Saturday Night Radio Drama - Roy Williams - The Interrogation

 

Hard-hitting BBC Radio crime drama, comprising three contemporary crime stories that probe some of today's most complex moral issues.

Starring Kenneth Cranham as Detective Inspector Max Matthews and Alex Lanipekun as Detective Sergeant Sean Armitage.

Episode 1 - Ross 00:00

The detective duo interrogate a young prisoner about an attack on another inmate, but there's something else they want help with.

Harry ... Rupert Holliday Evans

Ross ... Billy Seymour

Directed by Mary Peate

Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 4 June 2018

Episode 2 - Jack 43:16

While Max and Sean interview respectable writer Jack - who insists he's innocent of shoplifting - they discover something more serious.

Julie ... Georgie Glen

Jack ... Michael Shaeffer

PC Kerry ... Kerry Gooderson

Directed by Mary Peate

Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 5 June 2018

Episode 3 - Heather 1:26:43

A man is brutally attacked in his own home, but the detective duo are at a loss to find anyone with a motive. When they do find a suspect, her years of pent-up anger burst out, along with the motive.

Heather ... Jo Martin

Clare ... Claire Rushbrook

Directed by Mary Peate

Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 6 June 2018

Betty Carter - I Remember You

 

Live performance recorded in Lisbon, Portugal (1982) 

Unfortunately I can't tell you who the musicians are. 

"Imagine having to change your reality every three to six hours?"

 With the fire hose of bullshit that comes out of the Trump regime I hadn't realized that my passing and transitory  skepticism over the "pilot rescue" was being supported.  I hadn't paid attention to the bullshit so I didn't realize how absurd the Trump regime claims were.  Many who make sense are saying it was, actually, a catastrophically failed op to grab the enriched uranium becomes ever more credible.   

If there weren't many, many casualties, either injuries or deaths that we haven't been told about yet,  I'd be very surprised.   What is the big tell is that Trump and Kegbreath haven't named and paraded the rescued airman all over the place.  That's entirely less probable than the speculation about the failed op that includes that Iran was who destroyed all of those planes and helicopters being spot on. 

Kegbreath's Insider Trading On The War He Was About To Launch Will Go Unpunished

JUST REMEMBER THIS PREDICTION  which I admit I don't know if it will come true, there always being at least a theoretical chance of any prediction being wrong,  but I think the chance it will approaches 100% likelihood. 

I don't know but anyone who suspects that Trump or whoever is operating his Autopen - I'd guess Steve Miller but who knows - has NOT already issued a form pardon for everyone who agreed to be in Trump's criminal organization is probably wrong.   And I wouldn't be shocked if any of them haven't bought one from him as part of their plans of "serving" as a means of self-enrichment in the Hegseth manner.  

And I will predict that if any such crime conspiracy originating presidential pardons  are challenged in the courts that the Roberts Court or those on a lower level would OK them and enforce them on some legal pretext or even just on the absurdly stupid general language on that in the Constitution is, as well, a near 100% certainty.   IF THE ROBERTS COURT NULLIFIED SUCH CORRUPT PARDONS IT WILL CONSTITUTE THE GREATEST SURPRISE THAT COURT HAS EVER GIVEN ME.

The pardon provision, alone has increasingly been used to cover up presidential criminality,  certainly the pardons of those in the Reagan and Bush I administrations who were deeply involved with the Iran Contra crimes by daddy Bush to protect, among others, HIMSELF, was an example of the kind of thing that has probably reached its, so far, historical apex in the Trump regime.   Combined with the corruption legalized by the Roberts Court (which is certainly a self-interested ruling based on what we know about the corrupt practices of its majority members) and the obscenity of Trump v USA turning any presidents so inclined into an absolute mafia boss,  the corruption is completed by the pardon provision which has been there as a potential tool of a criminally inclined president to get his goons out of prosecution all along.   That we haven't had prominent cases of such insider trading on this level within other presidencies AND ON THE MOST DANGEROUS OF MOTIVATIONS IN ORDERING UP WARS TO PROFIT FROM may have been something of a barrier which has certainly been smashed under Trump and the Roberts Court.   And one thing is certain in American history, under the Constitution as defined by Supreme Courts,  it is that once such a barrier has been crossed, it never will hold in a criminal of any rank, least of all a president.  And that was before Roberts et al issued Trump v USA.  

And look at the levels of criminality and thuggery we are just beginning to scratch the surface of.  Elbridge Colby [The Grandson of William Colby, the famous (or infamous) "Catholic-warrior" of OSS then CIA infamy] threatening Pope Leo like a mafia thug.   His threat, made to the French Cardinal Christophe Pierre,  including a reference to the Avignon Papacy mentioning the power of the American military was certainly a threat of violence if Leo didn't play along with Trump.   The threat of the attack on the early 14th century Pope, Boniface VIII included the kidnapping and violence that led to his death, has to mark a modern treat on the same level as that which faced Pius XII under Italian fascism and Nazism.   Anyone who thinks that Colby didn't understand exactly what he was threatening the Pope with has to understand he's a product of Yale and Harvard and wouldn't have come up with that historical example without understand exactly what he was threatening.   The French cardinal would certainly be aware of it, "Bridge" Colby would have expected that he would understand it,  and it's pretty certain that Leo would have, too.   

I am not expecting that even the Trump regime is going to force the reform of our ever more dangerous Constitution because that document is such a false god to our "civic religion" our popular kulcha and our corrupt oligarchy.   And if there is any reform without changing, drastically, the role of the Supreme Court in dictating what it means at any given time, any amendment to it is going to be as nullified as the Roberts Court has nullified provisions that would have kept Trump from power.  We are really and truly screwed by it as, in fact,  Black People, other People of Color,  Women and that largest of all minority groups in the US,  the economic underclass have been the entire time it has been in place.   I used, from time to time, to shake my head at seeing how servile the subjects of the British crown were in putting up with the rule of their oligarchy but seeing how even the large majority of Americans rejecting Trump cannot manage to depose him,  I don't think we're that far above them and largely because of the ahistorical, superstitious regard we are taught to have for the Constitution which the radical abolitionists correctly noted was a pro-slavery compact.   

The true history of the Civil War and its aftermath proves that even that national catastrophe brought on by the Constitution as the Supreme Court defined it and the, then, oligarch class of slave-holders, is that even that hardest of hard lessons of our history did not reform the thing to make it safe for subsequent generations.    Ken Burns won't tell you that,  but it's the real history of the thing and our government under it.   It is the reason that the decades and centuries of resistance, making periodic progress against it with enormous work, toil, blood of martyrs and hopes dashed,  always has the institutions under it, the Supreme Court worst of all, roll that enormous boulder back down the hill.

Watch, even if the next Democratic president appoints an attorney general courageous enough to test whether the corruption of a Trump pardon of Hegseth will stand in courts - and almost no prominent lawyer would have the kind of courage - the Supreme Court would OK that corruption.   And despite what the lefty lawyers will say, THAT IS WHAT THE CONSTITUTION REALLY MEANS IN REAL LIFE AND NOT IN LAWYERLY MAKE BELIEVE.  

As Seen At RMJ's

 

There's No Reason To Be A Thought Criminal If I Don't Tell You The Forbidden Truth

ISRAEL WILL TRY TO BLOW UP THE IRAN DEAL.   I call it "the Iran deal"  because, as is being pointed out,  Trump caved on all 10 of Iran's demands.   Trump has proved that the man who has, his whole life, mastered and controlled the American judiciary and legal system,   couldn't master the Iranian government.   No, he was the one who was mastered by, first the Israeli, Saudi and other governments who bribed him and, I'm certain, blackmailed him into making this war on Iran and, who in the end ended up caving to the Iranians.  It is to be hoped that Trump and his goons will be more afraid of the economic consequences of renewed fighting than they will be of what Israel has got on them.  And if there is one thing that you can take on faith with little danger of being wrong, it is that Israel has got stuff on them. 

Iran's government goes from being in some real danger of internal overthrowing earlier in the year to being in the strongest position it has ever been in since the revolution that brought it to power more than four decades ago.    THAT IS THE PRODUCT OF US HAVING A REALITY-TV PRESIDENT WHO HAS BEEN ENABLED BY THE SUPREME COURT,  REPUBLICANS IN THE CONGRESS, THE CORPORATE MEDIA AND OUR INDIGENOUS FASCISTS, THE WHITE SUPREMACISTS.   

Indeed, it is a product of all of the 18th century, "classical" liberal democratic theories and institutions, complete with the amorality of that,  the enablement of lying as a "right," the elevation of property over People,the "liberty" of the privileged over the lives of the underclass, the legalizing of quid-pro-quo corruption and the enthronement of the American presidency by the Roberts Court, and all the rest of it.  

One of the most startling of realities of this five week war has been the shocking conclusion that has to be reached that it was the dictatorial, theocratic regime of Iran who acted more responsibly, in a more adult fashion, with whatever moral restraint and measurement of response there was demonstrated in their choices of targets made in proportional response to the Israeli and American attacks on Iran and its allies.   As a full and total egalitarian democrat, that disturbing reality is something I'm having to come to terms with. 

I would not, for a second, say that they proved their regime to be superior to a true democracy but they have proved that their regime is, at most morally superior or at least more adult than the apartheid, corporatist, oligarchic democracies of Israel and the US.   

I doubt, very strongly that anyone but myself will notice the role that the Supreme Court majority played in producing this disaster - most of that on the basis of their First Amendment rulings - but they had a bigger hand in this than much of anyone will notice or, if they do notice that, admit to it.   IT ALL STARTED WITH LIES BEING GIVEN LEGAL PROTECTION, LIES TOLD BY TRUMP SINCE AT LEAST HIS CENTRAL PARK 5 NEW YORK TIMES AD BUY, LIES TOLD IN THE MEDIA, LIES THAT THE NEW YORK TIMES STILL BRAGS ABOUT HAVING HAD SUCH A HAND IN ENABLING.   Apart from that the revival of Jim Crow under the Rehnquist and Roberts Court, the overturning of what would have been the first achievement of the United States of true democracy, egalitarian democracy under the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts had almost as much of a role in producing the Trump disaster.  

The other big loser in this war,  Israel, may have, finally, suffered its greatest defeat since its founding in that for the first time very large numbers of Americans have had enough of it, exactly as I predicted would happen twenty years ago during a previous invasion of Lebanon by Israel.  It opened my eyes as to the real nature of what was sold to us lefties in the early years of as progressive, quasi-socialist experiment in democratic governance.    The extent to which the PR nonsense sold in the measured, eloquence of Abba Eban was always a lie gradually broke through.   I think that at least a large minority of Israelis now realize what a disastrous mistake that colonial settler project was.  As I understand it the Israeli government is trying to prevent as many Israelis fleeing as possible.  It would be ironic if the expansionist Israeli apartheid state ended up using its Palestinian-containment walls to keep Jewish Israelis in like the Berlin wall did. 

A winner in this is the growing Jewish anti-Zionist movement, both its always present religious side and the secular-leftist side.   The Rabbis who have always been anti-Zionists have now got a status they never had in the United States and elsewhere.  The credibility of the opposing Rabbis and secular scholars has risen enormously in the past five years, first from the Gaza genocide and now with this disaster war that Netanyahu and his fascist government have finally suckered the stupidest, most corrupt and now certainly senile American president into bringing on for the Israeli government.   

If this finally forces the break between Israel and its major lifeline to the US and its lesser ones to Europe, that would be a good thing.   Twenty years ago I said that if the collapse of Israel I thought was inevitable happened,  I'd be in favor of the US taking in the Jewish population of Israel.   Now, given the war crimes, the crimes against humanity and the well over 90% support for those among the Israeli population,   I wouldn't favor that anymore.  I want there to be a full ban on emigration of war criminals and fascists from anywhere, including Israel now.  Where they would go is not a moral burden that the United States has a responsibility to shoulder.   I would, of course, welcome any Israelis who could demonstrate that they opposed the fascist-apartheid-criminal government in any real way.   We can always use People of high morals, we have no use for more racist-apartheid-fascists and criminals,  we have way, way too many of those now and have from before the founding of the country.   

To a lesser extent the credible, non-Jew-hating, anti-Zionist population among non-Jews has gained in credibility as they have weathered the smearing of them by the Israel lobby, both its professional and media and its academic and popular followers.   That accusation has lost an enormous part of the hold it once had over those who faced the reality of what a moral and political and humanitarian disaster the Israel project has developed into.  If anyone wants to discredit them,  I'll point out that to do that will only enhance the antisemitic anti-Zionists who have also gained something that will be made to pass as credibility through Israel's criminal conduct as the embargo on exposing that has fallen. 

Israel's apartheid, racist, gangster democracy will do everything it can to blow up any peace and certainly will this one on Iran's terms.  It is already saying it will not stop its expansionist program in Lebanon,  it will certainly continue its genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and into Lebanon.   They will do everything they can do to get the attacks on Iran to resume.   All they will have to do is remind Trump of the texts, photos and videos that they certainly have on him, certainly a lot of that having come from Epstein and Maxwell. 

What the United States will pay for this will be going on decades if not from now on.   I'm not predicting that that will result in any kind of moral and intellectual reform of the country,  nor am I predicting that the close call WHICH MAY NOT BE OVER in which we face the real prospect of our worst president in American history starting a nuclear war to cover up his pedophile crimes and with the bribery of the Israeli and Saudi and other governments.   There has been no change that would keep a Trump from carrying out a nuclear attack without the Congress, the judiciary or the military stopping him.  ANYONE WHO WASN'T PRAYING FOR A MILITARY COUP TO PREVENT TRUMP NUKING IRAN LAST NIGHT IS A MORALLY DEPRAVED PSYCHOPATH.   And I am totally opposed to military coups, but using nuclear weapons is a greater and super-mortal sin.  

I am sure that as I say this the MS-Now and other liberalish lawyers are making claims about the "unconstitutionality" of what Trump and his gang of oligarchic criminals have done, of it being in some way a violation of the sacred Constitution.  Which is bullshit.   He's gotten away with it and will continue to get away with it,  Hegseth, Rubio, Kuschner, etc. will all get away with it.  JUST AS THE RAILROADING OF BLACK PEOPLE BY THE COURTS WAS WHAT THE CONSTITUTION REALLY, TRULY WAS AND IS, THE PERMISSION OF RICH, WHITE, FASCIST, OLIGARCHS BY THE LEGAL SYSTEM AND THE JUDICIARY TO COMMIT THE GREATEST CRIMES EVER COMMITTED BY AMERICANS AND GET OFF WITH TOTAL LIBERTY AND THE MONEY THEY STEAL IS WHAT THE REAL MEANING OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION IS.  The claims of the Meidas and MS Now lawyers other than to that effect are pious lies. 

I doubt anyone else anywhere is going to tell you that truth but I won't stop pointing it out. 

That Trump Is Still In Office Proves That The Constitution Has Failed, Utterly And Completely

ANYONE WHO IS PUTTING their hopes on that fraudulent and quick fix, the 25th Amendment, is as much of a sucker as those who put their hopes on the impeachment myth.  

It is one of the fatal defects in the presidential system that those who are assigned the choice of removing the most criminal or dangerous presidents in our history have the most personal, selfish, self interested reason to keep them in office.   And the worse the president, the worse those he puts around him that the 25 Amendment gives the responsibility to make that responsible decision and the worse the members of his party, IN OUR CASE THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS IN THE HOUSE AND SENATE who will block their removal.

It is one of the features of democratic parliamentary systems that those who have those choices,  whether as part of a failing an disastrous prime minstership or those in such a disasters' party are those with a real and important self-preservation interest in removing a Trump level disaster.   

Our Constitution has repeatedly failed to remove the worst presidents in our history,  and now we have the worst example of that in our history.   It failed to remove him and, thanks to the Roberts Court, the means of preventing his return to power in the 14th Amendment was nullified by the Republicans with help by a Democratic appointee.    Never, ever put your hopes on the Supreme Court, especially the Ivy League Law school class of them. 

I pray and hope that the rest of the world,  the free and aspiring to be democratic countries and forces tell us to change it or they're cutting us off,  that the boycotts will continue and increase,  that they can't trust us at all until the goddamned presidential system we have now is drastically altered to really, basically protect the world from another Trump.  

Our system is entirely,  completely, catastrophically failed.  THAT ANYONE IS EVEN TALKING ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF TRUMP USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS THIS WEEK PROVES HOW DANGEROUS OUR CONSTITUTION IS.    I fear that even that won't be enough to overcome the putrid, lying founders fetish that protects our failed Constitution.   Maybe if Lin-Manuel Miranda makes it rap and boogie on Broadway,  something might be done.   But he'll never do that.   If he did the NYT and the NY based funding agencies that gave his founders fetish show its legs would never back him.  

A College Credentialed And Tiresome Would Be Wise Guy Makes Me Do A Repost I Hadn't Planned On

If there is one thing that is predictable about the day,  it is that some mid-brow, college-credentialed dolt is going to snark about this on Easter.   All they prove is that, despite their credentialing,  they are ignorant dolts.  I think I first posted this about eleven years back. 

My Easter Evergreen - Eostre, My Ass

It comes around every year as certainly as FOX "news" pushing the "war on Christmas" nonsense, the internet babble about how the "Xians" stole Easter from those poor put upon pagans.  I'm reading it all over the place today so I'm posting this now.  Somehow the "reality community"  thinks that the English invented Easter.   The whole thing centers around the derivation of the English name "Easter" by the Anglo Saxon monk, The Venerable Bede in 725.  From The Reckoning of Time:

Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated "Paschal month", and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.

Apparently that statement is the sole reason that this modern myth arose, no other one, apparently, making that claim.  You wonder why a bunch of "Xian" haters take the word of a Catholic monk for it.   I'm no expert in the minor goddesses of Germanic paganism but the entire issue of Germanic paganism as known in the early 8th century is made moot by the fact that by that time Christians around the Mediterranean had been fighting over the right time to observe the PASCAL TIME for, oh, about 535 years and likely longer. 

Ecclesiastical history preserves the memory of three distinct phases of the dispute regarding the proper time of observing Easter. It will add to clearness if we in the first place state what is certain regarding the date and the nature of these three categories.

First phase

The first was mainly concerned with the lawfulness of celebrating Easter on a weekday. We read in Eusebius (Church History V.23): "A question of no small importance arose at that time [i.e. the time of Pope Victor, about A.D. 190]. The dioceses of all Asia, as from an older tradition, held that the fourteenth day of the moon, on which day the Jews were commanded to sacrifice the lamb, should always be observed as the feast of the life-giving pasch [epi tes tou soteriou Pascha heortes], contending that the fast ought to end on that day, whatever day of the week it might happen to be. However it was not the custom of the churches in the rest of the world to end it at this point, as they observed the practice, which from Apostolic tradition has prevailed to the present time, of terminating the fast on no other day than on that of the Resurrection of our Saviour. Synods and assemblies of bishops were held on this account, and all with one consent through mutual correspondence drew up an ecclesiastical decree that the mystery of the Resurrection of the Lord should be celebrated on no other day but the Sunday and that we should observe the close of the paschal fast on that day only." These words of the Father of Church History, followed by some extracts which he makes from the controversial letters of the time, tell us almost all that we know concerning the paschal controversy in its first stage. A letter of St. Irenæus is among the extracts just referred to, and this shows that the diversity of practice regarding Easter had existed at least from the time of Pope Sixtus (c. 120). Further, Irenaeus states that St. Polycarp, who like the other Asiatics, kept Easter on the fourteenth day of the moon, whatever day of the week that might be, following therein the tradition which he claimed to have derived from St. John the Apostle, came to Rome c. 150 about this very question, but could not be persuaded by Pope Anicetus to relinquish his Quartodeciman observance. Nevertheless he was not debarred from communion with the Roman Church, and St. Irenæus, while condemning the Quartodeciman practice, nevertheless reproaches Pope Victor (c. 189-99) with having excommunicated the Asiatics too precipitately and with not having followed the moderation of his predecessors. The question thus debated was therefore primarily whether Easter was to be kept on a Sunday, or whether Christians should observe the Holy Day of the Jews, the fourteenth of Nisan, which might occur on any day of the week. Those who kept Easter with the Jews were called Quartodecimans or terountes (observants); but even in the time of Pope Victor this usage hardly extended beyond the churches of Asia Minor. After the pope's strong measures the Quartodecimans seem to have gradually dwindled away. Origen in the "Philosophumena" (VIII, xviii) seems to regard them as a mere handful of wrong-headed nonconformists.

The fact is that in the Greek language the far older name for the feast day is "Paskha" apparently from where the Latin "Pascha" comes from, all of which is taken from the Hebrew word for the Passover "Pesach",  all of which pre-date any interaction that Christians are likely to have had with Germanic rabbit worshipers by a considerable time. 

Let me take a second to point out that anyone who knows anything about the accounts of the execution and Resurrection of Jesus, would know that it was entirely, intimately and from the beginning related to THE PASSOVER, WHICH HAD ALREADY BEEN SET FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL BY THE 1ST CENTURY.

14 This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance. 15 Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread; on the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses, for whoever eats leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day shall be cut off from Israel. 16 On the first day you shall hold a solemn assembly, and on the seventh day a solemn assembly; no work shall be done on those days; only what everyone must eat, that alone may be prepared by you. 17 You shall observe the festival of unleavened bread, for on this very day I brought your companies out of the land of Egypt: you shall observe this day throughout your generations as a perpetual ordinance.

Exodus 12:14-17

The Christian holiday has NOTHING to do with German paganism, it would be more accurate to say that pagan practices polluted the Jewish-Christian holiday.

All of the romance languages I know of derive their name for Easter from the same cognates from the Hebrew.  And even a number of  Germanic tongues, such as Danish (Påske), Swedish (Påsk), and even Icelandic (Páskar) who would seem to have missed the Eostre bandwagon. You'd think that the isolated island that preserved the Sagas and, as my old History of English teacher claimed, a closer affinity with Anglo Saxon than modern English does, would have retained it if anyone would have, but it was likely never there to start with. *

If anyone had a legitimate beef to make over the holiday, it would be the Jews and Jesus and everyone named in the accounts of the event, except a few Romans, were Jews, including Jesus. 

But what can you expect, the same people run their own ideological campaigns around Christmas, just like FOX does.

*  Update:  Other than German and English and a few modern descendants of German such as the language of the Pennsylvania Dutch, just about all of the names for Easter in most languages are, clearly, derived from the Hebrew cognate name for the the holiest day of the Christian year.  Some examples, Norwegian (Påske), Scots (Pace),  Welsh (Pasg), and,  Irish Gaelic, (Cáisc) I suspect through a p to hard c consonant shift, though I'm no Irish scholar, much to my shame.  Even the near cousins of English don't share in the "Eostre" stuff showing more affinity in their name for the day to the Hebrew, Flemmish (Poaschn),  Frisian (Peaske).

Update 2026:   I think this old evergreen is going to be fresh every year until the last of at least my generation of mid-brows dies out.  And, unfortunately, it doesn't look like the upcoming generations are any more interested in historical or etymological accuracy than they are.   College credentialing ain't what it used to be and it never was.