The people who are so worried about their privacy should consider how George R.R. Martin protects his Game of Thrones novels from piracy by using an old DOS based machine THAT ISN'T CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET. It would certainly be a different election campaign if the managers of Hillary Clinton's campaign and members of the DNC staff hadn't felt so foolishly free to just share whatever was on their mind in e-mails that have been hacked.
And that's nothing compared to the idiots who put their entire life and that of other people on their Facebook and Twitter and other accounts. I think it should be a rule that anyone who prattles stuff about online privacy but who let it all hang out online are too stupid to listen to. The idea that online communications are secure and private is sheerest stupidity.
If Hillary Clinton becomes president, I hope one of the first things she does is to ban members of her administration from discussing both important information and their personal lives and opinions online. I hope she and the DNC have learned something about how obvious targets for hackers, domestic and, especially, foreign, shouldn't do what they've done in the past. And don't for a second believe that everyone you can think of who might be won't be trying to hack all of them looking for stuff to sandbag her with.
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Right Before Our Eyes Julian Assange And Wikileaks Doing Exactly What Paranoiacs Of The Left Worry The American Government "COULD" Do
With their continued publishing of what we are supposed to believe are John Podesta's e-mails, I want the Obama administration to start putting pressure on the Ecuadoran government to expel Julian Assange from their embassy. I want to see him made available for the possible prosecutions in Sweden, then I want him extradited to the United States to face charges here.
Assange is doing far worse than what the NSA has been accused of in publishing stolen e-mails by John Podesta, a private citizen of the United States, in order to influence American elections. He is doing, before the eyes of the world, what the most paranoid fantasies encouraged by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and Oliver Stone have worried COULD happen if the NSA did to us what it is now, just about certain, Russian intelligence has, in fact, done.
Back when the Edward Snowden story was hot I pointed out, over and over again, that anyone who believes their biggest worry about online communications being hacked came from the NSA or the FBI were deluded. The same communications that they could have monitored under legal restriction HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AVAILABLE TO BE STOLEN BY ANY FOREIGN GOVERNMENT WITH THE MEANS TO HACK THEM. The United States government is probably one of the least likely to violate your privacy because the United States isn't a fascist dictatorship as so many other countries with high-tech capabilities are. And now we see one of those countries has an intelligence apparatus which is doing that, working with the hero of the paranoids club, Julian Assange, to publish that information to throw an election to someone as bad as Donald Trump. Assange is part of an operation that is reminiscent of the worst of what the CIA did in third-world and even some European countries, things that the American Congress investigated in the wake of Watergate. Which, in the American system led to legal restrictions that are not in place in other countries.
The paranoia whipped up in the wake of Edward Snowden's theft of massive amounts of stuff the NSA had collected - despite some real concerns - largely based on some pretty transparent foolishness. When you send stuff over the internet, even when you just allow your computer access to the internet, you are vulnerable to hacking and organized crime and criminal governments around the world have some of the most sophisticated hackers working for them. Even if the American government didn't do a single thing by way of monitoring internet use other governments entirely outside of democratic control will violate the privacy we have been duped into believing we had.
John Podesta and, even more so, the people who sent him the stuff that the Putin government, entities such as Assange's organized crime outfit and the Trump campaign are using to try to get their guy elected, they were stupid to send the kind of stuff they did over the internet. Unless there is some unhackable means of encryption used - if there is any such thing - they would have been far better off using the U. S. Postal Service to send anything they didn't want read by unwanted eyes. The U.S. Mail can't be accessed even by the federal authorities without a judge issuing a warrant. And it's pretty well untouchable by foreign governments and organized criminals. The United States government has SOME restrictions as to what it can do and get away with, those others who can hack anything you make available online, don't have any.
If it comes to a contest of trusting the United States government or trusting Assange and his ilk, well, I never voted to make Assange commissar of information.
Assange is doing far worse than what the NSA has been accused of in publishing stolen e-mails by John Podesta, a private citizen of the United States, in order to influence American elections. He is doing, before the eyes of the world, what the most paranoid fantasies encouraged by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and Oliver Stone have worried COULD happen if the NSA did to us what it is now, just about certain, Russian intelligence has, in fact, done.
Back when the Edward Snowden story was hot I pointed out, over and over again, that anyone who believes their biggest worry about online communications being hacked came from the NSA or the FBI were deluded. The same communications that they could have monitored under legal restriction HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AVAILABLE TO BE STOLEN BY ANY FOREIGN GOVERNMENT WITH THE MEANS TO HACK THEM. The United States government is probably one of the least likely to violate your privacy because the United States isn't a fascist dictatorship as so many other countries with high-tech capabilities are. And now we see one of those countries has an intelligence apparatus which is doing that, working with the hero of the paranoids club, Julian Assange, to publish that information to throw an election to someone as bad as Donald Trump. Assange is part of an operation that is reminiscent of the worst of what the CIA did in third-world and even some European countries, things that the American Congress investigated in the wake of Watergate. Which, in the American system led to legal restrictions that are not in place in other countries.
The paranoia whipped up in the wake of Edward Snowden's theft of massive amounts of stuff the NSA had collected - despite some real concerns - largely based on some pretty transparent foolishness. When you send stuff over the internet, even when you just allow your computer access to the internet, you are vulnerable to hacking and organized crime and criminal governments around the world have some of the most sophisticated hackers working for them. Even if the American government didn't do a single thing by way of monitoring internet use other governments entirely outside of democratic control will violate the privacy we have been duped into believing we had.
John Podesta and, even more so, the people who sent him the stuff that the Putin government, entities such as Assange's organized crime outfit and the Trump campaign are using to try to get their guy elected, they were stupid to send the kind of stuff they did over the internet. Unless there is some unhackable means of encryption used - if there is any such thing - they would have been far better off using the U. S. Postal Service to send anything they didn't want read by unwanted eyes. The U.S. Mail can't be accessed even by the federal authorities without a judge issuing a warrant. And it's pretty well untouchable by foreign governments and organized criminals. The United States government has SOME restrictions as to what it can do and get away with, those others who can hack anything you make available online, don't have any.
If it comes to a contest of trusting the United States government or trusting Assange and his ilk, well, I never voted to make Assange commissar of information.
Who Ever Would Have Believed That It Would Be The Republicans Who Ran A KGB Assett For President
As the news is full of the stories of women who are coming forward to say that Donald Trump grabbed at their genitals, kissed them full on the lips without warning and otherwise did pretty much what he said on the now universally known recording with Billy Bush, the other serious charge, that he and his campaign are taking information directly from the Putin regime to use against Hillary Clinton is going largely unreported.
In Newsweek, Kurt Eichenwald points out that there is a smoking gun to be found in the incompetent reports from the Putin regime of the contents of the stolen e-mails from John Podesta. They incompetently misidentified a piece by Eichenwald that Sidney Blumenthal sent to Podesta as being the words of Sidney Blumenthal.
An email from Blumenthal—a confidant of Hillary Clinton and a man, second only to George Soros at the center of conservative conspiracy theories—turned up in the recent document dump by Wikileaks. At a time when American intelligence believes Russian hackers are trying to interfere with the presidential election, records have been fed recently to Wikileaks out of multiple organizations of the Democratic Party, raising concerns that the self-proclaimed whistleblowers group has become a tool of Putin’s government. But now that I have been brought into the whole mess—and transformed into Blumenthal—there is even more proof that this act of cyberwar is not only being orchestrated by the Russians, but that they are really, really dumb.
The evidence emerged thanks to the incompetence of Sputnik, the Russian online news and radio service established by the government controlled news agency, Rossiya Segodnya....
The documents that Wikileaks unloaded recently have been emails out of the account of John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s election campaign. Almost as soon as the pilfered documents emerged, Sputnik was all over them and rapidly found (or probably already knew about before the Wikileaks dump) a purportedly incriminating email from Blumenthal.
The email was amazing—it linked Boogie Man Blumenthal, Podesta and the topic of conservative political fevered dreams, Benghazi. This, it seemed, was the smoking gun finally proving Clinton bore total responsibility for the terrorist attack on the American outpost in Libya in 2012. Sputnik even declared that the email might be the “October surprise” that could undermine Clinton’s campaign.
Eichenwald identifies the part of his article which Sputnik attributed to Blumenthal a misattribution that appeared only in that source from the Putin government but which almost immediately was coming out of the mouth of Donald Trump who, forgive me for suspecting, is unlikely to read any news services but seems to get his knowledge of the world from what he gets told by people he listens to.
This false story was only reported by the Russian controlled agency (a reference appeared in a Turkish publication, but it was nothing but a link to the Sputnik article). So how did Donald Trump end up advancing the same falsehood put out by Putin’s mouthpiece?
At a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump spoke while holding a document in his hand. He told the assembled crowd that it was an email from Blumenthal, whom he called “sleazy Sidney.”
“This just came out a little while ago,’’ Trump said. “I have to tell you this.” And then he read the words from my article.
“He’s now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi,’’ Trump said, dropping the document to the floor. “This just came out a little while ago.”
The crowd booed and chanted, “Lock her up!”
This is not funny. It is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth. How did this happen? Who in the Trump campaign was feeding him falsehoods straight from the Kremlin?
Those seem to me to be at least as important as what we're finding out about the extent of Donald Trump's sexual abuse and possibly worse treatment of women.
It is amazing to me that we have a situation in which the leader of Russia, a former Communist Party member and a high up member of the KGB is running the conservative, right wing - no make that neo-fascist Republican candidate for president, a man who some people believe will, despite all of that get a majority of Republican and conservative votes and who is taking talking points directly from the Putin regime to use against her. If someone told me at any period from the 1950s through the fall of the Soviet Union that the Russians would be running a presidential candidate which was the asset of the same people who ran the Soviet Union, I'd have though it was outlandish fiction. But the corruption of the American right, its media, the media which has created the conditions that produced both Donald Trump AND THE SOCIAL-POLITICAL MOVEMENT THAT CHOSE HIM AS THE REPUBLICAN NOMINEE is so complete that even with this, large parts of it will still choose Putin's man over Hillary Clinton.
The media is the source of the mind-deadening gullibility of those who mistook the CEO of "reality" TV as presidential material. Ever stupider network entertainment, the cabloid "news" operations, right-wing hate talk-radio, the "free speech-free press" legal theorists and Supreme Court justices who either bought into their theories of media libertarianism or cynically used their wordings to forge rulings like Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United - if anyone ever asks how we got this far in handing our presidency to, effectively, a KGB apparatchik, that's who did it.
As to how the Republicans went from the political use of accusations of the State Department being riddled with Soviet agents to running a TV star who is one, himself, as their presidential candidate, when you make money and wealth acquisition your one and only value you're eventually going to buy the rope that hangs you. It would certainly be interesting to know the extent to which Russian oligarchs, many of them former members of the Soviet ruling class, stand as Donald Trump's creditors. Though I doubt you'll ever have FOX news raise that question. Or most of the American media. I suspect they wouldn't think such issues would be as good for their ratings as a sex scandal. Though they seemed pretty slow to latch onto one when it involved a Republican nominee who has had decades of public exposure as a sex as well as a business sleaze. Imagine if he'd been a Kennedy or Clinton, there would have been no proof necessary as they ran with it "being said" by.....
In Newsweek, Kurt Eichenwald points out that there is a smoking gun to be found in the incompetent reports from the Putin regime of the contents of the stolen e-mails from John Podesta. They incompetently misidentified a piece by Eichenwald that Sidney Blumenthal sent to Podesta as being the words of Sidney Blumenthal.
An email from Blumenthal—a confidant of Hillary Clinton and a man, second only to George Soros at the center of conservative conspiracy theories—turned up in the recent document dump by Wikileaks. At a time when American intelligence believes Russian hackers are trying to interfere with the presidential election, records have been fed recently to Wikileaks out of multiple organizations of the Democratic Party, raising concerns that the self-proclaimed whistleblowers group has become a tool of Putin’s government. But now that I have been brought into the whole mess—and transformed into Blumenthal—there is even more proof that this act of cyberwar is not only being orchestrated by the Russians, but that they are really, really dumb.
The evidence emerged thanks to the incompetence of Sputnik, the Russian online news and radio service established by the government controlled news agency, Rossiya Segodnya....
The documents that Wikileaks unloaded recently have been emails out of the account of John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s election campaign. Almost as soon as the pilfered documents emerged, Sputnik was all over them and rapidly found (or probably already knew about before the Wikileaks dump) a purportedly incriminating email from Blumenthal.
The email was amazing—it linked Boogie Man Blumenthal, Podesta and the topic of conservative political fevered dreams, Benghazi. This, it seemed, was the smoking gun finally proving Clinton bore total responsibility for the terrorist attack on the American outpost in Libya in 2012. Sputnik even declared that the email might be the “October surprise” that could undermine Clinton’s campaign.
Eichenwald identifies the part of his article which Sputnik attributed to Blumenthal a misattribution that appeared only in that source from the Putin government but which almost immediately was coming out of the mouth of Donald Trump who, forgive me for suspecting, is unlikely to read any news services but seems to get his knowledge of the world from what he gets told by people he listens to.
This false story was only reported by the Russian controlled agency (a reference appeared in a Turkish publication, but it was nothing but a link to the Sputnik article). So how did Donald Trump end up advancing the same falsehood put out by Putin’s mouthpiece?
At a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump spoke while holding a document in his hand. He told the assembled crowd that it was an email from Blumenthal, whom he called “sleazy Sidney.”
“This just came out a little while ago,’’ Trump said. “I have to tell you this.” And then he read the words from my article.
“He’s now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi,’’ Trump said, dropping the document to the floor. “This just came out a little while ago.”
The crowd booed and chanted, “Lock her up!”
This is not funny. It is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth. How did this happen? Who in the Trump campaign was feeding him falsehoods straight from the Kremlin?
Those seem to me to be at least as important as what we're finding out about the extent of Donald Trump's sexual abuse and possibly worse treatment of women.
It is amazing to me that we have a situation in which the leader of Russia, a former Communist Party member and a high up member of the KGB is running the conservative, right wing - no make that neo-fascist Republican candidate for president, a man who some people believe will, despite all of that get a majority of Republican and conservative votes and who is taking talking points directly from the Putin regime to use against her. If someone told me at any period from the 1950s through the fall of the Soviet Union that the Russians would be running a presidential candidate which was the asset of the same people who ran the Soviet Union, I'd have though it was outlandish fiction. But the corruption of the American right, its media, the media which has created the conditions that produced both Donald Trump AND THE SOCIAL-POLITICAL MOVEMENT THAT CHOSE HIM AS THE REPUBLICAN NOMINEE is so complete that even with this, large parts of it will still choose Putin's man over Hillary Clinton.
The media is the source of the mind-deadening gullibility of those who mistook the CEO of "reality" TV as presidential material. Ever stupider network entertainment, the cabloid "news" operations, right-wing hate talk-radio, the "free speech-free press" legal theorists and Supreme Court justices who either bought into their theories of media libertarianism or cynically used their wordings to forge rulings like Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United - if anyone ever asks how we got this far in handing our presidency to, effectively, a KGB apparatchik, that's who did it.
As to how the Republicans went from the political use of accusations of the State Department being riddled with Soviet agents to running a TV star who is one, himself, as their presidential candidate, when you make money and wealth acquisition your one and only value you're eventually going to buy the rope that hangs you. It would certainly be interesting to know the extent to which Russian oligarchs, many of them former members of the Soviet ruling class, stand as Donald Trump's creditors. Though I doubt you'll ever have FOX news raise that question. Or most of the American media. I suspect they wouldn't think such issues would be as good for their ratings as a sex scandal. Though they seemed pretty slow to latch onto one when it involved a Republican nominee who has had decades of public exposure as a sex as well as a business sleaze. Imagine if he'd been a Kennedy or Clinton, there would have been no proof necessary as they ran with it "being said" by.....
Monday, October 10, 2016
Impressions - Dave Stryker Organ Trio Live at JEN 2012
Dave Stryker. guitar
Bobby Floyd, organ
Jonathan Higgins. drums
with Bob Mintzer, sax
The Chaser
Rudolph the Shameless 'Splainer
Yes, if you haven't heard about it already, this is really a picture of Donald Trump with Rudy Giuliani dressed in drag, it's not fake. And if you watch the old video, it turns Trump's already infamous reputation for assaulting women into a joke. You can find it all over the web.
The public figures, politicians, former politicians have been fleeing from Donald Trump all weekend at the prospect that, in his long, long, long media career, there are more instances of him saying the most appalling things about women and who knows who else should generate a roll of dishonor. It's hardly as if that kind of thing about the man was unknown, it's exactly the kind of thing that most informed people would have concluded made him unfit to be president two decades instead of two days ago. It is why so many of the Republicans who now have to unendorse him were hesitant to endorse him in the first place, not that they are averse to someone as unfit to be president as he is to becoming president, that they were afraid they'd get stuck in exactly what they found themselves in over the weekend.
I read this morning that Rudy Giuliani was given the role of defending Donald Trump on the ever less credible Sunday morning talk shows. That Giuliani had the role is just more evidence of how clueless the Trump campaign and its figures are about why supporting Donald Trump is a sign of psychopathology, not mere politics.
I would like to know how a man with his baggage of treating his first wife as badly as he did comes across as Donald Trumps designated defender on the tape of him bragging to Billy Bush about assaulting women with the impunity that his kind of celebrity has gotten him and, lest anyone forget, his also taped bragging to Howard Stern that he was entitled to break in on Miss Universe candidates - a fraction of his age - because as owner of the pageant, he had a right to inspect the goods.
If there is someone who should go down with the Trumptanic, it's Rudy Giuliani, though he knows that the media won't stop calling him to go on shows, what his public career after several failed presidential bids went nowhere.
Also, yesterday's ultimate blaming the wife for what her husband is alleged to have done, when, if it happened, she was betrayed in the process deserves a special place in the annals of the double-standard that is always, always held to benefit men. In its never ending bid to offend every woman, it seems that no group will go unoffended by the Donald Trump campaign.
It is time to shame the media for having created, not only Donald Trump, the public figure, but also such courtiers of his putrid retinue as Rudy Giuliani. I wouldn't credit Chris Christie with having any kind of moral standard in his not appearing as Trump's lying, muck spewing defender on yesterday's blab shows, just one who still cherishes the hope that he still has a future in elective politics. Though his ongoing problems related to bridgegate in his state probably will guarantee his future is in lying predictably and shamelessly on TV and radio shows.
Saturday, October 8, 2016
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Amy Conroy - I (Heart) Alice (Heart) I
Drama On One team up with HotForTheatre to present 'I (Heart) Alice (Heart) I' by Amy Conroy, winner of the Fishamble New Writing Award at the Absolut Fringe 2010. Recorded with a studio audience and starring Amy Conroy and Clare Barrett, the play depicts Alice and Alice who are coming out… finally. This documentary piece is an unflinching and astonishingly personal love story that spans six decades. Two exceptional, opinionated women were spotted winking at each other in Crumlin Shopping Centre. Now they’re in a show ... reluctantly. 'I (Heart) Alice (Heart) I' explores the monumental journey of a most unlikely couple. Written and Directed by Amy Conroy. Producer: Kevin Brew
Cast: Amy Conroy and Clare Barrett
Hate Mail
I have no idea what Simples is lying about, the "quote" is nothing I recall saying. I don't even know what movie he's babbling about. Though it does show that Simps is fine with the right kind of pedophile. That would be one like Gore Vidal a decadent, dead writer who will soon join those forgotten second and third tier writers of the recent past who managed to pass themselves off as an important writer by managing their publicity. Something Simps could only dream about achieving in his own, um.... career as a scribbler. Only he couldn't manage it.
So he makes up something for me to have said.
And that's even with me having pointed out Gore Vidal having said that he didn't care for Israel as he Jew baited the Podhortezes in The Nation.
With the likes of Simps it doesn't matter what someone does, it matters who they are as they do it and whether or not they're held in high regard in what passes as the literary class in New York City. Or, at least what he can fathom as a literary class.
So he makes up something for me to have said.
And that's even with me having pointed out Gore Vidal having said that he didn't care for Israel as he Jew baited the Podhortezes in The Nation.
With the likes of Simps it doesn't matter what someone does, it matters who they are as they do it and whether or not they're held in high regard in what passes as the literary class in New York City. Or, at least what he can fathom as a literary class.
Must Be The Allergy Meds....
but I've realized I've developed a new pet peeve that is driving me up the wall, Youtubes that start out with someone saying, "Hi, guys" or "Hey, guys" or some variation of that make me feel like going e-postal.
From An Interview With Shirley Chisholm May 7,2002
Her prediction that within 25 years that the United States would elect a woman as president could come true this year. Her discussion of her experience in the House of Representatives and as a presidential candidate in 1972 are worth considering, especially in light of what Hillary Clinton has had to go through and put up with.
You should listen to her talking, especially, about how she dealt with the white, racist men she encountered and, even more so, her relationship with George Wallace. It's hard to imagine that the country wouldn't have been a far different and far better place if she had been elected that year. If you wanted to choose an anti-Trump, she would have been it. Here is what she said led her to run:
I had gone to the Congress as the first black person to be elected to Congress and I had gone on a number of speaking engagements through the country, and there was a fantastic
development for me as an individual, and people were encouraging me, you should run. You should run because you're a woman – we've never had a woman president. You're black – we've never had a black person for president. You speak Spanish. You have a lot of things…. And you have a knowledge of the issues. Run! And that's what motivated me.
I hope in her inaugural address a President Hillary Clinton would remember to mention her.
Update: Sorry for the html problem with the quote. I can't figure out what's wrong with it.
Something To Remember The Next Time You Hear A Hideous, Fat, Scummy White Man Mock A Woman On Her Looks
I get a lot of cracks about my hair, mostly from men who don’t have any. Ann Richards
No more double-standard.
No more double-standard.
Anyone of the alleged left who isn't supporting Hillary Clinton's election this month has discredited themselves and should not be trusted in the future.
Julian Assange and his Wikileaks are obviously carrying water for the Donald Trump campaign, it is very possibly doing so in concert with the spies of the Putin regime in Russia. As RMJ has pointed out they have obviously been stealing the contents of the e-mail accounts of figures in the Hillary Clinton campaign to be released whenever there is a seriously awful revelation about Donald Trump to try to get him elected president of the United States. The adulation on the left for Julian Assange and his spies has been revealing of the real nature of that left, illogical at best, corruptly duplicitous and reflexively hating the United States all through. This whole thing, from the advent of Wikileaks to the adulation of Edward Snowden and his Assange, Glenn Greenwald is saturated and dripping with hypocrisy. Just why it's OK when they and their sources do far more than the NSA has been accused of doing, I have yet to have explained. Now that it's rather obvious that a foreign and despotic government is involved in their ratfucking of American democracy, any "left" that supports or tolerates their presence deserves to finally wither and blow away.
I wonder how much what Snowden dumped into the lap of both the Chinese and Russian governments may have been a help to them in these efforts. He is reported to have taken so much stuff with him, so many documents, that it is impossible for him to have known what he was handing over to them. I have always wondered why it hasn't occurred to the Greenwalds, the Laura Poitrases, now that Hollywood has decided to make Snowden and the rest into a constructed myth, Oliver Stone, that their hero, their ticket to stardom and relevance in show biz, didn't likely turn over huge amounts of information on private people, average citizens, and Chinese and Russian dissidents. Not that I really think any of them would care about those people. This thing has been a chance for some rather sleazy people to profit themselves and to gain the mindless adulation of the lefty media which has so thoroughly discredited itself that it is probably farther from influencing events and elections than it has ever been in my life time, never mind yours.
We need a real left and I doubt it's going to come from the kind of people who have deputed themselves to constitute "the left". I wouldn't trust anyone to be part of it who haven't seen through Julian Assange and Wikileaks, Snowden and Greenwald or the lefty media that is still trying to sandbag the only woman between us and a president trump. This is the year such guys have entirely discredited themselves. They are a dead weight any real left with any real aspirations to gain office and do good have to put down. Unless we do that, we won't go anywhere.
The reflexive anti-Americanism of the alleged American left is an inheritance from the Marxists, anarchists and others who were, in reality, as opposed to democracy as any oligarchs. There was, from the start, a huge measure of intellectual snobbery involved in those movements, certainly by the time Lenin became the main world figure of that "left" many of its main figures and certainly it's scribbling class were thorough snobs who adopted Lenin's Vanguardist ideas, seeing themselves as the most developed and capable vehicle of the world revolution they dreamed up out of their theoretical politics. That attitude echoes in the phony left that is what most people mean when they talk about "the left". The reputation for snobbery among them is not going to dissolve because it is true.
It is no shock that such a left would despise the most liberal political figures that American democracy have managed to produce, if there is one thing that can be said for those who can get elected, they haven't done it through disdain for and disrespect of what the American people will accept. And it is rather incredible that as the American democracy has, actually, produced progress, progress that is endangered by Republican-fascism, the very people who did that are widely despised on that "left". More incredible, still, is the respect that those who have even openly supported actual dictators, even those with blood on there hands, even those who amassed body counts in the Nazi class of crimes as they have despised American politicians who have not done those things. There is hardly a magazine of the left which didn't feature such content and some which still do. Just yesterday I read a defense of Vladimir Putin in one of them. That taste for dictators elsewhere is matched by a disdain of Hillary Clinton, someone who, if we are lucky enough to elect her, will certainly not rule as a despot, murdering journalists, murdering political opponents, resistant to getting entrapped in foreign wars.
Let me put it plainly, in October 2016, Hillary Clinton is the most liberal person who American politics has produced as a presidential candidate. If she is elected she will very likely govern to the left of Barack Obama - unlike him, she has absolutely no illusions that Republicans are going to support her policies and unlike him she has no need for their love, something that thwarted Obama's first two years in office and led to his crippling weakness. In any real terms, Hillary Clinton is the real American left, the left that can gain office and change things in a direction pointed in a better direction. The alternatives we have before us are as serious as any ever presented to the American voters. It is literally the difference between a candidate who has the support of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, the Progressive Caucus and a candidate who has the support of neo-Nazis, the David Dukes, the white supremacists and Vladimir Putin. Donald Trump is in hock to Russian Oligarchs and who knows who else who will expect to benefit from his presidency. Anyone of the alleged left who isn't supporting Hillary Clinton's election this month has discredited themselves and should not be trusted, not today, not into the future. The real left must dump them.
I wonder how much what Snowden dumped into the lap of both the Chinese and Russian governments may have been a help to them in these efforts. He is reported to have taken so much stuff with him, so many documents, that it is impossible for him to have known what he was handing over to them. I have always wondered why it hasn't occurred to the Greenwalds, the Laura Poitrases, now that Hollywood has decided to make Snowden and the rest into a constructed myth, Oliver Stone, that their hero, their ticket to stardom and relevance in show biz, didn't likely turn over huge amounts of information on private people, average citizens, and Chinese and Russian dissidents. Not that I really think any of them would care about those people. This thing has been a chance for some rather sleazy people to profit themselves and to gain the mindless adulation of the lefty media which has so thoroughly discredited itself that it is probably farther from influencing events and elections than it has ever been in my life time, never mind yours.
We need a real left and I doubt it's going to come from the kind of people who have deputed themselves to constitute "the left". I wouldn't trust anyone to be part of it who haven't seen through Julian Assange and Wikileaks, Snowden and Greenwald or the lefty media that is still trying to sandbag the only woman between us and a president trump. This is the year such guys have entirely discredited themselves. They are a dead weight any real left with any real aspirations to gain office and do good have to put down. Unless we do that, we won't go anywhere.
The reflexive anti-Americanism of the alleged American left is an inheritance from the Marxists, anarchists and others who were, in reality, as opposed to democracy as any oligarchs. There was, from the start, a huge measure of intellectual snobbery involved in those movements, certainly by the time Lenin became the main world figure of that "left" many of its main figures and certainly it's scribbling class were thorough snobs who adopted Lenin's Vanguardist ideas, seeing themselves as the most developed and capable vehicle of the world revolution they dreamed up out of their theoretical politics. That attitude echoes in the phony left that is what most people mean when they talk about "the left". The reputation for snobbery among them is not going to dissolve because it is true.
It is no shock that such a left would despise the most liberal political figures that American democracy have managed to produce, if there is one thing that can be said for those who can get elected, they haven't done it through disdain for and disrespect of what the American people will accept. And it is rather incredible that as the American democracy has, actually, produced progress, progress that is endangered by Republican-fascism, the very people who did that are widely despised on that "left". More incredible, still, is the respect that those who have even openly supported actual dictators, even those with blood on there hands, even those who amassed body counts in the Nazi class of crimes as they have despised American politicians who have not done those things. There is hardly a magazine of the left which didn't feature such content and some which still do. Just yesterday I read a defense of Vladimir Putin in one of them. That taste for dictators elsewhere is matched by a disdain of Hillary Clinton, someone who, if we are lucky enough to elect her, will certainly not rule as a despot, murdering journalists, murdering political opponents, resistant to getting entrapped in foreign wars.
Let me put it plainly, in October 2016, Hillary Clinton is the most liberal person who American politics has produced as a presidential candidate. If she is elected she will very likely govern to the left of Barack Obama - unlike him, she has absolutely no illusions that Republicans are going to support her policies and unlike him she has no need for their love, something that thwarted Obama's first two years in office and led to his crippling weakness. In any real terms, Hillary Clinton is the real American left, the left that can gain office and change things in a direction pointed in a better direction. The alternatives we have before us are as serious as any ever presented to the American voters. It is literally the difference between a candidate who has the support of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, the Progressive Caucus and a candidate who has the support of neo-Nazis, the David Dukes, the white supremacists and Vladimir Putin. Donald Trump is in hock to Russian Oligarchs and who knows who else who will expect to benefit from his presidency. Anyone of the alleged left who isn't supporting Hillary Clinton's election this month has discredited themselves and should not be trusted, not today, not into the future. The real left must dump them.
Friday, October 7, 2016
"The rest of the world, which allowed the things recorded here to happen, should put the obligation to weep before the right to laugh."
Feuilleton: a part of a newspaper or magazine devoted to material designed to entertain the general reader
The performance of this play, which according to terrestrial measurement of time would encompass about ten evenings, is intended for a theatre on Mars. Theatre-goers of this world would not be able to bear it. For it is blood of their blood; the content is the narrative of those years, unreal, unthinkable, accessible to no waking sense or memory, only preserved in bloody dreams, when operetta characters played out the tragedy of mankind. The action, leading to a hundred scenes and hells, is impossible, fractured, hero-less. The humour is merely the self-reproach of a witness who has not gone mad at the thought of surviving these times with his mind intact. But except for those who reveal their share in this shame to posterity, nobody has any right to that humour. The rest of the world, which allowed the things recorded here to happen, should put the obligation to weep before the right to laugh.
For anyone who wants to learn more about the real satirist Karl Kraus and why he makes the two-bit clowns who get called "satirists" now-a-days look like two-bit clowns, here's a website that takes on the huge project of presenting a translation of his enormous play, The Last Days of Mankind. As it points out, the entire work was not until very recently all available in translation and was often presented in watered down excerpts made congenial instead of meaningful. There is so much in the play that is, if anything, far more relevant to an America trained by the decadence and corruption of television, hate-talk radio, pop culture where entertainment that sells has entirely swamped fact and reality. Kraus rather exactly predicted what happens when that kind of thing replaces reality. From his Preface to the play.
The most improbable deeds reported here actually took place; I only painted what was done. The most implausible conversations in this play were spoken verbatim; the shrillest inventions are quotations. Propositions, whose folly is indelibly registered on the ear, swell into the music of life. A document is a character; reports rise up as living forms while the living die as editorials; the feuilleton gains a mouth and delivers its own monologue; clichés stand on two legs – some men are left with only one. Cadences rattle and rage through these times, crescendoing into a hymn to the unholiest acts.
The America that produced the Donald Trump candidacy, a mere eight years after George W. Bush and the catalog of horrors and crimes his time in office committed, is the world in which Trump's TV show, The Apprentice, is denominated as being "reality TV." That a population which has had the phony, constructed, fiction of television presented as "reality" is in the gravest danger of choosing him as its leader is proof of the power of the media to produce, not democracy, but a depraved, demented, dangerous and deadly demagogue. That is what Donald Trump promises to be, not covertly, but as a promise. Donald Trump is what it happening here looks like. The Donald Trump phenomenon is, absolutely, the kind of thing that Karl Kraus warned would be the result of the press being as irresponsible as ours is. From top to bottom the cynical, self-serving, press presented in The Last Days of Mankind is what we've got. When The People have been corrupted, democracy doesn't mean that people make choices that are for the common good, they are a manipulated tool of TV promoted millionaires and billionaires.
As I've mentioned so often, what presents itself as the cream of our free press, the lefty magazines and such electronic venues as Democracy Now and The Young Turks have been as irresponsible this year but with their own twist on it. Some of them are still encouraging people who can be gulled into voting for Jill Stein. Having been brought up on the reverence for journalism that I was propagandized into, believing in by the media and the cult of the romanticized First Amendment, both created and promoted by the media industry, it took me a long time to see through it. Karl Kraus was a journalist who saw how corrupt it can be, how corrupting it can be at first hand. It isn't any great shock to realize that he wouldn't be as much promoted by the media as the far less biting, far more facile and far more easily dismissed Bertolt Brecht. And both of them are buried by the media attention given to the chief executive of The Apprentice.
The performance of this play, which according to terrestrial measurement of time would encompass about ten evenings, is intended for a theatre on Mars. Theatre-goers of this world would not be able to bear it. For it is blood of their blood; the content is the narrative of those years, unreal, unthinkable, accessible to no waking sense or memory, only preserved in bloody dreams, when operetta characters played out the tragedy of mankind. The action, leading to a hundred scenes and hells, is impossible, fractured, hero-less. The humour is merely the self-reproach of a witness who has not gone mad at the thought of surviving these times with his mind intact. But except for those who reveal their share in this shame to posterity, nobody has any right to that humour. The rest of the world, which allowed the things recorded here to happen, should put the obligation to weep before the right to laugh.
For anyone who wants to learn more about the real satirist Karl Kraus and why he makes the two-bit clowns who get called "satirists" now-a-days look like two-bit clowns, here's a website that takes on the huge project of presenting a translation of his enormous play, The Last Days of Mankind. As it points out, the entire work was not until very recently all available in translation and was often presented in watered down excerpts made congenial instead of meaningful. There is so much in the play that is, if anything, far more relevant to an America trained by the decadence and corruption of television, hate-talk radio, pop culture where entertainment that sells has entirely swamped fact and reality. Kraus rather exactly predicted what happens when that kind of thing replaces reality. From his Preface to the play.
The most improbable deeds reported here actually took place; I only painted what was done. The most implausible conversations in this play were spoken verbatim; the shrillest inventions are quotations. Propositions, whose folly is indelibly registered on the ear, swell into the music of life. A document is a character; reports rise up as living forms while the living die as editorials; the feuilleton gains a mouth and delivers its own monologue; clichés stand on two legs – some men are left with only one. Cadences rattle and rage through these times, crescendoing into a hymn to the unholiest acts.
The America that produced the Donald Trump candidacy, a mere eight years after George W. Bush and the catalog of horrors and crimes his time in office committed, is the world in which Trump's TV show, The Apprentice, is denominated as being "reality TV." That a population which has had the phony, constructed, fiction of television presented as "reality" is in the gravest danger of choosing him as its leader is proof of the power of the media to produce, not democracy, but a depraved, demented, dangerous and deadly demagogue. That is what Donald Trump promises to be, not covertly, but as a promise. Donald Trump is what it happening here looks like. The Donald Trump phenomenon is, absolutely, the kind of thing that Karl Kraus warned would be the result of the press being as irresponsible as ours is. From top to bottom the cynical, self-serving, press presented in The Last Days of Mankind is what we've got. When The People have been corrupted, democracy doesn't mean that people make choices that are for the common good, they are a manipulated tool of TV promoted millionaires and billionaires.
As I've mentioned so often, what presents itself as the cream of our free press, the lefty magazines and such electronic venues as Democracy Now and The Young Turks have been as irresponsible this year but with their own twist on it. Some of them are still encouraging people who can be gulled into voting for Jill Stein. Having been brought up on the reverence for journalism that I was propagandized into, believing in by the media and the cult of the romanticized First Amendment, both created and promoted by the media industry, it took me a long time to see through it. Karl Kraus was a journalist who saw how corrupt it can be, how corrupting it can be at first hand. It isn't any great shock to realize that he wouldn't be as much promoted by the media as the far less biting, far more facile and far more easily dismissed Bertolt Brecht. And both of them are buried by the media attention given to the chief executive of The Apprentice.
Thursday, October 6, 2016
Maine's Kind of Hideous Lying Deranged Bigoted Ugly Fat White Scum Spewer Chief Executive Could Soon Be Yours
You really know what's interesting, Samantha Bee's analysis of how it happened here is way more sophisticated and realistic than the lefty magazine idiocy that is trying to cause it to happen everywhere. I would really love to see In These Times fold up almost as much as I'd like to see FOX, Breitbart, NPR.... fold up. They're really not that much different when it comes to real results.
Update: Why "fat"? Because after last week's fat shaming of a normal sized woman by Trump and his posse of fat white crypto-fascist men I'm going to not pass up an opportunity to point out that they are glutenous tubs, themselves.
Wednesday, October 5, 2016
Goner - The Thought Criminal Posts A Movie
At least three of the people involved in the series of radio dramas, "Bailey's Way," which I've posted a few Saturdays are involved in this movie, Esther Perves Smith does some of the writing and other stuff, Grant Linneberg and David LeReaney appear in it. All of them based in Alberta, Canada. I liked it. Apparently some other people from Maine did too. Here's the writer and director, Kelly Zombor pitching it at the tiny film festival held in Lewiston-Auburn.
The Worst Wing
Just out of curiosity, I sampled several pages of my "Spam" file and, based on that, I can announce that easily 97% of the comments I never published were submitted by Steve Simels. Since it's his habit of posting the stuff I won't post at Duncan's it's clear I've got higher standards than the guy who milks Baby Blue while going through the motions of being an important and influential blogger. He was real big - well, for a blogger - back c. 2005. Rumor was that they had a walk on with no lines on The West Wing who was he. Or that was the rumor. Or maybe Sorkin just wanted to add some c. 2004 relevance to show how hip he was with the kids. The West Wing broadcast its last episode more than a decade ago. About the time Duncan stopped going through more than the motions. Maybe he figured he'd arrived and didn't have to do any more work.
I can't tell you how annoying I found that show the several times I was subjected to it. All of those smarty pants talking and walking fast in largely incomprehensible voices. And, really, a New Hampshire yankee, ex-governor who was a liberal Roman Catholic? Back then? Well, it was a fantasy, after all.
Update: Oh, yeah, and those decent, principled Republicans, you'll remember how plentiful those were during the just past Democratic administration. I remember so well that the official decent Republican, after holding some of the most ridiculous of the Clinton era "scandal" hearings, Jim Leech, being asked by Barney Frank, What's a nice guy like you doing in a party like that? Only a nice guy wouldn't be in it.
I can't tell you how annoying I found that show the several times I was subjected to it. All of those smarty pants talking and walking fast in largely incomprehensible voices. And, really, a New Hampshire yankee, ex-governor who was a liberal Roman Catholic? Back then? Well, it was a fantasy, after all.
Update: Oh, yeah, and those decent, principled Republicans, you'll remember how plentiful those were during the just past Democratic administration. I remember so well that the official decent Republican, after holding some of the most ridiculous of the Clinton era "scandal" hearings, Jim Leech, being asked by Barney Frank, What's a nice guy like you doing in a party like that? Only a nice guy wouldn't be in it.
Stupy, stop being so stupid.
Update: I know it's more than your tag team buddies at Duncan's playpen for the drooling senescent can fathom, but when you have to elide what something refers to, you're just being stupid and making no point about what was said. I think Skepsy is leaking and the leach field is saturated.
Update: I know it's more than your tag team buddies at Duncan's playpen for the drooling senescent can fathom, but when you have to elide what something refers to, you're just being stupid and making no point about what was said. I think Skepsy is leaking and the leach field is saturated.
Wendy Waldman, Back by Fall
I was looking at the fruitless apple trees just now, a result of the man-made global warming that the Republicans and Libertarians figure we should just accept because the sun is going to go red giant sometime in the far distant future and this song came to mind.
I don't think Wendy Waldman ever got her due as a songwriter and performer. Neither does Hosea, these days. I wish someone asked Mike Pence about that during last night's abomination of an excuse for a debate.
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
TRIO Soleil au SUNSET - Lendépendans
Franck Nicolas, trumpet
Nelson Veras, guitar
Sonny Troupé, drums
And, something I posted before, Gamme Zayan, with Nicolas playing flugelhorn.
I wonder if the CD I forgot to order is still available.
Invective Echoing From The Distant Past
Wow, you read that old post on Brecht and what a pile of B.S. his theories of theater were. It's my experience that once you've seen through Brecht, his stuff becomes a lot less watchable. That's especially true of the stuff without Kurt Weill's music. The one discussed with music by Hans Eisler is, as stated, a lot like Springtime for Hitler, only real.
There is a rule of thumb I've developed that someone who fled the United States for the GDR (there should definitely be quotation marks around the "D") even in the 1950s wasn't especially interested in democracy.
Marxism, lest anyone not understand, was never a democratic ideology, it is far closer to fascism than it is to democracy. In its body count amassed in virtually every place where it was given a test of time proves it's far closer to Nazism. I think it would be fair to say that any real, serious about it, Marxist would have to be anti-democracy. That's certainly how it worked in real life.
Read the one I like the best from that whole string of posts, you don't mention it.
There is a rule of thumb I've developed that someone who fled the United States for the GDR (there should definitely be quotation marks around the "D") even in the 1950s wasn't especially interested in democracy.
Marxism, lest anyone not understand, was never a democratic ideology, it is far closer to fascism than it is to democracy. In its body count amassed in virtually every place where it was given a test of time proves it's far closer to Nazism. I think it would be fair to say that any real, serious about it, Marxist would have to be anti-democracy. That's certainly how it worked in real life.
Read the one I like the best from that whole string of posts, you don't mention it.
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