Hate Mail - It Took Me A While To Find It

but here is something I asked in a Lenten post called  How "It Works" To Really Believe In The Christian View Of Reality As Opposed To The Materialistic-Scientistic-Atheist View Of It

Who would you rather live next to, someone who believes that the morality of the Gospel is something they are going to have to answer for, if not now then in the life after death,  or someone who believed they didn't need to do unto others as they would do unto them, to do for the least among us what we would do to God, to love their enemies and pray for them, to love their neighbor as themselves, so long as they could rig things to act accordingly and get away with doing it?    Who would you rather have conduct national policy in this pandemic?  Someone who believes in the Gospel and that there will be consequences for our conduct in an afterlife, or in the people who are in charge in the United States?  

Answer that question and I'll expand on that as an answer.   Though I'll point out that the Trumpzis certainly don't follow the morality of the Gospel because they deny and don't practice any of those points of it listed above.   Materialist-atheist-scientism is in no absolute or even implicated way opposed to what Trump is or, in fact, what any of the 20th century or 18th century science claiming reigns of terror and genoicde was,  totally unconnected with the Gospel of Jesus.   That's an observation that works for my slam on "trad" Catholics, white supremacist Baptists, Pentecostals  etc  as it does many of the libertarian atheists online and elsewhere.    Whatever morality you hold to that is in line with that list of the Gospel of Jesus is held, unwittingly by you, against the logical conclusions of your own claimed ideology.   You're a bit more Christian than you'd ever like to think you are. 

Dunking on Israel Bot Sarah Hurwitz for 15 MINS Straight

 "She sounds like Alex Jones."

My only reservation about this video aren't the observations that Sarah Hurwitz was acting as more than an apologist for genocide by pulling the IHRA style "antisemitism" lie it is that the focus on only her lets off the others like Melanie Phillips who said things as immoral and degenerate.  It's also that more focus should be on the Jewish Federation of North America for holding what should be seen as the moral equivalent of a German American Bund rally in 2025 as the most contemporaneously reported genocide in history is taking place as they support it. 

One thing, that lying pro-scribbler who wrote for Hillary Clinton, Michelle and Barack Obama and other Democrats should never work for any Democrat anywhere or have any kind of respectable status among anyone who is opposed to genocide.  Her continuing status as a member of tje U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council discredits the Council and the current such efforts as what Norman Finkelstein accused them of in his book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. 

Any study of or mention of or remembering of the Shoah that isn't directly and completely tied to the condemnation and exposure of genocide anywhere it is happening is the ultimate in "Holocaust denial" and there are none more prominent in that denial than many of those who have made it either their career or their sideline.   And that always goes back to their Zionism which is as tied to the genocide of the Palestinian People and the other moral degeneracies of the state of Israel as any other ideology with ties to genocide and moral atrocity are.   That ideology should be as rejected as that which committed the Shoah and the Soviet, Chinese fascist etc. genocides.   I would  say that that extends to US and British and French, etc. imperialist ideologies.   I don't play favorites for my own country and its citizens.   I have no intention of doing so for Israel. 

Katie Halper's Youtube channel is one of those I listen to regularly.   

I Am Giving Food And Money To The Poor This Year

everybody else gets my services or, food I grew or things I've made without spending money as a present.

I am participating in the anti-Trump, anti-billionaire, anti-Republican-fascist, anti-Roberts Court fascist, etc. 

BLACKOUT

Someone Asked Me At Dinner What I Thought Of Simon Cowell

saying that Bob Dylan has no talent. 

I answered, Who's Simon Cowell?  

As soon as I heard he had something to do with American Idol - which I'm sorry to say I've been exposed to I felt like saying it should have been called "American can caterwaul"   He's also the ears behind several other such franchises which I'm somewhat aware of and avoid even more rigorously than I avoid Hallmark Christmas Movies. 

Bob Dylan has probably not been paid such a huge complement in decades,  I'd never want the likes of this Cowell creature to be a fan.    I said something more toned down because I knew one other at table likes that kind of crap and I didn't want to hurt her feelings. 

Thanksgiving 2025

 

She Should Be Detroyed But Don't Make Her Their Scapegoat, Nuzzi Isn't An Outlier She's Just Been Living The Life

I'M OLD AND DON'T follow every flash in the pan of crap that is American journalism so I was only vaguely aware of Olivia Nuzzi before now,   I'd known about her scribblage about RFK jr. even before their epically gross and vulgar sexting became public in the early phases when her jilted fiance started spilling the beans on her.  I didn't have a real idea of how she's weaponized being a skank to get ahead in the journalism racket until I heard Keith Olbermann talking about his history with her (she was a legal adult when they started living together so what they were doing is officially none of my business).   But it wasn't until reading this article in The New Republic that I had a real appreciation for how sleazy and slimy she AND THE MEN WHO WERE INVOLVED WITH HER have been.   It is one of those rare pieces of journalism about someone in the racket which admits that what they do can lead to catastrophe in real life. 

It’s all scintillating, and it’s all a distraction. The only thing you need to know about Olivia Nuzzi is that she used her position of power, as a journalist, to advise and elevate the world’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist to the most influential health position in the United States. The latest bombshell revelations about what they did or didn’t do together risk obscuring the important part of the story: The beliefs RFK Jr. espouses kill people. These beliefs have already killed people. As secretary of the Department of Health and Human services, he now holds the well-being of millions of Americans in his hands. And Olivia Nuzzi is joking about it in The New York Times.

“All I think about is how this woman was part of mainstreaming this guy,” Aparna Nair, professor at the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto, told me. RFK Jr. “will do profound damage on a global scale—that’s all that matters,” she said. The global health program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was among the first to be cut under RFK Jr.’s tenure, and outbreaks of illnesses like Ebola, Marburg, and mpox are now expanding across countries and borders.

As the public fixated on fresh Nuzzi scandals last week, RFK Jr. was instructing the CDC to add language on its website about the possibility of vaccines leading to autism. It’s the latest in his expanding focus on autistic individuals; he has also overseen the creation of a national autism research registry and blamed parents for taking Tylenol during pregnancy. 

“In elevating someone who has now become essentially the most powerful person in public health in the country and who is taking a wrecking ball to public health institutions, she has done untold damage,” Gavin Yamey, professor of global health at the Duke Global Health Institute, said of Nuzzi. “She certainly contributed to his rise.”

Yes, she did and she did it knowing full well how dangerous it would be for him to have any role in public policy - as bad as he is in charge of HHS imagine an RFK jr. presidency.  

I want to in no way diminish the moral atrocity of Olivia Nuzzi and what she did but it's necessary to point out that she was hardly the only one in the journalism racket who is responsible for all of the above LITERALLY THE LARGE MAJORITY OF THOSE WITH A WIDELY RECOGNIZABLE NAME IN THE AMERICAN JOURNALISM RACKET HAD AS MUCH AND MANY HAD MORE OF A HAND IN THIS.   Jake Tapper and  Dana Bash and many others at CNN, those at every one of the other networks, cable, TV, radio, the goddamned New York Times, the WaPo the LA Times and many of the surviving ink on paper entities.  Virtually the entire American media of any size and influence had a hand in the sandbagging of Joe Biden which led directly to Trump II and with full and absolute knowledge of who he was, what he intended,  the Heritage goons of Project 2025 who had laid out the plan for his destruction of democracy and the country.

It isn't something you'll get from Ken Burns or any "public intellectual" but one of the greatest and most horrifying lessons that should but almost certainly won't be learned from the decade of Trump is that the free press, those whose free speech is magnified the most by money and technology and, so, influence, is not anything like an asset of democracy,  certainly not of egalitarian democracy.   It has served as a total and willing part of the fascists' attempt to destroy democracy.   

The real history of the American "free press" isn't honestly told in the fable of Elijiah Lovejoy or Peter Zenger it's more honestly told in terms that we are being force fed in the bio of Olivia Nuzzi,  THAT, PERHAPS USUALLY MINUS THE SEX, IS THE REAL CHARACTER OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM.  

As I must always point out this has been made ever worse by the Supreme Court starting with the Warren Courts carte blanche issued to the media to lie about politicians and other public figures with impunity.   Though I've come to think that there is no more obtusity encouraging a professional training than one in the law - that pose of obtusity directly related to the ubiquitous professional practice of lying with impunity by lawyers -  there has never been a stupider ruling than the one that ended up profiting the wealthy oligarchs who owned and ran the media and the oligarchs who could buy media companies and lie to their own profit.   I don't believe for a second that any of the Warren Court members who issued that ruling were not fully competent enough to understand that would be the result of it,  though they pretended that wasn't a fully and confidently predictable consequence of that "free speech" ruling, and ever more so the Buckley v Valeo ruling that was the first to call the corruption of money in our elections "free speech."    If I slam the scribblers and babblers AND PUBLISHERS of the free press,  I slam the lying-lawyers even more so.  

Only a press that tells the truth is an asset and necessary part of egalitarian democracy.   One that lies will destroy it. 

" I plead guilty here to writing ‘program music.’ I am passionately concerned with, even frightened by, the American psyche and I deeply believe that, as we enter what may be the most perilous passage in our history, we need to understand ourselves better – otherwise certain disaster will follow."

I wasn't imposing my interpretation on William Bolcom's Piano Quartet I was honoring what he said about it at the time the original recording I posted was issued:

Both my major commissions for the 1976 bicentennial observance took for their themes what I think of as a tragic flaw in the American psyche that seems to lead inexorably towards violence. While the Piano Concerto’s last movement was a cavalcade of brutal clichés and naïveté in constant juxtaposition, the impulse that leads the Piano Quartet to a (to me) terrifying conclusion is internal and psychological, having as much to do with the inner forces of the previous movements as with the overriding contrary principle. I plead guilty here to writing ‘program music.’ I am passionately concerned with, even frightened by, the American psyche and I deeply believe that, as we enter what may be the most perilous passage in our history, we need to understand ourselves better – otherwise certain disaster will follow. The contrary principle in the quartet derives as much from my own emotional fix on our nation's spiritual state as from Blakean philosophy.

“I find that this piece has grown with time even in my understanding of it, and now I can indicate more clearly to performers what I meant. The present recording reflects my intentions as well as any performance can and I endorse it heartily.”

Apart from the Quartet and William Bolcom's wonderful First Piano Concerto, I can think of exactly two other such compositions as significantly controversial related to national birthdays, one was Roy Harris's Bicentennial Symphony and the other is the Canadian Opera Riel by Harry Somers to a libretto written by Mavor Moore and Jacques Languirand commissioned by the CBC for the Canadian centennial.

I think this piece and the Concerto are only two of the certain signs of Bolcom's greatness as a composer and as a thinker.  I think he is, after or along with Charles Ives among our greatest composers.   

A Much Older Straight Man

 many years my senior told me about ten years ago that he couldn't support LGBTQ+ equality because of anal sex and his disgust for it.   I usually wouldn't discuss sex with him because I because I was brought up with a particularly old fashioned habit of not talking that way in front of my elders.   It took me a long time to get used to calling him by his name as he asked instead of "Mr."  It still feels strange to me to call people significantly older than I am by their names.

Anyway,  he annoyed me enough with that that I pointed out that considering the percentage of Gay Men there are in the population and the significant percentage of gay men who seldom or never engage in anal sex that most of the anal sex that happens probably happens between men and women.   Not to mention virtually every description of sex acts that straight people think of as "gay" but which are engaged in by straight People in no small numbers.  He was surprised by the statistics I cited to him at the time - I wouldn't argue from them the same way today.   He didn't realize how many straight men and women did anal. 

So the revelations of the porn-poetry of the incumbent Sec of Health and Human Services in which Little Bobby seemingly tried to entice an alleged journalist gal decades younger than him to engage in the repulsive act of feltching (repulsive because it is disgustingly anti-hygienic and, so, degrading) and force being used by him in the act shines a light on what many may have figured was a "'gay thing" being very much a "straight thing."   It's clear it was certainly part of at least his active sexual imagination as something he'd want to do. 

It certainly did nothing to make me think of my life experience - I'm ever more respectful of other People and their health than just using a honorific title with them - it made me think of the media and political treatment of one of my heroines the Clinton Administration's first Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders when she was asked if Children should be encouraged to masturbate so as to delay the dangers of them engaging in sex with others.   She took the question and bravely answered that she thought that should be considered as a possibility and she was vilified and fired for that great service to public health.   Dr.  Elders is,  I'm glad to say, still with us, though I don't know if she's still practicing in one of the finer examples of public health careers I know of.   I hadn't known of her stellar record in preventing prengancy among her patients in Arkansas, especially girls with diabetes.  For that, alone, she's a heroine. 

It is an example of the pornographication of America (thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Gingrich era Republican caucus in the House an, particularly,   the scumbag Henry Hyde) that RFJ jr. isn't being raked over the coals in such a pursuit of something so grotesquely health and dignity destroying an act - I'm sure he's done it if he's broken out all poesy about it.  If he's writing like that,  he's almost certainly doin' it."    We're a long way down the road from the hypocrisy of Newt and Hyde and the 1990s media.  And about that, shouldn't sexting be considered adultery these days?  I don't mean the law, the law shouldn't get to define such things because the law tends to rather favor the guys. 

If you're waiting for the media and the hypocritical morality police to drive him from office over this? Well, what?   Do you think they're going to hold the CDC destorying rich, white, straight ambulance chaser lawyer who should never have been allowed to hold that office to the standards they held for a fully qualified Female-Black-Physician suggesting we consider what would be responsibly given sound medical advice?   Not when you can have an incompetent, dishonest, ambulance-chasing rich, straight, white, male Harvard Law oligarch who promotes the most dangerous of self-profiting medical quackery instead.   This is America where someone like the total scumbag Little Bobby will get away with everything as the most responsible and honest and competent Black Woman won't get away with doing what's right.   Our free press would certainly never hold him accountable, even as it's probably (and properly) cost his sexting partner her career in "journalism." 

And while I'm at it,  Hey, hey, RFK.  How many kids did you kill today?  

I Have Not Watched The Ken Burns Treatment Of The American Revolutionary War - A Response

MY RECENT CRITICISM OF KEN BURNS isn't specifically about that series, it's about his stuff I've seen in the past and the idea that you can replace READING HISTORY from books and, especially, reading entire primary documents with something as limited and expensive to produce (and so the limits) aimed at a popular audience.  IF and that big if is too small, it led viewers to think of the movie as a brief intro and if the movie led them to the primary documents - many of which are easily available for free online (I haven't looked, have Burns of PBS made such available in an easily used form online?)  a lot of my criticism would be answered.   Certainly it would cost them little to do such a thing, though if they didn't give enough emphasis to, for example, the anti-federalists and the opponents and critics of the revolution and the activities of the oligarchs and enslavers that proved their hypocrisy and hatred of equality and democracy,  they shouldn't bother.   We've already got that kind of bullshit history everywhere and don't need PBS pushing it any more than they do. 

But the problem with even that is that you can lead only a few to viewing and, even those  being "information age" People, you can't make them read, it's not going to be effective.   I don't know if his self-admittedly flawed magnum opus which I did see all of,  The Civil War, had been effective we would not be living through the Republican-fascist, Roberts Court effort to reestablish the Confederacy generally in the exact way that those who wrote and signed onto the Dred Scott decision tried to do in 1857,   I don't think that was due to his reliance on the folksy-drawling Confederacy romanticism of Shelby Foote,  it was because the ambition to maintain the lies set in motion by those who were following Lewis Powell's road-map to American oligarchy from Hollywood to NYC to DC to Atlanta in those years had the bigger megaphone, including that most dangerous of all venues for such lies,  entertainment media.  

I think Burns has a habit of relying on celebrity pop historians and writers which doesn't help much.  Pop history becomes pop history because it supports existing, established narratives.  If his use of easily identified Hollywood actors for reading stuff helps,  I don't know but sometimes I have found it distracting and occasionally annoying.  I don't recall who pointed out that part of Burns' method is to find appealing characters such as Foote was (to many, I found him unappealing) and to feature them based on that.  I think that criticism was true in his case and perhaps in others.   

He's hardly the worst of the type,  that may have been Frederick Wiseman, whose movies teach nothing and seem to try to teach nothing.   I think part of my problem with documentaries in general is that compared to real research into a subject, especially viewing a large range of primary documents, it gives a false sense of having learned about a topic when reading a range of relevant articles in the old World Book Encyclopedia would probably give you more actual knowledge of it and would certainly give you more lasting clues of what to search for online or in a good library.   It's the old "I saw the movie" approach as compared to reading the book.   When it's fiction,  that doesn't matter much.   When it's history,  you end up with Confederacy romantics and idiots who believed the founders and framers were gods whose ideas and Constitution should regulate our lives and laws in ways that no fundamentalist Baptist or Pentacostalist would ever try to use Scripture for (except to regulate and control OTHER PEOPLES' LIVES).  If Burns' series turned into a rejection of Roberts Court "originalism" and "textualism" bullshit it would be useful though I doubt it could be effective for that and still get the NYT media mainstream approval and do anything for eventually, getting PBS's funding restored.  

No Sarah Hurwitz,

YOU DON'T "SOUND OBSCENE" when you try to cover up GENOCIDE BY THE ISRAELI APARTHEID STATE 

YOU ARE OBSCENE.    

You have placed yourself not only at the same moral level as David Irving who lied about genocide carried out decades before he denied it had happened,  you place yourself at the moral level of those who knew about the genocide while it was happening and they covered it up or tried to dismiss knowledge of it as it came out.   

I don't know the name of the man who was interviewing her who called the reality of Israel murdering children "emotional blackmail" but his name should be as infamous as hers deserves to be from now on.   As, in fact, the combined Jewish Federations of North America who don't do far more than disavow what was said at that conference where she said this.   They are the equivalent of the American Bund in the face of the genocide Israel has been carrying out for years and which has intensified since they agreed to the phony "peace deal" announced several weeks ago.   Israel is a moral atrocity. 

She's a product of Harvard and Harvard Law, to tell you where she got her credentials in lying and her connections that got her the Obama job.   Harvard and, especially Harvard Law are vile institutions. 

When Ana Kasparian Finally Did The Joseph Welch Thing On Dershowitz And He Was The One To Bawl Out "McCarthyism" My Question Is Why Isn't "Cohnism" A Thing

THE DEGENERATE LIAR-LAWYER ALAN DERSHOWITZ is crying "McCarthyism" because Ana Kasparian has succinctly and memorably and so, perhaps virally articulated his history with Jeffrey-Epstein, including his role in getting the perverted child-rapist-child-trafficking-almost certain intelligence service and who knows who else peddling blackmail collector a sweetheart deal that allowed him the freedom to carry on as before and,  etc. etc. etc.   I'd add to the indictment, literally everything the shame of Harvard Law has done in support of his fellow Epstein-Maxwell sleaze, Trump, which becomes entirely understandable just in terms of his confidence that Trump in power would do everything he could to suppress the Epstein evidence and crimes BECAUSE HE HAD GOOD REASON TO BELIEVE MAKING THAT PUBLIC  WOULD EXPOSE HIM.

About the promiscuous use of the "M" word including by those who are full blown imitators of Wisconsin's worst senator before Ron Johnson.  

No one is accusing the Dersh of being a fucking commie,  he'd never do something so unprofitable for himself or to put him at any real risk.   BUT HIS ROLE IN THIS IS - WITH THAT KIND OF MEDIA PERPLEXING IRONY THAT THE GODDAMNED AMERICAN FREE PRESS ALWAYS FALLS FOR AND NEVER NOTICES  - COULD HONESTLY BE CALLED "COHNISM."   

Like Roy Cohn Dershowitz has been an ambulance chaser for the rich, the powerful, the criminal, a series of scumbag millionaire-billionaire rich white men, he has never been what McCarthy and Cohn and HUAC went after.   It should be a rule that no one who has been a whore of a lawyer for the likes that Dershowitz has and who has been a supporter of genocidal fascism and neo-apartheid gets to claim the role of the victim of those who were nothing like that in history.   Am I not remembering correctly but didn't he claim somewhere in the media that Epstein didn't pay him which the records of him being paid millions reveal to be a frickin lie?  

Alan Dershowitz is playing the Roy Cohn role in what could be a new spin-off franchise of the longest series of sequels to every Hollywood-Broadway-Made for TV movie about the red scares of the late 40s to early 69s.  I'm saying that because I hope that someday Hollywood will pull it's head out of the asses of those first few producers, directors and writers who started the interminable sequels of red scare shows* AND GOD NO,  I DON'T MEAN AARON SORKIN OR GEORGE CLOONEY , some competent and honest playwright or script writer they might profitably give the same kind of treatment to the career of Dershowitz.   Hey, Kushner, you might do it before the degen-liar-lawyer croaks.   Just don't go all sympathetic to Dershowitz, though, he doesn't have even the claims to possible sympathy that Cohn might be imagined to have as a self-hating faggot.   Dershowitz hasn't risked anything more than being denied service at a pirogi stand on the Vinyard, 

Considering how many lawyer-liars and liar-lawyers have public roles that are far, far better identified as like that of Trump's first brain,  Roy Cohn, you have to wonder why that hasn't come to be called "Cohnism"  because the Dersh isn't the only one who has modeled his public career on him. 

*  At this point they're just bouncing the rubble without revealing much new.  I mean, what's been discovered since it was revealed that Julius Rosenberg was, in fact, a Stalinist Stalin-era spy?   That was like 30 years ago.   If someone like Cloony wants to deal with the disaster that Trump and Republican-fascism are,  raking over the early 1950s is about as stupid a way to do it as exists outside of a Broadway musical,  

William Bolcom Piano Quartet

It was an accident of my ordering the recording of this piece and it arriving two days before Thanksgiving that year - of course I listened to it immediately and repeatedly for the next several days - that accounts for why I associate it with American Thanksgiving.    Like others of his pieces,  such as his first Piano Concerto,  it is topical in its prophetic warning of disaster under the American system and culture.   Only its topicality has only grown through the years.   I am grateful the pianist has posted these videos. 

 I. Barcarolle / Ketjak

II. Largo fantastico (Nachtstuck)

III. Intermezzo 

IV. Marcia risoluto

Jerome Jelinek, cello

Charles Asharian, violin

David Ireland, viola

Joseph Gurt, piano