Alabama’s Tiny Kingdom Black Sheep
(or The Late Life Reflections of a Tiny Kingdom Birmingham Country Club Heretic)
by Sloan Y. Bashinsky Jr.
Author's Preface
I grew up playing golf at the exclusive Birmingham Country Club in upscale all-white Mountain Brook, Alabama, which later got nick-named The Tiny Kingdom. Mountain Brook lies over Red Mountain, just south and east of Birmingham. My father and his father were members of the Birmingham Country Club, and that's why I got to play golf there. After graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa, I became a member of the Country Club, because my father and his father were members. Within a few years, my views of most things were changing, and I resigned from the Country Club. As more time passed, my views of most things kept changing, and kept changing, and kept changing. I blame God for all of that, and I am glad it happened, even though the going never was easy and often it was very rough. I became what I suppose more than a few Mountain Bookies, especially the church goers and the capitalists, might call a heretic. Certainly, black sheep fits just as well. This book is the next installment in the Inquisition's evidence. Earlier installments can be found at archive.org. Go there and type Sloan Bashinsky into the search space and press Enter on your keyboard and see for yourself. All of those books, non-fiction, fiction, and stranger than fiction, are free reads, no ads, no soliciting.
I grew up at The Birmingham Country Club in The Tiny Kingdom aka Mt. Brook, Alabama
I woke from dreams this May 5, 2023 morning, thinking maybe The Powers That Be had nudged me to start a new blog.
Yesterday, I was invited by a fellow close to my age to join him at The Birmingham Country Club, where he was headed to hit practice balls on the driving range.
I grew up at the Birmingham Country Club and played thousands of rounds of golf on its East Course, then called "the ladies' course", and on its West Course, called "the men's course", because it was far more challenging than the East Course. Women were allowed to play one weekday on the West Course. The Summer of my 16th year, I won the club's junior boys golf tournament on the East Course, where that tournament was played. Later, the annual junior tournament was played on the West Course.
When I started practicing law in Birmingham, in 1973, I seldom played golf and didn't use the country club much. After some mental and emotional going back and forth, I mailed a resignation letter to the club's board of directors, stating why I was resigning and offering my membership slot to someone who wanted to be a member. It was not easy to become a member. I was one, because my father and his father were members.
The Birmingham Country Club was a white only club, and it looked white only on the driving range yesterday. The club is in Mountain Brook, which for many decades was an all-white upscale Birmingham suburb that eventually got nicknamed, "The Tiny Kingdom".
The only blacks in Mountain Brook were live-in servants and day servants, who came "over the mountain" from Birmingham on city transit buses to work during the daytime, and then rode back over the mountain on city buses. The country club had a caddy house below the golf course, where quite a few black caddies hung out, hoping to get work that day for very little pay. There were two black workers in the part of the golf shop where the members stored their golf clubs.
My family had a black live-in maid/cook/nanny named Charlotte Washington, who came to our home looking for work on the day I was born at Hillman Hospital in Birmingham. Her parents had been south Alabama plantation slaves. I called her "Cha", pronounced "Sha", which everybody called her. She loved and raised me as her own child.
Cha is the second person memorialized in a little book that fell out of me in August 2004, when I was spending the summer in Helen, Georgia, in the home of good friends. I eventually put A FEW REMARKABLE ALABAMA PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN onto afewremarkablealabamapeople.blogspot.com, where it can be read for free: https://afewremarkablealabamapeople.blogspot.com/
The first person memorialized in the book is the Birmingham federal judge for whom I clerked after graduating from the University of Alabama School of law, who lost both of his legs when he was 15, as he hopped off a freight train he was riding and slipped and fell under the box car. The judge created the national debtors court and ran the Democratic party in Alabama from behind the scenes.
The third person is my father's older brother, Leo, the greatest fisherman, in the world, whom I sometimes wished In my youth was my father, and the greatest pediatrician, who called a spade a spade.
The fourth person is my father's grandfather Leopold, an East European Jew, who immigrated to America in the 1880s, and ended up in Troy, Alabama. Leopold married the daughter of a Southern Baptist Confederate officer and was trusted by the people of Troy to settle their disputes, instead of using lawyers. On Leopold's gravestone is "An honest man is God's noblest creation."
The fifth person my mother's Episcopal minister, who stood down his vestrymen after they voted to not let blacks worship in the Mountain Brook church he had started from scratch and built up.
The sixth person is my father's crusty, shrewd lawyer, who never went to law school, but was smarter than any lawyer I ever knew, and who told me I would never be happy until I found God.
My first child was born at Hillman hospital, and seven weeks later he died of sudden infant death syndrome, which was called "crib death" back then. His death so disturbed and disrupted me, that no matter how hard I tried, I was not able to fit, squeeze or force myself into any of the square and round holes my parents and their parents and I had envisioned were mine to fill.
After many attempts to fit myself into those holes, I went off and had maybe a dozen different lives, which I could not have anticipated, and which made me into the family prodigal, the black sheep, the keeper of the family skeletons, a mystic, and a heretic.
A Surprise Kudo
As for some of what I got into after I left the Tiny Kingdom and later Birmingham and Alabama, and ended up in Key West, a Key West amigo emailed me yesterday.
Morning, Sloan
I was playing around with ChatGPT and asked it to "write an article about the blogger Sloan Bashinsky.” Here is what it came up with after about 30 seconds. Note, I gave it absolutely zero prompts background or anything else. All I did was ask what is above in quotes. Interesting huh?
ChatGPT Response Box
Title: Sloan Bashinsky: A Blogger's Journey Through Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Truth Introduction
In a world where social media influencers and bloggers are a dime a dozen, it takes a truly unique voice to stand out from the crowd. Sloan Bashinsky is one such voice. With his candid writing style, unapologetic honesty, and unwavering commitment to truth, Sloan has carved out a niche for himself in the blogosphere. In this article, we will explore the life and work of this remarkable blogger, delving into his background, his motivations, and the impact he has had on his readers.
Background
Born in 1942 in Birmingham, Alabama, Sloan Bashinsky hails from a prominent Southern family with deep roots in the legal and political spheres. His father, Sloan Bashinsky Sr., was a successful attorney and businessman who served as the CEO of Golden Flake Snack Foods. Despite his privileged upbringing, Sloan chose to forge his own path in life, pursuing a career in writing and activism rather than following in his father's footsteps. Sloan's journey as a writer began in the 1960s when he started contributing articles to various publications, including The Miami Herald and Key West Citizen. Over the years, he honed his craft and developed a distinctive voice that resonated with readers. In the early 2000s, Sloan decided to take his writing online, launching his blog "Good Morning Key West" – a platform that would allow him to share his thoughts, experiences, and insights with a wider audience. The Blog: Good Morning Key West Sloan's blog, Good Morning Key West, is a treasure trove of personal anecdotes, political commentary, and spiritual musings. With a focus on local issues and events, Sloan provides a unique perspective on life in Key West, Florida. However, his writing transcends geographical boundaries, touching on universal themes such as love, loss, and the human condition. One of the most striking aspects of Sloan's blog is his unflinching honesty. He does not shy away from discussing difficult topics or sharing his own struggles and vulnerabilities. This openness has endeared him to his readers, who appreciate his willingness to lay bare his soul in the pursuit of truth. In addition to his personal reflections, Sloan also uses his blog as a platform to advocate for social justice and environmental causes. He has been a vocal critic of local government decisions that he believes are detrimental to the community and has used his writing to raise awareness about important issues such as homelessness and climate change. Impact on Readers Sloan's blog has garnered a loyal following of readers who are drawn to his unique voice and thought-provoking insights. Many have expressed their gratitude for his willingness to tackle difficult subjects and share his own experiences, stating that his writing has helped them feel less alone in their struggles. Furthermore, Sloan's activism and advocacy work have inspired others to take action in their own communities. By using his platform to shine a light on important issues, he has encouraged his readers to become more engaged citizens and to fight for positive change. Conclusion Sloan Bashinsky is a testament to the power of honest, heartfelt writing. Through his blog, he has touched the lives of countless readers, providing comfort, inspiration, and a sense of connection. As he continues to share his journey through life, love, and the pursuit of truth, there is no doubt that Sloan will continue to make a lasting impact on the world around him.
There were two factual errors in the AI's report: (1) My younger brother Major and I were lawyers, and our father was not a lawyer; (2) my family had no roots in the political sphere until I got involved in Key West and Florida Keys politics in early 2001, and stayed involved through the fall of 2018, when I moved back to Alabama, where I have lived and stayed out of local politics, until perhaps now.
The AI's report needs more clarification and augmentation.
I wrote letters to the editor to the Key West Citizen and to the Keynoter, which was headquartered in Marathon and was owned by The Miami Herald.
The two goodmorning blogs went offline in early 2017, and were succeeded by afoolsworkneverends.blogspot.com, about the first half of which went offline in late 2018 or early 2019. I wrote a few times at that blog that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were flip sides of the same coin and they both should be locked up in adjoining cells.
In 2021, I started diaryofredneckmysticlawyer.blogspot.com, and in 2022, I started spontaneousramblingsofbatshaman.blogspot.com, which a tech friend digitized into books that can be read for free at archive.org. As can be read free there, Prisons & Freedom (non-fiction metaphysical); Kundalina, Alabama, a stranger than fiction novel, and Heavy Wait, a stranger than fiction novel, for which I now am writing a sequel, The Return of the Strange, which will be readable at archive.org.
Since Donald Trump and I both were spoiled rich kids who got into politics …
ChatGPT AI's report in the previous post at this blog was such a glowing endorsement of my blogging, that I wondered if the AI really likes me, or if is like the Yellow Hammer newspaper in Alabama, which, it seems to me, writes what pleases people it writes about, so more people with use/buy its services?
When I was in high school, I liked the Democrat candidate for president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. When I told my mother that, she said we can't let the Catholics get control of the government! Later, she told me that it had really upset my father that I wanted a Democrat in the White House.
My father owned controlling interest in Golden Flake Snack Foods, which was headquartered in Birmingham. Golden Flake competed head-on with Frito-Lay in the southeastern states of America. For a while, I was Golden Flake's marketing and advertising director. As such, I became familiar with market research, and ass-kissing, which I wasn't very good at, and with bull-shitting, of which I sometimes was guilty.
Since Donald Trump and I both were spoiled brat sons of rich white men, and since my Key West friend mentioned in the previous post at this blog belongs to the predominately white Republican Party and voted for Donald Trump, and since, egged on by my Key West friend, I ran ten times for local public office in Key West and the Florida Keys, I joined ChatGPT and asked its AI to write about "Donald Trump politician".
Here's what the AI wrote:
Donald Trump is a former American politician and businessman who served as the 45th President of the United States from 2017 to 2021. A member of the Republican Party, he first entered politics as a candidate for the party's nomination in the 2016 presidential election.
Born in Queens, New York in 1946, Trump graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. He then joined his father's real estate development company and eventually took over as its CEO. Over the course of his career, Trump built a reputation as a brash and flamboyant figure in the business world, known for his ostentatious lifestyle and his willingness to take risks.
In 2015, Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States. Running on a platform of "Make America Great Again," he quickly became a controversial and polarizing figure in American politics. He was known for his inflammatory rhetoric, which often targeted immigrants, Muslims, and other marginalized groups. He was also known for his use of social media, particularly Twitter, to communicate directly with his supporters and attack his critics.
Despite facing significant opposition from within his own party, Trump won the Republican nomination for President in 2016. In the general election, he faced off against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, whom he attacked as part of a corrupt political establishment. In a surprise victory, Trump won the election, becoming the first person without prior government or military experience to be elected President since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952.
As President, Trump implemented a number of controversial policies and initiatives. He sought to restrict immigration from Muslim-majority countries, including a travel ban that was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court. He also sought to repeal the Affordable Care Act, although his efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. Trump's administration was marked by a number of scandals and controversies, including allegations of collusion with Russia during the 2016 election and an impeachment trial in 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Trump's leadership style was often characterized by a lack of discipline and a tendency to make impulsive decisions. He frequently contradicted his own advisors and made policy announcements via social media without consulting with his staff. He was also known for his use of inflammatory language, particularly when it came to his political opponents.
Despite the controversies that marked his presidency, Trump remained popular with his base of supporters. He was known for his ability to connect with working-class Americans and for his willingness to take on what he saw as the corrupt political establishment. He was also praised for his efforts to strengthen the American economy, which saw low unemployment and a strong stock market during his presidency.
In 2020, Trump sought reelection against Democratic nominee Joe Biden. The election was marked by controversy, with Trump making baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and refusing to concede the election after it was called for Biden. His refusal to accept the election results led to a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, which resulted in five deaths and widespread damage to the building.
After leaving office in January 2021, Trump remained a controversial figure in American politics. He continued to make baseless claims about the 2020 election and was banned from several social media platforms for his role in inciting the Capitol riot. Despite this, he remained popular with a significant portion of the Republican Party, and his influence over the party continued to be felt in the months and years after he left office.
I thought the AI report was fairly balanced and emailed it to my Republican friend, who replied:
Seems pretty accurate and unbiased to me. Amazing how quickly it can write huh? Sloan and the AI! What have I unleashed on the world????
My Republican friend is a former US Army Special Forces combat veteran, who took an oath to defend America.
After the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the National Capitol, my Republican friend told me the January 6, 2021 insurrectionists all should have been shot dead, and I could quote him on that.
Although Birmingham is more blue than red, Alabama is a deep dark red state. One of its US Senators, Jeff Sessions, was appointed by President Trump to be his Attorney General.
A couple of years ago, former (as in fired) Auburn University head football coach Tommy Tuberville, was elected to the US Senate after campaigning that he was with President Trump all the way.
Alabama Governor Kay Ivey made similar remarks.
I heard several Alabama people say, if you want to do business with Governor Ivey, see her in the morning, when she is sober. I also heard Alabama people say Governor Ivey is told what to do and say by powerful Alabama people.
I never joined a political party, and came to view political parties as cults, religions. Over the years, discussing Donald Trump with Republicans on Facebook is like discussing the real Jesus with Christians.
I recently posted on my Facebook page:
I saw in news reports that Trump said, if he is reelected, he will pardon all people who participated in the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol, which he has the power to do, if he is president. The thought came to me yesterday, that President Biden can use that same power to offer pardons to the same people, if they go before a notary public and are sworn in and sign a document in which they they swear before God, under penalty of perjury, that they will testify in court that they acted solely on President Trump's orders to assault the national Capitol on January 6, 2021, and if they don't so testify in court, they don't get pardoned by President Biden. Armed with such sworn documents, President Biden's Attorney General prosecutes Donald Trump in the United States District Court of Washington, D.C., for inciting insurrection against the United States of America, and for breaching his sworn oath to defend its Constitution.
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Donald Trump and his legions and the Democrats and Joe Biden prove Charles Darwin got evolution backward
My grandparents on both sides were southern Baptists. They attended Southside Baptist Church in the Five Points part of Birmingham. My grandfathers were deacons in the church.
My mother and father attended the church in their youth.
My mother didn't care for the Baptists, and she stopped attending church.
I was maybe 10 when Mt. Brook Baptist church was built near our home on Montevallo Road.
My father and I had a Sunday morning ritual.
He drove us to a local drugstore, where I got a soda fountain Pepsi Cola, and then we took a drive.
Then, he drove us to Mt. Brook Baptist Church, where he attended a Sunday School class for men and I attended a boys class.
I really liked the teacher and the students.
Driving home from the church, my father and I talked about what was discussed in my class.
I seldom attended church services. The sermons went on and on, and bored the shit out of me. And, tortured me.
A young Episcopal priest named Lee Graham started a parish church in an old farm house across the street from the Mountain Brook Fire Department, Police Station and City Hall. My mother started attending Sunday services at St. Luke's. She really liked what minister was saying. His name was Lee Graham.
My mother told my father, if he didn't get serious about church, she was taking their children to St. Luke's. My father and I kept up our Sunday morning ritual. My mother decided that wasn't good enough.
She took me with her to St. Luke's, and made me sit through morning worship services, which consisted of songs, recitations from a prayer book, chants, long boring sermons, songs, communion, which I could not take, because I was not confirmed, more chanting and song.
I went places in my imagination.
My grandparents on both sides and their minister at Southside Baptist went haywire.
My.mother held her ground.
One Sunday night, my father asked me what that day's sermon was about? What could I say? I had no clue, because I had not listened to the sermon.
My father gave my mother the look,
My mother gave me a much worse look.
I supposed she had hoped I would prove to my father and their parents that she had done the right thing by joining St. Luke's and taking her children there with her.
It apparently didn't occur to them that I should be in a Sunday school class with my peers, instead of attending church services;
When I was 12, mother enrolled me confirmation class, so I could be confirmed by the bishop and take communion.
Every Saturday afternoon, for 2 hours, I endured confirmation class, while being forced by my mother at home,s to memorize the Ten Commandment and a lot of stuff from the prayer book, including the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds.
I hated grammar school, viewed it as prison. Saturday's were my days out of jail. Now I was in a different jail for two hours every Saturday afternoon.
I completed the confirmation training.
The Episcopal Bishop of Alabama came to St. Luke's to confirm our class at a Sunday service. My mother and father and their parents were there.
The bishop spoke a while, about what, I doubt I remembered much.
Our confirmation class all went to the rail and knelt.
The Bishop passed by us one at a time, putting in our cupped, open palms a thin, white, wheat wafer, the body of Christ, for use to lap up with our tongues and hold in our mouths until it dissolved and we swallowed it.
The bishop returned with a sliver chalice filled about half way with red port wine. He offered us the chalice and helped us tip it up so we could take a sip.
My first sip ever of alcohol, which the bishop had called the blood of Christ, went down my throat wrong.
It burned, and it was all I could muster to pretend all was great and wonderful.
I felt like I was choking to death, and needed to gag and throw up.
Summoning every ounce of my will, I shakily walked back to the pew and pulled down the padded knee rest and kneeled with my eyes closed, begging God to save me.
It passed, but it did not seem God had anything do with it.
I didn't tell anyone.
When I was 14, my mother pushed me to become an acolyte, and wear a white robe and carry a gold cross on a pole and a silver candelabra to light candles in the church nave during Sunday services.
I was not interested, and she kept pushing, and I was not interested.
At church one Sunday, my mother asked the curate to persuade me to become an acolyte. He faced me, saw my pleading eyes and head shaking, and told my mother I didn't want to do it.
Time passed, and I grew resistant to attending church.
I much preferred playing golf, fishing, or anything, to attending church.
That really upset my mother, and I felt guilty.
Maybe I was going to hell, but I didn't want to go to church much.
Over the years, I went back to attending church for a while. I was sincere, but it didn't stick.
At Vanderbilt, my sweetheart, Dianne, and I consulted with a school chaplain, who was an Episcopal priest, and he told us to get married, if we wished.
We already were doing every thing married men and women do, but live together.
After my son died of crib death when I was in law school, Dianne and I attended a little Episcopal church for a while, but it didn't stick for me.
When it got rough for Dianne and me, we attended a small Episcopal Church called The Church of the Transfiguration, or, Trans Fig.
It was a pretty far out church, even for Episcopal.
Then, I didn't attend church much.
After I tried out the New Age, which was interesting but didn't fix anything, angels got a hold of me, and turned me every which a way but loose, and that's when I started wondering when was I never not in church?
I attended churches sometimes, but it was not the me who had attended church in the past. I didn't I fit in. I said things that were not always well received.
I stopped attending church.
During the black night early 1987- June 1998, I attended SouthSide Baptist Church, and was baptized, again. I attended a progressive Sunday school class, which I liked.
The minister's wife asked me to speak with him. We met privately. I took him into a soul alchemy ritual. He said he saw eagles. He was moved. His wife said she hoped I would keep meeting with him.
By then, I was so down that I quit attending that church.
I began hanging out week day afternoons in St. Luke's nave, hoping for a miracle.
The black workers, who kept the church clean, seemed to grasp I was in a horrible soul struggle. When I fell asleep sitting or lying on a pew seat, they left me alone, until it was time to close the church. The white people in the church never approached me.
I started attending Sunday Services at St. Luke's. I met a man in the congregation, who was fascinated in mystics, but himself had not, to his knowledge, had a mystical experience.
He was fascinated by my personal pre-black night experiences. He offered me a bedroom in his home, if I felt I needed to leave my wife, Deborah.
When I left her, the black night began to lift. I took him up on his offer.
I kept attending Sunday services at St. Luke's.
One Sunday before the morning service began, a woman in the foyer outside the nave called out, "Sloan, is that you?" I didn't recognize her.
She introduced herself, said her and my children had once played together. I remembered her then. We sat together during the service. After it was over, I asked her if she would like to go somewhere for lunch? She said, yes.
Over lunch, I told her a little about what I had been though and was coming out of. I told some of my mother and St. Luke's.
My lunch "date" said she was raised Southern Baptist and had come to view that as too severed and judgmental.
I told said I might still be really messed up, l but I knew the hand of God in something, when I saw it.
Really?
Yeah, really.
Where it went from there for us is a l-o-n-g story, which I have told elsewhere, but do not know if it's to be part of this tale.
Suffice to say, it was by far the most physically passionate and unearthly romance I had experienced (or would experience).
But, she was so sure she would die and burn in hell if she did not attend church every Sunday...
And she was so just as sure I had to be a successful capitalist to be her man...
And she just as so sure kept ignoring, or forgetting, God, she said, repeatedly telling her to leave me alone about that, I was doing God's work...
Until, finally, God told her in her sleep, lying beside me on my bed in my apartment, "You are not the one,"
And she woke up terrified, and fled.
On the refrigerator in her kitchen was a "We Plan, God laughs!" magnet.
I had told her a few times that was a message from God to her, and she had agreed.
I didn't hear any laughing after she fled, only my heart and guts wrenching and angels weeping.
When I was homeless, mostly, 2000-2005, I went into quite a few churches, and often I realized I was encountering the devil where most Christians never would think to look.
When I addressed what was in front of me, unseen, it seemed, by any one else, it was not welcomed with smiles.
When I was in Birmingham after my father died, I dreamed of my St. Luke's girlfriend one Saturday night, and I went to St. Luke's the next morning, and there she was, sitting in the same part of the same pew where we sat the first time.
I said it was good to see her, I hoped she was doing well.
She said I was looking well, and she was not interested.
I said, ok, I didn't wish to cause her discomfort.
I got up and left the nave, and my mother's church.
What seemed the trigger for our break up had come at St. Luke's in the summer of 1999.
The priest preached hard for, and vestrymen then got up and begged, the congregation to give the church more money, because it was struggling financially.
They quoted Jesus in the Gospels, "Be a generous giver, good measure pressed down." But Jesus had meant, give to people in need.
My girlfriend already had concluded, if the church was doing God's work, then God would provide what money the church needed.
I had been told in a dream a year earlier, that I had two adversaries with her: the Baptist and the capitalists, and the capitalists were the tougher adversary.
A budding anti-capitalist, I suppose I had no chance, even though she made very good money.
She really a good salary with a tech company, and had really good benefits. She was was doing well in the stock market.
I told her to ask God for investment tips. She blanched, and I said, just do it and see what happens.
She asked, received investment tips from the ethers, and the stocks she bought which went up nicely, quickly.
But I wasn't a capitalist.
Nor, according to my mother, was Lee Graham.
She told me that he refused to use sermons to try to raise money for St. Luke's. Only one time a year, when the Episcopal Diocese required it, did he make such a sermon, and he clearly did to like doing it.
My mother also told me, that during the time of the troubles, when Birmingham Blacks sought the same rights, privileges and treatment that Whites enjoyed, Blacks started pop-calling at White churches, to worship. That cause quite a stir.
At a St. Luke's Vestry meeting, the vestrymen (deacons) discussed that situation and decided to hire off-duty Mt. Brook police officers to stand guard at St. Luke's on Sunday mornings, and turn away any Blacks who came there to worship.
As the vestrymen adjourned the meeting, Lee asked them if they wanted to hear what he thought about what they had decided?
Oh, well, er, yes. What do you think Reverend Graham.
Reverend Graham said, he had built St. Luke's from scratch, it was its pastor, and if Blacks came to St. Lukes and were turned away, he would end the service and close the church.
Chi-ching.
No Blacks ever came to St. Luke's to worship during that time. Mt. Brook was all-white, except for Black servants and yard workers.
Not long after that, Lee told my mother that he work at St. Luke's was done, and he was taking a small parish outside of Tallahassee, Florida.
After my mother died in early 1967, my father sent his company plane to bring Lee to say last words over my mother's casket at Elemwood Cemetery, where my son woyld be laid to rest on September 12, 1968.
Lee's eulogy was brief. He walked down the family line, shaking hands with my father and my brother, I was looking down and he passed me by.
I think Lee served that small Florida parish until he passed on.
If asked what I would say today over my mother's casket ...
I would say she loved life. She had more friends than anyone I knew. All my friends and my brother's and my sister's friends loved her and being in my home, and they called her Nelle, and she loved them. She was devoted to her children and loyal to her friends. She and my wife loved each other like older and younger sister. She was devoted to St. Luke's Episcopal church and its pastor, Lee Graham. She withstood horrible firestorms from her parents and in-laws and their Southside Baptist Church minister for switching to St. Luke's and taking her children with her. She was a saint for not divorcing her womanizing husband, and she told me the reason she didn't was because her mother told her, "If you divorce Sloan, it will kill me!." So, she got a divorce from her mother and my father, and here we are, telling her goodbye.
I don't think. my mother wanted me to work for Golden Flake, and perhaps if she had not died, she would have helped me find enough spine to practice law in Troy, Alabama, instead. She and my Great Grandmother Bashinsky were very close. But then, perhaps I would not even exist, if she had not written my father a letter when he was at Princeton, telling him if he didn't leave Princeton and come home and marry her, she would marry the first man who would have her, to save her from her Puritan parents.
She told me that. too.
In the mid-1980s, I was moving toward not practicing law. My father and I had lunch in local restaurants about twice a month.
During one of those lunches, I asked him, if the reason he had pushed himself so hard in business and investing, was to make it up to his father for dropping out of Princeton to marry my mother?
My father said, "You know me pretty well."
His father had graduated from Princeton, and from all I could tell, that was his father's crowning life achievement.
His father tried several times to persuade me to go to Princeton, and he would pay for it. It didn't feel right to me, and I declined.
Much later, Major told me that our Grandfather Bashinsky had made him the same offer. Even later, I learned the same offer had been made to the male children of my father's brother Leo.
None of us went to Princeton.
I danced a while in Birmingham with a lady lawyer, who loved Bill Barr and Donald Trump
This article was in my Apple News feed yesterday:
THE HILL
Barr: Trump will deliver 'chaos' and 'horror show'
Former Attorney General Bill Barr said Friday that former President Trump will deliver “chaos” and a “horror show” if he returned to the White House in 2024.
“If you believe in his policies, what he’s advertising as his policies, he’s the last person who could actually execute them and achieve them,” Barr said of Trump at an event in Cleveland. “He does not have the discipline.”
When pressed further, Barr claimed his former boss doesn’t have “the ability for strategic thinking” or “setting priorities.”
“It is a horror show when he’s left to his own devices,” Barr said. “And so, you may want his policies, but Trump will not deliver Trump policies.”
“He will deliver chaos and, if anything, lead to a backlash that will set his policies much further back than they otherwise would be,” he added.
Barr, who served as attorney general under Trump and former President George H.W. Bush, was in Cleveland discussing his book, “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General.”
The former attorney general has become a frequent critic of Trump since leaving the administration in December 2020. Shortly before resigning, Barr revealed the Department of Justice found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, despite then-President Trump’s claims.
Last month, he [Barr] suggested Trump was the Republican candidate “most likely to lose again” to President Biden in 2024.
I forwarded the article to K, the last in a string of lawyers, who represented my stepsister's son during the long, arduous winding down of my father's considerable financial remains, so to speak. My father's wealth paid a whole lot of lawyers, some of whom sometimes caused me to want to kill them, or at least get them abducted by the mother ship and never seen or heard from again.
I described that in considerably more detaii in a book I recently completed about my father, his company and his family. I named the book, "The Golden Flake Clown's Tale." The clown was a hobo clown children loved. In my youth, I sometimes was likened to the clown. In my 60s and 70s, I was a homeless off and on hobo.
K is a quite physically attractive lady lawyer, who was a county judge and a prosecutor in a western state and had her own television show sort of like Judge Judy, I suppose. Later, K worked for her good friend, Attorney General William Barr, in his US Department of Justice.
After my part of my father's estate finally resolved and K was done representing my stepsister's son, I told her that Trump was infiltrated by a demonic entity, and anyone who associated with Trump was infiltrated by that entity, and I hoped she and her husband would remove themselves from politics and get on with their lives.
K was looking for a new job. Since she had many contacts in important places, including the media, I offered to pony up $1,000,000 to fund for two years a law firm consisting of her and me. Her job would be finding us clients we would consult on going about legal squabbles differently. She said that would be dangerous, we would need a whole lot of malpractice insurance, and she declined.
K emailed me about the William Bar article:
I know - BB is after him BAD. Apparently they didn’t leave in gods terms lol.
How are you? Johnnie and I had a long catch up the other day. I love and miss you all!!
Johnnie is a Birmingham lawyer K associated so she could represent my deceased stepsister's son in the litigation over my father's financial remains in Alabama courts.
I really liked K and Johnnie, and we had some fun conversations about life and such. When Johnnie promoted Kay and I be boyfriend and girlfriend, I said that ain't gonna happen. First, because she is married, and second, because she is a Trumper.
K howled, I wouldn't be her boyfriend because she is a Trumper?
I said, that's right.
I replied to K's email about the Bill Barr article and Johnnie:
Maybe they didn’t leave on good terms because Barr publicly stated Trump’s stolen election claims were bull shit. Maybe Barr told Trump privately that he was bull shit, which he has been since he was a spoiled brat rich kid. Your and Johnny‘s client’s male role model. Seems your promises to call me were bull shit. Hope your and your hubby’s new jobs are suiting you. I offered you a fully-funded dream job,
What really drives mass shooters and gun lovers is they don't feel good about their dicks
As a boy, I loved to hunt dove, quail and ducks with a shotgun. The last shotgun I had was an Ithaca 12-gauge pump with improved-cylinder barrel - scattergun. I kept it long after I quit hunting, because racking a shell into the chamber would scare the living shit out of any intruder. The magazine held 5 shells if the plug was removed. I kept it in my bedroom, loaded with #3 buckshot, which would hit anything half-way aimed at 20 yards away, and make an intruder wish he had never been born. I use the male pronoun, because the odds of an intruder being female back then were zero, and I imagine that's close to the odds today.
I don't think I ever heard of a female mass shooter in America. Perhaps I missed it in the news, but it just isn't American women's style to commit mass murder with guns, or with any weapon. I think that must suggest, if Dr. Freud and Dr. Jung, were here today, they would say mass shooting and gun love is really a manhood issue. The shooters and gun lovers don't feel good about their dicks. The best the really unhinged gun lovers can come up with to feel better about their dicks is to load their large capacity assault rifle facimile and go where there are a lot of people and let their surrogate dicks do their talking until the good guys come and let their surrogate dicks do the talking, and the unhinged guy with the small dick complex is sent to the unhappiest fucking hunting ground there is.
Psychoanalysis behind, here's something a Birmingham, Alabama man posted on Facebook today, which started a discussion into which I put my 80+year-old dick's worth.
Kyle
Banning the sale of these firearms wouldn’t affect those
getting them illegally regardless. I also know many people
reload ammunition which banning sale of the ammo would
encourage and if done slightly improperly it could cause
more issues to otherwise safe individuals who responsibly
use the firearm. personally, for home defense theres no
better option than an AR-15 to protect other family members
or bystanders from second hand wounds due to the velocity
and way the ground flowers compared to handgun rounds
and shotguns.
David
I have problems with the math. 20,000,000 AR-15s out often
justified for home defense. In a given year how much
actual use for actual home defense occurs using (or
threatening to use these weapons?) We'd disagree on the
fraction, but we'd agree it's a tiny fraction.
On the other hand, how much harm is done, in a given year, by the legality of these weapons. How many innocent people dead and, I mean, blown apart dead. How many people deeply traumatized by grief? How many first responders, law enforcement, and countless others who have to live with the experience of directly encountering these slaughtered human beings and their families. All of this loss of life, all these terrible injuries, all this grief and trauma are endured by large numbers of people for the limited benefit of people being able to shoot home invaders and only rarely actually doing so.
Sloan Bashinsky
I would lay my money on the best home defense being a
12-gauge pump shotgun loaded with 00(double aught)
buckshot. Racking the chamber will scare the living shit out
of any intruder, and it's really hard to miss any target within
20 yards.
Dale
I'm a psychologist and have been for 40 years. The problem would NOT be solved by universal access to mental health care. As much as that is needed. It presumes that (a) the kind of people who would shoot children would, at some point, decide to get treatment. (b) That mental health treatments would somehow always address the underlying mental health problems behind all this, and no one even knows what that is. Treatments don't always work in any field of health care (surgery, chemotherapy, medication use). (c) No one knows how difficult and MASSIVELY expensive an undertaking would get us to a mental health system where anyone can go, at will, get all the most effective treatment they need. The problem with this mental health argument is that it's based on idea that, in our current political environment, Republicans would fund anything like it. Talk about a massive spending program!
I believe many people with your view about how the "only way" to address this is through mental health care are sincere. But this argument basically diverts us from doing things that are do-able. Those things won't solve the problem either. But is it possible they'd reduce this level of carnage? Yes.
Finally, the organized and well-funded campaigns to prevent ANY gun legislation has created the situation of having so many of these weapons out there (most of the 20,000,000 AR-15s out there in the US were manufactured in the last 10 years), that it's now extremely hard to think of a way to actually reduce their numbers in meaningful ways. The gun lobby made sure this happened and now say, oh, sorry, nothing can be done about guns.
Dale
There are many, many gun owners who are responsible and no threat to the public at large. They sometimes miss the fact that in championing the rights of responsible people to own AR-15s, they are also championing the right of irresponsible people, not to mention potential mass shooters, to own AR-15s.
Peter
Uh...no we aren't. I'd love nothing more than for teachers at my kids' schools to be armed, trained and ready to neutralize a threat, rather than being sheep waiting to be slaughtered.
Dale
I recently had a conversation with a police chief, one of many people I know in law enforcement, who agrees that the idea of arming teachers is one of the most dangerous ideas related to schools in recent memory.
Michael
Look at the statistics. More people die from drug overdoses, obesity, cancer, and heart disease by much larger percentage than those who die by guns (homicide and suicide).
Charles
So let me get this right, l should not complain about a class of 6 yo or a pot luck supper where some 70yo are shot by a gun weapon because more people will die from a overdose, cancer, heart disease, obesity, etc... ??!!
Sloan Bashinsky
I think the only way to get a gun lover to look at this topic differently is for the gun lover to have some loved ones shot up and blown apart at a school or grocery store by guns such as the gun lover defends.
What sane, caring, responsible, law-abiding person would oppose Congress passing legislation that requires strict background checks for the types of guns being used in school and other public massacres?
That aside, does anyone in this conversation actually believe legislation banning such guns would make any difference, given such guns are all over America and apparently are easy to acquire?
I can't imagine any mental health professional (psychiatrist, psychologist, clinical social worker, psychological counselor, addiction counselor, etc.) actually thinks they have any power to stop shooting massacres. In fact, because mental health is their line of work, they know for a fact that they have no such power.
What should have been done decades ago, was put well-trained, armed guards in public lower, middle and high schools. But did the local and state governments do that, as part of their "states rights' jurisdiction? No, they did not.
Did any US President federalize state national guards and use them to guard public schools? No, they did not. Even though President Kennedy federalized the Alabama. lNational Guard to escort black students to their classes at the University of Alabama, literally pushing aside Alabama Governor George Wallace, as he hollered segregation now, segregation forever!
Today, I saw in my Apple newsfeed that president Biden is sending US military personnel to the nation's southern border, to deal with the immigrants flooding in from Mexico. That is more important to Biden, and to his backers, was more important to Trump, and to his backers, than guarding the nation's public schools.
Imagine what this all looks like to Christians' God and Jesus and Mother Mary? Imagine what it looks like to Jehovah and Allah and Buddha? Imagine the karma when the roll is called up yonder for US presidents and state governors and local city and county mayors and commissioners, and school boards who did fucking nothing to protect school children from being massacred with guns that mean them no harm.
If I were a school child in America today, I would refuse to go to school, because I do not feel safe there. Imagine every school child in America going on strike and not going to school? I'm not joking. Their parents don't give a shit about them, because their parents keep making them go to school. Yet, school children stayed home during the covid pandemic shut down, not to protect them, but to protect their parents and grandparents, who were far more at risk to Covid-19, than were children.
The US president and state. governors and local elected officials and school boards don't give a shit about school children, because they don't put well-trained, armed guards in the schools.
Fuck all.
Here's something an amiga sent me maybe 10 years ago, which she said just up and leaped out of her about as fast as she could type it.
TIME TO CHOOSE
I cry out from within my soul, a place filled with such grief that only my subconscious ventures there
Out of fear of never returning from the guttural screams and wails, I awake only to find the world to which I am returning, the war that is not
finished…..
The principalities, the powers, the unseen,
Einstein measured math and explained the unexplainable.
There is no formula for this world though, the war between good and evil.
It was attempted , the explanation many and many times in the past with the Koran, the Bible, the tribal languages.
In writings and in generations passed down time and again.
The invisible weapons.
The Indians trying to explain a gun to the village.
No comprehension, no words to describe the terror of it.
The tribe saw his fear as he explained in terrifying images,
the death of his friend and brother.
The village looked on. Was he crazy? He tried so to convince them.
He warned them.
He knew the weapons would come on the shoulders of the evil warriors.
Calling for the heads of the Indians on a platter,
like John the Baptist, delivered.
Where were the laws of the U.S. then? Where were the Courts?
What was the difference? They called for the heads to be delivered on platters.
They still do.
The principalities, the powers of darkness, calls for heads everyday.
And unknowingly you choose your side.
When the Indians, the homeless, the children are not worth standing and fighting for, you have become a tool of darkness, watching the deliverance of the Saints.
“Don’t be surprised when they hate you”, said Jesus, “for they hated me first without a cause.”
But that is terrifying. Who wants to be hated?
We run a popularity contest in the U.S.
We can’t win, can’t succeed without our friends. Then what would be the measure of our worth?
Jesus said his saints would be like the salt of the earth scattered abroad.
Some have lost their savor. How many are left?
Few, outnumbered, holding the ground, fighting the wars of the unseen.
And the village hears of the weapons and can’t imagine, so they prepare not.
How do you prepare for the unbelievable?
“Only with God, the armor of the Lord, and the Holy Spirit”, says Jesus.
But these words are pungent in the ears of the Christians, the civilized.
“No heads are called for”, they say. Yet they are, by Satan everyday.
And the idle stand by and do nothing as the saints are delivered,
And the idle claim innocence of the blood of it all,
because they carried not the gun to slaughter the Indians, the Jews, the homeless, the children, the Saints.
But I tell you truth, idle ones, you are guilty!
You chose not to engage in the battle and the battle engaged you,
knowingly or not.
When you said, “No”, to the chosen, you said, “Yes” to Satan.
You said, “Yes, Satan carry on and deliver him on the platter, but I want
no part of it.”
You watched the slaughter but raised not a word in protest.
Fear of losing the popular friends, fear of becoming the salt of the earth scattered about and preyed on by Satan and his devouring angels.
Why would Satan destroy one of his own? Of course not.
He would not target the idle, who allow him to deliver the heads on the platters.
The ones he despises are the workers of God, the salt of the earth.
Where is their army, where is their law?
We believe we live by rules. We live by rules other than those we see.
The rules were written, they tell us the price.
They are written in the Bible, in the Holy books of old.
We read with our lips and see with our eyes but believe not in our heart.
Or we would become the salt, the persecuted, sawn asunder, living in
caves, destitute, beheaded, tortured in prison and so the Book goes.
And so the sale is void. There are no takers.
They want none of the hardships of the Lord elect.
Those promised, those delivered.
The idle fall by the wayside, planted shallow, planted on rocks,
Yielding nothing but thorns.
And Jesus says, “It is hard to kick against the pricks.”
The pricks of the fallen, the fence walkers, they will not choose a side.
The side is too torturous that bears the eternal promise.
The other side, Satan’s side, is full of success, victory in this world,
and awards and accolades.
The elect sleep without a home, without a country, alone with our wounds with only God to comfort us.
Speaking to the unseen as our only friend.
“Too hard” the idle say. “Not appealing.”
Then go and take your reward. Sit alongside as they deliver the heads on platters,
And know…. you will have your reward! For it is written.
It can’t be seen, but it is explained in the Book, the Bible;
You have chosen even if you refuse to.
You have chosen if you are not engaged.
You are not the salt of the earth if you are comforted, and popular.
No words of Jesus offered prosperity.
No words of Jesus have offered rewards here on earth.
Jesus spoke of trials and tribulations, and persecutions on earth.
Only above from the Father in a world yet to be seen, will our
efforts be rewarded.
In a world Einstein could not explain.
In a world where the formulas work, but no man can figure them out.
In a world too grand.
“Do you understand how I hung the moon and the stars?”, said God.
“Then how can you understand things greater?
They only heard from the Indian, who had seen the gun.
They didn’t recognize the evil ones who carried it.
Nor did they know when the evil ones would come,
or how many there would be.
But the heads have been called for and surely they will be delivered,
as always.
And the platters with the blood will be full,
And your hands will not be clean if you sit idly by,
And you will be rewarded with your portion for the killing.
It is written.
-Sandy Downs, Cudjoe Key
When are we ever not in church?
So on this Sunday morning, perhaps it is appropriate to share recent FB chat with the Trumper Joseph, who got a lot of air time in a previous post at this blog. After that, he switched lanes. Birmingham is our hometown, and we both attended the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and we both grew up in St. Luke's Episcopal Church in the Crestline side of Mt. Brook aka The Tiny Kingdom
Picking up where the previous post ended...
Sloan Bashinsky
I keep wondering if the Calvinists at McCallie
School poisoned your brain and your soul?
Joseph
McCallie has nothing to do with my viewpoint. And while you're on this subject, I got E class for dancing in Lockett Lodge with the Howard High Glee Club who were our guests. Also if you remember the senior year requirement to give a talk at morning services in the chapel, I read from Kaliel (Kahlil) Gibran. No not a Calvinist. Just a St. Luke's communicant who was confirmed by CC Carpenter who helped the civil rights effort with meetings in his library for various black ministers in Birmingham. My Dad, though raised in a traditional southern Democrat family with forebearers who held local and state elected offices, became an active Republican in the 1952 election of Ike. What was your heritage?
Sloan Bashinsky
I also was a St.Luke's communicant confirmed by Bishop Carpenter. When he gave me the chalice to take my first sip ever of alcohol, it went down my thought wrong and I felt like I was going to choke and gag to death at the altar, and it took all of my will power to pretend everything was okay and walk back to the pew where my mother and father were and kneel and pretend I was praying, instead of dying. I was 12 years old. My mother and Lee Gram [the priest] and Ben Smith [the curate] had forced me through Confirmation training. When I gave my talk to the McCallie assembly, it was about the threat of communism to America. I was still pretty naive. It was along time before I figured out white supremicists were the real threat to America, and when I look at photos of MAGA rallies, it is there in plain view.
Joseph
So you see we're both products of WWII and Depression era parents. The difference is that I feel like the sensation one has when the back of the neck twitches enough to make you alert to danger is Trump warts and all makes me feel both political parties don't have anyone's interest in mind. Except I feel having a senile POTUS in office who obviously amassed for himself and his family ill gotten wealth by selling his influence to bad actor nations that want to destroy us. Communism is just a convenient buzz word, it's totalitarianism and total upheaval of civil rights. To me photos of Maga rallies show me ordinary people who still find God, Country and the US Constitution are still valuable even in a pluralistic society. When I look at videos of BLM burning stores it reminds me of being in the Army preparing for riot duty at Fort Bragg after the death of MLK and RFK. And that we are closer to a civil war. And I believe it can be easily started by the Left, our intelligence services and the lack of astute judgement of our Media. Have you ever walked the beach at low tide? To the less observant it looks like sand but if you get closer your eye can spot black point like arrowheads but really are shark teeth. January 6th is like that to
Sloan Bashinsky
The MAGAS have a few token non-whites. In olden times, they would be called "Uncle Toms". I pick on the left and the right, because both side are totally fucked up. You call Biden a communist? If so, you are nuts, and ignorant, and know nothing about communism. You do not renounce Donald Trump? You will answer for that when your roll is called up yonder, or sooner.
If Jesus were to come back today and go into St. Luke's and talk like he did in the Gospels, the people at St. Luke's would not like it at all. They might threaten him, not having a clue who he was, because he did not look like any of the Caucasian artists portrayed him. Episcopalians think they are saved by grace, but they read prayer books and listen to their priests, instead reading the Bible, where Jesus plainly often says the way people get close to God and the Kingdom is how they live. That's it. To the extent they live as Jesus lived and taught, they are saved by him. The same for any Christian, or non-Christian, or Atheist. The same for anyone who never heard of Jesus.
Trump is possessed by a demon. A different demon, or maybe the same demon, is working on Biden. This is so crystal clear, that it is not seen by the American masses reveals just how blind, deaf and dumb they are. They have no clue that hobnobbing with either man, with either party, allows that demon, or those two demons, to infiltrate them, and they are clueless it is happening.
I love Gibran's writings/verses, and I loved the two biographies written about him, the first by his American lover and secretary, the second by a Lebanese man. Two very different treatments, make it a whole. If he was an American and living today, Gibran would have had nothing to do with Trump, nor with Biden. Gibran would urge Americans to rebel, which he actually did urge his brothers and sisters in Lebanon do when he was younger, and he had to leave there and come to America, because it was no longer safe for him in his home country.
Joseph
Peace be unto you Sloan. We both have to wear an outer self and inner self and because we're human there isn't much we can do when our past is history and the future we can't predict. We live in the present moment, make the most of it.
Sloan Bashinsky
That is pretty much Jesus taught in the Gospels, with the caveat, God's will, not ours, be done.
Joseph
Amen
Sloan Bashinsky
The last service I attended at St. Luke was in the fall 1999. The
Church was struggling financially. My view was, if the church did
God's work, God would provide the money the church needed. I
had read or heard Mother Teresa had said that to her workers,
who were pushing her to soiicit donations for their work. The
service that Sunday was devoted tor hitting the congregation up
for money. The minister quoted Jesus saying in the Gospels, "Be
a generous giver, good measure pressed down." I didn't think
Jesus had in mind giving churches money, when he said that. I
could not
recall Jesus ever built a church made from earthly elements. I
recalled my mother telling me that Lee Graham, who had built St.
Luke's from scratch, starting out in an old farm house in Crestline
Village, hated preaching on tithing, and he only did it one time a
year, when the Episcopal Diocese required it. I attended a few
services that farm house, which much later was razed and the
Mountain Brook Library was built there. Lee is the 5th person I
memorialized in A Few Remarkable Alabama People I Have
Known, which is a free read at:
afewremarkablealabamapeople.blogspot.com
Post-script
Just after posting that at this blog, I opened a post from Poetic Outlaws, which is managed by a fabulous poet, Erik Rittenberry, who had posted one of his own poems there this morning.
Woke up Sunday morning to the ancient
sound of the birds chirping outside
my window. Laid there half-naked
in a mess of sheets listening to
her breathe. Her hair pours off
the pillow. The taste of her love
still lingers on my tongue.
Maybe I’ll attempt a poem today.
Or perhaps she and I will tote a bottle
of wine down by the pond
and read a little Steinbeck in the shade
of a sycamore and forget about
it all.
The archaic eyes of a bearded Whitman
gaze down at me from a painting
on the wall.
I get out of bed quietly and shuffle
into the backyard. Barefoot and alive.
The black coffee in a cracked porcelain
mug stirs the blood. The golden liquid
rays of the renewed sun pierce through
the thirty-foot bamboo stalks that I
planted a few years ago.
It’s springtime in the south and the breeze
feels good on my face. The crape myrtles
and magnolias are blooming. The cardinals
and blue jays flutter around the birdfeeder
as I watch the mischievous squirrels
creep ever so closer. The fresh jasmine
fills the morning with a sweet fragrance.
Daydreams and budding flowers.
Fresh dew glistens on the ferns and
philodendrons as my pooch
chases lizards in the
damp grass.
The flawless symphony of creation, the
eternal throb of life, my spirit
drenched with an undisturbed joy,
a rare contentment. My ornery impulses
at ease, along with my ego. My countless
vices have succumbed to a natural
innocence. Yesterday’s qualms are
forgotten. The future is of no concern.
The bloodstain of history is far from
my mind. Not a drab or dreary
thought arises. Ambition is
absurd. Death is a lie.
I hear the words of Rumi
wafting in the soft morning light,
The breeze at dawn
has secrets
to tell you. Don’t
go back to
sleep.
I made this comment:
Just after posting at my new blog today, I opened the newest Poetic Outlaws offering, "Sunday Morning", from the top of the totem pole itself :-).
I once was madly in love with a woman, who grew up Southern Baptist and finally concluded they were too severe and she switched to attending the Episcopal church in which I had grown up after my mother switched from the Southern Baptists to a new church in an old farmhouse pastored by a young Episcopal priest.
Now, this woman I loved so much, our passion was not of this world, and often when we were alone, just sitting, talking, we went into something we called "the space", which was so smooth and silky, so marvelous, that I hoped it would never end.
She was convinced, if she did not attend church every Sunday, she would die and burn in hell. But one Sunday, I persuaded her to go with me to a nearby lake that rented canoes. I had been a pretty good whitewater canoeist, and I still figured I could keep from tipping over a canoe on a flat calm lake.
It was a warm beautiful sunny spring day. We were in the space. We saw a great blue heron fishing in shallow water next to an island in the lake. But after it was over, she didn't want to do it again.
Part of my blog post today, "When are we ever not in church", is about that Episcopal church, and is an insult to what Eric gave the world in his incredible poem, but, sadly, just as real.
The blog post begins...
"So on this Sunday morning, perhaps it is appropriate to share recent FB chat with the Trumper Joseph, who got a lot of air time in the previous post at this blog. After that, he switched lanes. Birmingham is our hometown, and we both attended the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and we both grew up in St. Luke's Episcopal Church in the Crestline side of Mt. Brook aka The Tiny Kingdom.”
The heart has its own reasons that reason cannot understand
The other day, I sent out an email blast to old contacts in Key West and the Florida Keys and elsewhere, and to new and old contacts in Alabama, about this new blog going online.
I met one of the elsewhere contacts, D, in a Christian Science Monitor online political forum during the summer 2002. The discussion was whether or not President Bush should invade Iraq. I said Iraq was a trap, and I bored in on what would Jesus say about America invading Iraq? I pissed off some people, and some people liked what I had to say.
D and I stayed in touch. He told me that he was from the Dominican Republic, and his family had moved to America when he was young. He spoke several languages fluently. He knew the Bible and the Classics cold. He was familiar with other religions. He was a retired tech engineer. He lived in New York City. He started calling me Don Quixote, and I started calling him Sancho Panza.
We had many discussions about lots of things.
We traveled together through the rise and fall of Barack Obama, who Sancho hoped was the answer to his prayers. We watched Obama accept the Nobel Peace Prize while he was waging the two Bush-Cheney wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By the end of Obama's 2nd term in the White House, Sancho was totally disillusioned. He told me that he would vote for Donald Trump, hoping Trump would destroy American politics and the Washington, D.C, swamp, snd something new and better would emerge. Sancho voted for Trump again, hoping Trump would finish the job. Sancho couldn't stand Hillary Clinton, and he did not like Joe Biden. I thought Trump and Hillary both should be locked up in adjoining cells. I think Joe Biden means well, most of the time, but America needs somebody very different in the White House. Jesus.
Sancho and I had a falling out about his supporting Trump,
We had a second falling out over his opposition to covid-19 vaccinations, after he had convinced me that a New York family practitioner doctor, Vladimir Zelenko, had developed a 5-day early stage infection cure, which he explained in a letter to President Trump, who touted the cure as a possible miracle. Dr Zelenko and Trump were hammered by the Democrats and the Medical-Industrial complex, and Trump threw away the cure, instead of making it freely available to all people in America, which would have allowed America to remain open. Dr. Zelenko's letter to Trump is at the bottom of this post.
Sancho was very much against the covid vaccinations, and he got very angry when I told him people who declined to be vaccinated should not be allowed into hospitals. At that time, Alabama's hospitals were flooded with unvaccinated covid patients, and people needing to be in those hospitals for other reasons could not get in. President Trump came to Alabama and told a MAGA rally in Cullman, 50 miles north of Birmingham, that they should get vaccinated. They booed him. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey started saying publicly that Alabama people needed to get vaccinated, so hospitals could take care of people who did have covid.
Sancho kept including me in email blasts about matters of human concern he felt were important, so I included him in an email blast I sent out two weeks ago, announcing this blog:
Sancho replied:
Thanks, I’ll check it out. He included a meme and his :
Life is short, make sure you spend as much time as possible on the internet arguing with strangers.
A true lover of wisdom has hands too busy to hold on to anything! He learns by doing and every pebble in the path becomes her teacher! Oink
Something got into me and I went with it in my reply:
Oink indeed, Sancho
A south Alabama amiga I met online after my brother went missing in early 2010, lets me toss around a poem she said seemed from somewhere above her.
“Pigs in mud”
All want the security of the well fed pig.
Horror at the baseness unrecognized.
A lifetime spent in shirt stuffing.
And pen comparison.
Is truth more palatable when honeyed?
Is a stark soulscape less so with the eyes of Monet?
May my affectations always be understood.
I agree, doing politics, or perhaps just about anything online, is like cloning a clone of a clone of something that might actually be, exist, happen.
Alas, perhaps before, but most likely after prostate cancer radiation therapy, my pecker don't get excited about anything, except sometimes in a dream.
I got so many physical ails going toward 81, that just getting up and lumbering to the kitchen and then to the laptop, and driving 15 miles south several times a week to play at the duplicate bridge club and chess with a black country pastor in a public library keeps me pretty tuckered out, no relationship to the fucker named Tucker FOX ditched.
Have a small plot in a nearby community garden. All the other gardeners are growing tomatoes, peppers and squash, mostly, while I'm growing green leafy vegetables and edible herbs.
I meditate sometimes in the park, which I discovered holds an earth vortex - imagine that coincidence! Some really interesting seance kinda stuff has happened.
I live in a 1950's vintage apartment tower, on the first floor, which saves me exercising up and down stairs or getting trapped in a persnickity elevator. I've lived in this building two other times. It's where I seem to end up after I stop running away from home, again. Yeah, in Birmingham.
Don't miss Key West and the Florida Keys, much, but often dream of being there dealing with something, which turns out to be a metaphor for what i'm dealing with here, or something I need to cover in what I am writing.
I'm into writing my 6th book since leaving Key West in late fall 2019. Stranger than fucking fiction, often as not.
Legs numb from knee to toe, started at toes in 2011. Doctors have no no clue why. Nothing helps. I can walk, but need to be more careful, especially about steps, especially steps going down.
Maybe I should have bought a bicycle when I got here, but the streets are not nearly as bicycle friendly as Key Way West of Weird. But, then, no hurricanes here, only passing tornadoes. And much colder winters. But tolerable.
A friend with tech skills created The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast, when he and I do. We started on YouTube and found it was akin to Pravda too much of the time, and Russia banned us, and then all the Russian federation banned us, and part of India banned us, and we think China blocked us, and the religious and political right kept flagging us, so with some help from a recovering Shintoist in Japan, my friend discovered the Torrent system, and we now have good distribution there, getting around 80,000 complete views per episode, world wide. People who use the Torrent system by-pass national Big Brothers.
Tonight we're going to record an episode, which might be called "Dicks and Guns," which might be a bit Freudian and Jungian.
We started out doing an audio podcast on Spotify, which was doing well until Joe Grogan, their cash cow, went way off the politically correct chart, and Spotify kept Grogan and dumped a lot of their users who were doing free, no ad podcasts. YouTube tried several times to get us to let them run ads on our podcast, and we declined. My tech friend put the audio podcasts on Torrent.
He also figured out how to get several of my books into an internet library, archive.org, which likes books that are different and can be read for free. People all over the world are reading those books.
Thanks to my tech friend, I will be shooting off my mouth long after I'm recalled by the mother ship, or by whatever.
If a beloved pet ails as much as I often ail, its owner would lovingly get a vet to put the pet down and out of its misery. Human beings, however, are expected to live as long as possible, and to make as many doctors, nurses, physical therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, hospitals, assisted living facilities, nursing homes, hospices and lawyers as happy and profitable as possible..
I hope you are doing okay. Covid was such a fun time. Kids were kept home from school to protect their far more at risk parents and grandparents, and now kids are sent to schools which have no armed guards, and it's anyone's guess if kids will come home alive.
I don't think Don Q is quite ready to hang it up and see just how truly boring his life can be.
Rummaging back in time in my email account about two weeks ago, I found this beauty I didn't even remember writing a few hours before a monthly Key West Poetry Guild reading.
Eve’s Answer
April Fool
Vexing Truth
Life is Poetry,
Poetry is Life,
There's no more to say,
but that would
make God
a really dull boy,
now wouldn't it,
Eve?
So, Eve,
What say you?
After all,
You have been,
still are, blamed,
for everything that went wrong with
hu - MAN - i - ty.
Well, do you really want to hear
what I gotta say?
Is this one of those
be careful what you ask for
pregnancies?
Well, is it?
Probably, but say
what you wish -
I s'pect you need
to be heard.
Heard?
Funny you mention ears.
Yes, ears.
Such important receptacles.
Yet filled with concrete,
shit, propaganda, beliefs,
certainties, well,
let's not leave out
SUPERSTITION
and
RELIGION,
should we?
By the way,
where do ya
suppose
God came from?
Or, out of?
And,
why do ya s'pose
I made Eve
in my own
IMAGE?
'Cause Adam was
so bored and dull -
so ... predictable
He was BORING!!!
the shit outta me!!!
That's why.
Now
Shusssssh -
Don't go round quoting me on
any of that -
I've had quite enough of
the religious right
ta last me
the rest of forever
Sancho replied:
Well, since you are waxing poetic these days, here is something in a Newsletter I received this morning about how the Heart and not the Brain is the real seat of thought/feelings/consciousness, according to ancient writings... I think you might like it!
It was a lot of reading and it didn’t dull my knee jerk reaction in few words:
I bet any kid knows the heart has its own reasons that reason cannot understand.
Today, Sancho emailed YouTube videos of Richie Valens performing - AKA, Ricardo Esteban Valenzuela Reyes.
I replied:
Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper sadly were killed in a private airplane crash. Had they not been killed, perhaps America would have turned out very differently. Perhaps one of them would have become president. Perhaps love and music would have prevailed over war and my dick is bigger and better than yours.
Sancho emailed a thumbs up.
The Great Pussy Grabber rides again
I posted this on Facebook today, May 10, 2023, and it got a couple of nibbles.
Sloan Bashinsky
From today's NY Times:
In the civil case, the federal jury of six men and three women found that Ms. Carroll, 79, a former magazine writer, had sufficiently proved that Mr. Trump sexually abused her nearly 30 years ago in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan. The jury did not, however, find he had raped her, as she had long claimed.
As an Alabama lawyer, I have some views.
1. 6 men sided with the plaintiff. In olden times, that would not have happened in Alabama, in a case where the woman waited for a very long time to make a public accusation. So, that all 6 men on the jury sided with the plaintiff is, well, remarkable. Perhaps, well, a miracle? However, maybe the men jurors persuaded the female jurors to give Trump a pass on the rape allegation, and convict him on the lesser sexual assault/abuse charge and the defamation charge. And, if wonder if a federal appeals court panel might scratch their heads a bit over giving Trump a pass on the rape charge, when the plaintiff testified she was raped by Trump.
2. Trump did not attend the trial and face his accuser and testify on his own behalf. In a civil lawsuit, if a defendant does not take the stand, the jury can view that as an admission of guilt. Trump's lawyers knew that, and I suppose that's why they entered Trump's deposition into the record, hoping the jury would be happy with that, while Trump was in Ireland playing golf on one of his golf courses, lamenting the far and away front runner Republican candidate was having to deal with a fake lawsuit brought by a lying woman he never met. Yet, there is no way Trump's lawyers could erase Trump having publicly bragged, because he was a celebrity, he was able to kiss women and grab them by their pussy, and get away with it. And, I can imagine that is what convinced the 6 men to vote to convict Trump for sexual abuse/assault, and I can imagine that's not going to be forgotten by a federal appeals court panel.
3. What opened the door to the lawsuit was the plaintiff had stated in a book that Trump had raped her. Trump publicly tore into her, called her a liar and other bad things, and that opened the door for her suing him for rape and willful defamation - but she would have to prove he raped her, to prove he defamed her. During the lawsuit, Trump kept calling the plaintiff a liar and other bad things, and now that the jury sided with the plaintiff, she can sue him again for defamation that occurred after she sued him. I can't imagine Trump's lawyers did not warn him about that, and he ignored them.
4. Trump said he will appeal, which is his right. If he appeals and wins, then that's the end of all of it. If he appeals and loses, then I can imagine the plaintiff will sue him again for defamation.
Ky
Can he appeal if he didn't show up for the trial? On what grounds?
Sloan Bashinsky
Yes, Trump can appeal. He is not required to take the witness stand. As for what grounds he might appeal, his lawyers might attack the trial judge as being biased? His lawyers might say there was too much pre-trial publicity, Trump couldn't get a fair trial? Who caused the pre-trial publicity?
However, I think the law in NY federal court is the same as the law in Alabama federal and state courts, where I practiced law after clerking for a federal judge in Birmingham.
Simply stated, an appellate court will not overturn what the finder of fact decided, in this case, what the jury decided, unless there simply were no facts in evidence to support the jury's decision.
A childhood buddy, who is not a lawyer, told me this morning that the lawyer who represented Trump in the case won't be paid. I said, if the lawyer didn't get paid in full up front, like, $2,000,000 wired into his law firm's bank account, he is an idiot.
Tonight's CNN Town Hall Meeting at 7:00 p.m. Central Time might shed further light, if Trump shows up? If he shows up, will he play by the rules, or will he do what he did during the first Trump-Biden debate in 2020, and talk over everybody despite repeatedly being told to shut up? Consider the irony of CNN hosting what Trump probably originally imagined would be a MAGA rally.
Ky
Sloan, I'm thinking he won't answer direct questions from CNN and scream "biased". As far as publicity, he created it.
Sloan Bashinsky
Yep. Maybe he will get so worked up that he explodes, literally. Then, the MAGAs will blame CNN. This would be a fabulous Reality TV series, if it wasn't real. Maybe call it, "The Great Pussy Grabber Rides Again"? Meanwhile, somebody ought to give him this hurt feelings report to file where the sun never shines. I wonder if Trump and MAGAs and Republicans would be shocked to learn I am not a Democrat? I am a human being .
Sloan Bashinsky
A Birmingham native, who is a Trumper and says he is a Christian, read the above and sent me a FB chat private message:
JW
After listening to hear Carroll's interview on Today, I think she may have opened the door for any prominent men to be charged years after fact. It doesn't necessarily mean conviction but it does mean lawyer fees for defense. Undoubtedly an opportunity for lawyers. verbum sapienti satis est: "don't dip wick, indiscriminately.
I replied to JW on FB chat:
Why'd you put your response in a private massage where no one could see my response?
How many prominent men publicly boasted about being a celebrity and because of that they got away with kissing women and grabbing their pussies?
How many prominent men would go to Ireland to play golf, instead of being at the trial to testify?
How many prominent men would ignore their lawyers and keep saying defaming things about the woman who had sued him, giving her grounds to sue him again if she won her lawsuit against him?
I don't know what happened to you that causes you think and speak like you do, but I think it is not becoming of a grown man, nor of a Christian, but then, I think Christians who back Trump would back him no matter what he did or said. Even if they knew he was the Devil, they would back him.
Joseph
After listening to Carroll's interview on Today, I think she may have opened the door for any prominent men to be charged years after fact. It doesn't necessarily mean conviction but it does mean lawyer fees for defense. Undoubtedly an opportunity for lawyers. verbum sapienti satis est: "don't dip wick, indiscriminately."
Me
Why'd you put your response in a private massage where no one could see my response? How many prominent men publicly boasted about being a celebrity and because of that he got away with kissing women and grabbing their pussies? How many prominent men would go to Ireland to play golf, instead of being at the trial to testify? How many prominent men would ignore their lawyers and keep saying defaming things about the woman who had sued him, giving her grounds to sue him again if she won her lawsuit against him? I don't know what happened to you that causes you to think and speak like you do, but I think it is not becoming of a grown man, nor of a Christian. But then, I think Christians who back Trump would back him no matter what he did or said. Even if they knew he was the Devil, they would back him.
Joseph
I have a thumbs up on your article in FB. I liked your legal points. But I think this kind of lawsuit may begin to be used going forward elsewhere. But considering the fact you want to berate me in private or public all the time why should I reply to you publicly you seem to have the desire to be irascible to anyone. You need more psychological help . Hope you get it.
Sloan
I have a long history of responding publicly to people who write to me online. I do not edit what they write to me to make me feel or look better. I did not disclose your identity. You have consistently written things that strike me as sneaky and off the main point. When I see you deal in public with Trump and the Republicans and the MAGAs as a real Christian would do, I will have a different view of you. You don't need token reminding me of Biden's and the Democrats' many failings. I am not one of them, Democrats get very uncomfortable when I get onto them about their messes. I was ruthless with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. If anyone made it tougher on men, it was not the plaintiff but it was Trump. The dumb shit should have settled the case privately, had the verdict sealed. There was a right wing nut on the jury, and even he voted with the plaintiff. Hell, I thought the verdict would be in Trump's favor, because the plaintiff had waited so long, and she could not even remember the exact year when it happened. If she had come to me as her lawyer, I would have told her she was not going to make a good plaintiff, and I would not feel okay representing her. Trump behaved like an idiot throughout the trial, and who knows if that didn't come to the jury's attention? How can such a loose cannon degenerate be president of the United States. It says volumes about the people who vote for him. Volumes.
Joseph
Christ Sloan when a person doesn't appear in court the optics to the jury any jury would assume he's guilty. Look I voted for Trump twice, so what? I've always voted the Republican ticket. Most of your posts I believe occurred when I was elated that Tucker Carlson revealed tapes that cast doubts that January 6 was an insurrection. I didn't believe it was when the Democrats chorused it in 2021 and I do not believe it is now. Not do I believe that our Atty general and his cadre around him have done squat to prosecute Hunter Biden for fear that it also involves influence peddling right up to Joe Biden's wallet. As for the Carroll case when you mention she couldn't remember the year of her rape, and that it didn't register with the jury is to me an opening of similar types of cases in the future and you probably know lawyers who might be anxious to get into the spotlight. As for Trump, If he is the Republican candidate or not, I'm voting for him or someone else. Because I think every damn Democrat is a lying piece of shit now and in 2024.
Me
And there you have it, you are a fanatic, which I thought all along. Trump hung himself with this jury by not showing up and by having bragged about kissing women and grabbing their pussies and he got away with it because he was a celebrity. You totally ignore Jesus's admonition to judge not, and to take the beam out of your own eye, including your political party's eye. The Republican Party was a Satanic Cult before Trump came on the scene, as was the Democratic Party. You side with either, you side with the demon running that cult behind the scenes in plain view, if you have eyes that see and ears that hear.
He unfriended me, after he had sent me a friend request from out of the blue. I had no idea who he was, only that his FB profile showed we both are from Birmingham and we both attended McCallie School in Chattanooga and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, so I accepted his friend request. He tossed in Latin phrases to close his arguments, and he ignored the one Latin phrase that applied to everything: res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself.
Rise of the American White Reich, again
I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, into a white, affluent family. We lived in the Crestline side of Mountain Brook, a white, affluent suburb "over the mountain" from Birmingham. The only blacks in Mountain Brook were live-in servants, day workers, sanitation workers, and caddies, kitchen staff and waiters in the Birmingham and Mounty Brook Country Clubs. They came over the mountain every morning on city transit buses, worked, and went back over the mountain on city transit buses in the evening.
Mt. Brook eventually gave itself a nick-name: The Tiny Kingdom.
When I was a boy, white people called black people Negroes, nigras and niggas, depending on cultural upbringing and mood of the whites. I often said nigga, which was a shame, because my black nanny loved me as her own child. Looking back in time, I think I can say, if she was not in my life when I was a boy, I would have been fucked. She is the second person memorialized in A FEW REMARKABLE ALABAMA PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN (2004): afewremarkablealabamapeople.blogspot.com.
When the sit-ins and Birmingham Police brutality against black people happened in Birmingham, I was off at a prep high school and not particularly interested or concerned.
When the freedom marches happened, I was off at college, drinking beer and dating girls, and was not concerned or involved.
When Governor George Wallace stood barring black enrollees from attending class at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and President John Fitzgerald Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard to escort black enrollees to their classes, I was off at college and was not concerned.
When the freedom marches came to Alabama, I was off at college and was not concerned.
I belonged to the Kappa Alpha Order (fraternity), whose spiritual founder was Robert Edward Lee of Old Virginia. The top Confederate general. The actual founders of KA were young white men.
KA had a brass cannon and a Confederate flag, and we often shot off that cannon and waved that flag and seceded from the Union. We had northern members who shot off the cannon and waved the flag. I was convinced two of our brothers from Mississippi were Klan, and that bugged the shit out of me.
Now, KA had a different aspect. Our Order's crest contains the words, Dieu et les Dames. God and the women. The secret initiation rites, which we called "the mystic goodies", were based on the Holy Grail tradition. The mystic goodies had nothing to do with the Confederate Flag and the brass cannon. The mystic goodies had to do with a way of life, in which, for men, God and women are paramount.
Decades later, when I was living in Key West, I got involved in a Facebook discussion started by some of my KA brothers, whom I remembered well and fondly. The drift was the good old times at the fraternity house. The drift was kinda Confederate flag and cannon. I said, I thought the real drift of KA was its mystic goodies, which were based on the Holy Grail. A brother from Louisiana took offense, A brother from Georgia said I was right. The brother who took offense asked if I was not all the way into the flag and the cannon when I was a KA? I said, yes, but as the years passed, I grew out of that and into the mystic goodies.
I met my wife to be on a blind date to a KA party in 1963. She became my KA Rose. I dreamed about her last night, perhaps so I would think to tell this story today, before I get into what I saw on television last night, which I reported today on my Facebook page, as follows:
I watched parts of CNN's town hall meeting last night, while I did other things online, and I suppose I got about half of it. In what I saw, Donald Trump used it to preach to his adoring legions for free. I think it assured Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2024, unless something happens between now and then that takes him out of action, such as a medical event, or a criminal prosecution that results in conviction and prison time, but even then he could still run for the presidency from prison.
What I wonder about last night, and perhaps CNN hoped, while Trump was preaching to his adoring legions, he also was freaking out a lot of people who will join ranks with the Democrats in 2024 and vote for the Democrat candidate, which is looking like Joe Biden, unless he has a medical event that knocks him out of action.
I'm an Independent. In 2016, for the first time ever, I voted for a major party candidate. Joe Biden. I voted for him very reluctantly. I came to wish I had not voted for him. I think America is fucked, regardless of who is in the White House. But when I see Joe Biden, I am not reminded of Germany in the late 1930s.
If you actually look at photos of MAGA rallies, and of the Charlottesville Confederate Monuments removal protest, and of the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, you see oceans of white people. In the law is the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur, which is Latin for, the thing speaks for itself. Res ipsa is evidentiary in a court of law, and in God's Court.
Is Donald Trump America's karma for George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owning African slaves?
The previous chapter's 'Rise of the American White Reich, again’ post ended:
If you actually look at photos of MAGA rallies, and the Charlottesville Confederate Monuments removal protest, and the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, you see oceans of white people. In the law is the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur, which is Latin for, the thing speaks for itself. Res ipsa is evidentiary in a court of law and in God's Court.
A Vanderbilt University graduate commented:
And if you disagree with the judgment of God's court, to whom does the appeal lie? Or is God the final arbiter, from whom no appeal lies?
Vandy grad me replied:
Well, perhaps the Devil would be pleased to give you a second chance?
Vandy grad
In other words, there is no appeal. All judgments are final, and no mistakes are ever made.
I replied:
I gave you the answer I gave you, because I know no higher authority than what I was raised to call God. Christianity seems to think it has a lock on God, as does Islam. Likewise, the Republicans and the MAGAs think they are with God, and the Democrats are not. The point I made in the post is simple. It speaks for itself. If you have a problem with that, I can't help you, because I did not take the photos that plainly reveal the skin color of the mobs that worship Trump, instead of God.
Received a friend request today from Birmingham native Robert showing Birmingham native Jim as a mutual friend. I went to Robert's Facebook page and saw this at the top of his feed.
Robert
May 9
Thank Jim for sharing, I am with you!
Jim
May 9
I recently heard Elon Musk say that a friend of his said his daughter was studying the Presidents in school,when asked what she learned about George Washington, the first thought of the girl was that, "he was a slave owner". We are the only western nation that teaches it's children to despise their country....and now I saw a whole segment on California preparing to pay reparations to those who are relatives of former slaves.....we are in so much trouble .... I do not want to be associated with anyone who preaches hateful speech against this nation while sitting in their nice homes and cars. So, if this is your agenda and you call yourself a "friend"please erase me from that category.
Sloan Bashinsky
May 12
I am wondering why you and Jim sent me friend requests?
Not just George Washington, but quite a few signers of the Declaration of Independence, including its author, Thomas Jefferson, owned plantations and African slaves. School children should not be taught that? They should not be taught slavery is why the American Civil War was fought? They should not be taught the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, which opposed slavery, later became the Party that opposed desegregation in the South? They should not be taught that the Republican Party today is predominantly Caucasian, and the Trump MAGA Republican Party is almost all Caucasian, which is plainly seen in photos of the Charlottesville Confederate Monument removal protest, MAGA rallies, and the January 6, 2021 insurrection in the National Capitol. A Birmingham, Alabama native and lawyer, I know about the legal doctrine of res ipsa loquitur, which is Latin for, the thing speaks for itself. Res ipsa is evidentiary in the courts of man, and in God's Court.
A childhood Tiny Kingdom (Mountain Brook) buddy texted me yesterday about the CNN Town Hall meeting:
I've come to think, perhaps as you do, that CNN did exactly what it wanted to do, expose DJT as the asshole he is, and then making it look like it was a big goof, i.e. f-up, when it really wasn't. Give him a big stage and turn him loose, and it worked. All the legitimate press is crowing about all the lies and bodacious behavior. I felt an Opinion column in the Philadelphia Inquirer was particularly interesting as they were lamenting the behavior of the audience, clapping and laughing as he went after, again, Jean Collins. As you have no doubt seen/heard the fact checkers have had a busy day as well!!!
Me:
Won't surprise if Carroll sues him again, soon.
The people at the town hall meeting, who were lapping up DT's skree, looked subhuman to me.
Him:
Her lawyer said as much today. Chew his dumb ass up and spit it out.
Me today:
Saw in news that Trump's lawyer filed notice of appeal, and, if true, I think she has to win the appeal to have grounds for new lawsuit, so too soon for 2nd lawsuit. If she ultimately prevails, trying to collect the damage award from Trump might be interesting.
Him:
I will defer to you, but aren't his remarks about her the other night a second and separate defamation?
Me:
Yes, if Trump said something new that is defamatory of her and not part of the case he lost. Also yes, if it was something he said before, and he loses the appeal. Hell, who knows what a federal appellate court panel with a Republican majority might do? Or what the US Supreme Court might do?
Him:
Do you remember Redd Fox on Sanford $ Son? He was always about to suffer "the big one!" I'm about ready for the big one to wreak its wrath on the orange turd even if it did put me in a precarious situation.
Me:
I been ready since 2015. I knew what Trump would do to SCOTUS, and that he was a POS spoiled brat rich white kid with no moral compass.
When I started writing, I learned it helps to make your product seem sexy
Years ago, an internet acquaintance started calling me Don Quixote, so I started calling him Sancho Panza. After reading the Rise of the American White Reich, again post at this blog, Sancho emailed:
Obviously you are writing all this as a Socratic Apology for your family... there are many versions of this in your lexicon and I suppose that this is true of all of us, in whatever way we are capable of expressing it... we all want to be understood and accepted as being a person worthy of love!
Hey, Sloan, you need somebody to do a quick proofreading of your writing before it's published, I saw a couple of times you called "Blacks", "Backs" and you also got the year 2024 all screwed up!
You are a very prolific writer and have a tremendous memory and love taking the road less traveled... that, cannot be denied!
I replied:
Thanks for the edit catches. I'm dyslexic, and that has been a problem for me all of my life with writing and math. I've never used a human proofreader for a blog, but I'll give that some thought.
Sancho and I had many discussions about Covid-19 and the tragedy of President Trump shutting down America when he had a simple, cheap 5-day early treatment cure in his hands, thanks to a New York family practice doctor name Vladimir Zelenko, whose letter to President Trump is at the end of this blog post. Sancho told me about the letter, which I published many times of my bog, afoolsworkneverends.blogspot.com.
President Trump announced the cure on TV as perhaps a miracle. The FDA gave the cure provisional approval to treat early stage Covid-19. The Democrats and the Medical-Industrial Complex went haywire. The FDA canceled its provisional approval. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other social media blocked anything about Dr. Zelenko and his cure. President Trump abandoned what could have kept America and the world open.
Sancho was totally opposed to vaccines, which I came to view as a necessary evil. Even today, Sancho rails against the vaccines, which led to my emailing him yesterday, that his railing against vaccinations seems odd, since he voted twice for Trump, who made the vaccines possible. (Sancho voted twice for Barack Obama and didn't like how Obama did things.)
When I reminded Sancho of that yesterday, he wrote:
I just remembered your mentioning that your Mother-in-law had a myocardial infarction shortly after receiving the shot... so everybody is different... in your case these Trump shots might have helped you get your inheritance sooner than later. :-)
I replied:
I don't know if my stepmother was vaccinated or not. She was a MAGA and in Alabama MAGAs tended not to get vaccinated. What I was told by my stepmother's lawyer was, she wasn't feeling well and was taken to a hospital where she died of a massive heart attack.
Her death certificate shows two causes of death, in this numerical order:
1. Covid-19 pneumonia
2. NSTEMI
I looked up NSTEMI and found:
A Non-ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction is a type of heart attack, often referred to as NSTEMI or a non-STEMI. In medical terminology, a heart attack is a myocardial infarction. The NSTEMI is a less severe form of heart attack than the STEMI, because it inflicts less damage to the heart."
My stepmother's death could have speeded things up in my father's estate, but it didn't, because the trustee of the trust in which my father's children had interests, sued her grandson for defamation and stalking. Her grandson was one of the trust beneficiaries, because his mother, the daughter of my stepmother, had died. But for that lawsuit, the trust would have been resolved in mediation. Instead, it was a real shit show, but finally it resolved.
Sancho wrote:
OK.... I was just busting your balls about that, I really know shit about all that legal stuff involved in inheritances, other than what you told me at the time, You told me she needed to die before your full inheritance could be released and that they were advancing you money monthly to help you get by! Keep healthy and forget about Politics... why don't you take a little vacation back to KW and visit old friends there?
I replied:
There was an inheritance for each of my father's children, to be paid when my stepmother died. My part of that inheritance is what they began advancing to me, after they learned I was living on the street, sleeping nights in the KW police station. That was much le$$ amount, than the trust, which was to be paid in 2021. Yet, even the smaller inheritance didn't get paid when my stepmother died, because of her lawyers and her grandson and their lawyers and the trustee of the trust. I'm out of all of it now, but it was no fun getting out of it.
I don't think I have the physical stamina to go back to Key West for a visit, nor do I feel, not yet at least, longing to go back there. I'm happier and feel more alive when I'm writing and poking where I'm not particularly welcome. I like where I live in Birmingham, and I get to play a lot more chess and bridge here, than in Key West. That was a wonderful phase of a really diverse experience, but I've moved on to other ways of strange.
I wrote a book earlier this year about my father, his company, Golden Flake, and his family, from the perspective of his presumed oldest son, who became the family black sheep and keeper of the family skeletons. I covered the litigation that affected me and my father's blood heirs.
The book is being readied for submission to a publisher. If there is no interest, the book will be published as a free read at archive.org, where a number of my non-fiction, fiction, stranger than fiction, poetry, etc. works are free reads.
You should by now have read enough of what I wrote to know for a fact that I do not write apologies for my family, nor do I write because I want to be understood and accepted as being a person worthy of love. :-)
I took your advice and now have an old friend proofreading my blog posts (after the fact). She proofread a book I wrote and legal papers I drew up after I moved back to Alabama, and she did a very good job. She has read my writings since 1990, and she knows I take no prisoners, including myself.
Sancho wrote:
It's good to have friends when you get old... I have very few... and all this politics is making it less and less!
BTW, did you get that Cataract surgery? I need to, but been procrastinating... if you did, did everything go well? Do you need to use eye drops all the time now?
I replied:
I knew the eye doctor when he was a kid. He told me that when my father came to him with much the same cataracts as mine, he told my father that young doctors would operate, but he thought my father should not go that route, but come see him a year later, and that was his advice to me. I think, though, I will need cataract surgery. No eye drops, so far. My younger daughter and her husband are eye surgeons, he does cataract surgery all the time. She is retired. She was a pediatric eye surgeon. She told me she loved her children patients, but their parents were stressful, and she was a good actress and her patient's parents thought she loved them, too.
Re politics, religion, etc.- at my age, the only contact sport available to me is the Internet. My keyboard gets lots of exercise. Re friends - I have quite a few who put up with me, seem to like me, up to a point. A few beyond that point. But only one I would want in my foxhole with me during a mortar attack. As for angels, that's a different theater altogether.
My proofreader said she loves the name of this new blog, and I am really good with coming up with names for blogs and blog posts. I said, back in the day, I learned it helps to make your product seem sexy.
Mother's Day question; Why is the Christian Trinity all male?
Earlier this month, I "invented" this blog, which I named "Late Life Reflections of a Tiny Kingdom Birmingham Country Club heretic"- reflectionsofheretic.blogspot.com.
This blog is not specifically about The Tiny Kingdom (aka Mountain Brook) and the Birmingham Country Club, in both of which I grew up. There are some stories about those places, but the theme is the perspectives of someone who started out there and left and went off and did other things and developed new perspectives, and then he came back to live late in life, when the Internet is the only contact sport available to him. It is also a place for him to reminisce, lament and reflect what it's like to feel like someone from another planet most of the time.
Since this is Mother's Day, and since I grew up in St. Luke's Episcopal Church in The Tiny Kingdom, let's consider the Christian Trinity, which, according to nearly every Christian I have known, is all male, which necessarily raises the question: How does it reproduce? The only answer I could come up with is, by cloning itself.
I think I read somewhere that a clone of a clone of a clone is not much like the original clone. When I compare Christianity in America today to Jesus and his tribe in the Gospels, I don't see much resemblance, and I wonder if the all male Trinity clone progression is the reason.
In Judaism, the spirit of God is called Shekinah, gender female. In The Old Testament, Wisdom is female gender.
I wonder how Christianity in America, and elsewhere, would have evolved if the men who decided what went into the New Testament actually were infused with the Holy Spirit, which is the female side of God in any religion and in no religion.
I wonder how Christianity in America, and elsewhere, would have evolved if the men who decided what went into the New Testament had let the Holy Spirit explain to them that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were a couple in all ways, and they had a child, whose bloodline now spans the planet, and people with traces of that blood in them do not feel like they are from this planet.
I wonder how Christianity in America, and elsewhere, would have evolved if the men who decided what went into the New Testament had let the Holy Spirit explain to them that Judas was Jesus's closest male friend, who did what Jesus asked him to do, which so distressed Judas that he killed himself, and if he had not killed himself, God would have used him greatly and perhaps we never would have heard of St. Paul, who was a celibate Jewish Pharisee killing Jesus's followers when Jesus apprehended him on the Road to Damascus.
I wonder how Christianity in America and elsewhere would have evolved if Paul had told in his letters that his thorn in the flesh was he was gay and that's why he never married and propagated God's chosen people, which was his duty as a Jew and a Pharisee.
I wonder how Christianity in America and the West would have evolved if the Roman Catholic Church had allowed its priests to marry and have children of their own.
I wonder how Christianity in America and the world would have evolved, if the men who wrote the New Testament had not made a virgin their only holy woman.
The Feminine and her Art, Beauty and Creativity are dying, humanity is fucked
I emailed ‘Mother's Day question; Why is the Christian Trinity all male?’ post to several people I know, and three of the recipients made replies that led to further discussion. All three grew up in The Tiny Kingdom, aka Mt. Brook, Alabama. I knew two of them when I was a kid. Unlike me, they were really smart and went on to become lawyers and then partners in a prominent, respected Birmingham law firm. They ran with a crowd, who met daily in designated watering holes after work, to drink and talk about life. Sometimes I joined them at their watering holes. I understand they still drink and talk about life.
Here is their and my discussion, a grubby "warm up act" for the main event - my discussion with the third responder, a renown artist and sculptress, who was born and raised in The Tiny Kingdom, and escaped.
Lawyer 1
I haven't heard anyone mention the "Trinity" for years, which is a good thing since that bizarre concept makes about as much sense as "original sin"
Me
You must not have been in a church for years? :-)
I haven't, but I know nothing's changed.
Superstition competes vigorously with God in all religions.
Lawyer 1
Religion IS a superstition
Me:
That is not totally Accurate. God is in all religions, but human beings, mostly the male variation, have made God into their own image.
Lawyer 2
Interesting speculations about gender in religion.
My Mother announced at one of our last Christmas parties that she was convinced that Jesus was actually a woman. Many of the Judaism and Christian
tenets seem so inclined. This is Mothers Day by the way.
I’m in agreement that our democracy would be better led by a qualified woman in lieu of current prospects. One of my favorite nations, Finland, leaves the government and corporate leadership to women while the men are concerned with more important pursuits like hunting and fishing.
Now we can discuss how many angels can dance on the point of a needle.
Lawyer 1 to Lawyer 2
Your mother was a fireball, and obviously broad-minded as well. And a great sense of humor!
Me to the lawyers:
The men had many opportunities to run America, and look at how that turned out.
Look at the Declaration of Independence -
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
All white men, and nothing about women. The African slaves were freed and black men could vote decades before any women could vote.
I don't see a woman in national politics, whom I think is right for the White House. I wish I did see such a woman, because I don't see any men I think are right for the White House.
This was the first time I heard someone thought Jesus was a woman. I imagine that would be a sight, a naked crucified woman.
Meanwhile, if you guys lived in my skin for a little while, say, a week, you would have an entirely different view of your present views and everything else :-).
Lawyer 1 to me:
I would modify that by making it "Gods" are in all religions. Monotheism came late to the party, and with it came the "male" kingpin- back in the plural-gods days the "mother goddess" was the central figure.
Me to lawyer 1:
Whatever religious people want to call what I was raised to call God, has as many names as there are stars in the heavens, but for some people, leaving this life is the only way they can accept that, while others believe it will all their heart, mind and being, and others, such as the Swiss Psychiatrist C.G. Jung, when asked at a party if he believed in God, Jung is said to have replied: "Believe? I know."
I once had a good friend named Dora Kalff, who invented Sandplay Therapy, after she had trained under Jung, who had encouraged her to work with children. Dora and Jung both lived in Zurich.
In the summer of 1988, I spent a month in Zurich with my 3rd wife, who was one of Dora's students. My wife was a licensed clinical social worker. Dora had for students: psychiatrists, psychologists, Jungian analysts, clinical social workers, etc. Dora told her students, I heard it, that the Dalai Lama told her, that Sandplay was applied Buddhism. Dora, and her students actually doing their inner work, all knew God existed.
Most of her students were women, and they seemed uncomfortable every time Dora told them, for any real change to occur in the world, the women will have to go first. I argued with her about that, and she told me it was true never the less. When I asked Dora why the Jung Institute had not embraced Sandplay, she told me that she thought it was because they had not embraced the feminine. My wife with me when that happened, looked like she wanted to crawl under a rock and hide.
If you lived in my skin for one day, you would know God exists, and there would be nothing religious or superstitious about it. It is as real as hitting your thumb with a hammer or having an orgasm or simply breathing. It cannot be imagined by the mind. It can only be known by experiencing it.
Sloan
Lawyer 1
I am a pantheist, and I suppose that's my equivalent of "god".
Me to Lawyer 1
pantheist
noun [ C ] RELIGION specialized
US /ˈpæn.θi.ɪst/ UK /ˈpæn.θi.ɪst/
someone who believes in many or all gods, or believes that God exists in, and is the same as, all things, animals, and people within the universe:
There is an unfathomable chasm between belief and actual experience.
For example, Christians believe God exists, and Jesus existed, and he saved them, even though they were not born yet. But do they know God exists? Have they actually met Jesus? Some of them did move past belief, into knowing, and when that happened, everything changed for them. They were no longer like anyone around them.
A timeless movie about Francis of Assisi, Brother Sun Sister Moon, is about that shift.
Lawyer 2
Spinoza was great but we should never lose sight of the significance of
W C Fields. “Everybody has to believe in something, so I believe I’ll have
another drink”.
Lawyer 1
…and for his choice of drink, WC memorably chose alcohol over water, reciting that fishes swim in and poop in water all day.
Me
And there you have it, God Bacchus.
The third responder, E, is about 10 years behind me, I knew one of her older brothers and her parents. E became a remarkable sculptress. She was commissioned to do a statue for Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, also known as The Civil Rights Park, where statues memorialize how Birmingham city police brutalized back people marching for the same rights as white people had. Brutalized them with water cannons, German police dogs and night sticks.
I found this online:
Elizabeth MacQueen's statue, "Four Spirits", is a moving tribute to the four girls who were killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on September 16, 1963. Located on the corner closest to the church, the four girls are represented around a bench: Cynthia Wesley sits on one end of the bench with a Bible in her lap. Carol Denise McNair, the youngest girl killed, releases doves into the air while Addie Mae Collins ties a sash around her dress. The fourth girl, Carole Robertson, stands apart from the bench, in motion as she beckons the girls to church. The sculpture is a beautiful tribute to the innocence of the victims, with the release of the doves symbolizing the hope for peace or the release of these four spirits to heaven. There is a pair of shoes on the ground by the bench under McNair and Collins. Both figures are barefoot in the sculpture, so it is not clear whose shoes they are. However, the shoes that McNair was wearing when she was killed are on display at the Civil Rights Institute, along with other personal effects she had on her that day and the piece of shrapnel found in her skull.
E told me a few years ago that she lost popularity in Mt. Brook after she did that sculpture, and she didn't care what those people thought of her. Here is her and my conversation yesterday.
E
S…..
Because it was handed down orally and eventually written, then re-written multiple times, even today, by self serving misogynistic men.
Why any woman would follow a book written by all males, about male hierarchy, controlled oppression of females and children, promoting vengeance thru murder, is an enigma to me.
Why anyone, especially women, would follow “a God”
who punished a wife and mother hearing screams of her family, cousins, neighbors, women, children, babies and all animals while smelling the stench of flesh burning and billowing smoke swirling through the desert sky, with her heart filled with the horror of everything she knew and loved tortured, turned for one last anguished moment, to be murdered by “a God” by turning her into a pillar of salt…… and to continue this brutality, leaving her children motherless.
That is only one of hundreds of brutal “how to keep your females and children in line” stories.
Misogyny has a “How to Manuel.”
And you promote it…..still.
It might interest you to read how and by whom Mother’s Day originated.
Me
I promote it?
E
Yes.
You are a “Christian”.
Did you ever count how many humans the Bible’s God
Killed, murdered, tortured?
Statistics are around.
I read one time somewhere, more than all the wars BCE
and AD combined. Nice guy, dad, “father”. Insane.
Kindness.
Where is it?
I don’t talk write about this. Incredibly boring and useless.
Art, Beauty, Creativity.
It is getting more and more difficult to stay in my bubble.
Good trying on your side.
We are fucked.
Me
After reading your first email, I did look up and read how Mother's Day got started. I think being a mother is the most important job on this planet, and I have said so from time to time at my blogs. What I wrote today was aimed at the Christian religion. Were I to go into a Christian church Sunday School class and say those things, it would cause a disturbance. Regardless of how I feel about Christianity today, it is very important in America, especially to the red spectrum, and so I poke it where it least likes to be poked.
You did that statue? If so, can I spread it around?
M
Why would I send someone elses’ work?
6’. 230-50lbs
On her way to me from getting a beautiful patina,
Ferric gold at foundry in Berkeley.
She needs a home.
Just got back from Mexico.
Had to laugh seeing Manuel
for manual. Spanish auto correct
Use my few paragraphs for your sheep.
None of them think.
To think
To think
St. Luke’s you know
But this insanity is global
at least the Koran before it’s gutted and abused by the likes of the Taliban and other male sadists,
supports knowledge, science while education is first given to the females( they raise the children…so first instilled pablum of propaganda).
Then Rome with its male horrors brought down the shared male/female Pharaohs of worship in North Africa spreading more oppressive Christianity…..and still going strong.
Nothing you aren’t aware.
Good luck.
We are on the end road.
Not a lot of productive time left.
Me
That's a beautiful sculpture.
No, I'm not a Christian. Since early 1987, my ongoing direct experiences with angels known in the Bible is that God is so much bigger than the Bible, that Christendom is clueless. The Bible's Old Testament God was a pretty rough dude at times. Those angels never displayed to me any kind of physical threat to human beings. The ego, that's another matter altogether.
As for my sheep, looking at the analytics for the blog where I posted this column, nobody reads the blog regularly and only a few people have read it.
A friend and I do The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast, which averages 80,000 complete watches world wide per episode. Unlike YouTube, Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, etc. the Torrent platform owners, which accept the podcast for their subscribers, like stuff that is different and is free and has no advertising and no soliciting. We address lots of topics and we are controversial relative to the status quo.
We recently told the audience that humanity is fucked and is no longer capable of unfucking itself. The cause of it is two things. Demonic influence and loss of the feminine essence in the species. We recommended people of child-bearing age stop making babies and do their best to be true to themselves and the planet. We suggested that all of humanity stop making babies because the species is fucked, and why bring new babies into that? Better for the species to die itself off, before it kills the planet and thus itself.
feather talk
Tiny Kingdom native E, featured in the previous post at this blog, continued her elucidation of my male ignorance about pretty much nearly all things:
You have shared your podcast with me.
Most countries, usually poor with finite resources, the males equate their masculinity with proliferation of off spring.(They do not have money to purchase their gilded influence via needless consumerism, ie, status) This of course comes from religion and culture where men can do as they please to a woman, wife, lover, female slave, daughters IF the female does not open her legs. Beatings, burnings, honor killings, rape, incest, an endless list, are used as brutal control through fear. The US is one of the most violent. Denmark, one of the least. Show me a woman who comes into a grammar school with an AR-15 slaughtering 6 year olds.
Education. That’s fucked as funds are cut n cut n cut
A suggestion such as your PodCast is futile to stop men from fucking and taking what they want when they want. Grab ‘em by the pussy. They have to take the birth control or be clipped. I don’t see a long line of volunteers wrapping its way around miles of NY blocks. Then there is China, imposing by law a limited # of procreations allowed….or, fines, imprisonment, ostracization.
That’s not worked out so well for China.
Hoards of unmarried testosterone inflamed men.
Like a Revolution. You can have one but they fail because no one creates and implements toute suite a peaceful plan of transition to alleviate the consequences of chaos and mayhem. The “winners” sit around with their thumbs up their arses wondering what to do now. Military might take over and it all starts again.
The poem by Shelley, Ozymandias, describes it all as it happens again and again and again.
That’s enough for today.
You asked a question about why the trinity was all male.
I gave you (THE) an answer and you just let it fall into the abyss of silence. Why ask then?
Top 10 Countries with the Highest Birth Rate (per 1000 people, CIA WorldFactbook 2021 estimate)
1. Niger - 47.28
2. Angola - 42.22
3. Mali - 41.60 (tie)
4. Uganda - 41.60 (tie)
5. Benin - 41.55
6. Chad - 41.05
7. Congo (Dem Rep of) - 40.53
8. South Sudan - 38.26
9. Somalia - 38.25
10. Mozambique - 38.03
Top 10 Countries with the Lowest Birth Rate (per 1000 people, CIA World Factbook 2021 estimate)
1. Monaco - 6.63
2. South Korea - 6.89
3. Andorra - 6.91
4. Japan - 7.00
5. Taiwan (limited recognition) - 7.43
6. Greece - 7.72
7. Puerto Rico - 7.90
8. Portugal - 8.02
9. Spain - 8.05
10. Bulgaria - 8.15
ECONOMICS of your no babies.
“Problems associated with population decline include a slowed economy, which can lead to the closing of businesses from restaurants to public transportation to schools to medical facilities. To help counteract these concerns, some governments offer financial incentives to encourage citizens to have children.”
Btw. My daughter had her tubes tied. I supported her and paid for it. Yours and your buddies' female children and grandchildren.???? Stones and Glass Houses.
I replied:
Sorry, Elizabeth, I only just saw this email from you.
The question about the Trinity being all male was rhetorical.
Given how fucked up humanity is, there are only two ways for humans to fix it. Stop making babies and go extinct, or keep making babies and kill Gaia and go extinct. I'd be nuts if I thought humanity would agree with me.
Women have a great deal more power than they are willing to deploy. Yes, crossing their legs until men change their ways is risky, and lots of women who did it would suffer horribly at the hands of men. So, women don't cross their legs and nothing changes, and they blame men for it, even though they are complicit.
I came to my views late in life, after seeing absolutely nothing was working, humanity was terminally stupid and there was no cure for stupidity, not even God can cure it, nor can Goddess, nor can ETs, nor can anyone.
My dilemma is, I was trained by angels known in the Bible for a very long time. The training was very rough, stood me before endless mirrors, and eventually I was sent into the world to, apparently, rock the boat, poke where I'm not welcome, and paint bullseyes all over me even. I've been doing it for a long time. Mostly via writing, but also talking. It's part of my metabolism, biorythym. I don't expect to have any effect on the course humanity is taking. Occasionally, someone tells me that something I said or wrote changed how they looked at something.
The podcast below, the last one we launched onto YouTube, and then we put it into the Torrent system, has gotten over 100,000 complete watches world wide. People I will never know or hear from.
E replied:
Non-edited….which always leads to miscommunication., leading to ?
Why waste time on a rhetorical question. People in all cultures do not put that together.
We’ll keep on trying Sloan.
I tip my hat.
Yes some females are complicit but mostly not out of intentional maneuvering but because of fear and non thinking I.e., fear of thinking, and obeying the men, as they allow their male children to continue bad behavior into adulthood. This is Global. I already wrote on this to you and you side stepped it. Stoning. Honor killings. Grab that pussy…. Not writing it again.
I believe that this “complicit-ness” which it is not purely, has to do with deep survival fear, and this is global. How will they survive in their older age without a male child going forth into the pre ordained global maelstrom protecting them. It’s only in my generation where US women were beginning to be able to educate themselves. What female did you know that had a profession and was self-sustaining?
I knew 3. Evelyn Allen was the first female on radio in Bham. Our former First Lady’s mother whom I knew since 5th grade spending the night in their home. Bertha Munger(camp Mary Munger)Anderson(Carl and Donald’s mom) and Iris Parker(close with my parents, were both foraging forward as the only women in real estate. Everyone else played Bridge and Volunteered.
No pay.
No future security.
Dependent on male children or marriage of their female children on the auctioning block starting as young Debutants to be married into a “good” family…. Which at that time with such few families in Mt. Brook, was everyone.
Angels.
Don't have a clue. Ask them to stop the horror in Ukraine. But if you want people to take you seriously, my opinion without asking if you desired it, not my usual MO, ending a conversation or debate with stories on your angels will dilute intellectually the path of gender balance…. Especially since angels in religious books are pro-ported to be non gender. Non binary for a wooptedo term.
I have died …. Almost…. and brought back by my own will, intellect and sense of humor.
I won’t go into my story.
I was 22.
No angels.
No religious iconic apparitions or symbols.
Space.
Hyper hyper warp speed.
Ok
Enough.
I have spent 50 years on this theme. I usually say start by reading Dawkins. Read Chomsky. Then go on to Read “The Fifth Child”, Lessing. Read “Guns Germs and Steel”. Read “Surveillance Capitalism”,
Read Naomi Klein “Shock Doctrine”.
Read “Chasing The Flame”, Samantha Power.
Cure stupidity through education in critical thinking and non religious compassion and empathy.
Gaia will not be killed. She needs parasitic humans off her body.
She is set to thrive with us extinct.
Love and more,
em
I replied to E:
You have had a remarkable life. A life few women could imagine, and perhaps no men, including me.
It is not angels' job to fix what humanity keeps fucking up. In Ukraine, or anywhere, say Uvalde, Texas. Children are no longer safe in America. Yet, parents keep sending them to unguarded schools, even though parents kept their children home during Covid-19, which was not much threat to children, but was a big threat to adults. School boards and local, state and the national government do not put armed guards in schools to protect school children and their teachers. Ukraine is in America.
Religious freaks force unwilling mothers to have babies they do not want to have, and to raise those babies all by themselves, if necessary, regardless of how those mothers will treat their unwanted babies.
The religious freaks have no clue when a fetus becomes a living soul. They worship a lump of tissue, which reminds them of themselves when they were mistreated by their own parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, etc., and no one saved them.
Humanity is an experiment, and each person's life is their own experiment, and like all experiments, there is an end.
Angels are part of what I experience, and If I pretend otherwise in my relationships with other people, then I am a liar.
I was with several women, one at a time, who knew for a fact that God and angels exist, and it was a severe struggle for each of those women, as it was and is a struggle for me.
Last below is a link to yesterday's blog post, which has a comical macabre warm up act featuring two booze-loving Tiny Kingdom lawyers I once knew pretty well, and then comes the main attraction, you.
Attached is a soul drawing, "Feather Talk", of the woman in the homeless cowgirl shaman podcast. The drawing fell out of me 8 years before I met her.
E told me several years ago that she, like me, gets by on the remains of wealth her father earned the old fashioned way.
Was E. Jean Carrol's civil rape/sexual abuse lawsuit against Donald Trump barred by New York's statute of limitations?
A retired Birmingham, Alabama lawyer friend, who grew up in The Tiny Kingdom, asked me what I think about New York's Adult Survivor's Act (ASA), which allowed E. Jean Carroll to sue Donald Trump for rape and sexual abuse in a United District Court in New York long after the regular New York statute of limitations had run for such civil lawsuits.
I found this online about New York's ASA:
The Adult Survivors Act (ASA) is New York State legislation enacted in May 2022 which amends state law to allow alleged victims of sexual offenses for which the statute of limitations has lapsed to file civil suits for a one-year period, from November 24, 2022, to November 24, 2023. The act thus expands the ability of plaintiffs to sue for sexual assault and unwanted sexual contact in the workplace.[1]
Background and enactment
Before 2019, a three-year statute of limitations applied to civil suits for sexual misconduct in New York. In 2019, New York extended the statute of limitations for civil suits arising from sex crimes against adults to 20 years, but this extension was not retroactive.[2]
In 2022, the ASA was enacted. The bill was sponsored by state Senator Brad Hoylman and Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal.[3] It unanimously passed the Senate in April 2022, passed the Assembly on a 140–3 vote in May 2022,[4] and was signed into law by Governor Kathy Hochul.[5]
Provisions
The ASA amended New York's Civil Practice Law and Rules to allow alleged victims of sexual offenses for which the statute of limitations had lapsed to file civil suits for a one-year period (the "lookback window"), from November 24, 2022, to November 24, 2023.[1][6] The ASA is modeled after the New York Child Victims Act of 2019, which established a one-year window (later extended by an additional year) for victims of child sexual abuse to sue, raising claims that otherwise would have been barred by the statute of limitations.[2]
Ass-u-me Trump's lawyers filed a pleading objecting to Carrol's lawsuit, because the NY regular statute of limitations had run, and ass-u-me they also argued NY's ASA was ex-post facto, thus illegal.
I think Trump's lawyers can argue on appeal that NY's ASA is unconstitutional, because it is retroactive - ex post facto. NY's ASA gives someone a cause of action that ceased to exist because she didn't timely file a lawsuit within the regular statute of limitations time.
I think Carrol's lawyers might counter that by arguing Trump wasn't living in NY and so the regular statute of limitations is tolled. But Trump's lawyers would argue, what prevented Carrol from suing Trump in Florida, where he lived?
As much as I dislike Trump, I think the NY ASA is unconstitutional and the jury verdict should be overturned by a federal appellate court.
Carrol's defamation charges in her lawsuit hinged on the jury finding Trump had raped or sexually assaulted/abused her. For if he had not, how did he defame her by calling her a liar?
So, if a federal appellate court rules NY's ASA is unconstitutional, and the US Supreme Court affirms that ruling, Carrol's defamation verdict also is overruled, and anything Trump later said about Carrol being a liar, or having made it all up, probably won't fly well in a subsequent defamation lawsuit she prosecutes against Trump.
I posted that at my Facebook page, and a man living in Chattanooga, who, like me attended Vanderbilt, replied:
EC
The important thing to remember here is that a jury, after hearing the evidence, concluded that Trump did, in fact, sexually assault Ms. Carroll. With that in mind, it does not speak well of a political party to support such a person for ANY political office, much less the Presidency of the United States.
Sloan Bashinsky
There are many reasons Trump is unfit for office, and you named one of those reasons. However, that is not what this Facebook post is about. It is about the rule of law, which Trump seems to have flouted all of his life. And yet, ironically, it looks to this Alabama lawyer, who once clerked for a Federal Judge in Birmingham, that the Federal Court in New York City messed up. Or, Trump's lawyers did not argue the NY ASA law was ex post facto, thus illegal, and they waived that argument and cannot make it on appeal. I have a hard time believing they did not make the ex post facto argument in the Federal Court in NY City. As for what you and I think about Trump's fitness for office, that is irrelevant to people who back him. I am pretty well convinced there is nothing he might do that would cause them not to. vote for him. That, I think, is the most important issue.
As for Carrol, I wonder why she could not remember the year when she claimed Trump assaulted her? And, why did she wait so long to go public with it? Why didn't she go public with it when Trump ran for president in 2016? If she had gone public with it then, would that have affected the outcome? Would Hillary Clinton have won not only the popular vote, but also the electoral college vote? Not that I cared for Hillary. I thought she and Trump both should have been locked up, in adjoining cells.
Peggy
Sloan, the mind does great things to one's memory sometimes. I was raped in 1960 and the detectives I worked with in the late '70s said I empathized so well with all the survivors that I must have had a similar experience and I said no. Then driving past a certain business in downtown West Palm with a man I was dating in the early '80s, I just started shaking and when he questioned me, I said the owner of that business raped me in 1960 a few weeks after I moved to Florida. Until that moment, my mind shut down about the whole thing, so I can very well understand why a woman could not say exactly when the rape occurred, because the mind just shuts down on some factors of such an assault sometimes.
Sloan Bashinsky
I know some women get amnesia and don't remember being sexually abused, and sometimes something happens that triggers some or total remembering of it. Carrol did not claim that kind of amnesia, she said she remembered it vividly. But not the year. Trump had bragged about getting away with grabbing women’s pussies, and he did not attend the trial, and I think that’s why the jury sided with Carrol. I’m glad the jury did that, yet I can’t understand how a law passed many years later, to bypass an existing statute of limitations, is legal in cases where the woman does not claim she had total amnesia for many years, and then she suddenly remembered it. I also can’t understand why Carrol didn’t make the claim when Trump ran in 2016, when making the claim really mattered, in the bigger scheme of things. Anyway, it’s in a federal appeal now, and will be decided there.
Peggy
Some remember parts of it and not others. I probably remembered the year, and actually the month (June), because it happened just a couple weeks after I came to Florida from Ohio. I can't say why she couldn't remember the year but I think it's likely she was telling the truth. Had it not been such a drastic change for me, I might not have remembered the month and year, either. It happened to me at the beach and I was a girl from southern Ohio who'd never seen the ocean before, much less been right there at the edges of it.
Sloan Bashinsky
I believe you, and I believe Carrol. I think her very long delay in speaking publicly about it, given who assaulted her, did not win her any gold stars in Heaven, and, as a lawyer, I think the new retroactive NY law ,which gave her a way around the NY statute of limitations, is illegal. Trump is a SPOS, I think he should be in prison. Too bad Carrol didn’t go to NY law enforcement right after it occurred. She instead finally got around to trying to make money off it.
Peggy
Could be, Sloan, but I'd put it way down the list of reasons.
Sloan Bashinsky
I think her publishing company and her trial lawyer might disagree.
Why the Golden Flake Clown's Tale won't be a best$eller
Yesterday morning, May 28, 2023, I introduced THE GOLDEN FLAKE CLOWN'S TALE at goldenflakeclownstale.blogspot.com. Yesterday afternoon, it became available for free at archive.org, where it can be read on most any modern device.
Here's a link:
https://archive.org/details/goldenflakeclownstale
It's written from the perspective of my father's presumed oldest son, me, the other Bashinsky who learned Golden Flake from the ground up, about my father, his family, my mother, her family, my father's second wife and her family, my father's company, Golden Flake, and its history and demise, and two awful lawyer-feast lawsuits that helped kill my father's second wife and made his blood heirs wish their father had never remarried. I also tell a good bit about my childhood and college and law school years, and later years, and even later years, which became more and more stranger than fiction. I tell it from the perspective of the family black sheep and keeper of the family skeletons.
The general public has no clue how my family came to own Golden Flake, or what it was like working at Golden Flake, or what it was like having a stepmother, who became known as The Golden Flake Queen, whose grandson received about 8 times more from my father than his three blood children each received. The public has no clue what happened in the 2nd lawyer-feast lawsuit, because it was sealed due to two of the defendants being minor children of my younger brother, Major, and his second wife. I review and examine both lawsuits. I also review Major taking his own life and provide information the news media never reported.
A fellow who grew up across the street from my family and was a very good friend of Major, private-messaged me this morning that the Clown's Tale is heavy, he's almost done reading it, and it could be a best-seller. I thought he had not read the chapter in which I tell why the book will not be a bestseller.
No literary agent or publishing house will accept a manuscript containing material previously published on a blog.
Nor will a literary agent or publishing house accept a manuscript from an elderly person, who claims he has experiences with and hears from Biblical beings - angels; and if a publishing house receives such manuscripts, they contact the elder protection agency of the author's state and ask them to investigate and examine the author for his own protection.
The reason I considered trying to use a literary agent or publishing house was that might make the book more available and more people would read it, and if it sold well, what I made in royalties could fund causes I think do God's work and help people in need.
Thanks to what I inherited from my father after the second awful lawyer-feast lawsuit ended, I don't need a best seller's royalties. When I needed such royalties was when I was homeless 2000-2005 and 2016-2107.
Last night, my tech buddy, who created The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast, and I did a podcast about THE GOLDEN FLAKE CLOWN'S TALE. During our discussion, I said, in the Torrent system, we are getting 80,000 plus complete watches per episode, world wide, which makes us a mega church - but wait! We don't pass a collection plate, we don't ask for donations, so we are not a church.
Golden Flake dumped its clown many years ago
A very close friend of my younger brother, Major, commented under The Golden Flake Clown's Tale post at my Facebook page yesterday.
Jack
Deep !!!
Thank you for sharing this!
Sloan Bashinsky
De nada, old friend, who’d have thunk or imagined when you and me lived across the street from each other, what all adventures, intrigue and often hilarious as well as grotesque and mystifying adventures lay ahead?
Jack
I remember. You were always good to me. The Nash Rambler [my first car, which my father bought]. Flying in GF plane. Florida Keys. Bryant Field. Going to Nasau with your Dad as copilot. Him buying the whole tray of daiquiris at landing. Grumps. As we referred to him. Nelle best in the world. Thomas. Cha [the two black servants]. Thanks for all the good! Our divers found Major at Highlands. FBI talked at length ...
Sloan Bashinsky
I didn't know it was your divers, I figured it was part of Birmingham PD or FBI. I offered myself to BPD and FBI, if they wished to speak with me, but no reply. The chapter about Major, around the middle of the book, The Golden Flake Clown's Younger Brother, R.I.P, contains extensive recount of what I found in the FBI report, which was never reported by the new media, which left zero doubt Major took his own life. At first, the FBI was reluctant to provide its report to me, but after I told them I was the oldest member of my father's family and the family still had questions, they got a redacted report to me pretty quickly. There also is a good bit in that chapter about the Legal Schnauzer blog/blogger, who had his own views of what happened, including suggesting I might have been in on having Major killed. The chapter begins with how I learned of Major going missing from Birmingham friends, and within an hour of learning of it, I "heard" what had happened, but of course could not prove it. A Birmingham News journalist called me to do an interview about Golden Flake and Major. The journalist told me cold chills were running up and down his spine after I told him my premonition, and then he told me his same premonition, which had occurred around the same time, nearly 1,000 miles apart.
Jack
I was president of the Hoover City Council, it was our divers. My wife's father was kidnapped and killed at hospital. For drugs. Major came and flew with me. My father was missing 3 months. Major died exactly 40 years latter to the date. Gun in pond was your Dad's from WW2? He was not gunny. Highland Pond was where first murder in Bham was.
Your family was Great to me. Thank you!!
Sloan Bashinsky
Major met both of his wives at the Highland Racquet Club, when they were the tennis pro in residence.
Someone who married one of my first cousins just emailed me about the Clown's Tale:
"I am about 3/4 finished reading this book that I literally started as soon as I got it and am totally enamored. My son is on his way over here now, so I have to stop reading for awhile, but there are three things I must tell you. I, too, was molested, by my father at a young age (my parents divorced twice/he was an alcoholic) and my mother would spank ME with a hairbrush, but it was a sterling silver one that hurt like hell. Lastly, I took a one semester typing course from Mr. Hamilton my frosh year of HIGH SCHOOL, and told him years later it was the most beneficial course I ever had other than a phonetics course in college. Just some fyi's. More later."
I replied to her:
"Totally enamored? Perhaps they should reopen Bryce in Tuscaloosa? The fellow who does The Redneck Mystic Lawyer podcasts with me is putting the clown book into an internet library, archive.org, which already has several of my digitized books. The Clown Tale will be easier to read and bookmark there. Toward the end of the book, perhaps the 4th to last chapter, is a hilarious explanation of why we decided not to submit the book to a book agent or book publisher and get Bryce reopened just for me. [Bryce was the Alabama State Mental Hospital in Tuscaloosa.]
Jack
I got an insurance appt with your Dad. Suggested Bashinsky School of Buis. At Samford and Alabama!!
Sloan Bashinsky
The gun in the pond was a Browning .32 automatic, rare piece. In the FBI report, which I never saw reported in the Bham news media, there was a pistol just like it in a plastic display in the den of my father and mother's home- my stepmother Joann's home after my father passed in 2005. I thought it was just like Major to see that pistol at his father's home and want one just like it. I don't know where the gun in my father's home came from. I never knew him to have a gun other than a Browning 16-gauge shotgun he used when he sometimes went on a dove or quail hunt with me. The fellow who does The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast with me, and who created it for me, started reading my blog after Major went missing in early 2010. The fellow would not contact me until 2017. He knew guns, and he told me that he thought he knew the gun dealer in Birmingham, who sold Major the gun found under his body in the Highland Golf Course pond. He drove a ways to Birmingham and spoke with that gun dealer and the dealer said, yes, Major had wanted that gun really bad, and he found it for him, and changed him a lot for it.
Jack
Now Leo Bashinsky Field House. And Bashinsky School of B at Al
Sloan Bashinsky
I knew nothing of your dealings with my father.
Perhaps from your vantage, that at Samford and Alabama is important, but not from my side of it. The reason it was named Samford University, and not Bashinsky University, is Frank Samford gave Howard Collage, it then was called, more money that Leo Bashinsky gave it. Frank and Leo were childhood friends in Troy, and they both moved to Birmingham, and they were in a competition to get the school named after them. Samford won. My father, who never graduated from college, later gave a lot of money to Alabama, Auburn and Samford. He dropped out of Princeton to marry my mother, because she threatened, if he didn't do it, she would marry the first man who would have her and save her from her Puritan parents. My father came to view Princeton as run by eggheads, even though his father had graduated from there and it was the crowning moment of his life, based on all I knew about him. He tried to persuade all of his grandsons to go to Princeton on his dime, and none of us took him up on it.
Jack
Don't expect you to. Just family lore. Green Turtle Inn was fun. Sylvia Hichcock Miss USA. Boston Whaler at Fish House [my father's 2nd home on Lower Matecumbe Key]. Caught 50 Grunts. Found a painting of Bashinsky Mansion at Art display in Troy. Got it for Major. Was over the mantle on Country Club Road [Major's home]. Lot of fantastic Bashinsky memories
Sloan Bashinsky
I know you do, and I am glad you do. Alas, you did not grow up in my family, which Major and I and our sister did, and you may have heard things, but you were not living it, and that's so very different, as was what it became like after my mother died and my father remarried. One chapter in the book is "ALL That Glitter Is Not Gold." While that chapter is about the awful litigation early this decade, the title applies generally as well. I loved the Florida Keys so much that I wanted to live there, and finally I did live there, and oh what an adventure that was, which I never would have imagined beforehand. Some of that's in the book, too.
Jack
Never knew!
Well could have been Bashinsky U. But now Leo Bashinsky Field House.
Bash, I love you and family thru thick and thin!!
Sloan Bashinsky
The fieldhouse was named after my grandfather because of money my father gave Samford. Tell you something Samford will not likely say publicly. Howard College brought Cumberland Law School with it to Birmingham. Cumberland was a private law school and its tuition was a lot more than University of Alabama Law School's tuition. U of A Law School funked out 2/3s of each freshman class by graduation time. Nearly all Cumberland Law School students graduated. The Baptists liked getting the tuitions. 95 percent of U of A Law grads passed the Alabama Bar exam, about 50 percent of Cumberland Law grads passed. I don't know if that changed, or not. That was a long, long time ago, in a universe far away.
Jack
I'm on your side! (broken heart)
Sloan Bashinsky
You haven't finished the book yet, so keep reading
Jack
Yes sir, correct (thumbs up)
My wife had a premonition Major was in water
Sloan Bashinsky
There you go, three premonitions kinda locks it up, don't it? Keep reading. I have a problem maybe I inherited from my father's older brother, Leo, who called a spade a spade.
Jack today
Very Heavy. Not done yet. Front one side. Back. Best things about The Clown. Might be Best Seller. The Bashinsky Family did a Ton of Good! Too
Sloan Bashinsky
My father and his father's money gifts helped a lot of college students. My father helped initially fund Big Oak Ranch, and continued to fund it, and it became very important to Joann, who kept funding it. I heard a couple of years ago that Big Oak was accepting boys and girls, whose parents didn't like their sexual orientation, and Big Oak was doing conversion therapy on those children. Don't know if that was rumor or fact. I think conversion therapy is a product of religious fanaticism totally out of touch with reality and God. My father and his father gave their churches a good bit of money. I leave for God to say if that did any good. My father and his father destroyed their families, and so were they giving money away to try to buy their way into heaven? I leave for God to answer that, as well.
Jack
?? Don't know
Clown Tale, best seller?
Sloan Bashinsky
Maybe you haven’t gotten to the Breaking News chapter?
Jack
(thumbs up)
Sloan Bashinsky
Golden Flake dumped the clown many years ago. The clown never gave money to colleges, Big Oak. He gave to people and places my father and his father would have nothing to do with. He gave his life to humanity many times, and he’s still at it, and very few people grokked it.
Jack
(thumbs up) (broken heart)
Facebook's Big Brother struck again
A while back, I started a new Google blogspot named Late Life Reflections of a Tiny Kingdom Birmingham Country Heretic. To make getting there easy, I chose for its URL,
reflectionsofheretic.blogspot.com.
I intended for the blog posts to be prompted by someone or something in Mountain Brook aka The Tiny Kingdom, or in Birmingham, or in Alabama.
When I tried to post on my Facebook timeline a link to the first blog post, the FB's AI said the post was restricted just for my viewing, because it violated Facebook's community standards. I tried several times with the same result, and a few days ago I was invited to file an appeal, which I did.
In the appeal, I provided the name of the blogspot and its URL and why I had chosen the URL. I heard nothing back from Facebook, but when I posted the URL at Facebook earlier today, the post was allowed. I tried again, just to make sure, and the post was rejected as spam.
I wondered if that was Facebook's view of me or of The Tiny Kingdom, Birmingham Country Club, etc.?
Undaunted, I used my trusty WMD (laptop) to create this blogspot, and when I posted its URL at my Facebook timeline, it was accepted.
I wondered if Facebook's AI views anything with the word heretic in it as spam?
Yesterday, my friend who does the tech work for The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast, which has become a mega church, except it's not a church, because we don't pass the collection plate or let anyone run ads on it, sent me a link to a Politico article, which reported that YouTube reversed its policy and now will allow people to make fake stolen election claims. We found that both startling and amusing. Startling, because YouTube has lost its fucking mind. Amusing, because YouTube killed some of our podcast episodes, in which we lit into fake stolen election claimers. I figure lots of people in The Tiny Kingdom and the Birmingham Country Club are pleased with You Tube's policy shift.
About YouTube's new policy, a Tuscaloosa native white lady living in south Alabama, wrote to me on Facebook: "Disgusting, I strongly feel that allowing the extremists to continue spreading lies, hate and fear is being complicit in the results."
To which Alabama lawyer me replied, "In criminal law, it is called aiding and abetting. In God's Court, YouTube tried and convicted itself. As do all people who still claim the 2021 election was stolen from Trump. What the stolen election claimers mean, but cleverly do not say, is, 'stolen by blacks and other minorities.'"
I made this quixotic report the first blog post and posted its link on my Facebook timeline and it was accepted.
Carlos Castenada, Simon & Schuster and the Golden Flake Clown's books
I wrote to Simon & Schuster today, June 4, 2023:
Last night I read an extensive article, The Dark Legacy of Carlos Castaneda,
https://www.salon.com/2007/04/12/castaneda/
and learned Simon & Schuster was Castaneda’s publisher. I had enjoyed reading his early books, which obviously contained deep truths, notwithstanding later revelations about him.
In the early 1980s, Simon & Schuster acquired my first three books, HOME BUYERS: LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER? SELLING YOUR HOME $WEET HOME, and KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? A CLIENT'S GUIDE TO HIRING, FIRING, USING AND SUING LAWYERS. Simon & Schuster acquired Prentice-Hall and assigned my books there. Despite my being extensively interviewed by national, regional and local media, there were no books in bookstores and the books did not sell well.
I then had a dramatic experience, which shifted me toward a spiritual journey unlike anything I had heard or read. I submitted my first spiritual book, THE HIGH LEGAL ROAD: A NEW APPROACH TO LEGAL PROBLEMS, to my Prentice-Hall editor, Paul, whose last name now escapes me. After reading the manuscript, Paul told me that he argued with parts of it and was deeply moved by other parts of it, but it was too legal to be a spiritual book and too spiritual to be a legal book, and Prentice-Hall did not know how to promote it.
After that, I self-published quite a few books that blended metaphysical and ordinary experiences.
The most recent is THE GOLDEN FLAKE CLOWN’S TALE, which is a patchwork quilt composite of my father, his family, and his company, Golden Flake Snack Foods, which was headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama and competed head-on with Frito-Lay in the U.S. southeastern states. Not for the faint of heart, the tale is written from the perspective of my father’s oldest presumed son, the black sheep, mystic, and keeper of the family skeletons.
I was informed that, because of Castaneda and his witches, no publisher today will consider such a book by an elderly author, and a publisher today will report the elderly author to his state’s elder protection agency. So, I recently published THE GOLDEN FLAKE CLOWN’S TALE at archive.org and in the Torrent system, where it can be read for free.
In a dream last night, I told some people I had known in New York City that I will submit the Clown’s Tale to Simon & Shuster, so here is a link: https://archive.org/details/goldenflakeclownstale
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
I then found Michael Korda on Facebook. Korda was Simon & Schuster's Editor-in-Chief and Castaneda's editor. I sent Korda this private message.
Once upon a time, 1986, I wrote a hot letter to Simon & Schuster's CEO about my books Simon & Schuster it had sent over to Prentice-Hall. I was getting a lot of media interviews, but there were no books in book stores.
I stupidly included a manuscript I was working on, as an example of my newest writing project, on a topic I knew little and had no life experience to address in a book. You wrote to me that you had considered my submission and were sorry, but it was not right for Simon & Schuster.
The next year, I had a life changing experience that started me down a spiritual trail unlike anything I heard or read about before or since.
I read an article last night about Carlos Castaneda and his witches, and your and Simon & Schuster's relationship with Castaneda. I had liked Castaneda's early books, but did not read the later ones.
I then dreamed last night of submitting my most recent book to S & S, which I knew was about 100 percent folly, as they don't accept unsolicited manuscripts.
I had been by people in the book publishing trade, thanks to Castaneda and his witches, publishers today, who receive manuscripts from elders who write about having contact with angels and spirits, report the elders to their state's elder protection agency.
So, I published the book at archive.org and in the Torrent system, where is it is being read for free.
I don't need money, and the only reason I considered a publisher in the first place was that might make the book available to more people.
In case you might be interested, here's a link to the post at one of my blogs about the book and the submission this morning. The blog post contains a archive.org link to The Golden Flake Clown's Tale.https://tinykingdomblacksheep.blogspot.com/2023/06/carlos-castaneda-simon-schuster-and.html
I wonder how Castaneda and his witches, and Simon & Schuster and Michael Korda, might have viewed what I posted yesterday at the Poetic Outlaws Facebook page, in response to a post there, "Don't Ask Angels How They Fly"?
Headed toward 81, I've had many experiences with angels, they had no wings, but they flew instantly, there to here, here to elsewhere, the speed of light had nothing to do with them. They taught me many things, starting with they were very real, they worked for what I was raised to call God, and they were going to try to use me, and, first, they wanted me to know myself better, and many mirrors did I get to stand in front of, looking at me. They taught me what matters is how I live this life, for that's why I'm here, and they stayed with me, steering me sometimes, correcting me sometimes, rebuking me sometimes, carrying me sometimes, sometimes dragging me out of hells I had fallen into, and encouraging me to be who I am, authentic, true, caring, and giving it my best shot every time. The angels did not school me on dying, other than dying is what many people do their entire lives, because they did not live who they truly are.
I've been told God quit speaking to people after the Bible was written
Back a ways in time, I was told several times by devout Christians that God stopped speaking directly to people after the Bible was written. I wondered how they might feel if God started speaking directly to them?
I recently accepted a friend request from someone who is friends with a few of my Facebook friends. His profile shows he lives in the western area of Birmingham.
He posted on his Facebook timeline this past Sunday.
Jeff
June 11 at 7:40 PM ·
What’s on my mind tonight,
How God Speaks to Us
Psalm 25:14
“The friendship of the LORD is for those who fear him, and he makes known to them his covenant.“
When my grandkids were smaller, I took them to “secret” places. For instance, I’d tell them, “We’re going into this restaurant. Do you want to go in the regular way like all the other people, or do you want to go in the secret way?”
“The secret way, Poppa!”
So I’d take them in through a side door, but they thought it was the secret way.
The Bible tells us that God revealed secrets to Noah: “By faith Noah, being divinely warned of things not yet seen, moved with godly fear, prepared an ark for the saving of his household, by which he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is according to faith” (Hebrews 11:7).
God spoke to Noah, and it activated his faith. There are a lot of ways that God speaks to us, but the primary way He speaks is through the word of God.
When you believe the Bible, you know things that other people don’t know. In fact, God reveals things to Christians that non-Christians don’t understand.
Because they believe the Bible, average Christians know more, in many ways, than some of the great intellects of the world. For instance, the Bible teaches that humanity is basically sinful. Now, that makes sense, and the world makes more sense when we accept the premise that we’re not basically good.
The Bible also teaches that God is good. It teaches that one day judgment will come to the world and that it’s going to get worse before it gets better. The Bible teaches that one day Christ will return and will right every wrong.
And the Bible says, “The secret of the Lord is with those who fear Him, and He will show them His covenant” (Psalm 25:14)
Has He spoken to you lately?
Folks I talk to Christ everyday
Sloan Bashinsky
What do Christ and God say back to you? I’m headed toward 81. Since 1987, God, Christ and angels known in he Bible have turned me upside down, inside out , and every which a way but loose. They stood me before many mirrors, and still are at it. I fret ongoing that I might be or am out of sync with God. I need constant reminders, instruction, correction. I get rebuked. That scares me something terrible. Imagine that happening to Joe Biden and Donald Trump. To every politician. To every minister. To every businessman/woman. Every law enforcement person and soldier. Every doctor and psychiatrist. Etc.(Jeff "liked" my comment.)
Jeff
He is my Armor and Savior.
Sloan Bashinsky
That is the view of every Christian I have known. My question to you is, do God and Christ talk to you? (Jeff "liked" my comment.)
Jeff
Sloan yes , I suggest you read your Bible Sir and pray and talk to Jesus.
Sloan Bashinsky
Jeff, I was raised in the Bible, and had several refresher courses, including being taken back through it by God and Jesus, and the angels Michael and Melchizedek. That, and what they were telling me and doing to me, changed my perspectives of me and everything else. I became interested in what other people were hearing and being shown and dealt with directly by God and Jesus and angels known in the Bible.
If you are interested in how it went for me, and the Bible and God and my Christian upbringing and thereafter, some of is told in The Golden Flake Clown's Tale. Golden Flake was my father's company. It's a free read at an internet library.
https://archive.org/details/goldenflakeclownstale/page/11/mode/2up
Jeff
Sloan praying for you my friend.
Sloan Bashinsky
Thanks.
Jeff did not "like" the summary of my Bible experiences and the link I provided to The Golden Flake Clown's Tale. I believe he is praying for me, and I hope it helps me.
It's the next morning. After sleeping and a couple of dreams, I commented to Jeff.
Sloan Bashinsky
I dreamed last night of a very large group of people using the internet. They had their own system, which was working for them. One of them, a man, was trying to help me learn to speak in their language and ways. There was mention of how to do a reset. I woke up, thought about the dream, thought it could be about your and my discussion.
I had dreamed yesterday afternoon of an old friend, who is deeply devoted to her very old denominational church in Birmingham. She had some chicken eggs, and asked me if I wanted them? My last human interaction with her, she kept telling me how unhappy she was with her new minister, he was astray, and I kept telling her to use her voice and speak out in the church. I told her there was a demonic entity involved, and it was attacking me for telling her what I thought she needed to do. She did not like what I was telling her and we have not spoken since.
It's very lonely living surrounded by people, who do not, or do not seem to be getting regular input from God about themselves, their affairs, and how they are dealing with themselves and what is going on around them. It's like being from another planet. Over the years, I have known a few people who were getting input from something a lot bigger and smarter than themselves. Something they feared crossing, going against.
Somewhere in the Old Testament is said, "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom. In the Old Testament, Wisdom is assigned the female gender. The Old Testament is full of wisdom, and so is the New Testament. Jesus devoted his life in the Gospels to trying to get people to go about things differently. His teachings were perfect, and some of them were very hard to accept and live. I have known people who read the Bible every day to find guidance for them that day. I have had Christians tell me God quit speaking directly to people after the Bible was written.
I have had Christians and non-Christians tell me I am delusional, hearing voices, seeing things, etc. By their measure, Jesus and his disciples and the Christian saints were delusional, hearing voices, seeing things, etc. I sometimes have told people, believers and non-believers, if they lived my skin a while, they might wish there was no God.
I had a very good friend, who, long before we met, had been a building contractor, then he had a heart attack, and then he became a Methodist minister. He was absolutely convinced the Devil would get anyone who didn't attend church. I asked him how many churches Jesus built in the Gospels? I told him I didn't know when I was ever not in church. Yet, he remained convinced the Devil would get anyone who did not attend church. I had attended his church until he and his righthand man and my Sunday School teacher, told me they could not allow me to upset the congregation. Finally, I asked him where the Devil would hide, that no one would think to look? He said he didn't know. I said, a church.
I then was shown he was at risk to another heart attack, if he continued pastoring that church. I was not able to reach him, so I wrote his wife a letter, explained it to her. I did not know her, but had learned of their home address. He then came to me in a dream and asked if he could stay in the church system, but not as a pastor. I said, yes. He took a job working for his denomination, where he traveled to different churches as an emissary and consultant. That was 2005. I left that area and have not had further dealings with him, but now I feel I should call a friend in that area, who introduced me to that minister, who was always bugging my friend to attend church, and I kept telling the minister my friend was dealing with God in his own way. My friend definitely is a believer, but not so much about church.
By 2005, it was clear to me that attending church services was not what I needed to be doing. My life and my work were elsewhere, in the mire and the muck of life. Yet, God is mysterious, full of surprises. For all I know, I might be told to start attending church services and Sunday school classes again. Or perhaps I'm to stick with the internet, where I have spent a great deal of time since early 2001. The internet reaches everywhere. I even don't have to walk or get into my car to get there.
I can't imagine it's possible for anyone not having direct experiences with God and angels known in the Bible to fathom someone who is having such direct experiences.
First, do no harm to incurable suffering
I've been trying to turn over a new leaf on my Facebook timeline, and sometimes I seem to get distracted, or something in me just can't seem to accept change.
Sloan Bashinsky
Had heart-rending conversations yesterday with friends whose aging, ailing parents want the Lord to take them, but instead are being kept alive by any and all means possible.
This morning, I saw at the Poetic Outlaws FB page,
“suicide fails as you get older:
there’s less and less to kill.”
― Charles Bukowski
I posted this comment at Poetic Outlaws:
Looks to me humanity cares far more for its beloved pets (dogs, cats, gerbils, etc.) than for its aging, ailing elders, because when beloved pets are old and suffering, they are kindly put down by a veterinarian, whereas old, suffering people are forced, regardless of their sentiments, to be kept alive as long as possible, no matter how much money it costs, although I have heard recently that doctors in Oregon are offering old, suffering elders the same services veterinarians offer old, suffering pets.
Elizabeth in Bon Secour, Alabama
Hey old timer, move your ass to Bon Secour. No one gets old here.
Sloan Bashinsky
I have been in your lovely river and bayou country, and 20 years ago, if you were not married, homeless me would be on Greyhound to Mobile pronto. Today, 81 years and prostate cancer seem to have killed my romance and adventure genes, your church's troubles would drive me nuts and I probably would get myself lynched, and a number of doctors in the Birmingham area keep patching up various parts of me and other doctors look out for me in other ways, and it seems to be a giant cosmic redneck conspiracy to keep me in the so-called Magic City. Now, if you know a veterinarian down there in bayou swamp river country, who thinks likes I think all people should think, I just might move down there despite all the other.😀
Elizabeth
😀
You think a veterinarian would be better suited to fix you than the doctors? I concur, mostly due to medical malpractice being the #3 cause of death.
Sloan Bashinsky
I think vets understand and deal with incurable suffering, whereas people doctors and religion and society, in America, anyway, mostly don’t. First, do no harm to incurable suffering.
Elizabeth
💗
Lynda
Terminally ill adults in NJ have the right to ask for Dr assisted suicide. I'll be 1st in line
Sloan Bashinsky
That’s a good start.
My mother’s father spent the last year of his life lying barely conscious in a nursing home bed, waiting to die of old age. Before that m, he spent a year in the assisted living side of the nursing home, waiting to die of old age. Before that, he was in a senior section 8 kind of apartment, waiting to die of old age, after his wife had died of a medical illness. He was ready to leave the day his life mate left. In those days, medically-assisted departure in Alabama was unthinkable. Now, only impossible.
Linda
😢
Sloan Bashinsky
My father's older brother, who, in my youth I wished was my father, because of how much we both loved to fish, and who many years later told someone that I should have been his son, told me in 1998 that he was waiting on the Lord to take him. Not long after that, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Eventually, he was moved to a nursing home, and in late 2005, his wife organized a family reunion for his birthday. He asked one of the aids, "All of these people are my family?" I was so upset that I broke down crying, and then I left, cursing silently. Enough was enough! He lingered a few months, and then he left officially.
I met Lynda when she was passing through Key West. I think she already was following my blogs, goodmorningkeywest.com and goodmorningfloridakeys.com, and after those blogs died and went somewhere in early 2017, she started following their successor, afoolsworkneverends.blogspot,com, which eventually was replaced by blogs showing on my Facebook home page. Now, Lynda puts up with me on Facebook and sometimes in email blasts I sometimes send out.
I became acquainted with Elizabeth, sometimes known as the Empress of Fantasia, after my younger brother Major went missing in early 2010 and I was writing daily about that on at the good morning blogs. Views at those blogs spiked about five-fold, to about 90,000 that month. I figured nearly all new viewers were in Alabama.
A more accurate and fuller account, than what the Birmingham news media reported of my tortured brother Major’s suicide made to look like murder, is found in "The Golden Flake Clown's younger brother, R.I.P." chapter of The Golden Flake Clown's Tale, a free read starting at page 37: https://archive.org/details/goldenflakeclownstale/page/11/mode/2up
The Hit and Miss Club
Today is Father's Day. I have two wonderful daughters, who have great husbands and two great kids each, and two great dogs each. Sometimes their kids call me by a nickname which dates back to when my older daughter's first child was born and her husband, whose father had been one of my favorite professors at the University of Alabama School of Law, asked me what I wanted my grandchildren to call me, and Grandfossil popped out of my mouth.
On August 3, 2005, I was seized to type something that came to me about as fast as I could type it, perhaps 40 words a minute, about how fast I touch typed after taking a typing class my freshman year at Ramsay High School in Birmingham, which my father had suggested I do, as it might come in handy later in my life. Perhaps some day he wondered if that was a good thing for me to learn?
Anyway, what I wrote that day was a memorial of sorts about my father's and my relationship, which was filled with love and also with disappointment and distress. When I typed the last period of the last word in the last sentence, my cell phone rang. It was my father's lawyer calling to tell me my father had passed away.
THE HIT AND MISS CLUB
Sloan Young Bashinsky
around age 50
Sloan Young Bashinsky caused the Golden Flake Potato Chip Company in Birmingham, Alabama to become a market force in the southeastern United States. This below leaped out of me right before I learned he had died.
“THE HIT AND MISS CLUB”
IT’S AUGUST 3, 2005. I was involved in something for a few years that did not turn out very well (in my estimation), and I was beating myself up about it and wondering what I was going to do instead. Then came a series of dreams last night. In the last two dreams, my oldest daughter, Nelle, takes me by the hand and leads me away from something toward something else; then my father’s wife, Joann, is a legal secretary who hands me a case file I do not have in a bundle of other files I’m already carrying. I wake up about sunrise, knowing there is something I have missed or do not yet know about. Then I find myself thinking about a hunting club that went by the name of “The Hit and Miss Club”. Now why, I ask myself, am I thinking about that?
In 1964, my father purchased a membership in this club, which mostly was for quail hunting, while I was still in my senior year at Vanderbilt. He was not a hunter but in those days hunting was a pretty big deal for me, and he did it for me. We went down there some together, and sometimes I went with friends. What I remembered this morning, after waking up and thinking of this place, was a time my father and I were coming back to Birmingham after hunting over the weekend, and I was driving and we were talking about different things. I was going to leave Birmingham and return to Vanderbilt that night. It was good between us; it felt tight. About halfway home he said he liked me driving, he felt safe, which he said he did not usually feel when he rode with other people. Maybe he felt safe because I drove a lot like he did, which some people in those days told me made them a bit nervous when they were riding with me. Well, maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe it was just one of those things that happened on that day but might not have happened the next day.
Another thing that came to me this morning was that a lot of what I seem to be given to do, and a lot of my life before I got into this way of living, has had a lot of hit and miss in it. Maybe more miss than hit. In baseball, if you bat .333, that is, you get a hit one in every three at bats, that’s considered very good. You might even win a league batting crown with that percentage, but certainly you will be a star and maybe play in the All Star Game and will get well paid for hitting so well, and with a life-time batting average that high, well, maybe Ted Williams and a few others would be higher up the ladder but you would be way up there yourself, too. Maybe that was God’s way, this morning, of telling me to stop beating myself about not hitting a home run with every job assignment, or even a triple, or even a double, or even a single, or even just getting a walk or hit by a pitched ball.
Darn, I’m about to have myself a big conniption here, if I’m not careful. Why that is, is that for a very long time now, it has seemed to me that heaven has had me on a training regimen that is all or nothing. I do assignments perfectly, or it’s judged for naught. I bat 1.000, or I bat 0. And even if I bat 1.000, if my playing partners don’t also step up to the plate, then it’s as if I did not step up to the plate, too. I heard a few times in dreams that this is what has been going on, so for me it’s not mere conjecture. I told a friend after I got up this morning that this whole thing was driving me nuts, feeling that I have to do everything just in a certain way, or I get plastered afterwards. Jesus surely made mistakes, I said. How could he not have made them? He was human.
The Job assignment that had not gone well came to a head out of nowhere, like I had stepped unexpectedly on a convey of quail I did not see hidden on the ground in plain view right under my very eyes and the darn things suddenly erupted with all of their unnerving flapping wing-noise right from underneath my startled feet and swarmed up and all around me in various trajectories and directions designed to get me to shoot at holes in the air and run out of shells as they frantically dove for safety, and maybe I got one or even two of them but I didn’t shoot the whole damn convey out of the sky and maybe I didn’t hit even one of them. Hit or miss, that’s what bird shooting is. That’s what life is. Despite Jesus saying in Matthew 5:38 et. Seq., for his disciples to be perfect, even as their Father in heaven was perfect, that dog simply doesn’t hunt, at least not on his world.
After God has gotten ahold of someone real good and that has gone on for a while, the aholdee starts to see things both from the perspective of both a human being and an angel. However, this is not the same perspective that just being an angel enjoys. An angel doesn’t have to mess around with and put up with the human being messing up what the angel is doing. An angel can just be an angel. But a human being can’t just be an angel. A human being has to mess around with and put up with being a human being, too. It’s a serious problem; maybe it’s a kind of multiple personality disorder: a perfect angel yoked to a perfect donkey, or something like that.
I probably could say that my father was a perfectionist and his father was a perfectionist and his father also was a perfectionist and so I am a perfectionist therefore. Perhaps there is some truth in that. But then, I said, perhaps it is fucking impossible to be a perfectionist, because it is fucking impossible to be perfect. However and despite all of that, I told John that I now find myself thinking of some perfect moments I had with my father, and that drive home from the Hit and Miss Club was one. Maybe just a small one, but it was one. My father knew how much I loved to hunt, and he didn’t care that much for it yet he made it possible for me to have that experience. I had some very good times down there with college and law school buddies, and our wives. I don’t care to hunt now, but that doesn’t take away what it was for me then.
I remember when my fourteenth birthday came, and my mom and dad asked me what I wanted for a birthday present, and I said I wanted to go to Destin to fish in the Rodeo. I’d heard about the Destin Fishing Rodeo, that it was the best fishing time of the year. My birthday was in October, in the peak of the Rodeo. So my father came and got me out of school on Friday and off we went to Destin, five hours away, before I had learned to drive in the way my father drove, all rather exciting for me, but he seemed blessed with a sixth sense and we arrived safely and a bit early, as I recall, at the Silver Beach Motel, which you might still be able to find today underneath all the high rise condominiums down there.
I remember a few years before that fishing trip, the last day we were to be there that summer vacation, we were staying in at the Old Miramar Hotel in Ft. Walton, which is about twelve miles west of Destin. In those days, there were no motels and no anything else on that beautiful beach lying east of Destin, and my father and brother and I went out there to swim, and it was one of those magic moments, like I had died and gone to heaven, but was still on this world, and I really didn’t want to leave that beach that day, I wanted to stay there forever actually, just us, no one else was there. I asked Daddy why it felt so good that day and he said it was because it was our last day down there. I think it might have been because of this day, too. My tears say it is so.
Anyway, when we got up on Saturday morning, it was raining and the seas were stirred up. We had a boat chartered for that afternoon and the next morning, but nobody went out in this sort of weather. Over breakfast in the Silver Beach Motel restaurant, I don’t think I was drinking the water but only milk, because the water from under the ground there is full of sulfur, Daddy said we could stay and try to fish tomorrow, if the weather let up, or we could go home and come back the next weekend and fish. I chose to go home and come back, and when we came back the next weekend the weather was perfect the first day and we caught a lot of nice king mackerel that first afternoon, after fishing on Crystal Beach pier that morning. The wind had shifted by the next morning, a cold front coming in. The kings were not biting so we went to bottom fishing and caught a bunch of nice red snapper. We took it all home. It was the best birthday present I think I ever had.
Many years later, my father started taking me into the Florida Keys to fish there, for bonefish mostly. This is not something rookies can do very well, as you have to learn the flats and tides, see the fish, stalk them, and so forth. It’s a cross between hunting and fishing and finding and stalking the fish is similar to using bird dogs to find quail, which bird hunters feel is as important as, if even more important, than actually shooting. Most people who don’t know how to do it already use flats guides; and most people do it out of skiffs to cover more territory, although wading works very well if you know where a good wading flat is. I fell so in to love with bonefishing that there are no words to describe it. When my father bought a nice home on Lower Matecumbe Key, about Mile marker 76, I really got to do a lot of bonefishing.
I went down there a lot with the family, and with wives and friends. It was Paradise. It made me want to live in the Keys. It seemed when I left the Keys headed back to Alabama, that my soul stayed behind, and when I went back down there and reached the Overseas Highway, just below Homestead, my soul was there waiting for me. I could literally feel my soul greet me when I left the mainland. It’s still like that, and I am having these big raindrops falling out of my eyes right now over this. My father loved it down there, and I felt awful when I learned he had finally sold his beautiful home on the Atlantic, because I knew how much he loved it. But, I was told he had not been up to going down there for a few years, and so it was sold.
My father once told me that he didn’t go down and live there all the time because he was afraid he would find out just how sorry he was. But I tell you truly, when I learned he had sold it, I wept, because I could not imagine him being more happy than down there; but he had all sort of things in Birmingham that were important and close by that he was involved in, and he let go of what I once told him was the only thing he had that I really wanted: The Fish House. I didn’t feel that way when I later I learned it was gone, but I felt that way when I said it, and it looked to me that it sort of got to him that I said it, because it sort of looked to me that he saw that I really meant it.
Most likely, I would have lived in the caretaker’s cottage, gotten guide papers and fished the flats with clients, and rented out The Fish House, when it wasn’t being used by folks who had fallen in to love with it too. For my father let many people use it: family, friends, business customers. Beside the front door, as I recall, was a sign on which was printed: “Welcome to my home, please treat it as you would your own.” Somewhere inside, as I recall, was another sign saying, “Some guests please us in their coming, others in their leaving.” And over the toilet in downstairs bath was a drawing of Bear Jesus, er Bear Bryant walking on water, and underneath were these words: “I Believe!” Coach Bryant spent some serious time down there with my father and other close friends of theirs, and in the Green Turtle Inn still hung, last time I looked, a pair of old white tennis shoes in a plastic bag, with some sort of card or sign hanging off them, saying “Bear Bryant’s Booties.”
I caught a passel of bonefish wading that flat out in front of The Fish House, and I caught another passel of them in the little Boston Whaler my father bought when he got the place back in 1963. I fished those flats hard, got really sunburned chasing those grey ghosts hither and yonder. And then, as had already happened with hunting, which I had come to love after I had fallen in to love with fishing, it went away. I no longer wanted to fish for sport, and I really didn’t even care much to fish for the skillet either, even though I might do that sometimes.
The changes started in early 1987. I felt it, like a great shadow coming over the land. I felt it over me, against me, and inside me. There really is no describing it, but I knew it was going to be very different. Very different. Then an odd thing happened: I saw that I was still fishing, but it was a different kind of fishing. Very different. I still used what I had learned on the flats, and before that at Destin, and fishing lakes and ponds and streams near Birmingham: cane pole, bait casting, spinning and fly, but invisible. In this moment, I have no doubt that my father’s spirit was there with me all along, and my son’s, we three were fishing together. We three are fishing together now.
My father was fishing when I was twelve and it was early spring and baseball was warming up and there would be a Little League in our community that year. We made up a pitcher’s rubber and a home plate in the gravel drive behind our home. He bought a catcher’s mitt and came home after work every day, and I threw until his knees wore out from stooping in the catcher’s position. I got to where I could get it over the plate pretty well and could hit different spots in the strike zone. I didn’t have any stuff on the ball, no curve, no knuckle ball, but I had zip, and I was left-handed, and that was unusual for a pitcher in those days and batters were not used to it coming from that side, and I got on a good team and I was one of the pitchers, all because my father and I had gone into the zone together those many afternoons after he came home from work.
He had season box tickets behind the visitor’s dugout at Rickwood Field, where the Barons played. We went a couple of nights a week. I’d get in the back seat and go to sleep on the way home. Jimmy Piersall played one year, before he went up to the majors. He hit a lot of game-winning home runs, to the opposite field (he was right-handed), in the bottom of the ninth, as I recall. In those days, baseball was the most important American sport to me, although football would take its place one day. In football, winning is everything, or so said The Bear. I suppose it is, but it has killed me, trying for perfect records every day of my life.
I made a lot of bad casts to bonefish, but I caught my fair share. I wrote a number of very good books, non-fiction, novels, verse. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, a lot of good books wrote themselves, using me, as I had no clue where it was coming from, just as I have no clue where these stories here are coming from, before they come from wherever they are coming from. Yet by the measures of this world, those books were inconsequential. How they sold in heaven, I cannot say, because I have not been told. The best novel I may ever write was written right here in Helen, Georgia, 2001, perhaps on this same library computer.
And I just now received a phone call from John McKleroy, my father’s lawyer, to tell me that my father passed away in his sleep yesterday morning…
Maybe I need to stop writing, for now…
Next morning epilogue…
I burst into tears when John McKleroy called yesterday afternoon, because, I said, I had not gotten to see my father before he left. John said I would see him soon, and I said, yes, but still my tears were because I had not seen him here, on this world, before he left. I said I see him often in my dreams; it is good for us.
The night before John called, I also was told in dreams why my father and I were not seeing each other: it wasn’t anyone’s fault and was just one of those things I would never have known if it had not been revealed to me. Then I got up and went into town the library and I wrote yesterday’s story. Then John called to say he had not been able to reach me the day before yesterday, to tell me that my father had gotten up that morning in his home and had breakfast, then said he wanted to take a nap and thanked everyone there for helping him.
About four months ago I was told in a dream that something undefined would change by August 2. A friend has offered to drive me over to Birmingham this afternoon so that I can attend the memorial service tomorrow. John McKleroy has offered to get me a rental car and place to stay. Friends in Birmingham have offered me their home, for a place to stay, and I will take John up on the rental car. Dreams last night were encouraging. It did not turn out as I had hoped, but then, maybe that’s why I awoke yesterday morning thinking of the Hit and Miss Club. Maybe some things just turn out the way they turn out and that’s a good enough batting average.
White Supremacy hypocrisy and other American-right communist plots
Today, June 21, 2023, is the Summer Solstice, aka, the bringing of the dark- as in, what is obvious is not seen.
I dreamed before dawn on Juneteenth of getting down to writing about white supremacy in America, and this is what I posted on my Facebook timeline that morning.
This is Juneteenth, which is really important to Black Americans. However, I'm a white American, and I live in Birmingham, Alabama, which is more blue than red, while Alabama is very red and a Donald Trump stronghold. Maybe because I practiced law and thereby learned about res ipsa loquitur - Latin, for the thing speaks for itself. Or maybe I had enough hard knocks to peel off some of the programming and blinders I acquired growing up. Or maybe I actually believe what I see, when I rummage the internet and see lots of photos of MAGA rallies, and the Charlottesville riot, and the January 6 riot, and I see seas of white faces. Believe it or not, I'm not a Democrat. When a retired Birmingham lawyer I like a lot told me the other day, he likes some of what I post on Facebook, but I'm a little left of him. I said, I'm not left or right, I'm in the middle. And, back in 2016, I kept saying Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both should be locked up, in adjoining cells.
Charlottesville
January 6, 2021
MAGA rally
Trump, Republicans and MAGAs are too clever to say what they mean by claiming the 2020 election was stolen. What they mean is it was stolen by Blacks.
Today, I posted this on my Facebook timeline:
Communist propaganda
Politico
Ex-Bush Aide Rips Evangelical Trump Supporters For 'Obvious' Hypocrisy.
"'You have in Donald Trump the person who probably most embodies the antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount, the person of Jesus, and the teachings of Jesus,” Wehner, a prominent conservative Christian, said on MSNBC on Tuesday. 'And this guy’s a rock star and has been for year after year."
Peter Wehner said evangelical support for Trump is a "tremendous indictment" of that religious community.
Wehner, who served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and as a senior aide to George W. Bush, said evangelicals could have argued in 2016 that they didn’t know who Trump really was.
But not anymore.
“And by the time we got to 2020 it was so obvious what he was,” Wehner said. “And yet they stayed and it’s a tremendous indictment of them” and of the evangelical movement overall."
Trump and Jeffrey Epstein
One of my closest friends is a US Army Special Forces combat veteran. He voted twice for Trump. After the January 6 assault on the National Capitol, my friend told me that the rioters all should have been shot dead. Yet, he did not say the rioters' leader should have been shot dead.
Trump, Republicans and MAGAs' defense to Trump's classified documents indictment is it is a political witch hunt, because Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted for mishandling classified documents, which jeopardized national security. In making that defense, Trump, Republicans and MAGAs concede Trump mishandled classified documents, which jeopardized national security, and they are okay with that.
Trump was president for four years. He had two Attorney Generals, Jeff Sessions, from Alabama, and William Barr, from another part of Hell. They did not prosecute Hillary.
Barr has said many derogatory things about Trump. Barr has said the classified documents indictment, if true, is terrible. Barr also has said he will vote for Trump again, anyway.
When he was President, Trump had a photo taken of him standing before a church holding up a Bible. That photo was featured in the television media.
Do Trump backers ever ask themselves if Trump attended one service in that church? If he opened that Bible and read it? If he attended any church services when he was President, or before he was President, or after he was President?
Do Trump backers feel any unease about Trump's first wife Ivana being quoted in Vanity Fair as saying when she and Donald were married, he kept a book of Hitler's speeches in a cabinet on his side of their bed, and sometimes he read that book at night?
Does even one Trump backer doubt Trump paid Stormy Daniels money to be quiet about having sex with him when Melania was pregnant?
Do Trump backers ever even once ponder Jesus in the Gospels saying, "Hypocrite, first take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother's eye?"
Do the Democrats need to do the same about Hillary Clinton, President Biden, his son Hunter, and Vice-President Harris?
Yes, if they actually believe Jesus is their savior.
Yes anyway, if they have any decency in them.
Summer Solstice chatter about illusion, belief and direct experience
I engaged in some mindless chatter after this showed up in my Facebook timeline yesterday, June 21, 2023.
Poetic Outlaws
“You always replace one illusion with another illusion.
Always…
So your wanting to be free from illusion is an impossibility. That itself is an illusion. Why do you want to be free from illusions? That's the end of you.”
—U.G. Krishnamurti
Sloan Bashinsky
In the early 1990s, I read two or maybe three books written by U.G. Krishnamurti, who described having experienced a spontaneous metaphysical event that changed him permanently. It happened to him, he took no credit for it. He said he lived in a totally natural state, where his mind no longer operated, unless something engaged it. He described, before the changes, meeting and speaking with J. Krishnamurti, and during their conversation, U.G. told J that he thought J had seen the sugar, but he did not think he had tasted it. I didn't live in J's skin, so I don't know what he saw or tasted. One thing I read that J said, which rang true for me, was, the solution to every problem is contained within the problem. I shared the first of U.G.'s books, in which he described what had happened to change him, with some people where I lived. After reading it, a fellow, who kept saying we can't. know anything, not really, so why try to know anything?, asked me what I thought about U.G.? I said I thought U.G. really did have the experience he described, and it really changed him in the way he described, yet he said in the book that he told people who came to him that he had nothing to offer them; he could not help them experience what he had experienced, it was an anomaly, and yet he wrote more books, after saying in the book I read, that he had nothing more to tell anyone. Maybe he needed to make money off book royalties?
Diwakar
Sloan Bashinsky as far as i know all of his books are property of their publishers. He hadn't claim any ownership on books neither charged any commission
Sloan Bashinsky
Diwakar Publishers own books they publish, and the authors are paid totalities, in my day with publishers anyway. Of course, authors can decline royalties or donate them.
Diwakar
Sloan Bashinsky ok what i wanted to say is, he didn't author any books and he didn't charge any money if someone wanted to write a book on him.
Sloan Bashinsky
Diwakar I read 2, maybe 3 books written by U. G. Krishnamuri. Here's a link to books about him, several show him as the author. https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en...
For all I know, U.G. didn't accept payment for his books. However, the first of his books I read, which described his journey in and from India to England, where the big change came, looked like he was struggling financially in England to get by, and why not accept payment for that book about his truly DIFFERENT experience? I have had so many truly DIFFERENT experiences that it's become like breathing, for me. I wrote reams about earthly and unearthly experiences, weaving in an out of each other. I wrote about other people I knew having somewhat similar experiences. I reported conversations with people having their own experiences, and people still in the belief stage. I published books about all of that, and when I realized the books were not going to make me a living, financially, I gave them away. I gave away later books I wrote about my and other people's evolving and/or not evolving process. Some of those books now can be read for free at an internet library - archive.org. Just enter Sloan Bashinsky in the search space and press Enter.
Marc
When you know that it is impossible to understand the universe, then why would anyone not live with illusions that are not toxic but in fact helpful? It's like God: Why try to prove it exists? If it makes you feel better to believe in God, and that you do not then try to force others into your belief, then why not do it?
Sloan Bashinsky
Marc Belief in something is what seems to drive humanity. I think Einstein was certain that nothing could move faster than the speed of light? But, was that simply his belief, based on what he knew? Donald Trump probably now believes he was sent by God to save America from communists - Democrats, and his ardent followers seem to believe that, too. When Trump dies and they die, will they still believe that? Oh, that assumes when they die, they don't really die, but carry on without their very short-lived (in the big scheme of things) physical bodies. Is any person, including U.G. or J Krishnamurti, not seriously affected by their beliefs? Is there any way to be rid of beliefs? Perhaps by staying drunk and hallucinating all the time? Perhaps by dying? Hillary Clinton seemed to believe she would make a great president, lots of Democrats thought so, too, including President Obama and Vice-President Biden. Turned out, Hillary had pissed off so many Americans that she got Trump elected. I suppose Shakepeare could have really done something with that. I read where the Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung was asked at a party, if he believed in God? He answered, "Believe? I know." I didn't live in Dr. Jung's skin, so I have no clue what he knew. I live in my skin, and because of that, I know for a fact that angels exist, that ETs exist, that other sentient life forms exist, which are around Planet Earth. I also know I would be insane if I thought, or believed, I could prove that to anyone else. Yet, I have had friends, and I have met people, who were not church goers or Bible readers, who belonged to no religion, to no political party, to no sect, social group or cult, who knew for a fact, from their own direct experiences that were as real to them as hitting their thumbs with hammers, that humanity has no clue what is really "out there", and what is "really going on". Angels can move instantly, and can be in many places at once. They are not constrained by the speed of light. There are ETs that are not constrained by the speed of light. I saw one of their ships do circus tricks in the sky, for three people I was with, who would not even look up and watch what I was describing to them that the ship was doing. I have been messed with by demons, and by what might be called "ultraterrestrials" which are not angels, nor demons, but can travel about without needing a spaceship. There is so much humanity doesn't know that it makes humanity a very backward species. God knows what it would do to human religions, if ETs landed on the White House and Kremlin and Beijing Palace front lawns and came out of their ships and paralyzed any resistance and said, "Take us to your leaders." God knows what Christendom would do if Jesus in the Gospels came back and did what he did in the Gospels. Very likely, they would kill him.
Marc Wampach
Sloan Bashinsky I do appreciate someone who goes beyond a mere utterance in reaction to a text.
Sloan Bashinsky
Marc I don't recall the title of the first of U.G.'s books that I read, but it was his firsthand account of his journey up through and past the anomalous experience that changed him permanently. It included an account of a discussion he had with J. Krishnamurti in India, before U.G. moved to the UK, as I recall, where the anomalous event happened. U.G. described the serial onset of massive physical commotion at each of his chakra areas, his physical body changed shape at each chakra, and it proceed to run its course, and by the time it was finished, he was someone else entirely. He took no credit for it. He told the many people who came to him that he had nothing to give them, but people kept coming. It's easy enough to quote what someone says, it's a little more involved to include the context for what the person said. I read other accounts by people who experienced what appeared to be full arousal of the kundalini energy, and their reports were nothing like U.G.'s report of what he experienced. I had my own anomalous experiences, far too many to even imagine trying to chronicle. Nothing like what U.G. reported he experienced.
Malek
Marc Well! I potentially do not believe in the existence of god, but I do not force others to follow up my beliefs. I can not prove myself right when I had followers, but I am okay .
Sloan Bashinsky
Malek I've had countless direct experiences, still am having them, daily, which cannot be ascribed to anything human or scientific, in the human sense. Nor can they be imagined in the human sense. Belief is what most people go with, or not. Direct experience is something else altogether, and, in my experience, it cannot be proven in a human way. But once it happens, there is no way to honestly ignore or pretend it didn't happen. Psychiatry, Philosophy, Science, Religion, etc. are out of their depth in the direct experience realm. I speak not just from my own personal experiences. I have known a number of people who reported having ongoing ongoing direct communion with supernatural beings. These people were lucid, sober, were not taking LSD, peyote, ayahuasca, etc. They were entirely different to relate to than anyone else. Like a different species.
Gloria
My own experiences have not been quite as broad in range as your own, but you were there when AJA and the philosophy professor showed up during a time you and I were working on an important project, and totally blew my mind. They opened me to no longer being hesitant, shy or cautious about speaking of my own anomalous experiences with beings/ personalities beyond the ordinarily accepted.
Sloan Bashinsky
Gloria Attorney Judge Attorney and the Philosophy Professor showed up to tell you stuff to tell me, to help me deal with something awful I had set in motion in Alabama, but if I had not set it in motion, I may never in this life have learned why something happened to someone in my family. Being helped in that way is very different from not of this world beings capturing me and reaming me out in many ways that I imagine might cause most people to wish there were no God.
Gloria
Sloan Bashinsky you got that right!
Bigotry comes in many forms, flavors and disguises - Conversations with a south Alabama bayou river country belle poet about Southern Baptists, Methodists, Jesus, the Adversary (Devil), mammon worship, gender and salvation bigotry
A south Alabama bayou river country amiga replied on Facebook to the The Golden Flake Clown's younger brother, R.I.P. post about my bisexual younger brother killing himself and trying to make it look like murder.
Elizabeth
The southern baptists have come to my methodist church and are bullying the elderly into disaffiliating from the UMC so that they can get the property for 1/1000th it's current value and I have prayed all over it.
Sloan Bashinsky
You are speaking out in your church about this? You have reported it to UMC? You have reported it to the local newspapers? There is a newspaper in Foley? I know there is one in Mobile. Are the Southern Baptists local to your little river village? Are they from somewhere else? I keep hearing in my thoughts,
Matthew 6:24 No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
And now,
Matthew 12 Then Jesus entered the temple[a] and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. 13 He said to them, “It is written,‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it a den of robbers.”
Elizabeth
The UMC is who explained the coup. The usurpers aren't from here and don't even live here.
God hates a coward. I will fight this contagion.
Sloan Bashinsky
Yep, God dumped that on you, but the UMC is doing what? You will have to speak out in that church, and perhaps to newspapers and radio show hosts and local bogs, like you are doing on FB. I don't think there is any way to walk with God and not take risks, which Dietrich Bonhoeffer did when he joined a movement that tried to get rid of Adolph Hitler. Bonhoeffer's iconic book, THE COST OF DISCIPLESHIP, speaks of "cheap grace," as opposed to being in the flames. He is said to have said, "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil." He was captured and put in a camp and executed.
Speaking out in her Birmingham church was the difficulty I had with a very old dear friend when she told me about what the new minister in her very old line Presbyterian church was doing. I told her she had to speak out in the church, raise hell, interrupt the church service, but as far as I know, she didn't do that. She didn't like my telling her a demon was in the church, and the demon was infectious and was infiltrating everyone there, and it was attacking me, and I didn't care for that. We have not spoken or seen each other since then, and I can look out my living room window and see that church any winter day, when there are no leaves on the trees.
Elizabeth
It's true and I am making waves.
Sloan Bashinsky
My experience is, sheep and/or the sleeping and the dead don't care much for waves, and my experience also is that it when it is given to me to make waves, not knowing what might then happen, I mostly don't see much change, but it was mine to do anyway.
Elizabeth
It's looking like I am the only member who's not going along with the dirty deeds for the deed. The only one who thinks it's evil to judge. I guess there's no one to fight for. Somehow the Methodist Church wasn't clear enough along the way in every way that what it means to be a Methodist is being the love of God. Not judging, just loving. The members are FINE to leave the above and embrace the hate.
Sloan Bashinsky
I thought this was about selling the church land to make a lot of money? Jesus was very clear that there are times when something must be spoken to, regardless.
Elizabeth
For the minister who came in and started this, yes, the financial reward will be large. But apparently they're all bigots like him and want to disafiliate from the Methodist Church for their loving embrace for all who want to come.
Sloan Bashinsky
Well, mammon chase looks to me like a very different issue from to be be a Methodist is being the love of God. Not judging, just loving. Love without Truth is mush, Truth without love is harsh, they live together, or die together, is something that flopped out of me in the fall of 1995 and then I proceeded to screw it all up pretty well. Jesus was not nice when he brought out his whip in the temple. If the usurpers are outsiders, and the minister is going along with them, you might be looking at going to church in your flower garden. For, when are we ever not in church, really?
Elizabeth
The minister is the main outsider. Word is that everyone else likes him fine. Has seen no bullying and will vote under his direction to leave the UMC, leaving the church and desirable property for the minister to take from the UMC as allowed if they want to disaffiliate for everyone being welcomed. They do so there's no one to fight for other than the UMC. Since finding out first hand that fellow members care a great deal about the sex lives of others and are disturbed at the very thought of a possible gay member, they can tell it to a higher authority than me.
I'm turning it over. I wash my hands of them. They can handle their own flowers and be oh so proud of being themselves entirely perfect enough to break the only Commandment Jesus gave. [Love your neighbor as yourself]
Elizabeth
Oh, and the Gulf Shores UMC is doing the same. No more will they be Methodist. Fine with taking the property from the UMC due to a very stupid clause that allows it.
Damn.
Sloan Bashinsky
I recall in the Gospels that Jesus told his disciples to go forth and spread the Gospel and where they were not welcome, to shake the dust off their shoes at the doorstep and leave. I confess I was sort of puzzled when you first started telling me about this church and the good effect it was having on you. I was puzzled, because you have never come across to me as someone inclined to get involved with a church. Maybe when you were younger, but not now. I can't imagine anyone who channeled the "pigs in mud" poem being a "good church girl".
All want the security of the well fed pig.
Horror at the baseness unrecognized.
A lifetime spent in shirt stuffing.
And pen comparison.
Is truth more palatable when honeyed?
Is a stark soulscape less so with the eyes of Monet?May my affectations always be understood.
Elizabeth
There surely are still Christians and Christian churches. My gay step sister and her wife attend one. But apparently the people of the deep south hold bigotry in high honor.
It's just cultural. If the Naziesque ideologies prove to pay enough, it'll spread like it did in Germany.
Sloan Bashinsky
I think that's a different topic than the Southern Baptists taking over Methodist churches to get their land. I was begged the other day by a woman I know pretty well, and her husband, to attend their church with her, because I am one of her favorite people and she wants to see me in the afterlife. I asked her how many churches Jesus built? She said, "One." I said, "And it was not made of stone and mortar and wood. Church is everywhere. God is everywhere." I'm still undecided whether I will accept her invitation. She isn't coming on to me. She really believes I need to attend church.
Elizabeth
It's the exact same topic if the Baptist minister took a position in the Methodist Church expressly to use bigotry to take the church.
Hey, it works. Just have a member who secretly was never Methodist in his heart recommend a Minister they know preaches not from the Christian part of the Bible but rather the Old Testament.
It would be lovely to have fellowship and discourse with like hearts. You are fortunate to be asked.
I will place my no vote. Beyond that, it seems that they actually never were Methodist if they will vote to leave over gay people being allowed to attend. They were always Baptists in their hearts I suppose.
Sloan Bashinsky
Agreed, and that's a very different topic than mammon worship. I have a trans grandchild, who had surgery to become male. I have zero tolerance for religious freaks that do what you describe here. Yet, they abound, and they are totally convinced God is their Authority. However, there was at least one Southern Baptist church in Birmingham, which I sometimes attended, mostly an eclectic Sunday school class, which welcomed gay men, whom I persuaded to give that Sunday school class a try, they would like it, after I convinced them St. Paul was gay My very old dear friend, described earlier in this thread, is lesbian, she is in the open with it since long before I met her in maybe 1975, sang in the church choir. But the new minister at her church went on a tear about baptizing infants, and did other things that caused her to think he was an evangelical freak, and she was not alone in that congregation, feeling that way, according to her. The church was in her bones and DNA, so to speak, and I can't imagine she would ever leave it. But I don't see how you could cope with what you describe about your church. I couldn't cope with it.
As for the invitation to attend my friend's church, I told her the people at her church might not care to have me around, and I would think about it. I'm still thinking about it, and a dream last night caused me to think perhaps I should take her up on her offer. Then, see how it goes. She gets onto me about saying damn, hell, shit. It's not Godly. You can imagine I'm wondering how else she and I and her church members might differ.
Elizabeth
Sloan Bashinsky After contacting church officials, I reached out to one of the members who expressed that she didn't care for the bullying by the minister. Told her I requested his removal and she answered that that was wrong. That most agree that we're to love another but not tolerate perversion and sin. My answer is below, since I can't message you.
My dear, wonderful stepsister is not a pervert. She was the Orange Beach librarian. People acting for the Adversary made her leave her church and state.
Of course her current church is not bringing up Old Testament and judging her. No more than we'd stone our dear organist for being divorced. Or eating shellfish.
Unless Jesus said for me to judge another, I never shall. Other than if they judge another Child of God.
I have Vascular Ehlers Danlos and will not get to be your age. The up side of knowing that I am so close to death is that I know it.
I'm leaving the matter since everyone wants to judge the woman who taught me about Jesus and turning the other cheek.
I'd rather stand next to her, knowing that she never allowed anyone to diminish another child of God than be anywhere near the Life Review of one who did. I will continue calling on Jesus and Archangel Michael to deal with the ones who would cause strife in God's Sanctuary, meant for all.
May God's Grace cover you.
Sloan Bashinsky
Thank you, Elizabeth. In my 20s, I was very prejudiced against gays, but I grew out of it and I cannot pin point why. Perhaps learning my younger brother was bi-sexual had something to do with it. It really bugged me many years later, when I concluded he had killed himself and had tried to make it look like murder, because someone was going to out him and there was nothing he could do to stop it. I sent someone I met yesterday a link to the chapter about his death in The Golden Flake Clown's Tale. This person is a pathologist at UAB Medical Center. He said he works with the Jefferson County Medical Examiner. I told him that the Jeff Co ME had determined a relative's suicide was made to look like murder.
https://goldenflakeclowntale.blogspot.com/2023_03_26.
Elizabeth
It's sweet. I see nothing wrong with it.
Sloan Bashinsky
You were in love with your Methodist church, encouraged me to come down there and attend services with you. I've had many experiences in Birmingham churches, and churches elsewhere. Who knows what my friend's church is like? She is sincere, no doubt of that. The only way to find out is I go there and be with people who are convinced the only way to get into heaven is attend church.
Elizabeth
I can't hurt.
Sloan Bashinsky
That's not the point. She is convinced the only way to get into Heaven is attend church. That's her stated motivation to get me to go to her church. It could hurt a whole lot if I absorb psychic shit in that church, which I have done a lot in churches in past times.
Elizabeth
Well, I guess that's truly what some people think. It's still sweet that she cares for you that much.
Sloan Bashinsky
Yes, in that sense, No, in the sense she is convinced I will go to Hell, if I don't attend church. Is not that bigotry?
Elizabeth
Not if she's just thinking about you staying in a high vibration.
Sloan Bashinsky
I think you need to step back and meditate on what you are saying. What's the difference between a church person believing your sister is ungodly and going to hell because she is lesbian and my church friend thinking I'm going to hell because I don't attend a church? Nearly every time I go into a church, I feel the palpable presence of Lucifer. I then have to deal with it, and it's never pretty. If I'm told by God to go to her church, I will go. But staying in higher vibration? If my friend had to deal with what God has dished out to me since 1987, she might wish there was no God? As might any Christian I have known, might wish that, if they had lived in my skin that long. I don't wish that, I am very glad God took a direct interest in me, and I wish God would do that with everyone. This would be a very different world, if that happened. Meanwhile, because God does not do that, look at the mess in your church.
Crazy is as crazy does and other hitchhiker guides on earth and beyond
Once upon a time I clerked for US District Court Judge Clarence W. Allgood, in Birmingham Alabama, who presided over every federal criminal prosecution in that Court's jurisdiction. Behind the scenes, Judge Allgood ran the Democratic Party in Alabama - except for the George Wallace faction. Democrats who wanted to run for local or national office went to Judge Allgood to get his blessing. Today, I think Judge Allgood would be revolted by the Democrats and the Republicans.
As for the classified documents indictment, it is merely that, an indictment. A jury will decide if Trump is guilty. The Department of Justice chose to prosecute Trump in south Florida, which is very red, instead of in Washington, D.C., which is very blue. It takes a unanimous jury to convict. One hold-out juror, Trump walks. One Trump ringer on the jury, Trump walks. The DOJ could prosecute Trump again, but mostly likely, would not.
What might be in jurors' minds? How about Trump is nuts, and that's why he kept the classified documents after being asked to return them. Nuts is a good defense, if the Defendant pleads he is nuts, not responsible for his actions. Of course, pleading that defense might disqualify Trump from running for president again. But, a good defense lawyer very easily could plant that seed with the jury, without it being official.
A good defense attorney might put Trump's Attorney General Bill Barr on the witness stand and let him analyze Trump's Achilles heel- his giant ego blinds him to anything but his giant ego. He really does love America, but he's just too self-absorbed to see how his giant ego gets in the way. The classified documents were retrieved. It was ugly. But no harm, no foul.
Right. Did Trump actually damage national security? I think that will be on the jurors' minds. Can DOJ prove Trump actually damaged national security? Can Trump argue he is not getting equal protection under the law, because Hillary Clinton damaged national security, and she was not prosecuted? Can Trump argue to the jury that he only did what Hillary did, but he didn't actually damage national security like Hillary did?
What is not been talked about in the news I see online and on television, even if Trump is convicted, even if he is in prison, he still can run for president. He still can be elected. What a circus that would be, taking George Wallace's 3rd party candidacy to levels never before imagined by the craziest conspiracy freaks!
I told a black preacher friend yesterday, that it looks to me that Hunter Biden might be as sorry as Donald Trump, and it also looks to me that Hunter got to where he is today with help from his father, when he was President Obama's vice-president, and perhaps when his father was president. I think the DOJ needs to do to Hunter what is being done to Trump. I think the DOJ should do to Hillary what it is doing to Trump.
In 2016, I published many times at my blog that Trump and Hillary both should be locked up, in adjoining cells. After Trump beat Hillary, I published that the Democrats ran the only candidate Trump could beat.
On the same day that upped and hopped out of me and I posted it at Facebook, this showed up in my email account:
POETICOUTLAWS.SUBSTACK.COM
Riding it to a New Age, a New Birth, a Totally New Condition of Mankind
By: Joseph Campbell
“Is there not some point of wisdom beyond the conflicts of illusion and truth by which lives can be put back together again? That is a prime question, I would say, of this hour in the bringing up of children.”
― Joseph Campbell
There were formerly horizons within which people lived and thought and mythologized.
There are now no more horizons.
And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies.
It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together. And so we are right now in an extremely perilous age of thunder, lightning, and hurricanes all around.
I think it is improper to become hysterical about it, projecting hatred and blame.
It is an inevitable, altogether natural thing that when energies that have never met before come into collision—each bearing its own pride—there should be turbulence.
That is just what we are experiencing; and we are riding it: riding it to a new age, a new birth, a totally new condition of mankind—to which no one anywhere alive today can say that he has the key, the answer, the prophecy, to its dawn.
Nor is there anyone to condemn here (”Judge not, that you may not be judged!”). What is occurring is completely natural, as are its pains, confusions, and mistakes.
Sloan Bashinsky
I was easing through the New Age when I discovered Joseph Campbell. In time, I came to view the New Age as kin to the Fukawi tribe, which was forever getting lost and gathering in a circle and sitting down and holding hands and closing their eyes and chanting, "Where the fuck are we?! Where the fuck are we?!" I feel much the same about mainstream Christendom.
It looks to me that humanity, in the main, has lost its receptivity and creativity, which are aspects of the feminine, and the result is, humanity, in the main, is spiritually cloning itself and devolving.
I think if I were a woman, I would be very concerned about bringing a baby into this world today. I might decline to do that.
Tracing humanity back in time, it looks to me that the mess today is the result of men running most things. Humanity is killing the planet, and thus killing humanity, which don't seem terribly smart.
A very tuned in woman named Dora Kalff, who graced me with being her friend, invented what is called Sandplay Therapy. She was a direct student and friend of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. She was a friend of the Dalai Lama, who, she said, told her that Sandplay therapy was applied Buddhism. Most of Dora's students were women, including my 3rd wife, which is how I met Dora.
When I asked I Dora at her home in Zollikon outside of Zurich, why she thought the Jungians had not embraced Sandplay Therapy?, she said she thought it was because they had not embraced the feminine. My wife gave me "the look" and looked like she wanted to hide.
Dora kept telling her students, in order for any change to occur in the world, the women will have to go first. That really bothered my wife and most of Dora's women students. It bothered me. I argued with Dora about that, and she humored me and said it was true nonetheless.
Imagine if women went on strike, crossed their legs, quit having sex with men. Imagine if women quit making babies. In 100 years, humanity would cease to exist on this planet. Along the way, such interventions might cause a great deal of change in humanity.
The day before at a Reddit spirituality group:
Millenial Ardvark
I’m struggling with the state of the world right now
The rise of transphobia, misogyny, anti progressivism. The rise of AI and out further detachment from nature and our minds. The further demise of the environment. All these polarisation and conflicts are taking away the light. Even spirituality is mocked and dismissed more now. What do we do in this times?
Puzzleheaded Drop (me)
In the main, humanity is destroying itself in two ways. It has lost its receptivity and creativity (feminine aspect) and is cloning itself spiritually and is devolving, and it is destroying the planet. If you watch or read mainstream TV news or commentary, you see this clearly. There is nothing you can do about it. All you can do is deal what is dead in front of you each day in the most authentic way you can. That includes spending a great deal of time looking at yourself in the mirror, which is not fun and certainly is not popular. I think women of childbearing age should give serious thought to not birthing children into such a wasteland. If women took charge of getting pregnant and stopped getting pregnant, they could put humanity out of its misery in less than 100 years, and save the planet, as well. Of course, that's not going to happen, so it's pretty much every man woman and child for themselves in the big scheme of things. But most people are social creatures, they need something to belong to, to feel okay, safe, have fun, feel relevant, secure. Me, included, although the path I was put on by angels known in the Bible did very definitely cut me out of any herds, and made it impossible for me to fit into herds. I came to feel like a visitor from another planet, or a new species that looks the same as the old species, but is wired very differently in perspective, endeavor and what is important and causes me to feel somewhat okay about myself. Even as I am tested ongoing, stretched, ground up, roughed up, etc. Mostly internally, today, but in the past the external tests were very rough, as well, and perhaps the external tests will return. In the end, it looks to me that life is the grindstone of soul alchemy for me and for humanity, and how I progress, or not, is why I'm here. In the spring of 2004, this fell out of me, I did not think I was its author:
"Earth, the sacred prism through which souls are refracted into their elemental parts, purified in Holy Fire, then one-forged and sent on their way to not even God knows where, simply because they are all unique emanations of God, evolving..."
Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors?
In 2017, I met someone in Key West, who did documentary films. He interviewed me several times on camera, and he interviewed other people in Key West, who knew me. After I moved back to Alabama in the fall of 2018, Corey and I became Facebook friends.
About a month ago, I published on my Facebook page links to The Golden Flake Clown's Tale, written from the perspective of my father's oldest presumed son, the family black sheep, skeleton keeper and mystic- the other Bashinsky who had learned Golden Flake from the ground up. Corey private-messaged me about perhaps doing a documentary on that topic, he could come to Birmingham. I suggested he read the book and see if that subject matter interests him. I sent him links for an internet library that carries the book and a Google blogspot I had created to hold the book. Corey said he had started reading the book at the blogspot.
https://archive.org/details/goldenflakeclownstale/page/17/mode/2up
https://goldenflakeclowntale.blogspot.com/
Yesterday, Corey posted on his Facebook page:
Corey
Can someone explain to me why the states were suing on behalf of the student loan companies? Can’t they afford their own lawyers?
Sloan Bashinsky
I don't understand how the states had legal standing to bring that lawsuit. Does that mean. the states now have legal standing to bring federal lawsuits about anything the US Government does that the states don't like?
Corey
What’s their ostensible motivation even, operating on behalf of debt collectors? How is that a matter for the state?
Sloan Bashinsky
I imagine only a Republican can fathom why.
I'm a lawyer who clerked for a United States District Judge in Birmingham, Alabama. On the SCOTUS student debt case, it was ruled Biden did not have legal authority to forgive the student debt, even though the Act in question allows the president to take extraordinary action in a national emergency. President Trump declared Covid-19 a national emergency. Covid-19 put a lot of people out of work, including students who had taken out student loans. I think the historical kink is student loans were really popular, then Congress passed an Act that prevented students bankrupting student loans. I know this, because I represented an optometry student in his bankruptcy, and he won before the Bankruptcy Judge, but he lost before the U.S. District Judge. The other part of the SCOTUS decision that makes no sense to me, as you point out, is how did Nebraska have legal standing to bring the lawsuit? It looks to me that this SCOTUS decision opens the door to states filing federal lawsuits about any and every thing that hurts their feelings. I think the 6 Justices who opened that door should be tarred and feathered, then keel-hauled, and put on Elon Musk's next rocket.
Sloan Bashinsky
I've thought more about this. The Federal Bankruptcy Act was passed to save people from going crazy, killing themselves, turning to crime, losing their homes, because they could not repay their debts. Before US District Judge Clarence Allgood, for whom I clerked, was appointed to the Federal Bench, he pioneered the Federal Debtors Court in Birmingham, and then he wrote the legislation that Congress passed, which established the Federal Debtor's Court nationally.
That Court was where where debtors could seek relief from debt payments they could not afford, which the Debtors Court Judge adjusted to make the payments affordable and save their credit and/or save them from filing straight bankruptcy and be freed from their debts and ruin their credit. For that work, Judge Allgood was appointed to the Federal Bench, even though his law degree was from the unaccredited Birmingham Night School of Law, which was taught by Birmingham lawyers, and even though he had never practiced law.
When student loans started being made, it was possible to go bankrupt and be freed of those loans. When that was stopped by Congress, a lot of people owing student loans they could not repay, nor bankrupt, were put under great stress, while people who incurred other kinds of debt could go to Debtors Court or to the Federal Bankruptcy Court.
Covid-19 was out of the blue, nobody was prepared for it, including President Trump. Many people with student loans were put under unprecedented, unfathomable stress. The olden days of the debtor's courts and prisons were upon them, except they could not be put into physical prisons. Only someone without a heart, without any compassion, who never heard of Jesus, could wish that on someone else, But, the Republicans and their 6 Justices on the US Supreme Court wished it on those people described above, without any concern for what would happen to those people, or what they might do because of so much stress.
Judge Allgood didn't attend church, he swore and he used to drink moonshine, until his stomach gave out on him. He lost two legs above the knees as a teen, when he hopped off a freight train he was riding and fell onto the tracks. He was the most Godly man I have known in my lifetime. I flew from Colorado to Birmingham for his funeral at Elmwood Cemetery, attended by more people than I had ever seen at a funeral.
Clarence W. Allgood was God's Judge, and I hope the 6 Supreme Court Justices and the Republicans who laud those Justices' decision to revoke President Biden's executive order reducing student loan debt, stand before Judge Allgood when their roll is called up yonder.
Sloan Bashinsky
In the news later last night and this morning, President Biden now is trying to use the Department of Education to mitigate and even waive student loans, looks sort of like a hybrid of Debtors Court and straight bankruptcy. Heck, Trump says, if he's reelected, he will pardon the Jan 6 insurrectionists. So why can't Biden pardon people who took out student loans they cannot repay? How many times did Trump go bankrupt and stiff his creditors?
mirror mirror on the wall
I think the cover photo of me on my Facebook page indicates I'm an old man, who uses a laptop and likes dogs and nature.
Yesterday brought a friend request from a young oriental woman whose Facebook page indicates she lives in Birmingham, but is from a foreign country. I accepted her friend request and she immediately private- messaged me and it went from there.
Jeanie
Hello, my friend, how is your day?
Me
I didn’t go extinct, yet.
Jeanie
i don't understand what you mean, friend
I mean how was your day?
Me
I told you.
Jeanie
Ok, what did you do today, friend?
Me
Wrote, played chess online, talked on the phone, ate lunch in a restaurant, took a nap, showered, watched golf tournaments on TV, movies tonight, and more chess.
Jeanie
It's rich, can you write? What kind of books do you usually write?
You usually watch golf tournaments, I think you usually go to play with your friends, right?
Me
Did you check out what I post on Facebook before you sent me a friend request? Several links to free reads of some of my books and blogs. Might take you a month or several months to read it all.
Jeanie
No, I think it's easier for me to understand you if you tell me yourself
4:23 AM today
Me
I’m a writer. What I write explains me. You would know that, if you read what I post on my FB page, and you would know from that if I’m someone you really want as a friend. For some reason, I get new FB friend requests every day from people who don’t seem to know anything about me, including what I post on FB. I used to delete such requests. Then, I had a dream that left me feeling maybe I should accept such requests, and if they turned out to be spam or gamey, I could unfriend them. I’m kinda like someone from another planet, who got stuck here for a while, who wishes the mother ship will come back and fetch him. Meanwhile, I write, sometimes I do podcasts, sometimes I do other things. I demonstrate that at my FB page. Perhaps there is a cosmic reason you found me, beyond what I put on my FB. If so, it will reveal itself.
4:53 AM Today
Me
I wonder if some people see my FB page and become curious, perhaps they view me as a strange creature in a zoo? My FB info shows I am an old man. I live in Birmingham, Alabama, and this is where I was born and raised and went to school. A while back, a fellow living in the Bessemer area, about 14 miles west of Birmingham, sent me a friend request. His FB page indicated he was an evangelical Christian, in that he put something most days on his FB about his relationship with Jesus, God and the Bible, and how that was so important for him and other people. So, he posted something one day, and I responded by asking him if he was having direct experiences with God, Jesus, angels known in the Bible, because I was. He said he did, by reading the Bible. That really didn't answer my question, so I kept probing, and I kept getting the same answer. He kept calling me his friend in what he wrote to me. I wasn't sure he would do that, if he was reading what I was putting on my FB, or if he sat down somewhere and talked with me a while. Three days ago, he posted on this FB that he, his wife and their children were being attacked horribly by Satan, and he asked for his FB friends to pray for him and his family. He did not explain in what way Satan was attacking them. I wondered what actually was going on, but I remained silent. The next day, he posted a meme tearing up President Biden and his son Hunter. It was the first time I had seen anything political from him, but it did not surprise me, because where I live, Evangelicals are certain the Democrats and President Biden are communists and work for the Devil and Donald Trump was sent to them by God to save them from the Democrats and Satan. So, I replied to this fellow's post, by saying something like, based on what all I read in online news and see in TV news, Hunter Biden might be as sorry as Trump, and Hunter got to where he is because of his father's influence as President Obama's Vice President, and later via his father's influence as President. And, I think the Republicans should take to heart what Jesus said in the Gospels, "Hypocrite, first take the beam. out of your own eye," and they should deal with Trump, and the Democrats should take that same passage to heart, and they should deal with the Bidens. This fellow in the Bessemer area commented back that I should wake up, Trump was not close to as bad as the Bidens. As I was typing a reply, he unfriended me. I tried to find his FB page, and did not find it. Now if you are wondering if I am a Christian. The answer is, No. I was raised in that religion, and I left it, but still believed God existed and Jesus was who I was taught he was. I had other experiences. Then, I had experiences that proved beyond any doubt that God exists, that Jesus exists, that angels in the Bible exist, that the Devil exists, and that human beings, in the main, have no clue what is really going on. I was turned every which a way but loose, and upside down and inside out, and was stood before endless mirrors, looking at me. That still is going on. Looking at the beams in my own eye. Which does not seem to be a particularly popular thing to do in Christianity, nor anywhere else.
I saw this about mirrors at the POETIC OUTLAWS Substack the day before yesterday:
Break The Mirror
By: Nanao Sakaki
In the morning
After taking cold shower
—-what a mistake—-
I look at the mirror.
There, a funny guy,
Grey hair, white beard, wrinkled skin,
—-what a pity—-
Poor, dirty, old man,
He is not me, absolutely not.
Land and life
Fishing in the ocean
Sleeping in the desert with stars
Building a shelter in the mountains
Farming the ancient way
Singing with coyotes
Singing against nuclear war—
I’ll never be tired of life.
Now I’m seventeen years old,
Very charming young man.
I sit quietly in lotus position,
Meditating, meditating for nothing.
Suddenly a voice comes to me:
“To stay young,To save the world,
Break the mirror.”
Sloan Bashinsky
Writes Sloan’s Newsletter
Jun 30
And all along since early 1987, when angels known in the Bible grabbed me and stood me before endless mirrors, looking a me, looking at me, looking at me, ugh, looking at me, ugh - was a message that the mirror was, is, humanity's cure, if it will use it :-).
monsters and men
Writes monsters’s Substack
Jun 30
That is an interesting perspective I didn’t think about, but now that you mentioned it, it makes all the sense in the world 😃 I saw the poem as an invitation to liberate ourselves from what we think we know about us and live beyond the limitations/weaknesses that the mirror reveals. On the other hand the mirror can reveal our fouls as you well pointed out.
Sloan Bashinsky
Writes Sloan’s Newsletter
Jun 30
The mirror reveals the monsters in men and in women, as well as any good qualities they do not see in themselves.
Sue Cauhape
Writes Ring Around the Basin
Jun 30
I see it as a chance to have a conversation with yourself: hello beautiful, what marvelous mischief is in store for you today? what gifts shall you bring to the party to make people laugh and love themselves. Only when they love themselves can they love others.
Sloan Bashinsky
Writes Sloan’s Newsletter
Jun 30
That, too. And yet, until they, and we, see the monster sides of ourselves, and deal with that, do we even know ourselves?
monsters and men
Writes monsters’s Substack
Jun 30
Sometimes not being aware where our limits are, can make us push further beyond what we would normally dare to try. “Looking in the mirror” and reminding ourselves about what we can and what we can not do might be rather a setback in our endeavor. So from this perspective maybe forgetting about the mirror would help. On the other hand, just as you said, it reveals some of the wicked corners of our personality. So in your opinion, should we break the mirror or not? 😃
Sloan Bashinsky
Writes Sloan’s Newsletter
Jun 30
I think if we break the mirror, we are the loser, we weenie out.
Me to Jeanie
I'm going to try to go back to sleep.
Hey American homophobes - St. Paul was queer!
This below was in my Apple News yesterday morning, and I shared it on my Facebook timeline. A Pennsylvania woman, whom I had met in Key West when she was visiting a homeless friend there, responded, and that led to further conversation.
Sloan Bashinsky
Well?
Mitch McConnell’s Dream of a Segregated U.S. Is Being Realized — Advocate
Excerpt:
A year from now, America’s new catchphrase will be “You are not welcome.” It will be heard at colleges, storefronts, churches, restaurants, loan offices, bakeries, and Chick-fil-As, with a 21st-century spin of “access denied” on apps and websites. White, straight, wealthy Christians informing the poor, people of color, and queer, “You are not welcome.”
U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell’s dream of a United States where colleges only admit and are only affordable to wealthy whites, businesses only serve straight Christians, and abortions are reserved for rich white women is being realized.
Jacqueline
I’m so sad that we got so far and ended up right in the shitter.
Sloan Bashinsky
Jacqueline The shitter is the result of the Democrats running Hillary in 2016.
Jacqueline
Sloan Bashinsky totally agree. How the f did we get here? I always had faith in our government to a degree. Young and stupid in my end.
Sloan Bashinsky
Jacqueline How about this for justice- when the homophobe Justices and their homophobe brother and sister Americans leave this life, they are Greeted by St. Paul, who gives them “the look”, shakes his head, says his thorn in the flesh was he was queer, and they all have to go back to Earth pronto as new babies, who will be queer and black. And if they object, they get mothers who don’t want them but can’t get abortions, and they still will be queer and black.
Jacqueline
Sloan Bashinsky I think that would be the ultimate glorious karma that I so want! Wishing I could pray so hard that it would happen.
Sloan Bashinsky
Jacqueline God’s will, not ours, be done, but maybe God has a suggestion box? Imagine the homophobes all being visited in dreams by St Paul, who tells them he was queer and what they are looking at for their next incarnation on Earth, if they don’t tell everyone they know what they dreamed and if they don’t become flaming advocates for queer people, and if they object, they also have to vote Democrat for the rest of their lives.
Jacqueline 😀
Sloan Bashinsky, this morning
Jacqueline Once upon a time, I persuaded a group of gay men in Birmingham to attend an eclectic Sunday school class in an old line Southern Baptist church in Birmingham, which at one time was the church of my parents and their parents. My grandfathers were deacons in that church. How I convinced the men to attend the Sunday school class was I convinced them St. Paul was queer. It wasn't hard to do. There is nothing in his letters about him ever marrying and having children. He was a Pharisee, meaning, he had a solemn duty to God to marry and propagate God's chosen people, the Jews. He told his flock he wished they were like him, celibate, for sex caused troubles. He told his flock that Christ is to the head of a man and a man is to the head of his wife, who can only know Christ through her husband. Where's Paul get that shit from? Well, he never met Jesus in the flesh, nor Mary Magdalene. Had he done that, he would have known what the disciples knew about that couple. But I drift from where I was going with this. The plight of queer people became even more poignant to me when I lived in Key West, where. perhaps 20 percent of the adult population are queer people. The city and county governments were glad to have them. One of them was a county commissioner. Another of them was a city commissioner. She is Key West's mayor now. She is sharp as a tack. She was the best city commissioner the city ever had, until she resigned, I felt in deep frustration over how the mayor and other commissioners were running the city. The plight of the queer people further deepened for me when I lived in Key West, when my bi-sexual in the closet brother killed himself because someone was going to out him in Birmingham and he could not prevent it. The plight of the queer people became acute in me, when I learned one of my grandchildren was trans. And then that child had surgery. And now that child is much, much happier. During citizen comments at a Key West City Commission meeting, one of the last such meetings I attended, and I attended hundreds, and spoke several times at each meeting during citizen comments on an item before the Commission, I explained to them how anyone with eyes that see knows that St. Paul was gay, and that the Christian fanatics needed to deal with that. Now you might wonder if my comments were reported in the Key West Citizen? What do you think? Nada.
Jacqueline
Sloan Bashinsky I think if our Supreme Court continues their racist rulings Key West will be 100% gay as that will be the only safe spot for them in America. I am disgusted to be an American right now and angered that we have to fight to no avail.
Sloan Bashinsky
Jacqueline There are other safe areas for St. Paul's persecuted people. The American Christian right is in for a really rude awakening when their roll is called up yonder, but only their being there for it will convince them.
An old fart's Declaration of Independence? I talk to trees.
Something at Poetic Outlaws yesterday, about exodus-ing the slings and arrows and madness of living on this world, aroused me to respond. It got a bit more exciting around the middle part...
An old fart's Declaration of Independence?
I wake up each morning sort of wishing I am not still here. Yet here I am, so there must be more for me to experience. What I resent about heading toward 82, is parts of my body don't work as well as they once did. One part has not worked right since 1969, when it suddenly stopped working like it was supposed to, and it has given me a very hard time ever since. I sort of learned to cope with it, after medicine proved unable to help, and herbs, meditation, visualizing, health clinics and different kinds of healers proved unable. I spent a lot of money for nothing. I realized it was intelligent when some things I tried seemed to be helping and it punished me horribly. I concluded it was karma, for something. My messed up shitter was joined by the other elimination system, when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2020, and had radiation therapy early in the Covid-19 shut down, and that was the adios for any romance I might have hoped might not come my way, again. My toes, feet and legs are numb and coldish up to the knees, but I can still walk, I can drive to the grocery store and wherever. My mind still seems pretty sharp, if I ignore increasing difficulty with life-long dyslexia and the vertigo spell an ear doctor fixed with what he called "the log roll" exercise. And, I seem to forget things I'm supposed to do, more frequently. I'm taking a med and Prevagen and an herb for that. Otherwise, I take no meds and my pulse, blood pressure and oxygen efficiency baffle my doctors. No way I'm headed toward 82. I can't swing a golf club any more, without throwing out my low back and ending up in a wheelchair maybe for the rest of my life. My L-4 and L-5 decided to fuse naturally, X-ray and Cat scan showed. The real kicker was the MRI didn't reveal a brain, and that's when the Government was called in. Also influencing, I was claiming to be in steady communion with angels known in the Bible ever since a life-changing jolting event one night in early 1987, which convinced me 100 percent that God exists, which, of course, I can't prove, any more than the Government can disprove it. What most seems to perplex the Government is not that I don't have a brain, but I seem able to think and speak and get around without a brain. I keep trying to convince the Government that angels needed my brain for something top secret they would not explain to me, and, they jerry-rigged my spine so that it became a substitute brain. That was really interesting, because an ET race had to be brought in, which had learned how to do that kind of procedure. Of course, I didn't tell the Government about the ET thing, because that's a sure way to get locked up with the ETs the government already captured and stuffed in cages in Area 51, or somewhere nobody who knows about Area 51 ever heard of. For all I know, I'm in an underground cavern under the South Pole. So, how I am I able to let you know about this? I can project myself anywhere I want to be, unless the angels don't allow it. Right now, I'm sitting on the sofa in the living room of my apartment in a gentrified apartment building in Birmingham, Alabama. I have lived here two other times. This is where I end up after I quit running away from home, again. What most distresses me about getting old and decrepit is, humanity has not yet figured out that it loves its pets- dogs, cats, whatever- more than it loves its elders. This is evidenced by humans take their old, ailing pets to veterinarians, who kindly exodus their pets out of their misery. While old farts like me are expected to live until the Lord takes me, no matter how much I am suffering. Of course, there is a good explanation for that. The longer I live, the more money the medical profession, hospitals, physical therapists, pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies, assisted living facilities, nursing homes and hospices stand to make. That's the deal. Well, I need to stop now, because I hear my minders walking toward my cell in the Government's top secret black site. I don't want to freak them out by not being here when they get here. They would never figure that out and probably one of them would get blamed for it and end up in my cell.
Something else in the same Poetic Outlaws offering caused this to come out of me today.
I talk to trees
The apartment building in which I live is across the street from a public park, which is much more lush than when I lived in this building in 2000 and left on adventures I could not have possibly fathomed beforehand. The park has a community garden, and I was able to get myself a small plot where I grow edible leafy greens and herbs. The trees in this park are much larger than when I lived here before. New trees were planted that grew fast. When the trees have leaves, they are quite spectacular. Also, the ground shrubs were left to grow wild and they went really brambly and lovely. There are a few benches in the park, and from time to time I sit on a bench and stare up into the massive trees of different species. Sometimes I take a small pillow and put it on the bench rail and lie down and stare at the massive trees. I talk to the trees, and to Mother Nature. I asked them one day, why don't they take charge and rid the planet of the invasive species that is destroying it? I went into an altered state that lasted about an hour. I was not really on this planet, but I was very much on it. I really can't describe it with words. It felt wonderful. I was dizzy. I was fully awake, aware. I thought it might be like being on some kind of drug, but I had not even brought a bottle of water to drink. After that, I found if I sat long enough in that park, with my eyes open or shut, something came over me and off to somewhere else I went, but I was still here. It was like getting an ethereal massage, but what kind of hands were doing it? I've been a mystic for a long time, so I am familiar with other-world sensations. Yet, what happens in the park seems somewhat different. I think I will go there today. Perhaps the pair of owls that hung out in the park for three years, then went elsewhere, will be there. Perhaps I will see the peregrine falcon that tried to snatch the owls' baby will show up and not risk being driven away with all due speed by the mother owl, which I witnessed. Of course, I viewed the owls as a "sign." Just as I viewed their departure as a "sign".
The American Declaration of Independence doesn't recognize Christianity
This morning, July 4, 2023, I found a copy of the American Declaration of Independence online and I copied and pasted it into a document file and removed from it all passages in which there is no reference to deity. Down below is what was left. I capitalized the four references to DEITY.
For the life of me, I do not see in anything below, nor anywhere else in the Declaration, that justifies how American Christians came up with the idea that America was founded on Christian principles.
Many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, including its alleged author Thomas Jefferson, were Deists. Later in time, Jefferson led the charge to block this home state of Virginia's legislature from making Christianity the Virginia state religion.
"In Congress, July 4, 1776
"The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which THE LAWS OF NATURE AND OF NATURE'S GOD entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their CREATOR with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
"We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to THE SUPREME JUDGE OF THE WORLD for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of DIVINE PROVIDENCE, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."
There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution about Christianity or Christian principles.
Amendment I of the U.S. Constitution plainly states the US Congress cannot establish or prevent a religion in America.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
I posted that at Poetic Outlaws Facebook group, and something came back and I took the bait.
Mr. Raven writes Whisper from the trees
Yawn another self righteous, puritanical, humorless fundamentalist atheist, zzzzzzz... How boring.
Sloan Bashinsky
Atheist?
Thomas Jefferson?
Me?
I sometimes tell Christians I know, if they lived in my skin for a little while, they might wish there was no God, Jesus, angels, or Devil :-)
Mr. Raven
What does that even mean? Why is the thought of secular people always such a confused muddle?
Sloan Bashinsky
You didn't answer my questions and left your first comment more muddled :-)
Mr. Raven
How can you even answer a question when it is in the context of meaningless gibberish like:
"I sometimes tell Christians I know, if they lived in my skin a little while, they might wish there were no God, Jesus, angels, or Devil :-)"
Sloan Bashinsky
I'm pretty sure I write in plain English when I give it only half a try. You can answer the questions I put to you, or you can keep playing whatever kind of game this is that you are playing. :-)
Mr. Raven
I am very sure I am blocking you because you are a boring atheist shit heel, bye, bye.
Sloan Bashinsky
Himm, I did wonder if I might have punched some of your buttons, but atheist I definitely am not. I know for a fact God exists. Shalom
Jesus had a near death experience, Thomas Jefferson was an idiot, and other St. Luke's Episcopal Church Tiny Kingdom black sheep heresies
In the fall of 1995, St. Luke's Episcopal Church, my mother's church, in which I was Confirmed, hosted a series of presentations by a noted Episcopal theologian. At the invitation of a lawyer friend, I attended one presentation.
The noted theologian said the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead was not a resurrection but was a resuscitation, and not a miracle, whereas Jesus died and was resurrected from the dead, and that was a miracle.
The audience was allowed to speak. I left my pew and walked to the podium in the center isle and said I'd had some training in herbs, and I had learned aloe is a powerful wound healer and myrrh incites lymphocyte production to fight infection. Why was a hundred weight of those herbs put on Jesus' body if he was dead?
John 19:39-40 New American Standard Bible - NASB 1995(NASB1995)Nicodemus, who had first come to Him by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds weight. So they took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen wrappings with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews.
The esteemed theologian said he was not familiar with that science. St. Luke's head priest said it was according to the burial custom of the Jews.
Later over dinner, my lawyer friend said he understood what I was driving at, but he chose to believe Jesus physically died and was resurrected. I said, and Lazarus was dead longer than Jesus was in the tomb, and Lazarus was not resurrected?
Recently, I joined a discussion at the World Deists Union Facebook group.
Frankie Waves Top contributor ·
The simple truth of the matter is Jesus does not exist…
Sloan Bashinsky
Do you bet your life and your soul on that?
Frankie Waves
Sloan Bashinsky 1776 traitor… the rule of law will be enforced!
Sloan Bashinsky
Frankie Waves looks to me, thr Declaration of Independence recognized a Creator that gave unalienable rights only to white men. Yet even its allege author, a slaveholder, who had a black slave mistress, recognize Jesus had existed, when he made The Jefferson Bible out of what he deemed relevant in the Gospels about Jesus.
I am not a Christian, but I have had direct experiences with the being Christians call Jesus, and I have had direct experiences with angels known in the Bible. I was raised Christian, but along the way things happened that moved me past believing into knowing God exists, and I sometimes tell Christians they are saved by Jesus to the extent they live as he lived and taught people to live.
This poem fell out of me in the spring of 1994, when I was in the 3rd year of what would be a 4-year dark night of the soul, which came up on me and there was nothing I could do about it, and it left the next year, after I had 3 spontaneous visions that clearly were not of this world. Anyway, here's the poem that seems to sum up God and humanity's relationship thereto about as well as anything.
"Earth, the sacred prism through which souls are refracted into their elemental parts, purified in Holy Fire, then one-forged and sent on their way to not even God knows where, simply because they are all unique emanations of God, evolving..."
Perhaps you should hope, or pray, that God doesn't take a direct interest in you and all of a sudden you don't wonder, believe, reason, or doubt God exists- you know God exists, as surely as you know when you are having an orgasm or hit your thumb with a hammer or take a poop.
Rebecca AnnTop contributor
The existence of Jesus the man has yet to be factually proven but also yet to be factually disproven. What you choose to believe is your own personal view. However virtually all scholars of antiquity seem to be in agreement that the historical human Jesus existed. My statements are researchable.
Frankie Waves
Rebecca Ann no proof of rising from the dead… and flying out into space… therefore suicide (extremism)
Rebecca Ann
Frankie Waves there is absolutely no proof of that. Also, no proof of any suicide. However, having studied ancient cultures a fair amount myself, I can say with measured certainty that Romans used crucifixion as a means of execution. 
Frankie Waves
Rebecca Ann toxic… the anonymous authors thought the three days and rise was a good idea for our character…
Rebecca Ann
Frankie Waves I am speaking about the scholars and researchers that are published today, those that specialize in the study of ancient times. I’m not referring to the anonymous authors of so-called scripture. The researchers today hold a consensus that a man called Jesus, who did preach, existed.
Frankie Waves
Yeah but we don’t want to associate suicide with love… they are not connected… too extreme…
Frankie Waves
Remember it is the light from the sun which lifts everyone up, regardless of position… especially with a collective reverence… only the blind suffer and even they still feel it’s warmth… science may find a cure soon too!
Rebecca Ann
Frankie Waves I like that.
Joe Robinson
Rebecca Ann If proof were needed that a Man named Jesus existed comes from the Koran who acknowledge Jesus as a great Prophet.
It is also held by many Philosophers and Scientists that a Man named Jesus existed but nowhere is there any evidence that he was a “God”. The idea that he was a “God” comes from organized religion who deified Jesus in order to use him for their nefarious operations in gaining wealth and power from their Parishioners.
Sloan Bashinsky
I was born and raised in Christianity. I don't think Jesus ever claimed in the Gospels that he was God. I recall he said the Father and he were one, and if you saw him, you saw the Father. In Gethsemane, he prayed, "Not my will, by your Will, be done, O Lord." In modern lingo, Jesus in the Gospels claimed to be an avatar infused with God. As for suicide, Jesus in the Gospels had to know what would happen if.he kept shooting off his mouth and infuriating and scaring the shit out of the Jewish hierarchy and even the Roman government. As for the crucifixion described in the Gospels and the resurrection also described there, two secret disciples got permission from Pilate to take Jesus down from the cross the same day he was nailed to it. They slathered him with 100 weight of aloes and myrrhs and wrapped his body in linen and took his body to the tomb of one of the disciples. Aloe is a potent wound healer. Myrrh incites lymphocyte production to fight infection. Linen is a sterile bandage. Today there are lots of reports of Near Death experiences. Where do Deists stand on NDE's? Jesus in the Gospels had a NDE. There are reports of him walking and talking with people after he left the tomb. There are reports he later was in India. I think it is ludicrous to claim that Jesus did not exist. Frankie Waves did not claim that. Frankie posted. "Jesus does not exist." Being inclined to be a prick at times. I asked Frankie in my first comment here, "Do you bet your life and your soul on that?" So far, Frankie has laid low. That tells me volumes. If Jesus never existed, that makes the Deist who wrote the Declaration of Independence out to be an idiot. Why? Because that idiot cut and pasted from a Bible many of Jesus's sayings in the Gospels into his own book, which became known as The Jefferson Bible.
Two old fart dog and cat lovers discuss life, compassionate suicide, and running for president in Kundalina, Alabama
In 2002, I met a fellow in an online discussion group and we became internet friends and probably exchanged several hundred emails about this and that. We were kinda out of the box, but in different ways. He was a technology scientist, I was mystic. He started calling me Don Quixote, and I started calling him Sancho Panza.
Sancho sends out email blast to people he knows. He sent this today.
What if you could
Dr. Ben Kim's Newsletter
July 17, 2023
Dear Reader,
What if you could see everyone's date of death in an imaginary bubble above their head?
How would knowing the day that people will die impact the way you see and treat them?
Take a moment to think about the people around you, those you know best. Are you consistently treating them as you would if you knew the precise day of their departure?
What would you change about your approach to life if you knew your own date of expiration and that of those around you?
As Achilles reminds us, everything is more beautiful because our days are numbered. Let's remember this, especially in how we treat others.
Let's make those closest to us feel deeply loved for who they are, and let's do this through our actions, not just through words.
Let's not leave anyone with that sickening feeling of being seen only as a source of personal gain, be it financial or social.
Let's look to see how we can best be helpful to those who most need our support.
Let's develop our listening and understanding skills, and let's nurture a genuine desire to help others feel understood.
Let's remember to show heartfelt thanks for every act of kindness that comes our way, even through a friendly wave to another driver who signals for us to go first.
A true lover of wisdom has hands too busy to hold on to anything! He learns by doing and every pebble in the path becomes her teacher! Oink
I replied to Sancho
Well said. Tough to live, sometimes. I'm trying to find a veterinarian to put me down when I feel ready to go. I have talked to a number of people, who think, as I do, that there is something seriously fucked up about putting down our beloved, suffering pets, while requiring us to suffer as long as possible and spend as much money as possible to do it
Sancho
I just had that done to Jake, last Friday, it was painless, and his heart just stopped.... very painful for me and my daughter who were there holding him, but he was OK! I tend to agree with you on this... there should be some painless way to depart at our own time! My poor Mom stuck around for almost ten years in a limbo state... Parkinson is the worst... you are relatively being spared a lot of shit! Well, I shouldn't say that... I don't know what you are going through!
Me
I'm not to the wanting to check out stage yet, but I see that day coming. Meanwhile, some doctors and nutritional supplements keep me going, and I decided yesterday to try getting some exercise, despite the last time I worked out most days at a local YMCA, I caught a bad cold and had to get a prescription to keep me from catching pneumonia, which I am prone to get.
I saw your email about Jake, and recalled how hard I had cried over the death of a dog, George, my first basset hound, and much later a cat, whom I named MacPolecat, since my 2nd wife and I had a Scottish terrier named MacPollock.
I was maybe 10. George got run over by a car when I was at school. My nanny Cha grabbed and hugged me when I got home, and told me what had happened. I bawled and bawled and bawled. I went and got my .22 rifle and loaded it and was going looking for the mother fucker who had killed George. My parents were out of town, and Cha called my Uncle Leo, my father's older brother, who was my baby doctor and sometimes he took me fishing. Leo gave me bloody hell being a crybaby. Much later, he gave me bloody hell for bursting into tears when Cha came to me at my son's funeral.
MacPolecat was a great hunter. Mockingbirds loved to torment him by dive-bombing him. One day, I watched him lie on his back in our backyard. Legs and paws cocked up, eyes closed. A mockingbird started swooping in, over and over, getting closer and closer. Then, suddenly, a little too close- four paws and claws and a mouth full of teeth had a mockingbird sandwich.
We had two more cats, the female was Sadie. MacPollock liked eating their cat n food, and they didn't like MacPollock eating their cat food. My wife or I rescued MacPollock several times from Sadie and MacPolecat.
One night, we hear a great ruckus in the kitchen, and out of it races MacPollock, squealing, with Sadie and MacPolecat prancing on their hind legs on both sides of him, repeatedly raking him with their front paws and claws. MacPollock reaches the living room and crawls under a footstool I had inherited from my father's father. MacPollock's nose sticks out one end, his tail sticks out the other end. He puts his front paws over his nose and snout, as Sadie keeps round-housing his nose and snout, while Mac Polecat is rearranging his tail, as he keeps squealing. I let that go on a while, then I call him a dumb shit, and stop it.
I was in my home office one day, and out the window I saw MacPolecat playing catch and release with a chipmunk he had caught. He got outside the yard and fence with the chipmunk, and had it under our car. He let the chipmunk escape again, into the street. He went after it, and a passing car ran over his head and no more MacPolecat. I asked my wife to get some frozen fish I had caught out of the freezer, and I took it and what was left of MacPolecat to my vegetable garden and took a shovel and dug a deep hole and put him in it with the fish, and I covered the hold and dropped to my knees and wept like a baby.
Jake Carruthers was my pen name for my first novel, Kundalina, Alabama, a seriously wild and crazy redneck Buddhist Pleiadean colony, anti-lawyer hero, definitely white witch heroine veterinarian, anti-religion romp and love story, somewhat inspired by Tom Robbins, now a free read at archive.org.
https://archive.org/details/kundalina
Sancho
Why go for a work-out, that's not fun? See If you could get a friend to go for a little walk-n-chat, early in the morning, every morning... if I lived near you, I would enjoy that... you would probably do most of the talking and who knows, maybe ET's would beam us up to examine what kind of rare talking birds these two old parrots were!😀
Me
That would be lovely. Alas, I don't know anyone in Birmingham with whom I could have such walks and talks. Wherever I live, I feel like I'm from another planet. I have one friend in another state, who is beleaguered by angels and we have lots of talks. You are not afflicted in that way, but the future is unknown😀.
What inclined me to try working out again was an article I read online last night about about mice studies that suggest resistance training, such as weights, machines, which builds muscles, delays memory loss and cognitive degradation. For that, I'm taking a prescription, Memantine Hydrochloride, which is the only prescription I take. I also eat dried jellyfish brains (Prevagen), which is over the counter at CVS and costs a great deal more than Memantine, so perhaps that means it works? A lady friend in Birmingham told me Prevagen helped her memory. I also take Pure Neuro, which I learned about and acquired online.
I'm pretty sure the ETs have observed us for about as long as we have known each other. Maybe they will beam up Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin and other notables? My dreams last night seem to suggest I run for president. I recall promoting you and I do that, and we flip a coin to see who ran for president and vice president. I can see doing a podcast about me running for president on The Redneck Mystic Lawyer ticket. A total prank, but who knows? Perhaps some people would write my name on their ballot just to be contrary. Perhaps I get under enough people's skin that someone does for me what I have not been able to get a veterinarian to agree to do.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
No comments:
Post a Comment