A REGULAR READER sent me a link to this comment made at the baby blue blog.
Friday, January 17, 2025
Thursday, January 16, 2025
Late Correction
I just noticed that I left the mistake of saying "Jackson" where I meant "Johnson" stand all day and no one corrected me. I'm guessing the guys who troll me didn't know the difference and my regular readers who can read and know stuff are too polite to point it out.
The Mendacity Industrial Complex - An Impromtu Reaction
APART FROM him falling for the Israeli apartheid regime's genocide in Gaza, I think Joe Biden has had the most potentially positive administration since LBJ if not FDR. And it's clear that it is about to largely if not all go for nothing as the Trump regime takes over. Only not for nothing, for far worse than that. I don't think in any period since the Lincoln presidency gave way to that of Andrew Johnson have we come close to the drastic contrast that we saw when Biden took office from Trump to its return to Trump, has that transfer of power been more pronounced. Any country which could go from Trump to Biden and back to Trump is a dangerously sick country, probably in the throes of a fatal illness.
The speech President Biden made from the White House yesterday told some truths I wish he'd told decades ago, though if he'd told them then he probably would have had a short instead of one of the longest careers in government. He laid out the role that lying in the media, the mass media, the even more enveloping and suffocating social media lies that sandbagged his phenomenally accomplished administration, everything from FOX Lies and down to the goddamned New York Times, NPR and, I will say it, Stephen Colbert style entertainment painting one of our most competent presidents as a senile, doddering incompetent, whipping up lie after lie, spreading and normalizing those - the specialty of the great grey whore of NYC and the minor one of NPR - and many other lies on top of those lies.
But telling that truth gets you uncomfortably close to the idiocy of the Bill of Rights a forbidden topic, my violation of which led to me adopting the name of Thought Criminal as I was told that was going too far. Telling the truth about the Warren Court, the Burger Court, Rehnquist and Roberts' Courts, the part that the hollowly hallowed ACLU has played in the empowerment and weaponization of lies, especially those targeting Democratic politicians who attempted to give us democracy, real democracy, egalitarian democracy, starting as soon as the Warren Court issued the first of those deadly rulings in 1964, the lies in the media that both sank LBJ's administration, the chances of Hubert Humphrey in the next presidential election, the elevation of the previous champion of criminality in the presidency, Nixon, and the entire half-century of the undoing of American democracy which has paralleled the emergence and financial flourishing of the freest press and media in human history. The old-style ACLU style assurances that allowing the most flagrant of lies to flourish would be effectively countered by "more speech" has been given the test of time and time has failed it absolutely, conclusively, to the point of being among the most certain of disconfirmations possible in the philosophy of law and governance.
One thing about the profession of lying, lawyering and its elite branches in judging and "justicing" is that once an avenue of opportunistic lying has been taken, especially in terms of the U.S. Constitution, that that avenue can't be merely closed off by a future ruling but it will have to be shut off at the source, in this case the First Amendment, and that is a forbidden topic of conversation. The fact is that that is as true for the First Amendment as it is for the Second one, the one which Republican-fascists in power and on the Court has used to arm the fifth column which we certainly have reason to fear will open up on our fellow citizens whenever the oligarchs and their tools in government tell them to. The sacred language of "Jemmy" Madison and the other amateurs, slave-holders, financiers and crooks of the First Congress set in stone will have to be changed to explicitly un-privilege lies and firmly abolish the "right to lie" that the Court has invented as certainly as it invented presidential immunity. The problem lies in the vague, inferior late 18th century poesy of the Constitution. Frankly, with what I've learned about the corruption of the slave-holder-financier founders, every defect in that document is rightly suspected as being lawyerly loophole setting to empower them, so much of the language of that document being used that way by later generations of lawyers, judges and "justices" none more blatantly than under John Marshall and more infamously by the Taney and gilded-age courts as well as the later Rehnquist and, perhaps worst of all, the Roberts Court
With all deference to Joe Biden who has earned my respect in the past four years, he's a little late to this realization though he's still years ahead of almost everyone in the tiny fraction comprising the honest media and the likely even smaller percentages of those in the legal and political world. As Eisenhower only came to articulate the dangers of the beginning of our oligarchic rule in the military-industrial complex in his last speech, the trained lawyer, Joe Biden has only fully articulated the problem in his last speech. I have a deep and respectful appreciation for the necessity of a good politician to not go too far and become an ex-politician through losing their next election. I have less respect for those who work in the media because the stakes of them losing their paying jobs is far less consequential for the American People, other People around the world and the world in general. I don't have anything at stake in telling you that truth, a truth I was warned against telling when I posted one of my early pieces on this topic at Echidne's old blog. What are they going to do to me? Fire me from an unpaid writing hobby?
Until the language of the First Amendment is changed to make it clear that:
a. Lies are not covered by "free speech-press,"
b. There is no such a thing as a "right to lie,
c. That 'the press" [and other corporate entities] do not have rights, what the fools in the First Congress misnamed those are privileges and that that privilege comes only with an obligation to tell the truth to inform us so we can cast an informed vote for our representatives and for ballot measures,
the First Amendment will continue to be the vehicle to power of lie-empowered oligarchy as certainly as it kept in power the white supremacists in the South and elsewhere and thwarted the struggle for equality and real democracy.
Of course, all of that heavy lift will be for nothing unless the Supreme Court is reigned in, starting with term limits and ethics as President Biden finally endorsed but, more important still, have their usurped Marbury v. Madison powers definitively stripped from them. The Voting Rights Act which the Rehnquist and Roberts, white supremacist Courts have abolished will have to be restored. It was only with that law and the Civil Rights Act that America started to weakly live out its promises, as MLK jr. mentioned in that speech which will be desecrated by Republican-fascists, white supremacists and others, next week, that is if Trump's elevation doesn't totally drown out that yearly disgrace to his legacy. The Supreme Court, it's 'liberal" manifestation in the Warren Court as they stupidly set this catastrophe off with their "free speech-press" ruling and the conservative then fascist dominated ones accelerated as they weaponized those "liberal" rulings, is the penultimate source of this. That Court has to be harnessed, not to fealty to "The Constitution" but to equality and democracy. I'd put those in place to what they're supposed to uphold, protect and defend instead of that document. And I wouldn't give you a pint of piss for democracy without equality. As we can see in the white-power states, in the Israeli apartheid government, in every dictatorship where there are elections in which an oppressive majority lords it over minorities, democracy without equality is, if anything, as dangerous as outright oligarchy.
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Artie Shaw - I Cover The Waterfront from 1949 and 1941
He kept moving on instead of repeating himself.
I'm Still Getting Hate Mail
over my dissing of John Lennon's hypocritical atheist dirge "Imagine." That that banal, hypocritical, useless song seems to have replaced another song I dislike, "Amazing Grace" as the go-to song to sing for every ill conceived occasion where a show of piety, of some vague sort, is evoked shows how bad things have gotten since the once common familiarity with earlier Protestant hymnody has died out of the life experience of most Americans.
I've gone over what's wrong with the song and John Lennon's hypocrisy (he'd have to imagine "no possessions" really hard as he clung to his hundreds of millions and what possessions he had with Yoko in The Dakota) and its defects as a melody and its banal harmony as well as insipid, stupid words - look for it in my archive - so I won't go over that again.
What is really hilarious about the push-back I'm getting is it's from the superannuated cohort of the "nothing is sacred" set such as congregate to masticate their pre-digested ideas as their Geritol kicks in. If you want to see how sincere they are about that "nothing sacred" pose, diss the "smart" Beatle and his crappy song and you'll find out they hold such shit in the highest regard.
But I want this to be constructive so I'd suggest a more appropriate song to remember Jimmy Carter would be Marty Haugen's fine hymn, All Are Welcome, here sung at a Roman Catholic Women Priests' Ordination Mass
Let us build a house
where love can dwell
And all can safely live,
A place where
saints and children tell
How hearts learn to forgive.
Built of hopes and dreams and visions,
Rock of faith and vault of grace;
Here the love of Christ shall end divisions;
Let us build a house where prophets speak,
And words are strong and true,
Where all God's children dare to seek
To dream God's reign anew.
Here the cross shall stand as witness
And a symbol of God's grace;
Here as one we claim the faith of Jesus:
Let us build a house where love is found
In water, wine and wheat:
A banquet hall on holy ground,
Where peace and justice meet.
Here the love of God, through Jesus,
Is revealed in time and space;
As we share in Christ the feast that frees us:
All are welcome, all are welcome,
All are welcome in this place.
No Matter What That Little Sleazebag
from that unusually sleazy state does to placate Trump, the majority of Americans will be in mourning when Trump is reinstalled. And a large percentage of those who aren't in mourning will be soon after.
Jimmy Carter was everything Trump and the likes of Mike Johnson never will be, starting with him being a decent human being of high morals. Johnson is a good example of everything wrong with the Southern Baptists just as Trump is one of everything wrong with the real estate industry and the TV industry.
Watching the Republican-fascists in the Senate during the Hegseth hearings, the country is going to go to hell and very fast. Very badly and very fast.
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
I'll Just Call This One "Hate Mail"
IT MIGHT BE the decisive turning point in what has become my loss of faith in secularism, the Buckley vs. Valeo case in 1976 in which the Supreme Court overturned the truly bipartisan attempt of Democrats and Republicans in the Congress to prevent the corruption of big money and combined money in American politics, opening not only the then flow of corrupt money such as had been revealed in the crimes of the Nixon campaign and administration but set in motion further rulings of the Supreme Court which have totally corrupted American democracy, leading directly to the overt buying of the American government by billionaire and multi-millionaire oligarchs, INCLUDING THE DICTATORS OF RUSSIA, CHINA, SAUDI ARABIA, ETC. all in the name of First Amendment "free speech-press." That is the reason that in 2025 and for the past decade the biggest fattest proponents of "free speech-press" have been exactly those buying and corrupting American politics. The whirlwind we are reaping is the direct consequences of that elevation of "free speech-press" over everything else, including honest government and the protection instead of the destruction of democracy. American democracy died on the altars of the First Amendment and, ironically, on the alter of the now known to be false god, the "rule of law." I've mentioned how little stomach I have for the civic pieties of the MSNBC style lawyers who had told us for the past six years to put our faith in the legal system, now that that has turned out to be the primary vehicle in enabling the crime spree of the Trump crime gang.
My once childlike, then adolescent then adult faith in secularism is a casualty of fifty years of witnessing the failures of the liberal-progressive-left side of that faith, best symbolized in the part that the "civil liberties" industry, the ACLU and its allied institutions have played in that ultimate corruption of our laws based on the phony reverence for the secular legal order, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights the main idols of that "civic religion" to use a hideous phrase from a corrupt member of the Supreme Court. I wish there were some way to get back the donations to such outfits as the ACLU that I was stupid enough to give them, even after the role they played in Buckley v Valeo. They conned me out of it.
In thinking more about the consequences of, finally, taking the inescapable theological dimensions of political life and action seriously, I'm not going to minimize the problems of doing that. One of the most obvious of current crises in that, apart from the lawyerly, Supreme Court sanctioned privilege given to lying for gain, is the issue of abortion. In that an allegedly overt theological issue as defined by those who oppose Women practicing bodily autonomy, the same Court which has created the democracy destroying "right to lie" has abolished that right to bodily autonomy. And if there is one thing that is clear in the 2024 election, that demotion of Women as subjugated People, having that most basic of rights to bodily autonomy taken from them WAS NOT DECISIVE AS A REJECTION OF THAT IN THE WAY THAT MANY OF US ON THE LEFT NAIVELY BELIEVED IT WOULD BE.
The fact is that not all issues of morality can or should be subject to legal prohibition, there being no overriding public or state interest that can be asserted to match the right of a Woman to decide what happens inside of her own body. The right to decide whether or not she will carry a pregnancy and give birth. The consequences of the state intervening in that by the law is a catastrophic denial of everything from bodily autonomy up to permanent injury and, in fact, death of Women so subjected to such legal usurpation generally by male politicians, judges, prosecutors, etc. And once such laws are in place, they are kept there no matter what the body count and horrors experienced and reported on, the indifference of those not impacted by them, all men (with the exception of a few who care about the Women so impacted) and not a small percentage of Women who either have not or are not yet impacted or who, once they have stopped being of child bearing age, don't care about what happens to such Women. The same indifference that pervades the legal profession as the "justices" and judges and lawyers on the make advocate and rule in matters which are of little to no concern to them as the lead their privileged, affluent lives within the well upholstered, well paid ranks of that rank profession.
Politics is certainly not the most important area of life in which such theological dimensions are to be played out. It was one of my early conclusions about the reaction of the Catholic clergy in the aftermath of the Roe decision that if they were really intent on ending abortions, the most effective way to do that would be to advocate, as strongly as possible, for the education in using and the availability of contraception. To those who have bemoaned the tens of millions of abortions in the United States during the legal administration of abortions, such early and widespread promotion of contraception would certainly have prevented most of them. Yet such alleged moral experts, such theological experts, chose not to make that morally obvious choice. That also led me to wonder how, once they had regained the status quo from before Roe, as we now have, they would try to prevent the many illegal abortions which had so noticeably not been a major concern of them, even as such illegal abortions were widespread in the pre-Roe period. It would seem that before Roe, as while Roe stood and now that we have reverted to the coat-hanger- motel room period of abortion, they never really cared much about preventing abortions, only in making such abortions that they knew would happen, illegal, dangerous and deadly. There was everything wrong with that application of the theological dimension to the question of abortion. That it was uniformly males, in the earlier period and males and right-winger women past child-bearing years who have reimposed that on the country, is an indication that the defects of men and those unaffected by the political imposition of such defective theology in an inegalitarian regime.
But I'll point out that the decision to overturn Roe was done not by theologians but by Ivy League trained lawyers, lawyers trained and indoctrinated in the secular law, not one of whom I'd take their sincerity as believers in religion seriously, certainly not as compared to their sincerity as members of that lucrative orthodoxy and profession. If there's something I've got to complain about with the present membership of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, the leaders of "white evangelical Christianity" it is that they have far too much in common with the cauistical practices of the secular law.
Once the SCOTUS interpreted the 1st Amendment as conferring the right to lie with impunity, we were on the irrevocable road to fascism. That was the whole point.