Archaic, Cumbrous, and Ineffective

Simps has his pinafore all in a twist because in that short post I knocked off the other day expecting my internet to go out again at any second,  I spelled the word "poll" instead of "pole."   He loves to put on his tireless meter maid of orthography uniform and get out his ticket book as much as he likes to put on his Poldark breeches when PBS is running that bodice ripper again.   He's got an uninteresting fantasy life.  

I'll use the occasion to repost, again, one of the best passages from Thorstein Veblen, from the last pages of his Theory of The Leisure Class:

As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be found, outside of the Far East, is the conventional spelling of the English language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are possessed of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is indispensable to a blameless scholastic life.

Thorstein Veblen 

I just love the language Veblen used when he was being as sarcastic a writer as there has ever been in the history of the English language, even more subtle and sarcastic than Ben Jonson.   I'm tempted to go into Jonson's spelling, not only of his last name which he changed TO NOT CONFORM TO THE COMMON SPELLING OF IT mid-career but spelling by one of the most learned and erudite writers in the history of the language.  But this is a knock-off piece, too.  

I'm a thought criminal.  I have no desire for reputability.  What's reputable in 21st century America and English language kulcha is most likely stupid and sloppy.  I decided to embrace disrepute after years of being told that I can't say the things I say.   You think that's going to make me feel shame?   As opposed to what?   Supporting the most publicly conducted genocide in history?    You've been trying to make me feel ashamed for years and it hasn't worked yet,  it's never going to.   It only risks making me feel smug.   Though I don't even care that much about it. 

It's A Mistake To Let Them Keep Calling It "AI"

something more like "cheap imitation of intelligence" would be more honest.   It's not even the margarine of intelligence it's more like replacing butter with used motor oil.  Intelligence has nothing to do with it.   I think if we survive and recover from "AI" it will serve mostly as a cautionary tale as to how gullible human beings can willfully be out of bad habit.   Turing may have been an incredible genius with numbers but he knew shit all about how complex real intelligence in real, living beings is.   I mean, the genius went to the cops to complain about his boyfriend robbing him in 1950s Britland.   How stupid can someone get?  

So You Figure All We Have To Do Is Go BACK To The Constitutional Order. How Stupid Can You Get? - Hate mail

IT IS ONE OF THE UNDENIABLY CORRUPT aspects of the United States Constitution as drafted by the idiotically idolized framers that the slave-power, the Southern states and their Northern Allies - who were not an inconsiderable part of the slave-power - that the slave-power insisted on counting slaves in apportioning representatives to the House of Representatives even as those slaves would never be represented by the House members elected from those states.   The white-supremacists, the slave-power insisted that, in truth THEY, THE ENSLAVERS, THE WHITE SUPREMACISTS, be given additional representation through that mechanism.  Which is exactly the same thing that the Republican-fascists in Texas and other states trying to gerrymander their Congressional districts before next years mid-terms are trying to do.   Though as I and others have pointed out,  it was one of the consequences of de jure emancipation of slaves that the 3/5ths of stolen representation apportioned on their behalf would be enhanced to a full 5/5ths representation under de facto slavery,  the Jim Crow that reigned for the majority of time after the Civil war.  That corruption was baked into the Senate - apportioning far more representation to low population states to start with and giving all of the Senate representation in the many more states where Black People, Women, etc. were not allowed to vote to the minority of white men.   Even if there was universal suffrage the Senate would carry the taint of inequality through its very definition under the corrupt Constitutional system.   I believe Franklin was the only one of the framers who favored a unicameral legislature,  I wouldn't be surprised if that anti-democratic structuring of the Senate had a lot to do with that.  

Some of the worst of that might have been different in American history if Reconstruction had continued to completion.  Reconstruction was supposed to do for the United States what the more, at least temporarily successful, de-Nazification did in West Germany though far less effective in the Stalinist East Germany and not much in Austria which was idiotically deemed to not need it since they'd been overrun by Germany in the Anschluss    Reconstruction's failure was also a product of the slave-power and their Northern allies in the original Constitutional Convention through the adoption of the totally corrupt Electoral College which led to one of the several corrupt deals under it which had Rutherford Hayes sell out emancipated slaves to get the support of white-supremacist Southerners in Congress by promising to end Reconstruction.   

Among other things relevant to my criticism of the First Amendment and its idiotic, perhaps unintended creation of the notion that there is such a thing as a "right to lie" is the fact that such provisions prevented the United States government from outlawing lynching.   The first federal anti-lynching law was prevented - especially in the slave-empowered Senate - from being adopted until March 7th,  2022 when Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law.    

let me repeat that 

THE FIRST FEDERAL ANTI-LYNCHING LAW WAS PREVENTED FROM BEING ADOPTED UNTIL MARCH 7TH OF 2022! 

I have absolutely no confidence that the Roberts Court or an even more Republican-fascist (you can read "white supremacist" with complete accuracy) packed Supreme Court will knock it down,  either by direct action or through its increasing and cowardly shadow docket practice as one of the Trump-McConnell-Grassley atrocities on the federal bench knocks it down which you know many of them would like to do.  

So, you can see my criticism of the Constitution as the "pro-slavery compact" that the Abolitionist Wendell Phillps truthfully described it has had the most serious of consequences for Black People, other People of Color and the prevention of legitimate government,  egalitarian democracy in the United States.   If he had lived about twelve more years he could have seen the Supreme Court, using the Constitution as an excuse,  enhance the de facto slave-power even more through the Plessey decision.  And that Court was modest in its outrageous white supremacist (you can read that "Republican-fascist" with total accuracy)  partisan,  corruption.  The Roberts Court is now polling as the least trusted Court in the history of polling on that question.   Not that it bothers them,  in their billionaire-millionaire padded and, self-exempted corruption.    It's yet another idiotic aspect of the Constitution that they failed to find any provisions to keep that Court honest - which it hasn't been since 1803 and the Marbury power grab.  

I used to share the fear of a new Constitutional Convention being corrupted by the billionaires and millionaires and their kept media and politicians and lawyers and judges and "justices" making things worse but that fear disappeared with the rise of the Rehnquist (Bush v Gore among others) and the Roberts Court which is imposing those corruptions without any consultation of the Voters being involved.   Charles Pierce isn't wrong in his fear but he's naive if he thinks that's not exactly what we are seeing happening right now,  every week, every day of the week,  hourly, right now.  

On Again Off Again Life

WELL,  I THOUGHT that yesterday they'd replace the telephone poll down the road,  the one which has to be replaced before, MAYBE,  my internet will be reliable to any extent.   A car with a little yellow light was parked there with a big guy with a big beard sitting in it for a quarter of an hour and I thought,  Oh, the poll must be coming.   Well, other than getting all the dogs within earshot of the one that was barking at him going nothing happened.   I needed to get down the road to do a chore so I was going down and the guy was getting out with something in his hand.   

I said, "Are they finally replacing the poll?'

He said,  "I don't know.   Could be today, could be in thirty days.  I'm just here to put these on door knobs."

They were notices saying that the poll had to be replaced and that they'd be doing some excavation to put it in.   I guess they figure we were as unclued into that as the power company apparently has been.   Thing is still held in place by a 4x4 bolted into the two ends, still looking like a stiff wind could blow the whole thing and all the wires down.   The cable guy who came out to look at it told me that it was really dangerous to have it propped up like that.   Like that wasn't obvious, too.   He said he couldn't fix the wires till they replaced the poll.   

And Maine is supposed to have one of the better public utility commissions, or so they tell us.  They're probably going to give the power company that big increase they're asking for to deal with the damage to the system two winters ago.  Ain't capitalism wunnerful!  

You'd think they'd at least send some skinny kid working for them over the summer out to put those knob hangers out instead of some guy who looks like a lineworker.    

Hate Mail 2

I dealt with that a long time ago, too. 

No two groups are discriminated against in exactly the same way, each struggle for equality will have its own aspects peculiar to that group as well as features which are common to all.

Yrs, truely

Note the long exchange I had with Simps back then.  Maybe I should do summer re-runs of some of the more entertaining of those.  

That's A Question So Transparently Dishonest That I Dealt With It Two Decades Ago

THE AFFLUENT WHITE no doubt mostly straight-male answer to the arguments I made on Monday,  "If you don't like what they're saying you don't have to listen to them, "  shows nothing except how safe and secure the affluent-white-straight-males who invented that feel.   They may feel so secure and are rendered so stupid in their leisure that they can't imagine this as anything more than a matter of preference and offense of sensibilities.   They know they have little to nothing to fear from the kind of hate talk I say should be suppressed,  that would be because the ones who have the most to fear would probably be attacked or killed by other straight-white-males who are too cowardly to attack those with more money than they have.   And they know they have little to fear from those who are the focus of those lies.  

I am far more surprised when it is members of groups who are the main focus of lies and hate speech and receive the full measure of violence that comes with those who are as willfully deaf to the insanity of what they're saying.  

Look at that quote from Cornel West, "They have a right to spread their lies."  

TO SPREAD THEIR LIES.   

Even someone as degenerated as the once better West understands that the hate speech is spoken, it doesn't just dissipate in the air to no effect at all but the ideas it transmits take hold and spread,  no doubt being repeated by those it has spread to and spread to even more People.   Next thing you know you've got a lynch mob or a fascist party or a fascist government - which we have had in large numbers in the United States.   I doubt Mississippi, Alabama or any number of states in the USA have ever not had one governing it and many states have seldom had anything but a fascist government - white supremacy having been our indigenous form of fascism before fascism had a name.  The United States was under overt white supremacy up until 1865 and under de facto white supremacy for much of the rest of its history.  The white supremacist faction has always had more than its share of representation in the Congress and has been able to control the presidency through the Electoral College for much of our history.  That is historical fact made legal fact through the majority of the laws passed and enforced.  That the Supreme Court has been even more securely in the hands of white supremacy, AND NEVER MORE SO THAN IN THE ROBERTS COURT is even more evident in the history of its rulings.  They are about to reimpose Jim Crow.   All of that is supported by an ocean of lies and hate talk, all of it spread by the freest of free presses in human history.   The internet which some of us naively believed would be a force for breaking through the lies of corporate media has become a tsunami of lies and hate speech, now automated by "AI."   Still the civil liberties asses bleat their slogans of "free speech" absolutism as it is the vehicle driving us to fascist empowerment. 

It was easy for the affluent, white, straight or passing as it men of the Constitutional Convention and the First Congress to pretend that their second-rate late 18th century poetry of the First Amendment  was sufficient without excluding lying and hate speech under its absurd general protection.   I've said that many times,  that it is as plain as the distinction between good and evil that there can be no such a thing as a right to do what is evil and lying is except in the most exceptional circumstances,  evil to some degree or other.*   These days, as off on the legal professions as I am,  I wouldn't be surprised if those lawyers who drafted both documents understood how professionally and financially profitable their lying had been and they didn't want to include any possibility that their lies might someday be even mildly taken to account.   Though in my experience lawyers are such habitual liars - far more so than cops in my experience - that might not even cross their minds.   I'd always attributed it to Madison's distaste for having to keep that one promise, to push through a Bill of Rights and, so, just coming up with something that sounded good on its surface in the past.   

I have noticed one thing, the last time I slammed an individual for saying that there was a "right to lie" it was the noted civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley.   I attributed her myopic view of the real life consequences of such a dishonest framing of the right to free speech - which should have noted the right to tell the truth but stated there is no right to lie - to her law school training (she's a Dartmouth and Columbia product,  the goddamned Ivys).   Cornel West is an Ivy product too (Harvard Princeton) but not the law schools.  Come to think of it, most of the most influential framers with a university education probably were too.   Members of the groups most impacted by the violence and oppression and murder that comes from the spreading of lies must have to eat a special brand of lotus to blind them to what that should have taught them.   It comes naturally to the affluent, straight, white males who have created the culture of such institutions and professions.   Most such lying is done by them on their own behalf.  

It is less surprising to hear it from an affluent white woman like Nadine Strossen whose identity includes the greatest number of victims of such violence, WOMEN, even white Women, primarily because she's a lawyer and one who has gained her professional and public status through that most morally compromised of idols of liberalism, the ACLU.   And - surprise, surprise,  she's an Ivy product too,  Harvard and among the worst of it,  Harvard Law.  

*  I've dealt with the evasion that claims that then it's evil to lie to the Nazis about where the Jewish children are.   The greater evil of the Nazis - who believed in all kinds of lies of the kind I hold should be totally suppressed, those lies being the basis of their evil - is what makes lying to them a moral imperative, preventing a greater evil.   I would hold that as an emergency exception to the evil of lying in general.  Such as you and the ACLU would use it as an excuse to permit the Nazis to lie themselves back into power wherever they can dupe themselves back into power through their lies.    

The Amorality Of Modernism Eats Everything And Discredits Everything It Touches

I HAVE NOT listened to the three hours plus that this twelve minutes plus have been taken from.  I will say of the three in the discussion,  the former ACLU executive director,  Nadine Strossen,  the former scholar,  Cornel West and Norman Finkelstein I have the most respect for Finkelstein.    I have long disdained Strossen and almost as long had disdain for the parody radicalism of West.   Take these examples:

They have a right to spread their lies.  Cornel West

She [Nadine Strossen] said you have the right to advocate anti-semitism and you have the right to advocate genocide.   Norman Finkelstein summarizing what Strossen said, a summary she doesn't object to.   

ANY ALLEGED SCHOLAR such as Cornel West has been, in academia and in the public sphere, saying that there is such a thing as a "right to lie" THE VERY THING WHICH VIOLATES EVERYTHING THAT THE PROFESSION OF SCHOLARSHIP IS ALLEGED TO EXIST TO UPHOLD, THE DISCERNMENT AND THE PROLIFERATION OF KNOWLEDGE OF THE TRUTH should have their credentials as a scholar pulled.    No one who has made their living as a scholar who can hold that there is any such a thing as "a right to lie" deserves to continue being paid as a scholar, should be employed to be a scholar, should be published as a scholar.*   Cornel West's claim discredits him as any kind of scholar, or it would if the world of scholarship - that would be academia and the academic publishing industry - had any intellectual or moral integrity.   I could go on to ask what it says about his other professional gig as an ordained minister but will leave that to you to fill in.   That a Christian minister could hold that there is such a thing as a "right to lie" is even more outrageous. 

It is one of the more grotesque pretenses of this whole thing,  "the law" but, also,  the modern scholars racket, that we can't discern the difference between lies and the truth,  the advocacy of equality and inequality, the difference between equality based democracy and the most extreme kinds of the opposite of that.  And that, given that pretense of intellectual and moral incapability, that we can't make those distinctions performative in even the most careful of decisions and actions.   That scholars who supposedly spend their professional lives in discerning the most minute of differences and making categorical assignments on that basis get away with pretending the most glaring of real life differences can't only be discerned but held to be definitive in choosing the good over the most evil are some of the biggest fattest liars there are and I would put someone like West in that category, now. 

I am far less shocked that a lawyer like Strossen would claim that there was a "right to advocate genocide" or "anti-semitism" or any other kind of bigotry because of all the allegedly scholarly pursuits,  the study of, theorizing about and profession of practicing "the law" is a profession of practicing and excusing and holding up lying as a professional responsibility like no other.   I have, over the last quarter of a century, ever more been impressed at how much of the legal, the lawyering racket is based in such pretense and willful nonfeasance, not only on the part of lawyers but even more so in the senior branches of the lawyering racket,  the judges and most of all the "justices."   I think the "civil liberties" lawyers are especially dishonest and disgusting, given their claims to moral stature.   I could go into the Premiership of Keir Starmer at this point but I'll try to keep it on this side of the Atlantic. 

I will say that only someone who believes, whether rationally or stupidly that they, their friends their families, their loved ones, those they might have the least comma of any care about has NO CHANCE OF BEING THE FOCUS OF MURDEROUS VIOLENCE AGAINST THEM AS INDIVIDUALS OR AS A GROUP could possibly advocate that there is such a thing as a "right to advocate genocide" or any other kind of racist violence which is guaranteed, once it is believed, once it falls on the ears of someone who is both disposed to take it as encouragement and act on it,  that someone is going to be attacked and likely someone will be killed.   Clearly, Strossen as well as the long line of lawyer-liars of the "civil liberties" industry don't really believe that they and theirs are going to be the recipients of the logical outcome of their pious (in a purely secular sense) professional pose or they would not claim that any such a thing as advocating genocide or forms of bigotry that have and still do lead to violence FOR OTHERS attains the status as "a right."   Though I am fully prepared to believe that the professional (and you can certainly include monetary) interests of such lawyers will blind them to the possibility that they are calling down everything from individual violence to genocide against those they may care about and they'll still do it.    I  don't believe for a second that they really care about the lives and rights of the victims of those whose "rights" to advocate their oppression, violence against them and,  in Strossen's chosen examples, their mass murder at the hands of the state all of which - as in Finkelstein's very real life historical example of an infamous spectacle lynching - proves to be a very, entirely probable possibility of the kind of lying that West and Strossen are advocating.   

I clearly take Finkelstein's reasoning that it is a desecration of the memory of the victims of those who commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, etc.  very seriously.  But it is ever more important than that because such talk has the not only possibility but guarantee that eventually someone, some group, some conspiracy, some region or state or country is going to act out of such lies to repeat that violence, that discrimination, that genocide again and again.   The desecration of the dead takes its most severe form in permitting, encouraging what was done to them to be done to others who are still living,  now and into the future.   Strossen's babble about them being honored by the protection of their killers and those who are inspired by their killers is among the most disgusting things that are current in the blathering, blithering "civic piety" that we are all spoon fed by the perverted notion of civics and, especially by the "civil liberties" industry and the mass media, news but most effectively entertainment which makes billions off of lies and next to nothing off of the rigorous telling of the truth.   

About the only encouraging thing I have read about the "civil liberties" groups is that younger, Women and People of Color, for the most part, are fed up with the old lines that "we must protect Nazis, white supremacists, male supremacists, pornographers, etc. "   

Despite all of the "never again" talk when it comes to the Nazi holocaust the official, required POV in these matters is that "never again" really means ALWAYS AGAIN.   If I'd been on that stage with them,  I'd have said that about both Strossen and West   West's claim that he had an uncle who was lynched in this context - which I am prepared to believe him on - makes his stand especially putrid and discrediting.   If I had had an uncle I had never known who was lynched I certainly would have had the moral integrity to question the received conventional POV on the falsely claimed "right" of those who incited and led the lynch mob to say what they did  to encourage his terror-murder,  every syllable of their lies and accusations and mere racist incitements,  everywhere up to and including, perhaps, them actually putting hands on my uncle to kill him.   It might do to claim that while sitting on your ass at your writing table or computer station as you coolly are in absolutely no danger yourself,  anticipating how you will gain esteem by your postmortem burning of your uncle on the secular altar of the First Amendment,  to me it just makes me think you are detestable.    Though no less detestable than a "civil liberties" lawyer who doesn't even have that much ancestral skin in the game. 

*  Reading this through again, it occurs to me that if Cornel West thinks there's a right to lie in regard to inciting genocide and anti-semitism and, indeed, in the example he claims, inciting a lynching,  I wonder if he holds there is a right to lie in the impotent, dusty, generally useless and irrelevant to anyone outside their often very obscure specialties, ream of scholarship.   How can a right that he holds so dear when it gets People killed disappear when it's something as trivial as most "scholarship" is?   Though I'll bet he'd never admit that such a "right to lie" in that one context, exists. 

The Best And Brightest Of The Ivy Law Schools Gave Us The Stupidest, Most Criminal, Most Vulgar, Most Clearly Demented Despot And Are Enabling Him Right Now

IN READING THE SEVERAL posts RMJ posted about just this weekends' manifestations of Trump's floridly senile and demented statements about him achieving percentages in the thousands of reductions in the price of drugs - an achievement which not only never happened but would mean that the drug companies would have to be paying patients back handsomely for buying their drugs - it makes me ask a question I have not heard asked at all.

ARE JOHN ROBERTS AND THE OTHER SUPREME COURT 'justices' WHO HAVE MADE THE UNITARY EXECUTIVE, FASCIST INTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY "LAW" PROUD OF WHAT THEY HAVE, BY A VOTE OF SIX SINGLE PEOPLE TO THREE BROUGHT THE UNITED STATES TO?

This,  this very real, very actual, entirely non-Ivy League Law faculty theoretical TRUMP is the embodiment of what they think is desirable for the United States of America to be governed by.  THIS follows on to the Bush II,  not even smart, though criminal, daddy Bush,  "H.W." BUT  the idiot son "W" Bush who was a cautionary example of what the unitary executive theory could bring in the very lifetimes of those six "justices" ALL OF THEM PRODUCTS OF ELITE LAW SCHOOL EDUCATIONS, ALL OF THEM MEMBERS OF THE LAWERLY (liarly) ELITES,  his diasterous presidency - I WILL REMIND YOU BROUGHT TO US BY REHNQUIST COURT FIAT -  to have cautioned them as to the very real life consequences of their elite-entirely anti-democratic, entirely financially self-interested legal, constitutional theory for those in real life who don't get to live "safe in their alabaster chambers, untouched by morning and untouched by noon."   

Though I doubt ol' Emily Dickinson realized she was describing late 20th century, early 21st century Ivy League law faculty and their spawn who would be put into that ultimate alabaster chamber,  the goddamned supreme Court.   Though, considering her lawyer politician-father's relationship with those who took a dim view of how Harvard (see the intentions of those who founded Amherst College)  was developing, even then, maybe she did have some such idea.   

Only Roberts' clique has no intention of their Doge surrendering, they really believe he is going to do everything from making their familiy's extraction industry fortune safe from environmental action (Coney-Barrett, among others)* to keeping "People Unlike Us" (People of Color, etc.) out of their alma maters and professions and clubs and out of the voting booth and out of Congress (all of them clearly have that goal.  John Roberts can stand as the Taney of this racist court, and I include that poison well of pathology,  Thomas in that).   They are well on their way to reinstituting de facto Jim Crow with all of its necessary violence of enforcement. 

They really have been prepared to not only intentionally pave the way for the stupidest, most criminal, most vulgar, most corrupt man to have ever held the presidency (even more so than the one who appointed Alito and Roberts) to rule as an absolute dictator,  they are doing their best to try to enable his idiocracy, his gangster governance even as they try, in the most modest of ways, to cover their own judicial asses as they do it. 

John Roberts et al are the most corrupt of the already very corrupt Courts since the one chiefed by John Marshall - a man who never found a slave to side for in the many cases that massive slave holder ruled in and who grabbed the unconstitutional Marbury power for the court.   John Roberts has gone farther than Taney or those who started destroying and distorting the 14th and other Civil War Amendments to work for the newly empowered successor of the slave-power allegedly defeated in the Civil War and against which those Amendments were adopted.  He is the most corrupt, most criminally intending Chief Justice in the history of the country and his fellow five are as worthy of removal and prosecution for their crimes against equality and democracy and even the inadequate and fatally flawed liberal democracy that was set up by the Constitution and the early revolutions of Jefferson and Jackson.   I have a theory of the history of my country that literally everything good about us has been in opposition to the Constitutional order as originally set up and as it has been distorted by the Supreme Court and the corrupt powers in the other branches.  The abolition movement, the Women's rights movement, the struggle for equality, the struggle against wage-slavery and oligarchy, etc. have all been struggles against the Constitution and the law as it was set up and as it developed in each and every case.    The Supreme Court, presented in amber-tinted, soft-focused sentimentality in the American media and academia is and always has been the primary engine of anti-equality, anti-democracy, pro-oligarcy in our country and our history.   It has been the forces of "Constitutionalism" which constitute the worst of our history.   Though they won't tell you that in your education as a "Constitutional scholar."  

Either the United States will adopt a different Constitution, one which will, among other things, strip the usurped Marbury power and the even more appalling add-ons made by academic law school fascists** or the United States will possibly devolve into one of three things.  The oligarchic fascism they clearly favor (no doubt with "the vote" of white racists propagandized by our "free speech absolutist" lying media), an even worse fascism which those soft-handed, soft-brained "justices" believe couldn't happen here, or the United States will split into two or more entities,  I think there are regions and states which will eventually conclude that they can't tolerate the Constitutional order as it has become in reality.  If there will be a civil war, this time waged by the slave-power states (which now include many even in the upper-mid-west and Rocky Mountain states) against those who favor equality and democracy, God only knows.   

I used to fantasize about the possibility of Canada taking Maine, my state,  in though I would caution Canada against doing that without the strongest of grantees that U.S. habits of thinking wouldn't prevail in any part of the old US that wanted in on a more modern Constitution in a country which still aspires to egalitarian democracy.   The greatest disincentive of that on the part of Mainers,  that it would probably forfeit the Social Security of those in the state who paid into it, the Republican-fascists seem to be about to remove as they destroy Social Security - another thing the Roberts six are perfectly OK with.   If Mainers didn't have that keeping them from it,  I think only the really hard cases would oppose that.  But, of course, all that is only a fantasy.   I can tell the difference, Roberts,  Coney-Barrett et al seem to have been educated out of being able to discern that kind of thing.   The Ivys and their equivalent can do that to you.  

*  Though I have absolutely no doubt that the racism, sexism, dislike of freedom of choice in abortion and contraception,  class hatred of the six fascist "justices" are a strong motivation YOU CAN BE CERTAIN THAT THEIR PRIMARY MOTIVATION IS THE PROTECTION OF THEIR PERSONAL AND FAMILY MONEY AND THAT OF THEIR UPPER CLASS.   That, alone, explains pretty much about 19 twentieths of the history of the Supreme Court in action.  

Though, thinking this out and writing it makes me realize that we need a word to describe Clarence Thomas's clear and serially demonstrated hatred of Black People, "racist" doesn't cover it.   I don't think there has been a "justice" since the 19th century who has more clearly demonstrated his hatred of Black People than that ocean of pathology.  

**  Those currently at Harvard, alone, are a ship of lunatics who are often fools of the worst kind, and that's ONLY HARVARD!  Many of them are the most lunatic are "trad-catholic" theocrats of the most insane variety.   I was working on a post about that, too, but the iffy internet here is delaying that post. 

Answer To A Lying Piece Of Hate Mail

 

The ICEtapo Is Fascism Here And Now And Not Stopped By The Goddamned Bill Of Rights

 

ICEstapo arresting a Native American, slamming her head on the ground and when they give their excuse (probably because they found out she was Native American an not Latina) saying she was "twerking illegally."   And that's only the start of this short list of Republican-fascist secret-police crimes documented by Meidas Touch that American law, the Constitution, the goddamned Bill of Rights isn't stopping them from doing under the Roberts' Republican-fascist Court and the lower courts and Trump II Do"J" defiance of what courts might order to stop such crap.

Remember all of this the next time someone scolds you for pointing out that fascism is here and now as it has always been here and now for People of Color.   Just watch,  Trump is going to pardon the cold blooded cop murderer Derrick Chauvin, probably using his pardon of Diddy as a cover.  You just know Trump wants the cops murdering People of Color as does, clearly, the Republican Party and the American free press which will cover for him.  

If by some miracle Democrats regain power we have to make sure that they don't chicken out of addressing this like Obama and the Do"J" under Merrick Garland did and the Democratic Caucus leadership did when they had the chance to really deNazify the system.   As I mentioned that is my biggest nightmare, that Democrats will get the same kind of chance Obama got in 2009 and they will blow it like he did. 

Hate Mail

SOMEONE WHO OBJECTS to one of the things I recently posted about Israel's genocide in Gaza has asked me:

Free Palestinians in the West Bank and (now) Gaza from Israeli occupation and so-called leaders who are either genocidal terrorists or corrupt AF? 

You have got to be kidding me.  That would be opposed to the current Israeli occupation and genocide and Lebensraum and - I suppose I have to get used to the repugnant phrase now being standard "ethnic cleansing" - by the Likude and other Israeli-fascist coalition under the longest "serving" Israeli PM WHO HAS FOR YEARS BEEN AVOIDING CRIMINAL TRIAL FOR CORRUPTION IN ISRAEL THROUGH WAGING WAR AGAINST PALESTINIANS AND OTHERS, PROVOKING WARS FOR THE UNITED STATES AND OTHERS TO FIGHT WITH IRAQ AND NOW IRAN, ETC.   And those domestic crimes pale in significance to his and other members of his governments actual present criminal indictments in international court for crimes against humanity, war crimes, many more indictments that should be brought against many more Israeli politicians, terrorists encouraged by the government, "settlers," the Israeli military and terrorist-intelligence services, etc.  NONE OF WHICH IS DONE ON BEHALF OF EVEN THOSE PALESTINIANS WHO ARE ISRAELI 'CITIZENS.' OF A SORT, THAT IS UNTIL THEIR HOMES ARE DESTROYED AND APPROPRIATED EITHER "LEGALLY" BY THE OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT OR THROUGH MURDER AND TERROR BY THE "SETTLERS" WHO FORM A SIGNIFICANT PART OF THE SUPPORT OF THE PRESENT GOVERNMENT,. . .  I could go on. 

I've got a question for you.  Two, in fact.  Given the genocide in Gaza, the terrorism, murder and theft of property, driving the survivors out in the West Bank, WOULDN'T PALESTINIANS  HAVE TO BE BE INSANE TO NOT PREFER THEIR OWN DESPOTS WHO WOULD, AT LEAST,  NOT DO THAT TO THEM OVER ISRAEL'S ETHNO-DEMOCRACY WHICH PERMITS THAT AND, IN FACT, HAS HAD IT AS POLICY FOR PRETTY MUCH ITS ENTIRE EXISTENCE?   Wouldn't any non-Palestinian who sees the status quo you prefer be guilty of choosing genocide for them out of some "principle" that they would never, ever, choose for themselves or their loved ones to be subjected to?   

If I supported that I'd be the equivalent of an American supporter of any other criminal regime who has done that during my lifetime or in history - and I include many a state government and the federal government of the United States, in history and during my lifetime in that statement.   I will not be that kind of a person or "democrat."  

To elaborate, considering all the above and your statement that opposes any Palestinian state,  no doubt ready to see the status quo stand till the last Palestinian is either expelled, forced out or murdered,  do you ever listen to yourself?   The most charitable interpretation of your own definition of the issues involved in the matter of Israel was that its establishment was a massive mistake that ignored every aspect of the predictable* consequences that you, yourself, admit constitutes the status quo.   And you don't have to get to anything like the worst-case scenario that Zionists, those who went to Israel, those who have merely visited as tourists, those many, many who have never been there and have no intention of putting their own asses on the line to maintain the situation, ARE ENTIRELY IN FAVOR OF EVERY CRIME COMMITTED TO PRODUCE THAT STATUS QUO.   And I am fully prepared to believe that the large majority of those Zionists are not Jewish at all but are gentiles, INCLUDING MANY SUCH AS THE "CHRISTIAN-EVANGELICAL-ZIONISTS" WHO ARE CLASSIC ANTI-SEMITES**.

I am a person who believes that Nazism and any ideology which has a history of genocidal violence not only should be, in fact, totally suppressed but so  removed from the possibility of having any role in the human future.   I believe its suppression is a moral imperative and any legal theories or system which permits its perpetuation and chance of succeeding, again, into the future is a clearly and insanely illegitimate and criminal legal theory.   I hold that American style "civil liberties" that holds Nazism is to always have that chance into the future is criminally negligent.  It is, on its face,  insane to allow Nazism any possible chance to do what it holds as its basis of existence ever again out of some daffy notion of equality among ideologies.   I hold the same about many other ideologies with a similar history,  such as the white supremacy, America's indigenous form of fascism which still stains the United States, its Constitution, its legal system and our history from the start and till today.   Its permission out of "civil liberties" is directly responsible for its current resurgence to control our present and future.  For that I loathe the "civil liberties" industry.    I certainly hold the same view of Zionism is as valid as my stand that Nazism should be vigorously, legally suppressed.   I find it impossible to ignore the reality of those who ignore the most public genocide in human history,  matching those by the various governments in the former Yugoslavia and topping them, demanding that Western governments support it and succeeding in that.   I resent Israel for drawing my country into its own crimes,  I especially resent it for drawing my political party and the man who would have stood as the best U.S. President since Lyndon Johnson into supporting it.  

Argue against those arguments on an honest and rational basis and I might,  I MIGHT post your comment.  

*  That is literally predictable in that those consequences of the establishment of a modern Israeli state on Palestine were predicted decades before Israel was declared a state.

**  I have, for the past number of years, adopted the non-hyphenated spelling that Deborah Lipstadt insisted on out of my former respect for her.    Given her involvement in the IHRA coercive and dishonest defining of entirely normal kinds of criticism of the criminal state of Israel as "anti-semitism" and coercing governments and institutions around the world to adopt that dishonest and I now hold criminal cover up to use as a weapon against those legitimate critics,  any respect that shielded her against a normal level of criticism of an academic who has been part of that is gone,  gone to the extent that I have reviewed the criticism of her academic work that Norman Finkelstein has made of it and think much of his criticism is valid.   Given that, I'm reluctant to follow her spelling advice.    Given her academic specialty, it is remarkable to me that she can support a genocide happening in public, gleefully videoed and published immediately online by the genocidalists who are far more public in their genocide than almost any in the past.   She has forfeited any respect I may have once had for her largely due, I will admit it, to her exposure of David Irving.  

I Never Get Tired Of The Whining Of The FAFO Crybabies Here's an Alabama Contractor Who's Getting What He Wanted Done To Others Being Done To Him

 

Surprised To Still Be Here For What Is It, About Eighteen Hours?

THANKS TO THE TEMPORARY fix the commission pampered electric monopoly here has made to the phone pole down the road, the one that got wrecked a week ago, I can still go online.   I told my sister that they'd fix it on the hottest day of the year so I couldn't use a fan for the day, apparently that hasn't come yet.   Maybe today? 

I will start again on the long post I had going, an answer to someone who didn't like me dissing liberal democracy which,  I hold, is a form of government only lesser as the rule of gangsterism than the fascism our liberal democracy is devolving into - as so many another liberal democracy is or has so devolved.  Maybe I'll get to post it this time. 

One I'm researching right now but finding it hard - one that tries to track the links between Epstein-Maxwell and the new atheist fad among the high and sciency in the 00s and beyond - is in the works.  Among other things I found was a quote by Epstein that said all he was interested in was "Science and pussy."   No doubt that's one of the things that led him and Maxwell to finance that hotbed of the new atheist fad the "Scienceblogs."  But that was small potatoes compared to the many, many scientists, some of the biggest names in science, who had both a financial and social relationship to the leading socialites of straight (so far as we know so far) pedophile pandering and rape.   The scientists, science departments and major private universities (I haven't seen much in the way of land-grant schools named as being part of it) intersects broadly with the big names of organized atheism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.   I'm finding it hard to research because I suspect what has been published so far is the tip of the same frozen shitberg of the Epstein-Maxwell pedophile client list of those in politics, the law and other areas of interest.   Considering how many scientists Epstein-Maxwell (they worked as a tag team of kidnapping and trafficking children and should ALWAYS be joined when that topic is discussed) threw parties for, partied with, flew to the locations where he supplied children to be raped I suspect the Venn diagram would show that intersection with the new atheist fad to be even more considerable than the one that intersects Harvard-Yale, etc. Law grad and those who Epstein-Maxwell supplied, very probably videotaped committing moral atrocities and crimes and very likely profited from blackmailing or selling their info to those who would then blackmail them.  

I say publish it all, anyone who partied with that pair should be exposed and, at this point, let them prove their association with them was innocent.   I'm tired of the Napoleonic rules for the least among us while the "innocent till not only proven guilty  then pardoned by Epstein-Maxwell's best buddy" for the rest of them,  you know, the ones who get big name lawyers (including those in the E-M orbit) to get them sweetheart deals.   From now on, as far as I'm concerned, the biggest and brightest stars get to prove their innocence,  Republican-fascist, merely Republican (corrupt) or those with a "D" after their names.  At this point there have been so many likely entirely innocent Democrats named by the fascists that it is a disservice to the truly innocent to not publish ALL OF THE EVIDENCE.   What are they going to do?   Bring those prosecutions that they, so far, have not?   Including for the four years that Harvard product Merrick Garland had to do what he so obviously was loathe to do,  go after the rich and powerful.   

Publish it so the innocent won't be further slandered.   I will point out what I pointed out the week before last, WHAT EVER IS ALLOWED TO HAPPEN UNDER THE BILL OF RIGHTS, THE U.S. CONSTITUTION IS WHAT IS REALLY CONSTITUTIONAL, and a lot of it is utterly corrupt and entirely unequal, profiting the rich, the white the male and the connected,  you know, the same ones who run the big name universities and law schools.   The founding father types. 

Surprised I'm Not Being Accused Of Celebrating Tom Lehrer's Death

USUALLY WHEN A TOM LEHRER,  or a list of many others is mentioned anywhere the usual jackass lies to say that I dissed them when I never did.   That said, I heard what Lehrer had to say before 1975, found it funny and didn't much need to hear it again after that, something apparently he and I agreed on because it was about that time he stopped working in music, writing his wittily cynical songs and performing them very well.  That's the thing about a joke, you hear it once or a few times then its store of substance is gone for you.   I can respect someone whose well of inspiration lasts through a very long life and I especially can respect someone whose well runs out AND THEY STOP GOING TO THE SAME TEAT THAT ONCE GAVE GOOD MILK BUT WHICH HAS DRIED UP.   I recalled reading him answering someone on that point and it was, typically, witty and wise.

If an idea came to me, I'd write, and if it didn't I wouldn't—and, gradually, the second option prevailed over the first. Occasionally people ask 'If you enjoyed it'—and I did—'why don't you do it again?' I reply, 'I enjoyed high school but I certainly wouldn't want to do that again.

Considering the guy who generally takes these occasions to lie about what I said and the milieu in which he says it - frequenting the Baby Blue Blog like so many others is like perpetually sentencing yourself to the nightmare of repeating jr. high - I'll let Mr. Lehrer have that last word put so perfectly.   

He died at 97,  I read, most likely of something like natural causes.  THAT isn't a tragedy.   Marvin Gaye being shot to death by his deranged father when he was far less than half that age,  THAT'S A TRAGEDY.  

UPDATE:  Stupy posted a comment I'm tempted to post containing exactly the kind of lie about what I say above to prove what I was talking about.   I can only imagine what Lehrer would make of him, he pinned down so many specimens of the failure of American education and kulcha.  One of the things he said was that he detested the kulcha and anti-intellectual aspects of the 60s era "counter culture,"  what I call "kulcha,"  which he said contributed to his abandonment of his career in musical satire.   The post-literate, post-truth Stupy is a prime example of that. 

The Roberts Court And The Media Will Be All In With The Trump Deal With Ghislaine Maxwell

as is the entire Republican-fascist caucus in the House and many in the Senate, and the entire Republican-fascist party who have not only NOT rejected Trump but HAVE NOT pulled him down from the presidency and exposed his pedophile crimes with his former best boy friend, Jeffrey Epstein.   I wonder if Ghislaine Maxwell was in on a threesome of  Trump, Maxwell, Epstein raping a minor.   Is there a video of it?  I wouldn't bet against there being one WHICH SHE HAS A COPY OF. 

We are on the verge of watching American Satyricon enter into a whole new phase with the Roberts Court, Mike "KKKristian" Johnson, white-evangelicals, "trad-Catholics" etc. all in on it this time.   Ghislaine Maxwell is going to tell Trump authored lies in exchange for a pardon from him, a degenerate who is certainly making a deal to suppress information as to his own felonies in raping children. 

We need a number of Constitutional amendments, one of those is a drastic revision of the idiotically broad presidential pardon powers our idiot - and likely as criminal- founders put in that disaster ridden document.  

I Won't Go Into Details But

an accidental event has kept me off-line since early Wednesday or so.  Not a health issue or fire or anything like that.  Corporate indulgence by the courts and regulators is part of it,  we got better service from our electric company seventy years ago back when the grid here was hardly a grid and it was probably run on phone calls and handwritten messages and the service was far cheaper than now.  Quite literally, that has everything to do with it.   

I will probably be posting lightly if at all for a few days to come.   

Someone Took Exception To My Comment About The Role Comedians Have Played In Getting Us Trump II

I ADMIT that I have found some of what Stephen Colbert has done on his late night show very funny,  especially the Stormy Watch segments and his imitation of Trump I's short term communications director, Anthony Scaramucci.   But I can't forgive him his "old Joe Biden" shtick in which he joined in the media sandbagging of Biden on his age.   If it hadn't helped bring about Trump II,  I may never have brought it up but it didn't help.  I long ago figured out that being a comedian usually meant you'd say anything to get the next laugh and it's one of the reasons I don't find professional comedians to generally be worth listening to, anymore.   

Getting flack for me making that comment reminded me of something Barney Frank said almost eleven years ago.

Q: If the press were so influential, wouldn’t Paul Tsongas have been elected president in 1992?

A: The press is very different today. It’s a major contributing factor to pro-right-wing, anti-government feeling. Because even the liberal press is anti-government. Ever watched Jon Stewart say anything good about government?

Q: He’s part of the problem?

A: Him and others. The effect is to tell people it doesn’t make any difference who they vote for. I differentiate Bill Maher from Jon Stewart. Maher’s very funny, but also has good and bad guys on the show. You say, “Oh, I agree more with this side than that side.” You come away from Stewart and especially [Stephen] Colbert, and say, “Oh, they’re all assholes.”

The only part of that I'd disagree with is what he said about Maher late in 2014, I have never once in my life found Bill Maher to be funny or smart or anything but a total asshole.   I will note that Jon Stewart has been playing a far different character this past year on his comeback to his old network, not unlike the one Gavin Newsome has taken in his bizarrely Obama-like desire to win friends among the Republican-fascists when if there's one thing we know,  that'll never work.  I don't know if Stephen Colbert will try a similar tack after he leaves CBS but I now wonder if like so many a show-biz liberal if he's just playing another role he doesn't really have a firm commitment to.   

If I had the time I could go over a list of alleged comedy liberals and other show-biz figures of the past who turned into right-wing assholes, like Mort Sahl did in a really big way.   I think Frank's point, though, extends to any of them who promoted a cynical view of life, in general, such as one of the most over-rated of them of all,  George Carlin.   In that I think we can see a good part of the difference between liberalism that is merely a form of libertarianism and the far less common, now, liberalism that is an expression of religious morality,  especially the Golden Rule but, in its most extreme forms, the rest of the program of Christian morality,  extreme generosity to the least among us,  acting out of equality as a religious moral requirement,  even loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us and even refusing revenge when being the victims of violence.   

Of course a lot of the most ideal form of that is generally unworkable in the context of politics and the governance of a community or a country - those who do violence have to be stopped - but it then has to take the form of humane treatment of prisoners.   Ironically, enough, some of the greatest fuel for the engine of cynicism is the government, especially in the form of the courts and prosecutors doing exactly that when dealing with the richest, whitest, malest of violent criminals and crooks - Trump has been among the foremost beneficiaries of the secular-legal adoption of that unworkable ideal on behalf of the richest and most powerful of criminals.   And that has fed liberal cynicism which is then wasted on the impotence of comedy which has notably not kept any despot from power to my knowledge.   Was there anyone who disproves that more decisively than that focus of oceans of jokes and comedy gags, Trump?  

I think Barney Frank was right about that, I think the unwillingness of comedians working in show biz or the networks to finally, firmly and unceasingly take the side of egalitarian democracy over the powerful, the rich, the white, the male, the privileged and to not play the evenhandedness game - Colbert announced on Biden's win that he would treat him like he treated Trump,  I heard him say that as a gag to his roaring audience approval on his show - that most basic aspect of a financially successful career in show biz, getting paid the big bucks, means that they really aren't worth much.   They might do a fundraiser here and there but they aren't worth much unless they're ready to take a hit for the truth, the values of egalitarian democracy.    I wonder what Frank would say about Maher now.  

Keith Olbermann's hostility to Colbert and his take on what he thinks is the real reason he was canceled and the way that CBS chose to do it is extremely interesting.   He compares it to the real reason MSNBC cancelled that other dubious liberal hero  Phil Donohue,  which he attributed to the high cost of his show format as compared to the money it made for the network and the rapid diminution of the once large late-night TV audience.   I will admit that the clip he plays of himself with Carlin annoyed me as Carlin always did annoy me.   There's no accounting for different taste in comedy and I can respectfully disagree on that without losing respect for someone.    Unlike some of my trolls,  I'm not 12. 

Retort to the eternal tween, the perpetually pubescent. 

Actually,  I was 12 when I was 9 but then I got over it. 

As Usual Brian Tyler Cohen Gets It - Republicans Run The Greatest Snake Oil Show In U.S. History To Sucker Low Info Voters

 

If The Department Of Justice Had That Trump Birthday Card To Epstein Why Wasn't It Made Public

during the four years that Merrick Garland was the Attorney General Of The United States?   The four years when the Garland "Justice Department" didn't bring charges against any of the child rapists or associated pimps involved in the Jeffrey Epstein crime spree that lasted for decades in plain sight of the rich and powerful BECAUSE MANY OF THE THE RICH AND POWERFUL WERE ALL IN ON JEFFREY EPSTEIN CRIME SPREE OF CHILD TRAFFICKING AND RAPING AND,  ALMOST CERTAINLY, BLACKMAILING THE RICH AND POWERFUL MEN WHO RAPED THEM ON THE VIDEOS HE CLEARLY COLLECTED.   They flew on his jet, the "Lolita express,"* they joked about his sexual escapades,  certainly we know that that was all known to law enforcement after the first legal action, finally, at long last taken against him what with the sweetheart deal that the corrupt Florida-Harvard product Alexander Acosta made with him which his pimpess Ghislane Maxwell may well get the Roberts Court to spring her from the insufficient 20 year sentence she got when she was tried for her crimes.   In the reports breaking today,  it is often pointed out that the current AG the Florida figure Pam Bondi certainly knows much if not all of the evidence,  the same was certainly true of the previous Trump AG William Barr under whom and almost contemporaneously with a visit to him with Epstein in prison and Epstein's supposed suicide in prison.   We know that Barr had a long connection to Epstein because his father gave Epstein his first big job "teaching" math and physics at the elite prep school Barr's father was the head of,  a job given to a young man who didn't have a bachelors degree for a position that generally requires those who get them have a graduate degree,  not atypically a PhD in the relevant subject.  

My question or why, since the Department of "Justice" had this evidence for the four years Garland was the Attorney General didn't he make it public and end Trump's crime spree AND HIS CONTINUAL CAMPAIGN TO MAKE THE COMEBACK HE CERTAINLY HAS SUCCEEDED IN and saving the United States, the many victims in the United States, those across the world who are already dying due to the actions of those in the Trump II regime will, certainly,  have an answer that includes "rules." "Rules" of how to handle evidence, "rules" of lawyerly scrupulosity,  all kinds of rules cooked up by lawyers and groups of lawyers and maybe a few by the senior members of that sleazy profession, the judges and maybe even "justices" that may have led to Garland or other lawyers suffering professional rebuke or damage - the kind of damage that politicians of any legitimate repute are expected to take to do the right thing in their profession.    If there's one thing we know about Garland and many of the lawyers in those positions they care about nothing more than their professions and their careers and their professional and, so, social positions.   

Garland had chance after chance to take down Trump and he dithered and delayed until he finally appointed someone else to do it far too late for that to work.    I won't go into the help he had in making sure Trump got away with the greatest crimes of the thousands he'd committed up till that time -IN ORDER THAT HE NOT HAVE THE CHANCE TO COMMIT THE CRIMES HE IS COMMITTING RIGHT NOW AS PRESIDENT - that help given him by the "rules" he and his gangster lawyers have manipulated Trump's entire life to get him off of answering for his crimes and the many instances of him robbing contractors and others,  of colluding with organized criminals here and from the Putin regime, laundering money for them, etc.   Many of the greatest enablers of Donald Trump, in his life of crime and cheating, in his first chance as president, after leading an insurrection to destroy American democracy and his successfully getting another chance to do it again have been judges and, especially, the "justices" of the goddamned Roberts Court - lawyers all, all "officers of the courts" all of them allegedly in the business of "justice."   

American democracy, the victims of the Trump II crime wave have been more ill served by the lawyers, the legal profession, the great fraternity of the law than they have any foreign adversary.   We have all been a victim of the "rules" that are used by an excuse by those professional ass-coverers and cowards with LL.D or JD after their names.    They have, with almost no exceptions, been careerist cowards when they aren't actual colluders in the the crimes of Trump,  just as the infamous and powerful Roy Cohn was,  the man who taught Trump all about evading responsibility for crimes and civil wrongs through using the rules and the courts (judges scheduling light work days for themselves, for example) - the only thing that Trump has ever actually mastered.   His crimes and wrongs have been known to his lawyers and the judges who have dealt with the evidence of those for more than half a century.   They have never held him to real account for them.  

I have no doubt that virtually any lawyer who is currently a member of the Republican Party,  the fully fascist party which isn't the merely corrupt party of their fathers and grandfathers, will never do anything to save American democracy, something I had long ago figured out.  If I'd had any notion that there was even one of those who were the brave and stalwart figures of public virtue the activities of Robert Mueller and the accommodation he gave to his good friend William Barr when Barr misrepresented and suppressed his report on his investigation into the crimes of Trump would have killed that off.   

Before the term of Merrick Garland I may have expected that non-Republicans might have put themselves slightly at risk to save the country,  I don't think that anymore.   I don't expect it of any lawyer,  these days the scruples and adherence to "the rules" by Democrats with law degrees in the Congress and as president give me nightmares that if, by some miracle, Democrats are in a position to save American democracy that their legal training and adherence to Garland style scruples will lead them to, like Obama, like, I am sorry to say,  Joe Biden, waste the opportunity that the American voters gave them.    I will say that I think it was Biden's principled adherence to not getting involved with the so-called Department of Justice, to not interfere with them that leads me to think there is a good chance that he had far, far less knowledge of the evidence in the Epstein case than the man he sentimentally appointed to be Attorney General did.  If there is something I fault Biden for it was him giving the man Obama nominated to the Supreme Court and who the Republican-fascists wouldn't even talk to as they prevented the Black President from practicing the full extent of his granted powers the consolation prize of being Attorney General.   Garland was Biden's worst appointment and it couldn't have been more disastrously consequential for the country.  But he isn't alone in that,  it's a long, long lifetime ago that a Democrat appointed a really good Attorney General, and I'm not talking about Bobby Kennedy or Janet Reno. 

I may have confused a few people here the other day when I alluded to my contempt for the legal profession.   I hope I've explained that in a bit more detail,  this rant could have gone on a lot longer.  America's lawyers have done some of the greatest damage to this country,  especially those on Supreme Courts, in the Congress and as president.   It's a sleazy, rotten profession that exists primarily to make money from the deepest pockets, those like Trump and Epstein, and I think that corruption accounts for some of the greatest damage to the American People in our history.   It's certainly the case, today. 

Since we can see how far the Roberts Court has gone in enabling and servicing the power grab and crime spree of Trump II, on behalf of the stupidest, most incompetent and corrupt vulgarian who has ever held the office of president (we do live in history making times) imagine what they'll do for J.D. Vance once he has assumed office to give Trump the pardon he has, certainly, already negotiated with him for, just as Nixon certainly negotiated with Gerald Ford for.   Maybe Vance will expect to be given the Kennedy,  the 'Profiles in Courage" prize that Teddy and Caroline Kennedy gave Ford for doing one of the most damaging things ever to be done to the rule of law in the United States, pardoning Nixon half a century ago.   Both of the Kennedys were lawyers, Harvard products,  though Caroline got her LL.D. from another of the Ivys,  Columbia. 

P.S.  I should note that the piece of shit who is about to get a position on one of the Courts of Appeal,  Emil Bove, is a product of that Ivy Equivalent run by Jesuits,  Georgetown.  Another great example of the morality imparted by Catholic elite education. 

*  It should have been called the Humbert Express because that's who it mostly carried,  old men who raped young girls.   It should never be forgotten in this that the girls were not "Lolitas" the middle age male fantasy of a young teenage girl who has an uncontrollable desire to have sex with men old enough to be her grandfather.  The girls were gulled into a place of total powerlessness and raped by Epstein and Maxwell (it is reported that she participated in the actual sexual abuse with Epstein)  groomed to be trafficked by them to the disgusting old goats who raped them.   I have always held that that book by Nabokov was disgusting fiction, promoting child rape and the alibi of the men who rape them,  that they were seductresses who were in control of the situation.    It was exactly the same fiction, inverted, that Gore Vidal gave as an excuse for the pedophile priests who began to be exposed at the end of the his long and largely fictitious life.  He said that the boys who were raped were "young hustlers" and he, out of all of his irreligious character, claimed the rapist priests were their victims.   

If there were rapist victims in this,  they were those who Epstein and Maxwell almost certainly videotaped committing felonies and then blackmailed,  some of those named by those who have seen the evidence powerful figures in politics and finance - it is speculated that Epstein and Maxwell may well have made money peddling what they had to foreign and maybe U.S. intelligence services who certainly would use it to make those powerful men do what they wanted.   So Epstein and Maxwell may have had a hand in the corruption of governments in that manner.   Such elite victims are in positions to transfer the costs of what they did to other People,  WE ARE THE ONES WHO PAY FOR THEIR CRIMES.  Such are the ways of the civil and criminal law.   

I've heard the names of three prominent Democrats floated as possibly being named or even recorded in the Epstein evidence,  if that's true I say publish it and let them face the consequences.   If they did rape children supplied to them by Epstein,  lock them up and throw away the key.   Who knows who else is doing what Epstein and Maxwell did.   It's important to let those who did the raping as well know they're in danger of imprisonment for their crimes.   Maybe they can get a plea deal by telling the full extent of what they paid and to who in the blackmail that resulted.   Though that would certainly have involved them in committing other crimes to get their asses out of the sling Epstein got them to put their asses in. 

Made The Mistake Of Hearing Some Brit Invasion Crap So I Need A Remedy - Sam & Dave Hold On I'm Comin' Live

 

Grassley's Name Should Become a Byword For The Corruption Of The Senate And The Courts Like "McCarthyism" Has Been - Iowa should answer for him

THERE WAS A TIME when saying or hearing the word "Iowa" didn't make me want to spit on the ground,  that was back when Iowa used to send the like of Tom Harkin to the Senate.   That was a long time ago, now.   Now it sends the like of Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley to the Senate along with four Republican-fascists in the House.   Added to that has been such 19th century bull shit as the Iowa Caucus.   

While I have despised some of the others,  Ernst,  the former Nazi enthusiast House member, Steve King. etc.   There is no one who mixes personal and political sleaziness with sanctimony and pompous piety like the vile Chuck Grassley.   He has outdone himself in his role as the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.    His role in the Republian-fascist judge making assembly line has been as bad as any of the tales of Congressional corruption from the filthiest of periods in the 19th and 20th centuries.   

Here's what he's been up to this week, as recounted by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Note the obvious collusion and coordination of the Trump regime,  the Republican-fascists in the Senate AND THE ASSEMBLY LINE TRUMP JUDGES ALREADY PUT ON THE BENCH BY GRASSLEY AND HIS CORRUPT, ANTI-DEMOCRATIC, ANTI-DEMOCRACY PARTY. 

As for Iowa,  I hope it goes bankrupt. I hope to hear FAFO wailing and gnashing of teeth from them as they reap what they've sown.   It's the only thing that will teach the majority of selfish, sanctimonious and greedy Republicans there anything.  I don't trust any lessons learned to last past one election cycle.   I won't bother trying to appeal to them on any grounds higher than self-interest,  on anyone who is a Republican in 2025.   I've stopped wasting my time on their better angels,  maybe those angels have been corrupted by them or maybe they've fled to preserve their virtue.  

Amos Goldberg Holocaust History Scholar At The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Has Called What Israel Is Doing Genocide

I DON'T WANT YOU TO TAKE MY WORD FOR ANYTHING.  Best would be for you to look at the evidence and see what's right there before the eyes of the world, that is what many though far too few Israelis have done and many Jews around the world.   I would disagree with Goldberg that the crimes of the Israeli government and military are a "stain on Jews" for generations, only on all People who supported Israel in its genocide and many more of those are gentiles.

You can hear what he said from a post made today. 

Is Democracy Too Complicated To Work Or Just Too Complicated For Abstract Pondering And Publishing?

WHENEVER SOMEONE starts talking "natural" as in "natural law" my skepticism starts kicking in.   I have, repeatedly, noted that the modern meaning of the term in the claims of science are a mixed bag, indeed,  finding both closer approximations of the truth IN SOME AREAS and peddling claims that are anything from dubious as a product of the violation of that quintessential (NOTE THE "ESSENTIAL" IN THAT WORD) requirement of accurate and measured observation of nature given as a complete explanation of phenomena.   In the most legitimate uses of that idea,  such as the demonstrably successful products of physics and chemistry,  those claims work out for a large range of observable phenomena until they don't.  Most famously the massively successful framing of Newtonian physics proved to be deficient as a complete explanation of observable phenomena during the 19th century and the early 20th century drastically modified that view in both Einstein's model and in quantum physics,  which are, famously, not yet and perhaps never will be entirely reconciled with each other.   No doubt the concepts of physics today are far more complete as a workable explanation of observed physical phenomena as Newtonian physics is still enormously useful as an explanation of a range of physical phenomena and a tool for harnessing what are contained in that explanation as "forces" such as energy and gravity - in themselves anything but completely or even basically defined, descried and understood. 

The hubris of those for whom science and its methods are taken as a replacement for another very mixed bag of thought, religion,  has given rise to the superstition that all phenomena,  all of existence, in fact, must conform to "laws of nature" which science has defined.   That can lead to the inept and entirely unevidenced application of such "laws" usually in the form of some mathematical modeling, in itself of little to no demonstrable connection to what is observed - psychology, sociology, much anthropology,  the "political-science" which I have recently expressed my doubts about and that other extremely dangerous "science" economics are all the product of the superstitious belief in what I've described in this paragraph.   All of those university ordained courses of study,  departments, even schools in modern universities are about as scientific in fact as astrology is and their wildly, bizarrely obvious inability to come up with firm and durable OR EVEN TESTABLE theories and even hypotheses should have discredited all of them to the extent that their official academic standing should be that of astrology or other ancient forms of divination and would be manipulation of "natural phenomena" but such is the ubiqutious modern superstition about the validity of the "natural laws" that scientists have successfully demonstrated in some areas and very partially demonstrated in others giving us a known and entirely reliable framing of reality so as to rely on such pseudo-scientific procedures and claims,  that we can just brush past the falling of previous universal framings as Freudian or Behaviorist psychology as the inadquacy and, sometimes demonstrable fraudulence of them to go on to the next big thing of as little actual legitimacy peddled by the next "school" of psychology that gains prominence in universities.  Evolutionary psychology is probably the one that is now ripe for overturning and succeeding now.   

Most dangerously for the world, right now, are the various frames and claims of economic theory,  theories which are put into law directly to the benefit of the few over the needs of the many and, ultimately,  to the destruction of the biosphere on which all of us depend.   I've noted here now the combination of economics with Darwinist claims of the universal efficacy of the far from demonstrated theory of natural selection is directly responsible for Trump I and such as the government of Sweden adopting policies that needlessly resulted in the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths during the Covid pandemic and are currently endangering many more through the Trump II administration of RFK jr.  which again makes the crudest of Darwinian eugenics the actual law of the United States.   And in that I will stress that the "natural law" of natural selection which is a pillar of such thought is, in itself, the most over-sold "law of nature" in the history of science.   One which flows from the crudest and most self-unaware of economic theory, the Brit upperclass framing and call for mass death of Malthusian economics - in case you think I'm being overly dramatic in the potential for this kind of pseudo-science adopted by the academic industry as a universal "natural law' to get lots of People killed, not only as an incident of neglect but as an adopted and intentional part of human made law.   I could go for several more paragraphs on the part of that other field of academically blessed and peddled "law" the legal profession but if you read me you know that my skepticism of that racket (the thing that gives Little Bobby Kennedy his credentialing and misplaced authority) is currently boundless. 

I would hope, while actually thinking it's hopeless, that scientists would adopt what should have been a universal law of science that what cannot be adequately observed or measured cannot be the subject of the scientific method, which would immediately disqualify all of those pseudo-social-sciences and such things as "natural selection"* from membership of the science club, with all the rights and privileges attached to that.   No matter how desirable it might be to be able to treat such subjects and obtain such successful results as you sometimes get with physics and inorganic and some organic chemistry,  permitting it to have the rights and privileges on the basis of that desire without the ability to actually submit them to real scientific procedures is one of the most consequential of academic sins of often deadly effect. 

What has provoked me to point this out, again, is an article by Sean Micheal Winters enthusiastic about the recrudescent emergence of "natural law" talk in poly-sci and the ever dubious field of journalism.

It's been a good week for natural law. People are talking about it even if they do not mention it by name.

David Brooks, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, [Note: BS shield activation] spoke about the pattern of "rupture and repair" that has characterized our society. Brooks said that we are in a moment of rupture now, and offered some ideas about how we commence the work of repair.

Near the start of his talk, which I watched this past weekend after three friends sent me a link, Brooks quoted two of my favorites, the evangelical historian George Marsden and columnist and thinker Walter Lippmann.

Marsden wrote, "What gave such widely compelling force to [Martin Luther] King's leadership and oratory was his bedrock conviction that the moral law was built into the universe." Brooks commented that, in the past 60 years, "we've become a much more individualistic country. ... The moral order has frayed."

To try to encapsulate something as complex as "King's leadership and oratory" so as to come to a simple conclusion as to what made it what it was strikes me as a habit of thought that is related to, if not a product of the superstitious extensions of science where science cannot go.   To complicate that with the like of David Brooks making use of Marsden's thinking of it extends all of it well past the point where anything said is reliable.   If my view of the legal profession has failed,  my view of journalism failed a lot longer ago, espcially when it comes to that most debased embodiment of that racket, the "columnist."   While I am totally dismissive of a creature like Brooks, even a better practitioner of column scribbling like LIppmann gets you way out on the ice where it gets very cold, soupy and deep.  

The problem is not just individualism, however, but our conception of freedom. Lippmann wrote in 1955, "If what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what the individual chooses to invent based on his feelings, we have left the ground of civilization."

America's core understanding of freedom has always been a negative freedom, a "freedom from." Our revolution aimed to free us from British control. American liberalism through the 19th century and first half of the 20th century sought freedom from the overly large influence of the business interest. Our involvement in two world wars was about making the world free from tyranny. Throughout, freedom of religion and speech and assembly were understood as freedoms from government control.

This conception of freedom was essentially political and it could be because Americans held to a widely shared conception of the moral order. The one time we could not agree on what that moral order required, we fought a great and terrible civil war to resolve the difference.

In the years after World War II, that shared conception of the moral order evaporated as the personal became political. There was a shift in our conception of freedom to something not just more individualistic but more volitional. We believed we could "choose" and "invent" the morality that worked for us.

He goes on in the article in ways I don't have the time to deal with, today. 

While I think Winters is on to somethings in some of this,  I would remind him that there was nothing new in the "choosing and inventing" of morality in America under its so-called "democracy,"  what with Indians being murdered so their land could be stolen,  Africans kidnapped and brought here into slavery,  the breeding of slaves (with even those who supported slavery noting how often the slaves resembled the fathers and male members of the enslaving family), the subjugation of Women, the legalized theft of wage slavery, etc. inventing and choosing morality has been a part of it, all along.  It has been easy as pie for relatively affluent, straight, white males (even Gay white males) to not notice that, as it is for those not the object of those to ignore those evils happening all around them.  Such as has had control of academic discourse, by and large, the reaction to the small amount of academic discourse dealing with the experiences of all of those Others, being among the things most decried and suppressed by those with power. 

This is libertarianism, and it is found on the left in social issues and on the right in economic ones. Both versions paved the way for Trumpian authoritarianism. Both.

I agree with this statement almost without reservation and with the crisis in the concept of liberty, especially, but also "freedom." 

How do we recover a shared sense of the moral order that is built into the universe? I am not sure, but dusting off the idea of a natural law might allow us to at least find a shared moral vocabulary again. That might lead to the discovery of shared moral ideals, without which any project at renewal and repair after Donald Trump will be stillborn.

I am not discouraging anyone from reading Winter's articles or even reading the NYT whited sepulcher Brooks or Lippmann (and when you throw in him on such subjects,  you should always See Also that other over-rated and under-rated thinker John Dewey) but I will note that in this article the complete absence of two of the most salient words to an understanding of how American democracy has failed "equality" through the assertion of inequality and "lies" as Trump is a direct product of,  lies told and permitted to be told by the freest of "free presses" in American history,  both the "news" divisions and, especially relevant,  the "entertainment" division (he would never have had a political career without "reality TV" which is, start to finish, the presentation of lies and pretend) though as a journalist I have no doubt that Brooks, Winter, Lippmann, or John Dewey, for that matter, would not be too enthusiastic over a real and rigorous, even a quasi-scientific analysis of the consequences of "free press-speech" absolutism in the corruption of democracy because it impinges directly on their professional careers.   John Dewey was, by the way a practitioner of the rank pseudo-science, psychology, so I'll toss that fact into this mess - Lippmann, while I disagree with him about much, was about the least compromised in that way of all mentioned so far.   I don't know how much psychology he may have imbibed through his study with William James at Harvard or if he just got the his reliable philosophical thinking from him.    I'm somewhat more confident in Marsden's profession though I know little about Marsden's writing.   But whenever someone starts talking "natural law" even in the less pretentious forms of that surrounding theology I get my back up.   Perhaps it's due to the use of that phrase against Women and LGBTQ+ People that accounts for that,  though my skepticism about the actual ability of anyone to discern with complete accuracy a single "law of nature" enters into that, too.   It might be desirable to have such a law book to hand but I doubt any one ever compiled will be any more valid than the laws of the pseudo-social-sciences or the literal mother of all such pseudo-laws, in the current world  natural selection. 

That "shared sense of the moral order" is certainly not something to recover because that "shared sense" of it existed with all of the evils of inequality and the product of freely told fully present in the society and in American law right up to the adoption of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts whatever partial and very brief period was had while those were the law of the land now overturned by such in the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts who have nullified them - I would bet most of them, to one extent or another, great enthusiasts for the concept of "natural law."  Things are far too slippery to allow such language to control how we think about these things.  Trying to do so so they would fit into a course of philosophy at an old lCatholic university such as Notre Dame was and, to too great an extent, still is, only gets you farther from the truth.  

I think political experience is if not more reliable, at least is less prone to lead you on wild goose chases than academic and columnist babbling.