The only person at Baby Blue who lies more than Simps is that vapid Brit transplant.  What they don't know about music could fill a university library.   

Update:  Gee, imagine that.  I know more about the punk music scene I hate than Mr. Rock 'n Roll and her Kewl Britanianess put together. But, then, I guess I understood what they were saying and I knew neo-Nazism when I saw it. 

Update 2:  Stupy is calling the Anti Defamation League a bunch of liars for documenting that the punk, um, "aesthetic" was especially useful to neo-Nazis, racists, skin-heads, etc.   Only he's saying I'm a liar for agreeing with their research.   Punk was a pathetic, violent, hate filled attempt to come up with some kind of new thing based on the most banal of musical materials geared to appeal to those who were attention deficient due to either stupidity or alcohol and other drug use.  It was sexist, to start with, and its sub-lowest common denominator substance and, most of all, its violence was bound to appeal to stupid men with dysfunctional sexuality and lots of anger.   It's no shock that neo-Nazism, which shares so much if its, um, "aesthetic" bases would find it useful and, as the ADL said, profitable. 

I could show you dozens and dozens of websites that mix punk with overt Nazism, "redneck," white-supremacy, horrific sexism and, dear, Simps, overt and vicious antisemitism, none of which have a shred of "Christian" content.  As the ADL said, if you had read the link, some of the neo-Nazi punk is overtly anti-Christian.  Some of the worst I've seen are gay porn tumblr blogs.  Needless to say, none of it is compatible with the Gospel of Jesus, any of the words or actions in the Epistles or Acts or even that last book that got tacked onto the collection, the Apocalypse.   They're more likely to play the role of the anti-Christ than anything.  

Simps, you just hate Christians and resent their existence and like most other online atheists you'll try to pin anything on them you can no matter what lie that takes.  Admit it, you're an ignorant bigot who just adopted the lies of previous generations of atheist snobs and, like all bigots, will not look at anything that contradicts your ancient prejudices. 

I nailed the connection between Darwinism and Nazism in the words of Darwin, his closest friends and followers, his own children, two generations of German Darwinists up to and including the very authors that Hitler was reading as he was writing Mein Kampf.  I further noted the overt Darwinism of the violent American neo-Nazi atheist William Pierce in his own words and the words of his followers.  That is a proven point, no appeal to the ignorance of your fellow bigots will change that.  Those things they said are there for anyone who is honest to read.  The big lie that Darwinism and Nazism have nothing to do with each other won't stand reading the evidence. 

Update 3:  Stupid Steve is pretending that none of what the ADL documented at the link above is there.  Just like he pretends what Darwin, Galton,  Haeckel, Pearson,  Leonard Darwin, Francis Darwin,  Paul Popenoe, Oliver Wendell Holmes jr., Baur-Fisher-Lenz, Rudoph Hess and William Pierce said isn't there to be read by anyone who cares to do the work of reading it.  It's funny how much stuff those evidence-based materialists have to ignore the existence of to maintain their fantasy life of their so-called minds.  As I said, it was fact-checking their claims that led me to make that extensive study of the primary material linking Darwinism to the genocides of the Nazis and others as well as the continuing neo-Nazis as found on so many tumblr porn blogs. 

Update 4:  ql can jump in a lake as far as I'm concerned.  All of the Eschatots can.   

Saturday Night Radio Drama Late Show - More of Gordon Pengilly's Bailey's Way

The Wanderer 

Dallas Calgary 

One of the good things about listening to a lot of these radio dramas is that you hear playwrights you're unlikely to have encountered before.   I like this series enough that I've ordered some of Gordon Pengilly's work on inter-library loan.   I wish I could hear some of his other radio plays, he has written for radio and been produced quite a bit.  I've looked for the past few weeks and other than this series, I can't find anything online.  Hopefully that will change.  

Saturday Night Radio Drama - The Wooden Overcoat

The Wooden Overcoat

This isn't something I'd usually post because it's an adaptation, but I found a website that has a huge collection of radio dramas that David Tennant was in.  I like David Tennant, even if I hated the Hamlet he was in. 

A Rant

So, this is the day, after years and years of not saying anything, I let loose in my hatred of tattoos.   It was to one of my great nephews who I hired to do some work, who has a new child and a low income but who also has new tattoos every time I see him.   His idiot girlfriend likes them. 

I absolutely despise the fad for tattoos, absolutely hate it.  I see it as a really bad sign that young people have been sold the idea that their bodies aren't good enough as God made them and they need some creepy ink injector to improve them.  I guess it was seeing an iron cross on his arm that did it.  The young fool believed it was in Irish cross.  I should have asked if he had any 4-leaf clovers he believed were shamrocks.  And it's in one of those colors that I understand won't come off with a laser.  If I were sleazy I'd invest in tattoo removal businesses, I can imagine it's going to be a profitable field in the near future. 

This country has gone to hell under the crap that pop culture is.  I remember when punk started in the late 1970s that I figured it would be something to be endured till it passed but it's only gotten worse and worse.   I had it tagged as covert fascism and I don't see any reason to suspect I was wrong.

I'm old.  I'm not going to hold back.  

Carla Bley Trio - Wildlife

Horns/ Paws Without Claws / Sex With Birds


Carla Bley, composer, piano
Steve Swallow, bass
Andy Sheppard, saxophone

I love this suite.  Absolutely love it.  I especially love the second section.  Lead sheet. 

Update:  Another of my absolute favorite Carla Bley compositions,  

Doctor

Gary Burton,vibes
Pat Metheney, 12 string
I think it's the quintet they recorded an album of Carla Bley pieces with in the mid-1970s but it was my brother's record and I'll have to check it against the recording.  I should see if it's available on CD.

Dušan Bogdanović - Toccata for guitar

Dusan Bogdanovic, guitar

I'm still getting snark about the Balkan heritage of Dušan Bogdanović, which I don't get at all.  Why should a Balkan composer not incorporate any musical substance they want to in their music?   It's not as if Gershwin isn't praised for doing that. even borrowing from Black Americans, or Prokofiev for borrowing from Jewish Klezmorim.   And the dolts who are snarking are so tin-eared that they don't get past the idea of that to hear that his music for guitar is, truly, original and pioneering.

I don't know.  Maybe it's because I've read several Balkan authors in Esperanto, untranslated.  I keep going back to the Croatian author Spomenka Štimec's Kroata Milita Noktlibro in thinking about Bogdanović music.

Speaking of Gershwin, here's Bogdanović's Blues

Denis Azabagić

I'll bet Gershwin would have liked it.

The Lunacy of Lefty Play-time Purity In The Face Of The Prospect Of A President Trump

Joel Bleifuss, the long time editor and publisher, apparently for life,  of In These Times has a short piece up in which he whines about some journalists pointing out that in all of the hullabaloo over Hillary Clinton's period of Secretary of State, forgotten seems to be that there is no evidence she ever did anything improper and certainly nothing illegal.   He names several, Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum and takes a swipe at Sidney Bluementhal accusing the others of wishing to join him, the former In These Times correspondent in Boston, in the halls of power.   It's an especially stupid accusation, especially to make it against Kevin Drum, but it is a small hint to the method of this kind of lefty effort.  I will quote a passage from Drum because it makes the real point that Bleifuss takes exception to:

So now we have some more emails related to Hillary Clinton, and what have we learned? The crown prince of Bahrain wanted to meet with the Secretary of State, and in addition to making a request through normal channels he also talked to someone at the Clinton Foundation, who then called Huma Abedin. The meeting took place, which is entirely unexceptional since meeting with people like this is the Secretary of State's job. There's no indication that the extra push by the Foundation had any particular effect.

Another time, someone at the Foundation called Abedin to see if she could expedite a visa. She said this made her nervous, and the Foundation guy backed off.

On another occasion, a lobbyist who had formerly been a Democratic staffer asked for a meeting with her client, a coal company executive. Abedin blew her off.

We might yet find a smoking gun in all these emails. But so far, the trend is clear: lots of people talked to Huma Abedin to try to set up meetings with Hillary Clinton. Generally speaking, Abedin treated them politely but told them to get lost. That's about it.

If some of these efforts had succeeded, that would hardly be noteworthy. It's the kind of thing that happens all the time. What's really noteworthy about the most recent email releases is that they demonstrate a surprisingly high level of integrity from Hillary Clinton's shop at Foggy Bottom. Huma Abedin was tasked with running interference on favor seekers, and she seems to have done exactly that. There's no evidence at all that being a donor to the Clinton Foundation helped anyone out.

The real point is that what Hillary Clinton's office was doing was the kind of thing that the Secretary of State and her office do all the time.  While you might criticize someone at the Clinton Foundation for making an approach to Huma Abedin, there is no evidence that even that had any undue influence on the actions of Hillary Clinton or her office while she was Secretary of State.  As Kevin Drum asks,

So tell me again what the issue is here?

To which Bleifuss apparently holds, he doesn't have to find an issue, using the ever vague and ever flexible and creative standard of "an appearance of a conflict of interest" and he, by virtue of his claim as a journalist, apparently doesn't even have to find an interest to be conflicted, he can just assert one exists.

The issue here is not whether we can find a smoking gun establishing a quid pro quo exchange. Smart operators (like Gulf State autocrats and their contacts in the State Department) don’t produce paper trails of receipts or memoranda confirming transactional corruption. For this reason, principled public officials avoid the mere “appearance of impropriety” lest they expose themselves to reasonable inferences of corruption. This is a tenet that any judge who has recused herself from a case understands—and with which any graduate of Yale Law School is familiar.

However, in order for there to be a quid pro quo, you have to establish that a quid and a quo, or even one of them, exists.   You need that much before you can construct an interest to appear to be conflicted over.   His straw grasping would seem to leave out a far more important reason for the Secretary of State to have contact with Gulf State autocrats.

What clear-eyed observer would not deny that the U.S. failure to strongly condemn Bahrain’s oppression of its Shia majority might somehow be related to the warm rapport between the Bahrainian monarchy and American elites—ties nurtured through many relationships, including, perhaps, through Crown Prince Salman’s contributions to the Clinton Global Initiative?

A clear-eyed observer would look at what happened under Hillary Clinton's leadership of the State Department and the encouragement of the Bahrain government to end the oppression of the Shia population.  You can google her statement on the release of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) report:

Our countries have many shared, strategic interests and a relationship that includes decades of working together to defend regional security. In this context, it is essential for Bahrainis themselves to resolve the issues identified in the report and move forward in a way that promotes reform, reconciliation, and stability.

We are deeply concerned about the abuses identified in the report, and urge the Government and all elements of Bahraini society to address them in a prompt and systematic manner. The Government of Bahrain has committed to establish a follow-on committee to implement the report’s recommendations, and we urge full and expeditious implementation of these recommendations.

It is noteworthy that the government of Bahrain commissioned the inquiry.  What would Bleifuss suggest?  That the American Secretary of State refuse to speak to the government?  While, as opposed to the impotent fire breathing of lefty magazine scribblage, the diplomatic language sounds weak, that's the language they deal in.  Something more in the I.T.T. style would be a diplomatic excuse to drop discussion of the issue.  Also lost would seem to be the reality that an American Secretary of State has very limited influence to wield over a very rich government half-way across the world.

It’s an economy of power that is corrupt … and that corrupts. But systems can be changed. When In These Times was founded 40 years ago, we pledged to confront the “political taboo” of corporate capitalism.

And I'm sure it feels very satisfying to be Mr. Bleifuss when they make their confrontation, a confrontation that might be read, literally, by a few thousand, or more likely hundred people who don't exercise any influence.  I doubt much happens when The Nation does that, or Mother Jones.   That satisfaction is an entity in the politics of the imagination as opposed to the politics of things that actually happen and make things happen. Anyone who doesn't see that it is better to have Hillary Clinton as president as opposed to a man who believes we should have "just taken all the oil" in his own, even more extravagant and more dangerous play-time imaginings is living in a lefty La-la land.   The purity lefties, the posing process lefties, the "more speech" lefties, Greens, principled non-voters, etc. all live there instead of in reality. This is the year I've realized, once and for all time that such people are a huge part of why the left lost power and why they have to be thrown aside if it is ever to gain power.

You wonder how that little matter of OIL got left out of his analysis.

As to that small clue I mentioned, it is part of this kind of lefty effort to use the success of someone of the left to exercise influence as a means of discrediting them, even using such a figure to make accusations against other lefties that they aspire to exercise influence and actually do something in reality instead of in the pages of a little read magazine.   You have to wonder why lefties who want to actually do something in reality is something they figure earns scorn and distrust.  It's as if they didn't understand that's the whole point of politics, not their ideological and lifestyle posing.

The Peculiar Case Of The First Amendment Absolutist As A Victim Of His Own Position

Yes, I do mean that the current understanding of the First Amendment is seriously wrong if democracy is the desired outcome and will have to be changed.  "First Amendment Absolutism" in reality, instead of the imaginations of those who spout the phrase, turns out to benefit the wealthy owners of the media it frees from fact checking.   "First Amendment absolutism" is a blind faith that elevates, among other things, the ability of our well-entrenched, wealthy establishment to dominate the media that has a real, political effect and to use it to sell lies that benefit them to people who are unable to fact check to find out that they are being sold lies that disadvantage and endanger them.   They are left unable to cast an informed vote and if they go to the not inconsiderable bother of discovering the truth, they are in danger of the election being decided by an effective margin of voters who have been successfully seduced into believe those lies.  The lines turning what is civic necessity, finding the truth in a tsunami of lies thrown at the country by the lying, corporate media, turning that necessity into a matter of individual responsibility while letting the mass media which lies off the hook is exactly what the "First Amendment absolutist" line does.

Allowing the rich and powerful to lie and deceive for their own benefit through the loudspeakers that the media is has proven to be as big a danger to democracy as an invading foreign army and far more dangerous than subversive infiltration from abroad.   The lesson taught in this area in the past two centuries is that media selling lies can get large numbers of people killed, the selling of climate change denial shows that these people can successfully endanger us all with those lies.  And the Republican-fascist success in politics over the past half-century, accelerating in the past 40 years, even as Republican policies have been a disaster for the majority of us, prove that that flaky theory worked up on behalf of the mass media by lawyers and law scribblers in their pay proves that.

One of my favorite examples of what happens when such an absolutist meets the reality of what they advocate is the case of the journalist and First Amendment activist, the late John Seigenthaler, among other things a fixture at "The First Amendment Center" and an adviser to Robert Kennedy, a special assistant to the Attorney General under him, one who was beaten up by white supremacists when he was working to enforce anti-segregation orders of the Supreme Court.  His later career was as the founding member of the "First Amendment Center" and a promoter of the particular interpretation of that amendment I'm criticizing. 

When some anonymous "editor" at Wikipedia inserted a "biography" of him accusing him of, among other things,  being involved in the murders of both John and Robert Kennedy, this great figure of "freedom of speech, press" suddenly found he didn't like the results of that so much when he was its target.   He found the Wikipedia establishment sluggish if not reluctant to remove the slur against him and, to his even greater rage, that the "information" that Wikipedia included for many months was picked up by such other online media as automatically repeat the contents of Wikipedia - machine "intelligence" doesn't seem to have a capacity for fact checking.   I would imagine that Seigenthaler realized through his belated personal experience that a freedom to lie could impinge on HIS reputation and he wined that online media wasn't subject to the libel laws, the very same libel laws that his ideology had advocated the more traditional media be freed from.   Though in Seigenthaler's case, there was little chance that he would suffer any real damage from it, as a well known fixture of the establishment there was no chance he was going to be discriminated against or fired on the basis of outrageous lies.   He would certainly not suffer any ill effects due to lies told about him as a white male. 

It is a massive irony that when "The First Amendment Center" wanted to find an authoritative voice to represent a danger to the Sullivan Decision, it went to one of its major beneficiaries,  Antonin Scalia, appointed by another beneficiary of it, Ronald Reagan.

“Now the old libel law used to be (that) you’re responsible, you say something false that harms somebody’s reputation, we don’t care if it was told to you by nine bishops, you are liable,” Scalia continued. “New York Times v. Sullivan just cast that aside because the Court thought in modern society, it’d be a good idea if the press could say a lot of stuff about public figures without having to worry. And that may be correct, that may be right, but if it was right it should have been adopted by the people. It should have been debated in the New York Legislature and the New York Legislature could have said, ‘Yes, we’re going to change our libel law.’ But the living constitutionalists on the Supreme Court, the Warren Court, simply decided, ‘Yes, it used to be that … George Washington could sue somebody that libeled him, but we don’t think that’s a good idea any more.’”

Scalia was using the case as an illustration, and there’s no immediate likelihood that Times v. Sullivan will be overturned. But the justice’s comments serve as a reminder that the protections afforded by that decision are not engraved on a monument — and America’s news media can’t afford to take them for granted.

Well, it's true that up till the time of the Sullivan Decision politicians who were lied about by the media could sue.  They didn't all that often and they didn't always win, but, then, the media used to be more careful about not publishing lies before the decision.  The ability to sue had a real effect in preventing the sort of regime of lies that has ensued.  The media might not be accused of being honest before Sullivan but they were less dishonest than what we're left with, today with the 24-7 cabloids and hate-talk radio setting the ever lowering standards of what they say on-air to millions, to be quoted in everything from their rival cabloids to the upper reaches of the NPRs and New York Times level of the media.  

But consider the massive irony that it is the Scalias who oppose equality, who promoted white-male supremacy and who have nearly uniformly favored the wealthy and their corporations who came to dominate through lie and slander campaigns in the mass media.  The period of Republican and now Republican-fascist domination is a product of the media which is freed to lie in the interests of its owners.  

The mass media put the movie and TV actor, Ronald Reagan, into office through a systematic years and now decades long campaign of vilification of liberals and the undermining and mockery of the entirely more qualified Jimmy Carter.  They covered up for the ever erratic and, eventually, senile Reagan.   That kind of "freedom of the press" to lie on behalf of right wing politicians to the benefit of oligarchs is the actual product of the Sullivan Decision and its line of decisions.  

In the case of Seigenthaler, his fame as the man who was beaten up by white supremacists, it is a pathetic irony that his professional-ideological stance is what produced the very media that is now campaigning to put a overt white-supremacist in the White House.  It is more than ironic that an ideological group which cites Scalia as a danger to press freedom is in favor of the very press which used its privilege to lie to put him on the court.  Antonin Scalia was a total opponent of equality for those without money and power, those who were not white males, his career was dedicated to protecting the privileges of rich, white men.  If you want to see how such a thing might not have been noticed by the "free speech-free press" advocates, I would suggest you look at the pictures of the white male "experts" listed at The First Amendment Center, a joint project of the Newseum and Vanderbilt University, one of the Southern ivy-equivalent institutions, the kind of folks Scalia served. 

This is the thing that I held that liberals were suckers for.   

Leo Brouwer - Nuevos Estudios Sencillos

William Ghezzi, guitar

The 10 studies are homages to different composers, either significant guitarist composers or 20th century composers.   In order:

Debussy
Mangore
Caturla
Prokofiev
Tarrega
Sor
Piazolla
Villa-Lobos
Szymanowski
Stravinsky

I don't know Caturla's music, at all, I will be looking into it.

Betty Carter - Droppin' Things

"There's really only one jazz singer – only one: Betty Carter"
Carmen McRae

Betty Carter, vocal
Geri Allen or Marc Cary piano (I don't have my copy of the CD to tell who's credited, they're both great and I remember they're both on the album.)
Craig Handy, sax
Freddie Hubbard, Trumpet
Tarus Mateen, bass
Gregory Hutchinson, drums

"More Speech" For Powerless People And Those Who Tell Unprofitable Truth Is A Big Fat Lie Invented By Those Who Monopolized All Of It

It is so funny that you should ask what I meant by the 18th century liberal superstition that natural forces were going to take care of things, that things would just magically work themselves out with something akin to Newtonian laws of gravity and force. As if an American liberal would not have one of those on the tip of their tongue to mock, the idea that human markets were regulated and ruled by "an unseen hand" which would embody all economic wisdom if only allowed to work without human intervention is just one of those imaginary entities. That all of the workings of that "unseen hand" were a product of human intention, of intentional acts no more guaranteed to be wise or good or even rational than attempts to regulate economic activity for the common good doesn't seem to be considered.

And if that weren't as perfect an example as any, Marx applied Hegel's imaginary and absurd dialectic, a progressive force which would work out the unseen physics of economics to its deterministic and ordained end, certainly no less flaky an idea as applied to the product of human intention and agency.

And in terms of yesterday's piece, there is the slogan "more speech" invented within the entirely interested media industry and its hired hacks in the legal profession.  It is a slogan which ignores several pertinent issues, first is that an interested lie told by wealthy people through the media they own has a built in "more speech" feature due to the multiplication of power that, especially broadcast media and its marketing enjoys.

That feature was there in print and it was often used to malignant ends but the medium had nothing like the same power as Television, radio and the movies in ease of spreading false information and malign influence. So the owners of the media already enjoy much more "more speech" than people without access to those resources. When they already have that "more speech" that which is allegedly available to individual truth tellers who don't own the media is a fantasy that some hack writer might write a syrupy, heart-warming movie script about, it doesn't exist in effective reality so as to overcome the lies.

To merely mouth the slogan "more speech" to those so dis-enabled is entirely inadequate because, though arguably real and there for the wealthy owners of media and their hired scribblers and babblers, it is certainly a force so feeble among those who are not so enabled economically as to be non-existent .   That disenablement is exactly due to the same inequality in wealth that makes it so much more likely that the rich will lie to their benefit and the dispossession of the large majority of people.

That is how the media created, sold and imposed Donald Trump on us and how it is thwarting the aspirations of Hillary Clinton who is the victim of one of the most extensive and successful lie campaigns mounted by the great free press of the United States. The first great lie campaign by them, against the Kennedy family, was only a prelude to their massive and unrestrained lie campaign against the Clintons. As compared to the private activities of the younger Ted Kennedy and, certainly, Donald Trump throughout his life, the behavior of Hillary Clinton is a quintessential and selfless record of public service. And she's the one the free press have been making their most unrestrained and concerted effort to destroy for the past quarter of a century. There is no more amount of "more speech" that can overcome that kind of effort by a media which can lie with impunity.  Even for someone who became - so late in life - as wealthy as the Clintons couldn't possibly counter it The lavishness of the lies the free press has passed on and magnified on behalf of the worst, most incompetent, most dangerous person to ever be within reach of the American presidency makes that "more speech" line the most superstitious of all of those products of secularist magical thinking.

Update:  There's nothing hard about this.  Your feeble little "more speech" in answer to massive media lies is one voice as opposed to their blanket coverage of the national attention.  And your more speech can be responded to by their "more more speech".  Even your "more, more, more, more, more, more, more...." speech will be swamped by their ever more, ever louder, ever more multiplied speech into an effective infinity of power for them.   Supreme Court justices speaking from the bench might mistake their "more speech" as the same thing available to real people in real life but that's only a demonstration of how prone to becoming out of touch to the lives of the poor and powerless you can get from sitting on that anti-democratic Olympus.  The "free speech-free press" hacks and lawyers are lying about this, they always have been but it's undeniable, today.  They know who pays them.

The American Media Is Reliable In One Thing Only, Their Support of Republicans Even The Fascists Among Them

I meant it,  that liberals have been the biggest suckers in the world for their support of the media and the court rulings that have allowed them to lie us into a period of increasingly right-wing government.  They bought the bull shit of Deadline U.S.A., All the Presidents Men, and the steady stream of entertainment written by newspaper men over the decades praising their profession.   Now, in September 2016, they are not only treating the buffoonish white supremacist and fascistic Donald Trump campaign with kid gloves, they are making themselves into an arm of it. From the top with what are deputed to be the most reliable of newspapers and broadcast venues, even those often falsely accused of liberalism down to the gutter levels of FOX and Alex Jones, the American media is in the bag for the Trump campaign.  I won't let the handful of lefty magazines off the hook because they've been slamming Hillary Clinton all along, that slamming muted only by the ominous prospect of Donald Trump as president.   Let's just say they've been everything from irrelevant to no help, whatsoever.  

The ability to lie without any fear of consequences given to the press by the Warren Court in 1964 is the key to how the press, the media has become what it is today.  Before that they were no great deal but they couldn't lie as lavishly as they do now without risking an expensive and discrediting lawsuit.  That was enough to restrain some of the lying, though certainly not all of it.  As mentioned here before, it was the New York Times which used a minor instance of their publishing admittedly inaccurate information about an opponent of equality, something the court could have addressed with a requirement for them to print a prominent retraction of the inaccuracies but which a court which had become addicted to the attention that issuing block buster rulings got them was talked into turning into a license to lie about public officials.  

The great irony of that is that, once freed from the danger of being held to account for lies, by far the most lavish campaigns of lies have been waged against liberal politicians and the very same movements for equality that were the original focus of the law suit.  I think that was a real instance of naivety on the part of the Justices who made the ruling but anyone who stopped to analyze what the media was, mostly corporate, mostly in the business of making money by selling ads, could have predicted that a media freed to lie would lie exactly in the interest of the wealthy and the conservative. That is certainly how it has worked out.   As it turns out a license to lie benefits those who benefit from lying and they don't tend to be the side who favor equality because equality inevitably endangers the privilege that allows massive wealth accumulation.   That was, apparently, something that the alleged liberals who championed that ability to lie didn't understand.  My suspicion is that if they thought at all about it, they figured on some law of nature magically making those forces even out in the way that so much of that kind of 18th century liberalism superstitiously believes in.  That despite the obvious fact that doesn't happen in human affairs.  If it did, if egalitarian democracy were the natural outcome of natural forces instead of the product of intentional human choices it would dominate as a political system.  

That stupidly superstitious 18th century deformation of liberalism is the dominant ideology of those who call themselves "liberals," it was the superstition shared by some of the "founders" to one extent of another, though they knew each other and the ways of the world enough to make any such declarations more of a convenient and hypocritical piety than something that governed their lives. They were, by and large, slave holding aristocrats and land thieves who mouthed pious sounding phrases they had no intention of living, themselves. 

Actual, egalitarian liberalism, the original liberalism was based in the provision of a decent life for those left in poverty and destitution by the circumstances of life.   In its original and definitive expression, the Mosaic Law, it was meant to be radically equalizing, making the accumulation of vast fortunes less likely if not impossible.   It never happens by forces of nature balancing themselves out, it only happens as a consistent series of intentional acts, deliberately taken to achieve that end.  I think that is the real reason that liberalism of that kind is opposed by even the allegedly liberal media, which, in its influential entities, are all owned by rich people.*  It has more than a little to do with the attacks on religion that takes that seriously and the promotion of the anti-Christianity of the corporate fundamentalists.  

This is the year that any regard real liberals have for the media and the privileges granted to them should die, definitively.  Virtually no sector of it, very few figures within it, have acted in the interests of egalitarian democracy, it is and has been the major force in corrupting an effective margin of people and enabling the gradual shift to fascism.  This is the year that proves there is no worst Republican who they won't promote, Donald Trump is a creation of the press, the media freed to do what is most profitable to them.   The few figures in the media who are the exception to that have certainly not been willing to risk it all on behalf of democracy and they all know if they really did they would be gone in a second.  Instead we have the New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, etc. taking their lead from the overtly fascist right wing liars, the insane, even the white supremacists. The stinking cabloids have done that all along.   This is the year that there isn't any rational denial that they are, effectively, all promoting Donald Trump. 

*   Almost all of them white men.  Which is also entirely relevant in why they support the demonstrably incompetent man over the amazingly competent woman.

Update:  He says that as if it would be a bad thing to have more people like Gabby Giffords living in Arizona.  I'd love to have more Jews living here, especially states that now vote for Republicans.  I can't think of anything more likely to reestablish real liberalism than to have more members of one of the groups comprising some of the most reliable of Democratic voters.   I wish there were more in my state.  Of course, there being no more insular, parochial and ignorant yokels than the ones who have lived all their lives in the lesser NY City area, he probably doesn't believe such people exist.  I mean, the other week he and one of his buddies couldn't believe someone could get an egg cream in New Hampshire back in the 50s.  As if making one of those insipid kiddie concoctions required a degree from City College.

Update 2:  What a moron.  City College is the most prominent school of THE public university of New York City.    It isn't an ethnic institution, I'd guess that, by far, most of its students are not Jewish.   Simps pulls out the accusation of antisemitism whenever he's at a loss for words, which is pretty much whenever he encounters anything other than the most pat of conventional thoughts.  He is as vacuous as he is mendacious.   His frequent resort to the phrase "Words fail me" is about the only honest thing I recall him ever saying.

Update 3:  You're really grasping at straws.  The only family I ever knew with the name "Gora" were Italians and Catholics and the fact is Joel Gora is known to me only because of his role in enabling the media in lying and in the stinking rich to corrupt the political process.   To illustrate how full of shit you are, I'm just about 1000000% with Ruth Bader Ginsberg on that, I wish there were nine of her on the court when it comes to the issues that Gora has ridden to what should be infamy.   Most other issues, too.

Update 4:  You know, Stupy, I didn't think the guy who brought up Gora was you because you'd have to google the name first and that's more effort than you've ever put into anything.   I can answer more than one stupid troll, though if they're especially stupid I might suspect it's one of your famous socks doing the typing.

DUMP NPR

OK, I'm listening to Morning Edition and it is pushing the line that Hillary Clinton is unfit to be president, it's obvious that NPR is trying to elect Donald Trump.  The Trump pivot has been made by the American media.  It's way past time for everyone to stop giving money to them and their affiliate stations.   They should be investigated for making false claims to people who they solicit.  This country has always needed a real alternative to the corporate propaganda stream that is called news, NPR isn't it, neither is PBS.  

There isn't any way to reform NPR, it would be best to shut it down.   

Update: You don't know how funny it is for him to be dissing the elderly demographic of the NPR audience when he's older than the figure he cites made up and he's doing so to the Geritol and lumbago set at Baby Blue.  And what's funniest is that the dolt seems to not have noticed I was slamming NPR, not promoting it.  I really do think that it's amazing how low the literacy skills in the great "Brain Trust" are. 

Joseph Spence - There will be a happy meeting in Glory

I don't know who does the version that Stuart Mclean uses to introduce his wonderful program The Vinyl Cafe but this is the one that one copies.   I love the song and the association with that program full of good will makes me love it all the more.

Maybe I Should Have A Stamp Saying It Made

Anyone stupid enough to trust what Steve Simels says about what I've written without looking at it to check for his typical distortion is too stupid for me to worry about.   

Update:  I swear you are the stupidest conceited people I've ever encountered.

I said,  

Other than the weirdest of rich folk like the exhibitionists of the Loud family going on a half-century ago

Now I'm sure all of you tots have been to college and are proud of that but, really, what is there about that construction that you pudding heads don't get?   It would include the subjects of "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" BECAUSE THEY ARE EXHIBITIONISTS LIKE THE LOUD FAMILY WERE.  You were too stupid to even read the part of what I said that the man who can't say something without lying clipped, never mind the context it was said in.  Let me guess, you never had to take a rigorous Frosh Rhetoric class.   No, let me guess this,  that you got out of that remedial reading class that someone suggested you needed and took a gut course major in something like psych or soc where you just have to learn the ten current buzz phrases and how to regurgitate them.  

The American Media Is Trying To Put Trump In The Whitehouse

Who ordered the American media to get Trump elected?   It's been obvious in the past month that every major media outlet, from the New York Times and Washington Post and NPR to the gutter levels of the cabloids have been relentlessly negative on Hillary Clinton while pretending that the past 15 months, if not 70 years of Donald Trump's pathology don't matter.  

The synchrony of the hard turn to trashing Hillary Clinton is too pronounced to ignore, though it was never as if they were at all positive about her.  This has all of the appearance of being a concerted effort on their part.

Anyone who is left of center-right, anyone who cares about the United States or the world who falls for the bull shit that the American media is anything but a servant of oligarchs and Republican-fascism and that they don't need to be forced to not lie is a simpleton.    I watched that old Bogart movie, Deadline U.S.A. a few weeks back, the one where Bogey plays a crusading newspaper editor on a newspaper being sold down the river by the heirs of the former owner, a movie I liked a lot about fifty years ago when I first saw it.   I can't tell you how false, phony, dishonest and a load of bullshit it seemed to me now.  But, then, I've been able to see what the American media has become once it was freed from any danger due to lying intentionally  and with all but the most blatantly demonstrable malice proved with mathematical precision.  

This day's undermining of her because she allegedly got overheated on a hot day at an emotionally wrenching event was disgusting.   If it had been Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush it would be used to prop him up.    I can't for a second believe that it would be done to any man with an "R" after his name. 

Maybe A Better Question Is What's The Matter With Berkeley, Harvard, etc.

Thinking more about that annoyingly clueless piece by Theo Anderson I wrote about yesterday, it's remarkable how much scribbling has been done about "what's wrong with poor white people" by those who wonder why "they don't vote the way we want them to". Perhaps it's that my life has been passed largely among poor white people of the kind a Berkeley Sociologist has to travel to Louisiana to find to study but I've known lots and lots of poor white people, many who have a high school education, if that, who consistently vote for Democrats. As I mentioned the other day, a lot of them are Catholics and just about all of them are religious believers, most of them Christians.

My question is why these writers, Tomas Frank, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Theo Anderson, ... generally the products of elite educational institutions, Ivy and might-as-well be Ivies, never seem to study why poor white people who do "vote the right way," choose to vote the right way.  Would a book that studied why such "working class white people" vote for liberal democrats, what liberal democrats do right to convince them to vote for them,  sell?  My suspicion is that it wouldn't because I have come to suspect that the motive behind such pseudo-scientific study is, itself, an occasion of mostly wealthier white people feeling smugly superior to those of the great unwashed, satisfyingly ignorant masses.   And, let me clue them in, such underclass people know it just as other people who have been the frequent subjects of sociologists and anthropologists know some of that is what's behind such study.* 

I have come to suspect that the motive of most of that activity is not to find out how to appeal to such people, it is another occasion for such academic and journalistic elites to lord it over them. I think that that long established pattern has become expected by the members of the underclass and that is why Republicans can make such hay of things like Barack Obama's ill advised guns and religion comment and, now Hillary Clinton's admittedly dumb "basket of deplorables" gaff. In looking around the lefty comment threads, some of them are now pissed off at her for apologizing for it when that was not only called for but the most politically astute way of dealing with it. The reason they're upset with the apology is that they love to think of the underclass in that way.

Can you imagine Elizabeth Warren saying something like that? I have a hard time imagining it and the reason for that is because she came from a background in which she actually knows and deals with poor white people and she has advocated for them her entire public career. I think Hillary Clinton knows better than to have said it and I imagine it was a result of sheer exhaustion and perhaps exasperation that something like that came out. But the problem that Hillary Clinton faces, politically, isn't from poor white people, it's from rich white people who own the media, who lie to and deceive and propagandize poor white people. Most of them are the products of Ivys and might as well be institutions or they work for people who went to them and are either members of that elite group or that is their aspiration.

*  The often told joke runs something like "The average [name whatever target ethnic group] family consists of a father, a mother, two children and an anthropologist [more rarely "sociologist].   Other than the weirdest of rich folk like the exhibitionists of the Loud family going on a half-century ago, I can't recall any wealthy people who allowed that kind of violation of their privacy.   The closest thing I can think of, off hand, as an academic study is Thorstein Veblen's observations in his Theory of the Leisure Class well over a century ago.  And that was hardly something the rich volunteered to be subjects of.