Ekaterina Jezebel Dionne, Jr. is OUT of the Can A Left-Fascist Actually Breathe And Not Be A Hypocrite Contest!

In her first column after Berkeley, this dumb bitch defines "conservative" as what the Orange Mess-iah does and admits she's a "liberal". 

Two can play that game, sweetie.

A "liberal" is any fascist who ignores and therefore excuses left-fascist violence while at the same time constantly whining about how evil everybody to the right of Che Guevara is.

Why we can't think straight about government

From the Left / E.J. Dionne Jr. 

Sorry, princess, I'm pretty sure it's only you who can't think straight.

One of the barriers to sensible politics is the opportunism that so often infects our debates about what government is there for, where we want it to be energetic, and how we can keep it from violating the basic rights of citizens.

The muddled nature of our discussions of these matters has been brought home by two unfortunate events: The mass suffering unleashed by Harvey and President Trump's pardon of former sheriff Joe Arpaio.

In the case of the vicious storm, we are reminded that some politicians think government is great when it helps their own constituents and wasteful if it helps anyone else.

We also regularly assert that government is better when it prevents problems than when it focuses primarily on cleaning up after the fact. But when environmentalists suggest that development can be carried out in more sustainable ways or that climate change is worth dealing with, they are mocked as "anti-business" or "crisis-mongers." Then a crisis comes, and we wonder why the politicians were so short-sighted.

As for the Arpaio pardon, it is seen as technically legal because presidential authority in this area is almost unlimited. But it may be the most dangerous act of Trump's presidency. The occupant of the White House has claimed the power to permit government agents to violate the constitutional rights of Americans and to override the courts if he doesn't like what they're doing. This is the largest single step toward autocracy Trump has taken.

What we hear all the time is that conservatives are for "small government" and liberals are for "big government." But this is very misleading shorthand.

Yes, liberals typically favor more social insurance programs, including expanded guarantees of health care, and more government regulation of business in what they insist is the public interest. Conservatives are often critical of some or all of these initiatives.

But liberals (often joined by libertarians) are among the first to stand up against government violations of the civil rights of individuals. Many conservatives -- most certainly including Trump -- use the "law and order" battle cry to accuse liberals concerned about civil liberties of being "soft on crime." (In the case of the Arpaio pardon, Trump seems to be for his version of "order" but indifferent to the "law" part.)

So who is really for big government and who is against it? Which is more threatening to our liberties: higher taxes to pay for new benefits, or an expansive view of police powers and presidential prerogatives?

The conversation about disaster relief helps clarify another issue. The conservative critique of government aid is that it is on some level unjust because it takes money from one group of people and gives it to another. Applying this logic to natural disasters, why should parts of the country that will almost never experience hurricanes help the hurricane-prone areas? After all, people don't have to live in places subject to hurricanes.

Well, it's also true that some places get tornadoes and others don't. Some experience earthquakes and others don't. Some people live near rivers that overflow their banks and others don't.

Disaster relief is premised on an old-fashioned "there but for the grace of God go I" solidarity. We are happy to see government give a hand to our fellow citizens facing sudden catastrophe today and assume that they will help us if we face comparable challenges tomorrow.

This is why it is entirely appropriate to call out the hypocrisy of Texas conservatives who voted against assistance for the victims of Superstorm Sandy in New York and New Jersey but are now asking for federal help on behalf of their folks. They broke this basic rule of solidarity in the name of an ideology that, when the chips are down, they don't really believe in. Of course we should help all the areas devastated by Harvey. I'd just appreciate hearing our Texas conservative friends, beginning with Sen. Ted Cruz, admit they were wrong.

Call me a liberal (I won't mind) but I do believe in using government's taxing powers reasonably to direct help toward people who really need it, and in regulations to protect the environment and prevent catastrophe. But I also believe it is vital to stand firm when government officials violate constitutional rights, which is what Sheriff Arpaio was found to have done with Latinos in Arizona and why pardoning him is so dangerous.

We can certainly debate where government compassion becomes overreach. Unfortunately, we're not anywhere close to such a measured and civilized dialogue.

Wait...What? This isn't a documentary about anti-social media?

From the AP news archive:

Review: 'Ingrid Goes West' looks at social media's dark side

Quick, what's more important: social media or real life?

For the title character in "Ingrid Goes West ," there is no question, and perhaps no distinction.

Every once in a while, Hollyweird holds up a mirror for us instead of a propaganda poster.

Once in a great while, that is.

Powered by Aubrey Plaza's searing performance, director and co-writer Matt Spicer's feature debut explores such a dark side of social media obsession, it's hard to consider it satire. It's a story about young women who find validation in likes and followers, who equate social media experiences with real-life ones.

Like so many millennials, Ingrid (Plaza) is an Instagram junkie.

Her phone is always in hand, a portal to all that is #perfect and #blessed. Any free moment is spent scrolling through photos. The double-thumb-tap she uses to "like" images is as instinctive as blinking.

But she's also obsessive and mentally unstable. She once crashed a wedding and attacked the bride after fixating on her expertly curated Instagram profile.

Flush with cash after her mother dies, Ingrid moves to Los Angeles to be near her latest social media obsession: Blonde, beautiful Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen), whose life on Instagram looks like a chic California magazine captioned with literary quotes and hashtags like #weekendvibes.

Ingrid styles her hair like Taylor's. She eats at her favorite breakfast spot. She buys the purse Taylor posted about. Then she works out a way to meet the Instagram star so they can be friends.

Olsen is pitch perfect as sunny, superficial Taylor, who says everything is "the best" and has no qualms about asking a gas station attendant to lay on the ground to snap a perfectly-framed social media pic.

The screenplay by Spicer and co-writer David Branson Smith looks at how Taylor's appetite for admiration might allow for a friend like Ingrid — her sycophantic fawning feeds right into Taylor's million-follower ego.

Plaza disappears into the unhinged Ingrid, a character exciting in her sheer unlikeability. She lies and steals to get what she wants. She exploits trust and kindness. But she brims with a deep human fear of inadequacy, one she hopes internet popularity might remedy. Plaza brings a vulnerability and desperation to Ingrid that makes her relatable. She's obsessive and unstable, but she just wants to be liked, online or anywhere.

O'Shea Jackson plays Ingrid's landlord/neighbor/admirer Dan, this story's version of the manic pixie dream girl. Though Jackson gets to show off his sparkling smile more here than in "Straight Outta Compton," his character exists to be Ingrid's savior and moral foil.

"Ingrid Goes West" has fun with some social media tropes and Southern California tendencies, but it feels less like a satire than a cautionary tale, for both the envious and the envied. It dips into rich territory by examining the covetousness social media inspires, not just for things, but for attention. Still, even someone with millions of followers can feel lonely or unseen.

Taylor and Ingrid may approach Instagram from opposite sides, but both live in a world where "likes" have tremendous value.

"Ingrid Goes West," a Neon release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for "language throughout, drug use, some sexual content and disturbing behavior." Running time: 97 minutes. Three stars out of four.

___

MPAA definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Toolgle über alles!

On the one hand, Google can spend its money promoting totalitarianism if that is what it wants to do. The company obviously gets along with the Slave Chinese regime. Who cares if the Chinese people are being oppressed? As long as the money keeps coming in...


Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant -The Old Gray Whore 

 In the hours after European antitrust regulators levied a record $2.7 billion fine against Google in late June, an influential Washington think tank learned what can happen when a wealthy tech giant is criticized.

The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999. That money helped to establish New America as an elite voice in policy debates on the American left and helped Google shape those debates.

But not long after one of New America’s scholars posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had been chairman of New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.

The statement disappeared from New America’s website, only to be reposted without explanation a few hours later. But word of Mr. Schmidt’s displeasure rippled through New America, which employs more than 200 people, including dozens of researchers, writers and scholars, most of whom work in sleek Washington offices where the main conference room is called the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab.” The episode left some people concerned that Google intended to discontinue funding, while others worried whether the think tank could truly be independent if it had to worry about offending its donors.

Those worries seemed to be substantiated a couple of days later, when Ms. Slaughter summoned the scholar who wrote the critical statement, Barry Lynn, to her office. He ran a New America initiative called Open Markets that has led a growing chorus of liberal criticism of the market dominance of telecom and tech giants, including Google, which is now part of a larger corporate entity known as Alphabet, for which Mr. Schmidt serves as executive chairman.

Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that “the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,” according to an email from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn. The email suggested that the entire Open Markets team — nearly 10 full-time employees and unpaid fellows — would be exiled from New America.

While she asserted in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, that the decision was “in no way based on the content of your work,” Ms. Slaughter accused Mr. Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole.”

Mr. Lynn, in an interview, charged that Ms. Slaughter caved to pressure from Mr. Schmidt and Google, and, in so doing, set the desires of a donor over the think tank’s intellectual integrity.

“Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings,” Mr. Lynn said. “People are so afraid of Google now.”

--------------------------------------------------------------

Remember the lesson of the Mensheviks, (and all others who wouldn't toe the line of the most powerful) kiddies:

From Spartacus Educational :

Mensheviks:

Robert V. Daniels, the author of Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (1967) has argued: "Between Lenin and the Mensheviks the basic difference was more temperamental than doctrinal. The Mensheviks, like many earlier critics of Russian injustice, were idealists driven by sympathy for the masses but disinclined to conspire and fight;...

 Stalin's Purges:

On 23rd December 1930, Isaak Illich Rubin was arrested by the secret police and charged with participation in a plot to establish an underground organization called the "Union Bureau of Mensheviks." Rubin's sister later reported: "They put Rubin for days in the kartser, the punishment cell. My brother at forty-five was a man with a diseased heart and diseased joints. The kartser was a stone hole the size of a man; you couldn't move in it, you could only stand or sit on the stone floor. But my brother endured this torture too, and left the kartser with a feeling of inner confidence in himself, in his moral strength."

The OGPU now decided to change their tactics. On 28th January, 1931, he was taken to the cell of a prisoner named Vasil'evskii. The interrogator told the prisoner: "We are going to shoot you now, if Rubin does not confess." Vasil'evskii went on his knees and begged Rubin: "Isaac Il'ich, what does it cost you to confess?" According to his sister, "my brother remained firm and calm, even when they shot Vasil'evskii right there". The next night they took him to the cell of a prisoner called Dorodnov: "This time a young man who looked like a student was there. My brother didn't know him. When they turned to the student with the words, 'You will be shot because Rubin will not confess,' the student tore open his shirt at the breast and said, 'Fascists, gendarmes, shoot!' They shot him right there."

The killing of Dorodnov persuaded Rubin to confess to being a member of "Union Bureau of Mensheviks" and to implicate his friend and mentor, David Riazanov. Rubin's sister continued the story: "Rubin's position was tragic. He had to confess to what had never existed, and nothing had: neither his former views; nor his connections with the other defendants, most of whom he didn't even know, while others he knew only by chance; nor any documents that had supposedly been entrusted to his safekeeping; nor that sealed package of documents which he was supposed to have handed over to Riazanov. In the course of the interrogation and negotiations with the investigator, it became clear to Rubin that the name of Riazanov would figure in the whole affair, if not in Rubin's testimony, then in the testimony of someone else. And Rubin agreed to tell the whole story about the mythical package. My brother told me that speaking against Riazanov was just like speaking against his own father. That was the hardest part for him."


V. V. Sher was another witness who gave evidence against Riazanov. One of his friends, Victor Serge, argued in his book, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951): "Of course his heretical colleagues were often arrested, and he defended them, with all due discretion. He had access to all quarters and the leaders were a little afraid of his frank way of talking. His reputation had just been officially recognized in a celebration of his sixtieth birthday and his life's work when the arrest of the Menshevik sympathizer Sher, a neurotic intellectual who promptly made all the confessions that anyone pleased to dictate to him, put Riazanov beside himself with rage. Having learnt that a trial of old Socialists was being set in hand, with monstrously ridiculous confessions foisted on them, Riazanov flared up and told member after member of the Politburo that it was a dishonor to the regime, that all this organized frenzy simply did not stand up and that Sher was half-mad anyway."


Roy A. Medvedev, who has carried out a detailed investigation of the case, argued in Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (1971) that the Union Bureau of Mensheviks did not exist. "The political trials of the late twenties and early thirties produced a chain reaction of repression, directed primarily against the old technical intelligentsia, against Cadets who had not emigrated when they could have, and against former members of the Social Revolutionary, Menshevik, and nationalist parties."

--------------------------------------------------------------

Google rejected any suggestion that it played a role in New America’s split with Open Markets. Riva Sciuto, a Google spokeswoman, pointed out that the company supports a wide range of think tanks and other nonprofits focused on information access and internet regulation. “We don’t agree with every group 100 percent of the time, and while we sometimes respectfully disagree, we respect each group’s independence, personnel decisions and policy perspectives.”


"Golly, Fyodor, it's just a search engine."

Money is Power.

Information is Power.

New America’s executive vice president, Tyra Mariani, said it was “a mutual decision for Barry to spin out his Open Markets program,” and that the move was not in any way influenced by Google or Mr. Schmidt.

“New America financial supporters have no influence or control over the research design, methodology, analysis or findings of New America research projects, nor do they have influence or control over the content of educational programs and communications efforts,” Ms. Mariani said. She added that Mr. Lynn’s statement praising the European Union’s sanctions against Google had been temporarily removed from New America’s website because of “an unintentional internal issue” unrelated to Google or Mr. Schmidt.

Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that “the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,” according to an email from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn. The email suggested that the entire Open Markets team — nearly 10 full-time employees and unpaid fellows — would be exiled from New America.

While she asserted in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, that the decision was “in no way based on the content of your work,” Ms. Slaughter accused Mr. Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole.”

Mr. Lynn, in an interview, charged that Ms. Slaughter caved to pressure from Mr. Schmidt and Google, and, in so doing, set the desires of a donor over the think tank’s intellectual integrity.

“Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings,” Mr. Lynn said. “People are so afraid of Google now.”

Google rejected any suggestion that it played a role in New America’s split with Open Markets. Riva Sciuto, a Google spokeswoman, pointed out that the company supports a wide range of think tanks and other nonprofits focused on information access and internet regulation. “We don’t agree with every group 100 percent of the time, and while we sometimes respectfully disagree, we respect each group’s independence, personnel decisions and policy perspectives.”

New America’s executive vice president, Tyra Mariani, said it was “a mutual decision for Barry to spin out his Open Markets program,” and that the move was not in any way influenced by Google or Mr. Schmidt.

“New America financial supporters have no influence or control over the research design, methodology, analysis or findings of New America research projects, nor do they have influence or control over the content of educational programs and communications efforts,” Ms. Mariani said. She added that Mr. Lynn’s statement praising the European Union’s sanctions against Google had been temporarily removed from New America’s website because of “an unintentional internal issue” unrelated to Google or Mr. Schmidt.

Ms. Slaughter also wrote on Twitter that the article was “false,” but was unable to cite any errors. New America would not make Ms. Slaughter available for an interview.

It is difficult to overstate Mr. Lynn’s influence in raising concerns about the market dominance of Google, as well as of other tech companies such as Amazon and Facebook. His Open Markets initiative organized a 2016 conference at which a range of influential figures — including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — warned of damaging effects from market consolidation in tech.

In the run-up to that conference, Ms. Slaughter and New America’s lead fund-raiser in emails to Mr. Lynn indicated that Google was concerned that its positions were not going to be represented, and that it was not given advanced notice of the event.

“We are in the process of trying to expand our relationship with Google on some absolutely key points,” Ms. Slaughter wrote in an email to Mr. Lynn, urging him to “just THINK about how you are imperiling funding for others.”

Mr. Lynn is now starting a stand-alone nonprofit with the same team to continue Open Markets’ work. The new group, which does not yet have a name, has funding commitments, though clearly is not expecting money from Google. It has launched a website called Citizens Against Monopoly that accuses Google of “trying to censor journalists and researchers who fight dangerous monopolies.” The site vows, “We are going to make sure Google doesn’t get away with this.”

After initially eschewing Washington public policy debates, which were seen in Silicon Valley as pay-to-play politics, Google has developed an influence operation that is arguably more muscular and sophisticated than that of any other American company. It spent $9.5 million on lobbying through the first half of this year — more than almost any other company. It helped organize conferences at which key regulators overseeing investigations into the company were presented with pro-Google arguments, sometimes without disclosure of Google’s role.

Among the most effective — if little examined — tools in Google’s public policy toolbox has been its funding of nonprofit groups from across the political spectrum. This year, it has donated to 170 such groups, according to Google’s voluntary disclosures on its website. While Google does not indicate how much cash was donated, the number of beneficiaries has grown exponentially since it started disclosing its donations in 2010, when it gave to 45 groups.

Some tech lobbyists, think tank officials and scholars argue that the efforts help explain why Google has mostly avoided damaging regulatory and enforcement decisions in the United States of the sort levied by the European Union in late June.

But Google’s Washington alliances could be tested in the coming months. Google emerged as a flash point in the latest skirmish of the culture wars this month after one of its male engineers posted a critique of the company’s efforts to diversify. And its data collection continues fueling questions about its commitment to privacy.

Then there are the mounting concerns about the market dominance of Google, which handles an overwhelming majority of all internet searches globally and dominates internet advertising. Its alleged tilting of search results to favor its services over those offered by competitors led to the European Union’s $2.7 billion antitrust penalty in June.

The Open Markets’ statement that drew Mr. Schmidt’s ire praised the fine, and called on United States regulators to more aggressively enforce antitrust rules against Google, Amazon and “other dominant platform monopolists.”

Last month, Democratic congressional leaders rolled out a policy platform that included a pledge to dismantle monopolies, including in cable and internet service, which some read as a challenge to Google in particular. That sentiment — which appears to have some support from populist elements of President Trump’s base — diverges sharply from the approach that had been taken by most Democrats until recently.

Google’s willingness to spread cash around the think tanks and advocacy groups focused on internet and telecommunications policy has effectively muted, if not silenced, criticism of the company over the past several years, said Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. His group, which does not accept corporate funding, has played a leading role in calling out Google and other tech companies for alleged privacy violations. But Mr. Rotenberg said it is become increasingly difficult to find partners in that effort as more groups accept Google funding.

“There are simply fewer groups that are available to speak up about Google’s activities that threaten online privacy,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “The groups that should be speaking up aren’t.”

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

This parrot is a stool pigeon. (What? That would have KILLED in Fifties...in the Catskills.)

Too bad the guy couldn't train his bird to handle a firearm.

From InUSANews.com:

Michigan woman charged with murder in shooting witnessed by parrot

This story is from 2016, but it is a classic.

A woman has been charged with the murder of her husband in a 2015 murder-attempted suicide near Sand Lake.

Glenna Duram was arraigned in a White Cloud courtroom for first-degree murder in connection to the death of her husband Martin Durum. She is being held in Newaygo County Jail without bond.

Martin was shot five times and killed in his home on 128th Street in Ensley Township in May 2015. His second wife, Glenna, survived a bullet wound to the head.

The prosecutor told 24 Hour News 8 that he has not ruled using a parrot who allegedly witnessed the murder as evidence.

Family members of Martin say Bud, an African grey parrot, seems to replay the murder — mimicking what sounds like two voices, a male and a female, in argument.

“Don’t f—ing shoot,” the bird says on a video that the family says it took several weeks after the shooting.

VIDEO: Winged murder witness: ‘Don’t f—ing shoot’

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

I'll bet you can't guess the topic of my most popular blog post EVER!

A recipe for porpoise stomach.


YES! Stuffed porpoise stomach!


I should post more recipes...





TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens, Requiescat in pace.

Boys, they don't make 'em like Jeannie anymore. Beautiful, tough, and fearless...that is what men want. And need.

May God have Mercy on her soul.

From The Old Gray Whore:

Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens, Valiant World War II Spy, Dies at 98 ...

Jeannie de Clarens with her husband, Henri. They both survived stays in concentration camps.

                  

Jeannie de Clarens, an amateur spy who passed a wealth of information to the British about the development of the V-1 and V-2 rockets during World War II and survived stays in three concentration camps for her activities, died on Aug. 23 in Montaigu, southeast of Nantes, France. She was 98.

The death was confirmed by her son, Pascal.

In 1943 Jeannie Rousseau, as she was then known, was an interpreter in Paris for an association of French businessmen, representing their interests and helping them negotiate contracts with the German occupiers. She was young and attractive. She spoke flawless German. She was a favorite with the German officers, who were completely unaware that the woman they knew as Madeleine Chauffour had been reporting to a French intelligence network, the Druids, organized by the Resistance.

Getting wind of a secret weapons project, she made it her mission to be on hand when the topic was discussed by the Germans, coaxing information through charm and guile.

“I teased them, taunted them, looked at them wide-eyed, insisted that they must be mad when they spoke of the astounding new weapon that flew over vast distances, much faster than any airplane,” she told The Washington Post in 1998. “I kept saying, ‘What you are telling me cannot be true!’ I must have said that 100 times.”

Even Nazis like pretty girls.

One officer, eager to convince her, let her look at drawings of the rockets.

Most of what she heard was incomprehensible. But, blessed with a near-photographic memory, she repeated it in detail to her recruiter, Georges Lamarque, at a safe house on the Left Bank.

In London, intelligence analysts, led by Reginald V. Jones, marveled at the quality of the information they were receiving from Paris, notably a startling document called the Wachtel Report.

Delivered in September 1943, it identified the German officer in charge of the rocket program, Col. Max Wachtel; gave precise details about operations at the testing plant in Peenemünde, on the Baltic coast in Pomerania; and showed planned launch locations along the coast from Brittany to the Netherlands.

Relying on this information, the British organized several bombing raids against the plant, which delayed development of the V-2 and spared untold thousands of lives in London.

In “1940-1944: The Secret History of the Atlantic Wall” (2003), the historian Rémy Desquesnes called the Wachtel Report a “masterpiece in the history of intelligence gathering.” When Mr. Jones asked who had sent the report, he was told that the source was known only by the code name Amniarix, and that “she was one of the most remarkable young women of her generation.”

Jeannie Yvonne Ghislaine Rousseau was born on April 1, 1919, in Saint-Brieuc, in Brittany. Her father, Jean, a veteran of World War I, was a senior official with the foreign ministry and, after retiring, the mayor of the 17th Arrondissement in Paris, on the Right Bank. Her mother was the former Marie Le Charpentier.

Any girl named Ghislaine is automatically 50% hotter.

Adept at languages, Ms. Rousseau performed brilliantly at the elite Sciences Po, graduating at the top of her class in 1939. When war broke out, her father moved the family to Dinard, in Brittany, which he thought would be beyond the reach of the Germans.

When the occupying forces arrived, Ms. Rousseau agreed to act as interpreter for town officials and kept her ears open. “The Germans still wanted to be liked then,” she told The Post. “They were happy to talk to someone who could speak to them.”

In September 1940, an unidentified man asked her if she might be willing to share the information she gleaned from her conversations with the Germans. “What’s the point of knowing all that, if not to pass it on?” she recalled telling him, in her interview with The Post.

As German suspicions grew, she was arrested in January 1941 and interrogated at the prison in Rennes. She was released for lack of evidence and ordered to leave the region.

She returned to Paris and, soon after finding translation work with the businessmen’s association, ran into Mr. Lamarque, a former classmate, on a train. She described her job. Mr. Lamarque mentioned that he was organizing “a little outfit” to gather intelligence and invited her to join.

Shortly before the Normandy invasion in June 1944, the British tried to evacuate “Amniarix” to London for a debriefing. She and two fellow spies drove to Tréguier, in Brittany, where a contact was to guide them through minefields to a waiting boat. Unfortunately, the day before the rendezvous, their contact had been arrested.

After getting out of the car and walking toward the meeting place, Ms. Rousseau was arrested. As two soldiers walked her back to the car, she began speaking loudly in German, a tipoff that allowed one of her fellow agents to escape. The other agent refused to flee, fearing that when the Nazis found out that he was from Tréguier they would inflict savage reprisals on the town.

Ms. Rousseau was interrogated in Rennes, but prison officials did not make the connection between her real name and her assumed surname, Chauffour.

She was sent to Ravensbrück, the women’s concentration camp, where bureaucratic bungling again came to her aid. She gave her real name to camp officials, who never made the connection between her and the dossier, sent separately, that identified “Madeleine Chauffour” as part of an espionage ring.

She was later sent to Torgau, a camp in Saxony attached to a munitions and explosives factory, along with 500 other prisoners. Determined to take a stand, she approached the camp commander and announced, in German, that she and her fellow Frenchwomen were prisoners of war and that under the Geneva Convention they could not be made to manufacture weapons.

She was sent back to Ravensbrück, where befuddled officials, after failing to determine who exactly Jeannie Rousseau was, sent her to a punishment camp in Königsberg, which she described tersely as “a very bad place.”

It was so bad that she and two friends concealed themselves in a truck carrying prisoners with typhus back to the gas chambers at Ravensbrück. Arriving at the camp, they sneaked into the barracks.

The ruse worked only briefly. An informer gave them up, and they were sent for harsh treatment to an inner prison, where they were given half rations and assigned to the dirtiest work details.

Ms. Rousseau was close to death when the Swedish Red Cross came to the camp in 1945, in the waning weeks of the war, with a list of prisoners, Ms. Rousseau among them, whose release they had negotiated.

While being treated for tuberculosis, she met Henri de Clarens, a fellow patient who had been imprisoned in Buchenwald and Auschwitz. They married. Mr. de Clarens, a bank manager, died in 1995.

In addition to her son, she is survived by a daughter, Ariane de Clarens, and four grandchildren.

After the war, Ms. de Clarens did freelance translating for the United Nations and other organizations. She rarely spoke in public about her wartime exploits.

“After the war, the curtain came down on my memories,” she told The Post. She added: “What I did was so little. Others did so much more. I was one small stone.”

Did I mention she was humble, too? What a woman!

She was made a member of the Legion of Honor in France in 1955 and a grand officer of the Legion in 2009. She was awarded the Resistance Medal and the Croix de Guerre.

In 1993, the director of central intelligence, R. James Woolsey, presented her with the Seal Medallion (now Medal) “for heroic and momentous contribution to Allied efforts during World War II as a member of the French Resistance.”

Mr. Jones was at her side to receive the first R. V. Jones Intelligence Award, now given to agents whose work displayed “scientific acumen applied with art in the cause of freedom.”

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Equality über alles!

Please read these two stories carefully, kiddies. This looks like a an excellent place for the fascist right and the fascist left to find common ground and start shooting: EQUALITY. Normal people like us know it better as REVENGE.



From The Old Gray Whore:


Britain Looks to Address Inequality With Executive Pay Measures ...

London - Worried by a long-term rise in inequality, Britain announced on Tuesday a series of measures aimed at increasing transparency over executive compensation, hoping to ramp up pressure on companies that offer lavish salaries for bosses but restrict pay for regular employees.

The proposals include plans to force all publicly listed companies to publish their wage ratio, comparing their chief executive’s salary with that of the average worker, as well as the creation of a register that “names and shames” firms that faced shareholder opposition over executive pay levels.

In much of the Western world, public anger is growing over what critics say are excessive wages for senior business leaders. That has helped contribute to a populist backlash in many countries, as the gap between the salaries of employees and their managers has widened markedly.

In the United States, pay packages for top bosses grew last year, with the highest paid, Thomas M. Rutledge, the chief executive of Charter Communications, making $98 million. That was 2,617 times the average salary for American workers.

But it has become an increasing point of contention here.

In one case, investors in the energy company BP protested against the $19.6 million compensation package awarded to the company’s chief executive, Robert W. Dudley, in 2016 — a majority voted against the deal in a nonbinding vote. And the salary of Martin Sorrell, the head of the advertising giant WPP, regularly attracts pushback from shareholders. Mr. Sorrell made 48 million pounds, or about $62 million, last year.

That expanding gulf has spurred the government’s proposals, which it plans to put into effect by June. In addition to forcing the publication of pay ratios, officials would set up a public register listing companies that faced opposition on pay packages from at least a fifth of shareholders.

Listed businesses would be pushed to improve employee representation on their boards, by assigning a nonexecutive director to represent workers, creating an employee advisory council or nominating a director from the work force. There is no punishment for failing to do so, but companies would have to announce why they had not followed the requirements.

“Today’s reforms will build on our strong reputation and ensure our largest companies are more transparent and accountable to their employees and shareholders,” Greg Clark, Britain’s business secretary, said in a news release.

Over the weekend, Prime Minister Theresa May wrote in The Mail that some firms had “ignored the concerns of their shareholders by awarding pay rises to bosses that far outstrip the company’s performance.”

The changes are not entirely unique. In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2015 required publicly traded corporations to begin providing standard information on pay disparities in 2018 (though the S.E.C. said in February that it might reconsider the measure). And in Germany, employees are often well represented on the supervisory boards of large companies.
Still, unions and analysts criticized the measures, arguing that they lacked teeth.

The Trades Union Congress, an umbrella organization of labor unions, derided the plans as a “box-ticking exercise,” while the opposition Labour Party said that the efforts could be easily ignored.

In particular, companies that are in labor-intensive industries or that employ large numbers of people in lower-paid jobs, like supermarkets, would look worse than investment banks, where average worker pay is higher.

“We’re punishing the companies that employ a lot of people,” Mr. Jenter said. “It in essence says you have a choice between employing low-paid employees in your companies — janitors, cleaners, drivers — or outsourcing the services to other companies or machines.”

Greg Campbell, a partner in the employment department at the law firm Mishcon de Reya, said the efforts to increase worker representation were also relatively mild, because company directors in Britain are already required to consider employee interests.
“A diversity of views is always worth having,” he said, “but I don’t think it is enough to really shift the dial.”

Still, some are hopeful that the measures will raise awareness of worsening inequality.

“This is obviously a more voluntary nudge approach to improve corporate governance, but I think there is no magic bullet,” said Ben Willmott, head of public policy at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. “Regulation can only take you so far because a lot of these issues are around organizational culture and leadership.”


Meanwhile, in another Third World hellhole, Namibia,...

Namibia's Wealth Redistribution Plan May Benefit Elite ... - Bloomberg

A plan by Namibia, among the world’s most economically unequal nations, to better distribute wealth among its citizens may end up the way neighboring South Africa’s has -- benefiting an elite minority.

The nation is working on a law that will require all businesses to be at least a quarter owned by “racially disadvantaged people.” While only about 6 percent of Namibia’s 2.5 million citizens are white, they own most enterprises. That’s a legacy of white-minority rule South Africa imposed when it controlled Namibia from World War I to 1990, with black people being disenfranchised and displaced.

Critics of South Africa’s policy, including the biggest labor-union federation, say it has failed to redress inequalities because it focuses on increasing black ownership of companies rather than raising education standards to match a skills shortage, and has benefited a small number of wealthy individuals. Proposals by Namibia, the world’s biggest marine-diamond producer, are similar, which could hamper investment and growth in an economy that’s contracted every quarter since March last year.

The plan “has caused much unease among white business owners and heightened investment uncertainty,” Gerrit van Rooyen, an analyst at NKC African Economics in Paarl, South Africa, said in an emailed response to questions. Both governments have to “create incentives to boost employment and stimulate investment. Black economic empowerment cannot succeed without job creation and wage growth.”

The New Equitable Economic Empowerment Framework Bill outlines six areas to increase black citizens’ participation in business, including developing people’s skills and providing financing for those disadvantaged by inequality to buy stakes in companies.

The Namibia Chamber of Commerce and Industry wants the focus on economic ownership scrapped, saying it will result in capital flight. It also calls for a rethink on employment equity, because it requires “formal racial classification and promotes racial polarization; blames white racism, brushes over complex causes of interracial inequality,” the NCCI said in its response to the proposed law.

The chamber suggests the bill should target “only the needy and disadvantaged,” and that selection criteria be based on “loyalty, restraint and goodwill and not on greed, tokenism and discrimination.” Namibia ranks alongside South Africa and Lesotho among the world’s most unequal societies in terms of distribution of income, according to Gini coefficients compiled by the CIA World Factbook.

The Law Reform and Development Commission is revising the bill and doesn’t yet know when the new version will be ready, said Yvonne Dausab, the body’s chairwoman.

The current version of the plan has helped see Namibia, the world’s fifth-biggest uranium producer, lose its spot as Africa’s second-most attractive jurisdiction for mining companies to invest in, based on policies, to Botswana, the Fraser Institute’s 2016 survey of 2,700 firms worldwide shows. Zimbabwe, which enacted legislation a decade ago that required all foreign or white-owned businesses to sell or cede 51 percent ownership to black nationals, is ranked last.

On June 19, Fitch Ratings Ltd. kept its assessment of Namibia’s foreign-currency debt at the lowest investment grade, saying the draft empowerment law represents a “modest risk” to the business and investment climate as uncertainties remain about what will ultimately be approved as legislation.

Almost two months later, Moody’s Investors Service cut its rating of the country’s debt to junk, citing a “material” decrease in the country’s fiscal strength, with public debt reaching 42 percent of gross domestic product from 26 percent when the company first assigned a rating in 2011. It has the assessment on a negative outlook, which means the next move could be another cut, saying that a change of investment sentiment is among risks to the rating.
Besides the empowerment law, Namibia is proposing legislation that will limit foreign ownership of land, and it has signed an investment promotion act that will reserve some business activities for black Namibians, Van Rooyen said.

“The government seems to be shifting towards nativist and protectionist policies, which typically discourages foreign investment and impedes economic growth,” he said.


TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Not only is Evgeni Robinson a commie, master race baiter/traitor,heat nazi, and liar, he's really really stupid.*

* Or, he's sleeping with Al Gore and feels he has to do this kind of crap in order to keep getting some.

Not surprisingly, this execrable cretin didn't use his latest column to condemn the left-fascist violence in Berkeley. (Watch as a Rogue's Gallery of lefty nincompoops fall over their word processing programs ignoring left-fascist violence:
This space is reserved for the flood of columns by left-fascist pundits condemning left-fascist violence in Berkeley, CA. )

Instead, he killed a few hundred trees and a few million of his "readers" brain cells by coming up with the following steaming pile of economic warfare.

From Washington's other other newspaper:

Hurricane Harvey previews our stormy future -

Pay attention to what happened to Houston. It is rare to be given such a vivid look at our collective future.

Climate change cannot be definitively blamed for Hurricane Harvey, but it likely did make the storm more powerful. Global warming did not conjure the rains that flooded the nation’s fourth-largest city, but it likely did make them more torrential. The spectacle of rescue boats plying the streets of a major metropolis is something we surely will see again. The question is how often.

The relationship between climate and weather is undeniable but never specific. Tropical cyclones do not batter Siberia’s arctic coast and heavy snowfalls do not blanket the beaches of Barbados because the climates are different. But no one blizzard or hurricane can be attributed to climate change beyond the shadow of a doubt — which opens anyone who raises the subject at a time like this to the accusation of “politicizing” a disaster.

The science explaining climate change is clear, however, no matter what deniers such as President Trump choose to believe. And it will be political decisions that determine how often we witness scenes of devastation like those in Houston.

Ok, smarty-pants, if the science is so clear, you should be able to explain it to everybody.

Look, kiddies! Not a syllable of science is to be found!

Begin with the basic fact of a warming planet, due primarily to greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. The waters of the Gulf of Mexico are unusually warm this summer — between two and three degrees above normal — which gave Harvey extra energy and moisture.

Unsupported shouts are not evidence, Geno.

Hurricanes usually ("Usually"? You mean your science doesn't know and can't predict? Why should anyone believe anything this moron has to say? This is nothing more than fascist fear-mongering. "Give us control and we will protect you!") weaken when they approach a coastline, but Harvey was able to gain strength, making landfall as a Category 4 storm. According to Pennsylvania State University professor Michael E. Mann, one of the world’s leading experts on climate change, Harvey’s unprecedented rainfall totals were likely boosted by global warming in at least two ways. Higher atmospheric and ocean temperatures mean more evaporation, Mann wrote in the Guardian, which means more precipitation. And the fact that the storm parked itself so stubbornly over Houston is due to a jet-stream pattern predicted in scientists’ climate-change models.

Since 2005, we’ve had Katrina, Sandy and now Harvey. The flood next time could come in Corpus Christi, Mobile, Pensacola, Tampa Bay, Naples, Miami, Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston — no one knows where. But there is no doubt that it will come.

WOW! Giant hurricanes have caused massive flooding in low-lying flat coastal areas twice in the past twelve years! You've convinced me, Evgeni. I'm ready to sell my soul to totalitarians like you so they can shut down the economy, starve millions to death, and rule what's left of humanity from their air conditioned palaces.

Humankind has boosted the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a shocking 40 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when we started burning fossil fuels on a large scale. Even if carbon emissions were magically ended tomorrow, warming would continue for many years. But we can — if we choose — keep climate change from getting catastrophically out of hand.

The rest of the industrialized world has decided to move toward a clean-energy future — and reap the economic benefits such a shift can entail. I’m betting that Trump’s successor, whether a Democrat or a Republican, will reverse his shortsighted, self-defeating decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord.

But in addition to mitigating climate change, we must adapt to the warming we have made inevitable. Houston officials at least tried to learn one lesson: In 2005, as Hurricane Rita approached, officials ordered an evacuation that turned freeways into parking lots; about 100 people died in the chaos. This time, residents were initially advised to stay put — and, from what we know so far, there appears to have been much less loss of life.

But billions of dollars’ worth of private and public infrastructure is being destroyed. Because low-lying coastal cities are not likely to pick up and move inland, they are going to need new natural or artificial barriers to protect against storm surge (which might have been the big problem with Harvey, but wasn’t) and high-capacity drainage systems to alleviate flooding (which was).

But that infrastructure is evil, isn't it, Gene? It encourages stupid people who disagree with geniuses like you to use more fossil fuels. (This is known outside the Beltway as "work". Which produces tax money that you can spend on really important things, like changing confused boys into "girls".) 

Such projects are hugely expensive — but cheaper than repairing the damage from a citywide flood.

Also, the nation needs a sustainable way of providing flood insurance to those living in vulnerable areas. The current National Flood Insurance Program charges rates that do not nearly cover its outlays, and for years it relied on out-of-date maps that did not accurately show flood risks.

Buildings, meanwhile, can be made more flood-proof. President Barack Obama signed an executive order requiring builders who receive federal funds for a project to account for the risk of flooding in their construction plans. Trump rescinded the measure, saying it was “job-killing.” How many people went to work in Houston today?


Also, the nation needs a sustainable way of providing flood insurance to those living in vulnerable areas. The current National Flood Insurance Program charges rates that do not nearly cover its outlays, and for years it relied on out-of-date maps that did not accurately show flood risks.

Buildings, meanwhile, can be made more flood-proof. President Barack Obama signed an executive order requiring builders who receive federal funds for a project to account for the risk of flooding in their construction plans. Trump rescinded the measure, saying it was “job-killing.” How many people went to work in Houston today?

If Robinson and his freedom-hating brethren were honest, they would give glory to Gaia for her persistent attempts to exterminate the little people who refuse to listen to them.

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

There is a particularly nasty place set aside in Hell for wicked, unrepentant priests.

Father William Aitcheson should know that better than most Catholics...but does he?

First, let me educate you kiddies about the American Civil War:

1) It was not about slavery. It was about power, politics, and money. Lincoln only gave a damn about the slaves when it became politically anf militarily expedient for him to do so.

2) The actions of the southern states were seditious and treasonous. In the rest of the world and throughout history, rebels were executed without much thought. Every last rebel and those who supported them should have been executed by the lawful government of the United States.

3) Robert E. Lee, et al., were damn fortunate many in the Union took Christianity very seriously.

Finally, I don't give a damn about statues and flags. Only people matter. Fascists of both the left and right threaten our freedom and our lives. ONLY YOUR GUNS CAN PROTECT YOU.

Now back to this ignorant man whose greatest sin may have been to sully the integrity of the One, True Church.


From Washington's other other newspaper:

How I discovered my childhood priest was in the Ku Klux Klan

The Rev. William M. Aitcheson was my childhood priest and my history teacher. A fervent advocate of the Confederacy, he used to joke about “Saint Robert E. Lee” in his homilies at church. When I was in middle school in the early 2000s, he taught a Civil War history class for the home-school group at my church in the small Shenandoah County town of Woodstock, Va.

He was also a former Ku Klux Klan member, who in 1982 was fined $26,000 for burning crosses in the yard of an African American family and on the grounds of two Jewish establishments — a fine he had never paid. Before that, he was charged with six cross-burnings in Maryland and with sending a threatening letter to Coretta Scott King. He had also been charged with making pipe bombs and was found with various weapons and bombmaking materials in his bedroom and basement. But I didn’t uncover those latter facts until this month, when I stumbled onto a discovery that would eventually prompt Aitcheson to step down temporarily from his public ministry. He wrote in an op-ed that his service to God had changed and redeemed him. But I knew he wasn’t being entirely honest.

I remember him as an imposing figure who took his history lessons to us home-schoolers very seriously. He had a reputation for being a bit gruff, but he was never unkind to me, and I recall him fondly. He knew so much about history, and I trusted him when he taught us that the Civil War was fought for states’ rights, not slavery; that the South’s cause was noble and just.

It would be many years before I would begin to question my ideas about the South. Aitcheson’s views on the Confederacy were certainly not outside the norm: Many people I know and love sincerely believe that Southerners never stood for slavery and that the North waged an unjust war on them. But slowly, as an adult, I shed my Confederate sympathies, and I would only occasionally think of Aitcheson and what he taught me.

After the now-infamous white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, ostensibly over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, I spent quite some time thinking about what it meant to grow up in a region where tearing down monuments felt like tearing down a whole culture’s founding mythology. Neither of my parents is originally from the area, but even as transplants, we learned to share a sense of local pride in the architecture, the stories, the music. Even if I disagree, I understand why some people want to keep the monuments; this is their architecture, their stories, their home. I thought about Aitcheson and wondered what had ever happened to him. On Friday, Aug. 18, I Googled his name. The first result was about his many years of service as a priest — he was now at St. Leo the Great in Fairfax City, Va. The second was a 1977 Washington Post article about William M. Aitcheson, a 23-year-old University of Maryland student and “exalted cyclops” of his local Klan group, the Robert E. Lee klavern.

This Aitcheson, according to coverage at the time, had joined a paramilitary splinter group called the “Klan Beret.” A Maryland State Police officer who had infiltrated the group testified that, with Aitcheson as an enthusiastic member, the Klan Beret aimed to use bombs and other violent tactics in its coming “revolution” against Jews, blacks and other minorities. The story of Aitcheson’s arrest for cross-burning and threats gained national attention, and another Klan leader complained that Aitcheson’s antics had “set the Klan back 50 years.”

At first, I thought it might be an odd coincidence. But a picture of a young William Aitcheson, Klan member, looked just like the William Aitcheson I remembered. My Aitcheson and the Klansman had the same name, were the same age and bore matching biographical details. If they were the same man, he had spent a few years teaching and entered the seminary in Rome in 1984. He was ordained in 1988 in Las Vegas.

Overcome by curiosity, I had to know if this was the same person — and if the church knew. I emailed the spokeswoman for the Arlington, Va., bishop’s office to ask. I wrote that I was a former parishioner. Although I am also an occasional freelance journalist, I wasn’t digging for a story at that point. I was looking for answers from my bishop — I am a Catholic parishioner in the Arlington diocese, at St. Mary’s in Alexandria.

I continued to pore over the details of Aitcheson’s case throughout the weekend: In 1982, a federal judge ordered him to pay $23,000 to Phillip and Barbara Butler, and $1,500 apiece to two Jewish groups, for burning crosses on their property in what the judge called “a personal campaign of terror.” The Butlers had been the fifth black family to move into the Maryland subdivision of College Park Woods, a predominantly white neighborhood at the time, when Aitcheson — who lived in a different Maryland county — erected a burning cross on their lawn. President Ronald Reagan read about the case in The Post and was so moved by the Butlers’ story that he went to visit them personally.

The Saturday morning after I sent my email, an official from the diocese emailed me back to say they would look into it; he asked if I was a journalist. By now, I realized that there was no question of Aitcheson being a different person and that I had clumsily stumbled into a real story. Yes, I said: I was a reporter in addition to being a former parishioner.

But I didn’t only want to know, as a Catholic, whether the church had known. I also wondered what Aitcheson thought now — about the Confederacy, the Klan, the cross he burned on the Butlers’ lawn. Clearly he had chosen a different path after his conviction. I wanted to hear about his search for redemption. Had he also apologized to the Butlers? So that Saturday, I went to the 5 p.m. service at his Fairfax City parish, where he was scheduled to celebrate Mass. As the minutes ticked past 5 and the ushers began to whisper, Aitcheson was nowhere to be found. Another priest came in to say the Mass, apologizing for a last-minute “emergency.” I called the bishop’s office to say that at this point, although I had not begun this inquiry looking for a story, I’d be writing one.

I called Phillip Butler, of the 1982 lawsuit against Aitcheson, and asked him if he had ever received any money or an apology. The answer was no — the family had never seen or heard from Aitcheson again. I explained how I had come upon the story. Butler, who is Catholic himself, was surprised to hear that Aitcheson had become a priest. Why hadn’t Butler pressed to receive the money? He told me he recalled that Aitcheson’s father had been something of a bigwig in Howard County and they didn’t imagine they would have much luck pressing it. They were satisfied with Reagan’s visit, which he said they “still cherish.” At the time, that was closure enough for them. (The University of Maryland Hillel, the first of the Jewish groups in the settlement, also told me that its rabbi at the time, Bob Saks, could not recall ever receiving a payment. Rabbi Mendel Abrams of the Beth Torah Congregation, the second group, said he had not received a payment or heard from the diocese as of Thursday.)

If that was enough for the Butlers, maybe it should have been enough for me, too. But I also wondered how a priest, a public representative of the church, could take such a position of influence without even privately apologizing for his sins to those he had harmed. Perhaps he couldn’t afford $23,000 at the time of his ordination, but I can’t believe he could never spare a phone call or a letter to ask forgiveness. As a Catholic, I was brought up to believe in God’s mercy — but my faith also teaches the necessity of penance, atonement, justice and paying your dues.

On Monday afternoon, the bishop’s office released the op-ed from Aitcheson, addressing (rather vaguely) his past, along with an announcement that he had requested to step down for now. Neither the editorial nor the accompanying news release addressed whether the church previously knew about his past or, if so, why church leaders had not asked him to apologize to the Butler family or pay his debt. The Arlington bishop’s office portrayed his disclosure, titled “Moving from hate to love with God’s grace,” as a spontaneous act, connected only to his private reflections on Charlottesville. “Our actions have consequences,” he wrote. So why hadn’t he faced them?

The Diocese of Reno, where Aitcheson was made a priest in 1988, informed me via email that while Aitcheson had “admitted” to officials there his involvement in the KKK, he had never made the church aware of the 1982 lawsuit and his debt. I wondered how such a large omission could really be considered “admitting” his past involvement. The Arlington diocese eventually released a similar statement about what it had known.

On Wednesday, the Butler family gave a news conference. Their attorney said that, while the diocese had now offered to set up a meeting for Aitcheson to apologize to the Butlers, they were unsure about how to proceed. They want him to finally reveal the names of the other Klan members who helped victimize them and who were never brought to justice. After the news conference, the Arlington diocese released another statement, saying that “a freelancer reporter, who introduced herself as a parishioner,” had contacted officials about Aitcheson’s past, prompting the disclosure.

I felt — and still feel — confused and conflicted about my role in this. A few nights into my investigation, I discovered yet another ugly surprise about someone from my past: An old acquaintance had marched in the white nationalist tiki torch parade at the University of Virginia, side by side with the young men shouting Nazi slogans.

I thought back to an evening several years ago, spent with this person and some mutual friends. After a few too many glasses of wine, he and another friend began to sing the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy — “Dixie.” I sang along, mangling the words a bit, but as a Virginian, it was a song I’d heard many times before.

Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton,
Old times there are not forgotten.
Look away, look away, look away, Dixie land!

It was the second time I had thought about that familiar old song in recent days, and this time it made my stomach churn. As I had searched through every article I could find naming William Aitcheson, I came upon a 2004 article in Fredericksburg, Va.’s Free Lance-Star. Aitcheson was still my pastor then. He had presided over a memorial service for the Confederate dead, where he read “The Conquered Banner,” a popular post-Civil War poem composed by a Catholic priest who had been a chaplain for the Confederate army. Then, the Lance-Star reported, Aitcheson turned to the crowd and said, “Let’s sing the old national anthem.” He led them all in song.

I wish I was in Dixie, hooray! Hooray!
In Dixie land I’ll take my stand,
to live and die in Dixie.
Away, away, away down south in Dixie!
Away, away, away down south in Dixie!

Twitter: @mtksantos

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.