I’ve disproved it more than anyone’s ever disproved an allegation… Nobody in history has ever disproved a case as convincingly as I have.

Donald Trump, Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz have joined together in a pervy, hypocritical cabal to argue that Trump did not smirch the Constitution.

The fog of war.

… in a story about the Golden Globes, she notes that Ricky Gervais said this to his Hollywood audience:

You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.

A canny comment, and quite true: As UD has pointed out before on this blog, it’s rare for our stars to have attended even a little bit of college.

(Gervais himself earned upper second-class honours in philosophy.)

There is a sort of stoicism about Europeans, a belief that the human situation is pretty bad anyway and that it can’t be put that much righter than it is; and I think that America is much more based on the expectation that things can be fixed… There’s a sort of stoical nihilism which is part of the European idea, which says “Well… It’s a wreckage. Find some shelter somewhere… and wait until that lot’s blown by.“

A story for our times.

… but the melody lingers on.

[Alan Dershowitz claims that one of his friend Jeffrey Epstein’s underage sex slaves has] “caused him severe emotional distress, including ‘cardiac conditions.’”

… the Kurds.

“The most radical women have taken over al-Hol Camp, enforcing a strict ISIS dress code and mandatory Koranic instruction. They burn down the tents of families they consider insufficiently fanatical and have knifed to death several young women who didn’t wear the full black hijab and veil. The annex where the foreign families live is so dangerous that the camp administration was reluctant for us to visit, even in an armored car. Roj Camp is somewhat better. The Kurdish camp administration has successfully banned veils and the wearing of only black clothes, and it is possible to walk around with armed escorts. In both places, radical women are indoctrinating children with ISIS ideology.”

If Trubu wins in 2020.

American archeology at its best.

Actually makes for a very engrossing read.

Marx said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Fittingly, the titans of the fruit industry did not do anything progressive that would have made the Cavendish [banana] more resistant to disease — aside from dumping more pesticides on it.

Some interesting commentary on the death of Epstein.

The dam might have held, I suggest, had Trump not been elected president — but his win after more than a dozen women’s sexual-abuse allegations and his own confession on the Entertainment Tonight outtake, provoked a wave of anger and solidarity among abused women… Trump’s election turned out to be the catalyst for women speaking publicly about other men, starting with the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history the day after his inauguration. In the Epstein case, the legal system could no longer bear the weight of all the public shame. Unlike his old friend, the Abuser-in-Chief can dismiss women’s allegations, and fear no investigation, thanks to the power of the office. That won’t last forever. The clock ticks on the dirty old man.

Ray, you remember, is the dolt who prefaces Humbert’s confession.

[A]t at least 12% of American adult males—a “conservative” estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (verbal communication)—enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special experience “H.H.” describes with such despair… [H]ad our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psychopathologist, there would have been no disaster… He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. …

As a case history, [this] will become, no doubt, a classic in psychiatric circles. Above all, there is the ethical impact [this should have; it warns] us of dangerous trends; [it points] out potent evils. [It] should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.