Saturday, September 29, 2018

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Robert Rigby - Nicked




What would you do if you were mugged but you recognised your attacker? Would you seek revenge?

New, gritty drama by Robert Rigby which works on our perceptions – the victim of knife crime is not always the innocent one.

There is a dark and dangerous side to Rory which people don’t see - but then something happens to him that finally unleashes his fury. He is mugged. But he happens to know the person who mugs him. Instead of going to the police, Rory is bent on revenge.


Cast:
Django ….. Kassius Carey
Rory ….. Douglas Clarke Wood
Oliver ….. Will Howard
Sarah ….. Emma Cunniffe
Chantelle (Shan) ….. Alex Jarrett
Richard ….. Michael Maloney
Patricia ….. Susan Salmon
Courtney ….. Gabrielle Brooks
Joe ….. Don Gilet
Lennox ….. Don Gilet
Mo ….. Tola Oluwole
Jayden ….. Shelley McDonald
Wilf ….. Jerdane Calder
Police Constable ….. Emma Cunniffe


Sound Designer: David Chilton
Production Manager: Sarah Tombling
Director: Carl Prekopp

Producer: Lucinda Mason Brown

Why I Hate The Senate

I watched all of the Chuck Grassley - Lindsay Graham production on Thursday, that after years of swearing I'd never watch another Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, the Alito hearings being the last straw for me.  The lying, the lies that everyone in the room knew were lies that came out of the mouths of Republican nominees,  Thomas, Roberts, Alito, . . .  was a big part of it.

But the thing that made me fear developing involuntary bulimia was the display of Senatorial comity between Democrats such as Joe Biden and and full blown fascist liars and sociopaths such as Orrin Hatch and Grassley.  That display of comity among Senators, such scum as Lindsay Graham even as they are spewing acid all over Christine Blasey Ford,  the rights of we common People and equal justice before the law, his full drama-queen mad scene drama on Thursday is one of the most revolting spectacles in modern life.   The old footage of the audience at Stalin's show trials who knew their cue to laugh derisively was only different in degree but not in kind from the insincere stage craft of the Senate.

Jeff Flake in explaining why he did his star turn of  blackmailing Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump into having a truncated FBI probe of Kavanaugh, while calling  Christine Blasey Ford a liar* by voting Brett Kavanaugh onto the full Senate was that he was so, so very, very concerned that no one could fault "the process".  That, as another Senator said, Flake only wanted "a process they could be proud of" even as every single thing about the process was a total and complete shame a criminal shame, a shame he hadn't called out when it really mattered.

And among the gentleman's club that still is the Senate, that is the paramount value in what they did.  Their first concern is that it look nice and they can claim that it was proper even as what they do kills people, cheats people, deprives people of their rights, does irreversible damage to people and the environment.  Jeff Flake and the rest of the dainty process concerned Senators can stuff it up their ass as far as I'm concerned.

The Senate, itself, designed by Madison and his fellow slaveholding-banker and merchant Founders to prevent democracy is only as decent as the members such as Mazie Hirono  AND THE TWO HEROIC WOMEN WHO CONORED FLAKE IN THE ELEVATORS IN FRONT OF A TV CAMERA insist that it be and there are far too few of them to go around.  I would put Sheldon Whitehouse in that all too small group who are concerned with more important things than the genteel comity of the gentleman's club because they take democracy seriously.  There are others who fall in between.  Corey Booker, good in is way,  is way, way too invested in looking nice when it's time to take out the brass knuckles.  He's too Obamaish for my taste as are most of the others on the Democratic side of that Committee. 

If, as could happen, there is new female membership in the Congress, especially in the Senate, I hope they are more like Hirono and Whitehouse.  That place needs to be knocked around because it is, in every way, the poison to democracy that the Founders intended when they structured it undemocratically and, originally, made sure its members were not elected by popular vote.  That one reform from the early 20th century was obviously not enough, it needs to be changed so that voters in some of our most regressive and privileged states, such as Wyoming, do not have more voting power than people in far more populous states, California, New York, . . . As a lifetime resident of a small state it is absurd that the small number who put Susan Collins in office have more power to decide things than someone from a far larger state.  She should not be in a position to get the attention she gets whenever there is one of these events due to the desire of Madison to thwart democracy for the benefit of himself and other rich men.

The anti-Democratic Senate is one of the Achilles heels of American democracy, another is the undemocratic Supreme Court, a third is the rigged anti-Democratic system of electing presidents and vice-presidents.  The Founders, not wanting there to ever be a possibility of democracy gave us as many bad heels as there are branches in the government.   If you want the United States to stand as a democracy, it's engineered to make sure it will fall into a slough of privilege and oligarchy.  If, like me, the Senate too often makes you want to puke, that's why.

*  There are only two meanings to a vote for Kavanaugh, one is that you are calling Dr. Ford and the other women who have come forward liars or you are saying you don't care that Kavanaugh assaulted or tried to rape them.  Flake, Collins, Murkowski, etc. in voting for Kavanaugh are saying one or the other.  I am inclined to think that they don't really care, they are Republicans for a reason.

Supid Mail And only because addiction to Big Pharma products is a horrible curse of modern life

Based on the many, many dated prescriptions for powerful psycho-active drugs, gotten from many different doctors (he was an infamous doctor-shopper) it is estimated that in the nine months before he died, Glenn Gould took more than 2000 pills - that they know of.  I'd say that was something for a musician to learn not to do from him. Anyone who doesn't think that contributed to more than just his death at the age of 50 is an idiot.  I'd say it accounts for a good part of his musicianship, as well. 

If you want a Supreme Court tie-in, this week when that Court is about to sink to a new, modern low, the present day drug addiction crisis is largely the product of Supreme Court overturning restrictions on things like Big Pharma directly marketing drugs to their potential addicts and abusers and victims.  That's nothing Brett Kavanaugh would do a thing to overturn even if he was totally convinced it was true and that tens of thousands were dying from it. Nor would Collins or Murkowski or Flake . . .

There Is No Limit To The Privilege Granted To Republican Men Who Have The Liar Kavanaugh's Background

If you haven't seen it yet, you should go to Vox and look at their charting of the testimony of both Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh on Thursday, with the questions of Senators (mostly Democratic) and the Republican hired gun Rachel Mitchell and the speechifying and grandstanding of Senators (mostly Republican).

They color coded the times that both Ford and Kavanaugh either clearly answered or tried to deflect or not answer questions in a way you can click on and read the passages to see it.  The color coding alone is astonishing in that it shows that at no time did Christine Blasey Ford refuse to try to answer a question or to deceive or deflect, Brett Kavanaugh constantly did all of those while testifying under oath WHILE SITTING AS A FEDERAL JUDGE. 

Brett Kavanaugh is a demonstrable liar who has lied under oath, while sitting as a federal judge.  He lied to the Senate now and in his past confirmation hearings, sometimes now he has lied about his lies at his past confirmation hearings.  Yet there are Senators, Republicans, possibly Democrats, who are still not decided about whether or not to put the liar who had an unprecedented lying, partisan tantrum at the hearing on Thursday.   His tantrum would never have gotten him anything but a boot out the door if he had been a Woman, a Latina, a Black Woman, it would certainly have gotten him the boot if he had done so while being a Democrat, even a White male Democrat who had been to prep schools and the Ivys.  Merritt Garland didn't even have to have a tantrum to not get into the door, he just had to be nominated by a prep-school-Ivy-League Black Democratic President and the same Republicans, Collins, Murkowski, Flake, etc. who are on posing on the fence over Kavanaugh didn't put up any kind of real complaint about that. 

If the FBI so much as says it can't produce conclusive evidence that Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick are telling the truth, the Republicans will vote to put the known liar and very likely sex offender on the Supreme Court. And the likes of the New York Times and CNN and ABC will treat it as too late to do anything about as he sits there attacking women and Democrats, organized labor, poor people, members of minority groups discriminated against, etc. 

This is the disgrace and shame of America.  The glaring example that we have adopted a class system as evil and destructive as that in other countries, including the one the Revolution was allegedly fought for to reject.  The privilege that our elites grant each other includes everything Brett Kavanaugh is known to have done and everything he is credibly accused of doing.

Friday, September 28, 2018

No, I Don't Take It Back

I'm not giving any Republicans any benefit of any doubt.  They forfeited any  right to any such thing by voting for Neil Gorsuch after refusing to insist that Merrick Garland be granted the bare minimum of hearings and a vote.  That includes Flake and Collins and Murkowski and the rest who want to pose as principled servants of The People.  They have been no such thing.

I don't give a pint of piss for the traditions of the Senate and the comfortable comity of Senators.  If Flake wanted anything like a benefit of the doubt, he could have done what any decent Senator would have and voted against Kavanaugh on the basis of his already demonstrated perjury, lies, evasion, the concealment of his record, his insistence on his sense of entitlement being fulfilled AND HIS OUTRAGEOUS DISPLAY OF YESTERDAY.  That last one alone disqualifies him for a judge, never mind a Supreme Court justice. 

What I Wished I Could Do When I Heard The Rape Survivors Confronting The Cowardly Hypocrite Jeff Flake

Image result for Beate Klarsfeld erklärt die Geschichte einer Ohrfeige

Nazi hunter Beata Karlsfeld in 1968 slapping Kurt Kiesinger at a Christian Democratic meeting and yelling, Kiesinger, Nazi, resign!  

I hope Jeff Flake is confronted by Women and Men over his vote to put the rapist Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court for the rest of his life.  All of the Republicans deserve to live with this one for as long as they live. 

Rachel Mitchell Partisan Hack?

If the Republican Senators she reportedly told what they wanted to hear aren't lying, we now know Rachel Mitchell is a Republican hack who was prepared to tell them what they wanted to hear from the start. 

If I had been a Democrat on that Committee I'd have demanded that she say whether or not she would have tried to proceed without a police agency doing the kind of investigation that Brett Kavanaugh refused to ask for even as he kept demanding a "fair process" and which Grassley and the rest of the Republicans made certain that they would never allow even as Kavanaugh's excuse for refusing to ask for the FBI to investigate was that he was willing to do what the committee the Republicans control did.

If I were a Democrat who was up against Rachel Mitchell in any way or if I were in Arizona in a position to do it,  I'd demand to know how her partisan bias influenced her professional work.  If the Republicans are misrepresenting what she said she could clear that up but her chance is about to disappear.  If she doesn't do that she deserves to have it damage her professional reputation.

Stupid Mail

The middle-brows of Eschaton who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds. 

Confession The Day After Lindsay's Star Turn - Why I Hate The Little Faggot

As a gay man I hate that pudgy little stagy faggot, Lindsay Graham and it's because of him being gay while being a total and absolute hypocrite as a Republican-fascist gay man from a state where he benefits from hatred of gay people, who supports and stages TV camera spectacles for people for Supreme Court vacancies and other offices who oppose every aspect of equality for LGBT people and Women and Black People and Latinos and Muslims and, most of all, poor People. 

Update: Well, let me quote someone Lindsay reminds me of, Truman Capote:

I'll tell you something about fags, especially Southern fags. We is mean. A Southern fag is meaner than the meanest rattler you ever met. 

First, Truman Capote never met me. Second, I doubt he ever met a gay man from Maine.  I've never aspired to or been under the illusions that I was part of the elite he'd been dropped by when he said that.  I don't deal in illusions. Third, Lindsay Graham is no Truman Capote, Capote never lied about who he was.




The Enraged Sense Of Entitlement Denied

Thinking about the preppy-jock brat-boy tantrum that Brett Kavanaugh threw yesterday, expecting it to get him onto the Supreme Court it was a full display of the sense of rich, male entitlement behind his theory or the law and his brand of billionaire boys-club funded Republicanism.

What we saw yesterday was someone who came up in the entitled, privileged world of affluence that went to the best schools and joined up with others produced by that silver spoon in mouth childhood to prep school youth to Ivy League level university to join the upper escalations of the professional world who was about to be denied a privilege for the first time in his privileged life.  It violated his sense of entitlement that goes where most of us have some sense of egalitarian rights.

The number of times he mentioned shibboleths of his privileged world, his rich, white, male jock world in which he, member of sports teams - the number times he seemed to use sports as a shield against questions asked by Democrats and, though I'll have to look at a transcript, Rachel Mitchell was very telling of how him being a jock enhanced his already swollen sense of entitlement.   It was as if that was supposed to shield him from the accusations that so many jocks have faced when their treatment of women finally catch up with them.  It was no accident that it was members of the football team at Georgetown Prep were the ones who had an inside joke in their yearbook at the expense of "Renate" there might be boys on sports teams at prep schools who don't do things like that but it's certainly no surprise when we find out jocks do that or that jocks are named as the attackers of women.

Brett Kavanaugh's world of entitlement is what fuels his position in politics and the law.  It is why Republicans, including Republican women are ready to allow him on the court where he will vote to discriminate against people on the basis of economic class, on the basis of them being Women on the basis of their race and ethnicity.  It is why he will vote on the court just as he has ruled for the entitlement of his upper class milieu, his male, upper class milieu and the billionaires who are above them in that upper caste world and who fund his and others advancement in it.

The Jesuits who run such places as Georgetown Prep have a lot to answer for, if there's one thing that it is clear, one that produces both Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch are producing the servants of privilege not people who demonstrate the morality or commandments of The Gospel of Jesus, The Law and the Prophets, the teachings of Paul, or Ignatius.  That's a different and longer piece.  If I were in charge of such a school with the eye-opening that the Kavanaugh scandal forces, I'd immediately turn it into a school for the disadvantaged in an inner city, selling its buildings and turning its grounds into a public park.  The world of its students and their families and alumni is not an expression of Christianity and it's obvious that many of those it brags about having produced are living the lives of arrogant, entitled  Mammon worshipers such as are warned about in the Letter of James.  They should certainly get rid of the classrooms of enhanced entitlement that team sports are.  The presence of those at so many elite Catholic schools and universities is a scandal, for schools pretending to be teaching the Gospel of Jesus they are an open occasion of sin.

It was obvious from his tantrum yesterday that "beer" is one of those shibboleths, one that figures into so many of the reported attacks on women by such jocks with a feeling of entitlement.  Beer.


Thursday, September 27, 2018

Kavanaugh Is A Preppy Swine

I have read the conservative anti-Trumper Jennifer Rubin say that she thought the lowest point of today's hearings was when Kavanaugh sarcastically answered Senator Amy Klobuchar's questions about drinking by not answering it but trying to turn it back on her.  It was appalling enough that someone told him during the next of many breaks the big strong jock had to have that he'd better apologize.  I found his apology to be as insincere as the rest of his lying, evasive, unresponsive, filibustering, blustering, boasting performance. 

I wonder what can be demonstrated about his disrespect for women from his patterns of responses to the women on the committee who are all Democrats.  He certainly came off as an all round pig.  I suspect lots of people knew his kind of bully in high school and that a good percentage of the non-preppy population encountered conceited preppies like him.   I didn't until I was in college but they didn't improve much when they matriculated. 

Stupid Mail

I don't find that I've ever mentioned Amy Winehouse on this blog.  I vaguely recall writing a post at Echidne of the Snakes at how tragic her addiction was*. I am only vaguely aware of her singing though what I heard struck me as promising if she could pull out of her self-destruction.  She didn't.  It killed her. I never compared GG to her.  As always, Stupy is just lying.  You can't say "Simels" without the "l" the "i" and the "e" and the "s".  Works for "s-l-i-m-e", too.

I am not going to discuss GG any more.  If what I said gives the Eschaton mid-brow non-musicians a sad, I couldn't possibly care less.

*  I looked it up.  Here's what I wrote there.

Saturday, February 16, 2008


"There's a greater chance that I would dye my hair green and get tattoos all over my body and do a rock tour with Amy Winehouse than there is that I would run for the Senate, so let me put that to rest. Somehow, just imagine me, green hair, on tour with Amy Winehouse, ain't happening, not running for the Senate, done deal, absolutely no way." Mike Huckabee

Having never heard of Amy Winehouse before she was denied a visa and having heard nothing that about her that isn't horrifically tragic and appalling, does it get any sleazier than having Rev. Huckabee using her like this? Is he paying a price with the 'values voters'?

Amy Winehouse doesn't just belong in rehab, she belongs in long term custodial care. The people promoting "Rehab" and providing yet one more excuse for people who are hard enough to get to treatment without these lines should be lined up against the wall. But the pop-culture industry has never suffered for promoting violent and self-destructive behavior yet and you doubt they will as long as they can make lots of money that way.

Posted by Anthony McCarthy

Grassley and Graham Stage A Farce And Didn't Expect Dr. Blasey Ford To Be The One Who Comes Out With Her Dignity Intact

The fact that the three women who have accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting either them or other women have all asked for the FBI to investigate them and their claims and when five Democratic Senators asked him multiple times to ask Donald Trump to ask the FBI to investigate their claims he hid behind Chuck Grassley who will never ask for that FBI investigation is enough to know that they are telling the truth and he is guilty.   Since he won't ever stand trial for any of it or even undergo a real investigation I feel that we have the default of deciding that for ourselves and there is no question that he's guilty by his own refusal to be investigated.

Her testimony was dignified and unevasive, his was constantly evasive and a disgusting spectacle.  His Republican allies, most of all the Drama Queen of the Judiciary Committee, Lindsay Graham matched him in disgusting spectacle.  Graham is, as I've recently reminded here, the man who signaled Samuel Alito's wife to burst into tears on cue at his confirmation hearings, this time he did it himself in an erruption of drama queen emotion. 

I don't know what happened to Rachel Mitchell the woman they hid behind for most of the questioning, maybe she was being too diligent in searching for something like evidence for them.  Apparently Republicans are venting their fury at her, I think it's so telling that the very people who support Kavanaugh first hired a woman to hide behind and now they're blaming her for the catastrophe that she stepped into at the last minute.  She isn't the one who gave her nothing to work with, it was Grassley and McConnell and Trump and Kavanaugh who did that.  Any of them could have had the FBI reopen its background of Kavanaugh and given her something to work with.  NOT that I feel sorry for her, she's the one who took the gig knowing that.  I would love to know what her conclusion after the hearings is but I suspect, unless she gives up politics and writes about it, we won't know.  Maybe she told them she believed Dr. Ford and pulled the plug on her part in this drama.

I think Dick Durban's questioning of Kavanaugh was the high point of it, Sheldon Whitehouse's promise to Dr. Ford that he would make sure she got the investigation she asked for when it's in his power was another one.  Nothing the Republicans did was any better than revolting.  Lindsay Graham deserves to be mocked into the flames of hell for what that little scumbag did.

Last Word On The Topic - Stupid Mail

Oh, for fucksake, I don't want to talk about Glenn Gould anymore.  There is nothing for a musician to learn from him except what not to do - don't get hooked on pills, among those - and why the recordings of almost any of the pianists of his generation who didn't become household names and icons of the middle-brow cocktail party college grad set are more worth listening to now.   Pianists largely unknown to the geezers who people such blogs as Eschaton, now.

He had his good points but he had many more really bad points.  I have a feeling I'd have liked him but he would have been the kind of friend who gave you endless worries and frequently had you tearing your hair out.  You don't have to take my word for that, there is this article in the Guardian, where a number of fine pianists gave their assessment of him on the thirtieth anniversary of his death.

A few months back, I listened to a long segment on a radio program in which the host and some classical music DJ went over the box set that the company which has the rights to them issued of all of the takes that weren't used on Gould's legendary first recording of the Goldberg Variations.  As if the world needed even more of those.  I listened to it largely because I was doing chores and I didn't want to touch my computer with wet hands.  About twenty or twenty-five minutes into hearing them gleefully remarking like the cocktail party crowd as a means of impressing themselves over short clips of different variations, I realized that they had not mentioned the name of the composer, J.S. Bach even once.   They hadn't talked about the overall structure of the Variations - it is one of the most completely structured and masterfully planned sets of variations made to create an overall effect in the history of variations.

That's what Gould and far more the publicity machine created around him did. As one of the pianists in the Guardian said, everything he touched turned to Gould.  Well, J. S. Bach is infinitely more interesting and worth thinking about than Glenn Gould was but he's harder to really talk about intelligently for that reason.  No wonder the middle-brow geezers babble on about Gould.

Susan Collins This One Is Different We Won't Forget How You Vote On Kavanaugh

I think one Senator has the ability to put most if not all of his colleagues in his debt,  Jeff Flake could stop the Kavanaugh catastrophe for the Senate and for the Republican Party by voting against him in committee.  If he would do that at the end of his Senate career, who knows.  At this point if the Republicans put him on the Court and Democrats win control of either the House or Senate and they can do the investigation that the Republicans and the Trump regime refuse to allow, they could either force a "Justice" Kavanaugh off of the court or they might be able to force even Republicans to vote to impeach him. 

I'm not certain that I don't actually favor that last scenario because I think it would do maximum damage to the Trump regime, the Republican Party and it is centuries past time that Supreme Court members (not to mention Presidents) realized that they could be removed from office by impeachment.  I think if that became real by having it happen just once it would sober up the least democratic body in the federal government.  

Susan Collins, the Republican I'm most familiar with from long years of watching her MO may have finally realized that her voting to put the Republican brat boy on the court won't be the end of this for her.  His every vote against the rights of Women, Women she has every reason to know, today, that he has no respect for will hang around her neck like a millstone.  His actions on the Supreme Court against the ACA, most obviously to destroy the ban on insurance companies discriminating against those with preexisting conditions will be her actions.  And that's just the beginning of what we know Susan Collins knows as she casts her vote. 

I have no doubt that Collins wants to put Brett Kavanaugh on the court or his perjury and lies and evasions and record would have been enough for a real moderate to have come out against him by now.  I think she was counting on this vote for a Supreme Court member would disappear as an issue for her.  But this one is different and I think she might now realize that.   I think it took the third and fourth accusations against Kavanaugh, accusations her Republican colleagues refuse to investigate as they do the very credible second and first accusations to make her realize she won't be able to just move on from this one. 

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Stupid Mail

I'm not especially interested in what a bunch of non-musicians at Eschaton think about what I didn't say about Glenn Gould and who certainly never have read what I did say about him (try to search the archive, window at the upper left of the screen, Baby Blue boys) on the say so of the perennial prevaricator,  the maven of mendacity, their own, their very own designated trolling liar, Simps. 

As I've said, read what I DID write about Gould and you'll see what I find, not wanting but just wrong with his musicianship and what I think of his very real talent which was there in an unhelpful abundance considering his mental problems. 

I think I'd rather go over the list of people who won Pulitzers for Composition than go over the over-over exposed Glenn Gould again on the say so of Steve Simels' imaginary friend who supposedly won one for (snort) . . .  criticism. Gould's been dead almost four decades, and was way too much talked about even at that time.  Every single thing that could be said about him had been said by about 1990. 

A Question

As a third accuser about Brett Kavanaugh's highschool and college sexual use of women comes forward, I've got to wonder what his supporters would be doing if he were a Democratic nominee and the accusers were young men.  I especially wonder what would happen if that theoretical Democratic nominee coached boys sports if credible accusations by people known to have known Kavanaugh were made and there was some confirmation available backing up the accusations. 

If I were the parent of one of the girls Kavanaugh had coached, I'd feel seriously uneasy about the whole thing.  If I were a Republican I would be running away from this as fast as I could because this one is going to stick like sugar boiled to the the hard crack stage. 

Busted: CNN's Republican Women For Kavanaugh Are Actually GOP Operatives



CNN is FOX-lite, it was the first cabloid network I ever saw long before I ever saw FOX and I knew it was a Republican-enabling jurno-brothel.  And they're still at it, phonying up things.  Look at this outting of the obviously chosen for being different shades and with ethnic names, average randomly chosen "Republican Women" (CNN is pretending it's a "focus group" which would imply it's a random sample). 

If you listen to this the scum bag, Gina Sosa "Republican voter"(and Republican congressional candidate) asks "What boy hasn't done this in high school?"  the answer to that is NO BOY I EVER KNEW IN HIGH SCHOOL !   No boy I've ever heard about doing disgusting things in high school.  And some of them were pretty disgusting.  Since all of them are Republican operatives who CNN is pretending are just "Republican voters" maybe that's typical of Republican men in their high school years, which would explain everything you need to know about how the Republicans put scum like him and Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and in lower courts and have one sitting in the White House right now.   Most of those with Latino names are Cubans drawn from the right-wing Republican Cuban circles.

CNN is a disgusting thing, it may be marginally better than FOX but that makes it more dangerous.  

Trump Hates Puerto Ricans And Why It Is Important To Make Brett's Boy-Pack Pay Even Decades After They Got Away With It

Has anyone else noticed that it wasn't until it was a Latina, a Puerto Rican woman revealed wrongdoing by Brett Kavanaugh that Trump decided to go on the attack?   I wonder if that's because he and Republicans figure they might pay some price by attacking a White Woman but that they won't if they attack Women who aren't white?  That's the way that racist Republicans think.   Or is it just as so many New Yorkers of his generation, he hates Puerto Ricans?   I wonder if Kavanaugh and his piggish boy pack at Yale targeted Deborah Ramirez because of her ethnicity and that she wasn't a rich kid like they were. 

I absolutely believe both of the named accusers at this point, seeing what they've faced and obviously knew they were going to face by coming forward.  I expect that by the end of the day there will be another Woman who bravely comes forward to expose Kavanaugh and his carefree boy-bonding days, confident that he could humiliate and attack women with other rich brat-boys without there being any time in the future when it would come back on them.  

That's the reason that this is important for young girls and others.  If teenage boys know that their crimes against girls could come back on them, that there is no privilege that protects them when they attack women, robbing them of their lives, it might make them not do it.  Maybe Trump wouldn't have assaulted women if he knew he might pay a price for it someday.  Today would be a good day for him to start paying up on that debt.  

Update:  Thanks for the correction, that one was me on automatic, Rodriguez is the name of one of my in-laws.  I typed it automatically. 

Questions For The Prosecutor Grassley And Graham et al Are Hiding Behind

If I were on the Senate Judiciary Committee, as the Republican men hide behind her skirts , I would want to get Rachel Mitchell or any other "experienced sex-crime prosecutor" on public record as to whether or not she would try to make a judgment on the merits of a case, to decide to not pursue it or to bring it to trial, WITHOUT A THOROUGH POLICE INVESTIGATION OF THE INCIDENT.

If Rachel Mitchell were honest, she would, of course say she would never try to figure out who was telling the truth in the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh without the kind of investigation that the FBI routinely does in the matter of judicial nominations but which her employers, the cowardy Republican men who will be hiding behind her, have refused to allow AND WHICH WHEN HE WAS ASKED, BRETT KAVANAUGH REFUSED TO CALL FOR.

If I were in the place of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse or one of the better men or women on that committee I would insist on an answer from Rachel Mitchell on that matter because it is the first question that is necessary to get her on record as giving if Brett Kavanaugh is to get what he claimed to want, I've read, 17 times on FOX Monday night, "a fair process".   If he is innocent he certainly has nothing to fear from an FBI investigation, I'm sure that's what he would say to someone who was being investigated for a relatively minor crime that could see them go to prison and he's in little danger of that, he's demanding a promotion.

In the little that I've seen about Rachel Mitchell, one of the things she is quoted as saying is:

“People think that children would tell right away and that they would tell everything that happened to them. In reality children often keep this secret for years, sometimes into their adulthood, sometimes forever.”

I would ask her if she would include the women who are coming forward now, when they are middle-aged and perhaps for the first time in their lives feel compelled by their conscience and sense of moral responsibility, to tell what Brett Kavanaugh and his good buddy Mark Judge or others in his male-bonding clique did to them.    I would ask her that in the course of the hearings, if she is standing in for Chuck Grassley and his fellow cowards standing behind her, having hired her to speak for them, then certainly Democrats on the committee have the right to ask her questions.   If she wouldn't answer them, that would be as revealing as Brett Kavanaugh's refusals to answer questions during the previous sessions of the hearings.  If Grassley and her employers would refuse to allow her to answer, that shows that Brett Kavanaugh doesn't want a fair process, he wants exactly the one rigged in his favor that he's had.   That process is the same process that has been rigged in his favor since his prep-school years. 

The hearing tomorrow is set up to be a rigged and dishonest farce designed to do one thing, to give Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski a fig leaf to hide their shame in voting for Brett Kavanaugh, that is the only reason for it, that's why the Republicans are making sure that fig leaf is as brief as possible.   They should not be allowed to hide behind it anymore than the male Republicans on the Judiciary Committee should be able to hide behind Rachel Mitchell. 

I would also demand that Rachel Mitchell produce to all members of the committee a written report of the matter in the manner of a prosecutor of sex crimes giving her reasons for her own conclusions as to the merits of the case.  She shouldn't be allowed to hide behind this farce, either.  She should have to put on paper what she either does or pretends to believe it shows.

Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Tucker Carleson Presents Kavanaugh As An Arthur Miller Martyr - The Play That Taught Ted Cruz So Much About The Plight Of Those Under Judicial Persecution

A few months back I got into a brawl here when I pointed out that Arthur Miller's play The Crucible as history was a total and complete work of hogwash as an example of why it's not only stupid but dangerous for someone to mistake "historical" plays as history.

This just in, Tucker Carlson uses the dear old pinko's play to push Kavanaugh.

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Tonight there are more allegations consistent in many ways with the allegations we have already heard. Leading Democrats are calling these new claims “powerful,” “compelling,” and “highly credible.” They are all but daring Republicans to question the new accusers. The victims, they say, must be believed. Here’s a selection of the charges.

Oh just kidding. That's a scene from The Crucible, which you will remember as the Arthur Miller play about the Salem witch trials.

Miller wrote The Crucible back in 1953, that was a time when liberals still cared about civil liberties and due process, and the right to face your accuser. Miller wrote it as an allegory about the McCarthy hearings.

The McCarthy hearings were a period the left deeply hated, until they took power and re-created it themselves. Nowadays, you wonder if progressives still read Miller's play, and if so, are they outraged by it? Maybe not.

It might seem completely reasonable to them. Mob accuses villager of witchcraft, villager denies it because witches always deny it, "Prove you're not a witch," they scream. The witch can't, proving beyond a doubt that she is in fact a witch -- to the stake she goes.

So much for the use of fictionalized "history" as  "analogy".  Tucker Carlson being nothing if not anal, he, of course, makes an even more botched use of the play to  promote the Supreme Court candidacy of someone who is more likley to be an analog to the infamous Judge Hathorne (Nathiel Hawthorn's ancestor) than even Arthur Miller's imaginary John Proctor.   Not that anyone in the FOX audience would know that much about it.   The use of plays to promote rational thought as opposed to manipulating emotions is an even more sometimes thing than their use as historical discourse.   Their thinking of just how those analogies work most rationally is non-existent but they know how they're supposed to feel about it.

Arthur Miller's best work was when he made it up instead of pretending he was writing history.  I love Arthur Miller's best work.  The Crucible isn't his best and its role in American popular culture is a mixed thing.   My favorite use of it was when Samantha Bee clipped the video of Ted Cruz's appearance in it [it's a must see]. He played the persecuted John Proctor.   You can tell just how important the play was for Cruz and his moral and intellectual development. You can see that from his deep sympathy for the persecuted and victims of judicial abuse

Susan Collins Is Lying

Susan Collins is lying when she says she's certain that Brett Kavanaugh isn't the fifth vote to overturn Roe v Wade.  It's as simple as that.  He told her the lie he knew she wanted to be able to repeat but she knows it's a lie and her saying she believes it is her own lie.  

Susan Collins is lying.  It's as simple as that. 

If Purjury and Cover Up and the Shameful Nominations Hearings Got Susan Collins to "95% Yes" For Kavanaugh It Will Take More Than The Sham Hearing To Get Her To No

Hearing John Heilemann on MSNBC say that his Friday interview with Susan Collins contained her claim of absolute certainty that Brett Kavanaugh would not vote to overturn Roe was just part of her Susan the Sucker act.  The act is that she poses as a principled moderate, she votes for a right wing thug for a court of other nomination or a piece of legislation on such pantomime guarantees and when those guarantees turn out to be worth less than the air used to assert them, she gets off due to the lie that she and whoever issued the lie both knew was a lie being buried by the media.   It's an act so often done that they probably figured it into the Brett Kavanaugh fraud of a process from the start.

Susan Collins wants Kavanaugh on the court probably for similar reasons why Sandra Day O'Connor wanted a Republican to replace her.  First, she's a Republican and she wants a Republican majority on the court because she's AOK with almost all of the Republican depravity that issues from the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts and she's never much less than A minus OK with almost all of the rest of it.  I doubt she wouldn't find the death by a thousand rulings that will be the actual way that Republicans overturn Roe OK, too, as long as no one remembers her hand in doing it.  She's voted for just about all of the other members of the court who are ready to do that as everyone knew they would as they were put on the court. 

Susan Collins is and always has been a fraud, her "moderate" act which she copied from Olympia Snowe is a conventionalized bit of snake oil salesman, shell-game, flim-flammery that went to college and looks best in a blue dress.  She is lying about this and she is pretty confident that she will get away with it.  The only way she will not vote for Kavanaugh is if she is convinced it will cost her and she is confident that the Maine media, especially the big media, Maine Public Broadcasting as bad as any of it, will cover her shameful ass as she does it.  

I have seen someone say they think shes 51% likely to vote for Kavanaugh.  As of today, I think that's got it wrong by about 24%, she's always been far, far more likely to do what she's already done with some really stinking awful Republican Supreme Court nominations.  She'll vote for Democrats as long as they don't have a chance to sway the court but she's always voted for Republicans unless she figures she can't get away with it.  If she figures this one will be the one she and her media supporters can't pass off with her Susan the Sucker act, maybe that will be different. I wouldn't hold your breath or wait up nights over it, though. 

Monday, September 24, 2018

I Heard Prep-School Boys Joking About The Kind Of Thing Kavanaugh Is Accused Of Doing Long Before He Was At Yale

There were at least a couple of people in the cabloid-broadcast-op-ed lying-leisure class who doubted anything like what Deborah Ramirez reported ever happened at Yale.  

There isn't any reason to doubt that Deborah Ramirez, seeing the treatment that Christine Blasey Ford has received would be extremely reluctant to bring such an accusation if she didn't feel compelled by her conscience to tell the truth.  That fact should add some weight in evaluating who you're going to believe.  

I do know that something very like what she said was given a name by the prep-school-private-college crowd I knew years earlier, especially the jock-frat boy segment of that.  I heard something very like what she describes being done to her called "Italian sit-ups" by some of them as they hilariously recounted either being a participant in or a witness to such sexual abuse and humiliation of unsuspecting and drunk women too inexperienced to realize they were being set up.  That was apparently an ingrained part of such preppy-fratboy-jock lore that I heard that about twenty-two eighteen (sorry, checked the date it was) years before the time Brett Kavanaugh would have been doing what he's accused of doing.   I was never heavily involved with that milieu of college students, I didn't choose to socialize with the ones I heard that from, they were pigs.  I changed dorms.  

The Quick And Dirty Medium That Is Blog Writing - The Stalinism They Wanted Was Infinitely Worse Than McCarthyism They Got

Sometimes, especially when I've got a head cold or allergies, it is made painfully obvious that my easy reading days are numbered.

I have always had less than great eyesight and am finding that as I get ever older it's getting worse.  I'm told there's not much to be done about that, that it's presbyopia exacerbated by a lifetime of reading words and music on a music stand.

When I go back and look at what I've posted sometimes I'm embarrassed to find in editing my early drafts that when I change something, the number of a noun, the tense of a verb, that I don't see to change all of it.  I hope I don't generally give the impression of someone who doesn't know how to speak something close to standard English, though I don't think mistakes in such stuff are something shameful or are an indication of stupidity.  I've known some very intelligent people who speak other than standard English, even as a first language.  And some of the most awful people in the world speak and write flawless English, taking advantage of that to peddle some of the most horrible lies to promote some of the most horrible things.  I've known lots and lots of highly intelligent, highly educated people the world would be a better place without, I've never known a good person that could be said of.  Look at the people promoting Kavanaugh if you want a current example.

There are other problems with editing in the dark, or dusk, as it were, finding stray parts of sentences that haven't been finished or completely removed, finding that there's a comma where a period should be.  Lots of it comes from keys being next to each other on the qwerty keyboard, an "of" where an "if" should go, that kind of thing.  Once in a while it comes from the inadvertent posting of a draft and not noticing that till it's too late.  I'm not good at picking that out, editing takes even better eyesight than a full draft, more time, too.  I find spell checking has been a mixed thing, you tend to rely on that red line under words too much while editing.

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Lots of it is the necessity of writing what passes as long-form in blogging due to the topics I deal with. More words and sentences, more opportunities to make mistakes.  If I had the time, believe me, I'd make it tighter though it might get longer, too.

I don't deal much with the friggin' obvious or the common received standard point of view.  I figure so many people do that all the time and they don't seem to make any progress.  When you're telling people why you don't just go along with what dear old Victor Navasky and Hollywood have to say about the endlessly rehashed passion of the show-biz commies because you know that those show-biz commies were, wittingly or dupedly buying into the propaganda or regimes that rival the Nazis, Mussolini, Imperial Japan, etc. in murderous, oppressive evil, it takes time to break through the decades of propaganda that those old commies and those brought up on that tripe tell about it.

On top of that you have to make what passes as a nuanced case that says you despise both sides of that, HUAC and the people around Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn - that there isn't any moral or rational reason you have to choose one side instead of rejecting both.  I do know, it was one of the most memorable moments of my life when I realized I could reject both them and the Stalinists, that I didn't have to, as that moldy old folkie song demanded, choose to be on one side of that or the other.  And it was an even more memorable moment when I realized those two sides weren't that far apart, that what the poor old Stalinists whined was being done to them, their hero was doing far worse to far more people, including writers and actors and directors and playwrights who the Hollywood Stalinists don't seem to have cared about.  Stalinism was only a far more extreme form of 1950s McCarthyism, with many more people executed, NONE of whom were given even a flawed version of due process found in an American style judicial proceeding.   What they got was, in almost every case, better than what they'd have gotten from their hero or the communism they were OK with hundreds of millions of other people getting.

It is stunning how many college educated people in the United States don't understand that you don't  have to buy the phony alternative demanded of choosing one or the other in an issue when both sides stink.  That it stinks to an unacceptable level in the case of HUAC and Roy Cohn or that it stinks in the definitive,  no-question-of-moral-acceptability way of genocidal oppression as in the case of Communism and Nazism.  That is the lunatic deal that American liberals bought into piously and self-righteously choosing to champion those poor put-upon communists whose ideology was a proven guarantee to destroy every single value that liberals used to feel sorry for them and to advocate for communists being able to try to do here what they did in the Soviet Union, China and other places.  It was even stupider of us, on behalf of those commies and such others as porn merchants to get suckered into an interpretation of the First Amendment that would see the ACLU advocating that we must allow Nazis to march in Skokie so they could terrorize Holocaust survivors and others and to recruit others to Nazism.  That event, the pseudo-liberals of the ACLU and on the Supreme Court being OK with the Nazis marching on Skokie might have been my actual tipping point, when my eyes were forced open as to the lunacy of that "which sides are you on" dogma of the "real" left.  You don't have to have good eyes to see that. It's glaringly obvious.

Most important of my recent thinking was understanding that the "left-right" linear diagram of politics we were all taught, with the Nazis on one end and the Communists on the other is a lie.  There is real, egalitarian, equal justice democracy and there is rule by gangsters and the "lefty" gangsters are the same kind of gangsters as the gangsters of the "right".   There is so much that becomes clear when you understand that Stalin was never like egalitarian democratic liberals anymore than Hitler was, they were gangsters at the top of gangster regimes. Absolute monarchs and emperors were and are gangsters too.  Anarchism would inevitably and quickly devolve into gangster rule, something that happens in any neighborhood the police don't police in any city in the world.  Anarchism is one of the stupidest political delusions there are, but that's a somewhat different issue of the stupid "left". It is disturbing how much of that crap is so widely held among our alleged intellectual class among our allegedly educated elite.  It is as if their educations are most effective in distancing them from reality.

Oh, well, blog writing is quick and dirty writing of necessity.   If some billionaire likes my stuff and would like it in more polished form, they could make that happen.  Not that I'm expecting that since I seldom use the word without advocating their non-existence through progressive taxation and laws, laws for economic justice and the protection of democracy from the peril that the too-rich have always posed to it.  The secret of great fortunes is a forgotten crime properly committed. That's the law.  Balzac was right, especially in the floridly corrupt milieu of post-revolutionary France.  The period when Balzac wrote that, the United States was as floridly corrupt.  It's reverting to that now but real democracy would do better than that.

See, one thing leads to another. Can't write short.

Sunday, September 23, 2018

Stupid Mail - I'm Not Interested In Making Scatology A Retirement Career

Between Simps and "General Zod" I've just sent about a dozen stupid rants to the spam file.  I'm still not convinced "Zod" isn't Simps.  Once when I said that Simps told me where "Zod" lives. Something I don't ever remember "Zod" revealing.  If I cared I'd do some comparisons of . . . well, I guess I'll have to say "style" to see what that shows. But I don't care. They're both really stupid guys, even if they're one in the same. 

Anyone Who Still Holds A Candle For Those Dear Old Commies of Yore Is the Equivalent Of Todays Neo-Nazis And They Are Fascist Enabling Idiots

Every time I am required by comments on what I said about the unfortunate effect of Marxism in American leftist politics and culture to look at that history, I come to the conclusion that I've never adequately expressed what a rational, practical and moral disaster that influence has been.  There are few areas in American politics where the Marxists and their sympathizers didn't have a disastrous effect.

And that only began with the fact that anyone who saw the Soviet Union under everyone from Lenin to Gorbachev and the Putin post-Marxist continuation of the gangster governance that that entire history was would know it was nothing any rational American would want.   The list of American Communists, communists, commies, sympathizers who admired the Soviet Union and Communism in its colonies and other states who elected to live in those workers paradises is notably short.  Especially among those who actually went there to be feted in propaganda events, especially those in the arts and show biz and the lit'rary life, it is telling that they, in virtually every case, returned to the hellish United States where they lived that good life far more often.

It is about 85 years past the time that the fabled, celebrated American Communists and other Marxists were seen as being the moral equivalent of the American supporters of Hitler,  I date that from the year when the Communist genocide against the Ukrainian People was first credibly reported in the West.  And that's probably overly generous, reports that turn out to be true as to the murderous oppression that Communism was preceded that date.   If it's any comfort, it would have been as easy for the American right to identify the Nazis as the moral equivalent of the Lenin and Stalin governments in the 1920s and 1930s, up to the beginning of the War, Stalin having come to his idiotic accord with the Nazis to share the spoils of their upcoming invasions and the beginning of their genocide program.

I think the most durable effect of that, other than the idiotic rehashings of the idiotic right-wing use of the idiot commies in masturbatory movies about the Hollywood 10 and their like is the enduring effort of American intellectuals and legal figures and people in the writing trade to expand the First Amendment to prevent commies from being suppressed in their impotent and inevitably stupid attempts to propagandize the American People.   The ACLU, of course, but other groups, especially those based in university and college faculties, in the media and others promoted an interpretation of the First Amendment which, after it was installed by the Supreme Court has proven to be most useful to exactly who any rational person would have known it would, the domestic fascists and Nazis of the United States, the indigenous racists and white supremacists, the wealthy enemies of democracy, equality and equal justice, what has developed into the billionaires whose "free speech" produced Trump.  It opened up opportunities for the Australian-Brit porn merchant to come here to pollute our politics in the way that Rupert Murdoch has done.

That is the most consequential and enduringly damaging delusion of the Marxists and their enablers, that they would be permitted to spout their bull shit by distorting the First Amendment  and The People would buy it and they would shove the dialectic to the right setting on the dial and they could produce the Soviet Union here.  How those idiots thought they were going to compete in the American media set free to not provide even real American liberals equal time to make their case only shows how totally stupid they were.   That the self-regarding, alleged intellectuals believed that they could sell that here is all the proof anyone would need that they are as stupid as they are morally deficient.  They are something to be ashamed of and to learn what not to do from, not heroes.  Seeing them as heroes through the self-generated propaganda of the idiots and feeling sorry for the champions of one of Hitlers competitors in mass murder and oppression is the enduring stupidity and the enduring self-damage that the American left got suckered into.   This American liberal ain't getting suckered by Hollywood and the publishing industry anymore.

This has been yet another response.

Ben Carson Is Mentally Unfit To Link Paper Clips And It Doesn't Take Brain Surgery To Figure That Out

Every time Ben Carson opens his mouth and words come out I am amazed that someone as stupid, nutty and loony and corrupt could have made a career as a brain surgeon. Well, that last one didn't actually surprise me, I'm never surprised to find out that an American physician is a crook and a worshiper of Mammon.  The man is a chapter of a textbook of mental debility and disorder made flesh.

The speech he gave to a bunch of conservative activists the other day blamed the accusation of attempted rape against Brett Kavanaugh on the moribund pseudo-socialist British entity, the Fabian Society, which I've slammed repeatedly over its perversion of socialism as constructed by the sour cream of the Brit class system and its eugenics for being too much like the American Republican Party. 

Since everything I've ever said against the Fabians has been based on cited statements and publications of the Fabians (has ever there been a political entity which so scrupulously documented their every depraved idea) I can say that Ben Carson might have read some right-wing American or Brit rants about their alleged socialism but he obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.

Much of the Fabian literature, dedicated to weeding the deserving sheep from the undeserving goats among the British poor and getting rid of the goats, that weeding being done on the basis of their economic utility to the rich, though on a pretense that an inability to get out of the most desperate poverty is either a sign of moral depravity, likely heritable, or after Karl Pearson introduced them to the idea of genes, genetic.  Some of it is blatantly racist, all of it is a presentation of a fraud of socialism which would leave the British class system in place though with different explanations for its existence. More scientific, don't you know.  Oh, and the sheep don't end up much better than the goats, it's Fabian faith that they are to be harried out of existence, too.

Ben Carson's la-la-land ga-ga governance at HUD should be among the things that Democrats should look at, some of the reported corruption there under him should generate indictments or at least an investigation that considers the possibility of indicting some of the crooks he assembled.  Including members of his own family.

If I had a loved one who Dr. Ben operated on, I'd want an X-ray to make sure he didn't absentmindedly leave something in that shouldn't be there.  It is a shocking thing, seeing him and some of the other GOP medical men in the Senate and Congress just how loony and stupid and corrupt you can be and practice medicine. Two words.   Rand Paul.

Stupid Mail

Simps is so stupid he believes Spiderman is real.  There's a word for a guy in his 70s who believes Spiderman is real, "Trumpian".   There are others, some referring to 12-year-olds but up here any 12-year-old boy who believed Spiderman was real would have been sent to a special school.  Maybe things were different down there in the upper-class suburbs of The City. 

I'm not making this up, you know.  

Update:  Oh, I'm just using Simels' own standards in reporting his claims.  He's the one who presented what he claims to be proof of Spiderman's existence.  That and the way he talked about some lame-assed Super(anti-)hero commic last month is evidence that I'm justified in saying he believes Spiderman is real.  That he was always that stupid is my first conclusion, that he is now is obvious.  Could be senility, could be just that he's a spoiled brat boy like Trump.