anti-queer, pro-Jesus. The more babies, the better, so as to prove a stronger devotion to God. In an attempt to get away from their father, to interrogate their faith, and to repress the growing feelings Mertz has about a woman in their community, Mertz chooses the Franciscan University of Steubenville, a conservative Catholic school in Ohio. As Mertz comes of age at an oppressive, gender-dependent Catholic college in the early aughts, they grapple with attractions, sexual encounters, and relationships with friends and teachers – men and women whom they trust and admire, who romantically engage with them while in the same breath renounce the sacrilege of Mertz’s identity. Ever the outcast during their college years despite their affinity and aptitude for poetry, Mertz is forced to face their sexuality and what it might mean within the confines of their strict faith. As Mertz struggles to navigate this repressive environment, and questions what role they could play in this community, the vulnerable identity they create begins to threaten the life they know in potentially irreversible ways.

Mod opinion: I haven't heard of this memoir before, but it sounds interesting.

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

Unnatural Law

We Must Protect Rich White Guys

Stephen Jay Morris

7/13/2023

©Scientific Morality

In Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” he presented factual evidence of an upcoming catastrophe: the climate crisis. Not only did he discuss the urgency of the impending situation, but he offered solutions to prevent it. Solutions such as lowering your carbon footprint and avoiding fossil fuel.

So, what did the oil companies do? They threatened their Republican representatives with ceasing donations to the G.O.P. unless they committed to run a campaign against Al Gore and his “Ecological Army.” Fox News attacked Gore by discrediting him with claims that he used tons of gallons of jet fuel to fly to his speaking engagements. You know? Labeled him a hypocrite. Also in CHUD fashion, they wealth-shamed him and aired aerial photos of his mansion.

You see, to take a left wing view of anything, you must be poor. After all, all leftists must take a vow of poverty, as do Catholic priests and nuns. Donkey shit! If you are going to slander somebody, try not using paralogical arguments.

At any rate, that is a major tactic they use—personal defamation. That way, the focus is taken off the issue and spotlighted, instead, on the individual’s shortcomings. Libel replaces the facts about Big Oil’s destruction of the earth and its atmosphere. Al Gore’s movie was right on the money.

Meanwhile, as the CHUDS are calling Al Gore an alarmist, they are telling the world that transgender people are grooming kids to be homosexuals. These halophiles only want to drink liberal tears. What the fuck are they good for? Sucking off WASP billionaires? Then Trump goes to court and the Newsmax reporters show their ugly, dolorous mugs. They sound almost robotically monotone: “We must protect rich white guys.” “We must protect rich white guys.” “We must protect rich white guys.” Ad-nauseum.

Today, I heard on the radio that Texas hit 110 degrees and two days ago, the state of Vermont experienced unprecedented flooding after nine inches of rain fell in less than five hours. The weekend leading into July 4th saw the highest ever recorded global temperatures. The southern portion of America is experiencing an unrelenting “heat dome,” while the northern portion of the country is seeing tornadoes, hurricanes, violent storms, and other extremes. Any meteorologist will tell you this is not normal for this time of year. If the world unites, we can begin to stop this onslaught of natural disasters. But the conservatives think their money and profit is more important than the welfare of humanity! While farmers’ crops are drying up and blowing away in the wind, the rich are snorting coke off a prostitute’s ass! But leave it to the conservative propaganda machine to spew that these are dignified, American gentlemen who want a clean cut, Christian country.  

 The only way to fight against this crisis is to counter the CHUD propaganda with educational facts to the contrary. When a liar calls you a liar, you are winning the climate struggle. There is a global youth movement and they pissed to the max. They are willing to damage property to give notice of the planet’s destruction, as well as hold nonviolent resistance protests. We should all support their efforts.

Meanwhile, the political Right is in shambles. The Religious Right is living their “End Times” fantasy, the fossil fuel companies are panicking that their great grandchildren will have to get jobs, and the White Power creeps are worried that all food will become kosher. The Republicans will build a giant tomb in Washington D.C. for Trump after he dies from a massive heart attack.

After Florida submerges into the Gulf of Mexico, oil drilling rigs will be above sea level because human remains become dirty energy. It’ll be better than dead dinosaurs!

America has the worst conservative movement in the history of the world!

[masterofd1saster]

CJ current events 29feb24

It's Oakland, what did you expect

Suspected prostitution ring moves into CA neighborhood outside Catholic school: 'Pimp is blocking my driveway'

Some of the girls are 15 and 16 years old, according to local leader

An Oakland, California, community is in shock after repeatedly seeing groups of suspected prostitutes and human trafficking victims reportedly soliciting outside a Catholic grade school. "I get the call saying, 'Mr. Gallo, I can't get into my home because the pimp is blocking my driveway,'" Oakland City Councilman Noel Gallo told ABC 7 of the weekly calls he receives from residents in East Oakland. "It's constant." The Oakland Police Department is beefing up patrols outside the K-8 St. Anthony Catholic School after parents and school leaders sounded the alarm on the young, scantily clad women and girls they see walking near East 15th Street in Oakland. Last week, ABC 7 reported that as parents arrived at the grade school on Monday morning, a suspected prostitute was already near the school, apparently soliciting right in front of the school’s gate. However, the scene is not uncommon.***

State Sen. Scott Wiener sponsored a bill that makes it harder to arrest prostitutes, SB 357. He is shocked that anyone would suggest a connection between the expansion of prostitution and his bill.

***

Taking the child pr0n jobs Americans won't

SPRINGFIELD, Va. - Fairfax authorities have charged a man with multiple counts of child pornography, along with unlawful filming or photographing of minors. Gherson Gonzales Hernandez, 24, faces ten counts related to child pornography and two counts of unlawful creation of videographic/still image of a minor, which is defined under Virginia code 18.2-386.1 as a person who knowingly and intentionally videotapes, photographs, or films any non-consenting person.  According to police, the unlawful filming charge is related to an August 2019 offense.*** On Friday, ERO Washington, D.C. spokesperson James Covington confirmed the suspect is a Honduran national and "unlawfully present."*** https://www.fox5dc.com/news/honduran-man-in-virginia-illegally-now-facing-child-pornography-charges

***

Colorado's miracle cure for recidivism

Colorado parole violations plunge 50% in 6 years as penalties lessen for drug, alcohol use

Parole violations in Colorado have dropped by more than 50% over the last six years, driven by sweeping declines in technical violations around drug and alcohol use. Read more →

It's like the riddle about how many Microsoft engineers it takes to screw in a lightbulb.  [None, MS has redefined darkness as the industry standard.]

***

Ms Riley should have known the dangers of running and been more responsible.

Conservatives called out the Associated Press on Sunday for appearing to categorize Laken Riley’s murder as more about the “fears of solo female athletes” rather than illegal immigration and weak crime laws. Riley, an Augusta University nursing student, was found dead Thursday after previously attending the University of Georgia before entering a nursing program at Augusta’s Athens campus, where she made the Dean’s List. Police have charged Jose Antonio Ibarra with malice murder, felony murder, aggravated battery, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, kidnapping, hindering a 911 call and concealing the death of another. By Sunday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) also confirmed that Ibarra entered the U.S. illegally in 2022 and had previously been arrested in New York City. However, the AP published an article on the murder on Saturday without referencing Ibarra’s immigration or criminal record and instead focused on how Riley was murdered while jogging by herself.*** https://nypost.com/2024/02/26/us-news/ap-slammed-for-framing-laken-rileys-murder-on-dangers-female-athletes-face-not-on-migrant-crimes/

***

Social control or Taylor Swift 37sec

Partying, gunplay prompt plans to close Lookout Mountain Road at night

The litter left behind after a typical night of frolicking is voluminous and varied: cannabis containers, hypodermic needles, underwear, bras, used condoms, fast-food packaging, cigarette butts, bullet casings — and a seemingly endless collection of beer cans and liquor bottles.

***

Wed

Worst Judge since Aaron Persky gets what he deserves

ROBERT K. ADRIAN on January 3, 2022 held a sentencing hearing in People v. Clinton, NO. 2021-CF-396, Adams County Circuit Court, Illinois.

Drew Clinton had held a pillow over the face of 16-year-old Cameron Vaughan and raped her while she was under the influence of alcohol. She had been

asleep, she awoke to a pillow 3 being pushed on her face, and she was being 4 sexually assaulted, and that she at no time gave 5 consent and that, in fact, earlier in the evening 6 she had specifically indicated that she did not 7 want any sexual contact with this Defendant.

After a bench trial, Clinton was convicted of criminal sexual assault is a Class 1 felony. At the sentencing hearing J. Adrian reversed his verdict and found Clinton not guilty. Why?

11 This is what's happened when parents do 12 not exercise their parental responsibilities, when 13 we have people, adults, having parties for 14 teenagers, and they allow coeds and female people 15 to swim in their underwear in their swimming pool. 16 And, no, underwear is not the same as swimming 17 suits. It's just -- they allow 16-year-olds to 18 bring liquor to a party. They provide liquor to 19 underage people, and you wonder how these things 20 happen. Well, that's how these things happen. The 21 Court is totally disgusted with that whole thing.

quotes are from https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21177245/20220103-clinton-21-cf-396.pdf

+++

Justice may not have been done for Clinton and his victim, but it eventually came for J. Adrian...

***The Illinois Courts Commission removed Adams County Judge Robert Adrian from the bench Friday after it held a three-day hearing in Chicago in November on a compliant filed against Adrian. Its decision says Adrian “engaged in multiple instances of misconduct” and “abused his position of power to indulge his own sense of justice while circumventing the law.” The commission could have issued a reprimand, censure or suspension without pay, but its decision said it had “ample grounds” for immediately removing Adrian from the bench in western Illinois’ Adams County.*** https://apnews.com/article/illinois-judge-removed-bench-reversed-rape-conviction-c821beec0cf87aebb64a36239e45fec6

The last link is the official report of J. Adrian's misconduct.

***

You don't want to testify "oh, dang."

Nathan Wade’s former divorce attorney and law partner was heard muttering, “Oh dang” to himself when presented with potentially damning evidence about his ex-client’s relationship timeline as he took the stand in Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis’ corruption trial Tuesday. The witness, Terrence Bradley, was presented with a series of text messages he sent to a defense attorney in which he was asked if he believed the couple’s relationship began before Willis appointed Wade to lead the state’s investigation of former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in November 2021, according to Business Insider. “Absolutely,” Bradley responded in the message to defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant, according to phone records read in court. Bradley had previously denied knowing about the relationship until he was presented with the texts. “It started when she left the DA’s office and was a judge in South Fulton. They met at the municipal court CLE conference.”

He also acknowledged that when Merchant sent him a draft of her motion, the only error he said he found was related to a payment, the outlet reported. The motion, however, alleged that Willis and Wade’s relationship began when Wade was still married and years before Willis appointed him to oversee the election fraud investigation, according to Business Insider. Willis and Wade have told the court their relationship first became romantic in 2022 and have stuck by that story through their testimony, but lawyers for Trump and co-defendant Mike Roman have insisted they can prove otherwise.*** https://nypost.com/2024/02/28/us-news/nathan-wades-ex-divorce-attorney-mutters-oh-dang-when-presented-with-damning-evidence-in-fani-willis-trial-video/

***Thurs

BB -

***

***

Laken Riley murder - tried to call 911

Nursing student Laken Riley desperately tried to call 911 last week when a Venezuelan migrant pounced on her during a morning run, it was revealed Wednesday. Police documents show that Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, prevented the 22-year-old from dialing the emergency helpline before he dragged her body to a secluded area after the vicious attack.*** https://nypost.com/2024/02/28/us-news/laken-riley-likely-fought-her-murderer-profiler/

***

Excellent Bari Weiss speech

The context of the speech is being Jewish, but the theme is freedom, in part it's the freedom that comes from what the Jesuits call detachment. You must be willing to stop worshipping golden calves if you want to be free.

***

Jeff Epstein grand jury records to be released

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill Thursday to release decades-old state grand jury records related to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who was found dead in his prison cell in 2019. Though late in the legislative session, the measure is one of the few agenda items that DeSantis had pledged to sign, according to Politico. The bill would allow access to investigation documents from more than 20 years ago, when Epstein was first investigated by Palm Beach authorities for sexual abuse of minors, Politico reported. After a grand jury referral, the case resulted in a plea deal in which Epstein avoided federal charges and lengthy federal prison time.*** The Palm Beach Post reported that Epstein abuse survivors Hayley Robson and Jena-Lisa Jones appeared at the bill-signing press conference. https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/ron-desantis-jeffrey-epstein-palm-beach/2024/02/29/id/1155436

***

4 years seems kind of light for sex trafficking children

Colorado falls in the top 20 states for human sex trafficking, often of children. We could top the list after Colorado legislators rolled out a welcome mat for perverts. It seems inconceivable that elected officials would signal Colorado as a friendly state for adults to have sex with children — which is always rape — who are sold by foreign cartels and domestic sociopathic profiteers. Yet, that’s what Democrats on the House State, Civic, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee — the “kill committee” — did last week. They sent a message that Colorado doesn’t care much about adults who use child prostitutes. Just as soft-on-crime drug laws have attracted drug dealers and traffickers, this will bring in people who sell children for sex and those who patronize them.*** Blame committee members Steven Woodrow, Andrew Boesenecker, Elisabeth Epps, Jenny Willford, Kyle Brown, and Naquetta Ricks, Jennifer Lea Parenti and Manny Rutinel for dismissing the bill. Thank Republican committee members Ken DeGraff, Scott Bottoms and Brandi Bradley for voting against adults raping children. Do not blame Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, a father who wants accountability for rapists. He vows to make Colorado among the 10 safest states, and this bill counters his effort.***

The bill would have required that adults convicted of sex with child prostitutes serve full sentences of four years for class 3 felony acts and eight years for class four felonies involving sex with child prostitutes. It seems unconscionable anyone who pays to rape a child gets no more than four-to-eight-years. Without this bill, adults who buy or rent child prostitutes face penalties that often result in little or no incarceration. As reported by The Gazette and Colorado Politics, 50-plus witnesses packed the committee’s hearing. All but three favored the bill. Many were survivors with heart-wrenching testimony about working as child sex slaves. This did not faze committee Democrats, who killed the bill after two state public defenders — who hadn’t read it until the day before — asked them to. Radicalized Democrats have taken their criminal justice reform agenda so far they appear in favor of crime.***

*** https://gazette.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-house-democrats-kill-the-bill-against-raping-children/article_13d8cc86-d04b-11ee-803c-ab4821441af6.html

***

[nijjhar]

Catholic Universities worst for liberal speeches because they were creat... Catholic Universities worst for liberal speeches because they were created by the sacked Husbandmen https://youtu.be/5k-FoSixftg Article in the Christian Post of today:- https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=rm#inbox/FMfcgzGtwzrhKtfrxwvSBQCPmrjpJVrW 2 Catholic universities among the 5 worst campuses for free speech: report By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter Two Catholic colleges have some of the worst climates for free speech in the United States, according to a recently released report that analyzed more than 250 campuses, most of which continue to maintain lackluster free speech protections. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, formerly the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, released its 2024 College Free Speech Rankings on Wednesday. The research is based on interviews with 55,102 students from 254 colleges and universities conducted between Jan. 13 and June 23. The margin of error for the overall undergraduate respondents is +/- 1 percentage point, while the margin of error for student sub-demographics goes from 2 to 5 percentage points. The report, created in conjunction with The College Pulse, ranked American institutions of higher education based on their openness to discussing controversial issues on campus, tolerance for both liberal and conservative speakers on campus, students' perception of their college's free speech policies, their level of comfort expressing ideas, students' acceptance of protest activity and written policies related to free speech and academic freedom. Michigan Technological University ranked the highest out of the 254 campuses, receiving an overall score of 78.01 and labeled "good" speech climate. By contrast, Harvard University in Massachusetts scored the worst with an overall score of 0.00, labeled an "abysmal" speech climate. Near the bottom of the list are two Catholic institutions: Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Fordham University in New York. Georgetown had the fourth-worst free speech climate with an overall score of 17.45, indicating a "very poor" climate for free speech, while Fordham placed fifth-worst with a "poor" climate for free speech and an overall score of 21.72. A Georgetown University student from the class of 2024 told researchers that she was told in class that she could not use the words "women" or "mother" when referring to maternal mortality rates but was told to instead use the term "birthing person." A student from the class of 2023 recalled being harassed for expressing a conservative opinion online and has been mocked by peers and at least one professor. At Fordham University, one student from the class of 2024 told researchers that they "felt that sometimes in a few of my classes, the catholic view or perception was ignored or misunderstood, which was uncomfortable at a catholic university." The report also detailed free speech climates at other Catholic colleges and universities, finding that Duquesne University has a "poor" climate with an overall score of 25.25, receiving the eighth-lowest overall score. Boston College received a score of 29.94 and the label of "poor" climate. The additional Catholic colleges included in the report all had "below average" free speech climates: Loyola University, Chicago (38.09), Santa Clara University (38.47), Creighton University (38.58) and the University of Notre Dame (39.92). The report also compiled a separate list of six "warning" schools, reserved for universities that have policies that "clearly and consistently" prioritize "other values over a commitment to freedom of speech." Among the "warning" schools, Catholic St. Louis University received the lowest overall score at 18.74. Brigham Young University, affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had an overall score of 25.80. Liberty University, an Evangelical institution in Virginia, received an overall score of 35.62. Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Texas, had an overall score of 23.80. The non-denominational Hillsdale College had the highest score of all the "warning" schools (46.87), while Pepperdine University, which has historic ties to the Churches of Christ, received an overall score of 29.17. The report gave each college a green, yellow or red-light rating based on the institution's established policies related to free speech. Twenty of the 25 schools with the best free speech climates, as determined by their overall scores, had "green light" ratings, while the lowest-ranked school to receive a "green light" rating was the University of Florida, which had an overall score of 29.37. In total, 36 colleges and universities had "green light" ratings, 158 received "yellow light" ratings, and 54 had "red light" ratings. The surveys also found that the student bodies were predominantly liberal at all but 20 schools Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com Trinity:- www.gnosticgospel.co.uk/trinity.pdf

[msclaritea]

We have got a SERIOUS PROBLEM in this country with ultra Conservative Catholicism. It seems the only way for them to successfully attend to their faith is to aggressively push their beliefs on the entire American populace. This ONE couple has been doing more damage to protections of LGBTQ, Abortion, Voting, etc...

Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network and Roger Severino, a senior health and human services official, have worked to reshape social policy and the courts they need to uphold it.

WASHINGTON — Last July, Carrie Severino, a leader among social conservatives dedicated to filling the courts with like-minded judges, appeared on a prominent Catholic television station to slam a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision that turned back the most recent effort to weaken abortion rights. During the on-air exchange between Mrs. Severino and an anti-abortion activist, Dorinda Bordlee, Ms. Bordlee made a plea: To “get to our ultimate goal,” she said, “we are going to, in the end, need one more justice. ”Three months later Mrs. Severino, the president of the Judicial Crisis Network, and her equally conservative husband, Roger Severino, who heads the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office for Civil Rights, are right where they have hoped to be. The looming confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court could usher in a new era of socially conservative jurisprudence — on abortion, health care, gay and transgender rights, and other issues long embraced by the Severinos. And Washington’s conservative power couple could rightfully claim more than a modicum of credit.

 “Professionally we’re hitting on all cylinders, and we’re accomplishing many of our lives’ ambitions,” Mr. Severino said in an interview. Mrs. and Mr. Severino — she is 43 and he is 45 — live a quiet life in a Virginia suburb of Washington with their six children ranging in age from a toddler to a teenager. They met at Harvard Law School and were married in 2004, shortly after they graduated. 

Though they are conservative Catholics, they say their efforts are rooted in law, not theology. But on Catholic and conservative media, they are ubiquitous champions of social conservative causes, the public faces of an interlocking web of groups and individuals in and out of government advancing social conservatism. In an interview Mrs. Severino rattled off the names of judges and justices her organization helped confirm, and said the “common goal” in pressing for the confirmation of President Trump’s nominees was “to have someone who approaches the law looking to the text and original meaning of the Constitution.” “One of the goals of originalism,” she said, “is to take your personal beliefs, be they religious or ideological, out of the judicial interpretive process.

”Mr. Severino told a Catholic TV reporter he was “privileged and honored to be a part of what President Trump has set in motion — he set in motion a reinvigorated defense of religious freedom,” adding, “My legacy will be what we have done to respect conscience and religious freedom at H.H.S. — and hopefully, beyond. 

”To critics, their influence has become dangerous. “Roger and Carrie are lovely people,” said Tom Carter, who worked with Mr. Severino on religious liberty causes. “You’d want them as your neighbors. You just don’t want them controlling the courts.” Mrs. Severino clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, whom she described recently as “the only member of the court who’s actually spoken directly, saying that he thinks that Roe and its progeny were wrongly decided,” referring to Roe v. Wade, the landmark case establishing a constitutional right to abortion. During the contentious confirmation hearings for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, Mrs. Severino logged more than 100 media appearances on his behalf. Judicial Crisis Network is linked to the Federalist Society and a web of anonymously funded groups that together laid the ideological, financial and communications groundwork for Mr. Trump’s effort to fill some 200 judgeships and a third Supreme Court seat with conservative jurists. Judicial Crisis expects to spend at least $10 million to support Judge Barrett with ads and media interviews by Mrs. Severino.

“She’s fantastic,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, the lobbying and grass-roots arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said of Mrs. Severino. “Her leadership really puts lead on the target for where support is needed in these fierce judicial confirmation battles.” Liberals have their own network focused on the judiciary, of course, that includes Demand Justice, the National Women’s Law Center and Alliance for Justice. Even before this week’s hearings began, Mrs. Severino sought to blunt questions about Judge Barrett’s faith and public stance against abortion. “The Democrats and their liberal allies think Judge Barrett is ‘too Christian’ or ‘the wrong kind of Christian’ to be a good judge. That is rank bigotry,” she tweeted. In its ads, her network has worked to disqualify concerns about Judge Barrett’s faith while simultaneously emphasizing it. One ad juxtaposes Judge Barrett’s image with John F. Kennedy’s, with a voice-over of his warning to those who attacked his Catholicism. Mrs. Severino applied the same contradiction to herself. “I don’t really want to comment on my religious beliefs,” she said in the interview. “I don’t think it is relevant.” Mr. Severino described the couple as “serious Catholics,” and himself as “proudly pro-life.” “Having a strong marriage and a strong faith life mean that we’re both dedicated to doing the right thing for the right reasons,” he said. “My motivation is to defend human dignity, and that is informed by my faith,” he added. Mrs. Severino has helped craft court challenges to the Affordable Care Act and other key conservative fights, which are intertwined with her push for judicial confirmations. Judicial Crisis Network has been one of the largest single donors to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which has led legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act. Last month, 22 Republican state attorneys general issued an open letter urging the Senate to confirm Judge Barrett. 

Mr. Severino worked at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit law firm that represented Hobby Lobby in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a 2014 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that requiring family-owned corporations to pay for insurance covering contraception under the Affordable Care Act violated religious freedom. In 2007, Mr. Severino helped write the Becket Fund’s amicus brief supporting California’s ban on same-sex marriage. In and out of government, Mr. Severino has pressed to roll back civil rights protections for gay and transgender Americans. 

Before joining the Trump administration, Roger Severino led the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation. “Roger and I had many long talks about same-sex marriage, with him trying to convert me,” said Mr. Carter, who was a co-worker at the Becket Fund. “I saw it as a human rights issue in line with the Loving case,” referring to Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court eliminated laws banning interracial marriage. “But he was adamant that L.G.B.T. was not the same as race,” Mr. Carter said. Before joining the Trump administration, Mr. Severino led the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation, where he opined against the Obama administration’s expansion of civil rights protections for sex to include gender identity. 

At the Health and Human Services Department, Mr. Severino created a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division described in the Catholic press as “charged with enforcing the federal laws that already exist to protect doctors, nurses, midwives and other health care workers who refuse to perform, accommodate or assist with certain procedures on religious or moral grounds,” chiefly abortions.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who has investigated the interlocking activities of the Judicial Crisis Network, the Federalist Society and the Trump administration, railed during Judge Barrett’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday about the “dark money” influence wielded by the groups. In an interview he described Mrs. Severino as a bird flitting from branch to branch in a tree representing “this larger scheme to have big anonymous donors capture the Supreme Court and big chunks of the federal judiciary.”Mrs. Severino insisted anonymity was not about secrecy; her donors, she said, could be subject to “harassment” if their names were made public. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, displayed posters showing the “dark money” influence wielded by conservative groups in judicial nominations. 

The Severinos appear to their critics to be moving in tandem, with Mr. Severino creating social conservative policy while Mrs. Severino builds a judicial system to uphold it. “I’m flattered that people think we’re that powerful,” Mr. Severino said. “We set up firewalls. Most of the time she learns what I do by reading it in the newspapers, and vice versa.” In 2018, the Health and Human Services Department sought to legally define gender under federal civil rights law as an immutable condition determined by the genitals that a person is born with, effectively defining transgender out of existence. In June, the department finalized a rule removing protections against discrimination on the basis of sex for transgender people seeking health care under the Affordable Care Act. Both rules have been challenged in court. 

Their opponents seethe at the Severinos’ doggedness. “Carrie and Roger Severino are interested in remaking the legal and regulatory landscape of this country in their image,” said Alphonso David, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest L.G.B.T.Q. civil rights organization. During his (..Kavanaugh's ) confirmation hearings, Mrs. Severino logged more than 100 media appearances on his behalf. Mrs. Severino said promotion of Judge Barrett’s nomination is being coordinated from a “war room” at Judicial Crisis that includes the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, Catholic Vote, America First Policies, the Club for Growth and Heritage Action.

  While Judge Barrett’s advocates attack any suggestion that her judicial views might be influenced by her Catholicism, they are also proud of the church’s impact on the courts. “Catholics actually, in a very unique way, have a very keen understanding of the crisis that we were having with the judiciary, but not just because of the abortion issue, but because Catholics understood that there’s something about following rules, and there’s something about humility, which are important in human life,” Leonard Leo, the longtime head of the Federalist Society, said in an interview for a presidential history archive. Judicial Crisis Network was born in 2005, under the name Judicial Confirmation Network. The organization worked alongside Mr. Leo, who took a leave from the Federalist Society to organize conservative campaigns supporting two Supreme Court nominees, John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr., according to an investigation of the Federalist Society network in The Washington Post. The Judicial Confirmation Network became the Judicial Crisis Network during the Obama administration. Mrs. Severino took the helm in 2010.

See also:

https://tendergingergirl.tumblr.com/post/631988923214725120/billionaire-oligarchs-and-anonymous-megadonors

https://tendergingergirl.tumblr.com/post/631909603815407616/let-the-record-show-amy-coney-barrett-draws

https://tendergingergirl.tumblr.com/post/631905322545659904/charles-kochs-big-bet-on-barrett-for-almost-50

https://tendergingergirl.tumblr.com/post/631812122802798592/a-gun-rights-decision-provides-a-preview-of-the

https://tendergingergirl.tumblr.com/post/631795624001650688/barrett-was-member-of-anti-abortion-group-that

https://tendergingergirl.tumblr.com/post/631701581050593280/it-instilled-such-problems-ex-member-of-amy

https://tendergingergirl.tumblr.com/post/630741503050973184/religious-group-scrubs-all-references-to-amy-coney

[realcatalina]

Her family Part 3-Juana I’s depictions

Juana was very interesting character, on one side this very smart highly educated woman, on other side woman who got labelled as crazy. 

And also woman who is frequently depicted looking nothing like she trully was!

She is always thought about as brunette. Yet she is just another victim of darkening of portraits.Her hair, was golden like mum and youngest sister. Dark shade of golden strawberry blond.

Johanna "die Wahnsinnige" (1473-1555)/Juana the Mad  by Juan de Flandes, c. 1500,  Kunsthistorisches Museum in Wien, Austria:

(Museum also has matching portrait of her husband Philip.)

This one in particular shows the strawberry blond hair very well and she is adult(around 21). Her hair was highly unlikely to change anymore, and certainly wouldn’t turn into dark brown. 

I am not exactly sure what is going on with the fashion, headwear is not spanish, dress looks like it could be lower gown, yet at same time there are differences in shape etc. Logically it should be Burgundian(actially Flemish /Neatherlandish) or German fashion, because that was fashion of court ofher husband and  of her father in law, Emperor Maxmilian.

Enjoy the rest of Queen Juana’s depictions. :-)

This painting is thought by many fans to be Catherine, but sitter doesn’t have her tip of nose. It’s too much narrower. (Mary I as child visibly had her mum’s nose tip, hence her mum as child should have it too!)

Juan de Flandes arrived to Spain cca 1496. It has to be one of Catherine’s older sisters still in Spain around that time, and that leaves Juana(16) or Maria(14). We know Juana had this narrow nose, this shape of eyebrows, these ears, these lips, this shape of forehead, shape of face, so I am going with Juana.

Portrait of Infanta by Juan Flandes-cca 1496(she’d be 16th and rose bud could be symbol of her upcoming marriage)

before removal of yellow varnish:

After:

There are many way more reddish hair versions circulating only but this is the real deal and really hair into golden shades of strawberry blond. 

(Don’t mind the changing colour of eyes between these two portraits. Very often painters used cheaper pigments to make eyes(because blue ultramarine was expensive and for just tiny detail they didn’t want to bother) and often they darkened(to brown) or faded to grey or greyish.)

There is actually third portrait where her hair is not darkened:

The Virgin of Mercy with the Family of the Catholic Monarchs(The National Gallery of Arts.Washington D.C., USA) by Diego de la Cruz and Workshop -supposedly cca 1486:(Juana in green dress on left)

(Sorry couldn’t find closeup on painting after conservation work was carried out.)

I strongly suspect this was painted before Maria was born in 1482(hence her being excluded). Juana would be less than 3 years old. (she looks way taller, if you realise where her dress ends, but in face it is little child. While yes, it is highly stylized, it is not bad likeness. Just not great one either.

In iluminations darkening of pigments occured less frequently:

Juana and her parents supposedly in 1482(i think 1500+ is more likely):

Juana is also probably one of girls next to her mother in this one:

(I think it might be mid to late 1480s, but supposedly 1482)

However in iluminations aside from hair colour and skintone and perhaps period fashion, don’t believe anything.

Juana and Philip, with 3 of their daughters

Their daughters didn’t arrive to Spain with their parents, and youngest was one. But nobody bothered to depict kids at correct age those days. Philip’s skin isn’t supposed to be as dark and his hair was between strawberry blond and red, not reddish brown(but I know from some English examples that even iluminations can sometimes darken and it happened in his case, compare his face and right hadn with one holding book, different shades of skin entirely).But this is another proof that Juana was golden haired, strawberry blond woman with fair skin and not at all brunette. 

This ilumination is frequently stated to be Isabella and Ferdinand, but coat of arms behind the couple is Philip’s and you can even see the order of golden shroud underneat it:

Philip’s coat of arms as Archduke and Duke of Burgundy:

Then we have several portraits of Juana as brunette(all darkened):

There are eight different versions of one portrait, or rather there are many copies of it:

(in the closest to original the gown is lined with fur which is much more noticeable in the severely altered copies(made larger) and missing in slightly altered copies.)

And I can’t tell which one is original, if any! I just know original was probably done cca 1500, due to fashion we see.

Two of them are closest to original(in my opinion), but I suspect both are copies:

Joanna of Castile, likely by Jacob van Lathem, over 1500,  Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid(Spain):

What strikes me as odd is back of hood(back veil). Because I know! that it is not supposed to make that shape! It’s supposed to fall flat copying shape of head.

Like in this painting of Margaret of Austria, done around same time!

2nd portrait i couldn’t find how is called nor who painted it, nor where it is

And I can’t find version where the background isn’t pitch black

Tbh, the hood’s and partlet’s details are so similiar to tryptych bellow that I am not even sure there is an original, and that they aren’t copies of that one!

(and that weird jewelry forming flowers, if it isn’t supposed to mimic the bejewelled piece she has on.)

Wings from the Last Judgement Triptych of Zierikzee, by the Master of Afflighem, showing Philip von Habsburg and Juana of Castile c. 1500, held by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium 

or Volet droit du triptyque de Zierikzee. Avers : Portrait de Jeanne la Folle 1482-1555 ; revers : Saint Martin   (entre 1495 et 1506),  Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles:

Museum dates it as 1495-1506, but I agree with rest of people who say it is c. 1500-1505.

 Because there is coat of arms of Spain shown at their clothes, alongside to coat of arms of places represinting Philip or his family(austria for example). Juana is here already as Princess of Asturias, hence it is painted after her nephew Miguel died in 1500, but before she left for Sain in late 1505. Juana should be here 21-26 years old.

Philip the ‘Handsome’ is here shown with way nicer nose he actually owned, while Juana’s is in very unflattering angle. (Nose is biggest in this angle) and I am not so sure it is her actual nose:

I stumbled upon print of the same painting from 1894 where nose is different:

It is of course possible that black and white version shows painting with later altereations which were removed and revealed that unflattering nose(which might have been original). Problem is, you can better see how fabric of her hood fells on the print than in the painting. With dark shadows which aren’t consistent with fabric touching shoulders. 

I suspect the front of hood was repainted, and might have originally been shorter. But even if wasn’t, the lower edge wasn’t the perfectly straight line we see in painting nowadays! Yes, these could be straight and stiffened to keep the shape, but even so it’d bend slightly. 

The straight line is big red flag for. Makes me very suspicious.

Unfortunately the museum’s webpage didn’t help to solve the dilema, as they only show very tiny picture of the painting:

Tryptych despite it’s seemingly good quality, proved for me an unrealiable source. I think it is altered and I do not trust it and I think in the print, it looks like Juana’s nose by Juan de Flandes, but not in version found in museum. It’s hanging too low.

I wonder if there were two versions of thsi tryptych and surviving one isn’t the original. Given how many very well-made copies of Henry VIII’s portraits there are, I think it is possible. (Especially if the copy was done in early 16th century, museum would have no way of knowing their version wasn’t the original.)

The hood is essentially an insignificant detail. But nose isn’t. Because based upon such features you can exclude or include Juana in identification of other still unidentified potraits. 

You might think, no undentified potraits exist, they must know them all by now.

But I found one potrait of woman wearing spanish fashion(and for while i thought it might be Isabella’s posthumous depiction), but then I realised it bears striking resemblence to fashion on Juana’s tomb.

Juana’s (and Philip’s) tomb by Bartolomé Ordóñez:

Her tomb was finished within her lifetime(work started 1519), but I can’t  figure how without meeting her sculptor achieved such likeness(maybe based upon now lost potraitm but maybe it just seems as good likeness), take it with pinch of salt:

(For example her forehead seems as short as Isabella’s yet we know from portraits it wasn’t that short!)

From this angle you can see cofia on her head:

This angle is most interesting:

It shows Juana with rather long neck(because her head is tilted up and behind, hence it looks way longer than it was, not very natural sleeping pose), with scepter and crown(same as on her mother’s tomb), with probably emerald necklace of arrows(the front piece is missing so either it was altered in Juana’s time as Queen or after she got confined, or by the time sculptor got to see the necklace). The waistline is cca same height as on Isabella’s tomb, and there is some resemblance to praying sculpture of Isabella(because both wear lower gown but I think we need to discuss the sleeves here.  It’s as if sleeves were part of upper gown. And Juana is only royal spanish woman depicted in such fashion.

Germaine of Foix in only potrait of her wears without doubt upper gown. But Juana’s is mixture of both lower and upper gown, with rather small slashes and bows or ribbons used over it. 

I think this unidentified potrait is Juana:

Portrait of girl by Ambrosius Holbein, supposedly c. 1518 (not even close fashion-wise) was part of the Austrian imperial collection at Ambras Castle, near Innsbruck. But it is now part of Krannert Art Museum at University of  Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in USA.

In this case, there is no mixture of lower and upper gown, and it looks very similiar to what Isabella wore towards end of her life, except that cuts from previous style of upper gown are tied together by ribbons and cloth girdle is also tied around the waist(just as it is on the tomb). The headwear is between 1490s and 1520s, lenght of hair points to 1500s. (they got up as 16th century continued). The hair looks like it could be strawberry blond. It’s too yellow under certain light to be regular blond and in the 2nd version I could find, the reddish tint is stronger and it also goes towards either dark blond or light brown. Which is exactly what I’d expect to see from dark shade of golden strawberry blond which I know Isabela, Catalina and Juana had.

The rest of features matches too. (Of course in this angle it is hard to say lenght of neck.)Not so short forehead, rather full lips, small chin, overal face, narrow nose,profound philtrum  the very light almost none-existent brows. It matches the 1st two paintings I’ve show you, way better tahn all of her marriage potraits comissioned by Philip combined. It also shows her with possibly blue-grey eyes and the background is same shade as one used by Juan de Flandes. It is not noticable on Juana’s painting(because it suffered some damage to backrgound) but on matching potrait of Philip it is. 

Background shade/colour was thing of fashion, and this would tie the background to late 1490s and 1500s.

It is either misdated or the painting is rather realistic early copy of original done in 1500s based upon probably now lost original by Juan de Flandes(it has big similiarities in features to his painting, that is why I suspect him specifically.)

I am very surprised it hasn’t yet been suggested by professional art historians that it might be Juana! In my opinion, it is. And certainly the nose is not hawk-like in this one. 

It’d be done after her return to Spain(because prior Philip wouldn’t allow her to wear spanish fashion, even after she became heir of Spain.) Hence it is 1506-09(in 1509 she was confined for good). I think 1506-1507 is most likely when that painting was made, while Juana was still free. (I couldn’t find matching for Philip, but that doesn’t prove there wasn’t/isn’t one. Maybe they are just apart.)

And you might have started to get feeling, that the painting seems similiar in some way:

Notice the colums, the shade of background? Sure this is much later copy(from 18th century) of portrait of Catherine of Aragon wearing fashion of cca 1525, colums were guilded and parts of it cut(and possibly changed a bit). But it looks like possibly part of same collection of portraits. Such collection would be full of copies, not originals, but sometimes that is all we have, as originals got destroyed.

It is also important to note than in religious paintings sometimes royals are hidden and this is my another candinate of unidentified portrait of Juana:

Hidden in painting of Marriage feast at Cana, by Gerard David and Jean Sedano, located in Louvre Museum is this lady dressed fully in spanish atire. 

( Les noces de Cana, avec Jean de Sedano, son fils et son épouse).

 Now Alonso Sedano is person who painted potrait which I think is unidentified religious painting Isabella. It is posisble Jean Sedano is a relative of his, employed by Isabella or her family. Yes, the painting is dated 1500-1503, but frills of french hood could be also late 1490s and if this is Juana, she looks extremely young. As young as in the first painting in this post. I recon it not even year apart. Hence most most likely this is 1496-1497. And it would make sense for this to be actually yes, religious painting, but celebrating Juana’s wedding to Philip, which occured in 1496.

There is 2nd version of this painting located Cathedral Vieja, Plasencia, Caceres(Spain) and it is said to be done by David Gerard also(that it was made by original painter), but most interesting is the name: Bodas de canna(wedding at Cana) con Los Reyes Catolicos (of Catholic Monarchs). Catholic monarchs is refering to Isabella and Ferdinand. Hence there is direct link between this painting and Juana’s parents. Yes they were pious, but also they could have wished to have painting with their daughter in it.

Unfortunately, as it is often the case with spanish museums and galleries, I couldn’t find its webpage nor any better version of this painting. 

By the way, Philip is not at either painting, probably because there was originally 2nd painting where the feast would continue or because painting got cut. Painting doesn’t seem balanced at all. Proportions etc suggest more is supposed to be towards right. Many figures are actually looking or tilted toward lady in spanish dress. While they should be focused on Jesus and his mother Mary(with halo). Spanish lady is also sat just next to Jesus.

The lady between Jesus and St. Mary would then probably be Margaret of Austria,

 who would in late 1496 travel to Spain to marry Juan, Prince of Asturias but she was not to be happy for long. But she got along nicely in her in laws.

Only the hair are darkened. Otherwise resemblance is there.

Speaking of Margaret, I was not sure if this was her portrait or if it was Juana, but finally I found portrait of younger Philip and it is clear these are the siblings.

(Nose of both got much wider as they grew up.)

There is some resemblance to Juana, but Margaret’s and Philip’s grandmother was Eleanor of Portugal and through her Margaret and Juana were related on Iberian side, and also they were both related through English blood. 

BUT WHAT ABOUT JUANA’s nose? Which one is the real one?

From left it is Marriage at Cana by Gerard David. From front it is Juana as young woman by Juan de Flandes, from right it Potrait of girl is by Ambrosius Holbein. 

It’s same very narrow nose, very squeezed nostrils, profound philtrum, etc. It has slightly shorter neck in Ambrosius’ and Flandes’ due to angle doesn’t show the nose isn’t perfectly straight, but these three in my opinion are true likenesses of Juana. There is 4th: stained glass window once adoring window of chapel in her husband’s palace, and you can see nose rather up, profound philtrum, her full lips, etc. It’s good likeness of her as adult. 

Just not realiable for comparison with other portraits, but more as guide to what her base features were and what her hair colour was.

And I can only conclude that each depictection where her nosetip is hanging down like Hawk’s beak is altered.  Sorry, the famous depictions of Juana, are not true Juana and that very narrow nose on her tomb, is actually hers!

[dhaaruni]

Okay as someone that openly declares that "abortions are good and there should be more of them" on and off my public Instagram story, I totally disagree with this post lol.

About 70% of Americans want Roe to stay as law, but that doesn't mean a majority of people support abortion "on demand and without apology," and it definitely doesn't mean that they don't think abortion is ideologically "bad." These people will still judge women they know who get abortions, they will still go on and on about how we can and should minimize the number of abortions with better sex education and birth control and economic justice, and these people are much more likely to vote than people like me who are extremely liberal on abortion and think there should be an abortion clinic on every street corner.

My point is, if saying abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare" keeps abortion accessible in as much of this country as possible, even in red states, I'll opt for that messaging even if I personally loathe the idea that we have to play into the conservative framing of "abortion should be minimized." Once again, politics means that we have to do what's popular and that means Democrats have to utilize messaging that lines up with what the voters believe so we can get elected, even if I, a 20-something college-educated woman that lives in Washington D.C., believe they're backwards misogynists.

Also, once elected, legislators can and do move left, which is why we have to elect Democrats!! Conor Lamb is pro-life on paper because he's a devout Catholic and flipped a district Trump won by 20, but once in office, he co-sponsored Judy Chu's Women's Health Protection Act, and publicly condemned the Supreme Court's latest anti-choice shenanigans. Former Democratic senator Heidi Heitkamp allowed and even encouraged pro-life organizations think she was anti-choice so she could get elected as a Democrat in North Dakota, but once she took office, she ghosted them, and flat out ignored them when they called her a baby-killing psycho for her votes. And, Heitkamp ultimately lost her seat (while Manchin kept his seat) in part due to her "no" vote on Brett Kavanaugh, which I'll always respect her for.

[viterbofangirl]

Any followers of mine that have been with me for a while know that I am a devout Catholic and lean pretty heavily conservative. I try to keep a sense of balance in posts and reblogs, and I know the importance of listening and keeping an open mind and try to do so. I also know that Tumblr users tend to skew heavily to the left, and I appreciate those who have stuck with me despite any ideological differences we might have.

With that in mind, and in an attempt to be absolutely honest to both my conservative and progressive followers and anyone in-between, I will state for the record that I do not at all like what has transpired in D.C. today. My sympathies remain with those in the area who are frightened and sheltering, wondering if violence will invade their neighborhoods. I hate the lawlessness permeating these actions. And I fear the repercussions of an already unfriendly Congress.

There are instances where one might be called to overthrow a tyrannical government for the good of the rest of the country. These instances are rare, exquisitely dangerous, and invariably detrimental to whatever moral high ground one has, and so must only be acted upon at the utmost extremity and with the utmost gravity.

In my tiny corner of Tumblr, my little whisper into the near-infinity of cyberspace, allow me to state that I do not see either qualification justifying the actions in Washington.

[newstfionline]

Monday, December 28, 2020

Trump signs massive measure funding government, COVID relief (AP) President Donald Trump signed a $900 billion pandemic relief package Sunday, ending days of drama over his refusal to accept the bipartisan deal that will deliver long-sought cash to businesses and individuals and avert a federal government shutdown. The massive bill includes $1.4 trillion to fund government agencies through September and contains other end-of-session priorities such as an increase in food stamp benefits. The signing, at his private club in Florida, came amid escalating criticism over his eleventh-hour demands for larger, $2,000 relief checks and scaled-back spending even though the bill had already passed the House and Senate by wide margins. The bill was passed with what lawmakers had thought was Trump’s blessing, and after months of negotiations with his administration.

New Year’s Eve storm to move across US with heavy snow, winds, severe thunderstorms (ABC News) Cold Arctic air in the East Coast brought almost 2 feet of snow to western New York—from Hamburg to Buffalo—Saturday. Chilly weather has extended all the way to Florida, where freeze warnings have been issued. A new storm will cross the country, just like last week, from California to New York, with heavy rain, snow, ice and strong winds. By Tuesday and Wednesday, the storm will move into the central U.S. with heavy snow for Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Heavy rain is expected to fall along the Mississippi River Valley, and strong to severe thunderstorms are possible in Texas. By New Year’s Eve, rain and wind will hit all major cities in the Northeast, from Boston to Washington, D.C.

To stay or to go? (Washington Post) Kevin Euceda believed he was in imminent danger. Down the hall in the immigration detention center where he was being held, a man whose psychiatric visits had been suspended because of the pandemic was hallucinating and screaming. Others were shivering and sweating, scared they were going to die. Surrounded by so much sickness, Kevin was growing desperate to find a way out. A migrant who said he came to the United States when he was 17 years old to escape gang threats in Honduras, Kevin had been living for nearly three years in a place that was now being overrun by covid-19. [And so he asked to contact deportation officers.] In detention centers around the country, more and more people have been asking for the same thing, seeking their own deportation as the novel coronavirus has spread through facilities and sickened more than 8,000 detainees, according to government data. The virus has collided with the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” approach toward people looking for refuge and asylum in the United States. Those policies have led to a record number of immigrants being held in detention, including 7,000 people who had cleared the first steps of requesting asylum when the pandemic began and would normally have been released on bond while their cases were processed. Some immigrants have been withdrawing cases against their lawyers’ advice, saying they’re more afraid of being in detention during a coronavirus outbreak than of what might be waiting in the places they fled.

Millions face new UK virus restrictions (AP) Millions of people in the U.K. faced tough new coronavirus restrictions Saturday, with Scotland and Northern Ireland demanding tighter measures to try to halt a new variant of the virus that is believed to spread more quickly. Northern Ireland went into a six-week lockdown and in Wales, restrictions that were relaxed for Christmas Day were also re-imposed. The number of people under England’s top level of restrictions—Tier 4—increased by 6 million on Saturday to 24 million people overall, around 43% of England’s population. No indoor mixing of households is allowed, and only essential travel permitted. Gyms, pools, hairdressers and stores selling nonessential goods have been ordered to close and pubs and restaurants can only do takeout. Business groups say the restrictions will be economically devastating to their members.

Pope proclaims year of families, offers advice to keep peace (AP) Pope Francis on Sunday proclaimed an upcoming year dedicated to the family as he doubled down on one of his papal priorities and urged renewed attention to his controversial 2016 document on family life. Francis announced the upcoming year on the family would begin March 19, the fifth anniversary of his document “The Joy of Love.” Among other things, the document opened the door to letting divorced and civilly remarried couples receive Communion, sparking criticism and even claims of heresy from conservative Catholics. In making the announcement, Francis offered some friendly papal advice to bickering families, reminding them to say “pardon me, thank you and sorry” and never end the day without making peace. “Because the Cold War the day after is dangerous,” he quipped.

Hundreds of migrants freezing in heavy snow in Bosnia camp (AP) Hundreds of migrants were stranded Saturday in a squalid, burnt-out tent camp in Bosnia as heavy snow fell in the country and winter temperatures suddenly dropped. A fire earlier this week destroyed much of the camp near the town of Bihac that already was harshly criticized by international officials and aid groups as being inadequate for housing refugees and migrants. Despite the fire, Bosnian authorities have failed to find new accommodations for the migrants at Lipa, leaving around 1,000 people stuck in the cold, with no facilities or heat, eating only meager food parcels provided by aid groups. Bosnia has become a bottleneck for thousands of migrants hoping to reach Western Europe. Most are stuck in Bosnia’s northwest Krajina region as other areas in the ethnically divided nation have refused to accept them. The EU has warned Bosnia that thousands of migrants face a freezing winter without shelter, and it has urged the country’s bickering politicians to set aside their differences and take action.

China’s Economy Set to Overtake U.S. Earlier Due to Covid Fallout (Bloomberg) The Chinese economy is set to overtake the U.S. faster than previously anticipated after weathering the coronavirus pandemic better than the West, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research. The world’s biggest and second-biggest economies are on course to trade places in dollar terms in 2028, five years earlier than expected a year ago, it said on Saturday. In its World Economic League Table, the consultancy also calculated that China could become a high-income economy as soon as 2023. Further cementing Asia’s growing might, India is set to move up the rankings to become the No. 3 economy at the end of the decade.

Near 1 million virus cases, South Africa weighs restrictions (AP) As South Africa’s COVID-19 spike has taken the country to nearly 1 million confirmed cases, President Cyril Ramaphosa called an emergency meeting on Sunday of the National Coronavirus Command Council. With South Africa’s hospitals reaching capacity and no sign of the new surge reaching a peak, Ramaphosa is expected to announce a return to restrictive measures designed to slow the spread of the disease. With a cumulative total of 994,911 confirmed cases of COVID-19, South Africa is expected to exceed 1 million cases when new figures are released late Sunday. That number includes 26,521 deaths.

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

St. Marys is home to a chapter of the Society of St. Pius X, or SSPX. Named for the early-20th-century pope who railed against the forces of modernism, the international order of priests was formed in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church’s attempt, in the 1960s, to meet the challenges of contemporary life. Though not fully recognized by the Vatican, the priests of SSPX see themselves as defenders of the true practices of Roman Catholicism, including the traditional Latin Mass, celebrated each day in St. Marys. Perfumed with incense and filled with majestic Latin hymns, the service has an air of formality and grandeur. To most American Catholics under the age of 50, it would be unrecognizable.

Throughout American history, religious groups have walled themselves off from the rhythms and mores of society. St. Marys isn’t nearly as cut off from modern life as, say, the Amish communities that still abjure all modern technology, be it tractor or cellphone. Residents watch prestige television on Hulu and catch Sunday-afternoon football games; moms drive to Topeka to shop at Sam’s Club. Yet hints of the town’s utopian project are everywhere. On a recent afternoon, I visited the general store, where polite teens played bluegrass music beside rows of dried goods. Women in long, modest skirts loaded vans that had enough seats to accommodate eight or nine kids—unlike most American Catholics, SSPX members abide by the Vatican’s prohibition on birth control. At housewarming parties and potluck dinners, children huddle around pianos for sing-alongs.

In their four decades in St. Marys, the followers of SSPX have more than doubled the town’s size. Even with six Masses on Sundays, parishioners fill the Society’s chapel to capacity; overflow services are held in the gym of the Society’s academy, which inhabits an imposing campus built by the Jesuit missionaries who called St. Marys home in the 19th century. The school is constantly running out of classroom space. The parish rector, Father Patrick Rutledge, has to scramble each summer to accommodate rising enrollment. Real estate sells at price points closer to those of Kansas’s big cities than of its other small towns.

Newcomers are attracted by the opportunity to live beside like-minded neighbors. But many are pushed here as much as they are pulled. When they lived in other places, many SSPX families felt isolated by their faith, keenly aware that their theological convictions were out of step with America’s evolving cultural sensibilities and what they perceive as the growing liberalism of the Catholic Church, especially on issues such as gay marriage and abortion. They were wary of being labeled bigots by co-workers and even friends. They worried that their children would be exposed to sin: A friend’s parents might let their kids watch violent television shows; teens might encounter pornography on a classmate’s phone. “We can’t keep things out that we’d like to keep out completely,” Rutledge told me. But the environment in St. Marys is “as conducive as possible for children to save their souls.”

---

In 2017, the conservative writer Rod Dreher published The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, in which he describes growing hostility to Christian values in the secular world. Dreher, a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, argues that sexual expression has become secular society’s highest god. He laments that Christians have been pressured to accommodate and even celebrate LGBTQ identity. In the face of what Dreher calls the “barbarism” of contemporary American life, he believes the devout have no option but to flee—to build communities, churches, and even colleges where they will be free to live their values and pass the gospel on to the next generation.

Among the conservative-Christian intelligentsia, Dreher’s book was explosive. Charles Chaput, the outgoing archbishop of Philadelphia and an influential figure in the Catholic Church, described it as “a tough, frank, and true assessment of contemporary American culture.” The New York Times columnist David Brooks called it “the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade.” The Benedict Option prompted a flurry of essays in evangelical magazines, panel discussions at Christian colleges, and at least one spin-off book from a young Dreher acolyte. Dreher himself continues to write about so-called Ben-Op communities springing up around the country, from Alaska to Texas to the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Dreher addressed his book to fellow conservative Christians, but in calling for a strategic retreat from society, he tapped into an impulse felt by a range of groups in America. In Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C., contemporary followers of Marcus Garvey, the 20th-century Pan-African activist and thinker, have built infrastructure designed to free black people from systemic oppression: community gardens to provide food in neighborhoods devoid of grocery stores, and Afrocentric schools that teach black pride. Young leftist Jews skeptical of assimilation have founded a number of Yiddish-speaking farms in upstate New York, in an effort to preserve their ethnic heritage as well as Judaism’s agrarian tradition. Environmentalists have established sustainable settlements in rural Virginia, which serve as both utopian experiments in low-impact living and shelters for the climate disasters ahead.

[alexsmitposts]

Race Crime Opens Up Third Front in “Never Ending Conflict” The notorious serial killer Charles Manson was a fine salesman, very good at persuading people. According to the prosecutor at his trial, he persuaded his followers that there was going to be a race war between black and white people, which they would escape from by hiding in a hole in the ground. The murders his followers committed were intended to incite this war, which would end with them emerging to rule over what was left This crackpot theory has since been cited as evidence of Manson’s psychopathic nature, and the way he used it to manipulate people has been picked over again and again. It is therefore deeply distressing to see that he was right all along – and this time we cannot accuse a patently disturbed career criminal of manipulating us, because we voted for those who have proved him right, are of legal age, and had a choice. Orwellian Triangle Until the murder of George Floyd at the hands (or rather the knee) of that Minneapolis police officer, there were two highly polarised forces fighting for control of each Western democracy, and therefore the world. On the one side you had the traditional middle class, who run things a certain way, within their own institutions, and make the rules of conduct everyone has to live by. On the other you had the populist movements which have arisen because people feel those institutions and rules have failed them, and they want to be the opposite for the sake of it. One of the rules of conduct which has been imposed upon people is “multiculturalism”. We have all had the official anti-racist rhetoric rammed down our throats by those who rule what have often been institutionally racist countries and agencies, as if spouting it excuses their own crimes. But though we are told that racism is wrong, which it is, we are not given a way to understand the different cultures and their representatives in our midst. Consequently the uninformed are unable to bridge the divide between themselves and their neighbours. They are then excluded on the grounds of being racist or ignorant, with no place and no voice in the world of those who rule us. Obviously this generates a backlash against immigrants, who are perceived to be profiting from the exclusion of others from opportunity and cultural validity. But it also generates a backlash against natives of different racial origins – and in Western democracies–and that means black people. Even if a black person has lived sixty years in their white majority homeland, was born there and has known no other home, they still experience many forms of discrimination for being different. Those who rise above this by achieving success or celebrity are often the first to recognise this, indicating the depth of the problem. So, indigenous black communities are opposed to both the complacent white middle class culture which keeps them down, and the new populism which openly seeks to exclude them forever, as “foreigners”. This has always been a subliminal feature of politics and community relations. Now, thanks to George Floyd’s killing and the inadequate white establishment response to it, the opposition has broken out into open warfare, exactly as Charles Manson predicted. Fighting your future While white people vote for Brexit, attack immigrants and try and destroy parliament and police, black people loot shops, those symbols of discriminatory capitalism, attack white people and try and destroy parliaments and police. Neither side is achieving anything, or ever will, except to get angrier. But both white populists and black activists ultimately blame each other for the sins of the middle class elite, as they see them. Whites think they are too much in the pay of foreigners. And blacks think they are too much in the pockets of white people, Uncle Toms, who are inherently anti-black. As we have already seen with Brexit, winning an argument, or looting a shop, and it doesn’t make the anger go away. On the contrary, the worse things get, the more people look round for someone else to blame for them – the Brexiteers who turned on the EU are now turning on the UK itself, the very thing they said they were fighting for It is a truth is any democracy: the white middle class elite never goes away. In Portugal democracy was overthrown by the conservative military in 1926, and the subsequent dictatorship then overthrown by Marxist military in 1974. When democracy was restored, a key promise of the victorious Armed Forces Movement, the people voted for the middle class parties you find in any democracy, not Marxists. They even altered the post-1974 constitution to remove all the references to making Portugal a socialist state, even though the main political parties claimed to be socialist or social democrat. No amount of revolt against the “liberal elite”, by white or black populations and their sympathisers, will remove that elite or the system it operates. But as Michael Collins found in Ireland, when he was murdered by fellow nationalists for signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty which gave them a watered down version of which they had fought and died for, once you have gone so far it is more dangerous to turn back than to keep going, no matter what the consequences. Eventually white populists and black activists will have to turn on each other, and seek the protection of the elite when they do so. If they do not get that protection, they will accuse the elite of conspiring with the other side. This is precisely what happened within recent memory in Northern Ireland. Extensive collaboration between Protestant paramilitaries, the police and the British Army provoked Catholics, but many Protestants blamed those same police and army for not protecting them and their traditions when attacked by Catholics Charles Manson’s race war is being staged by proxy at present, with both sides attacking “the system” rather than each other. But it didn’t take long for the proxy Nazi-Soviet conflict of the Spanish Civil War to become World War Two, even though The Soviet Union wasn’t initially one of the allies. When “the system” doesn’t go away, the other two points of the triangle will attack each other for allegedly controlling the system, the common enemy. Neither does, so neither will be right, so no negotiated peace will be possible as there is nothing real to negotiate about. The only question is who has provoked this and why. Or perhaps there is a second question – why did we all see them provoking it, but give them the power to do so? Death Valley, D.C. Manson said that he and his followers would escape to a hole in the ground during this war. Groups of his followers went looking for this hole, inspecting various sites in Death Valley, California, to see if they were fit for purpose. So who went down into a hole in the ground when demonstrators were thought to be about to turn violent? Donald J. Trump, no less. He also said he was merely “inspecting” the bunker, not hiding in it. But his own Attorney General has contradicted him, even though he says it wasn’t Trump’s own decision. There have always been underground bunkers for key government officials, which have the same purpose Manson described: those who feel they are entitled to be the rulers hide in them so that when the crisis is over, they will continue ruling over what is left. They are not equipped as last resorts in a crisis but with all the facilities a ruler would need to continue doing their job, and monitoring the situation, from the safety of their impenetrable depth. Duck and Cover During the Cold War, with its ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, many such bunkers were constructed for defence institutions and also private citizens. Switzerland once made it a state policy to ensure that every citizen would have a place in a nuclear shelter. Since the Iron Curtain fell, many have been sold off to private citizens as accommodation, showing how many facilities they actually had. Trump should know all about the possibility of race wars. Like little brother Boris Johnson, he openly played the white populist card to get elected. He blames “the system” for everything the voters he courts don’t like, so none of them has responsibility for anything. Building the border wall to keep Mexicans out is one of a long litany of actions which demonstrate that he also blames people of colour, of any description, for drugs, crime and terrorism, though his own national statistics don’t bear this out. His message is clear: “the system” should be torn down because it has been hijacked by foreigners and foreign ideas. It needs to be replaced, along with all the people who have corrupted it. Yet he is very well aware that black activists who don’t like him and his voter constituency say exactly the same in reverse: that the system needs to be torn down because it is full of Trump’s voter constituency, who use it to project their cultural dominance and oppress blacks. If you want to get elected, you try and spread your supporter base as far as possible. But if you are in office and are being attacked, as Trump has been from day one, you go back to where you know your core support is. Even starting with Nixon, the War on Drugs was understood to mean a War on Blacks, especially young blacks. When Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate collapsed under his son Richard, it was torn apart by ex-combatants who had run out of steam arguing about who was the true upholder of the “good old cause,” because the ideology was incapable of embracing new ideas. More recently, when Robert Mugabe was threatened in Zimbabwe by the same black populations he claimed to represent, he talked about the guerilla war which had created his power, and relied for support on its veterans rather than attracting new constituencies of support with new policies. Predictably, Trump has used the violence following the death of George Floyd to call for more law and order. This is always a rallying cry for his faithful, who believe only they want it, and that the law enforcement agencies are there to protect them from those they consider different. He is currently being sued by a coalition of civil rights groups over one manifestation of his solution, the violent dispersal of a Black Lives Matter protest opposite the White House which was obstructing a photo opportunity in which he was depicted holding a bible. Using Flag and God as the last resort is a common move for political in deep up to their necks. As a sitting president Trump is in the same position once lamented in the famous quote by the 2nd Earl of Manchester – “If we beat the king 99 times, he is king still, and so will his posterity be after him; but if the king beat us once, we shall be all hanged, and our posterity be made slaves. May say he wants to overthrow the system, but when all this is over, which he hopes will be after he has cancelled the November election under “emergency powers,” only he will rule what is left. Fatal absurdity Since Manson committed his crimes, very few have wanted to live in a world where he really was a prophet, and the person to turn to if you wanted to know the truth. The lunatic has not only taken over the asylum, he has made it the hole in the ground from which he can issue his truth, and everywhere else the asylum. No one wanted to talk to black communities. Whenever they raised their concerns, whether legitimate or not, they were told in effect “you would say that, wouldn’t you?” Neither did anyone want to listen to the politically incorrect, the forcibly unemployed, the homeless or the out of fashion – their views weren’t good enough, they didn’t matter anymore than the life of a black man did. This is precisely what should not happen in liberal democracies, which exist to give power to “the people”, even if you don’t like what they want or think, provided those who disagree don’t face negative consequences. It is also what should never happen in a Christian country, as Christ died for us all, and racism or discrimination are direct contradictions of Christian teaching, strange though that may seem to some. Ballot or the Bullet The white populists and black activists are right: the system has failed them by discriminating against them unfairly. But they will never tear it down, as they will never resolve their problems that way, modern Africa bearing strong testimony to this. It is like Malcolm X, when he spoke of a different view of history for American Blacks, We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; the rock was landed on us. What is needed is to redefine what is acceptable in public life from within. The anti-racists who look down on those outside their circle will never achieve this. Not only another generation of blacks have been sold down the river, but minorities, and those of the former middle class with skill sets that are no longer needed, as those jobs are now in China and elsewhere. But all the conflict can be stopped by people displaying the basic humanity they do, when pushed, on an everyday basis, instead of expecting others to do it for them. That starts with electing people who represent what we are, not what they have made us into. If we did, we might just take back control – by keeping Mansonism in the asylum permanently, where we all know it really belongs.

[lastsonlost]

A participant in the Women’s March on Washington earlier this month has been accused of inappropriately touching a video producer for Infowars as he conducted interviews at the event, according to D.C. police.

NO THAT BITCHES SEXUALLY ASSAULTED A MAN AND ADMITTED TO IT ON CAMERA.

Isabel O’Shaughnessy, 21, was charged with misdemeanor sex abuse, and a police spokesman said she surrendered Wednesday. A Superior Court judge released her pending her next court appearance March 14.

The police spokesman identified O’Shaughnessy as a student at Catholic University of America. She did not immediately return a call seeking comment, and her attorney did not respond to a phone call to his office or to an email message.

Police said the incident occurred Jan. 19 as thousands of people marched through the nation’s capital. The producer was conducting an interview at the time near New York Avenue and 14th Street Northwest.

The producer posted a video on the Internet on Jan. 21, saying on Twitter: “Here is the moment I was sexually assaulted by a #WomensMarch2019 protester. She laughed about it. The crowd cheered. The police did nothing.” Infowars was founded by Alex Jones, a conservative conspiracy theorist.

HOWEVER NONE OF THIS MAKES SEXUALLY ASSAULTING A PERSON OKAY.

Dustin Sternbeck, a D.C. police spokesman, said the producer reported the incident on Jan. 23 and the investigation took several days before prosecutors signed off on an arrest warrant.

The arrest affidavit alleges O’Shaughnessy intentionally grabbed the producer in a private area.

In an interview with police, she said she “inadvertently brushed up against him” and that he took her comments out of context in what was an “emotionally charged situation.”

SHE’S ALSO LYING AND MAKING EXCUSES.

The Washington Post generally does not identify victims of alleged sexual assault, and the producer could not be reached for comment.

OUT OF CONTEXT MY ASS.