I Hope Canada Shows Us How A Real Democracy Deals With Traitors

 

Hate Mail Already

I don't know if anyone has ever formally studied it from this angle, but the perpetual hostility of Republicans and their whores to Social Security may well have originated in the crooked bankers and other entities through which they could steal the life savings of the underclass were diverted into Social Security where they couldn't directly steal them.   The bankers alone would have hated it, not to mention that other major venue of unillegalized theft, insurance. 

If I were twenty years younger I might try to make that study but it would take a lot of digging because they would have never actually admitted to the reality that SUCH THEFT IS AT THE BOTTOM OF JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING THEY DO.  

And the ideological opposition to it and other government programs is probably the afterthought cover-job  to push in order to con and convince the stupider members of the underclass into electing their tools who will do that stealing for them.   As Max pointed out in that passage I quoted from,  every president from Ronald Reagan,  Republican and Democratic has either pushed or failed to stop such transfers of wealth, though so far not through the gutting of Social Security though Medicare has already taken huge hits and Medicaid is a shell of what it used to be.  

What you think you favor "on principle" is actually a huge line of con-jobbery as pushed by whores in the media and academia and the law.  

Just Curious

so I looked up what the CBS skank Jan Crawford to see which universities or colleges produced her.

She majored in "journalism" at the University of Alabama* and got a JD from the U. of Chicago.   Sort of a double whammy in terms of my themes here.  

To back up my recent slamming of the "journalism" specialty of fluffling the Supreme Court, she did that for the Chicago Tribune,  the NewHour with Jim Lehrer, and Face the Nation.    She was enough of a fluffer that Supreme Court "justices" as varied as John Roberts and John Paul Stevens chose her to do those kinds of bespoke interviews that are the only kind that just about all "justices" will do.  

And now at the Ellison-Weiss CBS, she's breaking their "journalistic" standards in support of paid Republican-fascist trolls pushing racist narratives.   Well, I don't think that she's a native white Alabamian is irrelevant to all of that.   Alabama being one of those states which has been under our native form of facist controll, white supremacy, for its entire history, apart from a brief era during Reconstruction (but going into that might get me back into ranting about Profiles in "Courage" again).  

Such is American "journalism" under free-speech-press absolutism and the "right to lie" that was created for the NYT that her job is almost certainly more secure than Lesley Stahl's is at this point.   And I've been plenty critical of ol' Lesley in the past, too.  But compared to Crawford, she's a monument of journalistic integrity.  

*  That goddamned movie and book, All The Presidents' Men and the academicization of what used to be better when it was the realm of those without degrees but who learned to be reporters on an apprenticeship basis has been part of the ruination of American reporting.   "Journalism" should never have been allowed to become an academic major.   Especially on the end where they hire the stupider sons and daughters of the affluent class who are too stupid to do what's most important to them, go into banking, insurance swindles and other direct forms of self-enrichment.    Now that the tech billionaire bros are hiring the executives and staffs at traditional media,  it's even worse than it was at the end of the last century when it was already totally decadent. 

First This Excellent Explanation Of A Complex Entity

Joe Kernen of CNBC’s SquawkBox is everything that is wrong with mainstream media. While most media critics focus on the hyperpartisan presentation of debate segments and opinion shows, the real malignant nature of news is hidden in the mundane. In this episode, Max sets the table with examples of Kernen’s uncritical approach to news from a right wing perspective to determine the host’s bias then illustrates how this bias shows up in even the most innocuous and seemingly harmless observations. 

This like most of Max's commentary is worth listening to until you understand the details because so much of it is quite detailed.   And Max highlights why what they are peddling on virtually ALL of the commercial media and much of the non-commercial media is either knowing lies or total PR bullshit for the oligarchy. 

I especially liked this sarcasm after playing a clip of the tool, Joe Kernan and the corporate whore Peter Boockvar because it contains so much information about why the common consensus of the media-corporate-academic class repeatedly leads us to disaster and hints at part of the basis of it.

As usual, this is my editing of the auto-generated transcript,  Max's delivery is so good that that is unusually clear in the text when it's from him. 

"We all know where the problem is. 'It's entitlements.'" [Sarcasm quotes added by me.]

It's you. You and all that retirement security income and your health issues because you want to live in the world after paying into a system your entire life because you expect some sort of return on investment after your 40 hour work week over 40 years. How dare you? 

Don't you know that we have wars to start? I mean, sure, Trump is asking for a half a trillion on top of the trillion already allocated for defense. And sure, every president since Ronald Reagan has either cut or maintained tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations and allowed them together to hide nearly $4 trillion in offshore tax havens. 

Okay, take a breath. Here's the thing.

It's not the panel debates that actually influence public opinion. It's not the opinion shows themselves that drive opinion. Like the late night CNN lineups of the he-said-she-saids or the Piers Morgan ruses where they put seven faces on a screen and let them all yell at one another hoping for something clippable.

Which, I will insert, is a rather succinct summary of what American journalism in the cabloid age has devolved into.  Like the 500+ channel age with nothing on TV phenomeon, the 24-7-365 "news" cycle is as news free, as information and fact free as most "history"  Youtubes.  

It's the stuff that goes unchecked and unchallenged day after day,  stuff that's passed off as common knowledge and settled science.  Like every assumption out of this guest [Peter]  Boockvar, every assumption out of his mouth could be annihilated,  at a minimum scrutinized.

See, when people on the left criticize the mainstream media, this is what we're talking about. It's not the hyper-partisan fictions propagated by the likes of Fox

News or MS Now. 

It's the mundane, repeatable offenses that worm their way into the record and become the law of the land. That's why I go out of my way to give a tongue lashing to feckless stenographers of corporate shibiliths designed to maintain the status quo. 

I'll start by saying the reason that these guys peddle that line on "entitlements" doesn't have anything to do with the alleged economic damage done by We The People having the money to live, be housed, eat food that will keep us healthy, get healthcare when we aren't,  IT'S BECAUSE THE OLIGARCHS KNOW THERE IS A HUGE POOL OF MONEY THAT IS THERE FOR THE STEALING AND ALL THEY NEED IS TO GULL ENOUGH PEOPLE INTO VOTING THEIR CRIME GANG INTO OFFICE AND THAT'S WHERE THE "NEWS" MEDIA AND THE ENTERTAINMENT "MEDIA" COME INTO IT,  THEY ARE TO SELL THAT LIE SO THEY CAN STEAL THAT MOUNTAIN OF MONEY.  

I'm sure some of those who read me often will note a particular sentence that was like cat-nip to me, 

It's the stuff that goes unchecked and unchallenged day after day,  stuff that's passed off as common knowledge and settled science.

The truth that a large percentage of those who are called economists or play them on cabloid TV pass off their oligarchich mythological lore as "science" is aided and abetted by academia who, enjoying the patronage of the oligarchy pretend the study of the generally artificial, man made, intentional conditions (to the extent that is controllable) of economies can achieve the reliability of science, and so their desired narratives have the same status as the discoveries of Newton or Mendeleev.  And that is among the things that allows them to get away with it.   

The study of economies could be a legitimate academic study, as could some other things included in the "soft-science" if they would give up the pretense that their incredibly complex, largely unseeable and often entirely artificial areas of study can be treated as science or find hard facts that are as reliably true and basic to more complex phenomena as those findings of mathematics, physics and chemistry (especially inorganic chemistry).    They could honestly admit that, in the example of economics, that the focus of their study is nothing like a natural phenomenon that can generate similarly hard "laws of nature" but might be honestly done if it was an analysis of choices made, laws imposed by human choice and the consequences of those "laws" playing out in reality.   In which case NOTHING ABOUT IT IS INEVITABLE NOTHING ABOUT IT IS UNCHANGABLE, NOTHING ABOUT IT IS SET IN STONE OR MOLECULES OR ATOMS OR SUBATOMIC PARTICLES.   It was the ideological foundations of all of the "soft-sciences" that all of reality was subject to the same laws and conditions as generated the laws of Newtonian gravity or atomic theory.   And that was always a rather obvious lie from the start of the formal study of economics and the subsequent areas of such pseudo-science as sociology, linguistics, anthropology and psychology.     And, as I have repeated endlessly,  the infection of that ideology entered into the real life sciences through the theory of natural selection to the extent that in the past half-century the absurdities of "evolutionary psychology" what Stephen Jay Gould called "Darwinian fundamentalism" has become the currency of similar "common knowledge and settled science."  

I will note in passing that while the hack Peter Boockar has a degree in finance and attended law school (I don't see that he ever graduated from it),  the total tool and asshole joke, Joe Kernan actually got a masters in molecular biology from that ultimate military-industrial whore house MIT.    I would love to know how much of what he learned there informs his view of economics as a science. 

Marylin Robinson, in her excellent book Mother Country, in which she took apart the British class system and its disastrous consequences, noted that the early economist whose false plaster-image and name is an idol of American and Brit oligarachic culture was really nothing like that false front.  She did what hardly anyone who invokes his name these days has done, SHE READ WHAT HE SAID.    And so did the current Democratic candidate for the Senate in Michigan Abdul El-Sayed, clearly also has read Adam Smith and knows what he actually said.   Here he is giving a really interesting answer to a CNN gotcha question about democratic socialism.   Note how he differentiates his motivations based in science-based medicine and his accurate analysis of what "capitalism" was supposed to mean, before the Chamber of Commerce "Adam Smith" was errected. 

I don't think I've ever heard a better candidate cutting through the cabloid BS narrative to get right to the real truth of things.    And the American news media is doing everything they can to take him down.   I've seen a lot of that this year, especially in Senate races.    The lies in Maine to support Susan Collins are as over the top as those under white supremacy in the old South ever were.    

Message At The End Of Two Hard Days

 What Hawk says about James Carville saying he'd rather have Republicans keep control of the house instead of DSA members having some influence on policy.  That is despite DEMOCRATS, members of the party he allegedly is a member of, voting for them.

 

He reminds me of his fellow campaign consultant, I believe it was Bob Shrum, who I recall hearing on a TV talk show talking about the "strategic advantage" in losing elections.   Which, considering how many losing campaigns he worked for (NO ONE SHOULD GET MORE THAN ONE OF THOSE BEFORE THEY ARE NEVER HIRED AGAIN) you can imagine him coming up with such a stupid idea. 

ANY FORMERLY DEMOCRATIC CAMPAIGN CONSULTANT WHO ADVOCATES REPUBLICANS WINNING CONTROL OF ANY BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE HELD TO HAVE ENDED THEIR CREDIBILITY AS A DEMOCRAT FROM THEN ON.   There should never be any coming back from that.   Especially after Trump I and Trump II.   Carville is a Republican tool. 

 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Listening To The Dead

 Listening To The Dead

This is a series of five substantial plays, enough for a whole week of nightly radio dramas.   It is one of the best things I've heard in radio drama both as individual plays and in the arc of the complete story. 

Here's the description at Archive.org 

1. Enoch's Machine

First broadcast: Mon 30th Dec 2013, 14:15 on BBC Radio 4 FM

Enoch Cartwright, Victorian gentleman scientist, invests everything in the development of a machine to record the voice of his dead daughter, Emily, unaware that his living daughter Clara talks to her sister every night.

Enoch …. Michael Bertenshaw
Clara …. Eva Sayer
Emily …. Georgie Fuller
Wesley Blackburn …. Ben Crowe
Woman at door …. Carolyn Pickles
Joe …. John Hughes
Josie …. Priyanga Burford

After developing the means to make long distance radio transmissions, Marconi devoted much of the rest of his life to listening out for the voices of the dead. If radio can conjure a voice disembodied in space, he expected, as have legions of people since, that radio can capture the voices of those disembodied in other dimensions - in time, in ethereal planes. 

As technology becomes more sensitive, more diverse, more obscure, there are pioneers always ready to harness the new to the service of this age old fascination.

This is the story of five generations of a family whose members can and can't hear the dead. It's an enterprise to explore the myriad ties, stories and quirks that bind families through the generations, across the spectrum of meanings of 'listening to the dead'. 

Between allowing the echoes of a beloved's voice to live on, and the notion that the dead can engage in communicating new information, are vast grey areas of misinformation that beguile the bereaved and thrill the imagination.

2. Four Sons

First broadcast: Tue 31st Dec 2013, 14:15 on BBC Radio 4 FM

It's 1914, and Clara Tully, a Leeds baker's wife and the proud mother of four beautiful boys, knows the war won't be over by Christmas. And she knows a much darker secret besides.

Clara …. Michelle Terry
Eloise …. Georgie Fuller
Charlie …. Harry Jardine
Robin …. Joel MacCormick
George …. John Norton
Customer …. Priyanga Burford
Customer …. Sabina Arthur
Customer …. Carolyn Pickle
Lloyd George …. Sean Murray
Finley …. Will Featherstone
Joe …. Will Howard

3. The Great Pretender
First broadcast: Wed 1st Jan 2014, 14:15 on BBC Radio 4 FM

Ralf Little stars as a small-time 1950s psychic, who hungers for fame, despite his inability to read the thoughts of anyone, let alone the woman he works with.

Frank …. Ralf Little
TV presenter …. Arthur Hughes
Eloise …. Carolyn Pickles
Girl …. Carys Eleri
Betty …. Harry Jardine
Betty …. Joanna Monro
Peggy …. Lizzy Watts
Joe …. Sean Murray


4. Ruby's Shoes
First broadcast: Thu 2nd Jan 2014, 14:15 on BBC Radio 4 FM

Ruby Tully grows up unaware of her clairvoyant heritage, and finds that her gift is a curse in an age of experimental psychology.

Ruby 8:…..Nell Herrin
Ruby:…..Ami Metcalf
Nish 8:…..Leon Human
Nish:….Hamza Jeetooa
Peggy:…..Lisa Stevenson
Frank:…..David Seddon
Doctor:….Michael Bertenshaw
Miss Violet:….Carys Eleri
Tuesday 3:…..Rosa Yevtushenko
Ralph:….Arthur Hughes

Emily:……Georgie Fuller

5. Tuesday's Child
First broadcast: Fri 3rd Jan 2014, 14:15 on BBC Radio 4 FM 

Tuesday grows up assuming her mother abandoned her, despite the voices in her dreams that try to tell her otherwise

Tuesday ..... Jeany Spark
Tuesday 11 ..... Rose Hilton Hille
Tuesday 3 ..... Rosa Yevtushenko
Frank ..... David Seddon
Peggy ..... Lisa Stevenson
Maggie ..... Carolyn Pickles
Ruby ..... Ami Metcalf
Nish ..... Paul Bazely
Oliver 20 ..... Joel MacCormack
Oliver 55 ..... Michael Bertenshaw
Dan ..... Harry Jardine
Melinda ..... Georgie Fuller
Boss ..... Sean Murray

Directed by Jessica Dromgoole

Yes

@TheRickWilson

I await the multi-day stories on the cover of the NYT about Trump's declining mental and physical health. I SEEM to recall a lot of those in 2024.

As seen at RMJ's

There should be a massive and continual call out of the New York Times, it's editors and especially its publisher calling attention to the contrast between its treatment of the old and at times temporarily infirm Joe Biden and the clearly criminally insane and senile Donald Trump and the ruin they brought the United States to in order for all of them to get the second round of Trump billionaire-millionaire tax cuts.

I loathe the New York Times and the Sulzberger family which is among the more malignant forces in the United States that gets passed on from sentimental attachment to what its (largely undeserved) reputation used to be.   The Boston Globe (alas, nothing like its former self)  got ruined by them.  They are not the friends of an accurately informed American People given the information they need to govern themselves and they seldom were. 

No, I Hadn't Read That

the lying, grifting, hallelujah peddlin,' Jim Bakker had died and has most likely gone to hell.   I hope he gets out when the last of the evil he did in this world is burned out of him,  as described in Paul and, as I recall, it says in both Luke and Matthew's Gospels.   But not till then. 

Though I will admit that I had a sentimental affection for the original Azuza Street Pentecostalism which was  integrated both along racial and gender lines and produced some great music,  seeing the antics of, especially, the racist, sexist, hateful white supremacist majority of Pentecostals and not a few non-white Bakker level crooks and grifters among the current herd of them,  I don't consider Pentacostalism to be Christianity,  it is just another of the many pseudo-Christian, ideological-financial-political manifestations of the Antichrist which are most accurately considered christianist,  not Christian.   Nor, by the way do I any longer consider much of what is called "evangelical" Protestantism or "traditional Catholicism" to be much better.   

As I said in the post you objected to,  it's not the fault of authentically Christian People or those of other faiths that the lawyerly language of the First Amendment and the love that our lawyers, judges and, especially, "justices" have for playing even stupider than they are when it comes to determining a religion from a con job,  faith for robbing the vulnerable and mentally deficient,  enriching a small circle of crooks for those who give everything to the least among us,  that our Constitution and law is that stupidly written and dishonestly administered.

But there is every reason for those authentically Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Native and other Religious Believers to reject such dishonesty and stupidity.   There's nothing to keep us from calling them out and condemning them.

And daintily not doing that is not a matter of niceness or fairness,  we've got the history of such abuse of the forms of religion and the enormous numbers of People they harm to reject the idea that our own, personal and temporary tranquility overcomes the need to condemn and reject and fight against those things. 

Jesus did it continually in the Gospels.   Paul did in his letters, Luke did in Acts, and the rest of the Scripture from the time of the Prophets did too.   It's clearly a religious duty to forego the ease of that cowardly, scrupulous refusal to tell the truth about it.   At least if you take the example of the Prophets, the Apostles and Jesus as normative.  

Time To Stop Funding Israeli Fascists And Murderers

 

The Brit Establishment's Anti-Irish Bigotry Is On Full Display As Is Its Hypocrisy In Regard To Israel

 

THE SLANDER against Sally Rooney and the Irish People in regard to their opposition of the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian People has long roots and contains many an irony.    The Brit establishment,  including the Labour Party and virtually the entire Brit media are silencing the opposition to the ongoing genocide adopting fascist policies in order to do that - they don't suppress the supporters of that genocide but those who oppose it.   

Owen Jones does a good job of pointing out the incredible hypocrisy of the whole thing.   I hope that Sally Rooney sues Adam Boulton and wins.   But if she does it will be against the very Brit legal system that codified the lies that he told against her.   The irony is that that line conflating supporting the genocidal Israeli government's genocide with "Jews" is the very substance of the most putrid forms of antisemitism but in the double-talk of support for Israel, it is ubiquitous among the supporters of Israel, the first to call out "antisemitism."   

Hate Mail - Those Who Favor Democracy Have No Business Being "Fair" or "Nice" About It

I ADMIT THAT to some disappointment that one of the earliest posts I ever wrote didn't have much impact.   That was the one in which I declared that I won't be fair to fascists and I won't be nice to Nazis.   Which I think makes a good slogan and a good basis of conduct for those who favor egalitarian democracy.  

As I pointed out in the piece, we know from history that fascists and Nazis and, I could have added our traditional and highly successful forms of those, white supremacy, male supremacy are fully able to govern large parts of the United States and continually in many of the individual states and, under our entirely rigged form of governance, the entire country.   They do right now and form the large majority of the Supreme Court.  

The motivation to write that was listening to the host of the Saturday morning show on NPR tisk-tisking a liberal for not being fair to someone who the host would never have tisk-tisked for being dishonestly and entirely partisan.   The "code of liberal ethics" (another phrase I'm kind of disappointed didn't gain more currency) which held that liberals and lefties were supposed to always behave better in regard to our opponents than the media ever held that our opponents were ever to be expected to act,  was what got me to overcome the initial reluctance to embark on what I have to admit I'm a little surprised turned into an unpaid part-time job into my senescence. 

Among the consequences of taking that stand against the media-imposed code of liberal ethics is that I also early came to disdain what I called the "process liberal" who often claimed that all they wanted was "an even playing field," in the blood sport of politics and the law.   That bullshit is especially popular with the "civil liberties" lawyer set.   The kind who can be counted on, eventually, to accept money for representing or wring an amicus brief against clean elections or other laws that don't favor the fascists and Nazis. 

Such "even-handedness" and such asserted "fairness"  is putrid bullshit and no one who really believes in equality and, so, any democracy worth struggling and fighting for can continue to fall for that line.   To hold that line is to surrender to those who will never be held to any higher morality than Trump has been held to.

It gets back, as so much does, to what those who wanted to found the United States as an independent country from Britain claimed to hold as self-evident truth AND NOT TO WHAT SO MANY OF THEM ACTUALLY GAVE US IN THE CONSTITUTION.   Either you believe in the rights and principles of legitimate governance that Thomas Jefferson gave in his argument for overturning America's rule by the British monarch and parliament or you are opposed to the very existence of even the defective and bound to fail form of liberal democracy.   And, if the founders and framers had not betrayed those principles, they would have given us an egalitarian democracy, not the thing that has failed utterly under Republican rule and reaching its current state of disaster in Trump II. 

If it is true that only government with the consent of the governed is legitimate, then there is no possibility of compromising that.   And, since it is impossible for there to be any government with universal acceptance, what is instituted has to be on a majoritarian principle BUT WITH THE BASIC RIGHTS OF ALL PEOPLE PROTECTED BY LAW.   And by that I don't mean such nonsense as that those with money have "more speech" in the form of that money, that there is a "right to lie" in mass media,  that there is any right to gull, or misinform, or dupe, or cheat, or swindle, or encourage People to fall for race, gender, ethnic, etc. hatred and betraying the principles on which they claim their own rights to be valid and the legitimate concern of legitimate government. 

There is no compromising those things or there is no legitimate governance.  AND ONE OF THE THINGS THAT ALL PEOPLE HAVE A RIGHT TO, IT IS THAT THE GOVERNMENTS THEY LIVE UNDER HAVE THAT BASIC LEVEL OF LEGITIMACY. 

The U.S. Constitution, riddled with slave-holder empowering provisions, including the unequal representation of the Senate and also the Electoral College, the explicit slavery-enhancing parts of it, the permission to states to keep People from voting (something which started to break down for white men in 1800 and which the slave-power and their ideological and actual heirs have fought against expanding ever since) is the thing which those favoring legitimate governance, egalitarian democracy, have been struggling against since before the thing was adopted. 

NO, there is not going to be a "level playing field" because the fascists and Nazis and our indigenous forms of that in white supremacy and economic oligarchs AND THEIR OWNED MEDIA will never allow one.   Anyone who is opposed to them who calls for such bullshit is a traitor to equality and democracy,  anyone who is not ready and willing to attack all of them all of the time TO DISEMPOWER THEM THOUGH THEY WHINE AND WHINGE ABOUT THE UNFAIRNESS OF IT ALL,  SHOULD GIVE UP POLITICS AND CONCENTRATE ON SOMETHING IMPOTENT AND HARMLESS. 

Anything they won't whine and whinge about is probably not doing the job and never will and the process liberals would probably run away from it if it showed signs of working.    I don't keep up with Common Cause these days, so I don't know if they've learned a lesson.   Maybe they have.  The ACLU hadn't the last time I looked.   But I don't trust lawyers to not betray us in the end. 

 

*  This has me feeling nostalgic so I'll give you the complete June 17, 2006 post with a few updates:

PRETENDING POLITICIANS HAVE THE SAME JOB DESCRIPTION AS SAINTS

You have to admit some liberals are strange. Some get up on a soap box and that turns into their whole universe. One of the oddest of these ducks is the process liberal. You can tell one by it's call, "I'm not interested in the outcome, I only want the process to be honest,". And so it's time to rip out another weak plank from the platform of The Code of Liberal Ethics before someone else steps on it and gets hurt.

This might pinch some toes but Fred Wertheimer is the great example of process liberalism. Some of you know that I've got a bone to pick with him over his teaming up with Newt Gingrich to get Jim Wright ousted, ending the only real opposition that the Reagan-Bush administration ever faced. In the most supreme political irony of our age, Fred and Newt sank him over a BOOK DEAL that by Gingrichean standards was chump change. Even if Wertheimer's motives were pure, in theory, this act marks him as the archetype process liberal due to it's pettiness, the enormous benefit it brought to Republicans and the damage it did to Democrats. You remember, Wright was replaced by the tragically ungifted Tom Foley who obsessed over marble floors in the elevators and lost the house to Newt Gingrich. I don't believe that was what Wertheimer wanted but it wasn't any surprise when it happened.

[Update 2026:  Note that Wertheimer and the group he led,  Common Cause, were alert enough to understand what a catastrophe the eventual decision in Buckley vs. Valeo was for democracy.   You can't say the same for many others who could be called process liberals, such as those who ran the ACLU and other "civil liberties" outfits and lawyers.   I'll give him that though my original criticism of him was sound.]

Process liberals bask in their own purity knowing that they are welcome on any talk show in the country and will seldom be asked a tough question or get pinned down on anything they say. They go on and answer all of the reverently posed questions about the latest sins of Democrats. They predictably bleat out their dismay over these venial sins which, they decree, must carry the penalty of eternal damnation. In the process they sell out the real progressive agenda that doesn't end in process, it ends in results, in making peoples' lives better.

They say "the ends don't justify the means" on the rare occasion someone questions their judgment. But that phrase was invented to counter people who wanted to use means that involved killing people and doing serious injury. Dictators' ends don't justify their means. But the left in the United States won't start doing that, no matter what the temptation. The left will use the untidy and imperfect process of government to defeat Republicans' lies and theft. If there is some minor naughtiness involved it's a small price to pay for child nutrition, healthcare, jobs creation, Social Security and other such benefits to humanity as the notably impure Democratic majorities of the past have produced. Remember the "post office scandal"? Looks penny ante after Bush II, doesn't it.

[Another 2026 note:  For egalitarian democracy THE ENDS ARE THE ENTIRE POINT.  AND THE ENDS OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY ARE JUSTIFIED BY ANY MEANS THAT ARE IN LINE WITH THE MORAL GOALS OF EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY.]      

The sentimental attachment we have for these process liberals is rather strange itself since they haven't produced much and they've prevented much good. That the Republican media values them isn't any surprise, it should be an indictment against them. They wouldn't be asked on if Republicans didn't like the results.

Note:  When I did a search for "I won't be fair to fascists, I won't be nice to Nazis"  to get a link to my original post,  "AI" attributed the phase to me, which makes me wonder who wrote about it, though "AI" didn't say who gave it what it said  with a rather accurate description of my blogging orientation.  It noted I wrote for Echidne of the Snakes where I reposted the piece later that year, so I suspect someone who read it there commented on it.   "AI" doesn't come up with original observations, it copies some person who wrote something online.   I have to say, it was kind of shocking because I hadn't expected "AI" to figure in the search for the link.   I had to do that by myself, the old fashioned way.  

My Brother Sprung This On Me

and I'm going to share it too.   It's almost unbelievably awful.  I'm amazed they'd license the song for this performance.  Maybe P.S. had a deep appreciation for campy kitsch. 

It's too bad that color TV was invented before the 1970s were well over.  It would be less horrific in black and white.  

Hate Mail - More About Darwinism In Current Public Policy

 "It's in their genes.  There area  lot of bad genes in our country right now."

Donald Trump 

 In One Of My Many Posts Attacking The Theory of Natural Selection,"DARWINISM,"  I called the study of the evolution of species the "mother of all n-factorial problems" due to the enormous number of vectors that would have to figure into such a proposed generalized theory about such an enormously varied phenomenon and the enormous and unknowable number of "traits," the combination of those, and all of the other entities that would be held to differentiate one species from another one,  but, in the theory that makes those of "selective" value in deciding all along the scores or hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of generations which members of a species' population would produce more viable offspring which would - due to the inheritance or non-inheritance of "traits" - go on to have reproductive success, determining the predominance of "traits" in whatever species would arise out of the parent species.   

Consider this abstract from a fairly recent paper discussing what speciation is supposed to be and various problems with the concept. There is a sentence in what follows I'm going to focus on, see if you can see which one it is.  I am not adding or subtracting from or rearranging the text, but I am making paragraph breaks and adding punctuation in it to make it easier to understand. 

Speciation is a complex process that can unfold in many different ways. Speciation researchers sometimes simplify core principles in their writing in a way that implies misconceptions about the speciation process. 

While we think that these misconceptions are usually inadvertently implied (and not actively believed) by the researchers, they nonetheless risk warping how external readers understand speciation. 

Here we highlight six misconceptions of speciation that are especially widespread. 

- First, species are implied to be clearly and consistently defined entities in nature, whereas in reality species boundaries are often fuzzy and semipermeable. 

- Second, speciation is often implied to be ‘good’, which is two-fold problematic because it implies both that evolution has a goal and that speciation universally increases the chances of lineage persistence. 

- Third, species-poor clades with species-rich sister clades are considered ‘primitive’ or ‘basal’, falsely implying a ladder of progress. 

- Fourth, the evolution of species is assumed to be strictly tree-like, but genomic findings show widespread hybridization more consistent with network-like evolution. 

- Fifth, a lack of association between a trait and elevated speciation rates in macroevolutionary studies is often interpreted as evidence against its relevance in speciation—even if microevolutionary case studies show that it is relevant. 

- Sixth, obvious trait differences between species are sometimes too readily assumed to be 

(i) barriers to reproduction, 

(ii) a stepping-stone to inevitable speciation, or 

(iii) reflective of the species’ whole divergence history. 

In conclusion, we call for caution, particularly when communicating science, because miscommunication of these ideas provides fertile ground for misconceptions to spread.

Here's the first sentence I'll concentrate on because it is practically the definition of the theory of natural selection from the time that Darwin published On The Origin of Species and because it is a description of the entirety of the science-based evil that has come from it starting almost immediately on the first reading of the book.

Speciation researchers sometimes simplify core principles in their writing in a way that implies misconceptions about the speciation process. 

The first simplification of the core principles in the writing on this topic was in On the Origin of Species.  The definition of species that Darwin and his generation of scientists worked on, the one that is intrinsic to his theory is itself simplified so radically that even in his own examples, especially his referencing of human animal and plant breeding, is a radical distortion of what speciation in nature is.   If he had not done that, he and virtually every Darwinist who came after him would have never implied that human manipulation of animals and plants could have any knowable relationship to the entirely unknowable though obviously far more complex organisms and their lines of descent that would have accounted for a new species arising from a parent species.   

That point isn't from any social, medical, political, legal or historical consideration of these matters a mere detail.  Just as an example, it is systematic in one of the worst and most consequential products of Darwinism,  eugenics and the legal and political application of the ideology of Darwinism that has literally gotten millions killed and likely more oppressed and discriminated against.  

Those who have done what so few of you defenders of Darwin have done, read the literature of Darwinism, starting with him but also those whose work he cites as supporting his theory (Galton, Haeckel, Spencer, Greg, . . . ) and the writings of the next generations such as Pearson, Schallmeyer, Davenport, Ploetz,. . . would see that the problems listed above actually characterizes both the scientific literature of Darwinism but, more dangerously, its insertion into wider culture and especially the law and politics.   That was not incidental to the work of the Darwinists, starting with Darwin.  He defended his son George when he proposed that British law regarding marriages be changed to involuntarily annul marriages of those deemed by the law to be mentally ill - even if at some later date they were judged to have recovered.  He and his son Leonard opposed the legal support for universal vaccination - especially of those considered to be members of the underclass.   And that only increased, all based on ignoring the problems with the theory which were present from the start and which have not decreased anymore than the definition of speciation has in the more than a century and a half when the article abstracted above was written. 

That is reflected - though the source of it is not admitted - in the last sentence of the abstract. 

In conclusion, we call for caution, particularly when communicating science, because miscommunication of these ideas provides fertile ground for misconceptions to spread.

This is the closest the article gets to admitting that it was not Darwin's practice to make any such distinctions he was presumably aware of at the time.

What practical steps can speciation researchers take to resist this misconception forming in the minds of audiences outside the field, when referring to ‘species’ remains an indispensable component of our work? First, in research articles, we should state the species concept that we are adopting (e.g ecologically/genetically/phenotypically oriented) as well as the working definition that we are using within that concept to delineate species (e.g. lack of hybrids observed or below threshold genetic similarity). This is especially important when communicating with other speciation researchers. It is possible that no single species concept will ever satisfy researchers from all backgrounds; and it is unlikely that there will ever be a single working definition that is practically applicable for all taxa and research approaches. This was recognized by Darwin (albeit in male-centric language that does not reflect the diversity of naturalists): ‘No one definition has satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species’ (Darwin 1859, p. 58).

Any vaguery that was a component of his proposal as science should have made his claims far more modest than how his text and his subsequent editions and his application of the theory in The Descent of Man presented it.  

That vaguery should have made professional scientists proportionally more skeptical of his theory of natural selection than history proves it did.  And that negligence of skepticism due to such problems has not diminished,  certainly not in the economists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists who claim it to add sciency cachet to their pseudo-scientific assertions, nor in the proposals AND PRACTICES of racist and eugenic politicians, commenators, judges and "justices" who have been given support for their racism, their enforcement of economic class divisions, their favoring of the same "favored" individuals and families that Darwin certainly meant when he published his theory

The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

We have his own words that link that title and theory to the human population and human law and politics through his eager adoption of his cousin Francis Galton's first works in eugenics, two articles in Macmillan's Magazine and his book Hereditary Genius which he cited over and over again as valid science supporting his theory and identifying "natural selection" in the natural world and his citation of Ernst Heckel's even more radical and racist assertions, going so far as to attribute group hygiene to infanticide and war making. 

As I noted in what I recently said,  you cannot break the connection between the theory of natural selection and the aristocratic British economic ideology of Thomas Malthus because Darwin, himself, attributed Malthus' homicidal theory as his inspiration - though as I also pointed out,  Marx correctly noted that Darwin made that depraved ideology more depraved by generalizing its murderous aspects to the whole of nature, making it an imitation of the "natural law" that had more successfully then been found in physics and chemistry dealing with far, far less complex phenomena.   The more complex a phenomenon, the more vectors in a description of that phenomenon, the less likely you are to find an accurate general theory of it.   And I stand by my statement that natural selection and the study of speciation in general is both utterly complex and generally unobservable due to the permanent loss of any relevant physical evidence and the entirely unpreserved record of events that leave no permanent record but which, according to the theory, could not be more important to its testing. 

Yet on the basis of the ideology of Darwinism, people in large numbers lose their lives and a chance to have a dignified life for them and for their children.   Yet the college-credentialed class wonders how it engendered such hostility. 

It is an irony that so many of the Trump fan base who would be expected to hate "evolution" or the name of Darwin are, like him, total believers in the most malignant aspects of it (see the quote at the top of this post).  But, then, so many opponents of eugenics and scientific racism are true believers in the basis of just about all of that, today. 

Why I Can't Stand Listening To the MS-Now Lawyers Anymore

First  the video of Harry Litman and MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas that set this off.

Then my comment on it. 

What he learned from Roy Cohn was how to use the corruption and irresponsibility and dishonesty and laziness and cowardice of the American legal profession and system,  the lawyers,  the judges,  the "justices" and the rest of it.    He has weaponized the corruption of YOUR PROFESSION which has been allowed to shape the courts and the process.     I'm fed up with lawyers telling me "justice" is on the way,  "justice"  will soon happen,  that "justice" is going to be done BECAUSE IT HASN'T HAPPENED DURING THE MOST IMPORTANT TIME WHEN WE NEEDED THE REAL THING AND INSTEAD WE GET "justice."  

Your profession is utterly corrupt, starting with its major tool, lying.  Oh, and your profession's primary focus,  billing for large amounts of money per hour.   Put those together and it was bound to be corrupt and to facilitate corruption. 

What Ro Khanna Said, For A Good Start

 IF YOU LOOK AT THE MASTHEAD of my page you will read 

LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE 

which is more than just a slogan,  I am completely certain it is necessary to save us from the increasing and disgusting inequality AND SO CORRUPTION that is running the United States.    INEQUALITY IS A GUARANTEE OF CORRUPTION, IT IS ONE OF THE MAIN SUPPORTS OF CORRUPTION AND A LOT OF THAT HAS COME FROM THE LIBERTARIAN LIBERTY NOTIONS OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY.    

What Ro Khanna said about the increasing buying of elections, the increasing buying of politicians, the increasing buying of our government and the courts and the Supreme Court is a product of the liberal democratic,  ACLU supported corruption that was brought in by Supreme Court rulings starting with the Sullivan decision creating a "right to lie" by the corporate media,  the "RIGHT TO CORRUPT OUR ELECTIONS"  in Buckley v Valeo and the increasingly corrupt rulings that are in that line including the well known ones like Citizens United and a host of lesser known ones. 

I don't think there is any accident that the out of control billionaire ownership of the government that came in the wake of those rulings that legalized lying in the mass media and the buying of elections THROUGH ADS SOLD BY THE MASS MEDIA and those "First Amendment," "free speech-press" rulings from idiots like the members of the Warren and Burger Courts - almost all of them never having run for public office - believing that more lies and more money (they also created "money speech") in our politics WOULD LEAD EXACTLY IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION OF WHERE THEY HAVE LED OUR COUNTRY.  

The billionaire tax on the ballot in California is a start but it is doomed to failure if that line of Supreme Court rulings is not abolished and we make it costly for the media and the billionaires and millionaires to lie and spread lies and to drive out money from our politics.    But it is a start - one which I will bet you anything the Supreme Court finds some legalistic blather to overturn because the Supreme Court is controlled by the billionaires who have bought the Republican-fascist majority.   Though I would like to think that at least some of the Democrats on the Court would realize the folly of the Warren and Burger Courts' rulings in this area. 

My Theories Run A Few Ways

I AM BEING TROLLED over the alleged near death experience of one Gabe Poirot,  the one who claims he met the roid-ragein' Jeeezus!   You know, the one Kegbreath and his "pastor" claim they believe in.   My theories about it are: 

1.  He experienced no such thing and he's making it up. 

2.  What he met is the Antichrist,  which is not implausible for someone with his dedication to the anti-Christian white-supremacist, christianist ideology.   

Sounds like it might have been influenced by christianist ideology, movies, TV shows, video games, comic books,  or fascist hate-talk radio.   From the little I listened to him, to prepare for this,  I don't get the feeling he's read much.  

3. See 1 and 2.  

No one but this Poirot is responsible for answering for what he claimed.   No more than anyone else is for anything they claim.   Well, or those who act to publicize and profit from such claims.   I'd like to know if the frequently reported changes in behavior for the better that come when people have near death experiences has happened with him.  You know, the ones who are kinder and gentler and not roid-ragin' like he wants us to believe.   I'll believe in the Jesus presented in the Gospels and Epistles and Acts as well as some of the very earliest extra-canonical writings. 

Here's another take:

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Earthquake Girl

Earthquake Girl

Edie works in a library and is terrified of causing a world catastrophe.

Edie's sister-in-law, Lila, thinks she should go out and find a man, but she’d rather stay in to write a gothic romance, in fact, Edie would be a library if she could...

Katie Hims’ award-winning play stars Saskia Reeves.
Edie …. Saskia Reeves
Lila/Aunt Ameila …. Jane Hollowood
Mrs Penny …. Jean Alexander
Erroll Maroon …. Burt Caesar
The Hero …. Philip Rham
Library Supervisor …. Barbara Marten

I Know Nothing About Susan Dell

 for all I know she's a horrible person or she might be anything less than that - as a billionaire I favor leveling her out of existence, as I do every billionaire on Earth - but with the men in that Oval Office scene,  it's telling that her freakish make up and hairdo are what's getting all the attention.   If she had nothing, even looking like that,  I'd hold that it's entirely her own business how she chooses to look.  When I am acting as I was brought up to act and be too polite as to comment on that,  I'd hold that line. 

The way she looks is no worse than the men, but it's what everyone is focused on. 

Still, as a billionaire, level each of them out of existence.  There is nothing uglier than someone owning billions of dollars. 

Repubicans Have Made The United States A Laughing Stock And Ended American Dominance

IT'S FORTUNATE FOR REPUBLICANS that their compliant, complicit, corporate media keeps the American People so ignorant of the world outside of the United States and even within the United States that those still under their sway don't know how far the United States has sunk under Republican regimes since 2000.   Under Trump the United States' dominating reputation in the post-WWII period has been totally obliterated and with his reaction to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee's awarding of their prize to  Navanethem  Pillay,  the world is mocking his Baby Huey tantrum that it wasn't given to him.  

It's funny that one of the most appropriate American English idioms to describe Trump's public behavior is to say he's got no class or that he's low class.   That's because it holds up the upper class,  those with lots of money as having better and more adult level behavior and self-restraint in such stuff when everything in the news reminds us that the upper class, especially those who grew up rich are more typified by the spoiled brat, selfish criminal behavior of Trump, his children, his grand children, those the Republicans in the Senate allowed him to fill the executive branch and judiciary with and, especially the billionaires and millionaires, media figures and Hollywood producers, etc. who created him as a public figure and as a political figure. 

The Cornel 7 (as someone said this week, it's more like the Cornel 57) case, the fraternity boy gang rape case is a reminder that the Ivy League "Greek life" set* are among the most dangerous of criminal gangsters who become even more dangerous as they graduate and start running the real criminal gangs and their lawyer protection rackets.   By a huge majority, the members of the U.S. Supreme Court have been frat boys for more than a century.   And they're probably not the most dangerous of the ones that went into that career.    The really dangerous ones are the ones who bought those seats for their frat bros. 

The fact is, with almost no exceptions,  the rich are trash.   

No, in that metaphor,  they're hazardous, nuclear waste.  Those who are taught by the media, by movies, by fiction to look up to them are chumps.  It's astonishing how much of the most popular movie and TV and pulp crap is a PR campaign promoting a totally fake and heroic view of the rich.   And how their victims are convinced to fall for that shit.  

When they start talking about the end of the American century, which Trump has ended about sixteen years short of it being declared (by that piece of shit, Henry Luce) they won't admit it was the Republicans and their owners the billionaires and millionaires, the corporate media, the Ivy League lawyers, the corporate class that blew it out of their greed.   They partnered up with the white supremacists to get us here.  

I love, absolutely love that it is a South African Woman who was a warrior in the anti-apartheid campaign and judge on the International Court of Justice who is joking about Trump's Baby Huey tantrum at not being given the apple of his eye.   I wonder the extent to which the oligarchic corporate darling Maria Corina Machado bribing Trump with the one they gave her last year only to have him bypass her installation to run Venezuela played in the committee's choice this year.   Preferring to make a deal with the corrupt VP  Delcy Rodríguez who has an extensive record in the very drug running that Trump supposedly opposed. **  Bad bet to make,  giving Trump what he wants.   He'll throw you under the bus as soon as he has it in his hands and you don't have anything else he wants.   

He's thrown the United States away.   Including the lower and middle class white supremacists who provided the bulk of his low-information vote.   And now a lot of the oligarchs stand to lose as well as Europe, Canada and others separate themselves from American corporations because they suddenly realize that relying on those is a danger to their independence and existence.  

*  There has been so much really insightful and important coverage of that case, much of it bringing in other cases and making the point that it's not just the frats and sororities that are rich boy and gal criminal gangs,  it's also sports teams.    I've been following  the Hysteria Podcast and  also liked what Christ Hedges said about it. 

**  Trump called off the American drug cops on Rodriguez.  

The Pain Report

IT WASN'T MY DOCTOR who told me the most important thing I've found to diminish the debilitating pain of the trigeminal neuralgia which has made such an impact on me since late summer, it was someone who told me that using a conventional toothbrush to brush my teeth might be making it much worse and so it has proved over the past three days.   

Since then I've looked it up in legit seeming sites online and have learned a lot more than the medical advice which centered on taking debilitating drugs told me.    After years of taking doctors' advice - though I have always told them I would only take pain meds when it got unbearable - I found that one bit of advice given by a long-term sufferer was worth more than everything they told me.    As is so often the case, when it comes to doctors,  your successful treatment to a good extent depends on your luck and chance. 

I'm experimenting with those silicon finger brushes they make for brushing babies and pets teeth (didn't know those existed before she told me about them) and am looking for soft bristled brushes which it never occurred to me to try before this. 

Thought I'd pay on the advice I was given for free in case someone who reads this needs it. 

By the way, one of the things a doctor wanted to prescribe for me is a benzodiazepine drug that someone my age should never take - it says that right in the hand-outs they give you at the drug store.   I knew that because of the terrible consequences my elderly mother suffered because she took them when she was prescribed them so I refused those.   

Apparently they're handing those out to even those who the literature says shouldn't be given them like they handed out Tetracycline in the 1970s.