Here's My Answer - Zohran Mamdani CLEANS UP New York And MAGA Can't Stand It!

 

No. I Don't Think The Ku Klux Kourt Has Seen The Error Of Its Ways

THE PITIFUL LITTLE GESTURES made in a few recent rulings and rejections to hear cases doesn't even much register on their full attack on Voters of Color, those in groups who tend to favor Democrats and their other measures to ensure Republican-fascist rule and their imperial presidency. 

What I think all those tiny little gestures mean is that they hear the so far muted demands for Court reform and they're hedging their bets in case that blue tsunami happens.   

Nothing short of ending the Marbury usurpation by which the Court has been favoring political corruption for the last half century since they issued the Buckley v Valeo ruling that started the flood of dirty money and millionaire and billionaire domination of our politics and every other measure the Court has taken TO PREVENT THE CONGRESS AND SOME PRESIDENTS TO CLEAN UP OUR POLITICS,  nothing short of abolishing Court mandated political corruption will be enough.  What Nixon did before then was a trickle of dirty water by comparison. 

From Buckley v Valeo onward,  the Supreme Court has done with their rulings what Bull Connor did to those who demanded equality and the right to vote with attack dogs and fire hoses.  

If some of those early "justices" in 1976 did so out of their political naivety doesn't change the fact of what they did.   The corruption that plagues the United States now is a consequence of their mowing down the clean elections laws to get money out of our politics using "free speech" as their excuse.   The tell in that is how "freedom of speech" is now the slogan of the billionaires, millionaires, white supremacists and fascists.   They wouldn't care about it if it had not become their major tool in destroying equality and democracy.   

They have used the Marbury power to mow down every single measure to make the United States a country of equal rights and voting rights and economic justice since the first significant use of it in the Dred Scott decision in which they abolished the long standing law that abolished slavery in SOME of the territories and SOME of the states.  I would argue the Court was about that well before then in such rulings as the Antelope case and the Prigg case, in which actions of the Congress and state governments restricted slavery and the abduction of free People in free states by those who would kidnap them into slavery were set aside or overturned.   The Supreme Court has been the primer locus of such corruption in the United States, far more typically corrupt than the Congress and even the presidency.  

We end that or we see any future progress against our indigenous and new forms of fascism mowed down by the Court in the future as the Roberts Court has done as Courts have done since the time of Marshall and Story.  

Bill Donohue

president for life of the Catholic League is a racist piece of shit.   I didn't realize I wished he'd long ago died and gone to hell until I heard him standing with a couple of racist hags from the NYC Council.  

In other news,  it's hilarious that, ONCE AGAIN DURING A REPUBLICAN-FASCIST EVENT GRINDR HAS CRASHED IN DALLAS.

Don't buy the line that Republican-fascists are damaged from living in the closet,  they're damaged by their epic greed, selfishness and bigotry and love of power. 

No, I Didn't See It

What's the matter?   Tom Cotton unavailable to write another editorial for the Great Gray Whore?  

Yeah,  I could tell how broken up Erika was as she grieved for her racist, misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ, fascist hate monger husband.    The video that showed her putting fake tears in her eyes before she hit the runway was another clue.  

I'm sure like Liberace,  she was crying all the way to the bank. 

The Sulzbergers are no different from the Murdochs, Ellisons, Mercers, etc.   Only they pretend their rag is liberal because of the suckers they still get to buy it.    All they want is the money they get when the oligarch servicing party is in complete control,  the rest of it is bullshit. 

All the major venues of legacy media are in on it, with a very few minor exceptions who aren't that major.   The paper that got the "right to lie" for it is no exception to that. 

Craven Little MAGAt Token Tim Scott

is a non-binary gay man who, late in life, entered into a lavender marriage when his being so tellingly single started to look like it could be a political liability for him. 

He's also a fake Christian who worships Mammon and has since at least the day he had that famous sandwich with the Chick Fil-A franchisee.   And I'd really like to know a lot more about THAT relationship than we ever will. 

There.  Sue me.   

Hey, We Saw What They Think About Someone Else Building A Bridge To Them

when Trump blackmailed Canada when THEY built a bridge to the US.   

If those MAGAt white ranchers and farmers, small business owners,  wannabe white MAGAt Cubans and Venezuelans and other really stupid members of minorities who let their racism and sexism override the most basic level of common sense, and all the other MAGAts who fucked around and are finding out want a bridge to us, LET THEM BUILD ONE AND PROVE THAT IT'S SAFE FOR US TO TRUST BECAUSE I DON'T TRUST ANYONE WHO WOULD VOTE FOR DONALD TRUMP IN 2024, 2020, OR 2016.  

THEY'RE THE ONES WHO HAVE TO PROVE THEY'VE REALLY LEARNED A LESSON TO US.  And that's going to take more than a couple of videos or days or weeks or years to prove it.   

As it is,  I suspect that as soon as they thought it was in their interest to shaft us and those they wanted to see hurt by Trump,  they'll turn on us like Michael Cohen did to those stupid enough to trust him. 

Liberals, lefties, even moderates get played through the dishonest exploitation of their good will over and over again.  I'm not going to be anyone's sucker ever again. 

This is a response. 

I Was Going To Joke

that the Trump "Convention" was so hard up for talent that they were going to have a Moms and Dads tribute band.  

But listening to this old chestnut,  I wouldn't dishonor their memory by making that joke. 

Yeah, let them do Kid Rock and Lee Greenwood.   Hell,  Greenwood is his own tribute act these days.   

Maybe they can get the four Mormon boys gang banging one piano like they got a decade back.   I'd imagine they can get a Toby Keith imitator to sing that pro-lynching song he sang back then.  I mean, there must be that kind of talent who'd be glad to have the gig. 

Update:  Liking to know things,  I looked.  Yeah, there are a number of Toby Keith "tribute" acts out there.   There's something kind of pathetic about "tribute" acts.  Especially those who imitate sub-A list "talent."  

For The Large Majority of White Farmers And Ranchers Who Voted For Trump, Yeah, I Agree With This Now

 

White farmers and ranchers are being given what the Department of Agriculture has been giving to Black Farmers for its entire existence.  Nothing.   What the white farmers got, the big ones, anyway was socialism. 

Don't worry,  Vance and the billionaires are ready to buy out your farms and ranches for pennies on the dollar.   It's part of their plan to own everything and turn us into serfs and slaves and vassals.   And it's what you voted for.

I come from farming People.  And I'm sick to death of the whining of the MAGAts who are losing their farms and whining that we're not crying for them.  They can have the years they voted for.  And I hope no one ever stops pointing that out to them.  

Trump Claims To Have Helped Clean Up After 9-11?

AT BEST WE MIGHT pretend that this is a golden opportunity to experience what we imagine it must have been like for those in Rome who experienced the madness of Caligula, or Nero, perhaps.

If you think me saying that is a huge stretch,  consider the third one generally put on the list of most insane Roman emperors, Commodus.   He liked to cos-play as the reincarnation of Hercules,  he would mount gladiator battles in which he would "battle" disabled opponents..  He had disabled Romans, especially those who had no feet or other amputations tied up in the arena then he,  dressed as Hercules, would club them to death in front of crowds.   Trump does stuff like that that by proxy and in AI images posted by the Second Prostitute.   And, like Trump,  Commodus liked to rename things, renaming Rome, itself as The Colony of Commodus,   Colonia Commodiana. 

Only, it's an experience I would like for all of us to never have had to experience.   Our Senators and "justices" are as degenerate as the ones who didn't get rid of him then.   It took his mistress (he'd had his wife murdered) and to others finding out that he'd put them on a "to-kill" list for the next day to poison him and when he vomited up more of the poison than they thought was safe for them, they paid an athlete to strangle him.   

Only, considering those who have been killed by Trump and his goons like Hegseth and RFK jr.  I think Trump has to stand as more depraved and more of a symptom of terminal decadence than the Roman emperor.  

"disrespecting the Court" - Hate Mail

WELL,  IF YOU don't like what I've been calling the Roberts Republican-fascists, how about calling it the 

KU KLUX KOURT 

Easy Listening - A Holiday Post

THERE HAS BEEN some recent interest in the founder and framer James Wilson, one who played a role in creating the excuse used to insert the Marbury power into the real Court shaped instead of the written Constitution.   I will say up front that that excuse, lame as it was to start with, has like the Constitution it has constantly deformed and changed under the pretenses of things like "originalism" and "textualism"  isn't the same now as then.  Even if there was some plausible excuse for that in the beginning, that  has proved to be a lie under use. 

I stopped listening to Public Radio in the United States years ago and had always had a bit of an allergy to Fresh Air so I hadn't known  about this renewed interest in Wilson until I went looking for more information about him and came across this interesting but arguably overly positive presentation of him by his most recent biographer, Jesse Wegman.   It's one of the things I've come to get my guard up over,  biographers tend to present their subjects in overly favorable terms.   

I, of course, being a sworn and complete opponent of the Marbury power and the idea of judges and "justices" taking on a role superior to a popularly elected legislature for all of the reasons I've given here, am inclined to be far more skeptical of its proponents, especially those who have been or are elite lawyers.   I note that in the discussion in which Wilson's official opposition to slavery is mentioned there is no mention of the fact that he kept a man in slavery for a number of years, himself.   Whether or not he kept others in slavery,  I have yet to try to find out.   One is made suspicious by the monumental under-count by his biographers and admirers of those that John Marshall kept enslaved and the clear motive that the enormous wealth their violent enslavement gave to Marshall in his uniformly slavery favoring rulings on the Court.   That fact is something for which I am indebted to the current history of Paul Finkelman and his colleague who did what the previous hagiographers failed to do, look at his will and property records to find out the facts.   I regard Finkelman as one of our best current historians. 

To his eternal discredit,  Wilson authored the morally disgusting 3/5th provision and caved on many of the worst anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic aspects of the Constitution.   He also indulged in that other major moral abomination of the founders and framers,  western land speculation which inevitably involved the genocidal removal of People and the theft of their lands, in the end, it was what broke him and led to him, one of the most prominent lawyers in America, taking on the lam, running from his creditors and the law as he remained an associate justice of the U.S Supreme Court. 

I'm going to suggest listening to and reading the transcript of the Wegman interview because we share many of the same ideas about reforming the corrupt Supreme Court and because, skeptical as I am of biographers presentation of their subjects,  he gives a lot of introductory information about Wilson who will figure in some of my planned posts. 

'The Lost Founder' profiles a brilliant lawyer who helped craft the Constitution

I should finally ask, does anyone prefer to have these links open in a new window or is the way I've always done that OK?    I will change that if you want it otherwise. 

Footnote To The Post Below

IN HONOR OF IT BEING LABOR DAY WEEKEND, here is a link to a report dealing with just what I'm talking about. 

It's summary is given here. 

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 3, 2022 – Today Alliance for Justice announced the release of a new special report entitled Economic Justice, Judges, and the Law, a first-of-its-kind analysis detailing the severe under-representation of lawyers with backgrounds in labor and economic justice fields among active federal circuit court judges. The report finds that, among active circuit court judges, 68% are former corporate attorneys, and 28% are former prosecutors. The report also notes that judges with these legal backgrounds are far more likely to rule against workers and consumers than judges with other forms of legal expertise. By contrast, only 6% of active circuit court judges have experience in labor or economic justice fields including union-side labor law, employee-side wage and hour law, consumer protection, and civil legal aid. 

Update:   I just noticed that either I or auto-correct mistook the name of the Greek goddess of hunting for the snotty minor Platonist for whom the make-believe lawyer was named.   I don't know which is to blame.   If any of the three or so readers of the post at the time noticed, they were too polite to point that out to me.    Feel free to correct me,  I'd rather be embarrassed than to persist in error.  No idea how auto-correct feels about that. 

leaving the ultimate decision making in our law, in our government, the interpretation of the Constitution in the hands of those enculturated in the law and the lore, habits and dubious scruples and what is laughably called "ethics" of the legal profession is supremely dangerous

IT'S MY EXPERIENCE THAT LABOR DAY WEEKEND is second only to Thanksgiving Weekend in having things you post online not being read because who isn't doing something more important, like being with your family and friends? 

In an earlier attack I made on the Supreme Court I dealt with the excuses for the Supreme Court usurping the powers given to the Congress and president in several posts, two of which I am going to repost with some new commentary this week. 

I have been criticized for being hard on lawyers, judges and most of all "justices" in these posts but I'm not going to pretend for a second that they don't deserve it.  

The profession, itself, has one of its foundational practices in looking for opportunities for their clients and themselves to do things that are either objectionable to others or, more importantly, harm others, many of which lie in the impossibility of writing laws to cover every single nuance in which they can regulate in life.  

And that is what a law does.  The objections of conservatives, right wingers to the government "regulating" things is, itself, an objection to why governments exist and why laws have any legitimacy at all because they want to do things that hurt others.   That's the nature of conservatism as that word has developed in the modern period. 

I suspect that for most Americans, Brits, Canadians and others among the generally English speaking peoples, that last sentence will be read as me criticizing the legal racketeers for getting real criminals who seriously injure, rape, etc. others off in a dramatic fashion in a court trial.   For most of us our conception of the law and its personnel are formed by some of the worst of TV, movies, stage plays, pulp fiction and the blathering of those on TV, radio and, worse than those once were, online.   Which is entirely unrealistic.  And generally melodramatic and badly written. 

While sometimes, in the rarest of instances, that kind of crusading for something called "justice" actually happens, it is not the real character of the legal profession or the results of its activities.  It's not even typical of defense lawyers who, as they proudly announce, represent the guilty as easily as they do the innocent, especially those who can pay their fees.  It is undeniable that the business of lawyers is to twist evidence and lie and exploit prejudices* and emotions or even the uncertainty of jurors (reasonable or unreasonable, it doesn't seem to matter much which one)  to allow bad People to escape legal punishments for doing some really terrible things.   Generally that is done in line with two traits of criminals, belonging to a privileged class of People or, more destructive of justice, having great wealth.   

Lawyers are in the business of billing far, far, far, more than they are in the business of crusading for something called "justice."  

But the foremost and likely most destructive activity of lawyers and many judges and, I'd argue the majority of "justices" in the history of our Supreme Court is to allow those with wealth to do what they want to do unhampered by laws passed by legislatures and signed by presidents and governors.   I would say that the overwhelming presence of those in the legal profession in legislatures and among governors and presidents have, like those they appoint to judgeships and especially to supreme courts, is to extend the habits and practices of their profession into the actual, written laws so as to profit those who they have profited from or who they hope in the future to profit from.   I say without any fear that I'm being unjust to say that service to those with the most money is probably the most certain route to a judgeship or a seat on the Supreme Court. 

There is a reason why the only U.S. Supreme Court "justice" in history has worked as a low-paid Public Defender is the most recently confirmed of them,  Ketanji Brown Jackson.  The number who have worked as corporate lawyers is so numerous that almost all of the other members of just the present court have been corporate lawyers.  And that really makes A COMPLETE DIFFERENCE in the "justice" that the U.S. Supreme Court issues.   

Here, from a 2014 analysis:

A Reuters examination of nine years of cases shows that 66 of the 17,000 lawyers who petitioned the Supreme Court succeeded at getting their clients’ appeals heard at a remarkable rate. Their appeals were at least six times more likely to be accepted by the court than were all others filed by private lawyers during that period.

The lawyers are the most influential members of one of the most powerful specialties in America: the business of practicing before the Supreme Court. None of these lawyers is a household name. But many are familiar to the nine justices. That’s because about half worked for justices past or present, and some socialize with them.

They are the elite of the elite: Although they account for far less than 1 percent of lawyers who filed appeals to the Supreme Court, these attorneys were involved in 43 percent of the cases the high court chose to decide from 2004 through 2012.

Of the 66 lawyers mentioned above, 51 worked for law firms that primarily represent business interests. This means that over time corporate America cultivates a small pool of lawyers who are better able to get cases before the Supreme Court than any other attorneys in the country. And they acknowledge that they avoid taking cases from individuals seeking to challenge their high-paying corporate clients, whose activities and concerns are generally entangled and embedded throughout society.

Individuals seeking to challenge large businesses are left to choose from a smaller pool of less experienced and less successful lawyers.

Reuters continues:

An elite firm might refuse to represent an individual suing a corporation on a labor issue, for example, because it fears that winning the case could create a precedent that might hurt top clients in other industries. Large firms do take cases pro bono on behalf of the indigent. But those appeals are generally related to criminal law or social causes such as gay marriage – topics unlikely to affect U.S. business interests.

For many top firms, the conflicts mean declining to represent environmental organizations, labor unions, employees suing employers, or consumers filing class actions.

Joseph Sellers, a lawyer for the midsized firm Cohen Milstein who argued a Supreme Court case against Wal-Mart and for a class of more than 1.5 million female employees who alleged gender discrimination, said, “It’s not that there aren’t lawyers at these large firms who aren’t public-spirit minded and don’t want to do these cases. It’s that their business model won’t allow it.

. . . Michael Luttig, general counsel for aerospace giant Boeing Co., said of the new class of lawyers who are intimate with the Supreme Court, “It has become a guild, a narrow group of elite justices and elite counsel talking to each other.” The court and its elite bar have grown “detached and isolated from the real world, ultimately at the price of the healthy and proper development of the law.”

I think that all of this is one of the biggest reasons that leaving the ultimate decision making in our law, in our government, in the interpretation of the Constitution - WHICH IS FAR MORE THAN JUST A BUNCH OF LAWS - in the hands of those enculturated in the law and the lore, habits and dubious scruples and what is laughably called "ethics" of the legal profession is supremely dangerous.  Even many of the most moral of them,  and I hold they are not typical of those who are in that profession, no more than those in any other line of work,  are blind to some of the most outrageous practices of their fellow lawyers.    You hear it all the time from the likes of those who are regularly tapped for commentary by MS-Now or Meidas Touch on the outrageous decisions and actions of those on the Roberts Court.   As I've pointed out a number of times here,  it was hearing one such lawyer whose career and commentary I have enormous respect for declare that there is "a right to lie" that broke my conception of that profession, one built up in the regular way,  by imbibing the tripe from Atticus Finch and Horace Rumpole and following the heroic careers of real lawyers - often on the basis of my own prejudices and what I was persuaded to believe by advocacy journalism. 

Journalists, now there's another profession just about all of this applies to.  Even many of the real ones, reporters. 

I have been thinking more and more about Thomas Jefferson's statement in his 1819 letter rejecting the Marbury power in which he said his "construction" of the Constitution gave all three branches of the government the power that the Supreme Court declared it alone had, of defining the meaning of the Constitution.  Our history would have, certainly, been far different if that had been the case.  Just for a start, the 1870 Voting Rights Act and the 1875 Civil Right Act that went far in enforcing the equality of Black People and other People of Color would have stood for the rest of our history instead of being abolished, along with the even earlier anti-lynching law by the Supreme Court in 1883.  

Imagine if that had been the law of the land, including in the states of the Confederacy and all the others.   The Congress, which everyone slams all the time, came up with law after law to protect disfavored minorities, workers, etc.  State legislatures came up with such laws AS WELL AS LAWS DISCRIMINATING AGAINST BLACK PEOPLE, WORKERS, ETC.   Only it's generally been the laws that favored oppressed minorities, workers, etc.  that the lawyers on the Supreme Court have so consequentially found "unconstitutional."  The Warren Court was an outlier for a reason,  and even then a lot of their landmark "civil liberties" rulings proved to be foolish, giving the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts tools and words to twist to their worst ends.   

I don't trust the thinking of the lawyers among their fellow lawyers, not when they can make their ideas into law.  Not as compared to those who have to persuade non-lawyers in legislatures to get bills passed or those who, usually after having served long in the Congress,  in the presidency.   I'd rather put my future in the hands of the elected Congress than in the unelected, generally corporate lawyers of the Supreme Court. 

* There is little to keep a judge's prejudices out of it and absolutely nothing to keep a Supreme Court "justices'" prejudices out of the law. 

Lying Lawyers Get People Killed In Large Numbers

BY NOW YOU KNOW that I loathe Little Bobby Kennedy,  RFK jr. along with every single other person in the Trump II regime and, really, every single person who still belongs to the Republican Party.  It's got the same moral status as the American Nazi Party, the KKK, White Citizens Councils, the John Birch Society, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, Hoover Institution, . . . sorry, been doing some research into the origins of the "unitary executive" form of fascism that the Court has replaced the written Constitution with,  the role of our original fascists under their various guises.  More about that in the future.  

I've suspected from the start of his latest racket, as Trump's Sec of "health and human services" was him gutting the science on things like vaccines so he and his law firm could cite the phony "science" when he goes back to being just a plain ambulance chasing anti-vaxx lawyer-liar so he can reap millions from here till his steroid use finally ends his disgusting life.   I was certain of it when he wouldn't promise that he wouldn't profit from it when Elizabeth Warren gave him the opportunity to do that during his confirmation hearings.  Like most liar-lawyers, if he's the one under oath as a witness, his facility for lying can be rather easily exposed,  though that almost never leads to a Republican being refused confirmation, as the membership of the current Court proves. 

And now he's been caught trying to cover up deaths from the measles epidemic that he and his fellow anti-vaxxers fomented with their lies and pseudo-science.  

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked his new CDC director to remove a reference to two Pennsylvania deaths from the agency’s online measles tally after he questioned whether the disease contributed to the ​fatalities, three sources familiar with the situation said.

Kennedy’s request came after CDC staffers had already accepted the state’s characterization of the deaths as linked to measles, a Pennsylvania official ‌said.

Despite that, Erica Schwartz, the recently appointed director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agreed with Kennedy’s directive and implemented it without objection, said the three sources familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The move followed a heated exchange on social media between Kennedy, a long-time anti-vaccine activist appointed by President Donald Trump, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat. The two officials accused each other of politicizing the outbreak in Pennsylvania, the latest state to grapple with a ​resurgence of measles since the Trump administration took office.

Data from the CDC and from individual states shows that vaccine rates have been declining, with many medical organizations citing rising vaccine hesitancy as a major ​cause. In Pennsylvania alone, the state health department has reported 540 measles cases this year.

Georges Benjamin, chief executive of the American Public Health Association and formerly ⁠Maryland's secretary of health, said it is "unheard of" for the CDC to publicly raise doubts about the conclusions of state and local health departments, even if the agency seeks more information.

"The secretary had no business ​interfering in the normal process," Benjamin said. "He has an anti-vaccine agenda and he's using this to play out his anti-vaccine agenda.”

I hope that Democrats get the chance to go after these criminals and hold them accountable but under our corrupt Constitution and government I'm not holding my breath.    I'm not very familiar with that Erica Schwartz skank but I'll bet there's something in it for her, too.  I mean other than getting another appointment from Trump, she had one in his first regime, too. 

I wish his cousin,  Caroline would come out with more of the family knowledge of him and his dark past.   He is a seriously dangerous psychopath and entirely amoral.  

I Hope Gloria Steinem Is Happily Being Reunited With Other Heroes Like Shirley Chisholm

Their like is missed though there are others who build on what they built.    What the Supreme Court didn't knock down, that is. 

Maybe I should Make Shirley Chisholm's memoir my next book to type out and study.  My copy has teeny-tiny print so I'll have to use a magnifier to do it. 

I Am Left Thinking In The Face Of This That Those Who Support The IHRA "Definition" of Antisemitism Are Guilty Of The Same Thing That David Irving Is

 

A sense of honesty doesn't come into it for a second - Cry The Benighted Country

THIS WEEK, IN MY COUNTRY,  the Republican-fascists in Congress, in the state houses,  the Roberts Court,  most of all in the media and among the billionaires, fawning over and humoring Trump remind me of this from Petronius's infamous novel.  Only we're a lot worse,  Eumolpus knew what he was doing was a con to rope in corrupt greedy people,  Trump has sold himself as what he pretends to be, most of all to himself.   It was the corporations going along with his renaming of Lake Ontario that tipped the scale.   And it's Trump making them eat shit while he's alive AND THEM DOING IT WITHOUT SHAME, SO MUCH STRONGER IS THEIR GREED THAN EVEN A SENSE OF DIGNITY.   A sense of honesty doesn't come into it for a second.   Such is the product of the legal standing of the Courts and the real Constitution they made up that lying is as valid as the truth.   Though Madison et al got that started with their stab at neo-classical brevity.  Lawyers are generally shitty poets and worse law writers. 

That this is happening now when it never happened before to this extent, not even in Trump I is a product of Trump v. USA, brought to you by the minds trained in the Ivy League law schools and the Federalist-fascist Society. 

(“I have thought up a scheme,” replied Eumolpus, “which will embarrass our fortune-hunting friends sorely,” and as he said this, he drew his tablets from his wallet and read his last wishes aloud, as follows:) 

“All who are down for legacies under my will, my freedmen only excepted, shall come into what I bequeath them subject to this condition, that they do cut my body into pieces and devour said pieces in sight of the crowd: {nor need they be inordinately shocked} for among some peoples, the law ordaining that the dead shall be devoured by their relatives is still in force; nay, even the sick are often abused because they render their own flesh worse! 

I admonish my friends, by these presents, lest they refuse what I command, that they devour my carcass with as great relish as they damned my soul!” (Eumolpus had just started reading the first clauses when several of his most intimate friends entered the room and catching sight of the tablets in his hand in which was contained his last will and testament, besought him earnestly to permit them to hear the contents. He consented immediately and read the entire instrument from first to last. 

But when they had heard that extraordinary stipulation by which they were under the necessity of devouring his carcass, they were greatly cast down, but) his reputation for enormous wealth dulled the eyes and brains of the wretches, (and they were such cringing sycophants that they dared not complain of the outrage in his hearing. 

One there was, nevertheless, named) Gorgias, who was willing to comply, (provided he did not have too long to wait! To this, Eumolpus made answer:) “I have no fear that your stomach will turn, it will obey orders; if, for one hour of nausea you promise it a plethora of good things: just shut your eyes and pretend that it’s not human guts you’ve bolted, but ten million sesterces! 

And beside, we will find some condiment which will disguise the taste! No flesh is palatable of itself, it must be seasoned by art and reconciled to the unwilling stomach. And, if you desire to fortify the plan by precedents, the Saguntines ate human flesh when besieged by Hannibal, and they had no legacy in prospect! 

In stress of famine, the inhabitants of Petelia did the same and gained nothing from the diet except that they were not hungry! When Numantia was taken by Scipio, mothers, with the half-eaten bodies of their babes in their bosoms, were found! (Therefore, since it is only the thought of eating human flesh that makes you squeamish, you must try to overcome your aversion, with all your heart, so that you may come into the immense legacies I have put you down for!” 

So carelessly did Eumolpus reel off these extravagances that the fortune-hunters began to lose faith in the validity of his promises and subjected our words and actions to a closer scrutiny immediately; their suspicions grew with their experience and they came to the conclusion that we were out and out grafters, and thereupon those who had been put to the greatest expense for our entertainment resolved to seize us and take it out in just revenge; but Chrysis, who was privy to all their scheming, informed me of the designs which the Crotonians had hatched; and when I heard this news, I was so terrified that I fled instantly, with Giton, and left Eumolpus to his fate. 

I learned, a few days later, that the Crotonians, furious because the old fox had lived so long and so sumptuously at the public expense, had put him to death in the Massilian manner. That you may comprehend what this means, know that) whenever the Massilians were ravaged by the plague, one of the poor would offer himself to be fed for a whole year upon choice food at public charge; after which, decked out with olive branches and sacred vestments, he was led out through the entire city, loaded with imprecations so that he might take to himself the evils from which the city suffered, and then thrown headlong (from the cliff.)

Our fortune hunters are still playing stupid and nothing will get them to admit it's gone too far.  The Roberts majority as much as anyone.  So much more corrupt is the decadence of America in 2026. 

Aaron Copland - Violin Sonata - 1st movement

 

Louis Kaufman - Violin

Aaron Copland - Piano

This is the third performance of this sonata I've heard in which Copland, himself, plays the piano part.  The subtle differences in them is fascinating.  

This piece makes me mourn the country that I used to think I would one day live in. 

Update: 2nd Movement

3rd Movement 

Hate Mail - It's not so much that I "hate Israel"

as it is that I'VE HAD IT WITH ISRAEL AND ITS DOMESTIC LOBBY.   I've had it with their absurdly out sized influence on the United States, leading to us participating in Israel's apartheid and Lebensraum program of stealing land from Palestinians and its neighboring states, terrorizing and murdering huge numbers of People to do it.   

I can say I have come to hate Zionism.   Just as I hate every other kind of supremacist and chauvinistic ideology, ESPECIALLY those originating in the United States.   And the strongest influence on me in that are a number of anti-Zionist rabbis and the remnants of the Jewish Bund movement.  I don't think I'd have gotten to this point without their influence on me. 

I Want The Next Democratic President

To issue an executive order to tear down the Supreme Court building and replace it with homeless housing.   

The Court has created a monster and I hope it ends up destroying their fascist-marble palace during the lifetimes of the Roberts New Taney majority.