are whining when YETI doesn't discriminate against them BUT HOLD THEM TO THE SAME POLICY THEY HOLD OTHERS TO. The same groups that celebrated the Supreme Court reinstitutionalize deial of services to LGBTQ+ People are whining and crying when THEY ARE BEING TREATED LIKE OTHER POLITICAL GROUPS UNDER A COMPANY'S POLICY THEY DON'T SERVICE POLITICAL GROUPS.
I like Tabitha's commentary and style. There is no group that is whinier and more self-pitying than the privileged.
Marilynne Robinson concludes her preface with two questions, one obviously true, the other one true but which needs considerable discussion.
What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy? After all these things rose together. The air is thick now with "the people," a phrase that is meant to give authority to the claims and the grievances of those who use it. That it is often invoked in good faith one may doubt, but the fact that resort is had to it so insistently means that we are still good enough democrats to feel that ultimately authority and reason do and should lie with the people. Then the old impulse that lay behind the dissemination of information and learning, the will to ensure that the public will be competent to make the weightiest decisions and so conform society to its best sense of the possible should be as powerful as it has ever been, and more powerful because of the fragility of the contemporary world. Instead we have slack and underfinanced journalism and the ebbing away of resources from our universities, libraries and schools. The liberation of the human individual as a social value required optimism which is also amply justified. This loyalty to democracy is the American value I fear we are gravely in danger of losing.
It is inescapable that when you use the word "democracy" you have to define what you mean by that or you will end up talking about radically different things. It is absolutely different if you put the emphasis on "freedom" instead of the equality that will make that freedom available to everyone and of value to everyone. The history of America is tellable in the freedoms which those with money and power have given themselves in reality, perhaps giving the least among us the theoretical possession of those same freedoms but which they will never get to enjoy. The crucial point isn't "freedom" the rich and always the richest have always enjoyed the lions share of freedom.
Equality is and has been lacking in American democracy from the beginning of it up till at least 1965 when the most decisive steps taken towards real, meaningful equality were taken in the Johnson administration. Steps that were immediately attacked by white supremacists and the Republican Party as they sought to benefit from the disaffected racists who had been traditionally members of the Democratic Party leaving because they opposed equality. They had nearly a hundred seventy years of precedent of life under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to fuel their resentment. As that reaction took hold, as the likes of Lewis Powell set out an anti-democratic blueprint to create the oligarchy that the courts he was a member of clearly worked towards and which is reaching its lowest point in the Neronian style decadence of Trump II the target was always equalty, making sure that all the freedom was as concentrated in the same places that the framers placed it, in affluent white men of an acceptable kind.
It is all well and good to talk about democracy but, as my posts on The Trial of Socrates demonstrated, "democracy" as a man-made, artificial thing can be had by a favored, restricted class of those deemed in ancient Athens to be "free men" or "citizens" who hold large numbers in slavery, Women and who exclude even wealthy men who are not part of that traditional group. Why would anyone not in that group care about such a democracy? Why would anyone who was excluded from participation care about America's democracy as, in fact, most adult citizens of the country were excluded from even the vote, not to mention the just access to the necessities and, as importantly, the goods of life?
The times we live in provide, instead of equality and the right to a decent life free from the fear of homelessness, an inability to access healthcare, food, and any number of other things, provids The People with entertainment that is like what was provided in Orwell's 1984 but with better production values, one of the greatest pleasures cultivated by it, hating other People, feeling resentments, and stoking greed after status symbol possessions. The ersatz religion of the TV style ministires and the variety-show-nightclub churches turn something referred to as "The Bible" into an inversion of the Gospel, the Epistles, The Law, the Prophets hardly mentioned except in their fortune telling games.
If relgion, if Christianity, especially, among if not the most egalitarian religion if Jesus is to mean anything to it, has to make equality the central moral aspect of it or it will continue to decline. The United States may well be lost to despotism because it never has been allowed to be pushed to equality despite that struggle having been engaged in since before the Constitution was drafted. That struggle for equality, NOT THE PURSUIT OF LIBERTARIAN "FREEDOM" is literally the best thing about the United States and it is continually thwarted on the basis of the Constitution or something as illegitimate as the "common law tradition" under the practices of the legal profession, the courts and, especially the Supreme Court.
Marilynne Robinson correctly notes that democracy and prosperity would seem to have something of a direct relationship, as the Biden presidency shows, as the Johnson presidency showed, as the New Deal showed, and the opposite has been demonstrated, as well, in the string of Republican administrations that have thwarted equality all have a record of producing economic hardship going back more than a century Governing of, by and for the millionaries and billionaires produces bad economic results, especially as you go down the economic scale. Yet our "free press" lies about that because bad times for the many have the possibility of temporarily being good for the rich.
I think the first question in this last paragraph from Marilynne Robinson's Preface is self evident. Of course good institutions come from good intentions. Like religion, like scripture, all of that is a product of human thought, of human intentionality, of pursuing purposes. If an institution goes from bad to good, it is a product of human intention. I doubt the change and reform of any bad institution has ever just happened on to the good by accident. The opposite happening by chance has somewhat better odds, especially if "civil libertarian" lawyers or "institutionalists" are making those choices. The fact that the common good, the general prosperity, what the familiar preamble to the U.s. Constitution states as its intentions in a way that a non-lawyer would certainly take to be a promise made by those who frame it and would be an integral part of the document, since that is what was promised in the document that they got The Peoples' representatives to sign on to in the beginning. Here is the lawyerly loophole to that as found at that most august of American institutions, the secular delphic oracle of our idolatry, the United States Courts:
The preamble sets the stage for the Constitution (Archives.gov). It clearly communicates the intentions of the framers and the purpose of the document. The preamble is an introduction to the highest law of the land; it is not the law. It does not define government powers or individual rights.
Establish Justice is the first of five objectives outlined in the 52-word paragraph that the Framers drafted in six weeks during the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787. They found a way to agree on the following basic principles:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Maybe those largely lawyers who framed it put "justice" first because they knew they needed lawyers to get out of the existing contract promising "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," that The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. so famously noted they had promised in the Declaration of Independence but which they never intended to pay up on. And they appointed such judges and "justices" as would never intend to make them pay, some things haven't changed much since then.
Of those five things promised under the Constitution, the only one that they can be said to have intended to deliver on was the protection of the country from foreign attacks and whatever domestic attacks as would put the wealth of the wealthy and the order that favored them at risk. It was the rebellions of those who felt duped by the revolutionary leaders, who, typical of revolutionaries who take control, once in power didn't keep their overtly made promises. That is what led to the drafting of the Constitution. But they certainly never did much of anything to quell violence against others under the rule of law, they institutionalized it under the Second Amendment, what the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have used to arm a Republican Klan in case egalitarian democracy threatens to become real. And now under Trump, they have failed even to quell the possibility of insurrection against the very government they instituted or, incredibly enough, an insurrectionist gaining the presidency by election. The Roberts Court, with some Democratic support, nullified the relevant section of the 14th Amendment to allow an insurrectionist to become president. YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A RADICAL EGALITARIAN DEMOCRAT TO NOTICE THAT THE CONSTITUTION HAS FAILED. Though you appear to need to be one to admit that obvious and terrible truth.
The slave holders and Indian murdering land grabbers in the Constitutional Convention certainly didn't have any intention at all to provide any of the others on an equal basis, certainly not to those they enslaved, the free Black People that the Supreme Court under "due process" said were allowed to be abducted into slavery as Trump's ICESTAPO are abducting People off the streets today, they had no intention of permitting those for most of the People living in the United States during slavery and genocide against the Native population, Women, to those who were denied the vote due to their propertyless state, and, in the beginning, even Catholic males who met all other requirements to vote in some states. The history of America is tellable with great accuracy, I'd say only told with any possible accuracy, as the struggle to achieve equality by all of those groups and others, such as those who were in bond to the wage slave system. It is incredible that those at the top of the "justice" system, the Courts, deny that those contractual promises are not only a contract BUT FORM THE BASIS OF THE CONTRACT THAT GIVES THEM AND ALL OF GOVERNMENT ANY LEGITIMACY with complete and self-granted impunity AND THAT A DUPED AND COWED PUBLIC WILL ALLOW THEM TO GET AWAY WITH IT BECAUSE THEY'RE THE BIGGEST FATTEST LAWYERS IN THE LAND.
Whatever good institutions we have had under the federal government are either being destroyed or have been turned bad and since the federal government is allowing that to happen, it has to be attributed to the Constitutional order it is happening under, John Adams three-branch theory has failed, the presidential system turns out to be as dangerous here as it has in other countries that have copied it, the First Amendment has been the engine of corruption under its interpretation by the Supreme Court which grabbed extra-Constitutional powers in the first such failure of the Constitution in 1803, the terrible assertions of Marbury v Madison.
By their fruits you will know them. Donald Trump is the fruit of the kind of democracy America has. As were George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Bush I and Richard Nixon. The fruits of the long struggle for equality, The Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, myriads of other rights, which apart from Roe v Wade, were the product of long and difficult and not infrequently deadly struggle which have been have been swept aside by five or six or nine unelected "justices" And that is because of what the Constitution is and always has been apart for a few brief years in a couple of periods in American history when Courts and Congresses and the majority of voters had better intentions.
Note: I'd written this post and thought I'd already posted it but, apparently not. I have rewritten it because I can't find what I'd originally intended, I think the commentary is pretty much the same. I will not give it a last edit because the electricity is flickering here and I don't want to lose it, again.
Continuing on with Marilynne Robinson's Preface:
Whitman was a Quaker and he wrote as one: "I say the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion,/ Otherwise there is just no real and permanent grandeur,/ nor character nor life worthy the name without religion . . . )." This is from Leaves of Grass, and so is this: "All parts away for the progress of souls,/ All religion, all solid things, arts, governments, all that was or is/ apparent upon this globe or any globe,/ falls into niches and corners/ before the procession of souls along / the grand roads of the universe." The vision of this soul, all souls, realizing itself in the course of transforming everything that has constrained it and them, finds expression in many writers of the period, prominent among them Emerson, Melville, and Dickinson, and in later writers such as William James and Wallace Stevens. For all of them creeds fall away and consciousness has the character of revelation. To identify sacred mystery with every individual experience, every life, giving the word its largest sense, is to arrive at democracy as an ideal and to accept the difficult obligation to honor others and oneself with something approaching due reverence. It is a vision that is wholly religious though by no means sectarian, wholly realist in acknowledging the great truth of the centrality of human consciousness, wholly open in that it anticipates and welcomes the disruption of present values in the course of finding truer ones. And it is fully as well attested as America's old-time religion as is any exclusivist or backward-looking tradition, though our ill-informed nostalgias elevate what is called fundamentalism to that place, with the result that those who cannot endorse fundamentalist religion scorn the past while those who embrace it despise the present.
I will point out again that Walt Whitman anticipated one of the greatest and most important discoveries of modern physics by a half a century, the centrality of the individual mind observing and thinking about anything is all we have, we can't have that theoretical and mythical scientific point of view, an "objective" point of view of anything. One of the reasons that so many in science and outside of it acts as if that isn't the truth is because it is, actually rather frightening because so many points of view are so focused on self-gain, self-importance, selfishness and the selfishness that is at the bottom of all parochialisms, those which are merely annoying to those that are as dangerous as Trump's or Putins or Xi's or MBS's, . . . *
I have spent most of my life studying American history and literature. I have studied other histories and literature largely to gain perspective on this civilization. The magnanimity of its greatest laws and institutions as well as its finest poetry and philosophy move me very deeply. I know that there are numberless acts of generosity,m moral as well as material, carried out among its people every hour of the day. But the language of public life has lost the character of generosity and the largeness of spirit that has created and supported the best of our institutions and brought reform to the worst of them has been erased out of historical memory. On both sides the sole motive force in our past is now said to have been capitalism. On both sides capitalism is understood as grasping materialism that has somehow or other yielded the comforts and liberties of modern life. Capitalism thus understood is seen on one side as providential, so good in its effects that it reduces Scripture with its do-unto-others to shibboleth. The other side sees it as more or less corrupting and contemptible but beyond human powers to resist.
And no one offers a definition of it. But in these days when its imperium is granted by virtually anyone who attends to such things, our great public education system is being starved and abandoned and our prisons have declined to levels that disgrace us. The economics of the moment, and of the last several decades, is a corrosive influence, undermining everything it touches, from the industrial strength of our research capacity to the well-being of our children. I am not the first to suggest that it is undermining our politics as well.
One of the things which troubles me about this essay is that as astute an observer as Marilynne Robinson doesn't take into account the centrality that the media plays in the actual lives of almost all Americans and, in fact, in almost all of the world which has access to mass media or merely electronic media, especially when they can go online. Before the internet it was television and radio and the movies (especially when those became available for in-home watching), before that it was radio and the movies. The United States, or, rather the various states didn't try to raise the financial resources to allow the public schools to even try to compete with them for the time and, so, minds of students. I doubt that even if they had it would have been very effective in countering the effect of that all encompassing difference in the United States and, in fact, the possibility of democracy from before the mass media and its ever diminishing prospects afterwards.
Considering the place that the mass media, the most consumed "entertainment division" far more than the "news division," has played in exactly the production of the things that she rightly bemoans about our culture, society and, so, government it is extraordinary that she has left it so much out of the discussion.
Considering the role that mistrelsy had in promoting racism and chattel slavery in the time of those 19th century writers and, especially the role that Uncle Tom's Cabin played in, as Lincoln said, fomenting the Civil War, it is hardly a new thing in American life, though never as ubiquitous as it became when it was distributed by Hollywood, starting at least as early as Birth of a Nation and, especially, when it became available in the home at the turn of a dial.
Dealing with the fact that the media is what has most corrupted Americans and thwarted equality and, so, any democracy that is worthy of mentioning in a positive manner, to mention it is to risk being blackballed or drilled out of the realm of respectability or to just get ignored.
Despite what the still fashionable new atheism held, what vulgar (both in terms of crudeness and ubiquity) academic culture held and still holds, religion as such is hardly the dominant feature of our decadence. As an attempt to discern the meaning of Scripture, institutions such as the incumbent U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, the Southern Baptists, and the other churches held to have some sway over large numbers of allegedly church going Americans is far less accurate than that they are, in fact forces for the worst of capitalism in its current, billionaire-millionaire dominated investor-crook, non-produing form. That was, of course, nothing new, similar things could be said for the Roman Catholic Church and most of the national Protestant and Orthodox religious establishments in the long history of Christianity in Europe and elsewhere. The extent to which the disestablishment of churches held that off for a time in the United States is probably related to the rise of radio and then TV "ministries," who financed and sponsored them and their propensity for propping up capitalism and such things as white supremacy, too. The worst of that, coming in the 1970s, with the rise of Jerry Falwell (motivated in the first instance by white supremacist rebellion against equality, not least of all his own enrichment) and such as Pat Robinson, Jim Baker, etc. (mostly in it for the money) and the others cannot be considered without the centrality of the mass media promoting them, as well. In Catholic terms it would be the putrid Mother Angelica and her ETWN and, now, Robert Barron's Word on Fire. All of which is intimately tied up with the corruption that mass media is allowed to have under our Constitution.
I am ever more certain that American democracy as a decent thing, apart from elections that turn ever more into shams of exclusion under Roberts Court overturning of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, the Republican controlled states reimposing Jim Crow apartheid, cannot escape the necessity of rewriting the rules, the laws, the Bill of Rights to save American equality and, so democracy from the media which is a cesspool of stupidity and lying. I agree with Walt Whitman that America is only as good as its religious adherence to those principles of equality, of the equal distribution of the good of life, the distribution of wealth from its massive concentrations in few hands to its equal possession all over, not only the discouragement of bigotry and discrimination but the full out attacks on those, making them that most deadly of things, unfashionable, is included in that religion.
You might get the idea from this series that I have gone off of Marilynne Robinson but that couldn't be farther from the truth. I think that her work holds up to rigorous criticism and I think she is America's best living novelist and essayist. I encourage everyone to read her. I only half agree with her on Calvin, though more on the actual role that 19th century descendants of Calvinists had in creating American style liberalism based on the liberal distribution of material wealth to the least among us. I think the Anabaptists have an outsized role in that, though you always have to distinguish those who held with slavery and other forms of oppression from those who were among the first of our abolitionists and Women's suffrage agitators. As Marilynne Robinson points out, Walt Whitman was an Anabaptist, a Quaker. He was no Southern Baptist.
* I can never hear Emerson's or Thoreau's name without recalling them being invoked by the late anti-tax activist in Massachusetts, Barbara Anderson, a truly awful person whose stinginess was overtly claimed to be part of the rugged independence preached by the transcendentalists. Though what she was was your typical 2-year-old 20th century libertarian, I can honestly say that I despised her so, perhaps, that has tended to prejudice me against that tradition. I have never found anything in Dickinson or Whitman to put me off of them.
LAWYERS WHO GIVE OUT health advice, pretending to have an expertise they don't have, should be held responsible for what happens when parents follow his advice and it endangers their children. Especially when that lawyer gets 10% of the millions his law firm gets from bringing suit against those who actually produce sound health care to People.
Excessive consumption of vitamin A can result in serious health complications — indeed, several unvaccinated children in Texas have had to be treated for liver damage due the vitamin-based regimen some families are using, a children’s hospital in Lubbock, Texas, announced.
The increase in parents using vitamin A as the primary treatment for measles — despite no scientific backing — comes after Kennedy has downplayed the outbreak for weeks and falsely promoted the treatment option as effective.
This is what happens when you allow an arrogant Ivy Leaguer lawyer-ambulance chaser who is of proven amorality to run HHS. He should be under criminal investigation, not running the country's health system. Hell, he should have been disbarred and imprisoned for what he did to get CHILDREN killed before now. The Senators who confirmed him share in this. They should be fired by the voters. Republicans have absolutely no morals.
This is different from when the world was so grateful to Obama for ending Bush II that they gave him the Peace Prize, as they were grateful to Biden for ending Trump I, the American voters and non-voters giving the world the old and far, far worse Trump II and the Constitutional system maintaining this criminal insanity for even two months has changed everything for the worse. I doubt America can ever regain its status in the post WWII world under the present Constitution, especially as the Roberts Court and, even before that, the courts in general and the Republican caucus in the Senate let him off to run again. Nullifying the part of the 14th Amendment that would have stopped him under law.
America's position it had in the world during Biden's term is gone and it's not coming back during our lifetimes. The billionaires, millionaires, the judges and "justices" and lawyers and media have brought us down to this, the non-working, non-productive elite has brought us to this.
I was talking to my brother yesterday and he agreed that the U.S. position as "leader of the free world" has been forfeited by billionaires buying the presidency, with the complete collusion of the media and the refusal of "law enforcement" to stop any of the illegality during what we're witnessing THE BIGGEST CRIME SPREE IN AMERICAN HISTORY. If you think they're not stealing everything, personal information of ALL AMERICANS and monetizing it for themselves, if you think they're not actually stealing money and other valuables as Musk-Trump ransack the United States government, you are as stupid as an old line DoJ "institutionalist" or a member of the Republican caucus of the Supreme Court. Or a Susan Collins, though in her case it's just her "I'm just a dumb little girl," act that she's gotten away with due to the 100% Republican media ownership in Maine
About the only good thing I've seen come from the goddamned Trump II regime is that it has done wonders for Canadian unity. I always watch Ma Prof de Francais to overcome my school-French limits but I was surprised that this one was posted today. I hope they show us how inclusion can be achieved even after centuries of division and justifiable resentment. There's no reason to let the past destroy the future.
IT SHOULD BE illegal for ICE to do what they've been doing, with covered faces, without uniforms and anonymously abducting People in violation of the law and their legally acknowledged rights.
Trump is doing it on behalf of Putin, now.
Anyone tell me that this isn't being done under the Constitution as it really is instead of as the make-believe of Supreme Court pretense about what that rag is?
The entire goddamned Republican-fascist party is all-in on this, every single one of them in Congress and on the Supreme Court. Every single Republican voter, fascist or otherwise is guilty of this.
Michel Cusson, guitar and composer
Paul Brochu, drums
Jean-Bertrand Carbou, bass
Benoit Glazer, trumpet
Daniel Thouin, keyboards
MY CRITICISM OF MODERNISM, by which I certainly mean the "modernism" of the 20th century but in which I include the earlier modernism of the 18th century and, really, according to context, sometimes include the 16th century, DOESN'T LEAD TO THE CONCLUSION THAT I WANT TO RECAPITULATE WHAT MODERNISM WAS A REACTION AGAINST.
I know that for non-Catholics and, also, for many Catholics it won't be appreciated that in my rejection of Catholic integralism, both the 19th century kind that was a reaction against "liberalism" of the 18th century and it's even more insane billionaire financed Ivy Leaguer wackjob neo-version , would certainly signal that I reject any idea of going back to any past.
I can't find the video in which he said it but David Bentley Hart did a two minute or so take-down of the current Catho-fascist version of integralism, including the criminally insane assertion that the ancien regime, from the French Revolution back was some golden age, literally what such integralists have based their clams on. In rejecting the products of the 18th century revolutions, including the slave-holder-financier framed U.S. Constitution I HAVE NEVER ARGUED FOR RETURNING TO ANY PAST, I HAVE ARGUED THAT WE HAVE TO MOVE ON FROM THOSE. Here's a rule to go by, Catholic neo-integralists are, to a person, total nut jobs and decidedly are not interested in the Gospel of Jesus.
The typical either-or style of "which side are you on" forced choice is generally wielded by nostalgic fascists or would-be lefty ideologues WHICH TOO MANY PEOPLE FALL FOR. It is a classic straw-man, false alternative style of assertion and argument in which too many People fall for defending one of those false alternatives by condemning the one they take as worse wastes generations of time. The old and ubiquitous practice of defending some pretty awful Stalinists who worshiped one of the 20th centuries worst mass murderers and oppressors BECAUSE OF THE AWFUL AMERICAN FASCISTS WHO MOUNTED THE RED SCARE has been one of the biggest wastes of time for the American would-be left. The Stalinists may have had some of their rights violated by the FBI, the House Unamerican Activities Committee and been slandered by Red Channels and other organs of the media, elite as well as gutter level, but they were certainly not heroes of equality and democracy and the left that held them up as that were lying as much as any anti-commies did.
It may have been when I read that asshole, Lester Cole's alleged memoir, Hollywood Red that I realized I'd been played for a fool, that I didn't have to choose his side or the side of those who testified to HUAC about the Communist Party, that I was free to hold all of them in contempt. I certainly realized I'd been played for a fool when the Soviet recordswere released proving that Julius Rosenberg had, in fact, been a spy for Stalin while he worked on the atomic bomb, that he was guilty on that account AND THAT DIDN'T MEAN I HAD TO BE ON THE SIDE OF HIS PROSECUTION AND HIS AND ETHEL'S EXECUTION. I didn't have to choose one side OR the other, I could reject them both. Since then I have found that instead of drifting right, I have actually become far more radically egalitarian and democratic. Instead of becoming a right-winger, like so many Trotsyites did or becoming a neo-liberal as several members of the "new left" did or someone who fell into the trap of the Democratic Leadership Council, I found that The Gospel, The Epistles, The Law and The Prophets are a far more radical and dependable left than the secular left is. That certainly doesn't mean that I look to any past from the Christian period or before that in the history of the Kingdoms of Israel or Judea as something to be recreated, if I'd been tempted in that direction the scandals of the history of "Most Christian Monarchs" or those recorded in the Jewish Scriptures would have warned me off of it.
So, to answer your question, No, I don't want to return to any past, I want to return to nothing but to go to a better future which, at least we can say this much for, it hasn't already failed. One which, unlike our Constitutional system, learns from the evils of the past in order to prevent them from happening again.
I CERTAINY AGREE with the idea that Democrats should have been doing more to address issues of the working class and poor than they have been doing but they don't do more because of the pressure that the media puts on them when they do it. And they have to do it because todays Republicans will stop them doing it at all costs. And by "media" I don't mean just what supposedly constitutes the "news" I mean the entire media and what they choose to put on. I remember when the greatest advance in helping the working and poor since LBJ, the ACA was passed, the media gave hour after hour of coverage to the phony billionaire financed, Republican astroturf "Tea Party" which was largely responsible for disastrous 2010 election which elevated a Republican majority in Congress, continuing on a road to insanity which leads directly to the present Republican Caucus in both House and Senate, a product of the media coverage of Joe Biden, THE PRESIDENT WHO TRIED TO DO MORE FOR THE WORKING CLASS THAN ANY PRESIDENT SINCE LBJ.
Michael Sean Winters published an article in which he takes up the typical media criticism that the trouble with Democrats is that they're too "elite"
In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Democratic pollster David Shor argued that "the most important political trend of the last 30 to 40 years, both here and in every other country in the world — at least in Western countries with elections — has been this story of education polarization. Basically, we've seen highly educated people move to the left, while working-class people have moved to the right."
Shor argued that the competing narrative — that Donald Trump's ascent was really a continuation of the GOP's "Southern strategy" after the Civil Rights Act, motivating white voters with racist dog whistles — was wrong. White voters did not shift very much in 2024. Trump's biggest gains were among Hispanic and Asian voters, especially immigrant voters.
"There's a very clear correlation between how many immigrants there were in a county and how much Trump's vote share increased," Shor said. "In counties like Queens, N.Y., or Miami-Dade, Fla., Trump increased his vote share by 10 percentage points, which is just crazy."
How crazy? "Our best guess is that immigrants went from being a Biden plus-27 group in 2020 to a group that Trump narrowly won in 2024. This group of naturalized citizens makes up roughly 10% of the electorate."
Michelle Cottle recently profiled Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado. "A lot of communities divide the world between when you shower: before work or after work," he told her. The problem for too many Democrats is that they do not know anyone who showers after work.
To start with, I don't know who Jason Crow knows but most of the Democrats I know are either of the lower middle-class or they are working class to poor, even most of the college educated Democrats I know have blue collar jobs or their equivalent. And if they have a white collar job, their families are full of those who don't.
IF HE WANTS TO ARGUE THAT TOO MANY TOP POSITIONS IN DEMOCRATIC ADMINISTRATIONS AND WITHIN THE PARTY APPARATUS GO TO THE AFFLUENT, I WOULD NOT ARGUE WITH THAT. I have railed against the tyranny of the Ivys and Ivy equivalents and their product since at least Obama's administration - I remember an early brawl that started when I noted neither he nor his Secretary of Education had ever been a student in a public school or university or had children in public schools or universities.
If that's his point he should have made it more accurately.
In saying what he did he props up a Republican-fascist narrative that, unfortunately, Barack Obama and previous Democratic Presidents have not seemed to mind being made. That Obama and Bill Clinton were products of Ivy League - Ivy equivalent schools, Georgetown, Oxford, Yale, Columbia and Harvard may have something to do with that perception. Though that was never a media created problem for the Bushes. They surrounded themselves with the same and, in all cases, appointed the same to their administrations and to the Supreme Court. I will also note they are Ivy Law trained lawyers. Since I've been addressing the inherent corruption of the legal profession due to its golden rule of servicing the interests of those who can pay the best, that Jason Crow as well as way too many Democrats in office and in power have been from that profession. I don't know too many lawyers who are best friends with members of the great unwashed, except when they have them as pro-bono clients. I'll bet you one of the more widely held opinions of the working class and the poor are that lawyers charge way, way too much. Probably a lot more than think that "the Dems" are too elite.
Of course, the big irony here is that what Crow, Winters, etc. say about Democrats being too elite is said about the party which has served the elite far less than the only alternative. Why that isn't widely perceived is because of the media lying about it, distorting reality in favor of a narrative that benefits Republicans, in the past and Republican-fascists today.
I would ask Michael Sean Winters and, while I'm at it, Jason Crow which of the minority groups who Democrats support - their championing the rights of LGBTQ+ people is often implied as a problem in these kinds of articles, their support of Black People is hinted at tacitly - is to be tossed aside in order to attract the kind of voters who are so fickle that they'll go from voting for an Obama or a Joe Biden to voting for Trump - so easily forgetting that when Republicans held power THE WORKING CLASS, THOSE WHO "SHOWER AFTER WORK" WERE GETTING SHAFTED BY THEM. Jason Crow has an excellent record of voting for the Democratic agenda, he had a 100% record of voting with Joe Biden and is given top grades by a number of groups which give such ratings. I think he's a good Democrat. It is a plain fact that the most reliable group which most consistently votes Democratic are Black Voters, who are also largely NOT PART OF THE ECONOMIC ELITE. It's one of the facts of this that it is exactly the Republican-fascists, especially those of the Ivy League rank who are trying to resegregate the most elite institutions and schools, the ones on the Supreme Court have certainly made that one of their higher priorities. It is the Republicans who want to go back to 1950s era policies that allowed all levels of American life to be able to serve a restricted clientele.
I think this boils down to the real unmentionable fact that our media has lied us into a situation when the party of, by and for the billionaires and for impoverishing those who aren't get into power gain power. And, after their policies and practices destroy the economy too much for the media to lie about and Democrats fix it, they lie about Democrats in order to put the billionaires' party back into power. That is a pattern that has held since 1964 when the "civil liberties" industry and the Warren Court made media lies about politicians a part of the First Amendment. It has gotten steadily worse as subsequent Courts have built on that decision to make money equal speech and to overtly hand our government over to the highest bidder, whether that billionaire be domestic or foreign or a freakish illegal immigrant from Apartheid South Africa.
Sean Micheal Winters as a journalist has a professional self-interest that all the rest of the journalists have in covering up that fact, of never admitting that the legal permission they are given to lie or get it wrong has a direct result in the media owned by millionaries and billionaires to lie their servants, Republicans and now Republican-fascists into power. The lawyers have an interest in this, too, which, as I point out, is likely not unrelated to their means of making as much money as they can and the professional culture they are trained in and go along with to get along. It is far easier for a journalist, or, in fact, a blogger or podcaster to just repeat the old like that Democrats are elite than to tell the truth about the decisive role that media lying on behalf of Republicans and the class who owns their media - apparently it is a habit that even those in the independent, non-millionaire owned media just repeat out of professional habit.
A lot more accurate predictor of who will vote for Republican-fascism than when they shower is certainly WHAT MEDIA THEY CONSUME.
That has entirely more to do with why Joe Biden was forced out of the race and why Harris and Walz lost (even more how Hillary Clinton lost the election that she won) and how Trump got the chance to wreck everything and steal everything this time. The journalists and the lawyers are at the bottom of this, not Democrats who favor equality for hated minority groups.
Law in seventeenth-century Maryland forbade the use of the words "papist" (Catholic) or "round-head" (Puritan), fighting words in the Old World whose effects were muted here by methods still familiar to us. We learned early to live with diversity, at least by the standards of the time. It is useful to remember that the terrible Thirty Years War (1618-1648) was fought among European Christians during the early period of European settlement in America, and that New England was largely populated by British Protestant refugees of religious oppression and warfare in Protestant Britain. What might look like homogeneity in nostalgic retrospect was felt and acted upon as intolerable difference justifying enormity in these cultures of origin. Our national ancestors generally managed, by the standards then prevailing, to avoid encouraging the same conflicts here. Now it is seen as un-American in certain quarters to reject participation in the bitter excitements that can surround religious difference. This is a crucially important instance of self-declared patriots attacking the very substance of our heritage.
I can't let that go without pointing out the fact that in Calvinist New England, four Quakers were hanged by the governing theocracy for testifying to their faith, others were beaten or otherwise tortured. And it was a capital crime for Catholic priests go be there, though that was due in part to them wanting to exclude French Catholics even at that early period, sometimes excused for geo-political reasons but which resulted in a form of bigotry which survives into living memory. Still, I take Marilynne Robinson's point about the early adoption of an unusual level of tolerance among diverse Protestants in most of the colonies. In some, even after the adoption of the Constitution, there were places where non-Protestants were not allowed to vote. Some of the framers wanted to exclude Catholics from being citizens. I agree with Robinson that America's traditional liberalism, founded on the liberal provision for the least among us, is a heritage of a strain of Calvinism but we're talking about a double heritage all through this, and that one includes some of the worst theological racism and bigotry along with some of the earliest calls for abolition of slavery and equality for Women.
We have seen bad times and we will see more of them, like any other human community. The question is always whether America is indeed doing well upon the whole, whether the civilization at any present time is strong and resilient enough to sustain itself despite the crisis of the moment, or the decade, or the generation, and despite the bent toward malice and nonsense that is always present anywhere but seems harder to resist during periods of crisis.
What has been the basis of the enduring health that has so far made for the stability and the dynamism of the country? It is always necessary to stipulate, though of course it should be assumed, that a statement like this one implies comparison with the human norm, not with Utopia. As societies go, we have enjoyed the kind of prosperity and advancement that is possible only where there is domestic peace. We have managed this at the same time that we have created a population whose origins are increasingly various. The canard that associates "heterogeneity" with conflict and instability would have to be reexamined if comparison were made between America and countries that claim to be homogeneous or insist that they must be. The modern history of Europe is highly relevant here.
We are blessed with the impossibility of arriving at a definition of America that is either exhaustive or final not only because of our continuously changing and self-transforming population but also, as Whitman says, because we have never fully achieved democracy. This is a very reasonable light in which to consider a mingled heritage, full of lapses and errors and therefore often said to be hypocritical or failed, even by those who see themselves as its defenders. By Whitman's lights this process of discovery with all its setbacks, is a splendid, metaphysically brilliant passage in human history. It is moved by the power of religious imperative because it honors and liberates the sacred human person. He says:
"There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity-yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth's dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of the Me in the centre.) creeds, conventions fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value.
Language like this makes clear how far our vocabulary has drifted over the generations. So far from the sense of radical uniqueness Whitman evokes here, identity seems now to imply membership in a group, through ethnicity or affinity or religion or otherwise. Rather than acknowledging the miraculous privilege of existence as a conscious being (and, considering the overwhelming odds against anyone's existence, the word "miraculous" is an appropriate superlative), it has reference now to knowing one's place, culturally and historically speaking. And this is taken to be a good thing. Whitman himself has been charged with rampant egoism for pondering and celebrating the centrality of the perceiver, that "hardest basic fact." It seems fair to conclude that certain of his critics have no grasp of physics of metaphysics. In other words, in changing, our vocabulary has not always advanced.
Taking that last point first, it is among the greatest and most central discoveries of modern physics that no statement can be made about any observation without taking into account the fact of the individual making the observation, their position when they made the observation, their method of making the observation, the other individual even peculiar aspects of THEM MAKING THAT OBSERVATION and not some other one making it from another point of view. It is impressive that Whitman identified it as "the only entrance to all facts" a half a century before the most sophisticated physicists of our century formalized it as a scientific law.
I will, again, point out that those very things that Marilynne to some extent rightly bemoans, that "identity" is so caught up with the ethnicity or affinity or religion, of membership with a group is inescapable because, among other things, our Constitution and government and laws have, from well before independence, been caught up in those and those in various elites and right down the economic scale have sought to benefit from membership in a privileged group and assigning others to groups not to have equal access to the good of life and entirely more access to the bad of it. You can rightly point out the ways in which, largely white, largely male, largely straight, males have been somewhat unhabituated to treat differences among themselves as determinative but you won't make any real progress until you address the fact that those so privileged, the institutions and companies and governments and legal systems they have set up are based on those other discriminations based on group identity, applying those to the individuals assigned those identites. That is so strong that identification with a larger group of People discriminated against is, itself, a necessity in fighting against that discrimination. Given a life in which their identiy was taken as unremarkable and equally as the various Protestant, white, affluent identities were allowed to live under, every member of every such identity group would probably prefer to generally just live their lives unencumbered.
It is no good pretending that the predominant forces with power have sought to gradually or even slightly diminish THOSE discriminations which are, in fact, still embedded within our very forms of government, state as well as federal, informally even more so than as a matter of putting in writing. The benefits to the original slave states are still befitting those states with the least dedication to overcoming the very discriminations the framers installed in the Constitution and, with that, the laws we still live under. Emancipating those prevented from voting merely increases the share of stolen power for their oppressors by two-fifths. Whitman's democratic aspirations can't make the jump over those facts to arrive at some kind of peaceful prosperity because, as we can see in the white supremacist rancher-farmers who voted for Trump based on their racism, are now complaining that the immigrant laborers who were the basis of THEIR prosperity aren't there to work in terrible conditions for low pay and they certainly aren't about to improve the conditions and raise the pay to tempt unemployed white workers to take those jobs, and so Nebraska is afraid of bankruptcy but I have not seen any of the ranchers offering a living wage for those jobs.
I see the point of the idealistic aspirations in Whitman's essay but, as all safe idealism must, have to see it in light of things as they really were and really are. Which is about as fashionable as the get up I'm wearing as I type this out.
Again, I'll point out that when she wrote this Barack Obama was in office and there was no evidence that Trumpism was on the horizon. I would wonder how she would write on the same themes now.
AS FAR AS I HAVE ever seen, I have been the only person anywhere who has been making this argument for the past two decades. It was, as I recall, the topic of my first disagreement with Duncan Black and a number of his ACLU type commentators back in the earliest years of this millennium. Apparently it convinced one person who I know reads me:
Steve Simels, blog malignancy
Phineas T. Gage
20 hours ago
Beg to differ.
There is no, nor should there be, Constitutional right to lie with impunity. We need vastly stricter libel laws.
There would have been no Rush Limbaugh, hate radio and Fox News without the Sullivan decision.
And free speech absolutism is as dangerous and stupid as gun rights absolutism.
Nice to know I have some persuasive ability even against the greatest of resistance. I assume that is due to even Simels realizing that hate-speech is effectively dangerous in producing violence, terrorism, discrimination and genocide, something that I will compliment him on realizing as those in the media, those on the secular left and even many on the religious left pretend that most terrible of lessons in the school of experience isn't obvious on behalf of the ACLU style reading of the goddamned First Amendment and the blathering blather of "civil liberties" lawyering. I will note that in recent years, well after I started making that argument online, I've come to understand some lawyers Of Color, some Feminists have said similar things. Those who are most likely to be victims of hate speech and the violence it inevitably incites and encourages. And it always does
IN HER PREFACE to one of her collections of essays published in 2013, Marilynne Robinson said:
Writing in 1870, Walt Whitman said, "America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without, for I see clearly that the combined foreign world could not bear her down; But these savage, wolfish parties alarm me. Owning no law but their own will, more and more combative, less and less tolerant of the idea of ensemble and of equal brotherhood, the perfect equality of the States, the ever-overarching American Ideas, it behooves you to convey yourself implicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dictators, but steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them." And he said, "It is the fashion of dillettants [sic] and fops (perhaps I myself am not guiltless,) to decry the whole formulation of the active politics of America, as beyond redemption, and to be carefully kept away from. See that you do not fall into this error. America, it may be, is doing very well upon the whole, notwithstanding these antics of the parties and their leaders, these half-brained nominees, the many ignorant ballots, and many elected failures and blatherers." These passages come from Whitman's long essay Democratic Vistas, a virtual hymn of praise to America, and to Democracy, words which for him are interchangeable.
It needs to be asked how Black and Native Americans would see the state of American democracy in 1870. NO STATEMENT ABOUT THE UNITED STATES CAN BE COMPLETE WITHOUT SUCH QUESTIONS, EVER. For Black Americans things may have seemed better than they ever had be as Reconstruction was in effect in the former Confederacy, one of those brief periods in American history like the one a century later when the Jim Crow that came in with Rutherford Hayes and his Electoral College deal with white supremacists was briefly eclipsed with the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts and a few Supreme Court rulings that would be increasingly swept aside as Republicans, empowered by their deal with white supremacists, the "Southern Strategy" gained power and packed the Courts which have been overturning all of that progress just as they did in the Jim Crow period.
And you could ask similar questions about how working People under the wage slavery that was never abolished by presidential proclamation or law - Marilynne Robinson had interesting things to say about how that was also a political issue for those like Lincoln - and how Women, who would be denied the vote for fifty years saw it.
I have to point out one thing in Whitman's list of supposed American virtues that is not only deeply troubling as an idea but which constitutes one of the most glaring defects of the U.S. Constitution and the source of some of its most anti-democratic manifestation, "the perfect equality of the States." You can't have "perfect equality" of the states when the features embodying that, the equal representation of different states in the Senate, the added weight given to even the lowest population states in both the Senate and the Electoral College that results, the equal weight given to the states with the smallest populations to either pass or block amendments, etc. is inherently anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian and, it being easier to propagandize and gull smaller populations than larger ones, it hands those who would manipulate the system by doing just that an enormous advantage in corrupting the American system. Adding in such notions as states being the ones to control elections - which directly led to the American apartheid system that rose in the post-Civil War period - and you need to take seriously the folly of believing that states have rights, including a "right" to equality. People have rights, the fictitious entities, states don't. The United States won't be a democracy of any kind until all of those corruptions of our Constitutional system are removed in favor of the perfect equality of People.
It is true that the period after the Civil war was a low point in American political history. And it is true also that the country came through it all at last, fairly intact by the standards that apply in such cases. This is reassuring to consider, since we now live in a political environment characterized by wolfishness and filled with blather. We have the passive pious, who feel they have proved their moral refinement in declaring the whole enterprise bankrupt, and we have the active pious, who agree with them, with the difference that they see some hope in a hastily arranged liquidation of cultural assets.
It was Whitman's faith that a great presiding spirit of Democracy would check, or correct for, the worst deficiencies of the civilization. It may indeed have been that ideal that kept us on course, or allowed us finally to find our way back to a better and healthier national life then and in all the other periods in our history when our politics have seemed to be beyond redemption. Whitman says Democracy "is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remain unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted." It is for him like the word "Nature" in that its history, therefore its definition, remains partial and tentative, though some valuable phrases and paragraphs have been added from time to time.
The only "great presiding spirit of Democracy" that "would check, or correct for, the worst deficiencies of the civilization," is, in fact, equality of People. The very reason that democracy "has yet to be enacted," something as true, perhaps more true than in 1870 is due to the fact that the many long, hard, not infrequently bloody struggles for equality under law have been repeatedly thwarted from progress and, on those rare occasions when great progress towards equality is made, the very Constitution, most frequently in our history by Supreme Court assertion of the "meaning" of the Constitution has turned back the clock to 1862 and earlier. The Court under the genteel Virginia white supremacist John Roberts has done that in just about every category under which progress had been made, including against Black People, People of Color, Native Americans, Women and working People. It was one of the great and ironic tragedies of America in this century that Barack Obama, Harvard trained lawyer, was so timid in asserting opposition to that re-imposition of a status quo that Whitman may have recognized and that Joe Biden appointed another Harvard man as Attorney General whose failures have contributed directly to Trump II. Biden was far and away the greater egalitarian but I think his lawyerly training may have led to his too easy capitulation to Roberts-Republican-fascist enablement. I have to watch, it, though, that will get me on the topic of lawyers and the inherent corruptions of their lucrative profession.*
What if we have ceased to aspire to Democracy, or even democracy? What if the words "Democracy" and "America" are severed and no longer imply each other? It is not unusual now to hear that we have lost our values, that we have lost our way. In the desperation of the moment, justified or not, certain among us have turned on our heritage, the country that has emerged out of generations of attention to public education, public health, public safety, access to suffrage, equality under law. It turns out, by their reckoning, that the country they call the greatest on earth has spent most of its history acting against its own (great) nature, and that the enhancements of life it has provided for the generality of its people, or to phrase it more democratically, that the people have provided for themselves has made its citizens weak and dependent. How the greatest nation on earth maintains this exalted status while burdened with a population that patriots do not like or respect is an interesting question, certainly. In any case, the return to traditional values seems to them to mean together with a bracing and punitive severity toward the vulnerable among us, the establishment of a kind of religious monoculture we have never had and our institutions have never encouraged.
Americans have been gulled out of their rightful inheritance, not ironically due to the actions of such as the "Heritage Foundation" by a combination of media, entertainment most effectively but also the "news" the promotion of racism starting in the 1970s reaction against the progress made in Civil Rights in the 1960s, the promotion of racism and bigotry and inequality in the movies, on TV, the glamorization of vulgar wealth (Trump was invented through that) and various lies and regional resentments. Religion - which will become the central feature in this discussion later - Christianity, especially - -was perverted to mean white evangelicalism and "traditional catholicism," again through the free press, the media.
I'm planning on going on with what Robinson said in her preface, wondering how she would write the same piece today, during Trump II. Though I certainly will not try to speak for her.
* As I pointed out in discussing I. F. Stone's chapter from The Trial of Socrates, "democracy" without THE FACT OF equality being the dominant feature of it is guaranteed to produce a corrupt government, no matter how many elections are held. American apartheid as South African apartheid featured regular elections, as have happened in various "Peoples' democratic republics" as a one party, often clique or even one family have ruled in a totalitarian manner for decades. Our apartheid ran under the slogan "Equal Justice Under Law" as the entire legal system proved that was a lie. What the Roberts Court is reimposing very fast.
I'm tempted to go through the discussion between two of the MSNBC style lawyers I heard this morning blithely asserting that John Roberts is about to lower the boom on Trump. One of the thing they put their faith in was Marbury v Madison, to show you how much they've learned from witnessing the past twenty five years.
AMERICA CAN'T AFFORD ITS RACISTS
I listened to a Black commentator responding to a white Trump voter's FAFO over how Nebraska's going broke because the immigrants who used to do all the mean dirty jobs on their ranches aren't showing up to do them. He asked them why, since they voted white supremacist by voting for Trump, WHY THEY AREN'T WHINING THAT WHITE PEOPLE AREN'T TRYING TO FILL THOSE JOBS. He made the point that that was the whole reason white supremacists kidnapped and enslaved People of Color, because white people wouldn't do the jobs - at least not at the price the slave owning class - the richest class in the world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the billionaires of their times - were willing to pay.
Which leads me to this one
AMERICA CAN'T AFFORD BILLIONAIRES
and this one
THE WORLD CAN'T AFFORD BILLIONAIRES
A world-famous landmark of international friendship is where Trump's bully-boy cowards have drawn a line in the sand. Trump is such an a-hole and so are the rest of them. All of them should wear the dishonor they've earned for the rest of their lives.
During my recent illness and needing to take some time off each day from the horror of America's descent into Republican-fascist Trumpzism I've been returning to reading about the only science fiction author I really like, Clifford Simak. I've re-read, again, what I think is his masterpiece, Way Station, another of his masterpieces, All The Traps of Earth and a number of his other pieces. I'd known that some of his stories had been turned into radio dramas during the last years of the "golden age" and have posted one of those. Looking to see what I could find I came across this reading of one of the stories that make up what most of the Simak fans consider his best book, City. I read City but found lots of it didn't measure up to his later work. He was already a good writer as Desertion shows, and Desertion was one of only two of the piece in City that I really liked so I decided to post it. I'll look for more as I find the time to and post that.
One curious note, until I heard several people pronounce his last name online, finding they consistently pronounced it the same way, I find out that I've been pronouncing his name wrong for about fifty-five years.
Update: X-Minus One - Episode 119 - October 31, 1957 radio broadcast "Lulu"
LELAND DUDEK, the guy who threatened to close down Social Security because a court has ordered the Social Security Administration to not let Musk's incel-boy army root around and copy and, I have no doubt, steal personal and other information on literally just about every American has a particular relevance for Maine. It's no surprise as before Donny named him acting director, he was already in trouble for violating non-disclosure laws and policies at SSA.
Acting Social Security Administration Commissioner Michelle King resigned over the holiday weekend after she reportedly refused to aid Elon Musk’s pseudo-agency, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with accessing sensitive beneficiary data. King left a vacancy that was immediately filled by Leland Dudek, a guy who most people at the agency had never heard of before. By Wednesday night, Musk was publicly praising him as a hero. What happened?
In a now-deleted LinkedIn post on Friday from Dudek that was shared with me earlier this week, he proudly admits to violating multiple agency protocols and ethical standards in service of Musk’s SSA team—which I’ve confirmed includes Ethan Shaotran, Nikhil Rajpal, Gautier Cole-Killian and Marko Elez (who previously resigned after his racist social media posts resurfaced but has been reinstated).
Dudek posted his confessionary tale when King was still in charge, but when his fate suddenly changed early this week, the post vanished. Here is the full text, which has been referenced elsewhere but not published in its entirety:
When diaper Donald picked a fight with Maine's governor, Janet Mills a few weeks back, Dudek closed down a program that allowed new parents to get a Social Security number for their infants without having to go to a Social Security office, there are, from what I read online, eight Social Security offices across the largest and among the most rural states east of the Mississippi and that move would have caused enormous hardship, especially for those with the least ability to travel and take time off. When confronted over that Dudek backed down and said he did it because he was pissed off that Governor Mills dissed his diaper wearing man-god.
Anyway, Dudek is a product of one of those big name Catholic schools, Catholic University* and the National Defense University. You have to wonder if there is any discussion in Catholic education circles as to the immorality and amorality of so many of those who they credential, considering one of the foremost claims of the Catholic educational establishment is in the moral formation of its students. They don't seem to do a very good job of it, for institutions that get so much of their cred and, perhaps donations, from those claims. I'd trust land grant universities probably do at least as well and, considering the family wealth of their typical product, probably more reliably turn out decent People.
* Catholic University is one of only a few pontifical universities in the United States, so it's not your average rinky-dink Catholic college. It has the dubious distinction of having the Republican-fascist, Trumpzi Caridinals (Carol Channing-Liberace impersonator) Raymond Burke and Timothy Dolan and the former RNC headEd Gilespie as well as some less sleazy grad who might be counted as somewhat to its credit.
I HAVE WATCHED a brother and several other family members drink themselves to death and one of the things I know is that probably every alcoholic has almost certainly lied about how much they drank. Jefferson admitting to drinking "only" three or four glasses of wine a day while shunning whisky and other distilled liquors only means to me that he was a wino. Try reading through a large number of his letters and tell me that it's not obvious that he wasn't sober while he wrote a good many of them. Some of the most quoted things I've had thrown at me over the years, when I went back and read the letters that contained them led me to think he was drunk when he wrote them.
Anyone who told me that they drank "only" three or four glasses of wine a day would automatically make me suspect they were an alcoholic. There's only one thing I can say with certainty for my fellow abstainers, you can't suspect that we're drunks. My totally abstinent mother used to say, if you don't drink you don't have to wonder if you have a drinking problem. It requires no bogus psychological theorizing as long as you don't drink at all.
Trump may not drink but his substance abuse history is long and very well attested to by those who have been around him. His alleged sobriety is no kind of recommendation for drinking.
super-rich investor who was Elon Musk's biggest and earliest promoter (or so I'm told) trying to save his company's big investment in the rapidly tanking Tesla desperately trying to get Musk to quit and disassociate his poisonous personal branding from the company that will never, NOT EVER be separable from the pudding faced, Afrikaner accented white supremacist, Nazi who is destroying the United States after having bought the presidency . . .
I HOPE HE AND ALL MUSK INVESTORS LOSE IT ALL ALONG WITH MUSK. I want to watch their fortunes crash and burn like the death-trap cars they peddle to stupid people with more money than knowledge.
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES AND MILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE, EQUALITY, DEMOCRACY AND THE POSSIBILITY OF A DECENT LIFE DEPENDS ON IT.
after finding out one of the hundreds of living lawyers and government workers in their 70s and 80s who were doxxed by Trump's fiat to release all of the records of the investigations into JFK's assassination WITHOUT REDACTIONS, which led to us finding out all of those black outs in all of those records which had been released were many SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS AND OTHER PERSONAL INFORMATION ABOUT STAFFERS AND OTHERS, included the doxxing of the Republican-fascist lawyer-liar and cabloid mouthpiece and thoroughly skanky Joseph "degenerate" diGenova. And apparently the rAs Seen On TV Rage-o-matic lawyer-liar is madder 'n a wet hen about being so thoroughly doxxed by his god-king Donald Trump.
I hope lots of the others are similar supporters of Donald Trump it's so seldom we hear about such assholes FAFO experiences, corrupt lawyers don't get enough just desserts and there is no one who deserves it more than Joseph "degenerate" diGenova. I hope he gets the full effect of it, his skanky Republican-fascist as Seen On TV lawyer-liar wife too.
from the Pentagon website under Trump apartheid policy, I found out the interesting fact that he's a product of Harvard Harvard University, an A.B. and also the Pushkin State Russian Language Institute, which I don't find at all surprising.
I'm sure Harvard is proud of having credentialed him, as they no doubt are the other Trumpian fascists who they produced along with the theorists of unitary executive theory and some of the most insane of lawyerly Christian nationalists. I think it's time that Harvard and, especially, Harvard Law is classified as a fascist training academy that sometimes turns out a few nominal liberals. As I used to say about one of its biggest celebrities, Dershowitz, torture advocate who plays a civil libertarian on TV.
This wasn't the only rodeo for Ullyot, he was part of Trump I where he had to resign for, wait for it, trying to cover up the white supremacy of the Charlottesville Nazis and KKK cowards who had a mini Nuremberg rally that led to violence, antisemitic chants and a murder.
Ullyot came under fire in December [2017] after emails surfaced showing he discouraged the department’s former chief diversity officer from posting a more forceful condemnation of white supremacists and neo-Nazis who participated in the deadly August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
At the time, Wilkie defended Ullyot in a statement, confirming he was “on the VA team because he is committed to Veterans and has spent a lifetime of exceptional service as a Marine and public servant.”
Last March, USA Today and The Washington Post reported that Ullyot tried to facilitate the ouster of then-secretary David Shulkin by trying to get a top House Veterans’ Affairs Committee staffer to encourage members to demand his resignation.
I have the feeling that Ullyot will show up in future scandals. American white supremacists with his kind of connections don't just fade away into a white background and there is no one putrid enough for the Ivy League old-boys to drop.
LITTLE BOBBY KENNEDY is a perfect example of the ignorant arrogance of a kind that is most dangerous when wielded by an Ivy Leaguer with more power than actual knowledge. And there are fewer groups in which that is more dangerous than those with a degree in the make-believe lore of the law.
Little Bobby's declaration that the solution to the bird flu pandemic is east-peasy, just let it loose on entire flocks of birds and it will do all the work of choosing the survivors, the ones that are immune so we can go on with those avian Aryans to the greater profit (that is "glory" to such guys) of the survivors. It is literally what "Darwinian economists" advocated being done in the human population during Trump I which led to hundreds of thousands of dead Americans - it is the stupid and popular understanding of the theory of natural selection.* I say that because as horrified veterinary scientists have said in reaction to to Little Bobby's lawyerly scientific erudition proves, real science, to some extent, has moved on from natural selection as Charles Darwin and the next like five generations of Darwinists thought of it.
With H5N1 avian influenza spreading in poultry flocks, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is pushing a new plan: let the virus rip.
Kennedy recently told Fox News that by letting the highly pathogenic bird flu spread through flocks, farmers could “identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it.”
But poultry experts say that, in addition to causing an unimaginable poultry death toll, this plan wouldn’t work.
“No, not for this disease,” says Rocio Crespo, a poultry veterinarian at the North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine. “This is crazy.” . . .
Even with avian diseases that are slower-acting than highly pathogenic bird flu, scientists have struggled to find a key to genetic resistance. Huaijun Zhou, a professor of animal science at the University of California, Davis, worked on a project on Newcastle disease, another viral illness that is also nearly always fatal in poultry but that some infected birds can survive for weeks. “We didn’t find any magic bullet,” Zhou says.
There were genetic variants in chickens that allowed the birds to survive longer with Newcastle disease. Yet each one had a tiny effect, and it took a combination of hundreds of them to make a noticeable difference in survival. “It’s just the nature of the disease,” says Zhou, adding that the bird flu’s high mortality rate makes success even less likely.
Kennedy’s remarks belie a lack of knowledge about the way poultry breeding works, Koci says. The chickens that provide meat and eggs are not in the breeding population: they’re the product of parent generations that are bred to maximize disease resistance and meat or egg production. Wiping out the working offspring of these breeders wouldn’t do anything to alter the next generations of chickens coming down the line.
But if you think, thank heavens, Little Bobby doesn't have control of agricultural policy, you aren't counting on the fact that the Ag secretary is another lawyer from one of the functional Ivy Equivalents: (Texas at Austin.)
Kennedy does not have a say in the U.S.’s agricultural policies. But, as the New York Times reported on Tuesday, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has also indicated support for the let-it-rip idea, telling Fox News that some farmers are interested in piloting the strategy.
In a statement, Emily Hilliard, the deputy press secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services said, “We want to keep people away from the most dangerous version of the current bird flu, which is found in chickens. Culling puts people at the highest risk of exposure, which is why Secretary Kennedy and NIH want to limit culling activities. Culling is not the solution. Strong biosecurity is.”
But viral spread leads to more viral particles in the environment, begetting more viral spread, Crespo says.
And a no-cull policy would expose farmworkers to sick chickens, according to Koci. “You’re exposing more humans to more chickens,” he says, “and just buying more lottery tickets for that pandemic strain.”
I will bet you that the two lawyers in question, Little Bobby and Brooke are OK with exposing farm workers to the virus, figuring that population could do with some natural culling, ignorant that such exposed workers are one of the more reliable vectors in incubating viruses that can jump to the human population. I understand Marge Greene has been promoting "measles parties."
Darwinism is as dangerous a pseudo-scientific theory now as it always has been.
* I wouldn't call it fair to mention but merely accurate to point out that the most respected and conventional Darwinists from Charles Darwin down till today have, in fact, advocated exactly that policy of leaving the human population vulnerable to preventable viruses and other diseases to let nature kill off those they imagined to be biologically inferior. That is what led Charles Darwin to bemoan the imaginary dysgenic effects of universal vaccination against small-pox, what led his son Leonard to campaign on an anti-vaxx platform for a seat in the Parliament (thankfully he lost) and future generations of scientists, public understanders of such science, politicians and Supreme Court "justices" to go on wringing their hands over public health initiatives that would keep those they liked to imagine as inferior alive and able to have children. That is, even today, the popular understanding of such science and such viciously apathetic scum, of the kind that so many lawyers are, hold dangerously important positions in governments here and around the world. I will also point out that the disastrous ignorance-based inaction they favor is matched by a complete willingness in many cases to forcibly sterilize those they target as inferior, especially People of Color and members of the underclass.
ITS ONE OF THE things I concluded after being able to read more of Jefferson's letters online than I'd ever read in ink on paper, due to the drastically uneven quality of the thinking and writing and, comparing what I've also read about the alcohol consumption at Jefferson's Monticello that he was often doing the 18th century version of drunk dialing when he wrote his voluminous correspondence. If I had enough years left to me I might compare his production to that of other great letter writers of the period like John Adams or maybe the incredible journal of John Quincy Adams (available online, as well) to lay out what evidence there might be in those. I think Jefferson was very likely an alcoholic, believing alcoholism was far more common in the 18th and 19th centuries than it is even now. I do know that Jefferson said lots of shit along with the gems that are often embedded in it. So you can't just rely on his authority in judging nonsense such as that little bon bon full of shit about preferring newspapers to governments. That's the one I was referring to.
The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.
Anyone who has lived through the tyranny that lies told with impunity by the freest of free presses in American history has gotten us, lies spread with the most money behind them and that science of lying, public relations, to gull them with, what both invented and imposed the phony Trump on us should be able to recognize the fact that Jefferson, writing from Paris BEFORE HE HAD A REAL POLITICAL CAREER was full of shit.
You can get a taste of how full of shit he was by contrasting his claims about how political disruptions in the States in 1787 were being received by Europe with the receptions of the product of that far, far freer press today Here's what he said before that stuff the media and "civil libertarians" love to quote:
The tumults in America, I expected would have produced in Europe an unfavorable opinion of our political state. But it has not. On the contrary, the small effect of those tumults seems to have given more confidence in the firmness of our governments. The interposition of the people themselves on the side of government has had a great effect on the opinion here. I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution.
Well, the free press and the result of "The people" being peddled lies in the Jeffersonian style free press is rightly that the United States has totally lost the confidence of European democracies and also Canada and other democracies around the world while getting the praise and support of the worst of the worst anti-democrats and dictators.
The free press has lost us any claim to stability as a democracy or an example that the world should follow or whose treaties and promises should be relied on. If Jefferson sobered up enough, he'd likely have retracted what he said while under the influence. The 'liberty' he valued in the 18th century United States was a liberty of wealthy white men to enslave Black People and murder and dispossess Native American People. So perhaps he wouldn't be too worked up about the liberty that white supremacists have been given to repeatedly thwart equality and overturn what little equality has been wrested from the Constitution as it has stood with little interruption from the start.
In real life, in the fullness of Constitutional history, his "best army" turns out to be Trump's January 6th insurrectionists. Jefferson was the kind of guy who loved the idea of blood being shed as long as he was far from the violence. Though I think if it had been an army of the enslaved he'd have changed his tune, mighty fast. I don't doubt he would have taken the actions of lynch mobs, or, as it was protected by the Second Amendments, the version of that termed "slave patrols" as fully acceptable examples of what he favored
If lies told in the mass media aren't prevented through the ability of those lied about to sue the media till it hurts enough to stop their lying, American democracy is already dead as the drunk of Monticello. I think it is among the basic rights we have that equality and democracy are protected from those who propagandize and gull the stupid(media addled) and immoral (white supremacists, male supremacists, etc) into destroying those. I'd include an egalitarian democracy having the responsibility to suppress lies and hate speech that erode and destroy it as among those basic rights which government owes all of us, including, ironically, those very opponent of equality and democracy. I value that more than I value the right of the networks, the cabloids, the online outfits and individuals the Supreme Court, First Amendment fiction of a "right to lie." Clearly Jefferson was either stupid enough or drunk enough to believe there was a right to lie, which discredits him. I have no doubt he was amoral enough to believe that.
Note: I don't have the time to justify the copied and pasted lines today.
