Made The Mistake Of Hearing Some Brit Invasion Crap So I Need A Remedy - Sam & Dave Hold On I'm Comin' Live

 

Grassley's Name Should Become a Byword For The Corruption Of The Senate And The Courts Like "McCarthyism" Has Been - Iowa should answer for him

THERE WAS A TIME when saying or hearing the word "Iowa" didn't make me want to spit on the ground,  that was back when Iowa used to send the like of Tom Harkin to the Senate.   That was a long time ago, now.   Now it sends the like of Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley to the Senate along with four Republican-fascists in the House.   Added to that has been such 19th century bull shit as the Iowa Caucus.   

While I have despised some of the others,  Ernst,  the former Nazi enthusiast House member, Steve King. etc.   There is no one who mixes personal and political sleaziness with sanctimony and pompous piety like the vile Chuck Grassley.   He has outdone himself in his role as the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.    His role in the Republian-fascist judge making assembly line has been as bad as any of the tales of Congressional corruption from the filthiest of periods in the 19th and 20th centuries.   

Here's what he's been up to this week, as recounted by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Note the obvious collusion and coordination of the Trump regime,  the Republican-fascists in the Senate AND THE ASSEMBLY LINE TRUMP JUDGES ALREADY PUT ON THE BENCH BY GRASSLEY AND HIS CORRUPT, ANTI-DEMOCRATIC, ANTI-DEMOCRACY PARTY. 

As for Iowa,  I hope it goes bankrupt. I hope to hear FAFO wailing and gnashing of teeth from them as they reap what they've sown.   It's the only thing that will teach the majority of selfish, sanctimonious and greedy Republicans there anything.  I don't trust any lessons learned to last past one election cycle.   I won't bother trying to appeal to them on any grounds higher than self-interest,  on anyone who is a Republican in 2025.   I've stopped wasting my time on their better angels,  maybe those angels have been corrupted by them or maybe they've fled to preserve their virtue.  

Amos Goldberg Holocaust History Scholar At The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Has Called What Israel Is Doing Genocide

I DON'T WANT YOU TO TAKE MY WORD FOR ANYTHING.  Best would be for you to look at the evidence and see what's right there before the eyes of the world, that is what many though far too few Israelis have done and many Jews around the world.   I would disagree with Goldberg that the crimes of the Israeli government and military are a "stain on Jews" for generations, only on all People who supported Israel in its genocide and many more of those are gentiles.

You can hear what he said from a post made today. 

Is Democracy Too Complicated To Work Or Just Too Complicated For Abstract Pondering And Publishing?

WHENEVER SOMEONE starts talking "natural" as in "natural law" my skepticism starts kicking in.   I have, repeatedly, noted that the modern meaning of the term in the claims of science are a mixed bag, indeed,  finding both closer approximations of the truth IN SOME AREAS and peddling claims that are anything from dubious as a product of the violation of that quintessential (NOTE THE "ESSENTIAL" IN THAT WORD) requirement of accurate and measured observation of nature given as a complete explanation of phenomena.   In the most legitimate uses of that idea,  such as the demonstrably successful products of physics and chemistry,  those claims work out for a large range of observable phenomena until they don't.  Most famously the massively successful framing of Newtonian physics proved to be deficient as a complete explanation of observable phenomena during the 19th century and the early 20th century drastically modified that view in both Einstein's model and in quantum physics,  which are, famously, not yet and perhaps never will be entirely reconciled with each other.   No doubt the concepts of physics today are far more complete as a workable explanation of observed physical phenomena as Newtonian physics is still enormously useful as an explanation of a range of physical phenomena and a tool for harnessing what are contained in that explanation as "forces" such as energy and gravity - in themselves anything but completely or even basically defined, descried and understood. 

The hubris of those for whom science and its methods are taken as a replacement for another very mixed bag of thought, religion,  has given rise to the superstition that all phenomena,  all of existence, in fact, must conform to "laws of nature" which science has defined.   That can lead to the inept and entirely unevidenced application of such "laws" usually in the form of some mathematical modeling, in itself of little to no demonstrable connection to what is observed - psychology, sociology, much anthropology,  the "political-science" which I have recently expressed my doubts about and that other extremely dangerous "science" economics are all the product of the superstitious belief in what I've described in this paragraph.   All of those university ordained courses of study,  departments, even schools in modern universities are about as scientific in fact as astrology is and their wildly, bizarrely obvious inability to come up with firm and durable OR EVEN TESTABLE theories and even hypotheses should have discredited all of them to the extent that their official academic standing should be that of astrology or other ancient forms of divination and would be manipulation of "natural phenomena" but such is the ubiqutious modern superstition about the validity of the "natural laws" that scientists have successfully demonstrated in some areas and very partially demonstrated in others giving us a known and entirely reliable framing of reality so as to rely on such pseudo-scientific procedures and claims,  that we can just brush past the falling of previous universal framings as Freudian or Behaviorist psychology as the inadquacy and, sometimes demonstrable fraudulence of them to go on to the next big thing of as little actual legitimacy peddled by the next "school" of psychology that gains prominence in universities.  Evolutionary psychology is probably the one that is now ripe for overturning and succeeding now.   

Most dangerously for the world, right now, are the various frames and claims of economic theory,  theories which are put into law directly to the benefit of the few over the needs of the many and, ultimately,  to the destruction of the biosphere on which all of us depend.   I've noted here now the combination of economics with Darwinist claims of the universal efficacy of the far from demonstrated theory of natural selection is directly responsible for Trump I and such as the government of Sweden adopting policies that needlessly resulted in the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths during the Covid pandemic and are currently endangering many more through the Trump II administration of RFK jr.  which again makes the crudest of Darwinian eugenics the actual law of the United States.   And in that I will stress that the "natural law" of natural selection which is a pillar of such thought is, in itself, the most over-sold "law of nature" in the history of science.   One which flows from the crudest and most self-unaware of economic theory, the Brit upperclass framing and call for mass death of Malthusian economics - in case you think I'm being overly dramatic in the potential for this kind of pseudo-science adopted by the academic industry as a universal "natural law' to get lots of People killed, not only as an incident of neglect but as an adopted and intentional part of human made law.   I could go for several more paragraphs on the part of that other field of academically blessed and peddled "law" the legal profession but if you read me you know that my skepticism of that racket (the thing that gives Little Bobby Kennedy his credentialing and misplaced authority) is currently boundless. 

I would hope, while actually thinking it's hopeless, that scientists would adopt what should have been a universal law of science that what cannot be adequately observed or measured cannot be the subject of the scientific method, which would immediately disqualify all of those pseudo-social-sciences and such things as "natural selection"* from membership of the science club, with all the rights and privileges attached to that.   No matter how desirable it might be to be able to treat such subjects and obtain such successful results as you sometimes get with physics and inorganic and some organic chemistry,  permitting it to have the rights and privileges on the basis of that desire without the ability to actually submit them to real scientific procedures is one of the most consequential of academic sins of often deadly effect. 

What has provoked me to point this out, again, is an article by Sean Micheal Winters enthusiastic about the recrudescent emergence of "natural law" talk in poly-sci and the ever dubious field of journalism.

It's been a good week for natural law. People are talking about it even if they do not mention it by name.

David Brooks, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, [Note: BS shield activation] spoke about the pattern of "rupture and repair" that has characterized our society. Brooks said that we are in a moment of rupture now, and offered some ideas about how we commence the work of repair.

Near the start of his talk, which I watched this past weekend after three friends sent me a link, Brooks quoted two of my favorites, the evangelical historian George Marsden and columnist and thinker Walter Lippmann.

Marsden wrote, "What gave such widely compelling force to [Martin Luther] King's leadership and oratory was his bedrock conviction that the moral law was built into the universe." Brooks commented that, in the past 60 years, "we've become a much more individualistic country. ... The moral order has frayed."

To try to encapsulate something as complex as "King's leadership and oratory" so as to come to a simple conclusion as to what made it what it was strikes me as a habit of thought that is related to, if not a product of the superstitious extensions of science where science cannot go.   To complicate that with the like of David Brooks making use of Marsden's thinking of it extends all of it well past the point where anything said is reliable.   If my view of the legal profession has failed,  my view of journalism failed a lot longer ago, espcially when it comes to that most debased embodiment of that racket, the "columnist."   While I am totally dismissive of a creature like Brooks, even a better practitioner of column scribbling like LIppmann gets you way out on the ice where it gets very cold, soupy and deep.  

The problem is not just individualism, however, but our conception of freedom. Lippmann wrote in 1955, "If what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what the individual chooses to invent based on his feelings, we have left the ground of civilization."

America's core understanding of freedom has always been a negative freedom, a "freedom from." Our revolution aimed to free us from British control. American liberalism through the 19th century and first half of the 20th century sought freedom from the overly large influence of the business interest. Our involvement in two world wars was about making the world free from tyranny. Throughout, freedom of religion and speech and assembly were understood as freedoms from government control.

This conception of freedom was essentially political and it could be because Americans held to a widely shared conception of the moral order. The one time we could not agree on what that moral order required, we fought a great and terrible civil war to resolve the difference.

In the years after World War II, that shared conception of the moral order evaporated as the personal became political. There was a shift in our conception of freedom to something not just more individualistic but more volitional. We believed we could "choose" and "invent" the morality that worked for us.

He goes on in the article in ways I don't have the time to deal with, today. 

While I think Winters is on to somethings in some of this,  I would remind him that there was nothing new in the "choosing and inventing" of morality in America under its so-called "democracy,"  what with Indians being murdered so their land could be stolen,  Africans kidnapped and brought here into slavery,  the breeding of slaves (with even those who supported slavery noting how often the slaves resembled the fathers and male members of the enslaving family), the subjugation of Women, the legalized theft of wage slavery, etc. inventing and choosing morality has been a part of it, all along.  It has been easy as pie for relatively affluent, straight, white males (even Gay white males) to not notice that, as it is for those not the object of those to ignore those evils happening all around them.  Such as has had control of academic discourse, by and large, the reaction to the small amount of academic discourse dealing with the experiences of all of those Others, being among the things most decried and suppressed by those with power. 

This is libertarianism, and it is found on the left in social issues and on the right in economic ones. Both versions paved the way for Trumpian authoritarianism. Both.

I agree with this statement almost without reservation and with the crisis in the concept of liberty, especially, but also "freedom." 

How do we recover a shared sense of the moral order that is built into the universe? I am not sure, but dusting off the idea of a natural law might allow us to at least find a shared moral vocabulary again. That might lead to the discovery of shared moral ideals, without which any project at renewal and repair after Donald Trump will be stillborn.

I am not discouraging anyone from reading Winter's articles or even reading the NYT whited sepulcher Brooks or Lippmann (and when you throw in him on such subjects,  you should always See Also that other over-rated and under-rated thinker John Dewey) but I will note that in this article the complete absence of two of the most salient words to an understanding of how American democracy has failed "equality" through the assertion of inequality and "lies" as Trump is a direct product of,  lies told and permitted to be told by the freest of "free presses" in American history,  both the "news" divisions and, especially relevant,  the "entertainment" division (he would never have had a political career without "reality TV" which is, start to finish, the presentation of lies and pretend) though as a journalist I have no doubt that Brooks, Winter, Lippmann, or John Dewey, for that matter, would not be too enthusiastic over a real and rigorous, even a quasi-scientific analysis of the consequences of "free press-speech" absolutism in the corruption of democracy because it impinges directly on their professional careers.   John Dewey was, by the way a practitioner of the rank pseudo-science, psychology, so I'll toss that fact into this mess - Lippmann, while I disagree with him about much, was about the least compromised in that way of all mentioned so far.   I don't know how much psychology he may have imbibed through his study with William James at Harvard or if he just got the his reliable philosophical thinking from him.    I'm somewhat more confident in Marsden's profession though I know little about Marsden's writing.   But whenever someone starts talking "natural law" even in the less pretentious forms of that surrounding theology I get my back up.   Perhaps it's due to the use of that phrase against Women and LGBTQ+ People that accounts for that,  though my skepticism about the actual ability of anyone to discern with complete accuracy a single "law of nature" enters into that, too.   It might be desirable to have such a law book to hand but I doubt any one ever compiled will be any more valid than the laws of the pseudo-social-sciences or the literal mother of all such pseudo-laws, in the current world  natural selection. 

That "shared sense of the moral order" is certainly not something to recover because that "shared sense" of it existed with all of the evils of inequality and the product of freely told fully present in the society and in American law right up to the adoption of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts whatever partial and very brief period was had while those were the law of the land now overturned by such in the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts who have nullified them - I would bet most of them, to one extent or another, great enthusiasts for the concept of "natural law."  Things are far too slippery to allow such language to control how we think about these things.  Trying to do so so they would fit into a course of philosophy at an old lCatholic university such as Notre Dame was and, to too great an extent, still is, only gets you farther from the truth.  

I think political experience is if not more reliable, at least is less prone to lead you on wild goose chases than academic and columnist babbling.  

Geri Allen Trio - Dark Prince

Geri Allen - piano 

Ralph Armstrong - bass 

Ralph Penland - drums

Duke Ellington - Ivie Ivy Anderson - I Got It Bad And That Ain't Good

 

"Christians ought not to support a MAGA movement that claims the name of Jesus, but whose core sacrament is the systemic ritual abuse of the Other."

I ALMOST DIDN'T LISTEN to this one but I'm laid up with resurgent sciatica and I'm in too much pain to read a book.    The guy in the video, an ex-evangelical mininster-ex-Republican has a theory about how the fantasmagoric, obsessive, eternal damnation - Revelations literalist soteriology of that anti-Christianity is related to what makes them so damned cruel.

I think universalism is a far healthier movement that seems to be gaining some traction in popular Christianity - I think the better scholars among universalists make a rather convincing case for their belief - one which some are afraid would lead to amorality though I don't think you can make the case that a belief in the most grotesque idea of eternal damnation leads to better morals.   The entire history of Western culture right up to today would have probably been a lot less evil if eternal conscious torture was not pushed by the churches.   I wish they'd never put Revelation into the canon of Scripture,  it's been little more than trouble for the few beautiful images held within it.   Its danger has actually grown since the early modern period when Biblical literalism came up in a big way with Protestant "sola Scriptura" doctrine.   Though as "trad-catholics" prove, they're just as bad as the worst of them.  

Trump's Brains and Epstein's Procurer Working Together To Get Her Sprung

I'M GENERALLY ALLERGIC  to the rambling Meidas Touch style - though generally not their content - but this one is definitely worth listening to.    

He laid out pretty well what seems to be going on in the dance between Trump - or, rather,  Trump's brains and Ghislaine Maxwell over her holding back on what she knows about Trump and other rich white child rapists balancing her certain fears of being offed like Epstein was and her desire to get pardoned or otherwise sprung from the 20 year sentence she got for tafficking young girls through Epstein.   I have no doubt that the rumors that several countries intelligence agencies may have a stake in this,  I've heard Russia,  Israel,  the U.S. and Britain as likely having had connections to the child peddling almost certain blackmailer who is known to have had his properties in which the child trafficking to rich, powerful men happened rigged for video recording.   No doubt the favorite child of the known triple agent degenerate and crook Robert Maxwell - who as well "committed suicide" when his crimes just started catching up with him - would have known a lot as well as the possibility that a "suicide" or other untimely death in custody was possible for her if she told what she could have to get more lenient treatment than she got.   That's the reason Trump wanted to pardon her all along,  only he was convinced it would be worse for him than if he took his chances on her playing the game she has.

ON a related note,  re, the Michael Wolff claims that he's got tapes and had seen photos as he's describing NOW! instead of when those may have saved the country and the world from Trump II.   If a "journalist" or even a journalist has such information and they don't do what a journalist does REPORT IT TO THE PUBLIC IN A TIMELY MANNER but hold it for yet another book deal (I'm looking at Woodward here, too) then they are total assholes and as bad as anyone in Trump's regime or campaign for holding it back.   I think in Wolff's case he should be required to put up or shut up instead of being cited.   If he doesn't have what he claims to or if what he has isn't what he's hinting it is,  he will end up helping  Trump,  Bondi, Patel, etc. in burying this scandal,  doing Trump's bidding.   If he does have it and has withheld it hoping to get a fifth book out of the Satyricon Now Trump era he's a massively irresponsible asshole.   That latter possibility won't get him kicked out of the "profession" of journalism,  he's just helped set the low, low bar that you have to shuffle over to be one of those these days.   I used to put the scare quotes over the "journalism" but these days that so-called profession is about as worthy of respect as lawyering and being president of the United States.  

If someone like Brian Tyler Cohen or another who does it better by using a well-written script instead of winging it (though I'll admit sometimes Ben is doing that better for the amount of practice he's gotten)  comments on this,  I'll try to post their's as well. 

I came to the conclusion that artificial entities,

which countries certainly are, had no "rights" in thinking about the Supreme Court inventing "corporate persons" and then repeatedly setting them and their "rights" up and above those of mere human beings.  The earlier courts were entirely corrupt in working up that fiction but the Rehnquist and far more so the Roberts Courts have made them Nietzschean Übermenschen who, especially through such further Supreme Court inventions creating money as speech and the such have given them billions of times more "rights" than ordinary human beings do.   Lawyers - a profession that never stop sinking in my esteem - have certainly not done much to complain about that,  especially the corrupt "civil liberties" industry which has played such an outsized role in obtaining such "rights" for such artificial "persons."

Once I saw though that legal and lexcicographic con job,  hearing it said about Israel, I first felt odd about in the early 1970s as I first encountered some thuggish zionist students (at least one was a member of the JDL) from the Middle-Atlantic states.   I almost immediately saw through the bullshit and rejected that as any legitimate framing of any issues.   It was only the other day when I decided to answer some trolling I chose not to post that I came across this quotation from a note Noam Chomsky sent to someone who asked him to answer some lies that David Mamet told about him:

To my knowledge, the concept ‘right to exist’ was invented by US-Israeli propaganda in the 1970s, when the Arab states (with the support of the PLO) formally recognized Israel’s right to exist within secure and recognized borders (citing the wording of UN 242). It was therefore necessary to raise the bars to prevent the negotiations that the US and Israel alone (among significant actors) were blocking, as they still are.  They understood, of course, that there is no reason why Palestinians should recognize the legitimacy of their dispossession — and the point generalizes, as noted, to just about every state; maybe not Andorra.

Which seems to me to be a rather well-founded suspicion that that was the origin of the bullshit PR slogan,  as I recall that was back in the days before the overt fascists, the Likud gained the control which they have pretty well had the entire time since,  even forcing the so-called Labour Party to adopt their overt apartheid and genocidal policies.  Though I doubt that the Labour Party of Israel has much of a future as the voters of Israel go ever more fascist.   I think the myth that they're about to vote out the fascist coalition that has controlled the country for most of the last half century is ever more obvious nonsense.  At this point they'd have seemed to be going to do that for longer than the U.S. Green Party was announcing its imminent breakthrough.   It's easy as pie to practice that hopeful anticipation when you've got no real skin at stake and you don't mind generations of Palestinians being  terrorized, dispossessed and displaced and murdered en masse as most Americans obviously haven't in the half a century that Chomsky talks about, above. 

I haven't read anything by Chomsky that goes as far as I do in rejecting the idea that states have rights and that includes any "right to exist."  But he does seem to have noticed the invention of that slogan about the same time I recall it coming into existence.   I think that idea has no right to exist because it is a smokescreen for theft, violence, displacement and murder.   

Let Me Break This To You By Breaking It Over Your Head

THE WORLD DOESN'T HAVE TO AGREE with anyone that THEIR preferred country, or nation or state or nationality or "race" or "ethnicity" or religion, for that matter,  GETS TO HAVE SPECIAL TREATMENT THAT IS AFFORDED TO NO OTHER ONE.    In fact, let me break this to you,  bunky, THE WORLD IS NOT GOING TO AGREE WITH YOU ON THAT POINT AND IS UNDER NO OBLIGATION,  LEGAL, SOCIAL OR MORAL TO DO THAT.   Though you may get many governments to do that when those in control have some ulterior motive which may though probably does not have much to do with the People in those countries so favored,  but in some economic or strategic reasoning.   People have little to do with that kind of thing, in the end.   If you scratch most forms of nationalism you'll find that those pushing it see "their people" as little more than a natural resource to exploit and are expendable to one extent or another.   

I know you idiots who use the entirely stupid "Israel's 'right' to exist" trope have never considered that but if "states" have rights and even "rights to exist" then there is no rational means of declaring the Third Reich did not share that "right to exist,"*   Imperial Japan before the end of WWII had every reason for claiming that "right" and those it convinced of the divinity of the Japanese imperial state or those who believed in Hitler and his state did too,  if Zionists are allowed to claim such a "right" for the far less clearly founded "modern state of Israel" and the idiots who buy into that mere slogan are allowed to hold it as some legal, social or moral reality which all so-called decent minded People are required to acquiesce to.    What that phrase is is a propaganda tool to take advantage of the mid-brow and lower (that would be your crowd) superficiality in the use of language to advantage what was an apartheid ethno-state in the guise of a democracy - WHICH I TAKE AS JUST ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF WHY A REAL DEMOCRACY MUST BE EGALITARIAN OR IT WILL BE JUST ANOTHER APARTHEID ETHNO-STATE OR ITS EQUIVALENT - in order to cover up and allow its crimes to go unremarked on.   And, I think it is probably as close to a rule of so-called "political science" as any that an apartheid ethno-state will, almost inevitably, turn into a genocidal apartheid ethno-state as it discriminates against those who are not part of its master-ruling-race, to disadvantage them, to discriminate against them, to enslave them and steal their labor, to steal their property, to steal their land - I am describing those who wanted and want right now for the United States to be just such a white-supremacist ethno-state as much as anywhere - and to, in the fullness of evil to murder them.

As I've noted, the irony in the case of Israel is the use it made of the illegitimacy of that flagship example of such evil,  the German ethno-state that the Nazi ideology called for and tried to put into effect in their propaganda.   What is not an irony is that America's racists and antisemites have made such common cause with the modern state of Israel in their genocidal "ethnic cleansing" of Palestine, though it is ironic that so many Americans who favor equality HERE have been gulled and morally blackmailed into supporting what they oppose here being the OFFICIAL AND LONG TERM PRACTICE OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

The "modern state of Israel" that most Americans hold in their mind is a product, not of the reality of it,  but believed through  carefully crafted and dishonest propaganda.   I, in my youth, bought one side of that bullshit, the "socialist" side of that propaganda, the kind of pop clap trap that had Pete Seeger and the Weavers singing the Zionist "folk song" Tzena, Tzena, Tzena whose original lyrics were a promotion of the proto-Israeli military and its alleged moral goodness even as they were anything but an unambiguous good in the early 1940s.  That socialist Zionist stuff kept the so-called Labour Party in power for a little while but it was about as socialist as the Starmer Labour Party is in Britain, today.  It may not have been as overtly settler-colonialist (by the way, Tzena refers to Israeli settlements as "colonies"),  it was quieter about it.   And, just as you can have a democracy which is entirely non-egalitarian and so evil,  you can certainly have a non-egalitarian socialism, as, in fact, the Nazis styled themselves and as Stalin claimed his government,  one of many rival world's greatest mass murder regimes have claimed to be.   If there's one thing America's socialists have been,  it is naive and as much of a sucker for PR tactics as any mindless capitalist has been. 

ONLY HUMAN BEINGS AND OTHER NATURAL LIVING BEINGS HAVE RIGHTS.   Rights do not inhere to the creations of human beings,  they don't inhere to abstractions such as states or even shadier human creations and mythical entities such as corporations and other often criminal syndicates.  Rights don't inhere to religions.  Human beings may have a right to their religious beliefs just as they may to their property but the religion no more than the property has any such a thing as a "right."  If you think that is not a small point,  it is one of the founding evils of the U.S. Constitution and law that it held that there were People who were property and that as such they had no rights.  There are several standing U.S. Supreme Court rulings to that effect which have never been overruled - I used to think such a thing was not important but with the Roberts Court I wouldn't count on that in the future.   Corrupt courts such as the U.S. Supreme Court may claim that such artificial "persons" have rights but that is a lie,  the kind of lie that Courts and those who use their rulings use to deny the very real rights of real human beings - something the Court here has been lying about the 14th Amendment and its legislative history to do since the 1880s with often deadly as well as injust effects.   

That is exactly what I suspect the "right of Israel to exist" slogan was intended to do from the start though if that was not the intent IT HAS CERTAINLY BEEN WHAT IT HAS BEEN GOOD FOR SINCE I FIRST HEARD IT IN THE 1970s.    In that it seems Noam Chomsky also noticed that that was when the phrase first gained currency,  not unrelated to the increasingly obvious discrimination against and dispossession and killing of Palestinians by Israel,  both the official government and the "settler" movement who have been the vanguard of murder, terror and dispossession that has been so effective in stealing land for the Zionist project.   I think it's another close-to law of so-called political science that whenever a state starts to have that "right to exist" slogan pushed that you can be sure someone is being robbed and killed by said state.   

In the United States, "states rights" is certainly the most common form of the same thing as pushed by the slave-states and, after merely de jure emancipation,  the Jim Crow states under lynch law and constant, violent terrorism.   That has been going on for centuries, now, and it provides some of the strongest evidence of the evil of the concept.   Most of that evil unstated but no less certainly, for that, its real goal. 

I could go on and on and on.   I certainly reject this kind of crooked bullshit in my country,  the United States and I'm not under any moral obligation to pretend it's not happening in any other country.   Not those states that idiot lefties of the past - for example Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers as well as the Weavers - held whenever some country called itself "socialist" not for those which are called "democracies" even as they practice American style lynch law and Jim crow style inequality,  I'm certainly not obligated to pretend it in the case of the actively genocidal, apartheid ethno-states such as the old South Africa or the current Israel.  

One thing I have concluded is that a very large percentage of Americans, many of them racist-antisemitic-right-wing crooks and many of them would-be egalitarian liberals are not bothered when it is happening to non-white People in some other country.   The list of such countries would probably comprise a good number of those which get American military and other aid every year,  it certainty includes Israel.   That American liberals are still cowed by the fear of someone calling them an "antisemite" is absurd,  as absurd as those old-timey liberals who got cowed by being called "commies."   American liberals have to stop being cowards when they see evil done by Israel as they certainly have no right to pretend not to see it because the U.S.,  Britain and many other Western governments are in the blood bath up to our eyeballs.  

*  As I've pointed out here,  such a "right" for a country to exist lies at the bottom of why such as the American senator Robert Taft opposed the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis on the basis that due to the government of Germany legalizing those crimes against humanity and other evils they were tried for, there was no legitimate legal process for holding them responsible for even mass murder.    He was a product of Harvard Law - as have been so many other moral idiots such as JFK who considered the morally atrocious Taft a "profile on courage" which, by the way, is one of the major factors in me considering JFK to have been morally obtuse.   

Have I mentioned I got over the Kennedy cult even as I was still buying romantic bullshit about things like the kibbutz movement?    I don't remember who it was who pointed out that even in the death camps Jews sometimes could observe Holy Days and the such but in some of the kibbutzes of Israel that was banned.   I got over my romantic view of communes pretty early on in having actually been to a couple.  Especially the ones with lots of rules.   They inevitably developed dictatorial cliques who ran them.  You'd have to be a real fanatic to live in a kibbutz.   I'd have told them to all fuck off by the time I was seventeen.  

Electricians in Maine FAFO

I DON'T PLAY FAVORITES in which of those who f'ed around and are finding out,  I'm as satisfied to hear Maine electricians reap the racist stupidity they sowed as I am white-guy-welfare farmers in Nebraska, the mid-west and the sunbelt.

This guy was set up, as well, by the Maine media,  less by the little read print sources but by the 24-7 from sea to land borders with New Hampshire and Canada all-Republican-all-the-time electronic media here.   I don't know if he is one of the really flagrant racists who, especially, populate Northern Maine (some of the most overt racists I've ever heard come from up there)  but I'll bet that's one of the big reasons he was so clulessely upset about Biden's record on illegal immigration and why he would never have voted for the Black Woman who would have kept him in work over the white supremacist criminal clown he voted for.   

He's hardly alone, from what I've heard a majority of those in the building trades here voted for the white supremacist.  If any didn't,  they might get my sympathy if they voted for Kamala Harris and Democrats but they're the only ones who will.  I hope all Trump voters get what they wanted for other People because a. they deserve it and b.  there's no hope for them learning except from bad personal experience of it costing them.   They are amoral,  it always comes down to what's in it for them and there's no reason in 2025 to pretend they're ever going to be any better than that.   I'm done with that going all gooey over those who fucked around and are finding out,  they'd have been perfectly OK with what they're getting happening to other People. 

Israel Is Reproducing At Scale The War Crimes Of The Nazis

 and the United States is on the side of the genocidalists, now.   But first, listen to what's being said about the Israeli's intention to set up a huge concentration camp in Gaza at the EU Parliament.

The tragedy of Joe Biden ending his political career supporting the Israeli fascist government in its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and elsewhere is a small personal tragedy for him,  the crime his administration supported only to have the Trump II regime giving them complete permission and support - no doubt so the Trump family can snap up some seaside property once the native population has been destroyed - is among the worst crimes of the 21st century.   I will never forgive those who have brought my country so far from the country my parents and grandparents lived in WHERE THEY JOINED THE MILITARY TO STOP THE NAZIS AND IMPERIAL JAPANESE GOVERNMENT FROM COMMITTING to the U.S. being on the side of the genocidalists, now. 

Now the Israeli fascists have said they were going to set up a large concentration camp, something which they present as a right to declare all Palestinians who will not go there are enemies who can then be wiped out - essentially what they've been doing all along - is more than an irony,  it is about as cynical as it gets considering the use that Zionists have made of the genocides of the Nazis when they sought to wipe out Jews,  Romas, Poles, and others in blackmailing Western governments and the consciences of those of good will. 

It will certainly be a fact that is noted that it was the so-called International Holocaust Memorial Alliance that set up the cultural preparation for this in declaring that any comparison between the actions of the Israeli government and the Nazi government is "antisemitism."   I can't for a second believe that that preceded the actions of the Israeli government in the past two years was a coincidence,  it is too specific to have been hit upon by chance.   Except for any of those involved in the drafting of that cover-up for genocide after it was published,  I know of exactly one who did,  those who supported that definition have to be considered all-in on this crime.   The chance for them to escape that judgement is over. 

Israel is a genocidal ethno-fascist democracy,  we are all learning the terrible truth that a majority population can vote and maintain such a counter-intuitive "democracy" in place when we were all told that that is exactly what democracy was meant to prevent.   As Rabbi Shapiro said in that interview I posted earlier this week points out,  the definition of Israel as NOT BEING THE COUNTRY OF ISRAELIS BUT "the country of the Jews" is a declaration that any Israeli democracy was never going to be egalitarian but was guaranteed to be an apartheid state, to start with, and a calumny against Jews who did not and did not want to live there by feeding into many of the worst tropes of antisemitism.   It leaves Jews around the world vulnerable to misplaced responsibility for the crimes of a country they don't live in,  do not want to live in AND MAY NOT HAVE EVER SUPPORTED AND EVEN OPPOSED in the minds of those who are predisposed to dislike Jews and to those who such antisemites can convince to hold them responsible for crimes and evils they have no responsibility for.   

Zionists have skillfully played that game along with taking advantage of gentiles who detest antisemitism and all forms of inequality by making the trope that anything they wanted to call "antisemitism" suspect in the minds of the middle-and-low brow culture of places such as the U.S. and Britian.  As I noted the other day,  Rabbi Yakkov Shapiro's refutation of that is more complex than the lie that has been actively promoted by Zionists that conflate opposition to the crimes of the Israeli government with antisemitism,  noting both that there are, indeed, antisemites who also oppose the crimes of the Israeli government and antisemites WHO ARE, THEMSELVES, ZIONISTS WHO WANT ALL JEWS OUT OF THEIR COUNTRIES.     That was one of the earliest objections to Zionism among Jews who lived in democracies in North America and Western Europe,  that it would exacerbate antisemitism and suspicions against Jews as, in fact, the creation of Zionism did inspire a significant part of the antisemitism that was manifested after its announcement and promotion. 

That game of blackmail is rampant among us, today but may of us are not playing it anymore.   I was pretty much done with it with the invasions by Israel of Lebanon during the Bush II regime when I knew that the crimes of the Israeli fascists had to be condemned, that to remain cowed into cowardly silence was to be complicit in them.   It is my moral failing that I didn't keep on the topic then.  That is my confession of guilt. 

The filthiness of the intimidation, the moral blackmail that long ago ceased to have any atom of morality to it can't be allowed to keep anyone who has any morality silent about this, anymore.

Greg Brown - Cheapest Kind

 

We travelled Kansas and Missouri spreading the good news

A preachers family in our pressed clothes and worn out polished shoes

Momma fixed us soup beans and served them up by candlelight

She tucked us in at night

Oh she worried through many a sleepless night

Dad and me would stop by the store when the day was done

Standin at the counter he said "I forgot to get the peaches, son."

"What kind should I get?" I said to him there where he stood in line

And he answered just like I knew he would "Go and get the cheapest kind"

[Chorus:]

But the love, the love, the love

It was not the cheapest kind

It was rich as, rich as, rich as ,rich as, rich as

Any you could ever find

I see the ghost of my grandfather from time to time

In some big city amongst the people all dressed so fine

He usually has a paper bag clutched real tight

His work clothes are dirty

He don't look at nobody in the eye

Oh he was little, he was wirey, and he was lots of fun

He was rocky as Ozark dirt that he come from

And they was raisin seven children on a little farm

In not the best of times

The few things that they got from the store

Was always just the cheapest kind

[Chorus]

Fancy houses with wealthy people I don't understand

I always wish I could live holdin on to my grandpa's hand

So he could lead me down that gravel road somewhere

To that little house where there's just enough supper

For whosever there

My people's hands and faces they are so dear to me

All I have to do is close my eyes and I see 'em all so near to me

I have to cry I have to laugh

When I think of all the things that have drawn those lines

So many years of makin do with the cheapest kind

[Chorus ]

RMJ Has A Post

commenting on the New York fucking Times rehashing lies about the most demonstrably competent President we have had since LBJ being an addled, senile old man, while it covers up and enables the addled, senile old man who is also an idiot to start with and a criminal who the New York fucking Times did so much to put there, starting well before 2016 when they sandbagged probably the most qualified candidate to have ever gotten a major party nomination to put him there. 

Along with those myths about the Supreme Court, the Constitution and other dearly cherished myths of American life,  the myth of the "free press" being a bulwark of American democracy is a pile of shit with a few quarters thrown into it.   You have to mine loads of shit to find those things that have really been valuable, only shit will eventually turn to compost which has a good purpose,  most of journalism has no purpose except to bury democracy on behalf of oligarchs such as who own outfits like the big papers like the WaPo and the NYfT.    I wish someone would do an in-depth investigation of the financial and personal motives of the owners of the NYfT to expose their motives in doing so much to sink democracy while posing as the defenders of democracy.    I know why they strike the pose,  to gull the affluent idiot-moderates and liberals who can afford the goddamned thing.  What I want exposed is the real motives behind why they an their brothel of media whores do what they do.    It's far more transparent in the case of the owner of the WaPo and the LA Times but the Ochs-Sulzbergers and those who cling on them is not as obvious or transparent.   I always had the feeling that the previous publisher - I forget, was it "pinch" or "punch" or maybe "putsch" - had felt some social slight by Bill Clinton that caused the Times three decades and counting war against him and Hillary Clinton,  much as I always figured Christopher Hitchens resented Bill Clinton from Arkansas being more successful with girls at Oxford than tubby, oily little Hitch was.   

But I think to really continue as they have, sandbagging Joe Biden, there has to be money at the bottom of it.  Could it be as simple as they wanted the Trump millionaire-billionaire tax bonanza to continue?  I wouldn't be surprised if it were that simple.  

I'm going to remember everyone,  from the alleged left to the moderates to the right who had a hand in handing the country over to Trump and Republican fascists,  from the owners of the media brothels to the hired talent right on down to the alleged comedians who made "Old Joe Biden" jokes.   The consequences for us and the world of what they did is as serious as those who aided the rise of Hitler and other of the kind of worst criminals who the modern era has given rise to.  I've told before how, when Ronald Reagan died I gave scandal to many a lefty blogger by telling the terrible truth about him and the many thousands he killed only to have them give me the "speak only good of the dead."  My answer was that the forgiveness they needed wasn't mine to give,  that I'd consider it after those tens and hundreds of thousands or more before me in line uniformly gave him theirs.   I will never overlook what they've done to us.   The consequences for other People and living beings is too great for that.   May they spend a long, long period in hell for what they've done. 

Rabbi Yakkov Shapiro Demolishing The Lie That Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism

WHILE I'M CERTAIN that there are things Rabbi Shapiro and I would disagree about,  a few,  and I'll note that again A FEW aspects of sexual morality,  gender roles and, of course, that I'm a Christian and he's an Orthodox Jew,  his honesty and clarity of thought as well as his clearly diligent scholarship and reasoning impresses me ever more every time I listen to one of his talks.  Unfortunately his book, "The Empty Wagon: Zionism's Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft"  is outside of my budget and longer than I'd feel capable of taking on right now. 

In looking more deeply into the lie that anti-zionism is antisemitism, the clearly dishonest though largely successful lie campaign to equate the two to the extent that,  as Rabbi Shapiro points out,  someone taken as being as credible as Deborah Lipstadt is taken to be,  can call Jews "antisemites" because they oppose zionism and are critical of the state of Israel.   Lipstadt tap danced around an answer to that direct question in a weasely way by claiming that "the jury was out" on that issue,  so as to say that not only Jews but the most observant of Jews, the most dedicated to Judaism can be anti-Jewish which should impeach her as an honest voice in the discussion but, as he also shows,  she's far from alone in being so dishonest.   

If zionism were an honest ideology,  its defense wouldn't force scholars who certainly know when they are lying to lie through their teeth, in public, on the record.  If academic credentials carried an obligation to tell the truth there would be some mechanism for removing university credentials from those holding those credentials who use their alleged authority to lie so flagrantly and maliciously though, from the start, academia was never much a moral proposition outside of some seminaries attached to specific denominations - and a lot of them were no more honest about guaranteeing the validity of the credentials they issue.   They didn't remove the academic credentials but they, sometimes, removed other credentials from them.    I have to say that academic credentialing is something that has plummeted in my regard since the turn of the century and I went online to read more of the babble of such college grad. 

I can't claim that Rabbi Shaprio's answers to the many aspects of the question brought to him by the interviewer are neat and succinct in the desired modern American mode - which is unfortunate because Americans aren't, by and large, deep thinkers with great powers of concentration or even a long attention span,  and I am directly talking to a couple of the jerks who troll me when I say that.   

But his answer is the best one I've yet heard so I'm posting it.  The definition of "antisemitism" he comes up with as opposed to the phony, polemical one that the IHRA has pushed so as to protect the criminals of the Israeli government and military as they commit genocide and crimes against humanity is vastly superior to that one which has been made de facto law of the land and the lying corporate media.   As he points out,  it was the genuine definition of the word,  one that not only appeared in dictionaries of the English language BUT WAS SET OUT IN AT LEAST ONE HANDBOOK OF CAMPUS PRO-ISRAELI PROPAGANDA BEFORE THE NEW ONE WAS ADOPTED.    He also says something that I've pointed out here a number of times,  states don't have rights, human beings have rights,  no state has a "right to exist."   I feel especially vindicated in what I said because he is such a deep and honest and rational thinker and I don't get much occasion for having my ideas vindicated so authoritatively. 

I would recommend listening at least once,  I intend to listen a number of times and may go to the effort of editing the entire machine made transcript for posting in the future. 

The More I Think

 about the point in yesterday's post about the Roberts Court creating an extra-Constitutional means of law making in the United States, the more convinced I am that I am right about that.  The Roberts Court isn't the first court to amend the Constitution by Supreme Court majority fiat,  they've been doing that with increasing frequency and increasing recklessness since 1803,  but it is the first one to have gone so far as to basically and drastically alter the very form of governance that is the entire basis of the United States Constitution WHICH BEGINS BY MAKING THE CONGRESS THE ONLY BODY ABLE TO ACTUALLY MAKE LAW.   The Supreme Court, starting with the modest nullification of a provision in the Judiciary Act - actually drafted by and voted on in Congress by actual framers of the very Constitution - and next and far more catastrophically in the Dred Scott decision,  even those entirely outrageous oversteps by the most compromised and corrupt Court in the land hadn't gone so far as to, in effect, nullify the First Article in the Constitution. 

And that is exactly what the Roberts Court did starting just over a year ago by making their future Republican-fascist king,  Trump, immune from the law and which they have been reinforcing with increased intensity - especially for the lazy, Ivy Leaguer slackers on this court - and devotion to destroying the United States as a government of laws and not of one Republican-fascist man.  They have nullified laws and even sections of the Constitution to put what is indisputably the most corrupt, most criminal, stupid and the most dishonest liar and . . . to remind you CONVICTED CRIMINAL to have ever held the Presidency in the position above laws duly enacted by Congress and previous presidents - allegedly the only legitimate means of making law in the United States.    And, as I pointed out, combined with the foolish absolute pardon power that is actually in the Constitution,  they have made it certain that Trump and whatever future presidents who are of his criminal nature will be able to enact their laws made by monarchical fiat through pardoning their henchmen and storm trooper armies to enforce their will with violence and even death.   

So the Supreme Court which was supposed to interpret the law, has, in fact, nullified not only laws, some of the most important ones ever made such as the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, but have by 5-4 and 6-3 PARTISAN MAJORITIES on the Supreme Court nullified the very form of government which the Constitution set up.

I pointed to the Dred Scott decision in which the infamous Taney Court - before now generally held to be the worst Court to have ever sat in . . . "judgement" which nullified the citizenship of Black People and nullified all of their rights under the Constitution.   They did that along with nullifying a long-standing law made by Congress,  the Missouri Compromise, to do that.    Proving that not only could the Supreme Court make real human beings non-persons,  it could create not only "persons" but grant them de facto citizenship in the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case in which the Court created corporations as "persons"  using a forged and plainly dishonest claim by a Senator who then became a corporate lawyer,  lying that into the 14th Amendment where it has gone on to let later courts turn their artificial "persons" into Übermenschen with even the rights baked into the First Amendment but with more power than thousands and millions of real human citizens.   The 1976 Buckely vs Valeo,  made on behalf of one of the premier fascist elite family which also transmuted money into "speech" thus giving billionaires, millionaires and corporations millions and billions more "speech" than any citizen or even their measly non-profit corporations could ever wield.   And all the time, as they expanded farther and father on that,  creating junk that was never in the Constitution nor ever adopted as law by the due processes of Constitutional government,  they have been stripping actual human beings of their rights - the Roberts Court has gone farther in that than any previous court or,  I'd argue, ALL PREVIOUS COURTS TOGETHER HAVE.   The Taney Court settled on stripping Black People of their rights and person hood and even citizenship,   the Roberts Court has done that to whoever Trump and their own Republican-fascist Party targets for that dehumanization.   White People, even white men, for the first time in our history could stand a chance of finding out what life in these United States has been for People of Color, Women and others targeted by the law and the Court as lesser beings in ways that previous generations never had to face   Of course workers have been treated that way for almost the entire career of the Supreme Court, especially under their invention of "corporate person hood" through their from the bench amendments to and nullifications of clauses in the 14th and other Amendments. 

I have a nightmare that the United States, by a miracle, at this point, pulls out of this and a Democratic super majority under a Democratic president takes power and is in a position to stop this Court led plummet into the fascism we are actually in the beginning stages of.   My fear is that the Constitutional scholars and civil liberties lawyers and milquetoast moderates will be too goddamned chicken to make the changes needed - starting with stripping the Court of the very Marbury power that they stole to start with,  putting sufficently short term limits on the tenure of the members of the Court (they should be stripped of the lying title "Justices" too) and making it far easier to remove them than the impossibility of doing that now.   And those are only some of the necessary limits on the Supreme Court.   They also need to make it clear by Constitutional Amendment that no person in the United States - INCLUDING MOST OF ALL A SITTING PRESIDENT WITH SO MUCH POWER - is immune from prosecution for crimes committed while AND AS PRESIDENT.   They should also remove the idiotic absolute pardon power when it comes to those in and out of their administration whose actions impinged on their election and holding the office of president,  Vice Presidents who take power on the resignation of a President should explicitly NOT be able to pardon the president who is in a perfect position to make a Nixon-Ford corrupt deal to that effect.    And it must also make it clear that no Supreme Court has the power to nullify or amend the Constitution.   Without those,  I wouldn't bet a dime on American democracy in even its imperfect and unequal form surviving.   Once those Ivy Leaguer lair-lawyers have made innovations and published them,  that is a trail for them to always follow ever after until those trails are destroyed, utterly.     

I've grown used to people who read what I post thinking I've gone too far,  twenty years ago I used to have idiots on blog comment threads scold me for saying the Republican Party was a fascist party - Bush v Gore was the tipping point in that for me.  I've been scolded for condemning the Supreme Court by those who got the vapors and accused me of being like the segregationists who put up bill boards calling for Earl Warren's impeachment.   I had more than one mid-brow, college-credentialed, media addled dolt saying "The first person to say "fascist" (or "Nazi") loses."   I always hear Susan Stamberg's smarmy NPR voice saying that when I hear it in my mind no matter who typed it into the comment thread.   But I'm getting used to even some of those who mocked that saying the same thing, sometimes years later.    Generally, in the past I hoped they were right and I was wrong.   But I don't bother hoping that anymore because I'm certain I'm right.   And I don't feel any happiness in being right about these things.  

Leo Parker - Bad Girl

Leo Parker - baritone saxophone

Dave Burns - trumpet

Bill Swindell - tenor saxophone

John Acea - piano

 Al Lucas - bass

Wilbert Hogan – drums

What Ever Happened To J, K. Rowling? And Lying By Editing, A Common Practice Among Those Who Can't Rely On The Truth Doing It For Them

THE BRILLIANT British commentator Owen Jones has been vilified online by J. K. Rowling and I have to say his answer asking her,  the epic anti-trans avenger of feminism (though I'd like to know how she treats feminists who have no problem with TransPeople) has been entirely silent over the murders, rapes, sexual abuse,  torture,  and the health, nutritional, family and personal catastrophe that has been ongoing for going on two years against Palestinian WOMEN,  only, as he shows in his video defense of himself and turning the question on her.  Or maybe it's only Women in the West she cares about or Women who want to do things like compete in sports or play roles in movies.   She clearly hasn't been bothered to say anything about the hundreds of thousands who have been the victims of Israel's genocide in Gaza and elsewhere. 

But  she wasn't exactly silent, having early on condemned those who were calling for a cease fire.    I was pretty much done with Harry Potter well before this but I'd never have taken it up if I knew how things were going to go.   You might want to listen to how he takes her apart. 

I'm going to post the video again from later in it where he exposes the libel against himself committed by the Israel right-or-wrong and even in Nazi mode crowd, including the war criminal Netanyahu's former press flack.   He shows how a dishonestly clipped question he asked of the odious Piers Morgan was presented as him excusing the acts of Hamas on October 7th,  when he was pointing out that what Morgan was saying about Israels' ongoing genocide WOULD BE EXACTLY LIKE EXCUSING THAT CRIME DUE TO ISRAEL'S TREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS.  The Liars for Israel clipped it to make it seem like he was excusing the crimes of October 7th and it's gone viral with the apologists for genocide and mass slaughter.

Only, the fact is that it is the Israel apologists who are doing exactly what they are accusing Owen Jones of doing WHEN HE DIDN'T DO THAT.  

Back to Rowling.  

Maybe what happens to Rowling happens to most if not all of those who become billionaires and believe they got it by being a lot smarter or better than they are.  In her case probably exacerbated by her knowing that without her imagining the books,  none of that would have happened.   She didn't hire the writing job out like most billionaires have gotten rich off of other Peoples' ideas.  If that's the case she should have gotten over that by now. She wrote a series of kid's books that became wildly popular,  it isn't as big as all that.   Seeing what she's up to these days,  I don't think I'd read her books to children again,  I don't think I'd defend her against her dishonest right-wing fundamentalist critics, as I used to.   If she were as good and smart as she seems to like to believe she is,  she'd listen to as honest and exigent a critic as Jones is and do a little of that self-reflection that I believe is also recommended in even her Presbyterian tradition. 

While Thinking About The Roberts Court Making Us A Republican-fascist Monarchy

 something occurred to me that I haven't heard anyone address.    Their un-constitutional declaration last year that presidents are immune from prosecution when they break the law as an "official act" of the presidency mixed with the idiotic provision that is actually and dangerously IN THE CONSTITUTION means that the president, on his own, can effectively make laws that, if future presidents chose to take them up and continue or even expand them,  they could put into effect in perpetuity without the Congress doing it,  that continuing as long as the heretofore and likely never will happen removal of a president by impeachment doesn't stop it.   And no one he orders to implement said law would be prosecuted if he gave them a pardon for it,  even the courts would be disempowered by the Roberts Courts actions to stop that law ever being the real law of the land,  in concrete fact instead of Ivy League lawery-liarly non-reality.  

If you have any faith in the Supreme Court, especially this corrupt Roberts Court overturning a president pardoning himself or corruptly making a deal with the VP to pardon him on his stepping down from office - as I have always believed Gerald Ford made with Richard Nixon - you are as stupid as an old line "civil liberties" liberal.  

Since the Roberts Court has said that Trump could violate the law and even deport People without any judicial review preventing that from happening - even to third countries where the People being deported, to their almost certain torture and likely risk of death with the blessings of Roberts,  Alito,  Thomas (the RAT in this court) Goresuch, Kavanaugh and the fradulent "moderate"  Amy Coney Barrett clearly they are all in on that actual,  concrete,  presidential law making stuff, 100%.  

I will be writing a post on the uses of negative stereotypes, the condemnation of those as an abstract proposition running up against the reality of those members of groups who actually do the things that the stereotype contain,  seemingly giving some TRUTH TO IT and why objecting to calling that out is a massive and currently very dangerous practice of alleged "civil libertarians" and others such as who pose as that while promoting some of the greatest evils of our day - but as you can see from that description of the very real phenomenon,  laying it out is rather complex and getting out of that complexity towards clarity is not the easiest thing to write.   But I do have to ask, as an Irish Catholic of the kind who takes both the The Gospel, foremost, and the Law and the Prophets and the best of the Christian tradition extremely seriously,   what kind of Catholicism formed the six fascists who are sitting on that Court right now.   ALL OF THEM had an alleged Catholic formation, if my memory of their bios is correct,  ALL OF THEM ARE DESTROYING EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY TO SET UP THE MOST IMMORAL, AMORAL, CROOKED AND STUPID PRESIDENT OF OUR LIFETIME TO BE SUCH A DICTATOR AS I DESCRIBE ABOVE AND TO KEEP THEIR CROOKED FASCIST PARTY IN POWER FOR PERPETUITY AGAINST THE WILL OF THE MAJORITY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.  

I have no problem with someone asking that question,  a question which,  I will point out,  anti-Catholic bigots have pointed out in the past - leaving out such as "justice" Sotomayor who are more in line with the Catholic tradition than those six whited sepulchers in black robes.   THAT question will come into play in that post I'm undertaking but want to say just right.   

"La arenosa" (Leguizamón/Castilla) -) Hernán Ríos (piano) / Facundo Guevara (percusión)

 

 

Update: Mercedes Sosa live 1995

Now, This Is My Kind Of Socialism

I FIRST LEARNED of the wonderful writer and actor Wallace Shawn from watching My Dinner With Andre.  At first I thought I was going to hate the movie because of Andre Gregory's long stream of bullshit semiconsiousness of a kind I'd gotten my fill of during my college years - for its devaluation of mysticism into that kind of bullshit, too.   

But then "Wally" took over and I liked the movie a lot more after that.   I have, from time to time, looked at what Wallace Shawn has been up to, some of his plays have been the kind that I think are the most important,  disturbing, troubling, questioning, forcing uncomfortable situations to conscious consideration.  Aunt Dan and Lemon, for example.   

Here he presents why he calls himself a socialist,  it is one of the best short essays I've heard or read in a long while.   I don't call myself a "socialist" for the same reason I rejected the word "Christian" for myself, though I certainly believe in the Gospel of Jesus and most of what is said in the rest of the New Testament and by a good part of the Christian tradition that takes those seriously.    I think the word, itself has lost its meaning and any positive usefulness  through its appropriation by some of the most vile of political ideologies,  Fabianism,  Marxism, various right-wing "socialisms" and, of course, the contradictory claim of a form of it as "National Socialism" (which makes almost as little sense as "Christian nationalism").    The term "antisemitism" (which I have heard applied to Mr Shawn) has lost its meaning through a similar appropriation by those with evil ideological intent and it is not only meaningless but has been weaponized by fascists around the world,  many of them actual antisemites.  

But here is a voice of reason for the last day of the long American weekend 

No, That's Not How I Heard It - Hate Mail

MERCEDES SOSA WASN'T an atheist as you claim,  I have no idea if Silvio Rodriguez is or not, he is a fine poet and not a bad song writer.   And I did post that song of his because his covert message was fitting for July 4th in the United States. 

Here's what I found online about her religious orientation.

Dos días antes de morir, Mercedes Sosa recibió la unción de los enfermos (sacramento también llamado extremaunción) de manos de un sacerdote amigo, el padre Luis Farinello.

La muy querida intérprete, de profunda voz y raigambre popular, en buena parte de su vida circuló en ambientes artísticos y políticos muy ligados al Partido Comunista y a sectores de izquierda afines.

Quizá sean poco conocidas algunas manifestaciones suyas que revelaron un proceso de acercamiento a la fe católica de sus mayores, y una reconsideración de algunos enfoques, como el trato que se dio a la gente de fe ortodoxa en Rusia.

En una conferencia de prensa, en julio de 1999, en San José de Costa Rica, donde estaba en una gira centroamericana, Mercedes Sosa declaró haber encontrado a Dios, luego de atravesar un agudo proceso de depresión. "Estuve perdida y encontré a Dios", reconoció en esa ciudad.

Confesó estar saliendo de "un agudo proceso depresivo", que había comenzado varios meses antes y que en algún momento le impidió cantar pues "lo único que quería era dormir".

Entonces, declaró ante la prensa costarricense que los rezos de su familia y de muchas otras personas contribuyeron a su recuperación.

"Tengo tíos curas y tías monjas que rezaron por mí cuando estuve enferma. Vengo de una familia muy católica", dijo. A la vez, reconoció entonces que su proceso de encuentro todavía se encontraba "a medio camino".

En una ocasión, la intérprete cantó ante el papa Juan Pablo II en el Segundo Concierto de Navidad en el Vaticano.

El padre Farinello atendió a la madre de Mercedes, de fe católica arraigada en su familia tucumana, hasta su muerte. Allí, la artista empezó a mostrar fuertes inquietudes espirituales. Y le dijo al padre: "Cuando llegue el día en que esté así, no se olvide de mí".

A juicio del sacerdote, ella "fue madurando y abriéndose al misterio".

Mercedes cantó gratuitamente para la fundación del padre Farinello y sus chicos. Y le decía que "el hambre de los pibes es obsceno". Hace unos dos años le había pedido al sacerdote una imagen de la Virgen de Luján. "Siempre que hablábamos, conversábamos mucho sobre Dios y la Virgen de Luján", comentó él.

Cuando el sacerdote la visitó, la artista estaba inconsciente. El le dio la unción y sintió un estremecimiento. Le habló al oído. A su entender, "ella se conmovió". Y entiende que ante la muerte se ve eso: "Es entregarse a una ternura invisible, que uno presiente".

The well known radical Argentinian Fr. Luis Farinello certainly knew her, he clearly was satisfied with her standing as a Catholic, enough so he administered the Sacraments to her.    If she had a devotion to the Virgin of Lujan, I don't know how much more Catholic you get than that. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Darren Canady - Day of Days

 

Day of Days is a six-part podcast series from Walking Cinema that recounts a meeting between Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black mystic Howard Thurman, as King was recovering from a stabbing in Harlem in 1958. That meeting brought King face-to-face with the demons pursuing him since the Montgomery bus boycotts, and revolutionized his approach to the fledgling Civil Rights Movement.  

Jonathan Mitchell directed, sound designed, and composed the original music for  the series, which was created by Michael Epstein of Walking Cinema, and written by Darren Canady. 

You can learn more about the series, and it's free companion Augmented Reality app at http://dayofdayspodcast.com

I've been looking for excellent dramas to post here but haven't had much time this year, what with the world going to hell.   I don't often like dramas that use real People and real events but this one does so very well and for a higher purpose than costume dramas generally do.   You can decide if posting it was the right decision or not.   The writing is excellent as is the acting and the production. 

I've posted it from Youtube where you an hear the whole series because, unfortunately, the player at the website for the production doesn't like the version of Linux I'm using these days.  You might have better luck with that one. 

I found this through the excellent audio-drama production outfit at The Truth who seem to have reactivated after a long period of behind the scenes action,  if that's the case then it's great news in itself. 

I'll Post The Idiot's Comment Only If Requested To

BUT HERE is my response from the Consumer Product Safety Commission: 

As July 4th celebrations near, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is urging the public to prioritize fireworks safety. Mishandling fireworks can turn celebration into tragedy.

In 2024, there were 11 reported fireworks-related deaths, most involving misuse and device misfire/malfunctions. An estimated 14,700 people were injured by fireworks last year – a sharp increase of about 38% in deaths and about 52% in injuries respectively compared to 2023. There were an estimated 1,700 emergency room treated injuries in 2024 involving sparklers.

Adults ages 25 to 44 accounted for the largest share of reported injuries (32%), followed by people ages 15 to 24 (24%). The most frequently injured body parts were hands and fingers (36%) and head, face, and ears (22%). Burns were the most common injury, making up 37% of all emergency room visits.

In 2025, you can add those who died and were injured when that fireworks warehouse facility in Esparto California blew up the other day the fire spreading to surrounding areas,  not to count those in other countries, such as China, where the things are made.   Of course, if you care nothing about workers' lives, others killed in such disasters,  the lives of children injured when their parents or others are irresponsible*,  like any low-brow pop-kulcha guy who has never had kids might be expected to,  then none of this will bother you as you groove out to what is an even stupider form of entertainment than American football or Broadway musicals in todays' slacker-low-brow style are.   

My brother calls setting off fireworks "burning money."  I say you've seen one fireworks display you've seen them all.  If there's a stupider form of entertainment,  I'd like to know what it is.   Given the death toll, the maiming, the environmental damage from them, it's something that should be banned by law. 

*  That guy who died while he set off a firework from his head while drunk was among those who died in the U.S last year.   I wonder if he'd seen something like that on TV or in a movie or online.   

Against The Sentimentally Nostalgic Use Of History And Historical Figures And Opportune Notions Of Moral Equivalence

I GREW UP WITH THE CLICHE IN MY EAR that "you can't judge those of the past by preset day standards" though I think I always thought it was nonsense.   It was invariably said to hold some figure or group up as heroic or authoritative or worthy of imitation while knowing that they were not worthy of imitation.   Of course,  Thomas Jefferson is the case example of this I'm going to cite today but I've also held up Madison and others of the fabled (that means having their many sins covered up) founders and framers.   And it was never equally applied to all of those in the past but only to those who were put to such use.    But I think it's time we look at a corollary that should have been in place all along if that rotely repeated and stupid rule of thumb is to stand.

If you aren't to make moral assessment of the real lives of such as the founders and framers by present day standards, WHY SHOULD YOU TAKE THEIR WORDS AS A STANDARD TO JUDGE PRESENT DAY ACTIONS AND STANDARDS?   Last week I pointed out that unless you're going to learn from the past to gather information so as to determine present day actions and improve on those standards of the past,  everything about looking at history turns it into a devalued and sentimental (that means false when it doesn't mean lying about it) exercise in the cheapest of nostalgic antiquarianism.  Much of the worst of that made more saleable by the morally bankrupt standards of crappy novels and Hollywood movies and Broadway song and dance crap methods.    Any emotional response, such as holding human beings and their actions in what gets passed off as conventionally felt "reverence" which isn't based in a rigorous evaluation of them can quickly turn dangerously dishonest.    (See Also Leon Uris's "Exodus" and especially the crap movie they made of it. )  

IN THE UNITED STATES,  THAT IS MOST EVIDENT IN THE USES OF SUCH AS THE REHNQUIST AND ROBERTS COURT, THEIR PHONY "ORIGINALISM" AND "TEXTUALISM" AND WHAT OTHER LYING LABELS THEY'RE TACKING ON TO THEM DOING EXACTLY THAT AND FORCING THEIR LIES ABOUT HISTORY ON US, TODAY.   Alito and Coney Barrett have done that about some of their citation of ancient British law some of which has been superseded in Britian by British Courts on the basis of that ancient legal lore not standing the test of time to answer present day conditions.   If you think that's inconsequential,  look at what's happening to Women with dangerous miscarriages and likely fatal pregnancies in most of the country and, quite potentially as soon as they can do it, extending their nationalization of Womens' bodies such as is done in the abortion ban states to the entire country, as, in fact, was one of the things that the Taney Court did in expanding slavery to all of the "free states" in the Dred Scott decision.    I've pointed out here that their ancient ancestor, the Supreme Court "justice" who was allegedly the anti-slavery voice on the Marshall Court,  Joseph Storey did much the same thing in citing ancient English law in his Supreme Court practice,  law that had been, likewise, superseded in British Law even before he cited it to try to control the law in the United States.  Knowing that,  it's a lot less surprising that he wrote the Prigg decision, which, before Dred Scott, was the most infamous pro-slavery ruling that corrupt Court had issued.   I can't think that Storey's pride in his knowledge of the history of ancient English and British law was  not a major factor in why he could use the U.S. Constitution to such corrupt ends and still pride himself as being what he clearly was not.   May he rot in a particularly hot region of hell with John Marshall,  Roger Taney,  Rehnquist and Scalia, among others.   Alito and Coney Barrett, as well. 

It's absurd that late medieval English or ancient British Law would have that much power over a country that was founded in those very founders rejecting the most enduring of medieval English and ancient British Law,  rejecting not only the monarch which has been retained in Britain, but also the authority of the very institutions and long dead People who  adopted and retained that even more authoritative British legal framing only to have our Supreme Court - especially when they want to make law from the bench that is especially a violation of rights of living People - CITE WHAT THEY HAVE REJECTED AS UNWORKABLE to make judicially legislated laws here and now.   That under the framing of the Constitution,  We The People and our ELECTED representatives roll over and give up when they do that is a moral abomination.  

But such absurdity is, in fact, what governs us under our disastrously failed Constitution.  IF YOU THINK I'VE BEEN ALL WET OVER THAT FACT,  THAT THE CONSTITUTION HAS FAILED CATASTROPHICALLY,  WELL, EVEN JUDGE LUTTIGE AND EMINENT LAWYERS ARE ADMITTING THAT, NOW.

This post was motivated by me reading Michael Sean Winter's very uneven piece about the Declaration of Independence posted on the 3rd.   Particularly this passage. 

Last weekend, I rewatched Ken Burns' 1997 documentary on "Thomas Jefferson." It celebrated his achievements while also addressing his failings. It captured the degree to which Jefferson remains an enigma. How could the man whose words and life celebrated the possibilities of human freedom, and its God-given quality, fail to disassociate himself from the greatest affront to that freedom, slavery? All these years later, there is no good answer to that question.

When the leaders of the civil rights movement spoke, they spoke first and foremost in the words of Sacred Scripture but secondly in the words Jefferson himself had penned in the Declaration of Independence. And let us always demonstrate sufficient humility to admit that if we had been born on a Virginia plantation when Jefferson had been born on such a plantation, and if we think we would have seen how to end slavery as he did not, we think very highly of ourselves.

The problem is that once the young Jefferson penned those famous - and largely correct words - at the start of the Declaration of Independence about "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,"  Jefferson not only never did much of anything to end the most obvious violation of that rampant among those in the Continental Congress who edited and adopted the Declaration of Independence and their suppos-ed "new order for the ages,"   holding Black People in slavery,  he became increasingly enthusiastic about not only slave-holders holding People as property but, also, in breeding People into slavery as a means of HIM AND HIS FRIENDS increasing their wealth.   He was so enthusiastic about that that he raped one of those he held in slavery and fathered children with her WHO HE HELD IN SLAVERY.    There's no one who would not only never do that but who would condemn it in any age who doesn't have a right to think that they have higher moral standards than Jefferson did.   I'd say they have an obligation to hold that their standards AND PRACTICE are superior to his because the lives of those potentially impacted for the worst by such as hold Jefferson up as a model of law making - whether with some claim to legitimacy in the legislature or with blatant illegitimacy from the Court or,  now, with the Court's permission,  as illegitimately by Presidential decree.  

I would say that it's  especially valuable to do that in the case of Jefferson - it's only during my lifetime that the issued words of the Declaration in question,  words that have been hollowly echoed in total dishonesty for the majority of our history have been applied to the the "all men" who are People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, etc. instead of only those white men who owned property who the founders and framers intended those to be applied to.   The present day Republican-fascist reaction to that progress towards equatlity is destroying the progress we finally started making in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts which the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts are overturning - along with even the Civil War Amendments - using their asserted fictions about the intentions of Jefferson's generation and lies about the legislative record of the 14th Amendment to do that.   Looking at all of this in terms of what is moral and morally consistent and noting the failures of the men who wrote such words AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF THAT FAILURE IN THE LIVES OF THOSE MOST HARMED BY THAT FAILURE is the only good use of the past that can be had from them.    If the Roberts Court Republican-fascist majority could get what they want to out of the words by telling the truth,  they wouldn't have to lie so incoherently and they wouldn't have to go looking to judges who burned Women at the stake for witchcraft to find their excuses.  

If you look at the Black Abolitionist literature,  you will note that the hypocrisy of Jefferson, whose words are sometimes so true and whose life was a fabric of lies and hypocrisy,  was a truth self-evident to those who had been held in slavery by the very class of white men he advocated breed their slaves for profit,  I must point out, in his case, certainly, also for his fun.  It was so self-evident that even the white abolitionists picked up on it.  You certainly don't have to be a very good person, yourself, or even to consider yourself as one to know you've done better than that.   What's the point of examining your conscience, as I'm sure a good Catholic boy such as Winters would advocate doing, if you were to never conclude that there are practices that are better than others?  

It is a good thing for People to not be too impressed with their own moral conduct,  as an Irish Catholic of what would be called the "liberal" kind,  constant self-questioning of my own motives and actions is practically congenital, it even works, on occasion.   But to dishonestly deny that anyone who would never do that and would be opposed to it is more moral than a Thomas Jefferson,  not to mention a Madison or Washington, is being dishonest to no good purpose and, not infrequently, a really evil purpose.   There were Quakers and others in Jefferson's day who gave up holding slaves and liberated them due to their finally choosing the morality of Jesus - the Golden Rule most often cited.  Going back almost 1,500 years before that,  St. Macrina, St. Gregory of Nyssa,  and others opposed slavery,  Gregory's argument's against it were particularly good.   His sister and teacher Macrina convinced her widowed mother to practice equality in their household, treating those held in slavery on an equal basis with those of their own family.    If I've got to have long dead figures of the past being taken as the basis of the law I have to live under,  I'll take them and the like of John Woolman over Jefferson,  Madison and the other slavers, any day.