"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed "

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .

So said Thomas Jefferson, a claim of the basis of legitimate government that the signers of the Declaration of Independence put their names to and which has been ratified in any number of ways - however observed at least as much in the breech as in the observance as soon as the Revolution that the document started was won by those who sought independence for the thirteen colonies.

I am going to be doing something that I have at best no business getting involved in, though in reality some interest in, writing about the issue of abortion and how it has and is going to continue to play the role of a sticking point in American politics, perhaps the pivotal one in turning elections in the United States, certainly in the Senate, to Republican-fascism.

That issue doesn't properly appertain to me because I am a man and abortion is an issue that does not directly impinge on the life and body of any man. Only women become pregnant, only women either need or want to end a pregnancy, only women have abortions. Only women are governed by laws on abortion, men are not governed by those laws, arguably doctors who provide abortion may have a minor, secondary legitimate interest in those laws but those laws do not regulate or determine the most intimate aspects of their lives, their own bodies. Just as I think the legitimate right of the state to regulate things stops at a person's own body, the legitimate interest of the individual to determine what other adults do in their bodies stops there as well. 

 

That statement I made the title of this piece, when those men said "among Men" they really meant men, there is no reason we should limit the meaning of it in the same way.  We certainly know better than they did, just one of the advantages of time and learning from hard experience which the "originalists" think we're supposed to ignore for all time. 

 

Abortion does, though, have an enormous effect in who wins elections in the United States, the people who comprise the legislatures and executive branches of the federal and state governments, and, so, in that way all of us have an interest in the issue and how it is thought about.  I don't think most people think about it in a particularly productive way, that is as true for those who favor abortion being legal and those who oppose it.  Abortion as an issue has not gone away despite the large majority of Americans favoring the legality of abortion anymore than there is any real prospect of the Republican-fascist packed court really overturning abortion except in those states where people imagine they want it to be illegal.  I suspect that if the Supreme Court did overturn it and many states made it illegal, the effect may not be what the opponents of abortion believe it will be.  I remember when abortion was uniformly illegal, very illegal.  There were many abortions and there were many women injured and killed by them, many women who endured terrible ordeals.  Making abortion illegal has never ended abortions, it has only made them dangerous, deadly and the business of organized crime.  I don't remember the churches much being bothered by that, for reasons I'll get into. 

That phrase that I am certain any American who has any awareness of the Declaration of Independence or who holds with American democracy will certainly agree with, Jefferson's definition of legitimate governance, I certainly do agree with. He would have gone down through history as a far greater man if he had consistently held with it in his life and his career as a politician, though he would certainly have had to have had far larger numbers of American voters who would have practiced what they no doubt professed in so far as that idealistic statement claimed was a self-evident truth.  That majority or plurality was not to be found in 18th or early 19th century America, it's hardly reliably decisive in elections today.

But, then, the even more self-evident truth that only women are governed by any law made in regard to abortion and so THEY are the ones whose just consent to any such law is required to make any law in regard to abortion and that men, who cannot have abortions, cannot have the same standing to consent to laws made in regard to abortion as women do, those self-evident truths hardly make it into the discussion of abortion laws.

The Catholic Church, the Southern Baptists (whose shifting position on abortion is a whole epoch in hypocrisy, in itself) and other churches which presume to dictate the morality of abortion are entirely under the control of men.  Especially in the Catholic Church that issues is essential in understanding, among other things, why a majority of Catholic Lay People do not agree with the central authority of the Church. The glacial pace of inclusion of women in the effective decision making in the Catholic Church is so far behind that it is big news that Pope Francis has appointed exactly one woman in the entire history of the Church to have that kind of role and as of the other day it wasn't clear that the one Religious Sister he appointed will have equal voting rights with the men on that body. Clearly, women's' voices are not part of the decision making on much of any issues in the Catholic Church, that this one woman's appointment is world-wide news shows that in no way have women as a whole have never given just consent on any issue, never mind those issues that either entirely or almost entirely concern them, their lives and their bodies. In no way can any such laws, whether made by the hierarchy of any religion or secular government have the level of legitimacy that I have no doubt if you caught them unaware and put the question to them, every single cardinal, bishop, priest in the United States or throughout most of the world would assert is the very definition of legitimacy in governance or law.

The line that the Church is not a democracy is often recited by those who have no problem with it being an oligarchy or autocracy of men, of unmarried men, of men who have consciously and deliberately excluded women from decision making and law making from time immemorial.  If God didn't intend the Church to be a democracy, there is no evidence God intended it to be an autocracy, either.

The history of the United States is most comprehensible as a struggle between the words of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, the promises of equality and democracy made in it to those they sought to fight their war of independence, if you overlook the racist slanders against the Native People and some other passages of it, and the successful attempt by the slave power, the wealthy and the advantaged to renig on those promises and to install inequality and anti-democracy within the Constitution. The entire struggle for justice in the United States, the only thing that is great in our history and in our country is a struggle for the principle that government is legitimate only when it is a product of the consent of those who it governs. ALL OF US.

The United States has no state religion, its government is a secular one, something it must be to establish its egalitarian nature in a religiously diverse country. It has no higher authority than the will of The People, the just consent of those it governs. The struggle against slavery, against the genocide of the Native People, against the denial of the vote to women, the rights of workers to the product of their work, all of the many rights all of that is a struggle against the Constitution and, as The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. noted, it is The People who are deprived of justice calling the promissory note that was written and signed in July 1776 with a demand that the debt be paid. Any politician who has any legitimacy has taken it upon himself or herself to be answerable to The People on an equal basis. The churches may declare that they are not democracies and be satisfied with that, the American government should not have the luxury of not noting that any such church which excludes women from decisive decision making are not, by the definition of American democracy legitimate deciders of those decisions and dogmas and doctrines that impinge exclusively on women. The US Catholic Conference of Bishops have no moral standing to make those decisions and try to force them on the government and so, The People, of the United States. They may have standing to do so in other areas WHICH DO NOT EXCLUSIVELY APPERTAIN TO A HALF OF THE POPULATION WHICH THE BISHOPS EXCLUDE FROM DECISION MAKING, but not in the matter of abortion, by their own choice. 

I don't think there can be any just law making in regard to abortion if the fact that women are the ones governed by them is not the decisive factor in making those laws.

Anti-president Trump As The Mar A Lago Anti-pope of America's Flawed Democracy

DUE TO the wi-fi problem on my street, I was thinking of not writing anything this morning but I came across this article by Jamie Manson and was struck by this passage:

The church is in a remarkable position, one that it hasn't been in for centuries. We have a scenario that is akin to the rise of an anti-pope.

As most of us remember from high school history class, during the Western Schism, which began in 1378, there was a pope in Rome and an anti-pope in Avignon, France. But there was also a second anti-pope who took up residence in Pisa, Italy. The first Pisan anti-pope was Alexander V. He died early in his reign and was succeeded by another anti-pope, who, believe it or not, took the name John XXIII.

There have been more than 30 antipopes in the Catholic Church's history, and they typically had factions behind them who questioned the validity of the election of the pope in Rome.

Regardless of how cognizant Benedict is of what is going on around him, he has a vocal, well-oiled faction of radically traditionalist Catholics who do not accept the authority of the current supreme pontiff.

This widening fissure in the church is, of course, what comes with vesting one man with absolute, unchecked, quasi-divine power.

As can be seen from the scandalous behavior of traditionalist Catholic bishops and cardinals, Dolan, Burke, Strickland, and a large number of other American and even foreign cardinals, bishops, even priests, many of the same who have tried to set up the retired pope, Benedict XVI as an anti-pope as an assertion of the illegitimacy of good Pope Francis, are as all in on setting up Trump as an anti-president. Nothing much good came of the anti-popes of history, some of them were as corrupt as the worst in-Vatican Popes but few of them could outdo Donald Trump in his lavish corrupt depravity. While I have been extremely critical of Benedict XVI from even before he became Pope, minus the red shoes he loved to wear and his choices in other matters, he couldn't come close to Trump in corruption and vulgar disregard of Christianity.

I had thought I might comment on the substance of the article that passage comes from but I will wait to do that. I thought this should be pointed out.  I think calling Trump the anti-pope would stick in the craw of the Republican-fascists among "catholic" neo-integralists (that's Catholic talk for "white evangelicals" among us) but it would take some explanation for most people, including many Catholics who probably never heard of the anti-popes.  Calling him "anti-president" in lower case is probably more effective.

Hate Mail - Who Cares If You Don't Listen?

That's the thing, I post these radio dramas because I love the form, you can walk around doing housework while they're on instead of vegetating on the couch, you can get up and exercise while they're on, the pictures are always right because you make them in your mind, the work is closer to the authors' intention and the range of work is so much broader than you get on TV and way, way, way broader than you'll get in the movies.  You lose so much more when you've got to pay for pictures and costumes and sets and locations.

You can listen or not,  I don't care I POST THEM BECAUSE I LIKE THEM.  If other people do, I love sharing.  I want everyone to have good things.  If one other person likes it, that's worth doing this.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Vivienne Harvey - DCI Stone - Blood

 

When sixteen year-old Jackson Bennett becomes the fourth teenager murdered on the notorious Bridgeton Estate, DCI Stone vows to bring his devastated family justice. Confronted with a case with no witnesses and a community with an inherent distrust of the police, Stone finds his priorities challenged as he struggles to catch a killer and reclaim the increasingly lawless estate. 

 DCI John Stone...Hugo Speer 

DS Sue Kelly...Deborah McAndrew 

Kenny McQueen...Gary Lewis 

Damien...Luke Broughton Danny...Luke Broughton

 Liza...Hollie-Jay 

Bowes Directed by Nadia Molinari.

 

I do like DCI Stone most of the time, though I hate leaning so heavily on one source for this. 

I'm not having a lot of luck in my searching for other things I want to post these days, partly because finding gems among the trash takes time that I don't have (damned wi-fi is still going in and out) and radio drama takes time, partly because I've had a lot of trouble with my hearing due to just one more joy of getting old, excessive ear wax.  I've learned more about ear wax and how disgusting it can be in the last week than I'd known in the past sixty years.  I'm desperate, I've started Lent early to see if a diet change will help. 

Why I Am In Favor Of "Cancelling" Republican-fascism In The Wake Of Trump's Attempt To Destroy American Democracy

WHAT is amusing about the screams of Republican-fascists of "cancel culture" is that they were the original practitioners of "cancel culture" in American during the 20th century.  They were the ones who put anarchists, communists, socialists in prison for publishing stuff they didn't like during the First World War and after, they were the ones who booted one of the few arguably great figures of American Socialism, Victor Berger out of the House of Representatives, the House going far beyond what has been done to the thug Marjorie Taylor Greene.  They were the ones who pretty much ran the red-scares, the blacklists, HUAC and the persecution of communists and those who were accused of communism and the usefully vague category of "fellow travelers" in the 40s-60s.  

Much of the stupidest of "free speech-press" advocacy was done in a reaction to conservative, capitalist, Republican and, now, Republican-fascist suppression of speech and publication and sending literature through the mail as well as getting it kicked off of the radio, TV and movies.   

I fell for that "free speech-press" stuff as did anti-anti-communists, because the anti-communist side was so full of American fascists (white supremacists and segregationists) and capitalists and opportunistic sons of bitches (the ideological grandparents of Cruz, Hawley, Jordan, Greene, etc.) I fell for it hard, along with the self-interested and opportunistic mythology that arose around the innocent victims of the red scares and purges and black-lists, though those who I really had and have affection for were mostly figures in show business who were hardly political, Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford.   

Far less appropriate figures whose passion narratives I was sold were the actual Communists who were mostly full blown Stalinists, whose moral character is indistinguishable from those who were full blown Nazis.  I have come to the point where I have no problem with the suppression of Stalinism anymore than I would the suppression of Nazism. That is as true today as it would have been if I had thought as hard about the meaning of the history of the 20th century dictatorships as I have since done.   I have no problem with that being "cancelled" kept off the air-waves, kept off the internet, kept out of the movies, or out of the US Mail.  I have no problem with people who favor that being held up to the disdain and derision it deserves.  Even those dear old commies of Hollywood-Broadway lore.  Though anything they happen to write or say or act which does not promote anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic ideology should not be suppressed, certainly not by the government, the only entity covered and prohibited by the First Amendment.

ANYONE WHO BELIEVES THAT THE SUPPORTERS OF GENOCIDAL, OPPRESSIVE GANGSTER REGIMES OF ANY IDEOLOGICAL PRETENTIONS HAVE A RIGHT TO TRY TO OVERTURN EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY IS AN ENEMY OF EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY, I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH SUPPRESSING THEIR PROMOTION OF THEIR IDEOLOGY. 

I have no problem with the "cancelling" or suppression of our domestic fascists, white supremacists, Republican-fascists and other enemies of egalitarian democracy, I AM A GREAT BIG SUPPORTER OF THE TOTAL SUPPRESSION OF FASCISM, NEO NAZISM, COMMUNISM AS THEY ATTEMPT TO GAIN POWER TO DESTROY EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY.   I am as big a supporter of the suppression of the total idiocy of anarchism because there is no faster route to gangster fascism than the lack of democratically controlled civil authority INCLUDING A WELL REGULATED POLICE FORCE AND MILITARY.    Reading the early writings of the anarchists, what would become fascists and Nazis and many of the early communists and socialists, tracing the evolution of those who held those ideological positions as they transitioned, often going from Marxist to fascist or Republican-fascist, in some cases right on to neo-Nazism gives you pause in believing the claims that they are really ideological opposites instead of the mere rivals in anti-democracy they are.   Reading Emma Goldman in her own words, in full, as was made possible by going online and reading her actual words, was a shocking and complete eye-opener for me.  Especially her adoration of the proto-Nazi, proto-fascist Nietzsche explicitly due to his negation of morality.   She was hardly a believer in equality, she was a friggin' snob and a total idiot untethered from reality.   And she was hardly the only one.  

I have pointed out before that I think the old-fashioned linear graph of political identity that has Nazism on one end and Communism on the other, with various other named ideologies working back or forward to a center of "democracy" is entirely wrong.  There are anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic promotions of gangsterism as government and there is egalitarian democracy.  Anything that isn't egalitarian democracy is merely, to one extent or another, the promotion of gangsterism, whether that be a medieval monarchy, an imperial system, the "dictatorship of the proletariat (yeah, right) or some form of fascism or Nazism.

Well, by conviction and by declaration I am a radical egalitarian democrat, I hold it to be the only really legitimate government, all others are not legitimate, the extent to which a democracy deviates from egalitarianism is the extent to which it is illegitimate, as can be seen in the Republican-fascist suppression of voter equality, that form of "democracy" is rampant under our antiquated Constitution.  

I hold that We The People have a right to have egalitarian democracy protected from liars and con men and decievers who would exploit our worst character flaws and fears to con us out of egalitarian democracy, that is what the entire Trump phenomonon was, a warning as to how susceptible American democracy is to that and our own domestic, longstanding and wildly successful indigenous fascist tradition.  A tradition that goes right back to the First and Second Continental Congresses, which is embedded in our Constitution by the self-interest of the slave holders and the Northern financial powers.  Due to that legal power and the longstanding habits of the American nation, those are the gangsters who will succeed where the meat-headed Marxists never had or will have a chance here.  We have every right to cancel their chances to do that again through the media WE OWE IT TO OURSELVES, TO EACH OTHER, TO OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN, NIECES AND NEPHEWS TO SUPPRESS ALL ENEMIES OF EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY, IT IS A MORAL DUTY THAT OUT WEIGHS THE IDIOTICALLY INADEQUATE LANGUAGE OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT.

Wha'd Ya Mean "the superstitions of the various sects of psychology"

In psychology it is a commonplace to glorify him [Gustave Theodore Fechner] as the first user of experimental methods, and the first aimer at exactitude in facts. In cosmology he is known as the author of a system of evolution which, while taking great account of physical details and mechanical conceptions, makes consciousness correlative to and coeval with the whole physical world.

 

William James, 1904 Introduction to the English translation of  Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode

 

Of all those who hold a faith in materialism and scientism, admitted or not, those who believe in psychology have, in my experience, a place second only to those who believe in Darwinism in their irrational and information resistant anger when someone who does not share their faith expresses his skepticism and doubt. I've gone way past skepticism in the matter of the "social sciences" to outright conviction that their status as sciences is wrong, dangerous and inappropriate and it always was. Other than a few discoveries and things that are better considered possible hints of the connection of physiology with our consciousness than solid facts such as are found in physics and chemistry, the entire history of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and, Lord save us, these days economics, are far better treated as lore with all the dangers of condescension for the proclamations of such of those who make proclamations. If you think that's exaggerated, look at the past years assertions of "Darwinian economics, in advising the Trump regime and that in Sweden on how to manage the pandemic and the recently self-promoted editorial on the same of that Harvard meat head of way too much influence, Larry Summers. 

 

The longer I read into the origins of the social sciences the more I think they are an (often ignorantly performed) act of ideological assertion and, in their history in universities and elsewhere, hegemony. First, perhaps in Germany and from their eminence in late 18th and 19th century, spread to the English speaking academic world. 

 

Here is one of the times William James, speaking as a founder of academic psychology in English language universities declared by fiat something I think he, by the time of 1904, may have wished to revise.

 

Psychology is to be treated as a natural science in this book. This requires a word of commentary. Most thinkers have a faith that at bottom there is but one Science of all things, and that until all is known, no one thing can be completely known. Such a science, if realized, would be Philosophy. Meanwhile it is far from being realized; and instead of it, we have a lot of beginnings of knowledge made in different places, and kept separate from each other merely for practical convenience' sake, until with later growth they may run into one body of Truth. These provisional beginnings of learning we call 'the Sciences' in the plural. In order not to be unwieldy, every such science has to stick to its own arbitrarily-selected problems, and to ignore all others. Every science thus accepts certain data unquestioningly, leaving it to the other parts of Philosophy{2} to scrutinize their significance and truth. All the natural sciences, for example, in spite of the fact that farther reflection leads to Idealism, assume that a world of matter exists altogether independently of the perceiving mind. Mechanical Science assumes this matter to have 'mass' and to exert 'force,' defining these terms merely phenomenally, and not troubling itself about certain unintelligibilities which they present on nearer reflection. Motion similarly is assumed by mechanical science to exist independently of the mind, in spite of the difficulties involved in the assumption. So Physics assumes atoms, action at a distance, etc., uncritically; Chemistry uncritically adopts all the data of Physics; and Physiology adopts those of Chemistry. Psychology as a natural science deals with things in the same partial and provisional way. In addition to the 'material world' with all its determinations, which the other sciences of nature assume, she assumes additional data peculiarly her own, and leaves it to more developed parts of Philosophy to test their ulterior significance and truth. 

 

William James: Psychology 1892

 

There is so much to unpack in only this one passage that demonstrates THAT THE ENTIRE ENTERPRISE OF THE EXTENSION OF SCIENCE PAST WHERE ITS METHODS COULD GO that it would take a whole series of posts just to get to the second layer of the problem. I think it's possible to locate the origin of the problem in this statement about the general culture of academic Western thought then and, probably bereft of training in philosophy among most holding credentials in most fields, far more so today.

 

Most thinkers have a faith that at bottom there is but one Science of all things 

This is a faith upon which both materialism and scientism are based, a faith which is generally entered into for an ulterior purpose, quite often that of atheism, or the desire that the entirety of the universe be knowable using familiar methods that are, in any case, intrinsically bound up with the abilities of people and, quite possibly, mitigated by our own biological limits as further complicated by the conditions of the consciousness which bounds our experience and our capacity to think about anything.  Though it is true that even religious believers or skeptics of materialism can share in that faith as much as the most hard bitten 19th century style materialist would.

 

Why they should think that is inextricably bound up in the success of physics and chemistry and to a far lesser extent in other areas of study which are susceptible to the most basic methods of science, careful observation, careful measurement and careful analysis and thinking about AND MAKING CLAIMS ABOUT what is observed and measured. Why anyone should conclude from that that things which cannot be subjected to those methods could be believed to follow the same regularities that are discovered by science is certainly a matter of faith, and as I said yesterday, what people believe is WHAT THEY CHOOSE TO BELIEVE.  

 

What is, in fact, the basis of the extension of what is ideally the limited and modest - though powerful - successes in the exact physical sciences were applicable to the enormously complex and largely unknowable experience of consciousness, what William James admitted in this same passage is the entirely unknowable consciouness of other beings who cannot articulate their experiences to us (as if people are really good at that, either)  and even more irrationally the far more complex phenomena of human societies and even extending to allegations about what people "think en masse" and the only slightly more observable or measurable phenomena of what they do when considered as a whole (both of those as a "thing" being fictions). 

 

There never was any reason to believe that there was any basic law that could be discovered by scientific method to make verifiable or refutable predictions to study human minds, human actions, human interactions on an individual or, greatly multiplying the variables and problems, small groups or entire societies and nations of people. That was all a matter of faith, for example, that of August Comte (often credited as the founder of sociology) whose lavishly bizarre materialism should have been a warning that he'd climbed up a nut tree instead of the one with such dangerous fruit as is found in the lore of Genesis 2 the fruit of which God warned against eating.  Only that tree is generally considered to be explanatory lore by thinking people of faith, that of Compt and his like are to be treated as a natural science by those who deny they hold any faith. 

I've long thought that William James was way too good a philosopher to have fallen for the building claims of psychology while realizing why someone like him may have done it.  I don't know the extent to which he was aware of Freud's bizarre declarations of our minds as minefields of irrationality WHICH IN ITSELF SHOULD HAVE LED TO THE CONCLUSION THAT ANY SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF IT WAS A SELF-CONTRADICTION, but I suspect he may have regretted his work in it by the end of his life.  But this is about the start of the problem, not the total mess that the "science" of psychology has been up to now, including the disastrous attempts to verify the published claims of psychologists in the past decade and earlier, the problems of non-verifiability, of appallingly bad methodologies and lavishly made claims published as science, and everything else that more than confirms the problems that will arise when corners are cut and liberties taken in the name of science. Considering the history of psychology after William James, not to mention that of modern physics, I think the same naive faith promoted in this paragraph can be seen in the end of it.

So Physics assumes atoms, action at a distance, etc., uncritically; Chemistry uncritically adopts all the data of Physics; and Physiology adopts those of Chemistry. Psychology as a natural science deals with things in the same partial and provisional way. In addition to the 'material world' with all its determinations, which the other sciences of nature assume, she assumes additional data peculiarly her own, and leaves it to more developed parts of Philosophy to test their ulterior significance and truth. 

There is no way to reliably make that leap from the observable and physical to the unobservable, unverifiably attested to experience of consciousness, which, if we can make one reliable assumption is that even the person experiencing it will not be good at trying to make an honest description of it AND THERE IS NO WAY TO VERIFY IF THEY ARE BEING ACCURATE OR HONEST IN THEIR DESCRIPTION OF THEIR INTERNAL EXPERIENCE.   There is no way to know if the same person would describe one event in their life the same way a week or a month or a year after they gave a first description of it, quite often time brings a different understanding of it.   If I had described something that happened when I was in 4th grade the day it happened, ten years later or today, I would expect I would have a far different understanding of it now than I did then, though the experience was freshest then.  Which of those would be the one worthy of scientific consideration?   Which of those incidents would other people who were there describe differently?  Which of those different incidents deserves scientific consideration as accurate?  

I think Fechner, William James and the rest of them may have found some interesting and perhaps useful things in some of the more basic measurements of human perception but those are a very limited thing and hardly universal.  But other than easily reportable and verifiable matters of basic perception of things like the numbers of dots on a piece of paper (where the dots could be counted and arranged reliably) and other things which are about human perception of a verifiable thing, psychology very fast goes totally beyond any reliable claims.  It is quasi-scientific at its most reliable, it quickly becomes dogmatic materialistic, scientistic faith after that.  Where the thing perceived cannot be reliably limited, described, controlled, they are trying to observe and measure the unknowable and the unreliably reported, it is a total fraud as is found when its claims are rigorously tested.   I certainly think it is extremely dangerous to accept the claims of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists or, Lord help us, economists within the application of the law, giving their pronouncements power to decide life and death.

If Actions Speak Louder Than Words Words Should Count More Than The Invisible Unverifiable Beliefs Of Serial Liars etc.

"I was allowed to believe things that weren't true."

MAGA Marge (Q Georgia) is taking advantage of the ubiquitous superstition that what we believe is not our choice when that is, in fact, how we come to believe things, through our choice.   I have wondered if there was a time before people chose to get sold on the superstitions of the various sects of psychology when people were expected to take responsibility for what they claimed was real, how they acted, how they felt, things that now are commonly believed to happen apart from our own acts of choice but I don't have the time to chase down enough evidence to make an argument that I could choose to accept or reject.   

Menteuse Marge who lied as she was trying to cover her ass on the floor of the house last night is matched in her resort to that superstition that she didn't choose to push lies that she liked through involuntary compulsion by the exoneration of Trump because it's claimed he believed the lies he incited insurrection and sedition with and so that makes what he did OK.  I have every confidence that the law of the United States and in the Anglo-American tradition has been so corrupted by that kind of permissiveness which is doled out to those who are advantaged and most certainly is not given to those of the underclass and unfavored people, will allow Trump out of the most criminal thing short of fomenting a war based on lies ever done by an American president based on his unknowable mental state.   For that we have nothing but his own claim and as everything he says is a lie, there is no reliable means of ascertaining whether or not his believing the lie is one of the few true things he's ever said.   

I've been entertaining myself by re-reading the Rumpole stories this past week, it was a mistake, the charm is gone, but one thing you do get is a more skeptical view of the legal system and the absurd belief that judges are any better at being impartial and fair than the general run of humanity.    For every judge who has stood up to Republican-fascism or, if not exactly to that then for the law as it's supposed to be, there are judges who allow obviously guilty insurrectionist real estate sellers to go to Mexico on a planned vacation or allows a legally adult neo-Nazi killer to violate their bail, repeatedly and to permit his lawyers to withhold information that they are required to give.  I think any judge who allowed any of the insurrectionists out while awaiting trial should be reviewed for possible removal from their positions.   As has been endlessly pointed out the entitled white criminals of the Trump mob have been given a different standard of justice than they would have been if they were black, accused and eventually, after months or even years in prison, found to be INNOCENT.   

Sometime during the demonstrations against police murder of Black men and women, I heard an interview with a young Black Woman being interviewed who did a very good, very accurate review of just a few of the outrageous wrongs done to Black People and she said that white people were lucky that Black people only wanted justice and not revenge.   That's the fire this time, that's the fire that had better be tended and what caused it addressed because there will be a fire next time fed by injustice.  Just as on the other end of justice, letting the Marjorie Taylor Greenes, the Trumpist fascists, the Republican-fascists, the Proud Boys the AmericaNazis of white supremacy to get off so easily as Trump and Taylor Greene expect to see a repeat of the Trump insurrection, only worse, stronger, more highly financed by billionaires and Hollywood millionaires ( I hope Little Ricky Schroeder finds himself unable to get work) and their foreign gangster allies, more skillfully gaming our broken, corrupt Constitution and the state the law is left in by precedent.    

There should be no more (R) after Republican-fascists in office, it should be (Q) from here on in.  EVERYONE WHO REMAINS IN THAT PARTY SHOULD WEAR IT, EVEN THOSE WHO VOTED TO KICK THAT QPUBLICAN OFF HER COMMITTEES.   The whole party is to blame, the old-money-"principled conservatives" as much as the Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Tommy Tubberville, Cruz and Hawley faction of it.   There are no "votes of conscience" that make up for the rest of their support for the support network of Republican-fascism that props up the overt Nazis.  

If we buy the nonsense that someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn't choose to believe what she believes, or claims to believe,that it is an involuntary act, then those who bask in the media driven sanctimony regarding their "votes of conscience" such as Susan Collins has been given on the rare occasion she cast an impotent vote of conscience that meant nothing.   They shouldn't get any praise for it, no more than MTG should be allowed to skate by consequences for her allegedly involuntary mental state and the actions that come from it. 

TO HELL WITH THE POSES  OF MORALITY FROM REPUBLICAN "MODERATES" AS THINGS HAVE DEVELOPED THEY AREN'T ANY BETTER THAN "GOOD GERMANS".   Certainly to hell with those who didn't vote to remove MTG from her committees or those who vote to let Mo Brooks, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, etc. off.  

John Danforth Does His Interpretation Of The Susan Collins Double Talking Two Step

 John Danforth, the rich dog food heir, former Republican senator, sponsor of Clarence Thomas, slanderer of Anita Hill, sponsor of Josh Hawley - before he belatedly figured he'd better dump his protegee once he involved himself in an insurrection is welcome to eat dirt and go to hell as far as I'm concerned.

I might agree that there are conservative, former Republicans who have done more than merely bemoan what their (only sometimes former) party has become, what it has done, some have actually earned something like my respect, though I wonder what took them so long, I saw this coming decades back.   But anyone who remains in that disgusting cult, anyone who lies about its recent past as if it was any better during the Brooks Bros. - Rehnquist Court putsch that put Bush II and Liz Cheney's father in office through the machinations of Jeb Bush and the corrupt election in Florida in 2000 and before as  Bush I was pardoning a raft of conservative Republicans to protect his own ass from criminal charges shows that they were all in on corruption up till it reached the Trump phase of rot.   John Danforth, ordained Episcopal priest, is one of the bigger hypocrites, that is clear from the fact that he was supporting the rich-boy fascist - who it was clear was a fascist - as he was an up and commer, as he promoted and sponsored Clarence Thomas, clearly a psychotic, Black-hating tool of a merely more seemingly genteel form, as he perjured his way onto the Supreme Court.

There Is No Such Thing As A Decent Republican In 2021 They Have Been On This Trajectory Since The 1950s.

I suppose I shouldn't complain about the internet service on my road being screwed up, there's a teacher on the road who's having to deal with that while teaching remotely.  She may have to go somewhere else to set up, all I have to do is grit my teeth as I'm prevented from doing online research for this pro-bono writing I attempt. 

Though I have found I'm still exhausted from the past year, maybe it's just as well that I haven't been writing thousand + word diatribes. 

In the little listening I have been doing through pirates of MSNBC, Chris Hayes raised one of the best issues I've seen raised in the last four years. It was riffing off of a quote from the Chamber of Commerce, Wall St. Republican Senator John Thune from one of the worst white supremacist states, South Dakota, he asked, 

"Do they want to be the party of limited government and fiscal responsibility, free markets, peace through strength and pro-life or do they want to the be party of conspiracy theories and QAnon?"

 

Chris Hayes, correctly, points out that no one, not even the Republican base wants that, which, due to it being tried and flopping, screwing the Republicans own rural racist base to the extent that Donald Trump hammered Jeb Bush to pieces in 2016, the Republican Party is, in fact and not idiotic "conservative theory" the party of white-supremacy and insurrection and is just fine with Marjorie Taylor Greene and QAnon, Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, etc. because they are motivated by their racism and their hatred and their largely whipped up media driven resentment in which they blame all the wrong people, exactly as the corporate media planned over the past sixty years. 

 

There are no decent Republicans in 2021. Not Liz Cheney, not Adam Kinzinger, not Lisa Murkowski or Mitt Romney. The last two got together with the disgusting fraud Susan Collins to try to destroy aid to the American People AID THAT, AS HAYES POINTS OUT IS EVEN POPULAR WITH SOME OF THE WORST REPUBLICANS BECAUSE THEY ARE DESPERATE. They may announce their disdain for the Taylor Greens, the Lauren Boeberts, maybe eventually even the Matt Gaetzs and others, but what they want is the flip side of a depraved party which is a danger to the United States. Mitt Romney has the distinction of having voted to remove Trump through conviction last year and he almost certainly will do that this year, the others not so much. 

 

As I noted recently as far back as the Republican Convention of 1964, the baseball hero Jackie Robinson was noting that the racists had taken over the Republican Party, the first one in which the white supremacists the Republicans took in as Democrats started passing civil rights for Black People and others into law, dominated the party.  His account from his memoir is worth reading and re-reading because everything that was obvious in this past election was already in place AND ON THE CONVENTION HALL FLOOR, PUT THEIR BY RACIST REPUBLICAN DELEGATES FIFTY-SIX YEARS AGO.  It was a trend that started even earlier, back in the 1940s when the Democrats really started making changes in light of the lessons from fighting Nazism.   

Anyone who is pretending that the Republican Party, a party that unites the money interests, the financier class, the increasingly tiny, flaky and work eaten stalwart Republican families that started out that way while Lincoln was still alive (hardly still extant in rural New England) and the Americanazis, the old line white supremacists, the more dangerous modern ones, often founded among the college credentialed and more amorally depraved and degenerate than the genteel racists of the Republican past.   I have had to recently point out to someone who bought his old PR that the posing elitist William F. Buckley was opposed to voting rights laws for the same reasons that today's Republicans sitting on the Supreme Court do, that Black People will vote. 

If You Will Insist

THE "new atheist" fad of the '00s wasn't really new, it was just a more superficial, TV era repeat of the old Brit style of atheism only without much if any reading or addressing anything, the leaders perhaps reviewing the writings of dear old Bertie Russell - at the high end, and what the American branch under Corliss Lamont, his alphabet soup of groups as managed by Paul Kurtz and his crappy "Prometheus" publishing company, the self discrediting CSICOP (now CSI to cover up its sTARBABY scandal) regurgitated from earlier atheists.   And that's the higher end of American-Britatheist invective.  The lower end such as was pushed by that old degenerate crook, Madalyn Murray O'Hare didn't seem to figure much in it, and she was the higher As Seen On TV end of that even lower level of old line Brit style atheism.  

I became quite a student of English language pop atheism and a little less of one in the atheist traditions of other languages over the past two decades.  I was, of course, as a typical college-educated American familiar with it, unreviewed, non-fact-checked.   I can say that of those I reviewed the most superficial was the Brit-American.  It never fact checks itself, stuff that was lied about in the 19th and 18th century is repeated and published as fact, though of every issue I looked into, none of them took long to refute.  Mostly that was the simplest, most basic matter of looking at the things cited by the atheists to see that in few if any cases did those books, articles, etc. say what they were claimed to say.  Some, such as the certainly spurious if not non-existent letters of Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine that the 19th century atheist propagandist Moncure D. Conway claimed to have read are still "cited" even though no one else seems to have ever seen them, their existence being otherwise unevidenced.   I suspect there may have been forged letters, made to sell to a rich atheist looking for such crap.  Only Conway doesn't seem to have bought them.  Or he may have just lied them into existence.  And that's only one small part of what I found when I looked for the primary documents claimed, cited and allegedly quoted.   Even the otherwise respectable atheist journalist or scholar seems to throw the most basic standards of honesty out the window when it comes to promoting their religious beliefs.  I would say as I did when I started going into that here, I couldn't care less what slaveholders like Jefferson and Madison said about Christianity, they didn't practice it.

This is all to say that the Britatheist who snarked about my piece about Thomas Aquinas never read it as she has never read a word of Aquinas.  She probably never even read something like ol' Bertie's typical Brit, anti-Catholic distortion of what he wrote, claiming that unlike that old phony Socrates, Aquinas always had a predetermined goal in his inquiry (as if Socrates ever questioned his own preferences, such as his Athenian ruling male elite snobbery.  I suspect old Bertie shared in it enough, translated to aristocratic Brit terms, so he never much noticed it permeates Socrates as Plato invented him.).  I think the Britatheist just knows that you're supposed to disdain Aquinas because he was, A. Catholic, B. not an English Catholic, C. Religious.  Her American buddies probably don't even know that much.  I wouldn't claim that current American atheists are stupider than the Brits are, just that the Brits have a more direct link to a tradition that invented the lies that get retold.

Thirty years ago I stupidly and ignorantly associated atheism with intellectualism, now I associate it with the opposite. Current atheism is a manifestation of anti-intellectualism at its most conceited.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Has The Protection Of "moderate" Republicans, All Republicans They Should Wear That Every Day

THE reason to show this is because it's a. Brian Tyler Cohen, as usual, makes good points and b. it shows the longest video of her more than merely implied threat against David Hogg, WHO WAS PUBLICLY ACKNOWLEDGED TO BE GETTING DEATH THREATS WHEN SHE DID THIS, having a crazy woman chasing him down the sidewalk as she was telling him she packs a gun with her.  What she did should be a felony, she shouldn't be allowed to own a gun, carry a gun, handle a gun under pain of being put in the booby hatch where she belongs.   Asa Hutchinson's refusal to support removing her from the Congress, the notable lack of Republicans supporting that clearly warranted move, especially considering her threats against members of the House and others, just shows that she is part of the mainstream of the Republican-fascist party, a party that she is a member of because they absorbed America's indigenous fascist class, the racist white supremacists.   It's going to be really telling if her clear antisemitism added to her racism doesn't get her thrown out just how dangerous the Republican-fascist party is.   It's not only pre-Civil Rights Amendment, it's back into the period of overt antisemitism. 

Hate Mail

 I don't care.  I'm done with all that crap.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Tony Schumacher - Fare

 

Just a normal night for a taxi driver. Hoping that the next fare will be easy and hassle free. But then a dodgy geezer and his girlfriend climb in. All attitude and matching nylon tracksuits, they pay him big money to drive around. And it turns out not to be a normal night after all. 

Cast: The Driver - Mark Womack 

Mikey - Mike Noble 

Leanne - Sade Malone 

The Kid - Sacha Parkinson 

Producer/Director - Gary Brown 

 

Kind of made me think of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Mystery Project, Midnight Cab though it's not really like that.  

What Do You Mean Gay Men Act That Way?

A number of weeks ago I came across a piece written by a gay man, a Catholic, who had decided to go from being a Christian who was in a relationship with another man, a relationship that included sexual relations, to not having sex with other people. I don't know anything much else about his life than what he said about it, I don't know how the man he was in relationship with felt about that. Anyone who chooses to not have sex with someone else as the right thing for them to do is entirely OK by me, as long as it is a matter of mutual agreement with someone they may have made prior commitments to.  

When he was giving his reasons as to why he not only chose that route for himself but was advocating it for others he said something that I can both understand and which I think oversimplifies a far more nuanced and difficult issue and which is hardly specific to gay men. He claimed that when he looked hard at the gay men he knew who were Christians, he saw little in their life choices and action that differentiated them from gay atheists or agnostics or those who called themselves "pagans" etc.

Now, I would be the first to agree that someone calling themself a Christian should lead to discernible differences in how you live your life. It is a requirement of real belief instead of mere baptized heathendom that you try to follow the Gospel, the Epistles, the Law and the Prophets. You should not lie, you should not break promises of fidelity, you should not act in ways that exploit people and endanger them, treating them like disposable objects but as representatives of God. That is especially those who by lesser strength, lesser intelligence, irrationality due to personality problems or through poverty and mere circumstance are vulnerable to those smarter, more rational, richer than they are. And certainly that includes those who are more physically powerful.

And anyone who has read much of what I have written will know that I have deeply criticized gay men, in particular, for what I assume is what this man meant by behavior which is consistent with atheism, agnosticism and "paganism". I would never go to a pride parade because from what I've seen in videos and pictures and read in articles, I can't agree with much of what I've seen celebrated in those. Treating people as sex objects, certainly high among those things, treating sadism, bondage, exploitation as acceptable lifestyle choices is an evil I have never supported and always rejected.

But my issue with what this newly chaste gay man says is that none of what he said is not as true of straight Christians, officially celibate Christians or those who are self-claimed practitioners of chastity. Straight men and women who are Catholics, married, unmarried, allegedly chaste, practice all of those sexual kinks and fetishes and practices, they break their promises, they commit adultery, they commit fornication in casual, uncommitted relationships probably in numbers that much different from gay men. What does that tell you about the moral status of straight sex and, generally, about straight sex?

Shouldn't, in light of the way straight people who do not really practice monogamous, faithful marriage mean that they are as inelligible for trying to have a moral, committed sexual relationship with a person of the opposite sex? If it's to be used to discredit gay sex, why not?

I don't know how strongly and well Lesbians are at keeping faith to the promises they make, how well they can have a committed, caring sexual relationship with another woman while not violating their obligations accepted when they considered themselves to be Christians. I know of gay men who I believe do both, though I will admit probably not as many as straight people who do. The long legacy of oppression and the relatively few years when it was possible to live in a committed, even avowed marriage is not going to be easily overcome. I think to assert, either by the "sex-positive" promoters of gay sex or anti-LGBTQ nay sayers, that such honest, faithful, committed relationships are not possible for gay men is going to hinder a time when it becomes the norm. At least as much of a norm as it is for other human groups.

And that is concentrating only on one of the general areas of moral corruption that are ubiquitious among ALL PEOPLE REGARDLESS OF THEIR GROUP IDENTITY. I don't think that gay men are any more prone to those venues of sin than heterosexuals are, many of the gay men and even more of the Lesbians I've known are far better at it than some straight folk and many, many of those who are the biggest fattest fans of mandatory chastity for LGBTQ poeple. Look at the right-wing in the Catholic hierarchy, in many of the Protestant denominations, clergy and the religious conservatives in those Christian and many other denominations. I don't think you would be likely to discern the principles of the teachings of Jesus or Paul from the lives of the "religious conservatives". Many of the worst of them are flaming pagans in their own moral observances.

 Well, the problem isn't my computer or the operating system, it's the wi-fi connection, the reason my internet use has been so spotty.  And it's not just me, people around here are having the same problem, so please bear with me. 

I Never Thought I'd Be Writing This Two Hours Ago

IT is the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, formerly (I think it's formerly but don't care enough to formally look it up) the official and required theologian of Catholic orthodoxy. I've never warmed up to Aquinas, I have to admit, finding that he was way too wedded to medieval and late classical Latin language theology and thoroughly invested in the misogyny that infects late classical and later Christianity but which I do not find nearly as present in the New Testament and not at all in the recorded words of Jesus in the Gospel. And that's only one of the things about Aquinas that leaves me cold and unconvinced.

I think that today, in 2021, the alleged allegiance to Aquinas is a pretty good indication as to whether someone is a Catholic who is also a Christian and a Catholic who is only one in some imaginary, false anti-Christian pre-Vatican II cult supported by billionaires and millionaires, the modern version of the secular potentates and monarchs who did their best to suppress Christianity, the good news for the poor, the downtrodden, the suffering, neutering the most radical of egalitarian forces, the motive of right-wing "Christianity" Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox today, including much of the clergy and leadership of those bodies and denominations.

In looking around this morning, I found this interesting sermon by Karl Rahner, one of the most prominent theologians of the 20th century. I have read any number of both accusations by right-wingers in the Catholic Church and by those who are eager and ready to move on from the 13th century as re-imagined and codified by the corrupt late Renaissance hierarchy and codified as rigid, official theology when the reaction against the Reformation gave the writings of Aquinas the status they had and may still have, to some extent. Reading it I was struck by how Rahner went past the text of Aquinas's massive Summa Theologica and other writings by pointing out the inadequacy of human theology, without exactly saying that.

"To reflect upon Thomas Aquinas as patron of theological studies does not mean merely to think back on some man in History or on his influence in Western thought. Because we are Christians, we are linked to him; we can actually see him as a fellow Christian in the community of saints. Those Christians who have gone before us into the assembly of saints are not dead; they live. They live in perfection, that is, in the true Reality which is also powerful and present among us today. Some of them we can call by name. These Christian men and women can be more real and more important I or its than theoretical principles or abstract ideas. In many ways they are even more real than we are, for they are with God. They love us; we love theta [them?]. They are present at the eternal liturgy of heaven, and intercede there for its [us?] their brothers.

In comparison to the saints' present existence, their past. history on earth is comparatively of little significance. They now live the quintessence of our life on earth in an eternal form, and the Reality in which they exist is in the last analysis the ground of all reality on earth. They do not belong to the past at all, except insofar as they have lived on earth in past history. Actually they have run ahead, hastened forward into the future, a future waiting for us. To look at a saint., then, is not. to look at something abstract or impersonal, something dead, but rather to sec a concrete person, a unique individual, once alive on earth and now eternally alive, someone who loves and praises, someone who is blessed and redeemed.

There are a number of reasons that this was interesting to me, first had nothing to do with Aquinas but with Rahner who has often been either accused (by the enemies of "modernism") of or, by Rahner's would be supporters, praised for denying the actual existence of the soul, the person after death. If he believed what was attributed to him on that count he could never have written what he did in this sermon. It is one of the most interesting ideas I've read about what the afterlife, of us dying into God, would have to mean, including the meditation worthy passages where I assume there are two serious typos in either the translation or the transcription. The perfection of love that would require us either getting beyond or seeing beyond (as we take earthly reality into account) which is required of us by the Gospel ("Love one another as I have loved you,") but which is only imperfectly possible while we are here, in the body. In line with the piece about how you might meditate on the Lord's Prayer, this matches the prayer that "they will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven," I don't think Jesus would have had us pray for what is impossible, clearly the "new heaven and new Earth" would mean that the Earth we live in is not the one of the future, no matter what N. T. Wright might say about that. If "material reality" means anything it is that the only partially realized vicissitudes which define physical reality can only support what is supported by its limitations and conditions and what is described as an eternal existence is not, under present understanding of physics, sustainable.  I think that part of currently fashionable theology is not sustainable under modern understandings of that anymore than the equality of women and the possibility of LGBTQ people living full and good lives was in 13th century understanding.

But this is supposed to be about Aquinas and the massive work of theology that he produced. Karl Rahner said at the start of his article that he had to consider Aquinas in three areas. He starts by his assumptions about Aquinas that would come from his present sainthood before discussing his life's work in relation to his life's experience.

Three things strike me about one of history's Christians, Thomas Aquinas. (1) He was a friar, a monk; (2) he was a theologian; (3) he was a mystic."

I will leave it to you to read about the brief section on the conditions that surrounded his role as a theologian but it is as a mystic that, as actually turned off by Aquinas's theology as I am, I find something that is reported about him late in life as leading me to respect him. Rahner gives a brief mention of it.

"When we speak of Thomas as a mystic we do not mean that he had frequent ecstasies or visions or that he was a little introverted or overly concerned about his own experiences. There seems to he nothing of this in his writings. Yet Thomas was a mystic. He knew about "the hidden Godhead," Adoro te devote, latens deitas (Devoutly I adore thee, hidden Deity). He knew the hidden God. He spoke of the God who pervades and determines everything in silence. He spoke of a God beyond everything holy theology could say about him. He spoke of the God he loved as inconceivable. And he knew about these things not only from theology but from the experience of his heart. He knew and experienced so much that in the end he substituted silence for theological words. He no longer wrote, and considered all that he had written to be "straw." As he lay dying, he spoke a little about the Canticle of Canticles, that great song of love, and then was silent. He became silent because he wanted to let God alone be heard in lieu of those human words he had spoken for us.

Thomas lives. He may seem far away but he is not in reality, for the community of saints is close. The saints come to us overshadowed by the brilliance of the eternal God into whom they have plummeted through the centuries. But God is not a god of the dead but of the living, and whoever has gone home to him, lives. And so Thomas lives. The question for us is: Does our faith live? For it is through our faith that Thomas can become part of our own life."

It has to stand as one of the rarest of things for an academic, a scholastic, a writer of a huge, major piece of thought that took enormous effort, both in the preparatory study and in the writing, revising, editing (with a friggin' quill pen, not a word processor or even text editor) and final draft, to then declare that his enormous, impressive, life's work is as nothing, mere "straw" something that later hierarchs would ignore as they gave that straw a status which became totalitarian in its potential oppressiveness, the opposite of the freedom which is promised to be a result of knowing the truth, why Catholic right-wingers pretend that they study and take Aquinas dead serious and apply the writings that he more or less repudiated, himself, to modern life, looking in it for means of opposing, for example, the rights of women, prisoners, workers, the poor. I think if Aquinas had any idea of the use his writings would be put to in later centuries I think he wouldn't have started to write it.

So I can think well of Thomas Aquinas but not for the reasons most people would. I disagree with much of what he wrote and I think the use that has been put to has been generally unfortunate. I honor him for that great act of humility, of honesty, of giving up everything he had, what he had created. I think in the end anyone, modern theologians as well as those of the 13th century and the fifth, need to understand that as cool as they want their thinking to be, as removed from corrupting biases and a priori considerations, we are not a party to the perfect knowledge that would be required to do that, everything we think, everything we want, everything we want to be true or feel we must hold to be true is a product of our own minds, our pasts, our own experiences and there is nothing to be done about that. It is as true for the hardest of hard science and mathematics and even more so as we deal with more complex realities than those most reputable of modern idols in our imaginations deal with. 

 

When I got up this morning, I have to say, writing about Thomas Aquinas was nothing I expected to be doing.

I've Been Wondering Who The Most Recent Pictures Of Tubby Bearded Ted Cruz Reminded Me Of, Charles Buono as Batman Villan King Tut

 

News To The National News, Stop Pretending Susan Collins Isn't As Much A Hypocritical Piece of Shit As Lindsay Graham

One thing you have to understand about Maine is that while its Democrats and a large proportion of its independent voters are moderate to liberal, it's Republicans are as benighted and or fascistic as Republicans around the country are.  Any informed, decent Republicans left that foul thinking cess pool before now.  They and the various 3rd party and independent candidates who get easy access to Maine's ballot (I said that Democrats in Maine are moderate to liberal, some of them have been damned stupid in their "reforms") put the proto-Trumpian fascist Paul LePage into the governorship for eight years.  Like Trump kicking Nixon out of the "worst president of all time"out of lowest place, LePage knocked the former Republican Jock McKernan (aka Mr. Olympia Snowe) out of the worst Maine governor in living memory position. 

Maine is the way it is through the past stupidity of 1970s liberals in the legislature thinking it would be groovy to get 3rd  party names on the ballot and the fact that the  broadcast electronic media dominant in the state is solidly establishment Republican,  including the influential public radio network MPBN.   They went all out to get the putrid Susan Collins put back into the Senate this year, the "news" coverage may as well have been written by her campaign.   Maine has long been duped through the media and Susan Collins and, to the same extent, the retired Olympia Snowe doing the least possible to maintain the implausible fable of their "moderate" Republican status.  Of the two Susan Collins was always the more reliable for Republicans and because of that she was always the bigger phony of the two.  

Anyone who expected Susan Collins in what is likely her planned last term as Senator (she originally pledged to Mainers she would not stay more than two terms in the Senate, a promise she was allowed to break with impunity) she will do what Susan always wanted to do and ususally did do, what was good for Susan Collins, her rich DC Lobbyist husband and the Republican-fascist party.  I think Mitt Romeny is more reliably a person of something like principle than Collins who has always been only as honorable as she figured she had to be to maintain the fiction that she peddled to voters in Maine who should have known better by last fall.  

Anyone who thought she would vote for a 15 dollar minimum wage, the rest of Joe Biden's Covid-19 rescue package out of some principle or even shame at having voted for Trump-McConell's billionaire tax-break bill (she said she was as proud of that on "principle" as she was her vote to put Kavanaugh on the court) is an idiot

Susan Collins never did have any character other than self-interest, she is a typical Maine Republican who is selfish and stingy and as hollowly sanctimonious as Chuck Grassley.   She is a fraud, she always has been as I've been telling Mainers for more than three decades.   There's nothing surprising in her proving what a piece of shit she is.

Joe Biden and Senate Democrats may, to some extent, win over Lisa Murkowski or Mitt Romeny, maybe even Ben Sass, but they should forget about Susan Collins who is dependable only the extent to which she figures there's something in it for her.   I would say that her blatant opposition to help that the working poor of Maine need while proclaiming her pride in giving hundreds of billions to billionaires means that she is freed from her plans to not seek another term in five years and she can be as awful as she was about 95% of the time.