Anyone who believes that our minds are the product of material causation, that our minds are the same thing as our brains, that our ideas are the epiphenomina of the chemistry and physics in our neurons is, literally and by their own definition, a MEAT HEAD.
Hate Update: Perhaps if requested I'll repost that bit of comment threadage I've been sent where such meat heads as Tlaz prove my point. Till then you'll have to take my word for it. I really hope no human or animal life depends on whatever it is they do at that lab where she allegedly works as she gossips at Duncan's Daycare for Aging Atheists because I doubt they're that bright if they hired her.
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
I'm A Thought Criminal Did You Think I Wouldn't Diss Football?
First, people get killed playing American football, they sustain long term and sometimes terminal brain damage, permanent injury and, lest anyone not notice THEY ALSO INTENTIONALLY DO WHAT KILLS, PARALYZES, CAUSES DEMENTIA, ETC. American football, kills the body AND THE SOUL. The audience participates in that slow motion homicide, they are an integral part of it. There is no way to honestly ignore or deny those aspects of football, if you do ignore or deny them, you are lying in a way that covers up obvious immorality. As a nominal Catholic, it disgusted me when a relative told me the priest included praying for the friggin' Patriots to win in his sermon on Sunday, it disgusts me that such great Catholic universities and colleges as Notre Dame and Boston College are football factories. You wonder how their graduates could be so superficial as to value football more than the education those places provide. But, then, friggin' Cardinal Dolan gave his clueless "grasping what pleases you" prayer at the installation of the "grab her pussy" American Mussolini the other day, too. But don't get me started on the low quality of the bishops and cardinals named by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The American ones are some of the worst, there has never been a worse collection in the US Catholic Conference of Bishops than in the wake of those two popes.
On a less important but still important level, I have never had anyone be able to explain to me why I should care that a bunch of guys or gals is able to get a ball to the end of a field past the people who are trying to stop them. No one has ever been able to explain why I should be happy that half of the people doing that fail to do it more often than the ones who win, no one has ever been able to tell me why I should feel happy about half of the people watching being unhappy and half of the people watching the stupid carnage are happy about such an awful thing. And that's not even getting to the repulsive immorality that goes along with it, the misogyny, the sense of entitlement, the more generalized violence it encourages, etc.
Other games at least theoretically lack the worst features of American football. Hockey's violence isn't intrinsic to the game, Basketball can be played without any violence. Baseball injuries from getting hit by a ball or from slamming into someone are not intrinsic to the game. But a lot of the other problems, especially those involving macho posturing and deification are. And no one has been able to tell me why I should care who wins those either.
And, really, is there anything more attention deficiency producing than watching American football? At least soccer and basketball they keep moving. Even baseball which you have to pay attention to is less of a chore to watch. I think if they didn't wear those raunchy spandex pants they wouldn't get much of an audience. As one of my gay friends said to me when I said I couldn't believe he could watch the stuff, "It's all about ass". Um, no thanks. I'm not an ass man, myself.
On a less important but still important level, I have never had anyone be able to explain to me why I should care that a bunch of guys or gals is able to get a ball to the end of a field past the people who are trying to stop them. No one has ever been able to explain why I should be happy that half of the people doing that fail to do it more often than the ones who win, no one has ever been able to tell me why I should feel happy about half of the people watching being unhappy and half of the people watching the stupid carnage are happy about such an awful thing. And that's not even getting to the repulsive immorality that goes along with it, the misogyny, the sense of entitlement, the more generalized violence it encourages, etc.
Other games at least theoretically lack the worst features of American football. Hockey's violence isn't intrinsic to the game, Basketball can be played without any violence. Baseball injuries from getting hit by a ball or from slamming into someone are not intrinsic to the game. But a lot of the other problems, especially those involving macho posturing and deification are. And no one has been able to tell me why I should care who wins those either.
And, really, is there anything more attention deficiency producing than watching American football? At least soccer and basketball they keep moving. Even baseball which you have to pay attention to is less of a chore to watch. I think if they didn't wear those raunchy spandex pants they wouldn't get much of an audience. As one of my gay friends said to me when I said I couldn't believe he could watch the stuff, "It's all about ass". Um, no thanks. I'm not an ass man, myself.
I wonder, going on five days into the Trump regime, how many of those people on the play left who said that Trump would be better than Hillary Clinton still think so. I say that in view of how with his green lighting of the oil pipeline, his gag order on federal agencies, blocking them from perforning their vital public information functions, the attacks on the ACA, the attacks on the very idea of the truth, it's clear that Trump, his brats, his crime-family son-in-law, his neo-fascist staffers, etc. are hell bent on destroying not only the Democratic legacy of the past century but are also destroying many of the advances made by Republicans. I'd say that they are intent on returning to the United States to a hellish version of some of the worst of the 19th century but I'm afraid that they're probably intent on doing far worse, bringing us to places this country was saved from going in the 1930s. I doubt anything is going to be undamaged from the Trump-Ryan-McConnell-Roberts regime which has control of this country for at least the next two or four or who knows how many years.
So, I can't keep myself from saying, Susan Sarandon, enjoy.
So, I can't keep myself from saying, Susan Sarandon, enjoy.
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
Notice: I'm having a lot of eye trouble and probably need new glasses. Sorry for the worse than mediocre editing, please, don't think I don't know that verbs and subjects have to agree in number and any number of other lapses in editing that is a result of my not being able to see what I'm writing, sometimes.
Susan Collins Is Just As Bad As All Of The Other Republican Snake Oil Shills And She Adds A Massive Amount of Hypocrisy To It
So, what symptom of criminal insanity has Trump revealed since I last looked? Which Republican Senator has given him or one of his nominated pirates their support?
Susan Collins, the shame of Maine before Paul LePage became THE SHAME OF MAINE with her endorsement, has a con-job, smoke-screen, fig-leaf alleged replacement for the Affordable Care Act up, along with another con-artist cum Senator from Louisiana. One of its major cons is giving states the option of setting up the Affordable Care Act system (or a phony imitation of that) on a state by state basis. If you're not paying attention, I noted that the two Senator con-artists running this shell game come from the "die faster, poor people, state of Lousiana" the other comes from the state that has been under the dead weight of Paul LePage for the past six years.
One of our Republican friendly Maine news programs tried to get the LePage administration to sign on to such a state ACA system, the last I heard they hadn't responded. I will point out that under LePage the option to insure the poor and destitute under Medicaid was never enacted, thanks to Chief Injustice John Roberts and his fellow Republican-fascists on the court. I'm sure that if Susan Collins con job came into law and some state tried to use it to expand Medicaid (as if that will survive the Paul Ryan-Mitch McConnell Congress) that the Supreme Court, reinforced on the neo-Nazi end by Trump's nominee would say that it was unconstitutional, as well.
Susan Collins is rumored to want to be governor of Maine and, with the idiotic ballot access laws we have, I'm sure the Republicans can arrange another millionaire spoiler to put that piece of slime in the Blaine House. That would be Blaine as in the slogan from his presidential campaign of 1884, “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine, 'Burn this letter!"*. Susan Collins, with this latest dodge, deserves a slogan as notorious as that one.
* A notorious crook and influence peddler during his time as a Senator, he would often include the instruction "Burn this letter," in his business correspondence. His mansion is the governor's mansion in Maine.
Susan Collins, the shame of Maine before Paul LePage became THE SHAME OF MAINE with her endorsement, has a con-job, smoke-screen, fig-leaf alleged replacement for the Affordable Care Act up, along with another con-artist cum Senator from Louisiana. One of its major cons is giving states the option of setting up the Affordable Care Act system (or a phony imitation of that) on a state by state basis. If you're not paying attention, I noted that the two Senator con-artists running this shell game come from the "die faster, poor people, state of Lousiana" the other comes from the state that has been under the dead weight of Paul LePage for the past six years.
One of our Republican friendly Maine news programs tried to get the LePage administration to sign on to such a state ACA system, the last I heard they hadn't responded. I will point out that under LePage the option to insure the poor and destitute under Medicaid was never enacted, thanks to Chief Injustice John Roberts and his fellow Republican-fascists on the court. I'm sure that if Susan Collins con job came into law and some state tried to use it to expand Medicaid (as if that will survive the Paul Ryan-Mitch McConnell Congress) that the Supreme Court, reinforced on the neo-Nazi end by Trump's nominee would say that it was unconstitutional, as well.
Susan Collins is rumored to want to be governor of Maine and, with the idiotic ballot access laws we have, I'm sure the Republicans can arrange another millionaire spoiler to put that piece of slime in the Blaine House. That would be Blaine as in the slogan from his presidential campaign of 1884, “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine, 'Burn this letter!"*. Susan Collins, with this latest dodge, deserves a slogan as notorious as that one.
* A notorious crook and influence peddler during his time as a Senator, he would often include the instruction "Burn this letter," in his business correspondence. His mansion is the governor's mansion in Maine.
Hate Mail - The Longer I Think About What Is Claimed For Natural Selection The More Like A Delusion It Seems To Me
I wrote a piece a long time ago in which I called what is proposed to constitute Natural Selection "The Mother of All N-Factorial Problems". A lot of your accusations and claims were answered in that post. I've dealt with issues of natural selection any number of times since then. A day or two before I wrote that one, I wrote one in which I quoted Richard Lewontin pointing out that the difficulties in even observing and measuring proposed selective forces made those two most basic, crucial steps which cannot be left out impossible. He admitted that any story or scenario about those alleged forces could not be put to a test. Unlike many who make up those stories and believe and claim and sucker even college grads into believing they've done science, Richard Lewontin certain knows better. I underlined what I thought was most important about that for my argument.
It is not only in the investigation of human society that the truth is sometimes unavailable. Natural scientists, in their overweening pride, have come to believe that eventually everything we want to know will be known. But that is not true. For some things there is simply not world enough and time. It may be, given the necessary constraints on time and resources available to the natural sciences, that we will never have more than a rudimentary understanding of the central nervous system. For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them. In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them. Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were. Over and over, in these essays reproduced here, I have tried to give an impression of the limitations on the possibility of our knowledge. Science is a social activity carried out by a remarkable, but by no means omnipotent species. Even the Olympians were limited in their powers.
Which would take many, I would now say virtually all, if not all alleged scenarios of natural selection outside of the realm of real science. If you can't really observe or measure some proposed "trait" if they are too subtle or too anything to remove them from the very methodology of science, if the problems involved makes it impossible for you to really test proposed ideas about them, in reality, not in Just-so fiction, then that makes all of that definitively NOT science. I think even calling it "lore" which is often based in habitual, sometimes even careful observation, is more than most of it deserves, Did you read my analysis of one of the most famous of those?
I think natural selection is most likely a delusion, an imposition of an all too artificial and all too humanly invented economic order* on all of the unknown lives and events in the forever invisible past which constitutes the real "thing" we have called evolution. My thinking doesn't deny that evolution is a fact, which I think it is. My thinking denies that squeezing such an incredibly large, detailed, unobservable, unmeasurable, series of events over billions of years and who knows how many trillions of lives of how many billions of what we would call species of organisms into one theory or even a handful of theories is honestly possible. I think much if not all of the "usefulness" of the theory of natural selection is an illusion in which professional pride and convenience plays entirely more of a part than biologists, real ones, and certainly the frauds who do it as social science while entirely invested in it would care for anyone to notice.
Though not all biologists, certainly not now as even some eminent ones are expressing increased skepticism about either its universal explanatory powers or even whether or not it's a good theory.
The matter of teasing out "traits" and building them up into either adaptive or maladaptive categories is another fundamentally insoluble problem of trying to come up with science demonstrating natural selection. You might be able to sell people on what you claim but I'll bet you won't be able to sell anyone who thinks really, really hard about the problem who doesn't have a stake in pretending you've succeeded.
If you want, I can give you some of my more recent reasons for concluding natural selection is a mass delusion among the educated. Those tend to be rather complicated.
I have also pointed out why so many millions of college educated people today, especially those who are not of "Anglo-Saxons" or other related North-Western European ancestry (excluding the Irish) should seriously question Darwinism because, according to Darwin, they shouldn't have been born because they carry a permanent inferiority that makes us a danger to the future of the human species. Lots of those suckers are among the biggest promoters of the naive, ignorant Charles Darwin, one based in not reading what he really said. You don't give me a name so I can't tell but that you might not be on Darwin's hit list for those to be excluded from the future of humanity due to not only ethnic but, perhaps even more so, the economic status or your Victorian era ancestors or, most of all, the health status of those same ancestors. When you look at the list of those on Darwins hit list or that of his colleagues whose work he endorsed, placed there on the assumptions about natural selection in the human species, that number probably includes most of the people alive today. Including, I will bet, most of those who hold college degrees, including many of the biggest suckers for the Darwin industry post-war model. Any claim that evolutionary biologists and, even worse, those in the so-called social sciences and, worst of all, those who claim some kind of Darwinian character for their would-be philosophy have left ideas like that aside could only be made by someone who is profoundly ignorant of post-WWII eugenic proposals, made by some of the most eminent people in the field. For example, the famous Watson and Crick, Crick probably being a far more committed racist and eugenicist than his obnoxious American partner.
* Here's the quote from Marx which I left out of that piece the other day. As much as I disagree with Marx on most things, this is absolutely spot on.
I'm amused that Darwin, at whom I've been taking another look, should say that he also applies the ‘Malthusian’ theory to plants and animals, as though in Mr Malthus’s case the whole thing didn’t lie in its not being applied to plants and animals, but only — with its geometric progression — to humans as against plants and animals. It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’. It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes and is reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which civil society figures as an ‘intellectual animal kingdom’, whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil society.
Karl Marx: Letter to Engels, June 18th, 1862
It is not only in the investigation of human society that the truth is sometimes unavailable. Natural scientists, in their overweening pride, have come to believe that eventually everything we want to know will be known. But that is not true. For some things there is simply not world enough and time. It may be, given the necessary constraints on time and resources available to the natural sciences, that we will never have more than a rudimentary understanding of the central nervous system. For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them. In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them. Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were. Over and over, in these essays reproduced here, I have tried to give an impression of the limitations on the possibility of our knowledge. Science is a social activity carried out by a remarkable, but by no means omnipotent species. Even the Olympians were limited in their powers.
Which would take many, I would now say virtually all, if not all alleged scenarios of natural selection outside of the realm of real science. If you can't really observe or measure some proposed "trait" if they are too subtle or too anything to remove them from the very methodology of science, if the problems involved makes it impossible for you to really test proposed ideas about them, in reality, not in Just-so fiction, then that makes all of that definitively NOT science. I think even calling it "lore" which is often based in habitual, sometimes even careful observation, is more than most of it deserves, Did you read my analysis of one of the most famous of those?
I think natural selection is most likely a delusion, an imposition of an all too artificial and all too humanly invented economic order* on all of the unknown lives and events in the forever invisible past which constitutes the real "thing" we have called evolution. My thinking doesn't deny that evolution is a fact, which I think it is. My thinking denies that squeezing such an incredibly large, detailed, unobservable, unmeasurable, series of events over billions of years and who knows how many trillions of lives of how many billions of what we would call species of organisms into one theory or even a handful of theories is honestly possible. I think much if not all of the "usefulness" of the theory of natural selection is an illusion in which professional pride and convenience plays entirely more of a part than biologists, real ones, and certainly the frauds who do it as social science while entirely invested in it would care for anyone to notice.
Though not all biologists, certainly not now as even some eminent ones are expressing increased skepticism about either its universal explanatory powers or even whether or not it's a good theory.
The matter of teasing out "traits" and building them up into either adaptive or maladaptive categories is another fundamentally insoluble problem of trying to come up with science demonstrating natural selection. You might be able to sell people on what you claim but I'll bet you won't be able to sell anyone who thinks really, really hard about the problem who doesn't have a stake in pretending you've succeeded.
If you want, I can give you some of my more recent reasons for concluding natural selection is a mass delusion among the educated. Those tend to be rather complicated.
I have also pointed out why so many millions of college educated people today, especially those who are not of "Anglo-Saxons" or other related North-Western European ancestry (excluding the Irish) should seriously question Darwinism because, according to Darwin, they shouldn't have been born because they carry a permanent inferiority that makes us a danger to the future of the human species. Lots of those suckers are among the biggest promoters of the naive, ignorant Charles Darwin, one based in not reading what he really said. You don't give me a name so I can't tell but that you might not be on Darwin's hit list for those to be excluded from the future of humanity due to not only ethnic but, perhaps even more so, the economic status or your Victorian era ancestors or, most of all, the health status of those same ancestors. When you look at the list of those on Darwins hit list or that of his colleagues whose work he endorsed, placed there on the assumptions about natural selection in the human species, that number probably includes most of the people alive today. Including, I will bet, most of those who hold college degrees, including many of the biggest suckers for the Darwin industry post-war model. Any claim that evolutionary biologists and, even worse, those in the so-called social sciences and, worst of all, those who claim some kind of Darwinian character for their would-be philosophy have left ideas like that aside could only be made by someone who is profoundly ignorant of post-WWII eugenic proposals, made by some of the most eminent people in the field. For example, the famous Watson and Crick, Crick probably being a far more committed racist and eugenicist than his obnoxious American partner.
* Here's the quote from Marx which I left out of that piece the other day. As much as I disagree with Marx on most things, this is absolutely spot on.
I'm amused that Darwin, at whom I've been taking another look, should say that he also applies the ‘Malthusian’ theory to plants and animals, as though in Mr Malthus’s case the whole thing didn’t lie in its not being applied to plants and animals, but only — with its geometric progression — to humans as against plants and animals. It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’. It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes and is reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which civil society figures as an ‘intellectual animal kingdom’, whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil society.
Karl Marx: Letter to Engels, June 18th, 1862
Monday, January 23, 2017
Arch Oboler - Crazy Town May 20, 1939
39-05-20 The Lima News
Oboler Radio Play Indicts
Current Affairs In World
"Crazytown" Inhabitants Show Toll Of Hate, Greed, Mistrust
"Crazytown," a stinging indictment of the present anarchic state of "world af fairs, will be presented by Arch Oboler over WEAF Saturday at 9 p. m. The contemporary fantasy is to star Edmund O'Brien, who scored a success this season as Prince Hal in Maurice Evans' Broadway production of "Henry IV." Charlotte Manson, young and talented NBC actress, will have the leading feminine role. The story tolls of two young aviators who make a forced landing in unknown territory while returning from a successful bombing expedition against civilians of a defenseless enemy city. They soon find they have cracked up in Crazytown, the place where individual moral values have become us topsy-turvy as are international moral values in the outside world. Hate, envy and suspicion are cardinal virtues; pity, love and honor are considered unforgivable sins, while murder is the only logical way of settling a quarrel.
Scary how much of Arch Oboler's Plays before and during the rize of fascism and WWII is relevant to the Trump regime.
Lies Are Truth
Southern Beale has a great post up about the weekend when all the Presidents Men and Woman literally said that lies are truth.
I would dearly love to see the truly evil Kellyanne Conway discredited, denied a government pension and forgotten before she is indictable for crimes against humanity like Lord Haw Haw or Axis Annie but only because I'm hoping against hope the path they've set the country and world on can be avoided. And that goes for Reince, Sean and the rest of them, too.
I would dearly love to see the truly evil Kellyanne Conway discredited, denied a government pension and forgotten before she is indictable for crimes against humanity like Lord Haw Haw or Axis Annie but only because I'm hoping against hope the path they've set the country and world on can be avoided. And that goes for Reince, Sean and the rest of them, too.
Keith Olbermann - Trump Is Insane He Needs To Be Removed From Office
Yes, that's one thing that has been on full display for the three and a half days of the Trump regime, he is literally insane and he's sustained on the lies people like Kellyanne Conway and Reince Pribus tell him and, worst of all, the ones he tells himself.
If Donald Trump is not removed from office, it constitutes that Constitutional crisis we were all told we had to avoid at all costs. Well, we can't avoid it this time, he is insane for all the reasons Keith Olbermann cites and so many, many more. I am certain that the career people at the CIA know he's insane, I'm sure even the ones at the FBI who aren't amoral political hacks and liars like James Comey know it, I'm sure even lots of Republicans in the Congress know it.
I'm betting it is going to have to reach a real crisis where a lot of people die before our disgustingly inadequate Constitutional system removes him from office. Let's hope some of us survive it to change the stupid thing. That is if junk like Hamilton haven't made that impossible.
Did You Really Expect Me To Care If The Patriots Are Going To Play During The American Mammonist's Religious Holiday?
So, what I have decided, and I'm not going to let you vote on this (laughter) I have decided that the Jesus movement, the earliest Jesus movement is essentially a protest against the economy of extraction and the proposal and practice of an alternative economy. And I get that because if you look in – well, I don't know if you know the Letter of James but the Letter of James, the lead apostle, is filled with warnings about the love of money which in context means don't sign on with Rome. But in the Epistles of Paul, in Galatians, I think it's chapter 5, Paul has a list of what he calls the desires of the flesh are greed, lust, fornication, licentiousness, quarrelsomeness, which I think names – if accumulating more money is the goal of your life, that's the kind of society you will get and that's the kind of society that we have. So I have come to think, --- you won't mind if I say this since the Cowboys have been winners lately – (laughter) that the NFL is basically the liturgy for that society. The NFL is all about sex, money, and violence and they now say the NFL's slogan is “We own Sunday”. (inaudible) Paul answers desires of the flesh with a list of the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, humility, kindness, patience. These are the kinds of habits that will not be developed if our commitments are to the competition system. They are habits that are only viable if we come to regard, if we come to practice solidarity with all our neighbors.
Walter Brueggemann, at about 17:30 here.
I would put it a bit more harshly than he did. I have always loathed American football.
Walter Brueggemann, at about 17:30 here.
I would put it a bit more harshly than he did. I have always loathed American football.
A Post Script To This Morning's Post
I just noticed that a crucial phrase in my argument this morning was inadvertently edited out and it is important enough so I'm going to turn it into a bold, large font post of its own.
Considering that all of those in the Executive Branch, in Congress and on the federal courts who are cutting women and children off of healthcare, including reproductive healthcare HAVE FULL PUBLIC HEALTH CARE AVAILABLE TO THEM it is our right to do call them on their hypocrisy.
I don't know, does their healthcare extend to birth control and abortion? Not that most of the mostly men among them and most of them past the age cohort for which those are vitally important aspects of health care need it. Does it cover their adolescent children for whom that is important?
I'm undecided as to whether or not the private lives of the children and wives of politicians, cabinet members, judges, prominent congressional staffers should be gone into by those of us excavating the mother-lode of their hypocrisy or not. I'm inclined against that but they have no problem violating in the most intimate terms the privacy of each and every woman whose bodies they want to turn into a public interest.
Considering that all of those in the Executive Branch, in Congress and on the federal courts who are cutting women and children off of healthcare, including reproductive healthcare HAVE FULL PUBLIC HEALTH CARE AVAILABLE TO THEM it is our right to do call them on their hypocrisy.
I don't know, does their healthcare extend to birth control and abortion? Not that most of the mostly men among them and most of them past the age cohort for which those are vitally important aspects of health care need it. Does it cover their adolescent children for whom that is important?
I'm undecided as to whether or not the private lives of the children and wives of politicians, cabinet members, judges, prominent congressional staffers should be gone into by those of us excavating the mother-lode of their hypocrisy or not. I'm inclined against that but they have no problem violating in the most intimate terms the privacy of each and every woman whose bodies they want to turn into a public interest.
Republicans Are Probably Planning on Profiting From The Back Alley Abortion Industry They're About To Create
One of the certain effects of Republicans destroying the Affordable Care Act and trying to destroy such health care providers as Planned Parenthood is that there will be more abortions. Whenever women cannot avoid pregnancies that are not planned and intended, there will be abortions. Of course the plan of Republicans and other opponents of women being able to have safe, legal abortions will be what it was throughout history, when safe, legal abortions were not available, unsafe, illegal abortions were the only resort. I came of age in a world where it was not uncommon to know women and teenage girls who had had an illegal abortion, where it was routine for women to die, need emergency care - which carried the risk of being harassed by the police and arrested - many of who were injured, some unable to carry a wanted pregnancy to term or at all.
So one of the certain effects of the actions that Trump and Republicans in the Congress and in state legislatures will be an increase in abortions not a decrease. Which is a point which should always be made whenever these things are being discussed.
And, it must be included, they are the ones who are always attacking the availability of health care for women who do want to carry pregnancies to term, give birth and raise children. They are the very people who will, in fact, be throwing millions of such women and their children off of health coverage.
For them to put a man in the presidency who has made screwing around outside of marriage one of his hall marks, the hypocrisy of the certain retort - stated or not - that women who don't want to be pregnant shouldn't have sex has to be exposed as totally and absolutely discrediting of them. All of the sex lives of all of the opponents of women having access to full medical care, especially that involving reproductive rights is absolutely fair to bring up. Considering that all of those in the Executive Branch, in Congress and on the federal courts HAVE FULL PUBLIC HEALTH CARE AVAILABLE TO THEM it is our right to do so. It was always an ever recurring theme that men and women who were some of the loudest opponents of legal abortion had, themselves, either had abortions or had encouraged women they'd impregnated to have abortions. The hypocrisy of Republicans and conservatives and alleged religious figures who now hold power over the lives of women is epic.
I want to know how many of them either had abortions or impregnated women who had abortions as a result of their producing an unwanted pregnancy, especially those who encouraged or coerced women to have abortions. I will bet there are more than a few of them and I hope they are exposed. When they are taking the very public actions they are, with the power they have, they have no right to privacy on those matters.
EXPOSE THE HYPOCRISY.
So one of the certain effects of the actions that Trump and Republicans in the Congress and in state legislatures will be an increase in abortions not a decrease. Which is a point which should always be made whenever these things are being discussed.
And, it must be included, they are the ones who are always attacking the availability of health care for women who do want to carry pregnancies to term, give birth and raise children. They are the very people who will, in fact, be throwing millions of such women and their children off of health coverage.
For them to put a man in the presidency who has made screwing around outside of marriage one of his hall marks, the hypocrisy of the certain retort - stated or not - that women who don't want to be pregnant shouldn't have sex has to be exposed as totally and absolutely discrediting of them. All of the sex lives of all of the opponents of women having access to full medical care, especially that involving reproductive rights is absolutely fair to bring up. Considering that all of those in the Executive Branch, in Congress and on the federal courts HAVE FULL PUBLIC HEALTH CARE AVAILABLE TO THEM it is our right to do so. It was always an ever recurring theme that men and women who were some of the loudest opponents of legal abortion had, themselves, either had abortions or had encouraged women they'd impregnated to have abortions. The hypocrisy of Republicans and conservatives and alleged religious figures who now hold power over the lives of women is epic.
I want to know how many of them either had abortions or impregnated women who had abortions as a result of their producing an unwanted pregnancy, especially those who encouraged or coerced women to have abortions. I will bet there are more than a few of them and I hope they are exposed. When they are taking the very public actions they are, with the power they have, they have no right to privacy on those matters.
EXPOSE THE HYPOCRISY.
Sunday, January 22, 2017
Sunday Night Radio Drama - Arch Oboler - The Family Nagachi
Right after the war when Arch Oboler wrote and produced this play for the first of his series of plays, the internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry was not a popular topic. Arch Oboler stood just over five feet tall but he had more courage than the bully boys all put together. Again, the theme is appropriate to the beginning of the Trump regime.
This site gives what I assume is the cast, though it would appear not one of them is Asian, that's something I would guess would be different if he were doing it today.
As I am typing this NPR has on some jerk saying that Black Lives Matter is the equivalent of the neo-Nazi =, KKK "alt-right". I believe it's the Wall Street Journal "My Share of Plutocrat Money Matters" figurehead, Jason Riley, saying it. The guy is scum.
NPR deserves to die. I'd rather have local public stations going back to editing their own news reporting to be broadcast between long stretches of classical music disc jockeying.
Update: And now they've got neo-Nazi, white supremacist Pat Buchanan on. And now he's promoting Trump's puppet master, the greatest sponsor of neo-Nazism in the world, Putin. NPR deserves to die.
NPR deserves to die. I'd rather have local public stations going back to editing their own news reporting to be broadcast between long stretches of classical music disc jockeying.
Update: And now they've got neo-Nazi, white supremacist Pat Buchanan on. And now he's promoting Trump's puppet master, the greatest sponsor of neo-Nazism in the world, Putin. NPR deserves to die.
The Unspeakable Truth
There is no chance for egalitarian democracy to recover or even survive as long as the law of the United States - as imposed by the Supreme Court, not by legislation - refuses to say that lies are not to be protected, that refuses to admit that lies are a danger to freedom and democracy and that a democratic country has an interest in their suppression and that the truth, not lies, are what deserve the kind of protection mentioned in the tragically truncated First Amendment.
Democracy will always be endangered when ideological groups which deny the political equality of all people, which rank people on a scale of value, that calls for the dehumanization of some people, the denial of the existence of the rights of some people, which advocates the violent oppression and even destruction of entire groups of people are treated the same way, by law, as the most benevolent of egalitarian groups which promote equality, democracy and a peaceful decent life. The idiocy that refuses to make that distinction and which allows the spread of those anti-democratic ideologies through media amplified hate-talk - again, mostly permitted by the courts, not legislatures - has been what has driven the United States into the arms of Vladimir Putin in the form of the most overt hate-talker ever allowed to occupy the presidency by our defective Constitution in our modern history. You have to go back to the worst days of Jim Crow, genocide against the Native population of North America to find this kind of a horror show as our chief executive.
Our Constitution, especially as twisted by the Supreme Court at its frequent worst, is in basic need of major revision to protect the possibility of egalitarian democracy - egalitarian democracy being the only kind that deserves to use that word. Just because someone wins the most votes in the disgusting Electoral College con job, that doesn't mean the results are democratic, as we saw last November, it has a number of times meant the opposite.
Democracy will always be endangered when ideological groups which deny the political equality of all people, which rank people on a scale of value, that calls for the dehumanization of some people, the denial of the existence of the rights of some people, which advocates the violent oppression and even destruction of entire groups of people are treated the same way, by law, as the most benevolent of egalitarian groups which promote equality, democracy and a peaceful decent life. The idiocy that refuses to make that distinction and which allows the spread of those anti-democratic ideologies through media amplified hate-talk - again, mostly permitted by the courts, not legislatures - has been what has driven the United States into the arms of Vladimir Putin in the form of the most overt hate-talker ever allowed to occupy the presidency by our defective Constitution in our modern history. You have to go back to the worst days of Jim Crow, genocide against the Native population of North America to find this kind of a horror show as our chief executive.
Our Constitution, especially as twisted by the Supreme Court at its frequent worst, is in basic need of major revision to protect the possibility of egalitarian democracy - egalitarian democracy being the only kind that deserves to use that word. Just because someone wins the most votes in the disgusting Electoral College con job, that doesn't mean the results are democratic, as we saw last November, it has a number of times meant the opposite.
Saturday, January 21, 2017
Extra-Feature - Arch Oboler - The Bathysphere
Another classic from one of the best of the original generation of radio dramatists. Originally a play in response to the megalomaniac dictators of the 30s and 40s. Here's one online description of the original production of the play.
Aired on Arch Oboler's Plays soon after World War II broke out in Europe. Two outstanding acting performances (Hans Conried and George Zucco) lend crucial believability to a contrived premise in which the oppressed is allowed to confront the oppressor (a favorite device of Oboler's propaganda plays), clarifying their opposing views in the process.
This is a production from 1964.
It's another one appropriate to the megalomaniacal Trump regime we are going into.
Second Feature - From A Story By George G. Toudouze adapted by James Poe - Three Skeleton Key
Vincent Price
John Dehner
Ben Wright
Not sure exactly why this seems to be such an appropriate story for the beginning of the Trump Pretendency, their paranoia, certainly, the absurdity of the merely plausible sense of fear it creates in its intended audience....
Anyway, it's considered a classic of radio drama, it was produced at least five times in different productions for radio, I think Vincent Price was involved with most of them.
Here's an earlier one that some people like better from 1950.
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