Category: History

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King’s Park Psychiatric Center

About this institution.

King’s Park Psychiatric Centre was a complex of dozens of buildings intended to house individuals with mental problems. It operated from 1885 to 1996.  At its peak, there were close to 10,000 patients.

The remains of the buildings are haunting.

The intent was good.  Of course.  The idea was to provide a healthy environment for these patients to live in, where they could work on farms and workshops and be fed and housed at state expense.

We are told that governments came to believe this was not a good way to deal with mental patients and the population of Kings Park was reduced through drug therapies, transfers to other institutions, and simple release.  I have read that many of these patients ended up homeless, but I don’t see any clear documentation about the disposition of the thousands of patients.  But they are all gone and the buildings have been abandoned for about 30 years.  Some of them were demolished. Some of them had asbestos in them complicating the idea of recycling the structures.  The remaining buildings are decaying.  There is a lot of graffiti.  People break into the buildings to take photos and videos.

There is something about the ruins that fascinates people.

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The Great Women Composers of Opera

A recent edition of the New York Review of Books contains an article by George B. Stauffer called “Where are the Woman Composers?”.

The writer is astonished that for centuries major musical institutions have performed hardly any operas by women.  I can only presume that there actually were operas composed by women, sufficient numerically and qualitatively to provide a potential body of work that could be drawn upon.

That remains an open question.

Broad draws the reader deep into the lives of four British women who encountered misogyny while attempting to forge careers in the male-dominated field of music composition.  New York Review of Books, 2023-10-05

The writer then proceeded to cite a particular British woman,  Ethel Smythe, who dressed like men, smoked cigars, like to golf and horseback ride, and had affairs with numerous men and women including Virginia Woolf.

Aggressive, determined to gain recognition, and unfazed by tradition, she was described by Woolf as an “uncastrated cat.”  New York Review of Books, 2023-10-05

There you go.

There is a woman composer of an opera who is being denied her rightful place in the repertoire of established musical companies.

 

 

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Profound Contrived Authencity: Little Bird (the MiniSeries)

Together, they reached for what Moscovitch calls “profound authenticity,” and created an opportunity for narrative activism: the idea that victims can help heal their trauma and change attitudes by telling their stories.  Globe & Mail

I don’t mind if someone wants to make a film or mini-series that “will help heal trauma and change attitudes”.  Just don’t put it on my playlist.

Changing attitudes is not the mission of real art.  Real art is about expression, revelation, insight, and beauty.  The minute you say, “oh, and we want people to  adopt our political views”, you have sold out the aesthetic dimension to the social dimension.  To make a film to tell people what to think about the way indigenous people were treated in Canada is to make a bad film.  To make a film about the way indigenous people were treated in Canada, just make a good film.  And if you are authentic about it, tell us what you know about the subject: not what you want us to think. And be honest: don’t caricature or exaggerate or make things up just to drive your point home.  Watch a film like “Come Sunday” which makes its point without dumbing down the issues.

So when my wife asked me to find the series “Little Bird” for her to watch, I checked it out.  I thought, it might be good.  I might want to watch it.  I looked for reviews on line and found the “review” (it’s not a review: it’s a press release disguised as news) linked above.

I suspect this series is about making liberal viewers feel great about themselves: I watched a sad story about injustice and felt bad for the victims for I am a good person.

I watched the first ten minutes.  As I feared, it starts by showing the girls who were abducted by the Canadian Child Family Services and RCMP living in nearly idyllic conditions with their happy affectionate parents.   Even worse: there’s that jerky hand-held camera work that immediately conveys “oh look how authentic we are we’re pretending we’re actually filming the real thing which wouldn’t be possible if we had a tripod” vibe.

I am immediately repulsed by most films that show parents being incredibly tolerant and affectionate and patient and loving with their kids as a setup for imminent tragedy or threat.  Nobody interacts with their children the way these parents do.  It’s manipulative and dishonest.  It is the hallmark of bad direction.  And that is how “Little Bird” starts.

In “Little Bird,” Bezhig is driven by her newly emerging repressed memories.  Variety

Oh no.  Seriously?  We’ve been through this movie before and it did not turn out well.  Not at all.    Not this time either.

Podemski: We looked at all the various ways in which trauma presents itself. Especially when it has been repressed for many years . We worked with our two story advisors, Nakuset and Raven Sinclair, who supported us in shaping the way in which our lead character, Esther, experienced PTSD through intrusive memory. We were able to express this authentically through the use of acoustic and visual layers which I think played very authentically throughout the story.

Okay, firstly, it’s not the trauma that has been repressed but the memory of it.  And memories are not repressed.  That is a fake trope from the 1980’s that has pretty well lost all credibility.   And the method by which they decided to tell the story of the “repressed” memories sounds more like therapy than art.  But please don’t try to claim anything like “authenticity” when you are clearly constructing a narrative that projects a political and social idea rather than any particular real human experience.

 

A CBC article on the movie contains this flag:

WARNING: This story contains distressing details

Oh please fuck off with your trigger warnings.   This is bullshit.  What kind of news is “distressing”?    A man falsely accused of rape while feminists claim that women never lie about sexual assault?  Al Franken resigning his seat in the Senate over ridiculously trivial allegations of inappropriate behavior?  Tax-payer subsidized sports stadiums?  Music by Neil Diamond?  Senile white men running the U.S. government?   Prescription drugs developed at publicly-funded universities which cost pennies to manufacture selling for $30,000 a pop?

 

 

 

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Joan Baez’s Weird Homage to Slavery

Way back in 1971, Joan Baez released a double album called “Blessed Are”, which, in retrospect, may be one of the weirdest album releases of all time.

Blessed Are... (Joan Baez album - cover art).jpg

Joan Baez, in case you don’t remember or weren’t born yet, was a famous folk singer who became a prominent anti-war, anti-racism protest leader during the 1960’s, and an interpreter of Bob Dylan’s songs.  As a result, unsurprisingly, she pissed off a lot of patriotic war-loving Americans who regarded her, along with Jane Fonda, as treasonous dupes of the radical left.  They may not have liked John Lennon; they may have regarded Dylan with hostile indifference; they may have ignored Pete Seeger; but they hated Baez and Fonda with a toxic rage.

“Blessed Are” appears to be a peace offering of some kind, to southerners, patriots, farmers, and, perhaps, country music fans.    It featured a hit for Baez, “The Night They Drove old Dixie Down”, by Robbie Robertson of The Band (and subject of a bitter dispute between him and The Band’s drummer Levon Helm).

Levon Helm says in his autobiography:

“I remember taking him [Robertson] to the library so he could research the history and geography of the era and make General Robert E. Lee come out with all due respect.”

Helm was so bitterly annoyed by Baez’s version of “The Night They Drove old Dixie Down” that he refused afterwards to sing it in concert.  I wonder if he was more annoyed by her politics than anything else.  What musician gets upset when another artist makes a signature song more popular?

Anyway, to make General Lee come out with “all due respect”– all the respect due to a slave-owning General who led the war effort to preserve the institution of slavery– may strike some as a dubious cause.

Look at the lyrics:

Like my father before me, I’m a working man
I’m like my brother before me, I took a rebel stand
Well, he was just eighteen, proud and brave
When a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the blood below my feet,
You can’t raise a Cain back up with it’s in defeat

Some claim that the song is sympathetic to the Lost Cause ideology and defends slavery.  I think it does neither.  The fact that it was written by a Canadian should clue listeners in: this is an observational song, not propaganda for either side.  In fact, its observational qualities are acute and beautiful and tragic.

The album also has a song by Jagger and Richards, a paean to the “hard-working” average joe who always gets the short end of the stick.  And a tribute to a southern farmer friend with “the slowest drawl I’d ever heard” showing the narrator and friend around his beautiful farm.  There’s an intriguing song about apocalypse: Three Horses.

But let’s move on to “Lincoln Freed Me Today”.  If “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” seems ambiguous, “Lincoln Freed Me Today” is decidedly revisionist.

Been a slave most all my life
So’s my kids and so’s my wife
I been working on the Colonel’s farm
Aint been mistreated, aint done no harm…
The Colonel’s been right good to me
He’s taken care of my family

The Colonel rode his buggy in from town
Hitched his horse and called us all around
Said he couldn’t keep us here no more
I saw a tear as he walked toward the door

Wow!

I’m sure Baez did not have in mind the idea of rescuing slavery from the dustbin of history, or, giving us the positive side of antebellum culture.  I’m sure she thought, well, it’s a true picture of some slave-owners, and some slaves.  And one must be fair by presenting both sides of the issue.   But the “I saw a tear” is kind of repulsive.  That’s the image we’re supposed to take away from this kindly old slaveholder?

You see how convoluted we become.

The songwriter is variously credited as David Paton, David Patten, and David Paton.  It’s likely David Patton.  There’s very little information out there about him.

 

 

Ian and Sylvia do a just peachy version of this song.

 

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The Comedy of Being: Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (“Being and Time”) often reads like a parody of philosophy.   The first 35 pages are replete with repetitive (in my opinion) insistences that before you can analyze reality in any sense you must apprehend the being-ness of being there in the radical sense of existential being, which everybody else has failed to do.

I consider the idea that Heidegger may be a massive fraud.  I think it’s a possibility.  He is very, very esteemed in the world of cool philosophy geeks, but it is quite possible that they are entranced by Heidegger’s incomprehensibility being confused for “mystique”, combined with the language that is almost poetically inane.  “The being of being is the beingness of not-being authentically in a non-thematic ontological context that cannot be known.”  Ok.  I made that up– but it’s close.

It is quite possible that he has hit upon something that everybody already knows in a certain valid sense and has taken to describing it as if it is hidden from everyone else and must be revealed to them.  Don’t you see that we are all breathing?!  We’re all sucking air in and out of our lungs!  This has profound implications for all of life.  Read him long enough and you begin to think about your breathing.  Maybe you try breathing differently.  Two exhales for every inhale.  Try breathing through one nostril at a time.  What if I stop breathing?  By golly, he’s right: breathing is incredibly important.  We all need to think about breathing.

He is his own best argument for Wittgenstein’s argument that the world is comprised entirely of facts.  What we believe to be reality is always and only a construct of the language we use to express our experience of it.   How does Heidegger know that everyone else does not know what he knows about being?  He offers no explanation.  He only knows the language that others have used to describe time and existence and phenomena but he really has no explanation of how he can possibly know that the way this language is used is inadequate to explain the authentic meaning of being.

He seems at times to assume we have a reason for believing there are others in the world, yet I have not seen the slightest discussion of the senses through which we experience others, and the world itself.  He seems to insist that we cannot really know if they have a real existence outside of our imagination, just as he doesn’t seem to be concerned about how time can be explained if we only barely understand the meaning of our own “being there” or Dasein.   Is time linear?  Is time atomic?  Is time continuous?  I’m at page 113.  I’ll let you know if I find an answer.

According to Heidegger, Western Philosophy has it all wrong because it has skipped the most essential truth which is that “being” itself, or “being there”,  or “Dasein”, is the proper subject of philosophy and has been almost entirely ignored, at least, since the Greeks.  He is going to rescue us from this terrible omission.  Get out of your car, burn your records and books, change your diet and haircut: we have  no way to experience the world.  Being there.

Let’s get this out of the way right from the start: Heidegger believes that Western Philosophy has forgotten the essential character of “Dasein” but what it is it has forgotten, he can’t seem to remember.

There it is.  I summed up Heidegger that way at Trinity Christian College 45 years ago and I stand by it.

What prompted this reflection is my reckless urge to revisit “Being and Time” now that I have experienced a lot more of both.  I am in my 60’s and haven’t looked at this book since I was in a philosophy course taught by Dr. John Roose at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois, back in 1973.  It is the only course I ever took anywhere which I did not complete, and for which I received an “F”.   It wasn’t the difficulty:  “Contemporary Philosophy” taught by Dr. Vrieze was far more challenging– and satisfying– and of course I did well in it.  I still remember a considerable chunk of that course, on Paul Feyerabend, Imre Lakatos, Karl Popper, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others.  Feyerabend was the first philosopher I read that convinced me that it actually was possible for 2 x 2 to not equal 4.  And Karl Popper’s discussions of paradigms is still very useful to me.

But here’s a line from Martin Heidegger that I think you might find as amusing as I do (from “Being and Time”, translated by Joan Stambaugh, page 35):

Because phenomenon in the phenomenological understanding is always just what constitutes being, and furthermore because being is always the being of beings , we must first of all bring beings themselves forward in the right way, if we are to have any prospect of exposing being.

In regard to Kant, one question that remains: if we can never know a thing in itself– only our empirical experience of that object– does it matter?  If we can never know the thing in itself, then, really, does it even exist?    And so if Heidegger insists that we don’t apprehend Dasein– being itself– does it even exist?  More critically, does it matter?  Heidegger seems to believe that we can encounter Dasein if we cast off our archaic beliefs.  This makes him a superman, since he is the only one who knows about Dasein and he is here to enlighten us.  (In fairness, he does credit some other philosophers– even Kant– with having a diminished idea of Dasein).  But again, given his explanations of how we are ignorant of the decisive importance of Dasein, how can he possibly know anything about others’ experience of it?

All this so far and I haven’t even mentioned that Heidegger was a Nazi.

 

 

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President Jill Biden

The only way Joe Biden gets re-elected president is if his opponent is Donald Trump.

The only way Donald Trump gets elected president is if his opponent is Joe Biden.

The history of aging, increasingly feeble presidents with younger, more vigorous wives is not reassuring.  And it is reassuring.  In some cases, as with Nancy Reagan and Eleanor Roosevelt , the results may be anodyne.  In the case of Woodrow Wilson in 1919, the result may have been catastrophic.

Jill Biden is a medical doctor.  She seems pretty smart, pretty capable.  If Joe Biden becomes enfeebled while president, if he suffers a stroke, if he is barely capable of leaving his bed, it would not shock me to see a situation similar to the Woodrow Wilson situation in 1919 develop.  Jill Biden relates Biden’s “directives” to his senior staff and does not permit any of them to directly converse with the ailing president.  When questions are raised, the president’s own physician reports to the cabinet and the vice-president that he is perfectly mentally capable of issuing instructions, even if, perhaps, he is not, really.   In that situation, Jill Biden speaks with the presumed authority of her husband, and it would difficult for others to bypass her to determine directly if the president is actually capable of executing his office.

The government, of course, is, for all practical purposes, actually run by the hundreds of high-level officials, White House staff, and cabinet appointees.  The president sets his agenda by appointing like-minded people to positions of power.  They will know what to do.

When it might matter, of course, is in a situation that demands a military response.  China might very well consider an ailing president vulnerable to aggressive moves by competing powers.  China might make a move on Taiwan.  Putin might become more aggressive in Ukraine.   Cuba might finally invade Miami.

It could all turn out well.  Jill Biden might be a wise and effective leader.  But she would not have been elected to be president.  Constitutionally, the cabinet and vice-president should meet to determine if Biden continues to be fit for office.  They could demand, perhaps, that an independent physician examine the president.

Here’s the thing:  it will be in the interests of many in the top echelons of political power to maintain the illusion that Biden continues to execute his office.  They were appointed by him.  They derive their power and status from that appointment.  His replacement may replace them.   His replacement may be politically weaker than he is.   Even the opposition party may be reluctant to see the presidency handed over to a younger potentially more appealing candidate.  (Right now, the thinking is that Kamala Harris is not a strong potential candidate, but given a year or two in office, who knows?)

People love to imagine unlikely scenarios and play them out but this one is strikingly possible.  It appears that Trump will be Biden’s opponent in 2024 and it is not unlikely that Biden, despite current polling, prevails in the swing states, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona.  He probably only needs one of them to win, whereas Trump needs all four.

He is obviously already suffering from various age-related challenges, physically and mentally.  It is difficult to imagine him surviving a debate with Donald Trump except for the fact that Donald Trump (strikingly, today, in an interview with Kristen Welker of NBC) also appears to be showing age-related challenges.

Here’s a prediction: neither of them agrees to a debate.

 

 

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Best Joke in Dr. Strangelove

The best joke in Stanley Kubrick’s insanely brilliant “Dr. Strangelove” is not, as is widely repeated, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here: this is The War Room”.  It’s not a bad joke.  I always thought it was a bit obvious given the pedigree of the rest of the movie, but it’s okay.

The best joke is when the President demands of General Turgidson how a mentally unfit General could possibly have launched a nuclear attack on Russia all by himself, without presidential authorization.  Turgidson responds  with this:

I think I’d like to hold off judgment on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in…I don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn the whole program because of a single slip up, sir.

The absolute brilliance of those lines lies in the allusion to standard business and political wisdom: don’t judge until you have all the facts.  This pedestrian axiom is familiar to everyone, widely accepted, and almost applicable to situations in which a “slip up” has relative anodyne consequences.

To insert this line in the middle of an intense discussion of actions that may, as a consequence, result in total war with the Russians and ultimately annihilation of the human race, is more than just schadenfreude.  It is profoundly revelatory about the nature of the nuclear arms race and politics.  It hammers home profoundly the fact that these incredibly powerful weapons, capable of wiping out all life on the planet, are the hands of mere men, and “Dr. Strangelove” reveals to us just how absurdly unqualified the men who control these systems are, how petty, and clumsy, and sometimes stupid, and how the consequences of their short-comings can actually result in the destruction of the world.

Let me say that, on the surface, these men, Muffley, Turgidson, Ripper, Mandrake, and the others, would appear to the public to be competent, intelligent, and rational.  But when Ripper talks about the threats to our bodily fluids and President Muffley argues with Premiere Kissov over just who is the most sorry about the turn of events, and Bat Guano tells Mandrake that he is going to have to answer to the Coca Cola Company, we realize that humans are just too wrapped up in our immediate concerns and perspectives to comprehend the majesty and might of nuclear weapons.

This motif resurfaces time and time again through-out the movie.

Another line that is far funnier than the war room quip.  Turgidson, after hearing a description of the new Soviet weapon that can destroy the entire world, says “Gee, I wish we had one of them Doomsday Machines, Stainsey”.

And this why “Dr. Strangelove” is, perhaps, the greatest film of all time, and the one that is most relevant to our current age.  You could substitute climate change, pandemics, massive bank failures, whatever you like for nuclear war and you would have same fundamental factors at play: foolish men with constricted perspectives making decisions of extreme consequence for the human race.

And the nuclear issue remains.

 

 

 

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Figaro

I recently read an article (can’t remember where– the Atlantic?) that described, with adoration, the conclusion of the opera “The Marriage of Figaro” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  This article went to argue that “The Marriage of Figaro” is one of the greatest artistic achievements of Western Civilization.  I decided I must see it.  One must be cultured.

There is a wonderful version on Youtube by Glyndebourne Festival Opera– with subtitles!  Here’s another.  You want subtitles because “The Marriage of Figaro” is in Italian and songs don’t generally translate well from one language to another.  You want to know what’s happening.

I will summarize the plot because I want to try to remember the basic plot points and regurgitating it is a good way to do that.

Okay, so here we go.  Figaro is a servant to the Count.  The Count has just abolished le droit de seigneur to the delight of his citizens.  This, of course, is the mythical right of a lord to have the first sex with a subordinate woman on her wedding night.  Figaro is especially delighted because he wishes to marry a fellow servant, hand-maiden to the Countess, Susanna.   The Count, however, realizing he has missed an opportunity, attempts to rescind abolishment at least for one case: Susanna.  Meanwhile, a mischievous servant, Cherubino, has been roaming around the castle making out with lots of women, and even has his eye on Susanna as well.  The Count knows about him and wants to send him off to join the army, but the Countess and Susanna decide to dress him up as a woman so he can hide from the Count.

The Countess is upset about the Count chasing other women so she and Susanna plot together.  Susanna will send a note to the Count agreeing to meet secretly in the garden that night.  The Countess will dress up as Susanna on her wedding night, wearing her veil, and then wait there instead, trapping the Count.  Susanna will dress up as the Countess.  Figaro doesn’t know about the plan and thinks, at first, that Susanna is about to betray him.  Somehow, he finds out she is not (there are lot of overheard conversations in this opera), but Susanna doesn’t know that Figaro knows that it is her dressed as the Countess.  Figaro decides to have some fun and pretends to be hitting on the Countess.  An angry Susanna whacks him a few times until he admits he knew who she was right away.  The Count, meanwhile, does believe that Figaro was hitting on his wife, the Countess and calls in the guards to arrest them.  That’s when his wife shows up revealing the Count’s nefarious scheme.  The Count asks for forgiveness and everyone is happy.  They sing a lovely song together.

That’s the song the writer raved about:  Pian pianin le andrò più presso.

Or is it “Contessa Perdono”?  I am not sure how Opera segments are organized and I don’t feel like taking the time to find out.  There are lists and references to tracks and then to arias and recitatives and duets, and then subtitles referring to specific passages, I think.

In Amadeus, Salieri speaks about “Figaro” in the same vein as the piece in the Atlantic:

The restored third act is bold, brilliant. The fourth… was astounding. l saw a woman disguised in her maid’s clothes hear her husband speak the first tender words he’d offered her in years. Simply because he thinks she is someone else.

l heard the music of true forgiveness filling the theatre… conferring on all who sat there perfect absolution.

God was singing through this little man to all the world. Unstoppable. Making my defeat more bitter with every passing bar.

Anyway.  Here’s my take-aways from watching the entire 3 hours.

One of the greatest works of art in history?  Seriously?  The music is absolutely fabulous, of course, but the comedy is very broad, very obvious, and the characters are cardboard cut-outs, really.  One does get “into it” if you watch it patiently, and it is fairly enjoyable, but I would not rank it even against the movie about the composer, “Amadeus”, which, to me, was far more profound, far more insightful, and richer and deeper.

It is interesting to hear praise for the last act, the reconciliation scene, which kind of trivializes the philandering going on.  All is forgiven.  “Perfect absolution”.  Let’s get back to the party and enjoy the frivolous pleasures of flirtation and– well, fucking.  I don’t object to Mozart’s take on the issue– I mean, it is a comedy.  But I wonder if the admiring audience shares his Woody Alan-esque view of love and romance?

But if you were trying to sell the “perfect absolution” is this context, you could never beat the musical setting of that piece: it is exquisite.

 

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Permission to Vent

Did you know that in the 1960’s, while all of the mainstream media devoted their sports sections to professional baseball, football, basketball, stockcar racing, and hockey, the sport that attracted the most actual fans– in person, in stadiums– was…. ready for it?  Demolition derbies.

In politics, the whacky far right is the demolition derby of ideologies.  Until recently, relegated to the back pages of history.

In spite of all the think-pieces about polarization in American politics, I really think the issue comes down to something much simpler.

Firstly, there has not been a massive change in attitudes or beliefs over the past 70 or 80 years.  A large segment of the U.S. population has always held stupid ideas about culture, education, leadership, the military, and the police.  And, of course, race.  They love guns, hate affirmative action, can’t bear the thought of giving up their massive V-8 powered pick-up trucks, fear black people even if they don’t see themselves as racist (and some aren’t), and hate the idea of foreigners coming into the country and taking away their jobs while they themselves are unwilling to work hard for long hours to get ahead and there is a labour shortage in most areas of the country.  They believe that good manufacturing jobs have been shipped over-seas even though 85% of them were lost to automation.  They believe Republicans when they say they intend to reduce the deficit even though, when in office, they never have and never will.  They seem to think that cutting taxes on the rich will benefit them, because, fuck it, some day I might win the lottery.

Until recently, people with toxic beliefs about society have intuited that they shouldn’t openly express those views because the consensus among politicians, the media, and other leaders is that those views are, in fact, untrue, toxic, and counter-productive, and ignorant.

They always believe crime is on the increase.  Always.   Try to explain to them that if crime was always increasing it would eventually reach 100%, so there must be times when it is actually decreasing (in fact, the crime rate is up only in year-over-year statistics.  Over a longer period of time, it is down, by a clear margin).

They think that somehow making the bail system rational increases crime: no study has shown this.  Not one.

Newt Gingrich came along, and Alex Jones, and Rush Limbaugh, and then Donald Trump, and they all publicly expressed massive approval of these toxic beliefs.  The internet broke the consensus among major media outlets to not give play to ill-founded, idiotic conspiracy theories.  Now every ignorant, ill-informed jack-ass in the country can search online to find that the cause of the wild-fires in California is Jewish space lasers or sun spots.

Try to explain to these people that international trade agreements, on the whole, benefit them.  (Essentially, the lower cost of imported goods frees capital within the local market to pay for more goods, services, and other items which you otherwise could not afford.  Free trade is a net benefit to the average American worker and consumer.  Tariffs take money out of your pocket and give it to the government which in turn subsidizes corporations to the benefit of wealthy shareholders.)

People haven’t changed.  They are just louder and more outspoken and more than happy to enlighten you as to their brilliant insights into the nature of reality and the truth about Biden and the international child porn conspiracy and Hollywood’s Jewish cabal and they way young school-children in small towns all across Iowa are being provided with litter boxes so they can “identify” as a transgender kitten.

Perhaps the most bizarre characteristic of these people is their close identification with Christianity.  Do any of them actually read the Bible?  Do they really see something in Jesus reflected in Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity?  Do they really think God blesses them as they storm the capitol building and threaten to hang Mike Pence?

 

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Farewell, Your Irrelevant Highness

Well, farewell to the “The Queen”.

She seemed liked a very nice lady. I like that she learned to be a mechanic 80 years ago. But when people say she did a “great job” I can’t, for the life of me, think of anything she actually “did”, other than, basically, pose for tourists, pose as a tourist, dub things this or dub things that, wave, and stay out of the way of Parliament. As a mother… well… the results are decidedly mixed. And considering the obscene industry her like has inspired– the cult of privileged , narcissistic, self-centred white princesses (don’t kid yourself about the token ethnic entries on the market)– , Disney should have paid her salary.

I doubt that 4-year-old girls will ever aspire to be King Charles III. They might ask for the King Charles dress for birthdays or Christmas (it’s a “kilt”, dearie).

Historically, the best solution to regicide? Make ourselves irrelevant.