August 31, 2025

The trans communtiy needs their own Billy Jean King, by Hal M. Brown

 


I just watched this guy, Sebastion Gorka shown below, this lying trans obsessed sack of excrement, on CNN blaming trans youth for an inordinate number of school shootings:

When the host tried to interrupt him disputing his claims with real statistics he kept talking over him. This was yet another time I wished hosts could a flash yellow light before cutting off their microphone. 

Whenever the host tried to interject actual factual statistics he accused CNN of making up their own facts and having done this for 10 years.

In the next segement, which was supposed to be about RFK Jr., another Trump spokesmans went off once again on how trans people need to be dealt with. This had absolutely nothing to do with what everyone else was discussing on a panel what included him, a less adamant RFK Jr. supporter, and, if I recall correctly, one or two critics.

I am not going to go into depth about this particular show and specifically Sebastion Gorka. It should suffice to show his X page (below):

What I am both intrigued and disgusted by is how anti-trans has even become a “thing.” As both a retired psychotherapist and I hope a rational person it seems that this should be a non-issue. The only time the word “problem” should be in the same sentence as “trans people” is when addressing the problem of the lack of mental health services for providing support for this group. Not only this population, but for any other underserved vulnerable group for whom expert, which would mean non-judgmental, counseling would be beneficial. 

When I was on a diversity committee about 25 years ago, along with school administrators and counselors, pastors, and other therapists, it was to help address what was then a growing recognition of the problems gay, lesbian, and bisexual students were having coping with their emotions and to find ways to help them deal with prejudice and basically, to put it simplisitically, to feel good about themselves and their future. We didn’t even talk about trans. 

I’m not even sure that I and others knew that, as current estimates show, 3.3% of high school students identify as transgender. The term gay at the time encompassed lesbian, hence they was a “gay and straight” alliance group in our high school. AI tells me that “The term LGBTQ began to be used in the early 2000s, evolving from the earlier acronym LGBT, which was adopted in the 1990s. The initialism itself originated from LGB, which was first used in the mid-1980s.” 

There was no LGBTQ+ alphabet with a long list of acronyms like those listed and described on this 2021 website and others.

Political expediency has manadated that people who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual must only be mocked in private and that they may never be publicly demonized. There are just too many of them in the population that hold high postions in politics, business, the arts and entertainment.

There are gay and lesbian people working in the White House, notable among them Scott Bessent, Secretary of Treasury and Ric Grennell, the presidential envoy for special missions, but there are several more (see article).

Trump can play YMCA at his rallies and nobody blinks a bigoted eyelash, but citing financial constraints and scheduling conflicts, he canceled The Gay Men’s Chorus at The Kennedy Center Pride perfomance (see article) I am quite certain it was really because of one capital letter in this sentence:

Aside from believers in the Pray the Gay Away movement my sense is that many, perhaps the majority, of people accept that people are born with certain gender preferences or proclivities. The idea that one could become gay or lesbian due to some kind of overprotective mothering or, as Freud thought, a developmental arrest in early childhood, has been abandoned by experts in psychology and sexology.

While it SHOULD be abundantly clear to a thinking person that the same holds true for a trans person who knows from an early age that the gender of the body they were born with is not the gender that they really are.

The exact causes of being transgender are not fully understood. Current research suggests a combination of genetic, brain structure, and hormonal factors play a role. I’m not an expert, but I don’t think childhood experiences play a role as the anti-trans people want you to believe.

But what a wowza way to demonize a group for political gain than to decide trans people are just plain bad and shouldn’t exist. 

The anti-trans GOP don’t rage about people like tennis great Billie Jean King who is a prominent LGBTQ rights advocate. She publicly came out as a lesbian in 1981 after being outed.

I well remember when she played a well known male tennis player, Bobby Riggs, in the much hyped Battle of the Sexes (see Wikipedia).

But had she been someone born a man who became a woman, you damn well know the anti-trans movement among Republicans would have gained traction back in the eighties.

OUT Magazine recently listed 33 football players who came out as gay (here).

Nobody is raising hell saying they shouldn’t be allowed to play.

Just wait until we have one accomplished male to female trans athelete competing in and being a standout in a very popular woman’s sport and we’ll have to see what the anti-trans group has to say. So far all I have found is a list of 29 trans athletes who have won state, national or international titles in women’s sports. I have not heard of a single one of them. If you look down the list you will see the sporting events are not what you would call “major sports.” It is only a matter of time before someone emerges in a professional sport that large numbers of people pay attention to.

Then we may have a trans Billy Jean King. I hope it happens in my lifetime. I want to see a spokeswoman like King go up against the anti-trans bigots.

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August 30, 2025

Who among the Trump toadies believes the shite they spout in praise of Dear Leader? Really, if they're in their right minds, who among the people we see surrounding Trump just about every day believes he is as great as he says he is?

 

Substack (here) is the best place to read this. It is where I post updates.

Two things struck me watching the news last night. One was a video of the Trump Cabinet meeting a few days where Steve Witkoff, United States Special Envoy to the Middle East, pitched Trump as the “single finest candidate” ever for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Watch the 30 most embarrassing 30 seconds ever to come from the White House here.

Trump and everyone in the room wants us to belieive he deserves the honor awarded to people who have "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

One might wonder what Nobel would have thought about the army Turmp has been building under the guise of fighting crime and illegal immigration. He also might wonder about Trump trying to run roughshod over the fraternity between free nations by cozying up to authoritarian counties.

Witkoff made his Nobel Peace Prize statement with a straight face. There was no hint of irony. Nobody in the room showed any indication of cracking a smile, let alone falling on the floor beset with a sudden attack of the giggles.

I wonder how a Cabinet room full of people not beholden to Trump who also were sane would have reacted to the Nobel Peace Prize shite. Probably like shown below:

Then there was the clip of Stephen Miller praising RJK Jr. See 'Crazy': Trump aide Stephen Miller buried in mockery after wild claim about RFK Jr.

Last night in an update to my Substack I wrote:

If you think Epstein and Ukraine are the stories Trump, if he’s got a semblance of sensibility, ought to be fitfully fretting about in the wee hours of the morning it has to be what he’s going to do with RFK Jr. How can he, the man who’s never wrong and has never admitted he was wrong admit he was wrong about Kennedy? All I can come up with is something to do with Trump claming that nobody told him how bad having brain worms were.

I added these illustrations:

These are merely two examples of how Trump has surrounded himself with toadies.

If only these were real amphibians. At least most toads play an important beneficial role in the ecosystem (read article). They are more like the exception, cane toads which have toxic skins and a voracious appetites. They are now considered a pest and an invasive species in many of its introduced regions. You can chose your synonym for these human toadies (click below to enlarge): 

Here’s the question I pose to you:

Shit or shite, we say it the the first way and the Brits say it the second. Either way you say it, in reality what we see before us on a daily basis is an exaggerated version of the only dirty joke my father ever told me. 

He told it as if it really happened to him when he was in the Army. He set it up by explaining how the mess hall cook was not someone to trifle with because, as a master sergeant, he could order troops to do the most boring repetitious KP like peeling potatoes for weeks at a time. 

I knew about KP because I’d read Beetle Bailey comics.

Cookie (Cornelius) Jowls, was known for his questionable cooking and his lack of sanitary food preparation measures. He expected his soldiers to show that they thought his cooking was always fantastic and for them to praise every meal effusively.

In my father’s story one day the mess sergeant became suspicious that his soldiers were faking their compliments so he baked cakes, and instead of his usual chocolate icing from a can, he got his icing from another can, also known as the latrine.

When desert came, the soldiers could immediately smell what was what, but they knew they had to eat the cake. Each and every one of them did their best not to throw up and managed to swallow a few forkfuls. Then the only brave soldier in the group summoned the courage to exclaim “master sergeant, this cake tastes like shit!” 

It was like everyone in the mess hall held their breath for what seemed like an eternity, but it was only seconds before this brave soul succumbed and said…


…. check back on Substack later to see what news I have comments about.

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August 28, 2025

Madness and Mystery at the Medical Mausoleum and Museum of Morbidity, by Hal M. Brown

Tue, Aug 26 at 5:23 AM

 .



Above is the main page of HUFFPOST this morning (article). This is how the story about of what is happening at the CDC is being covered on CNN:

Trump wants to control everything he thinks he can. This ranges from the ridiculous like how the Oval Office looks to what the Gulf of Mexico is called, to serious matters like how the Federal Reserve sets rates, and extremely serious things like turning cities into zones occupied by gun toting soldiers, and how immigrants are treated. Somewhere in the middle put taking possession of Greenland and the Panama Canal. This may not seem that serious to us, but you bet leaders and residents there don’t take it lightly.

Why in the name of all things holy and unholy does he want to allow RFK Jr. to control the nation’s health?

RFK Jr. has his MAHA, which if you haven’t heard, means Make American Healthy Again. It’s even the name of a commission. (Read NPR article)

Above: President Trump, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Education Secretary Linda McMahon at an event announcing the release of a Make America Healthy Again Commission report in the East Room of the White House on May 22. Several other members of Trump's Cabinet who served on the commission, including EPA head Lee Zeldin, also attended.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

These fake experts are considering changing rules about who can get what vaccines to EPA regulations. 

Ah, tis a mystery wrapped in bacon with butter on top why Trump is allowing this to happen. It could be that he really revels in knowing he can create chaos whenever he wants to. 

If this attack on science based health and medicine plays out as it is likely to, people will die, hence the alliteration in my title. People’s remains will end up in mortuaries and mausoleums, and perhaps if America is restored to being a country free from MAGA and MAHA, the I hope that story will be honestly told in a Smithsonian Museum.

Did you know that The National Museum of Health and Medicine existed and that it is located in Silver Springs, MD? Here’s their website. It is run by The Department of Defense and is not a part of The Smithsonian. This is because it has collected and shared information about the history of medicine and American military medicine.

There is no Smithsonian museum specifically about medicine, although I recall seeing some exhibits about how medicine and dentistry was practiced in the colonial era when I visted DC years ago. If there were to be a health and medicine museum in the future, it buggers my imagination to think of what would be displayed after Trump and his medical madmen committed mayhem on American medical care. 

Putting “Make America Heathy Again” on a hat or sign doen’t make it real when “healthy” means a time before Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, or even before Dutch scientist and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) was the first to discover and describe microorganisms.

I wonder if RFK Jr. and Trump even know who the greats in medicine are? I read Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters when I was a teenager. 

Reading this made me want to become a doctor until I got to college and as a pre-med aspirant had to take a difficult science course. I chose to take zoology because I thought I’d learn a lot about animals. I did learn many things I didn’t know but the exams were so difficult I changed my major to psychology.

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