Chaos and the Anti-Thread

[Emil El Zapato]

I just watched Kavanaugh and his wife talk about the charges (On Fox News).

She was lying her ass off and he went along for the ride...it's sad...they have compromised themselves...perhaps solidied their relationship with a mutual skeleton in the closet. Pretty unfortunate...

[Maggie]

I just watched Kavanaugh and his wife talk about the charges (On Fox News).

She was lying her ass off and he went along for the ride...it's sad...they have compromised themselves...perhaps solidied their relationship with a mutual skeleton in the closet. Pretty unfortunate...

IMO Kavanaugh lies as easily as he speaks.
He is being pushed through because I think he has been aiding and abetting the break down of the democratic process for his whole career. I have been following this story because I am certain he is being pushed forward absolutely to help the puppet masters. IMO it may be he is a raging alcoholic? IMO he is so compromised for some reason that he can be black mailed for any purpose the PTB choose?

There is an aspect of this confirmation hearing that is OUTING the cultural system of jowly (white in the US but not necessarily) men who are the predominant law makers in the world and the mouths of the masters. IMO the system is one ruled by people who all share something in common. They all really dislike other people and especially women at a deep level. I don't know why the deep suspicion and need to subjugate but it seems plain they have it.

One example is coming up in the hearings. It has to do with the elites who all recommend and share the world's spoils..... they have clubs that are only for the boys (mostly) and all include debasing and abusing one another as well as others. Hazing is an example. How far are people willing to take debasing to be a "man" among "men" is amazing.

And women are just objects.

women are not equals in the eyes of the Greek system—among other things, the system generally prohibits sororities from throwing their own parties with alcohol, and so sororities rely on fraternities to provide booze—and they frequently become a casualty of this dynamic. In college, fraternity costume parties, engineered to encourage women to dress as sluttily as possible, felt to me as distant from actual sex as Trump’s remark about Tic Tacs: men seemed to be getting women to doll themselves up as “tennis hoes” to their “golf pros” just to prove that they could. It was common, in some frat houses, to deliver a collective slow clap to the girls who sneaked out the morning after a party. As Syrett writes, fraternities implicitly frame sex with women as something engaged in “for one’s brothers, for communal consumption with them.” Women’s bodies become the tools with which men perform intimacy and solidarity with one another; at least at first glance, women are not potential partners so much as potential means for upholding male self-interest. Under these conditions, the lines between boorishness and sexual assault are quickly blurred and easily crossed.

Historically, Syrett explains, white fraternities have served to solidify élite male power and entitlement. In the nineteenth century, wealthy men separated themselves from their poorer classmates through the Greek system; in the twentieth century, men used frat houses to preserve an exclusively male space in an “increasingly mixed-gender world.” Of course, fraternities are not the only institutions like this—they are not the only structures that attract men who value other men more than women, that allow their members to serve élite interests at the expense of a more just and equal society. On Thursday, a man who has been accused of sexual misconduct by two women, and who has been nominated for a position on the Supreme Court by a President accused of sexual misconduct by twenty women, will attempt to persuade eleven Republican men that he deserves that position—a position that would give him the authority to help decide, among other things, what options are available to women if they get pregnant after being sexually assaulted. What more damning demonstration of the solidification of male entitlement could we possibly get? https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-c...-for-other-men

If they let girls in to the ranks of the powerful, they have to be "good ole girls". They are compliant with the ways things work. That was high lighted when it came out that Chau at Yale literally groomed the candidates for clerkships for Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh mentors lots of "model" women clerks. These women will dress for men and also follow the leader so they can have the power they think is rewarding. Lots of people have started decrying feminism. I think the femisnist movement is NOT about being the same but about making equality a real factor in social experience. I think that this whole male/female system has never been about equality. It is about wresting the power to make decisions about the cultural landscape. Women were always pawns and SO WERE MEN. The good ole boy network is NOT obsolete at all in 2018. The Good Ole Boys are those who were made humane-less successfully. This network is as willing to kill millions as to blink. if one gets to be "old" it is because of the collateral "kills" that one succeeded in making along the way IMO.

With-holding contraception and out lawing abortion is not about how much "people" care about children. The care and concern is not about women either OR morality. It is about just one facet IMO of cremation of care that is the ONLY way the players can remain in their games.

Maybe a sea tide change is happening inside people who may speak out and then gather others and maybe end the good ole boy system?

But no matter how it plays out from here, Kavanaugh’s moment in the public eye has already shined a light squarely on America’s elite institutions and their attendant cultures of sexual violence. It’s a world I got a close look at myself when covering a rape trial sparked by events at St. Paul’s Prep in New Hampshire a few years ago. Suffice it to say this is a dark place, and it sometimes seems like the fancier or more rarefied the surrounds, the more depraved the twisted rituals of sexual cruelty—and the better the chances perpetrators will get away with it.

“What happens in more prestigious institutions is the institutional response of protection, and the institutional response of, ‘These young men have their lives ahead of them,’” Lisa Rocchio, a clinical and forensic psychologist, told me in an interview. “Like in the Catholic Church, and media and entertainment industries, there is this idea that the institution itself is deserving of protection." In these cases, the powers that be somehow rationalize protecting the accused, and in turn the institution, "without recognizing what they are actually doing is sacrificing the victim to their priorities and goals."

Rocchio said Ford’s response since she exposed herself to relentless public scrutiny has been consistent with someone who experienced abuse—remembering the traumatic event in vivid detail, but not every detail surrounding it. That didn’t stop President Trump, himself a man accused of sexual violence by at least 16 women, from tweeting dubiously, asking why she didn’t report it at the time, spawning a hashtag of survivor stories on Twitter.

Jennifer Freyd, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, gave the phenomenon of abusers turning around and attacking those who accuse them (as Trump has done) a name: DARVO, which stands for "Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender." It's a form of what in psychological literature is called "institutional betrayal." Freyd said she first noticed the phenomenon during Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas, whom she accused of sexual harassment, in 1991. “If somebody is accused of something, they might attack, they might say they’re lying or they're crazy," she told me. Then they cast themselves as the victim. “It's actually an effective strategy for a perpetrator to use,” Freyd added, noting it engenders public sympathy and can increase the chances that the accuser will blame themselves, and that she coined the term to "defang" the strategy.

As the people sharing their stories under the #WhyIDidntReport hashtag exemplify, assault among teens—while horrific—occurs regularly, including at elite institutions like the ones where Kavanaugh received his most polished credentials, and where America’s leaders come of age.

“What happens at Georgetown Prep, stays at Georgetown Prep,” Kavanaugh joked in a 2015 speech at Catholic University's Columbus School of Law. "That's been a good thing for all of us, I think."

What happened at Georgetown Prep, exactly?

Ford has alleged that Judge, another Georgetown Prep student, was in the room at a party where Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed, groped and tried to undress her, and covered her mouth so she could not scream. She was only able to escape when Judge jumped on the bed too, she said. Judge has claimed he did not remember the event, and (with the help of GOP senators) has rebuffed calls to testify about what happened.

But it’s clear Kavanaugh and Judge—who wrote a memoir about his drunken prep school escapades—were good friends who spent a fair amount of time together. And among many other disturbing things, Judge wrote in his high school yearbook that “women should be struck regularly, like gongs," quoting a playwright. Meanwhile, Kavanaugh’s own page contained a cryptic reference to a “Devil’s Triangle.” It’s impossible to know what, exactly, either was referring to, but the language has the hallmarks of the kind of ritualistic abuse, paired with written accounts and inside jokes, that I saw in the St. Paul’s trial.

Avenatti went on to claim the “FFFFFFFourth of July” reference on Kavanaugh’s yearbook page meant, “Find Them, French Them, Feel Them, Finger Them, Fuck Them, Forget Them.” That sounds like a vintage version of "THE LABREAZY SLEAZY METHOD,” which former St. Paul’s student Owen Labrie—who was convicted of using a computer to lure a child for sex at the elite school—described as “feign intimacy... then stab them in the back," later exclaiming, "THROW EM IN THE DUMPSTER.”

Leaving aside Kavanaugh’s own alleged crime, four years before his speech about letting the past be past, in 2011, Garrett Orr, a former priest who taught at Georgetown Prep, pleaded guilty to fondling two teenage students between 1989 to 2003. Prosecutors compared the school's handling of the initial report to the coverup at Penn State University

"They were not interested in dealing with Orr,” Eric Ruyak, a survivor of Orr’s abuse told the Washington Post at the time. “They wanted it to go away.” More recently, Ruyak told USA Today that Ford’s claims rang true to what he experienced there. “What she’s describing, I saw at parties in 2003 and ’04,” Ruyak said. “Boys trying to take advantage of girls who were drunk.”

Brett Kavanaugh has been a member of prestigious institutions like these his whole life. After Georgetown Prep he went to Yale and Yale Law School, where he joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. You may remember the Yale chapter’s infamous chant, "No means yes! Yes means anal!" for which they were suspended for five years in 2011.

During Kavanaugh’s time, DKE pledges were “fondly known as ‘buttholes,’” according to a caption of a photograph in the school paper showing recruits waving a flag woven from women’s underwear. Kavanaugh was not photographed, but was a sophomore at the time the photo was taken on January 18, 1985. He was also a member of one of Yale’s secret societies, Truth and Courage, known by the nickname, "Tit and Clit."

Bizarre and possibly criminal elite white male coming of age clubs and rituals aside, Kavanaugh has of course for much of his adult life been a member of another institution, often overlooked and even more untouchable: the judiciary itself.

Take Alex Kozinski, the federal judge Kavanaugh clerked for and authored books with—the man who was once his most vocal mentor, the man who introduced him to the Senate when Kavanaugh was nominated to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2006. Kozinski retired last December after several of his former clerks came forward to the Washington Post to accuse him of myriad sexual misconduct, including touching, kissing and showing them porn. One woman noted he showed her a chart Kozinski and his friends kept of all the women they slept with, which is almost exactly the kind of sexual tallying system that was in place at St. Paul’s. He resigned shortly after these incidents came to light, effectively shutting down the investigation into his misdeeds and allowing him to keep his $200k plus pension.

Meanwhile, Kozinki’s “Easy Rider Gag List,” which he encouraged clerks to sign on to under pseudonyms, and included jokes about topics like anal sex, has been public since at least 2008.

Kozinski once called the relationship between a judge and a clerk “the most intense and mutually dependent one outside of marriage, parenthood, or a love affair.” Not only did Kavanaugh clerk for Kozinksi, he clerked for Anthony Kennedy—whose seat he is gunning for—on Konzinski’s recommendation. (Kozinski also clerked for Kennedy.) And Kozinski’s son clerked for Kavanaugh.

In other words, this is the good ol’ boys club and then some.

But in his hearings, before he had been publicly accused of sexual violence, when Kavanaugh was questioned about Kozinski’s email list and comments, he said he couldn’t remember a thing.

They have an old saying at St. Paul that might apply here, too: "Deny till you die."https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4...-elite-schools

[Dreamtimer]

There was a group of guys I knew in college, frat boys, and they had a well orchestrated machine operating which drew girls into S&M parties and the guys were quite brutal. They got away with it because they called it consensual and because of the atmosphere in the 80's. They continued into their adult years, probably still to this day. I was smart enough to avoid them, barely.

[Maggie]

There was a group of guys I knew in college, frat boys, and they had a well orchestrated machine operating which drew girls into S&M parties and the guys were quite brutal. They got away with it because they called it consensual and because of the atmosphere in the 80's. They continued into their adult years, probably still to this day. I was smart enough to avoid them, barely.

When I was in college, it was not at a frat kind of school with sports as it's culture. I have learned a new phrase: homosocials. I did not ever hang out with them personally. I still do not befriend men who don't see me as a real person. There are MANY men who see women as partners but they are the minority and the institutions cannot even see their bias. I think you might see a cultural persuasion to reward male homosociality because the good ole boy network is obviously the networking fact, mostly including men who see women as care givers, breeders and sluts, not partners or god forbid more powerful.

I think homosociality is embedded in the culture of male/female dynamics globally. I think women may aid and abet it because there is a matching belief system that women really are nothing without a man?

Trump is, ...... staunchly homosocial. That is, he appears to almost exclusively prefer men for intimate, meaningful (nonsexual) relationships, while he thinks of women as pretty much just for sex, as decorative accessories, or in traditional roles that do not put them on equal footing.

Trump shows a consistent pattern of viewing women as far beneath him, which makes him incapable of the kind of relationship in which he and a woman are intellectual equals. Whenever a woman rises to challenge him as an equal, he appears threatened and tries to slap her down ― from Hillary Clinton (who Trump said doesn’t have “stamina” or a presidential “look”) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (whom he demeans with a racial slur) to Rep. Maxine Waters (whom he’s attacked as a “low IQ person”) and, pathetically, grieving gold star mothers who’ve had the courage to criticize him.

Sociologists and psychologists have long discussed homosociality as distinct from homosexuality. One can be homosexual, for example, but heterosocial or bisocial ― having intimate, nonsexual relationships only with the opposite gender or people of both genders, respectively. And there are definitely homosexuals who are mostly homosocial ― only hanging out with other gay (or even straight) dudes, period. The world of gay men has its share of misogyny, too.

While sexual orientation today is considered an innate characteristic by most medical professionals and social scientists, social preference is learned within culture ― it’s literally about how people are socialized. Feminists have written about homosociality in societies: how it privileges men in the workplace and in familial and social settings where men and women have often been segregated. There are entire societies that are homosocial to the extreme, such as Saudi Arabia, and they are societies in which women are often brutally oppressed.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...b0fd5c73be241a

[Emil El Zapato]

yeeouch...lot of truth, unfortunately...

[Dreamtimer]

I've made an effort my entire life to befriend men. It works pretty well and they make great friends. I've had debates with some men who insisted men and women couldn't be friends. It mostly boiled down to, "They just want to have sex with you, they're not really friends."

Aside from the fact that men degrade their gender by saying that, it's stupid anyway. Human relations are complex, not one-dimensional.

Maybe a sea tide change is happening inside people who may speak out and then gather others and maybe end the good ole boy system?

This, imo, is what is under way.

You can see it with the Kavanagh mess. The old guard are just a callous as ever, treating these women as badly, possibly worse than Anita Hill. And the women of America are up in arms. And many men are as well.

Trump is a kind of catalyst but he can't control how the change happens.

[Aragorn]

I've made an effort my entire life to befriend men. It works pretty well and they make great friends. I've had debates with some men who insisted men and women couldn't be friends. It mostly boiled down to, "They just want to have sex with you, they're not really friends."

Aside from the fact that men degrade their gender by saying that, it's stupid anyway. Human relations are complex, not one-dimensional.

I wholeheartedly agree with that. As a strictly heterosexual man, I've always had non-sexual/non-romantic relationships with girls/women throughout my adult life — I was quite a loner before I reached adulthood — and at some points in my life even more so than that I had male friends.

There are indeed multiple factors involved in that. Upbringing and social culture are definitely important in that regard, but I think it's also related to one's intellectual level. I've worked in environments where most people had an IQ that was smack on or even below the null meridian, and in environments like that, you get lots of one-sided thinking.

If it's an environment with predominantly men, then women are considered dumb sex objects. If it's an environment with predominantly women, then men are considered insensitive and clumsy nuisances — no different from a misbehaving dog that needs to be taught manners — except if it happens to be a celebrity, because then they'll automatically see him as a lust object. And this is quite often even far more the case among married women or women in a long-term relationship than among single women.

Now I'm going to go out on a limb here, but a recent scientific study has revealed that when a woman has given birth — and especially if it's more than once — then the hormones circulating through her body during the pregnancy will have physically altered her brain structure. From that moment on, the woman becomes a full-time mother, and to a mother, her children are the most important thing in the world. The husband — or if they're not married, the partner — becomes relegated to a lower position on the woman's priority list, and quite often it's not even the number-two spot. And it's even worse if her partner is not the biological father of her children.

Hopefully I'm not going to be chided over the above statement by our feminism-inclined members, but it is something I myself had already noticed from long before the above-mentioned scientific study was published, both from my own experiences with former girlfriends who already had children from a previous relationship, and from seeing this phenomenon manifest in other couples. It is true.

I also know couples who've consciously decided not to have children, and they are still as much in love now as when they got married twenty or thirty years ago. The romantic love between couples with only one child is also still comparable to that. But in couples with two or more children, the romantic vibe usually dries up and dies within a year after the second child is born, if not already during the second pregnancy itself.

Couples like that will still maintain a sexual relationship with one another — or at least, if their marriage hasn't broken down yet to the point where they start contemplating divorce — but then that sexual relationship will only be purely physical anymore, and then it'll usually also be more of a routine than an actual desire for intimacy.

And it's always because of the woman's change in priorities, caused by that physical change to her brain structure during the pregnancy. Men are usually not affected by whether they have children or not, because — as I've recently explained already — their mind works differently, with emotion working in parallel with their rational thinking, while in a woman, emotion and reason are wired in series.

And what's worse is that society even stimulates this behavior through the subtle "moral compass corrections" embedded in soap operas and advertising — "corrections" which are not intended to actually bring about sanity, but rather so as to manipulate the public into a consumer behavior favorable to the broadcasting network and their commercial sponsors.

Returning to the subject of non-sexual/non-romantic relationships between both genders, I've also worked in environments where most people had been properly educated, and where virtually everyone had a higher IQ score. And in those environments, sex isn't even being talked about all that much, if at all.

Even the children— which is a far more popular subject among women than among men — don't come up all that often. Instead, people will talk about politics, about their jobs, about their experiences in college, or about any kind of abstract topic. And then generally, men and women consider each other as equals. There might be some jesting and teasing between members of the opposite sex, but even then it's usually not even flirtatious in nature. It'll rather be friends teasing each other in non-gender-specific ways.

Over the years, I have had many female friends whom I would address as "Sister", and on a few occasions, I've even introduced them to other people with the line "This is my sister." And those friendships are often more fulfilling and enriching than my friendships with other men.

Sure, there are things of which it is easier for a man to talk about with another man, or for a woman to talk about with another woman. But there are also things of which it is easier for a man to talk about to a woman, or for a woman to talk about to a man. Guys don't often talk about their deepest feelings to other guys, but it's easier for a man to pour out his heart with a woman. Likewise, a woman might find more support and comfort with a man in certain situations.

This is a public thread and therefore I'm not going to get into any details, but my homies in the mod room know that I'm involved with such a situation right now, in which a dear female friend has been pouring out her heart to me regarding something she can't talk about with anybody else — not even her husband, because he's rather insensitive and blunt when it comes to things like this.

Again, I think the most crucial aspect with regard to non-sexual/non-romantic relationships between men and women would be the intellectual level of both parties. It allows them to talk and think in more abstract and more academic ways and to forego the platitudes and stereotypes. Culture is important too, and in that regard, the USA is still running far behind on Europe, given that the USA has a culture in which raw masculinity is still heavily revered, thereby creating a subtly misogynistic social and corporate atmosphere. That's why all of the US' tech giants score so high on misogyny. This is far less prevalent in Europe.

I won't even begin to address the Arab world, where women are still considered inferior and subordinate in the 21st century. Something we unfortunately see over here in Europe as well among the many immigrants from countries with a predominantly Muslim culture. We even see it among our Turkish immigrants, who, although Muslim, are not an Arabic people.

As is so often the case with humans, people tend to remain stuck in either the thesis or the antithesis, without ever coming to the synthesis. The sexual revolution in the West of the 1960s has not fully led to a synthesis yet, not even here in Europe, although things are better here than in the US.

In the Arab world and other Muslim countries, they're all still stuck in the thesis of female subjugation, due to the fact that this thesis is being enforced by a dogmatic and often fanatic religion. Islam didn't create that situation — it already existed from beforehand, as I've explained in my other post on this subject — but it is definitely still propagating this injustice.

Like Albert Einstein, I'm not so sure whether the universe we live in would be infinite, but mankind's stupidity has certainly already long proven itself to be.

[Fred Steeves]

Two ponderings on the Kavanagh circus:

1) What would the FBI be able to uncover about a couple of high school drinking parties back in the early 80's?

2) Would the current roles of Senate Democrats and Republicans playing cowboys and Indians be reversed, were this President Hillary Clinton's Supreme Court nominee?

[Dreamtimer]

Young progressives are calling establishment Democrats "The Assistance". How astute.

They are the New Wave.

[Maggie]

Two ponderings on the Kavanagh circus:

1) What would the FBI be able to uncover about a couple of high school drinking parties back in the early 80's?

2) Would the current roles of Senate Democrats and Republicans playing cowboys and Indians be reversed, were this President Hillary Clinton's Supreme Court nominee?

They are mostly all supporting the same world view. The most interesting idea in all this is IMO the light on the elite GOBs. Once an Indian, always an Indian... Indians R US IMO. And the FBI may not find anything. IMO Kavanaugh is a tool for someone who knows how useful. Kavanaugh may be seated?

This positive image obfuscates the real purpose of elite schools: From their inception, the core function of elite schools is to make, remake, or advance the socioeconomic status of each student. They provide students access to a social circuit that allows them to go from one elite institution to another and eventually on to high-paying and high-power positions.

Elite school culture encourages the sense that success comes at the expense of others
Within this circuit, elite schools cultivate privilege — a lens through which students come to understand themselves, others, and the world around them. Students’ values, perspectives, assumptions, and actions are shaped and sustained through this lens. It helps them survive and thrive within the elite circuit.

Above all, these lessons teach students that hierarchies are not only natural but necessary. They learn that there is a winner and therefore a loser in every situation and interaction. Hierarchies enable and propel them to success. Their success, it is worth noting, always comes at the expense of others.

As a teacher once told me during my research: “The most important thing we do here is prepare our students to become tough competitors. Competition is not a dirty word at our school. There are winners and there are losers. We teach them to be the former.”

Privilege is reinforced in every aspect of students’ educational experiences: the school’s ideals, missions, and standards; admissions practices; interactions within classrooms; involvement in extracurricular activities; the rigors of a demanding curriculum; and participation in sporting competitions, social events, and rituals. Rituals, in particular, are effective in transmitting and reinforcing unspoken cultural expectations, behavioral norms, and values that cultivate privilege as a collective identity and further impose hierarchies.

When these rituals become public, such as an alleged rape that occurred at the annual “Screw” dance at the New Hampshire prep school St. Paul’s in 2014, we learn what some of these rituals are truly about: celebrating male sexual conquest.https://www.vox.com/first-person/201...eorgetown-prep

[Dreamtimer]

I've seen enough not to buy the false parallels. The right didn't even give Obama a hearing for Garland. They couldn't even do their job of advice and consent. One seat was open for more than 400 days. How many excuses did they use? The Democrats have mostly been wusses.

[Dreamtimer]

Those Good Ol' Boys were remarkable cowardly today. They had to bring in a woman to do their job, yet when it came time to question Kavanagh they sent her away.

Effing cowards.

[Emil El Zapato]

Two ponderings on the Kavanagh circus:

1) What would the FBI be able to uncover about a couple of high school drinking parties back in the early 80's?

2) Would the current roles of Senate Democrats and Republicans playing cowboys and Indians be reversed, were this President Hillary Clinton's Supreme Court nominee?

probably, with one significant difference that history would suggest. The Bluebies would be telling the truth and the Redsky's would be lying. A good FBI investigation would demonstrate the accuracy of my statement.


I feel bad for Kavanaugh...but he has a red face...Why?

Young progressives are calling establishment Democrats "The Assistance". How astute.

They are the New Wave.

I hadn't heard that...I really like it...

They are mostly all supporting the same world view. The most interesting idea in all this is IMO the light on the elite GOBs. Once an Indian, always an Indian... Indians R US IMO. And the FBI may not find anything. IMO Kavanaugh is a tool for someone who knows how useful. Kavanaugh may be seated?

yeah, I think they are going to do it...they don't care...plain, simple, and in yo' face. They are soulless amoralists. It's about the power...that's all. They are scary!

[Fred Steeves]

So I tuned into the whole entire circus today, all 8 hours worth between radio at work, and t.v. later at home.

I give both parties a D- on both their ever downward spiral into shameless tribal hacks, only reason both didn't get a straight out F is because in the rarest of moments, both sides spoke undeniable truths that the other, in their own respective blind partisanship, never will.

As to the accuser I give a good solid B, she started out admitting she was terrified, yet kept her composure throughout like a champ. Even though I only caught her part on the radio, she never let me see her sweat, and by and large came across as very authentic. Despite lack of any evidence, she impressed me.

The accused, in his long opening statement, however partisan it was, started off for me as in the A category. However, upon being subjected to questioning he quickly began to unravel before my eyes. I'm not talking here about the charge, I'm talking about what's called "military bearing", basically the ability to demonstrate grace under pressure.

Of which the accused demonstrated pretty much a big fat zero for me: Whining, complaining, interrupting, being belligerent, dodgy (especially on the alcohol question!), and not even appearing to be a competent trial lawyer to boot... Even if he were just a local county judge, I wouldn't trust his personal judgment to settle something as simple as a property line dispute between me and a neighbor, much less some of the most important issues of the day.

Were I a Senator previously inclined to vote YES, but on the fence pending, I would now vote NO (career be damned!). Not on the likely never to be determined "he said she said" merry go 'round, but on the grounds of his piss poor personal demonstration, of someone supposedly worthy of the highest levels of governmental power. Dude, at least make a good show of it like most of your brethren. Minus the one who nominated him of course...

Having said all that though, here's what bothers me a lot more than even this latest D.C. "Swamp" spectacle: It's the ever increasingly polarizing gap in this country, even in supposedly enlightened forum would, that believes to their very cores that either one wing of this bird or the other, is the way out of this embarrassing mess. And that the other wing simply needs to be obliterated to make this happen.

[Dreamtimer]

Of which the accused demonstrated pretty much a big fat zero for me: Whining, complaining, interrupting, being belligerent, dodgy (especially on the alcohol question!), and not even appearing to be a competent trial lawyer to boot... Even if he were just a local county judge, I wouldn't trust his personal judgment to settle something as simple as a property line dispute between me and a neighbor, much less some of the most important issues of the day.

Were I a Senator previously inclined to vote YES, but on the fence pending, I would now vote NO (career be damned!). Not on the likely never to be determined "he said she said" merry go 'round, but on the grounds of his piss poor personal demonstration, of someone supposedly worthy of the highest levels of governmental power. Dude, at least make a good show of it like most of your brethren. Minus the one who nominated him of course...

My impressions as well.

I've been tuning into the next generation, which is not an integral part of either wing, and they see through the BS pretty easily. Social media gives them the opportunity to share feedback in real time unlike the young and politically active of my generation.

This is where the change is going to happen and those of my generation don't understand theirs. Maybe I'm wrong, but my generation has written off the younger generations, because they were not active, and hasn't learned to adjust to the new crop.

And then there are the women.... Just like me they're sick of the shite. They're going to make change as well.

When the winds pick up, new sails are unfurled. I see a Spinnaker or two coming.