And getting ready for Halloween
James W. Nichol - Midnight Cab - The Mystery of the Silver Rings
Saturday, October 15, 2016
I Think We're All Going To Need A Shower With Brillo Pads After This Is Over
So, the guy who came to Donald Trump's defense against the accusation that he groped a woman on an airplane turns out to be a really seedy Brit Conservative with a long history of lying, taping his friends having illicit sex so he can sell the tape to the Britabloids, claiming to have illegally procured minor boys so high-placed Tory politicians could drug them up and have sex with them, some as young as 15.
Yeah, sounds like another occasion for the Trump campaign to prove its credibility and to go under-reported on the Trump friendly media. Oh, yeah, and the guy would have been a teenager when the incident would have happened. I would imagine more research into this would prove he wasn't or couldn't have been there. Not that it would make the slightest bit of difference in Trump world.
Yeah, sounds like another occasion for the Trump campaign to prove its credibility and to go under-reported on the Trump friendly media. Oh, yeah, and the guy would have been a teenager when the incident would have happened. I would imagine more research into this would prove he wasn't or couldn't have been there. Not that it would make the slightest bit of difference in Trump world.
Hate Mail
I don't much care if the buddies of JR-Freki and Simps think I'm the kind of person who thinks "music stopped before he was born." I probably post and write about more music composed in the past 10, 20, 30, 40,.... years than they know exists. It only shows a. they don't read what I write and, b. are habitual liars about everything important and of of more modest interest. I'm sure I listen to, play and present more music written by living composers than Stupy does at his blog for almost exclusively white, mostly male, mostly everything from late middle aged to dead pop song writers and players.
Freki will never forgive me for being Irish, for having seen through the Brit common received POV and for knowing that most everything that the Britatheists have promoted as fact is, in fact, false. She's your typical Brit snob who pretends to be a lefty while, in fact, holding an ideology that couldn't be more supportive of the elite status quo.
There are at least a couple of the regulars who can still put up with the boredom at Eschaton who know that's not true of me. I can't say that I expect them to correct their buddies on that count. I don't much care about that, either. It's a place for them to get their regular fixes of 2-minute hate, clicking on like rhesus monkeys imprisoned and tortured in some university psych-lab. It's sad, when you think about it. Which they won't.
Update: I might publish one of your comments when you learn to read and think and they represent what I've said accurately. In short, it will never happen.
Freki will never forgive me for being Irish, for having seen through the Brit common received POV and for knowing that most everything that the Britatheists have promoted as fact is, in fact, false. She's your typical Brit snob who pretends to be a lefty while, in fact, holding an ideology that couldn't be more supportive of the elite status quo.
There are at least a couple of the regulars who can still put up with the boredom at Eschaton who know that's not true of me. I can't say that I expect them to correct their buddies on that count. I don't much care about that, either. It's a place for them to get their regular fixes of 2-minute hate, clicking on like rhesus monkeys imprisoned and tortured in some university psych-lab. It's sad, when you think about it. Which they won't.
Update: I might publish one of your comments when you learn to read and think and they represent what I've said accurately. In short, it will never happen.
Friday, October 14, 2016
Atanas Ourkouzounov - Folk Song Variations
Atanas Ourkouzounov, guitar
I'm going to try to order the disc pictured. I'd include Ourkouzounov as one of the group of excellent composers who, being guitarists, are composing some of the most significant work in the history of their instrument. I'd include him with Leo Brouwer and Dusan Bogdanovic, not choosing any of them over the other because each of them has a unique voice, all their own. It must be an exciting time to be a young guitarist like the 18th century for violinists or the 19th century for pianists.
I'll probably spend some time with his music, though I'm sure it will annoy the usual fans of the usual, the tried and tried and the heard and heard and heard.... The people who want their music to be like unobtrusive wall paper, a background to themselves.
Stupy Spoke I Answer So You Won't Have To Read It
“I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. It would spread a lively terror.” Winston Churchill, 1920
“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.” Winston Churchill, 1937, addressing the Peel Commission
"I propose that 100,000 degenerate Britons should be forcibly sterilized and others put in labour camps to halt the decline of the British race." Winston Churchill as Home Secretary. I have no doubt that after that lot had been done in he'd have found another 100,000 or more to do the same to. The work house system had shown that even during his lifetime the British establishment he championed was willing to starve people to death.
Churchill was a racist and a white supremacist who advocated mass murder in the middle-east and genocide elsewhere. Like the pre-Nazi Germans, the Brits were involved in a number of mass detentions with large numbers of murders during his lifetime and with his complete approval. And all in the interest of British imperialism. He either approved of or directly participated in events which led to the deaths of many civilians starting when he was young and continuing to his death. Much of it in Africa, India, and elsewhere. He bragged of shooting at least three people in Sudan. His imperial whims and legacies are still with us in places like Iraq and Jordan and elsewhere.
I don't think anyone who was murdered by a Brit speaking English would consider themselves any less dead or their death any more desirable because their murderers spoke Brit style English. You, of course, don't think, you absorb TV costume dramas.
It has become interesting to me why it's OK with so many pseudo-liberals when the racist murderers and imperialists have Brit accents but if they have an American accent, especially one from the South or the mid-west, it's seen for what it is. I wonder if that's not the real legacy of American public TV importing so much BBC crap.
Those quotes above? There are as bad if not worse lying out there to be seen by anyone who wants to do the research. He had more than a little in common with Donald Trump.
Update: If you think what I said about the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s was something that got fixed.
Here are a few quotes from Churchill from 1943 in response to the horrific famine in Bengal, made far worse by British policy in India, not much different from the role Britain played in the Irish famine, though the death toll, estimated at 3 million was far larger.
“If food is scarce, why isn’t Gandhi dead yet?”
“Relief would do no good. Indians breed like rabbits and will outstrip any available food supply.”
"Starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks."
That is pure Malthusian-Darwinist-Nazi style thinking. Those three lines of ideological theory belong together. Churchill was, obviously, ready to administer the deaths of millions of people if he thought it was in the interests of his people, that is the British aristocracy and the British monarchy.
Update: If you think what I said about the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s was something that got fixed.
Here are a few quotes from Churchill from 1943 in response to the horrific famine in Bengal, made far worse by British policy in India, not much different from the role Britain played in the Irish famine, though the death toll, estimated at 3 million was far larger.
“If food is scarce, why isn’t Gandhi dead yet?”
“Relief would do no good. Indians breed like rabbits and will outstrip any available food supply.”
"Starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks."
That is pure Malthusian-Darwinist-Nazi style thinking. Those three lines of ideological theory belong together. Churchill was, obviously, ready to administer the deaths of millions of people if he thought it was in the interests of his people, that is the British aristocracy and the British monarchy.
Answer To The Same Old Flock of Canards
I have said before, over and over again that the mass murders proposed in English by people like George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill, by the very same scientifically provided means that the Nazis, much later, used, gas, impeach their right to be taken as good and credible people as it did anyone who said those things in German. And those proposals for salubrious genocide by, other, often unspecified means as scientific fact go right back to the founding generation of Darwinism and, in fact to ol' Chuck Darwin, himself. His theory of natural selection immediately generated that idea which found expression in him and in his closest friends and scientific colleagues as soon as the theory was published.
That is not surprising because his theory is based on the economic depravity of Malthus who called for the poor to be harried, deprived and starved to death as a means of killing off what he presented as excess population for the benefit of the survivors. That entire line of thinking grew out of the habits of thought among the British aristocracy, the purveyors and beneficiaries of the British class system, the proto-fascist Poor Laws, made far worse in the early 19th century under the scientific thinking of such people. The British aristocracy may not have been the only aristocracy to harbor such thoughts but they were uniquely influential in presenting it as scientifically reliable.
I have also told you that I entirely reject their kind of thinking that ranks entire groups of people according to some scheme of valuation. That is Nazi thinking, it is the thinking of white supremacy, of ethnic bigotry, it is among the origins of this whole thing. It is entirely in opposition to the Mosaic Law which orders the Hebrew people to treat those of other ethnicity living among them as they treat their relations and people, it is certainly entirely in opposition to the Gospels of Jesus.
It is, though, part and parcel of Darwinism and the kind of thinking which begins in ranking people according to such schemes of "fitness" and value. It is the legacy of Darwinism to many of the ideologies that took his theory as a fact of nature.
As critical as I can be of Karl Marx, it didn't take him long to figure out that what Darwin actually did was to impose the prejudices of the British class system on nature as a means of framing the evolution of species. And other men of science, either of his class or aspiring to it, found that entirely congenial. For all the claims of the post-WWII Darwinists that he wasn't asserting that the survivors of mass killing, active and passive were superior to those who had died, even his own writing is full of that claim, both within other species and as explicitly as could be stated, among people.
To see how Darwin bent that idea every which way to suit his prejudices, you can see that in how he exempted his own aristocratic class from the mass culling, the benefits of which he asserted as a law of nature and how he twisted the recent, repeated culling of the Irish population through famine, that horrific famine in Ireland during his adulthood made far worse by British law and policy, as he asserted those who survived that were inferior to the Brits and Scots who hadn't been starved in their hundreds of thousands, more than a million. His typical, British aristocratic disdain for the Irish led him to impeach the validity of his own theory in the real-life example closest to hand.
I know that you don't believe that all people are equal and of equal value and so you don't believe that the mass murders and attempted genocides of history are all of equal importance, we've been through that before. I reject that idea. All of the mass murders of people are of equal depravity and are all equally deserving of condemnation, those who committed and those who advocated those mass murders or mass murders that didn't manage to come to fruition are all criminals of exactly the type condemned at the Nuremberg trials and at the trial of Eichmann and other Nazis. They just lacked the opportunities that their fellow advocates of mass murder got. That some of them spoke and wrote their advocacy in English and that their actual or intended victims were not Europeans or members of groups you hold are more significant than one group or other does nothing to change that.
My research into this topic has led to the pretty shocking fact that German Darwinists such as Eugen Fischer and the German military had performed a trial run for the death camp system in their incarceration and slaughters in Africa in the first decade of the 20th century. Fischer and others used the science they gathered from conducting Mengele-style experiments on African people, plundering the body parts of the victims of the mass murder they participated in to be shipped back to science departments in Germany and elsewhere for scientific use. Indeed, the repatriation of those body parts is an ongoing process. If that mass murder had been condemned and punished, severely, it is possible that the Armenian genocide would not have happened and the Nazis would not have figured they were safe in doing the same on a larger, industrial scale in the 1930s and 40s. That it was Africans who they first got away with killing that way is certainly something we have no right to ignore. Letting people get away with mass murder leads to other mass murders of other people. If the moral atrocity of it doesn't make people give up their chauvinistic dismissal of the importance of those mass murders that don't concern them and "their people" then the danger it is to all groups which might be murdered similarly should give them at least a rational reason to not practice that kind of convenient forgetting through ranking yourself higher in importance.
Every group which was listed by Darwin as those who should die under his natural selection for the benefit of the survivors, the poor, the disabled, the merely disadvantaged, as well as entire racial and ethnic groups, are the same groups that later generations of his followers and those influenced by his and their thinking advocated should die. Probably the group most favored by most people to die were and are the disabled. Calls for their murder presented as a "mercy" go back right to the start. Another group of people who were, in fact, murdered in large number were the infants and children of poor people. Victorian society, the British law absorbed the fact of massive infanticide being practiced to the extent that it was alluded to in musical comedy, the bodies of murdered infants left in the street were a common sight in some cities.
I am extremely skeptical as to the scientific validity of natural selection. I've come to think that the phenomenon of evolution, the succession of life in all of its diversity is such a vast and complicated phenomenon that any proposed explanatory mechanism(s) devised by scientists will at the very best be partial of some of it, likely irrelevant to some if not most of it. That was a conclusion I reached while reading the back and forth between the conventional neo-Darwinist ideologue, Jerry Coyne and his fellow geneticist at the University of Chicago, James Shapiro. While I, unsurprisingly, think James Shapiro and others are almost certainly right in their conclusions about the neo-Darwinian synthesis being, if not over then in need of basic revision, I also doubt that they, in the extreme complexity they are uncovering are likely to find a replacement for the nearly universally imposed and insisted on framing of Darwinism.
I doubt any proposed universal explanation of evolution, facilely presented on TV or in a magazine article or in the few paragraphs in an intro to biology course will maintain that status as more is learned. To present any one explanation as the final step, the last nail in the coffin of..., or any other final solution to that problem is more likely to be useful to those who want to deny evolution than to scientific progress.
My conclusions are that they have taken on a massively complex phenomenon of enormously varying and different circumstances for different organisms at different times and that there is probably no one universal framing that will cover everything that was involved in producing the enormous biological diversity that exists and has existed throughout the billions of years of evolution. Oh, and, yes, the fact is that any direct, physical evidence of even just the physical characteristics of most of the organisms that have been part of evolution is lost for all times, not to mention the events of those lives which will remain unknown no matter how many Just-so stories can be made up about them. Evolution is an enormous "thing" which will be known only through the tiniest of percentage of what it was and is. Even calling it "a thing" is probably entirely inadequate, it is mostly known through acts of imagination.
To further insist that any framing of the fact of evolution is of discernible and reliable relevance for figuring out such policy as whose death will be beneficial, the kind of thing that Darwinists and their ideological descendants still do is utter and complete pseudo-science, it is inserting the worst and basest desires of those who do so into the very heart of what is asserted to be science. That will be more than just a potential, it will be a danger as long as natural selection is the required ideological framing to explain evolution, anyone in any group which could become the target of such efforts had better understand that they can be held to be less fit than some other group and targeted for either passive or active eradication.
I don't even think it much matters in reality that the BBC has turned Churchill into a plaster saint when he was a pretty awful person or that George B. Shaw inspired that Lerner and Lowe musical and said some witty things even as he repeatedly and publicly advocated the mass gassing of those he considered inferior. I know what you've seen on TV is the sum of your knowledge of them, that's what most English language college-educated people are likely to hold in their heads about them at any given moment, unless they've read something that presents their own words that wouldn't be considered as crowd-pleasing in the lying, hagiographic, PR style biography of that sort. There is little risk that the entertainment industry is going to present the real history of these issues. I'm not interested in show-biz myth.
That is not surprising because his theory is based on the economic depravity of Malthus who called for the poor to be harried, deprived and starved to death as a means of killing off what he presented as excess population for the benefit of the survivors. That entire line of thinking grew out of the habits of thought among the British aristocracy, the purveyors and beneficiaries of the British class system, the proto-fascist Poor Laws, made far worse in the early 19th century under the scientific thinking of such people. The British aristocracy may not have been the only aristocracy to harbor such thoughts but they were uniquely influential in presenting it as scientifically reliable.
I have also told you that I entirely reject their kind of thinking that ranks entire groups of people according to some scheme of valuation. That is Nazi thinking, it is the thinking of white supremacy, of ethnic bigotry, it is among the origins of this whole thing. It is entirely in opposition to the Mosaic Law which orders the Hebrew people to treat those of other ethnicity living among them as they treat their relations and people, it is certainly entirely in opposition to the Gospels of Jesus.
It is, though, part and parcel of Darwinism and the kind of thinking which begins in ranking people according to such schemes of "fitness" and value. It is the legacy of Darwinism to many of the ideologies that took his theory as a fact of nature.
As critical as I can be of Karl Marx, it didn't take him long to figure out that what Darwin actually did was to impose the prejudices of the British class system on nature as a means of framing the evolution of species. And other men of science, either of his class or aspiring to it, found that entirely congenial. For all the claims of the post-WWII Darwinists that he wasn't asserting that the survivors of mass killing, active and passive were superior to those who had died, even his own writing is full of that claim, both within other species and as explicitly as could be stated, among people.
To see how Darwin bent that idea every which way to suit his prejudices, you can see that in how he exempted his own aristocratic class from the mass culling, the benefits of which he asserted as a law of nature and how he twisted the recent, repeated culling of the Irish population through famine, that horrific famine in Ireland during his adulthood made far worse by British law and policy, as he asserted those who survived that were inferior to the Brits and Scots who hadn't been starved in their hundreds of thousands, more than a million. His typical, British aristocratic disdain for the Irish led him to impeach the validity of his own theory in the real-life example closest to hand.
I know that you don't believe that all people are equal and of equal value and so you don't believe that the mass murders and attempted genocides of history are all of equal importance, we've been through that before. I reject that idea. All of the mass murders of people are of equal depravity and are all equally deserving of condemnation, those who committed and those who advocated those mass murders or mass murders that didn't manage to come to fruition are all criminals of exactly the type condemned at the Nuremberg trials and at the trial of Eichmann and other Nazis. They just lacked the opportunities that their fellow advocates of mass murder got. That some of them spoke and wrote their advocacy in English and that their actual or intended victims were not Europeans or members of groups you hold are more significant than one group or other does nothing to change that.
My research into this topic has led to the pretty shocking fact that German Darwinists such as Eugen Fischer and the German military had performed a trial run for the death camp system in their incarceration and slaughters in Africa in the first decade of the 20th century. Fischer and others used the science they gathered from conducting Mengele-style experiments on African people, plundering the body parts of the victims of the mass murder they participated in to be shipped back to science departments in Germany and elsewhere for scientific use. Indeed, the repatriation of those body parts is an ongoing process. If that mass murder had been condemned and punished, severely, it is possible that the Armenian genocide would not have happened and the Nazis would not have figured they were safe in doing the same on a larger, industrial scale in the 1930s and 40s. That it was Africans who they first got away with killing that way is certainly something we have no right to ignore. Letting people get away with mass murder leads to other mass murders of other people. If the moral atrocity of it doesn't make people give up their chauvinistic dismissal of the importance of those mass murders that don't concern them and "their people" then the danger it is to all groups which might be murdered similarly should give them at least a rational reason to not practice that kind of convenient forgetting through ranking yourself higher in importance.
Every group which was listed by Darwin as those who should die under his natural selection for the benefit of the survivors, the poor, the disabled, the merely disadvantaged, as well as entire racial and ethnic groups, are the same groups that later generations of his followers and those influenced by his and their thinking advocated should die. Probably the group most favored by most people to die were and are the disabled. Calls for their murder presented as a "mercy" go back right to the start. Another group of people who were, in fact, murdered in large number were the infants and children of poor people. Victorian society, the British law absorbed the fact of massive infanticide being practiced to the extent that it was alluded to in musical comedy, the bodies of murdered infants left in the street were a common sight in some cities.
I am extremely skeptical as to the scientific validity of natural selection. I've come to think that the phenomenon of evolution, the succession of life in all of its diversity is such a vast and complicated phenomenon that any proposed explanatory mechanism(s) devised by scientists will at the very best be partial of some of it, likely irrelevant to some if not most of it. That was a conclusion I reached while reading the back and forth between the conventional neo-Darwinist ideologue, Jerry Coyne and his fellow geneticist at the University of Chicago, James Shapiro. While I, unsurprisingly, think James Shapiro and others are almost certainly right in their conclusions about the neo-Darwinian synthesis being, if not over then in need of basic revision, I also doubt that they, in the extreme complexity they are uncovering are likely to find a replacement for the nearly universally imposed and insisted on framing of Darwinism.
I doubt any proposed universal explanation of evolution, facilely presented on TV or in a magazine article or in the few paragraphs in an intro to biology course will maintain that status as more is learned. To present any one explanation as the final step, the last nail in the coffin of..., or any other final solution to that problem is more likely to be useful to those who want to deny evolution than to scientific progress.
My conclusions are that they have taken on a massively complex phenomenon of enormously varying and different circumstances for different organisms at different times and that there is probably no one universal framing that will cover everything that was involved in producing the enormous biological diversity that exists and has existed throughout the billions of years of evolution. Oh, and, yes, the fact is that any direct, physical evidence of even just the physical characteristics of most of the organisms that have been part of evolution is lost for all times, not to mention the events of those lives which will remain unknown no matter how many Just-so stories can be made up about them. Evolution is an enormous "thing" which will be known only through the tiniest of percentage of what it was and is. Even calling it "a thing" is probably entirely inadequate, it is mostly known through acts of imagination.
To further insist that any framing of the fact of evolution is of discernible and reliable relevance for figuring out such policy as whose death will be beneficial, the kind of thing that Darwinists and their ideological descendants still do is utter and complete pseudo-science, it is inserting the worst and basest desires of those who do so into the very heart of what is asserted to be science. That will be more than just a potential, it will be a danger as long as natural selection is the required ideological framing to explain evolution, anyone in any group which could become the target of such efforts had better understand that they can be held to be less fit than some other group and targeted for either passive or active eradication.
I don't even think it much matters in reality that the BBC has turned Churchill into a plaster saint when he was a pretty awful person or that George B. Shaw inspired that Lerner and Lowe musical and said some witty things even as he repeatedly and publicly advocated the mass gassing of those he considered inferior. I know what you've seen on TV is the sum of your knowledge of them, that's what most English language college-educated people are likely to hold in their heads about them at any given moment, unless they've read something that presents their own words that wouldn't be considered as crowd-pleasing in the lying, hagiographic, PR style biography of that sort. There is little risk that the entertainment industry is going to present the real history of these issues. I'm not interested in show-biz myth.
Thursday, October 13, 2016
Atanas Ourkouzounov - 11 Preludes-etudes
Atanas Ourkouzounov, guitar
While some have been going over the gone over and over and over and over..... I've been enjoying listening to new music for guitar by composers I've never heard before. Atanas Ourkouzounov is a Bulgarian who studied at the Paris Conservatory, both an excellent guitarist and a very fine composer. I wouldn't mind having more music of this quality being composed for my instrument, or maybe it is and I just haven't found it yet. There are a few defects in the recording, there are some of him playing these from a disc as well but it's so enjoyable to watch him play them.
Gerald Clayton - Shadamanthum
If I have to be reincarnated, I want to come back as Gerald Clayton.
Gerald Clayton . piano
Joe Sanders . bass
Justin Brown . drums
Logan Richardson . saxophone
Dayna Stephens . saxophone
Ambrose Akinmusire . trumpet
Update: Dusk Baby
Sachal Vasandani, voice
Believe me, good as this is the CD sound is even better.
Why Would You Think I'd Be Against The Award To Dylan?
I am challenged to say what I think of Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Well, I've got no problem with it. He's a good as some of the previous winners and better than some. I mean, it's an award that has been given to people like William Golding and Bertrand Russell and Ernest Hemingway and Rudyard Kipling.
Bob Dylan isn't the most puzzling one who has gotten it. George Bernard Shaw, the man who spent so many of his words advocating for the most horrific and grotesque inequality, advocating Nazi style mass slaughter decades before the Nazis did it. And if we're going to talk about him we can also note that another huge fan of genocide, Winston Churchill, got the lit award too. So, you see, we've hardly scratched more than the surface and Bob Dylan stands far above a lot of the guys who got it, on both his way with words and the ideas he puts forward with them.
The Nobel committees are nothing if not wacky. I mean, look at the Peace Prize winners. Hank Kissinger?
Bob Dylan isn't the most puzzling one who has gotten it. George Bernard Shaw, the man who spent so many of his words advocating for the most horrific and grotesque inequality, advocating Nazi style mass slaughter decades before the Nazis did it. And if we're going to talk about him we can also note that another huge fan of genocide, Winston Churchill, got the lit award too. So, you see, we've hardly scratched more than the surface and Bob Dylan stands far above a lot of the guys who got it, on both his way with words and the ideas he puts forward with them.
The Nobel committees are nothing if not wacky. I mean, look at the Peace Prize winners. Hank Kissinger?
Even Stupider Hate Mail
When I wrote, earlier this year that Kevin Puts' opera on The Manchurian Candidate was likely of current topicality I only meant in the general sense that a foreign government, specifically the post-KGB run Putin regime, was meddling in a U.S. presidential election in order to put their preferred candidate, Donald Trump in debt to the Russian oligarchs, into that office.
My mistake was in assuming that people who read what I wrote would a. really know what Richard Condon's novel was about, b. could make the necessary adjustments to get my point.
Obviously you didn't and couldn't, not a. and not b. I've got to conclude from what I'm seeing written on the topic that most people in the media who are breezily throwing the title around don't seem to understand those either. We are living in a post-literate society that would have been unimaginable to someone who grew up in a country where even the people who read pulp novels were also able to read other things, as well. Even the jerks who went to college after that don't seem to know even what the pop culture references they make to each other really mean.
Update: Stupy's just bitter that I exposed him for someone who pretends to have read books he hasn't. He might see the movie but I think he mostly just repeats what some reviewer said. Well, he could do both, I suspect that's mostly how he made a living.
Again, what he and most of the Eschatots don't know about music is pretty much everything.
Update 2: I'd say he was intellectually defective but I don't want to imply there's any intellect to be defective. What he is is a man in his senescence who never got over being a particularly awful 2-year-old.
My mistake was in assuming that people who read what I wrote would a. really know what Richard Condon's novel was about, b. could make the necessary adjustments to get my point.
Obviously you didn't and couldn't, not a. and not b. I've got to conclude from what I'm seeing written on the topic that most people in the media who are breezily throwing the title around don't seem to understand those either. We are living in a post-literate society that would have been unimaginable to someone who grew up in a country where even the people who read pulp novels were also able to read other things, as well. Even the jerks who went to college after that don't seem to know even what the pop culture references they make to each other really mean.
Update: Stupy's just bitter that I exposed him for someone who pretends to have read books he hasn't. He might see the movie but I think he mostly just repeats what some reviewer said. Well, he could do both, I suspect that's mostly how he made a living.
Again, what he and most of the Eschatots don't know about music is pretty much everything.
Update 2: I'd say he was intellectually defective but I don't want to imply there's any intellect to be defective. What he is is a man in his senescence who never got over being a particularly awful 2-year-old.
Two Topical Topics
How bizarre can it get? Because I noted that Richard Condon, the author of the 1959 pulp thriller with an absolutely absurd plot, The Manchurian Candidate, was not a literary genius, you assume I'm saying whatever else he said has no value. As if only literary geniuses had valuable insights into politics and should be seriously considered. If that were the case then we would be suffering under the foolishness that Benjamin Franklin said a government of wise men would be.
Democracy means that you believe the majority of people are, with ACCURATE INFORMATION, able to better determine the course that their government should take than the self-interested and tiny faction that gets to make that decision under non-democratic governments. It doesn't mean that democracy produces uniformly wise results, it just means that when that decision is spread over the entire population that the chances are that particular and parochial self-interest will be swamped by the general tendency of people pursuing the more general good. Of course it all assumes something that modern people have been being talked out of believing to be possible or even existing, a general belief that we have a moral obligation to be of good will towards other people. Democracy doesn't work by people merely considering their own self-interest and the good of their close circles of family and friends, it depends on the moral obligations that are contained in nothing much outside of some religions. Consider this from what Richard Condon said at the end of a series of prepositional phrases beginning with "when":
.... when organized crime merges with organized commerce and labor, when a feeble, bewildered set of churches cannot counteract any of this and all of it is power-hosed at all of us through the most gigantically complex overcommunications system ever developed we must not be surprised that one of us bombs little girls in a Sunday school or shoots down a President of our republic.
Condon was pointing out, fifty-three years ago, that it is a combination of forces INCLUDING THE MASS MEDIA that have made the United States a violent country. AND THAT THE ONE FORCE THAT COULD BE HOPED TO COUNTERACT THAT, "A FEEBLE, BEWILDERED SET OF CHURCHES CANNOT COUNTERACT" THOSE FORCES THAT SPRAY AT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THROUGH THE FIRE HOSES OF THE MASS MEDIA.
That he noticed that fifty-three years ago and said it, I will point out in The Nation, a lefty magazine which was frequently and notably anti-religious and which pretty well swallowed lots of the pseudo-liberal, libertarian line about free-press absolutism (a self-interested thing for the publishers, editors and writers of lefty magazines which was obviously NOT NECESSARILY in the interest of the common good) has had consequences that have grown steadily worse, resulting in, among other things, the propaganda that has made "liberal" a dirty word, the election of some of our worst presidents, the billionaire invention of such acceptable forms of white supremacy and bigotry as the Tea Party, and, this year, the Donald Trump campaign for president. It was the geniuses who ran the American left who took those actions, even in the very magazines where people like Condon pointed that out.
The facile slogans of pseudo-leftism and pseudo-liberalism were swallowed, it didn't take any specialized form of the "brain washing" techniques in the novel, it took repetition through the mind-deadening media of slogans reminiscent of the words of the deified "founders" and other such vague bromides of naive, 18th century, "enlightenment".
Walter Brueggemann, in a number of his recent lectures and sermons has pointed out that in our society it is ONLY the churches who promote the very essence of democratic liberalism, the promotion of equal justice, economic justice and the common good. Religions of the type he and I mean are the only force I know of that promotes that as a complete package AND AS AN EQUALLY HELD AND BINDING MORAL OBLIGATION. I have pointed out, as have others, that even the Marxist-atheist political scientist, Jurgen Habermas has pointed out that there is nothing else that nourishes democratic modernism. In the past decade of looking into these questions, I've found, not frequently but in a number of times, that wasn't unknown to some people in the past.
---------
The other day I watched a Youtube of John Oliver from last spring on the subject of the promotion of bad scientific studies in the stupid American media. Almost all of it was great and funny and accurate and smart - he said a lot of the things I've been saying here for years so you won't be surprised I agreed with a lot of it. Then he said, in response to the idiocy of Al Roker on the Today Show,
"No, in science you don't get to just cherry pick the parts that justify what you were going to do anyway, that's religion..."
to the cheers of his, no doubt, allegedly lefty-leaning studio audience.
Well, that's a complete lie popular among college educated Brits like Oliver and popular among the anti-religious members of the would-be lefty media and disseminated through it to the general and vaguely defined American "left". The very same people who claim that are the very same people who whine and complain about all of the pleasures available to their class of people which are forbidden by religion. RELIGION IS NOT WHAT TELLS YOU TO CHERRY PICK WHAT YOU WERE GOING TO DO ANYWAY, IT'S WHAT TELLS YOU NOT TO JUST DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO WHEN IT VIOLATES THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS. That is if it follows The Law and the Gospels or that kind of religion. Religion is also what tells you that it is a sin to lie, to distort reality, especially for self-gain. There is nothing in secularism that effectively promotes those things, they are far less of a force in even the best of secularism than they are when promoted by religion.
Religion is definitely NOT the thing that tells you that you can believe anything you wish to and that you can do anything you want to without ultimately paying the consequences. I think John Oliver got religion mixed up with popular atheism. Like most people in the English speaking world who believe themselves to be liberal, he's got it ass-backward.
It is 18th century "enlightenment" that encourages people to follow their self-interest just assuming that, by some unseen law of nature, things will work themselves out for the right people. And in that, the "enlightenment" was in opposition to the traditional morality of the Mosaic and the Christian tradition. And things got worse under a more "scientific" regime. It is 19th century natural selection that gave the biggest boost to the destruction of that morality through its promotion of the idea that survival of the fittest was the law of nature. That is something that the earliest promoters of Darwinism both realized and promoted starting within five years of the publication of On The Origin of Species. Darwin's closest scientific colleague, his fierce champion and "bull dog", the anti-religious, specifically anti-Jewish-anti-Christian, Thomas Huxley was enthusiastically predicting that the results of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation would be the eventual destruction of black people who, no longer the useful property of white people would now be destroyed by them. It was Darwinism's foremost continental champion who said, with Darwin's, Huxley's and others approval that Darwinism was not socialist, it was not democratic, that it was, on the contrary, a prop to an aristocratic system of government.* The general trend of "science" in this area is to tell the privileged that they not only "get to do what they were going to do anyway" their doing so is blessed by nature as the way to make evolutionary progress. Which is why some of the worst aspects of Darwinism became law and social policy so rapidly after the theory of natural selection was published.
* Besides, Darwinism, the theory of natural selection—which Virchow aimed at in his denunciation, much more especially than at transformation, the theory of descent—which is often confounded with it—Darwinism, I say, is anything rather than socialist! If this English hypothesis is to be compared to any definite political tendency—as is, no doubt, possible—that tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist. The theory of selection teaches that in human life, as in animal and plant life everywhere, and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably and more or less prematurely. The germs of every species of animal and plant and the young individuals which spring from them are innumerable, while the number of those fortunate individuals which develop to maturity and actually reach their hardly-won life's goal is out of all proportion trifling. The cruel and merciless struggle for existence which rages throughout all living nature, and in the course of nature must rage, this unceasing and inexorable competition of all living creatures, is an incontestable fact; only the picked minority of the qualified "fittest" is in a position to resist it successfully, while the great majority of the competitors must necessarily perish miserably. We may profoundly lament this tragical state of things, but we can neither controvert it nor alter it. "Many are called but few are chosen." The selection, the picking out of these "chosen ones," is inevitably connected with the arrest and destruction of the remaining majority. Another English naturalist, therefore, designates the kernel of Darwinism very frankly as the "survival of the fittest," as the "victory of the best." At any rate, this principle of selection is nothing less than democratic, on the contrary, it is aristocratic in the strictest sense of the word. If, therefore, Darwinism, logically carried out, has, according to Virchow, "an uncommonly suspicious aspect," this can only be found in the idea that it offers a helping hand to the efforts of the aristocrats. But how the socialism of the day can find any encouragement in these efforts, and how the horrors of the Paris Commune can be traced to them, is to me, I must frankly confess, absolutely incomprehensible.
Ernst Haeckel, Freedom in Science And Teaching, p 93.
Darwin wrote to Haeckel that he entirely approved of the book, Huxley wrote the preface to its English edition, as I recall it was translated by another member of Darwin's inner circle, Ray Lankester.
And things got worse in later generations of those who took Darwinism as hard science and the basis of life. Many species of anti-liberal depravity, such as that of Nietzsche, sprang directly from the theory of natural selection.
Democracy means that you believe the majority of people are, with ACCURATE INFORMATION, able to better determine the course that their government should take than the self-interested and tiny faction that gets to make that decision under non-democratic governments. It doesn't mean that democracy produces uniformly wise results, it just means that when that decision is spread over the entire population that the chances are that particular and parochial self-interest will be swamped by the general tendency of people pursuing the more general good. Of course it all assumes something that modern people have been being talked out of believing to be possible or even existing, a general belief that we have a moral obligation to be of good will towards other people. Democracy doesn't work by people merely considering their own self-interest and the good of their close circles of family and friends, it depends on the moral obligations that are contained in nothing much outside of some religions. Consider this from what Richard Condon said at the end of a series of prepositional phrases beginning with "when":
.... when organized crime merges with organized commerce and labor, when a feeble, bewildered set of churches cannot counteract any of this and all of it is power-hosed at all of us through the most gigantically complex overcommunications system ever developed we must not be surprised that one of us bombs little girls in a Sunday school or shoots down a President of our republic.
Condon was pointing out, fifty-three years ago, that it is a combination of forces INCLUDING THE MASS MEDIA that have made the United States a violent country. AND THAT THE ONE FORCE THAT COULD BE HOPED TO COUNTERACT THAT, "A FEEBLE, BEWILDERED SET OF CHURCHES CANNOT COUNTERACT" THOSE FORCES THAT SPRAY AT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THROUGH THE FIRE HOSES OF THE MASS MEDIA.
That he noticed that fifty-three years ago and said it, I will point out in The Nation, a lefty magazine which was frequently and notably anti-religious and which pretty well swallowed lots of the pseudo-liberal, libertarian line about free-press absolutism (a self-interested thing for the publishers, editors and writers of lefty magazines which was obviously NOT NECESSARILY in the interest of the common good) has had consequences that have grown steadily worse, resulting in, among other things, the propaganda that has made "liberal" a dirty word, the election of some of our worst presidents, the billionaire invention of such acceptable forms of white supremacy and bigotry as the Tea Party, and, this year, the Donald Trump campaign for president. It was the geniuses who ran the American left who took those actions, even in the very magazines where people like Condon pointed that out.
The facile slogans of pseudo-leftism and pseudo-liberalism were swallowed, it didn't take any specialized form of the "brain washing" techniques in the novel, it took repetition through the mind-deadening media of slogans reminiscent of the words of the deified "founders" and other such vague bromides of naive, 18th century, "enlightenment".
Walter Brueggemann, in a number of his recent lectures and sermons has pointed out that in our society it is ONLY the churches who promote the very essence of democratic liberalism, the promotion of equal justice, economic justice and the common good. Religions of the type he and I mean are the only force I know of that promotes that as a complete package AND AS AN EQUALLY HELD AND BINDING MORAL OBLIGATION. I have pointed out, as have others, that even the Marxist-atheist political scientist, Jurgen Habermas has pointed out that there is nothing else that nourishes democratic modernism. In the past decade of looking into these questions, I've found, not frequently but in a number of times, that wasn't unknown to some people in the past.
---------
The other day I watched a Youtube of John Oliver from last spring on the subject of the promotion of bad scientific studies in the stupid American media. Almost all of it was great and funny and accurate and smart - he said a lot of the things I've been saying here for years so you won't be surprised I agreed with a lot of it. Then he said, in response to the idiocy of Al Roker on the Today Show,
"No, in science you don't get to just cherry pick the parts that justify what you were going to do anyway, that's religion..."
to the cheers of his, no doubt, allegedly lefty-leaning studio audience.
Well, that's a complete lie popular among college educated Brits like Oliver and popular among the anti-religious members of the would-be lefty media and disseminated through it to the general and vaguely defined American "left". The very same people who claim that are the very same people who whine and complain about all of the pleasures available to their class of people which are forbidden by religion. RELIGION IS NOT WHAT TELLS YOU TO CHERRY PICK WHAT YOU WERE GOING TO DO ANYWAY, IT'S WHAT TELLS YOU NOT TO JUST DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO WHEN IT VIOLATES THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS. That is if it follows The Law and the Gospels or that kind of religion. Religion is also what tells you that it is a sin to lie, to distort reality, especially for self-gain. There is nothing in secularism that effectively promotes those things, they are far less of a force in even the best of secularism than they are when promoted by religion.
Religion is definitely NOT the thing that tells you that you can believe anything you wish to and that you can do anything you want to without ultimately paying the consequences. I think John Oliver got religion mixed up with popular atheism. Like most people in the English speaking world who believe themselves to be liberal, he's got it ass-backward.
It is 18th century "enlightenment" that encourages people to follow their self-interest just assuming that, by some unseen law of nature, things will work themselves out for the right people. And in that, the "enlightenment" was in opposition to the traditional morality of the Mosaic and the Christian tradition. And things got worse under a more "scientific" regime. It is 19th century natural selection that gave the biggest boost to the destruction of that morality through its promotion of the idea that survival of the fittest was the law of nature. That is something that the earliest promoters of Darwinism both realized and promoted starting within five years of the publication of On The Origin of Species. Darwin's closest scientific colleague, his fierce champion and "bull dog", the anti-religious, specifically anti-Jewish-anti-Christian, Thomas Huxley was enthusiastically predicting that the results of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation would be the eventual destruction of black people who, no longer the useful property of white people would now be destroyed by them. It was Darwinism's foremost continental champion who said, with Darwin's, Huxley's and others approval that Darwinism was not socialist, it was not democratic, that it was, on the contrary, a prop to an aristocratic system of government.* The general trend of "science" in this area is to tell the privileged that they not only "get to do what they were going to do anyway" their doing so is blessed by nature as the way to make evolutionary progress. Which is why some of the worst aspects of Darwinism became law and social policy so rapidly after the theory of natural selection was published.
* Besides, Darwinism, the theory of natural selection—which Virchow aimed at in his denunciation, much more especially than at transformation, the theory of descent—which is often confounded with it—Darwinism, I say, is anything rather than socialist! If this English hypothesis is to be compared to any definite political tendency—as is, no doubt, possible—that tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist. The theory of selection teaches that in human life, as in animal and plant life everywhere, and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably and more or less prematurely. The germs of every species of animal and plant and the young individuals which spring from them are innumerable, while the number of those fortunate individuals which develop to maturity and actually reach their hardly-won life's goal is out of all proportion trifling. The cruel and merciless struggle for existence which rages throughout all living nature, and in the course of nature must rage, this unceasing and inexorable competition of all living creatures, is an incontestable fact; only the picked minority of the qualified "fittest" is in a position to resist it successfully, while the great majority of the competitors must necessarily perish miserably. We may profoundly lament this tragical state of things, but we can neither controvert it nor alter it. "Many are called but few are chosen." The selection, the picking out of these "chosen ones," is inevitably connected with the arrest and destruction of the remaining majority. Another English naturalist, therefore, designates the kernel of Darwinism very frankly as the "survival of the fittest," as the "victory of the best." At any rate, this principle of selection is nothing less than democratic, on the contrary, it is aristocratic in the strictest sense of the word. If, therefore, Darwinism, logically carried out, has, according to Virchow, "an uncommonly suspicious aspect," this can only be found in the idea that it offers a helping hand to the efforts of the aristocrats. But how the socialism of the day can find any encouragement in these efforts, and how the horrors of the Paris Commune can be traced to them, is to me, I must frankly confess, absolutely incomprehensible.
Ernst Haeckel, Freedom in Science And Teaching, p 93.
Darwin wrote to Haeckel that he entirely approved of the book, Huxley wrote the preface to its English edition, as I recall it was translated by another member of Darwin's inner circle, Ray Lankester.
And things got worse in later generations of those who took Darwinism as hard science and the basis of life. Many species of anti-liberal depravity, such as that of Nietzsche, sprang directly from the theory of natural selection.
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
Stupid Hate Mail
You know, Stupy, I went back and looked at the novel, though I had to scan fast I think it confirms my memory that the party of the evil mother and her husband isn't specified. Refresh my memory with an actual passage from the novel or I'm going to conclude you never read the thing.
The plot is pretty silly, based on some of the bogus psychology of the 50s that, like just so much in psychology, is eventually shown to be complete crap. Though it works as sci-fi and will do as a movie.
I hadn't known about the plagiarism scandal over the book that was uncovered in the 90s, but, then, I don't think I've really thought about it much. I hadn't known they'd done a remake of the movie of it. From what I read, in the second movie, the evil mother and her husband are Democrats, why that would be, I don't know. I do sort of like to think Condon was comparing the corruption of American politics with the early imperial period of Rome, though it was hardly an original idea.
Update: Stupy, get the novel, type out where it specifies the party. You're even stupider than I think you are if you think I'm just going to take your word for anything. And I mean the novel, not the movies they made of it, which are probably the only things you've seen of it.
Update 2: "Condon was a genius" translated from Simelsese that means "I watched a movie based on one of his books" or, "Kewl people talk about the movie". He was an adequate pulp writer, the plot of The Manchurian Candidate is entertaining, the writing sags in places, the plot is absolutely absurd.
You do know, don't you, Stupy, that the guy who is brainwashed by the commies wasn't the one who was a candidate of an unnamed party, he was the guy who was programmed to assassinate the candidate. Thus the comparison of the movie to the Kennedy assassination, assuming Oswald did it. Condon wrote a rather oddly rambling article about it*. Actually, I'm not even sure you know that much about it.
* I was reading about how Senator Thruston Morton of Kentucky absolved the American people from any guilt in the assassination of the President when a reporter from a South African press association telephoned from London to ask if I felt responsible for the President's killing, inasmuch as I had written a novel, The Manchurian Candidate, on which had been based a film that had just been frozen in the United States because it was felt that the assassin might have seen it and been influenced by it. I told the reporter that, with all Americans, I had contributed to form the attitudes of the assassin; and that the assassin, and Americans like him, had contributed to the attitudes which had caused me to write the novel.
The differences between Senator Morton's views on this and my own are vast. The man who shot John Kennedy, Senator Morton said, was a stranger to the American heritage and his mind had been warped by an alien violence, not by a native condition.
Brainwashing to violence and assassination is the line taken in my novel. On its melodramatic surface, the book is a study of the consequences of a mind warped by alien violence, but I had also hoped to suggest that for some time all of us in the United States had been brainwashed to violence, and to indicate that the reader might consider that the tempo of this all-American brainwashing was being speeded up.
I meant to call attention, through example, to the proved brainwashing to violence shown by the increased sale of cigarettes after they had been conclusively demonstrated to be suicide weapons. I meant to show that when the attention of a nation is focused upon violence when it appears on the front page of all newspapers, throughout television programming, in the hundreds of millions of monthly comic books, in most motion pictures, in the rhythms of popular music and the dance, and in popular $5 novels which soon become 50c paperbacks; when a most violent example is set by city, state and federal governments, when organized crime merges with organized commerce and labor, when a feeble, bewildered set of churches cannot counteract any of this and all of it is power-hosed at all of us through the most gigantically complex overcommunications system ever developed we must not be surprised that one of us bombs little girls in a Sunday school or shoots down a President of our republic. We can feign surprise, as we did with the murder of President Kennedy, but none of us seemed either surprised or moved by the murder of Medgar Evers, who was also a man who had a young wife and children, and whose assassin most certainly matched the basic, American psychological pattern of the killer of our President...
I don't think David McCullough's contention that the evil mommy was supposed to stand in for Roy Cohn and her husband to represent Joe McCarthy helps much. Even more so if that was the case.
At any rate, I don't think it has much of an effect on my contention that no one would have predicted that it would be the Republican Party that ran a KGB asset for president, doing so rather openly.
Now, you're going to have to excuse me. I feel old realizing I remember an article I read almost fifty three years ago. I think I'll go put my feet up.
Update 3: Oh, yeah, this part of the Condon defense was, actually, kind of interesting and topical.
When the fanatic is a ruler, rather than the assassin of a ruler, the people who permitted him to take power must be blamed whether they be the Germans of 1933-35 for Adolf Hitler, or the people of Chicago, Illinois, for their local government. But when the fanatic is the assassin, he emerges from the very fabric of the people. In answer to Senator Morton: if the American people are encouraging a mass educational system the over communications industry [I assume he means TV and the radio] which instructs for the production of the highest crime rate and the most widely shared violence dependencies of any country in the world, is it not time to say, most particularly by our government, that each American is responsible for that state of affairs because he does nothing to change it? We are not, as some well-meaning European newspaper put it, a violent and unstable people because such toughness was required to tame the wild frontier 125 years ago. We are violent and unstable because we have been so conditioned to these responses that civilized, thoughtful conduct has become impossible for us.
It is a hell of a spot for a country to be in. Who, the least brainwashed among us, will cast the first redemptive thought?
You have to wonder what he'd make of today's media and the popular culture that is many scores of times more violent and brutal and the fascist demagogue who has a chance of winning the presidency of the United States with the support of the KGB thug from Russia and overt neo-Nazis and other fascists and white supremacists. You know what I think, that it's an entirely predictable result of media deregulation and the permission that liberals on the Supreme Court handed the media to lie with impunity a few months after he wrote that.
The plot is pretty silly, based on some of the bogus psychology of the 50s that, like just so much in psychology, is eventually shown to be complete crap. Though it works as sci-fi and will do as a movie.
I hadn't known about the plagiarism scandal over the book that was uncovered in the 90s, but, then, I don't think I've really thought about it much. I hadn't known they'd done a remake of the movie of it. From what I read, in the second movie, the evil mother and her husband are Democrats, why that would be, I don't know. I do sort of like to think Condon was comparing the corruption of American politics with the early imperial period of Rome, though it was hardly an original idea.
Update: Stupy, get the novel, type out where it specifies the party. You're even stupider than I think you are if you think I'm just going to take your word for anything. And I mean the novel, not the movies they made of it, which are probably the only things you've seen of it.
Update 2: "Condon was a genius" translated from Simelsese that means "I watched a movie based on one of his books" or, "Kewl people talk about the movie". He was an adequate pulp writer, the plot of The Manchurian Candidate is entertaining, the writing sags in places, the plot is absolutely absurd.
You do know, don't you, Stupy, that the guy who is brainwashed by the commies wasn't the one who was a candidate of an unnamed party, he was the guy who was programmed to assassinate the candidate. Thus the comparison of the movie to the Kennedy assassination, assuming Oswald did it. Condon wrote a rather oddly rambling article about it*. Actually, I'm not even sure you know that much about it.
* I was reading about how Senator Thruston Morton of Kentucky absolved the American people from any guilt in the assassination of the President when a reporter from a South African press association telephoned from London to ask if I felt responsible for the President's killing, inasmuch as I had written a novel, The Manchurian Candidate, on which had been based a film that had just been frozen in the United States because it was felt that the assassin might have seen it and been influenced by it. I told the reporter that, with all Americans, I had contributed to form the attitudes of the assassin; and that the assassin, and Americans like him, had contributed to the attitudes which had caused me to write the novel.
The differences between Senator Morton's views on this and my own are vast. The man who shot John Kennedy, Senator Morton said, was a stranger to the American heritage and his mind had been warped by an alien violence, not by a native condition.
Brainwashing to violence and assassination is the line taken in my novel. On its melodramatic surface, the book is a study of the consequences of a mind warped by alien violence, but I had also hoped to suggest that for some time all of us in the United States had been brainwashed to violence, and to indicate that the reader might consider that the tempo of this all-American brainwashing was being speeded up.
I meant to call attention, through example, to the proved brainwashing to violence shown by the increased sale of cigarettes after they had been conclusively demonstrated to be suicide weapons. I meant to show that when the attention of a nation is focused upon violence when it appears on the front page of all newspapers, throughout television programming, in the hundreds of millions of monthly comic books, in most motion pictures, in the rhythms of popular music and the dance, and in popular $5 novels which soon become 50c paperbacks; when a most violent example is set by city, state and federal governments, when organized crime merges with organized commerce and labor, when a feeble, bewildered set of churches cannot counteract any of this and all of it is power-hosed at all of us through the most gigantically complex overcommunications system ever developed we must not be surprised that one of us bombs little girls in a Sunday school or shoots down a President of our republic. We can feign surprise, as we did with the murder of President Kennedy, but none of us seemed either surprised or moved by the murder of Medgar Evers, who was also a man who had a young wife and children, and whose assassin most certainly matched the basic, American psychological pattern of the killer of our President...
I don't think David McCullough's contention that the evil mommy was supposed to stand in for Roy Cohn and her husband to represent Joe McCarthy helps much. Even more so if that was the case.
At any rate, I don't think it has much of an effect on my contention that no one would have predicted that it would be the Republican Party that ran a KGB asset for president, doing so rather openly.
Now, you're going to have to excuse me. I feel old realizing I remember an article I read almost fifty three years ago. I think I'll go put my feet up.
Update 3: Oh, yeah, this part of the Condon defense was, actually, kind of interesting and topical.
When the fanatic is a ruler, rather than the assassin of a ruler, the people who permitted him to take power must be blamed whether they be the Germans of 1933-35 for Adolf Hitler, or the people of Chicago, Illinois, for their local government. But when the fanatic is the assassin, he emerges from the very fabric of the people. In answer to Senator Morton: if the American people are encouraging a mass educational system the over communications industry [I assume he means TV and the radio] which instructs for the production of the highest crime rate and the most widely shared violence dependencies of any country in the world, is it not time to say, most particularly by our government, that each American is responsible for that state of affairs because he does nothing to change it? We are not, as some well-meaning European newspaper put it, a violent and unstable people because such toughness was required to tame the wild frontier 125 years ago. We are violent and unstable because we have been so conditioned to these responses that civilized, thoughtful conduct has become impossible for us.
It is a hell of a spot for a country to be in. Who, the least brainwashed among us, will cast the first redemptive thought?
You have to wonder what he'd make of today's media and the popular culture that is many scores of times more violent and brutal and the fascist demagogue who has a chance of winning the presidency of the United States with the support of the KGB thug from Russia and overt neo-Nazis and other fascists and white supremacists. You know what I think, that it's an entirely predictable result of media deregulation and the permission that liberals on the Supreme Court handed the media to lie with impunity a few months after he wrote that.
Why Are We Such Suckers For Con Men Like These?
Face it, the kewl kids, the hot, trendy would-be left, the hotshots of would be-hipness are conceited snobs who love, just love to believe they are and insist on being taken as absolutely brilliant. But they aren't any smarter than anyone else, me included. It didn't occur to me, immediately, that what such icons of kewlness among them as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden were con men who were not heroes of democracy and freedom and personal dignity. They are people who traded in stolen information for their own attempted and obtained personal gain.
Consider the cinema lauded Edward Snowden, a man who worked for one of the contractors of the NSA who, before doing exactly what he gained fame for doing said that people who hacked and stole information as he did should be hung by their balls. Then he stole massive amounts of the very information that we are told we should be upset that the NSA gathered, distributed some of it to such people of debatable credibility as Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and who knows who else in a rather vague chain of distribution and then took the entire massive hoards of millions of pages of that information with him to China and, when the Chinese intelligence services who arrested him got whatever deal he could make for them to not extradite him to the United States, he, then, took it to Putin's Russia - perhaps the two most effective large governments accomplished in invading the privacy of their own citizens, effectively crushing any possible opposition or even challenge by the press, including by means of imprisonment and even murder, at home and abroad. And don't for a second be so stupid as to believe he didn't trade them the information he had with him for not being shipped back to the United States. It was the only thing he had to keep them from making a bargain with the U.S. government to ship him back. And he would have known that. The places he chose to bring that information with him tells that story, that deduction, though not even hard to make is, apparently, beyond the capacity of the kewl kids.
A question that I've never seen asked about Snowden was why he stole so much information when a tiny fraction of what he stole could have made the point that the NSA collects information about us. He stole and took out of the country so much that he couldn't possibly have known the contents of more than a small fraction of it. The only reason I have ever been able to fathom for that is that he intended to sell some of it. Only he was so stupid that he brought it to one of the premier dictatorships in the world. The first crack in his insta-myth for me was to wonder if that huge hoard of intelligence couldn't have contained important information about dissidents in China and Russia which would more effectively allow those governments to suppress any opposition to them. Then I realized that it almost certainly contained information that would make their espionage of the United States, the government AND PRIVATE CITIZENS more effective. If you don't like the NSA having a record of your e-mail or phone calls, just who called who, how would you like the Russian kleptocrats to have whatever information Snowden stole, perhaps including that information and not unlikely clues as to how the NSA got it?
And that's not to mention what I said yesterday, that the what-passes-for-heroes in the lefty mythos of the American "left" Julian Assange and Wikileaks are actively engaged in using stolen contents of e-mails, likely stolen by the very Russian government that Snowden handed so much information to, and publishing it to damage John Podesta, Sidney Bluementhal, and, ultimately Hillary Clinton in order to put Putin's buddy and the reported massive debtor to the Russian oligarchs, Donald Trump in the American presidency. Now, what purpose do you suppose that could serve?
If Julian Assange were exposed as being that kind of operative for the CIA in Greece in the 1960s or Venezuela in the 2000s, he would have exactly the kind of (deserved) condemnation and loathing on the left that he doesn't get for doing that for the Putin dictatorship in the United States, today. He and his Wikileaks are the tool of a foreign despot which does exactly what the most paranoid and fevered fiction of would-be lefty Hollywood imagines but only imagines could happen here. What is it about this situation that doesn't impeach the credibility of them and the pseudo-journalists like Glenn Greenwald who have attached themselves like limpets and barnacles to the garbage scows that the big boys in this game are?
The United States government, like all governments, has the capability of doing bad things but, unlike the Russian or Chinese governments, it has some measure of democratic control, some limits on what it can get away with. I'm not saying that we should give the U.S. government a carte blanche and a blank check to do whatever the unsavory characters who we entrust with being spies dream up. But I am saying if we shouldn't trust the NSA, we sure as hell shouldn't trust the unsavory characters it hires who then do what Snowden and Assange have done and we shouldn't turn them into two-dimensional Hollywood heroes in the manner of thriller movies. Those don't even get the depth of the second-rate novels they're based on. We certainly shouldn't trust those like Assange who have proven themselves to be sleazes working for and at the service of governments as anti-democratic and corrupt as Putin's. We shouldn't trust the phony, play journalists like Glenn Greenwald who need to lie about the status of the sleazy game they use to become famous and wealthy.
The damage that the Marxists and anarchists did to the credibility of the American left lives on in this kind of bull shit. The reflexive assumption that what American democracy produces does worse than what others, even the most anti-democratic governments do, is one of the stupidest habits of the left. Yes, our government is certainly capable of doing bad things and it does bad things, all governments can and do. Democracy, even the best of imaginable democracies is only as good as The People who govern themselves through it. It can fail to do what's right but, unlike autocratic and dictatorial government, democracy has the capacity to try to correct some, ideally many of those things and to prevent some of the worst of them. The reflex that those like Greenwald are depending on is that the ability to see through that in the context of the Trump-fascist bid for the presidency, as supported by the Putin regime will be swamped by reflexive paranoia about our own government. That the likes of Greenwald and Assange are on the side of the kleptocrats of the Putin regime should certainly discredit them. If we don't take them as discredited, we also deserve to be discredited.
Either you really believe in the potential of democracy or not. No one who demonstrates that they lack that belief should ever be mistaken for someone who should be allowed to pass themselves off as superior. Why are we such suckers for con men who obviously don't?
Consider the cinema lauded Edward Snowden, a man who worked for one of the contractors of the NSA who, before doing exactly what he gained fame for doing said that people who hacked and stole information as he did should be hung by their balls. Then he stole massive amounts of the very information that we are told we should be upset that the NSA gathered, distributed some of it to such people of debatable credibility as Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and who knows who else in a rather vague chain of distribution and then took the entire massive hoards of millions of pages of that information with him to China and, when the Chinese intelligence services who arrested him got whatever deal he could make for them to not extradite him to the United States, he, then, took it to Putin's Russia - perhaps the two most effective large governments accomplished in invading the privacy of their own citizens, effectively crushing any possible opposition or even challenge by the press, including by means of imprisonment and even murder, at home and abroad. And don't for a second be so stupid as to believe he didn't trade them the information he had with him for not being shipped back to the United States. It was the only thing he had to keep them from making a bargain with the U.S. government to ship him back. And he would have known that. The places he chose to bring that information with him tells that story, that deduction, though not even hard to make is, apparently, beyond the capacity of the kewl kids.
A question that I've never seen asked about Snowden was why he stole so much information when a tiny fraction of what he stole could have made the point that the NSA collects information about us. He stole and took out of the country so much that he couldn't possibly have known the contents of more than a small fraction of it. The only reason I have ever been able to fathom for that is that he intended to sell some of it. Only he was so stupid that he brought it to one of the premier dictatorships in the world. The first crack in his insta-myth for me was to wonder if that huge hoard of intelligence couldn't have contained important information about dissidents in China and Russia which would more effectively allow those governments to suppress any opposition to them. Then I realized that it almost certainly contained information that would make their espionage of the United States, the government AND PRIVATE CITIZENS more effective. If you don't like the NSA having a record of your e-mail or phone calls, just who called who, how would you like the Russian kleptocrats to have whatever information Snowden stole, perhaps including that information and not unlikely clues as to how the NSA got it?
And that's not to mention what I said yesterday, that the what-passes-for-heroes in the lefty mythos of the American "left" Julian Assange and Wikileaks are actively engaged in using stolen contents of e-mails, likely stolen by the very Russian government that Snowden handed so much information to, and publishing it to damage John Podesta, Sidney Bluementhal, and, ultimately Hillary Clinton in order to put Putin's buddy and the reported massive debtor to the Russian oligarchs, Donald Trump in the American presidency. Now, what purpose do you suppose that could serve?
If Julian Assange were exposed as being that kind of operative for the CIA in Greece in the 1960s or Venezuela in the 2000s, he would have exactly the kind of (deserved) condemnation and loathing on the left that he doesn't get for doing that for the Putin dictatorship in the United States, today. He and his Wikileaks are the tool of a foreign despot which does exactly what the most paranoid and fevered fiction of would-be lefty Hollywood imagines but only imagines could happen here. What is it about this situation that doesn't impeach the credibility of them and the pseudo-journalists like Glenn Greenwald who have attached themselves like limpets and barnacles to the garbage scows that the big boys in this game are?
The United States government, like all governments, has the capability of doing bad things but, unlike the Russian or Chinese governments, it has some measure of democratic control, some limits on what it can get away with. I'm not saying that we should give the U.S. government a carte blanche and a blank check to do whatever the unsavory characters who we entrust with being spies dream up. But I am saying if we shouldn't trust the NSA, we sure as hell shouldn't trust the unsavory characters it hires who then do what Snowden and Assange have done and we shouldn't turn them into two-dimensional Hollywood heroes in the manner of thriller movies. Those don't even get the depth of the second-rate novels they're based on. We certainly shouldn't trust those like Assange who have proven themselves to be sleazes working for and at the service of governments as anti-democratic and corrupt as Putin's. We shouldn't trust the phony, play journalists like Glenn Greenwald who need to lie about the status of the sleazy game they use to become famous and wealthy.
The damage that the Marxists and anarchists did to the credibility of the American left lives on in this kind of bull shit. The reflexive assumption that what American democracy produces does worse than what others, even the most anti-democratic governments do, is one of the stupidest habits of the left. Yes, our government is certainly capable of doing bad things and it does bad things, all governments can and do. Democracy, even the best of imaginable democracies is only as good as The People who govern themselves through it. It can fail to do what's right but, unlike autocratic and dictatorial government, democracy has the capacity to try to correct some, ideally many of those things and to prevent some of the worst of them. The reflex that those like Greenwald are depending on is that the ability to see through that in the context of the Trump-fascist bid for the presidency, as supported by the Putin regime will be swamped by reflexive paranoia about our own government. That the likes of Greenwald and Assange are on the side of the kleptocrats of the Putin regime should certainly discredit them. If we don't take them as discredited, we also deserve to be discredited.
Either you really believe in the potential of democracy or not. No one who demonstrates that they lack that belief should ever be mistaken for someone who should be allowed to pass themselves off as superior. Why are we such suckers for con men who obviously don't?
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Hate Mail
Stupy, you're again mistaking fiction for scholarship. I was talking about the real world, not the plot of late 50s thrillers as made into movies. Besides, I already wrote about the possibility that the opera written on it was topical, this year.
Out Of His Own Mouth Maine's Shame, The Deranged 38% Governor Paul LePage Is Calling For Fascism
By ESME CRIBB Published OCTOBER 11, 2016, 10:51 AM EDT
Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) praised Donald Trump as a leader who would "show some authoritarian power" on Tuesday, even as he slammed President Barack Obama as an "autocrat."
"We need a Donald Trump to show some authoritarian power in our country and bring back the rule of law," LePage said in an interview with Maine radio station WVOM.
He went on to compare Trump to Obama, decrying the President as "an autocrat" who ignores Congress and "just does it on his own."
As Maine's Sun Journal newspaper noted, the dictionary defines "autocrat" as a person who behaves in an authoritarian manner.
LePage was seemingly unconcerned by Trump’s comments about forcing himself on women in a 2005 video that resurfaced last week, but conceded that Trump is not the "ideal guy I'd want my daughter going after.”
Lauren LePage, the Maine governor’s daughter, was hired in August by the Trump campaign as state coalitions director.
I remember the first time I heard the NPR idiot Susan Stamberg breezily mouthing the line, "The first one to say "fascist" loses, " and the thing I remember doing was thinking how convenient that conventional rule of the pop culture common wisdom would be for fascists. Well, now we've got 'em and they're in office and they're not that far from running the country. One is already running my state and a number of others.
And, note, Paul LePage is a crackpot who thinks Barack Obama, who can't even get his Supreme Court nominee a hearing in the Republican Senate is an "autocrat" as part of his call for Republicans to rule as fascists. Given that his guy has already said he was ready to guarantee his cheering supporters that he would put his political opponent in prison, this is the real thing, people, what it looks like when it's starting to happen here.
If Trump gets more than 25% of the vote - and who knows how the next month will go - this isn't a bullet dodged, it's a red-flag warning that we are, in no uncertain terms, in danger of the fascists the media are too genteel to call that winning and turning the country into a fascist dictatorship.
Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) praised Donald Trump as a leader who would "show some authoritarian power" on Tuesday, even as he slammed President Barack Obama as an "autocrat."
"We need a Donald Trump to show some authoritarian power in our country and bring back the rule of law," LePage said in an interview with Maine radio station WVOM.
He went on to compare Trump to Obama, decrying the President as "an autocrat" who ignores Congress and "just does it on his own."
As Maine's Sun Journal newspaper noted, the dictionary defines "autocrat" as a person who behaves in an authoritarian manner.
LePage was seemingly unconcerned by Trump’s comments about forcing himself on women in a 2005 video that resurfaced last week, but conceded that Trump is not the "ideal guy I'd want my daughter going after.”
Lauren LePage, the Maine governor’s daughter, was hired in August by the Trump campaign as state coalitions director.
I remember the first time I heard the NPR idiot Susan Stamberg breezily mouthing the line, "The first one to say "fascist" loses, " and the thing I remember doing was thinking how convenient that conventional rule of the pop culture common wisdom would be for fascists. Well, now we've got 'em and they're in office and they're not that far from running the country. One is already running my state and a number of others.
And, note, Paul LePage is a crackpot who thinks Barack Obama, who can't even get his Supreme Court nominee a hearing in the Republican Senate is an "autocrat" as part of his call for Republicans to rule as fascists. Given that his guy has already said he was ready to guarantee his cheering supporters that he would put his political opponent in prison, this is the real thing, people, what it looks like when it's starting to happen here.
If Trump gets more than 25% of the vote - and who knows how the next month will go - this isn't a bullet dodged, it's a red-flag warning that we are, in no uncertain terms, in danger of the fascists the media are too genteel to call that winning and turning the country into a fascist dictatorship.
Ed Cherry Trio - Cristo Redentor - Christ The Redeemer
Ed Cherry, guitar
Pat Bianchi, organ
Chris Beck, drums
This Isn't Hard It's Too Simple To Even Call It Easy
The people who are so worried about their privacy should consider how George R.R. Martin protects his Game of Thrones novels from piracy by using an old DOS based machine THAT ISN'T CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET. It would certainly be a different election campaign if the managers of Hillary Clinton's campaign and members of the DNC staff hadn't felt so foolishly free to just share whatever was on their mind in e-mails that have been hacked.
And that's nothing compared to the idiots who put their entire life and that of other people on their Facebook and Twitter and other accounts. I think it should be a rule that anyone who prattles stuff about online privacy but who let it all hang out online are too stupid to listen to. The idea that online communications are secure and private is sheerest stupidity.
If Hillary Clinton becomes president, I hope one of the first things she does is to ban members of her administration from discussing both important information and their personal lives and opinions online. I hope she and the DNC have learned something about how obvious targets for hackers, domestic and, especially, foreign, shouldn't do what they've done in the past. And don't for a second believe that everyone you can think of who might be won't be trying to hack all of them looking for stuff to sandbag her with.
And that's nothing compared to the idiots who put their entire life and that of other people on their Facebook and Twitter and other accounts. I think it should be a rule that anyone who prattles stuff about online privacy but who let it all hang out online are too stupid to listen to. The idea that online communications are secure and private is sheerest stupidity.
If Hillary Clinton becomes president, I hope one of the first things she does is to ban members of her administration from discussing both important information and their personal lives and opinions online. I hope she and the DNC have learned something about how obvious targets for hackers, domestic and, especially, foreign, shouldn't do what they've done in the past. And don't for a second believe that everyone you can think of who might be won't be trying to hack all of them looking for stuff to sandbag her with.
Right Before Our Eyes Julian Assange And Wikileaks Doing Exactly What Paranoiacs Of The Left Worry The American Government "COULD" Do
With their continued publishing of what we are supposed to believe are John Podesta's e-mails, I want the Obama administration to start putting pressure on the Ecuadoran government to expel Julian Assange from their embassy. I want to see him made available for the possible prosecutions in Sweden, then I want him extradited to the United States to face charges here.
Assange is doing far worse than what the NSA has been accused of in publishing stolen e-mails by John Podesta, a private citizen of the United States, in order to influence American elections. He is doing, before the eyes of the world, what the most paranoid fantasies encouraged by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and Oliver Stone have worried COULD happen if the NSA did to us what it is now, just about certain, Russian intelligence has, in fact, done.
Back when the Edward Snowden story was hot I pointed out, over and over again, that anyone who believes their biggest worry about online communications being hacked came from the NSA or the FBI were deluded. The same communications that they could have monitored under legal restriction HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AVAILABLE TO BE STOLEN BY ANY FOREIGN GOVERNMENT WITH THE MEANS TO HACK THEM. The United States government is probably one of the least likely to violate your privacy because the United States isn't a fascist dictatorship as so many other countries with high-tech capabilities are. And now we see one of those countries has an intelligence apparatus which is doing that, working with the hero of the paranoids club, Julian Assange, to publish that information to throw an election to someone as bad as Donald Trump. Assange is part of an operation that is reminiscent of the worst of what the CIA did in third-world and even some European countries, things that the American Congress investigated in the wake of Watergate. Which, in the American system led to legal restrictions that are not in place in other countries.
The paranoia whipped up in the wake of Edward Snowden's theft of massive amounts of stuff the NSA had collected - despite some real concerns - largely based on some pretty transparent foolishness. When you send stuff over the internet, even when you just allow your computer access to the internet, you are vulnerable to hacking and organized crime and criminal governments around the world have some of the most sophisticated hackers working for them. Even if the American government didn't do a single thing by way of monitoring internet use other governments entirely outside of democratic control will violate the privacy we have been duped into believing we had.
John Podesta and, even more so, the people who sent him the stuff that the Putin government, entities such as Assange's organized crime outfit and the Trump campaign are using to try to get their guy elected, they were stupid to send the kind of stuff they did over the internet. Unless there is some unhackable means of encryption used - if there is any such thing - they would have been far better off using the U. S. Postal Service to send anything they didn't want read by unwanted eyes. The U.S. Mail can't be accessed even by the federal authorities without a judge issuing a warrant. And it's pretty well untouchable by foreign governments and organized criminals. The United States government has SOME restrictions as to what it can do and get away with, those others who can hack anything you make available online, don't have any.
If it comes to a contest of trusting the United States government or trusting Assange and his ilk, well, I never voted to make Assange commissar of information.
Assange is doing far worse than what the NSA has been accused of in publishing stolen e-mails by John Podesta, a private citizen of the United States, in order to influence American elections. He is doing, before the eyes of the world, what the most paranoid fantasies encouraged by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and Oliver Stone have worried COULD happen if the NSA did to us what it is now, just about certain, Russian intelligence has, in fact, done.
Back when the Edward Snowden story was hot I pointed out, over and over again, that anyone who believes their biggest worry about online communications being hacked came from the NSA or the FBI were deluded. The same communications that they could have monitored under legal restriction HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AVAILABLE TO BE STOLEN BY ANY FOREIGN GOVERNMENT WITH THE MEANS TO HACK THEM. The United States government is probably one of the least likely to violate your privacy because the United States isn't a fascist dictatorship as so many other countries with high-tech capabilities are. And now we see one of those countries has an intelligence apparatus which is doing that, working with the hero of the paranoids club, Julian Assange, to publish that information to throw an election to someone as bad as Donald Trump. Assange is part of an operation that is reminiscent of the worst of what the CIA did in third-world and even some European countries, things that the American Congress investigated in the wake of Watergate. Which, in the American system led to legal restrictions that are not in place in other countries.
The paranoia whipped up in the wake of Edward Snowden's theft of massive amounts of stuff the NSA had collected - despite some real concerns - largely based on some pretty transparent foolishness. When you send stuff over the internet, even when you just allow your computer access to the internet, you are vulnerable to hacking and organized crime and criminal governments around the world have some of the most sophisticated hackers working for them. Even if the American government didn't do a single thing by way of monitoring internet use other governments entirely outside of democratic control will violate the privacy we have been duped into believing we had.
John Podesta and, even more so, the people who sent him the stuff that the Putin government, entities such as Assange's organized crime outfit and the Trump campaign are using to try to get their guy elected, they were stupid to send the kind of stuff they did over the internet. Unless there is some unhackable means of encryption used - if there is any such thing - they would have been far better off using the U. S. Postal Service to send anything they didn't want read by unwanted eyes. The U.S. Mail can't be accessed even by the federal authorities without a judge issuing a warrant. And it's pretty well untouchable by foreign governments and organized criminals. The United States government has SOME restrictions as to what it can do and get away with, those others who can hack anything you make available online, don't have any.
If it comes to a contest of trusting the United States government or trusting Assange and his ilk, well, I never voted to make Assange commissar of information.
Who Ever Would Have Believed That It Would Be The Republicans Who Ran A KGB Assett For President
As the news is full of the stories of women who are coming forward to say that Donald Trump grabbed at their genitals, kissed them full on the lips without warning and otherwise did pretty much what he said on the now universally known recording with Billy Bush, the other serious charge, that he and his campaign are taking information directly from the Putin regime to use against Hillary Clinton is going largely unreported.
In Newsweek, Kurt Eichenwald points out that there is a smoking gun to be found in the incompetent reports from the Putin regime of the contents of the stolen e-mails from John Podesta. They incompetently misidentified a piece by Eichenwald that Sidney Blumenthal sent to Podesta as being the words of Sidney Blumenthal.
An email from Blumenthal—a confidant of Hillary Clinton and a man, second only to George Soros at the center of conservative conspiracy theories—turned up in the recent document dump by Wikileaks. At a time when American intelligence believes Russian hackers are trying to interfere with the presidential election, records have been fed recently to Wikileaks out of multiple organizations of the Democratic Party, raising concerns that the self-proclaimed whistleblowers group has become a tool of Putin’s government. But now that I have been brought into the whole mess—and transformed into Blumenthal—there is even more proof that this act of cyberwar is not only being orchestrated by the Russians, but that they are really, really dumb.
The evidence emerged thanks to the incompetence of Sputnik, the Russian online news and radio service established by the government controlled news agency, Rossiya Segodnya....
The documents that Wikileaks unloaded recently have been emails out of the account of John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s election campaign. Almost as soon as the pilfered documents emerged, Sputnik was all over them and rapidly found (or probably already knew about before the Wikileaks dump) a purportedly incriminating email from Blumenthal.
The email was amazing—it linked Boogie Man Blumenthal, Podesta and the topic of conservative political fevered dreams, Benghazi. This, it seemed, was the smoking gun finally proving Clinton bore total responsibility for the terrorist attack on the American outpost in Libya in 2012. Sputnik even declared that the email might be the “October surprise” that could undermine Clinton’s campaign.
Eichenwald identifies the part of his article which Sputnik attributed to Blumenthal a misattribution that appeared only in that source from the Putin government but which almost immediately was coming out of the mouth of Donald Trump who, forgive me for suspecting, is unlikely to read any news services but seems to get his knowledge of the world from what he gets told by people he listens to.
This false story was only reported by the Russian controlled agency (a reference appeared in a Turkish publication, but it was nothing but a link to the Sputnik article). So how did Donald Trump end up advancing the same falsehood put out by Putin’s mouthpiece?
At a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump spoke while holding a document in his hand. He told the assembled crowd that it was an email from Blumenthal, whom he called “sleazy Sidney.”
“This just came out a little while ago,’’ Trump said. “I have to tell you this.” And then he read the words from my article.
“He’s now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi,’’ Trump said, dropping the document to the floor. “This just came out a little while ago.”
The crowd booed and chanted, “Lock her up!”
This is not funny. It is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth. How did this happen? Who in the Trump campaign was feeding him falsehoods straight from the Kremlin?
Those seem to me to be at least as important as what we're finding out about the extent of Donald Trump's sexual abuse and possibly worse treatment of women.
It is amazing to me that we have a situation in which the leader of Russia, a former Communist Party member and a high up member of the KGB is running the conservative, right wing - no make that neo-fascist Republican candidate for president, a man who some people believe will, despite all of that get a majority of Republican and conservative votes and who is taking talking points directly from the Putin regime to use against her. If someone told me at any period from the 1950s through the fall of the Soviet Union that the Russians would be running a presidential candidate which was the asset of the same people who ran the Soviet Union, I'd have though it was outlandish fiction. But the corruption of the American right, its media, the media which has created the conditions that produced both Donald Trump AND THE SOCIAL-POLITICAL MOVEMENT THAT CHOSE HIM AS THE REPUBLICAN NOMINEE is so complete that even with this, large parts of it will still choose Putin's man over Hillary Clinton.
The media is the source of the mind-deadening gullibility of those who mistook the CEO of "reality" TV as presidential material. Ever stupider network entertainment, the cabloid "news" operations, right-wing hate talk-radio, the "free speech-free press" legal theorists and Supreme Court justices who either bought into their theories of media libertarianism or cynically used their wordings to forge rulings like Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United - if anyone ever asks how we got this far in handing our presidency to, effectively, a KGB apparatchik, that's who did it.
As to how the Republicans went from the political use of accusations of the State Department being riddled with Soviet agents to running a TV star who is one, himself, as their presidential candidate, when you make money and wealth acquisition your one and only value you're eventually going to buy the rope that hangs you. It would certainly be interesting to know the extent to which Russian oligarchs, many of them former members of the Soviet ruling class, stand as Donald Trump's creditors. Though I doubt you'll ever have FOX news raise that question. Or most of the American media. I suspect they wouldn't think such issues would be as good for their ratings as a sex scandal. Though they seemed pretty slow to latch onto one when it involved a Republican nominee who has had decades of public exposure as a sex as well as a business sleaze. Imagine if he'd been a Kennedy or Clinton, there would have been no proof necessary as they ran with it "being said" by.....
In Newsweek, Kurt Eichenwald points out that there is a smoking gun to be found in the incompetent reports from the Putin regime of the contents of the stolen e-mails from John Podesta. They incompetently misidentified a piece by Eichenwald that Sidney Blumenthal sent to Podesta as being the words of Sidney Blumenthal.
An email from Blumenthal—a confidant of Hillary Clinton and a man, second only to George Soros at the center of conservative conspiracy theories—turned up in the recent document dump by Wikileaks. At a time when American intelligence believes Russian hackers are trying to interfere with the presidential election, records have been fed recently to Wikileaks out of multiple organizations of the Democratic Party, raising concerns that the self-proclaimed whistleblowers group has become a tool of Putin’s government. But now that I have been brought into the whole mess—and transformed into Blumenthal—there is even more proof that this act of cyberwar is not only being orchestrated by the Russians, but that they are really, really dumb.
The evidence emerged thanks to the incompetence of Sputnik, the Russian online news and radio service established by the government controlled news agency, Rossiya Segodnya....
The documents that Wikileaks unloaded recently have been emails out of the account of John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s election campaign. Almost as soon as the pilfered documents emerged, Sputnik was all over them and rapidly found (or probably already knew about before the Wikileaks dump) a purportedly incriminating email from Blumenthal.
The email was amazing—it linked Boogie Man Blumenthal, Podesta and the topic of conservative political fevered dreams, Benghazi. This, it seemed, was the smoking gun finally proving Clinton bore total responsibility for the terrorist attack on the American outpost in Libya in 2012. Sputnik even declared that the email might be the “October surprise” that could undermine Clinton’s campaign.
Eichenwald identifies the part of his article which Sputnik attributed to Blumenthal a misattribution that appeared only in that source from the Putin government but which almost immediately was coming out of the mouth of Donald Trump who, forgive me for suspecting, is unlikely to read any news services but seems to get his knowledge of the world from what he gets told by people he listens to.
This false story was only reported by the Russian controlled agency (a reference appeared in a Turkish publication, but it was nothing but a link to the Sputnik article). So how did Donald Trump end up advancing the same falsehood put out by Putin’s mouthpiece?
At a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump spoke while holding a document in his hand. He told the assembled crowd that it was an email from Blumenthal, whom he called “sleazy Sidney.”
“This just came out a little while ago,’’ Trump said. “I have to tell you this.” And then he read the words from my article.
“He’s now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi,’’ Trump said, dropping the document to the floor. “This just came out a little while ago.”
The crowd booed and chanted, “Lock her up!”
This is not funny. It is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth. How did this happen? Who in the Trump campaign was feeding him falsehoods straight from the Kremlin?
Those seem to me to be at least as important as what we're finding out about the extent of Donald Trump's sexual abuse and possibly worse treatment of women.
It is amazing to me that we have a situation in which the leader of Russia, a former Communist Party member and a high up member of the KGB is running the conservative, right wing - no make that neo-fascist Republican candidate for president, a man who some people believe will, despite all of that get a majority of Republican and conservative votes and who is taking talking points directly from the Putin regime to use against her. If someone told me at any period from the 1950s through the fall of the Soviet Union that the Russians would be running a presidential candidate which was the asset of the same people who ran the Soviet Union, I'd have though it was outlandish fiction. But the corruption of the American right, its media, the media which has created the conditions that produced both Donald Trump AND THE SOCIAL-POLITICAL MOVEMENT THAT CHOSE HIM AS THE REPUBLICAN NOMINEE is so complete that even with this, large parts of it will still choose Putin's man over Hillary Clinton.
The media is the source of the mind-deadening gullibility of those who mistook the CEO of "reality" TV as presidential material. Ever stupider network entertainment, the cabloid "news" operations, right-wing hate talk-radio, the "free speech-free press" legal theorists and Supreme Court justices who either bought into their theories of media libertarianism or cynically used their wordings to forge rulings like Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United - if anyone ever asks how we got this far in handing our presidency to, effectively, a KGB apparatchik, that's who did it.
As to how the Republicans went from the political use of accusations of the State Department being riddled with Soviet agents to running a TV star who is one, himself, as their presidential candidate, when you make money and wealth acquisition your one and only value you're eventually going to buy the rope that hangs you. It would certainly be interesting to know the extent to which Russian oligarchs, many of them former members of the Soviet ruling class, stand as Donald Trump's creditors. Though I doubt you'll ever have FOX news raise that question. Or most of the American media. I suspect they wouldn't think such issues would be as good for their ratings as a sex scandal. Though they seemed pretty slow to latch onto one when it involved a Republican nominee who has had decades of public exposure as a sex as well as a business sleaze. Imagine if he'd been a Kennedy or Clinton, there would have been no proof necessary as they ran with it "being said" by.....
Monday, October 10, 2016
Impressions - Dave Stryker Organ Trio Live at JEN 2012
Dave Stryker. guitar
Bobby Floyd, organ
Jonathan Higgins. drums
with Bob Mintzer, sax
The Chaser
Rudolph the Shameless 'Splainer
Yes, if you haven't heard about it already, this is really a picture of Donald Trump with Rudy Giuliani dressed in drag, it's not fake. And if you watch the old video, it turns Trump's already infamous reputation for assaulting women into a joke. You can find it all over the web.
The public figures, politicians, former politicians have been fleeing from Donald Trump all weekend at the prospect that, in his long, long, long media career, there are more instances of him saying the most appalling things about women and who knows who else should generate a roll of dishonor. It's hardly as if that kind of thing about the man was unknown, it's exactly the kind of thing that most informed people would have concluded made him unfit to be president two decades instead of two days ago. It is why so many of the Republicans who now have to unendorse him were hesitant to endorse him in the first place, not that they are averse to someone as unfit to be president as he is to becoming president, that they were afraid they'd get stuck in exactly what they found themselves in over the weekend.
I read this morning that Rudy Giuliani was given the role of defending Donald Trump on the ever less credible Sunday morning talk shows. That Giuliani had the role is just more evidence of how clueless the Trump campaign and its figures are about why supporting Donald Trump is a sign of psychopathology, not mere politics.
I would like to know how a man with his baggage of treating his first wife as badly as he did comes across as Donald Trumps designated defender on the tape of him bragging to Billy Bush about assaulting women with the impunity that his kind of celebrity has gotten him and, lest anyone forget, his also taped bragging to Howard Stern that he was entitled to break in on Miss Universe candidates - a fraction of his age - because as owner of the pageant, he had a right to inspect the goods.
If there is someone who should go down with the Trumptanic, it's Rudy Giuliani, though he knows that the media won't stop calling him to go on shows, what his public career after several failed presidential bids went nowhere.
Also, yesterday's ultimate blaming the wife for what her husband is alleged to have done, when, if it happened, she was betrayed in the process deserves a special place in the annals of the double-standard that is always, always held to benefit men. In its never ending bid to offend every woman, it seems that no group will go unoffended by the Donald Trump campaign.
It is time to shame the media for having created, not only Donald Trump, the public figure, but also such courtiers of his putrid retinue as Rudy Giuliani. I wouldn't credit Chris Christie with having any kind of moral standard in his not appearing as Trump's lying, muck spewing defender on yesterday's blab shows, just one who still cherishes the hope that he still has a future in elective politics. Though his ongoing problems related to bridgegate in his state probably will guarantee his future is in lying predictably and shamelessly on TV and radio shows.