Saturday, July 1, 2017

Dinah Washington - Clifford Brown - No More



Dinah Washington, vocal
Clifford Brown,trumpet
Junior Mance, piano
Keter Betts.bass
George Morrow, bass
Max Roach, drums

Lover Come Back To Me 



I couldn't find specifically who was playing on this track but here is the entire list from the album, Dinah Jams

Dinah Washington (vo)
Clifford Brown (tp)
Maynard Ferguson (tp)
Clark Terry (tp)
Max Roach (ds)
Keeter Betts (b)
George Morrow (b)
Richie Powell (p)
Junior Mance (p)
Harold Land (ts)
Herb Geller (as)


Second Feature - The Mystery Project - Becker - The World Of Mary Hunter




and 




I figured I should post something Canadian for Canada Day and 150 years of Canadian independence.   May Canada always be free, independent and the better (though not perfect) example on our border.   Wish I were there. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Sears Radio Theater - The Afro-Westerner - A 4th of July Special





"The Afro-Westerner" starring Brock Peters and Parley Baer, with Lome Greene, host.

The story of a young African from Liberia who, in 1875, visits Laramie, Wyo., where his grandparents, escaped slaves, had lived for 13 years.


This is the latest series of radio drama on commercial American radio that I ever heard of from the decade that I hold was the high point in the positive depiction of Black people in the American media.   I can't imagine Sears as run by an incompetent disciple of Ayn Rand sponsoring something like this, today.  Or, frankly, much of anyone else.   You'll also hear a next to extinct species, the public service message, something that pretty much got killed of during the Reagan administration. 

I also can't imagine anyone making the effort to point out that the 'ol west was not lily white. 

We're supposed to have thunderstorms coming through and I expect we'll lose our internet around here so I'm posting it early.  If I can I'll post more later.   You'll want to adjust the volume, the recording is slightly reverb rich.  

More Independence Day Weekend Commentary

I'm looking forward to Kellyanne Conway being hauled in front of a hearing or a grand jury under oath or being questioned by the FBI about her reported role in the collusion between the Trump campaign and the Putin crime regime with this Peter W. Smith scumball as a coordinator of that collusion.  I don't think the skank can talk without lying and if there's one thing I cherish it's the possibility of watching footage of her being perp-walked in an orange suit to prison for lying.  And if it isn't only her, it's Steve Bannon and that Clovis guy who are mentioned in the most recent disclosures of that effort.  

The Republican Party is being exposed as the indigenous criminal class of the United States, the subverters of egalitarian democracy and even the independence of the United States, something we're going to allegedly celebrate in three days.  They've handed control of the country to an active agent of a foreign dictator and are doing everything they can, through negligence and through things like the Trump voter intimidation effort to lay the country even more vulnerable to the Putin regime's attacks on our country.  

Republicans are the home of treason, unsurprising as they are, by active strategy going back to Richard Nixon, the home of the Neo-Confederacy, the original traitors, having made them Attorneys General and put overt white supremacists and neo-Nazis in positions of power, leaving known agents of Putin, currently the strongest and most ruthless promoter of neo-Nazim and white supremacy in Europe, North America and, perhaps in the world, in power.  People like Mike Flynn, heavily implicated in the recent stories, who had his security clearance to the most sensitive intelligence of the country during the interval between Sally Yates informing the Trump regime of his suspected collusion and him being forced out only after he was exposed in the press.  

This is dead serious stuff and any part of the media, especially the neo-Nazi sites and the brain toilet that FOX is are in on it.  This is what allowing the media to lie with impunity is proven to lead to in that most hard of laboratories, real life.  The theoretical virtues of allowing lies under a novel interpretation of the First Amendment is a proven catastrophe.  Trump was created as a public figure and put into the presidency by the media, by their phony show-biz, ersatz "reality" and the lies they told with impunity.   Something has to be done to incorporate the hard lessons of the Trump attack on democracy or we will lose it and it will not be automatically restored by some balance of a natural system.  This depends entirely on us, our facing real reality and our choices. 

"You Don't Have A Sense of Humor"

What do you want, pies in the face?  Seltzer down the pants?  An idiot cue telling you to laugh?  A laugh track?  An emoticon?  (the inter-nit equivalent of one). That's not the Maine style of humor.  We don't have to be told when something's funny.  We know it. 

I think one of the best things I heard last week, something I wish I could say I'd come up with, was Steve Colbert calling it the "Nyuck Times".  You know, as in Curley, who played the stupidest of the 3 Stooges?  I think I'm always going to think of it as "The Nyuck-nyuck Times" from now on. 

Though laughing at you guys as you unwittingly generate low comedy has been a part of this week, as it is whenever my attention gets drawn to you. 

Update:  Simels is in a swivet because I misspelled "Curly". Yeah, that's going to keep me up nights. 

Update 2:  I'm going to hold Simps' latest rant in which he accuses me of not having heard recordings I've posted.  I assume he means that undying hit by the Roulettes,  Tell Tale Tit, as in me posting the performance of Candida a few weeks back he doesn't seem to understand that I was the one who posted those things, not his Simelsness.   He just can't believe that someone in the sticks could have heard something.  You see, there was this thing called "radio"......  

He's so funny when he tries to run on empty, which happens whenever anyone challenges him.   And it happens a lot.  If there's one thing that Simels is, it's challenged. 

As We Get Closer To July 4th Republicans Are Calling For A War Which Will Kill More Americans Than Al Qaeda Has

I would like to know when a president made such an appalling request as the one Trump tweeted - in the face of the CBO estimate that the repeal of the Affordable Care Act would result in 32 million people losing their health care coverage and that in the first year the premiums on coverage would increase 25% and 100% within nine years that they just do that, anyway.   The deaths and damage to peoples' personal lives resulting from that make this like the ruler of the United States declaring war on the American People.  

And he's not alone, Senators Rand Paul and Ben Sasse are reported to have encouraged him to advocate repeal without even the tissue thin frauds of replacement that the House and the Senate Republicans have put forward.  These people have called for killing tens of thousands of Americans, they would, in one year, kill more Americans than Al Qaeda and the Taliban and ISIS combined have.   This is a continual September 11th attack on the American People AND IT IS ELECTED OFFICIALS OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WHO ARE DECLARING THIS WAR ON US. 

The insurance industry has certainly been a part of the Republican war against the ACA, they continue to try to come up with something which will get them to enough Senators to push through some lesser atrocity such as the 13 Republican thugs came up with last week.  It was also a declaration of war, something which would kill more Americans every year than died in the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma.  The Republican Party is the enemy of the American People, the commercial health insurance industry is too.

One of the states hit hardest in the insurance industry undermining of the ACA is Nevada where there are counties without any insurers involved.  The people of that state should demand that their state government ask to work with California in creating a single-payer system of insurance. Every state's residents should be pressuring their state governments to do the same.  The only way to end this war against the American People is by ending for-profit insurance for health care.  If the Republicans make their massive attack on the American People, either under the Ryan strategy for killing us or the McConnell strategy or the all out war advocated by Rand, Sasse and Trump, they will likely bring about an appalling situation in which single-payer is going to be adopted by those who succeed them in office.  But there is no reason for states to wait for that, there is every reason to protect their residents from the criminal insanity of the Republican leadership now.   

California has led the way for trends that took across the country in the past, trends that have been variously, excellent, good and at times bad for the country.  If they manage to institute single-payer for all of their residents, alone or as part of a multi-state consortium, they will have done one of the greatest services to the people of the country ever done.  They might also avoid the inevitable economic catastrophe that any of the Republican efforts will bring, hospital closures, hospitals overwhelmed with those who are seeking service they can't pay for, and a huge range or other disasters.  The Republicans are, as they so often are, as economically reckless as they are cruel and sadistic.  Democrats and whatever other politicians in California and in other states have an absolute and sacred obligation to their residents to act to protect their residents from the Republican criminals in Washington. 

We can't prevent states from electing psychopaths like Rand Paul and Ben Sasse, or the merely irresponsible like a Susan Collins, for that matter.  We can't prevent the Electoral College from giving us a Trump.  We can try to protect ourselves as best we can when that happens. 

Friday, June 30, 2017

Trump Will Not Be Cleared


They Don't Care About Their Constitutional Oaths So I Don't Have Any Problem Calling What They Did Treason

Now that we find out that Michael Flynn, Flynn's Intel Group and his son Michael G. Flynn were all part of an effort to collude with the Putin crime family to hack files to try to dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton as Flynn and Son were part of the Trump campaign, I think we can conclude that's a smoky gun we're smelling.  The revelations that they were hooked up with a long time Republican sleaze monger and master, the recently dead Peter W. Smith, who should probably have died in jail if treason and subversion of democracy were a seriously prosecuted crime, is a direct link to the Putin ratfucking of our election, the Trump campaign and long time Republican-fascist efforts to put awful people into office.  That it is the Republican party - the former super-patriot, anti-Soviet party - which has done this is certainly a revelation into what their motives always have been.  The Putin crime group is an extension of the Communist Soviet regime with a few of the minor pieces of baggage that they retained from their former Marxism being thrown off the sled.  With those gone its real nature of being indistinguishable from oligarchic fascism is entirely transparent. 

The Republican Party is the party of traitors, of fascists, of neo-Nazis and white supremacists.  All manner of our domestic enemies of equality and democracy are in on it, from the pseudo-Christian professional hucksters like the Huckabee family, the likes of Jay Sekulow, the old segregationists and champions of Jim Crow like the incumbent Attorney General, Jefferson Sessions, overt neo-Nazis like Sebastian Gorka and white supremacists like Steve Bannon.... Those are the people who every Republican who remains in the party either has to openly and overtly and honestly condemn and defeat or they are in on the treason, the subversion, the attacks on equality and democracy.   

The Republican Party 2017 is the enemy of the American People.  It is the enemy of equality and democracy and the general welfare and all of those other thing in the preamble of the Constitution which all federal office holders vow to protect and defend.  With the obvious treason and subversion and collusion that the leadership of the Republican Party has been exposed as being involved in, anyone who takes even the common defense of the country against foreign and domestic enemies they are exposed for all the world to see as deeply involved with that as any traitors of the past.   

What those people have done should be a very serious federal crime, it should carry a life sentence in the worst cases.  There should be a law that anyone who does what Trump did during the campaign, openly call for the Putin crime family to commit espionage to aid his campaign should be automatically disqualified from becoming a President, Vice President, Senator, House Member, or to hold any other public office.  Trump disqualified himself from any moral pretense of legitimacy in doing that.  Now that his campaign is being exposed as actually doing that, he should be indicted and tried and removed from office as should anyone else who was involved.  That would mean Paul Ryan becoming president unless or until he is also shown to have been involved.  I loathe Paul Ryan and consider him not merely sociopathic but openly and homicidally sadistic and deranged but so far he wasn't part of a treasonous conspiracy to destroy the country, handing it to the crime boss who runs Russia.   Mike Pence was part of the criminal conspiracy.  
Simps just accused me of wasting my time by finding out what a fidget spinner is.  Which took me about three minutes. It's hardly a deep subject, unless you're attention deficient which is probably why he figures it was a major undertaking. 

I checked, he also posted it at Baby Blue, the home of time wasting, violating the privacy of cats, bragging about what you're having for lunch and supper (really, I thought that's what teenagers used twitter for) saying what's been being said about the Mop Heads and Mick and his old Stones for the past fifty four years or so.  And, then, there's his blog where he intersperses promoting the oeuvre of his garage band with more of the same on pop music, the stupider the better.  

There's his gassing on about the obscure 60s Brit boy band The Roulettes, here.  Which was, I guess, a step up from his repeated inability to tell the difference between Martha And The Vandellas and The Supremes.  He doesn't seem to be able to take it seriously enough to remember it unless it's an all white group.   He's always telling me I couldn't know about things like that because I didn't grow up in Groovy-ville like he did.   He's got fewer clues than your average igneous rock. 

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Melaina Trump Supporting Her Husband's Cyber Bullying Ends Any Presumption of Kid Glove Treatment

In Melania Trump's response to her husband's sexist attack on Mika  Brzezinski, supporting that and saying that he'll "punch back 10 times harder" she has removed any reason to hold back on her.  In the past even rough and tumble journalists like Molly Ivins said that you don't go after a politician's wife but when a politician's wife supports their husband when he is a gutter level thug like hers, they have removed the presumed protection that someone might grant them.

As far as I'm concerned, any inclination I had to hold back on Melania Trump in my political writing ended with this.  Everything from her call-girl appearance to her hypocrisy on her "signature issue" cyber-bullying (yeah, right) is fair commentary from now on. 

I Was Told I'm Not Kew-el I Haven't Ever Been So Glad That I'm Not

I just looked up what a "fidget spinner" is.  It says that it became a fad this year.  Even the Trump era fads are incredibly stupid.  You'll know they've gone out of style when the geezers like those at Eschaton start talking about them.  

Fidget Spinner, the fad for people who find that a yo-yo is too complex and a Hula Hoop is too much like work. 

Seth Meyers On How The Republicans Are Still Going To Try To Ram Through the McConnell-Ryan Death With Negligence Bill


Names for Things

Geritol and Prune Juice Bar, Terrible thing- waste of minds, The rump remnant, A has been almost was,  Demonstrable and decadent waste of an ivy league PhD on a sloucher rich kid, ..... = Eschaton

By another name,  "No, I don't care what Simels is posting about me there."

Update:    Leave it to another Eschaton college grad to not know the word "sloucher" or how to look it up in a dictionary.   Among the definitions found in mine are, "laggard, loafer, sluggard.."  Which work as well for him as they do for his host.  Only I'm sure Simps doesn't know those, either.   He's got a raft of comments in moderation here where they're probably going to stay.   I didn't use "slacker" because I didn't want to imply that he's young.  He's on the downward slope of middle-age. 

Last Call For Nasty Women


I endorse that tee shirt.

Persisting 101 with Elizabeth Warren


ICE Is Trump's Voluntary SS It Needs To Be DeNazified


Someone expresses confusion as to why I posted that Youtube about the abandoned McMansions yesterday.  Other than because I'd been running a fever and didn't feel like writing,  it seems to me to be a fitting symbol of America under Trump and Republican-fascist rule.  Irresponsible financing of stupid projects by people who want to make a financial killing which will, most likely, end up being paid for by the general public which had no part in being irresponsible and which is an environmental blight.  There is so much about it that speaks of the United States in 2017. 

How The Constitution Has Given Us Trump And Republican-Fascist Rule And May Well Bring Us Overt Fascism

Every so often when Trump does something like fire the FBI director people reach for the phrase " Constitutional crisis" a phrase which is always said in dire terms as if that were the worst thing that can happen in our politics.  What they usually say is something like such and so is "going to throw us into a Constitutiona crisis" or threatens one or could bring on one.  But things are much worse than that already.   The election of Trump is a here and now, actual and serious crisis for democracy.  And a crisis for democracy is far worse.

The Constitution of the United States was ever only as valid, as good as it produced what it promised, "a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity"[note the capitalizations, they mean something] and what the common people thought they were buying when they adopted it, democracy.  Union, Justice, Tranquility, Welfare, Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our POSTERITY.   Egalitarian democracy is the only political genre which will ever deliver on that bill of goods,  exactly the kind of democracy which the aristocratic founders always feared might result from what they were setting up to favor themselves and THEIR posterity.  Much of American history has been a struggle by Black people, by Women, by Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, members of religious minorities, LGBT people to force the propertied, white men to give up what was their privileged condition, to make the more ancient Athenian democracy -  Roman Republican style government of the Constitution into a real, modern egalitarian democracy.   It has been a struggle which has not been peaceful, it has been as violent as the Civil War, as the reaction of the privileged to any struggle to force the extension of the vote, of the abolition of discriminatory laws set up and judged constitutional by Supreme Courts and the reaction to that violence and oppression by the groups whose equality has been resisted.  The violence was, likely, established in the Constitution to the extent the Second Amendment was a means of the slave holders to arm the slave patrols*.

That has been an ongoing crisis in the United States, a direct consequence of our maintaining the highly unjust, corrupt and cumbersome features of the United States Constitution, a document in which even the one or few of the founders opposed to slavery sacrificed the most basic morality of equality and the principle that human beings are not rightly the property of the wealthy and powerful to their goal of union.  The Constitution, far from intending or guaranteeing the rest of those promised virtues of government, has been a tool for sacrificing them to the interests of those it empowered.  The Trump regime, given to us by the Electoral College, just one of those things which was supposed to protect us from the evils of the popular vote (according to the founders) but which has given us an actual, insane, megalomaniacal, whimsically ignorant fascist in the White House.  It gave us George W. Bush and Rutherford Hayes and John Quincy Adams earlier.  So the E.C. isn't exactly a guarantee of great presidents, it's more likely to produce a real rotter of one. 

Everything we value, those of us who love equality and democracy and freedom and a rational, decent life for all, has been gotten through a hard fought struggle AGAINST THE ORDER SET UP UNDER THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION.  And it is the lesson of the past fifty-three years, since the height of egalitarian democracy in the United States, that week which saw the adoption of Medicare, Medicaid and The Voting Rights Act, has been that what was won through so much blood and struggle and work and pain can be lost very easily, undermined, in the entire past fifty four years by the privileges granted to the wealthy who own the media to lie, of decisions such as those making money into speech, those which endow corporations with rights - under the Constitutional fiction of corporate personhood - all of which were done by the least democratic part of the government, the Supreme Court.  

Even when the justices were supposedly acting to extend rights under the First Amendment,  the permission of the media to lie with impunity, alleged to be a liberal act by liberals on the court, the effect was that it freed them to lie about liberals, about minority groups, to whip up rumors and gossip, to play on existing prejudices and to promote them, to lie about the results of civil rights, to foment paranoia and resentment and to generally lie in any way to thwart the continuing struggle for equality and to put Republican-fascists in office who were prepared to roll back and repeal anything that the Supreme Court didn't find its way to overturning.  That theory of the First Amendment which liberals were suckered into adopting through the ACLU and Village Voice and other columnists in the 1950s and 60s was one of the biggest blunders that those who value equality ever have made in our history.  That it was sold through what turned into a slogan, "The First Amendment says" is matched overtly by those of the impending and new slave patrol, "The Second Amendment says".  

As we are getting ready to celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, a document which, while full of problematical claims, was, nevertheless, less troublesome than the Constitution, we should consider what the mania for turning the worship of such things and the fabled founders into a quasi-religious cult has actually resulted in.  Those things drafted by those long, long dead, white, rich men in the late 18th century are what produced, in the fulness of time, the Trump regime. And it was under the same Constitutional provisions that supposedly liberal courts have abolished segregation but also gave the media and the rich people who own it the power to destroy any equality which has been won.

The thing is a mess.  I am not necessarily advocating that we junk the whole thing because, as the Koch funded attempt at a new Constitutional Convention threatens, what they and the other billionaires enabled under the Constitution as read would certainly be far worse.  I would love for the United States to have a new, modern constitution informed by the experience of the failures of the old one over the past centuries of violent struggle and oppression AND INFORMED BY THE THINKING OF MORE THAN A SMALL GROUP OF WHITE MALE ARISTOCRATS.   But now, as the Supreme Court has given them the power to use their money-speech to make things worse, that is out of the question.   The beginning of a way out of this disaster is to change our own understanding of what went wrong, how the struggle to reach that peak of equality in 1965 went so wrong over the next half century - not least of which was under the libertarian enablement of the media to lie us where we have come to.  That was us, we liberals getting suckered and duped by the media - the decision was made on behalf of the New York Times - to a large extent it was us being suckered by lawyers working on behalf of rich people and the media peddling their own privileges as progress.  

Trump, the Republican-fascist control of the Congress, all of it is a product of lies told by the freest press in the history of the United States.  As even the media are realizing, in the past half century everything, even a sense that a lie is a lie and is not the truth has been sacrificed.  Trump is a product of lies and deceptions and show biz fakery.  All brought to us by the media. All allowed under that most sacralized of all aspects of our American idolatry, The First Amendment. 

You can consider this my statement for the upcoming 4th of July. 

*  I've read several articles which note that Patrick Henry, George Mason and James Madison, explicitly feared that the federal government under the Constitution might end the "militias" in the slave states, which were largely for the purpose of keeping slaves from rebelling against their enslavement.   That's certainly a big part of the gun nuttery that has been promoted by the gun industry for their profit and the Republican-fascist party.  Gun promotion groups have also used their freedom to lie through the media to turn us into an armed camp where we really do have to fear fascists with guns.  This time they're not just going to be shooting Black people.   The "militias" mentioned under the Constitution really should include the lynch mobs which were the continuation of the slave patrol. 

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Whole Subdivision of Abandoned McMansions

My brother showed me this and asked me who I would guess ended up paying for the enormous waste - other than the environment.  I would say that in these corrupt United States, we almost certain did or will in the end.


By the look of the Youtube side bar, this is hardly the only one like this.    Bankers, developers, regulators, law makers, judges, etc.  You can bet that they're not going to be the ones who pay for their idiocy.
Still sick, hope to write later.

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

A healthy body is the Soul's host, a sick body her gaole. Francis Bacon

Names For Things And Alleged People

Brain Toilet = FOX

Dixie Roy Cohn =  Jay Sekulow

Whore of the Anti-Christ = Sarah Huckabee Sanders, really anyone in the Trumphouse press operation but specifically, her.

Why Are We Appeasing Trump?


Senator Al Franken's Speech On The Republicans Kill The Poor, Kill The Sick, Kill The Babies They Claim To Love, Kill the Elderly Bill


The Costs Of Peddling Fiction As Fact

This is as the great Shakespearean actor, the artistic director of the Globe Theater,  Mark Rylance, said, "a work in progress" a dramatization of the Henry James story "The Birthplace" based on one of the covered up scandals of the Stratfordian industry's highest holy place.   In the 1890s the authorities who were in charge of "the Shakespeare Birthplace" chose the commoner poet Joseph Skipsey out of more than a hundred candidates to be the custodian of the place, which, by the way, no one can say Wm. Shaksper ever lived in, nevermind him having been born there.  He did the job for a while but he had to resign because he couldn't stand telling lies to the tourists about the things they were shown as "relics" of the "Bard of Avon".



Mark Rylance, Annabel Leventon, Peter Hamilton, and Robert Dorfman read from Henry James's novel 'The Birthplace', a satire of what is now the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Here's the text of Henry James' story.  It doesn't mention "Shakespeare" once and it doesn't specifically refer to what has become The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the epicenter of the world wide Shakespeare industry. 

He, having acted brilliantly in many productions of the plays and having read the poetry quite beautifully, clearly having done what so few do, thinking about it deeply, I would think Mark Rylance as well as others liked Derek Jacobi are quite credible in their skepticism.  

I was tempted to post some of the longer lecture-demonstrations in the conference last year, especially the one on "biografiction" and the one which links the fictionalization of the Stratfordians with the fictions that Brexit and the election of Trump depended on.  But you can watch those as you like it.  I think the most interesting thing about this is what it tells us about the construction of fictions and the successful presentations of them as truth.  It's what our news media and, if you can make an honest separation of them, the entertainment division do every day.  The cost of it is equality, democracy and freedom.   I wish I'd noted one place in one of them where someone used an academic's phrase to gloss over peddling lies as biography, as history, because it was essentially the same in substance as Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts".  

Update:  If you want to see Mark Rylance in one of the plays, here's the scene from Twelfth Night in which he played Olivia with Sam Barnett playing Viola. 





Hate Update:   I'm not making this up, you know.  From The London Times 8th September, 1903


Eschatotonian Chatty Cats

I told the dolts that people who know me say my voice is remarkably like that of the late Joe Perham.  

At this point I look at Eschaton as a petri dish to look at only to learn more about what went wrong with the left and what needs to be gotten rid of if liberals are going to get out of the political wilderness such idiots drove it into.  

Stupid idiots. 

Monday, June 26, 2017

The Amazing New Trump Defense


Vaccines: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver


"Did you know Simels called you a truther?"

Well, if I'm going to be called a "truther" I'd rather have it be done by someone who is an obvious liar. 

Update:  Let me put it this way, there are a list of people I'd rather have call me a "truther" than Steve Simels, people like Kellyanne Conway,  Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee 
Sanders, but that's only because they are professional liars who the world has heard lie shamelessly.  They aren't obscure liars who someone may not have know have lied publicly more times than Trump has eaten that disgusting chocolate cake he goes on about like a gluttonous eleven year old.  

The Continuing Infantilization of the American People Is A Danger To Democracy

Charles Pierce has been writing about the failure of Barack Obama to level with the American People about one of the most serious attacks on American democracy in our history, the extent to which he and his administration knew a year ago about the Russian ratfucking of our election.   I wouldn't be surprised if in the gradual drip, drip of revelations in this if it didn't become clear that the Putin crime family or the Trump campaign or both, or them in combination of some conspiracy of anti-democratic billionaires (for far longer a more obvious danger to American democracy) had not imposed the Trump regime on us and, perhaps, has had a hand in who is sitting in Congress.  That is a hand even bigger than the one the Rehnquist and Roberts' courts have given them, openly.

Charles Pierce correctly sees Obama's handling of this as his and others infantilization of the American People, it is something we have seen, over and over again.  I have said before that the Democratic Party has had a price to pay for having Barack Obama as president, over time he is almost certainly going to be one of those presidents, like John Kennedy, whose legacy, stripped of the direct memory of their star power and charisma, will be seen as mixed at best.  His failure to sound the alarm as loudly as what he knew warranted might go down as his worst failure, based on an arrogant, aristocratic view of the American People as infants, in need of handling instead of needing the information we do to elect the government.

I have to confess that reading these stories makes me so angry that I haven't been able to write about the issue.  I decided to go way back in the archive of my first blog when I wrote about that issue.  I think this is what comes of having a charismatic, prep-school, Ivy Leaguer with a decided tendency to aloofness from the common people of the country as the Democratic president.  Though Pierce is right about Lyndon Johnson in his keeping back the information he had about Richard Nixon, probably Henry Kissinger and others successfully ratfucking the 1968 election, that was before Nixon did so much to disillusion Americans as to the dirtiness of American politics.  Johnson was hardly a naif in such matters, being a pretty seasoned and ruthless politician, himself.  But he clearly didn't think the American people could handle it, either.   So that tendency is widely held and, certainly in the past 49 years, that assumption of the child like quality of the American common people has got to end,  Oddly, they never seem to think that the 18-year-olds they send to fight wars, even the entirely illegal ones brought by lies in that way.   With the Trump regime in all of its blatant corruption and cynicism, it is time to put that idiocy down for good.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006


September 11 Didn’t Make America An Orphan So Why Did They Try To Make Bush Our Daddy 

As they study the rise and fall of America as an empire, scholars should consider that as they dishonestly spoke the word “democracy” the political and media elites had no faith in it. They fight against any possibility of it rising up out of interest in their own wealth and power, but they also don’t even believe that its necessary precursor can exist.

One of the most characteristic assumptions of the American establishment is that the American People are high-strung and nervous children who have to be protected from even the most important realities. That’s their line. The same conservatives and their media mouthpieces who whine and complain about any program to aid the down-and-out as paternalism turn around and, when it suits their purpose, say that the entire American People are babies.

They pretend this because it allows a string of the most criminal administrations in our history, all of them Republican, to escape investigation or punishment. They have no such inclination during Democratic administrations, doing those the favor of inventing lurid and sensational crimes to be most publicly investigated at the cost of tens of millions of dollars when real crimes weren’t forthcoming. And that doesn’t include the fictitious impeachment porn that the religious right, Ken Starr and Henry Hyde pitched in most educational detail on the public airwaves. On Sunday morning, even.

The excuse of the Nixon pardon, that Americans couldn’t stand the indictment of a president, assumed that the American people lacked the maturity to see justice done. There was no reason to believe this was true. By that time, Nixon had accepted that resigning and having his hand-selected successor pardoning him was his only hope of escaping impeachment and prosecution. Nixon, who insisted on law and order for everyone else, accepted a pardon before he was even charged.

The majority of the American People would have listened to the evidence and let justice be done. It was our elites who couldn’t stand to see the Constitution come to life, not the People. And even if the People hadn’t been prepared to watch, when did that become a legitimate issue in law enforcement? The crimes of Richard Nixon included the extension of the Vietnam war into Cambodia, a crime which over its course was as bad and then worse than the invasion of Iraq today. Even the House committee which adopted articles of impeachment thought the American People were too childlike to face what its government had done to millions of people in that one. If you can find a transcript read what Congressman Robert Drinan said in favor of their adoption.

Perhaps, as proven in their inability to sway the public with their fully aired “evidence” in the Senate trial of Bill Clinton, their real fear is that the American People are fully able to judge evidence and to draw logical conclusions from it. If you don’t get that, let me point it out plainly. They put Clinton ON TRIAL over phony, rigged up charges - after refusing to try Nixon over some of the most serious crimes an American President has ever committed - and they lost with no resulting social disruption whatsoever.

Letting Nixon be pardoned set the stage for pardons by other Republican administrations, perhaps most infamously* in the Bush I pardon of the unindicted Caspar Weinberger. Wineberger’s handwriting put Bush the father “in the loop” of Iran-Contra and likely under perjury for denying that he was. The media shrugged. The Nixon pardon put Republican Presidents above the law. The excuse effectively said that the Constitution was impractical due to insufficient maturity of the American People. Despite that honor given to Gerald Ford at the Kennedy School, the Nixon pardon was one of the more injurious acts done to this country in the past half century.

What was, one hopes, the nadir of this coddling of the People was the post 9-11effort to present them with George W. Bush as a surrogate daddy. How desperate does an imperial establishment have to be to instill George W. Bush with preternatural paternal powers? And at the same time, they were trying to install him as first-frat-boy, first-drinkin’ buddy, top gun and a raft of other, would be, endearing personas. Flight-suit, Matthews, you know what I mean. The post-September 11th glorification, even deification of George Bush is a sign that our media has reached that stage of eutrophication that produces abundant methane and no clarity. The Press Corps wanted Bush to be their daddy, you wonder what their relationship with their natural fathers could have been to allow such a perverted idea to gain currency. Yes, let’s make it reflect back on to the media who say these things, they’re the ones who are saying them, afterall.

We've got to fight against this attack on the maturity of the People. It is an put-down given for the most dishonest purposes, to cover up imperial crimes, the kind of crimes that it takes grown-ups to detect, punish and prevent. By remaining silent as they treat us like children we allow them to be unaccountable.

Children exposed to war and tragedy often grow up too fast, it is heartbreaking to see them robbed of even what little childhood they might have had. Seeing an attempt to turn Americans into babies over one day of attacks is not sad, it is monumentally insulting. Roosevelt didn’t do it after Pearl Harbor. He knew he would need all the maturity that Americans had to win the war against fascism and Naziism. Americans won’t take to being called babies once it has been pointed out to them that is just what the corporate media has been doing for the past five years.


* After the fall elections watch a flood of pardons come down from Bush II. If the Democrats take back one or both houses it will be a deluge. If this is done it should not stop Democrats from fully airing the crimes of this regime. If Democrats do begin investigations watch for the press to increase the attempts to quash them with this and similar tactics. They will reach levels of insane frenzy surpassing those poor monkeys whose terry-cloth and chicken wire mother substitutes were taken from them.

In the mean time watch the exact same ersatz journalists’ defacto campaign for Republicans. They are already warning that if Democrats win they will do exactly what they, themselves, were encouraging Republicans to do to Clinton, impeach a president. Impeachment has gone from being a moral imperative under Clinton to being an unthinkable catastrophe that the country couldn’t survive under a Republican.

First posted September 10, 2006 on Echidne of the Snakes

Sunday, June 25, 2017

Hate Mail - Remember This The Next Time They Wax Self-Righteous

Why are the regulars at Eschaton in favor of a web hosting site that regularly posts photos, gifs and videos of children being raped by men, gay males being degraded, tortured and abused, women as well, in far, far larger numbers than those sexually abused by the Catholic priests who they'll go all hanging judge on for at the drop of a hat?  

Could be that child rape, etc. aren't what they're really against, they're A-OK with that depending on the identity of the rapist and the venue under which it's done?   Call it "porn" and that makes it all better.  Free speech, don't you know. 

As to the link Simps posted, everyone knows that someone who makes money in the porn industry, like someone who makes money in the coal industry is the best possible authority on whom to stake your simple, Eschatot like belief.   There is nothing that the pseudo-left is more hypocritical about than that kind of thing.  

Update:  I generally don't look at Eschaton anymore because it's sad to see how Duncan has wasted his talent.  It reminds me of the last phase of the late Tom Snyder's career, the Colortini years.  Only without the much older Snyder's energy.   I didn't dislike Snyder but I always found him a little weird and not that bright.   

What can I say?  Duncan's probably right about self-driving cars and Uber  But, then, so is just about everyone I know. 

Just Bob And Ray [5]





[Note:  The number in the title is for my reference because I can't remember week to week which ones I've already posted, it is otherwise meaningless.]  

And I wanted to use some square brackets.   You have to make your own thrills in this business. 

gods Denied - The Supreme Irony Of Atheists Making Probability A Creator god

It appears that the fundamental numbers, and even the form, of the apparent laws of nature are not demanded by logic or physical principle. The parameters are free to take on many values and the laws to take on any form that leads to a self-consistent mathematical theory, and they do take on different values and different forms in different universes.

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design 

It is one of the supreme intellectual ironies of our age that the most dogmatic of materialist-atheists, in their quest to put down the idea that a universe, under the current model of the Big Bang, which had an absolute beginning, can imply to people that the universe, as it is found by science, is most probably explained by a conscious, intelligent, Creator, God - have had to resort to turning the mathematics of probability into their own creator god, an unintelligent creator with all of the powers of God the Creator.  Only their creator acts robotically, without consciousness and without intelligence, it just being that way because that's how they can get their chosen equations to balance.

That is an effort that started almost as soon as the Big Bang was proposed as a logical conclusion resulting from Einsteinian Relativity.  Atheists didn't trust it because one of the people who made that discovery - the logical argument, not the physical confirmation of it -  Fr. Georges Lemaitre, was a Catholic priest as well as an eminent physicist and cosmologist.  The efforts to restore the atheists' favorite model of a past-eternal universe has been continual, landmarks in that effort are such things as the assertion of the (far more competent) Richard Dawkins of his time, Bertrand Russell asserting that the eternal universe was a fact in the late 1940s, well after some of the most convincing confirmation of the Big Bang had been published, and decades later when the editor of the preeminent science journal in English, Nature, John Maddox issued his frothing diatribe against the Big Bang in the 1990s.   It is an effort that still is taken up by atheist ideologue-cosmologists such as Sean Carroll and Lawrence Krauss.  I, for the life of me, can't see much else that motivates much of current cosmological assertion than trying to turn it into a means of getting rid of God  You'd think that they would be more credible if they found ways to modify or overturn Einstein in so far as his theories led to that conclusion.  But they want to have it both ways.

I have a strong feeling that Bertrand Russell was enough of a philosopher and enough of a logician to understand that their current practice, far from denying the reality of a god, has made a god out of probability,  Though I haven't run across anything from Russell commenting on that, an effort that was underway during his last two decades with the mania for multiverse cosmology.  I suspect that what he might have known about that, things like Hugh Everett's 1950s  many-worlds model seemed so patently ridiculous to him that he saw it as exactly the kind of scientific-intellectual decadence he had predicted in 1929.   That was when he read Eddington's description of then, current physics and cosmology and despaired.  He found that profoundly depressing whereas Eddington didn't.  But, then, Eddington was a Quaker who believed in God and he understood that science wasn't properly a religion or a method of asserting ideological positions.

Considering this, I'm reminded of other atheist gods in history, certainly none so fervently believed in by many atheists as the dialectic, that god as adopted by Marxism leading to the deaths of scores of millions.  There have been others, I would assert that Natural Selection is endowed with such divine attributes - certainly when they claim it gave rise to consciousness and intelligence.  And there are Western atheist assertions that  about things like Taoism and Buddhism.  If you take some of them seriously, you could name the Tao and the Dharma as similar atheist gods, though I think that is mostly Western ideological distortion of a far more subtle, far less materialistic, far less easily pinned-down set of ideas.  Some of the stupider atheists I know treat things like fashion and fame and conventional thinking as all powerful gods, you find them all over the internet, especially among those whose educations or lack of attention don't permit them to even read about things like the probabilistic god on even a popular level (sci-fi doesn't count),

Maybe it is inevitable that atheist gods, not called that, their actual identity denied, are invented.  It is certainly an incredible irony, considering the attributes given to probability among atheists who should certainly have the intellectual equipment to see what they're doing.