Saturday Night Radio Drama - Gordon Pengilly - Bailey's Way: Two Episodes

Dallas Calgary 

Returned to duty, but assigned an office assignment,
Tanis jumps at the chance to go undercover again,
even if it is as a hotel chamber-maid. And while
working a low priority case about room thefts, she
uncovers and solves two other cases involving
blackmail and several ‘high-rollers’.

Series Cast: Esther Purves Smith, Tanis Bailey 
David LeReaney as Sergeant Mann
Grant Linneberg as Detective Donaldson.

Cast: Doug McLeod; Pat Gomez; Doug McKeag;
Bartley Bard; Darcy Dunlop;

Doug Curtis.

Longbow's Justice 

Cast: Tom Rooney; Dennis Fitzgerald; Georgie Collins; Jim Leyden.

I've been reading and re-reading the scripts for a number of Gordon Pengilly's plays, I've never had the chance to see one on stage but have heard a number of his radio plays, several of which are among the best I've ever heard or read.  I'd love to be able to post more of them so you can hear for yourself, especially They Don't Call Them Farmers Anymore (which I understand is one of his favorites) and Ballad of an Existential Cowboy.   If you can find a copy, his play Flesh and Ghost is quite beautiful  and troubling.   More of his plays are available here.   I for the life of me don't understand why a playwright of his ability isn't more well known.  

He is also a sculptor. 

Stupy Mail To Stupify the Stupified

"Be My Baby" is a work of art.

As an art teacher I knew said when asked what she thought of the art of the rubber stamp that was a fad of a few years back, "I wouldn't even call it craft."

"Be My Baby" is the same kind of art that wall paper patterns are.  Considering you are bringing Phil Spector,  dubiously listed as a co-writer of the thing,into this, that comparison is exactly apt.  We all had a bit of fun with those girl groups but very few of them rose to the level of art, though some rose to the level of craft.  

Go on.  React predictably at this heresy against commercial garbage.  

Update: It's hilarious that pale, pasty, eternally 12 Stupy is pulling the "white boy" card on me over my dissing of Phil Spector.  Here's a picture of him and the Ronettes in 1963, the year Be My Baby was a hit.   Can you pick him out?

And to put the cerise glacée on it, he called Phil the lady killer (literally) the "acknowledged auteur" of the record.  By which is meant what a bunch of pretentious pop-music critics learned from reading pretentious movie critics and applied to producers who had the most to offer them when they flattered them, not the Brill Building stable of hacks who cranked out the original material.  

Lies In The Rat Shtick

No surprise that Lillian Hellman, the woman whose every word was a lie, has the devotion of the guy who follows her example at Duncan's jr. high school for scandal.  Simps pretty much lies about everything too.  And his fellow Eschatots don't care.  With less than a handful of exceptions, the ones who remain are lazy, time wasting dolts.  Even those exceptions apparently go there far less often than they used to.  Adults almost all fled in the past decade.  

As to that scummy old bitch being a Stalinist, that's not in question.  Millions murdered, hundreds of millions, even over a billion oppressed and deprived of every right, he doesn't care as long as he figures they don't appertain to him.  That's what it's all about, he figures other people don't matter. Just like Hellman and Hammett didn't.  Both of them endorsed Stalin's show trials in 1938, well after the extent of his Hitler sized mass murdering was known, accurately, in the west.  Both tacitly supported the Smith act being used against the rivals of their commie party, the old Socialists. Such people are no better than the German-American Bund crowd was.  I'm not a sucker for their self-generated, self-pitying propaganda, shedding tears for pampered, degenerate Hollywood reds who found they couldn't make big bucks turning out crap movies for a while.   They were just as vile as American Nazis and fascists, the only problem was they didn't do the same to the fascists. 

Hey, what do you expect?  Moral probity?  From the guy who, when he learned that Gore Vidal regularly went on boy-raping jaunts to Thailand claimed it was OK because he was a "great writer".   I will give Vidal that, he didn't steal other peoples' stories and peddle them as his memoirs but he was still a pedophile rapist. 

Susan Poses Before Susan Caves To Installing Trumpian Fascism On The Supreme Court

From the Portland Press Herald, Susan Collins prepares the way for her voting for whatever federalist-fascist Trump puts on the Supreme Court.

Collins to judge Trump’s Supreme Court pick without ‘litmus tests’ such as Roe v. Wade support

Her spokeswoman says Maine's Republican senator believes the landmark abortion ruling is settled law, and she won't use the issue to disqualify a candidate to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Considering the precident that Kennedy voted for this week with the rest of the Supreme Court Republican-fascist majority in the Roberts court to gut the long standing precedent, settled law in the Janus ruling, hollower words have never come from the empty vessel of Susan Collins' integrity.

The precedent they overturned in that case is roughly the same age as Roe vs. Wade and it's hardly the only long-term precedent overthrown by justices and judges Collins has voted for.   That is with Trump having vowed that he will make the overturning of Roe his litmus test.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine will not apply an ideological litmus test to the next Supreme Court nominee, a Collins spokeswoman said Thursday. "When Senator Collins evaluates judges, she always looks at their judicial temperament; qualifications; experience; and respect for precedent, the rule of law, and the Constitution," Collins spokeswoman Annie Clark said via email.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine will not apply an ideological litmus test to the next Supreme Court nominee, a Collins spokeswoman said Thursday. "When Senator Collins evaluates judges, she always looks at their judicial temperament; qualifications; experience; and respect for precedent, the rule of law, and the Constitution," Collins spokeswoman Annie Clark said via email.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine will not apply an ideological litmus test to the next Supreme Court nominee, her spokeswoman said Thursday.

Collins’ position, which is consistent with her past practice on high court nominees, means she won’t factor a nominee’s support for the landmark abortion-rights ruling of Roe v. Wade into her confirmation decision.

Susan Collins' judgement in such matters is rather abysmal, that is if you take the posture of acting out of principle as the standard.  I mentioned recently, she was one of the Senators who presented the racist, white supremacist, partisan perjurer, Jeff Sessions who, since he was installed as the Attorney General has been racist, cruel, heartless and unjust in such things as stealing children from their parents and putting babies in jail to sleep on the floor, in cages, with nothing but space blankets.

Susan Collins NEVER does anything principled, never does anything that goes against the leadership of the Republican Party unless she figures she has to to get something she wants, generally getting the votes of Maine voters who might not  vote her back into office if her pose of integrity is cracked. 

Only if Maine voters put enough pressure on her, expose her to enough risk will they keep her from doing what's best for Susan Collins in going along with Trump and Grassley and McConnell.   And it will take relentless pressure on her to get her to see that doing that isn't what's best for Susan Collins.  Appealing to her alleged principles is a mistake because that only allows her to make the kind of phony pose her spokesman posed in that article.

My message to Susan Collins is to remind her that the fabled Margaret Chase Smith, who everyone thought was in a safe reelection contest, was voted out in her last campaign.  I remember that election very well, no one thought her opponent had any chance until he won.   Susan Collins is no Margaret Chase Smith,  her speech in favor of Jeff Sessions is available as is the text of her speech lying in support of him.    That is the same Jeff Sessions who has sealed his reputation in history as the racist who took children from their parents and put babies in prison.  I can guarantee you that if I get the chance to ask Susan Collins about that, on camera, I will.  I encourage everyone in Maine to throw her record in her face because she ain't the queen.

You May As Well Claim That The Containing Vessel of the Miller-Urey Experiment Wasn't Relevant To Their Results You Are Citing As Claiming Intelligent Design Had Nothing To Do With It

You cannot get away from the fact that if scientists, on the basis of their knowledge, their INTELLIGENCE, had not used that intelligence to design experiments, the molecules, the structures they produce in their arguments against intelligent design would not have some-how just come about by random chance.

The product of the atheist-scientists who do experiments for the purpose of dissuading people that intelligent design was the origin of life on Earth is, itself, the product of intelligent design.   All they've done is produce things by intelligent design pretending, against all fact and logic, that those things refute intelligent design.  They confirm THAT IT COULD HAPPEN THROUGH INTELLIGENT DESIGN, not that intelligent design couldn't have been the origin of it.

I would say the exact same thing is involved with atheist-cosmologists who invent jillions of universes for the purpose of getting shut of exactly the same, known stupendous improbabilities of our known universe being able to contain matter, molecules, chemistry, stars, planets, etc.  They want to get rid of that nagging and so inconvenient discovery of modern science that troubles their chosen faith.  They are using their intelligence to create imaginary universes in order to intelligently, or, rather, unintelligently make arguments that our one universe could have been the result of random probabilities when the universes they use to do that may well exist nowhere but in the fevered and desperate imaginations of the scientists who do that.  Their universes, so far as anyone can know, are the result of their own intelligent design, but their ultimate argument has to pretend that intelligent design wasn't involved in what they did.

In order for them to get by the inconvenient facts of intelligent design being part of every single experiment atheist-scientists did to prove intelligent design wasn't part of what they did, they'd have to invent a universe in which the Miller-Urey experiment came about in a containment vessel, with just those concentrations of chemicals contained in it, the liquids and gasses, at just the temperatures they were subjected to and that the electrical apparatus that shot electricity into it, all of that would have had to have come about by random chance action in a ridiculously asserted universe where such things just randomly come about without any intelligence input into the construction.  But such universes are held by some of them to just come about by random chance, they have to because they will be faced with an infinite number of such inconvenient improbabilities in order for their chosen creator-gods random-chance and probability to have created our one and only known universe.  The original mutiverse conjecture, the so-called "many-worlds" conjecture claimed such universes are constantly popping into existence whenever anything happens in our universe and, presumably, in every other universe.  Without any explanation of what powers such an ever increasing order of infinities.  And that has been acceptable to such atheist faith.

If it's fair for them to dream up universes, it's fair for us to point out these kinds of things.  And far more in keeping with things such as the principle of parsimony which they violate in the most intellectually dishonest way that it has ever happened in the history of human intellectual culture.

Well, atheism, the denial of the possibility that such things as the stupendously complex mechanisms as even the simplest of life is a product of the intelligent design of God, that relies on the creations cooked up by the intelligent design of atheist-scientists makes the claims of them by said scientists, atheist-philosophers, loud-mouthed barroom, dorm room and blog atheists the opposite of intelligent.  Their arguments rely on the person they are trying to persuade not noticing that that science, its products, the molecules and structures made in the lab, were the result of intelligent design.  And I blew the lid on that cover-up job.

So what is your intelligence going to cook up now to get past that inconvenient fact?

Explain to me how you can disprove intelligent design by using intelligent design to produce results that are nowhere near as complex as that first organism would have had to be to have lived and reproduced.   For atheist-scientists to take it to the stage where they can even simulate something they can claim is an organism of human construction would take many times more combined minds, combined knowledge, combined intelligence that to do that takes them ever so much farther away from their claims that it would not have taken the Supreme Intelligence to do it in reality at a time they claim there were no minds, there was no intelligence to have done it and continually worked on it in the period before there was any scientific knowledge.   They might as well claim that their experiments don't involve containers, chemicals, energy as claim they don't involve intelligent design which was an essential component of literally everything involved.  And they then give awards to the scientists who come up with it.  I've never known of an atheist-scientist who was unwilling to accept rewards and money because their work was a product of randomly present conditions and nothing to do with their intelligence.

Atheists can be so dim, even as they puff themselves up with pride and conceit at their enlightenment.  They are nothing of the kind. 

Old Hate Mail - Atheist Unintelligence Is No Way To Refute Intelligent Design

Science can only deal with definable, observable, measurable objects and phenomena in the physical universe.

Science cannot be done if the entity scientists purport to study can't be defined, observed or measured, either because it can't be by the nature of what they purport to study or that the presumed observable objects or phenomena are not and, to within the realm of absolute certainty, never will be available to study with sufficient resolution to come to reliable conclusions about them.

If, as we both appear to believe, life on Earth began in a single instance of the assembly of a theoretical first living organism that is the origin of all subsequent life which we know about,  then to study that origin of life you would need to have the resolvable remains of exactly that first organism to study and it is within the realm of absolute absurdity to think that science could find such remains in detail of required resolution to even identify it as that first organism. 

To believe you can conjure it up out of lab experiments and suppositions without  the actual fossil of that organism is so absurd that anyone in the biological sciences, who has actually studied living organisms or even  resolvable fossils would know that you have to do that to actually do science about those organisms.  Anyone in science, or outside of it, who claims you can make up just-so stories and imaginary organisms instead of having the actual specimen to study should disqualify anyone from being taken seriously on the topic.

AND I WILL POINT OUT THAT EVEN IF YOU HAD THAT ACTUAL ORGANISM, YOU LIKELY WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO DETERMINE HOW IT HAD COME INTO BEING FROM NON-LIVING MATTER IN A WAY THAT HAS NEVER, ONCE, BEEN OBSERVED.  You would need to actually see how it happened to know how it happened exactly and solely in that one organism and I'm entirely confident in saying that that will never happen.*

To believe that Miller and Urey's experiment did any such thing is so stupid that anyone who brings their famous experiment up should be considered even more obviously disqualifed.  No one, including Miller and Urey could possibly assert that what they did a. is a representation of conditions on the early Earth, b. the product of anything but the intelligent design of two scientists.   Even if their experiment had done far, far, . . . entirely more than it did, show a rather odd way to generate amino acid sequences, and had produced an actual organism (something it came no where near doing) it could not disprove intelligent design but it would confirm that an organism COULD BE THE RESULT OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN.    I know that's not where you thought this would end up, but that is where it does end up.  The entire science of the alleged study of the origin of life on Earth (it's called "abiogenesis" since I doubt you know that) is basically wrong-headed.   Nothing that any of the atheists doing it for the purpose of disproving intelligent design could possibly do that BECAUSE EVERYTHING THEY DO IS A PRODUCT OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN, EVERY MOLECULE THEY PRODUCE IS A PRODUCT OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN.  The only thing they can do is confirm that it is possible that life began as a result of intelligent design BECAUSE EVERY SINGLE SCIENCE EXPERIMENT AND ITS RESULTS IS THE PRODUCT OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN.

That so many sciencey guys and actual scientists fail to recognize that simple fact about what they're engaged in is more a product of the failure of the Freshman year in college, if not the science curriculum in high schools.   I've come to believe that everyone who wants to get a bachelor's degree in any topic should be required to take a rigorous course in rhetoric, including the construction and criticism of logical arguments because the inability to do that seems to be rampant among people trained in just about every topic in universities in the English speaking world, perhaps elsewhere. 

Abiogenesis,  like Carl Sagan's equally if not even more absurd "exobiology", which purport to do science about life forms that have not, likely will never and those which certainly can never be known to exist and are certainly NOT HERE FOR THEM TO STUDY AS THEY PUBLISH THEIR "SCIENCE" NOW, are intellectually more dubious than alchemy or astrology which at least have things they can look at and measure.   That Carl Sagan has been considered in atheist sciency circles as some kind of logic ninja leads me to think that science is seriously screwed up in way too many cases.  The popular conception of science certainly is.  It's more than just someone who wasn't a biologist playing one on TV or to curry favor with Lenin and Stalin (in the case of Alexander Oparin), it's a violation of the most basic conditions for science to happen.   Both of those "sciences" should be sent to the boneyard of discontinued science.  Though they won't be.

Intelligent design and its disconfirmation is not anything that science can deal with.  In order to scientifically validate that the first organism was a result of intelligent design you would have to also have the evidence of that organism which I hold you will never have.  Being persuaded or not accepting that intelligent design was responsible for its spontaneous generation and being sparked into life isn't a matter of science, it's a matter of belief.   I have gone from being a rather conventional Darwinist on that matter to, when thinking about the enormous unlikelyhood of random events just happening to have assembled a living, metabolizing, and, most of all, reproducing organism is entirely more likely to have been the result of intelligent design than a random event that just happened to have happened.

Arguments made by scientists asserting intelligent design, such as Michael Behe, are a different matter.  I've listened to a few things and read a few things but I have not encountered anything he asserted that doesn't require a lot more information than I know so I don't say anything much about it.  That Behe is a scientist isn't for me to determine, he's got the qualifications, the publications history and the job.  And I've never heard him say something as stupid as some of the anti-ID side who are held to be scientists have said.   P.Z. Myers, for example.  I don't think you can prove intelligent design with science but I don't think there is anything illegitimate in making arguments for or against the idea as long as you use the science you cite honestly.

I don't know what the most recent polls on the topic say, I don't hold that polling is scientific, either, but the last time I looked, the conventional anti-intelligent design side were losing ground rather steadily since the latest go-round in this started in about the 1990s.  Doesn't look like people are buying it, maybe you guys should try not being such a bunch of dicks about it.  I've been through this over and over again, you don't refute what I said and you don't really say anything that isn't stupid, like something an unintelligent 12-year-old would say when they had nothing to say.  See, how did that make you feel?

* A couple of months ago I pointed out that when asked the reasonable question of why we have not seen life spontaneously coming about in conditions they alleged were the origin of life the scientist on the CBC's Quirks and Quarks show had not answered the question at all.   I don't think any scientist would dare to give a responsible answer to such a question because they would fear being black-balled or vilified or destroyed by those who uphold the atheist hegemony in science and academic culture, in general.   The real answer to such a question is we don't know why.  We likely never will know why and science can probably never answer that question.  It certainly can't answer it in any way that will be universally accepted or anything but controversial.   But that would open up all of the above to question and that would violate the rules of that atheist hegemony. 

Why Melania's Fascist Jacket Had To Have Been Intentional And Why The Republican Party Under Trump Is A Fascist Party

For anyone who thinks my calling the Republican members of the Supreme Court fascists was over the top, here's an interesting piece about Melania's interesting choice to wear the first $39 item on a trip to her husband's child prisons, the history of the slogan, its present day revival by neo-fascists, the neo-fascist messaging of the company that made the jacket.

The meaning of ‘Me ne frego’

The proud Black-Shirt motto ‘I don’t care’ written on the bandages that cover a wound isn’t just an act of stoic philosophy or the summary of a political doctrine. It’s an education to fighting, and the acceptance of the risks it implies. It’s a new Italian lifestyle. This is how the Fascist welcomes and loves life, while rejecting and regarding suicide as an act of cowardice; this is how the Fascist understands life as duty, exaltation, conquest. A life that must be lived highly and fully, both for oneself but especially for others, near and far, present and future.

Benito Mussolini

The connotations of altruism at the end of the quote are in direct contrast with the meaning taken on by the word menefreghismo (literally, ‘Idontcareism’), which ever since the regime has meant in common parlance a kind of detached self-reliance, or moral autocracy. Just as Italy broke with its former allies and charted a stubborn path towards the ruin and devastation of the Second World War, so too the Fascist citizen was encouraged to reject the judgement of others and look straight ahead. It should be remembered in this regard that the regime treated ignorance and proclivity to violence as desirable qualities to be rewarded with positions of influence and power. This required a swift redrawing of the old social norms, and of the language used to signify the moral worth of individuals. ‘Me ne frego’ was the perfect slogan for the people in charge of overseeing such a program.

Four years ago, speaking at a First World War commemoration in the small town of Redipuglia, Pope Francis linked ‘me ne frego’ not only with the carnage of that conflict, but also with the horrors of Fascism, recognising its ideological and propaganda value for Mussolini’s project. This is the form in which the slogan has survived until the present day, as a linguistic signifier not of generic indifference, but of ideological nostalgia. And because the attempts in Italy and beyond to stem the spread of such signifiers have been comprehensively abandoned, we readily find those words appearing not just on seemingly ubiquitous Fascist-era memorabilia but also on posters,

At the link above, there are several pictures of neo-fascist propaganda using that phrase, including an image of a tee shirt with it over the fasces worn by a model.

One of the commentators at another blog, where I read about this, points out that Melania Trump came from and lived in places where, unlike the United States, people who she knew and encountered would have known all about "I don't care" as a slogan of some of the most brutal of the Italian and other fascists.  Slovenia was a place where fascists were active during the war, the places she lived have a strong and ongoing commemoration of that history, the Communist Party of which her father was an official, promoted the remembrance of the anti-fascist struggle.

Melania Trump was born in Novo Mesto, a city in Slovenia which was part of first Fascist Italy, then the Third Reich in World War II.  Her father was a Yugoslav Communist Party member, from a village which has three large mass graves from the struggle against the Fascists and Nazis.  She went to school and first worked in Lubljana, a city full of references to the fight against Fascism.  She started her modelling career there before moving on to Milan, the city where Mussolini was executed after a mass uprising against the Nazis and Fascists. She speaks Italian.

Let me repeat that:  Melania Trump speaks Italian.

When you add to this the fact that Fascists have just had an electoral victory in Italy, that there are active Fascist street movements everywhere there today, actively resurrecting and using the Fascist slogans and mottos of the 1920s and '30's (including "I Don't Really Care"), that admirers of these movements have worked and do work in the White House, from Steve Bannon to Sebastian Gorka to Stephen Miller, and that Zara, the jacket manufacturer has previously been controversial for producing a swastika themed handbag and a shirt with a concentration camp Jewish star on it, it is impossible for me to think that this signalling was not intentional.

Some may think the jacket is a distraction from the very real threats facing our country and world right now, from scapegoating of vulnerable immigrants and refugees to the stripping of the social safety net and the destruction of workplace and environmental protections.  I firmly believe it is not. The First Lady of the United States, who grew up in the heartland of symbolic contestation over Fascist symbols and mottos, wore a Fascist message jacket from a company with a history of Fascist messaging. 

So, it is impossible that Melania Trump coming from where she did, at the time she did,  didn't understand that she was wearing a fascist slogan on her back as she was acting in an official capacity as the American First Lady, though you'll not catch me calling her that in the future.

The Republican Party is an overtly fascist party, now.  I'd argue that its judicial appointments largely have been for a long time, certainly as the Federalist fascists have had such a big hand in choosing them.

Basically,  Republicans are crooks and crooks always want to deal with their fellow crooks rather than people with an inconvenient notion of the common good, equal rights, justice . . . It's stupid to look at any anti-democratic ideologies or parties as anything but organized criminals.  Their use of ideology is in service to their goal of getting power, keeping power to serve their main goal, stealing everything they can and keeping it.   Basically the only reason anyone would have for marrying Donald Trump.

Update:  Oh, and, by the way,  Meghan McCain can go to hell.

Supreme Injustice Didn't End In The 19th Century

It is obvious that the Supreme Court is directly influenced by the worst features of American history, giving some people of extremely dubious motives a continuing power to govern our life.  Its reliance on the thinking of Supreme Court rulings of the past, many of them made by slave-owners, for slave-owners and against the Black People they held in slavery resonates with that and myriad other corrupt rulings by judges whose thinking is not merely colored by but determined by their economic and class interests.   While looking for excuses to do awful things today, they will look at the thinking of Justices who came up with excuses to do awful things in the past.

In this stunning lecture that the fine historian Paul Finkelman gave at the National Archive, talking about his book,  Supreme Injustice he mainly talks about two of the early Justices, along with the putrid Roger Taney, the legendary John Marshall, and Joseph Story.  He describes how Joseph Story went from being a passionate early opponent of slavery to being what the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called the "chief slave-catcher" because of his decisions favoring not only capturing escaped slaves and bringing them back into slavery but making it legal for freed Black People to be abducted in the North and sold into slavery without any recourse.  

Note that the introductions go on for way longer than they should, you should jump ahead to where Finkelman starts at about 8:25.  

He also details how the most respected of all the Justices,  John Marshall owned at least about 250 slaves (most of his biographers admit only about a dozen) as he over and over again wrote decisions favoring slave owners when Slaves held illegally by them were able to get a case heard in court - generally winning their case only to have Marshall overturn the cases.   Paul Finkelman goes into quite a bit of detail about the one slave that John Marshall offered freedom to in a codicil to his will, in which he offered his aged, devoted personal slave Robin freedom on Marshall's death, but required him to go into exile.  He would leave him $100 to go to Libera, when he had never been in Africa in his life or $50 to go somewhere else.  Finkelman points out that in order to stay in Richmond Virginia where Robin had lived his entire life, he would have had to get permission of the court, something which the SUPREME COURT JUSTICE FAILED TO DO FOR HIM WHEN HE WOULD HAVE KNOWN PERFECTLY WELL HE WOULD HAVE HAD TO DO TO LIVE THERE IN FREEDOM, but which the master lawyer in our history failed to make that effort in this case. 

His account of Marshall overturning the judgement in favor of a woman, Mima Queen, returning her to slavery for the rest of her and her children's lives is especially troubling because he noted earlier that in the 10 most often cited cases in subsequent court decisions,  Marshall wrote five of them.  At the end of his talk, Finkelman said:

I think Marshall is seeing Mima Queen in the way he saw the slave whose burial he had to pay for, it's a lost investment.   And so I think one of the stories of this is that the economic interests of the Justice and his investments and how he makes his money indirectly effects his jurisprudence.  Marshall obviously has no immediate economic claim to this case,  Marshall's not making money on this case, this is not corrupt, I'm not suggesting corruption here.  I'm suggesting something perhaps worse than corruption, which is that the way you view the world is determined by these investments in human flesh, that John Marshall has made throughout his life. 

I think that's exactly true for other Justices and for other issues, I think it's obvious that the five Republicans sitting on the court allow their partisan identification to decide a lot of their cases, the reason that they gave Trump the power to enforce his anti-Muslim bigotry on the pretext of national security, John Roberts blatantly denying that Trump's own words prove that is exactly what he and the other four fascists on the court have done.  And with this ruling there can't be any other thing to call them because they are giving a despot the ability to turn his whims into law, destroying the lives of countless people on the basis of their ethnic-religious identity.  Exactly what John Marshall, Joseph Storey and the infamous Roger Taney, the writer of the Dred Scott decision did.  

The Supreme Court has almost always been a dangerously anti-democratic institution.  As Charles Pierce said about this ruling and the recent rulings favoring Republican state governments to suppress the votes of Black People and others, they have brought us back to the Jim-Crow, Gilded-Age of law, Jim Crow being a de facto form of slavery, making Black People lesser people, joined by Latinos, Muslims, and who knows who else with join that list of lesser possessors of rights. 

His point that previous historians and biographers simply didn't deal with the enormous role that slave owning had in John Marshalls life AND IN HIS JUDICIAL LIFE, which is typical of people who write about Supreme Court justices.  The typical reportage on the court treats them as they don't treat bishops and cardinals and even Popes these days.   

There's too much deference and respect for the Court, it doesn't deserve that royal treatment, with the partisan Republican Rehnquist court and now the overt Republican-fascism of the Roberts court it is seriously important for us to attack them because, since they are the foremost force in the corruption of our elections and in the view of reality that Americans get through the media, they are and have been the biggest danger to egalitarian democracy in the past seventy three years. 

Irving Berlin - Blue Skies - Ella Fitzgerald

I'm trying to cheer myself up.  It's not working but maybe this will do it.

I'm too tired to look up the band and conductor. 

Trump Incites Terrorism

How much do you want to bet that the mentally deficient Trump fan base attacks or kills people at some restaurant that happens to have the name "Red Hen" or something like it?   I'd say that any bets that wouldn't happen are placed by the naive. 

The phenomenon of organized or, more dangerous, propaganda induced trolling on Twitter and other forums for the mentally deficient whose irrational and artificially induced passions are many times bigger than their intellect and many times more than that of their sense of morality is something which is truly dangerous.  Not only is it physically dangerous, something that leads to murders and nut-balls shooting up people and places, it is dangerous to democracy because they do it to intimidate people who oppose the violent and fascist from opposing them openly.

What Trump did in tweeting an attack to signal his drooling, lunatic cult to attack should be grounds for impeachment, it is an incitement to terrorize.   A president of the United States should never be exempted by election from suffering consequences for calling out his armed flying monkey squad to attack people.  Election by a minority of the voters in an election or even a majority of them should not carry that kind of exemption.   It is only one of the stupider aspects of our governmental system that someone who does something like that can't be removed from office.

Update:  I'd missed Obama's jerk of a Sec. of Education, Arne Duncan, tweeting that Sarah Huckabee Sander being asked to leave a restaurant due to her being an inhuman monster was the equivalent of Jim Crow era discrimination.  As someone who grew up in privilege, the son of a U. of Chicago prof who went to the prep-school of that training ground for the ruling class before he ended up at the mother ship of the same,  Harvard, I guess he's a fully credentialed idiot.

Arne Duncan is, of course, my exhibit A in the case that Democrats who want to be president should be required to promise that anyone they appoint to be Secretary of Education should be the product of the public schools and universities that are the proper concern of that department instead of the prep=>Ivy system.   They will almost always turn out to be bad for public schools and the large majority of people who depend on them.  Ask your typical, experienced public school teacher what they thought of the Obama-Duncan "Race To The Top" brought to you by those who started out at the top and look down at those who weren't.

I also hadn't heard that Obama's Senior Adviser, David Axelrod, a U. of Chicago product, similarly decried that the people at the restaurant were mean to Huckabee Sanders.   Just in case you have to be reminded at how badly Obama and his crew from the elite of Chicago blew the great hand the voters gave them in 2008.  I don't think they ever intended to do better than they did.

Haven't bothered to check what either of them have had to say about the appalling abduction and holding of babies and children, I can't imagine anything that either of those jerks had to say on the subject would be helpful.  Considering Obama's appalling, though less appalling record in that regard, maybe it's not a surprise.

We paid a huge price for electing Obama in 2008.   I don't like him at any more than I like Bill Clinton, which is less with every passing incident.

The Open Fascism of the Roberts Court And The Part The Warren Court Played In Putting It In Place

Anyone who is depending on the Roberts Court to not support Trumpian fascist rule is deluding themselves.  The five dependably fascist votes on the court upheld his discrimination against Muslims in his travel ban despite Trump's own words that that was what he intended as a gift to his racist and bigoted supporters. 

Liberals have had a deluded concept of the Supreme Court for more than half a century, depending on two things, the long, long dead court of Earl Warren, which was a mixed-blessing at best, and the equally mixed blessing of pious invocation of the First Amendment in both rulings and dissents in previous and subsequent courts.

The Warren Court is responsible for some very great advances, Brown v Board, other civil rights rulings, some of its less unwise rulings on civil liberties but it also set up the environment in which fascists have lied their way to power through the mass media.   The idiocy of pretending that fascists and Nazis deserved a "fair-chance" to air their murderous ideologies so that those poor, put-upon communists could do the same was always bound to end badly.   By the time they started doing that communism had so discredited itself through the examples of its rule in the Soviet Union, its occupied states in Europe and elsewhere, China, various smaller Communist countries, that the idea Americans would go for it was totally and obviously delusional.  As was the idea that if that had been a possibility that it was something an egalitarian-democratic country should risk happening.   The list of American Communists who elected to live in the "workers paradise" of their choosing is minuscule and that tiny little set of people was a subset of the set of the ideologically insane and stupid. 

The rulings of the Warren Court that liberals wax so romantically about were a big part of what set us up for the ensuing years of Republican-fascist ascendancy, the very media that the Warren Court relived from any danger from any political lie and libel they chose to peddle is what has led us to this state.   They and subsequent courts who ruled in favor of Nazis being free to spread their propaganda, to march in Skokie and Charlottesville and permitted corporate-fascists and billiionaire would-be oligarchs to lie are chiefly responsible for this.  The free-speech rulings of the Warren and earlier courts, the vocabulary provided to them by the lawyers in the hire of the mass media and the civil liberties industry were also used to ensure the corruption of our elections by shooting down virtually every means that the legislative branch came up with in the wake of the Nixonian corruption of our elections with slush funds and massive funding of corruption. 

As radical a lawyer as Louis Boudin long ago warned the left and everyone else of the danger of depending on the Supreme Court and other courts to protect us.  He understood that the Supreme Court - the least democratic of all of the branches of government - was far more likely to support the wealthy who high-price lawyers most often represent, who were often their patrons or the patrons of the politicians who appointed them than they were The People.   The culture of elite law-schools that formed them in their understanding of the law are cesspools of privilege and the training grounds for the servants of privilege.   The fascist federalism that is the ruling orthodoxy of the Supreme Court was formed at such institutions by prominent faculty, some have held judicial appointments, some to state supreme courts.   None of them have dirty hands and nails, none of them froth at the mouth, I'm sure many of them think the Trump regime is staffed by vulgarians, they have made such use of the crude and vulgar, that was part of the strategy to impose fascism.  Theirs is a violence once or twice removed. 

The Supreme Court has become a tool of fascism, it will remain so for the foreseeable future.  That is something we will have to fight and the first place to fight it is at the ballot box and the Supreme Court has been doing everything the fascists that rule it can to prevent fair elections and the equal representation of all people.   Liberals who have supported the lunatic ideas that empowered them, who stupidly believed that the Warren Court was typical are an encumbrance for the real left that will have to fight this.   Trump will almost certainly get to put more fascists on the Court, unless Democrats, by some miracle, gain control of the Senate and do to him what the Republican-fascists, Grassley, McConnell, Hatch, and other Republicans did to prevent Obama from filling a seat and seats on lower courts.  Without holding the majority in the Senate, nothing can stop them.  Democrats have no blame in it to the extent that they oppose the placement of fascists on courts.  Democrats have to play the hardest of hard ball with these people if they get the chance, we may have to hold their feet to the fire if that miracle happens.

We Are Being Ruled. Not Governed, By An Insane Little Boy

Just read that from going from the apple of his eye, at least according to an old script for his terrifyingly too real current reality show, Harley-Davidson is being threatened by Little King Donald with punitive taxes because it was forced by his tantrum-Putin motivated tariffs to move some of its production out of the United States.   Of course, Trump was too stupid to know that was a predictable outcome of what he did by starting a trade war with the European Union and other countries, because other than posturing and thieving and PR bullshit, he knows nothing about either business or economics or trade or much of anything. 

I don't feel sorry for any of the American workers at Harley-Davidson who will lose their jobs, at least the ones who voted for Trump, they're getting what they asked for. 

I will feel sorry for the ones who didn't vote for Trump who lose their jobs, they should thank those folks in the last sentence for the loss of their jobs, they're the ones who put Little King Donald in place to do what he just did to them. 

Likewise the owners and managers at Harley-Davidson and other companies and corporations which will now be faced with doing what Harley did or losing a lot of business in some of our largest markets.  At least the ones who supported Trump and Republicans in general.   Let's not forget the role that Republicans in congress, in state governments, on courts have done to produce this disaster, and not a few non-Republicans who supported the idiocy that bought us here, not to mention many if not most of the people in media who did this to us. 

I don't do photo-shop, if I did I'd do something with this image:



That beard on The Little King, turn it orange, put it coming out from under his crown, you'd get Trump's wig.  You could substitute the faces for Trump's courtiers for the background.  Little King Donald.  The cartoon was kind of tediously endearing, the reality is horrifically terrifying.

Where are the children?   The ones that the Little King took from their parents?  No one should ever let any Republican off on any occasion they can ask them that question.  Those in the Congress have to answer what they're going to do about it.  People wonder how it happened in Germany, it started with people being unwilling to ask those kinds of questions as atrocities started happening. 

Stupid Mail

You really have to be profoundly stupid to spend thousands of dollars traveling thousands of miles on a vacation in another country and spend any of it trolling my blog so you can misrepresent what I said (he can't represent it because he can't understand it due to an atrophied, unused mind) to a bunch of dolts who won't read it and who are almost as atrophied as his vestigial mind. 

He is that profoundly stupid, he doesn't feel real unless he's getting attention among his teeny little audience.   

The Magical Thinking of The Secularists (for which you can read "atheists")

A couple of people got upset with me for pointing out how common magical thinking is in current atheism and in the same week one of my relatives became unhinged when I told him I no longer believed that natural selection was a real thing.

First the relation who brought up natural selection as an explanation of a natural phenomenon only to have me commit the thought crime of skepticism in regard to both his application and the idea, itself.  Since I have written lots and lots as to why I believe that natural selection is an ideological delusion, in pretty much everyone of the many, not infrequently contradictory articulations of the idea,  I was prepared for the argument, though other than producing inarticulate and non-responsive anger in a guy who holds a Bachelor of Science in biological topics, that didn't do much.  It did turn out that I'd actually read a lot more about the theories of natural selection, from On The Origin of Species up till today than he had, his knowledge of Darwin's actual claims on that count, by his own admission were confined to whatever of it there was in The Voyage of the Beagle (none to nil) and Darwin's last published work, The formation of vegetable mould, through the action of worms, with observations on their habits, (likewise) as those were the only words of Darwin he'd ever read, his anger was pretty irrational and a confirmation of what I believe Darwin is for most of his most ardent true believers, a symbol of ideological and class identity, not much to do with science. 

Oh, and as a magic charm or talisman of some sort, and as in cult religions, the religious talisman is as much about group identity as it is supposed to have some potency in manipulating or mitigating the natural world.   Sort of like what Trump is for his true believers as at that link yesterday.

As far as I can tell my relation is still pissed off at me for disbelieving in natural selection, though I assured him my skepticism is a result of my thinking and reading about evolution, that the evolution of species was too big to fit into that clearly inadequate framing,* though that framing is the ideological requirement of anyone who wants to do biology.   Like those who want to claim to be rigorously for The Law of Moses or the Gospel but don't really want to have to hold their behavior to the rigors of those, they will trim and tuck, take short-cuts, deny they are at odds with them, contradict themselves and, as all of science has, made constant and at times complete revisions in the concept and call that the same thing.  When you require people abide by an ideological framing which doesn't really work, you can expect that.**

In the case of the magical thinking of the "brain-only" cult which insists that our ideas have to have their origin in physical structures in the brain, which are made by the brain, the entire thing depends on that kind of magical thinking and worse forms of it.  As I brought up the week before last, to even start the process of the brain being motivated to start making those physical structures and to make the right instead of wrong ones would require magic as the idea couldn't be there to motivate it or instruct it on what it needed to make because that structure wasn't already present in the brain to do that.

When I first realized that this was a definitive hurdle over which materialism couldn't jump the only way out I could see for them was in some kind of telepathic or clairvoyant presence of the idea, but that would disconfirm materialism because the idea couldn't be a physical "thing" and the brain would have had to have recourse to ideas, not as a physical entity, but as some metaphysical entity independent of physical sensory stimulus.  And if you're going to go there, why not admit that the mind is not identical with the brain but is, also, metaphysical.  I had already realized, long ago, that if the brain is not physical then the old atheist dodge about how a non-physical mind would interact with the physical brain overlooked the very good possibility that a non-physical mind would have recourse to qualities and powers that physical objects don't have because, otherwise, such a mind would be in no way different from a physical object.***

And that's not even getting down to where most of the atheist magical thinking really resides, in mid-brow and lower incantations of "DNA" "natural selection" "random chance" "probability" "multi-verse" "evolution (though not as it really has been but in a facile, folk simplification)" and literally dozens of other magic  charms and words of believed potency replace thinking or knowing what they're talking about.  If you press them on any of those, citing what they really mean and the real consequences of taking what your opponent said a lot more seriously than they do, you will get pretty much the same reaction I got over natural selection last week.

When you think very hard about these things the old atheist-materialist-scientistic conceit that they are exempt from magical thinking by virtue of their faith, quite often if not always, it falls apart.  It is the rarest of rare atheist who will admit that a lot of what they base their thinking on has little to no empirical basis and even rarer to get one who admits that their thinking is based in ideological and personal preference, sometimes a preference inherited from their dad or both of their parents.  I am struck at how many hard-core, even blathering barroom style atheists will brag that they learned their atheism from their parents, even as they mock religious believers for believing what they do because their parents brain-washed them into believing it.  And they'll go on and on about how they learned their atheism from the family tradition even if you point that out, holding that, somehow, it's different when it's atheism.   No doubt that difference is magical because there is no rational basis for otherwise believing that it is.

*  I think it is absurd to believe that one force is responsible for every speciation event in the billions of years long history of evolution, that "natural selection" could mean the same thing in all of the species covered under the five denominated kingdoms of life on Earth, which have such radically differing lives and cover every event or even a majority of the events that account for the differential rates of reproduction in every evolving species.  And I especially think it's absurd to think that Charles Darwin, on the basis of his knowledge in the 1850 s would have guessed what that force would be.  Practically the smoking gun forcing skepticism and suspicion is the fact that he used Malthusian economics, an economic theory that favored his economic class interests, as Marx pointing it out, distorting it at the most basic level in order to impose the British class system on all of nature, only to have his theory adopted, immediately, by other members of his class and the analogues of his class in other countries. 

I think the success of Darwinism as the controlling ideology of biological science is ideological and is based in class and ideological interests.  Instead of explaining phenomena, I think it imposes an ideological requirement on how those are to be thought of.  I doubt it really explains much, though it is used to cut out much from consideration.  My guess is that close to every citation of it in the literature is to impose that kind of framing on things and most of the rest are reassurances to others that the person writing the paper or making the claim isn't straying outside of orthodoxy.  There is no greater confirmation of that than the use of accusations of apostasy against pretty conventional, even devoted Darwinists that they have gone out of bounds.  Even a boob like Daniel Dennett, who has no qualifications to do so, likes to make that accusation instead of backing up his claims.

**  Though in the case of The Law and the Gospel, sometimes what has changed is the meaning of words, contexts that existed then but don't exist now.  Divorce, for example, and the serious, literal ban on remarriage after divorce contained in the Gospel.   What changed there was what a marriage was and what divorce was, a means of a man to get rid of a wife and likely children he didn't want to support anymore, casting them into destitution if not death by that action.  What both marriage and divorce are now, at least in come cases, changes the meaning of the ban on remarriage after divorce, though the law being still liable to favor men over women and children, it's always a gamble to depend on the law making things better.

*** It's one of the commoner and stupider atheist misconceptions about the God of monotheism, the God that most thinking Jews, Christians, Muslims, and, as I'm finding, many actual monotheists in what are misrepresented as polytheistic religions, many schools of Hinduism, many forms of African and American indigenous religions in which the "gods" would be better called "saints" or "angels" or some other lesser figure.  I'm finding out, to my surprise, that monotheism is much more widespread than my education led me to believe.