"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
A QUICK REMINDER OF WHY having Susan Collins in the Senate is a really, really bad thing. In one of the rare instances when she deigns to answer a question, she said that she didn't regret her vote to put Brett Kavanaugh on the court. Most will recall that she claimed she believed him* when he said he wouldn't vote to overturn Roe v Wade, but, and the irony in this case just spills over the top, he also wrote the ruling that made racial profiling by ICE entirely Constitutional.
Here is someone that Markwayne Mullin's goons picked up as she was walking to mass a while back.
I'll bet you a hundred bucks I don't have that some ICESTAPO or their allies saw her and hated her for being a nun while Black and that was the entire basis of her arrest. I'll bet you ten times that hundred I don't have that was it.
That is Sr. Leticia Ugboaja who is a registered nurse at South Texas Health System and worked previously for 10 years as a certified nursing assistant at DHR Health in Edinburg, so the ICESTAPO arrested not only a NUN WEARING A FULL HABIT but ALSO A NURSE working to comfort and aid the sick. The nun is part of the Daughters of Mary Mother of Mercy and volunteered as an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion at Our Lady of Sorrows Church, according to Brenda Riojas, a spokesperson for the Diocese of Brownsville.
And to top it off, she is also an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion at Our Lady of Sorrows Church. For those who don't know, an Extraordiary Minister of Communion, is a person who brings communion to those who can't get to mass due to illness, disability or other problems. THE ICESTAPO MIGHT HAVE ARRESTED HER AS SHE WAS CARRYING COMMUNION WHILE FULFILLING ONE OF THE MATTHEWS 25 OBLIGATIONS OF A CHRISTIAN.
Imagine if she hadn't had the outrage of many, many religious leaders who got her released. She'd be in some hell hole of a Trump concentration camp or worse.
And all because of the guy Susan Collins doesn't regret putting on the Supreme Court.
I first saw this at RMJ's.
* No, she didn't believe him. I've watched Susan Collins from before the fraud ever got elected to Congress, her playing dumb act is as much a part of her act as her patented As Seen On Sunday Morning TV "concern." She's always playing as if she got played when she knew exactly what she was doing, supporting Republican-fascism.
IN THE AFTERNOON HEAT YESTERDAY, as it was too hot to work in the garden and I needed to rest my eyes, I clicked on an image of the great philosopher who warned against totalitarian propaganda and its potency, Hannah Arendt. Only it wasn't a film clip of her, it was an "AI" generated image of her and an "AI" generated voice that could have been mistaken for her speaking lines that, I suspect, were not her exact words. And when it is someone as precise as she was, exactness is a major issue. The sentiments of the video weren't particularly objectionable, though in the "AI" phenomenon as it means to most Americans nearly 100% of the time, the generation of fake images, videos, voices and information, it most certainly could have presented information that was 100% the opposite of what she did say or any percentage between that number and 0. And Americans and certainly most other People in the English speaking world or somewhat understanding who could understand what was presented, almost the same percentage would have believed whatever that "AI" video presented because, like most, they've never read anything by her or bother themselves to fact check it.
What struck me, as soon as I realized it was "AI" and not Hannah Arendt, was that of all the philosophers and political thinkers of the 20th century, that use of her is probably the most ironic. Of all of them she was one of the earliest and most insightful as to the use of false information as producing fascism, Nazism and totalitarian governance and regimes.
The creation of false "quotes" from famous and not so famous People has always been a thing and with the invention of the internet and search engines that mine words in combination to present "top" search results, based on clicks, such quotes, often invented for ideological reasons, to appeal to the prejudices and hates and fears of large numbers of People, will become what most People believe was said by those People.
You might think that's generally innocuous though that would necessarily lead to the complication of trying to determine which are harmless and which are dangerous and that's something that the laziness and insouciance of modern culture, academia and, most of all, the legal profession isn't going to get done.
I will point out in passing that that is, at least to some extent, a product of the poorly drafted First Amendment which didn't specify that the only right of free speech and, especially, "press" that was a necessity for democratic rule WAS THE RIGHT TO TELL THE TRUTH and that any daffy idea that there could be such a thing as a "right to lie" was guaranteed to destroy democracy. I'm not sure Hannah Arendt ever got to that point, I'm only a casual reader of her, not a specialist.
If you want to get what she actually said, the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Culture at Bard College published a far more than excellent article by Roger Berkowitz on Fake Hannah Arendt Quotations, two years ago.
The closest in spirit and content [to the fake quote], and also the most easily available, is from an interview with Roger Errera in 1973, what turned out to be Hannah Arendt’s last public interview. Arendt spoke about the importance of a free press in an era of mass manipulation of truth and public lying: She said:
"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."
I will interject here because a "free press" is only a good for real democracy, egalitarian democracy, WHEN IT TELLS THE TRUTH. We have the freest of all free presses in the history of the world in the United States and it has brought us to Trump and Republican-fascism and the New Taney Roberts Court by using that freedom to lie and to appeal to exactly the kind of easily sold sensational lies that she went on to warn about as the very raw material with which totalitarians destroy democracy and the freedom to tell the truth. They never interfere with the freedom to lie in support of THEIR totalitarianism and, as the American "free press" has proved over and over again, it is more than willing to do that on behalf of the totalitarian regime and the oligarchs who fund it.
The key point in Arendt’s statement is that as lies multiply, the result is not that the lie is believed but that people lose faith in the truth and are increasingly susceptible to believe anything. When cynicism about truth reigns, lies operate not because they replace reality but because they make reality wobble–a phrase Arendt employs in her essay Truth and Politics. In that essay, Arendt argued that mass lying undermines our sense of reality by which we find our bearings in the real world:
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
The Arendtian point is that constant lying by a propaganda machine does not lead to the lie being believed but leads, instead, to cynicism. This is an argument that Arendt made, already, in her first published book The Origins of Totalitarianism. In that book, Arendt writes:
"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."
So why, given the surfeit of similar quotations, does the anonymous influencer responsible for the viral Arendt quotation change the quotation? On one level, who can know? But there is something to be said for the simplicity of language and clarity of purpose in the fabricated quotation. Arendt herself is profoundly quotable, but her sentences tend to be long and at times follow a meandering course. The impulse to clarify, simplify, and “market” Arendt to a public trained on easy social media quotations is real.
Which raises a second question: does the alteration matter? And here, the answer is yes. And it turns out that this is hardly the first time that Hannah Arendt’s words have been altered and simplified to ease their public consumption. One of the most notorious cases is in the documentary about Arendt Vita Activa by Ada Ushpiz. Ushpiz uses over 30 block quotations that she projects on the screen in her documentary. Shockingly, nearly every one of these quotations is altered. Some of Ushpiz’s changes were major and deeply deceptive. But many were simply stylistic, as in the fake quotation floating around social media today. In writing about this documentary, I explained why such seemingly innocuous changes matter:
I will ask you to read the rest of the article, I'd love to post it if it were not for reluctance to risk violating fair use because I know how few People online follow up links - though, of course, my regular readers, apart from my regular trolls, probably do that, maybe even more than I try to.
There is far more than enough in both what Arendt and Mr. Berkowitz said to inspire a month of posts on the topic, but it's the height of summer and I will have to get back to the garden because we are in a depression.
Great American State Fair Draws Freedom 250 People
I'll get back to dragging John Roberts And His Fascist Five Tomorrow. If a Democratic Congress is not elected and they don't impose drastic Court reform on that goddamned corrupt court this country is finished.
AS I NOTED HERE THE OTHER DAY, the IHRA corruption of the "A" word, "antisemitism" is so meaningless that it is regularly hurled at Jews, the example I pointed out was the leader of the British Green Party, the only Jewish leader of a major political party in Britain, Zack Polanski.
That is being reproduced here many times over, one of those being one of the three Zoran Mamdanh supported candidates, Brad Lander, who is Jewish and is being presented to the public as antisemitic by conservatives and Zionists as an antisemite because he has spoken out against the genocidal actions of the Israeli government. And there is no doubt that the US media, which is, in fact, with some ineffective lefties and others exempted, trying to hand the mid-terms to Republicans.
I haven't been following the obsession with those three candidates, which will get endless air-time and endless media distortion on behalf of the Republican-fascists AND THAT REALLY DOES MEAN FASCIST PARTY. I have read mostly about the sometimes appalling statements of one of them, Darializa Avila Chevalier, posted on online message boards and, or comment threads. The ones I read are pretty stupid and, though made about six years ago, would give me pause as to whether or not she's got potential to be an effective member of Congress BUT THEY PALE IN CONTRAST TO THOSE TRUMP AND HIS FACISTS TWEET OUT EVERY DAY, AND NOT WHILE THEY'RE DOPEY KIDS IN THEIR LATE TEENS, which these days seems to extend will into the 20s. I have seen no political price being paid for the statements of any of those who I listed in the title of this post or, in fact, scores and scores of Republican-fascist politicians and candidates who I could list if I had the time. And that wouldn't be anything hard to do, it would be easy as anything. Yet that task seems to elude, not only the American free press, which will obsess over this as it does a few of the dumber statements of Graham Platner for exactly the same purpose.
I'll say something radical, American journalism as it is and as it long has been, most of it for most of the history of the United States is a servant of and tool of the oligarchs, the racists, the fascists, the Republican-fascists and they, like the legal profession, exists mostly to service them like the most jaded of prostitutes. Presstitution is the second oldest profession an unlike the oldest one, it doesn't have First Amendment protection for its business practices. Though, come to think of it, it might only be third on that list, lawyers were in the same business even before there was anything like journalism.
And the media will, certainly, have all the conservatives and typical Democrats who get called on to wag their tongues against progressive Democrats. That's a branch of the same media.
Would I vote for Darializa Avila Chevalier? For a primary election, her opponent would have to be pretty bad for me to give her that kind of confidence that she would be the better choice. She may have grown up enough in the past six years but I'd like to see the evidence of that.
Would I vote for her in the election that really counts, the one that will fill a seat in the Congress, there isn't a Republican who I would vote for even if they were better than her because their just being in the Congress empowers the fascists in that party. The Comers, Foxxes, Jordans, Johnsons, etc. etc. etc. etc. There isn't a member of the Republican caucus who doesn't empower fascists, it is a fascist party. Any independent who ran against her would have to convince me they had A BETTER CHANCE to beat the Republican and, frankly, when I've done that in the past it has not generally worked as I hoped it would. The largely ineffective Angus King, who I didn't vote for when he ran and won the governorship but who I have voted for for the Senate, has been the one exception to that. And I didn't like his governorship much at all. So, yes, I would probably vote for her though with the same reluctance I voted for Angus King. Voting for the least bad which the voters in the primary gave us is the most moral thing to do, THAT IS LEAST BAD IN OUTCOME, not in some abstract sense of morality or even intellectual coherence.
Who knows, maybe she'll prove to have grown up and do something good.
The IHRA is not a credible organization, it is a false front that promotes lies and genocide and apartheid. The members that came up with that definition deserve to be considered as flacks for the Israeli criminal regime as certainly as those lobbying and propagandizing on behalf of the South African Apartheid government were and, I'll say it because it's true, the German American Bund. They and their "definition" are tools of racism and murder.
People are probably already getting whiped out by it and they don't have a clue it's happening. Phil from A Different Bias lays it out, noting that at least as far as Elon's massive theft is concerned, this starts in the United States by them changing the rules, calling their plan to rob us all "deregulation."
SpaceX IPO Disaster: Pension Funds Are Getting Wiped Out
I don't recall which Democratic politician pointed out a few days ago that for the majority of Americans, we are already in an economic depression, just one that hasn't yet decayed into what is coming. I remember hearing my grandparents and mother talk about how that happened to their family in the 1920s, a working farm family in which my grandparents had to already find low-paid factory work even before the official crash. I'd guess we are in the late part of that stage in the depression that's coming.
And, as then, the news media, back then newspapers and magazines with a tiny little bit of radio, were pretending none of that was going on. This is going to make the 2008 crash look like a little bump, the theft is even more obvious now as is the grotesque irresponsibility of the government and the courts.
This is what Milton Friedman and his ilk have brought us to. I could see this coming as soon as PBS put on that series in which that con man sold the country on neo-liberal economics back in the 70s. My response was that I immediately stopped giving money to my local "public TV station."
About the only idea that Friedman pushed that wasn't a disaster was back during the depression and into WWII when he was working for the government and he came up with the idea of withholding taxes. When THAT was in his own economic self-interest. After that lying on behalf of the rich was in his own economic self interest. That's what his field pretty much is in most cases.
WELL, YOU DON'T REALLY have to ask yourself why, to merely point it out tells you why.
Right wing politicians love to reference certain Bible verses, right wing jocks and others tattoo references and even short verses on themselves. I would imagine a higher percentage of such tattoos appeared at Trump rallies than in the general population. Trump - a man who certainly has never read a word of the Bible unless it was in some cheat sheet for an appearance in front of Thump-Trumpers - has even botched a refernce one when he went to "Liberty, . . . . um, University,"
"Two Corinthians, 3:17, that's the whole ballgame."
I wonder how long it took his handler to get him to memorize that number. I think he probably never heard anyone say the name of that book before they rehearsed that answer to a clearly set-up question for him before that appearance.
But you know, it's funny, how you guys are always throwing the clobber verses at LGBTQ+ but there's one verse I have literally never heard the slightest reference given by you meter maids of other Peoples private parts and where those get parked. It's not far from one of those you lurve to bring up. Which is odd because it talks about one of the most common of all the sexual acts forbidden and whic in Leviticus, carries a death sentence so you know they really meant it. Leviticus 20:10. Here it is in the Authorized Version,
10 And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.
You can certainly understand why that particular verse might not naturally be one that athletes, soldiers, (neither group noted for their chastity or celibacy) MEN (ibid) politicians, who love to cite them clobber verses naturally go to. Why it would certainly be one they would rather everyone forget.
Imagine what would happen if if the fundamentalists in Texas applied that to Ken Paxton - though I'm sure there are fundamentalist Texans who do, actually, intend to not vote for that sleaze on the basis of his public adultery. In my state, Susan Collins - who was slippin' round with her husband while he was married to another woman - would have to retire, at the very least, if Republican bible thumpers were consistent in their claims of sexual morality.
And, now that I've pointed that out, it's entirely unambiguous that Jesus said that marrying a divorced person is adultery. So even if they did manage to not screw around before the divorce, if they did after and while the ditched spouse is alive, they're adulterers as defined by Jesus. (Luke 16:18; Matt 5:32). I don't think there are more than a small rump of such right-wingers among you guys, apart from a few Catholics, who ever point that one out as applying to those clobber verses, many of which lie in close proximity to those restricting straight sex to within the bond of "traditional" marriage.
Imagine if that verse was the law of the land, and it was enacted. The Trump regime, the Congress, certainly including the Republican caucus, Republican caucuses in state houses (probably Democratic ones, too) would be far more than just decimated - which means every tenth one of you guys would get killed. I wonder how the right wing and other corporate media would fare if all adulterers in their ranks got the ol' Lev 20:10 treatment.
I would like to know how many of the conservative churches who claim that they favor the civil law be based on the Bible would have many, many empty places in their pews and audiences if that was the applied law of the land. You want to bet it would really cut into the . . . um. . . pastor's Bently or new jet fund? I would expect that there would impact the US Catholic Conference of Bishops a bit, though if that would be on the dominant right wing side of the aisle there instead of the far smaller lefty one, I couldn't say. I'd guess it would impact the putrid Robert Barron's operation - he loves him some bodybuilder types and they're notorious for breaking that particular commandment. That a-hole was standing next to Paula White in the pictures I saw at Trump's blasphemy hootenanny the other day.
In terms of US law and the law to which it is so irrationally tied, English law, it was the notorious whore master, adulterer, serial divorcer, repeat wife killer, murderous, torturing psychopath, Henry VIII who first made gay male sex illegal an carrying the death penalty. He and Trump have a lot in common, including both of them being psychopaths, though I'll say Henry was learned while Trump is the stupidest and most ignorant president in American history as well as a rapist, child rapist and adulterer.
Get back to me when you guys take that one literally.
Dallas: Given an assignment to uncover a hotel thief, Tanis unwillingly plays the part of a Chambermaid, but then finds there are other, more nefarious, things going on in the big hotel.
that if I'd just said, hell with it and let all comments in unmoderated, that I might have had one of those all hell breaks loose blogs that I could have monetized early and made some money out of it. I regularly outraged people at other blogs I wrote for and commented on and expect I could have had huge numbers of clicks with just the regular stuff I post. I often got hundreds of hateful comments at Echidnes, it was when I didn't mind brawling a lot on the comment threads. At Chris Mooney's blog I had a brawl that almost went to a thousand comments. That was when I said I thought PZ had faked his "Great Desecration." When someone told me what he'd claimed about it it was so transparently implausible that I said I thought he'd faked the entire thing and never had a consecrated communion host, that he'd either made one of Wonder Bread or he'd cut one out of paper. That got their knickers in a twist.
But I had enough of that kind of crap at Duncan's blog and didn't think it was responsible for me to host the kinds of slander and libel and lies and false common received wisdom that is damaging to morals and American politics. Who knows, maybe I'd have let the liars and slanderers and others make the comments into a club that had nothing to do with me, like you know who, and made a little ready cash out of it.
But I wouldn't have had a sponsored link to Amazon. Even if I were depraved I'd have drawn the line at that.
I might have had a fund raising week. Though when I thought of that, once, I remembered what Quentin Crisp said when he was brought up on charges of solicitation, I don't ask strange men for money because I don't believe they'd give it to me.
Maybe I should risk it and see what happens. I could use a couple of dollars.
THIS ONE IS FROM SIMPS, the one who trolls me, though he didn't send me the original in the short string of posts that ended in the one in which I posted Owen Jones' video about the UN report about Israel targeting children, To which Simps said:
As always, you enjoy saying this shit far too much. Which is, of course, a classic anti-Semitic tell.
Now, I have given him a tiny measure of benefit of the doubt before, that doubt being mostly based in my knowledge of his general nescience and ignorance and inability to progress past the common received wisdom of the mid to late 1960s, exactly the kind of thing that I moved far left from as I thought about and researched and moved beyond as, in fact, anyone should from any kind of common received wisdom because none of that is adequate if you cling to them you will end up doing things like tacitly approving murder and associated crimes, or things that lead to those.
The documented instances of Israel, the "most moral army in the world" targeting children, in some cases, perhaps especially in the age of drones in which the murderers are at no risk, themselves:
turning murdering children in specific ways into a game among the murderers. I can well imagine the Nazis doing such things as the killing became quite routine for them, if I had time I'd research to see if those who study the Holocaust have documented that. I'm sure Mengele found it very entertaining to find new ways to kill the children he murdered, often after torturing them in the name of science.
If you object to me objecting to that, my only conclusion is that you approve of it or are at least not bothered by it even a little bit. Only you shouldn't mistake that latter alternative as in any way morally elevated from approval of it, it is its exact equivalent.
The word "antisemitism" has no meaning, the IHRA and the governments and other entities that adopted their ultimate distortion of it to protect the crimes against humanity of Israel have made it meaningless, as I've pointed out before. The same is being done to the term "blood libel." Once you make a term of moral opprobrium into a shield for the worst of all crimes, they mean nothing anymore.
Update: You can compare the descriptions from those who witnessed the IDF in Gaza with this:
The mass murder of children is surely the most salient feature of National Socialist atrocities: from the first victims of the child ‘euthanasia’ campaign, via the 1.5 million murdered children of Jewish descent, to the so-called bandit children in the occupied Soviet territories. Especially young children succumbed to the starvation policy in various occupied territories; infant mortality assumed horrendous proportions. The ruthless murder of so many children in particular is a crime without historical precedent. Numerous children, furthermore, were deported, compelled to carry out heavy labour, sent to camps or subjected to barbaric medical experiments. Others were stolen from their parents and given up for forced adoption. The crimes committed against these defenceless victims are a vivid illustration of the moral degeneration of the perpetrators.
The exceptional barbarity, pleasure and cynicism with which many German perpetrators murdered children – Jewish and non-Jewish alike – in the occupied Soviet territories is particularly disturbing. On one occasion, the head of the SS guard in the Minsk Ghetto, Adolf Rübe, led a child by the hand to the cemetery with the words ‘Now we’re going to join papa and mama’, where he then shot it. He had indeed killed the child’s parents a few days earlier. In the Lesnaya prisoner-of-war camp near Baranovichi, a German female doctor murdered an eight-month-old baby by lethal injection, only then to pose for a photograph with the child and its mother, who was present. In the village of Kovali in the district of Oktyabrsky, Belarus, German forces chased after fleeing children, caught them and threw them all into a fire. In nearby Dyomenka, little girls had their necks broken like chickens. Sometimes, during shooting operations, children were held over the pit by their hair and then shot; this resulted on at least one occasion in the shooter being left holding the child’s skullcap with some hair still attached after the child had fallen into the pit. One could cite many other such examples.
Dr. Alex J. Kay Senior Lecturer at the Chair of Military History / Cultural History of Violence, University of Potsdam and author of, Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing
According to the IHRA "definition" of "antisemitism" noticing the similarities between what the Nazis did and what the IDF and "settlers" are doing in Palestine, Lebanon, etc. is "antisemitism."
Right now Zach Polanski, THE ONLY JEWISH LEADER OF A MAJOR PARTY IN BRITAIN, the Green Party, is being targeted as "antisemitic" by the British media and establishment because of his criticism of the Israeli genocide. That designation can get you a lot worse legal and politican and societal treatment than being called a "communist" during the US red scare that is such a focus of so many a Hollywood movie. That word became pretty meaningless, as Trump in the vestiges of his decaying memory calls it up in exactly the same way that made it mean nothing.
The list of Jews who are regularly labeled as "antisemites" is matched by a list of Gentiles who have never expressed hatred of Jews and who, unlike Zionists, distinguish between Jews and those who hold with the racist, apartheid, genocidal ideology that Zionism is in 2026. I won't spend time pointing out what many, such as Rabbi Yakkov Shaprio has, that that common holding, which happens to be official Israeli law, has been a common feature of those who practiced antisemitism.
The word means absolutely nothing, it has dissolved into meaninglessness through such use by Zionists, most of whom are not Jews but crackpot Protestants with some deluded Catholics and others mixed in. As I said the other day, I'm pretty confident that there is a much larger percentage of anti-Zionists among Jews than among the general population of the United States and in places such as Britain. That is how dishonest and disgusting the use of the word "antisemitism" as a shield for the crimes of Israel has become.
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — One of President Donald Trump’s former Atlantic City casinos will be blown up next month, and for the right amount of money, you could be the one to press the button that brings it down.
The demolition of the former Trump Plaza casino will become a fundraiser to benefit the Boys & Girls Club of Atlantic City that the mayor hopes will raise in excess of $1 million
Opened in 1984, Trump’s former casino was closed in 2014 and has fallen into such a state of disrepair that demolition work began earlier this year. The remainder of the structure will be dynamited on Jan. 29.
“Some of Atlantic City’s iconic moments happened there, but on his way out, Donald Trump openly mocked Atlantic City, saying he made a lot of money and then got out,” said Mayor Marty Small. “I wanted to use the demolition of this place to raise money for charity.”
He stole lots of money and got out, what he always does. Who ever heard of anyone who couldn't keep a casino going? A business that's rigged so the house NEVER LOSES IN THE END. A stupid but oily crook, that's who.
They could start that as a starter event to clawing back the hundreds of billions of dollars of theft and grift and graft. I'd also like to be the one to lock the cell and throw away the key on hundreds of the crooks.
is as racist as the most racist Courts in the history of that dishonorable Court. It just nullified another federal law, passed by Congress, signed into law by a president, one that removes protective status from a list of those who came here fleeing violence and in many cases likely death. And it's not the only one they have nullified just this week, using the Marbury power ever more as Louis Boudin predicted it would be more than a century ago.
Amy Coney Barrett, alleged mother of two children adopted from Haiti, just put an ICE target on their backs by going with her five other Republican-fascist colleagues on the Court. I'd really love to know what those children think of that, that is if they still understand that they are now going to be the focus of racial targeting by racist cops, racist ICESTAPO. I wonder if that bitch cares enough to understand that's what she's done. I suspect that in her lawyerly-liarly way, she can come up with lawerly lying language to pretend that's not exactly what she's done.
Then there's Clarence Thomas, possibly the most anti-black "justice" he may have a worse record in many ways than that of James McReynolds.
But all of the Roberts Court Republicans are thorough racists, partisan Republican fascists and enablers of what is objectively the worst president in American history. They make Court reform not only entirely desireable they make it a necessity of maintaining not only a democracy but even an actual republic of laws and not Republican-fascist men and a few women in the mix.
Israel, their "most moral army in the world" is targeting CHILDREN in exactly the same way the Nazis targeted CHILDREN as those they especially wanted to murder.
The Nazis advocated killing children of “unwanted” or “dangerous”
groups either as part of the “racial struggle” or as a measure of
preventative security. The Germans and their collaborators killed
children for these ideological reasons and in retaliation for real or
alleged partisan attacks.
Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about 1.5 million Jewish
children and tens of thousands of Romani (Gypsy) children, about
10,000 German children with physical and mental disabilities living in
institutions, as well as many Polish children and children residing in
the German-occupied Soviet Union. Jewish and non-Jewish adolescents
(13–18 years old) had a greater chance of survival, as they could be
used for forced labor.
Israel is reproducing as closely as could be possible what was being done then. I can't believe, given the context of who is doing it and the ideology of Israel that they aren't doing so intentionally.
Usha Vance is married to a monster and remains married to him and breeds with him. There is no way she doesn't know the evil he is part of and the plotting he and his billionaire owner are doing.
To hell with her.
Remember how many imagined Melania as a sympathetic figure, trapped in a marriage to a monster who was hurting People? Remember those funny skits on Colbert's shows? They were funny but that wasn't Melania it was People imagining her as someone who she is not. She is a brittle, self-obsessed, selfish and totally rotten person.
The beginning alone, talking about his superliner sized yacht and its attendant yacht should make you want to get a pitchfork and torch.
These guys, their companies, their wealth is a danger to democracy. I remember when they were touting "tech" as being clean industry, now with their giant compounds spewing diesel fumes into poor neighborhoods and increasing carbon load in the atmosphere is added to the world threatening filth coming from the tech billionaires and their companies is going to either bring us all to serfdom like that described among the Meta workforce and far worse for those who the billionaire boys don't make money off of and death for anyone who isn't profitable to them. The RFK jr - Stephen Miller neo-eugenics which is sounding ever more like 1920s Nazi propaganda is greasing the skids for that. And I really mean that.
I would bet that about ten thousand high school chorus members around the country who aren't pretending to be the Patel's honey pot as he lives with a gay millionaire in Vegas could have done a better job.
As to Trump. I think he's been inhaling too much while they were putting it on.
I DON'T KNOW HOW IGNORANT OF HISTORY you can be and still be able to type but there was this thing call The Third Reich that couldn't exist without apartheid, genocide and Lebensraum and a large part of the world found it necessary to destroy it in about as terrible a war as has ever happened. No state that can't exist without any of those should exist, in combination they certainly mark that state as one that shouldn't be allowed to stand as it is. I am proud of my parents as being among those who volunteered to defeat Nazism. Both members of the military in WWII.
Ignorance of history is a danger to democracy. By that I mean an accurate knowledge of what has really happened, not Hollywood, TV documentary "history." Not "lost cause" bullshit "history." Not Stephen Miller approved, racist Trumpzi "history."
It's one of the worst things about the teaching of history that it goes from early to later. I remember as we spent several weeks in "American History" in school on the stupid details of the "age of exploration" bull shit and so barely got to the First World War by the middle of June. I now know why that was, because the closer you got to the history of today, even then, that it would be controversial because telling the truth about American history and America's history in the 20th and 21st century would show America in about as bad a light as telling the truth about the genocide, land stealing, the concentration of wealth by the slave-holders and financiers who brought on the Revolution and wrote the Constitution with all its many evils and defects. If we are really interested in having a real democracy, having People learn history relevant to us achieving and obtaining equality and, so, democracy and learning those things that have prevented that and endanger that throughout our history, is not optional. Movies and TV and internet slop that lies about that will need to be suppressed. I think that's as obvious as the fact that we need to overcome and defeat the white supremacists and billionaire-millionaire enemies of equality and democracy if we are to become a democracy (in any use of the word that deserves that name) and to retain it. Laissez faire is irresponsible, it just lets the rich and the morally depraved do their thing and corrupt everything.
I knew a guy in college in the 1970s, from California, who really and truly didn't know that the Second World War wasn't just a Pacific basin war but had a large part of it that happened in Europe, the Middle East and in Western Asia. One of his fellow Californians told me that they didn't really teach history in California, she'd gotten an A in her history class by writing and singing a nice song. Back then he was a bizarre anomaly, in New England, at least. Now it seems a lot of that is news to the college credentialed population generally.
As the constant lying which produces America's funding and support of the Israeli genocide, the Nazi regime could not have existed without constant, flagrant and dominating lies. Lies spread by the media, the print media, the new media of radio and the movies, lies told in organized groups, lies spoon fed to the young through things like the Hitler Youth.
Telling the truth about the present and past is about as radical an act there is, lying is always a help to the most retrograde and evil. It is one of the consciously articulated themes of my posting comments and pieces that the idea that there is some "right to lie" is one of the greatest idiocies of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the legal system that we either retained or developed and our general culture and discourse.
As that comment you objected to about Danny Danon's blatant lying about Israeli genocide pointed out, LYING IS THE MOTHER'S MILK OF FASCISM, whether that is Israeli genocidal fascism or American, also genocidal in aspiration, white supremacist billionaire-boys-club fascism.
Anyone who believes themselves to support democracy who believes there should be a "constitutionally protected right" to lie is as stupid as those Trumpers in '26 who still believe his lies with all their absurdity and immediate self-contradiction. I would include the entirety of the Harvard Law School faculty who I'm aware of, probably every other major law school faculty, the goddamned ACLU, a huge proportion of the legal profession, the corporate media (having lies have the protection given to it by the idiotically vague and democracy destroying First Amendment is a boon to their financial interests) and pretty much all of the idiotic lefty media.
Of course Danny Danon (an actual, life long fascist*) constantly lies, of course Trump (the previous comment in parentheses applies here,too) lies all the time. Of course the "Israel right or wrong" crowd lies just as certainly as Republican-fascist favoring media lies on behalf of Republican-fascism. Fascism can't live when People know the truth, it's what sets People free. Which is why our First Amendment, and especially as it has been made to be by the Supreme Court,is actually one of the things most in need of revision if we are to not revert into white supremacist fascism of the kind that sustained America's genocide and slavery and de facto slavery even after the Civil War, the passage of the Civil War Amendments, into the Jim Crow period and now in the John (Roberts) Crow reversion to American apartheid. America will never be a democracy until things such as white supremacy are actively and effectively disempowered and driven into extinction. And Israel will never be a real democracy until its like is extinct there. If it can't be one, well, real democracy, egalitarian democracy is the one and only legitimate form of government. That is the one thing that Thomas Jefferson got spot on in the Declaration of Independence we are about to so hypocritically celebrate in a few days.
* From his youth, as a member of Betar, a youth group founded by the fascist Jabotinsky and which, in the US, even the ultra Zionist ADL calls a hate group.
With An Extended Version of The Great New Hit, "They About To Drag You" with hilarious draggings from the internet.
I'll add that I've come to the conclusion that the roughly 1/3rd of Americans who are still with Trump after the past 500 days are hopelessly stupid, mostly feeble-minded white supremacists who have to be defeated continually, made discredited and held to not hold any legitimate ideas. They need to be dragged into impotence where even the uninformed don't want to be associated with them. They are a danger to us, a burden to us, a national disability as they have been from the start. If Democrats take control they have to dump the idea of ever being fair to them ever again, DON'T BE FAIR TO FASCISTS, DON'T BE NICE TO NAZIS, DON'T BE SIMPS FOR SUPREMACISTS.
And I apologize to "Simps" for using that alliteration in this context.
