to almost the entire Republican-fascist caucus in the Congress protecting the billionaire Pedophiles in the Executive (and beyond) and the Supreme Court's Republican-fascist majority enabling Trump at almost every turn
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS THE
NEW NAMBLA OF 2025.
IT IS SATISFYING to at least imagine that Trump feels something like we imagined Jonny Rocco as played in Key Largo by Edward G. Robinson trapped below deck by Frank McCloud (Bogart) only Trump wouldn't be as skilled at saving his own ass with a gun as Rocco was. I hope Trump's dementia hasn't gotten so far that he doesn't appreciate how close he is to total exposure and ruin but I think even the demented Trump must realize one thing, he very likely made a mistake in putting his needed pardon in the hands of J. D. Vance.
Vance, on his part, is probably at least a good enough student of history to realize that the pardon that Gerald Ford certainly promised Nixon was what led to his inability to ride the absurdly favorable press he got to electoral victory in 1976. If Vance isn't that smart, the man whose bitch he is, Peter Thiel is certainly smart enough to realize his chief asset in government would diminish his value to him enormously by giving Trump the pardon he needs. The story that Donny jr. was the one who sold his idiot father on choosing Vance might figure into this, and it makes the folly of it more satisfying. Anyone who was in any doubt that Vance would fail to fulfill a promised pardon should recall how he sold out those he claimed as "his people" the white working class of Appalachia. And if they forget that as an example of how he would sell out anyone is certainly watching him throw his own wife under the bus as he publicly kissed and handled the widder' Kirk, who he certainly must have expected would be considered a goddess by the white supremacists he threw his wife and, certainly by implication, his own children under the bus of his ambition. Little did he know that she would have undercut her own status so fast by her own behavior.
I think if Trump is driven from office the matter of Vance pardoning him or any of those who Trump has not pardoned, whether it be Bondi and Blanche or Patel or any of a list of obvious criminals in his regime is certainly something none of them would bet their lives on if they thought that far ahead. Any pardons Vance considers would be granted only if his and Thiel's calculations were that the cost of those outweighed the benefits to them, or rather
TO THEM
made that worth the cost. Frankly, I wouldn't bet on them even noticing those who it wouldn't cost them a thing to pardon getting one unless there was a benefit to Thiel and his bitch. Which is how a "President Vance" should be thought of as Trump should certainly be thought of as Putin's bitch
Trump must certainly have a vestigial sense that that's exactly how he'd deal with it. I mean, they say that dementia only exposes the person who was there all along.
If Elon Musk and his incel-boy army don't have pardons, already, I can imagine Vance ordering the AG he appoints to go after them so that Thiel and his cronies can pick through the pieces of Elon's empire as he goes to prison or worse.
These are just the ruminations of someone who isn't entirely sold on a lot more of the Epstein files getting made public as a given. Though I will say that the Democrats who have the stuff that they subpoenaed from the Epstein estate have been playing a remarkably cool hand in judicious releases of what they have. I think it's certain that if there is to be a next shoe to drop, it's going to be even more damning than what got released the other day. I think Thiel must be confident of one thing, there is nothing that ties him to the rape of young girls. I wouldn't bet on any of the other billionaires in and around the Trump orbit other than Bessent knowing that their names don't appear in the files and that's only because, like Thiel, he's not interested in raping young girls. While it would be hard for any gay Republican asshole to replace Lindsay Graham and a sitting member of the Republican faction of the Supreme Court as most loathsome living gay man, Bessent is close to being a contender of that if the other two die before he does.
I DON'T KNOW, maybe what he managed to do was the best that a Democratic Leader in this Republican fascist dominated Senate could get. Listening to Sheldon Whitehouse with Lawrence O'Donnel last night what he said made good sense. Sheldon Whitehouse always makes good sense. If I were posing the question it would be maybe we should do what should have been done and scrap the entire Senate. The Senate has been the killing floor of democracy only second in that position to the entirely anti-democratically chosen and staffed Supreme Court.
I agree with one thing he said above all WE HAVE TO MAKE THE PROMISED VOTE ON THE ACA PREMIUMS AS HARD AND COSTLY TO REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS AS POSSIBLE. I will be doing everything I can to put the heat on the eternally concerned but never responsible Susan Collins and not on the retiring Angus King. That skank is running for reelection in a state in which there are many Republicans and independents who are on subsidized ACA. If I were in his district I'd be putting pressure on Jared Golden who, now that he has announced he will not seek reelection can be the Republican- he has been suspected of being. If he'll vote to extend the subsidies is not something I'd bet on with any confidence.
I think there is a case that Schumer should consider retiring to make room for a younger politician, of course I'd like someone with AOC's politics in that seat though if she could win the seat is far from clear. I agree with those who point out that there are too may octogenarians who haven't done enough to bring along their successors in the party. I think one of our problems in Maine is that the adoption of term limits in the legislature and state Senate (and why we need to have one of those in the state government is a good question, too) has left us with some pretty sparse choices for higher office. You don't develop enough tested and experienced politicians with term limits, it's absurd that the alternative to Graham Platner, the troubled neophyte against Susan Collins is our 78-year-old incumbent governor. I say that acknowledging both that Janet Mills has been one of our better governors of my lifetime (though she was no Ken Curtis and who knows how he'd fare half a century later) and that I have had some large areas of disagreement with her. But it's far from optimal to have someone who will be 78 when the election is held running against the aged Susan Collins.* But there should be at least a handful of more obvious and younger choices. It doesn't matter much in Republican politics because all Republicans stand for is the further enrichment of the rich and throwing bones to the white supremacist-fascists. Any Republican is pretty much replaceable with any other one. Democratic politics is far more complicated. Also simplifying things for Republican-fascists is that the media everywhere, especially in Maine, will support the worst of them as a totally reliable practice, including that of "Maine Public" the alleged public broadcaster of both radio and TV the only state-wide media here.
But, on the other hand, if I lived in Massachusetts I'd be supporting the veteran Ed Markey over Seth Moulton (from the Jared Golden-Rahm Emanuel wing of the party) who is doing what a self-entitled Kennedy tried to do before him. I don't know if Markey has been cultivating younger politicians who would be as good as he has been in the Senate but I'm pretty confident that Moulton wouldn't do that, he'd be one of the three like Fetterman who voted with the Republicans to start with on the shutdown.
I do think Schumer owes the party a full and honest discussion of what happened. Keeping that quiet serves no one but the gossipers and off the handles fliers.
* If Mills is the nominee, she should pledge that this will be her last political office sought, reminding Mainers that Susan Collins lied through her teeth when she originally promised Maine voters she would not run for more than two Senate terms. Collins has been a liar from the start.
and at this time I don't care if they are or not, what ails me isn't exactly life threatening, that is unless longing for death in the midst of a spasm is in any danger of overriding my nearly congenital Catholicism.
Like many a geezer my age I've got a flare up of my sciatica. Oddly, it didn't come from the wood stacking I did, it was just bending the wrong way to sit down. One wrong move and you trade a moment of convenience for a month or more of pain and debility.
I won't say its getting better because my experience is that's jinxing myself.
PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING I've been saying for the past fifty years!
How Bribery Was Legalized In America
that in my challenged health when I don't feel up to writing new stuff that I could offer you parts of what I type out from others.
One of the things I started doing when I learned to use a computer was to type out long passages or even entire books as a means of studying their content more closely. I've typed out a lot of books over the years, many which I kept a copy of in some now antiquated format (floppy discs) or lost some other way. Keeping a typed out copy wasn't the point of it.
While typing out this passage from Luke Timothy Johnson's great but too little known book Living Jesus I thought of all the parallels of the problem of needing authority but that reliance comes WITH THE GUARANTEE THAT NO AUTHORITY, EVEN THE BEST OF IT IS ENTIRELY RELIABLE. Of course I thought of all the other areas in life aside from organized Christianity that that is true of AS WELL AS THE OBVIOUS TRUTH OF JOHNSON'S CONFESSION ABOUT THE ENTIRELY FALLIBLE AND TOO OFTEN CORRUPT AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCHES.
Academia, and I don't even consider the one and only one that most academics seem to care about, actual and alleged and often quite dubiously attributed plagiarism. The replicability crisis scandal in science, the amazing record of outright fraud, misfeasance, nonfeasance such as is regularly recorded by that great and too little known reporter of it, Retraction Watch.
The legal profession, which is saturated with lies, corruption, the institutional creation of lawyerly deception, dishonesty, greed, graft, grift in which only the paying clients interest is the measure of professional practice and ethics and the higher and higher consequences of that as lawyers are elevated - often by corruptly motivated politicians, executive and senatorial - into the judiciary and on to that most corrupt branch of the U.S. government, the Supreme Court.
The "non-profit" groups which are, I suppose, something that is supposed to act as a secular replacement for all of the (sometimes all to human and fallible) religious charities. There are so many examples of the various defects of those groups, from the incredibly dubious identification of some of the most grotesquely wealthy and endowed legal entities in the world, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, other private universities, incredibly wealthy museums holding vast and often artistically or intellectully dubious collections of enormous and fungible value. There are interest groups that serve the most corrupt and evil of governments - the ADL these days is a signal example of that - and the interests of millionaires and billionaires - so many obscenely endowed think tanks and public interest group. Evil industry advocacy groups, the gun industry, pollution generators, etc. And so many daffy, hypocritical groups on the alleged progressive to liberal to lefty identity. All given tax exempt status as they serve the most corrupt interests and, through their having been granted the "non-profit" label, treated with an absurd and dishonest reverence by the media.
And don't get me started on the "free press" as the more often than not oligarchic knocking shop that it is.
Here is what Luke Timothy Johnson wrote about the vicissitudes of the necessity of Christian teaching authority within The Church (the entire Church) at the end of Chapter 2 Learning Jesus Through Tradition
The commitment to learn the living Jesus within the context of the church's tradition means coming to grips also with the leaders who from the beginning have been entrusted in a special way with maintaining the tradition. It is this aspect of tradition - namely, its explicitly institutional character - that both the scholarly questions after the historical Jesus and the televagelistic marketers of Jesus most despise. Academics resist authority in the name of intellectual freedom and integrity freelance preachers reject ecclesial authority in the name of charismatic freedom and power.
Those who commit themselves to tradition can scarcely miss the same inadequacies of human leadership that have been so brilliantly and consistently displayed in the history of Christianity. They know that ministers of the gospel are often not as holy as they should be, are seldom as intelligent as we would like them to be, and all too often identify the tradition with their own self-interest. No matter how egalitarian the leadership of a community, or how hierarchical, the same human frailty and pettiness appear.
Yet there can scarcely be tradition without institutional leadership. Christianity is not simply a loose assemblage of those who at any time prefer to associate with each other; it is a people with a history and a mission that must be articulated in specific social arrangements and dynamics. The witness of leaders in the community, furthermore is at the heart of this tradition itself. Those commissioned by the risen Lord as apostles were the first in a long line of shepherds for this flock If every pope and bishop and presbyter and pastor and preacher has been unequal to the task, that inadequacy has not made their role in maintaining the living thread of tradition any less essential.
The teaching authority remains essential today, however difficult it is to reconcile with the egalitarian and anit-establishment urges of our age. No more than the canon or the creed can the leadership of the church arrogate to itself the loyalty that is owed only to the living Lord; no more than the canon or the creed does this leadership adequately express the meaning of the tradition, much less the Lord in whose name the tradition exists. The teaching authority of the community functions best when it is not isolated. The teaching office of the church requires the voice of prophecy to be alive if it is not to grow distended; through prophets the living Jesus can speak in new ways. And the preservers of tradition need also to hear the voices of theologians whose task is not so much to preserve as it is to extend the boundaries of our understanding of the mystery of Christ. The tradition is impoverished if the voice of prophecy is stilled and if th teaching of theologians is, for whatever reason, made an enemy rather than an enricher of the tradition.
Like the canon and the creed, the teaching authority of leaders helps provide a framework for learning Jesus in the community. From generation to generation from the beginning hands have reached out to select, hands have been laid on heads, words of commission have been whispered in the ears of those whose mission is defined by the task of preserving and protecting the tradition within which Jesus can continue to be learned.
I doubt that there has ever been a more honest assessment of the necessity and danger of maintaining authority within human institutions and human life than that. People are always going on about his book The Real Jesus, his take down of the quest for the historical Jesus, but I think this book in which he explores the real consequence for Christians believing in the Living Lord Jesus and the continued experience of the Living Jesus in our lives is far, far more valuable.
I am not that hot on the Hobbit or the rest of it but I'm always glad to have someone point out what an idiot a billionaire is. Especially Elon. Just Phil's name for him, "Space Karen" is worth it. I commented on his conclusion that Space Karen had clearly watched the movies but never read the books was that it was like Trump's "Gatsby" party. I thought it was obvious they had never understood the novel which was about the futility and ruin that wealth carries, I thought they'd probably watched the Redford movie and never read the book, RMJ said it was probably the more recent one which was even farther from the book.
The Sudden But Well-Deserved Fall of Rahm Emanuel by Rick Perlstein for a few of the reasons that he is not to be trusted and certainly not to be voted for. Here's an example:
. . . The legend continued through this past April, when Rahm—in Chicago and D.C., he’s known by that single name—won a second term as the mayor of Chicago in a come-from-behind landslide.
Nine months later, Chicagoans—and Democrats nationally—are suffering buyer’s remorse. Last month, a Cook County judge ordered the release of a shocking dashcam video of a black seventeen-year-old named Laquan McDonald being shot sixteen times by a policeman while he was walking away. Five days later, the officer was charged with murder. The charge came after four hundred days of public inaction, and only hours before the video’s release. Of almost four hundred police shootings of civilians investigated by the city’s Independent Police Review Authority since 2007, only one was found to be unjustified. So the suspicion was overwhelming that the officer would not have faced discipline at all had officials not feared a riot—especially after it was learned that McDonald’s family had been paid five million dollars from city coffers without ever having filed a lawsuit. Mayor Emanuel claims that he never saw the video. Given that he surely would not have been reëlected had any of this come out before the balloting, a recent poll showed that only seventeen per cent of Chicagoans believe him. And a majority of Chicagoans now think he should resign.
There are many examples in the article of how Rahm was an opportunist and traitor to Democrats and how his alleged achievements and gambits (I don't think he's really a strategic thinker, he goes on his own right-wing gut feelings) were disastrously wrong.
Victory, like defeat, can have a hundred fathers, and we can’t know what was ultimately responsible for the Democrats’ success that November. Anger at Republicans for the Iraq War (which Emanuel supported) certainly drove many voters’ decisions. What is indisputable is that the 2006 majority proved to be a rickety one. Critics argue that, even where Emanuel’s strategy succeeded in the short term, it undermined the party over time. One of his winners, the football star Heath Shuler, of North Carolina, would not even commit to vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House, and was one of many Rahm recruits to vote against important Obama Administration priorities, like economic stimulus, banking reform, and health care. Many are no longer congressmen. Some Democrats now argue that, in the long run, 2006 might have weakened the Party more than it strengthened it. “Rahm’s recruitment strategy” was “catastrophic,” the retired record executive Howie Klein, who helps run a political action committee that funds liberal congressional challengers, said, and it contributed to the massive G.O.P. majorities we have now, the biggest since the nineteen-twenties.
Obviously, that conclusion wasn’t shared by Barack Obama in 2009, when he named Emanuel as his White House chief of staff. There, however, Emanuel’s signature strategy—committing Obama only to initiatives they knew in advance would succeed, in order to put “points on the board”—nearly waylaid the President’s most historic accomplishment: health-care reform. Emanuel wanted to scale it back almost to the vanishing point. It took a concerted effort by Speaker Pelosi to convince the President otherwise. This time, it was Emanuel who apologized: “Thank God for the country he didn’t listen to me,” he said after the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, in 2012.
Rahm Emanuel is a creation primarily of his own PR and the callow unsophistication of those like the governor Bill Clinton and the two-year Senator Barack Obama. Imagine how Obama would be remembered today if he didn't get as much of the reduced stimulus he got through Congress or if Rahm Emanuel had succeeded in killing even the impaired ACA that NANCY PELOSI WAS THE ONE RESPONSIBLE FOR PASSING. Obama and Harry Reid had given up on it, it was Nancy Pelosi who got it through. It should rightly be called Pelosi Care.
Rahm Emanuel is someone who should have been driven out of politics by the more scandalous aspects of his career. If he were a Woman or Black he would have probably been sent into obscurity by only a few parts of his record. Democrats should be reminded of what a treacherous little piece of shit he has been and certainly still is.
and a few I come close to hating.
But there aren't many I loathe as much as I loathe most Republicans. Rahm Emanuel is one on that short list. Hell, he's the first on that list. And he's announcing a run for president.
Does he really want a full investigation of his time as Mayor of Chicago? Because I'd really like there to be a full investigation of his time as Mayor of Chicago because I suspect he is as much of a sleaze and crook as the worst of them.
Not to mention his time in the Obama first administration selling us out to big pharma and generally convincing Obama to waste the best situation a Democrat had been given since 1964. Not to mention what all of the myriads of Democrats he has screwed over the years will have a lot to say about the little piece of shit. He'll run a dirty campaign and will damage any far better and more credible candidate along the way, he should be considered a Republican spoiler. Which I would not be surprised if that is his intention and part of one of his backroom deals.
the worst chief "justice" in the history of the corrupt Supreme Court, John Roberts, really believes he's "just calling balls and strikes" or, since he's a professional liar and conman, maybe like many such he's convinced himself that he really believes that's what he's doing as he so consistently finds for the team he is so obviously a member of as he plays umpire. Though I doubt he's that unreflective about that thing which all conservatives are most concerned with, HIS OWN SELF, to not realize the game he was playing as he told that one lie among the many he told during his confirmation hearings.
I've never been stupid enough to buy any of the sports metaphors applied to the law or politics or the alleged news business or public life in general. Trump is the triumph of that stupidest and most dishonest innovation in stupidity as entertainment, "reality" TV. Such reality being entirely unreal and entirely stupid and nothing to do with reality but which is as cheesy and planned as a soap opera script or the originally male version of that, the phony sporting events known as "professional wrestling." All sports, even the real stuff, like all TV (including, as Keith Olbermann has said, TV "journalism") is show biz.
Sports have nothing much valuable to tell us about reality, in real life. Real life doesn't go by a rule book that calls for a "level playing field." The whole reason that the totally planned, totally fake event and results of pro-wrestling are taken for a sport is because it really doesn't matter in the slightest bit in real life who wins and who loses even a genuine sports event. If it does matter, as it does so often for gangsters engaged in sports gambling, you can bet that those rules get bent AND IT ALWAYS MATTERS IN REAL LIFE IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY TO OUR INDIGENOUS GANGSTERS, THE RICH AND THE RACIST. But, as in the case of "reality" TV, mistaking such phoniness as real can have real consequences in real life or why is the total idiot and, or so I read, lousy football coach Tommy Tuberville blighting American life from a Senate seat from Alabama right now. Why is Jim Jordan, sex-molesting doctor enabling assistant somewhat real wrestling coach and never practicing lawyer the chair of the House Judiciary Committee? Why did so many who he has harmed, killed, maimed, believe that big-boss Trump had their backs when he only had his hand in their wallets?
I think I've said enough on that count so I'll answer the point brought up to me. IN THE CHOICE BETWEEN EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY, ECONOMIC JUSTICE, SOCIAL JUSTICE, JUST PLAIN JUSTICE OF ANY KIND AND OLIGARCHIC-WHITE-SUPREMACIST FASCISM ANYONE WHO THINKS A "LEVEL PLAYING FIELD" IS DESIRABLE OR ETHICAL IS A TOTAL AND ABSOLUTE CHUMP FOR OLIGARCHIC-WHITE-SUPREMACIST FASCISM. This isn't a goddamned game, it's reality. Far from giving any moral or rational or even somewhat tethered to reality senator a reason to vote for him when he lied out his "balls and strikes" lie, THAT ROBERTS EQUATED THE ENTIRELY SERIOUS MATTER OF EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY OVER THE INJUSTICE THAT ALL OTHER FORMS OF GOVERNANCE AND LAW GUARANTEE WITH A FRICKIN' GAME SHOWED HE REALLY DOESN'T CARE ABOUT EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY. I know that in doing that he was doing, what the fascists have done over and over again, they've used the language that was first thought up by the kind of generally affluent, generally professional (generally lawyers) liberals who played us for suckers by such advocacy, whether from the ACLU or Common Cause or other of the playing-field-levelers who clearly never cared about those who are inherently saddled with an inability to get any fair treatment because they have nothing or little and none of the resources or power that the side they'll go up against have INCLUDING THE FACT THAT THOSE WHO ALREADY HAVE WEALTH AND POWER WILL BE THE ONES PLAYING GODDAMNED REFEREE.
I'm done with the kind of affluent play-liberals, professional lawyers who play that game because politics, the law, journalism (the real thing, not what we get under the frickin' First Amendment) isn't a game and no one who mistakes it for one has any business pretending they're in it for anyone but the oligarchs and their tools, America's indigenous and very powerful fascists.
THANK GOD MAINERS VOTED DOWN REPUBLICAN-FASCIST'S ATTEMPT to bring Jim Crow style voter suppression to Maine and they finally voted for the minimum standard of sanity on guns, a red-flag law. I know a young mother in Maine whose former boyfriend is a paranoid schizophrenic who has a gun who the police and a court have not taken it from on the basis that we had no red-flag law. It might not make her as safe as she needs to be from him but it's something whereas the hunting-gun industry in Maine has defeated previous attempts to impose the minimum of sanity on our state which has had one horrific mass shooting, a direct result of the libertarianism of our gun laws before now.
I'm sure those who want to bring Jim Crow to Maine will try again as will the gun-hunting industry who have way too much influence in this rural and often benighted state. Our insanely lax 1970s liberal era ballot access laws will give them and the millionaires and billionaires who are funding our return to Jim Crow - they bought themselves a Supreme Court to do it for them so even a referendum isn't a safe bet to prevent it. I'm sure the 1970s era liberals figured that things were just going to get progressively better, such was the callow, ahistorical sense of that rather stupid decade among such liberals.
I TOTALLY APPROVE OF THE CALIFORNIA INITIATIVE TO GERRYMANDER THEIR CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICTS TO KEEP REPUBLICANS OUT OF THE HOUSE. I say that as someone who is morally opposed to gerrymandering but am even more opposed to the idiotic liberalish-libertarian proposition that we are to play totally stupid in the face of Republican-fascists, the millionaire-billionaire and white-supremacist (fascist) coalition of the greedy and hateful using every defect in the Constitution, the structure of government and those put there by that most corrupt of all the branches of the government, the Supreme Court to destroy equality and democracy.
The real American liberals, based in such things as egalitarianism and economic as well as social justice need to dump that idiotic rule that they are to always play dumb, roll over and let the fascists win to maintain some minor or even just relatively less important point of scrupulosity. That stupid idea in 1970s era ballot access that Maine liberals in the legislature adopted because it would theoretically perform that stupidest of all desiderata in the "Code of Liberal Ethics" create a "level playing field" even as it gave us several of the worst governors, senators and house members in our history who were aided by Green Party and other Republican spoilers is just such a stupid idea of such liberalish-libertarian scruples.
When you're fighting against millionaires, billionaires and their violent allies in America's already empowered and enabled fascists - they have governed several states for their entire history as well as a majority of states at least at some times - including Maine - preening in your own private moral purity isn't a virture, it's an act of the grossest immorality and, most likely even more often, TOTAL COWARDICE. I know for a fact that in my state, such acts of "principle" have been sourced in those who are professional or at least trained lawyers, a profession whose inbred surrender to the fascists and, especially, the rich on such "principle" I'll wax at length on the least provocation these days. To such principle I say go fuck off and die, your theories have been tested in time and produced disaster. Just go away and shut up. I don't want to hear it anymore.
HE LED A LIFE OF EVIL and shares responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men, Women and Children, the enslavement and oppression of many millions of others and a lifetime of self-seeking and personal enrichment. He can't take the loot he got with him but he can take the responsibility for what he did to get it. He helped to destroy the American republic in the first mainstream blow of the wrecking ball to it, the Bush v Gore suppression of the vote to install the boy-king, Bush II as he governed as unofficial regent, he exploited the attack that came about during the Bush II years, an warnings of which the team that Cheney-Bush II put into place incompetently and insouciently ignored (I still want to know how Condi Rice's little star turn recital with YoYo Ma figured in that nonfeasance) in order to lie us into the total disaster of the invasion of Iraq. I don't know what role he played in putting the worst Supreme Court chief "justice" in American history into place, the corrupt John Roberts or the equally corrupt Alito but I have every confidence he had a hand in that continuing and likely fatal attack on American democracy and even its existence as a republic. And there is no possible honest appraisal except that Roberts is the actual worst chief "justice" in U.S. history.
And that's only what he did in this century.
If anyone deserves to go to hell, it's Dick Cheney. Like the woman in the Irish joke who tells the priest she doesn't want her late husband out of purgatory but to spend a good long time there, I will admit that I hope Cheney is finally getting the corrective justice he earned. If that's determined by the seriousness and number of sins, he's got a hell of a hell to go through, yet.
I'll get back to you on this if Bush II dies before I do.
Anti-antifa(scist) = profa(scist).
If you want proof, look at all the goddamned fascists who are going on about "antifa" this and "antifa" that. Uniformly fascist of the traditional, white supremacist American variety, even the ones of color (stupid Future Kapos of Amerika).
I'm the son of United States veterans in the fight against European and Imperial Japanese fascists, both father and mother. I'm congenitally antifa on both sides and couldn't be happier to declare it.
but it is in the Orthodox, Syriac, Ethiopian and Catholic Bibles and it was almost certainly considered to be Scripture among many of what would later become Jewish communities around the Mediterranean in the 1st century. I doubt the Greek speaking and writing early gentile Christians would have known about them or the other Jewish Scriptures if that hadn't been the case.
Wisdom is generally believed to have been written by a Jewish scholar in Alexandria in the 1st century BC though when the Masoretic text was chosen centuries later the choice was made to not include a Hebrew translation of the Greek it was written in. I might respect the right of those in early modern Judaism and much later Protestantism to make the choices they did - Protestants and other Christians, by the way, altered the ordering of the Old Testaments from the different ordering with quite different intents in the Jewish Bible so their Biblical choices differed from those who formed and kept what became modern Judaism, too.
As it is, the Septuagint, which was produced by Jews from the two or so centuries before Jesus was born till, likely, a while after, are as Jewish as any of it. It is certain that for a lot of Jews at the time of Jesus, to put it anachronistically as modern Judaism is a somewhat later development (and no one should read that chronology as conferring lesser legitimacy) the Greek Scriptures WERE THE BIBLE THEY KNEW even in parts of the Middle East as certainly as the King James Versions (and there are a number of those) are to lots of American Protestants. Paul who, as the Jewish New Testament Scholar Amy Levine has pointed out, is the only self-declared Pharisee for whom we have any writings, at all, certainly relied on the Greek version of the only Scriptures around during his time, the Jewish ones, as he was perhaps unwittingly writing what would become the earliest books of the Christian Scriptures. I hold with the idea that Matthew very likely wrote one of if not the actual and now likely lost (in its earliest form) logia compiling at least many of the sayings of Jesus which later formed the basis of the Synoptic Gospels, especially Matthew. I base my thinking on that to some of the earliest writings about the writing of the New Testament which say Matthew wrote that and later writers translated into Greek from the original "Hebrew" (I think they might have meant Aramaic but it's possible a literate Jew living near Jerusalem might have written Hebrew) and that that includes what became the Gospel of Matthew when, as in Luke, they relied on earlier logia and sayings and reports.
Other than him it isn't obvious that the other writers of the New Testament would have known any Scripture other than that which they had in Greek. I think the author of James and Hebrews and possibly Mark were likely Jewish as well, though that's far from known. I think that the Greek version of the Old Testament, including the books not chosen for inclusion in the modern Jewish and Protestant canons, are as legitimate as the later ones, including some of the best evidence of the contemporary Jewish understandings of the Hebrew Scripture that those Jewish scholars translated. Even the texts that you are always hearing are later "Christian forgeries" to make them seem more predictive of Jesus. I doubt that last accusation which is a later polemic not in earlier evidence.
I was raised a Catholic and when I got round to studying something about the history of all of those various Bibles, from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jewish Septuagint* to the Orthodox, Syriac, Catholic, Ethiopian, Masoreic and Protestant Bibles (listed roughly in order of their presumed writing or canons being formed), I figured to try to respect everyone's choices, at least for themselves. I once said that I'd hate to see the book of Wisdom go because a number of really good motets and chants were setting from it. You've got to admit, the Jewish scholar who wrote it wrote a really good text for All Souls Day. I think it's right, too, or I wouldn't have posted it to start with.
* I don't know a lot about how the Samaritan Scriptures differ from the Hebrew or much about their antiquity or if they consider anything about the other Writings that are included in other canons of Scripture but I figure I should mention them as part of the same development. I have read that they maintain many of the other Writings but they're not considered as part of their Scriptural canon which only has the first five books of the Jewish Scriptures represented. At least that's what I've read. I want to respect everyone's honest choices. I agree with Rabbi Heschel. The existence and persistence of religious diversity is an indication that God isn't greatly opposed to it or it would have been made even harder to maintain it. She hasn't even crushed the dishonest and currently politically dangerous dispensationalist heresy out of existence, at least not yet.
so their partners in that industry and the goddamned insurance crooks can rob us blind while giving us Soviet style healthcare under capitalism
Here's a little video of a German who recently had to go to an American hospital only to find out he had to go to another American hospital, etc.
This reminds me of Ali Velshi whose father had to have major heart surgery in Canada under Canadian healthcare and the only cost to him was to park his car.
3 But the souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of death shall not touch them.
2 In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure was taken for misery:
3 And their going away from us, for utter destruction: but they are in peace.
4 And though in the sight of men they suffered torments, their hope is full of immortality.
5 Afflicted in few things, in many they shall be well rewarded: because God hath tried them, and found them worthy of himself.
6 As gold in the furnace he hath proved them, and as a victim of a holocaust he hath received them, and in time there shall be respect had to them.
7 The just shall shine, and shall run to and fro like sparks among the reeds.
8 They shall judge nations, and rule over people, and their Lord shall reign for ever.
9 They that trust in him, shall understand the truth: and they that are faithful in love shall rest in him: for grace and peace is to his elect.
Wisdom 3:1-9 Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition
I haven't heard anyone read from the Douay-Rheims Bible since the 1960s when it was what they read the Gospel at mass from, I'd guess. Just thought I'd use it for this one, thinking about my grandparents and parents. I don't know if this would have been in the lectionary cycle back then, Vatican II greatly expanded the Old Testament readings in it.
I see this as an extension of All Saints Day because I believe in the eventual reconciliation of all beings with souls (animals), finding the arguments of the universalists more convincing than the infernalists. Though I think a lot of those who have gone on still have a long way to go. Don't we all.
Having had such a recent and still shocking death in the family has really colored this whole three-day triduum of the dead. I'm not much for the Day of the Dead thing as it currently is, too much like a commercialized American holiday for my taste, too colored by the infernalist nonsense kingdom of the devil and horror in the Americanized versions of it I've seen - an extension of infernalist-Hollywood Halloween more than anything to do with relligion. Maybe in some very small towns it might still be a family day that has some real meaning, just not in most places, now. Not in the US where everything is transaction and commerce. Nothing could be farther from the real purpose of the day.
St. Francis died
almost eight hundred
years ago,
the homilist said
St. Francis dead? No!
He lives
in caring hands
and quieting eye,
in singing stream,
flaming leaf,
and flowering sky.
The death that separates
him from us
is so thin!
He moves among us
freely here,
unlimited by skin.
Sr. Irene Zimmerman Order of Saint Francis
who shows how a white probably peroxide enhanced Aryan dimwit can lose big and make a career of it in white-supremacy hate on FOX Lies. Though these days she could probably do the same at CNN or CBS, for that matter.
Her challenge to debate the really accomplished Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was hilarious and clearly based on the Trumpian appeal to racism and sexism. Our fascists really have it out for Women of Color. AOC's challenge to her to get a real job shows that if they did debate, one on one, Whiney would still come in 5th.
UPDATE: "Riley Gaines is a Christian"
17 I appeal to you, brethren, to take note of those who create dissensions and difficulties, in opposition to the doctrine which you have been taught; avoid them. 18 For such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites, and by fair and flattering words they deceive the hearts of the simple-minded.
Romans 16:17-18 RSV
She's made a career out of spreading hate and now racism on FOX Lies., She's no Christian any more than J.D. Vance is no matter what such outfit she's a member of.
the guy I said it to, agreed, but he thought most People younger than us wouldn't know what that annoying cartoon character was so I'll post this for now.
I GENERALLY AVOID listening to the sound of Donald Trump's voice so I hadn't heard till just now his senile diatribe about President Biden, claiming he'd claimed to be a pilot and a truck driver in front of an audience of service members who must have been stunned to hear the guy designated to be their commander sounding loonier than Captain Queeg raving about pilfered strawberries and, unlike that fictional character, just having his mind shut down mid-sentence.
And it's not as if Trump hasn't been doing this for the past nine months or even the years before, you have to consider that at least several thousand of the more than thirty-thousand documented lies told back when the Washington Post was still something like a journalistic outfit had to have been similarly drug induced or dementia induced expressions of something that Trump may have had something like a fleeting notion were true.
Trump is exactly what, no doubt, the framers and founders must have felt themselves to have narrowly escaped, being governed by a clearly insane George III. Though by the time of the American Revolution he is still considered to have been largely in his right mind. Trump has never had much of an attachment to reality or history or reason or even the own commonly experienced reality that he might make some twisted reference to BUT HE'S CLEARLY A RAVING, DROOLING, LYING AND DANGEROUS LUNATIC NOW AND NOT ONLY IS NOTHING BEING DONE TO REMOVE HIM, HIS MOST DANGEROUS ROYAL IMPULSES ARE BEING ENABLED BY THE COURTS, BY THE REPUBLICAN-FASCIST CONGRESS, BY THE MEDIA AND BY THE LEADING (THAT IS WELL-FINANCED) INSTITUTIONS IN THE COUNTRY.
This is way past what Britain has had so recently with Boris Johnson this is us being ruled by a mad king made more like the situation in Britain under the House of Hanover than the American Federalists could imagine happening under their Constitution.
The U.S. Constitution, our presidential system, our "free press" our legal system has failed catastrophically and there is no sign that things won't get far worse. Even if Trump is removed by natural death the failure has happened and the impunity the Roberts Court gave our mad king will be used more skillfully by Vance and his owner Thiel. And that's before whoever the Courts and the tatters of our ratfucked election system puts in after him.
I DON'T NECESSARILY AGREE WITH EVERYTHING that Tad Stoermer says in every video he issues but his understanding of American history as "resistance history" is enormously valuable. Instead of the typical "which side of the aristocrats are you on" view of history, he says to introduce this topic, "Yes, both groups are bastard covered bastards with bastard filling. I get it. But we don't et to study just the history of People we like." The sides in this case are the Federalists, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, etc. who tried to freeze out others from ever governing, on one side, and the Democratic-Republicans, Jefferson, Madison, etc. on the other side (the so-called Jeffersonian revolution of 1800). Ultimately the side I'm on are the People of that period who were left out of both the Federalist fascists and the Jefferson-Madison side, those held in slavery, those without property, Women, other minority groups who were living under subjugation under the Constitution, even with that alleged Bill of Rights which, it should never be forgotten, even Madison wasn't all that hot on.* Even as I admit that the Jeffersonian revolution made some progress for dispossessed white men, it was entirely short of what needed to happen to the original Constitution that the goddamned "originalists" want to bring us back to. I'm no more happy with us going back to 1801 than I am going back to 1789. I'm not happy to go back to any minute in American history, not even the day before the last presidential election. All that gets you is going back to where things went wrong with the conditions that produced that wrong.
The only legitimate history of the United States to be proud of in any way was the resistance to that Federalist establishment's Constitution as it was written then and as the aristocrats and thugs and the Supreme Court (to risk tautology) and the struggle for equality and, so democracy, most of all by those suffering under that subjugation and secondly to those more affluent, formally educated and almost uniformly religious enfranchised white men whose conscience was stronger than their sense of entitlement and greed. If you want to call that "resistance history" I'd suggest that it's only really valuable to instruct us in those instances when it was successful. BUT NEVER FORGETTING THAT THE SUPREME COURT, THE ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA, ENTERTAINMENT INCLUDED, WAS ALWAYS READY TO TRY TO TURN BACK THAT HARD-WON PROGRESS. If you want a recent example, it occurs to me that you could look at Susan Faludi's book from the 1990s, Backlash: The undeclared War Against american Women, something which the Dobbs decision is a product of.
But here's the video:
His reading of the
* Paul Finkleman's essay James Madison And The Bill of Rights: A Reluctant Paternity is one of the best things I've ever seen on the topic. Though I would note this reference to it from an article earlier this year by John B. Vile
Madison pivoted in favor of Bill of Rights
The chapters by Paul Finkelman and Howard Schweber deal most closely with the First Amendment. Describing Madison as the “Stepfather” of the Bill of Rights, Finkelman notes that Madison was both a “reluctant and unenthusiastic,” albeit nonetheless effective, advocate for the Bill of Rights. He primarily viewed it as a relatively harmless way of avoiding a second constitutional convention that might undo the work of the first. It is commonly believed that Madison may have changed his mind about the value of the bill of rights as a result of his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, who strong favored such guarantees. Finkelman demonstrates that Madison had pivoted in favor of this bill even before he had received Jefferson’s letters.
Finkelman does not, however, note that, speaking before Congress on June 8, 1789, Madison argued that if individual rights were incorporated into the Constitution, “independent tribunals of justice will consider themselves in a peculiar manner the guardians of those rights” and “will be an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive.” This is very close to the argument that Jefferson presented to him in a letter of March 15, 1789, where Jefferson lauded “the legal check” that a bill of rights would put “into the hands of the judiciary.”
Anyone who knows the history of the "Bill of Rights" in the hands of the Supreme Court without having their blood run cold can't realize how wrong those luminaries were. That's especially true of the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, but also courts going back sixy-one years distorting the First Amendment to do exactly the opposite of what Madison and Jefferson expected would be the results of putting such matters into the hands of the courts, that that would guarantee a the protection of rights and the prevention of such usurpations of power as they faced in the run up to the election of 1800. For anyone unfamilar with me on that topic, I hold the Warren Court's absurd expansions of the meaning of "speech" in many of its most celebrated rulings to have opened the door that the Republican-fascists forced us into so as to do after 1976 what Adams and Hamilton tried to do, this time through "free speech" as distorted by the courts, starting with Buckley v Valeo.
that my relative who died of an easily treated infection didn't have insurance because he couldn't afford it even under the ACA in his state in which the Republicans had blocked Medicaid expansion in any real way. He was murdered by the Republicans. Especially John Roberts and the other Republican-fascists on the Court as well as in the state legislature in his state.
---------
I am asked, in a related question, if I've read John Fugelsang's book, Separation of Church and Hate. No, I haven't. I've listened to Fugelsang and agree with much of what he is saying though I was disappointed that, like virtually everyone, he seems to misunderstand the long argument against sanctimony and arrogance that most people think is a definitive condemnation of same-sex sex in Romans when, if you read over the artificial chapter break which Paul didn't put there, he used that in a list of things that he presumed his audience found disgusting or distasteful BEFORE HE POINTED OUT THAT THEY AS WELL AS HE DID THINGS THAT WERE AS WRONG AS HE ASSUMED THOSE OTHER THINGS WERE. Instead of focusing on the entire list of things Paul lists, AFTER HE MENTIONS SAME SEX SEX. I would point out that instead of falling for that, if he kept on and pointed out the list, it sounds like the list of things held to be virtuous by Republican-fascists, Hollywood fascist-chic, bro-kulcha, and eutrophic level American capitalism. Oh, and what the free press was given as a "right to lie, slander, vilify and etc. by current First Amendment dogma. Here's his set up in "Chapter 1, which shows what they ignore to concentrate on exclusively on what he says about sex.
24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen.
26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. 29 They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them. RSV
Anyone reading the list that render those who do them deserving of death without thinking of Donald Trump is someone who knows nothing about Trump. But not only Trump. The MAGAs, when they're confronted with the actual Gospel sometimes realize they hate Jesus who isn't their dispensationalist, fundamentalist action figure with blond hair and blue eyes.
In a related and excellent video released yesterday by Hysteria, there is this investigation of the central figure in the history of the current "Christian" hate, Jerry Falwell.
You will note that they announce they're going to do his sonny boy, too. I just hope that somewhere, Jerry's looking up from hell to see he's being roasted by feminists here, too. He makes the rich man of the parable seem like Dorothy Day or Mother Teresa, who he probably figured was going to hell for being a papist. At least before she became useful or at least not touchable. I recall some of his fellow TV hallelujah peddlers say she was in hell.
THIS STRIKES ME as one of the most important channels I hadn't heard about and Paulina Borsook impresses me as someone I should have known about before today. I intend to read her book as soon as I can get hold of it.
of expanding on something I posted. It's probably better to read it than much of what I said below. He does philosophy a lot better than I do. You lose a lot of reading time having to practice your scales and other exercises. I doubt most music majors could really count as intellectuals considering how much time playing an instrument takes. Though that did a lot for my typing.
I'm looking forward to Advent.
if they want to produce a really well written book. Harper Lee worked on To Kill a Mockingbird with Tay Hohoff, her editor, for more than two years to polish what apparently was a quite rough stone into the jewel that that book was. When its precursor, Go Set A Watchman was published with Lee's permission but without much of her participation, a lot of people noted that it would have been a far better novel if it had undergone the same kind of editing process.
I've been trying to do some translation work on a book by an author I have the highest respect for and am finding that this particular book - not one of his most well known but one which I think is uniquely valuable - could have used some rigorous editing, as well. I've realized that my virtually clause by clause notes which I've taken on it broke down many of his extremely long complex sentences into separate sentences and have wondered if translating my notes might not be both easier for me to do and to publish online - I'm sure it would violate America's absurd copyright laws but I might do it anonymously in several places so someone might profit from it. The author will be long dead by the time I get around to doing that so I don't feel any moral compunctions against doing it. I don't much give a damn about the American copyright laws as they've been expanded to absurd lengths to maximize profits well past the death of the original author or their children's lives.
As I've said to you guys before - this is an answer to yet another trolling about the quality of my writing - if you notice a marked rise in the quality of the writing here, such things as the words that unintentionally get deleted in my revisions remaining where they were, you'll know I've hit the numbers and can hire someone to edit me. Till then you get it quick and dirty, just like I write it.
A MEMBER OF MY FAMILY, close but not immediate, has died, uninsured, of a matter that could have been likely cured by a dose of antibiotics. He deferred treatment for the simple reason that he couldn't afford to go to the doctor another time this year. He was middle aged with two children and others who are devastated by his death. He had hidden his condition from everyone as he tried to treat it himself, he didn't want to burden his family with even that significant but relatively modest cost.
I used to babysit him when he was a child. He was an ornery little kid but adulthood improved him enormously. He was a good father and son to his parents and brother to his siblings.
His sudden death has affected me deeply but I can see that there is someone to blame for it, it's the goddamned Republicans who, first in the Roberts Court weakened the Affordable Care Act through his declaration that the Medicaid expansion requirement on the states was unconstitutional. The Republican ruled state he lived in didn't do much of anything in that direction. His inability to pay was a direct consequence of that decision by John Roberts who has to bear responsibility for such deaths that his choice caused. Though the original weakening of the Act, itself, so that Barack Obama could try to, unsuccessfully coax Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to vote for it so he could declare it was "bipartisan" and Rahm Emanuel's deal with big Pharma to keep their profits up played a role, too. If he had lived in Canada, cost would have been no issue at all.
I remember when the debate over the ACA was going on, a Canadian commented that the original Canadian healthcare law was only a few pages long whereas, catering to private insurance and hospital corporations in the typical American way the ACA was close to a thousand pages long. Our Constitutional system, especially as distorted by the Supreme Court in things like its "corporate person-hood" bullshit gets us killed at an earlier age, sometimes of horrific, agonizing conditions that are routinely cured in other countries. There is a reason that in healthcare, the rich get top level care, most of us get something closer to what the poor can get in developing countries. Lots of us get to die prematurely.
And the Republican's most recent destruction of it haven't kicked in yet.
OH, THIS ONE IS EASY.
The exact quote in its fuller context is from Marilynne Robinson's review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, alas behind a paywall at Harpers but I had quoted from it long ago so here it is:
Dawkins deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil “in the name of. . . an insane and unscientific eugenics theory.” But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point. Science quite appropriately acknowledges that error should be assumed, and at best it proceeds by a continuous process of criticism meant to isolate and identify error. So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear. The prestige of both is a great part of the problem, and in the modern period the credibility of anything called science is enormous. As the history of eugenics proves, science at the highest levels is no reliable corrective to the influence of cultural prejudice but is in fact profoundly vulnerable to it.
I can add that since then Richard Dawkins made a number of statements that brought him from being one of the grooviest new atheists during the new atheism fad of the 00's who a number of the women of more questionable taste in guys on some of the lefty blog comment threads drooled over to having the cooties. One of those was a defense of men who randomly hit on women who don't welcome it, and doubting that a little pedophile abuse by public school masters of the little boys they had sit on their laps did them any harm. Another was bemoaning that Hitler had made eugenics taboo for a short while. He was still doing a two-step on the issue as late as five years ago.
For a start I'd say the success in producing biologically superior cows, horses, pigs, dogs and roses by selective breeding by humans is extremely ambiguous, conflating human determined ECONOMIC UTILITY with biological superiority. If that were true you'd expect that when a strain of such are free to breed freely as feral animals, they'd keep the same type that the original organisms had but that is rarely the case after several generations. It would seem that what human beings define as biological superiority, nature begs to differ on.
It also assumes that human beings are capable of determining which humans possess desirable traits and which should be prevented from leaving offspring. To which I would give any number of examples of such selectively bred lines of humans in royal and other aristocratic lineages from the time of the interbreeding Pharaohs of Egypt to the Hapsburg lines of royalty, to he Windsors to such lineages as the Bush family which gave us George W. Bush and his sibs. And against that I would post every estimable person who came from parents and grandparents who scientists explicitly said were degenerate from the time of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel down to today. I've noted before that when the Nobel laureate William Bradford Shockley was promoting his racist eugenics and his loony idea of setting up a Nobel Laureate stud farm the geneticist Richard Lewontin, noting the average age of those who Shockley proposed breed a generation of super geniuses guaranteed that their sperm would have an elevated number of likely dysgenic mutated genes in it and so risked producing children with birth defects. Something that the physics genius didn't seem to have considered. I don't know how well documented Julian Huxley's adventures in sperm donation at an advanced age have been but the rumors have been around for a long time.
I think that far from ignoring ideology, Dawkins was promoting his ideology, his especially dodgy one of Darwinian fundamentalism, what his entire professional career, including his two-faced promotion of eugenics while pretending to oppose it, has been based in. Eugenics was invented and became wildly successful WITHIN SCIENCE on the inspiration of the theory of natural selection. We have the best evidence of that, the attribution of eugenics by its inventors, Galton, Haeckel, Schallemyer, etc to their reading of On the Origin of Species. Natural selection is not supported in the rigorous application of scientific method which, by the way, can't be done to support the theory of natural selection because no experiment or observation has, so far, observed a new species arising through natural selection, natural selection, itself, being unmeasurable and invisible and not discernible in nature through the time it takes for a new species to arise. The entire history of human science, of human culture is a day compared to the ages those processes took.
