Wednesday, July 15, 2026

Holocaust Denial

(Unfortunately, the top half of this meme came with the "fucking:reference in the lower frame.
I wish I didn't have to publish the lower frame, but, unfortunately, it comes as part of "the package.")

In any event, the top half of the above meme Fact Check:  https://share.google/aimode/WJf2o4vaG5fsZtSZV

Dear Laura,


I just came across this account...

And I was reminded - yet again - that, if Jesus is "the way, The Truth and the life," you will have an interesting encounter at The Pearly Gates.


On April 12, 1945, Dwight Eisenhower walked into Ohrdruf.

It was the first Nazi camp liberated by American forces, a subcamp of Buchenwald in central Germany. Patton was with him. So was Omar Bradley. The bodies were still where the SS had left them, some shot in the head days before, others stacked and partially burned.

Patton, a man not known for squeamishness, walked behind a shed and vomited. Eisenhower made himself look at everything.

Then he gave the order that mattered.

He wired Washington and London and demanded that congressmen, senators, and reporters be flown to Germany immediately. He wanted them to see it while the evidence was fresh, while the bodies were still there, while nothing could be cleaned up or explained away.

He also ordered that every American soldier in the area who was not on the front line be brought through the camp. In his words, they were fighting to defeat an enemy, and now they should see what that enemy had done. He wanted them to know, in specific and physical terms, what they had been fighting.

And he ordered the mayor of the nearby town, along with the townspeople, to walk through Ohrdruf and look at the dead. Many of them claimed they hadn't known. The mayor and his wife went home that night and hanged themselves.

Eisenhower's reasoning, written in a cable to General Marshall, was blunt. He said he made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there developed a tendency to charge these allegations to propaganda.

He already knew. Before the war was even over, before the full scale of the camps had been uncovered, he understood that people would try to deny it. So he brought witnesses. He brought cameras. He brought film crews. He brought soldiers, journalists, politicians, and German civilians, and he made them look.

The photographs and footage taken at Ohrdruf and the camps liberated after it became the foundation of the visual record. They were shown at Nuremberg. They were shown in newsreels. They are still shown today.

Eisenhower saw four more camps in the weeks that followed. He never spoke about them lightly.

He had understood, standing in that yard in April, that memory would need protecting.

*****
Holocaust Denial summarized by Google-AI:https://share.google/aimode/VB56nQWy2TKl8Iw4f


The New Netflix Mini-Series Production Of "La Casa de Los Espiritus" (The House of the Spirits)... And A Free, Well-Formatted PDF of Allende's Spanish Language Novel

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Queridos,

Cynthia and I were riveted by this new Netflix production of "The House of The Spirits" which we finished last night.

It is notable that the combined forces of Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons,  Glenn Close, Meryl Streep, Winona Ryder, and Antonio Banderas could not save their 2016 production of "The House of The Spirits." https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_house_of_the_spirits

This megastar failure may be attributable to the reconfiguration of the modern mentality so that we can no longer tell meaningful stories in 2 to 3 hours.

From now on, the mini-series may be the only palette large enough to tell big stories.

*****

Be forewarned.

There are a number of extraordinarily harsh images in this Netflix mini-series.

Clearly, it is not for the faint-hearted.

In the final episode of this new Netflix production, I was moved to fact-check one such "horror" frequently mentioned while working at the Managua Medical School in 1988-89. The grotesque substance of my inquiry was confirmed: Yes, Somoza's dictatorship routinely used helicopters to drop left-wing political prisoners into the crater of the Masaya Volcano about 30 miles from Managua.  Not a trace of evience. The ultimate "disappearance." https://share.google/aimode/7RsjnJuFofhjpNvpL  (N.B. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for whom I have high esteem, was famous for his appraisal of the Somoza family dictatorship: "Somoza may be a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch.")

If you think that Truth deserves deep contextualization, and a high degree of fidelity to the political realities or our time, I see no alternative but to include these elements. Harshness may be the only way to awaken America's many "sleepers."

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How Conservatives Tell Big Lies By Shunning The Fullness Of Truth Found Only In Rich Contextualization


Notably, reviews in the Catholic press are positive, albeit reluctant to entirely approve the series' touchy-feely approach to New Age "syncretic" religiosity and spirituality. (I too found the production's approach to religion frequently facile.) 

In any event, here are some useful links for Netflix' new 8 part mini-series, "The House of The Spirits."



And here is a PDF of Allende's Spanish language novel: https://www.libri.it/image/data/didattica/La_casa_de_los_espiritus.pdf

"The House of The Spirits" in English language translation: https://archive.org/details/houseofspirits0000alle_g6h0


Pax et amor

Alan

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Tuesday, July 14, 2026

YES! The Ultra-Wealthy Pay The Lion's Share Of Income Tax. BUT... America's Finances Are Not About Income Taxes Anywhere Close To The Role Played By The NET WORTH Of The Ultra-Rich. In Comparison To Net Worth, The Income Tax Paid By Wealthy People Is Trivial - Vanishingly Inconsequential

 

The United States Of America: "We're #1" (Ah! The Shame...)


Earlier today, friend Elodie Bentley posted the following meme.

As often happens, one of her Facebook friends Allen Sales responded with a hackneyed right-wing view.

I enjoy replyint to Allen Sales and have done so below.

Truth be told, I am grateful to Allen for giving me repeated reasons to "set the record straight."


Notice that Monbiot does not say "the rich and the ultra-rich pay no taxes."
He says that they pay lawyers and politicians - with the presuppositional "given" that they also pay taxes. Duh.
Another platitude the sounds really catchy, and very divisive. But it is nowhere near the truth.
According to the tax foundation ...
Bottom 50% of all tax payers, 76,900,699 of them, paid 3.0% of all federal income taxes paid.
The top 50% of all tax payers, 76,900,699 of them paid 97% of personal income taxes.
The top 25% paid 87.2%
The top 10% paid paid 72.0%
The top 5% paid 61.0%
The top 1%, 1,538,014 of them, paid 40.4% of all federal income taxes paid.
  • Reply

  • “The rich do not pay their share of taxes” is the greatest lie in politics. The richer you get, the more complicated your taxes get. That is why the richer you get, the more expensive the person is that you get to do them.
    There also needs to be a differentiation between “being wealthy” and earning a lot of money. We tax income, not wealth. Wealth is what you accumulate for retirement.
  • Reply


  • Allen Sale Here is the Cornerstone of your Falsehood:
    For the wealthy, income tax is a trivial business expense.
    Less than trivial.
    Vanishingly inconsequential.
    The truth is that "national finances" play out primarily in the domain of Net Worth, not income tax.
    Emphatically NOT income tax.
    The American Right has been propagating this substantive lie, this national "decoy" about "the wealthy paying their fair share..." forever.
    It all comes down to contextualization.
    Y'all assume that American citizens will be suckers forever, that "Jane and Joe Blow" will never awaken from the soporific stupefaction that The Ungodly Wealthy's propaganda machine has fobbed off on The Common Folk like political narcolepsy.
    Below you will find two links that explain the substantive truth of how we have become a rogue nation, a failed state and could quickly become what Trump himself describes as a "shithole country." 

    And we could become a "shithole country" the moment we look at American politics from the vantage of "The General Welfare" whose meaning is exactly what the constituent words say, not what the Supreme Court has decided they mean by the mangling "The General Welfare" and its Siamese twin, "The Common Good"
    Of the 50 words that comprise the Preamble (which is pretty much The Mission Statement of the Constitution), nearly 10 percent of those words (which begin with "We the People") are straightforwardly dedicated to "promoting the General Welfare."
    The Preamble: "We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[note 1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
    Just as "We the People" is a phrase that has tremendous traction with the American Right, "promotion of the General Welfare" is of equal importance. "Promoting the General Welfare" is a Truth that a huge number of Americans (whether they think about it or not) "hold to be self-evident."
    No wonder y'all are so opposed to wokeness.
    The whole goddamn System would come crashing down if everybody woke up; indeed if only the percentage of Americans who still approve of His Malignancy woke up. (A week ago, The Economist reported that 36% of Americans approve of The Grotesquerie. https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
    )
    See George Carlin's rap on "The American Dream." http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/.../george-carlin-on...
    For more Carlin, check out:
    George Carlin: Everything You Need To Know About American Society And Politics: "Just Promise The Doofuses New Gizmos"
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    I.IMGFLIP.COM
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    i.imgflip.com

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