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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geri Allen Trio - Dark Prince

Geri Allen - piano 

Ralph Armstrong - bass 

Ralph Penland - drums

Duke Ellington - Ivie Ivy Anderson - I Got It Bad And That Ain't Good

 

"Christians ought not to support a MAGA movement that claims the name of Jesus, but whose core sacrament is the systemic ritual abuse of the Other."

I ALMOST DIDN'T LISTEN to this one but I'm laid up with resurgent sciatica and I'm in too much pain to read a book.    The guy in the video, an ex-evangelical mininster-ex-Republican has a theory about how the fantasmagoric, obsessive, eternal damnation - Revelations literalist soteriology of that anti-Christianity is related to what makes them so damned cruel.

I think universalism is a far healthier movement that seems to be gaining some traction in popular Christianity - I think the better scholars among universalists make a rather convincing case for their belief - one which some are afraid would lead to amorality though I don't think you can make the case that a belief in the most grotesque idea of eternal damnation leads to better morals.   The entire history of Western culture right up to today would have probably been a lot less evil if eternal conscious torture was not pushed by the churches.   I wish they'd never put Revelation into the canon of Scripture,  it's been little more than trouble for the few beautiful images held within it.   Its danger has actually grown since the early modern period when Biblical literalism came up in a big way with Protestant "sola Scriptura" doctrine.   Though as "trad-catholics" prove, they're just as bad as the worst of them.  

Trump's Brains and Epstein's Procurer Working Together To Get Her Sprung

I'M GENERALLY ALLERGIC  to the rambling Meidas Touch style - though generally not their content - but this one is definitely worth listening to.    

He laid out pretty well what seems to be going on in the dance between Trump - or, rather,  Trump's brains and Ghislaine Maxwell over her holding back on what she knows about Trump and other rich white child rapists balancing her certain fears of being offed like Epstein was and her desire to get pardoned or otherwise sprung from the 20 year sentence she got for tafficking young girls through Epstein.   I have no doubt that the rumors that several countries intelligence agencies may have a stake in this,  I've heard Russia,  Israel,  the U.S. and Britain as likely having had connections to the child peddling almost certain blackmailer who is known to have had his properties in which the child trafficking to rich, powerful men happened rigged for video recording.   No doubt the favorite child of the known triple agent degenerate and crook Robert Maxwell - who as well "committed suicide" when his crimes just started catching up with him - would have known a lot as well as the possibility that a "suicide" or other untimely death in custody was possible for her if she told what she could have to get more lenient treatment than she got.   That's the reason Trump wanted to pardon her all along,  only he was convinced it would be worse for him than if he took his chances on her playing the game she has.

ON a related note,  re, the Michael Wolff claims that he's got tapes and had seen photos as he's describing NOW! instead of when those may have saved the country and the world from Trump II.   If a "journalist" or even a journalist has such information and they don't do what a journalist does REPORT IT TO THE PUBLIC IN A TIMELY MANNER but hold it for yet another book deal (I'm looking at Woodward here, too) then they are total assholes and as bad as anyone in Trump's regime or campaign for holding it back.   I think in Wolff's case he should be required to put up or shut up instead of being cited.   If he doesn't have what he claims to or if what he has isn't what he's hinting it is,  he will end up helping  Trump,  Bondi, Patel, etc. in burying this scandal,  doing Trump's bidding.   If he does have it and has withheld it hoping to get a fifth book out of the Satyricon Now Trump era he's a massively irresponsible asshole.   That latter possibility won't get him kicked out of the "profession" of journalism,  he's just helped set the low, low bar that you have to shuffle over to be one of those these days.   I used to put the scare quotes over the "journalism" but these days that so-called profession is about as worthy of respect as lawyering and being president of the United States.  

If someone like Brian Tyler Cohen or another who does it better by using a well-written script instead of winging it (though I'll admit sometimes Ben is doing that better for the amount of practice he's gotten)  comments on this,  I'll try to post their's as well. 

I came to the conclusion that artificial entities,

which countries certainly are, had no "rights" in thinking about the Supreme Court inventing "corporate persons" and then repeatedly setting them and their "rights" up and above those of mere human beings.  The earlier courts were entirely corrupt in working up that fiction but the Rehnquist and far more so the Roberts Courts have made them Nietzschean Übermenschen who, especially through such further Supreme Court inventions creating money as speech and the such have given them billions of times more "rights" than ordinary human beings do.   Lawyers - a profession that never stop sinking in my esteem - have certainly not done much to complain about that,  especially the corrupt "civil liberties" industry which has played such an outsized role in obtaining such "rights" for such artificial "persons."

Once I saw though that legal and lexcicographic con job,  hearing it said about Israel, I first felt odd about in the early 1970s as I first encountered some thuggish zionist students (at least one was a member of the JDL) from the Middle-Atlantic states.   I almost immediately saw through the bullshit and rejected that as any legitimate framing of any issues.   It was only the other day when I decided to answer some trolling I chose not to post that I came across this quotation from a note Noam Chomsky sent to someone who asked him to answer some lies that David Mamet told about him:

To my knowledge, the concept ‘right to exist’ was invented by US-Israeli propaganda in the 1970s, when the Arab states (with the support of the PLO) formally recognized Israel’s right to exist within secure and recognized borders (citing the wording of UN 242). It was therefore necessary to raise the bars to prevent the negotiations that the US and Israel alone (among significant actors) were blocking, as they still are.  They understood, of course, that there is no reason why Palestinians should recognize the legitimacy of their dispossession — and the point generalizes, as noted, to just about every state; maybe not Andorra.

Which seems to me to be a rather well-founded suspicion that that was the origin of the bullshit PR slogan,  as I recall that was back in the days before the overt fascists, the Likud gained the control which they have pretty well had the entire time since,  even forcing the so-called Labour Party to adopt their overt apartheid and genocidal policies.  Though I doubt that the Labour Party of Israel has much of a future as the voters of Israel go ever more fascist.   I think the myth that they're about to vote out the fascist coalition that has controlled the country for most of the last half century is ever more obvious nonsense.  At this point they'd have seemed to be going to do that for longer than the U.S. Green Party was announcing its imminent breakthrough.   It's easy as pie to practice that hopeful anticipation when you've got no real skin at stake and you don't mind generations of Palestinians being  terrorized, dispossessed and displaced and murdered en masse as most Americans obviously haven't in the half a century that Chomsky talks about, above. 

I haven't read anything by Chomsky that goes as far as I do in rejecting the idea that states have rights and that includes any "right to exist."  But he does seem to have noticed the invention of that slogan about the same time I recall it coming into existence.   I think that idea has no right to exist because it is a smokescreen for theft, violence, displacement and murder.   

Let Me Break This To You By Breaking It Over Your Head

THE WORLD DOESN'T HAVE TO AGREE with anyone that THEIR preferred country, or nation or state or nationality or "race" or "ethnicity" or religion, for that matter,  GETS TO HAVE SPECIAL TREATMENT THAT IS AFFORDED TO NO OTHER ONE.    In fact, let me break this to you,  bunky, THE WORLD IS NOT GOING TO AGREE WITH YOU ON THAT POINT AND IS UNDER NO OBLIGATION,  LEGAL, SOCIAL OR MORAL TO DO THAT.   Though you may get many governments to do that when those in control have some ulterior motive which may though probably does not have much to do with the People in those countries so favored,  but in some economic or strategic reasoning.   People have little to do with that kind of thing, in the end.   If you scratch most forms of nationalism you'll find that those pushing it see "their people" as little more than a natural resource to exploit and are expendable to one extent or another.   

I know you idiots who use the entirely stupid "Israel's 'right' to exist" trope have never considered that but if "states" have rights and even "rights to exist" then there is no rational means of declaring the Third Reich did not share that "right to exist,"*   Imperial Japan before the end of WWII had every reason for claiming that "right" and those it convinced of the divinity of the Japanese imperial state or those who believed in Hitler and his state did too,  if Zionists are allowed to claim such a "right" for the far less clearly founded "modern state of Israel" and the idiots who buy into that mere slogan are allowed to hold it as some legal, social or moral reality which all so-called decent minded People are required to acquiesce to.    What that phrase is is a propaganda tool to take advantage of the mid-brow and lower (that would be your crowd) superficiality in the use of language to advantage what was an apartheid ethno-state in the guise of a democracy - WHICH I TAKE AS JUST ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF WHY A REAL DEMOCRACY MUST BE EGALITARIAN OR IT WILL BE JUST ANOTHER APARTHEID ETHNO-STATE OR ITS EQUIVALENT - in order to cover up and allow its crimes to go unremarked on.   And, I think it is probably as close to a rule of so-called "political science" as any that an apartheid ethno-state will, almost inevitably, turn into a genocidal apartheid ethno-state as it discriminates against those who are not part of its master-ruling-race, to disadvantage them, to discriminate against them, to enslave them and steal their labor, to steal their property, to steal their land - I am describing those who wanted and want right now for the United States to be just such a white-supremacist ethno-state as much as anywhere - and to, in the fullness of evil to murder them.

As I've noted, the irony in the case of Israel is the use it made of the illegitimacy of that flagship example of such evil,  the German ethno-state that the Nazi ideology called for and tried to put into effect in their propaganda.   What is not an irony is that America's racists and antisemites have made such common cause with the modern state of Israel in their genocidal "ethnic cleansing" of Palestine, though it is ironic that so many Americans who favor equality HERE have been gulled and morally blackmailed into supporting what they oppose here being the OFFICIAL AND LONG TERM PRACTICE OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

The "modern state of Israel" that most Americans hold in their mind is a product, not of the reality of it,  but believed through  carefully crafted and dishonest propaganda.   I, in my youth, bought one side of that bullshit, the "socialist" side of that propaganda, the kind of pop clap trap that had Pete Seeger and the Weavers singing the Zionist "folk song" Tzena, Tzena, Tzena whose original lyrics were a promotion of the proto-Israeli military and its alleged moral goodness even as they were anything but an unambiguous good in the early 1940s.  That socialist Zionist stuff kept the so-called Labour Party in power for a little while but it was about as socialist as the Starmer Labour Party is in Britain, today.  It may not have been as overtly settler-colonialist (by the way, Tzena refers to Israeli settlements as "colonies"),  it was quieter about it.   And, just as you can have a democracy which is entirely non-egalitarian and so evil,  you can certainly have a non-egalitarian socialism, as, in fact, the Nazis styled themselves and as Stalin claimed his government,  one of many rival world's greatest mass murder regimes have claimed to be.   If there's one thing America's socialists have been,  it is naive and as much of a sucker for PR tactics as any mindless capitalist has been. 

ONLY HUMAN BEINGS AND OTHER NATURAL LIVING BEINGS HAVE RIGHTS.   Rights do not inhere to the creations of human beings,  they don't inhere to abstractions such as states or even shadier human creations and mythical entities such as corporations and other often criminal syndicates.  Rights don't inhere to religions.  Human beings may have a right to their religious beliefs just as they may to their property but the religion no more than the property has any such a thing as a "right."  If you think that is not a small point,  it is one of the founding evils of the U.S. Constitution and law that it held that there were People who were property and that as such they had no rights.  There are several standing U.S. Supreme Court rulings to that effect which have never been overruled - I used to think such a thing was not important but with the Roberts Court I wouldn't count on that in the future.   Corrupt courts such as the U.S. Supreme Court may claim that such artificial "persons" have rights but that is a lie,  the kind of lie that Courts and those who use their rulings use to deny the very real rights of real human beings - something the Court here has been lying about the 14th Amendment and its legislative history to do since the 1880s with often deadly as well as injust effects.   

That is exactly what I suspect the "right of Israel to exist" slogan was intended to do from the start though if that was not the intent IT HAS CERTAINLY BEEN WHAT IT HAS BEEN GOOD FOR SINCE I FIRST HEARD IT IN THE 1970s.    In that it seems Noam Chomsky also noticed that that was when the phrase first gained currency,  not unrelated to the increasingly obvious discrimination against and dispossession and killing of Palestinians by Israel,  both the official government and the "settler" movement who have been the vanguard of murder, terror and dispossession that has been so effective in stealing land for the Zionist project.   I think it's another close-to law of so-called political science that whenever a state starts to have that "right to exist" slogan pushed that you can be sure someone is being robbed and killed by said state.   

In the United States, "states rights" is certainly the most common form of the same thing as pushed by the slave-states and, after merely de jure emancipation,  the Jim Crow states under lynch law and constant, violent terrorism.   That has been going on for centuries, now, and it provides some of the strongest evidence of the evil of the concept.   Most of that evil unstated but no less certainly, for that, its real goal. 

I could go on and on and on.   I certainly reject this kind of crooked bullshit in my country,  the United States and I'm not under any moral obligation to pretend it's not happening in any other country.   Not those states that idiot lefties of the past - for example Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers as well as the Weavers - held whenever some country called itself "socialist" not for those which are called "democracies" even as they practice American style lynch law and Jim crow style inequality,  I'm certainly not obligated to pretend it in the case of the actively genocidal, apartheid ethno-states such as the old South Africa or the current Israel.  

One thing I have concluded is that a very large percentage of Americans, many of them racist-antisemitic-right-wing crooks and many of them would-be egalitarian liberals are not bothered when it is happening to non-white People in some other country.   The list of such countries would probably comprise a good number of those which get American military and other aid every year,  it certainty includes Israel.   That American liberals are still cowed by the fear of someone calling them an "antisemite" is absurd,  as absurd as those old-timey liberals who got cowed by being called "commies."   American liberals have to stop being cowards when they see evil done by Israel as they certainly have no right to pretend not to see it because the U.S.,  Britain and many other Western governments are in the blood bath up to our eyeballs.  

*  As I've pointed out here,  such a "right" for a country to exist lies at the bottom of why such as the American senator Robert Taft opposed the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis on the basis that due to the government of Germany legalizing those crimes against humanity and other evils they were tried for, there was no legitimate legal process for holding them responsible for even mass murder.    He was a product of Harvard Law - as have been so many other moral idiots such as JFK who considered the morally atrocious Taft a "profile on courage" which, by the way, is one of the major factors in me considering JFK to have been morally obtuse.   

Have I mentioned I got over the Kennedy cult even as I was still buying romantic bullshit about things like the kibbutz movement?    I don't remember who it was who pointed out that even in the death camps Jews sometimes could observe Holy Days and the such but in some of the kibbutzes of Israel that was banned.   I got over my romantic view of communes pretty early on in having actually been to a couple.  Especially the ones with lots of rules.   They inevitably developed dictatorial cliques who ran them.  You'd have to be a real fanatic to live in a kibbutz.   I'd have told them to all fuck off by the time I was seventeen.  

Electricians in Maine FAFO

I DON'T PLAY FAVORITES in which of those who f'ed around and are finding out,  I'm as satisfied to hear Maine electricians reap the racist stupidity they sowed as I am white-guy-welfare farmers in Nebraska, the mid-west and the sunbelt.

This guy was set up, as well, by the Maine media,  less by the little read print sources but by the 24-7 from sea to land borders with New Hampshire and Canada all-Republican-all-the-time electronic media here.   I don't know if he is one of the really flagrant racists who, especially, populate Northern Maine (some of the most overt racists I've ever heard come from up there)  but I'll bet that's one of the big reasons he was so clulessely upset about Biden's record on illegal immigration and why he would never have voted for the Black Woman who would have kept him in work over the white supremacist criminal clown he voted for.   

He's hardly alone, from what I've heard a majority of those in the building trades here voted for the white supremacist.  If any didn't,  they might get my sympathy if they voted for Kamala Harris and Democrats but they're the only ones who will.  I hope all Trump voters get what they wanted for other People because a. they deserve it and b.  there's no hope for them learning except from bad personal experience of it costing them.   They are amoral,  it always comes down to what's in it for them and there's no reason in 2025 to pretend they're ever going to be any better than that.   I'm done with that going all gooey over those who fucked around and are finding out,  they'd have been perfectly OK with what they're getting happening to other People.