Ted Cruz leads new seditious “emergency audit” coup. Charge him accordingly

 

The Republican-fascist party is going to have to be defeated and suppressed now or American democracy is already dead.  Joe Biden has no choice but to fight this, nor do the members of the House and Senate.   This is a de facto call for sedition and the over-throwing of the Constitution that all of the chuckleheaded fascists  who are going along with Cruz have brought on.  We either throw them out of the Senate or prosecute them for sedition or they win. This was always bound to happen, eventually, with the putrid Electoral College and the baroque dance of anti-democracy that it constitutes.  We get rid of that, too, or this will just be the beginning of using the Constitution to destroy the Constitution.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Ed Harris - Wasteland

Wasteland

 

A new comedy set in the world of Brighton Seafront refuse collection, from the writer of Dot. Blake, an idealist, is determined to clean up the sea front. . Are his methods too revolutionary? Or is he, as his team say, a twonk? 

 

Cast Blake ..... Matt King 

Cromwell ..... Michael Bertenshaw 

Diana ..... Cecilia Appiah 

Wilf ..... Simon Scardifield 

Long Pete ..... Hasan Dixon 

Jaws ..... Jane Whittenshaw 

Agent ..... Charlotte East 

Frankenstein ..... Ian Dunnett Jr

Hate Mail - Someone Didn't Like Me Making Fun Of S.L. Accusing Me Of Being Jealous Of Him

For at least the hundredth time, don't bother telling me I'm a terrible writer,  I don't know how many times I have to say it I'M NOT A FRIGGIN' WRITER, I HAVE NEVER SAID I WAS ONE, I DON'T ASPIRE TO BECOME ONE.   For me the written form of language is a tool, not an art.  And it's a tool wielded by an amateur.   I use a hammer and screw driver but that doesn't make me a carpenter, as my carpenter brothers and niece can tell you.  

In thinking about how terrible a writer and load of crap Stieg Larsson was this morning,I thought of the terrible books that he obviously read and the crappy writers he stole from, other male writers who love writing about terrible sexual violence and murder done against, mostly, women, and long for the days when that kind of putrid junk was treated as porn instead of junk peddled by the book-peddling-movie-adapting industry to be sucked in by the inner degenerates among men and women. And I thought about how, their subject matter being so drearily similar, they all copy each other.

I wonder if the 20th century liberation of the fiction industry so that they could write and get published and peddle anything they wanted to by the end of the century has resulted in something analogous to "the end of physics" the idea that the enormous success of 20th century physics has brought them up to the end of what they can possibly discover using valid scientific methods and, so, the theoretical aspect of it has fallen into, first decadence and, perhaps, already into degeneracy.   I wonder if the explosion in publishing and scribbling (perhaps the typewriter started that and the word processor accelerated it) may have led to all of the credible variations on plot, characters and devices being used up so that most future fiction will be nothing but a reiteration of earlier works or the kind of obscene, increasingly violent pornography that so much of lit'richer is now.  

Maybe we need about ten years of no books being published or written or a century.  I found reading novels was a matter of diminishing returns a long time ago.  There is some good writing in some of them but it's rare for a full new novel to tell me anything I didn't read before, nothing new about human character I didn't know, except when it is about lives of people outside of the Northern European-North-American bubble that most English language lit discussion is about.  I looked at a couple of "100 books you have to read" lists and found that with a few exceptions who could be predicted, all of them were English language writers with white skin, almost all of them male.  The books originally in other languages all by white men, too.  Maybe it's just white men who should shut up so other people can get heard. 

By the way, the best send-up of Stieg Larsson I read was Nora Ephron's.  It's good because it's short, I don't think I would have bothered to read a long one.  

Oh, and as to me being jealous of him.  He's dead, having smoked and eaten himself into a heart attack at the age of 50. I thought it was hilarious that he and his girlfriend, being too stylish to get married and him being too stupid to write a legal will had all of his posthumous wealth go to his father and brother (who he apparently didn't like) instead of the Communist party who would probably have spent it on producing crap to no effect at all.  I hope his brother and father spent the money well, though I don't know anything more about it.  I doubt his prose was any better in Swedish than it translates into English.  The substance is degenerate shit that proves he was a degenerate.  No moral person would have written what he did.  Covering his snuff porn with a thin layer of pseudo-feminism doesn't change what it is, no matter what dippy idiot reviewers pretended. 

On The Degeneracy Of Modernism

This morning I have a smile on my face knowing Stieg Larsson is long dead and there's no likelihood of another posthumous novel by him being found and published. 

Whenever you see him on a podcast or, more and more rarely, I sense, professional media, Glenn Greenwald is the definition of the bottom of the barrel.  I would like to see him disbarred for something and put into jail if he's broken any actual laws.  I don't usually want to see someone go to prison but I just passed by him waxing off of the suppression of alternative facts on Covid-19 and I have to admit, I hate people who lie about it and get people killed. I'm kind of sensitive on that issue.

La Famille Beaudoin - La Bénédiction du père

 

Words

Around here it was the Quebecois who had the best New Years traditions, our too assimilated Irish ones tended towards the "meh".

Yonder Come Day

I can understand pessimism, but I don't believe in it. It's not simply a mater of faith, but of historical evidence. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give hope, because for hope we don't need certainty, only possibility. Despite all those confident statements that "history shows . . .," hope is all the past can offer us.

Howard Zinn: Failure to Quit

Things are certainly darker than they were when that paragraph was written in 1990, though I remember 1990 and things were pretty damned dark then. The subsequent three decades have certainly given us every reason to give up hope but there is one overriding reason not go give it up. Giving up hope might have the comfort of lowering your expectations to zero and the wallowing in a lazy, fashionable dispair, so much more congenial if you're a member of the privileged classes than of an oppressed group. That temptation is overridden by one of the hard truths about despairing and giving up hope, it is also a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom so despaired of.

I will be restarting the reading of The Prophetic Imagination in the next few days, Going back to my previous treatment of the introduction and first several chapters, applying it to the days and weeks news in the run-up to the election, I certainly didn't give Walter Brueggemann or the Prophets anything like their due. I'm thinking of starting again in light of Howard Zinn's advice on, with knowledge of how tenuous it is, hope is all we've got and it certainly has the virtue of making the possibility of better things happen, certainly more than nihilistic despair or cynical nihilism. That those two poses, guaranteed to prevent a better future ever coming, ever gained currency on the alleged left is certainly related to how the abandonment of faith was also made fashionable among the secular left. I will leave it to you to read the rest of Zinn's call to optimism despite the continual countering evidence, I certainly don't believe anyone will look at his sample of reasons to be optimistic and be wowed by the immediate victory of good over evil because it's clear good does not have anything like a guarantee of winning over even terrible evil but if you give up on it, you guarantee it has no chance.

At the end of his article, Zinn said:

Surely history does not start anew with each decade. The roots of one era branch and flower in subsequent eras. Human beings, writings, invisible transmitters of all kinds, carry messages across the generations. I try to be pessimistic, to keep up with some of my friends. But I think back over the decades and look around. And then it seems to me that the future is not certain, but it is possible. 

 

It's possible, it's not guaranteed, there is nothing guaranteed about the continuation of the human species, no more than the myriads of species that have lived and either died off or whose offspring evolved into other species, including ours. Hope is an emotion, an action that depends on the future, it hopes for a fulfillment that we desire. Or one that we will find good. It isn't wisely spent on wishing things would stay the same because nothing does stay the same. The belief it can is a delusion. 

 

And the future will always be unknowable from the present. It is one of the biggest follies of the materialist-atheist attempts to replace revealed morality with idiotic schemes, none so much as utilitarianism which is based in a pudding-headed claim that it is possible for us to know the ultimate tally of whether something in the present or immediate past will produce more happiness for more people than some other possible thing in the present or immediate past. Well, no one can know what the ultimate good or evil will come out of something. No one can say who may not have been born who was either figure of enormous evil or enormous good in any possible line of present day or future human beings. I'll bet every single one of us has ancestors who would easily fit into both categories, without whom the greatest of good people among us would not be here.

 

And it works the same way when considering human beings collectively, too.  I dare say that if it were not for WWII many of us whose parents met because of the war would have no secure belief that but for that terrible thing, we might never have been born. The war and the fascist, imperialist and Nazi systems that caused the war was certainly an evil thing, but there is no way to figure out what its final results will be. One of those results is certainly the diminution of the evil of antisemitism in Western societies, albeit too briefly. The at least temporary diminution of expressions of racism in the United States was a result of the exposure of the evil of American apartheid. 

 

That is one of the things that the evil of eugenics has in common with utilitarianism, other than its scientific and philosophical incompetence, it holds that it can discern a future which is unknowable and claims the right to act on that fantastic delusion of a gift of precognition "for the better." I knew a young man, a very intelligent lawyer who knew he had a fifty-fifty chance of not living to be old and so went into public-service lawyering. The reason he knew that it was possible he would not is because his mother died of Huntington's disease. He was genetically tested because his girlfriend didn't want to marry him if he had the gene that would doom him to die a terrible death from it, she didn't want to risk having a child with him if he did. He did carry the gene, she married someone else and he continued on with his legal career until he started showing symptoms. He has since died. I don't know how her children with her husband will turn out, though the marriage ended in divorce. Maybe her children will do great and good things, maybe she would have had a child with him who would. Having spoken about how we are dependent on the telling of stories, the fact is, we often don't have an ending for them in reality. Reality has a way of editing our chosen endings of stories, it is one of the idiocies of modernism that it believes we can tell those now.  

 

There is no getting past the fact that things are a hell of a lot more complicated than the meat-headed utilitarians presented them as being. That utilitarianism arose in the same intellectual milieu that claimed the possibility of applying the very limited methods of the successful physical sciences to enormously complex and largely unknowable things like human cultures, human societies, politics, human minds and behavior, economics, the law - things I suspect that Howard Zinn would have found more easily palatable in all their pseudo-scientific nonsense than I do - proves how intellectually bankrupt modern materialistic, atheistic secularism is. The despair experienced by modern intellectuals is due to the fact that their secular faith leads to it, inevitably, in Zinn's piece he gives huge reasons to be despairing and rather weak examples of why we shouldn't give into it. I honor his conclusions a lot more than his reasoning advocating hope. 

 

I hope because I believe in God, I believe in the claim in Genesis that God saw creation was good. That somehow things will work out to a good end, an end I can't know and will certainly never live to see in this life. I choose to believe that because it is the right thing to do. Believing in the opposite doesn't get you to anything better.  It guarantees you worse.

Yonder Come Day - Bessie Jones and the Sea Island Singers

 

With Slight Apologies To Oscar Hammerstein II - Last Bit Of End Of The Year Fun In A Year That's Been Anything But Fun

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly

He's gotta, lie just lie till he dies,

Can't help lyin' that lyin' swine.*

I don't care what he says to anyone stupid enough and idle enough to spend their days there gossiping and sharing their ignorance with each other at Duncan's.  

I'll bet John Lennon would have been a Trump supporter by now, it's where he was headed. 

Fred Seaman was John Lennon's personal assistant from 1979 until his death in December 1980. Since then, he's written a book about the late Beatle, appeared on television programs where he was billed as "an expert on Lennon's childhood and adultlife" and been sued by Yoko Ono for violating his confidentiality agreement and failing to return the photographs, journals and letters he took out of Lennon's Manhattan apartment building during his two years working for the musician. Now he's claiming the man who wrote "Mean Mr. Mustard" was a closet Republican and big fan of the Gipper.

In a interview for an upcoming Beatles documentary, Seaman discussed Lennon's alleged conservative streak in greater detail. Some of the noteworthy quotes, as highlighted by the Toronto Sun:

"John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on (Democrat) Jimmy Carter."

"He'd met Reagan back, I think, in the 70s at some sporting event... Reagan was the guy who had ordered the National Guard, I believe, to go after the young (peace) demonstrators in Berkeley, so I think that John maybe forgot about that... He did express support for Reagan, which shocked me."

"I also saw John embark in some really brutal arguments with my uncle, who's an old-time communist... He enjoyed really provoking my uncle... Maybe he was being provocative... but it was pretty obvious to me he had moved away from his earlier radicalism."

"He was a very different person back in 1979 and 80 than he'd been when he wrote Imagine. By 1979 he looked back on that guy and was embarrassed by that guy's naivete."

Didn't surprise me when I read that, I'd never been much impressed with his radical act.  He always seemed more like a David Horowitz type, especially when I found out about what a piece of shit he was to women.

* And even more of an apology to swine.

Hate Mail - End Of The Year Fun

I wouldn't exactly call it a New Year's tradition, me making fun of whatever non-entity they got to intone the dreary atheist dirge, "Imagine" at Times Square, I don't do it every year. Sometimes I ignore NYC on NYE entirely. 

 

It is one of the stupidest and worst songs ever written by a hack in about five minutes, a song that proves that in addition to other subjects music education has fallen apart in the post-war period, as millions mumble out of tune along with the generally out of tune mumbling of whatever paid artiste they get to do it. 

 

It's like Amazing Grace only without any melody, even more banal lyrics, no grace and the only amazement that people didn't mock it into oblivion decades ago. John Lennon getting himself shot probably accounts for the faux piety surrounding it, it he'd only gotten as old, nasty and cranky as Orson Bean did it would probably not hold the position in pop-kulcha that it does. I'll bet he'd have been a Trump supporter.

Imagine sucks. I'd rather hear any song by George Harrison that I can remember than it, any day. 

 

Oh, I almost forgot,  Gloria Gaynor belting "I Will Survive" is one of the things I credit with having driven me out of going to bars.  I don't think I entered one after about 1979, maybe before.   Disco was a blight on everything.  But I do thank her and her fellow belters for keeping me out of bars.

 

Update: Why anyone in and around the incoming Biden administration should care what Duncan Black thinks about anything is a thing that doesn't exist.

That he is already bitching and tearing down Biden, who did more by merely winning the election, keeping Trump from occupying the office for four more years than all of the play-lefties in the entirety of American history is reason enough for him and anyone else who cares about reality instead of play-lefty playtime and attention getting to totally ignore him and his idiot resident geezers. The time of the play lefties has passed only they're too busy playing to notice that that. Duncan's old before his time.

.

As Recently As the 16th I Called McEnany " the woman who never opens her mouth without a flagrant, shameless lie come out"

 

The Weaponizing Of The Credulous And Those Prone To Paranoia Is Certainly Something That Has Occured To The Enemies of Egalitarian Democracy

Reading more about the 5G viral rumor (I refuse to honor such bull shit with the term "theory") and its many and metastasizing allies, I think it's more than a bit likely that some of this is instigated by organized actors, probably Russia, maybe other countries, who want to weaponize our nut cases who, by the sheer idiocy of the Second Amendment are capable of building massive car and truck bombs and who have ready access to what are essentially machine guns. If such malignant actors haven't noticed the potential of setting off our domestic lunatics, nutcases and paranoiacs to cause chaos or disruption they probably wouldn't have the positions they have, certainly not those in government and corporate entities. They probably are trying to find ways to steer the collective crackpots through the internet, a directed weapon is certainly more useful to them than one that isn't steered. It's one of the shocking things about the post-truth phase of modernism that it renders even the educated so helpless as they are manipulated by sensationalistic lies. Really, our common culture has been tabloidized by the abandonment of truth and the permission to lie given us by the "civil liberties" industry and the Supreme Court furthering their arguments. This is what we get when lies are empowered with "rights" talk. 

 

If that potential has occurred to me,it's certainly more than just occurred to those masters of post-truth amorality, the late Soviet era gangsters that took over that country as they gave up the pretense of Marxism for even more lucrative forms of anti-democratic governance.  And they're hardly the only billionaire oligarch gangsters who would do that, we've got more than enough of those right here in the land of the unfree and the home of the paranoid. 

 

The most dangerous things for democracy is the permission for the mass media to lie and to spread lies for profit and self interest and the destruction of good will. Modernism, the so-called enlightenment did both. It's not that the pre-modern period was much better at telling the truth and maintaining an attitude of good will, they weren't better at us but they hadn't articulated the antitheses of those in a way taken as intellectually respectable. Modernism has done that, either we overcome that or we will sink into a dark age darker than the one that gets called the dark age. As I've pointed out before, Bertrand Russell, witnessing the death of the 19th century scientistic materialism he relied on as a substitute for revealed religion predicted a period of such darkness. Only he was too invested in what led to it to get beyond it. We will or we will probably die in darkness.

 

This Situation Can't Hold Much Longer

I haven't been paying much attention to the more insane right-wing nutcase rumors this year, there are so many of those, so until I heard this morning that the Nashville Christmas Day bomber may have been motivated by the 5G conspiracy theories to attack the ATT office where the bomb went off, I hadn't read much about it.

What I've read about how that nutty mass delusion has spread in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic and how many of the early spreaders of it were pop singers and from that factory of malignant fantasy and some of the stupidest lies, Hollywood confirms some of my worst fears about the future of free speech and free press, that the old assumptions about those being absolute will be found impossible to sustain. I watched a BBC show from last July that was alarming enough, especially the denial of 5G wack-jobs about the existence of the virus and the already insane rumors about the yet to be produced vaccines in relation to the Spring shutdowns in Britain and can only imagine how much worse those are now that Britain has had to shut down again and is the host of an even more virulent mutation of the virus.

We should start facing the fact that with the change of technology, first the movies, then radio and then TV and on to forms of media that can implant and promote the most insane lies that can go viral far faster than an actual virus can, some of those "viral messages" clearly organized by gangster states and well financed lie campaigns, we can't permit that spread to continue, there will have to be consequences for those who spread the lies and those hosting sites and companies that make their products available to the worst people in the world for spreading them. The ACLU "First Amendment" cries won't work for much longer except to enable the worst of this because the results that have come from that theory of free speech and free press are impossible to sustain.

We can either have a world in which the ability to tell the truth is protected and the spreading of lies is suppressed or we will find ourselves in a world in which the ability to tell the truth will either be denied by governments that clamp down that far or by crazy people who attack and kill or scare truth tellers into silence.

We have gone past the world of one page at a time printing known to the writers of our First Amendment, the idiocy of not forcing their language to address the world two hundred thirty years on is sheer insanity in itself. We don't have time for the ACLU and the glacial pace of the legal profession to address this because they have a vested interest in pretending this isn't happening or, if it is, that it has nothing to do with their advocacy on behalf of liars to tell their lies no matter how damaging or disastrous they are. We can't continually put off addressing this anymore than we can the equally disastrous wording of the Second Amendment because it is killing people now.