"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
The Last Escape by R. D. Wingfield with Lyndon Brook as Seaton and Chris Hallam as Det Supt Dawson Seaton had been a model patient for all those years - and then something had been triggered off. Directed By: Christopher Venning Landlord: Walter Hall Harry: Malcolm Gerard Doctor: Jonathan Scott Det-lnisp Garwood: Kevin Brennan Police Constable: Anton Phillips Brindle: Gavin Campbell Secretary: Penelope Reynolds Sir Charles Ebsworth: Richard Hurndall
Male Nurse: Crawford Logan Listen now before they remove it from Archive.org
Going through Walter Brueggemann's book Gift and Task this Lent has led me to appreciate how following a set liturgy has the effect of forcing you to think about things that you either aren't inclined to think about on a particular day or, perhaps ever. Going with "the spirit" might be good for some things but I think it can be as dangerous as becoming too liturgically directed, it has a very high potential for narrowing your scope and your activity. I am not going to give the readings and his commentary for every day of it because this illness has made it harder for me to read while I type. Wish everything was available in large-print. I was, in my early adulthood, afraid of falling too much under the influence of any specific would-be authority which, looking back, was unwise. Someone who is aware of the dangers of falling under the influence of other people is probably already more or less immune from the greatest dangers of that happening. It did have the effect of leading me to seriously consider the Society of Friends, the local variety here in New England who have unprogrammed meetings* and who wait for the Spirit to move them. Which led me to think well of some aspects of that and not so well of others. I was kind of troubled at how Quakerism seemed to peter-out from a lack of cohesive substance in some of the Quakers I encountered and their families. And I also found, both in the reading of the history of Quakerism and what I observed that even the unprogrammed following of the Spirit didn't protect Quakers from developing very rigid habits and practices and even conventions of thought, Rufus Jones, one of the major figures in Quakerism in the early 20th century mentioned some of that that, seeking to free the Society of Friends from those but I think even modern Quakers can become quite rigid. Looking at some of them online, there seem to be some rare instances of that even among some of the most purportedly liberal among them. From this I take it that we can take what we can get from even the most set of liturgical practices in even some of the more rigidly legalistic churches, I read or listen to the daily readings from the Catholic Conference of Bishops - most days - and find I get new things out of it. I listen to sermons and read commentaries and find that whatever spirit leads the observations others have had can, sometimes, also lead me in similar directions. I also find that when it leads me to disagree with those commentaries that thinking about them can be helpful too. Sometimes I have had to go against my own inclinations to conclude what I disagreed with was worthy of consideration or even agreement. I should have realized that back a few years when I went through Brueggemann's book, The Bible Makes Sense here but I guess I wasn't ready to think about the value that was to be had from commentary. The idea that just a plain-sense reading of the Scriptures was the safest to avoid falling into a distortion of the meaning of it was silly. You're as capable of distorting the meaning and I'd say more likley to if you don't consider what other people have gotten from it. Which makes things a lot more complex than just reading it for yourself but it also means that you are open to someone maybe being guided to a deeper understanding than you're going to get from it. Rugged individualism is one of the more destructive delusions of modern thought, it can be as destructive as following a multitude to, perhaps, evil results. It might make a satisfying theme in a stupid movie but it's no way to approach the Jewish-Christian Scriptures. Jesus told us to pray "Our father" "Give us" "Forgive Us" "As we forgive those" and "Deliver us from evil". I'd have to check to see if I'm right but he seemed to address individualism mostly when he talked about matters of taking personal responsibility. I'll bet some commentator, somewhere, has addressed that in exhaustive detail, I just don't know enough to know about that. I hadn't known, until I heard Rowan Williams talk about her, that St. Edith Stein had addressed some important theological and philosophical problems directly relevant to egalitarian democracy until I listened to him the other day. * I do actually like Quaker meeting, though I wish they had them earlier in the morning than they do. Haven't gone for decades because of that. What I really wish there was around me is a house church led by a Roman Catholic Woman Priest, I'm tired of waiting for enough of the clerical reactionaries to die off so Pope Francis will open up the official priesthood. He'll never do what needs to be done.
Just thought I'd give an update. They said the last test they did on my sister they have results for were negative but we are still being told we should self-quarantine - at this point I'm not sure if they have any idea what's going on or maybe it's just an abundance of caution. NOT that any of us feels like going anywhere. My sister's coughing pretty badly, still, her fever is up, again, her school just announced they are suspending classes. I'm expecting that will be the rule. Things are going to get really bad really fast, I suspect. I heard one of the idiot podcasters sounding very Trump of several days ago not seeming to be able to believe it's not going to be better next week. I don't know how to write shaking my head in disbelief or I'd insert that here. Good thing I've got food in the freezer and wood in the wood bin. I would imagine everyone is mentally listing all of their family members, friends acquaintances who are old, are on chemo, have respiratory illness other illnesses that put them at increased risk. Keep well.
I was curious to see if the Bernie Bots online were still spitting poison at Elizabeth Warren. They are. Sam Seder is doing it as I type this, his community of commentators are as misogynistically vile as they have been for the past year. They've clearly got some major daddy issues around Bernie Sanders but I think it's also got more than a little to do with the fact that Warren is a woman just as it was that Hillary Clinton was a woman. I also find it hilarious that the Bernie Bots at Majority Report are going on and on about the "Boomers," they seem to believe that millenials are Bernie Bots and "Boomers" are Warren supporters. What's hilarious about that is that, born in 1941, by some common definitions Bernie Sanders is a "boomer" and Sam Seder, born 1966 was either one or practically one, depending on whether or not you include the entire quarter of a century from America entering the war as the boomer years. But, looking at their scribblage and babblage (Don't get me strated on that opportunistic idiot Sam Seder protegee, Nomiki Konst) the dead-ender Bernie Bots don't seem to be very big on history or thinking. The Bernie Bots belong on the ash heap of history, speaking of history. They're hoping to spoil the election putting Republican-fascists in power for four more years. After all, they learned nothing from 2000 and 2016.
Susan Collins criticizes federal coronavirus response, urging Trump to ‘step back’ Susan Collins is feeling the pinch, I think she realizes this on top of her deep unpopularity after the exposure for what she's always been might just finish her off.
This passage from Rowan Williams' second lecture is one of the most useful for opening up to the idea that our current notions of absolute rights in modern minds conditioned by the limits of secularism might be far from the ultimate expression of those that so many of us - my younger self certainly included - thought they were. It will certainly have an effect on my further use of the words we use to talk about them. The anchorage of human rights in an act of the creator and in the mutuality of the Body of Christ can't mean any weakening of the reach of this universal justicia, this justice in God acting for for God's sake. So unless we allow for some sort of convergence along these lines between the theological tradition and the discourse of human rights, I think we're going to be stuck with, on the one hand, a theological account which fails to find any traction in the real world of contemporary legal and social argument, especially in the context of acute oppression and inequality and on the other hand a secular rights discourse which is forgetful of its history and so incapable of looking at itself critically. The language of rights was learned and refined over a long period. And if you take nothing else away from these lectures, that's worth bearing in mind. It took time to learn how to talk about rights.
And it will certainly take time to figure out how that talk has gone so wrong in the United States which has produced, within two decades, a George W. Bush and now a Donald Trump regime. Clearly the notions of rights that flourished in the post WWII era has been a mixed bag otherwise we would not be in the serious trouble we are in now. We figure out way past that clearly inadequate, secular, libertarian view of rights to produce better government, or we die.
It is one of the things about those who do theology at this level that their breath and depth of scholarship, combining the style of academic philosophy with that of other disciplines, is hard to match in any other field. I remember being impressed with the breath of knowledge that 1960s-early 70s style medievalists of my experience considered a basic prerequisite but theologians outdo them. I am certainly not equipped to deal with what Rowan Williams says in more than a few details that impinge on practical politics. I think the most important thing for that is the explanation that no rights held by human beings can be held to be absolute without enormous danger coming from the exercise of those rights. At best I'm able to jot down a few ideas. The ideas that Rowan Williams discusses here strike me as being extremely important. Someone coming up with a simple and easily understood articulation of that complication in a notion of rights which protects individuals from both an oppressive government and from other people and institutions in the private sector will become more important in the preservation of egalitarian democracy. The simplistic view of it in secular thought is extremely dangerous. I think that in the context of the United States, there is no better example of that than in capitalist economics and the popular culture and academic culture that takes that as a given. The result of such a view of rights is that "market state" which I pointed out in Williams' lecture posted yesterday. I think where we are is a direct result of that secular view of rights unregulated by the Jewish-Christian, likely, Islamic conception of our Creator. Where that or a similar kind of limit put on rights, the admission that no human being has an unlimited divine right to do anything is absent, rights will turn around to oppress those with less power.
Things are changing hour to hour but as of the last thing I read, they were planning on keeping schools open in Maine because so many of the school children depend on the meals they get at school to eat. What a terrible country it has devolved into from the time of FDR and LBJ. One where you have to choose between letting children go hungry or protecting the population from a deadly virus.
And I understand the Trump regime is still intending to kick a huge number of people off of Food Stamps the First of April.
"These guys are businessmen, the ONLY thing they care about is money." That's what our lawyer said to us when a businessman tried to steal some of our family land. As he is still alive and in practice - and a good lawyer he is - I won't name him. We won the case and the crook had to admit he was wrong, though he didn't know till it was too late that he would have to admit it. I will never forget the look on the crook's face when he read the boundary agreement our lawyer wrote up that he was compelled to sign. I'm sure he realized the crook wouldn't read it till he was standing in front of the notary. I'm smiling as I type this. As a number of people have noted throughout the Trump regime, it pretty much puts to rest the slogan and the notion that what the United States really needed was a businessman in the White House. RMJ, I believe, noted that we have had a real businessman who had run a successful business as president, Jimmy Carter . But, certainly in his long and rightfully illustrious post-presidency, Jimmy Carter proved that he was entirely more than a businessman, a farmer, a nuclear engineer - his educational and military career credentials. I would guess that the entirely idiotic idea that businessmen were universally competent was hatched by businessmen or those who wanted to suck up to them in academia, economists, etc. If there's one thing that businessmen are sure to do as soon as they have the money to do it, is to collect a sycophant or so to praise them. And there are academics who have always been willing to be those. In thinking about this the last couple of days I kept thinking of how if you narrowed the range of your thought it could make what seems like sense, if you looked at it superficially. Which is what modern thought seems to specialize in doing, looking at complex things superficially and categorizing things and people who are not really much like things. I think Adam Smith was guilty of some of that but nothing like 20th century economists were, especially in the most recent period when they like to pretend they're evolutionary biologists. But I doubt the low to mid-brow, college credentialed businessmen and children of the such members of the Trump regime, the Republicans in Congress, on the Supreme Court, in the media do more than get the notions that flake off of that academic babblage, perhaps picked up in their business and econ courses in college. I would guess more of it comes from the movies and TV shows and scribblage in the Wall Street Journal style of journals or, most influential, TV bull shit. If some academics are ready to prostitute themselves, people in show-biz will claw each other apart to do that. I would bet that most of that kind of nonsense that spurts from the mouths of the talking heads comes from what they or their writers heard other talking heads on TV say about it. I would guess in the early years of that stuff on TV it might have come from the idiotic, total bull-shit. Tracy-Hepburn movie State Of The Union.* Though I'm sure there were other sources. Rich people like to be flattered and no one flatters rich people like the shills of show-biz. Its probably not worth thinking of where it originated from, it's far more worth kicking the stupid idea to death so that, for a while at least, it is buried. Being a politician is the job of being a public servant hired directly by The People. In every way it should be held to be a higher calling than making money and maximizing profits and self-gain. And all politicians should be held to the ideals that we have a right to expect from people who ask us to trust them to keep us safe and to protect us from dangers as well as enemies. Donald Trump is the mentally deficient, pathologically spoiled son of a fascistic, racist gangster who made money in one of the sleaziest of all businesses, New York City real estate. He was sent to about the most minor of the minor Ivies, no doubt kept there because the school wanted money from his gangster daddy, in a major that really never had any business being a department in a university. My guess would be that since Jimmy Carter majored in a real topic at a real place of learning, one that trained people for doing some of the most serious work there is, that saved him from the evil banality that the businessmen who have held that office make of it. Trump, George W. Bush. But I think that Jimmy Carter was always more than that because he was always about more than just his own, personal interest. And I think his religious belief had everything to do with that. I think he really does believe as so many others merely profess to. * It has a line here or there but boy, did I hate that movie.
California Rep. Katie Porter exacted a commitment from the director of the Center for Disease Control to pay for coronavirus tests of uninsured Americans, grilling the Trump administration official repeatedly in the middle of a Congressional hearing until he agreed the government would pay for the tests. When CDC director Robert Redfield agreed to Porter’s demands, she quickly turned to the American public to urge them to get tested. “Everyone in America, hear that. You are eligible to go get tested for coronavirus and have that covered, regardless of insurance.” Porter cited a provision in federal administrative law to ask Redfield, if he would commit to “using that existing authority to pay for diagnostic testing free to every American regardless of insurance.” I bet they go back on the promise but it was one of the best things I ever saw happen during a Congressional hearing. Though testing is only one small part of it, it was an enormous achievement. * Elizabeth Warren
From yesterday's passage from the Lenten passages from Walter Breuggemann's Gift and Task, I went to start looking into one of the theologians he mentioned, Stanley Hauerwas, who I was totally unfamiliar with. I listened to several of his lectures on Youtube - got to cheer myself up with something these difficult days - and from what he said I went on to listen to the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who is a very fine scholar and thinker.
In lieu of going through Brueggemann's passages for today and tomorrow, I'm going to post a two-part lecture that Williams gave on the topic of Human Rights and Human Identity from a Christian perspective and more. His deep thinking about the problems of our abstract "rights language" and its impact on real life where rights can overwhelm the common good and can deprive other people of their rights is enormously important. I have looked for a transcript of this talk and have found what looks like one of an earlier iteration of his lecture on the topic. I haven't had the chance to read it yet, William's discourse is full enough and deep enough that it's definitely going to take a number of readings and more hearings to be able to address it, so I'm giving you the chance to do that for yourself. I could't possibly do it justice by writing a response at this point. I haven't understood enough to address it but I am certain that what he said is very important, especially for the political theme of my blogging.
Here's part 1.
I think what he says here is enormously important as the results of the notion of absolute rights of individuals and, especially, those with large fortunes and, so, power overwhelm, swamp and destroy the common good. It also poses important problems for Christians and Christian churches. I'm especially struck and frankly, chilled by what he talked about as the "market state" after about 18:30 in the lecture.
THEY'VE LOST MY SISTER'S COVID-19 TEST MATERIALS A SECOND TIME! You get the feeling they're "losing" it on purpose. Actually, I believed that the first time it happened. I don't remember which public health figure it was who said it when they were still claiming there were no cases in my state that it was a certainty that there was, in fact, Covid-19 in my state but that they weren't testing effectively to identify them. At this point we don't have any idea of what to do but act as if we've got it. And it's going on the third week of our experience with this. Republicans are the party of criminal irresponsibility and willful depravity. "We bury our mistakes," is their honest motto. Stealing elections and telling big lies aren't the only thing they got from the (post-)Soviet gangsters. They've reduced us to a state where Italy, ITALY! is being more efficient and responsible. I remember back when I said I'd never want to have to go to an Italian hospital but now I'd rather go there than an American for-profit one.
Rachel Maddow said that Trump destroyed the Directorate for Global Health Security And Bio-Defense at the National Security Council for reasons that are "inexplicable". I can give you three reasons why a Republican-fascist would have done that. A. It violates the ideological faith of neo-classical economics, it shows that the government can do such things which the private sector cannot and would not do if it could. It violates the faith that flows from the University of Chicago that the market economic system can do everything and whatever they can't do doesn't matter. This is a product of the decadence of economics as an academic department and a pseudo-scientific enterprise. I think this is a product of the choice of PBS to put Milton Friedman on the screen in the late 1970s, popularizing a particularly evil and grotesquely decadent and irresponsibly romantic load of economic bull shit. One which the previous history of the 20th century had shown was a lie. B. It violates the racist, neo-Confederate sensibility that the federal government should do such a thing. Perhaps the libertarian, what I'd call Hollywood cowboy mythos as much for the government to do such things, especially when those serve the common good. C. Obama did it so the racists could do what they want want, to complete the nullification of the presidency of the first Black president. When you think about it, it's not in any way surprising that it was done by the people who destroyed our capacity to address a pandemic like the one we're in and for the reasons they do it. Ideas have consequences, neo-classical economics, "states-rights" and that human pandemic virus of racism combined to bite even the ones who practice those who wield power under them. Whats inexplicable? This is what happens.
I don't usually listen to Donald Trump because he is a habitual and pathological liar whose every word is undependable. And his lies are dangerous and have consequences that kill people and destroy the very basis of life and are carried dutifully by the mass media and which poison the minds of Americans. If I had realized how easy it was for a hideous talking head on a screen to lie a quasi-democrcy into the state we've become, I might have been better prepared for what we are living through in increasingly terrible horror. I did listen to him and his dead voice coming from his dead, bronzed face under dyed hair, trying to read through the words on the teleprompter in front of him - sounding like some of the slower readers in my third grade class as Mrs. M had us read aloud. I listened and it was even scarier than the press event at the CDC was. The second most scary thing I heard yesterday was the idiot Representative Grothman of Wisconsin repeatedly demanding that Dr. Faucci predict how many people are going to get the Covid-19 virus as he kept repeatedly telling the fathead that he couldn't give him a number that means anything, THAT WHATEVER HAPPENS WILL DEPEND ON WHAT WE DO. His demand that they put it in terms the "average American" will understand - I think he meant in terms he could wrap his mind around - not understanding what Faucci was saying. Demanding what he said could not be given, over and over again. That followed from Grothman wanting to make this the equivalent of the seasonal flu - which I guess, someone like him thinks is inconsequential. What's clear is that Grothman wants to put this in politically advantageous terms. And that is how the Republicans in charge are responding to it. The following testimony and the substantial questions Representative Krishnamoorthi asked about the testing kits (especially Trumps privatization of testing last night) only added to the horror. The contrast in the substance of the questions deserves to stand as the character of the two parties, the one out of power and the one who is destroying the common-good. I think we are going to find out that there was political pressure to not test, to keep the numbers down. And a legal system that doesn't consider that a felony level attack on the American People is one that is totally inadequate to perform the most basic function of a government, to protect us. I will bet you a hundred bucks that there is a financial motive from somewhere in the Republican-fascists close to Trump if not the Trump-Kuschner families. I'll bet they're looking to make money out of this.
There is something really unpleasing when you find out your seemingly paranoid suspicions the reason your family's Covid-19 testing seems to a. not be that high a priority as they're hospitalized with serious symptoms consistent with the virus, b. when they finally do test they screw up the first test and, c. when they finally retest the results are "inconclusive" but you're still under a quarantine order (overt for her, assumed for those of us who got infected by her) . . . when you hear that medical experts in Washington State were told to stop testing people because the numbers were not Trump regime friendly, you realize there was nothing paranoid about it. I'd rather have been wrong about that, though I never really believed it wasn't among the most rational explanations for what was going on. Trump is proof that an absolute monarch is a guarantee of a crime spree conducted under the morality of the worst of gangsters. And that's what the Federalist Society, the Ivy Leaguer unitary executive theorists are pushing as what our system should be. And Bernie wants a chance to tear down Biden before Florida and Georgia were Biden will lock down the nomination. I guess my hopes for Sanders doing the right thing are what is wishful thinking.
Joseph is practicing the rough art of statecraft, testing the suppliants who have come to him for food. But he is also toying with his brothers, secretly working revenge on them by keeping them in suspense and letting them experience the danger of being before him. By contrast, Paul continues his rigorous instructions to the Corinthian Christian community. He makes a sharp contrast between those inside the church community who are held to a higher moral expectation and those outside the church. He urges this because of a more radical ethic, the church will do well to maintain its own discipline. The juxtaposition of these texts poses the difficult question of the relationship between a public ethic that governs both the state and the corporate world, and a more intense ethic that guides the church. On the other hand, Reinhold Niebuhr has famously allowed that much more latitude is to be recognized in the pubic domain, as public affairs require greater "realism" about issues of justice, unlike the church, with its more insistent requirements of mercy and compassion. on the other hand Stanley Hauerwas[*] more recently, in a sustained appeal to the "peace church" tradition, refuses such a sharp distinction and expects more in the public sphere. This is an issue in which Christians must be engaged, especially since our public economy has largely been taken over by an oligarchy of wealth that skews all social relationships and that readily leaves behind those it judges to be disposable. Paul seems to want an exclusive focus on the church. In our time we might do well to require more of the state and the world of corporations. * Great, another theologian I don't know but have to read and don't have the time to. I'll be listening to his many lectures on Youtube, in the mean time. I think theology is the source of the most useful radical traditions without intending to be radical, they have to be considering the Gospel is radical and the Prophetic tradition is, the Law is radical in its economics and its vision of society. I just started listening to one very interesting and troubling one calling the inherence of rights into question. I'll certainly try to get around to addressing what he said in it. I think he is right about "rights language" which force us to understand that even the most obvious of inherent rights are limited in relation to our exercise of them when those impinge on the rights of others. I think his points are especially important in terms of the law and Constitutional law.
mmzen 8 hours ago “Maybe, just maybe, it’s the PUBLIC... that sucks.” - George Carlin But, you know, they'r all about the welfare of the masses over there. George Carlin, the marginally amusing comic who learned he could have a career by telling his kewelster fans that they were smarter than everyone else. *or Aspects of The Play-Lefty Personality.
My criticism of the play-left, that left which has not and still has not produced any real electoral success, has gotten the pat response that they exercise influence by being a threat to Democrats. I fail to see that tactic as having worked in any way. Anticipating the thread-bare arguments of the play-left in advance let me head two of those off. There is nothing more idiotic about the more than a century of lefty-third-party spoiler politics than the fact that their choice produces worse government. The idea that things would get so terrible that their imaginary force, the dialectic, would swing radically the other way is one of the more absurd delusions of intellectual pretenses. IT HAS NEVER HAPPENED. Revolutions are almost uniform in producing governments as bad if not far worse than those they replace, that is what you get from that fantasy of the play-left. That those delusions could persist among intellectuals only proves the power of a theory detached from reality to gull those who refuse to learn from observed experience. The threat to spoil an election that turns into a spoiled election weakens Democrats, to start with, what influence the play left hopes to exercise over them is weakened even more. Preventing Democrats being elected, putting the presidency or legislative branch into Republican hands prevents them from doing anything or protecting past gains and enables Republicans through elected offices and, most perniciously, through the courts to destroy chances of Democrats winning and making the change that is needed.
There is no doubt that if Democrats took decisive control of the federal government and state governments that the Republican-fascists on the courts would do everything they could to destroy any good change that they made. Those judges and "justices" were put into power through, among other things, the tactic of the play left playing spoiler in elections against Democrats who had to listen to other Democrats and supporting independents as well as the real left (those who win office and their supporters) and the play-left whose tactic have been to keep Democrats out of office if they didn't get their way. Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court are certainly all relevant due to the Green Party and other play lefties getting their way, keeping Al Gore and Hillary Clinton from winning their elections. And those are only the four worst consequences for the real left and the ever cutting off their own noses play-lefties. I mentioned Michael Moore yesterday, his piece written after the Green Party fame-fucker candidate Ralph Nader enabled Jeb Bush's adminstration in Florida to steal the election for his brother, the man who used to be the worst president in modern time, George W. Bush in office. The piece is a not-even-clever piece of jr. high level sophistry that mocks that reality by using what are the other pathetic play-lefty parties who ran candidates in Florida's presidential election that year, picking the fourth from the bottom, the Workers World Party mentioned here yesterday. I could make a number of arguments that show that Michael Moore made several rather obvious mistakes in logic - the play-lefties are really good at latching onto those to impress their fellow idiots - but one will suffice, the Greens got more than fifty times that number, his argument would apply to the Greens that much more than it would to the pathetic WWP and it was an announced tactic of the Greens to do what they, in fact did. If you think Michael Moore and the Green style spoiler potential is not a serous problem, think about it the next time Roberts and Alito join in the next guaranteed depraved decision of the Supreme Court. If you think the Bernie or Buster, Susan-Sarandon types are not someone who have to be overcome, not won over, think about what they did the next time you bemoan a decision pushed into law by Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. Bernie Sanders will soon face the fact that he cannot hope to be the nominee of the Democratic Party, he will also face the fact that he can either work as hard to prevent being a two-times Nader traitor of the real left that can win elections, make laws and change reality or he can become the enabler of Trumpian fascism. His asshole of a campaign mananger Jeff Weaver will almost certainly opt for being the same kind of jerk he was in the wake of the 2016 disaster. But this is a choice that is Bernie Sanders' alone. He can choose to enrage the Democrats haters in his cult or he can act, soon and decisively to persuade those of his supporters who are not play-lefty spoiled brats to support Democrats up and down the ballot. It matters not a bit that that is what he would have to do to make him at all respectable in my eyes, now. I will never forgive him for sandbagging Elizabeth Warren who, like Hillary Clinton is massively more qualified to be president than just about any of the men who were in for the nomination. But I can forgive that if he finally does what he should have done for the party whose nomination he sought twice and for the real left, defeats Republican-fascism by getting as many Democrats elected as possible. And while we're at it, the electoral power of the real left and those who can be convinced to get real is very real, too. Joe Biden and his people had better not blow their chances to get us out in large numbers in November to support Democrats. And that is get us out everywhere. Biden shouldn't, for a second, believe that his nomination is a product of the center policies he favored as a Senator for big business from Delaware, what allowed him to win over better candidates was that people thought he would get other people to vote for him over Trump. I mentioned the other day that on a ranked choice vote I would have put him after Warren but before Sanders who would have been my third choice in ranked-choice. That was because I thought he was more electable than Sanders, not because I liked his policies better than those of Sanders. If Sanders were ten or fifteen years younger and he didn't have the bull-shit Marxist and Vermont 1960s-70s radical baggage and had the same or slightly more moderate policies, I might have had a hard choice of choosing him or Warren for first place. I think the vice-presidential candidate is going to be more important than ever in this race, the age of the candidates, I think Biden had better choose one that the real left can be enthusiastic for. I would love for that choice to be Elizabeth Warren, though there are a number of others I could feel as good about. Kamala Harris is an obvious one, Amy Klobuchar wouldn't be the worse, though I think one with more appeal to the real left would be better. Julian Castro would be good. I would prefer he not choose someone who, if elected, would weaken the Democrats Senatorial prospects. We will need to win the Senate, another reason I did not support Sanders for the nomination. Joe Biden is going to have me nervous every time he opens his mouth though I think this election is, oddly, not going to be about Biden it's going to be an anyone but Trump election. Michael Moore is an ass who should retire into the obscurity he has earned. The entire play-left who remain the play-left should just go do fantasy sports or something like that. Their kind of politics is the exact equivalent of those, anyway. It's not real though it can have real and disastrous consequences because they play it with real entities. People die when they do it.
My sister has been released to house quarantine, her phenumonia has cleared and though she's weak she can breathe without the oxygen and she hasn't had a fever for a while. Her testing still is inconclusive and she can't return to work till the results are in. Not that she would be able to do it the condition she's in. She's wondering if it wasn't Covid-19 what's going to happen when she's exposed to it having had pneumonia so badly and so recently. It's kind of strange, we're hoping that that's what it was and that it gives some immunity to the virus. I'm still saying it was good for us that we had the experience especially if it wasn't Covid-19 because it forced us to think about just how hard it is to avoid getting it or passing it on. I'm hearing about the number of disposable garments and gloves the hospital is going through and remembering the stories my mother used to tell about washing surgical gloves and garments in the hospital in the 1930s and through the war years. I'll bet they'll get back to that before this is out. I hope the State testing goes better because the CDC is clearly either overwhelmed or they're responding to Trumpian pressure. That press conference the other day was the scariest thing I've heard or read about this, yet. I've still got the cough and am feeling pretty weak, too but nothing like she had it. I'm wondering if I should pick up a wind instrument again to build up my breathing.
