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.
MAYBE ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS to understand about many right wing philanthropists is the deeply pragmatic and self-interested nature of their "philanthropy." A donation to an obscenely well endowed private university that maintains that original and most grotesquely anti-egalitarian, pro-old money form of affirmative action, legacy admission, is as "charitable" as money given for the direct and emergency aid to the least among us. In fact, under the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by the product of such universities as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, direct aid to the least among us is rightly made illegal. They said so in one of their worst rulings of the past two years, the same Ivy League law school product who take millions from millionaires and billionaires who have business in front of the court and who legalized overt, post delivery payment of buying politicians (and no doubt "justices") so long as the quid is delivered after the quo.
So you'll read that Tim Busch, the man who said that the Trump II regime is the "most Christian he's ever seen. is a famous "philantropist" but one whose philanthropy seem to be exactly the kind of pragmatic, self-interested investment that he, no doubt, hopes will produce greater income and fewer taxes for him, his wealthy family and friends. And as Tim Busch is one of the major sugar daddies of the "trad-catholic" cult his "christianity" has to be considered in Catholic terms.
I recommended the reading of the fisking of what Busch wrote in all of its dishonesty, its hypocrisy and it's just plain and bald-faced lying because I can't do more than elaborate on what John Grosso did, giving many more instances in the myriads of examples of Trumpzi actions and words that prove that Busch either is lying about the words and actions of the central figure and ultimate authority of Christianity, Jesus or he is actually presenting anti-Christ as a substitute for Jesus. Sort of the same thing that the Roberts Court does in replacing grotesque privilege of the same class of wealthy people for that lie over the Courthouse door, "equal justice under law,"
I would not waste my breath on advising Tim Busch to take into account Matthew 19:23-24 but will recommend it as a means of understanding the inauthenticity of "trad-catholicism" which is pretty much, all of it, a contradiction of that passage which appears in pretty much all of the syoptics [Mark 10:23-27, Luke 18:24-27]. Since it's the trad-catholic cult I'm addressing, I'll give it in the Douay-Rheim translation of the Vulgate:
23 Then Jesus said to his disciples: Amen, I say to you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. 24 And again I say to you: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.
23 Jesus autem dixit discipulis suis: Amen dico vobis, quia dives difficile intrabit in regnum caelorum. 24 Et iterum dico vobis: Facilius est camelum per foramen acus transire, quam divitem intrare in regnum caelorum.
In light of that you have to question whatever comes out of a rich man in terms of Christianity, what a rich man says about things and the kinds of things that he'll pay other People to say. I think that whenever something that comes from a rich man like Timothy Busch whose interests seem to so conspicuously be served by what he claims to be "christianity" and "catholicism," you have to conclude that he's just lying about his support of it Since it is one of those issues that is being most grotesquely distorted in the astro-turf of lies that are coming from trad-catholics, here's what John Grosso says about the theory of subsidiarity as a means of gutting government spending for the least among us as they give billionaires and millionaires tax breaks and aid in profiting from evil:
Busch's reference to subsidiarity is disingenuous and bastardizes the concept.
Subsidiarity is a core tenet of Catholic social teaching, which essentially states that when addressing a problem, intervention should occur on the smallest or most local level possible. The logic for this is sound — generally that the people closest to the problem have the best understanding of it and what they need to solve it.
Some problems, though, are so complex, pervasive, or resource-dependent that they cannot be dealt with by small communities, or even countries. Those problems require intervention from larger institutions, who are also tasked with resourcing and empowering smaller organizations in a way that is not oppressive or restrictive but instead helps address the common good.
Until the Trump administration gutted USAID, this was precisely how Catholic Relief Services functioned in their work abroad.
Busch is cynically using subsidiarity to rationalize Trump's anti-Christian foreign policy and to excuse the abandonment of the homeless, starving and hopeless of the world.
Tim Busch, like so many a phony Catholic focuses on distortions of stuff like neo-Thomist theology and the long and often far from clear and not infrequently far from Christian history of Catholicism while ignoring the Gospel, the Epistles, the Prophet and the Law. Since I'm a lot less polite than a writer for a respectable magazine, I'll say Busch is a better example of the devil quoting scripture than he is a Catholic. Jesus rejected the temptation of Satan quoting Scripture when he offered him the world if he'd surrender his soul, Busch clearly put a lower price on his. I'll also recommend what Grosso points out about the exemplars of Christianity according to Busch in the Trump II regime, since his Napa Institute is one of the major nags about infidelity to strict sexual morality according to right-wing Catholicism:
And here's a topic for a panel discussion at the next Napa Institute gathering: Trump, senior adviser Elon Musk, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have fathered 30-plus children with more than 12 women.
Busch's laudatory assessment doesn't even hold up when judging by the standards of the Napa Institute's brand of Catholicism.
For the record, I think the theology of Thomas Aquinas is a deeply mixed bag and the distortions of it by current right-wing Catholics is mostly a sack of shit. I would love to know more about the mystical experience that Aquinas had late in his life that led to him declaring that his enormous life's work was as valuable as straw and he stopped writing. I think if he'd been more candid and had more time he'd probably have revised it drastically. I think compared to the Cappadocians it's decidedly inferior theology whose adoption by the anti-Christ of "trad-catholicism" is a warning of how dangerous much of it can be.
Update: I can't remember which theologian it was said that in his experience neo-Thomists tend to be quite ignorant of Scripture, having concentrated on the Thomist system of theology to the exclusion of the Gospel, Epistles, etc. I am hardly a deep student of neo-Thomism or even authentic Thomism, having found too little sustenance of Christian faith in it for the bother of going through the dross that Thomas, himself, seems to have realized he'd written. I see no evidence that it produced a superior level of adherence to the teachings of Jesus in the long history of its testing. It can't match the Quakers and Mennonites in that regard and you can hardly find less Thomist traditions.
WHEN I HEARD ABOUT THE TRUMP VOTER WHOSE new wife who had stayed past her visa got arrested by ICE on their Honey Moon and he's whining about it, something I've been thinking about took solid form.
Republicans, right wingers are always OK when its bad things being done to other people, what they're never OK with being done unto the. The "christian right" holds the exact opposite of the Golden Rule, they follow the fools golden rule. Depending on things like white supremacy to make sure those things they love to see being done to People of Color, male supremacy to see it being done to Women, cis-gender privilege when it's happening to LGBTQ+ People, and other forms of the privilege they take for granted to mean it never happens to them turns out to be a rather foolish thing to depend on.
Related to that is this article fisking the sugar-daddy of American-fascist trad-catholicism, Tim Busch as he claims that the Trump II regime is the most Christian presidency in history. By their fruits you will know them, he is absolutely a rotter. 'll probably have more to say about that jerk, later
that I should just ignore Simps for how even though he is clearly trying to get my attention by repeating stupid things I refuted years ago when he said them before. Maybe if he says something that answering it will amuse me and maybe those who like to read my response to his beefing I'll post it. Until then, he'll have to settle for the attention they give him at Duncan's Geritol and Ex Lax bar.
Update: I've also come to suspect that a teacher in the so-called STEM topics at the U of Chicago Lab School has that typical Eschatonian's habit of not reading what they express an opinion on. Not really a surprise to me anymore, but it wasn't till I encountered lots of science faculty at big-name schools online that I realized most of them were as credulous about things outside of their small specialty as your typical ignorant blog rat.
who are still warning about an impending Constitutional crisis are either colluding liars or cowards totally in denial of reality because with Musk-Trump using either Federal Marshals or hired guns (we don't know if it's some random armed thugs hired by Musk) to attack even independent agencies to ransack and steal files and other information from them IS WHAT A CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS IS.
We have been in a Constitutional crisis for going on months, since Musk-Trump has been destroying the federal government, attacking and abducting People who are not breaking the law, calling out their goons on even federal judges, now, with the full support of the Republican-fascists in the Congress and even some in the federal judiciary and in many state governments. I would argue we were certainly in one when the Roberts Court put Trump above the law going on a year ago and as they also legalized overt and clear corruption of government by post delivery of the goods payment. I have no doubt that the Supreme Court Republicans were thinking of selling more cases to their patron billionaires and millionaires as a retirement plan for themselves as they did that.
I have been going on for more than four years about how I have come to a conclusion that there are an unusual number of complete cowards among those who practice the law as a profession. I have repeatedly noted I first came to that conclusion on comparing the courage of the diplomats and military officers who testified to the House committees who investigated the crimes of Trump leading to his first impeachment. The lawyers who testified were clearly and publicly interested on one thing above all, covering their own asses as they covered up for the crimes of Trump I or at least required that any negative information about Trump be dragged out of them while testifying under oath. That pattern, once noticed, governed the abject failure of the legal profession, the prosecutors at the so-called Department of "Justice" including the Attorney General, to investigate and prosecute Trump, the many judges who failed to hold him to justice, the Supreme Court who one can clearly be justified in believing that many if not the majority of them failed to uphold the Constitution itself to prevent equal justice or any kind of justice to be done to the most criminal president in American history. That is true of even the ones who didn't obviously do it because, like those "justices" who directly participated in Bush v Gore to overturn a presidential election for the most obviously of partisan reasons, Thomas, Roberts, Barrett and Kavanaugh, it is true of even Jackson Brown who voted to gut the relevant sections of the 14th Amendment, annulling the Constitution, itself, to let Trump become president again.
Let's just say that I don't much trust the legal profession to save us because they have proven only slightly less reliable in that than those supposed great protectors of freedom and the good, journalists. Yeah, I know but you must have noticed how those in the news racket have told us about the vital function the free press plays in the promotion and protection of democracy because they're always telling us that. And there is that quote by the young and callow Thomas Jefferson they love so much but which I think must be one of the many, many things that came out of him when he was drunk, he certainly knew better than that by the time he became president.
I have pointed out recently that the absolute fact that almost all lawyers go into it because it's a good way for them to make a lot of money has to be considered one of those things that govern how that profession, from those who chase ambulances or make a profession out of parking garage law to those who are elevated to the senior ranks of the profession, the judges and what are laughingly called "justices" not only see their work but also what the actual laws mean. The legal system is rigged for those with the most money and it is probably the most apparent of things about how it works, so it is rigged against those with less money and certainly against those who have little to no money at all. In regard to that I have pointed out how many politicians have been trained in and have worked in the lawyer racket and, no doubt, their habits of servicing those with the deepest pockets has an effect on their conduct in those jobs. Consider that when you think about how Mike Johnson or any of the other Republican-lawyer members of Congress act. But also consider it when Democratic lawyer-legislators turn out to be cowards and enablers of the crimes of Trump. It's not unlike the most obvious explanation of the conduct of the so-called news media. Though in the case of lawyers, it is part of their professional courtesy to their best paid colleagues to excuse their immorality and their amorality because those are intrinsic to the professional practices of lawyers.
I recently came across a Bluesky post of some lawyer who claimed to be a feminist and liberal who, nonetheless, had written an op-ed saying that Democrats should support the Kavanaugh nomination to the Supreme Court because he was probably the best they were going to get from a Trump nominee. Someone in the comments posted a link to an article saying that Democrats should support Goresuch. I'd never heard of the first lawyer before but the second one was written by one of the MSNBC lawyers. I wasn't surprised at either because back when I could still stomach watching the Senate Judiciary Committee, I'd seen so-called liberal, even democratic lawyers AND EVEN DEMOCRATIC APPOINTEES TO THE FEDERAL JUDICIARY support the lying Republican-hack, even then supporter of neo-fascist theories of the presidency, Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court. That was even after the testimony of Professor Ronald Sullivan pointing out Alito's clearly favoring the rights and feelings of a wealthy adult woman who had been strip-searched with cause by the police as he favored the police strip-searching a ten-year-old girl when they had no reason to suspect her of any crime. I have little doubt that the MSNBC lawyer knew of Goresuch's opinion that a trucking company had the right to order a trucker to freeze to death on the job when he supported his nomination. And, remember, we're talking about the "liberals" among the lawyers.
So, even as we are now well beyond a mere crisis in matters Constitutional, you can count on the cowards of the legal profession TO NEVER ADMIT THAT THE CONSTITUTION HAS FAILED, MISERABLY IN THE HANDS OF A THOROUGHLY STUPID, LIKELY SENILE DEMENTED TRUMP. I have no doubt that behind his insane orders and ranting and attacks on everyone from the most law-abiding average person, DISABLED VETERANS, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! to those in the federal judiciary and on the Supreme Court, as he blows through the decisions and orders of federal judges with the impunity that the Republican-fascist congress and the Roberts Court ive him, they will be pretending that it's all OK because, you know, the Constitutional order is still being propped up like a Potemkin false front of liberal democracy and even on the lesser standard of there still being a republic still covered by the whopper of a lie that it is a country of laws and not men.
On a related note, it is shocking to me how little is being made of Musk's intel-grab by those who love to freak-out online. I say that as someone who remembers the furore over the piddling information collected by the NSA, which was stolen by Edward Snowden and, I have no doubt, handed it over to first the Chinese intelligence agency and then to Putins, how little concerned the same People who irrationally held that Snowden and the liks of Glenn Greenwald were heroes are about Musk, no doubt, now having far more and far more important and sensitive information as stolen by his incel-boy army for him. It's a hell of a lot more than just the records of who was in contact with who - it was illegal for the NSA to go farther without court orders. The judges might say they're restricted in what they can collect and what they can do with it - I suspect even the well intentioned judges are as tech-savvy as Chuck Grassley - but I have no doubt that Musk will be doing with the information he's stolen that Snowden did, sell it for his own profit and purposes. You can see how really useful the "civil liberties" lawyers and journalists are through that failure.
It's now clear that Simps is Trump level senile. It was only four days ago that he read my refutation of him saying the same thing ten years ago and repeating that I'd never said what he claimed I did over and over again.
Steve Simels, blog malignancy
12 hours ago
And which should definitely be made if only because it will piss the living crap out of a certain former Atriot/current idiot (whose name I won't mention but whose initials are Anthony McCarthy) who thinks Oscar Wilde was a hack writer and all movies suck.
As for "all movies sucking" I never said that, either, just that almost all of them are pretty stupid and watching movies instead of reading books was bound to make you as attention deficient and stupid as a Steve Simels and the Eschatots are.
A lifetime spent in pop kulcha makes you stupid. So does lying. I think that's an important point, lies and believing lies makes People really, really stupid. Part of why Trump is president right now.
