Here's' the latest thing I've seen about the ICESTAPO murder in Maine today, from the Portland Press Herald,  by Isabell Oss and Abby Driscoll

Cecelia Humiston woke up Monday morning to commotion outside her Chapel Street apartment in Biddeford.

The 22-year-old walked out and saw what appeared to be a person on the ground on Pool Street, then heard yelling from other neighbors and cries from a family in distress — two women and a young child.

“She couldn’t have been older than three,” said Humiston, who has a 2-year-old son. “She was still in her Bluey pajamas.”

Just minutes after a man was shot and killed, reportedly by federal immigration officials, Humiston saw who she believes was the victim’s daughter. She said the older of the two women yelled to law enforcement, “You took her dad, you took her dad!”

The Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine identified the victim as a 26-year-old Columbian man. His name has not been released, but the organizations said he had been issued a Social Security number and was authorized to work in the U.S.

Humiston said she did not know the family, but her father told her he’d seen them around town several times over the last few years.

From her window, Humiston could see law enforcement asking the family to stay on the scene and if they had spoken to investigators yet. A member of the family told an officer she “didn’t care,” and wanted to leave, Humiston said.

Humiston described the law enforcement officials as “rude,” and said they barricaded the family’s car from leaving. Another yelled at the little girl, who she said was trying to smell flowers.

Several neighbors said they have seen ICE activity in the city since February. Some recall agents patrolling bus stops and stopping people on the street, but Humiston was shocked to learn about Monday’s incident.

“This is Biddeford, things like this never happen here,” she said.

Naw, I don't feel in the least bit ashamed of saying it - Rain Delay Hate Mail

I HAVE AN UNSHAKABLE FAITH that Lindsey Graham is in hell, what most of you would know Catholics call purgatory.   Where Trump will go.  Which one will spend more time there, that I don't know. 

There's an old joke about Unitarian Universalists,  that the Universalists believe God was too good to damn anyone to hell for eternity and the Unitarians firmly believe that THEY are too good for God to damn THEM to eternity.   I'm with the universalists.  

I'm a Catholic universalist,  I think there's a hell where all the evil we have done and been gets burned out of us but that it's not eternal.   I wouldn't want to go there but I'm sure someone does. 

Charlie Kirk is there getting his racism and slander against TransPeople burned out of him, his promotion of gun murder, too.   And for the same reasons that Lindsey is there. 

Aren't you glad you demanded an answer?  

I Don't Know How Much Coverage It's Getting

but there has been another ICESTAPO murder, this one in Biddeford, Maine.  That's not far from where I life.   There haven't been many details in the media, and those will, I'm sure, come from witnesses and not the Trump regime.   

I haven't read anything from our governor, Janet Mills.   I hope she's as good on this as she was on standing up to Trump up till now.  Not that she'll have much more success with that than governors in other places where ICE and the other federal fascist police entities have murdered People.

Did these assholes get all their training from watching cop shows on TV and video games?   I'll bet our local cops probably got more training than to do stuff like that. 

This is the Trump regime at war with the American People. 

Before Going Out To Weed

 I'll repost what I said at RMJ's

I think it's pretty funny that a lot of the conspiracy theorists find it unreasonable that a 71-year-old man who is known to have eaten pretty much every meal from a restaurant (when a TV was stolen from his kitchen he didn't know it for weeks because he never went in there) and who is known to have drunk heavily - believe me, he was an alcoholic and not a recent one - could have died as a result of hardening of the arteries.

I was just talking to one of my younger relatives a couple of weeks back about how when I was a kid it was far from unusual for men in their 30s and 40s to die of heart attacks. Off hand, thinking of it right now, I could name you at least four or five of those who died in my town at the time. It's not because diets have generally gotten better, drugs for treating the effects of a meat centered diet mixed with other health endangering habits have gotten better.

Still, since the Republicans live by spreading rumors and lies, I've got no problem with what they do being turned against them, except it does nothing to defeat the deadly error that there is such a thing as a "right to lie."

Todays Article Slamming Democrats

BY MICHAEL SEAN WINTERS embodies what I really like about his journalism and what I really dislike about it.   I will pass by the typical and rather superficial comments about Graham Platner,  I have yet to read someone who isn't a long time observer of Maine politics who really gets that.  He is somewhat more at home when talking about New York. 

Like most American journalists, for him Democrats, except for the farthest right of them (see below), can only do wrong.  

Here for example is a paragraph I think is both rather unaware and unfair as it is, in part,  insightful.

The problem with the democratic socialists is not their economics. It is their indifference to the way liberal democracy works.  If they called themselves "social Democrats" they would not be such an easy target. Or, better, if they called themselves "FDR Democrats" they would put their opponents on the back foot. And there is not a single item on their agenda that requires one label over the others.  One suspects that they like the fact that "democratic socialist" sounds more radical.  In a democracy, however, one has to persuade, and this group of progressives prefers to hector. They speak as if their ideas are self-evident.

I would like to have Winters give us a paragraph or two just what is "the way liberal democracy works."  Because as the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, etc. show, it's either not working very well or it isn't working at all.   The turmoil in the United States that gave us things like the phenomenon of the Obama voter becoming the Trump voter and, I will go on to say, so many of those very same people turning from MAGA to FAFO regrets over their support for Trump is exactly that LIBERAL DEMOCRACY NOT WORKING AS ADVERTISED, IN ANY WAY. 

Liberal democracy with its maximum emphasis on "freedom" especially under the name of "liberty" as became a slogan in both the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century has proven to be entirely compatible with inequality, ECONOMIC INEQUALITY most of all, but also the rankest of racial, gender, ethnic, class inequality in terms of political participation and legal rights.   AND ALL OF THOSE AREAS OF INEQUALITY UNDER LIBERAL DEMOCRACY ARE INTERTWINED.   In the Post WWII years, when, through Democrats enhancing the power of organized labor and such massive economic and social leveling under things like the GI Bill and increased support of higher education - the tuition at Land Grant Universities in those years should certainly count as welfare as much as payment to poor families - the white working and middle class flourished as never before.   That was even as Black Americans and other People of Color were far, far less included in that until the passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts in the mid-1960s.   

Once that happened and with the economic consequences of things like spending for the War in Vietnam and increasing transfer of wealth from the working class TO THE RICH and poor and middle class whites felt the pinch, they were either talked into or fell back on those long, long ingrained habits under liberal democracy to kick down and kiss up.  

Michael Sean Winters' liberal democratic habits of thought are one thing that leads his desire for the consequences of egalitarian liberty with the very "freedoms" such as the freedom of the media to lie us into fascism, the freedom of those with money to buy government, the freedom of them to set up guess pools and programming on such as PBS in the past and in online "influencers" like the late Charlie Kirk to propagandize using such notions as "freedom" and, most potently destructive of equality, "free speech." to lie us into Trumpism.  

His notion that Democratic Socialists, who I have certainly been critical of in several ways, would be any more acceptable in 2026 by calling themselves "Social Democrats" or even "FDR Democrats" is naive in the extreme.    If calling themselves either of the two would in any way benefit their chances of getting elected or putting their economic equality agenda into law then that would have happened back when Democrats ran on the memory of FDR and called their agenda "social justice."   So corrupted has the memory of history become, under the liberal democratic definition of "free-press, media, speech" that those wouldn't work any better than "Democratic Socialism."  

He is, though, correct in the fact that so many lefties, especially those with college credentials, seem to be blissfully unaware of,  that in order to govern, make laws and put them into effect,  you do need to win a majority of the votes, though, as I noted yesterday, under our "liberal democracy" with its rigging to ensure that the right and ignorant and influenced by billionaire money actually win, the Electoral College and, especially under Supreme Court usurpation, can short circuit that.    Liberal democracy, American style, is even more corrupt than it is in many of the newer liberal democracies.  Ours is intentionally and explicitly rigged to ensure inequality will always be a major force in American politics.

Almost the entire news media, almost as much of academia and the conventional wisdom of the plutocracy will lie to you about that, never so much as in the month of July 4th and never so much as in a year that ends in a 76 or a 26.  

The most self-evident clause in the Declaration of Independence was rendered moot almost as soon as the leaders of the Revolution, slave owners and their allies, every one,  got actual power.  That was already clear when they got around to the parts about enumeration of population in the slave states and how they would be assessed for taxation at the commencement of the revolution. 

Before giving his article a bit of praise I have to address this obscene passage:

Nowhere is the progressives' morally obtuse self-certainty more obvious, and more troubling, than in the ease with which they accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. Everyone is free to criticize any decision of the Israeli, or any other, government. . . 

THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO MORAL OR RATIONAL ARGUMENT THAT WHAT ISRAEL HAS DONE IN GAZA IS NOT A GENOCIDE.  If you want to give that decision to the 'experts' there are numerous ISRAELI scholars of genocide who have said that what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza is a genocide.   The Nazis did their best to cover up their genocide as they were committing it.  As I recently linked to a piece by a Holocaust scholar noted, there is a rare instance of a soldier writing to his wife in Vienna about what he and his unit were doing in Eastern Europe,  and it is one of the rare instances of something like that.  The genocide by Israel in Gaza has been videotaped and commented on by the genocidalists as they were gleefully committing it TO THE WORLD ON THE INTERNET.  If Winters wants to argue about the definition of "genocide" to defend what the IDF an the widely supported Israeli government is doing as some lesser act, then he is in need of some serious moral reflection.   Maybe he should seriously contemplate a picture of a child shot in the head by the IDF like the baby who was shot while they were breast feeding.  

. . . Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel delivered a master class in how you criticize an ally in his speech in Tel Aviv last week. When a person only criticizes Israel, and ignores Hamas' responsibility not just for the pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, but for repeatedly placing Gaza's civilian population in harm's way and refusing to turn over hostages which would have brought the war to a speedy conclusion, why is that? Avila Chevalier attended a pro-Palestinian rally the day after the Oct. 7 attack. There is a word for looking at a complex problem and only blaming the Jews involved: antisemitism.

Dear Jesus, don't tell me that MSW is going to endorse Emanuel for president.   

There have been myriads of those who condemned the actions of Hamas on October 7th who are fully able to see that the scores and scores of thousands of civilians killed and outright murdered and millions removed from Gaza in what MEMBERS OF THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT AND ZIONISTS INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF ISRAEL ADMIT IS AN ATTEMPT TO DESTROY GAZA AND DEPOPULATE IT, LEBANSRAUM 2026, IN A WORD IS THE VERY DEFINITION OF GENOCIDE .  

What is Israel but a program of putting Jews "in harms way?"   One of the great criticisms of the Zionist project was that it would concentrate Jews in a way that killing them would make it far easier.   And it was seen from before the establishment of the state that it would exist in a perpetual state of war because of how it was built on land stolen from Palestinians, Muslims, Christians and others.   Dorothy Thompson went from an ardent supporter of Zionism - unlike Hannah Arendt, she supported the overtly exclusionary (and racist) Zionist Biltmore Conference - only for her to realize when she saw what was happening for herself to see the Israel project as a deeply dangerous trap for both Jews and Palestinians.   I think Winters would do himself a favor by looking closely at the evolution of Dorothy Thompson's position on the establishment of a "Jewish state" that has turned into an explicitly apartheid state which has steadily expanded its land by terrorizing, attacking and killing Palestinians and those in surrounding states, especially Lebanon.   Thompson was consistent in her opposition to that kind of thing, whether in Europe by Hitler or, eventually, in the middle east by Israel.  

I would love to hear what he would have to say about this recent quote:

 "What is Jewish supremacy? Eighty years after the Holocaust, it's Mein Kampf in reverse. The superior race is us." 

And this one:

"The Israeli government is encouraging Jewish pogromists to dispossess Arabs of their land through abuse, including shooting at them,"

That was said by former Israeli Defense Minister, Moshe Ya'alon .

I could go on with what is wrong with what Winters said,  here is something that demonstrates why he is pretty good in his real area of expertise, recent and past Catholic history and culture.

. . . The record of democratic socialism in postwar Europe is something Americans would do well to emulate. At its heart, it stands for the proposition that the common good needs to play a larger role in setting national priorities, that the hyper-individualism, and most especially the deregulation of capital, that characterized the Reagan-Thatcher revolution was a mistake. John Judis has penned an excellent analysis of the development of democratic socialism in recent years vis-à-vis the Democratic Party.

This is not merely my opinion. That noted leftie pol Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2006 book co-written with Marcello Pera, Without Roots, famously said: "In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness."

Maybe he could get the recent Catholic converts like J.D. Vance to refute the second most adored recent Pope of the trad-caths to good effect.   I have pointed out that, having to deal with both the far more radical than socialist economics of the Mosaic Law or its intensification under the Gospel of Jesus and the earliest church, even the recent reactionary Popes,  Benedict and JPII have sounded like economic radicals in their writings and speeches.   

I would, though, caution that European democratic socialism has rested on a reform of the liberal democratic order* and, so, it has not prevented the devolution of its retained inegalitarian features into neo-fascism and even neo-Nazism.   Which gets us to something we do really agree on,  I agree with MSW that the word "socialist" makes it a political liability if not a non-starter.   The Nazis along with the Marxists, the putrid Fabians and a myriad of other pseudo-socialism have made the word poison in far too many cases.   For the good that came from post-war European democratic socialism, it was certainly not an end of history any more than liberal democracy - you can safely read that "rampant capitalism" - has been. 

NOTE:  I have come to distrust any political or legal or, really, intellectual framing that pretends it can extend the methods of science as used in the more exact physical sciences into the realms of society, economics, and, most dangerous of all, perhaps, civil law.   Liberal democracy is, inherently, that kind of a pretense of extending scientific method way beyond where it can legitimately, honestly or safely be applied.  That danger intensifies with that most dangerous of all such attempts becoming part of the mix, the theory of natural selection.   For the Catholic journalist Michael Sean Winters, he might want to consider the consequences for the Gospel of Jesus under the intellectual framing of "natural selection" which Darwin, himself, said was identical to Spencer's "survival of the fittest." 

The Law, the Gospel, the Epistles, and their equivalent in other religious traditions are  the only secure foundation of egalitarian democracy and you can't find that with the scientific method.  "Liberal democracy" shuns that truth. 

The Clearly "AI" "Proof of Life" "Photo" Of Mitch McConnell Proves One Thing

and that is that an intelligent and skilled user of Photoshop type computer software could do a much better job at faking it.   

I won't go into the list of telling details in the first picture they put up because those probably are already known to you.

Then there is the report that they took the original one down and put up a revised "photo" then, according to some reports, they took even that down. 

I looked at the images in some of the reporting on this and was certain it was a fake.  

Really,  have Republican hacks, flacks, tech assistants gotten so lazy by already relying on "AI" that they can't be bothered to fake "photos" better than that?  

It is entirely absurd that the governor of Kentucky cannot demand to see and talk to McConnell in person, with someone else who knows him - they'd probably try to find a body double, they're so desperate to keep the Republican-fascist majority in the Senate - so I wouldn't necessarily trust anything less than that for "proof of life."    Surely if Mitch is as "well" as the "photo" shows him being he would welcome a courtesy visit from the governor of his state.

What we've learned from this is that "AI" is stupid and that it has already made those who lie for fascism for a living really, really lazy.  

Graham has died after what family members described as a "brief and sudden illness."

BRIEF AND SUDDEN ILLNESS like alcohol poisoning?    It's been known for years that Lindsey was a heavy drinker.   I've noticed this year that in hearings, in interviews,  in Q&As that he's been rather obviously under the influence, generally heavily so - I have been intimately involved with alcoholics, I can tell one when I see one.  

He's been a thoroughly evil man his entire life, living a lie as an in-the-closet and active gay man who was a stalwart of the party that has made hatred and oppression of LGBTQ+ People a plank in it's party platform, nowhere more so than in his little corner of the traditional bastion of bigotry,  South Carolina.   His record in the Congress has been one of sheer evil in almost every case, his record as a talking head of Republican-fascism as well.   I can think of literally nothing good to say about him in all of the decades I've been reading about him and hearing him.  Like with the several times when the late Mitch (Moscow's bitch) McConnell said something mildly positive, it only showed him to be as big a hypocrite as he was a constant force for the bad.  

The only thing I'm sorry about is that he didn't live till after the election in November because I think it's likely that he would have lost it.   I always want the truly evil to experience maximum consequences in this life though if that's not going to happen, yeah, death overtaking them is a second best and under our crooked system probably the best that we can look forward to for the worst. 

I do not hold with "De mortuis nil nisi bonum"  I say of the dead speak nothing but THE TRUTH.    And when there's literally nothing good to say about them,  the hell with lying about them.   I hope that purgatory burns out of him all the evil he's done and been, I'm expecting in his case it'll take a lot of that. 

Holding Public Office Is Not A Right It Is An Obligation To The People

THE UNITED STATES FOUNDED ON THERE BEING NO KING has become a total lie because we have a monarch,  before the New Taney Court issued its string of rulings making Republicans kings - when it's a Democrat in the office, they certain hold that "that's different" - things were bad enough.  Now there is no denying that they have made the presidency into a "unitary executive" and absolute monarchy.  In this 250th year after the slavers, aristocratic lawyers and others signed the Declaration of Independence issued their lofty and, sadly empty, words,  we have a mad king who is unusually stupid, unusually crooked and dishonest who has far, far more power to do evil than a King George III ever had.   And there is no way under out insanely retained 18th century Constitution and the political system that has evolved out of it to get rid of him.  

Look at the title of this post again, it states a truth that is entirely ignored.   No one has a "right" to hold a public office,  there is no rational basis for claiming that there is any such a right.  Under the U.S. Constitution, if it was to be claimed that the winner of an election has a "right" to hold the seat then that is certainly nullified by the atrocity of the Electoral College which has put the loser of the popular vote into the office five times in our history,  three of which imposed some of the worst presidents in our history on us including Rutherford Hayes,  George W. Bush and Donald Trump.   Of the other two, Benjamin Harrison was a pretty bad president and only John Quincy Adams is generally ranked in the top half in those historian surveys they love to take at C-Span.  

But the point of this is to show that even if you want to make what should have always been, explicitly, understood as not a "right" but as an obligation freely taken to The People is now treated in a more extreme fashon than a "divine right of kings"  to the detriment of the country and the world.   

The next congress, if it is controlled by Democrats should make it a law that all presidential candidates take a physical examination and psychological evaluation made by a panel of doctors not of their choice AND NOT ANSWERABLE TO A PRESIDENT and the conclusions of those doctors be made part of the public record.   The laws, the regulations and the courts allow those hiring People for minimum wage and low paying jobs to demand those kinds of tests of People who apply or accept an offer of a job often with the slightest of public safety implications.   Yet we are stupid enough under our president deifying law and culture to let a Trump hire hack doctors and those with clear political and personal agendas to lie about their physical and mental states over the course of going on two decades.    There is nothing rational in that, it is as much sheer madness as any of Trump's most extreme and obsessive nocturnal emissions that prove his dementia.    The ways of pretending to deal with that in the past, the idiotic myth of impeaching even the worst presidents in the process of the most public criminatlity and dangerous wrecklessness has never happened and with Bush II and Trump it's clear that will never happen.

Yet we don't require the qualifications for office that a fast food franchise can ask of someone looking for a job to flip burgers.  

The equally stupid "25th Amendment" means of dealing with the matter of removing a demented or damaged president from office is going to prove as much of an illusion as impeachment as a means of removing a Trump from office.   It gives exactly those with the greatest motive of keeping a Trump in the presidency,  HIS CABINET veto power over any proposal to do that.   

Nothing that depends on the "honor" of the powerful and generally rich is worth the photons with which you read the worthless ink on the parchment it is written on. 

I BREAK IN TO NOTE;  As I type this the news that the radio tells me the evil Lindsey Graham has died, suddenly at the age of 71, I'll have more to say about that.   And don't forget the rumors are that Mitch McConnell has died and the Republicans are covering it up,  both such evil hags as Virginia Foxx and liars like Scott Jennings claiming to have talked to him - It would seem that McConnell's Chinese gangster family wife and former Trump cabinet member Elaine Chao may have taken it on the lam as soon as she knew he was either dead or about to die.    

What a wonderful Republic the Constitution has given us in fact as it lies in mere words. 

A Democratic Congress should immediately put a Constitutional Amendment with an age limit for President and Vice President out for ratification.    I think if Joe Biden had not gotten caught up in the reflexive Zionist mindset of blindly and reflexively supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza and he had not been enough of a sentimental fool as to appoint Merrick Garland as Attorney General, he may have gone down as one of the greatest presidents we ever had.   Especially if age and exhaustion had not caught up with him - I blame his staffers for that, they really let him down.   But I am unwilling to ever take another chance on someone who will reach or surpass the age of Eighty in who I will vote for for president.   I think 75 should be an absolute cut off after which any presidential candidate will be ineligible and any sitting president should have to retire.   I think 70 may be a better age for that but I doubt such an amendment would pass congress, though it might be acceptable in many statehouses.  

Speaking of state legislatures.  I would say Congress should put one out an age limit for the Senate and House, too but there is no way you're going to get the many geezers who the voters should have put out to pasture long ago to let that through that initial phase of adoption.    If that is to be done it will have to be done through the state legislative route.  Which has the advantage that there will certainly be many members of those who would like the chance to run for a seat that some dithering person of my age cohort has a lock on.   

As I noted, the many PMs that the Brits have recently gone through,  seven or so in the past 10 years, several of them not through election, shows that their system gives them a way to get rid of a Keir Starmer or Boris Johnson or Liz Trott.  Unlike the stupid American system which gives those with the greatest incentive to keep a corrupt or incompetent member of their party in the presidency,  the British system makes it far easier for voters to make that party pay for a bad PM and their cabinet will be full of those who would like a chance to become PM or to move up in power in the one that will succeed the present one.  It makes it in their interest to dump the worst though they will often keep a really bad one in office for the wrong reasons.  Our system only has wrong reasons for keeping the worst presidents in office even as their crimes are flagrant, public and deadly. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Gordon Pengilly - Bailey's Way - Longbow's Justice

 Longbow's Justice 

Tanis encounters an animal rights activist and a mystery centered on husky dogs found abandoned in a kennel. 

Saying the "L" Word Out Loud And Putting It Into Practice Is The Only Basis Of Legitimate Economics

MAX AT UNFTR has an excellent obliteration of the "New Democrats" the successor to the "Democratic Leadership Council" and why they have been a disaster for those below affluence - the large majority - and, so Democrats going back to the early Clinton years.   And he puts it in terms of the ten most right-wing Democrats in congress and as candidates who are launching a platform of platitudes and dangerous promises that,  I believe along with Max, is a plan to gut the entire social safety net.   He begins by telling the sad truth that there are no socialists in Congress or anywhere else in the government, not Bernie Sanders, not AOC,  he gives the genuine definition of socialism,  the workers owning the means of production,  not the most common use of the term as distorted by Marxism, Fabianism and other pseudo-socialisms. 

I have made what I think is necessary clear,  the revival of Christian Socialism, only what I really want is a broad,  religiously based socialist movement that includes Christianity but also religious Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc.    I don't think any secular socialism is ever going to be achieved, one based on the pseudo-social-sciences, including economics, will never gain broad support of have the moral commitment to stick to the basic requirements of equality,  justice, economic justice and,  I'll say it out loud, LOVE.   And I don't mean the one and only thing you are allowed to use word that for in politics,  "love of country."   Which always turns into a mawkish and phony and hateful kind of pseudo-emotion.  What economics and politics and the law should be based in is nothing less than  Love of People and other Living Beings.   And secularists who read this are already throwing up in their mouths or jeering.   

We've tried everything else, it ain't working. 

But we do know BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT that Blanche and the rest of them wouldn't be impeding an investigation IF THEY KNEW THERE WAS NOTHING TO BE FOUND.

THERE ARE SO MANY TRUMP SCANDALS that I haven't had the time to give even the worst ongoing ones the attention they would require.   I have not specialized in the Epstein scandals.   I am seemingly innately resistant to anything that looks or sounds like a tabloid scandal so many of the most sensational accusations, such as those made by a young man who claimed that he was subject to and witness to sadistic sexual use of young children, pre-pubescent children, who would sometimes be killed during sadistic sex or, in some cases, murdered.   He said that when one girl was shot in his presence he was told not to worry, that girls were easier to find than boys so they wouldn't kill him.   It seems unusually difficult to find that particular account on the internet, at least when I went looking for it today.   I wonder why "the algorithm" might make that the case.

But I think my scruples against looking at things like that may be a moral failing on my part. 

I generally don't listen to reports even from credible journalists on the topic but this video by the now liberated journalist Katie Phang led me to a reluctant but, I hold, necessary conclusion about the Trump Department of "Justice" suppression of information and even investigations of the Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner crime ring.  

Even the filthy dirty lawyer-liar Todd Blanche must know that suppressing the renewed New Mexico governments investigation of the Epstein property mentioned in such accusations of child-rape-murder, the Zorro Ranch, with its private air-strip and more than ten thousand acres on which to bury bodies, will have one guarantee effect, THE SO CALLED DEPARTMENT OF "JUSTICE" SUPPRESSING INVESTIGATIONS INTO THOSE ALLEGED MURDERS AND RAPES WILL BE SUPPORTING THE MOST EXTREME OF THOSE ACCUSATIONS.

They certainly know that because they,  the Trump crime family,  the Republican-fascist party, right-wing media HAVE ENCOURAGED AND BENEFITED FROM THE MOST EXTEREME Q-ANON STYLE ACCUSATIONS, EVEN THOSE WHICH ARE PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE BECAUSE THERE WAS NO BASEMENT TO THE PIZZA JOINT THAT THOSE CENTERED ON.   They know that that is a guaranteed result of their blocking an investigation. 

It is an absolutely rational conclusion that those two facts mean that they fear what evidence will be found if a thorough investigation of the Zorro Ranch is made and that evidence become public.   

Todd Blanche and his corrupt department are rationally believed to be covering up child-rape-murder BY THOSE THEY WOULD WANT TO PROTECT,  TRUMP AND CLARENCE THOMAS ARE AMONG THOSE NAMED BY THE YOUNG MAN MAKING THE ACCUSATION,  THEY ARE CERTAINLY TWO WHO BLANCHE ET AL WOULD WANT TO PROTECT.    And there are certainly a whole class of billionaires and millionaires that they would want to protect too.

Given those truths, I think we all have permission to believe the worst about this even on a total lack of evidence OTHER THAN THE STATEMENTS OF THOSE WHO ARE CREDIBLY BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN VICTIMS.   That testimony and even online interviews and videos OF ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS MAKING STATEMENTS ABOUT THEIR CLAIMED EXPERIENCE, are evidence, though there is other junk being put out which may or may not be, without any careful examination of that, we have no way to know. 

But we do know beyond reasonable doubt that Blanche and the rest of them wouldn't be impeding an investigation IF THEY KNEW THERE WAS NOTHING TO BE FOUND.  We have every right to believe that they know something will be found if that investigation is made. 

Correction: It's COUNT Binface, not Captain Binface

I USED THE  title for the video I posted without correcting it. 

I wouldn't like to offend a Recyclon inter-galactic space warrior, not even one whose election I indicated I would approve.   Far from the joke candidate he's always presented as being,  Count Binface has got several excellent planks in his platform:

- Abolishing the House of Lords.

- Giving free broadband to everyone.

- Stopping the sale of arms to repressive regimes.

- Making Piers Morgan zero emissions by 2030.

Maybe best of all is:

- Proroguing Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Though I'd say that was just a first start at reigning in the current aristocratic fascist.   Here's what I said seven years ago:

I'm a total and complete opponent of capital punishment but every single time I hear Jacob Rees-Mogg talk I feel like volunteering to be the one who chops off his head. 

He's on a list of Brit fascists I've said should be permanently excluded from entering the United States.   Nigel Farage, Binface's opponent in the by-election is on that list I made then. 

The Guy With The Neo-Nazi Moniker

who claimed Republicans had higher morals than Democrats - A COMPARISON OF MORALS BETWEEN THE TWO PARTIES, is now whining like a Trump that I made a comparison between the Democrats who have told the accused Graham Paltner to leave the race BEFORE HE HOLDS AN OFFICE with Republican criminals and those against whom massive evidence already is public WHO REPUBLICANS NOMINATE AND ELECT OVER AND OVER AGAIN KNOWING THEIR CRIMINALITY.

Republican-fascists are such whiny little bitches.  Right wingers always are,  it's always different when you hold them to their own claimed moral standards WHICH THEY ONLY APPLY TO THEIR OPPONENTS.   And what you can say about Republican-fascists you can say about right-wing media which has never asked Susan Collins about her sex life.  Hell, they don't even hound her about her voting record in the Senate and her total refusal to face her constituents.  The Maine media have been covering for her literally for the entirety of her political career. 

White Supremacist Says What?

 An 1,800 word response to say, "Morals don't matter if the candidate is a Democrat!" 

Vandiemenlander 

Get back to me when you Republican-fascists have dumped the adjudicated sexual criminal Trump, you know, the one who bragged to Billy Bush that he could assault Women and get away with it because he's rich and famous. THE ONE YOU GUYS VOTED FOR FOR PRESIDENT THREE TIMES AFTER YOU KNEW HE SAID THAT. 

That one alone proves that morals matter to Democrats but don't, at all, to Republican-fascists.  

Then there are those members of his administration and circle who LIKE TRUMP, have ties to Jeffrey Epstein, Robert F. Kennedy jr, Howard Lutnick,  Elon Musk, Mehmet Oz, Stephen Feinberg, Tom Barrack, Kevin Warsh, John Phelan . .

And those are only those in THIS Trump regime.   In the last one that list starts with the guy who gave him his sweetheart deal,  Alex Acosta,  Steve Bannon, . . . 

Here's another headline name on that count,  Brett Kavanaugh.  Whose sexual harrassment including a credible accusation of attempted rape and another of sexual assault was covered up by the Trump I DoJ, the Trump FBI, the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee under Chuck Grassley and Lindsay Graham - even their Mr. Clean Jeff Flake suppressed the information called on on the so-called tip line that they set up. 

I could list so many more as examples of the immorality of Republican-fascists,  Jim Jordan, Lindsey Graham, Cory Mills, Chuck Edwards. . . 

And that doesn't get to the many, many Republican-fascists who, like Graham Platner have been accused of other moral lapses,  the list of known adulterers among them can start with Susan Collins who was screwing around with her present husband while he was married to his previous wife.   The list of Trump insiders and other Republicans who have been elected BY REPUBLICANS as they have been proved to be screwing around while married would be extremely long.  

AND THAT'S ONLY TALKING ABOUT SEXUAL MORALS, THE LIST OF MORAL DEPRAVITY FROM THEFT AND CHEATING (You really want to go there with Trump and his cabinet, the leaders of the Republican caucus and others?) everything from financial crimes, accepting bribes (let's look at the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court would make a list on that count, in themselves).  

And the worst crimes of all, the mass murders, like bombing a girl's school in Iran.  Those killed in the renewed bombing today. . . 

And I haven't even gotten to things like putting children in concentration camps and stealing them from their parents,  Nazi crimes.   I could go on this way for a year of posts and not exhaust the list. 

Get back to me when Republicans have cleansed their party on that count. 

Just When I Missed The Late Lord Buckethead

Could Captain Binface Actually Beat Nigel Farage?

If they elected Binface over Farage,  my respect for the British People would rise enormously.

And I do mean that quite sincerely. 

Not A Current But A Recurring Point Of Snark

that I get sent is a demand that I defend this or that claim made about "what Catholics believe."  

In more cases than not, what is claimed is a universally or even widespread belief of Catholics is some BS thing about a "miraculous" image of Mary or Jesus in the weathering on a bridge abutment or a tortilla or some BS "prophecy" about the "end times."   

Usually the claimed belief that they want me to defend is something I've never heard of or believed in,  more often than not, when I look into it, it's a tiny cult that believes it or there isn't any actual cult but it's based on some online blog post or click-bait, generally in a video, these days "AI" slop that is there to get clicks and the poster doesn't even care about whether or not anyone believes it.

This post is because I like how Reverend Ed Trevors deals with some BS clickbait he was asked to comment on,  claiming that someone I am rather skeptical of,  Padre Pio, make one of those hackneyed "three days of darkness" prophecies - complete with offers of "genuwyne blessed bees wax candles" for sale -  and what a load of BS it is.  His own order who, as Trevors notes, deny that Padre Pio ever said any such a thing, and they have pretty much everything he ever did say,  but there isn't any legal liability for telling the biggest whopper of a lie about someone like that.   Here's what he said.

Hate Mail - What's Really Important About The Maine Senate Race In The End

I AM TAUNTED by one of my usual trolls,  the one with the neo-Nazi moniker, over my support for Graham Platner, demanding to know why I haven't condemned him and demanded he leave the Senate race.   

The only thing that I think is really important for me to do is to support whoever is better than Susan Collins and whoever has the best chance to defeat her because her being in the Senate has been a catastrophe for the country and the world.  That is what is most important for everyone's welfare, including the Woman who has made this most recent accusation.   From what she claims, she seems to understand something of that, herself.  

If I had thought Janet Mills was the better candidate in that regard,  I would have supported her.   I thought that Graham Planter was the one who might do that so I supported him.   I never suspected he was in any way perfect- it is immoral idolatry to hold that about anyone, especially politicians.  And I think most of the accusations made against him have not been credible.   Some of them (such as the "scandal" that his mother bought oysters for her restaurant from her son's oyster farm, THAT REALLY WAS ONE OF THE MEDIA CARRIED "SCANDALS") would only be a "scandal" if the person accused had a "D" after their name.  That becomes an important point later in this piece, by the way. 

The reason I haven't written about the latest accusation against him, and they are ACCUSATIONS, is that I don't know much about the current situation.   I expect he will leave the race, though, if, as he is saying, the accusation against him is false, I can understand why he hasn't made that decision yet. 

I don't know how credible this latest accusation is, the details before the public at this time are vague.  They are certainly untested.  

When I read that the accusation seems to be from someone who hadn't made such an accusation against him in the past or, in fact, in the more than a year since it became some of the biggest news in our state that he was running for the Senate,  the reasonable question is why now after the primary and not before.   That timing, especially convenient for the Collins campaign is certainly a relevant point that needs to be addressed.   That this is in the context of a political campaign makes that question of timing extremely relevant. 

When I heard that her coming forward now had something to do with some kind of psychological counseling that she is in  (and I only heard that in passing on the radio)  that did absolutely nothing to convince me that it isn't motivated by something other than a desire to tell the truth whether on her part or that of the person counseling her.   

I say that having seen the horrific results of such counseling and possible manipulation of clients going back to when Geraldo was peddling As Seen On TV lies about "ritual satanic abuse" which led directly to the witch trials of the 80s and 90s plays a huge role in my thinking about these kinds of things. 

Though I have no way of knowing if my residual reluctance in that regard has any relevance in this case, the possibility of counselor motivations and wondering about the extent of the influence such a counselor might have over a client is also quite relevant.   I will point out that the laws dealing with counseling in Maine are dangerously lax.   Last I knew pretty much anyone could set up business as one by just declaring that's what they were.  I have no way of knowing how credible such a counselor is,  though my experience of, especially, "clinical social workers" duly credentialed by the relevant department at the University of Southern Maine (where I knew several of the faculty members, they were nuts) doesn't lead me to have a lot of faith in any credentialing of that business. 

She has also said that her motivation in making the accusation is related to the widespread and entirely justified opinion that the accusations made against him by a long-time Republican operative who has done work on behalf of Susan Collins in the past needed to be questioned.   I don't know if the woman making these latest claims is one of those who believes that wrong and unworkable shortcut that Women making accusations are always to be believed.   If that's what she means then she is wrong,  ANYONE CAN MAKE FALSE ACCUSATIONS ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE,  and in the case of a political operative making such accusations against a candidate of the other side, THAT ISSUE IS OF THE HIGHEST RELEVANCE.  Whether you like it or not.    

I have no idea if she is telling us exactly what happened to her or if her claims lie somewhere between total and accurate veracity or some variety of lesser veracity. I do know that "journalism" and even more so internet blather about that is no substitute for testing evidence.   What I am doing here is internet blather.  None of those issues I noted should in any way discredit her or support her claims though I think all of them are important considerations.   

All accusations should be fully tested - if a crime is involved, by a trial in which evidence is presented and tested and even then the judgement of it, whether by a judge or by a jury, can get it wrong.   When the cops or a prosecutor refuses to look at the evidence, that should be turned over to an honest and experienced investigative reporter, though that is very, very far from even the hardly guaranteed adversarial process in a fair trial.  

We have no such plausible doubt in the case of Donald Trump who was tried and found liable in TWO trials in which Trump gave a highly damning deposition in which he, himself, discredited his defense.   A process which has yet to play out to its end in which he pays the damages for him lying about that and defaming his victim, over and over again, something he is still doing.   We have Trump, himself, on a recording bragging that he could sexually assault Women and get away with it because of his wealth and celebrity,  we have every reason to believe, on that evidence, THAT HE HAS DONE WHAT HE WAS BRAGGING ABOUT DOING and which multiple Women have said he did to them.   Though in any individual case, that should be subjected to that adversarial process with both sides able to present their evidence - AND TESTIMONY IS EVIDENCE,  ESPECIALLY WHEN IT'S PRESENTED UNDER THE POSSIBILITY OF PUNISHMENT FOR LYING - and it is evaluated. 

And there are many other Republicans for whom far more credible and as bad and worse accusations are being made who are repeatedly elected to high offices,  including the presidency AS YOU REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS HAVE ELECTED TRUMP, TWICE AND VOTED FOR THREE TIMES.   The same accusation was made against Ronald Reagan - the status of which is very similar to the status of the accusation against Graham Platner, and you, the American media, and Republican-fascists and his other voters didn't bat an eyelash over that.   

But the most important thing about this has nothing to do with any individual's conduct or even the consequences of that for those they may have done things to. THIS IS ABOUT WHETHER REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS HOLD POWER OVER THE SENATE,  something in which the lives of millions and billions of People, the environment, equality, democracy and, with that, legitimate government is at stake,  whether it's Graham Platner who wins against Susan Collins or another Democrat, THAT'S WHAT'S REALLY IMPORTANT to far, far more People than the ones involved in the matter at hand. 

I hope and have every confidence that the possibility of defeating Susan Collins will be among if not the strongest issue in what decision Graham Platner makes.   Having heard him over the past year,  I fully believe he knows that this is an entirely bigger issue than him,  something I doubt Collins ever has had the vaguest notion of. 

If Graham Platner isn't the candidate, and I now think he probably shouldn't be,  I want whoever can beat Collins because she is truly and consequentially a dangerous person if she wins.    

I've heard several names mentioned, including Janet Mills, who has the advantage of having had some votes cast for her in the recent primary- though I think she'd lose to Collins.   I've heard someone I think might beat her, though in his recent run for the Democratic candidacy for Governor, he was far from the top candidate,  Troy Jackson, who was my first choice in Maine's ranked-choice primary vote.   My second-place in that won, by the way,  Hannah Pingree.   My own favorite choice would have been the Woman who got my third place vote on that ballot Shenna Bellows, who has been elected to state-wide office as our Secretary of State, though I don't have any confidence that she might beat Collins. 

Last night I heard the name of Patrick Dempsey floated, which at first struck me as far fetched but, then, he has maintained long term ties to his native state.   I don't watch TV or movies so my knowledge of him has been his decades of involvement with charities in Maine and his ties to that most working class of Maine cities, Lewiston.   I can't see Republicans having much of a leg to stand on if they object to an actor as Senator, considering they've supported Trump three times (and he's not even an actor, he's a lying huckster) and Ronald Reagan twice.   Not to mention all of the Hollywood figures who have been Republican members of the Congress,  everyone from Sonny Bono and Fred Grandy to the Republican liar-lawyer turned actor, the equally odious Fred Thompson.   Though I'm sure if Dempsey ran the media would make that an issue in exactly the same way that it has never been an issue when such a candidate has an "R" after their name. 

In the end I am, as I have been for decades, an ABC Democrat,  that would be ANYONE BUT COLLINS.   I've been telling Mainers, especially Women that she wasn't what she was sold to be from before her first run for office.   Her patented "concern" act, As most often seen on the most dishonest hours of the week on the Sunday Morning lie shows, is nothing but acting.   She has a terrible record that she has never been made to account for, one of the reasons she has gone, literally decades without doing a town meeting in Maine.  Retiring her and flipping the Senate is the most important issue.  All else pales next to that. 

English Speaking Crypto-fascist Racists Are Such Whiny Little Children

IT'S NOT JUST TRUMP,  here is the Brit Reform-fascist whose Trump style grift has caught up with him and, along with the theme of this morning,  it's possibly ending his hopes of being the PM.  That will never happen here though Trump makes Farage look like a school boy caught stealing petty cash. 

Do watch, it's hilarious to hear him piss and moan and whine and cry.   Though if I had the prospect of having him ruling over me it might be less funny.   I hope his seat goes to a Green or a non-New Labour politician. 

not a satisfactory substitute

IN FEBRUARY I POSTED a video of the critic of Noam Chomsky ,Chris Knight, in which he laid out an explanation of how he thinks Chomksy's dual life, as Knight sees it, can explain how he came under the sway of the criminal and conman Jeffrey Epstein.   I've casually looked more at Knight's criticism of Chomsky, supposedly from the "left" of Chomsky, on the basis of Knight's quasi if not consciously Marxist materialism - which, somehow, he also considers Darwinist - and with that I think his theory seems a lot weaker to me now than it did a few months back.   I now disavow it though I didn't strongly endorse it even then. 

You probably won't be surprised if I repeat what I've said before,  neither linguistics nor anthropology, the academic fields of Chomsky and Knight, respectively, are in any way sciences.   

There are a number of facts about them that definitively remove them from any plausible identification with scientific method.  They purport to study things that cannot be directly observed, many of their claims aren't even capable of being indirectly observed being entirely artifacts, creations, really of everything from academic ideology to the necessity of supporting their wider ideology.   In that they have this in common with the epicycles of the scientists who elucidated the Ptolemaic astronomy, they created things that didn't exist to make their systems function.  Unlike them, the Ptolemaics could make accurate predictions about some things.   You could see what they were talking about, at least. 

Many of their claims cannot be known to have now or ever had any material or mental or temporal existence before those story telling deivices were thought up by academics.  Anything said about "languages" which are claimed to have gone extinct before there was written recording of them or without any record of the actual words and how they were used is as real as Grimm's fairy stories.   And huge swaths of current and past linguistics are founded on such "objects" of study.   

And there are insurmountable problems in collecting "data" and measuring and analyzing the results, as there are in all of the soft sciences but especially in such pseudo-science. 

When you insert claims about the "evolution" of languages, the physical bases presumed to have comprised that "evolution" and claims about things in the as forever lost past,  it may add an air of scincyness to it, but it is as imaginary as anything in medieval or classical history that is looked on with condescension by academics today.   Only the medieval and classical scholars had the excuse that they were pre-scientific, modern academics who do the same thing today while looking down on them have no such excuse.   And that is rampant in current academia and the general culture.  

We are in no way "evolved" beyond the medieval or classical mind.  We have not moved on from the 19th or 18th or, in fact, any century before that.   If anything we are less moral in our modern materialism than the violent warring, conquering and oppressing People of the past.   My evidence of that is that we are currently  recapitulating all of the worst acts committed in the 20th century and are reproducing the record-breaking murder, maiming and genocide that exists in living memory with even worse technology - which is relevant to Knights original critique of Chomsky.  It is a fact that he, his lab and his university, MIT, were and are an intrinsic part of the military industrial complex,  Chomsky's purported attempts to make sure his work would not be used in war is a paper-thin ass covering for his professional life.    

And what you can say in that regard about linguistics is as true of anthropology, which, when it's not playing at being biologists with everything I said above applying, they claim to be able to scientifically study human communities, societies, even the entire human species though coming up with generalized claims about any of those and presenting that as science is at least as much of a fraud.   Here's a relevant claim made by the Radical Anthropology Group, founded around Chris Knight's students and colleagues. 

Anthropology asks one big question: what does it mean to be human? To answer this, we cannot rely on common sense or on philosophical arguments. We must study how humans actually live – and the many different ways in which they have lived. This means learning, for example, how people in non-capitalist societies live, how they organise themselves and resolve conflict in the absence of a state, the different ways in which a ‘family’ can be run, and so on.

Anyone who thinks you can answer that question by any or all of those methods is setting themselves a vast array of impossible tasks, maybe an effectively infinite number of impossible tasks.  Just gathering "data" that can achieve factual reliability (impossible when you rely on such things as People telling you about their inner life and their activities you can't verify),  with a large enough sample to get to even theoretically plausible numbers to come up with accurate generalizations about human life,  and to filter out the researchers ideological or other intents in analyzing whatever probabilistic hocus-pocus you choose to use on it (and THAT choice will, I guarantee you, be the subject of anthropological controversy) will never produce a clean analysis.  

And it only gets worse as their claims are compounded and multiplied. 

Additionally, it means studying other species and other times. What might it mean to be almost – but not quite – human? How socially self-aware, for example, is a chimpanzee? Do nonhuman primates have a sense of morality? Do they have language? And what about distant times? Who were the Australopithecines and why had they begun walking upright? Where did the Neanderthals come from and why did they become extinct? How, when and why did human art, religion, language and culture first evolve? While RAG has never defined itself as a political organization, the implications of some forms of science are intrinsically radical, and this applies in particular to the theory that humanity was born in a social revolution. Many RAG members choose to be active in Survival International and/or other indigenous rights movements to defend the land rights and cultural survival of hunter-gatherers. Additionally, some RAG members combine academic research with activist involvement in environmentalist, anti-capitalist and other campaigns.

Human beings are opaque boxes even with the possibility of People telling researchers about themselves, their lives, their experiences, their actions and, worse still, their inner lives,  doing that with animals who cannot tell us any of that is much worse.  Typically such pseudo-scientists fill in a lot of that inability by simplifying animals into unconscious or semi-conscious machines, which anyone who doesn't share their ideological and professional self-interests are entirely within their rights to call bullshit.  And I do. 

As for their pretenses of studying our humanoid and primate ancestors, as if those could tell us anything about us,   none of the preceding species in our direct line "went extinct" they evolved into modern humans, we now know that modern humans ancestors included "Neanderthals" and, I'd guess, since they claim we are descended from them, Australopithecus and other such species.   They're no more extinct than your great-great-grandparents are.  They just happened to have died a lot longer ago and looked somewhat different. 

This is the smoking gun that the whole thing is complete bullshit, "How, when and why did human art, religion, language and culture first evolve?"   You might, possibly, though I doubt it, come up with a "when" answer to that question in terms of art - if you can find and discern its material artifacts and accurately date them, though, as the more recently discovered Neanderthal art deep within quite hard to access caves show,* you could never discern if it was its "first" occurrence.  How can you even guess that you'd recognize the beginnings of art?   If you want to call whatever claims modern academics want to make about any physical and verifiably human made artifacts such as stone tools as comprising a "culture" then you might do that BUT IT WILL ACTUALLY TELL YOU VERY LITTLE ABOUT ANY CULTURE THAT THOSE PEOPLE EXPERIENCED OR CREATED BY THAT EXPERIENCE AND THEIR ACTIONS.   Multiply that impossibility by an enormous factor for non-humanoid animals. 

Anything about any culture or religion or language which left absolutely no physical trace, and that would be most of it, is forever, completely and irretrievably lost AND YOU CANNOT CONSTRUCT THAT OUT OF WHAT YOU HAVE.   That will always tell you far, far, . . . entirely far more about YOUR MIND AND CULTURAL AND IDEOLOGICAL SELF than it will about them. 

As I said in February the only person we could possibly get the information of why Chomsky fell under the spell of such a crass, cheap, vile and evil conman as Epstein is Chomsky.  That can only come from the man, himself and, as it's reported, he is so disabled by a stroke, he can't tell us that.  And even then, it would not be verifiable.   It would be a report on things that cannot be checked for accuracy or truth.  Chris Knight's claims of explanation are of a piece with the practices of anthropology, and that's not a satisfactory substitute.  

* I once heard a video in which Chomsky entirely dismissed the possibility of Neanderthals having language.  I'd already read about the cave art which Neanderthals for which they would have had to carry a paint kit deep within totally dark caves - so with a planned and carried light source - to produce for whatever motive they had to do that so I was shocked that someone like Chomsky who I assume was still reading about such things could conclude could have happened without language being involved.  Certainly implausible if it happened by more than one Neanderthal person.    But, given his own imaginary origin of language - even if you don't rely on Knight's sneering description of it - I can guess why he would make that claim as recently as he did.   Ideological commitments, especially if those commitments were your invention and part of your claim to academic fame, can blind you to even physical evidence.  Such is always the case in the sciences that rely on making up stuff not in evidence and for which evidence will never be had. 

Update:  I should add that the "beginning of Art" which might have left artifacts is a severely limited view of art.  Physical objects which may well have left no artifacts, through everything from total decay past recovery to intentional destruction (such as may have comprised sacrifices of things like textiles or as known in several sand painting traditions) are such things.  

And that leaves out what the Anthropologist Franz Boaz observed, that in hunter-gatherer societies, plastic arts that create objects account for very little of the artistic activity of such People.  They can create literature and music in their minds while waiting for an animal or for a fish to take their bait.  They can create verses and stories and have religious or other experiences, they can come up with abstract thoughts and things like mathematical calculations, they can observe topology and geometric figures and come up with ideas about them, accurate or inaccurate.  The pre-literate calculations that, we guess, explain some of the more astronomically accurate placement of huge stones to achieve effects are a lot more plausibly speculated about that any of the rest of it.  But without a record of what they were thinking, that's all conjecture about a very limited range of physical evidence. 

Sleepless Night Thoughts

CRITICAL AS I AM, YOU SHOULDN'T SUSPECT that I think that everything about the United States is wrong, or at least wronger than, say the British system, though there are things that are certainly better under the parliamentary system even there.   And the Brit system with its baked in anti-democratic elements, many of those hold-overs of pre-democractic rule by the aristocracy is certainly not the best example of one.  

First, a way in which a parliamentary system can be better, as the history of the last decade of many terrible Prime Ministers being forced out BY THE MEMBERS OF THEIR OWN PARTY shows,  they have a way to do that.  Under our idiotically bad 18th century, horse and carriage and slow boat assuming slave-holder favoring Constitution,  we have gotten rid of exactly one of the many really, really bad and flagrantly criminal presidents in our history.   That one exception was when the WWII fighting, dictator defeating members of the Congress convinced Nixon that he would be impeached and convicted in the Senate - and it would have been with members of his own party voting to convict in the Senate.   A number of Republican Senators convinced him to step down.  THAT WAS THE ONE TIME IT WORKED, IT WILL NEVER WORK THAT WAY AGAIN.   WE WILL NEVER SEE A CONSERVATIVE PARTY IN THE UNITED STATES AS MORAL AS THE REPUBLICANS WERE, THEN.   And, notice this,  that one example was an example of the Constitutional myth of impeachment being short circuited NOT AN EXAMPLE OF THE CONSTITUTION WORKING AS IT, IN FACT, NEVER HAS AND NEVER WILL.  I make that prediction knowing that when my predictions don't work it's always in the past turned out to be better than I predicted.   Though I'm sure that Republicans now are quite capable of impeaching and convicting a Democrat in ways that they never would a Republican who is the worst and proven criminal president in our history SOMETHING WHICH THEY HAD TWO CHANCES TO DO DURING TRUMP I.  

Second is more speculative,   it is the suspicion that the American federal structure may somewhat insulate us from as easily slipping into centralized fascism,  power, at least theoretically distributed among the 50 states.   That is until some atrocity like the Roberts Court doesn't overturn even that basic structure of American government.   And the Roberts Court as previous courts, are entirely capable of overturning, distorting, totally turning black letter Constitutional content into the opposite of what it says using the mother language of lawyers, lying, to do that.  And under our system there is nothing that is going to stop them from doing it.  At least there might be some organized, governmental opposition to it.   In Britain, as the Starmer government is doing by making any dissent it chooses to suppress illegal,  in some pretty horrifying ways, across the country, the centralization of power in London is an example of how that might be accurate.   The laws it is shoving though right now, from what I can gather, would make even receiving information from disapproved sources NOT EVEN PUBLISHING IT, JUST RECEIVING IT, could be a major crime with a prison sentence attached.   Of course, as in the rest of the Starmer 

These are some sleepless night ideas that came to me as I turned over the appalling idea that is being floated in the Brit press - at least as big a sewer as the American "free press" if not worse - that the crypto-fascist-civil-liberties-lawyer,  Keir Starmer, now that he's been dumped as, perhaps the most hated and rapidly fallen Labour prime minister in history, should be made a chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court.  Can you believe Starmer would ever prosecute the worst of the Israeli criminals who did exactly the same things that got Nazis the death sentence at Nuremberg?    That would never happen, he's done everything he can to put Brits who point that out in prison for long terms.  That's one of the things that turned him from a guy who won an election to massively hated in two years.   Though since it's lawyers and journalists making the proposal to make that thuggish "civil liberties" lawyer-liar the chief prosecutor of the ICC.   I'm sure they have no problem with that idea.   When you don't care about the truth to begin with, nothing has to cohere.  And a totally free media will not, in large part, care about the truth. 

But all of that is secondary.   I don't have any idea that liberal democracy can survive because it lacks the equality that gives everyone a stake in protecting it from the ever increasing powers of organized wealth, technology and the ever greater media stultification of populations around the world.   Until equality becomes the foundation of democracy everywhere,  as long as lies are treated as being better than the truth by courts and governments, democracy will be in danger and that situation won't continue, it will die.  I guarantee that. 

This conversation about why Starmer fell is worth listening to.