Sunday Facepalm.

The Owl of Minerva perched on a book was an emblem used by the Bavarian Illuminati in their "Minerval" degree.

The Owl of Minerva perched on a book was an emblem used by the Bavarian Illuminati in their “Minerval” degree.

Yet another lunatic I had not heard of until today, one Paul Begley, a right wing pastor. He’s the one who made up the story about Melania Trump insisting on having the white house exorcised. That’s a damn silly story deserving of its own post, but I’ll focus on the following one, which is all about the Illuminati plot to assassinate the Tiny Tyrant, led of course, by former President Obama. Be sure to gasp in shock. Interestingly enough, the wiki page on Illuminati opens thusly:

The Illuminati (plural of Latin illuminatus, “enlightened”) is a name given to several groups, both real and fictitious. Historically, the name usually refers to the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era secret society founded on 1 May 1776. The society’s goals were to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life, and abuses of state power. “The order of the day,” they wrote in their general statutes, “is to put an end to the machinations of the purveyors of injustice, to control them without dominating them.” The Illuminati—along with Freemasonry and other secret societies—were outlawed through edict, by the Bavarian ruler, Charles Theodore, with the encouragement of the Roman Catholic Church, in 1784, 1785, 1787, and 1790. In the several years following, the group was vilified by conservative and religious critics who claimed that they continued underground and were responsible for the French Revolution.

Gotta say, those goals all sound good to me, sign me up. Okay, on with the lunacy:

“We know right now, folks, that this was treasonous,” Begley said. “They’ve tried to hijack our nation, they tried to override our election and they are trying to destroy our Constitution. This is a cabal and by their own text messages, they even say they have secret societies and they say that these societies are meeting and these are top level people of several different U.S. government agencies working together as an Illuminati, working together as a cabal, to overthrow the United States of America.”

I’m just going to have to request citations here. Please, Mr. Begley, provide at least some of these nefarious texts, or possibly tweets. I will admit to a morbid curiosity over what type of text they would consider to be in the evil secret society category. I can’t help but think if people are openly texting about their secret societies and giving away major plot lines, it’s not much of a secret society. Basically, according to Mr. Begley, these shadowy secret societies are comprised of people who can’t keep a secret.

“I think that Bill Ayers is behind the scenes,” he continued. “I know that Barack ‘Barry’ Obama, I know that Barack Hussein Obama, I know that he is orchestrating it.

“I know, I know, I know!” No, you don’t know anything. You just make up stories out of whole cloth and act as if these are facts chiseled in stone. This is nothing more than wishful thinking, and it reveals a great deal about you, Mr. Begley. You’re all manner ugly inside.

Begley said that Obama and these secret societies are working to “impeach President Trump on lies,” but if that doesn’t work, they will seek to get Trump declared “deranged and incompetent and dangerous” and have him removed from office.

Oh, the Tiny Tyrant does lie, all the time. He doesn’t have a problem with being a liar, but he surely sucks at it. His attempts at lying are painfully transparent, as are all the lies parroted by his henchpeople. That said, the times he tells the truth are worse. As for deranged, incompetent, and dangerous, yes, yes, yes. That’s all blindingly obvious, and you all know it too, you just don’t care as long as you have a pliable puppet and can get what you want.

If those efforts fail, Begley said, then the final option will be assassination.

“We don’t have proof of assassination,” he said, “but I guarantee, if we could crawl into the bowels of these secret societies, there is a Plan C in place.”

Oh look, a teensy drop of truth. No, you don’t have proof, you don’t even have a reasonable cause for suspicion. Just ever divisive, poisonous bullshit full of hate and dark, twisted fantasies. Perhaps you should consider gaming, Mr. Begley, it might help you work out a few issues.

The whole thing, along with video, is at RWW.

Books.

Marcus was thoughtful enough to send me The Emperor of All Maladies, which I had meant to get months ago, but with everything going on, it slipped the brain. I was barely into the book, tears in my eyes, thinking “yep, yep, yep” and identifying with so much. It’s a truly riveting narrative, and it’s what the very best books always are – an opportunity to learn.

One thing which really struck deeply home was when the author talked about how it’s difficult to think of cancer as a thing, it’s more on the person side, and that’s so true. I don’t think of my cancer as random cells happily cloning and evolving at the expense of the rest of me; I don’t think of it as a nebulous disease; I don’t think of it as a thing. It’s more like you separate, and there’s a shadowy self staring you down, a dark charcoal swipe of a doppelgänger, challenging you to wage war for your life, and cancer cells are much better at the whole evolution business than we are, which is why you get poisoned and radiated to what feels like an inch from death. All that said, and given the recent nightmare of treatment, I found myself profoundly grateful for the current stage of medical and technological advance when I read this:

The sixteenth-century surgeon Ambroise Paré described charring tumors with a soldering iron heated on coals, or chemically searing them with a paste of sulfuric acid. Even a small nick in the skin, treated thus, could quickly suppurate into a lethal infection. The tumors would often profusely bleed at the slightest provocation.

Lorenz Heister, and eighteenth-century German physician, once described a mastectomy in his clinic as if it were a sacrificial ritual: “Many females can stand the operation with the greatest courage and without hardly moaning at all. Others, however, make such a clamor that they may dishearten even the most undaunted surgeon and hinder the operation. To perform the operation, the surgeon should be steadfast and not allow himself to become discomforted by the cries of the patient.”

I’d dearly like to be able to go back in time and smack the fuck out of Heister, and a host of others. Misogyny seriously sucks, and boy, is it ever present in cancer treatment. It’s certainly lessened a great deal, but it’s still more than present. Sigh.

Anyroad, highly recommended, for everyone.

ETA: Feeling better, got my anger and FUCK ITs back. Yeah.

Rats: Cooperative and Kind.

© C. Ford, all rights reserved.

The photo is from when my beloved Chester was terminal, and all the other rats took turns caring for him, keeping him warm and letting him know he wasn’t alone. Phys.org has a couple of good articles up about rats:

Behaviour study shows rats know how to repay kindness.

Rats help each other out just as humans do.

Of course, none of this is news to those of us who are kept by rats.

What A Load of Shit.

Dozens of protesters have gathered outside a London cinema to protest against the cancellation of a screening of a film advocating therapy to "cure" people from being gay.

Dozens of protesters have gathered outside a London cinema to protest against the cancellation of a screening of a film advocating therapy to “cure” people from being gay.

This is a larger River of Shit than what’s been pouring from me the last two weeks.

The British anti-LGBTQ group Christian Concern is getting some press this week after a London theater cancelled a screening it helped organize for a new movie focusing on people “who are emerging out of homosexual lifestyles.” The movie, “Voices of the Silenced,” was promoted in an email this week by the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice, the parent group of the “reparative therapy” organization NARTH.

A 2016 trailer for the movie, produced by the UK group Core Issues Trust, compares those who advocate “ex-gay” therapy and their allies in other fields to enslaved Jewish people in the first century:

‘Voices of the Silenced’ remembers the Jews ripped from Jerusalem in AD 70 and brought to Rome to quarry stone and build the Colosseum. They were now the property of their masters. Filmed in seven countries and over 50 locations, our exploration compares the cultural captivity of the Jewish slaves in towns destroyed by the Vesuvius eruption in AD 79 with that faced by those silenced in the 21st century, people under an imposed state orthodoxy which reaffirms the ancient idea of pansexuality.

Oh, go fuck yourselves. Or someone else, then perhaps you could mind your own damn business. If someone wants to play at being hetero, there’s nothing stopping them, it’s not against the law, y’know. That does not cover up your blatant attempts at trying to squash all queer folk down so far you don’t have to think about them.

You can read the full story at RWW.