The ADL has burned its last shred of credibility to excuse the Nazi salute that thrilled the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who aren't lying to defend Musk.

The ADL is dead to me from now on.  Fuck them all.

Hate Mail

 I don't mind you wasting your time trying to comment here but from here on out this is an American fascist (white supremacist) Republican-fascist (Trumpzi) and neo-Nazi free blog.   Your comments will not be posted.   You are banned.   Go find some secular-liberal sucker with a misplaced sense of fairness to fascists and niceness to Nazis,  I'm not a sucker. 

Went To See A Relative

who is listening to Dame Agatha e-books to distract her from the fall of American democracy.   I hadn't tried reading her since about the age of ten when I didn't like her and never tried her again.  My word, is there a cliched adjective, an adjective you couldn't have predicted two clauses and a few phrases away that she didn't use?    What a crappy writer she was.   Worse than Chandler. 

From Greatest Generation To Greatest Degeneration

FROM WHAT I'M SEEING, the mass media, the billionaire owners of which were all-in on the Trump installation, is selling Elon's Nazi salutes as something they so obviously were not, like not-Nazi-salutes.  

I was deeply skeptical of that short-lived fad of a news-anchor playing historian selling my parent's generation as the "greatest" one, being generally skeptical of the existence of "generations" as other than a mere chronological fiction even as I knew an unusual number of them actually learned something good while fighting against the WWII Axis and having lived through the Great Depression.   Whatever was greatest about them, as compared to my and succeeding "generations" was in their increased percentage who supported equality and democracy and it wasn't anything like even three-fourths of them who were all in on both.    Though even many of the WWII Republicans were opposed to the destruction of electoral democracy,  I mentioned the post-Watergate legislation that the Supreme Court and the ACLU put an end to,  you can say that for them. 

I don't have to ask what my veteran parents would say about Trump and the media-promoted overtly Republican-fascists - and the normalization of overt neo-Nazism - they opposed the far lesser manifestations of that on the fringes even as they had signed up to fight it in WWII.  I'm older than my father was when he died and I can say that I'm seriously thinking about the possibility that my generation may end up taking up arms to fight against American Nazis and white supremacists if things go as they well might.   I don't for a second believe that the process of the law is going to save us, the institutions we were told would protect us have all failed, the media which has been the primary engine of elevating the TV-reality star to the head of world fascism and the normalization of his billionaire financed now overtly neo-Nazi regime is certainly not going to save us.  

If Musk is allowed to retain his position of control over the Trump regime and proximity to power, it will come to that.   If there is one thing that should have been done in the past four years, it was him being stripped of all his assets with national security implications and him deported to South Africa along with his family.   That he wasn't is the failure of the rule of law and the Constitution in doing what both claim their purpose is, protecting the American People from our enemies.   Democracy, if it is to exist in the future, cannot exist in the 18th century framing in which the U.S. Constitution exists.   Equality and an informed pubic steeped in the virtue of equality is the only secure framing for it and that is incompatible with the existence of billionaires and millionaires rich enough to corrupt the media and democracy.    I don't think democracy can exist with the kind of social media we have, it has also been a major engine of 21st century fascism and neo-Nazism.   Keith Olbermann may be right that the ability to post anonymously online has to go.  No one should be able to post online without the ability to be held responsible for what is posted by them.  Bots must be abolished, AI is neither intelligent nor is it capable of telling the truth.

The Significance of Non-Violence And Martin Luther King jr

 

Diane Nash: Managing Fear

 

A Better Place For Resistance Than Despair - Psalm 91

1 Living in the Most High’s shelter,
    camping in the Almighty’s shade,
 2 I say to the Lord, “You are my refuge, my stronghold!
    You are my God—the one I trust!”
3 God will save you from the hunter’s trap
    and from deadly sickness.
4 God will protect you with his pinions;
    you’ll find refuge under his wings.
    His faithfulness is a protective shield.
5 Don’t be afraid of terrors at night,
    arrows that fly in daylight,
6     or sickness that prowls in the dark,
    destruction that ravages at noontime.
7 Even if one thousand people fall dead next to you,
    ten thousand right beside you—
    it won’t happen to you.
8 Just look with your eyes,
    and you will see the wicked punished.
9 Because you’ve made the Lord my refuge,
    the Most High, your place of residence—
10   no evil will happen to you;
        no disease will come close to your tent.
11 Because he will order his messengers to help you,
    to protect you wherever you go.
12 They will carry you with their own hands
    so you don’t bruise your foot on a stone.
13 You’ll march on top of lions and vipers;
    you’ll trample young lions and serpents underfoot.
14 God says, “Because you are devoted to me,
    I’ll rescue you.
    I’ll protect you because you know my name.
15 Whenever you cry out to me, I’ll answer.
    I’ll be with you in troubling times.
    I’ll save you and glorify you.
16   I’ll fill you full with old age.
    I’ll show you my salvation.”

Common English Bible

We We That Stupid In The OO's?

MY RECENT and very short trip down short-term memory lane,  looking at Eschaton again, I was struck at how the same gals and guys - minus the myriads who fled to save their adulthood - were saying pretty much the same bull shit that they were saying when I regularly wasted way too many hours there in the past.   Blaming "the Dems" for losing the election,  carrying, roughly, the Green Party, perennial play-lefty line on that,  making really stupid claims about it all,  the same kind of stuff I remember dealing with a lot back then and when I started writing a blog.  I referenced one of the early conclusions I came to that in contrast to those who would never run for office or, if they went through the motions of running, knew they'd never win an election and so would never have the possibility of actually making new law and new policy,  a real politician knew they had to win and take the office to do anything other than lose, what the Greens and the play-lefties have specialized in doing since the first play-lefty play-party was organized sometime in the 19th century. 

You would think that those who hold college credentials would be smart enough to realize that without having had to be taught that but, clearly, that isn't the case.   I think the refusal to learn that obvious truth is directly related to the whiteness, the affluence, the mostly maleness of the play-lefties whose aesthetic sensibilities are what most of their conception of politics is about.   Duncan Black is a good example of that but no where near as much as his cash cow, or, these days, cash calf.   As I mentioned Duncan used to write a number of actually worth reading posts on infrastructure which were ever more interesting and useful than his political theorizing and tantrums.   Not that his regulars ever seemed to much read those as compared to the tantrums.  

As a now longtime advocate of getting a more adult left going,  I don't see much evidence of that happening.   One that knows, first and foremost, that they have to win elections to do anything and that threatening those who have gotten elected and who know their reelection doesn't depend on the generally undependable play-left is needed more than the entire play-left from now on back.   

I don't think the play-left, affluent, indirectly affected by the Trumpian fascists winning and, then, not that much,  should be part of that because they are gifted at division and election losing.  It's their only talent other than spreading discouragement.    I wasted years trying to talk facts with them.   We're plum out of years to do that. 

Where Do You Think He Got This Idea? - They Send Me Links

 A REGULAR READER sent me a link to this comment made at the baby blue blog.

Steve Simels, blog malignancyMr.Murder 43 minutes ago

Once the SCOTUS interpreted the 1st Amendment as conferring the right to lie with impunity, we were on the irrevocable road to fascism. That was the whole point.

Late Correction

 I just noticed that I left the mistake of saying "Jackson" where I meant "Johnson" stand all day and no one corrected me.   I'm guessing the guys who troll me didn't know the difference and my regular readers who can read and know stuff are too polite to point it out.

The Mendacity Industrial Complex - An Impromtu Reaction

APART FROM him falling for the Israeli apartheid regime's genocide in Gaza, I think Joe Biden has had the most potentially positive administration since LBJ if not FDR.   And it's clear that it is about to largely if not all go for nothing as the Trump regime takes over.  Only not for nothing, for far worse than that.  I don't think in any period since the Lincoln presidency gave way to that of Andrew Johnson have we come close to the drastic contrast that we saw when Biden took office from Trump to its return to Trump, has that transfer of power been more pronounced.   Any country which could go from Trump to Biden and back to Trump is a dangerously sick country, probably in the throes of a fatal illness.

The speech President Biden made from the White House yesterday told some truths I wish he'd told decades ago, though if he'd told them then he probably would have had a short instead of one of the longest careers in government.   He laid out the role that lying in the media, the mass media, the even more enveloping and suffocating social media lies that sandbagged his phenomenally accomplished administration, everything from FOX Lies and down to the goddamned New York Times, NPR and, I will say it, Stephen Colbert style entertainment painting one of our most competent presidents as a senile, doddering incompetent, whipping up lie after lie, spreading and normalizing those - the specialty of the great grey whore of NYC and the minor one of NPR - and many other lies on top of those lies.  

But telling that truth gets you uncomfortably close to the idiocy of the Bill of Rights a forbidden topic, my violation of which led to me adopting the name of Thought Criminal as I was told that was going too far.  Telling the truth about the Warren Court, the Burger Court, Rehnquist and Roberts' Courts, the part that the hollowly hallowed ACLU has played in the empowerment and weaponization of lies, especially those targeting Democratic politicians who attempted to give us democracy, real democracy, egalitarian democracy, starting as soon as the Warren Court issued the first of those deadly rulings in 1964,  the lies in the media that both sank LBJ's administration, the chances of Hubert Humphrey in the next presidential election, the elevation of the previous champion of criminality in the presidency,  Nixon, and the entire half-century of the undoing of American democracy which has paralleled the emergence and financial flourishing of the freest press and media in human history.   The old-style ACLU style assurances that allowing the most flagrant of lies to flourish would be effectively countered by "more speech" has been given the test of time and time has failed it absolutely, conclusively, to the point of being among the most certain of disconfirmations possible in the philosophy of law and governance.  

One thing about the profession of lying, lawyering and its elite branches in judging and "justicing" is that once an avenue of opportunistic lying has been taken, especially in terms of the U.S. Constitution, that that avenue can't be merely closed off by a future ruling but it will have to be shut off at the source, in this case the First Amendment, and that is a forbidden topic of conversation.   The fact is that that is as true for the First Amendment as it is for the Second one, the one which Republican-fascists in power and on the Court has used to arm the fifth column which we certainly have reason to fear will open up on our fellow citizens whenever the oligarchs and their tools in government tell them to.   The sacred language of "Jemmy" Madison and the other amateurs, slave-holders, financiers and crooks of the First Congress set in stone will have to be changed to explicitly un-privilege lies and firmly abolish the "right to lie" that the Court has invented as certainly as it invented presidential immunity.   The problem lies in the vague, inferior late 18th century poesy of the Constitution.   Frankly, with what I've learned about the corruption of the slave-holder-financier founders, every defect in that document is rightly suspected as being lawyerly loophole setting to empower them, so much of the language of that document being used that way by later generations of lawyers, judges and "justices" none more blatantly than under John Marshall and more infamously by the Taney and gilded-age courts as well as the later Rehnquist and, perhaps worst of all, the Roberts Court

With all deference to Joe Biden who has earned my respect in the past four years, he's a little late to this realization though he's still years ahead of almost everyone in the tiny fraction comprising the honest media and the likely even smaller percentages of those in the legal and political world.   As Eisenhower only came to articulate the dangers of the beginning of our oligarchic rule in the military-industrial complex in his last speech, the trained lawyer, Joe Biden has only fully articulated the problem in his last speech.   I have a deep and respectful appreciation for the necessity of a good politician to not go too far and become an ex-politician through losing their next election.  I have less respect for those who work in the media because the stakes of them losing their paying jobs is far less consequential for the American People, other People around the world and the world in general.   I don't have anything at stake in telling you that truth, a truth I was warned against telling when I posted one of my early pieces on this topic at Echidne's old blog.   What are they going to do to me?  Fire me from an unpaid writing hobby?   

Until the language of the First Amendment is changed to make it clear that:

a. Lies are not covered by "free speech-press,"

b. There is no such a thing as a "right to lie,

c. That 'the press" [and other corporate entities] do not have rights, what the fools in the First Congress misnamed those are privileges and that that privilege comes only with an obligation to tell the truth to inform us so we can cast an informed vote for our representatives and for ballot measures,

the First Amendment will continue to be the vehicle to power of lie-empowered oligarchy as certainly as it kept in power the white supremacists in the South and elsewhere and thwarted the struggle for equality and real democracy.

Of course, all of that heavy lift will be for nothing unless the Supreme Court is reigned in, starting with term limits and ethics as President Biden finally endorsed but, more important still, have their usurped Marbury v. Madison powers definitively stripped from them.   The Voting Rights Act which the Rehnquist and Roberts, white supremacist Courts have abolished will have to be restored.  It was only with that law and the Civil Rights Act that America started to weakly live out its promises, as MLK jr. mentioned in that speech which will be desecrated by Republican-fascists, white supremacists and others, next week, that is if Trump's elevation doesn't totally drown out that yearly disgrace to his legacy.   The Supreme Court, it's 'liberal" manifestation in the Warren Court as they stupidly set this catastrophe off with their "free speech-press" ruling and the conservative then fascist dominated ones accelerated as they weaponized those "liberal" rulings, is the penultimate source of this.   That Court has to be harnessed, not to fealty to "The Constitution" but to equality and democracy.   I'd put those in place to what they're supposed to uphold, protect and defend instead of that document.   And I wouldn't give you a pint of piss for democracy without equality.   As we can see in the white-power states, in the Israeli apartheid government, in every dictatorship where there are elections in which an oppressive majority lords it over minorities, democracy without equality is, if anything, as dangerous as outright oligarchy. 

Artie Shaw - I Cover The Waterfront from 1949 and 1941

 

He kept moving on instead of repeating himself. 

I'm Still Getting Hate Mail

over my dissing of John Lennon's hypocritical atheist dirge "Imagine."   That that banal, hypocritical, useless song seems to have replaced another song I dislike,  "Amazing Grace" as the go-to song to sing for every ill conceived occasion where a show of piety, of some vague sort, is evoked shows how bad things have gotten since the once common familiarity with earlier Protestant hymnody has died out of the life experience of most Americans.   

I've gone over what's wrong with the song and John Lennon's hypocrisy (he'd have to imagine "no possessions" really hard as he clung to his hundreds of millions and what possessions he had with Yoko in The Dakota) and its defects as a melody and its banal harmony as well as insipid, stupid words - look for it in my archive - so I won't go over that again.

What is really hilarious about the push-back I'm getting is it's from the superannuated cohort of the "nothing is sacred" set such as congregate to masticate their pre-digested ideas as their Geritol kicks in.   If you want to see how sincere they are about that "nothing sacred" pose, diss the "smart" Beatle and his crappy song and you'll find out they hold such shit in the highest regard.  

But I want this to be constructive so I'd suggest a more appropriate song to remember Jimmy Carter would be Marty Haugen's fine hymn,  All Are Welcome, here sung at a Roman Catholic Women Priests' Ordination Mass

Let us build a house

where love can dwell

And all can safely live,

A place where

saints and children tell

How hearts learn to forgive.

Built of hopes and dreams and visions,

Rock of faith and vault of grace;

Here the love of Christ shall end divisions;

Let us build a house where prophets speak,

And words are strong and true,

Where all God's children dare to seek

To dream God's reign anew.

Here the cross shall stand as witness

And a symbol of God's grace;

Here as one we claim the faith of Jesus:

Let us build a house where love is found

In water, wine and wheat:

A banquet hall on holy ground,

Where peace and justice meet.

Here the love of God, through Jesus,

Is revealed in time and space;

As we share in Christ the feast that frees us:

All are welcome, all are welcome,

All are welcome in this place.

No Matter What That Little Sleazebag

from that unusually sleazy state does to placate Trump,  the majority of Americans will be in mourning when Trump is reinstalled.   And a large percentage of those who aren't in mourning will be soon after. 

Jimmy Carter was everything Trump and the likes of Mike Johnson never will be, starting with him being a decent human being of high morals.   Johnson is a good example of  everything wrong with the Southern Baptists just as Trump is one of everything wrong with the real estate industry and the TV industry.   

Watching the Republican-fascists in the Senate during the Hegseth hearings, the country is going to go to hell and very fast.   Very badly and very fast. 

I'll Just Call This One "Hate Mail"

IT MIGHT BE the decisive turning point in what has become my loss of faith in secularism,  the Buckley vs. Valeo case in 1976 in which the Supreme Court overturned the truly bipartisan attempt of Democrats and Republicans in the Congress to prevent the corruption of big money and combined money in American politics, opening not only the then flow of corrupt money such as had been revealed in the crimes of the Nixon campaign and administration but set in motion further rulings of the Supreme Court which have totally corrupted American democracy,  leading directly to the overt buying of the American government by billionaire and multi-millionaire oligarchs, INCLUDING THE DICTATORS OF RUSSIA, CHINA, SAUDI ARABIA, ETC.  all in the name of First Amendment "free speech-press."  That is the reason that in 2025 and for the past decade the biggest fattest proponents of "free speech-press" have been exactly those buying and corrupting American politics.  The whirlwind we are reaping is the direct consequences of that elevation of "free speech-press" over everything else, including honest government and the protection instead of the destruction of democracy.   American democracy died on the altars of the First Amendment and, ironically, on the alter of the now known to be false god, the "rule of law."  I've mentioned how little stomach I have for the civic pieties of the MSNBC style lawyers who had told us for the past six years to put our faith in the legal system, now that that has turned out to be the primary vehicle in enabling the crime spree of the Trump crime gang.

My once childlike, then adolescent then adult faith in secularism is a casualty of fifty years of witnessing the failures of the liberal-progressive-left side of that faith, best symbolized in the part that the "civil liberties" industry, the ACLU and its allied institutions have played in that ultimate corruption of our laws based on the phony reverence for the secular legal order, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights the main idols of that "civic religion" to use a hideous phrase from a corrupt member of the Supreme Court.   I wish there were some way to get back the donations to such outfits as the ACLU that I was stupid enough to give them, even after the role they played in Buckley v Valeo.  They conned me out of it. 

In thinking more about the consequences of, finally, taking the inescapable theological dimensions of political life and action seriously, I'm not going to minimize the problems of doing that.   One of the most obvious of current crises in that, apart from the lawyerly, Supreme Court sanctioned privilege given to lying for gain, is the issue of abortion.   In that an allegedly overt theological issue as defined by those who oppose Women practicing bodily autonomy, the same Court which has created the democracy destroying "right to lie" has abolished that right to bodily autonomy.   And if there is one thing that is clear in the 2024 election, that demotion of Women as subjugated People, having that most basic of rights to bodily autonomy taken from them WAS NOT DECISIVE AS A REJECTION OF THAT IN THE WAY THAT MANY OF US ON THE LEFT NAIVELY BELIEVED IT WOULD BE.  

The fact is that not all issues of morality can or should be subject to legal prohibition, there being no overriding public or state interest that can be asserted to match the right of a Woman to decide what happens inside of her own body.   The right to decide whether or not she will carry a pregnancy and give birth.   The consequences of the state intervening in that by the law is a catastrophic denial of everything from bodily autonomy up to permanent injury and, in fact, death of Women so subjected to such legal usurpation generally by male politicians, judges, prosecutors, etc.  And once such laws are in place, they are kept there no matter what the body count and horrors experienced and reported on, the indifference of those not impacted by them, all men (with the exception of a few who care about the Women so impacted) and not a small percentage of Women who either have not or are not yet impacted or who, once they have stopped being of child bearing age, don't care about what happens to such Women.   The same indifference that pervades the legal profession as the "justices" and judges and lawyers on the make advocate and rule in matters which are of little to no concern to them as the lead their privileged, affluent lives within the well upholstered, well paid ranks of that rank profession.  

Politics is certainly not the most important area of life in which such theological dimensions are to be played out.   It was one of my early conclusions about the reaction of the Catholic clergy in the aftermath of the Roe decision that if they were really intent on ending abortions, the most effective way to do that would be to advocate, as strongly as possible, for the education in using and the availability of contraception.   To those who have bemoaned the tens of millions of abortions in the United States during the legal administration of abortions,  such early and widespread promotion of contraception would certainly have prevented most of them.  Yet such alleged moral experts,  such theological experts, chose not to make that morally obvious choice.   That also led me to wonder how, once they had regained the status quo from before Roe, as we now have, they would try to prevent the many illegal abortions which had so noticeably not been a major concern of them, even as such illegal abortions were widespread in the pre-Roe period.  It would seem that before Roe, as while Roe stood and now that we have reverted to the coat-hanger- motel room period of abortion,  they never really cared much about preventing abortions, only in making such abortions that they knew would happen, illegal, dangerous and deadly.   There was everything wrong with that application of the theological dimension to the question of abortion.  That it was uniformly males, in the earlier period and males and right-winger women past child-bearing years who have reimposed that on the country,  is an indication that the defects of men and those unaffected by the political imposition of such defective theology in an inegalitarian regime.   

But I'll point out that the decision to overturn Roe was done not by theologians but by Ivy League trained lawyers,  lawyers trained and indoctrinated in the secular law, not one of whom I'd take their sincerity as believers in religion seriously, certainly not as compared to their sincerity as members of that lucrative orthodoxy and profession.  If there's something I've got to complain about with the present membership of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, the leaders of "white evangelical Christianity" it is that they have far too much in common with the cauistical practices of the secular law.

A Question For Our Times

 Naiomi Wolf, how psychotic is this lying asshole?

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Suspense - The Well Dressed Corpse

 The Well Dressed Corpse 

Eve Arden makes her only Suspense appearance in a role that is so darkly opposite to the happy but often befuddled high school teacher “Connie Brooks” of the hit radio series Our Miss Brooks. The script is another collaboration of radio scripter E. Jack Neuman and future Hitchcock movie screenwriter John Michael Hayes.

Arden’s character is a moody, narcissistic, business executive. She’s into all the trappings of success (a $40,000 salary is one of them, almost $500,000 in US$2024 value), and the clothes, and every best amenity of daily life. She falls in love with a successful businessman and writer she meets at a luncheon. She is celebrated as one of the nation’s “ten best dressed” women there. He’s handsome and also considered “best dressed” among his peers. . . 

The cast:

EVE ARDEN (Ruth Franklin), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Percy Hamilton), Jack Kruschen (Tony the bartender), Charles Calvert (Sergeant Collins), Howard McNear (Apartment neighbor / Policeman at end), Clayton Post (Eddie / Yates), Larry Thor (Lt. Rourke), Lamont Johnson (Roy Mason), Mary Jane Croft (“Petey” Wright), Irene Tedrow (Woman in Alley / Elsie), Peter Virgo (Joe, the cop)

COMMERCIAL: Jerry Hausner (Sam the Autolite dealer), Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Sylvia Simms (Operator)

Another post for fans of "golden age" radio drama.  I first listened to it because I've always been a big fan of Eve Arden.  I'm pretty stunned to see Sylvia Simms was in the commercial.  

the entire political enterprise has a theological dimension to it that cannot be disregarded

I SHOULD HAVE given you the next paragraph in that passage from Walter Brueggemann which I excerpted yesterday but I didn't have the time to discuss it.  So here is what he said.

Study of this topic [what happens when nation states exceed the limits of God's tolerance] invites engagement with the prophetic rhetoric of the Old testament that knows that the political enterprise has a theological dimension to it that cannot be disregarded.  Such thinking is reflected in the language of the church that prays regularly, "Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory."  The terms of the prayer, faithful to the Old testament, are political in a way that places all other political claims in question.   Study of this topic must resist "silly supernaturalism," but may nonetheless take seriously the claim of God that renders all other claims as penultimate. 

Of course, in the modern era, in the age of separation of church and state, such a claim would cause scandal on one side and, legitimately, risk all of the dangers of the combination of state and church which comprises the legitimately scandalous history of such quasi or, more often, pseudo-theocratic alliances.  In contemporary secular life you're supposed to entirely discount the theological dimension "that cannot be disregarded" and I think in many ways the sheer materialistic evil of contemporary political-economic activity is a product of that.   The blood drenched history of politically established religion is, if anything, exaggerated beyond legitimate measure while the even more bloody history of modern, secular and, especially materialist-atheist governance is never to be mentioned.   And that's not to mention that other even greater power than mere politics, the economic and financial systems which, like science, by common and foolish consent are exempted from the consideration of the moral consequences of their actions.   Anyone who doubts that the accumulated wealth of the economic and financial elites is not more powerful than political entities (and entirely more powerful than mere religion ever has been) has a completely unrealistic and fantasy view of all of those entities mentioned and the societies in which their existence plays out. 

The requirement of avoiding "silly supernaturalism" is a constraint within the polite realms of academia and the elite, though I don't think anyone who believes in God and the existence of such notions as rights and justice seriously can really do that.  Not without damage to the real life existence of justice and rights.  Our elites have chosen to live with that damage because it largely falls on those beneath them in the class structure. 

A few years back I wrote about an observation that the great American essayist and novelist Marilynne Robinson had mad about the theological argument that Thomas Jefferson had to make when he asserted that "men" were equally endowed by their Creator with rights, in his famous short list to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  She posed a question as to what a secular assertion of such a thing would be like, no one that I know of has ever tried to come up with a secular explanation of the origin and legitimate existence of rights, of which an egalitarian explanation of which would be far harder to claim except in metaphysical and, in the end, theological terms.  Of course, once their revolution had been fought by the common-folk, a considerable number of them People of Color, the framers of the Constitution wrote a document which excluded mention of the Creator and equal rights as they wrote one that explicitly was anti-egalitarian and which explicitly supported existing financial privilege, the slavery protecting and enhancing measures in it a proven disaster for democracy and domestic tranquility and the other things the framers claimed to be delivering.   Those anti-egalitarian, wealth privileging provisions among the things which the enemies of equality and democracy have, yet again, harnessed to bring us to the crisis we are about to embark on.  

If those of us who acknowledge the problem of regarding that theological dimension to the political enterprise while knowing full well that ignoring it is disastrously consequential have some tough puzzles to solve, those who demand that that be ignored - and that includes the entire legal apparatus, except when they choose to pretend to respect it for political ends - have a far harder task unless, as so often, they cynically and opportunistically are fine with the disastrous consequences.   

I think the mainstream of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc. should start taking the theological dimensions of life in a merely formally politically secular system much more seriously.  The formal separation of church and state is a clerical necessity in a vastly religiously pluralistic country - it is a practical necessity in even a theoretically religiously uniform country to protect religion from the occasions of the corruption of power.   But one of the most obvious lessons of the 20th century (not to mention the other centuries during which liberal democracy has existed) is that secular government is quite capable of doing enormous evil all on its own, largely due to such theological issues as moral absolutes being formally held to not matter in their decisions and actions.  

The corruption of "evangelical" and "Catholic" religion in the United States is intimately tied in with those areas of life in which, by common consent, such theological and moral consideration is banned or it is held to be irrelevant no matter how obviously evil the consequences.   The entire enterprise of "American enterprise" the legal profession that, in its most profitable and even its less profitable sides exists largely to service business, businessmen and the wealthy investor class, the judiciary, the media* and entertainment are all intimately tied in with that corruption.  It is remarkable how much of the professedly pious establishment of politics and religion are so intimately tied up with such formally amoral secular life, especially when wealth accumulation is part of it.   When the Kavanaugh hearings exposed the elite Catholic prep system as largely in service of producing apparatchiks of that elite, it was quite an eye opener to me, from what I see the "Christian school" system is, if anything, even more a part of it.   The Catholic Church, at least much of its hierarchy, has the modern Catholic social teaching to deal with  which, being based on the Gospel, the Law and the Prophets, is as Chomsky said, radical.   Though that doesn't seem to much effect what such Catholics as are a fixture in Republican politics and media say or do.  

I don't have answers to how to solve these puzzles but I felt an obligation to point out the consequences of merely relying on the provisions of the slave-holder framed Constitution (I believe John Adams was about the only framer who never held anyone in slavery) in regard to the separation of church and state as the final word on that because of all the consequences mentioned above and many more beside.  

Miles Okazaki - Black Bolt

 

Miles Okazaki - guitar

Craig Taborn - piano

Anthony Tidd - bass

Sean Rickman - drums

Children Don't Understand How Adults Think - Hate Mail

SIMP'S problem when it comes to imagining my reaction to something like that is that he thinks I have the same emotional make-up that he does, you know, like a seventh-grader.  A very young seventh-grader.   I don't much care if someone intones John Lennon's "Imagine" as long as I don't have to hear the insipid drone.  

Listening to Down Memory Lane on Maine Public Radio this afternoon, things really took a steep fall around 1965.  I had to turn it off once Toby got there.   Before then it was more likely you'd get at least some R&B most weeks.