Saturday Night Radio Drama - Vivienne Harvey - Dammage

 

Following a series of suspicious deaths in the homeless community, DCI Stone decides the only way to the truth is to go undercover on the streets.i

DCI John Stone...Hugo Speer 

DI Mike Tanner...Craig Cheetham 

DS Sue Kelly...Deborah McAndrew 

Jolene...Angela Lonsdale 

Carol...Angela Lonsdale 

Frances...Angela Lonsdale

 McAffrey...Conrad Nelson 

Rigger...Conrad Nelson 

Mad Dog...Reece Noi 

Jammy...Drew Cain 

Queenie...Verity Henry 

Nurse...Verity Henry 

Directed by Nadia Molinari. 

Boy, did I have to wade through a pile of low grad sci-fi, fantasy,  sword and dragons and the allegedly "surreal" before going back to this tried and true cop series. 

Elite Criminal Credentialing

Reading around the news, online, I just came to this headline from Law.Com, from the New York Law Journal

Biden Would Be First Lawyer-President Without a JD From the ‘T-14′ in a Century

 

I didn't know what the "T-14" is though I could tell that much of that list could be guessed and it was probably a safe bet that they would not be public law schools which graduate a large number of those from the lower economic classes. Doing a word search I found this succinct definition from Thought.Co

 

Fourteen law schools have consistently remained at the top of the U.S. News & World Report rankings since the rankings began in 1987, earning them the title of top 14 schools. Although rankings among the T14 may shift slightly from year to year, these schools have historically been ranked among the best, and many graduates have the best opportunities to obtain high-paying jobs nationwide.

First on the list is Yale which produced this year's most eminently expellable, hopefully indictable Senator not named Cruz, the putrid fascistic Josh Hawley.  Third is Harvard Law School which produced the most expellable seditionist, hopefully indictable, senator not named Hawley, Ted Cruz. I could compile a long list of sleazebags, even just those in and around the Trump crime spree and the seditionist plots to keep him in power who got their credentials at the "T-14". Granted I could also make a list that wouldn't be as embarrassing to those over-rated schools for the servants of Mammon. Probably some who will work in the Biden administration, though, as can be seen, not Joe Biden, himself.

The hegemony of the Ivys and the Ivy-equivalents is one of the things that must be broken. There is something deeply anti-democratic in having that entrenched, privileged, mutually-supportive old-school network as a permanent fixture in our governance. I have not started looking at who credentialed the people in the Biden administration yet but I hope there are far more people who either came from a pubic-school, land-grant university background or who don't hold degrees but came up in the ranks on pure competence and dedication to public service. Among our greatest public servants is Abraham Lincoln who was looked down on for his lack of elite credentialing, not even the equivalent of a jr. high level.  Among our worse are graduates from some of the most reputable universities in the world.  And those schools should never be able to sweep their credentialing and enabling of them and their networks under the carpet.

On The Republicans And Those Those Who Should Leave That Ship Of Criminally Insane Fools

Finding out that the Georgia Republican-fascist, gun-fetishist, QAnidiot congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green had once started then sold a CrossFit gym added explanation as to how she operates. Having profited from one psychotic, dangerous cult it's no surprise that she'd be on the lookout for others that might serve the same purpose of it. CrossFit is insane and dangerous and its suck . . . uh, "devotees' as superstitiously irrational as snake handlers and strichnine drinkers and anti-maskers and Trump true believers.  I mean, they figure the dangerous practice of exercising until you vomit is something to be proud of and an accomplishment, something that kills people.  They have a puking clown logo as part of their paraphernalia.

 

I would expect that she'll jump on something else, now that Qanon is falling apart. I don't know if those worrywarts who are afraid that depriving them of larger venues of social media like Twitter and Facebook will funnel them into more overt and dangerous white supremacist criminal online cults but the one they were in was dangerous enough to be going on with. Perhaps a percentage, maybe a large percentage, of those who drank the KKKool-Aid  might be deprogrammed but it's inevitable that a large percentage, especially those who rose to the top of that poisonous punch bowl will keep on with it. I remember someone grasping on to Lindsay Graham's immediate post insurrection deviation from his devotion to kissing Trump's ass as yet another of his shifts but that little piece of crap is too far into it to abandon it. 

 

I suspect that Mitt Romney and a few of the other Republicans are looking for a way to leverage the backlash against the crimes of the Trumpians to reassert the traditional business-first control of the Republican Party but I suspect they're about 26 years too late for that.  They'd do a lot better by leaving the party and forming a center-right independent caucus in the Senate. They'd get up to no good but their no good is nowhere near as bad as the no-good of Mitch McConnell and the white supremacist domination of the Republican Party.

On The Importance Of Being Experienced

Listening to Dr. Fauci on a pirated video of Rachel Maddow's interview with him, listening to him discussing the two-day old administration of the Covid-19 crisis and the implied comparison with Trump and the crooks year long botch, the rule of a spoiled 74 year old man child who the "adults in the room" couldn't make up for, it's clear that it's the difference of day and night when one of those adults in the room is the President of the United States.

People are marveling at the speed with which Joe Biden and his team are moving to fix things, to move things ahead to which I say, look at this list of recent presidents and consider a. their experience in DC politics and b. their devotion to the common good as opposed to private greed. Obama, Bush II, Bill Clinton, Bush I, Ronald Reagan Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford (maybe I should have included something about intelligence) Nixon, Lyndon Johnson (the man who moved democracy farther along than even FDR). Notice something in that list? Which two of those had a long period of a. experience in the governance of the country, b. devotion to the common good as opposed to private greed. 

 

Among the idiotic ideas that became common on the left, as it did on the right that what was needed in the federal government was "outsiders" an idea which I may have once believed but stopped believing as I saw how the media and the corrupt part of Washington DC chewed up and spat out Jimmy Carter, probably the most decent men ever to have held that office,  someone who in decency Biden is already beginning to remind me of.  Carter and the people he brought with him from Georgia were no match for the gangsters of DC.  Too many Democrats still bought the dumb idea that someone whose previous experience didn't include long time service in the Congress would be preferable to someone whose service was in state government and that got us the intellectually brilliant but unprepared Bill Clinton and the minimally DC experienced Barack Obama - who along with Carter may be two of the smartest men who have ever been president but who, at least in the case of Obama,had the bare minimum of experience in federal politics and it showed, badly.

The Trump regime should have killed, once and for all time that whopper of a lie that rich people loved to hear and to say, that what the country needed was a businessman as president. We had one and he almost destroyed the country, he may well if the Senate does not convict him and legal courts follow suit. The culture of business executives is not what you need in the presidency, if the Supreme Court was not constantly in the hands of Ivy League servants of money, MONEY WOULD BE REDUCED TO THE BARE MINIMUM IN OUR ELECTORAL POLITICS. If there are two things that I hope are kept from now on from this terrible plague year it is 1. a virtual political convention, 2. a virtual inaguration THAT CAN BE A SHARED EXPERIENCE FOR THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. Keeping the kind of corruption that raising money for the traditional forms of those and other aspects of politics out of politics is a vitally important thing.

It is so important to our politics that a third thing I hope is kept and expanded and made universal and typical it is voting on paper ballots through the U.S. Mail. It is one thing I hope and pray the Democrats do while they have control, that the repair the attack on the US Postal Service done by Republicans at the behest of private corporations. I want the Postal Service restored and its funding made strong and secure enough that maybe people will use it in preference to the corporations that tried to have it destroyed.

I also hope Louis DeJoy and his helpers are investigated, prosecuted and imprisoned for using an attack on the Postal Sevice to rig the election for Trump.

After Four Long Years Of Knowing We're Paying People To Tell What Are Transparently Lies.

IT seems so novel, listening to the daily press briefing from White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki to have a half an hour of NO LIES, NO HYPE, NO CRIMES. Jen Psaki is a star just because she is doing her job.

I Hope Kamala Harris Gets Amanda Gorman To Write Hers Too

Got into a discussion with someone about why I hope reincarnation isn't real, mostly because I never, ever, ever want to have to go through being a teenager again.   

Then the discussion went to the wonderful Amanda Gorman and her wonderful inauguration day poem which I hope is the beginning of a long and great career as a poet.  I was very glad to see that her books are flying off the shelves.  Let's hope for even greater work from her.

We discussed Obama's second inaugural poet Richard Blanco (Maine's got a piece of him, he lives here, sometimes).  And Clinton's first, Maya Angelou.   I said that I liked what I recalled of those poems,  I'll have to go back and read Elizabeth Alexanders and Miller Williams, that I didn't remember them might have had something to do with me not watching all of Obama's first or Clinton's second inaugurations.  I was mad at Clinton before his second and was too nervous for Obama's first one to watch most of it.

I had to admit that I detest the original  inaugural poem, which wasn't written for the inauguration, Robert Frost's The Gift Outright, a poem that pretty much ignores that the United States is based on land stolen from people the Europeans Frost says were given it murdered to get it.   NOT a big Frost fan. And my view of the Kennedy administration is pretty much changed from how I originally saw it.

We tried to remember if Trump had an inaugural poet and decided that he'd think it was too sissy to have one, making do with his Stephen Miller written manifesto  that should have started an A for Achtung!  

Thinking afterwards I had a kind of creepy feeling that reincarnation might be real and that it had a kind of nasty sense of irony, reincarnating Goebbels as Stephen Miller.

I'm Beginning To Feel Like Celebrating The Last Days Of Christmas Since The First Ones Were So Fraught

THERE IS NOTHING IN POLITICS MORE RADICAL THAN MAKING ANY PROGRESS, PASSING IT INTO LAW, IMPLEMENTING IT, MAKING IT REAL.  

THERE IS NOTHING MORE RADICAL THAN DOING THINGS IN REALITY INSTEAD OF THEORIZING FANTASY TO MAKE THE LIVES OF PEOPLE, LIVING BEINGS, THE ENTIRE ENVIRONMENT BETTER, SAFER, MORE SUSTAINABLE AND PREPARING TO PASS THAT ON TO THE NEXT GENERATION.

This Biden Administration has the capacity to move things on in those directions, I believe that is what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want to do, I think that is what those they are appointing want to do. 

The corporate media and the Republicans won't give Joe Biden and Kamala Harris any kind of honeymoon period,  I think the American left owes them a four year long one and their full support BECAUSE IF THE EXPERIENCE OF THE PAST FIFTY YEARS OF AMERICAN POLITICS SHOWS ONE THING IT IS THAT THE ONLY VEHICLE THAT IS GOING TO DO THAT IS A DEMOCRATIC ADMINISTRATION IN POWER.  

I hope and pray that with the Biden presidency his support of the appointment of Jamie Harrison as the head of the Democratic National Committee,  the legacy of Bill Clinton  and the DLC is at an end.  We have to move on from him.   Obama got us part way there, I think Joe Biden can do it.  With Bernie Sanders at the head of the Senate Budget Committee, I think things might change in the right direction. 

I was an ardent and complete supporter of Elizabeth Warrens Candidacy a year ago, I think she would have been a great president but what would have been is not the same as what can be.  One of the biggest lessons for me this past year is that there are other people in the great and diverse Democratic coalition who, while they may love Warren as much as I do, understood that she would not win against Trumpism.  I had been all in on supporting Hillary Clinton even as I was afraid that the garbage bags of lies told about her and, frankly, the problem of Bill Clinton might doom her candidacy. Bill Clinton's grotesquely stupid and irresponsible tarmac meeting with the Attorney General is probably the pivot point which lost her the Electoral College even as she won the popular vote.  I think she paid a huge price and the country a bigger one.  If I bring that up it is because I'll never not be mad about that anymore than I will James Comey and the New York Times sandbagging her to put Trump in office.  

I think more than leaving Trump behind is the promise of the last two days, and by saying that I don't mean not prosecuting Trump, his crime family, his criminal gang and the huge cast of goons and creeps who were the persona scumitae of the past five years.  I hope any time someone puts it to Joe Biden to interfere with the actions of the Department of Justice or prosecutors in New York, possibly Georgia, possibly other places that he should say he is not going to allow law enforcement under him to be corrupted by political pressure.   We've had that for four years and I hope among those considered for prosecution are Barr, Sessions, Rosenstein, Whitaker, and the rest of the gangster lawyer-liars who served the most criminal regime in our history.   Particularly Barr, of course, but the others should be disbarred and behind bars.  The lawyers who that could be said of is a long, long list.  And in saying that the various bar associations that don't throw out criminals like them, the candidates to be Donald Trump's new Roy Cohn should be investigated for being a corrupting force in the administration of law.  The contrast between the bravery of those who forthrightly and clearly and honestly exposed criminality and those who cowered short of calling what was right their in front of them what it was often hinged on whether or not they were lawyers or not.  

One of the unexpected things that happened yesterday at noontime - I wanted to know the exact second that Donald Trump was no longer president* - was that I felt an irresistible urge to fall asleep. As soon as I knew that gang of criminals  were no longer in charge and protected a tension that I'd come accustomed to for the past four years let up.   For me the most perfect of moments yesterday was seeing Kamala Harris presiding over the Senate and laughing about the weirdness of reading the description of her resignation from the Senate.  Knowing that Mitch McConnell won't be presiding over the Senate, at least for a while, may have been the highest point for me and that is thanks to the great Stacy Abrams, miracle worker and to the People of Georgia who turned out.  I hope that high turnout elections become the norm along with such things as virtual - I pray far less corrupt - conventions and inaugurations.   

Maybe The Only Good Thing About The Pandemic And Insurrection Is No Parade, No Balls, Those Would Only Detract From A Rare Perfect Moment

I am absolutely thrilled that there will not be a friggin' parade as part of Joe Biden's inauguration, I'm even more thrilled that they're not having the half-dozen or more balls and lots of the other crap that should never have become part of our civil ceremonial life.  Who the hell needs all that traditional crap after last night? 

Last night was absolutely the most meaningful thing I've ever seen in relation to inaugurations and I remember back to Kennedy's sixty years ago.  It was one of those rare things that was absolutely perfect, beautiful, simple, understated and for that reason classier than classy.  Anyone who was expecting Joe Biden's administration to be a pale imitation of Obama's or some gaff guaranteed comedy of errors should consider again.   

I think the gaffs were a product of a number of things, the anxiety of someone who has a speech impediment and the knowledge that the corporate media would use that against him, the anxiety I mentioned this morning from having to navigate the mine field of unknowable IEDs Democrats can depend on being there, real and those invented out of nothing.  I think Biden knows that after this he will not need to run another election campaign, he's free of that, he's done with it.  This is the last office he will hold, he can do his job without having to worry about his reelection.  He won't be anxious about being indicted, unlike Trump he doesn't have to wonder which day or hour or minute the papers will be served, the warrant will be issued, the summons to appear with be delivered.  

I'm far more impressed with Biden's nominees than I was with either Obama's or Clinton's  even if the feeling of relief at even a minimal exhibition of competence after the the era of criminal insanity and malfeasance were not our shared experience,  Biden's long experience in the Congress, as Vice President, have given him a far stronger knowledge of things than Barack Obama had.  Raw intellectual brilliance, which both Obama and Clinton had is good but it's not going to match decades of experience on the job.  

I'll be nervous for the next four years but only because I'll be afraid that something will happen to stop Biden from doing the job he intends to do. For the past four years I've been afraid that Trump would do what he intended to and for whatever criminally cruel and insane and merely stupid thing he and his ship of fools and garbage scow of criminals would do. 

Jinxes Superstitions And The Curse Of Lies Misnamed Liberty

You don't have to tell me that my habit of thinking I'm going to jinx things by hoping for them or expressing confidence that they'll happen is a silly superstition, I know it. Doesn't mean I'm going to take chances that I'm wrong about that. Not about something as important as what I hope happens the second noon Eastern Standard Time starts and continues through a Biden, then a Harris administration, with good and capable Democrats in control of the Congress. It's too important to take a chance I'm wrong about the jinx thing.

I've been very critical of Biden at many points in his career, though I had thought he was a promising candidate for president when he was young and perhaps callow. I think a lot of the stuff he said and did that I as afraid of was the necessity of a Democrat navigating their way around the lies and attacks that the media would throw in their way to scuttle their attempts at gaining power to do the good that the oligarchs want to prevent. That has been something you can thank the Supreme Court and its freedom to lie they granted to the media, a totally uncivil liberty that the corporate media and the play left have used mostly to destroy the promising career of Democrats who could win elections and do good. That is a habit which I have every confidence that the corporate media and the pseudo-non-profit media such as NPR and PBS will take up almost immediately. I have no doubt that Republican-fascists are planning on sandbagging the Biden-Harris administration as they will Democrats in the Congress and on the State and local levels, even as the insurrection of January 6th fades in the memory and the gaping wounds that our second As Seen on TV president inflicted on the nation and on the world scab over.

You mark my word, until the media, and you have to include the disease of "social media" in that, until they are all made accountable for lies they tell and lies they allegedly passively carry, you can count on a Trump and far worse and not in some distant future. It took eight short years from the disaster of the Bush II regime, a regime I will remind you was inflicted on us through the Electoral College as worked by Jeb Bush, the sleazy Florida Secretary of State and some media work by a Bush family cousin on FOX, it took eight short years for the media to bring us with lies told about Hillary Clinton to Trump. It took two short years for them and the billionaire astro-turf "tea party" to kneecap the Obama administration, throwing control of the House to the odious John Boehner (then the even worse Paul Ryan) and the Senate to the vile Mitch McConnell. 

 

The liberty, privilege, really, to lie that the Supreme Court gave to the mass media is a curse which secular materialism has cast on the United States, we will not have equality THE ONLY REAL AND SAFE GUARANTEE OF DEMOCRACY until that privilege to lie with impunity is removed and media is held responsible and punished for lies it actively tells and those it allegedly passively carries on the basis of "it's being said".  The most recent campaign of the "it's being said" form of lies is in the Republicans excusing their attempt on January 6th at a larger, more vulgar form of the Brooks Bros. Putsch that brought in Bush II there is an unprecidented lack of confidence in the Presidential election of 2020.  THAT THEY DON'T ADMIT THAT THEY ARE THE ONES WHO LIED A LARGE NUMBER OF REPUBLICANS INTO BELIEVING THAT THE ELECTION WAS CROOKED IS JUST A PART OF THE LIE THEY ARE SELLING, I have every confidence that the media will try to sell that lie for them.

The role that lies, especially lies created and sold through the same methods that advertising has perfected played in the disaster of the past four years should be fully recognized.  Lies in the style of successful con-men, what Trump always has been, lies which you can see all night and all day on TV, hear on the radio, see on the internet are what got us Trump.  Democracy has no chance as they get better at it.

I listened to Al Franken the other day talking with the two lawyers Joyce Vance and Prett Bhrara.  At one point the politician and show business guy AND ALL TOO BRIEFLY GREAT SENATOR talked about the necessity of doing something about the flood of lies that washed in the sewage of Trump.   He gets it, though I don't think in developed enough form.   The two lawyers seemed to be horrified at the thought that something might, no, must be done to stop the lies that will bring us here again.   That is something that is like a superstition in the legal profession, that because of a once novel interpretation of the woefully badly written Bill of Rights nothing is to be done even at the cost of democracy, even at the cost of basic decency and the distinction between the truth and lies.   That superstition that started in people like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis and William O. Douglas is far stupider and far, far more dangerous than my harmless fear of jinxes.  Free speech-press absolutism of even the degree that controls the thinking of our legal system is of demonstrable danger.  All you have to do is listen to how they talk about the truth that lies got us to Trump and the insurrection of the 6th but then they can't comprehend that the way out of that is by stopping the media from lying.

While Holding My Breath, Crossing My Fingers, Throwing Salt Over My Shoulder and Not Tempting Fate

Garden of American Heroes?  Sounds very Mussolini-American to me.  I missed that particular atrocity of Trumpian imagination.  Really of some numb nutz in his entourage, like Trump ever heard of most of the people on "his" list.  I mean, what are the odds that Trump ever heard of Hannah Arendt>? And I doubt the person who made up the list has much of a real knowledge of the people on it, Red Cloud and Tecumseh  is on the same list with a number of genocidalists, Davvy Crockett, for example.  I wonder what the unreconstructed Calvinist Johnathan Edwards and the post-Christian Ralph Waldo Emerson would make of each other.

 I suppose We The People are supposed to pay for the creepy statues of his hodgepodge of "heroes".  I'm opposed to that, I don't like this monument building mania that followed on the popularity of Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial which, which was hardly built when some of the boys, apparently furious with a girl coming up with an understated and thought provoking design with an attempt to  defaced it with a more traditional war sculpture.  After Lin objected to placing it at the apex of her design a reportedly far better placement for the statue was found that allowed both of them to maintain their artistic integrity.  

Following on,though, was a monsoon of memorials, some of which was about as inoffensive and anodyne as public stuff like that is, much of it was dreadful.  Trump, ever eager to have his name on things, certainly preferably things he could get other peoples' money to build, wanted something that might get his name slapped on it.

I looked at the list, one of the big things that jumped out at me is  Theodor Seuss Geisel, one of those dear old commies who I'm sure would have hated Trump and everything he was. Maybe he's on the list because Green Eggs and Ham is the one and only book Trump ever managed to finish. 

 

I hope this is something that never happens. It's gross.  

 More computer problems. I'm doing some fiddling with it, hoping to write later today.

Without Comment Without Apology