Death and A Complication

The death of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has fueled speculations about what happened to the prisoner--wasn't he supposed to be on suicide watch? (It turns out--he no longer was.)  Wasn't there an awfully long list of people who wanted to see him dead? (Yes, very probably.) Wouldn't his death end the investigation into his child sex trafficking? (Well, not necessarily--he had accomplices who should still be held to justice.)

I think the tendency to assign blame when a high-profile individual is found dead or dying in his cell is very reasonable. Being off suicide watch a mere three weeks after a previous attempt sounds suspicious as hell. Assuming murder, though, goes a bit further than I think is necessary. Here's what we know about Epstein: the man was a highly self-driven person who pursued money and power in order to live a life that was completely unaccountable to the law. He displayed the sociopathic ability to use and manipulate people in order to evade responsibility for his actions. In addition to having obtained an absurdly lenient plea deal, it seems evident the Epstein also finagled money out of at least one benefactor (probably more) and never faced the music for that.

Jeffrey Epstein's "art", if we could can it that, was escape. He got away with things. Although I appreciate the incredulity some are expressing that his death is not being treated as a murder, it seems actually pretty believable to me that a person who lived a life intent on maximizing his liberties and unaccountability would kill himself as yet another escape from facing the full weight of his crimes and one last middle finger to the world, the law, the morality he gave few fucks about.  If I saw the likelihood of any conspiracy at all in his ending, maybe there was a degree of "LIHOP" (Letting It Happen on Purpose) to quickly let the world be dispatched of such human rubbish. 

Of course, I don't know any better than anyone else, and while I hope there will be a very thorough investigation, sometimes the results of even very thorough investigations can be confounded. Of such is the world in which we live.

The Self-Unmade Martyr

The recent determination the Fox Lake police Lt. Charles Joe Gliniewicz took his own life, ostensibly because his peculations over a seven-year period, amongst other prior infractions perhaps, were about to come to light, is demonstrably tragic.  I feel for his family, because in a way, they are losing him twice--first as the man they knew and loved, and again, as a man they didn't even know. I can't imagine their sense of loss, and wouldn't wish it on anyone in the world--and he gave them that.

All this is not to smear the life of "G.I. Joe Gliniewicz, whose staged homicide resulted in the useless man-hours of hundreds of officers in a manhunt that wasted thousands of taxpayer dollars and could have resulted in the slaying, assault or pointless charging and possibly (because we can't pretend these things don't ever happen, can we?) sentencing of innocent people.

This person could not have made a messier end for himself with a dozen years planning.

No, my point is that this particular death was used to try and smear the Black Lives Matter movement: when the best argument against indicting cops who slay in the line of duty is to let the investigation happen and the facts present themselves over time without a rush to judgment, it was astonishing to see how quickly a rush to judgment against a whole movement of citizens occurred by police-backers before a full investigation let the facts present themselves.

This is still a tragedy, and a very strange one. This was not the only case of an officer shooting himself and blaming imagined others since September. Odder yet, sometimes the people who get blamed are real people who catch hell for the frame-up. And this really weird thing were cops blame other people for getting shot isn't even that new a thing--it predates the BLM movement.

Trust me, I don't entirely know what to make out of all of that. It kind of reminds me of Charles Stuart or Susan Smith. It's amazing how the image of the violent POC hangs out there waiting for white people to blame their grotesqueries on.

In any case, I think the strange unmade martyrdom of GI Joe Gliniewicz should give us all a little pause about how quickly we reach to politicize deaths. For instance, there's something I can't put my finger on about the Goforth murder that tells me this isn't anything to do with BLM. I'd kindly like to suggest that people who want to demagogue about what lives matter and when go take a long walk off a short pier. And once that cold refreshing splash wakes you the hell up, realize that yes, duh, of course, all lives matter. But every case is complex but not all cases are unique. And yes, racism is a real damn thing. And not all cops are simon-pure and halo-ready.

Jeb Bush Has to Go

He's at a place in the polls where he's unlikely to emerge as a winner, so why single out poor Jeb!? Because he is simply the worst candidate in the world. Period. He's released a healthcare plan--of sorts, that is probably the least-thought out thing a supposedly serious candidate could release--but the thing of it is--he dropped it like it was hot. There's no protection for pre-existing conditions and it rolls back the gains for women's health care under Obamacare. Having a female reproductive system is back to being a pre-existing condition. This idiocy is coming from a candidate that should have heard the criticism when his idiot idea that women weren't worth $500M in health care spending (about $2 and change for every woman in the US) and tried to learn.

Lessons learned? Bush men aren't learners. But Jeb! is toxically worse than he ought to be. He says the government should not meddle, but his record is of concern-trolling in the right of a minor to choose abortion, and the right of people to a dignified end of life.

I think I was wrong--Bush doesn't not want to be President--maybe he actually does and is just horrifically stupid. He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple--like Ann Richards said of his brother. Like you could even say of Donald Trump. But his fecklessness is an inability to grasp that other people have rights and judgment and will criticize him. And he ought to be criticized a lot. His low place in the polls is earned because he brings nothing good or new. At least Rubio is young. He might learn.

One can reasonably despair of Jeb! doing any such thing. And campaign-watchers probably also know.

Mike Huckabee is Pretty Gross

Former AR Governor Mike Huckabee (R) had some interesting comments to in reference to Caitlin Jenner and trans people in general:

“For those who do not think that we are under threat, simply recognize that the fact that we are now in city after city watching ordinances say that your 7-year-old daughter, if she goes into the restroom cannot be offended and you can’t be offended if she’s greeted there by a 42-year-old man who feels more like a woman than he does a man.”

Huckabee continued saying saying he wished someone told him in high school he “could have felt like a woman” and shower with the girls.

“Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE,” said Huckabee. “I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’ You’re laughing because it sounds so ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

A transwoman, regardless of her age and whether she was assigned as male at birth, is not a man. She is not presenting as a man. She is in a restroom to use the restroom, which is what a 7-year-old or any-other-year-old person is doing. The assumption that some middle-aged gender non-conforming person is in the restroom to specifically be offensive--is what is really offensive.

Note that Mike Huckabee, who recently was all about forgiving Josh Duggar for touching his little sisters, is broadcasting his fears about genderqueer people without  any sense of understanding about who they are and why they express alternative  gender expressions from their birth assignment. He's never looked into the facts. He doesn't seem to know, for example, that there really is no epidemic of problematic trans behavior (particularly not related to "restrooms"). 

To The Parents of Leelah Alcorn

I am deeply saddened to hear of the passing of your daughter, Leelah. I understand you are still in mourning over the death of your son, Joshua. It may take a lot of time for you to understand that the time to mourn Joshua's passing would have been far better done when your daughter, Leelah, was still alive.

What you needed to know was that your daughter, although assigned at birth by culture and genetics as male, had a medically-recognized condition called gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder. Mainstream science would have informed you that she needed to come to her own terms with her gender identity. Your religious "piety" tried to erase that from her, and you assisted that erasure of her feelings, experiences and choices until she saw no future at all so long as you were overriding her need to exist as her authentic self.

I am deeply saddened to inform you, because you are grown people, that her experience of herself was all she had. She did not know anything but a very real experience, to her, that she was a girl. A living girl. And being a girl is not wrong. It's unusual for a person with XY chromosome pairing, but unusual things do happen. You denied her that one thing she had--her experience of herself. She knew exactly who she was and what her situation was, and you never bothered to listen to her.

Brittany Maynard Made A Choice

I think one meets the news of the decision of a person to end one's life when faced with a terminal diagnosis with a kind of sadness, naturally--death is, so far, our common fate. But I think that she had the freedom to determine the timing of her end a merciful thing. She had laid out very well her reasoning behind this decision. Her time, and more importantly, to her, her still-lucid and not dramatically impaired and reduced life, were going to be taken from her anyway. She chose the path that let her family come to peace with the hour of her choosing, that gave her control, that spared her and them seeing a bitter and painful decline.

To my way of thinking, if her life was not her own to do with it as she would, why would she be entrusted with it? If anyone gives a gift, one expects the recipient to do as they would--or the gift was never truly "given". If we are to have anything like free will at all, ending our lives is also a choice. One that has no continued consequence for ourselves this side of the veil, only continued bill-paying and meals and remembrances for those surviving in our wake.

The argument against her choice is, by now, moot, but still, fairly dumb. I feel bad calling up the yammering thing that is still called Pat Robertson (I think his mind may have already gone over the hill to meet the fairies, himself) to point out the dumbest argument, but here it is: