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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

PRETENDING POLITICIANS HAVE THE SAME JOB DESCRIPTION AS SAINTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Brother Sprung This On Me

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

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

Hate Mail - More About Darwinism In Current Public Policy

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

Donald Trump 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(i) barriers to reproduction, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then my comment on it. 

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

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

What Ro Khanna Said, For A Good Start

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

LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE 

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

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

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

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

My Theories Run A Few Ways

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

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

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

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

3. See 1 and 2.  

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

Here's another take:

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Earthquake Girl

Earthquake Girl

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

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

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

I Know Nothing About Susan Dell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pain Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hate Mail - And Why I'm Not Posting Hate Mail Much These Days

WELL, NOW I KNOW you didn't go to school in the late 60s or early 70s, or, if you did, you never took a rigorous course in Freshman Rhetoric.   In mine, at my small, state university we were assigned to read Eugene Wigner's famous essay,  The Unreasonable  Effectiveness of Mathematics In The Natural Sciences which starts this way: 

There is a story about two friends, who were classmates in high school, talking about their jobs. One of them became a statistician and was working on population trends. He showed a reprint to his former classmate. The reprint started, as usual, with the Gaussian distribution and the statistician explained to his former classmate the meaning of the symbols for the actual population, for the average population, and so on. His classmate was a bit incredulous and was not quite sure whether the statistician was pulling his leg. "How can you know that?" was his query. "And what is this

symbol here?"  "Oh," said the statistician, "this is pi." "What is that?" "The ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter." "Well, now you are pushing your joke too far," said the classmate, "surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle."

Naturally, we are inclined to smile about the simplicity of the classmate’s approach. Nevertheless, when I heard this story, I had to admit to an eerie feeling because, surely, the reaction of the classmate betrayed only plain common sense. I was even more confused when, not many days later, someone came to me and expressed his bewilderment [The remark to be quoted was made by F. Werner when he was a student in Princeton.] with the fact that we make a rather narrow selection when choosing the data on which we test our theories. "How do we know that, if we made a theory which focuses its attention on phenomena we disregard and disregards some of the phenomena now commanding our attention, that we could not build another theory which has little in common with the present one but which, nevertheless, explains just as many phenomena as the present theory?" It has to be admitted that we have no definite evidence that there is no such theory.

The essay is still relevant to its subject matter though it's past the age of retirement for People because it's still true.  There is not only no knowable way to understand why mathematics works as it does in the physical sciences,  it is often "made to work" through manipulation of the data.   And, I'll note, that in many cases in the soft sciences and especially in the pseudo-sciences the confirmation of that effectiveness is not achieved by the success of predictions made regarding the results but are merely a question of assertion. 

I have said for years that one of the most dramatic of such confirmations in real life are the early predictions of climate change through humans dumping carbon into the atmosphere,  I think that is one of the most impressive scientific successes though perhaps the greatest of human failures and tragedies due not to the failure of the science but to the political folly of "enlightenment" political and legal theories based on the premature and pretty stupid assumption that the abstract perfection of mathematics and its solutions of some impressive but not that difficult physical phenomena in the early history of science could be applied to the governance of human life.   

That was especially true of the early "enlightenment" attempts at forming new kinds of governments not based on European feudalism,  the American one and the French one.   America's was what we are taught to never consider, a system of genocide and enslavement that makes European feudalism in the period before the Reformation, in many cases look enlightened and the French one which was a bloody catastrophe in which huge numbers of French peasants and the poor  and many other totally innocent People were killed in the name of REASON and under the cult of the "enlightenment." 

The history of the French republic, due to the tumultuous violence that affected its ruling class wasn't early locked into a written Constitution that made its basic alteration a practical impossibility,  ours developed in a way that that original power structure was locked down in ways that prevent its basic reformation even after the most terrible of wars in our history and the experience of a majority of our population under its subjugation has not been able to change it.   The effective amending or re-writing of the U.S. Constitution will probably not come until an even worse war happens.   Which will more likely result in the permanent break-up of the country.  

In each and every case of that failure, there was a moral failure often masked in reason and at times science.   It is one of the major features of science in the public sphere that you can always find someone with a PhD in science who will lie for money or one who will lie for their own profitable ideology.   And lawyers who will facilitate that lying, whether on or off of courts and, especially, Supreme Courts.   The "enlightenment" in the law is especially unimpressive when it comes to the rigorous application of the most obvious of morality.   They can always find reasons to reason their way out of that. 

I have been writing since he middle of last summer about the failure of the American enlightenment which has and continues to result in everything from Reagan to Trump II and looks like it's not about to stop any time soon.   In each and every case it is not only a failure or reason and the rationalist regime that was really a regime of the slave-holders, the plantation system, the northern importers of slaves and financing of that and genocide in the West, translated into current American English.     And if, as Wigner demonstrated, the connection between the abstract perfection of mathematical proof and the hard physical sciences is not only unexplainable and veering into the unreasonable, the assumption that they could ever be applied to human societies and laws and politics is a complete leap of faith.    The "enlightenment" desire to not have to rely on "faith" in such matters has not only been an even bigger leap of faith than that in revealed morality,  in its desire to by-pass revealed morality (especially those such as the Golden Rule and those imposing obligations of charity)  it has obliterated morality and endangered all of our lives.   And that demotion of revealed morality has happened in christianist religion as well as in the secular sector.   Our idiotic First Amendment can't even discern the difference between Hegseth style "religion" and a religion that is dedicated to helping the least among us.   It is that mentally deficient.   The secular law is an ass and its officers choose for it to be such. 

------------------------

It's kind of a tradition here for me to post the comments of one particular guy who likes to troll me (and at least one which I believe is his sock-puppet) but for the most part I don't post most of the others.  And these days he isn't sending much of it my way.  He's in his eighties now, maybe he's not feeling up to it. 

Me too.   I haven't been posting much of the hate I get in comment moderation because I'm not feeling up to it.   Though if it amuses me to answer directly, and the commentator hasn't violated my rules such as the one against lying about a third party,  I might get into a brawl again. 

I also haven't been posting much of the pre-election coverage because, frankly,  the closer it gets to possible disaster the more it takes out of me.   I don't trust polling so I don't believe any of it until the final results of the vote are in.   And I have a very strong sense of jinxing the results if I express any confidence in them before hand.    I am Irish Catholic and an heir to the thwarting of my optimism of you early adulthood, though I was always skeptical of such stuff as "The Greening Of America."   I was always more a student of Shirley Chisholm and The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. and Dorothy Day.   I am on the side of the farthest left, the one  that takes the Gospel, the Epistles, the Law and the Prophets seriously.   Far more seriously than the Constitution, especially since I've come to the realization that no one else with the ability to take it seriously does,  especially the Court.  

Why Did The New Atheism Fail?

I DON'T THINK it was providential that I wrote that short series of posts dealing with Darwinism and the origin of life on Earth that this video of Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon that had some relevant content to that.  Though I'm prepared to think it might have been.  Note Rupert Sheldrake saying that our own lives are a matter of the providential because it depends on all of our ancestors "going back to the origin of life" surviving and having offspring,  which isn't considered often enough. 

Remember that when you hear some snob bragging about the age of their family. 

The brief discussion of why the atheist fad of the 00s failed is interesting.   

I was planning another post relevant to the idea that the dogmatic materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology of life was just, in the end, not satisfying because it is sensibly not true.  I wasn't going to put it exactly that way but in a way close to it.    In the post which I've started but not finished, yet, it dealt with the accusation that I said what I said just because it was the way I felt, not that I could prove any of it.   Which was funny because in each and every instance I criticized,  that was exactly what the motive for the materialists, atheists and devotees of scientism for what they'd inserted against any evidence being required directly into the formal literature and culture of science.  

ALL WE HAVE IN THE BEGINNING, IN THE MIDDLE AND IN THE END IS WHAT SEEMS TO BE SENSIBLY SENSIBLE.   That's as true for science and mathematics as it is for the humanities and religion and just day to day coping with what comes our way.   Only in science, it is pretended that their methodologies remove all of that when it can't.   It can try to minimize it but, as in those cases I brought up,  scientists are fully as capable of cutting their own preferences slack when they want to for ideological or professional reasons.   

Since Rupert and Vernon bring up Richard Dawkins, his own professional career is built on nothing but that since evolutionary psychology takes the unobserved and unfounded theory of natural selection and adds to that some of the most pseudo-scientistic elements of psychology, ethology, etc. to it.    

Evo-psy is some of the rankest of pseudo-science current in the academic field of science and, more dangerously, its popular understanding, in no small part due to Dawkins' story-telling accepted on the misunderstanding that many of his claims were scientifically founded when they are not.   What we choose to apply critical thinking to is, also, unfortunately, a matter of choice, in the end.  I think what I've said here shows I'm very willing to subject my own preferences to a level of criticism that is typically absent among the materialists.  Theology is a far more self-critical field than the soft sciences and even much of what is taken as hard science, especially among such as cosmologists.  

The Fascists Here Are Trying To Intimidate Voters In Foreign Elections Too

THIS KIND OF THING is what comes of the Republicans in the Congress and on the Supreme Court letting a Trump and his goons mount a domestic Gestapo in the United States WITH MASKED IDENTITIES.  And why Democrats have to defund ICE and abolish the DHS.  I told people when Bush II invented the "Department of Homeland Security" that that "homeland" sounded like it was translated from the Nazi.    And it has proven to be something of the kind in the fullness of time. 

It should be absolutely illegal for anyone above the age of 12 to wear a mask that disguises their identity on the streets and in public venues.   I'm not sure if its still on the books but even my backward, rural state adopted such a law in the wake of the terrorism of the KKK. 

John Roberts Is Today's Roger Taney

THE REPORTING ON JOHN ROBERTS' and his vile wife and family being subjected to the reportedly intense disapproval of him expressed on Hupper Island where he bought an ocean front house and adjoining property to enjoy themselves, and in the mainland community of Port Clyde makes me smile.  

I am glad that there are those in my state who are letting the main author of the new fascist government we are beginning to experience know that he's going to pay some price for that.  He should never be allowed to live it down though he live to be 120.  None of them should be allowed to do that nor should any of those who put the Republican-fascist six on the Supreme Court. 

I'm sure that Roberts is mentally incapable of the kind of moral reflection that would lead a moral  person to realize the evil that he has ushered in in destroying equality and democracy in the United States,  if he had that kind of ability for that level of moral reflection he never would have had the career he has. - he probably would never have become a lawyer of the kind he was.   I will note in passing the elite Catholic prep and the Ivy League schools he went to didn't seem to give him that.  i don't trust elite preps and Ivy League level universities because they have provided the bulk of our elite criminal class. 

John Roberts will never feel or even express insincere regret for what he has done,  including for the murders of fishermen, of protesters, of innocent people murdered by ICE and DHS and the murders of school girls in Iran by the man he made an impume monarch.   He certainly will never feel any regret from restarting American apartheid - that has been the most constant focus of his entire career as a lawyer, a judge, a "justice"   HE IS A GENTEEL WHITE SUPREMACIST, among the most dangerous of that kind.   I believe in the rare possibility of such an intense racist to see the error of their ways - though in the cases I know, they were blue collar people who weren't given the ideological and academic excuses to pretend their racism either wan't racism or that it was right on some "higher principle."   But Roberts isn't going to be one of those.   The ones I've known came to abandon their racism to any extent through human relations, often because their children or grandchildren married across racial lines.   Though I've also known cases in which People were disowned for that reason.   Roberts is not ever going to be a former racist.  It's his professional career. 

And that's only one of the issues in which Roberts has earned the loathing of anyone who values democracy, equality, justice, fairness and the lives of ordinary People of no wealth.  I am not thoroughly versed in the legal decisions of Roger Taney but what earned him that kind of thing was that one horrifically bad decision,  Roberts and his fascist colleagues have issued several such decisions.   He may fairly be judged, someday, to have outdone Taney in earning the status of a bad name in democracy and history.   As can the other five of his fascist majority and those in the majority of the Rehnquist Court.    

All of them can be credited with giving the branch of government that was regularly given a pass before Rehnquist took over as Chief "justice"  the status as likely the worst of the three branches.  As I have been noting here since the end of July,  you can credit SOME eras of Congress and some presidents with making Civil Rights, Voting Rights and other Acts that expanded on that promissory note of the Declaration of Indendence.   They passed clean elections laws in the wake of the Nixon crime spree,  they made laws protecting the environment and a host of other good laws THAT THE SUPREME COURT OVER THE COURSE OF ITS HISTORY HAVE NULLIFIED AND OVERTURNED AND MADE MEANINGLESS BY THEIR RULINGS MOWING THOSE DOWN.   That is far more typical of the Court than even the presidents,  even the Senate where under our system good legislation is often sent to die has more creditable behavior.   You can really only credit one brief era of the Supreme Court with something somewhat better, under Warren and part of the Burger years up to Buckley v Valeo.  And they frequently proved themselves stupid in their attempts at doing better. 

You have to be really bad to earn the kind of name that John Roberts has for himself.   You don't hear much about Waite or Fuller though they were pretty bad and presided of vile courts.    

Roberts will already go down as one of the two worst in our history,  Taney being his sole competition for that position.   I'm glad that at least on one tiny corner of Maine coastline  he's getting some of what he's earned in this life.   I'm sure he can arrange his time in the DC area and elsewhere to shield him from consequences.  His wife gets enough dirty money to do that from her side-job which in an honest system would be illegal.   And I'm sure Roberts could get billionaires with business before the court to arrange that for him as they do other members of his Court.   I wish there was some way to keep him away from my state but at least he can be kept from enjoying it like he used to.    I haven't been to Port Clyde since I had a college friend who was from there.  I'd heckle him if I saw him there. 

Alito Is A Political Agent

if he were going to resign from the Court he'd do it.   He's making his coy indication because he's hoping to make the Republican-fascist domination of the Supreme Court an election issue to get the Republican-fascists out to vote Republican to keep the Court in fascist hands.   

It's not possible to rank the Republican-fascists on the Court for their villainy and vileness but Alito  certainly ranks as one of the worst of the worst.   A true believing fascist nutjob.   He would certainly do whatever he could to try to tip the scales in this election,  though the fascist six all would.  

I think if the Senate is going to go Democratic he will resign almost immediately to put another Leonard Leo protegee on the Court, a certain fascist vote, if it's going to remain under Republican-fascist control, he probably won't resign.  He likes to lord over and hurt powerless People too much, especially Women and People of Color and LGBTQ+ of no means.   NOT that Roberts, Thomas or the other three Republican goons aren't as bad, they are.  

Steve Swallow - Winter Songs - One

 

Mike Rodriguez trumpet 
Chris Cheek tenor saxophone 
Steve Cardenas guitar
Gil Goldstein piano
Steve Swallow bass
Adam Nussbaum drums

Addendum

OF COURSE YOU WILL PROBABLY have realized that I left one of the most urgent of issues out of those proposed constitutional reforms.

IF THERE IS ONE THING THAT IS OBVIOUS, THE PRESIDENTIAL PARDON POWER IS A VENUE OF GROTESQUE CORRUPTION,  TOTALLY OUT OF ANY BOUNDS AND WAS ALWAYS A DANGEROUS AND RATHER STUPID POWER FOR THE FRAMERS TO GIVE,  IN THE TERMS OF THE CONSTITUTION, UNCONDITIONALLY.    

It should, at the very last be invalid for a president to give a pardon to anyone who has given him any money or favors.  

It should be invalid for a president to pardon anyone in their own administration, campaign, or sitting members of the government and courts under their administration.   It should be invalid for a Vice President to pardon the previous president as Ford pardoned Nixon and Vance will pardon Trump if Trump isn't dead when he becomes president.  There was nothing in American history with quite the stench that the Ford pardon of Nixon had but they've certainly more than matched it under Bush I, Bush II and Trump. 

It should be invalid for them to pardon members of their immediate family though I fully think that Joe Biden pardoning his son and so many others was both understandable and excusable due to the proven abuse of power the Republicans had already shown they were and still are fully prepared to use to PERSECUTE THEM FOR NO REASON AT ALL.  

Our system is filthy to the core and there is no putting polish on that and pretending it's anything but that. 

Emergency Improvements To The Constitution That We Make Or America As It Was Supposed To Be Is Finished

NO HUMAN INVENTION, no humanly made structure, no humanly made idea in the real world is perfect, flawless and not liable to failure.   And by that I mean that all of them are  guaranteed to fail eventually.   You can bank on that. 

You will note that I stipulated "in the real world" because we have the illusion that the logical completeness that exists in mathematical proof concerning mathematical objects - which are entirely mental objects -  can be matched by anything we do in the world of living beings, material objects and in the human inventions to deal with the vicissitudes of our experience in the real world we actually live in.   That was one of the main and mistaken conceits of the so-called "enlightenment" which those who framed our government and more or less invented the idea of constitutions were under the sway of.   Their assumptions as to the perfection of their inventions have to a dangerous extent left us at the mercy of their mistakes, their necessarily incomplete experience or ability to guess the future, and not insignificantly their moral lapses and desire for their invented government to serve their own desires for wealth and power. 

If the experience since the Rehnquist Court decided the 2000 election for George W. Bush, after a clearly corrupt election in the state run by his brother as governor and clearly corrupt members of his party, the Republicans, and the consequent disasters that have come from that, the attack on 9-11, the illegal war in Iraq, the financial collapse of 2008, the elevation and election of Trump I through the corruption of the Electoral College, that reign of criminality and insane Hollywood-make believe handling of the Covid pandemic, the continuation of Bush II's wars through both the Obama and Trump I years until Biden ended at least the one in Afghanistan (under rather terrible terms set by Trump I), the botched finanical situation during Covid, THE VIOLENT INSURRECTION THAT TRUMP CALLED ON THE SITTING CONGRESS, THE FAILURE OF THE COURTS TO APPLY THE ANTI-INSURRECTION MEASURES OF THE CONSTITUTION, and all of the other things that led to the crime spree of Trump II - in which the Republican-fascists in the Senate and the Roberts Court played an enormous part,  is just a partial list of how those flaws and evils written into the "more perfect union" that was claimed by those callow gods of the American enlightenment have come to bear their bad fruit.  

Since the claims of natural and revealed law have figured in my recent addressing of these things,  I will proclaim the obvious truth that "by their fruits you will know them" certainly applies to constitutions as well as to human beings.  And this is the fruit which ours is giving now.   It's time that we faced the fact that at least two of the branches of that tree are producing poisonous fruit and either we graft new scion wood into it or the thing is done for. 

You won't surprised if I say that under our structure of government the first and most important amendment to the Constitution we need is one that strips the Supreme Court of the Marbury power the Court invented that gives it, alone the power to say what the Constitution is, a power which they have used with near total irresponsibility from 1857 in Dred Scott and with increasing frequency and irresponsibility and erratically, not infrequently in contradictory ways ever since.   Trump v USA should be the final straw.  Any branch of the United States government that assumes it has the power to turn the country into rule by a Trump II has proven that that power is a danger to us and the entire world.  And the Republicans sitting on the Court today have proven to be fully willing for partisan and corrupt ideological reasons to put us in that danger.   

And if there is one thing that a real instead of a phony As Seen On TV or heard on NPR history of the U.S. Supreme Court shows, once a Court has done something like that and gotten away with it,  they will do it again. 

As important is a definitive abolition of the unitary executive abomination that the Roberts Court and a number of Republican Attorneys General and lesser functionaries of anti-democratic government has created and imposed on us against everything from the Declaration of Independence to the framing of the Constitution,  to the certain will of the majority of American Voters since they decided to throw off the rule of just such a monarch - though one who actually had more liability than the Roberts Court has left Trump with.   

Trump v USA is the Dred Scott decision we face in 2026 and which could well destroy us.   

Speaking of the Voters and their Vote and THEIR GOVERNMENT, actually the government of the Voters and those who cannot Vote,  THEIR VOTE SHOULD HAVE THE STATUS THAT THE OATHS OF OFFICE AND SUBSEQUENT LEGAL OBLIGATION OF ALL OFFICE HOLDERS FROM THE LOWEST ONES IN OUR SYSTEM, THOSE OF THE MEMBERS OF CONGRESS UP TO THE SUPREME gods OF THE SUPREME COURT GIVES TO THE MAKE-BELIEVE, FAIRY-TALE CONSTITUTION WHICH THE COURT MAKES SURE IS NOT A REAL THING. 

The principle stated in the Declaration that only government with the express consent of the governed IS LEGITIMATE should be among the highest principles of law.   That should have always been taken as binding as anything that was written into the subsequent Constitution because it is the only legitimate claim to legitimacy that any of the government that results from it has. 

It should be illegal for any governmental official, office holder, judge, "justice" and right on down to the lowest member of a municipal board on the local level to deny anyone their exercise of the right to vote and to have that vote count towards the determination of who gets to govern the country.   Any member of the federal government,  up to and including the president and Supreme Court "justice" who even asserts, as the late and putrid Antonin Scalia (one of the architects of the unitary executive) did, that there is no right to vote should be immediately suspended because they have asserted that an illegitimate form of government can be legitimate under the Constitution.    If that was the intention of those who framed the Constitution after the war started on the stated principles of the Declaration of Independence founded the country,  then the government set up under it was illegitimate - WHICH IS SOMETHING THAT WE, THE PEOPLE REJECTED IN THE EXPANSION OF THE VOTE INCREASINGLY from the election of 1800,  THROUGH THE 19TH AND EARLY 20TH CENTURY, CULMINATING IN THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1964 AND WHICH HAD PREVIOUSLY BEEN DONE IN 1870 AND THE 19TH AMENDMENT IN 1920.  

The danger to legitimate government in the United States is increasingly voiced in Republican Party circles, explicitly through overturning those expansions of the vote as it has been in any place where white supremacy held sway and people legitimately holding the right to vote were kept from voting before those laws and amendment were enacted.   

That has always been the major impediment to honest government in the United States from the time when those held in slavery, free Black People and Women and Native Americans, those without property, Catholics, etc were denied the vote.  All of those except the franchise of Catholics have been promote again by Republican-fascists for years now,    The advocacy of overthrowing equality and democracy is the danger to us that the old-line commie hunters claimed that something which was never any danger of being able to do that.  WE KNOW THAT IT IS A DANGER TO US TODAY BECAUSE THEY HAVE SUCCESSFULLY DONE IT UNDER THE CONSTITUTION FOR MOST OF OUR HISTORY.   And in many states today, as soon as the Roberts Court nullified the Voting Rights Act, they took measures to do it again. 

Any Supreme Court "justice" who asserts or concurs or writes a Court decision that strips PEOPLE of their ability to vote, have their vote count and to get the representation which is the actual reason for them to have a vote should be held to be an enemy of equality and democracy and legitimate government.  Stripping one who has done that from holding office isn't enough, they should get at least twenty years in prison for that because it has proven to be a danger to the lives of People going back to the first lynchings over such issues.   The Roberts Court is as deadly as a lynch mob and with the same motive as the original KKK which formed to, among other things, terrorize Black People who tried to vote.   They are not a legitimate Court for any kind of democracy.   We are governed by an illegitimate court in the terms of the Declaration of Independence. 

And it should be as much of a crime for a president or member of Congress or any state or local government to do it for the same reason.

The stupidity of our Constitutional ideology is that because some aristocratic, white men of property in the late 18th and first year of the 19th centuries who had no extensive experience of democratic government either couldn't imagine or anticipate or care about what history would soon come to teach, we are forever bound to ignore all subsequent lessons of even the hardest of experience.   To some extent that is true of any written Constitution - which, despite what you have been taught to think is a fairly modern scheme of governance.    The ideologies - pretenses for doing whatever they want to, really - of "originalism" and "textualism" should be abolished due to the evils that those who claim such things have done under those excuses.   That should be the focus of an amendment to the written Constitution, especially since if we get rid of the Marbury power grab, it might actually become what is the highest law under which we have to live. 

The First Amedment should be drastically expanded to:

a.  make it clear that there is a right to tell the truth but that there is no such a thing as a "right" to lie.   The Court invented "right to lie" which is fully believed in by those who either want to lie or have no real problem with lying (lawyers, for the most part) but which is among the greatest sources of danger to us.    The idiot Trump and his fellow idiots who talk about abolishing the Sullivan decision - which I've been calling for doing for half a century - don't realize that if the People and groups they lie about could sue them Trump would have been sued into the flames of hell before he ever thought of mounting a presidential run or even before Hollywood lied him into the fantasy career as the CEO of an unreality TV show which led to him being inflicted on us.    You can say the same about the media and think septic-tanks and other entities which have lied us into fascism..

b. make it clear that the "press" and other entities have no rights, that artificial entities cannot hold rights but may have the permission to serve the real rights of We the People to accurate and true information which we need to make informed decisions, especially when we vote.    The lawyerly myth that there is any right for any artificial entity (including the Supreme Court invention of "corporate person-hood"  has been one of the most dangerous things in our history,  one which is masked by the sloppy, careless language of the so-called Bill of Rights. 

c. I'm sure there are other things that ought to be changed about it but this is enough to be getting on with. 

The Second Amendment has proven to be dangerous and needs drastic change, as well.   It was written to suppress the rights of Black People and that danger has now expanded to the entire population.   But because of the modern interpretation of that - MOSTLY AN INVENTION OF THE GUN INDUSTRY AND ITS LOBBY - and the likes of Antonin Scalia it is held that because of what they wrote into the Constitution in the late 18th century nothing can be done to protect us from one of the greatest dangers to life of We the People.    Which is as blatant proof that our Constitution is in serious need of drastic reform that can't be put off any longer.   How many more mass shootings will it take till we face the truth that we are already under attack,  one with a far longer and unstopped series of attacks with a far larger body count than 9-11.   

We do these things or our Constitution is failed, completely. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Black Dog

 

Clare Claire Rushbrook
Ray Ralph Ineson
Isaac (Age 7-10) Alexander Aze
Isaac (Age 14) Adam Thomas Wright
Isaac (Age 19) Will Howard
Constable Caolan McCarthy
Keisha Nahel Tzegai
Jamal Karl Queensborough
Gary Stephen Critchlow
June Rachel Davies
Brian Peter Wight
Jo Amelia Lowdell
Louise Amelia Lowdell
Leia (Age 3) Rosa Yevtushenko
Leia (Age 7) Greta Dudgeon
Leia (Age 12) Rebecca Ineson
Charlotte Deeivya Meir
Morgue Assistant Debra Baker
Therapist Jessica Turner
Stranger David Hounslow
Nurse Evie Killip
Hermit Chris Pavlo
Director Mary Peate
Writer Katie Hims

I've wanted to revive the Saturday Night Radio Drama but a combination of political and environmental crisis, the catastrophe of my gardening this year (a result of the environmental crisis) and my own health has prevented it. 

I hadn't listened to a play by one of the best radio dramatists today and one of the best in my experience, Katie Hims, in quite a while but I did listen to some of her work this week and, finding large amounts of it are available online,  I've decided to concentrate on her work for a while.   Her work is excellent and the productions of it from the BBC are very good, as well. 

Black Dog is really good.