"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
I've looked up a few of the issues cited in this video and came to an article that noted how many times Kirk took the 5th when he was deposed by the January 6th investigation by the House. If I have the time I'd like to go through a transcript of that to see exactly what he and his liar, uh, that is lawyer thought he was exposed on. I can't vouch for some of what is said but, then, the Kirk cult can't honestly vouch for much of anything their idol said.
He was a terrorist who is on video and record as saying that all of the school shootings, all of the church shootings, all the nightclub and concert and movie theater shootings, all the gun deaths were worth it. I've heard that the millioniare who funded his start up fascist organization was against Covid-19 protections and he ended up dying of Covid and Kirk the gun death diminisher died by gun death. It's not often in this life that you see such clear examples of people reaping what they've sown.
By the way, I'm not much of a tee shirt wearer, at least on the outside, but I'd wear one that said what that guy's says, "Make Lying Wrong Again."
nor most of the other Hollywood A or B or D listers, even those who market candles that supposedly have the aroma of their genitalia, but I listened to this profound moral indictment of her and after looking up what it was a response to, a terrible chill of familiarity physically came over me, from my legs up through my back and into my scalp.
The sense of bliss among the rich and "spiritual but not religious" is something I've noted here before, for example the "Buddhism" of Mark Zuckerberg and others. A secondary issue that especially struck me is the perverted concept of "freedom" that is handled so insightfully and, I most respectfully will say, poetically in this poem of moral outrage is one I hope to say more about soon. The perversion of the concept of freedom, especially when it is called "liberty" in the modern English speaking world is among the most dangerous of distortions, something perennially relevant here in the land of the supposedly free and the supposedly brave.
But what struck me also, apart from the citation of the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian People by the Zionists and the safe, passive, filthy rich supporters of the last European colonial project with their own sweet asses planted on North America or Europe, is that it reminded me entirely of this.
Campo Di Fiori
In Rome on the Campo di Fiori Baskets of olives and lemons, Cobbles spattered with wine And the wreckage of flowers. Vendors cover the trestles With rose-pink fish; Armfuls of dark grapes Heaped on peach-down.
On this same square They burned Giordano Bruno. Henchmen kindled the pyre Close-pressed by the mob. Before the flames had died The taverns were full again, Baskets of olives and lemons Again on the vendors' shoulders.
I thought of the Campo dei Fiori In Warsaw by the sky-carousel One clear spring evening To the strains of a carnival tune. The bright melody drowned The salvos from the ghetto wall, And couples were flying High in the cloudless sky.
At times wind from the burning Would driff dark kites along And riders on the carousel Caught petals in midair. That same hot wind Blew open the skirts of the girls And the crowds were laughing On that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.
Someone will read as moral That the people of Rome or Warsaw Haggle, laugh, make love As they pass by martyrs' pyres. Someone else will read Of the passing of things human, Of the oblivion Born before the flames have died.
But that day I thought only Of the loneliness of the dying, Of how, when Giordano Climbed to his burning There were no words In any human tongue To be left for mankind, Mankind who live on.
Already they were back at their wine Or peddled their white starfish, Baskets of olives and lemons They had shouldered to the fair, And he already distanced As if centuries had passed While they paused just a moment For his flying in the fire.
Those dying here, the lonely Forgotten by the world, Our tongue becomes for them The language of an ancient planet. Until, when all is legend And many years have passed, On a great Campo di Fiori Rage will kindle at a poet's word.
I've got a serious health issue to deal with, on my own, I can't afford medical care for it, thanks to the Republican-fascists, so I can't give a fully up to date answer. But here's one I gave as the last of the New Taney Court was being installed by them. Though I will note that the refusal of Republican judicial nominees to even admit that the Constitution says what it unambiguously says, as has happened over and over again as Democrats have asked them to admit that is a routine event before the Republican-fascists in the Senate confirm the worst nominees to courts in modern history. AND THE GODDAMNED AMERICAN FREE PRESS HASN'T HAD MUCH OF ANYTHING TO SAY ABOUT IT. The goddamned free press has proven that unless they are required to tell the truth in service to democracy they will be about as reliable a protector of it as the modern Republican Party.
Thursday, October 15, 2020 Don't Let The Wrapper Fool You Amy Coney Barrett Is Cold-Blooded Legalistic Evil "Men like to substitute words for reality and then argue about the words," Edwin Armstrong, inventor of regenerative circuitry, superheterodyne circuitry and FM transmission*
In Amy Coney Barrett's near total non-responsiveness to Democrats, even to the extent that "textalist" fraud would not even note that the clear text of the Constitution does not give a Trump the power to delay the date of an election and that it specifies, exactly the minute that a Trump's term of office ends and if he refuses to go he is a criminal, she showed that she might be less full of macho bluster than her colleague Brett Kavanaugh but she's every bit as dangerous and dishonest as he is.
I have listened to a number of the exchanges with some of the Democratic Senators that show her cold-blooded method of looking for ways to do terrible things, something that her fellow Republican-fascist judges and "justices" do all the time, something that is all too common in the legal profession which has done so much to earn the disdain that so many of us feel for it. I get the feeling that a lot of those lawyers on the Democratic side of the Judiciary Committee must feel finally freed to blow the whistle on how truly evil so many members of their profession are, from sleazebag lawyers in service to oligarchy to the judges they argue in front of to the Supreme Court.
I think Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's dissertation on the flood of dark money that the "free speech" rulings by the court have released into the American political system will be a classic in exposure of corruption, corruption which the Supreme Court released even as it was told that this would be the effect of those floodgates being opened so there is no possible claim that Roberts et al didn't know exactly what they were doing. I will point out that for a good part of that the phony-liberal icon, the ACLU was thick as thieves with the dark money interests. I have not looked closely to see if anywhere there is a full study of the funding and associations of the ACLU to see if it has a significant relationship with the dark money machine but if they aren't getting paid to do what they have been able to see will result in this corruption - and they've been doing it for pretty much the entire existence of the ACLU - if they're not doing it for money they're a good example of the total cluelessness of the secular modernist "enlightenment" mindset. But, then, they're the ones who figure the Nazis and KKK should be free to get another bite at the apple despite who gets killed by them. I cannot hide my disdain for the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry that has given these fascist "justices" the language and the cultural idiocy that has been the tool of such corruption in the United States. I'm sure to have more to say about that as they've got so many real liberals and "leftists" gulled so completely.
I have to say that even those Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee who regularly drive me nuts like Chris Coons and Diane Feinstein did a great job this time, though they certainly know that nothing they revealed or said or forced Amy Coney Barrett to reveal by her refusal to answer even the most obvious questions will make the slightest difference to her being put on that putrid court and doing untold damage to untold numbers of people from it. Some of their clear strategy of laying a record wasn't immediately apparent until I listened a second time.
One of those who I think is not often enough noted as a skilled questioner and deep thinker is Senator Mazie Hirono. Her exchage of yesterday exposed the cold-blooded, indifference that Barrett clearly practices that can be shielded by judge talk and lawyer talk and leaglistic babble, the kind of thing that can make the most seemingly respectable, even lovely people self-righteously do terrible things mostly to those too powerless and poor to strike back.
In her exchange with Barrett, Senator Hirono cut through it by noting the discrepancies between Barrett's babble and what she had written in her appalling dissent supporting one of Trumps anti-POOR immigrant policies that even she noted the devastating and dangerous effects it would have, which Senator Hirono supplemented with actual, real life examples of the effects that Barrett wasn't bothered by using legal babble as to why she didn't figure it was any concern of hers. I think one of the reasons that the Federalist Fascist judge choosing mechanism for the Republican-fascist party chose Barrett is that they figure hiding evil behind the facade of a white-woman with seven children would make it an easier sell than another preppy rapist. But no one should fall for the packaging, Amy Coney Barrett is as evil and cold-blooded as Alito or Gorsuch or Kavanaugh, she might even be as pathologically cruel as her hero Scalia or his sidekick Thomas. But I think their timing will make her the masthead figure on the decision that takes away healthcare from tens of millions and probably many more, maybe even on another Supreme Court coup putting Trump back in the presidency. It might seem unfair to put all the blame on her but that's a matter of Republican-fascist choice and the choice of Barrett herself.
I think the last hope of the United States staying together is if there is a big enough turn out throwing out enough Republicans in the Senate that the Democrats will have the guts to expand the courts and force reforms such as those Sheldon Whitehouse exposed that that the corrupt Supreme Court has needed from the start. Clearly they can't be counted on to police themselves, they've been getting away with murder since the start. I was interested to note that one of the cases that Coney Barrett put beyond anyone's questioning was Marbury v Madison, the one in which the Supreme Court gave themselves a power that appears nowhere in the Constitution that Barrett is all "textualist" over. Well, that power is nowhere in the text, it was not put there by amendment, if privacy rights can go, if other rights can go on the basis of it not appearing in the text, why should that corruption ridden court be able to make an exception for that self-granted power which no legislature, federal or state has passed into the text of the Constitution? * Edwin Armstrong is a person who got robbed by the court system on behalf of rich men, some of who claimed his inventions as their property when they couldn't even understand a technical description of what he'd created. I doubt the judges who helped rob him had any understanding of the physics and math behind them and didn't care, figuring in their lawyerly liarly way that "the law" was sufficent to make their judgements real. Only it was the clumsy fiction of the law that gave them that power. One of the things I've read about him noted that he was deeply skeptical about theoretical procedures and thought experimentation and reasoning were more likely to get you somewhere. I think he knowingly made that statement based in his experience with crooked courts and judges who were the servants of the rich and so powerful. Clearly the legalistic practice of an Amy Coney Barrett who can look at the terrible things her rulings create will find legalese to ease any vestiges of conscience she might experience, though I'm not terribly impressed with such problems from her cultic "handmaiden" catholicism. I'll bet she hates Pope Francis.
John Roberts: Everything You Didn't Know About His Sh*tty Past
It is impossible to fully express my disdain for Roberts and the rest of his racist liar Republican-fascist majority, It might be possible that I hate him more than Richard Nixon.
If any so-called Court reform doesn't nullify the Marbury power that has been used to destroy equality, democracy, economic justice, etc. it will be no reform. The Roberts Court's record should be the last straw.
The Wanderer: While under suspicion for the handling of her last case, and with a head full of fury over her "unfair treatment," Tanis Bailey works with her former lover to find his missing mother.
Why You Should Be Getting Ready For A 1928 Size Or Bigger Crash And A Real Fascist Takeover
I have taken the liberty or opportunity to do one of my quick and dirty editings of part of the machine generated transcript of this Youtube of Max from UNFTR and one of his not simple but comprehensible explanations of the financial swindles of the tech-bros and other members of the Epstein class. First, here's the video:
And here's the section I edited with some comments.
Now look at the mission statement. SpaceX says it intends to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary to understand understand the true nature of the universe and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.
That's not paraphrasing. That is literally the company's mission statement. And 93% of its projected revenue is supposed to come from AI and orbital data centers that don't exist. and probably will never because science.
If your bullshit meter isn't all the way straight to the highest measure over that, you should consider getting a new one.
The wildly optimistic, I would add certainly self-interested space agency presentation of the prospect of a human body being able to stand a trip to Mars is based on what looks to me on extremely dodgy scientific assumptions even when you take into account the extremely unlikely prospect of the fittest human beings being able to survive such an attempted trip to just the very nearest planet in the solar system. Not to mention a return trip and the prospect of a human body long living on a planet of such low gravity and such unearthlike conditions. I would put most of what is presented to the investing public in that regard is most realistically and honestly considered to be science fiction. And I don't mean informed science fiction of the kind that I've been disgusted that so many real scientists are big fans of. I mean the movie and video game junk. You can read through the paper at the link, I'd recommend not taking the mathematical speculations too seriously and note how much of that estimate is based in anything other than already known and widely agreed on physics and biology. The space agencies and its parasitic private corporate entities are quite capable of presenting total bullshit to the public in order to sucker the Congress into giving them money and corrupting the legal bases under which they operate and get funding.
I will, almost certainly, go into a diatribe at the danger of having an extremely stupid, ignorant and credulous ruling class who don't read non-fiction or even good fiction but watch shit like the kind I slammed here earlier in the week. And that rot certainly extends well into what passes as our intellectuals. The best sci-fi in cheap ink on cheap paper is light entertainment, the best of it doesn't rise above that, I mean the Le Guin level of it, no matter what second-rate academics who are at a loss for what to write papers about claim about it.
NOTE WELL before proceeding, public funding is, in the end, what this is all based in because, as noted in the last words excerpted here point out, Elon Musk as so many other tech-bro-Epstein class level billionaires and the mere millionaires who are parasites of that history making grift, are mostly good at corrupting governments into shoveling money their way and rigging the regulation in their favor through dirty money.
So, their own perspectus says, and I'm going to read this directly here, quote,
" Several of our anticipated market opportunities, including certain AI, orbital, lunar, and interplanetary, transportation, and industrial activities are still emerging and evolving or do not currently exist."
And such markets may not develop as we expect or at all. I mean, such markets don't exist, and they might never. But here's where it gets criminal, at least in spirit, if not law.
This IPO would never have gotten off the ground under normal regulatory conditions, because the SEC under the leadership of the administration that Elon helped install just looked the other way while two sets of rules were quietly rewritten. The first one, the NASDAQ changed its bylaws. So, conveniently timed for the SpaceX June listing, in May, NASDAQ enacted what it calls a fast entry rule.
Note this:
NASDAQ changed its bylaws. So, conveniently timed for the SpaceX June listing, in May, NASDAQ enacted what it calls a fast entry rule.
So, under the old rules, a company had to season for at least three months before joining the NASDAQ 100. Most cases, it was up to a year, and it needed a minimum 10% public float, meaning 10% of the shares had to be available to the public. Under the new rules, top 40 companies by market cap can just enter the index in 15 trading days and that float minimum totally eliminated. So SpaceX floated about 5% of its total shares which was an artificially very thin slice designed to create scarcity to drive up the price.
Now under the old rules, it could never have entered any major index. So NASDAQ literally rewrote the rules so SpaceX could get in. And this is hugely important. See, Musk made early NASDAQ 100 inclusion a condition of his listing there. So, they had to do it and they complied. They didn't have to do it. They just complied. Okay.
They didn't HAVE TO DO IT. They just complied! That is if they wanted this con job to be listed there, if THEY wanted to be in on the con, they had to do it.
So, you might be thinking, "This is just Wall Street nonsense. Why is this important to me?" I'll tell you. It means that every ETF, every index mutual fund, every passively managed retirement portfolio that tracks the NASDAQ 100 is now required to hold SpaceX without choice.
Notice this, that your mutual fund or retirement might be tied to this without you even knowing that. This is what happens when you trust them, under US law, under our Constitutional system as defined by the Supreme Court and as a Congress and executive produced by the regime of lies and money-corruption in our politics which the line of Supreme Court rulings I rail about regularly, permitted AFTER THE POST-WATERGATE CLEAN ELECTION LAWS WERE EVISCERATED IN THE NAME OF THE "FIRST AMENDMENT." That absolute fact that this is ultimately a product of the corruption of our elections allowed by Buckley v Valeo and its progeny is about to become the dominant issue in this analysis. The corruption that the Supreme Court allowed by knocking down that 1970s bipartisan effort to clean dirty money out of our politics has produced this.
So, if you have a 401k that includes an index fund with any exposure to the NASDAQ, congrats, you are an investor in SpaceX, whether you know it or not or want to be. Passive flows into the deal were estimated to be nearly $50 billion. Now, the second issue is the lockup period. Standard IPO lockups keep insiders from selling for at least 180 days. The idea being that executives and early investors have to live by the company's performance instead of cashing out as soon as they go public. SpaceX used a staggered lockup schedule.
So most early investors like sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East, members of the so-called PayPal mafia can begin selling 20% of their stakes at the first quarterly earnings call, which is right around the corner. Now, Elon's lockup is longer, but early investor exit liquidity was essentially baked in from day one. They changed the rules and the SEC allowed it because this is Trump's SEC.
The whole thing is probably going to be a pump and dump, and it's not the only "AI" IPO that is happening right now. I think there are at least two others if not more.
This almost certainly would not have happened if Joe Biden or Kamala Harris was president right now. Remember that when the crash comes, as it will. I don't hold any stock but I'm taking my meager savings out of anything except an insured savings account because I have no idea if that would be secure but I do know that it's in the bankers' interest that people still deposit money into their banks.
Now, let's talk about what we've actually done here. Because beyond the IPO mechanics, beyond the accounting tricks and the rule changes and this bizarre mission statement about extending the light of consciousness to the stars, we've handed one guy an unlimited war chest. And look what he did the last time. He had a pretty sizable one. He contributed $200 million more to the 2024 election. And analysts have subsequently determined that it was about roughly 115,000 votes in key swing states that determined that outcome. So did his money make a difference? You tell me. But here's the scale. 200 million today represents 2000s of 1% of his net worth. What are we doing? With the capital raised in this IPO, Musk can acquire dozens scores, maybe hundreds of other companies. He can buy his way into AI dominance even if he never builds a data center in orbit. He can own and reshape entire industries.
We've already seen what his vision of AI looks like, though. It's Grock. It's unsaavory and it's unstable. But we've given him the means to own the whole board. And so, let's be really clear about something. Elon Musk has never ever run a company that turned a profit on its own merits.
I've been trying to warn my loved ones who invest money in stocks and market funds and the like to get out of it while the getting is still possible, in every case to no avail. Their brokers can talk a good line. But I've got to try.
Of all of the many podcasts and such that I increasingly find is better than any corporate news or what you'll get from NPR, Reese Waters' is one I rely on daily.
I'm tempted to say let's ignore July 4 for the duration of the exile of democracy from the US but this makes me want to TAKE IT BACK FROM THE FASCISTS, THE WHITE SUPREMACISTS, FROM THE POMADE PETE KEGBREATH RACIST DRUNKS.
I WOULDN'T MIND HAVING the body I had at 28, the age that poor Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis but not if it meant I didn't have the life experience and reflection that the later decades gave me. True, by that age I hadn't lived as much as he had, though I'd seen a considerable part of an even more depraved demimonde than furnished him with a large part of his education and grew up in a far less innocent age than he had. I was still a young jack ass in many ways as most people are until they're older, I hadn't yet developed a deep skepticism for the intellectual milieu in which I grew up and was educated into - not in the classroom, in the media and entertainment and general trends. Seeing through that was one of the great things I got out of living longer though it could have gone bad very easily. If I had not made my way from the youthful conceit of agnosticism back to Christianity I might have lapsed into cynical materialism like so many of those who went from the left to the right. It was the morality that I got from Christianity that kept me from doing that. If Crane would have developed the same way out of the ultimately sterile and futile late 19th century notions of naturalism to what would now be called the left instead of vulgar materialism, no one can know. Mark Twain just sort of soured into an intense cynicism though he still had some notions of morality to it. His attempts at capitalism were not successful.
I am taunted with a link to a "Humanist" website that goes into the young man's, Crane's alleged irreligion, which I have to say I was vaguely aware of when I listed him yesterday but which I didn't take seriously. I haven't looked into it in regard to him but generally when I have looked at such claims by atheists (which "Humanist" means after the word was usurped by ideological atheists) about such historical figures they lay claim to, I've found those are anything from exaggerated to outright lies. One such earlier figure about whom such claims were made to me was Mozart whose letters, known associations (his Masonry, for example), and his music disprove those claims. Others in the repeated claims of such atheist polemicists, especially such crap coming from the "Humanists" and such outfits as "Freedom From Religion" should not be taken without fact checking but which never are, at least not by any atheists citing them who I've run across. And some of them are academics who should certainly know better but clearly don't have that level of integrity.
I mentioned Stephen Crane because his work of imagination, The Red Badge of Courage, has been sometimes compared to Huckleberry Finn. It reproduces the feelings of a young man, not much more but significantly more mature than Huck. It's not novel about a fully mature adult with an adult's level of experience and knowledge, Both books contain extremely important lessons for readers, certainly Twain's using Huck Finn to show readers what Uncle Tom's Cabin already had, that Black People are People, that enslaving them is wrong, something that John Woolman's Journal had done even earlier, though as it wasn't a story book, to less wide readership. Those parts of Huckleberry Finn are the parts when he and Jim are on the river, the parts in which the idiotic Tom Sawyer doesn't appear. The parts I said I might be able to re-read with pleasure.
One of the things I recall reading was that Stephen Crane said what I did, that of Twain's books, he liked Life on the Mississippi best, though that's my recollection of reading something about that. If I hadn't been struck at Crane having the same opinion as me, I probably wouldn't remember it.
You tend to focus on that which agrees with you and you develop that in your imagination instead of having a wider view of the entire picture. Which is one of the problems with taking the thinking of a young man as being what he would think if he had had the chance to become an old man with all of the life experience. But he imagined being an old man in one of his later stories, "The Veteran" which some think was him imagining his novel's hero surviving the war and achieving a heroic death far later. It starts with the old Veteran admitting to having been scared in battle, where his novel started out. No doubt he got that from him talking with Civil War veterans, and the young Crane doesn't appear to have shut off the possibility that he'd have gone in a different direction if he'd lived, too.
Old Fleming staggered. It was true; they had forgotten the two colts in the box stalls at the back of the barn. “Boys,” he said, “I must try to get ’em out.” They clamored about him then, afraid for him, afraid of what they should see. Then they talked wildly each to each. “Why, it’s sure death!” “He would never get out!” “Why, it’s suicide for a man to go in there!” Old Fleming stared absent-mindedly at the open doors. “The poor little things!” he said. He rushed into the barn.
When the roof fell in, a great funnel of smoke swarmed toward the sky, as if the old man’s mighty spirit, released from its body—a little bottle—had swelled like the genie of fable. The smoke was tinted rose-hue from the flames, and perhaps the unutterable midnights of the universe will have no power to daunt the colour of this soul.
I could speculate on what he meant by that, whether it was a sop to conventional piety in his readers or whether it showed he really believed in something like that but the young man didn't live long enough to tell us if there was anything to it.
Without that, something we can never have, there is no way to know.
He had a fine imagination for experiences he had never had directly and a talent for making his thoughts about that convincing. It's an extreme irony that so much of what is called "naturalism" and the like is a product of such imagination though it is never admitted that's what it is. Same with science, same with everything. The basic conceit of modernism, naturalism, etc. that we can have an unmitigated knowledge of things is plainly wrong.
He ends up with the question of how many times do these same war mongers get to make wars that get millions of People killed, that harm and maim even more than they kill with out them at the very least being treated as the COMPLETELY DISCREDITED CRIMINALS, LIARS AND IDIOTS THEY HAVE PROVEN THEMSELVES TO BE. I can guarantee you that John Bolton and John Podhoretz and many of the younger war mongering assholes revealed as criminals, liars and idiots in this video will continue to be go-to heads for the totally discredited American media whenever they get the urge to get the next Bush or Trump level idiot, liar and criminal to use he American military the way Trump has.
The "free press" in the US as protection against this kind of governmental evil is such a total load of bullshit.
As I've mentioned before, one of the consequences of this as the wars of Bush II, Bush I, the illegal wars of Reagan, Vietnam. . . should be that the war making powers the Congress unconstitutionally gave to the president are definitively removed back to there being only Congressionally approved wars as the friggin' Constitution claims are the only legitimate ones.
IN MY BRAWLS HERE over the years, I noted that that distinguished American author whose magnum opus, Huckleberry Finn, my generation was supposed to regard as THE GREAT 'MERICAN NOVEL, Mark Twain, was an extremely uneven writer producing, for the most part, crap. All of his most notable novels are written from the point of view of a boy or, in one case, the book he wanted people to regard as his best, a young girl AND EVEN THAT IS TOLD AS RECOLLECTED BY A LITTLE BOY sixty years later. That book, Recollections of Joan of Arc, is not well regarded today, probably because of its positive treatment of religion, but I think Twain wanted it to be his stab at writing an important adult book. He claimed to have researched it for years,
I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none.
I deeply sympathize with Mark Twain, no doubt he was sick to death of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and the other (now entirely dated) humor that made him famous. Of all his books, and I went through the project of reading all of him available to me years ago, the one I still like and could imagine re-reading for pleasure, Life on the Mississippi, was his attempt at good natured but not notably humorous realism. I could imagine re-reading parts of Huckleberry Finn, the parts without the putrid Tom Sawyer in it, with some pleasure though I don't think I would. Why read that when you can read Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman or Stephen Crane?
As to today's and yesterdays Twain schollars not liking it, anyone who would have gone into a life study of Twain would have done so on the basis of his more typical production so it's not a big surprise they wouldn't like his project to escape those confines. You usually judge an author on the basis of their typical and most lauded work, not on the outlier.
So I don't think Stephen Spielberg's several attempts at adult movies makes up for the bulk of what he did in, along with so many others in Hollywood once the 1970s BLOCKBUSTER movie that you could get teenage boys to pay to see 37 times in the first run had become a thing, to end Hollywood's brief post-WWII attempt to make adult movies. I've seen some of that and found it rather bland and sentimental. I would much, much rather have seen what Stanley Kubrick was planning by way of a movie about the Holocaust than what Spielberg did. I've read that Kubrick abandoned his project when Spielberg's Schindler's List was announced. I do not regard it as in any way up to the topic, but, then, no movie could be what that movie is made out to be. Kubrick's would probably not have been a big audience pleaser in the same way.
I recently noted the great effect on American drama that the Yiddish Theater and the Federal Theater Project had had once those who were involved with those got to write plays, produce plays, act in them and also to make movies dominated the field. Sidney Lumet's work is an example of that trend which started stalling out in the mid 70s. Just "The Hill" not one of his big movies proves that. I don't have favorite directors but he might be the one I chose if I was forced to choose one.
There were still adult movies being made and, I suppose, there still are but for the most part I don't want to sit through the months worth of dross to find the two hours of gems. When I told my brother-in-law I didn't watch TV anymore he talked about this or that show that I was missing out on. I told him if someone poured a bucket of quarters into a cesspool, I wouldn't dive in to retrieve them. I'd rather go looking at something that doesn't take as much time and where I can, generally, have more success at finding something worthwhile. Besides, these days I'd have to subscribe to some scheme to see new movies and it's not worth it. I'd rather look at the remnants of the Federal Theater Project and its offshoots that are available for free online, and I don't mean War of the Worlds. Though Welles was a product of that depression era project.
DECADES OF THE SOVIET UNION'S attempts including arms races, making deals with smaller countries, its entire foreign and much of its military policy has not done what Bush II in Iraq and Trump in Iran have managed to do in a quarter of a century, TOTALLY DESTROY AMERICA'S HEGEMONY ACHIEVED BY COMING OUT OF WWII INTACT AND WITH THE POLICIES THAT FDR AND TRUMAN PUT IN PLACE.
Trump's surrender note to the Iranian regime was, as many have said all along would happen, is a total capitulation to the Iranian regime. It is such a disaster for the United States, for United States power, for our economy, for the People of the United States that I doubt the Republicans in the Senate will allow it to come for a vote, if it does, they will have put the final nail in the coffin of MAGA because there is no way they can vote for it and, perhaps other than the brain dead Fetterman, NO DEMOCRAT WHO WANTS TO CONTINUE IN POLITICS WILL VOTE FOR IT. They would have to pass it with Republican votes and any Republican who votes for it should consider retirement too. About the only Americans who would welcome the thing are those who, like me, wasn't a big fan of American hegemony as it turned out to be but I don't favor it because it is so unfavorable to the welfare of The People of he United States and it would leave a very smart, very skilled, very mature and measured dictatorship in Iran as a major regional if not world power.
As in Bush II's Iraq disaster, Trump's Iran disaster is also a disaster in which Israel and the corrupt anti-Iranian dicatators of Saudi Arabia and some of the other Gulf states had a hand in convincing a stupid and corrupt American president into. I doubt that the American status quo in regard to Israel will ever return to what it was. Not after the combination of its self-posted genocide in Gaza and its somewhat less arrogantly self-posted Lebensraum violence in the West Bank and its role in convincing the stupidest and most corrupt president in American history to use the powers that the Congress stupidly gave American president to foment yet another disastrous foreign war.
While Norman Finkelstein is not incorrect in noting that Trump is, as Cheney and Bush II were before, quite capable of having other, largely financial motives in bringing these wars of such terrible consequence, the role that Israel and it's dangerously out sized influence in American politics through the Israel lobby here IS A HUGE PART OF THIS. In that Israel is not more at fault than other countries and, in fact, the United States are in their manipulation of other countries. We have made that extremely easy for them because Israel and its lobby here merely take advantage of our native corruption. We have chosen to maintain that exploitable corruption all on our own.
But that they have NOT been able to goad other presidents into direct American military involvement in the form of a war shows that Finkelstein's dismissal of their role in getting the two presidents with the least legitimacy (each was originally installed through an illegitimate electoral and, in Bush II,a corrupt, partisan judicial maneuver) to go into enormously disastrous wars is one of his few real errors of judgement. Israel and the Israel lobby are going to pay a price for this, unfortunately so will many entirely innocent American Jews who have been against the whole thing.
You can con even a conman by appealing to their weakness and Trump is a degenerate and stupid locus of the greatest accumulation of the most exploitable weaknesses that any American president has ever been. If Iran's rulers have been brilliant in their conduct of their response to the American-Israeli attack on it, I will give Israel's fascist government this, their corrupt leaders are far smarter than the corrupt leaders the American oligarchy put over us in the last half century. They just got too ambitious in their own corruption figuring that like Dr. Seuss's Sneetches, Americans don't learn anything from even the hardest of experience.
I think in his case Finelstein realizes that one of the real consequences of this is that it puts American Jews in danger in ways that they have never been in in American history till now. I worry about that too, and not just for the very large number of American Jews who have been opposed to all of this from the start and those who have finally seen what a disaster the last great European colonial project has been. First in terms of morality, second, and also in terms of morality, for Palestinians and others in the Middle East. Here in the United States the Israel industry and lobby has twisted and perverted our already twisted and not infrequently morally perverse foreign and military policy. They have been empowered in that by that line of the stupidest Supreme Court rulings in our history. Its billionaires have been attacking everything from whatever shreds of integrity our propaganda and lie filled alleged news media has to the blackmail of racist Zionist billionaires and their goons in the Trump regime and the Congress over our educational institutions. As in Britain, we are in another period like the red scare no behalf of Israel. In every way when a foreign country has had that kind of influence over the United States, it has ended up being to our detriment, though in the past only Britain has had that role, with some of the larger European economies, such as France's having some minor role in that regard. But getting into that will get me off of the topic of this post.
America has had two hugely disastrous wars in the Middle East within a quarter of a century, three if you're going for about a third of a century with the Bush I Gulf War. All of them brought by Republican administrations, all of them with the support of billionaire-millionaires who figured either to profit from them or to get support for their pet ideological projects, as if you can tease out any selfish motives for even those billionaire hobbies. Given the Bush I Gulf War which was the prelude to HW Bush's son's war, I'd say that's three Republican presidencies in a row that have done this and you can bet that there will be another one if Republicans get in again, they are utterly corrupt to start with and they are proven to be suckers for those trying to sell us on another war with terrible consequences. Eisenhower was the last Republican who had any sense when it comes to the cost of war. There won't be another from that party.
I used to say that the war in Iraq was sold in no small part to racists who really believed that the Iraqi People were going to roll over and do American bidding once Saddam Hussein was gone. It wasn't only the neocons who claimed that, Dick Cheney and Little Bush really believed that just as they believed that the utter catastrophe that Afghanistan has always been for empires far closer to it could be brought to heel by the great white hope that they certainly picture America to be. Racism has been the strongest and most durable of malign traits of the United States as a collective entity, it is our greatest evil and our most powerful one. It has ruled many states of the United States every single year of their existence, apart from the brief period of Reconstruction, it has ruled virtually every state in the country for at least part of its existence. It is a mainstay of our media, both the "news" and, especially in so-called entertainment, which is far more powerful than any purported venue that gives out alleged information. It is no accident that Trump has done what not even the two Bushes have done, go directly into a war with Iran which Saddam Hussein was stupid enough to start WITH THE HELP OF THE UNITED STATES AND AT THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION. The racism inherent in our elites as well as in the lowly here leads to a kind of amnesia when the lives destroyed by such wars are not considered white. Well, those so forgotten or not considered to start with don't agree, they have not forgotten and the consequences result in animosities that the average American and even those who get elected president by the worst of us are mystified at.
No deal would be better than the surrender Rubio, Vance, Kushner and the other real estate crook, Witkoff are presenting. Just coming home with our tails between our legs would be better. The worst consequences of this war are guaranteed to be the status quo for decades to come no matter what is signed. By then the, forgive me but there is no other way to put it strongly enough, retarded lard ass of a president the Republicans and the oligarchs gave us will be long rotted in his grave. If the Trump family are true to form it will be either in some grotesque tomb for which they'll get some grift or it will be dumped in a hole on some Trump property for tax purposes. Look where Ivana's brats allowed her corpse to be dumped without any regard for the grave-site. Nothing is sacred to these sub-humans except money. And look where that has brought us.
I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE MOVIES especially not sci-fi-adventure movies.
If it's true that, on the basis of a movie script which, or so I understand, is based on a treatment by Spielberg, himself, him making any kind of speculative declarations of what a scenario he imagines would do to Christianity are based on an even greater level of ignorance than my almost total nescience about his movie. What if the "ETs" turn out to be highly religious in a monotheistic way compatible with the Abrahamic religions? What if they convert to Christianity? If so, I'm hoping it's one of the peace churches or we might be in big trouble.
Spielberg is one of those whose movies of the mid-1970s onward buried the attempt at Hollywood to make movies for adults in favor of adolescents who would go see the same movie over and over again in one month. Which helped me to come to the conclusion that I really don't care about the movies, prefering the cheap, cheap, close to the author's intent form of radio drama - though, again, I generally don't care for the sci-fi and fantasy genres, too easy, too stupid.
That's a problem for any kind of theater but especially for the movies. Going back and looking at some of the classic movies I enjoyed when I saw them, the stories are largely absurd, the acting looks contrived and old fashioned and while some of them are visually striking and even to some extent artistic, that doesn't make up for the stories and the acting.
I suspect that whatever might happen if "contact" is made, it won't have much of an impact on those of us who really believe the Gospel of Jesus. It's not as if the Bible was the last word in that, though it certainly must inform any genuine understanding of the Gospel. When I imagine "ETs" who manage to have technology powerful enough for them to get here, I imagine they learned such things as "the meek will inherit their planet," "do to others what you'd have them do to you," sharing food and drink is to share in the very substance of God. Any species that developed technology that didn't share those truths of the Gospel probably end up destroying themselves like the materialists in the human species are doing right now. If Spielberg doesn't have that as a theme in the movie, it's bullshit.
WITH LESS THAN A MAJORITY OF THE VOTERS SUPPORT, the ego that ate Maine, twice, Elliot Cutler, had had five chances that someone who wasn't a multi-millionaire elite lawyer pedo-porn addict wouldn't have gotten?
The disgraced gubernatorial candidate and sex offender was arrested last week for failing to sign a probation treatment plan document — his 6th alleged probation violation.
According to court documents, the 79-year-old man from Brooklin refused to sign a contract required for participation in problematic sexual behavior treatment. . . .
A probation officer said that decision, as well as Cutler’s discharge from the counseling program, indicates that he “has no intent of following his ordered conditions.”
But during a court hearing in Hancock County on Tuesday morning, Superior Court Justice Patrick Larson agreed to remove the treatment program as a court-ordered requirement until his court proceedings are resolved.
I would like to know what Larson's record of treatment of non-millionaire, repeat parole violators has been up till now. I have a feeling this may be a unique case in Maine where someone has gotten six chances and the judge makes such requirements sound like it's something unusual as a condition for parole.
The legal profession, including the judges and, worst of all the "justices" is riddled with among the scummiest of sleeveens who know that their first order of business is to serve the rich and powerful, their training in how to lie about that in complex, elegant sounding language so as to fool the gullible. Lying and meting unequal law because they know which side their bread is buttered on.
I'd ask if the legal profession, including the judges and "justices" can get any lower than they are now, but, of course, they can.
Written by Gordon Pengilly, Bailey's Way stars Esther Purves Smith as Tanis Bailey, a young rookie constable on the the Calgary Police Service determined to make’Detective’ just as soon as she can.
David LeReaney as Sergeant Mann Grant Linneberg as Detective Donaldson
Introduced by Bob Boving
I was going throughsome thumb drives and found the mp3 of Gordon Pengilly's excellent radio play, Seeing in the Dark which won a prize from the BBC. Unfortunately the transfer of the recording of the BBC production was taken down so I can't repost that. I'd like to.
I also can't post any of his plays that I've only read but never saw a production of, a number of them for radio, which is my favorite form. I'd love to hear some of those I haven't heard. I have always liked his work. He wrote the series Bailey's Way for the CBC's Mystery Project so I've decided to post those over the summer, starting tonight.
THERE IS A FAINT GLIMMER OF HOPE for those of us who value the truth and honesty and just basic correct information against lies, self-interest and online slop, not that it will survive the US Supreme Court's usual BJ prostitute servicing of the billionaires, millionaires and "corporate persons" but a court in Germany has held that the part of Google that is giving even we the unwilling "AI" search results are liable for lies it throws out to the world.
Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews.
The preliminary ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder, where two publishers found that Google’s AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other sketchy business practices. After smearing publishers by making affirmative statements like “Yes, [it] is known for dubious business practices and is often perceived as a scam,” Google failed to correct the misleading output, even after the publishers sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year.
Google tried the usual arguments to shield itself from liability for false statements in AI Overviews, such as arguing that most users understand that AI outputs aren’t always accurate and must be verified.
But the court found that, unlike traditional search engines that merely present lists of links to third-party statements, Google’s tool made “independent, new, and substantive statements” based on its own misinterpretation of links on the Internet.
That’s a problem, the court said, because while publishers may have been able to sue to stop third parties from publishing defamatory statements appearing in Google search results, only Google can correct the underlying algorithm and outputs displayed in AI Overviews. And because, at least initially, the company did not, it therefore “must be held accountable,” the court ruled. Beyond that, Google’s argument was deemed particularly weak, since the AI overview in this case “contains statements that do not appear in the search results at all.”
All but the most tech savvy of those who have favored so-called "artificial intelligence" and those they have gulled among the public have the most magical and unrealistic view of it and its potential and that includes virtually every tech billionaire, individually or clustered into malignant herds of them and their tech goons. Their view of it more influenced by sci-fi, sci-ranger cultism, scientistic, atheist-materialist ideology or just the typical greed that has fed many a stock market bubble.
Other than the successful use of "AI" for some highly technical things, like scanning cell samples and imaging to look for signs of pathology, most of it is commercial crap fueling the approaching and disastrous pop or the current bubble the world economy is sitting on. That is concerning but, as I've noted, the use of "AI" to destroy real information in favor of slop, truth in favor of lies, oligarchic propaganda over everything else, is destroying equality and democracy as well.
Whatever parts of Google who still care about responsibility and not being evil - remember that slogan? - should buck the "AI" mania and shut it down and get it out of their search engine. I might go back to using it if they did that, with it, no. They're going to take a hit when the bubble bursts which, I think, given the eagerness of the tech billionaire oligarchs trying to dump their stocks in IPOs all at once, is about to happen, they might want to at least mitigate the disaster for their company by publicly trying to get shut of it.
But back to "AI" that libels companies and, no doubt, individuals making the corporations, billionaires and millionaires liable for their algorithm's lies here in the land lorded over by the lawyer-liars on the Supreme Court, I wouldn't suggest you wait up nights or hold your breath. Those Supremes love them some billionaire-millionaire lying. They have for at least sixty four years. I hope in other countries without our out of control Court they can keep the truth alive because it's got little chance here.
Note: You can, of course, use it to tell the truth or, at least, something closer to the truth than, for example, the American "free press'" version of things. I would, by the way, include the Iranian use of "AI" generated cartoons to hurl against Trump in that. Though they certainly wouldn't be interested in turning it against the dictatorship in Iran, once the Israeli-American war on them stops. If we live that long.
including Susan Collins' maybe their going after Graham Platner is a class issue.
After writing this, I wondered how many stories per day have been filed about the "scandals" of Graham Planter as opposed to past and proven sex scandals with an added boost of hypocrisy, like Henry Hyde's adulterous affair as he was chasing after Bill Clinton's sex life, Newt Gingrich's dumping of his first wife for the woman he was having an affair with as she was fighting cancer. And that's not to mention the many, many stories that are never touched in the media when it's a member of their own profession posing as a moral arbitor.
I wrote about Mika Brezinski's hypocrisy in questioning whether given his known minor issue of talking dirty with consenting adults online, if Graham Planter had the moral purity to go after Donald Trump for his Epstein involvement. She could have certainly asked Susan Collins that same question, Susan Collins is known to have been involved with her husband as his previous wife was fighting cancer which is a lot sleazier than the "scandal" that has blown up against Graham Platner's online sexy TALK. Which his wife and he have reportedly worked through PRIVATELY and he stopped doing it. It's reported that Collin's husband, who she was seeing for quite a while before, divorced his wife while she was ill. Exactly what Newt Gingrich did to his first wife.
And then there's the reemergence of Donald Trump's old pro liar, Kellyanne Conway who lied about what he's accused of WHILE WORKING FOR THE KNOW EPSTEIN CLASS #1 GUEST STAR IN THE EPSTEIN FILE, THE MAN WHO MIKA AND JOE GAVE PHONE CALL SEGEMENTS TO ON THEIR MORNING SHOW AS HE WAS A KNOWN ADULTERER RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT AT A TIME HIS KNOWN FRIENDSHIP WITH EPSTEIN DURING THE PERIOD OF EPSTEIN'S KNOWN CRIMES WERE PART OF THE PUBLIC RECORD.
And, as mentioned last night, the media who is going after Graham Planter to put a general sense of unease around him IS FULL TO THE TOP OF REPORTERS, OPINION SCRIBBLERS, EDITORS, PUBLISHERS AND RIGHT ON UP TO OWNERS WHOSE OWN MORAL HISTORIES DISQUALIFIES THEM FROM THROWING THE FIRST NOT TO MENITION THE NEXT STONES IN THAT REGARD. Everyone from David Brookes and his dumping his first wife for a far younger woman, to the likes of Rupert Murdoch whose fortune was, in no small part, built on peddling pornography, the soft core titty pics to the hard core stuff. And with his known history.
I remember while I was studying medieval and later history in high school and college that it was striking how the monarchs and nobility and aristocracy and, yes, the clergy were such notable adulterers, fornicators, rapists, etc. whose sexual sins were known but who seldom to never suffered the consequences meted out when the same became known of among the peasants. The same is certainly true in American history in which the rich and famous and connected had sex with whomever they wanted to, most famously Thomas Jefferson who raped at least one of the young girls he kept in slavery - the very crime of Epstein and Trump and the billionaires Epstein serviced - but who will be lionized as he is every 4th of July. And what he, as a member of the Southern aristocracy did, was common practice, so common that it was remarked on how many of the children among the enslaved looked like family members of their enslavers - one of the reported attractions of the girl Sally Hemmings to Jefferson was that she was almost the spitting image of his late wife - we can be in little doubt as to why that may have been.
But the same thing that is commonly accepted and acceptable when it is known to be done by the rich, both men and Women, certainly in the media class - itself now an appendage of the show-biz industry which is like a pack of dogs or herd of cats in perpetual heat is presented as having no moral disqualification at all. It's hilarious for Republicans of any kind to be pretending to get the vapors about this, considering how many of its biggest figures have really sordid histories, Ronald Reagan and his Hollywood past, Newt Gingrich who, like Trump, seems to have committed adultery with all of his wives - the present Mrs. Gingrich was screwing him while he was married and while she was a choir member at the National Cathedral - several of Gingrich's replacements as Republican Speaker's of the House including Denny Hastert who is known to have been a serial pedophile sexual abuser who is the highest member of the government to have ever served a prison sentence. The present Republican caucus as well as the Trump regime are full of sexual sinners, likely sexual criminals as a number of them are either suspected of or known to have been in the Epstein class. Then there's their gentleman's agreement policy on the likes of Lindsay Graham and many others who, if a Democrat shared their sexual history, they'd go after hammer and tongs. And don't forget the several accusations that the current Judiciary Chairman, Jim Jordan knew about the sexual harassment going on against his wrestling team members at Ohio State while he did nothing about it. I'd like to know the monthly percentage of stories about that as compared to the coverage that Graham Platner has faced. I'd put years to weeks that the media firestorm over Platner has been far heavier and more concentrated.
I think they're going after Graham Platner on the basis of him being a blue collar man from a small state, someone who from an early age grew up doing physical labor, who went into the military as a means of advancement and who went back to physical labor. It's certainly an issue of class and, not improbably, him not coming from a place like New York or California or Virgina or even Ohio. Certainly a likely issue in the NYT's treatment of him. It was one of the things that was certainly part of the media's sandbagging of the man who may well have been our most moral president, Jimmy Carter whose Georgian farmer origin was likely an issue for the media elite, as certainly was Bill Clinton's Arkansas origin was in their willingness to make his history an issue. Susan Collins, as a guaranteed to never vote against the financial interests of the Epstein class and the big media moguls, is given a pass in that regard.
There is more than a little it of outrage among the national media that their hit job on Graham Platner doesn't seem to have worked and, if my observation, shared with many others may well have driven up the Planter vote in Maine, it increased his support. It also may be the final hurrah of the influence of the traditional big media outlets like the Times and the cabloids. I hope that's right because it will certainly mean that at least a lot of Mainers have seen through their games and their self-interest and snobbery. Maybe it's because we've experienced the snobbery of so many elites from away who have colonized Maine. Especially those from the NYC area. I think they look on Graham Platner as an uppity rustic. One who doesn't aspire to be their handmaid like Susan Collins has so reliably been.
HEARING THE ADULTERESS MIKA trying to push the "scandal" of Graham Platner and consenting adults talking dirty online WHEN SHE AND HER HUSBAND AND COUNTLESS OF THOSE IN POLITICS SHE AND THEY HAVE NOT GONE AFTER FOR THEIR ADULTERIES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE makes me think maybe Graham Platner should only go on TV to be interviewed with only those who are not only celebate but who have led lives of total chastity.
Good luck finding anyone in the media or in politics who isn't an actual adulterer.
I'm not going to wait for Graham Platner to make us in Maine giving a giant FUCK YOU! to the mainstream media a plus for his campaign, I'm going to leave no opportunity to push that as one of the things we can accomplish by voting him into the Senate by a landslide. So, fuck you, Mika, Joe, NYT, etc. all of you FILTHY RICH Republican-fascist oligarch tongue bathing hypocrites.
