Kill the Messenger — Predictable Attacks on Christine Blasey Ford

Appearing on multiple extremist websites, this image purportedly from Christine Blasey Ford’s high school yearbook is meant to convince viewers this is her. It is not.

A fervent effort is now underway to discredit Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in her testimony about her sexual assault by SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The people involved in this smear campaign are no more interested in the background of Ford or Kavanaugh than in the price of wallpaper. Their interest is in protecting their revered lord Donald Trump and their collective agenda of shifting the nation’s highest courts to an extremist majority.

If they weren’t so pathetic, these efforts would be laughable. Consider, for example, this recent Facebook post:

Go to Google and type in ‘Dr. Ford’s high school yearbook’. The high school erased it offline Sept 17 but someone has copied and pasted the pages. It is printed in the yearbook, in her own words about how she was walking drunk down the middle of a busy highway and passed out, and the drinking games they’d play (naming them) of which she said she usually passed out and couldn’t remember things. It said she was a priviledged white girl that was racist and a sexual preditor of younger boys. She was permiscuous…

Several points bear mentioning about this particular post. Nothing is cited as “her own words.” No confirming citations are included. No matter what Dr. Ford’s sexual activity might have been, that does not mitigate Kavanaugh’s assault. She did not choose to have sex with Kavanaugh. Therefore what he did was an assault.

Secondly, the person posting this comment evidently believes anything she sees online. A blog named “USA REALLY” posted photos and quotes supposedly taken from Ford’s yearbooks. The blog post dated September 21, 2018, begins as follows:

Those accusing Kavanaugh went through his dirty laundry in order to accuse him of heavy drinking and call him “a hard-drinking party animal in high school.” “A little Princess Diana” and a lover of a “good science party” – this is how they called her, Kavanaugh’s accuser, unnecessarily pointing out she regularly goes surfing as if it adds weight to her last minute accusation. Not only did the senators appear to be skeptical about Blasey’s allegations, so did some bloggers who were resourceful enough to take a guess that those who form the group of the current resistance to Kavanaugh’s moving up the ladder will never let any ‘inappropriate’ facts from Ford’s biography come out in the media. Now, having copied some of her high school yearbook pages, we are given much food for thought.

There are no images or mention of Ford in this material.

The same person also alleged that Dr. Ford’s second entry door wasn’t added because she was afraid, but rather for rental property. In fact, she and her husband remodeled a garage into a master bedroom and added an entry door to the space under the same circumstances Dr. Ford described in her testimony. Later, the couple decided to rent out this room to Google interns, as she stated in the hearing.

Another website, The Washington Standard, repeats the slander on Ford’s high school years.

In a final republishing of a series of articles on Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s High School Yearbooks, which were scrubbed from the internet via Google’s blogspot Cult of the 1st Amendment, the unknown author demonstrated the racist nature of yearbook, possibly something that the school sought to avoid just as much as they did the binge drinking and promiscuity that was laden throughout the yearbook, as well as a motor vehicle accident that could have turned deadly.

The blog focuses on allegations of racism that are so ridiculous it’s hard to read. Pop-ups on this site include a photo of a nice white man with the caption: CO-AUTHOR OF PRESIDENT TRUMP’S TAX PLAN: TRUMP WILL BE RE-ELECTED WITH 40 STATES.

Yet another site alleging misbehavior by Dr. Ford is Freedom Outpost, a blog stating that, “We are a scrappy group of God’s people networked together to see the Kingdom break open in this region and around the world. Those who are a part of this come from many different life experiences and church backgrounds. They are leaders and individuals hungry to learn how they can move in an awareness and expansion of the Kingdom of God.”

This is very important that the truth of these articles remain in the public square due to the libelous and slanderous accusations that have been leveled at Supreme Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings.

Among Freedom Outposts’ proud accomplishments in its work on God’s behalf is a post by Andrew G. Hodges, M. D.

I am a psychiatrist and forensic profiler. Utilizing my training in the unconscious mind, I read between the lines of people’s statements, speeches and written messages.

Among his other revelations, Dr. Hodges claims he mentally obtained evidence that Michelle Obama secretly confessed that her husband was an illegal president.

Consider the Shad Olsen Show website which offered “proof” of Dr. Ford’s sordid past.

As Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s rape accuser today finally reaches terms for an invited offer for Senate testimony Thursday, (after initially refusing a Monday testimony deadline, saying through her attorney that a Monday timeframe set by Republicans was quote, “arbitrary,”) the inevitable levy [apparently the author meant ‘levee’] break of background information allegedly reveals Christine Blasey-Ford as a prolific high school party girl who is alleged to have bragged to a friend of having 54 sexual partners prior to college. If true, the emergence of five high school yearbooks from exclusive college preparatory school, Holton Arms (Bethesda, Maryland) destroys Blasey-Ford’s self portrayal as an innocent coed “church mouse” taken advantage of by an aggressive sexual predator.

But I repeat myself.

Another theme of far-right lunatic responses to the Kavanaugh hearing is that Dr. Ford isn’t really a doctor, that she was an employee of the corporation that produces abortion drugs, and that she holds stock in companies that produce abortion drugs—which only goes to show the real agenda of these posts, the belief that Kavanaugh will be key to overturning Roe v Wade.

I read that she has a PhD and can teach, but she did not take the test required in CA and cannot call herself a psychologist. Like going to law school and saying you’re a lawyer without taking the bar. If this is true she lied to the Senate in her first sentence…

“If this is true…” Yet the person commenting made no effort to learn whether or not this is true. The commenter seems incapable of understanding how a person can be a psychology researcher and not a psychologist.

Accusations like this come from sources such as “Dangerous,” a website owned and operated by Milo Inc., “a 360-degree media company conceived of and founded by Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-right agitator. His profile on Wikipedia refers to his work for Breitbart news and states:

Much of the work at Breitbart which brought Yiannopoulos to national attention was inspired by the ideas of neo-Nazis and white nationalists. In October 2017, leaked emails revealed that Yiannopoulos had repeatedly solicited neo-Nazi and white supremacist figures on the alt-right for feedback and story ideas in his work for the website Breitbart.

Wikipedia’s biographical profile of Dr. Ford clarifies her professional credentials and activities.

[Dr. Ford is] a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Widely published in her field, she specializes in designing statistical models for research projects. During her academic career, Ford has worked as a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine Collaborative Clinical Psychology Program.

She earned an undergraduate degree in experimental psychology in 1988 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Pepperdine University in 1991. In 1996, she received a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Southern California. Her 1995 dissertation was entitled Measuring Young Children’s Coping Responses to Interpersonal Conflict. In 2009, she earned a master’s degree in epidemiology, with a focus on the subject of biostatistics, from Stanford University School of Medicine.

[In her work through]… the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology (PGSP), Ford teaches subjects including psychometrics, study methodologies, and statistics. She has also performed consulting work for multiple pharmaceutical companies. Ford worked as the director of biostatistics at Corcept Therapeutics, and collaborated with FDA statisticians. Ford is widely published within her field.

Ford “specializes in designing statistical models for research projects in order to make sure they come to accurate conclusions,” as summarized by Helena Chmura Kraemer, a Stanford professor emeritus in biostatistics who co-authored a book and several articles with Ford. Ford has written or co-written several books about psychological topics, including depression. Her other research topics published in academic journal articles have included child abuse and the September 11 attacks. In 2015, she co-authored a book entitled How Many Subjects? Statistical Power Analysis in Research…

It is the link to Corcept Therapeutics that opens Dr. Ford to accusations of having a vested interest in Kavanaugh’s potential seat on the SCOTUS. As the blog site headline at Gateway Pundit announces, “Christine Blasey Ford Published Eight studies about “Abortion Pill” and Works for Company that Produces It,” the story goes on to post information about the chemistry of mifepristone (the so-called abortion pill) and research that shows its efficacy in treating Cushing’s Syndrome, retrograde amnesia resulting from electroshock therapy, psychotic depression, and weight gain resulting from anti-psychotic medications.

So yes, Dr. Ford worked for Corcept Therapeutics and performed research on mifepristone. But none of it had to do with abortion.

Which just goes to show that a fool is born every minute, easy victims of extremists with a not-so-hidden agenda. Which is why Donald Trump is currently president.

Incessant Self-Righteous Ignorance

Thursday afternoon I got a phone call. I had forgotten it was the day before the anniversary of Roe v Wade, immersed as I was in my current writing project. Usually I hang up as soon as the pause-click-click tells me it’s a solicitor.

The woman said her name was Grace. This time I said “Hi, Grace.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine, how are you?”

“I’m calling on behalf of the Right to Life. We need to stop the killing of unborn babies.”

“Oh,” I said, instantly furious. “Well, you can stop right there. I’m Pro-Choice.”

I hung up.

Then I spent the rest of the evening thinking of what I should have said.

Oh really, Grace? Are you referring to an embryo or a fetus? Do know what an embryo looks like or that 67% of abortions occur before eight weeks? So in this image of a human embryo, is this the chicken or egg phase? When you have eggs for breakfast, are you eating a chicken?
So are you in favor of government forcing women to have children? Is that part of your ‘smaller government’ plan? Smaller except the part where the Fetus Police want to control what’s going on INSIDE YOUR BODY?
Gee, Grace, how exactly would you suggest the government keep women from terminating unwanted pregnancies—should they require them to check in monthly for a pregnancy test? Then if they’re pregnant, the government can keep them in a Safe-For-The-Unborn-Baby Compound until the baby is born, thereby preventing any ‘home remedy’ abortions. Women wouldn’t be allowed to leave, so taking care of other children in the home or providing meals/laundry service for their husbands would have to stop, not to mention finishing school or keeping a job.
So you’re in favor of forcing women to produce children they don’t want? Tell me, Grace—do you think those women will be good mothers to those children? Did you know that 70% of abortions are performed on women making 200% or less than the federal poverty line of $11,670? Did you know that this same group of women, without health insurance, are far less likely to have access to birth control? Did you know that children from families with annual incomes below $15,000 were over 22 times more likely to experience maltreatment than children from families whose income exceeded $30,000? Did you know these children were almost 56 times more likely to be educationally neglected and over 22 times more likely to be seriously injured? Did you know that childhood poverty is closely related to the later incidence of crime? Think of prisons, Grace, more and more prisons built to hide away children forced on poor families by the lack of access to birth control.
So Grace, since I’ve got you on the phone, maybe you can explain to me how you plan to stop abortion. Ending unwanted pregnancies has been going on for thousands of years. Maybe you didn’t know that. Maybe you thought that it was only after the passage of Roe v Wade that women started having abortions. Maybe you didn’t know that throughout the ages, women have decided who will be born—not men, not governments, not churches. Women are the ones responsible for selecting future generations. I bet everyone alive today came from a woman sometime in the past who terminated other pregnancies. Even you, Grace, probably have a grandmother back in the mists of time who decided to limit the number of children so she could take proper care of the ones she already had.

I’ve got some abortion statistics for you, Grace, showing women’s reasons for obtaining an abortion.

- 74% felt “having a baby would dramatically change my life” (which includes interrupting education, interfering with job and career, and/or concern over other children or dependents)
- 73% felt they “can’t afford a baby now” (due to various reasons such as being unmarried, being a student, inability to afford childcare or basic needs of life, etc.)
- 48% “don’t want to be a single mother or [were] having relationship problem[s]”
- 38% “have completed [their] childbearing”
- 32% were “not ready for a(nother) child”
- 25% “don’t want people to know I had sex or got pregnant”
- 22% “don’t feel mature enough to raise a(nother) child”
- 14% felt their “husband or partner wants me to have an abortion”
- 13% said there were “possible problems affecting the health of the fetus”
- 12% said there were “physical problems with my health”
- 6% felt their “parents want me to have an abortion”
- 1% said they were “a victim of rape”
- <0.5% “became pregnant as a result of incest”[1]

Shall we discuss some of this data? You’ll notice that almost all the reasons for abortion have to do with lack of birth control. What is your position regarding birth control? Do you agree that birth control and all related information regarding human reproduction should be taught by middle school level? Do you agree that birth control should be freely dispensed at middle school level to any student who requests it? How about churches dispensing free birth control so there aren’t so many precious Unborn Children being aborted?

Did you know that only 1.3% of pregnancies are aborted after 21 weeks and generally only for medical reasons?

≤6 wks	7 wks	8 wks	9 wks	10 wks	11 wks	12 wks	13 wks	14-15 wks	16-17 wks	18-20 wks	≥21 wks
37.2%	16.9%	12.8%	8.3%	5.5%	4.5%	3.5%	2.7%	3.3%	2.0%	1.9%	1.3%

Grace, did you know that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act mandated that all employers were required to provide 100% coverage for all birth control methods? The only exception came after religious groups refused to provide such coverage and took their argument to court where they won the right not to provide coverage.

Maybe you can explain that for me, Grace. If the horror is abortion, why is there such outrage about preventing unwanted pregnancies? Because that really doesn’t make sense.

I mean, yeah, I get it. I know the unspoken thought. People aren’t supposed to have sex unless they want a child because sex isn’t for enjoyment. Sex is a duty to produce another generation—period. Because the only reason we’re on earth is make more of us. So if you’re having sex for fun, to feel good, then you’re doing it wrong and God will smite you.

It’s true that in all this, it’s the woman who suffers. I’m guessing that has to do with eating a forbidden apple. That’s on Eve. So she’s the one who has to suffer, all part of God’s loving plan to make people do what He wants them to do, which is, evidently, to keep having babies.

By the way, Grace, I don’t know how old you are, but if you were around in 1987, that’s the year the world population reached five billion. Now picture where you were and what you were doing in 1987 and imagine twice as many people. Because that’s where we’ll be in another thirty years. Twice as many cars, twice as many houses or twice as many people living in one house, twice as many big cities. Twice as many people grabbing that last loaf of bread.

It’s true that much of that population growth won’t be in the U.S. or Europe. The growth will mostly occur in Africa, you know, that “shithole” place where people already born are starving and killing each other. And Asia, of course. Those are the places where humanitarian agencies bring in food and provide medical care, including birth control. So the moral stance of this ‘Christian’ administration is to cut off financial support for any humanitarian health care group that offers abortion counseling along with birth control. So if a woman wants to obtain birth control, she can’t get it because someone in that same facility is answering questions about or providing an abortion.

That’s so perfect. So genius. So in keeping with the goal of stopping abortion.

~~~

[1] _{Finer, Lawrence B. and Lori F. Frohwirth, Lindsay A. Dauphinee, Susheela Singh and Ann F. Moore. “Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitiative Perspectives.”Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, Guttmacher.org, September 2005.

White, Angela. “Cost of Giving Birth at the Hospital or at Home.” Blisstree.com, 21 September 2008.

“Why It Matters: Teen Pregnancy and Education.” The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, retrieved 19 May 2009.}

A Presidential Stain

Just like in every other aspect of his privileged yet miserable life, Donald Trump can see only the surface. His “shithole” description of nations like Haiti or those in Africa is apt if you only see the poverty and political chaos. A thoughtful educated person would see beyond that surface to the culpability for all that of white Europeans.

African tribes lived fruitful happy lives in their native state, just as did the natives of the Americas. But their natural progress was interrupted by those from more developed cultures who took them as slaves and exploited the resources indigenous to their lands. Since emerging from the dark ages, European countries have sailed around the world trying to enforce their religious beliefs while at the same time seeking slaves and resources to enrich their nations.

That’s how Haiti became a predominantly black society. When Spanish explorers arrived in 1492, they found a widespread population of the Taino people, a Native American tribe. Disease and genocide pretty well eradicated the Taino by 1625 when Spain’s grip on the island loosened in the face of French, English, and Dutch incursions. France seized control of Haiti and by 1700, France had established plantations for tobacco and cotton and imported African slaves to work the fields. Within the next century, the agricultural focus turned to sugar cane.[1]

Intimidating slaves with unimaginable brutalities didn’t require many whites. Accounts of horrific tortures are preserved in Haitian histories. The island’s populations suffered not only the brutalities of enslavement but also the irregular devastation of earthquakes and tidal waves. The current status of Haiti resulted from the most recent earthquake eight years ago with “a death toll estimated by the Haitian government at over 300,000, and by non-Haitian sources from 50,000 to 220,000.” The quake destroyed the country’s capital city and in the intervening years, hundreds of thousands have died of starvation.

Clone this story of Haiti into a long list of other “shithole” countries referenced by our Moron-in-Chief, with a few tweaks and details thrown in. No one in Africa asked for Europeans to come into their midst to enslave their people and steal their natural resources. Just as Native American tribes had enjoyed a sustainable lifestyle in the lands now called the United States, African tribes maintained long-held religious practices and lived in stable communities.

Facts about the exploitation of places now referred to as “Third World” are available to anyone with a modicum of curiosity and reason. In a world before Trump, knowledge of these facts by a person elected president would have been taken for granted. Such knowledge would inform attitudes as well as foreign policy, most especially our immigration policies as, allegedly, the most advanced nation on earth.

Slavery became common within much of Europe during the Dark Ages and it continued into the Middle Ages. The Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, British, Arabs and a number of West African kingdoms played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade, especially after 1600. David P. Forsythe wrote: “The fact remained that at the beginning of the nineteenth century an estimated three-quarters of all people alive were trapped in bondage against their will either in some form of slavery or serfdom.”[2]

The conquest of African nations occurred for two reasons: Christian zealotry convinced of its supremacy and the acquisition of wealth. Christian and Muslim missionaries still plague Africa, preaching sin and redemption to people who originally possessed sophisticated spiritual beliefs that had served them well for millennia. Social disruption and war resulted—my religion is the true one and infidels must die. Much of the warfare in Africa today is based on conflicts between Christians, Muslims, and tribal traditions. This serves several objectives—it keeps the local people at a disadvantage so they’re more easily exploited and it sells weapons of war, fattening the wallets of First World industrialists.

As for the direct acquisition of wealth, in the ages before modern machinery, slaves were the machines who tilled, planted, cultivated, and harvested the crops. Crops for food, crops for textiles like cotton, and crops for rope and other industrial materials enriched farmers. More slaves equaled more money. If advancing social conscience hadn’t eliminated slavery, likely the advance of the machines would have accomplished much of the same thing. (Or, arguably, the elimination of slavery helped push the development of machines.)

More maps in this series at http://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/colonial-exploration-and-conquest-in-africa-explore/

But slaves weren’t the only wealth captured from these “shithole” countries and exploited by European conquerors.[3] “Africa has a large quantity of natural resources, including diamonds, salt, gold, iron, cobalt, uranium, copper, bauxite, silver, petroleum and cocoa beans, but also woods and tropical fruits.”[4] Once European nations discovered these resources, they couldn’t keep their hands off. Using primarily enslaved indigenous people to perform the labor in mining these resources, European nations built their wealth on the backs of African people and their native wealth.

This smash-and-grab mentality continues today. Much of the chaos of Central and South American countries is a result of American agricultural interests controlling the vast majority of suitable cropland. Here in these winter-free zones, crops can grow year round and keep the supermarket shelves full even in January. The story of American exploitation and criminal interference among our neighbors to the south portends a timebomb waiting to go off in our faces.

Under previous presidents and as the United States has tried to become more than an imperialist power in the world, programs to help improve conditions in “shithole” countries have been an important objective. Unlike our current president, previous holders of that formerly-prestigious office have supported programs to help improve conditions for native peoples. Education, health care, and social reforms have been part of an outreach that included a proportioned immigration quota.

The denigration of nations and even an entire continent by racist labeling shows nothing about those places or their people compared to what it shows about the person uttering the denigration. What Trump’s profanity reveals is a man totally bereft of curiosity, respect, and knowledge about the world around him, a man whose only goal in life is self-aggrandizement. That his petulant narrow vision should spread such shame over our entire nation is a horror that can end none too soon.

~~~

This post is dedicated to Martin Luther King, a man who rose to the pinnacle of human achievement, unlike the man current soiling the White House.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Haiti

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_colonialism

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_resources_of_Africa

Toss It, I Say

Reblogging so I can read this again and again and again…

Lisa Stowe - The Story River Blog

Many years ago while driving down the freeway, my son pulled his sock off, opened the window, and held it out. In his mind, the wind would fill the sock like a balloon (which he’d lost out the window earlier) and slow the car. Instead, there’s a little white sock out there on the shoulder of a road, slowly decomposing.

I remembered that today, thinking about my writing process. So picture me speeding down the highway, ripping the following pages out of a rule book and sending them flying.

Writers must outline. Rip, gone.
Characters must be developed before you start the story (or writers must use character dossiers). Rip, really gone.
Keep your theme/premise in mind as you write. Also gone.
Know the motivations of your characters. That one went very fast.
Write every day. Rip, with laughter.
Write a thousand words a day. Rip, with hysterical laughter.

Why…

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