Tue, 29 Jul 2025 12:53:46 -0700WeeblySat, 26 Jul 2025 00:36:04 GMThttp://www.mariephd.com/politics/communicationsThere should be no doubt that humans should defined by their ability to communicate although whether this instinct would arise with our DNA would mean every other critter was born to communicate. If we can accept this then we should be able to accept the other. 

From our beginning our mother/parents needed us to tell them why we cried and then we became a system of experts who communicate.

Indeed we do so much communication it is likely we know nothing about who we do it, i guess this is why there are so many fine arts courses to teach you to write novels?; how much of your high school education was devoted to you learning how to write essays....?; did you learn the names for word types in English (nouns, verbs), foreign words when learning other languages in high school? all while communicating.

We do so much communicating it's almost the Inuit problem of the 90 words for kinds of snow but no single generic word meaning snow.

while all translation means an initial rosetta stone for some alien/dead language.]]>Sun, 08 Jun 2025 16:08:59 GMThttp://www.mariephd.com/politics/artMany years ago I wrote an essay for my sister who'd demanded I write an art history essay for the fine arts course she taking. 

I wrote the essay because I was mainly curious about what I'd learn while I wrote it besides I love art. Anyway this was back in the 80s so it is hard to know how much of what I wrote was original. You see I mostly remember using my parents supermarket bought encyclopedia because my sister didn’t supply me with any reference material. I am certain the teacher knew my sister didn’t write the essay because it was way too intelligent and he asked her about the references, I used the Funk and Wagnall encyclopedia because I could get my hands on it easily.

What I decided in the course of writing the essay was that art needed to redefine itself with the invention of the camera. And this is the point of this blog entry, did I come up with this idea initially? Because although I used reference materials I definitely didn't read this idea in there. 

One of the main purposes of art up to the beginning of the 1800s was to record the images of events, for example. And people, especially the rich, famous and powerful.

Art prior to the invention of the camera was full of symbolism, and used to promote causes, namely paintings were fostered by religious institutions and the symbolism may have been no more than the placement of angels or using doves.

So it was no stretch to move beyond classical art to modern art being rich in symbolism and creativity.
Just as statues of justice are often mostly topless to make the legal process sexy and liberty strides nipple-less, at least now.

While the first ‘photograph’ (and I use the description of ‘photograph’ lightly) was taken in 1826, it took about two centuries, an industrial revolution and for society to completely change itself while the evolution of cameras, film and the process of developing it to was being perfected. Fortunately the Industrial Revolution would change so much of society that photography and its equipment would make it accessible and available to the masses.
while scientists experimented with cameras and chemistry, artists started experimenting with paint. John  Constable pioneered impressionism around 1810, but the school wasn't founded until about 1860.'

Artists of any kind of skill depend on the philosophy of the artist and the artists perspective.
During this period art started taking different turns. Impressionism is the first major leap.

While cameras make years of practicing and perfecting artistic skills somewhat redundant, many artists nevertheless love a challenge whether it is the perfecting of painting glass as the dutch masters tried with their still life paintings, photo realism, or the magical realism of the surrealist Salvadore Dali. 

If you want me to write you an essay, please write a comment below and we can discuss cost and whether I am curious about whatever you want your essay to be about.
]]>Sun, 11 May 2025 04:56:17 GMThttp://www.mariephd.com/politics/how-many-times-do-women-blame-themselves-for-what-happens-to-womenEveryone has been blaming women forever for what happens to them. You know: what was she wearing and how drunk was she? But more insidious: why couldn’t she detect with her inbuilt spider-sense that he was planning to rape her? But not so much with the murder. If she is murdered even the police tend to take it seriously.

I am watching an episode of evil lives here and this man gas-lit his niece into thinking she would go to prison if she told anyone of his nighttime activities that he perpetrated upon her.

She told her aunt and the aunt said, “I don’t believe you”

How many girls, teenage-women, and women in-general have been told this?

Most of us just give up.

Or they turn to a bottle like Delia Derbyshire did, or, or fortunately for Abigail Breslin we’ve started believing women.

To be honest I am not sure about Delia Derbyshire or Sophie Nyweide but it was strongly implied for Nyweide, but there are plenty of others. Like Susan Janet Ballion and the victims of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby to name just two, or Timothy Hutton. And the guy who ended Shirley Temple’s career in movies because she laughed at Arthur Freed after he exposed himself to her. But it didn’t impact her new career as a foreign diplomat.

But then when a boy is sexually assaulted it is portrayed as a good reason to destroy our society, think of Mr Robot.

Of course a great many boys have been sexually assaulted yet do not bring down civilization as we know it.

Fortunately the only thing women tend to do and for that matter boys do when sexually assaulted is make music and/or possibly slip into the bottom of a bottle.

]]>Mon, 07 Apr 2025 19:35:58 GMThttp://www.mariephd.com/politics/not-even-cheap-labourI’ve been watching HBO’s The Pitt which really teaches us we all need each other. We do have systems of people that slowly adds new people into their systems, and expels people who might disrupt the system (Dr Langdon and Dr Santos from the Pitt) and especially those who that system processes, or, the people applied to the system (aka patients).

We see the slow mixing of people into the system something like those wonderful images produced by Mandelbrot sets from chaos theory, or like paisleys slowly swirling about a whirlwind’s vortex (think dust devils, tiny or mini funnel clouds, and if you still don’t see what I am thinking, tornados or even cyclones as violent extremes) but this is also how the director of the Pitt wants us to see the show.

I digress.

You get the impression that these systems exist in isolation, but they don’t. People in the system go home after their shift and mix with their family, mix with others on transit systems, go to stores, restaurants and other places for leisure.

Meanwhile the Pitt keeps harking back to the Covid pandemic, which taught us how incredibly close/connected all people on this planet are to each other.

Yet we think it is somehow easy to throw people away when all they might want is a better life, like we don’t need you because we have to pay them something?

There is an overwhelming desire by American businesses not to pay American workers. So much so Americans fought a civil war so some could buy people so they wouldn’t have to pay them for their labor.


And because of this it opens up opportunities for illegal immigrants, which must be biting American businesses now with the republican desire to remove all non-Americans from the US taking jobs that citizens don’t want.

And too often we oblige. Women do the majority of the housework for free.

This also informs Americans approach to restaurants, most other countries have wait staff paid without the need to be tipped. And then Americans who eat at restaurants are made to feel guilty for not tipping. Business owners benefit from that guilt. Similarly we are guilted into donating money to the rehabilitation of soldiers when that should necessarily be the governments responsibility. I honor what service people do for us, but they go to war on behalf of the government mainly for political reasons so our taxes that pay for the war should help the soldiers recover from war.

One of the themes of the Pitt is the boy who made a list. You have to wonder what’d happen to a girl or a black kid if they made such a list. We know if a girl got pregnant in many states, too bad, her life is fucked, no matter how much screaming she might do. Perhaps it is time we brought back conscription? This kid in the Pitt can’t even be civil, and all they want is this kid speak to a professional. No doubt we need to do research on how to get especially at-risk boys to talk to professionals especially now when it is deemed “so cool” to let gun manufacturers  make as much money as they like.

The right of corporations to make money is probably how the constitution should be written. But the founding fathers had a revolution based on how much they hated corporations. I wonder how the founding fathers would feel about modern America.

Hospitals and governments cannot and should not be run like a business. Businesses must make money to survive, governments do not and hospitals should not.
]]>Mon, 10 Mar 2025 14:16:40 GMThttp://www.mariephd.com/politics/transgenderIt’s kind laughable that boys become female just so they can use women’s bathrooms when all a boy needs to do is go to the internet to perv on as many naked women a boy may ever want to see and given that I am a woman and have been using women's bathrooms all my life have yet to see another naked female in a bathroom.

So Trump has banned transgender girls from joining high school sports teams so these ‘boys’ won’t be able to perv on female team mates. I wonder how many people this has hurt? Probably a handful or two. But this is the kind of issue Trump might use to hide behind to obscure what he’s really doing.

I remember Obama did similar when he was in office. When a wedge issue was highlighted Obama covertly signed some very unpopular bill into law. One case, I think it was when ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ was repealed Obama signed the Monsanto protection act into law. I can only assume Trump is trying to deflect attention from whatever Elon Musk is doing or some other thing. Who knows? The whole of Washington DC has been turned into the worst kind of swamp, especially now.

In ancient Greece hermaphrodites were considered socially elite, according to my education at a very nice liberal high school. Unfortunately Google isn’t very forthcoming with references to this, or perhaps Trump made Google erase those references?
We were taught all about transgender, hermaphrodites and while I thought about my gender at the time I decided I was good with being a female. Still I am glad they decided to give me the opportunity to think about it. I was one of those odd girls who liked studying science and math. I didn’t play with dolls much as a kid, I’d done jigsaws and built things with blocks. Now I think this is the stuff of feminism where there should be very few gendered professions, like girls being nurses and boys being doctors for instance.

And girls had always worked with computers and it wasn’t until computers became ubiquitous that males took over the role of working with them. For me it’s a social/feminist thing, which role goes to which gender. There is no reason why women should’ve been chased out of computer science. Imo it was a good thing NASA had a woman in charge when they wrote the code for Apollo 11, as opposed to telling the astronauts onboard, turn it off and on again and cross your fingers that it’ll clear all those memory leaks.

Meanwhile the US is the only country doing this very bizarre experiment where the government is being dismantled from the inside. Russia and China are leaving their governments completely intact and even building them. 

So why is the US doing this bizarre experiment that’d leave former presidents even and especially republican spinning in their graves? I know republicans are impervious to logic errors, but Republicans seem quite capable of building government. W added homeland security, and Trump added US space force.

In my opinion it’s because the rich want to no longer pay tax, thus the gung-ho reduction in government size.

And we love how a republican based scotus put a small piece of government inside of every woman’s uterus. Which works purely based on society being big on policing women. If it was on men it’d be much more unlikely abortions would be monitored so hard.

But in a former political group I was a member of, we discussed when governments were dismantled such as in Iraq and Afghanistan but they did not transform into the libertarian dreamland libertarians all dreamed they’d be (the dreamland is exactly like our world with a liberal govt that is totally invisible, or tax free) but rather how both those societies descended into chaos.

It’s kind of amazing how countries slip in and out of news popularity, when was the last time the news covered Iraq or Afghanistan? Iraq is not currently safe to visit and 30% of the population lives in poverty. Iraq only became more unsafe with the recent Israeli war.

And Afghanistan has continued to remain unstable since Russia destroyed its government.  Given how long it has been since the 80s, and how much time the US were in there and achieved nothing regarding establishing any kind of modern govt.

I have now seen websites devoted to telling the us how many times govt has been restored and it really is nonsense.

Nevertheless most of these websites were places like the Cato institute and the heritage foundation. And the only people complaining about a lack of faith in govt are republicans. Yet another dreamed up excuse to dissolve government so the very rich can save a few pennies on their tax.

Those few pennies rich people will save on tax will dissolve because the rich may have to employ their own security, spend more on meds because they will get sick from food poisoning the govt normally would’ve tested but the testing will have to stop. I know libertarians who have told me they don’t care in the testing goes, but I do not want to have test all my food for all that can go wrong with it, do you? How many times will you test for how much lead, radioactive and other harmful substances like certain kinds of bacteria… that places like NIST test for but NIST will cease to exist once DOGE and Musk are done destroying govt.

The reality is that the govt provides the environment that gives money its value. It provides the impetus to make money flow through society. It employs people to ensure that those people go onto spend the money they earn which also stimulates the economy. Then when things go crazy which they seem to do often under republican presidents, the govt then sends out stimulus checks so regular people get a few crumbs after billionaires have stolen however much money from the rest of us (I am specifically talking about under the W administration) but Trump also sent out stimulus checks during the covid-19 lockdown.

Anyway if the left is to ever take office again, they need a plan, kind of like the plan that has evidently been behind the 'republican' plan. Whoever masterminded this plan has been course correcting realizing they need the scotus, funding market research that will unite people against wedge issues like transpeople, women, abortion, illegal’ immigrants, make sure people who are likely to vote democrat are removed from the electoral rolls and to disenfranchise black people, immigrants, hispanics… This has included checks and measures to keep corporate America in power.

And no doubt they have a plan to keep their current advantage.

We also need a plan to maintain everyone’s rights including women’s, but we need a plan to get ordinary Americans healthcare, we need a plan to protect our democracy including restoring peoples right to vote, fixing the gerrymandering that allowed states to be taken over by republicans and giving Haiti and Washington dc statehood.

]]>Wed, 08 Jan 2025 16:25:17 GMThttp://www.mariephd.com/politics/january-08th-2025Whenever America has been at its greatest America was freer. Whenever America is at its weakest it was keeping more and more people under control. During the cold war, we didn't have a patriot act, for example.

Controlling others whether it is their time, body, future, using those people as cash cows, aka enslaving people (and the modern day equivalent is by using debt or their bodies (sex)). Either way, historically or modern day slavery is all about using the slave as a resource and thus to make money from them.

Freedom seems very much to be the provenance of allowing people to be people, accepting people for themselves and allowing them to follow their own beliefs, dreams or agenda. By all means punish people when they mess up, but not before.

The people who aspired to be the US country’s leaders were honorable people who had the best interests of the people who voted for them at heart. Who would never do anything to shame the office that they sought to hold.
Allowing the separation of church and state and treating all people as equals, where all people are of equal value and their time being of equal value to themselves and to those who would employ them for their skills and their time.

All people must have a right to self determination, and be allowed to determine their own destiny within the limits of their ability.

The key to all of this was excellent education so people could be best informed, knowing how to sort junk information from the rest of the information people are/were bombarded with.

Government must follow the dictates of scientific method rather than individuals beliefs. Because people just don’t know everything yet thus imposing beliefs on another is just another form of slavery and ultimately ignorance.

America has been down dark roads before and recovered, and no doubt it will continue to do so. And if not a new dominate force will come to power as in the past, and will do something else, more freeing to it’s people.

Freedom for the people is the best way to ensure the longevity of a regime. We’ve seen this with the British empire and now the US but I rather suspect that this current trend in conservatism will end up destroying itself as it always does but who knows.]]>Sun, 01 Dec 2024 16:23:44 GMThttp://www.mariephd.com/politics/time8720751So by now you probably are aware Harris lost the presidency, and the very next day the Facebook memes came out that this what it’s like to be a black woman in America, you lose your job to a completely incompetent white guy. This annoyed me because this is what happened to Hillary Clinton too. My reply to the thread was: this is what it’s like to be a woman (in most of the world).

But curiously enough it was my husband who found the most interesting article on why Harris lost. Google reported that people searched on ‘did Biden drop out?’ on the day of the election.

My husband thought: why would you just go vote for whoever... without studying who or what you are voting for.

This headline called these people who googled whether Biden dropped out, boneheaded.

But I call it the ultimate privilege. If you have kids, work several jobs to keep food on the table, prepare food, clean, pay rent, keep other bills paid, shop the best deals, you don’t have time to be studying politics. And perhaps studying for some kind of evening class... If you were planning to vote the best you might hope for is to remember to vote for Joe Biden...

Can you also spot another reason for banning abortion?

In much of the world women are paid to have children, in the US it is just demanded of them and women must lay down their lives. We need to commemorate women who have lost their lives because fetuses are deemed more important than their mother’s lives. I know women never get paid to have children in the US and therefore it is considered valueless work nevertheless we commemorate the men who lose their lives in war, why shouldn’t we commemorate women who lose their lives to fetuses, or access to healthcare because republicans don’t want you to get healthcare?

The ultimate privilege is time. It is with our time we can figure out what is going on in the bigger world to thus inform our choice of activism. Without spare time there can be no activism. And the ultimate way to keeping those with less power than you from gaining power is to monopolize more and more of their time. Money may be time but time is all we truly have in the end.
]]>Sat, 02 Nov 2024 16:22:02 GMThttp://www.mariephd.com/politics/being-coolI was wondering how people define being ‘cool’. And people responded with things like: it’s confidence. Perhaps ‘cool’ may even be considered ‘charisma’.

Then how do you tell people who think they are cool but really aren’t. Like ‘being cool’ was something objective but of course it is not. Indeed ‘cool’ can only ever be subjective.

What I might consider to be cool may or may not be what you consider to be cool. Depending on what you consider cool, if you thought I was cool and then if I say something you consider uncool it may flip your opinion of my level of ‘coolness’.

Now I feel like I am describing ’narcissistic personality disorder’. Because if you are in favor then you are definitely ‘cool’. And if you fall out of favor then you may fall completely out and are definitely ‘uncool’. Because they are ‘believing they should associate only with those they see as worthy.’

I realized recently that ‘cool’ can be very important to some people and they can be convinced to do awful things to people who they consider not to be sufficiently ‘cool’ enough and rather than just not associating with those deemed unworthy (aka uncool) are even eligible to be bullied, ignored or even murdered? We see this especially amongst teenagers.

It can be devastating to be considered unworthy, uncool, not-one-of-us… When if you are told immigrants are causing all your problems then how do you deal with those immigrants, do you go there and destroy the lives of their lives and the lives of those loved ones?

Do you even consider whether those people are causing the problems you are told they are? Do you whether they are human? There are people of all kinds who are good or bad, but how do you know? Let alone whether they are cool, unworthy, not-one-of-us, doing interesting things that may or may not benefit you directly.

I worry about the economy once we throw away all the people who we’ve decided aren’t our kind of people, who will pick our fruit, who will slaughter our pigs for our bacon, who will kill the chickens for our McNuggets? Who will gather the trash on the side of the road, and who will put out our wild fires?

Will it be you who has decided they are not worthy, uncool, no-one-of-us? I doubt it.

And I normally dislike wikipedia because pretty much anyone can go in there are write whatever they like but before you believe anything Donald Trump says read this entry.

However before you throw out that ‘illegal’ immigrant, why would they be committing crimes? Presumably they want to be here because it’s better than wherever they came from otherwise why be here rather than there? And in America, I find this astonishing I need to inform people of this but you cannot be eligible for any kind of benefit from the government without proving you are eligible, with proof of who you are, proof of citizenship, or at a minimum, a green card holder and even that may not be even enough, as a requirement of eligibility. No illegal immigrants are not living off your tax money.

]]>Wed, 02 Oct 2024 17:18:59 GMThttp://www.mariephd.com/politics/october-02nd-2024tI was reading about a woman in France who her husband had been using date rape drugs on her and had her repeatedly raped for decades. And all these French women are protesting. One held up a sign saying ‘not all men, but always a man’, yes, that, it always seems so exhausting to have to agree, after all these years of writing this blog.

And I definitely approve the woman’s decision about the courtroom being open. That is so brave of her because woman have been told for way way too long to carry the shame of their abuse, because we are told we are to blame for what happens to us. But it is not our fault. Men do this to us.

Men have benefited far too long from the ‘hidden in the dark of the night’, ‘behind closed doors’, ‘if no one sees it never happened.’ Because the women it happened to just don’t count, no one will believe them and I’ve written about this before and it’s still true.

But as I read this story kept quiet in the US probably we don’t want to remind men of their shameful behavior in the midst of an election between a competent woman and probably one of the most shameful men to walk the planet (how on earth could this election even be close?) because how many men have done these awful things? It has happened to me and I know many men have given women all kinds of date are drugs to allow men to perform their heinous actions on women.

Anyway as I read this I realize I keep reading the Guardian and while I approve of their editorial stance and their journalism I think I should subscribe but I feel like a cash cow for all the stuff on the internet already. From the subscription to connect my devices to the internet, the equipment I need to access the internet, my subscriptions to the various pay-walled content, and then apple and google try to serve up our free weeks subscription to whatever... so then they too can benefit from my cash cow status.

And they wonder why there is so much poverty in the US? Back in the 80s there was no internet. Technology was nothing more than the size of your TV and its remote control. There was also entertainment systems but you could get by with a cheap transistor radio or you could go all in on a high end music system.

So if you laugh at someone for their poverty, remember most people are only a single pay check from losing their home let alone their lifestyle.
]]>Sun, 01 Sep 2024 22:45:36 GMThttp://www.mariephd.com/politics/the-white-princessOne of my favorite shows on Starz is ‘the white princess’.


I love how they describe it as women waging war for power.

I get this, if you read history from this time you get the impression that women just did not exist, beyond giving birth and who married each of the men. Women appear to be placeholders for real people (aka men) and had no ability to act, pawns in a much larger scheme. There is no doubt these women wielded a lot of soft power. They could whisper into the ears of the men who held the power, they could suggest, hint, and as women I knew used to say: kiss her king across the chess board. The problem with soft power is that it requires the men do as she wants. As we see in ‘the white princess’ the rise and fall of the Queen mothers soft power over those with real power, in this case the king. In the end the king not only has thrown her out of ‘her’ rooms, but out of his life, when he literally throws her out. The King’s wife, aka the Queen (Lizzy), taking all the power his mother once had and then holding all that power herself.

Lizzie does not realize how powerless she is, unlike her mother who does realize, when Lizzy visits her mother. Her mother is surprised by her daughter’s visit and when Lizzie returns ‘home’ is met by the king who tells her she wouldn’t have been able to go visit her mother if he didn’t allow it.

But there were women who held their own power, for instance in the Duchess of Normandy and Isabella I of Castile as portrayed in 'the white princess'. These women appeared to have governed in their own right in this version of history (whether they did in historical reality is another thing entirely).

And while I love that they are presenting us with a tragedy, the true tragedy is based on a modern perspective, that the King’s mother, indirectly, killed ‘the children’. This is only true from a modern perspective. No one at the time would’ve considered a person's age in anyway important.

The other tragedy is: what people will do for power. And how blind people can become based on that lust. They will use whoever they can to grasp what power they can, aka the dowager queen uses her daughter to keep her hand as close as possible to that power, convincing her daughter to keep her pregnancy, marries Henry VII, and becomes queen. This is also unlikely given that any child conceived out of wedlock would not be a legitimate heir to the throne. And given the King’s claims being weak already it seems twice as likely he’d be extremely careful about his eldest son’s claims.

Then there are the justifications people make for their actions “it is God’s will” (Margaret Beaufort and Prince Richard). And how they will use anyone or kill even those they love for power (Margaret Beaufort (Michelle Fairley) kills Jasper Tudor (Vincent Regan)), urging her (dowager queen Elizabeth Woodville, Essie Davis) Lizzie to marry Henry VII, and not abort their baby. And indeed the dowager queen’s joy at the plague ravaging England. She didn’t care about the people of England who she eagerly wanted power over. (Compare this with Trump’s lust to win the 2020 election, when Americans were dying from COVID. He did not care if Americans were dying, he just wanted to hang on to the presidency whether it was for the immunity from legal action or to continue using us to bankroll him or both?)

And I get th'e impression that this meant to be contrasted with what people will do for love. Lizzie (Jody Comer) makes it very clear she loves her son and his siblings and then her husband. We get the hate/love transition so common in romances, because how else can we possibly know they truly love each other? (Sic) invented even before Jane Austen and been used ever since in all romances.

Finally the show demonstrates what is good governance, versus the paranoia of losing power. Do you help your subjects as Lizzy does during the plague? Or do you constantly seek to punish people who might seek whatever power you have away from you as the King’s mother does, 'and you must punish her, severely', 'you must come down hard'...

But doing research on this period in history I learned one thing, women in this era did not wear underpants so they were all running or walking around commando! And in case you are wondering...


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