What's New at Green Man Review

Yes, it's that time of the week again, and this week also happens to be the Pride Parade in Chicago. Needless to say, traffic on the North Side was beyond hopeless.

At any rate, there's some really nice stuff at GMR this week:

Composer and Pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, A Bonnie Bunch of Steeleye Span, Another Spider-Man Film, Ghirardelli’s Intense Dark Hazelnut Heaven bar, Online Crafters Ban Trump as a Conversation Subject, A Lúnasa Recording, A Yolen Fantasy and Other Delights

And it's all right here.

Today's Must-Read: Where It All Really Started

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, and a lot of people think that was the beginning of the gay rights movement. It wasn't:

On July 4, 1965 — four years before Stonewall—39 activists from D.C., New York, and Philadelphia marched on the place where the Declaration of Independence had been signed roughly two centuries earlier. They wanted to remind the nation that their rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” had been denied. Dressed in formal attire — the men in coats and ties, and many of the women in skirts and dresses — they carried signs that read equal treatment before the law and homosexual bill of rights.

For the next four years, the organizer of that protest, Craig Rodwell, along with his comrades, Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen, marched in Philadelphia. Their demonstrations became became known as “the Annual Reminders.” But in the summer of 1967, Rodwell also decided to do something that was, in its own quiet way, more radical than marching. He wanted to open a bookstore.

It's a fascinating article, but I want to point out one thing: the gay rights movement actually started in the 1950s, with the founding of the Mattachine Society by Harry Hay, but it wasn't what you'd call "activist". Rodwell might well be the first to openly demonstrate against the prevailing repression of gays; Stonewall was a catalyst that pushed awareness of the state of affairs and gave us a rallying cry.

Read it.

Via BarkBarkWoofWoof.

Coda:

Today in Disgusting People

For reasons beyond my understanding, this person styles himself "Christian". Via Joe.My.God.:

This is demonic. This is the spirit of Antichrist. Whether people want to admit it or not, it’s the spirit of lawlessness. I may be a little hardcore about this, but I’m getting sort of sick and tired of the media, and I’m getting sick and tired of these left-wing politicians blaming President Trump for the horrendous conditions at these detention centers. I’ve got news for you, my friend: if they don’t want bad conditions at a detention center, don’t come across our border illegally.

“You’ve got the greatest center in the world at your home. If you’re complaining about not getting toothpaste and soap at a detention center, I’ve got a remedy for that: Go home! Go home and find your toothpaste and soap at your house. We’re not obligated. I just don’t feel like God has put it on America’s tab to pander to the lawless. God doesn’t pander to the lawless.” – Christian activist Chris McDonald.

I think the only appropriate response is this, from Matthew 25:

41 Then he will say also to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels; 42 for I was hungry, and you didn’t give me food to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink; 43 I was a stranger, and you didn’t take me in; naked, and you didn’t clothe me; sick, and in prison, and you didn’t visit me.’

44 “Then they will also answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and didn’t help you?’

45 “Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Most certainly I tell you, because you didn’t do it to one of the least of these, you didn’t do it to me.’ 46 These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Here's the video, if you can stand it:

Today's Must-Read: Beyond Sickening

Children are still being brutalized by our government, and the Democrats in Congress have just handed Trump 4 or 5 billion dollars with no strings attached to continue. If you really want to get angry, read this post by Adam Silverman at Balloon Juice:

We will be paying the price for this maliciously, amoral, immoral, evil stupidity for years and years to come. Fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, and the children themselves will seek vengeance for what we’re doing to them. And when they do, we’ll act surprised and plead that we’re the innocent victims of unhinged fanatics that hate us for our way of life. We’ll use their attempts to seek vengeance to justify more perpetual and forever war. And to whittle away whatever is left of our constitutional rights and liberties.

What follows is a series of quotes from the detained children, some as young as five years old, detailing the conditions under which they're being held.

Read it, then call your congressman and demand to know why he/she isn't making major noise about this.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

This could only happen in Alabama. (Or Mississippi, or Kansas, or Georgia, or South Carolina, or. . . .):

A woman whose unborn baby was killed in a 2018 Pleasant Grove shooting has now been indicted in the death.

Marshae Jones, a 27-year-old Birmingham woman, was indicted by a Jefferson County grand jury on a manslaughter charge. She was taken into custody on Wednesday.

Though Jones didn’t fire the shots that killed her unborn baby girl, authorities say she initiated the dispute that led to the gunfire. Police initially charged 23-year-old Ebony Jemison with manslaughter, but the charge against Jemison was dismissed after the grand jury failed to indict her.

Yeah, this really happened. (And of course, she's black.)

Today's Must-Read: The Lower Depths, Part ? (Update)

Trump's mean, vindictive policy of separating families and putting the children in concentration camps continues, and the more reports I read, the worse it sounds. This one, from CNN via Digby, is more than horrifying:

A 14-year old told us she was taking care of a 4-year old who had been placed in her cell with no relatives. "I take her to the bathroom, give her my extra food if she is hungry, and tell people to leave her alone if they are bothering her," she said.

She was just one of the children we talked with last week as part of a team of lawyers and doctorsmonitoring conditions for children in US border facilities. We have been speaking out urgently, since then, about the devastating and abusive circumstances we've found. The Trump administration claims it needs even more detention facilities to address the issue, but policy makers and the public should not be fooled into believing this is the answer.

The situation we found is unacceptable. US Border Patrol is holding many children, including some who are much too young to take care of themselves, in jail-like border facilities for weeks at a time without contact with family members, regular access to showers, clean clothes, toothbrushes, or proper beds. Many are sick. Many, including children as young as 2 or 3, have been separated from adult caretakers without any provisions for their care besides the unrelated older children also being held in detention.

We spoke with an 11-year-old caring for his toddler brother. Both were fending for themselves in a cell with dozens of other children. The little one was quiet with matted hair, a hacking cough, muddy pants and eyes that fluttered closed with fatigue. As we interviewed the two brothers, he fell asleep on two office chairs drawn together, probably the most comfortable bed he had used in weeks. They had been separated from an 18-year-old uncle and sent to the Clint Border Patrol Station. When we met them, they had been there three weeks and counting.

Read it, if you can stand it.

Update: And if people try to help, Border Patrol ignores them.

More on Mayor Pete

This was farther down in the same comment thread cited in the last post, and again shows what the media is not telling us and, even more so, what the "activists" being featured are ignoring:

.@CNN @BrookeBCNN Don’t let the malcontents sway you. I am twice @PeteButtigieg age and spent my entire life in South Bend and worked 40 years in media. He has done more to try and mend our community than anyone I remember. https://t.co/9Pul3tM8h1

— Maureen McFadden (@MMcFaddenTV) June 22, 2019

It's worth following that whole thread to see how much support Buttigieg actually has in South Bend.

It's worth noting that, in addition to the media focusing on click-bait stories, the professionally offended are generating their own slant on events by the simple expedient of ignoring facts that don't fit their agenda. (Sound familiar?)

When News Becomes a Profit Center

Our national media has been on a downhill slide for some years now -- actually, ever since the advent of Rupert Murdoch, which in this country means Fox News. It's not just that Fox deals in propaganda -- it's much more the idea that, rather than a public service (which has become a quaint idea, at best), news should be a profit center. Those two elements together -- profit and propaganda-- have made a sad joke of the Founders' idea of an informed populace.

This comes to mind after seeing these tweets in a comment thread at Joe.My.God., courtesy of commenter Lazycrocket:

more #voicesfromsouthbend #voicesofsouthbend - the media could take the time to interview people on what #MayorPete did and does for their community instead of headline grab with sensational nonsense and then move on (inhumanely). pic.twitter.com/iy4XIRR1Wm

— whyvote4pete #PeteForAmerica (@whyvotefor) June 24, 2019

I'm sure you've seen and/or read the story about Mayor Pete being shouted down by some of his black constituents in the wake of the shooting of a black man by a police officer. The stories I saw focused on the outrage in the community and slanted the narrative to make it look as though Buttigieg didn't have much support at home, much less nationally.

That doesn't seem to be the case.

The point of this is that we don't know what's being left out of the reports, and we can no longer trust reporters, or at least a substantial number of them, to be honest. Even less so, commentators.

So much for a free and independent press -- the major outlets have become departments in major corporations, and the goal there is not honest reporting but profits, with the results that we see everyday on the news.

Antidote, Pride Edition

This story has, as they say, gone viral.

This Oklahoma man is showing that ‘not all country boys are bigots’ with the Pride flag on his pickup truck pic.twitter.com/E56tscNkfU

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) June 24, 2019

I don't think I need to add anything.

What's New at Green Man Review

And it's our usual eclectic assembly:

The Very First Spider-Man Film, Four Fantasies, Bees, Mouse Guard short stories, A Spanish Christmas sweet fit for year round, Dr. John Live and Some Other Matters

And it's all there just waiting for you.

Todays Must-Read: The Lower Depths, Part II

As a follow-up to this post, read this post by Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo on conditions in the concentration camps.

Eyes otherwise fixed on the Strait of Hormuz Friday night caught this dispatch from a western hemisphere heart of darkness:

Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met. Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk.

Conditions at Customs and Border Protection's dangerously overcrowded "camps" (we'll get to that) on the southern border with Mexico continue to deteriorate. Over "45,000 people from 52 countries," refugees, have arrived over the last three weeks, the New York Times reports. Conditions are, to use a loaded word, deplorable. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas on Friday condemned national leaders in Washington for their inaction, “Congress is a group of reprobates for not addressing the crisis on our border.”

It's beyond appalling. It's gone past the point where I'm ashamed to admit I'm American.

Read it.

T

Better Late?

Well, it took a while, the the American Psychoanalytic Association has finally 'fessed up:

The American Psychoanalytic Association apologized on Friday for previously labeling homosexuality a mental illness.

“It is long past time to recognize and apologize for our role in the discrimination and trauma caused by our profession,” Lee Jaffe, the group’s president, said in a statement. “We all know that hearing the words ‘we are sorry’ is important to healing past trauma.”

The American Psychoanalytic Association is using this month's 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn uprising to apologize for having treated homosexuality as a mental illness in the past. pic.twitter.com/fZWEC7aJUm

— CBC News Alerts (@CBCAlerts) June 21, 2019

I'm not going to go all professionally offended on this and bitch about "empty gestures," first because it's not empty -- for an organization like the APA to admit it screwed up is significant -- but also because apologies do help.

What annoys me most about that whole period in the annals of psychology (and make no mistake -- the American Psychological Association and American Psychiatric Association -- the APAs -- were right on board with the "mental illness" thing) is that Evelyn Hooker had been doing studies in the 1950s that clearly showed that gay men who were not in therapy were as well-adjusted as anyone else. There was, however, a contingent of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, most notably Charles Socarides, whose livelihood depended on the "mental illness" diagnosis. (Ironically, Socarides' son is gay.) It took overt political action by gay psychologists and activists to get the associations to even think about it.

But at least they're admitting they were wrong.

Via Joe.My.God.

Today's Must-Read: The Lower Depths

That's the moral ground the U.S. government is occupying right now. This story beggars belief:

The Trump administration argued in front of a Ninth Circuit panel Tuesday that the government is not required to give soap or toothbrushes to children apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border and can have them sleep on concrete floors in frigid, overcrowded cells, despite a settlement agreement that requires detainees be kept in “safe and sanitary” facilities.

All three judges appeared incredulous during the hearing in San Francisco, in which the Trump administration challenged previous legal findings that it is violating a landmark class action settlement by mistreating undocumented immigrant children at U.S. detention facilities.

“You’re really going to stand up and tell us that being able to sleep isn’t a question of safe and sanitary conditions?'” U.S. Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon asked the Justice Department’s Sarah Fabian Tuesday.

U.S. Circuit Judge William Fletcher also questioned the government’s interpretation of the settlement agreement.

“Are you arguing seriously that you do not read the agreement as requiring you to do anything other than what I just described: cold all night long, lights on all night long, sleeping on concrete and you’ve got an aluminum foil blanket?” Fletcher asked Fabian. “I find that inconceivable that the government would say that that is safe and sanitary.”

This is the kind of reasoning you get from Trump's Justice Department:

On Tuesday, Fabian asked the Ninth Circuit to reverse Gee’s findings because they added new requirements – such as giving detainees soap and toothbrushes – that were not specifically included in Flores.

“One has to assume it was left that way and not enumerated by the parties because either the parties couldn’t reach agreement on how to enumerate that or it was left to the agencies to determine,” Fabian said.

“Or it was relatively obvious,” Fletcher shot back. “And at least obvious enough so that if you’re putting people into a crowded room to sleep on a concrete floor with an aluminum-foil blanket on top of them that it doesn’t comply with the agreement.”

I'm really starting to think about emigrating. Someplace rational.

Random Observations: Pride Month in Chicago

It may seem odd to some that Chicago is very gay friendly, given the history, but that's past. As for the present:

Riding the bus down on Clark or Broadway, when you get to the historic Boys' Town (East Lakeview), there are rainbow banners and flags on the light post, which actually extend north of that on Broadway into Uptown, with rainbow banners that read "Uptown Proud". On Halsted, at least at the north end, trans banners alternative with the rainbows.

Even the CTA has joined in -- there are rainbow el trains and, I believe, buses (although I haven't seen one of the latter).

There are also rainbows in various guises in shop windows -- including J. C. Licht, a paint and supply store.

And there are occasional rainbows in shop windows down into Lincoln Park.

Strangely enough, there is no official notice of Pride in Andersonville, the other gay neighborhood, although some of the businesses are flying the rainbow.

And the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Adler Planetarium are flying rainbow flags; the member sticker at the Field, rather than the usual blue, have a rainbow ground.

And of course, there will be the Parade, which in recent years has started in Uptown; rather than beginning at Halsted and Belmont, it now kicks off at Montrose and Broadway, which is quite a bit farther north. (We're everywhere.)

And that's the visible signs of Pride Month in Chicago.

A Club the Democrats Won't Use

Interesting post by Digby on why, even if the House passes articles of impeachment, Trump won't come to trial:

GOP senators say that if the House passes articles of impeachment against President Trump they will quickly quash them in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has broad authority to set the parameters of a trial.

While McConnell is required to act on articles of impeachment, which require 67 votes — or a two-thirds majority — to convict the president, he and his Republican colleagues have the power to set the rules and ensure the briefest of trials.

“I think it would be disposed of very quickly,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

“If it’s based on the Mueller report, or anything like that, it would be quickly disposed of,” he added.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), an adviser to McConnell’s leadership team, said “nothing” would come of impeachment articles passed by the House.

Given the Senate GOP firewall, Cornyn, who’s also a member of the Judiciary Committee, said he doubts that Democrats will commence the impeachment process.

“It would be defeated. That’s why all they want to do is talk about it,” he said. “They know what the outcome would be.”

(Note: She seems to be quoting from another source, but there's no link.)

Yes, we all knew that. What Digby notes as significant is this:

There was a time when Senators would say something like, "nothing I've heard so far adds up to an impeachable offense as far as I'm concerned, but of course, I will look at all the evidence before I render a judgment" (because I at least pay lip service to our constitution and legal system to show I'm not a total hack.) They don't bother with such niceties anymore --- the old "hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue" thing is dead and buried. It's pure partisan power playing now accompanied by WWE style trash talk.

What strikes me is that this is the opening Democrats need to really hammer the Republicans in the next election: indict not only Trump but the whole Republican party as anti-American and determined to establish a dictatorship.

The Democrats won't pick up on it, of course.

Sigh.

Yesterday Was Moving Day

But Green Man Review published anyway:

Folkmanis’ Rat in a Tin Can, Patricia A. McKillip’s Solstice Wood, Sam Adams Seasonal Ale, A Dance & Concert by Blato Zlato, A Futuristic Riff off Holmes, Clash’s ‘London Calling’ and Other Neat Matters

So there you have it. Enjoy.

What's New at Green Man Review

I'm a bit under the weather, so this is going to be brief:

A Whiskey Review Site, The Birth of British Folk Rock, Charles de Lint digital editions, Grateful Dead live music, A Great Supernatural Novel From Robert McCammon, Rocket Raccoon & Groot and Other Rather Charming Things

Go to it.

The Day After D-Day: Remembering the Forgotten

This is something I didn't know, part of this post from Adam L. Silverman at Balloon Juice:

There used to be a prevailing myth that no black men participated in D-Day — by far one of the most important days of World War II.

But a closer look reveals that some African-American soldiers played a key role on Omaha Beach, and their stories still remain largely untold.

"There were no (Congressional) Medals (of Honor) given to any black soldiers for what they did at D-Day," said 90-year-old Joann Snowden Woodson. "People really need to know the truth.”

Woodson has been on a consistent mission to share the truth of D-Day with the world, as well as the service of her late husband, Waverly Bernard Woodson — one of the few black soldiers known to have served on Omaha Beach that fateful day.

Originally from West Philadelphia, Waverly Woodson was a member of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, an all-black Army unit that specialized in placing barrage balloons in battle areas during World War II. Their goal was to distract and destroy enemy aircraft and provide cover for Allied soldiers on the ground.

Waverly Woodson and his Battalion left England on June 5, 1944. They arrived on the beach in Normandy via transport boat the next day.

"He said he could see the soldiers being picked off just like flies," Joann Woodson reiterated. "Some of them were dead; some of them he had to administer the last rites. And some of them — I think he said he had to do amputations and everything."

Read the whole thing. And read Silverman's complete post as well. It's sobering when we think we've made progress in exercising our humanity.

(My dad served in the Pacific. He never talked about the war.)

What's New at Green Man Review

Yep, it's Sunday, and that means new goodies at GMR:

Killer Robots, Dirty Rice, Gifted Children, Aaron Copland and other neat stuff

And it's all just waiting for you.