A few covers showing the Joker, who undoubtedly loves April Fools’ Day. I doubt anyone wants to be on the end of his pranks though.
Neal Adams
Jerry Robinson from the Joker’s debut.
Here Dick Giordano shows us the Joker in his own book
And Randy Elliott for an issue of Batman Scooby-Doo Mysteries.
About 10 months ago, an agent doing a writing workshop told me the opening of Let No Man Put Asunder didn’t give any idea of the genre and I should fix that. As I said at the link, I don’t see that as a problem for stuff published through my Behold the Book imprint. Readers are going to see a cover image and read the back-cover copy so they won’t look at the first page and assume it’s a mainstream story about a kid who dropped out of college and now works in a greasy spoon.
The same for Southern Discomfort. It’s not got any magic on the first couple of pages, and no definite magic even through the first chapter. However readers will know when they pick it up or see the Amazon listing that it’s specfic, rather than a historical novel about a female fugitive.
Showing the magic up front won’t work in either case. The protagonists are ordinary people about to be sucked into the supernatural; until that point they have no reason to know magic exists (as Maria in Southern Discomfort protests very loudly at several points). In some stories you can have weird shit happening from the get-go even if the protagonist doesn’t know the reason; these two books are not that kind of story. Originally I started Southern Discomfort with the murder of Aubric McAlister, cluing the reader in to the basic premise of the book. Feedback convinced me that was too slow a start, without sufficient tension; Maria’s story’s got tension in spades.
It’s perfectly legit to start a fantasy novel with mundane scenes, provided their interesting. Much as I like the magical goings on in Pharisee County, I think Maria’s character arc is a stronger hook. The magic is essential to the story and becomes more so as things get crazier. Still, it’s more about ordinary people stuck in the middle of a magic war than the magic war itself.
Which brings me to the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. After completing my viewing for Watching Jekyll and Hyde, I’ve come to appreciate even more how good this film is (though the abuse subplot is horrifying. Consider that your trigger warning).
In a 90-minute film, it takes us half an hour before Edward Hyde comes on stage. Several movies do that, introducing Jekyll, his fiancee/dream girl/wife and the nature of his research before getting to the transformation. A lot of them are boring with uninteresting, undramatic pre-Hyde scenes. They’re a long establishing shot that sets things up but accomplishes nothing else.
Not in this one, thanks to Rouben Mamoulian’s direction and Fredric March’s performance. We open with a Jekyll’s eye-view of his life — his elegant home, his devoted butler — and that unconventional viewpoint makes it way more interesting than it would be otherwise. Then we watch March’s Jekyll lecture to an astounded audience about his vision of splitting off our evil side so that we can enjoy lives of pure goodness. As I explain in my book there are huge flaws in this idea (what are the pure evil sides going to be doing?) but Mamoulian makes it visually fascinating. Then we cut to Jekyll’s charity clinic where his medical genius enables a girl on crutches to cast them aside and walk — a classic miracle as the ultimate proof of his goodness.
We shift to the Carew dinner party where Jekyll’s future father-in-law dresses him down for being late, then he and Muriel (Rose Hobard) snatch a quiet scene alone. March was best known at that point as a romantic lead; alternating between dreams of passion and whimsy he keeps the scene arresting (Hobard’s not a bad actor but her role doesn’t give her much to work with). The result? It’s a good movie even before Hyde enters.
I don’t know if I can create anything that intense in my opening. I’m certainly shooting for it.
Filed under Story Problems, Writing
As I do every year, I trekked down to Greenville SC this past weekend for the Piedmont Area Mensa regional gathering. While the drive is typically four hours — a little longer this time, I think age is slowing me down — it’s worth it. For example I got to meet PAM’s newest member Griffin.
Griffin is an Irish wolfhound. Quite large. Mellow and friendly.
It’s the PAM gathering’s 50th “golden” anniversary which meant lots of gold everywhere —
I gave a presentation, as I usually do. To fit with the theme, I looked at the James Bond films and how they changed over time by focusing on the changes from Goldfinger to The Man With the Golden Gun to Goldeneye.
The past couple of years I spent a fair amount of time in my hotel room, enjoying the pleasure of being alone. It’s something that doesn’t happen much at home. This year I was having too much fun chatting with friends, occasional Mensan strangers, sometimes random hotel guests. I’d have thought after dealing with Plushie’s diarrhea for two weeks I’d be craving more isolation but no. I had a great time being out and about.
I also competed in Blonde Bowl, a trivia game where the end of every question is the low-point “blonde clue” giving the answer away For example (not taken from this weekend), a detailed description of a baseball player’s career that ends with “…name this iconic player immortalized on screen in The Jackie Robinson Story, Jackie Robinson — All American, and The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson.“ This year I was on the winning team though my personal performance wasn’t as good as it sometimes is.
It was a great weekend though it’s good to be back with TYG and the pets, too.
Filed under Personal
According to Speaker of the House Mike “biblical worldview” Johnson, Americans misunderstand the separation of church and state: it’s supposed to let Johnson and people who share his worldview import their religion into government while protecting them from any government restriction.
Okay, that’s not how he puts it, but that is the gist. It’s Wilhoit’s Law again: government binds other faiths and doesn’t protect them; it protects conservative Christians but doesn’t bind them (much as he believes calling Republicans Nazis is bad but he’s fine when the shoe’s on the other foot). I’d quip that this proves Johnson’s the one who doesn’t understand but I suspect he’s more likely lying.
How does he put it? Quoting from the linked article: “To the contrary, the Founders wanted to protect the church and the religious practice of citizens from an encroaching state, not the other way around,” Johnson maintained, telling the audience that “our Founders understood that a free society and a healthy republic depend upon religious and moral virtue [to] help prevent the abuse of power [and] make it possible to preserve our essential freedom.”
I will state the obvious first: Johnson’s a devoted toady to the Toddler in Chief. Last week he gave the Toddler a made-up award for “solving all the domestic problems” (he hasn’t) and bringing on “the new golden era in America” (it isn’t). Ergo, Johnson doesn’t value moral virtue, nor does he object to the abuse of power.
Now, as to the main point of my post: yes, the Founders valued “religious and moral virtue” but those were the responsibility of churches — it wasn’t the government’s job to be the national chaplain. The government had no business enacting religious doctrine in law or laying down any sort of religious laws.
They’d also seen state churches in operation back in Europe and they saw where it led: violence, repression, revolution and civil war. They knew the only way to protect “the religious practice of citizens” was to keep government from aligning with any one faith or sect. As soon as the state does that, other faiths are in peril. As JFK put it when running for president in 1960: “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”
Republicans have made it clear it’s attacks on their religious liberty — which almost always means nothing more than their freedom to hurt the people they hate — that they care about. Rep. Andy Ogles declared recently religious pluralism is dead and we should deport all Muslims. Johnson sides with Ogles, declaring they have to prevent the threat of sharia law — which is not a threat in this country (and calling for mass deportation is about bigotry, not about sharia). And if pluralism is dead, it won’t stop with Muslims — it’ll be whichever sects Ogles or Johnson thinks do not qualify as Christian enough for a Christian state. Not to mention people like Christian theocrat William Wolfe, who thinks its Christian to keep America white and that it’s his right to impose his concept of Christian law on everyone else. Or the Christians who claim it’s godly to deny women the vote or that we shouldn’t tolerate non-believers in America. “White Christian nationalism doesn’t protect Christians. It decides which ones deserve protections and which ones can be discarded.”
Does anyone imagine Johnson or Ogles would meekly accept if some branch of the Christian faith that disagreed with them began imposing its policies on a God Says So basis? They’d scream with outrage that their religious freedom was violated. Any pretense this is a principle rather than Wilhoit’s Law is bullshit. Just look at the outraged reaction to liberal Christian James Talarico.
The defense the religious right sometimes makes is that sure, the Toddler may be a shitbag, but God can use shitty people to accomplish good things. This does not excuse them staying silent when he does evil things — because he’s still a shitbag. As witness Paul Campos’ discussion of the Toddler embodying all the deadly sins, followed by this quote from Virginia Heffernan:
“The president is not a moral figure in any idiom, any land, any culture, any subculture. I’m not talking about the liberal enlightenment that would make him want the country to take care of the poor and sick. I mean he has no Republican values either. He has no honor among thieves, no cosa nostra loyalty, no Southern code against cheating or lying, none of the openness of New York, rectitude of Boston, expressiveness and kindness of California, no evangelical family values, no Protestant work ethic. No Catholic moral seriousness, no sense of contrition or gratitude. No Jewish moral and intellectual precision, sense of history. He doesn’t care about the life of the mind OR the life of the senses. He is not mandarin, not committed to inquiry or justice, not hospitable. He is not proper. He is not a bon vivant who loves to eat, drink, laugh. There’s nothing he would die for — not American values, obviously, but not the land of Russia or his wife or young son. He has some hollow success creeds from Norman Vincent Peale, but Peale was obsessed with fair-dealing and a Presbyterian pastor; Trump has no fairness or piety. He’s not sentimental; no affection for dogs or babies. No love for mothers, “the common man,” veterans. He has no sense of military valor, and is openly a coward about war. He would have sorely lacked the pagan beauty and capacity to fight required in ancient Greece. He doesn’t care about his wife or wives; he is a philanderer but he’s not a romantic hero with great love for women and sex. He commands loyalty and labor from his children not because he loves them, even; he seems almost to hate them — and if one of them slipped it would be terrifying. He does no philanthropy. He doesn’t — in a more secular key — even seem to have a sense of his enlightened self-interest enough to shake Angela Merkel’s hand. Doesn’t even affect a love for the arts, like most rich New Yorkers. He doesn’t live and die by aesthetics and health practices like some fascists; he’s very ugly and barely mammalian.”
Filed under Politics
T. Kingfisher’s THORNHEDGE opens with a nervous, ugly fairy watching over a castle. She’s cut it off from the world with a thick wall of thorns, almost everyone’s forgotten it’s even there — only now a Saracen warrior has arrived, determined to find a way in and awaken the princess Which would be a Very Very Very Bad Thing … (a twist that’s been used at least once previously).
As my short story “Obolos” is a Sleeping Beauty riff I was curious what Kingfisher would do with the tale, and if they’d be too much alike. Nope: very different approaches (phew). I liked it, though the nature of the unspeakable monster felt a little off to me (for my taste she’s too powerful for the given origin).
While I saw British pantomime as a kid, I only remember bits of it. Becoming curious (for reasons too convoluted to explain) I checked Millie Taylor’s BRITISH PANTOMIME PERFORMANCE out of the library. Less of a historical perspective than I’d hoped for but a good look at the odd mix of fairytale riff, cross-dressing, slapstick. topical humor and musical that created this distinctive, much beloved form of stage entertainment. Taylor looks at how increasing costs have affected everything from the size of the dance troupe to the “slosh scenes” (slapstick) — sure, a pie fight might be cheap, but cleaning it up later can get pricey. The book looks at the way the pantomime cast invites the audience to participate (while carefully controlling their involvement), the key roles, the different methods for drawing an audience (from big name stars to local connections) and the occasional controversies — apparently some companies are nervous about the tradition of a woman playing the male lead role because they worry it gives the main romance a lesbian overtone (I’d be more freaked out over the Chinese stereotypes in Aladdin). A solid job analyzing the genre.
While TOPPER is novelist Thorne Smith’s most famous work, I’ve never particularly cared for it; as my Genre Book Club was doing “satire” this month I picked it up again and … nope (much as I love the movie).
Cosmo Topper is a successful banker smothering in his own stuffy respectability and the burden of his manipulative, hangdog wife. To perk himself up, he buys the car in which free spirits George and Marion Kerby died recently, drives by the scene of their death and oops, discovers he now has them for a companion. Having two drunken ghosts causing chaos around him soon makes Topper a pariah; not to worry, off he goes for a long, hedonistic vacation accompanied by Marion (George having duties elsewhere). However all vacations have to end …
The movie had the advantage of Cary Grant in the lead; more than that, it has a clear story arc — the Kerbys are stuck on Earth because they’ve never accomplished anything worthwhile so they set out to make Topper’s stuffy life worth living. Here, they drift along until the Kerbys run out of ectoplasm and have to leave. We soon drop the idea of Cosmo becoming a scandal in favor of him drifting through life for a while — and the book drifts with him. And much like James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen, the happy ending of Cosmo realizing his rather miserable marriage isn’t all that bad doesn’t convince. Overall it’s a dry run for better work by Smith later; I’m curious if the sequel, Topper Takes a Trip, improves on it as it’s the one Smith fantasy I haven’t read. Not curious enough to check it out just yet, though.
All rights to images remain with current holders.
Filed under Reading
Back in 2011, I began (re)watching all of Woody Allen’s movies, in order, starting with 1966’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? For some arcane reason, a number of his 1990s films weren’t available unless I shelled out for a DVD. When I discovered 1997’s DECONSTRUCTING HARRY was available on Netflix, I plugged one gap. While Allen is a hideous human being — friend of Jeffrey Epstein, married to his former partner’s adoptive daughter, allegedly assaulted underage Dylan Farrow (I include “allegedly” not because I doubt it but I sometimes worry about saying something libelous) — I do like his movies. Not so much his 1990s output so I was surprised how much I liked this one.
Harry (Allen) is a brilliant (of course) writer with a penchant for mining his personal life for thinly veiled roman a clef stories, complete with versions of the people involved (including Billy Crystal as a romantic rival and Julia Louise-Dreyfuss and Amy Irving as past relationships). They’re recognizable enough that many of them are pissed about it; others are pissed that he’s been an uncontrollable lecher since his teenage years (“We don’t know if there’s a god, but there are women.”), never faithful and now in a snit that his very young ex Fay (Elizabeth Shue) is marrying someone else.
Why yes, it does seem to be a confession of sorts, though nothing Harry does as bad as the worst Allen’s been accused of. Then again, his comment about using writing to settle scores reminds me of the vindictive streak in some of his 21st century films such as Blue Jasmine and An Irrational Man. “Boy, you must really love onions.”
TURA (2024) is a documentary on Tura Satana, the mixed-race Asian American/Native American burlesque dancer turned actor who found fame with Faster Pussycat, Kill … Kill! This follows her from a gang rape when she was nine into burlesque, acting, martial arts, parenthood, revenge on her rapists (“Over the news few years she tracked them down and beat them to a pulp.”), a list of lovers include Forrest Tucker, Tony Bennett and Elvis Presley and then a late-in-life revival when her movies became big on videotape.
While Ms. Satana is a fascinating figure, the documentary is flawed. As one friend of mine pointed out online, you’d think Faster Pussycat was something in the spirit of Thelma and Louise when Satana’s character is a violent killer, more villain than anti-hero. There are other puzzles too — the film says Satana has no Japanese ancestry (her kids did a DNA checkup) but my friend says her Japanese/Filipino ancestry is well documented. Interesting but not definitive. “In our day men beat the fuck out of women — no woman beat the fuck out of men.”
All rights to images remain with current holders.
Filed under Movies
It appears Plush Dudley’s diarrhea drama is over.
Certainly it’s much reduced. He’s stopped pooping on the bed in the night and the accidents he did have this week were small before they dried up completely. It appears the root cause was pancreatitis reacting to too much fat in his diet — so from now on, it’s low fat diet for Plush Dudley. Cheerio, veggies, low fat kibble, low fat soft food (we’d already bought some for Trixie for similar reasons). And rice mixed in with soft food to help firm up his stool. Fortunately Plushie’s perfectly happy to eat Cheerios and vegetable chunks (and rice) so we don’t have to deny him treats.
On the plus side, he’s been so lively this week, it’s been amazing. Even before the problem went away, he was bounding around, wrestling with Trixie, walking with a bounce in his step. Possibly he’s feeling better than he has in a while. Also possibly, losing around four pounds has made him lighter and his joints less strained — lord knows I’d have a lot less bulk to move if I lost 20 percent of my body mass.
Dealing with diarrhea the first couple of days was demanding, especially as TYG had some stuff of her on she needed to get done. While I miss the weekly payments from The Local Reporter I would have gotten nothing of my own stuff done this week if I’d been covering Carrboro. I applied for a couple of telecommuting reporting gigs I found online, no answer yet. I’ll keep applying. Much as I like writing fiction, I also like bringing in money.
As to my own work, I got another 8,000 words on the second draft of Let No Man Put Asunder. So far it’s proceeding smoothly and I like my output. I also started two new stories when I wasn’t quite ready to do more on Asunder. Good Morning Starshine is a rewrite of a novel I wrote the first draft of years ago, then never got back to. Recently I’ve been trying without success, due to being unable to figure out the protagonist’s character. I’m not sure I’ve figured it out yet, but he does have a character and I’m forging forward with the strange story of a hippy heading to San Francisco for the Summer of Love, then finding she’s in 1987. Labyrinth of Books involves a disgruntled grad student stumbling into a strange bookstore with an even stranger salesclerk. I have no idea where this goes from there, though I did get past the part I’d plotted out in my head.
I also tackled the usual range of chores including taking the car in for a tire replacement and paying our vehicle registration online. Over at Atomic Junkshop I looked at what Marvel Comics publishes in the Marvel Universe—
— and at that mainstay of Silver Age Superman, the “imaginary” story.
I do hope the IRL demands on me and TYG ease up a little in April. Still, this wasn’t a bad week of writing given what I had to overcome.
Oh, and one cool thing: with Project Hail Mary in theaters, that Christian Science Monitor article quoting me about aliens is now live. I’m only one of the experts quoted — given how long the interview ran, I’m surprised Stephen Humphries didn’t use more (I guess when you work for a major newspaper, you can take the time). Still, that’s way cool.
Covers by Jack Kirby (top) and Carmine Infantino (bottom), all rights remain with current holders.
This one was from last Halloween.
This one’s just there.
Filed under Miscellanea
Heck, on Monday alone, we had the Toddler President declare Iran was negotiating peace, then Iran replied no, they weren’t. However I rarely write my posts the day they go live, so here we go. Fortunately these are less current updates than links to deeper insights.
Commenting on the Toddler’s lies about negotiating, Cheryl Rofer says “The best explanation for the words that drop from Trump’s mouth is that he tries things out to see what the marks will pick up. It’s not lying or fantasizing, but there’s not a simple word for it. I know that “bullshit” has been suggested in a specialized meaning, but the normal use interferes. It’s complicated by his need to always win, always humiliate his opponents. There is probably an element of fantasizing, but how he is perceived by others is also an important factor.”
People are betting on the progress of the war. They’ve threatened one journalist for refusing to change a story about a missile hitting Israel.
The Necrotic Toddler running this country has been talking about dead people walking around without legs. We have minesweepers we could use in the Straits; he and SecWar Hegseth didn’t think to put them in position before the war started.
“He told Welker how little he really cares about gas prices. Since this war started, gas has gone from $2.94 a gallon to $3.66. That’s a 72-cent jump in two weeks. People are already feeling it at the pump and growing increasingly concerned about how high it will go and how they will be able to cover the increasing costs. And when Welker asked Trump directly whether rising gas prices could hurt Republicans in the midterms, he said, “I’m not concerned at all.” He added, “There’s so much oil, gas, there’s so much out there, but you know, it’s being clogged up a little bit. It’ll be unclogged very soon.”
Related to the above: “Iranian attacks have knocked out 17% of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity, causing an estimated $20 billion in lost annual revenue and threatening supplies to Europe and Asia, QatarEnergy’s CEO and state minister for energy affairs told Reuters on Thursday.” But never mind, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is celebrating the Toddler’s ongoing effort to eliminate alternative energy in this country — “the era of affordable, reliable and secure energy is here to stay.” This is not only a lie, it’s a stupid lie. All their lies are because they have no way to grapple with reality.
“What we are seeing in just the first few days of the US bombing of Iran is no normal fog of war. It is unprecedented I would argue. We have seen arguably the worst friendly fire incident in modern US history, the worst articulations of war aims, the worst economic/industrial preparations for a war, and, tragically, what might very well be amongst the worst war crimes in US history. To have just one of these things in at the start of the war would be a failure, to have all of them….”
“This isn’t a case of oderint dum metuant — let them hate so long as they fear. Instead, the world increasingly holds America in contempt.” As witness Iranian officials declaring “Someone like us will never come to terms with someone like you.”
““It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” — Tulsi Gabbard, US intelligence head, trying to avoid saying anything that would upset the Toddler. Spoiler: yes, it is their responsibility.
Cheryl Rofer, who has some knowledge of nuclear issues, says attempting to recover Iran’s nuclear material would be a bad idea.
We already know Russia has a big influence on Putin’s Poodle. Paul Krugman points out how much influence petrostates such as Saudi Arabia have on policies from embracing fossil fuels to attacking Iran. “Why does Gulf oil money play an outsized role in U.S. corruption? Because petrostates, unlike advanced democracies, combine vast wealth with secrecy and a complete blurring of the lines between public office and private gain. So they’re better placed than anyone else to line U.S. officials’ pockets.”
Ukraine is offering us support with its expertise in drone warfare. Nevertheless Hegseth says we wouldn’t run out of munitions except Biden sent them all to the Ukraine. Hegseth also keeps on blaming the media for not gushing enough.
“For the moment the point is: Trump and Hegseth exult in seeing things blow up, as in a video game, and crowing like teenagers because they’ve “won.” That is not how this story is likely to end.”
“[Trump] also said that “Iran wants to make a deal,” but he has declined “because the terms aren’t good enough yet.” Today Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Tehran had not even asked for negotiations, let alone a ceasefire.”
Anyone who thinks we’re on the side of right in fighting for Iran — well, they’re probably happy we’re also embracing Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban.
“Nine former members of the bureau told Kramer it seems clear the administration did not prepare for a global oil crisis. Trump’s claim that “nobody expected” Iran to hit other countries in the Middle East supports their statement because, as they told Kramer, previous administrations planned for exactly that scenario.”
“Not only was the Bush administration exploiting an actual security threat, always better campaigners than governors they also engaged in an all-hands-on-deck propaganda campaign, having a popular president as the front man. Trump has none of this going for him, and it shows” — Scott Lemieux on how W’s White House built support for the Iraq invasion.
Republicans also seem to think they can punch down at Muslims as freely as the W administration did. And they’re repeating familiar bullshit claims about how they’re saving us from Sharia law.
That said, “The men who want to Make America Great Again are searching for a clean break from the Global War on Terror. That conflict was launched with lofty rhetoric about democracy and freedom but led to years of civil war, chaos, swollen ranks of terror groups, genocide, a refugee crisis and, in Afghanistan, a complete, humiliating failure. What these men don’t seem to realize, or care about, is that their language of brute force represents a fundamental break with American traditions around war going back to the Revolution.
“Boastful talk about slaughter is as old as war itself. “The wheels of my war chariot,” bragged one Assyrian king, “were bespattered with filth and blood. With the bodies of their warriors, I filled the plain, like grass.” But America’s founders asserted universal principles that should make such an attitude unthinkable. If you believe not only that all men are created equal but also that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, then war cannot be justified as a pure display of power and dominance.
In his addresses to the troops, George Washington would bring up the imagery of violence not as a spectacle to be enjoyed but as horrors to be endured — from “mercenary hirelings fighting in the cause of lawless ambition, rapine and devastation” to those who wished to keep revolutionary America in “bondage and misery.” And when news of British atrocities reached him, Washington wrote that “their wanton cruelty injures rather than benefits their cause; that, with our forbearance, justly secures to us the attachment of all good men.”
Given the Toddler and his party have shown themselves incapable of admitting defeat or course correcting, this will not go well, nor end well. Though of course the Toddler may not grasp this because his toadies’ job includes shielding him from reality, for example “briefing” him with a montage of shit blowing up (“the videos are also driving Trump’s increasing frustration with news coverage of the war. Trump has pointed to the success depicted in the daily videos to privately question why his administration can’t better influence the public narrative, asking aides why the news media doesn’t emphasize what he’s seeing, one of the current U.S. officials and the former U.S. official said.”). And we have Alan Dershowitz — friend of Jeffrey Epstein, ardent Toddler toady — declaring that just as the Toddler is saving us from Iran, he would have stopped the Holocaust. No, he wouldn’t.
Filed under Politics
“It appears Epstein was involved in criminal activity that went way beyond pedophilia and sex trafficking, which makes it even more outrageous that [Attorney General] Pam Bondi is sitting on several million unreleased files.”
Jeffrey Epstein talked a lot about pizza. That doesn’t mean pizzagate was real.
“Epstein argues that teaching children to write may be harmful because writing forces “linear” and “narrow” patterns of thinking, whereas the greatest thinkers never wrote.”
“Billionaires really like thinkers who see their exploitation of the weak as a good and natural thing.” — from a look at how Epstein came to influence the Edge intellectual conclave.
Edge member Stephen Pinker offers what he considers controversial ideas: “Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage … Do men have an innate tendency to rape … Are Ashkenazi Jews, on average, smarter than gentiles because their ancestors were selected for the shrewdness needed in money lending?” Got to say, I’ve never found ideas like these to be cutting edge (the rape thing, for instance, is bullshit) but I can see why a bunch of older white men might find them appealing.
“Rep. James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, has claimed that the Department of Justice intervened to block a state investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch in 2019.”
“The Justice Department has withheld some Epstein files related to allegations that President Trump sexually abused a minor, an NPR investigation finds. It also removed some documents from the public database where accusations against Jeffrey Epstein also mention Trump.”
“Democratic members of the Republican-led House Oversight Committee told reporters that Bondi, who was joined by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, would not commit to complying with the subpoena for her sworn testimony April 14 to answer questions about the Justice Department’s handling of records related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”
“The 2014 visit to Newport was not the first time Epstein tried to get his “girls” onto a Woody Allen set. Emails from the latest DOJ document release show that between 2010 and 2017, he attempted to influence or aid Allen’s casting process.”
How predators like Epstein can manipulate their victims into believing they have agency.
Filed under Politics, Undead sexist cliches
