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"It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts... For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it." -- Patrick Henry

You Only Live Once:

In late August of 1776, the British Army landed more than twenty thousand troops on Long Island, where they planned to annihilate the Patriot forces...

To give hundreds of men in Washington's army time to escape, the Marylanders mounted a series of suicidal bayonet charges against an old stone house occupied by British General Lord Cornwallis...

Flanked by thousands of British and Hessian troops, a few hundred men fought desperately and somehow bought enough time for the bulk of Washington's men to withdraw. Washington, watching the action unfold through his spyglass, cried out "Good God! What brave fellows I must this day lose!"

Many of the Marylanders involved in the charge sacrificed their lives. Most lie in a mass grave somewhere near the epic stand in Brooklyn. The exact whereabouts of the mass grave remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the Revolution...

Or CNN, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, ABC, LATimes, Wapo, Huffpo, Buzzfeed,
Politico, BBC, GoogleNews, 2/3 of FOX, BostonGlobe, Hollywood...

Every day in the media, no matter what is happening, no matter what is more important, no matter what the facts, the evil and the nincompoop try to seize upon something to insinuate that Trump or his administration did something wrong, or are something wrong. (The dingbat lower-level lackeys actually believe it -- look at Mukasey's expressions, below, in interview with Erin Burnett, disbelief that anyone could be so stupid.)

(No. Russia didn't hack the election. Russia didn't phish Podesta's emails. Trump has no Russia ties. "Senior officials" in Trump's campaign did not have "ongoing secret talks" or "collude" with Russia. Paul Manafort does not have Russia ties. General Flynn, a career military American hero, did not have secret talks with Russia. There is no "chaos" in the Trump administration, nor is there any "scandal" that "could be bigger than Watergate" and similar delusional fantasies. Trump did not do things in Russia that gave Russia "blackmail power" over him, and neither did any of his people. No, Trump is not an anti-Semite. Or a bigot. Or a sexist. Or a xenophobe. Or a "fascist". Nor has he violated the Emoluments Clause. Steve Bannon, a retired Naval officer, is not a white supremacist. Jeff Sessions is not a racist. There is no "chaos". Etc. If you believe any of this shit, you are even more stupid or ill-informed than Erin Burnett.)

People don't have "genders". They are one of two sexes, or else intersexed. "Gender" is about the usually artificial or, at best, stereotypical, association of certain words, ideas, and things as being "feminine" -- associated with the female sex, or "masculine" -- associated with the male sex. This association is one of the core concepts that women's rights advocates fought against for so long. But now Caitlyn Jenner and his corset and lipstick and the rest of the extreme transvestite ilk have turned "feminist" ideology into a foolish psychosis.

At the point at which it became recognized that no matter how much one mutilates one's body, and no matter how one dresses or behaves or superficially appears, one cannot change one's underlying biological sex, suddenly the talk about "transsexualism" was dropped from the public discourse and in its place was the cynical and politically-motivated rise of "transgenderism" -- which apparently requires nothing but proclaiming oneself to be one or the other "gender", without regard for biology.

At a dinner conversation recently, two companions posited that people such as Jenner "feel like women" and thus they want to present as female. Yeah? my friends were stymied when I asked how would a feted athlete who won the Olympic decathlon, fathered children, and lived for decades as a heterosexual married man, have a fucking clue what it "feels like" to be a woman? (How do any of us know for certain what it "feels like" to be something or someone else?)

"Sex" refers to the biological role that the individual plays in reproduction (or otherwise would play, barring age, injury, or disease.) There is a tiny percentage of human beings who are so intersexed that they cannot reproduce and cannot otherwise be recognized this or that way, or even mostly this or that way (AIS XYs being a special case that heretofore have caused no great social dilemma). We certainly could recognize other sexes if we wanted to, if the intersex issue affected so many that it made sense to do so (do we have a plastics-estrogen environmental issue here?) Some insects, e.g. have three sexes (e.g. queen, drone, worker). Some other animals (and plants) are hermaphroditic. Some plants and animals can shift their biological reproductive role as circumstances dictate, but no higher-order animals can. Moreover, there indeed are biologically ambiguous persons who validly choose to change themselves outwardly in order to present socially as the other sex, and this should be respected, inasmuch as the prior "gender presentation" itself was arbitrary, often chosen by parents and not the person when he or she was a child -- but this still involves a relative miniscule number of people.

Be this as it may, we long have been clear that even copulating with one or the other sex doesn't make one into the opposite sex. Gay men aren't women, and lesbians aren't men. So certainly wearing a dress and high heels doesn't make a male into a female. It makes a transvestite, a man who makes a mockery of what is female by cloaking himself in the accoutrements of what is artificially deemed to be "feminine". Taking hormones or surgically removing a penis doesn't turn a male into a female -- it makes a mutilated and reproductively dysfunctional male, an extreme transvestite (and vice versa.)

There well may be many aspects of society not directly related to reproduction as to which we could and should remove artificial distinctions and assignments of what are "for women" and what are "for men". Women's colleges? Athletic teams? (That would kill Title IX "women's sports" but I'm not terribly bothered by that.) Women's affirmative action set-asides? Military combat? (Perhaps if and when a reproductively biological woman can function like a man can, endurance- and strength-wise, health-wise, family-wise.) I'm not so sure, however, that either combat or public restroom usage falls into a category of those mostly artificial and purposeless distinctions, or that it behooves us to overturn all social conventions for an insignificant number of outliers.

The bottom line is that no matter how much eyeshadow the former Bruce Jenner applies, he will never, ever have to call from a bathroom stall to ask another person in the restroom to please hand over a tampon. And no matter how much he pretends, he will never know what it is like to be a young woman who has learned to be cognizant of situations and circumstances that enhance the possibility of being raped and impregnated.

Or understand what it is to be a natural mother. Notwithstanding the currently trendy psychology and custody crap, fathers, or even adoptive mothers, will never be the same as birth mothers -- it's biological, hormonal, and different.

An aside on the parenting issue, to the progressives and psychs and social engineers: go "argue with science", in this case evolution, because it's idiotically inconsistent to claim that parental sex doesn't matter because parents don't "parent" differently but that children also need "fathers" or "father figures" because fathers "parent" differently, but -- oops -- two-parent "same-sex" families are just as good as heterosexual biological two-parent households because -- rationalizing and straining here -- it's about resource assistance... or something... that apparently doesn't apply when the second adult head of household is not a sexual partner of the parent but a grandparent.

May we please end the nonsense.

In this case it comes from Kurt Schlichter at Townhall, which still occasionally publishes some good writers and thinkers -- President Trump Has Been Far Too Nice To The Mainstream Media:

Only a fevered hive mind, poisoned by unearned self-regard and a delusional sense of its own moral superiority, could seriously equate a politician pointing out the obvious fact that today's reporters are mostly lying, incompetent jerks with Hitlerian press censorship. Tell you what -- I'll believe you when the National Guard shows up to shut down CNN by padlocking the makeup room.

Except, according to the AP, the National Guard is busy preparing to be unleashed upon the photogenic honor student dreamers who the press tells us make up the undocumented friend community -- when they aren't murdering us or voting, which our ink-stained guardians assure us totally never ever happens, and Trump lies, plus you're a racist. Another day, another example of Fake News. My favorite part of this particular press foot-shoot was getting lectured on the intricacies of the Posse Comitatus Act by 25-year old media savants whose military experience consists of pestering their dorm mates about Call of Duty's cartoon guns being phallocentric and how the game is insufficiently welcoming to the trans perspective...

Then there’s the Russians/Flynn nonsense, a non-story that America non-cares about. Oh, there’s a real story there, but the press isn’t interested...

Under the guise of merely asking questions, Wallace skirts being a purveyor of fake news while still skewing which topics get covered as "news", and which get short-shrifted or ignored. But what he chooses to seize upon and cover is out of balance, even to the point of verging into the realm of an obsessive focus on crap. The overall impression that is created for a casual listener as far as what are important current events is itself as "fake" as explicit prevarication. The fakery went over the top this weekend:

In the video below, almost hyperventilating, Wallace pokes and strains, even argues and talks over the unfailingly polite Priebus, in the apparent hope of creating the appearance of a real "controversy" over media-driven issues about nothing of consequence. This is a propaganda device that adds to the noise-signal ratio and is used to lend substance and credibility to what are non-issues, minor, tangential or unimportant issues, and even outright disinformation. This kind of fakery actually has a name in journalism -- it's called "false balance".

Evidencing that Wallace's intention was not merely to conduct a tough interrogation in order to provide a forum that either validated the trendy anti-Trump MSM subject matter or put this latest nonsense to rest once and for all, he followed up his interview with Priebus with another one interviewing Rush Limbaugh, using the same M.O., doing all he could to make it all about the same unproductive crap.

The most dangerous fraudsters are those who successfully hide their agendas. The best cons (and most difficult to detect) are those that mix truth with lies or mislead by omission.

Yes, anyone who lies to you, deliberately misleads you, tries to give you a false impression or confuse you, by whatever technique, indeed is your "enemy". Even some on Fox News.