Revisionist History is a Pain in the Butt

There was an inter-racial First Thanksgiving, of a sort, that was much enjoyed by both grateful Pilgrims and visiting Pequots and Wampanoags--some sort of civil and pleasant, three-day harvest-feast, probably in late October or November, to celebrate what had proved an amazingly bountiful year (1621).

And the reason it (1621) had been all so bountiful was the arrestingly simple, yet far-sighted, rule, laid down by the amazingly astute Governor William Bradford the year before, that all pilgrims (including, specifically women and children) might profit from their own, individual labors. Without quite acknowledging that they were doing so, and while making their education both free and compulsory, Pilgrims effectively emancipated and enfranchised their children (who were, from an early age, contributing members of society; who fattened pigs, raised fowl, gathered eggs, milked cows (after 1623), and grew squash, corn and melons in the garden-space allotted them, and who were permitted, thanks to sagacious old Governor Bradford's wise ruling, to keep their profits and their produce for themselves, selling it back to the community, with their consent, at reasonable prices).

Amazingly, even though a tenth of them (of young males) were massacred by red-skinned Native Americans in King Philip's War, they proliferated. Visiting Englishmen said the flocks of young children in Colonial New England were like "ducks on a pond." Abundance of food, salubrity of climate, 100% literacy, virtually absolute personal liberty--a powder keg, waiting for Fannie Trollope to touch it off.

I have heard (or read somewhere) that what gay men and boys did--during the century and a half before the Revolution, when the urge came on them, and knowing not what else to do, but gravitating instinctively to the docks and wharves along the waterfront where all the young men and boys (sailors) hung out--was walk around with their flies open, or, as men's flies were then fashioned, partially undone, to show that they were cruising, in a way that straights wouldn't tumble-to, but which was picked-up on by their homoerotic fellows, if any. And this is why there was only one prosecution for Sodomy in all of American Colonial History: They didn't know that what they were doing was, exactly, Sodomy.

Dalai Lama: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Damn this is funny. Especially the part where His Holiness turns a mock-reluctant John Oliver into a Demon. High Comedy. Then you notice--what we're talking about here is Powers and Competence, and, if you pay attention, what you're seeing here is a very harsh slap-down of the whole embarrassed face of the "Government" of the People's Republic of China. The old man has, in fact, a decidedly wolfish ("wolf in monk's robes") fury in him--as well as apparently infinite compassion.

But no, seriously--as an atheist bo'n and bred, and a Mahayana Buddhist--I am naturally disposed to be utterly disbelieving in Dalai Lamas. Not only do I dispute their right to be Dalai Lamas, I doubt that being a Dalai Lama can have any real, powerful meaning or significance. And this video proves how utterly wrong those casual assumptions of mine are.  Intriguing to me as a specifically gay ideologue is the (I think) television footage from the early 60's of the much younger and strikingly virile Vajrayana monk who was his Holiness, who seems to have quite the presence, and the allure, of a no-nonsense Jesuit of ducal, say, or Gonzagan, descent.

Culte : Le bêtisier de Maïté (complet) | Archive INA

The thing is, there is, instinct and alive, in these ladies an enchanting immemorial Latinity--the sweet, civilized way that they do not impose on one another, while perfectly helping one another--that makes them goddesses or muses, and explains why those earnest anti-Pâté laws are ill-considered.

Recette : Crépinettes aux foie gras et dinde aux cailles de Maïté | Arch...

Like one great French chef de cuisine said of another a couple of centuries ago, "He was a genius. He had perfect control of his fires."

Recette : Quiche de volaille aux raisins & soupe de coquillages de Maïté...

Recette : La terrine de bœuf à la bière de Maïté | Archive INA

Giuliani Threatens Trump With Secret "Insurance"

This is delicious. And I love, wuv, wuv the Narrator, nice Italian boy. Smart. For all our instinctive disdain for the principals of this melodrama aus dem Serail--Trump, Giuliani, etc.--in young  Gianni's account of them, we hear the clink of concealed weapons and smell the ooze on the floor beneath these Brontosauruses of Supreme Power, and we gain a perfect sense of what they are, and of what, hilariously, they think they are. 

Cute, ominous, horridly in fact significant--the super-responsive technology of the Drone: Much evil is loosed in the world where these deadly carrion crows are thick, spying everything.

Iraq protests: Baghdad's Tahrir Square, a state of its own

My heart is with these people. This goddamit is our Mother Land.

"CIA Coup"--¿Conspiracy Theorist, Moi?

1. Probably my supercilious take (Flesh-eating Lizards from Alpha Centauri) on this subject comes from my innate, visceral distaste for it: I can't force myself to affect a polite, non-judgmental moral neutrality towards the Politics of the Seraglio, of the Whorehouse, and of the Abattoir, that has prevailed in America since 1947.    

¿Has no one, ever, thought of repealing the National Security Act of 1947? ¿Why not? These questions which were never asked conceal, or gloss over, a terrifying accretion, and abuse, of power--of numbers of people/citizens under lock and key--and of swoll'n armies of thugs (police) to keep them there.

Nice Straight People are a Piece of Cake

This is one of the few useful, practical and not-dumb things I have ever said--which Marcus noted, remembered, and several times repeated back to me, over the course of the many years that we knew one another. It means: Stupid, or Unenlightened (Straight), People can still be "Nice," i.e., be well-intended, have good manners--and respond favorably to being treated kindly and politely. 

You'll notice a certain o'erweening presumption....

Bolivia's President Resigns Under Military Pressure

God damn the United States of America.

BOMBSHELL Evidence of Ukraine Quid Pro Quo

¿What fucking "Russian Aggression"? And, of those "13,000 lives which have been lost in the past several years," ¿how many were Russian-speaking civilians, men, women and children, of the Donbass, murdered--bombarded in their homes, schools and hospitals--by the illegitimate, unelected, fascist government of Kiev in the name of "National Unity"?

La Marseillaise, French National Anthem (Fr/En)

This makes my eyes water--transports me back to 1793. I suppose the Tyrannous Enemy whose Blood is Impure must be Austrians, particularly Habsburgs, and especially Habsburgs who are Archduchesses who are Queens of France  ¡Hail Mme. Guillotine!

Though it's at least as much fun to sing as "Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall," I dislike La Marseillaise more even than I do the similarly ridiculous and stupid (but not so barbarously blood-thirsty) Star Spangled Banner. Still it's funny to hear it sung by a group of French people--proving that they are both noisy and tone-deaf, as we Englishmen have been saying about them for the past several centuries. 

Supervolcano.The Truth About Yellowstone.

Any time from now to many thousand years form now.

¿"Posh" Accent?

Please.  That is an atrocious--snobbish/snotty--way to describe anyone's habitual manner of speaking, whether one's own, or someone else's. How is it that no one in the United Kingdom seems to mind, or to appreciate, the fact that: "Posh," as a concept and as a standard of excellence, is odiously, sickeningly vulgar? ¿And, as it happens, intrinsically wrong?  Odiously, sickeningly vulgar, say, in the same way that it is to imply that "love" is anything other than an emotion without any physical implication (as it does, nauseatingly, in the American Hillbilly Dialect: e.g. "He's a-lovin' 'er"). And as it does not in, for example, Elizabeth Tudor's great, final Golden Speech.

Which, by the way, is not only astutely and irresistibly endearing, but a damned fine specimen of  Elizabethan prose--not unworthy of, say, Francis Bacon. Hint, hint.