Month: June 2024

The Supreme Court issued its ruling in Department of State v. Muñoz on Friday, and it is some magnificent assholery. Muñoz refers to Sandra Muñoz, an American citizen who married an undocumented Salvadoran named Luis Asencio-Cordero back in 2010. They have a child together.

Contrary to what you might think, marrying a U.S. citizen does not automatically confer citizenship on a foreigner. And things get very complicated when the foreigner has entered the United States illegally. Now, you might think it’s not such a bad thing to inconvenience people who violate our immigration laws, and I probably wouldn’t disagree with you. But, in this case, Mr. Ascencio-Cordero attempted to do things by the book. You see, in order to get the legal right to live in the United States he had to go back to El Salvador and talk to a consular affairs officer. But since he risked being denied reentry, and this would impair Ms. Muñoz liberty interest as a U.S. citizen, the couple first applied to the Department of Homeland Security for a waiver that would prevent him from being denied readmission.

The problem is that the consular offices are run by the Department of State, and while they use the same statutes as DHS, they don’t have the same standards. DHS officers have to provide a rather detailed rationale to anyone they reject, but the State Department merely has to cite a statute. In this case, the consular officer in El Salvador rejected Asencio-Cordero without specific cause, merely citing 8 U. S. C. §1182(a)(3)(A)(ii) to argue that he “planned to engage in ‘unlawful activity.'”

Explanations were sought, but none were forthcoming. New applications were filed, but they were also rejected. Appeals were made, but the State Department denied them.

Finally, a lawsuit compelled the State Department to disclose that Asencio-Cordero was denied access because the consular officer believed he was affiliated with the violent MS-13 gang. This was based on an apparent misunderstanding of the meaning of a tattoo. Asencio-Cordero isn’t a gang member; he was “a celebrated workers’ rights lawyer” in Los Angeles, California until he was banished from his wife and child.

Here’s the thing, though. The law is pretty clear that the courts cannot review consular decisions except in cases where those decisions affect a U.S. citizen’s fundamental rights. An appeals court ruled that Muñoz’s right to marriage was impermissibly denied when her husband wasn’t provided any reason for being denied reentry. But even the dissenting judges on the Supreme Court recognize that had the consular officer simply said he believed Asencio-Cordero was a gang member intent on committing crimes in the United States, that would not be reviewable. In other words, a mistaken belief that a tattoo signals gang membership is sufficient to screw over this family. At issue is whether you can string an American citizen along in this Kafkaesque manner for years without so much as an explanation.

And the conservatives on the court could have simply said ‘yes,’ which would be bad enough. But instead the used this case, which was brought to correct a gross miscarriage of justice, to do real damage to all families in similar situations, where one spouse is a citizen and the other is not. The conservative majority ruled that a U.S. citizen no longer has a fundamental liberty interest in their noncitizen spouse being admitted to the country.

And, so, instead of being reunited in the United States, this family is now responsible, because they lost so catastrophically at the Supreme Court after winning their appeal, for making the situation worse for countless other families in the future.

Happy Midweek and Juneteenth!

Here’s a Sonny Sharrock track I used to play on my radio show back in the day.

The bar is open and the jukebox is limited to your imagination. Cheers!

 

It’s easy to forget that prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913, members of the U.S. Senate were elected by state legislatures. Although it can’t true, it seems as if historian Francis Barry, who has written a confusing editorial in the Washington Post, seems to have forgotten. So, let’s start with an accurate portrayal of what actually happened in the 1858 Senate election between Democrat Stephen Douglas and Republican Abraham Lincoln.

On Election Day, “Republican candidates for the state legislature by far outpolled Democratic candidates in total number of votes,” but gerrymandered districts resulted in a decisive win for Douglas’s Democrats.

…the apportionment of the state’s population among the fifty-six state house districts and the twenty-five state senate districts was not even. Even though more Lincoln voters cast votes, they were unevenly represented in the various districts and failed to elect a sufficient number of Republican state legislators to secure Lincoln’s election to the Senate in January 1859.

When the General Assembly met to vote for the winner, Douglas received 54 votes to Lincoln’s 46, which matched exactly the 40 Democrats and 35 Republicans who were elected to the state House of Representatives, and the post-election 14-11 Democratic majority in the state Senate.

Given this, it’s somewhat peculiar to write an editorial about why Lincoln lost without any reference to the popular vote. But, okay, Lincoln knew that the goal was to win the legislature, so let’s ask the Organization of American Historians what went wrong?

In particular, Lincoln failed to get majorities in the districts across the middle of the state, which historically had been loyal to the old Whig party. Lincoln had been a Whig before 1856, and the “Whig belt” had given its votes to Whig candidates even as late as 1856, when the last Whig presidential candidate, Millard Fillmore, ran against the Democrat, James Buchanan, and the nominee of the new Republican party , John C. Fremont. As a former Whig, Lincoln had hoped to carry these “swing” Whig districts. But Douglas played strongly on Whig fears about abolitionism and race, capping his efforts with an “October surprise”: an endorsement letter from the last great champion of the old Whigs, John J. Crittenden of Kentucky.

So, Lincoln was banking on winning in traditional middle-state Whig areas but that didn’t pan out mainly because Douglas was successful in race-baiting. But to hear Barry tell the story, Lincoln lost largely because he used the phrase “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” and was successfully attacked as too divisive.

If you find that theory confusing, you’re not alone. The basic idea is that Lincoln should have been focused on what united Illinoians rather than what divided them, and that Joe Biden should heed the precedent and not fall into the same trap by constantly emphasizing the threat to democracy presented January 6 and a second term for Donald Trump.

I acknowledge that Biden, irrespective of his strategy, could win the argument and still lose the war. It happened to Al Gore and it happened to Hillary Clinton, both due to the vagaries of the Electoral College. You must play by the rules that exist, not the ones that you think ought to exist, and the 2024 election won’t be decided by the popular vote. Having said that, a candidate who gets the most votes must have done many things right and probably isn’t the best choice to serve as an exemplar of failure.

The choice of Lincoln’s 1858 campaign is all the stranger for the fact that Barry actually treats Lincoln’s strategy as if it had been successful, asking, “So what can Biden learn from Lincoln?”

Barry identifies four strategies that Lincoln utilized in his failed campaign that he believes Biden should emulate.

First, [Lincoln] put his wit to work, mocking Douglas for his criticism of the biblical [House Divided] verse in ways that disarmed and endeared. Biden, who revels in Irish American blarney, should have more fun cutting Trump down to size. An old uncle who can crack up a room wins hearts.

Blarney is all fine and good, but has Barry forgotten that Lincoln actually lost?

Second, Lincoln separated himself from his party’s radical wing, assuring his audience that he was neither an abolitionist nor a believer in Black equality, and reaffirming his support for the right of enslavers to reclaim their “fugitives.” The Biden campaign should look for opportunities to underscore its separation from the party’s far left, especially on issues where Trump is inflaming fear, such as crime, “wokeism” and border security.

Yes, you read that correctly and Barry just praised Lincoln for distancing himself from abolitionism and Black equality. Biden, Barry believes, should find ways to act similarly by dissing the progressive left. It has always been disheartening to read Lincoln’s denouncement of black equality during his seven debates with Douglas, and been all the more troubling that his calculated lack of principle wasn’t redeemed by victory. You can argue that Lincoln needed to do more distancing to keep the support of traditional Whigs in the middle of that state, but I remind you that the Republicans won, by far, more votes than the Democrats. Even if he still lost by sticking to principle, it would have looked better in the history books.

Third, Lincoln went out of his way to express personal understanding of his opponents and solidarity with them, saying that Southerners “are just what we would be in their situation.” Biden should not hesitate to say much the same of Trump’s supporters. Doing so will strengthen his call for unity by sending a more welcoming message to undecided voters, depriving Republicans of the kind of advantage they gained from Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark.

Here we have to ask just what “situation” Trump voters are in? In what way are Trump voters just what non-Trump voters would be if the tables were turned? This argument makes absolutely no sense. Should Biden absolve the people who stormed the Capitol because Democrats would have done the same? It’s a preposterous idea.

Fourth, and most crucially, Lincoln reframed the debate. Without giving an inch on the principle that mattered most to him — upholding what he saw as the Founders’ vision of containing slavery for the purpose of eventually extinguishing it — he emphasized how local differences are part and parcel of the “bonds of Union.” In other words, as long as Americans kept faith with the Founders, a house divided against itself could stand.

Okay, how many things are wrong with this? First, Lincoln lost. Second, the house did not stand. Less than three years later, the country was at war with itself. Nothing Lincoln said during the 1858 campaign brought victory or prevented catastrophe. Barry whitewashes this by arguing, “Although these tactics were not enough to carry Lincoln to victory in 1858, they ultimately helped lift him into the White House, where they remained hallmarks of his leadership.”

Does Barry think Biden is running for president in 2026?

Barry starts this piece by arguing that Biden shouldn’t fall into the trap Lincoln fell into, and then uses Lincoln’s failed strategy as his guidepost. He fails to identify the most crucial reason that Lincoln lost, which was gerrymandered districts, and he suggests Lincoln’s appeal as a presidential candidate was based on being convincing about uniting the country. He was so unconvincing that the South seceded before he could be inaugurated.

How did this piece get published in the Washington Post?

Oh right, it’s run by News Corp. veterans now.

 

 

On October 1, 2017, from the windows of his corner suites on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Hotel in Paradise, Nevada, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire on 22,000 people attending the annual Route 91 Harvest country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. He was equipped with 24 firearms and a boatload of high-capacity magazines allowing him to fire up to 100 rounds a minute. His targets at the festival below were nearly 500 yards away, but that proved no obstacle for his .223-caliber AR-15-type and .308-caliber AR-10-type semi-automatic rifles. To add to the lethality, his AR-15’s were fitted with bump stocks, which allowed him to fire 90 rounds in ten seconds.

In what quickly became the deadliest mass shooting by one gunman in American history, Paddock killed 60 people, and shot and injured 413 more. In the resulting panic, another 400 people suffered injuries.

In a solemn address from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, President Trump said the country was united “in sadness, shock and grief” over “an act of pure evil.” Over a year later, in December 2018, the Trump administration “issued a new rule banning bump stocks, the attachments that enable semiautomatic rifles to fire in sustained, rapid bursts.”

To his credit, after the Parkland, Florida high school mass shooting on Valentine’s Day 2018, President Trump pushed for the bump stock rule and overcame resistance from his own Justice Department.

The regulatory move may face a legal challenge. The Justice Department had initially decided that the executive branch lacked the authority to ban bump stocks on its own under existing gun-control laws, and that action in Congress — where it is politically difficult to enact new gun-control legislation — would be necessary to curb legal access to the devices.

But the department reinterpreted its legal authority and determined it could ban the devices as an executive action after President Trump directed it to find a way to prohibit them earlier this year, following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court, including the three members Trump appointed, just ruled that the Justice Department’s initial analysis was correct and congressional action is needed to outlaw bump stocks. Oddly, Trump celebrated the decision and claimed that as president he “did nothing” on the issue or any other restrictions on weapons of mass death.

With the ball now in Congress’s court, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer planned to introduce a bill to ban bump stocks on Tuesday, but rather than get bogged down in filing. for cloture and trying to overcome a filibuster, he was asking for unanimous consent from all 100 senators. You’d think it would be able to pass but that’s not going to happen. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina will not consent. Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida says it should be a states’ rights issue.  Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, who wants to be Trump’s running mate, says the ban is a distraction that will “end up just inhibiting the rights of law-abiding Americans.”

But there’s no difference between the two parties, right? Six years ago, even Trump recognized there’s no Second Amendment reason for civilians to have the ability to fire 90 bullets in 10 seconds. But his Court didn’t agree, and his congressional Republicans don’t agree. It doesn’t even look like Trump agrees anymore.

And they have the power, even out of office or in the minority to protect mass shooters over country music concert-goers. So it goes.

 

This election cycle has some perplexing poll results. Consider the latest CBS News/YouGov poll which found that 62 percent of “Hispanic people favor the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.” If that’s true, we can just hand Donald Trump the keys to the White House right now. Of course, I know the naysayers will argue that the Hispanic community’s support won’t survive contact with the implementation of such a policy, involving as it inevitably must “showing papers on-demand, racial profiling [and] a huge increase in the number and scale of ICE raids.” But all Trump needs to win is support for the policy in theory.

But the poll is just plain strange. It’s not hard to understand that a higher percentage, 66 percent, of whites favor mass deportations than Hispanics, but why is the policy supported by only 47 percent minority of blacks? It seems to me that the population that stands to have its families broken up by ICE raids would be less enthusiastic about the policy than the one that wouldn’t.

On the whole, though, the new survey results bolster results from Axios in April showing “a majority of Americans support the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, including 45 percent of Latinos who were in favor of such a measure.” I suspect you can get less emphatic results if you ask the question differently, but clearly people are fed up with illegal immigration on the southern border.

Then there’s the polling of black support for Trump.

Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., claimed there’s something wrong with polling showing former President Trump’s increased popularity among Black voters during an interview published on Saturday.

“I think Joe Biden is doing exactly what he needs to do to win reelection. Something is amiss with the polling. I call your attention to the recent polls in Maryland. The African American woman [Angela Alsobrooks] running for the United States Senate nomination — the Sunday before the election, one poll had her five down, the other poll had her seven down — and she won by 13. How do you explain that? That’s 20 points,” Clyburn told Politico’s Ryan Lizza during the “Deep Dive” podcast.

Lizza noted a Wall Street Journal poll that found 30% of Black men said they would vote for Trump in November. He also pointed to a New York Times/Siena College poll showing 23% Black support for the former president, a large increase since 2020.

“Anybody who believes that Donald Trump will get 30% of the Black male vote or 12% of the Black female vote — I got a bridge down there on Johns Island I’ll sell you,” Clyburn continued.

I’m inclined to agree with Clyburn, but then why are reputable polling outfits getting results like this? I mean, you have to pray that these polls are off by 20 percent.

.

The Stanford Internet Observatory was established by former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos in 2019. Stamos had created a rift with top management at Facebook when he went public about Russia’s extensive use of the social media company’s platform to sow division in America and promote the 2016 candidacy of Donald Trump. His project at Stanford was to study misinformation on the internet in real time, when education could make a difference, rather than long after the damage was done. The Observatory investigated more than just elections and even expanded to look at child exploitation and anti-vaccine rings.

The University of Washington partnered with the Observatory to create the Election Integrity Partnership, and they came under attack. Now, you can probably guess that the attacks did not come from Democrats. Trump’s top adviser Stephen Miller’s law firm sued the Partnership in May 2023. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio went on the warpath against them.

The study of misinformation has become increasingly controversial, and Stamos, DiResta and Starbird have been besieged by lawsuits, document requests and threats of physical harm. Leading the charge has been Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), whose House subcommittee alleges that the Observatory improperly worked with federal officials and social media companies to violate the free-speech rights of conservatives.

Jordan has demanded reams of documents from Stanford, including records of students discussing social media posts as they volunteered to help the Observatory, and Stamos testified before the House Judiciary Committee for eight hours.

Among top selective American universities, Stanford along with Dartmouth has the most conservative alumni and donors, so pressure was applied against the Observatory from that angle, too. It was incurring substantial legal costs and angering congressional Republicans and MAGA world. So, you can guess what happened next.

The Stanford Internet Observatory, which published some of the most influential analysis of the spread of false information on social media during elections, has shed most of its staff and may shut down amid political and legal attacks that have cast a pall on efforts to study online misinformation.

Just three staffers remain at the Observatory, and they will either leave or find roles at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, which is absorbing what remains of the program, according to eight people familiar with the developments, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

The Republicans destroyed the program. But ask yourself why this was a purely partisan effort. Why didn’t the Democrats share any of the same concerns about the conduct of the Observatory? Weren’t they ever guilty of spreading disinformation about elections on the internet?

The answer is that the Democrats supported efforts to identify misinformation campaigns because those campaigns overwhelmingly originated on the right or in foreign countries looking to promote the American right or sow division that the right can exploit. The left could have evolved to match these efforts with lies of its own, but preferred to see academics do research and educate the public.

Maybe that’s fighting a tank with a peashooter, but at least it’s honest. The Democrats weren’t constantly being exposed and scolded for spreading lies and then crying that their free speech rights were being violated by simple academic analysis. They weren’t bullying college administrations or filing harassing law suits.

So, now the American public has lost an important resource in a presidential election cycle that specialized in identifying deceptive political influence operations and operators in real time. The Republicans consider this a great victory.

“Free speech wins again!” [Rep. Jim] Jordan posted on X on Friday, calling the Observatory part of a “censorship regime.”

What does it mean when one party, but not the other, thinks “free speech” means the freedom to base a political movement on (sometime foreign-based) viral internet lies without being exposed or criticized for it by experts?

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Flagstaff, Arizona scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have added a small bush to the area ahead of the large bushes. It serves to add some depth. Note also that the mountain in the far distance has received some revision. The mountain is part of the San Francisco Peaks, near Flagstaff, Az.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.000550

Rick Perlstein is quitting X/Twitter and I don’t care. People on the left leave X/Twitter every day, and the good reasons are difficult to count. In Rick’s case, it has something to do with his own disappointment in himself, so at least it’s more interesting than just one more iteration of lefties realizing that Elon Musk has gamed the platform against them. Specifically, he’s frustrated that he resorted to histrionics to defend the choice of Joe Biden over Donald Trump with respect to their comparative handling of the crisis in the Gaza Strip. Perlstein said that Trump would encourage the use of nuclear weapons and Netanyahu might take him up on it, leading to potential armageddon and human extinction. He says he didn’t actually believe this argument and is shame-faced about making it.

Of course, he ends the article by quoting Garrett Graff, the author of a new book on the possibility of life on other planets, and it’s clear Perlstein is still thinking in apocalyptic terms.

The scientists who work on SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—have this thing called the “Drake Equation.” It’s an equation that is supposed to predict the number of intelligent civilizations out there, and how many there are at any given time. The main variable scientists call “L,” which stands for the length of time an advanced civilization lasts. To me, the challenge is, L could turn out to be, based on where humanity is heading, a pretty short number. And when you look around our world right now … there’s no guarantee that human civilization is around for that much longer … So to me, when I look at Donald Trump’s possible return to power, what I’m thinking about right now is what it does to the L of American democracy and human civilization and how it could, and almost certainly would, accelerate the unwinding of modern American life.

It doesn’t look like we have more than a century more as an advanced civilization and even the near-term habitability of the planet should be in question, and that’s true whether or not Trump wins, although I agree that he presents a massive risk of a quick negative resolution of those questions. This isn’t hyperbole, it’s just an honest look at how humans are currently behaving. We’re destroying ourselves and our environment, and we appear headed in the absolute wrong direction to head off the worst outcomes. As for nuclear war, it’s as likely to begin in Ukraine, the subcontinent, the Korean Peninsula or the Taiwan Straits as it is in the Middle East or Iran.

We need international cooperation and collaborative conflict resolution and climate action, and the ascendant global right is hellbent on reviving colonial era nationalism and 20th Century fossil fuel usage. So it goes.

The left is the intended audience for Perlstein’s piece because he senses that a divided left will doom us to a second term of Trump. He’s not wrong about that, and he’s despondent that Biden’s complicity in the evisceration of Gaza is causing many of the left to lose the script of what is at stake in the upcoming election. I think he does a great job of describing the true choice by developing his theory of the “authoritarian ratchet,” which is apparently a major theme in Perlstein’s next book.

The basic formulation is valuable. The conservative movement operates with an impossible mandate of returning to the past. Since this is unachievable by definition, the movement can never be satisfied even when it wins. These failures are rationalized as the result of insufficient conservatism, and blamed on an ever-changing list of political enemies: women suffragists, the labor movement, New Deal safety nets, communists, terrorists, the Woke Mob, etc. Things get more desperate, intolerant and authoritarian with every turn of the ratchet, and the cycle actually advances towards Doomsday.

With a second term of Trump looming, we’ve reached a critical stage, at least for America’s political system and stability. Seen in this light, even a myopic inability to distinguish between Trump and Biden on Gaza actually strengthens the case for Biden. If Trump won’t be an improvement, then the choice is easy: preserve our way of life, our rule of law, our representative system.

Perlstein’s despondent that he’s not more convincing on this point, and it makes him question what he’s done with his life. I feel the same way. He’s written an important piece that should be widely shared, but he shouldn’t be so hard on himself. When all is said and done, he spent his life trying to prevent the worst. That’s what I tell myself, and it’s adequate consolation for any disappointment or despair I might feel.

Things go from bad to worse:

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest and most politically powerful Protestant denomination, voted Wednesday to oppose in vitro fertilization.

…The resolution, which was passed by nearly 11,000 so-called messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, declares that IVF “most often participates in the destruction of embryonic human life” and calls on Southern Baptists to adopt and “only utilize reproductive technologies” that affirm “the unconditional value and right to life of every human being.”

Though the resolution is nonbinding, nearly 13 million Southern Baptists across 45,000 churches may now face pressure from the pulpit or in individual conversations with pastors to eschew IVF.

It seems to have suddenly occurred to this 13 million-strong denomination that their insistence that life begins at conception necessarily means that every egg fertilized for in vitro procedures is sacred. Now, for the first time, they’ve developed an  interest in intellectual consistency, whereas two minutes ago they were perfectly happy to harangue pregnant women about abortion without giving a thought to all the frozen and discarded embryos produced by the IVF process.

Of course, huge numbers of Southern Baptists, including those in the church hierarchy, have availed themselves of IVF to have children, and now they’re all morally suspect. This pivot was initiated when Alabama’s Supreme Court granted frozen embryos full personhood and suffered a furious backlash. But the brains behind this change are not concerned about being unpopular.

IVF has come under increasing scrutiny since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision two years ago. Many on the right have begun to question whether the practice, which often discards fertilized eggs, is at odds with their beliefs on when life begins, even as it is relied upon by millions of Americans to grow their families and is supported by the overwhelming majority of evangelicals.

“It’s going to be a long process. It took us 50 years to take down Roe,” said Brent Leatherwood, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the SBC. “It may take us a similarly long time frame to get people to a place where they are thinking more deeply about something like this. It’s okay. It takes time. We have to be patient.”

These freaks say some really weird things.

Erick Sessions, a pastor at Graceland Church in New Albany, Indiana, and his wife struggled to conceive for seven years but decided against IVF because of ethical concerns and opted instead to foster children. Nearly 15 years later, they have four adopted and five naturally conceived children.

“Anytime you get outside of the normal means within which procreation occurs, the more foreign you get or the more alien you get from that, the more you have to consider its moral implications,” Sessions said. “When you divorce it now from the actual physical act of sex, and you put it into a laboratory, it just becomes further and further away from the normal means within the natural world of procreation.”

The whole point of the procedure is to help people who try and fail to use “the normal means within the natural world of procreation” to have children. They have sex with each other and no child is produced. It’s not that weird. It happens all the time.

When it happens, do couples have to consider the moral implications of other options? Yes. Adopting has its own set of moral issues related to race, nationality, gender, and socioeconomics. IVF produces multiple fertilized eggs to increase the odds that the procedure is successful. Shockingly, ovaries do the same thing and for the same reason.

I’m willing to grant that when an egg and sperm come together, they create a unique genetic pattern that’s very special, but I’ve also lived through two ectopic pregnancies where the fertilized egg implanted in a fallopian tube instead of the uterus. That created a life-threatening situation for my partners rather than a child. I’ve also experienced multiple miscarriages resulting for a too-thin uterine lining, meaning that the fertilized egg tried to implant in the uterus but couldn’t sustain a foothold and died. It’s also common that a fertilized egg has genetic problems from the start and doesn’t implant, or implants briefly before dying off. In most cases, women have no idea this has happened.

A fertilized egg is no guarantee of a live birth, and that’s by design. Expecting anything else involves a fundamental misunderstanding of biology.

But these god-botherers fetishize fertilized eggs. They’re not happy when people have sex for fun instead of for procreation, and now they’re not happy when people have children without having sex. Why can’t they just fucking relax and let other people live their lives in peace?

Greetings! I hope you all are well. I am still recovering from spending a week out of town at work. I won’t bog you down with the details but I did have my most serious medical emergency to date. I’ll be okay. Nothing to worry about.

Today I am going to give you a trio of songs by Brian Eno from his 1975 Another Green World LP, with footage from an early 1970s sci-fi film called Solaris. The footage shown on this video was shot in Tokyo to give the sci-fi film more of a futuristic feel.

The combination works. I love it when I find obscurities like this one. Enjoy. Cheers.