Author Archives: oinsketta

What you can tolerate will depend

We have different thresholds for what kind of treatment we can tolerate from others. One person’s tough, challenging, funny wise-ass is another person’s humorless abuser sometimes. It all depends on our personality, our experience, our other relationships and what we feel comfortable with.

To some people periodic displays of intense anger are fine, providing the person quickly calms down and becomes reasonable. It’s not hard to understand or identify with anger, we are all subject to it from time to time. We are able to tolerate different levels, displays and durations of anger, depending on the circumstances and our tolerances.

Pirkey Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, is found in the back of many Jewish prayer books like the ones that are usually at the Bar and Bat Mitzvahs I’ve been forced to sit through over the years. So as the congregation is rising and being seated, (please rise, please be seated, please rise), and praying in unison, I am scanning Ethics of the Fathers, the whole short book is in there, after all of the prayer services. I used to read Pirkey Avot looking for little bits of eternal wisdom from ancient times. There’s one about anger I’ve been greatly influenced by. It describes the four kinds of temperaments with a beautiful, clean logic.

There are four kinds of temperaments when it comes to anger and peace.

One type of person is quick to anger but quick to be pacified. His loss is offset by his gain.

Another type is slow to anger but slow to be pacified. His virtue is offset by his deficit.

Another type is slow to anger and quick to forgive. This is a virtuous person.

The fourth temperament is quick to anger and slow to forgive. This type is evil.

I always thought the Father’s (whoever the hell they were) laid that out profoundly and indisputably. My cousin Eli was quick to anger, and I made him angry many times. But because he loved me he was also very quick to be placated and we would soon move on from the thing he was so angry about a minute before. It was a beautiful thing about our relationship.

My mother had the same kind of relationship with him before I did. She would fight with Eli hour after hour, day after day and when they said goodbye they hugged and kissed and had big smiles on their faces and couldn’t wait to do it all again soon. It was beautiful to see.

If Eli didn’t like you he had no qualms about making a face, turning away and closing a door on you, or, if needed, making a great display of his purple faced anger, which was terrifying to see. As a young man he had no hesitation to punch somebody in the face, if it came to it.

But in spite of his fierceness, his face deadly as a springing jaguar’s, teeth ready to bite, foam on his lips, his face purple, his white hair trembling on top of his head, neither my mother nor later I, ever backed down from his terrifying displays of dominance.

We would say “come on Eli, you have to be honest, if your daughter said that to you you would be pretty pissed off too.” And Eli would rage a bit more, give a few last groans and cries and flashes of teeth, but then he would say “fine, but I have to tell you what happened after that” and he’d continue until the next fight.

After a few fights it was time to go get dinner, take a long time-out, to talk about other things, eat and have coffee in peace and drive back to his place. Only once we were settled comfortably back in our chairs would we resume the fights, which would sometimes go on until late in the night. Every time I left Eli we hugged and kissed and agreed to talk soon and make plans for the next time.

Eli didn’t have that kind of relationship with any of his estranged children or grandchildren. Or really anybody besides my mother, that I knew of. I certainly didn’t have that relationship with my father or mother, I mean we fought all the time but there was none of that hugging and kissing and laughing at the end of it. I guess I was lucky to know somebody like Eli, who could be infuriating, and furious, but was at the same time very easy to get along with.

Strange are the blessings and curses of this life.

A happy, healthy, sweet 5783

The first day of 5783, the new Jewish year, dawns after a night of plentiful rain.   The garden is looking very lush after its long, refreshing drink.  Tomorrow we join a group of old friends for lunch and a walk to the river to symbolically throw away our sins, our bad thoughts, our hurtful deeds, the times we gave in to our baser impulses.  Thoughts percolate in my head as every year at this time, maybe more so today than most years.

Today is the first of the Ten Days of Repentance, a traditional time of introspection for Jews, a period when we are supposed to make amends, let go of hurt and anger and repay debts.  In my experience, few people have much use for introspection.  It’s not hard to understand why.  It makes people feel like shit to spend too much time thinking about their real motivations, confronting the demons that make them act with (justifiable) brutality toward others.  We would rather feel right, just and loving than wrong, unfair and punitive.  If you think I’m wrong, unfair and punitive I’ll show you who’s fucking wrong, unfair and punitive!

Some people pray at this time of year.  I’m with Ricky Gervais on this: pray, by all means, it’s fine, but do not cancel the chemotherapy.  Prayer is between you and God, if you have that kind of relationship, have a deep, prayerful talk with your Maker.  Not for me, though.  Prayer does nothing for me.  If I talk to God at all it’s as an equal, made in the All-Merciful’s image, as we all are.

The arrogance of humans can be seen in a hundred variations, in every direction.  If you are ashamed, crush whoever makes you feel ashamed.  If you have hurt somebody, it’s their fucking fault for being an asshole.  If you are caught in a criminal act, blame others, wail about being persecuted by ruthlessly unfair enemies.  

Religion can ordain certain actions, but it cannot cause a greater truth to enter the heart unless people allow it to.  We surrender our own will to a higher will and feel righteous doing so, some of us.  Others try to live a life of fairness, expecting no more of others than we ourselves are capable of.  Then we will have a war, where both sides fervently believe God has our backs during the righteous slaughter.  Pathetic earthlings.

Best to you all for a happy, healthy, sweet 5783.  May it be much better, in every way, than 5782.

Bagpiper blows bad breath

Blustering, bagpipe blowing, bullying buffoon Bill Barr barges belligerently between talking heads to blow some bad faith bad breath toward the viewers.  Barr weighs in on the detailed claims of NY AG Latisha James’s civil fraud lawsuit against his corrupt benefactor, the CEO of the Trump Organization:  

“What ultimately persuades me that this is a political hit job is, she grossly overreaches when she tries to drag the children into this.  Yes, they had roles in the business, but this was his personal financial statement and the children aren’t going to know the details of that, and be able, nor are they expected, in the real world, to do their own due diligence and have it reviewed independently.” 

A man who knows a thing or two about political hit jobs.  And it’s not like his Special Prosecutor John Durham, hired to expose the corrupt motives of those rabid partisans who’d investigated and documented Trump’s many ties to his role model Vladimir Putin, and his obstruction of that investigation, came up with bupkis to document the Radical Left’s purely political hit job on the innocent Trump and associates, after a much longer investigation than Meuller’s.

Joyce Vance points out that one of those “children” (ages 44-38) was the senior advisor to the president of the United States, while the other two ran Trump Inc. while their father was busy making America Great Again.   

I wish, and keep wishing, that people like Barr, Bolton, Mulvaney, Christie, et al would just keep their poisonous, Nazi adjacent opinions to themselves.  Granted, opinions are like assholes, everyone has one, but these guys never wash their asses, ever. Sheesh.

Justice, justice ye shall pursue

I started to write that you can’t claim a search warrant was unfair after the search finds the evidence that the warrant enabled law enforcement to look for, but, of course you can. You simply lie. There’s no law against lying, as long as you don’t do it under oath.

That’s the reason no sworn statements were included in F POTUS’s belated emergency application to his handpicked judge Aileen Cannon, in Donald J. Trump b United States of America. Even though every such application must be supported by sworn statements, with the bullshit they had to work with it would have been perjury had Trump’s lawyers submitted a sworn statement. So Cannon spared them that risk by waving away their failure to plead anything under the penalties of perjury.

I’m thinking about judge-for-life Aileen Cannon, clearly abusing her discretion by taking jurisdiction over a case there was no legal grounds for her to hear and then acting as an attorney and advocate for F POTUS. Her baseless ruling temporarily blocked law enforcement from investigating F POTUS’s criminal retention of documents he illegally possessed.

Accessory to obstruction of justice? I think so.

Trump’s proposed Special Counsel for Election Fraud

Or perhaps it was Attorney General. At any rate, she’s now expected to testify before the Fulton County criminal grand jury investigating interference in the election in Georgia by F POTUS and Rudy, among others.

Whoopsie! She failed to appear today. Now she is subject to arrest, oh dear!

She may be crazy, but I’ll go out on a limb here and say she’s no more nuts than her good friend and comrade in arms Ginni Thomas, who has finally agreed to come in, informally, and stonewall the libtard cucks of the J6 committee.

Trump Judge Aileen Cannon overturned 3-0 on appeal

Every person with any legal training knew that Aileen Cannon’s staunchly loyal, batshit ruling the other day, enjoining the Department of Justice from conducting its criminal investigation into evidence seized during a legal search of Mar-a-Lago, was unsupported by any evidence, was literally arbitrary and capricious and an abuse of discretion.

A three-judge panel at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with all the other reasonable legal minds who have looked over this strictly MAGA decision. They wrote, unanimously:

The Justice Department “argues that the district court likely erred in exercising its jurisdiction to enjoin the United States’ use of the classified records in its criminal investigation and to require the United States to submit the marked classified documents to a special master for review,” a three-judge panel of the appeals court wrote. “We agree.”

The NY Times reported that F POTUS maintains his alternative view of the facts:

… in an interview that aired late Wednesday, Mr. Trump made the extraordinary claim — not advanced by his own lawyers or supported by prior practice or legal precedent — that he had the right as president to declassify documents by wordlessly willing it to be so.

“You can declassify just by saying ‘it’s declassified,’ even by thinking about it,” Mr. Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News.

The three judge panel had that canard covered:

Mr. Trump “suggests that he may have declassified these documents when he was president,” the appeals court wrote. “But the record contains no evidence that any of these records were declassified.”

The court went on to say, “In any event, at least for these purposes, the declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal.”

source

Lawrence O’Donnell provides an excellent overview of the decision and what it means.