Monday, April 15, 2019
Never Forget Who Protected Those Lies That Gave Us Trump: The Utterly Transparent And Dishonest Habits Of The ACLU On Display
Here is the money-shot of Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project's statement on the extradition of Julian Assange.
"Criminally prosecuting a publisher for the publication of truthful information would be a first in American history, and unconstitutional. The government did not cross that Rubicon with today’s indictment, but the worst case scenario cannot yet be ruled out. We have no assurance that these are the only charges the government plans to bring against Mr. Assange. Further, while there is no First Amendment right to crack a government password, this indictment characterizes as ‘part of’ a criminal conspiracy the routine and protected activities journalists often engage in as part of their daily jobs, such as encouraging a source to provide more information. Given President Trump’s and his administration’s well-documented attacks on the freedom of the press, such characterizations are especially worrisome.”
What assurances do any of us have that the government, especially under the depraved Republican domination the ACLU's concept of "speech" and "freedom of the press" has produced that the government won't over step at some point in prosecuting someone who, like Assange, has clearly violated the law? And note, Wizner's disingenuous insertion of the alleged and highly arguable journalistic character of Assange and his crime operation even as he admits that isn't what the American government is indicting him for. From what I understand (thanks largely to the erudite Phil) is that Britain has very stringent laws governing extradition that would prohibit sending him to the US that would bar the US government from bringing charges he was not extradited for.
What spy couldn't be protected if all you have to do is call yourself a "journalist" and get knee-jerk jerks to go along with that under Wizner's formulation? Who couldn't be protected from conducting espionage of the kind that Assange did? It leaves a country which has "free press" vulnerable to any attack by any agent of any gangster regime, anywhere. Which, I have to conclude, is AOK with the ACLU. "Free press" like "gun rights" language the gun lobby here fell for, is nothing that Assange's clear patron and cohort, Putin has any intention of allowing in the Russia he dictates over. That's the kind of criminal regime the ACLU's position leaves the United States and its past advocacy open to.
As to Wizners' playing the card of "government overreach", I can answer that, there is not and never has been any guarantee that any government, anywhere won't overreach. If that were a legitimate issue, no laws would be safely made because there is always a potential for governments, corrupt prosecutors, corrupt judges, etc. using any provision of the law illegitimately. Wizner's and the ACLU's rote, knee-jerky response to support this most illegitimate darling of the deluded play-left is a perfect example of ACLU style double speak. It is so stupid that I would classify it as a fund-raising statement, appealing to emotions and that lefty paranoia that so much ACLU fundraising has been centered around. Wizner's job description should be changed to "fund raiser".
It's also in line with the ACLU's entire line of "free speech" "free press" slogans which, having been adopted by the Rehnquist and Roberts courts (and the neo-Nazis the ACLU has championed in the past) have used (with supporting briefs from the ACLU) to stop every single instance of the Congress, past presidents, state legislatures and governors from trying to clean the corruption of big money out of our politics, the thing which has given us "President Trump’s and his administration’s well-documented attacks on the freedom of the press." Especially those which helped free the New York Times and the cabloid lie industry in their demonization and sandbagging of Hillary Clinton with well-placed lies right before the election. As I recall even the warning by some of its past officials didn't keep the ACLU from ignoring the warnings that the Citizens United ruling would open us up to the big money corruption of foreign billionaires. The "such characterizations" that to Wizner "are especially worrisome" are a direct result of the ACLU's idiotic absolutism in regard to the very issues that this putz, Wizner uses in his unadmitted fundraising PR. The Republican-fascists could never have lied Donald Trump, a 100% creation of the corporate media, into the presidency without that line of ACLU bromindes entering into US law through the Supreme Court.
The ACLU is one of the biggest and stupidest frauds that the American left has ever bought, it might be the biggest one. It's a lot to swallow to admit that some of the criticism of the ACLU by the right which I abhor, is, in fact, legitimate.
The ACLU is an example of the elite play-left's anti-Americanism, which is why it can overlook the fact that we are under attack THROUGH THE FREE PRESS THAT THEY HELPED FREE FROM AN OBLIGATION TO TELL THE TRUTH AND NOT LIES and to protect from civil actions when they told lies against liberals and others who were unprofitable for their fellow rich people. I'm sure you could go through their various briefs submitted in such cases and find all kinds of bull shit claiming that the lies of the press were innocuous and would be overcome by the truths told by the press they would take to be respectable when the history of lies spread in the mass media were known to be extremely damaging to democracy and to the lives of those lied about, especially minority groups who are discriminated against. The lawyers, most of them White and either from affluence or having great expectations of becoming affluent through their legal practice, were hardly the ones in danger of being the recipients of the end product of their "free speech - free press" theories.
In the past decade, looking at who some of those "liberal" lawyers take on as clients, everyone from Greg Craig sharing a dictator-client with Paul Manafort to the demi-god of conventional liberalism, Lawrence Tribe, hearing their excuses for representing dictators and coal companies in terms of their personal finances, listening to the Democratic lawyers who assured us that Rosenstein and Barr (perhaps Muller as well) were sterling fellows whose devotion to the institution of the Department of Justice meant we should trust them, I have come to distrust elite lawyers almost as much as I distrust the ACLU. One of the biggest hits in my respect for such lawyers was when I heard and read the number of "liberal" lawyers and members of courts (all of them with some professional relationship to him) who endorsed Samuel Alito's nomination and, in the most recent case, even Brett Kavanaugh. As I said the other day, I think when we hear someone say "institutionalist" we should translate that into the truth, "careerist". I think the confidence we have put in "liberal" lawyers has hardly been a sound investment. I stopped donating to the ACLU way back when they championed the soi disant "rights" of Nazis to terrorize Holocaust survivors in Skokie. That was the first of the huge cracks in my conventional secular liberalism. Reading more about the actual history of the ACLU helped bring down a lot more of it.
"Criminally prosecuting a publisher for the publication of truthful information would be a first in American history, and unconstitutional. The government did not cross that Rubicon with today’s indictment, but the worst case scenario cannot yet be ruled out. We have no assurance that these are the only charges the government plans to bring against Mr. Assange. Further, while there is no First Amendment right to crack a government password, this indictment characterizes as ‘part of’ a criminal conspiracy the routine and protected activities journalists often engage in as part of their daily jobs, such as encouraging a source to provide more information. Given President Trump’s and his administration’s well-documented attacks on the freedom of the press, such characterizations are especially worrisome.”
What assurances do any of us have that the government, especially under the depraved Republican domination the ACLU's concept of "speech" and "freedom of the press" has produced that the government won't over step at some point in prosecuting someone who, like Assange, has clearly violated the law? And note, Wizner's disingenuous insertion of the alleged and highly arguable journalistic character of Assange and his crime operation even as he admits that isn't what the American government is indicting him for. From what I understand (thanks largely to the erudite Phil) is that Britain has very stringent laws governing extradition that would prohibit sending him to the US that would bar the US government from bringing charges he was not extradited for.
What spy couldn't be protected if all you have to do is call yourself a "journalist" and get knee-jerk jerks to go along with that under Wizner's formulation? Who couldn't be protected from conducting espionage of the kind that Assange did? It leaves a country which has "free press" vulnerable to any attack by any agent of any gangster regime, anywhere. Which, I have to conclude, is AOK with the ACLU. "Free press" like "gun rights" language the gun lobby here fell for, is nothing that Assange's clear patron and cohort, Putin has any intention of allowing in the Russia he dictates over. That's the kind of criminal regime the ACLU's position leaves the United States and its past advocacy open to.
As to Wizners' playing the card of "government overreach", I can answer that, there is not and never has been any guarantee that any government, anywhere won't overreach. If that were a legitimate issue, no laws would be safely made because there is always a potential for governments, corrupt prosecutors, corrupt judges, etc. using any provision of the law illegitimately. Wizner's and the ACLU's rote, knee-jerky response to support this most illegitimate darling of the deluded play-left is a perfect example of ACLU style double speak. It is so stupid that I would classify it as a fund-raising statement, appealing to emotions and that lefty paranoia that so much ACLU fundraising has been centered around. Wizner's job description should be changed to "fund raiser".
It's also in line with the ACLU's entire line of "free speech" "free press" slogans which, having been adopted by the Rehnquist and Roberts courts (and the neo-Nazis the ACLU has championed in the past) have used (with supporting briefs from the ACLU) to stop every single instance of the Congress, past presidents, state legislatures and governors from trying to clean the corruption of big money out of our politics, the thing which has given us "President Trump’s and his administration’s well-documented attacks on the freedom of the press." Especially those which helped free the New York Times and the cabloid lie industry in their demonization and sandbagging of Hillary Clinton with well-placed lies right before the election. As I recall even the warning by some of its past officials didn't keep the ACLU from ignoring the warnings that the Citizens United ruling would open us up to the big money corruption of foreign billionaires. The "such characterizations" that to Wizner "are especially worrisome" are a direct result of the ACLU's idiotic absolutism in regard to the very issues that this putz, Wizner uses in his unadmitted fundraising PR. The Republican-fascists could never have lied Donald Trump, a 100% creation of the corporate media, into the presidency without that line of ACLU bromindes entering into US law through the Supreme Court.
The ACLU is one of the biggest and stupidest frauds that the American left has ever bought, it might be the biggest one. It's a lot to swallow to admit that some of the criticism of the ACLU by the right which I abhor, is, in fact, legitimate.
The ACLU is an example of the elite play-left's anti-Americanism, which is why it can overlook the fact that we are under attack THROUGH THE FREE PRESS THAT THEY HELPED FREE FROM AN OBLIGATION TO TELL THE TRUTH AND NOT LIES and to protect from civil actions when they told lies against liberals and others who were unprofitable for their fellow rich people. I'm sure you could go through their various briefs submitted in such cases and find all kinds of bull shit claiming that the lies of the press were innocuous and would be overcome by the truths told by the press they would take to be respectable when the history of lies spread in the mass media were known to be extremely damaging to democracy and to the lives of those lied about, especially minority groups who are discriminated against. The lawyers, most of them White and either from affluence or having great expectations of becoming affluent through their legal practice, were hardly the ones in danger of being the recipients of the end product of their "free speech - free press" theories.
In the past decade, looking at who some of those "liberal" lawyers take on as clients, everyone from Greg Craig sharing a dictator-client with Paul Manafort to the demi-god of conventional liberalism, Lawrence Tribe, hearing their excuses for representing dictators and coal companies in terms of their personal finances, listening to the Democratic lawyers who assured us that Rosenstein and Barr (perhaps Muller as well) were sterling fellows whose devotion to the institution of the Department of Justice meant we should trust them, I have come to distrust elite lawyers almost as much as I distrust the ACLU. One of the biggest hits in my respect for such lawyers was when I heard and read the number of "liberal" lawyers and members of courts (all of them with some professional relationship to him) who endorsed Samuel Alito's nomination and, in the most recent case, even Brett Kavanaugh. As I said the other day, I think when we hear someone say "institutionalist" we should translate that into the truth, "careerist". I think the confidence we have put in "liberal" lawyers has hardly been a sound investment. I stopped donating to the ACLU way back when they championed the soi disant "rights" of Nazis to terrorize Holocaust survivors in Skokie. That was the first of the huge cracks in my conventional secular liberalism. Reading more about the actual history of the ACLU helped bring down a lot more of it.
Sunday, April 14, 2019
This Is A Model Of How To Construct A Legitimate Criticism of An Ineffective Lefty Leader
I am ever more impressed with Phil's political analysis, here about his criticism of Jeremy Corbyn as a terrible leader of the left and in Parliament even as he defends him from the false attacks on him of personal antisemitism. Maybe it's because in his day job he's a science teacher that Phil can come up with such full and finely reasoned analyses, maybe it's just that he's extremely smart and honest. I really love his commentary. Maybe because, Britain, as the United States is a democracy under attack from the same forces, much of it flowing in the polluted sewer that is Rupert Murdoch's operation.
Problems With Imaging Reality According To Expectations
I gave up reading the misnamed Religion Dispatches long enough ago that I didn't know it had moved and, apparently, wisely gave up posting comments.
There's a kind of silly article on its new site about the black hole "photo" that wants to bring God into it, God Need Not Be Real, But the Black Hole Photo Is, which, I suppose, is inevitable though I can't help but feel it's oh, so last decade and more past it. He makes one mistake, sort of, in that the eminent astro-physicist who took the most famous photos in the history of Enistein's theory of relativity, Arthur Stanley Eddington wasn't only "the son of Quakers" he was an actively believing Quaker throughout his career. I was impressed enough with his Swathmore Lecture, Science And The Unseen World, that I typed it out to post online before the book, itself was available online, without typos. Given what he says about the risks of trying to mix theology with science, at least on the science side of it, I don't think this is exactly a successful article. I'd say anyone who wants to try to find theological or, even more, anti-theological implications in this image are fetching it pretty far. As to science disposing of God, Eddington, pointing out the folly of a materialist conception of consciousness and its inability to judge the wrong answer to 7x9 as inferior to the right answer, Eddington pointed out:
Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed*.
You could probably find other things in Eddington's Gifford Lectures, or Tarner Lectures to find some passages that, in the context of this image and article, are quite ironic.
I'd listened to Dr. Katie Bouman in an already out of date TED talk the other day and found her both informative and extremely appealing - does everyone younger than me sound like a bright, precocious, energetic, high school student from now on - and pretty honest about what leads me to continue to question this passage from the article:
For me the photograph (made possible by an algorithm developed by Dr. Katie Bouman) both confirmed and exceeded expectations; in many ways the picture appeared as I sort of assumed it would, but when I actually viewed the image it shattered my sense of what I was looking at, of what’s possible, of what lay at the center of distant galaxies.
I still would question the extent to which this "photo is real," considering it's a product of fitting together disparate data points and choosing among what Bouman said was "an infinity" of possible visual interpretations of that data using the artificial, human construct of algorithms, based in what would be expected to be seen, based on existing theories about black holes. It's not a philosophical game to ask in what sense the product of that kind of thing is "real". The "photo" isn't even like what Eddington took, the images of starlight as deflected in relation to the position of Mercury during a solar eclipse, that was light falling on a photographic plate - which didn't by the way, keep some sci-guys on the make from floating the idea that Eddington fudged it. Even the description in the article shows the problem, this is an image that is based, not on light hitting a photographic plate, but based in "expectations" on things "as [we] sort of assumed". I don't doubt that the picture very well might be as valid a "picture of a black hole" as we're going to get but it's worth asking if it's "real".
That's a question that has every similarity to my criticism of opinion polling, surveys, with so many other kinds of "science" as done in the social sciences which construct artificial stereotypes of human populations which are, then, taken as not only "real" but far more real than the individuals who comprise the real group in real life, in all of their variation from that type. Which, given its proven potential to blight lives, to blight the lives of entire groups of people, to promote discrimination against those who, oddly enough, are the groups already disadvantaged and to discriminate for those who are privileged and even gets huge numbers of people killed or forcibly sterilized, cutting them out of the future, there couldn't be a more important question to ask. That kind of algorithm based construction of "reality" is the reason I decided to comment on the article. Unless we're going to be sucked into a black hole sometime in the future (and what would we do to prevent that?) the reality of that picture is of vanishingly little importance as compared to the clear, present and immediate danger of repeating an all too humanly constructed past that hasn't really passed, considering the use of this construction of reality is entirely important.
* Suppose we concede the most extravagant claims that might be made for natural law, so that we allow that the processes of the mind are governed by it; the effect of this concession is merely to emphasise the fact that the mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions. If, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the way in which thoughts succeed one another in the mind. Now the thought of “7 times 9" in a boy’s mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of “65.” What has gone wrong? In the intervening moments of cogitation everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. Nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as soon as we consider the fundamental property of thought – that it may be correct or incorrect. The machinery cannot be anything but correct. We say that the brain which produces “7 times 9 are 63" is better than a brain that produces “7 times 9 are 65"; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better. Our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces, and that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law – laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed.
There's a kind of silly article on its new site about the black hole "photo" that wants to bring God into it, God Need Not Be Real, But the Black Hole Photo Is, which, I suppose, is inevitable though I can't help but feel it's oh, so last decade and more past it. He makes one mistake, sort of, in that the eminent astro-physicist who took the most famous photos in the history of Enistein's theory of relativity, Arthur Stanley Eddington wasn't only "the son of Quakers" he was an actively believing Quaker throughout his career. I was impressed enough with his Swathmore Lecture, Science And The Unseen World, that I typed it out to post online before the book, itself was available online, without typos. Given what he says about the risks of trying to mix theology with science, at least on the science side of it, I don't think this is exactly a successful article. I'd say anyone who wants to try to find theological or, even more, anti-theological implications in this image are fetching it pretty far. As to science disposing of God, Eddington, pointing out the folly of a materialist conception of consciousness and its inability to judge the wrong answer to 7x9 as inferior to the right answer, Eddington pointed out:
Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed*.
You could probably find other things in Eddington's Gifford Lectures, or Tarner Lectures to find some passages that, in the context of this image and article, are quite ironic.
I'd listened to Dr. Katie Bouman in an already out of date TED talk the other day and found her both informative and extremely appealing - does everyone younger than me sound like a bright, precocious, energetic, high school student from now on - and pretty honest about what leads me to continue to question this passage from the article:
For me the photograph (made possible by an algorithm developed by Dr. Katie Bouman) both confirmed and exceeded expectations; in many ways the picture appeared as I sort of assumed it would, but when I actually viewed the image it shattered my sense of what I was looking at, of what’s possible, of what lay at the center of distant galaxies.
I still would question the extent to which this "photo is real," considering it's a product of fitting together disparate data points and choosing among what Bouman said was "an infinity" of possible visual interpretations of that data using the artificial, human construct of algorithms, based in what would be expected to be seen, based on existing theories about black holes. It's not a philosophical game to ask in what sense the product of that kind of thing is "real". The "photo" isn't even like what Eddington took, the images of starlight as deflected in relation to the position of Mercury during a solar eclipse, that was light falling on a photographic plate - which didn't by the way, keep some sci-guys on the make from floating the idea that Eddington fudged it. Even the description in the article shows the problem, this is an image that is based, not on light hitting a photographic plate, but based in "expectations" on things "as [we] sort of assumed". I don't doubt that the picture very well might be as valid a "picture of a black hole" as we're going to get but it's worth asking if it's "real".
That's a question that has every similarity to my criticism of opinion polling, surveys, with so many other kinds of "science" as done in the social sciences which construct artificial stereotypes of human populations which are, then, taken as not only "real" but far more real than the individuals who comprise the real group in real life, in all of their variation from that type. Which, given its proven potential to blight lives, to blight the lives of entire groups of people, to promote discrimination against those who, oddly enough, are the groups already disadvantaged and to discriminate for those who are privileged and even gets huge numbers of people killed or forcibly sterilized, cutting them out of the future, there couldn't be a more important question to ask. That kind of algorithm based construction of "reality" is the reason I decided to comment on the article. Unless we're going to be sucked into a black hole sometime in the future (and what would we do to prevent that?) the reality of that picture is of vanishingly little importance as compared to the clear, present and immediate danger of repeating an all too humanly constructed past that hasn't really passed, considering the use of this construction of reality is entirely important.
* Suppose we concede the most extravagant claims that might be made for natural law, so that we allow that the processes of the mind are governed by it; the effect of this concession is merely to emphasise the fact that the mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions. If, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the way in which thoughts succeed one another in the mind. Now the thought of “7 times 9" in a boy’s mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of “65.” What has gone wrong? In the intervening moments of cogitation everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. Nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as soon as we consider the fundamental property of thought – that it may be correct or incorrect. The machinery cannot be anything but correct. We say that the brain which produces “7 times 9 are 63" is better than a brain that produces “7 times 9 are 65"; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better. Our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces, and that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law – laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed.
I Don't Care
Let me guess, the TV-retarded tool from Teaneck is saying I said something that I never said about something I never knew existed and don't intend to look into because it's not anything I care about.
That's not to say that I'd care if it was about something I'd said, by the time he and his fellow post-literates dealt with it (unread) it would be something I'd never said.
I'm scrapping useless junk this year, Youtube subscriptions, online liars from fading pastel colored blogs, the play-left (the Majority Report experiment was the last one I'm trying, the play-left is worse than a waste of time), etc. Life is too short to waste on that kind of stuff. Life is too important to get caught up in let's pretend.
That's not to say that I'd care if it was about something I'd said, by the time he and his fellow post-literates dealt with it (unread) it would be something I'd never said.
I'm scrapping useless junk this year, Youtube subscriptions, online liars from fading pastel colored blogs, the play-left (the Majority Report experiment was the last one I'm trying, the play-left is worse than a waste of time), etc. Life is too short to waste on that kind of stuff. Life is too important to get caught up in let's pretend.
With His Recent Letter, His anti-Papal Encyclical, Benedict Has Set Himself Up As A New Kind of Anti-Pope
Non-Catholics and a lot of Catholics impatient with Pope Francis's response to the pederast scandal in the Catholic clergy and hierarchy might imagine him as an absolute monarch or even the version of that which his next to last predecessor, John Paul II wished he was, or perhaps his immediate predecessor Benedict XVI who, in a number of ways, was JPII's William Barr, someone who went along with JPII even as he demonstrably knew JPII was wrong and making the breaking scandal worse. Those who went to see the movie Spotlight, about the Spotlight story that brought the abuse scandal to the world's notice would likely be unaware that it had been breaking for some time before the Boston Globe's renowned team of journalists took it up, there had been much earlier reporting in the Globe and elsewhere that there were serious crimes being committed by priests raping and molesting children and some adults, stories that were certainly known to the Bishops and Cardinals and in the Vatican, itself going back quite a way. In just about every way the papacy of John Paul II made that worse. And up until the time he succeeded JPII, Cardinal Ratzinger was a first hand witness to some of the worst enabling by the, then, Pope, we know that because as soon as he was Benedict XVI, he started to make some amends. Amends which he, in his long retirement, is undoing.
Now, with his recent letter, the self-retired pope in the wake of the recent world meeting of bishops to address the sexual abuse scandal, he is, again, making things worse.
Retired Pope Benedict XVI has published a new letter blaming the continuing Catholic clergy abuse crisis on the sexual revolution, developments in theology following the Second Vatican Council, and modern society's aversion to speaking about God.
The letter, one of a handful the ex-pontiff has shared publicly since his resignation in 2013, immediately drew criticism from theologians and Vatican watchers. They noted it does not address structural issues that abetted abuse cover-up, or Benedict's own contested 24-year role as head of the Vatican's powerful doctrinal office.
The former pope instead points the finger at a range of esoteric issues, from a supposed societal "mental collapse" brought on by the protests of 1968, to a claim that the sexual revolution declared pedophilia to be "allowed and appropriate," and to "vehement backlashes" by theologians against a 1993 encyclical by Pope John Paul II. . .
. . . A lengthy 5,500-word text, the former pope's letter was published overnight April 10 by several right-wing Catholic websites, including the EWTN-owned outlets National Catholic Register and Catholic News Agency.
The Vatican press office did not immediately respond to requests to verify the letter's authenticity, but the city-state's news portal reported on the text at length, saying it was first written for a German magazine for clergy, Klerusblatt.
As soon as a person informed on things Catholic saw the letters EWTN, they should have yelled, BINGO! because if there is anything that is a sign that Ratzinger is either participating in or being manipulated by the well-financed billionaire gangster funded attempt to take down Pope Francis, it is seeing those usual suspects in on it. EWTN is the right-wing kingdom of someone I called The Nazi Nun for decades before she died, the inaptly named Sr. (I can't bring myself to use the "M" word for her) Angelica.
Two other certain signposts that this is a politically motivated document is shown by how the gang around Benedict didn't inform Pope Francis' administration about it until it was released to right wing media and that his longtime secretary, Bishop Ganswein, someone who is decidedly on the record of being in the anti-Francis camp seems to have been involved.
Even the Vatican appears to be struggling to understand what to do with a former pope who wants to engage in public debate. As Benedict's latest letter appeared on several right-wing Catholic websites overnight April 10, the Holy See Press Office seemed unprepared, unable even to respond to questions about whether the text was authentic.
In fact it was Archbishop Georg Ganswein, Benedict's personal secretary, that confirmed for many journalists that the text was indeed from the former pontiff.
I haven't trusted Georg (Georgeous George) Ganswein* from the first time I laid eyes on his fashion plate picture next to the red Prada wearing Benedict. If you suspect there might be a story there, all I can say is lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. It's nothing the right-wing camp wouldn't go with if they thought they could make hay of it.
With this, if it is, in fact, his intention, the retired pope has set himself up as a modern form of anti-Pope, something which some wondered might happen if he lived long enough, especially the day that Pope Francis was elected and immediately proved he had no intention of continuing in the tradition of JPII and Benedict XVI. It was a big mistake to allow a self-retired Pope to maintain a status that did't make it clear that he is not a Pope any longer, something that as authoritarian but far more responsible Pope, Pius XII made clear when he produced a document saying that if, as many expected, he was taken hostage by the Nazis, he was, in every sense an ex-Pope and that he would revert to the status of a Cardinal, a document that, probably, only chance kept from its unprecedented execution with his kidnapping. I never trusted Cardinal Ratzinger and trusted him as Benedict XVI by the slightest of margins. He was a really terrible Pope, leading me to think that anyone who was as beholden as he was to Augustine's City of God theology was bound to be a disaster as a pastor.
If you want to have a more informed and more charitable view of what he is up to, this piece by Michael Sean Winters, which calls it "a regrettable text" implies that it is the product of a mind in decline.
When a friend first sent me Pope Emeritus Benedict's article about the root causes of clergy sex abuse, I thought the text was a hoax. Here, it seemed, was a caricature of both Joseph Ratzinger's once powerful intellect and of conservative explanations for the sex abuse crisis. Apparently the text is authentic, so we must search for other reasons why it gets so much wrong — and so much that the retired pope would know is wrong. Let us examine the difficulties with this text.
I will leave it to you to read Winters' fine analysis of the letter, he clearly criticizes it from a starting point more inclined to think well of Benedict XVI than I am as well as someone certainly more informed of the issues than I am. I would call your attention to what he says about the actual facts, as supported with statistics, that the seminary formation of the majority of those convicted of sexual crimes against children was pre-Vatican II, which, as he points out, was hardly fully implemented for decades, it, in fact, isn't now, having been undermined and attacked by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, though Benedict was one of the theologians who worked on some of the major documents of the Council. It is clear in his letter that he is still obsessed with the events that turned him from a moderately liberal theologian into an arch conservative, the student demonstrations of 1968 which upset his placid academic theologian's quiescence**. The sexual abuse crisis is a product of the elitist clericalism he and JPII reimposed on the Church and the twisted view of sexuality as well as the all male-unmarried priesthood. Anyone who doesn't admit the role that that exclusion played in producing so many child abusers as priests is denying an obvious reality.
My view of this is more along the lines of this article by Jamie Mason which points out that the glaringly wrong and politically reactionary nature of the anti-encyclical, that it is far better an explanation of how the past two Popes managed to make things worse and how they learned nothing from even the worst aspects of this. He certainly saw the corruption under the papal administration he was the second in command in, but that seems to have made no impression on him.
If you want more depth to the story, there is a fourth article dealing with various critiques by theologians, which I won't go into, though some of the things said in it are important to understanding that this has more to do with the billionaire, fascist financed war against Pope Francis and the Vatican II Church than it does the pedophile scandal.
* I seem to remember the house of Versache used Gorgeous George as a inspiration for a line of clothes for women, using his image in their ads.
** You have to wonder at the moral obtuseness of someone who learned so little from the sins of the Church while he has obsessed for a half a century over the very short and relatively harmless student demonstrations of 1968.
Now, with his recent letter, the self-retired pope in the wake of the recent world meeting of bishops to address the sexual abuse scandal, he is, again, making things worse.
Retired Pope Benedict XVI has published a new letter blaming the continuing Catholic clergy abuse crisis on the sexual revolution, developments in theology following the Second Vatican Council, and modern society's aversion to speaking about God.
The letter, one of a handful the ex-pontiff has shared publicly since his resignation in 2013, immediately drew criticism from theologians and Vatican watchers. They noted it does not address structural issues that abetted abuse cover-up, or Benedict's own contested 24-year role as head of the Vatican's powerful doctrinal office.
The former pope instead points the finger at a range of esoteric issues, from a supposed societal "mental collapse" brought on by the protests of 1968, to a claim that the sexual revolution declared pedophilia to be "allowed and appropriate," and to "vehement backlashes" by theologians against a 1993 encyclical by Pope John Paul II. . .
. . . A lengthy 5,500-word text, the former pope's letter was published overnight April 10 by several right-wing Catholic websites, including the EWTN-owned outlets National Catholic Register and Catholic News Agency.
The Vatican press office did not immediately respond to requests to verify the letter's authenticity, but the city-state's news portal reported on the text at length, saying it was first written for a German magazine for clergy, Klerusblatt.
As soon as a person informed on things Catholic saw the letters EWTN, they should have yelled, BINGO! because if there is anything that is a sign that Ratzinger is either participating in or being manipulated by the well-financed billionaire gangster funded attempt to take down Pope Francis, it is seeing those usual suspects in on it. EWTN is the right-wing kingdom of someone I called The Nazi Nun for decades before she died, the inaptly named Sr. (I can't bring myself to use the "M" word for her) Angelica.
Two other certain signposts that this is a politically motivated document is shown by how the gang around Benedict didn't inform Pope Francis' administration about it until it was released to right wing media and that his longtime secretary, Bishop Ganswein, someone who is decidedly on the record of being in the anti-Francis camp seems to have been involved.
Even the Vatican appears to be struggling to understand what to do with a former pope who wants to engage in public debate. As Benedict's latest letter appeared on several right-wing Catholic websites overnight April 10, the Holy See Press Office seemed unprepared, unable even to respond to questions about whether the text was authentic.
In fact it was Archbishop Georg Ganswein, Benedict's personal secretary, that confirmed for many journalists that the text was indeed from the former pontiff.
I haven't trusted Georg (Georgeous George) Ganswein* from the first time I laid eyes on his fashion plate picture next to the red Prada wearing Benedict. If you suspect there might be a story there, all I can say is lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. It's nothing the right-wing camp wouldn't go with if they thought they could make hay of it.
With this, if it is, in fact, his intention, the retired pope has set himself up as a modern form of anti-Pope, something which some wondered might happen if he lived long enough, especially the day that Pope Francis was elected and immediately proved he had no intention of continuing in the tradition of JPII and Benedict XVI. It was a big mistake to allow a self-retired Pope to maintain a status that did't make it clear that he is not a Pope any longer, something that as authoritarian but far more responsible Pope, Pius XII made clear when he produced a document saying that if, as many expected, he was taken hostage by the Nazis, he was, in every sense an ex-Pope and that he would revert to the status of a Cardinal, a document that, probably, only chance kept from its unprecedented execution with his kidnapping. I never trusted Cardinal Ratzinger and trusted him as Benedict XVI by the slightest of margins. He was a really terrible Pope, leading me to think that anyone who was as beholden as he was to Augustine's City of God theology was bound to be a disaster as a pastor.
If you want to have a more informed and more charitable view of what he is up to, this piece by Michael Sean Winters, which calls it "a regrettable text" implies that it is the product of a mind in decline.
When a friend first sent me Pope Emeritus Benedict's article about the root causes of clergy sex abuse, I thought the text was a hoax. Here, it seemed, was a caricature of both Joseph Ratzinger's once powerful intellect and of conservative explanations for the sex abuse crisis. Apparently the text is authentic, so we must search for other reasons why it gets so much wrong — and so much that the retired pope would know is wrong. Let us examine the difficulties with this text.
I will leave it to you to read Winters' fine analysis of the letter, he clearly criticizes it from a starting point more inclined to think well of Benedict XVI than I am as well as someone certainly more informed of the issues than I am. I would call your attention to what he says about the actual facts, as supported with statistics, that the seminary formation of the majority of those convicted of sexual crimes against children was pre-Vatican II, which, as he points out, was hardly fully implemented for decades, it, in fact, isn't now, having been undermined and attacked by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, though Benedict was one of the theologians who worked on some of the major documents of the Council. It is clear in his letter that he is still obsessed with the events that turned him from a moderately liberal theologian into an arch conservative, the student demonstrations of 1968 which upset his placid academic theologian's quiescence**. The sexual abuse crisis is a product of the elitist clericalism he and JPII reimposed on the Church and the twisted view of sexuality as well as the all male-unmarried priesthood. Anyone who doesn't admit the role that that exclusion played in producing so many child abusers as priests is denying an obvious reality.
My view of this is more along the lines of this article by Jamie Mason which points out that the glaringly wrong and politically reactionary nature of the anti-encyclical, that it is far better an explanation of how the past two Popes managed to make things worse and how they learned nothing from even the worst aspects of this. He certainly saw the corruption under the papal administration he was the second in command in, but that seems to have made no impression on him.
If you want more depth to the story, there is a fourth article dealing with various critiques by theologians, which I won't go into, though some of the things said in it are important to understanding that this has more to do with the billionaire, fascist financed war against Pope Francis and the Vatican II Church than it does the pedophile scandal.
* I seem to remember the house of Versache used Gorgeous George as a inspiration for a line of clothes for women, using his image in their ads.
** You have to wonder at the moral obtuseness of someone who learned so little from the sins of the Church while he has obsessed for a half a century over the very short and relatively harmless student demonstrations of 1968.
Saturday, April 13, 2019
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Five Rachels
What if you could replace sad memories with happy ones? What if it was really easy, just as easy as popping a pill? In Katie Hims’ beautifully layered and sweetly funny psychological drama, Rachel Davies stars as Rachel Ridley, a perfectly ordinary woman who seems to have discovered memories that she didn’t used to have. She thinks she used to have them, but her doctor is very sure she didn’t. As Rachel tries to research what might be happening to her, she discovers the almost mystical nature of the brain… we’ve all breathed in the atoms of the dead, maybe Rachel could have picked up their stories too… or… maybe she’s really a replicant, like the Rachael in Blade Runner…
Cast
Rachel Ridley ….. Rachel Davies
Rachel 2 …… Kika Markham
Dr Jones ….. Michael Bertenshaw
Girl in the newsagents ….. Sarah Ovens
Receptionist ….. Franchi Webb
Library customer ….. Christopher Harper
With thanks to Dr Paul Broks, Dr Katja Paeprer, Dr Frank Rohricht, Professor Peter Garrard, Dr Daniel Glaser.
Sound design by David Chilton
Written by Katie Hims
Directed by Allegra McIlroy
I'm not big on art that is based on psychological theories but this one is pretty good.
Bow Down To Me As If I Were Lord Buckethead! Yeah, right.
It's been a weird 24 hours in which people have attributed some kind of power to me that is not only something I'd never have suspected I had but I'm quite sure isn't there.
Someone, using typical play-lefty rote language said to me, "don't abandon Sam [Seder] over one issue. That's authoritarian, and immature," The issue is his absurd assertion that we have to champion Julian Assange because "freedom of the press", I had decided to stop posting videos from Seder and recently added Michael Brooks to that over his Bernie Bro. bullshit but when that showed up in the sidebar of Youtube and I heard Seder's bullshit championing of Assange I made it official and told him that I'd unsubscribed and considered it a definitive break. Maybe if I hand't been reminded of the Almanac Singers' "FDR and Eleanor are warmongers for fighting with Stalin's ally, Hitler " period* I'd not have bothered to say it.
The idea that someone who is dumping their subscription to a friggin' play-lefty Youtube channel is an authoritarian act is an example of how overblown play-lefty language can substitute for thinking. It's like the phenomenon of play-lefty anti-anti communism, in which "we must stand up for those poor, put upon Communists because the people oppressing them are so uncouth". Later in the same comment thread where my terrible act of authoritarian oppression consisting of deciding not to continue wasting time listening to that bull shit, Sam's play lefty audience, a. compared my name to Senator McCarthy (I asked the ass if he'd ever said the same thing to Eugene McCarthy) someone called me a "war monger" and there were various and other substitutes for actual thinking common to the play-left thrown around. The play-left is, as I pointed out, in response, stupider than the Trumpian fascists in that at least they can put someone in the presidency, the play left can't manage that. Their only electoral success is in putting Republicans in the presidency.
That Seder is advocating for the overt, publicly exposed tool of the most Stalinesque figure in Russia since Stalin and his side kick Micheal Brooks is advocating yet another in that long series of play-lefty presidential candidacies which have helped put Nixon and Reagan and Bush II and now Trump in the presidency is what led to the definitive break, not any aspirations to a authoritarian power, even if I were stupid enough to think that that was an option. That, again, is more like the thinking of Bernie Sanders whose idea that he, as president, would find it possible to get his program through the Congress and that it would be sustained by the courts THE FRIGGIN' 2020 ROBERTS COURT! which is so delusional as to comprise megalomania. Perhaps exacerbated by dementia, I say as one not that much younger than he is. Even Joe Biden, as deluded as he is, is more realistic than that.
Also, here, one of the guys who trolls me uncovered my real intentions, of using egalitarian democracy, legally enforced equality, economic leveling to take power from which I, Like Doug Pirhana, can impose my will and exert terrifying power through making fun of ideas and the people who spout them. "He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, pathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious". Yeah, that's me all over, isn't it.
I think everyone watches too much TV.
* I am becoming far more interested in how extensive the Communist Party duplicity and dishonesty has been in duping, discrediting, weakening and defeating the American tradition of liberalism, egalitarian democracy, economic justice, etc. It's something like when I started my investigation of Darwinism and its relationship to eugenics, every time I look into it, the clear trail of it is there virtually everywhere. And a lot of it is, as clearly, at the instigation of Marxists. I think Marxism, an anti-democratic ideology, which was sold as what it is not, never has been and never can be, something akin to traditional American style liberalism will always, in every case be far more helpful to its ideological cousins, fascism, Nazism, other capitalist, state-capitalist systems. I haven't looked into it yet but this came up in the sidebar of my Youtube screen yesterday.
Listening to Noam Chomsky's critique of Marxist behaviorism as being an intellectual position that inevitably leads to one of the two roads of horrific oppression in the 20th century (the other one he said Bakunin correctly predicted was state capitalism) made me wonder how Chomsky missed that his mid-20th century conception of genetic determinism had, itself, been productive of horrific oppression. I think what both of those have in common is their materialism which is always deterministic, in the end, freedom being an ephemeral and unstable epiphenomenon of material determinism. Only a rejection of materialism, the firm belief that animal consciousness is not a product of material causation has the potential to avoid that. The concept of inalienable, endowment by God of rights to everyone is the only thing that is dependable to produce something other than oppression. The Mosaic Law is the most reliable source of that in most of the world, especially, as Habermas pointed out, as modified by the teachings of Jesus and Paul.
Update: I took the "early onset" out of "early onset dementia" because at Bernie's and Biden's age, there ain't nothin' early onset about it. Habit, a prelude to dementia, use it or lose it.
Someone, using typical play-lefty rote language said to me, "don't abandon Sam [Seder] over one issue. That's authoritarian, and immature," The issue is his absurd assertion that we have to champion Julian Assange because "freedom of the press", I had decided to stop posting videos from Seder and recently added Michael Brooks to that over his Bernie Bro. bullshit but when that showed up in the sidebar of Youtube and I heard Seder's bullshit championing of Assange I made it official and told him that I'd unsubscribed and considered it a definitive break. Maybe if I hand't been reminded of the Almanac Singers' "FDR and Eleanor are warmongers for fighting with Stalin's ally, Hitler " period* I'd not have bothered to say it.
The idea that someone who is dumping their subscription to a friggin' play-lefty Youtube channel is an authoritarian act is an example of how overblown play-lefty language can substitute for thinking. It's like the phenomenon of play-lefty anti-anti communism, in which "we must stand up for those poor, put upon Communists because the people oppressing them are so uncouth". Later in the same comment thread where my terrible act of authoritarian oppression consisting of deciding not to continue wasting time listening to that bull shit, Sam's play lefty audience, a. compared my name to Senator McCarthy (I asked the ass if he'd ever said the same thing to Eugene McCarthy) someone called me a "war monger" and there were various and other substitutes for actual thinking common to the play-left thrown around. The play-left is, as I pointed out, in response, stupider than the Trumpian fascists in that at least they can put someone in the presidency, the play left can't manage that. Their only electoral success is in putting Republicans in the presidency.
That Seder is advocating for the overt, publicly exposed tool of the most Stalinesque figure in Russia since Stalin and his side kick Micheal Brooks is advocating yet another in that long series of play-lefty presidential candidacies which have helped put Nixon and Reagan and Bush II and now Trump in the presidency is what led to the definitive break, not any aspirations to a authoritarian power, even if I were stupid enough to think that that was an option. That, again, is more like the thinking of Bernie Sanders whose idea that he, as president, would find it possible to get his program through the Congress and that it would be sustained by the courts THE FRIGGIN' 2020 ROBERTS COURT! which is so delusional as to comprise megalomania. Perhaps exacerbated by dementia, I say as one not that much younger than he is. Even Joe Biden, as deluded as he is, is more realistic than that.
Also, here, one of the guys who trolls me uncovered my real intentions, of using egalitarian democracy, legally enforced equality, economic leveling to take power from which I, Like Doug Pirhana, can impose my will and exert terrifying power through making fun of ideas and the people who spout them. "He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, pathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious". Yeah, that's me all over, isn't it.
I think everyone watches too much TV.
* I am becoming far more interested in how extensive the Communist Party duplicity and dishonesty has been in duping, discrediting, weakening and defeating the American tradition of liberalism, egalitarian democracy, economic justice, etc. It's something like when I started my investigation of Darwinism and its relationship to eugenics, every time I look into it, the clear trail of it is there virtually everywhere. And a lot of it is, as clearly, at the instigation of Marxists. I think Marxism, an anti-democratic ideology, which was sold as what it is not, never has been and never can be, something akin to traditional American style liberalism will always, in every case be far more helpful to its ideological cousins, fascism, Nazism, other capitalist, state-capitalist systems. I haven't looked into it yet but this came up in the sidebar of my Youtube screen yesterday.
Listening to Noam Chomsky's critique of Marxist behaviorism as being an intellectual position that inevitably leads to one of the two roads of horrific oppression in the 20th century (the other one he said Bakunin correctly predicted was state capitalism) made me wonder how Chomsky missed that his mid-20th century conception of genetic determinism had, itself, been productive of horrific oppression. I think what both of those have in common is their materialism which is always deterministic, in the end, freedom being an ephemeral and unstable epiphenomenon of material determinism. Only a rejection of materialism, the firm belief that animal consciousness is not a product of material causation has the potential to avoid that. The concept of inalienable, endowment by God of rights to everyone is the only thing that is dependable to produce something other than oppression. The Mosaic Law is the most reliable source of that in most of the world, especially, as Habermas pointed out, as modified by the teachings of Jesus and Paul.
Update: I took the "early onset" out of "early onset dementia" because at Bernie's and Biden's age, there ain't nothin' early onset about it. Habit, a prelude to dementia, use it or lose it.
Friday, April 12, 2019
Gary Burton The New Quartet - Nonsequence
Gary Burton – vibraphone
Michael Goodrick – guitar
Abraham Laboriel – bass
Harry Blazer – drums
Mike Gibbs, composition
I love the players on this album from the early 70s.
Coral, Keith Jarrett composer
If Assange Is A Journalist To Be Championed By Journalists American Journalism Is Contemptible
If American journalists want to make the Putin asset, Trump supporter, probably one of the biggest reasons Trump was able to win the Electoral College, the leader of a ratfucking op that Trump thanked and praised more than 100 times, Julian Assange the hill that American journalism makes its stand on, they are only proving what a bunch of discreditable idiots and assholes they are. And I mean even the ones I generally admire who are running around like chickens worrying that the sky is falling in the wake of Assange being arrested yesterday.
It does highlight several things I've noticed more, lately, something called "freedom" as an idol instead of a virtue. How something called "freedom" as in "freedom of the press" seems to have a life in real life that is independent of egalitarian democracy, self-government by free people who have an adequate knowledge of reality. Independent of the things that the First Amendment was created for, especially that one "right" created of an artificial right for an artificial entity "the press". That "freedom of the press" is what people who get paid as members of "the press" put well over that list of things that right was created to serve. Service to egalitarian democracy and self-government is, clearly, secondary in the minds of most journalists, far, far behind what they get paid to do for those artificial entities. I have every confidence that if you brought up that responsibility, the only rational reason that "the press" was given that freedom, the only rational reason that it is important, that they serve self-government by a free people, they would disdain that as a vulgar consideration that was beneath, not only their notice, but beneath their contempt.
I think, as well, and, especially in the supposed journalistic left that there is in their knee jerk support of Assange a knee-jerk anti-Americanism*, the kind of thing that has not only fueled so much lefty scribbling and babbling as journalism, but which has, in the process, discredited, not only their play-left but the only real American left that values the real American liberal tradition, the ones who have struggled to actually make life better for real people. I think that rote anti-Americanism that disdains that obligation of journalism is an expression of a snobbery that doesn't really value democracy (the reason that they've had such an incredible rate of supporting even the most brutal dictators) and, clearly, value even the most obvious scumbag like Assange as one of them.
If legitimate journalists have something to fear in the legal process against Assange, there might be a good reason for that in what he did and how he did it. He certainly isn't doing what real news operations did with the Pentagon Papers, his motivation was nothing like Daniel Ellsberg, I don't think Chelsea Manning is comparable to him, Ellsberg had a sense of responsibility and, more generally, a lot more sense than the young Manning did with all of her issues. Assange used Manning's youth and emotional vulnerability. If jounalists can't make the distinction between what they do and what Assange does, maybe they had better go back to the start and figure out what their real responsibilities are, I mean their responsibilities to equality and democracy and self-government, not to their professional convenience and privilege.
If the government oversteps in its treatment of Assange, that would be another thing, as it possibly was in its treatment of Chelsea Manning. That doesn't mean that what they did doesn't deserve to be prosecuted and punished. From what I've read, they put real lives in danger, not all of them American military or government agents, some of them civilians who they exposed. I can't begin to imagine how many of those private citizens the Putin regime crushed or has information on thanks to that other hero of such degraded journalists, Edward Snowden.
* "Americanism" is another word that has been seriously abused through it meaning different things. The only Americanism that is worthy of respect is that American liberal tradition of egalitarian democracy, economic and social justice, fairness, honesty, civic responsbility. I would guarantee you that easily 9 out of 10 times that something like the word is used by the "free press" it means the kind of rah-rah, nationalistic clap trap that embodies everything wrong with America, best symbolized by Donald Trump groping the American flag before his racist hoard.
It does highlight several things I've noticed more, lately, something called "freedom" as an idol instead of a virtue. How something called "freedom" as in "freedom of the press" seems to have a life in real life that is independent of egalitarian democracy, self-government by free people who have an adequate knowledge of reality. Independent of the things that the First Amendment was created for, especially that one "right" created of an artificial right for an artificial entity "the press". That "freedom of the press" is what people who get paid as members of "the press" put well over that list of things that right was created to serve. Service to egalitarian democracy and self-government is, clearly, secondary in the minds of most journalists, far, far behind what they get paid to do for those artificial entities. I have every confidence that if you brought up that responsibility, the only rational reason that "the press" was given that freedom, the only rational reason that it is important, that they serve self-government by a free people, they would disdain that as a vulgar consideration that was beneath, not only their notice, but beneath their contempt.
I think, as well, and, especially in the supposed journalistic left that there is in their knee jerk support of Assange a knee-jerk anti-Americanism*, the kind of thing that has not only fueled so much lefty scribbling and babbling as journalism, but which has, in the process, discredited, not only their play-left but the only real American left that values the real American liberal tradition, the ones who have struggled to actually make life better for real people. I think that rote anti-Americanism that disdains that obligation of journalism is an expression of a snobbery that doesn't really value democracy (the reason that they've had such an incredible rate of supporting even the most brutal dictators) and, clearly, value even the most obvious scumbag like Assange as one of them.
If legitimate journalists have something to fear in the legal process against Assange, there might be a good reason for that in what he did and how he did it. He certainly isn't doing what real news operations did with the Pentagon Papers, his motivation was nothing like Daniel Ellsberg, I don't think Chelsea Manning is comparable to him, Ellsberg had a sense of responsibility and, more generally, a lot more sense than the young Manning did with all of her issues. Assange used Manning's youth and emotional vulnerability. If jounalists can't make the distinction between what they do and what Assange does, maybe they had better go back to the start and figure out what their real responsibilities are, I mean their responsibilities to equality and democracy and self-government, not to their professional convenience and privilege.
If the government oversteps in its treatment of Assange, that would be another thing, as it possibly was in its treatment of Chelsea Manning. That doesn't mean that what they did doesn't deserve to be prosecuted and punished. From what I've read, they put real lives in danger, not all of them American military or government agents, some of them civilians who they exposed. I can't begin to imagine how many of those private citizens the Putin regime crushed or has information on thanks to that other hero of such degraded journalists, Edward Snowden.
* "Americanism" is another word that has been seriously abused through it meaning different things. The only Americanism that is worthy of respect is that American liberal tradition of egalitarian democracy, economic and social justice, fairness, honesty, civic responsbility. I would guarantee you that easily 9 out of 10 times that something like the word is used by the "free press" it means the kind of rah-rah, nationalistic clap trap that embodies everything wrong with America, best symbolized by Donald Trump groping the American flag before his racist hoard.
There's No Reason For Younger People To Get The Popular Culture References Of Geezers, I'm Sorry For The Confusion
I don't blame the person who didn't get my reference to Woody Guthrie's once famous guitar in what I wrote yesterday. There is no reason for someone to get it, it's a piece of trivia that old lefties, such as myself could be excused from getting, I'm sorry I didn't make myself clearer to younger people. I certainly don't consider it important information to know. Here's a picture of him with the guitar with the silly claim on it,
I'm sure it made all those lefties feel all warm and good even though it was clearly not true. I have read that he first wrote it on that c. 1940, as World War II had been going for several months, as Europeans measure that. Of course in places like Ethiopia it might rationally be considered to have started earlier. Needless to say, Woody Guthrie's guitar, even all of the Almanac Singers put together, had a nugatory effect in defeating fascism except in so far as any of them enlisted during WWII.
And that was after the Almanac Singers, as good commies during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact sang songs condemning FDR as a warmonger, slamming Britain for fighting the war with the Nazis, you know, things they didn't tell us callow, young lefties about those lefty heroes during the 1960s folk revival. Woody Guthrie warn't the great hero the PR campaign claims he was. I believe Pete Seeger, perhaps alone of the Almanac Singers, late in life made some kind of apology for dutifully following the Stalinist line of the Communist Part, people every bit as evil as the fascists they proved they could get along with on orders from Stalin. At the time Stalin had a body count already in the millions, even as Mussolini and Hitler were mere beginners.
They left that out of the piece I remember reading in one of the lefty magazines about how FDR and others in his administration didn't trust those idiot young lefties in the Almanac singers. I recall reading somewhere that Woody's early mentor who gave him his radio show broke with him over the Hitler-Stalin pact so I suspect Woody, that great champion of "freedom" followed the party line on it. I can't claim that I've been able to maintain my image of him since finding out about it.
Update: I'm not making that up. Here's ol' Woody and Pete and Lee Hays and that other one I can't remember the name of slamming FDR and Eleanor as warmongers for J.P. Morgan IN 1941 EVEN AS WW II WAS ALREADY ON. You have to wonder, if Hitler's timing had been only slightly different if the Almanac Singers would, like the most corrupt of Republican businessmen, have been advocating doing business with Hitler into the month of the Wannsee Conference. It, in fact, was already going as those lefty heroes were writing and singing the song, the official genocides beginning in 1939 with the disabled.
As it happened, Hitler started his invasion of the Soviet Union right after the song came out and all those young commies and their backers withdrew the record and tried to destroy all copies of what had suddenly become so revealingly politically incorrect. If I'd heard this c. 1963 I'd have understood a lot that I didn't and I'm sure I wouldn't have bought nearly as many lies as I had. I never bought any Pete Seeger albums, as it was, it wasn't my thing. But I did see that documentary about The Weavers that, if I saw it now, would turn my stomach.
Update 2: The Almanac Singer whose name I couldn't remember was Millard Lampell who wrote that piece of crap get along with Hitler song for those idealistic young Commmies. He later turned to Hollywood script writing, writing several pieces of crap for the movies and being one of those who was persecuted by HUAC and blacklisted, though that only meant he had to use a pseudonym as he went on writing. Many writers in the land ruled by his great hero didn't make out nearly as well after he wrote the song or before. Lots of them ended up shot or worse, something I always feel obligated to point out.
Update: I'm not making that up. Here's ol' Woody and Pete and Lee Hays and that other one I can't remember the name of slamming FDR and Eleanor as warmongers for J.P. Morgan IN 1941 EVEN AS WW II WAS ALREADY ON. You have to wonder, if Hitler's timing had been only slightly different if the Almanac Singers would, like the most corrupt of Republican businessmen, have been advocating doing business with Hitler into the month of the Wannsee Conference. It, in fact, was already going as those lefty heroes were writing and singing the song, the official genocides beginning in 1939 with the disabled.
As it happened, Hitler started his invasion of the Soviet Union right after the song came out and all those young commies and their backers withdrew the record and tried to destroy all copies of what had suddenly become so revealingly politically incorrect. If I'd heard this c. 1963 I'd have understood a lot that I didn't and I'm sure I wouldn't have bought nearly as many lies as I had. I never bought any Pete Seeger albums, as it was, it wasn't my thing. But I did see that documentary about The Weavers that, if I saw it now, would turn my stomach.
Update 2: The Almanac Singer whose name I couldn't remember was Millard Lampell who wrote that piece of crap get along with Hitler song for those idealistic young Commmies. He later turned to Hollywood script writing, writing several pieces of crap for the movies and being one of those who was persecuted by HUAC and blacklisted, though that only meant he had to use a pseudonym as he went on writing. Many writers in the land ruled by his great hero didn't make out nearly as well after he wrote the song or before. Lots of them ended up shot or worse, something I always feel obligated to point out.
Mueller Had Better Get Beyond His Professional Scruples If He Wants To Save His Reputation, If He Is The Genuine Article
When I read about Rod Rosenstein covering up for William Barr in the interview he gave to The Wall Street Journal I went back to check what I'd said about Rosenstein here and was glad to see that I never mentioned him without, at the very least, being skeptical about his sterling reputation with the class of DC, NYC, etc. lawyers and government officials who get on talk TV and radio. And that's the most charitable thing I said about Rosenstein. The truth is, I don't trust him, I don't believe he is more than careful about not getting himself in trouble at work. I doubt he has any deep sense of morality.
I don't believe anyone who is a Republican in the time of Trump or, in fact, since Bush II could have a deep sense of morality. And as this post-Mueller investigation period continues, that includes the man Rosenstein hired to conduct the investigation Trump's own and his inner-circle's alarming and clear criminality made mandatory, Robert Mueller. I don't think anyone who knows the workings of the current and past Republican regimes on the intimate level that Rosenstein and Mueller must and who has remained a Republican, who has witnessed, close up, the political corruption among Republicans in Congress, Mitch McConnell and maintains membership in that party can be honestly believed to believe that it isn't a criminal operation, a collection of criminal operations.
If Robert Mueller conducted an honest investigation, one which he, himself, reportedly concluded leads to reasonable conclusions that Donald Trump obstructed justice, a serious crime committed to shield serious crimes, and he is participating either actively, according to Barr, or passively, just sitting by as Barr and Trump use a distortion of his report, his life as a sworn law man makes his either malfeasance or nonfeasance on the basis of DoJ RULES a thing that condemns his actual character, perhaps even more than Rod Rosenstein's in his cowardly covering up for the outrageous behavior of Barr,. Clearly Rosenstein is a practiced careerist, what seems to be the real meaning of the word "institutionalist", I'm beginning to suspect Mueller's sterling reputation is based in the same thing Rosenstein's is among people so used to seeing amorality that they can't tell the difference.
I can tell you one thing, if any blue collar, minimum wage worker behaved like this no one would think of them as anything but a sleaze, the kind that neither Rosenstein nor Mueller would grant the benefit of the doubt like they have Trump or, now, Barr. If the weekend goes by without Robert Mueller putting a stop to Barr and Trump's use of his reportedly thorough report, I don't think any better of him than I did Rod Rosenstein and I haven't trusted that little sleaze since finding out his participation in giving Trump an excuse to fire Comey, another deeply ambiguous and rather grimy Republican.
I don't believe anyone who is a Republican in the time of Trump or, in fact, since Bush II could have a deep sense of morality. And as this post-Mueller investigation period continues, that includes the man Rosenstein hired to conduct the investigation Trump's own and his inner-circle's alarming and clear criminality made mandatory, Robert Mueller. I don't think anyone who knows the workings of the current and past Republican regimes on the intimate level that Rosenstein and Mueller must and who has remained a Republican, who has witnessed, close up, the political corruption among Republicans in Congress, Mitch McConnell and maintains membership in that party can be honestly believed to believe that it isn't a criminal operation, a collection of criminal operations.
If Robert Mueller conducted an honest investigation, one which he, himself, reportedly concluded leads to reasonable conclusions that Donald Trump obstructed justice, a serious crime committed to shield serious crimes, and he is participating either actively, according to Barr, or passively, just sitting by as Barr and Trump use a distortion of his report, his life as a sworn law man makes his either malfeasance or nonfeasance on the basis of DoJ RULES a thing that condemns his actual character, perhaps even more than Rod Rosenstein's in his cowardly covering up for the outrageous behavior of Barr,. Clearly Rosenstein is a practiced careerist, what seems to be the real meaning of the word "institutionalist", I'm beginning to suspect Mueller's sterling reputation is based in the same thing Rosenstein's is among people so used to seeing amorality that they can't tell the difference.
I can tell you one thing, if any blue collar, minimum wage worker behaved like this no one would think of them as anything but a sleaze, the kind that neither Rosenstein nor Mueller would grant the benefit of the doubt like they have Trump or, now, Barr. If the weekend goes by without Robert Mueller putting a stop to Barr and Trump's use of his reportedly thorough report, I don't think any better of him than I did Rod Rosenstein and I haven't trusted that little sleaze since finding out his participation in giving Trump an excuse to fire Comey, another deeply ambiguous and rather grimy Republican.
Thursday, April 11, 2019
Note The Joke At c. 6:20
What a coincidence. Just yesterday morning I wondered where all those stories about white racists calling the cops on people for doing anything while being Black had gone.
I don't usually care for comedy about peoples' personal life but, as Samantha Bee reminds us, this fun couple got their start with doing that, so I have no problem with posting this.
Stupid Mail - Destroy All Gangster Governments
If it were only true, I might put "This Blog Kills Fascism" on my masthead almost like what ol' Woody put on his guitar. But what Woody put on his guitar was make believe. Guitars, songs have a battle record that is wildly overstated as opposed to their actual record in fighting fascism. Ol' Woody's guitar wracked up a body count in the fight against fascism of exactly 0. I have no illusions about the power of my small readership blog. And I wouldn't put it the same way he did, anyway. I'm opposed to killing anyone, unless they are a clear and IMMEDIATE danger to the life of someone else so I wouldn't put it in the kind of silly lefty-macho language Woody did, anyway. And opposing merely fascism is not nearly enough.
I am a radical egalitarian-democrat, a radical leveler. I am as radical an anti-racist, anti-fascist, though more accurately, I am an absolute opponent of gangster government those deputed to be of "the left" as well as those of the right and otherwise. I oppose all gangster governments, fascist, Nazi, Stalinist, Maoist, Marxist, "right-left-center." Lord save us from the slippery and ubiquitous gangsterism of the "center."* Included in that list the fascist-apartheid establishment that has arisen in Israel under parties and their successors that my betters, such as Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt and Stefan Wolpe, warned about about the time I was born. I don't favor any of the other gangster governments in the region. Name one I've supported. If Palestine develops a gangster government I will be as opposed to that one. I oppose the one that the Supreme Court has opened the door for here, the one that billionaires domestic and foreign are imposing on the United States through the broadcast self-interested lies of the freed "free press".
The part that the Israel lobby plays and has played in American politics is no different from the part that any other lobby plays in American politics, and like all of them it has had a hand in corrupting American politics. I'm in favor of abolishing all lobbying and making lobbying by any other than individual voters or real groups of petitioning People, illegal. For-pay operations being abolished. I want billionaires and multi-millionaires leveled to the state of equality with the poorest person in the country. They are the biggest danger to egalitarian democracy there is. I'm not even all that happy about my fellow lefty's shoestrings united lobbying of the government. I'm certainly not in favor of any other government being able to have that kind of effect on American democracy. Lobbying corrupts governments, including the one you want to hold up as immune from criticism, anyone who holds up a lobbying effort as sacrosanct has announced their support for corrupt government.
* Thinking about the recent assurances of the solid, reliable legal class as to the reliability of William Barr's "institutionalist" restraints on his Republican-fascist criminality and lying, a lot of that centrist fascism is brought by willfully gullible establishment chumps. If Robert Mueller doesn't, very soon, counter Barr's antics, the assurances given by those same chumps as to his solid-gold character will turn out to have been fools gold, as well. And that doesn't get me to Greg Craig's exposure as a lobbyist for a fascist thug.
I am a radical egalitarian-democrat, a radical leveler. I am as radical an anti-racist, anti-fascist, though more accurately, I am an absolute opponent of gangster government those deputed to be of "the left" as well as those of the right and otherwise. I oppose all gangster governments, fascist, Nazi, Stalinist, Maoist, Marxist, "right-left-center." Lord save us from the slippery and ubiquitous gangsterism of the "center."* Included in that list the fascist-apartheid establishment that has arisen in Israel under parties and their successors that my betters, such as Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt and Stefan Wolpe, warned about about the time I was born. I don't favor any of the other gangster governments in the region. Name one I've supported. If Palestine develops a gangster government I will be as opposed to that one. I oppose the one that the Supreme Court has opened the door for here, the one that billionaires domestic and foreign are imposing on the United States through the broadcast self-interested lies of the freed "free press".
The part that the Israel lobby plays and has played in American politics is no different from the part that any other lobby plays in American politics, and like all of them it has had a hand in corrupting American politics. I'm in favor of abolishing all lobbying and making lobbying by any other than individual voters or real groups of petitioning People, illegal. For-pay operations being abolished. I want billionaires and multi-millionaires leveled to the state of equality with the poorest person in the country. They are the biggest danger to egalitarian democracy there is. I'm not even all that happy about my fellow lefty's shoestrings united lobbying of the government. I'm certainly not in favor of any other government being able to have that kind of effect on American democracy. Lobbying corrupts governments, including the one you want to hold up as immune from criticism, anyone who holds up a lobbying effort as sacrosanct has announced their support for corrupt government.
* Thinking about the recent assurances of the solid, reliable legal class as to the reliability of William Barr's "institutionalist" restraints on his Republican-fascist criminality and lying, a lot of that centrist fascism is brought by willfully gullible establishment chumps. If Robert Mueller doesn't, very soon, counter Barr's antics, the assurances given by those same chumps as to his solid-gold character will turn out to have been fools gold, as well. And that doesn't get me to Greg Craig's exposure as a lobbyist for a fascist thug.
Wednesday, April 10, 2019
William Barr Channeling John Mitchell Only A Bigger Liar
After two days of William Barr testilying to the House and Senate, it's clear that he's almost as fecund and shameless a liar as his fake-fur Fuhrer. His entire act is to give FOX et al Republicans in Congress and out, lies to lie to Trump's suckers. I'll certainly have more to say once a few of the knots in his twisted knots of lies are undone.
Democrats have to demand that Mueller come in and testify and they'll have to insist that he answer questions. I don't know if allowing Barr to lie to them is part of a larger strategy, I hope it is and I hope they call him on it. If they don't find some way to punish that scumbag it will only enable the next one. No more impunity for criminals like him.
Update: Remember yesterday when I linked to the Honorable Glenda Jackson addressing the idea of honoring Margaret Thatcher, something I love to watch once or twice a year, here's one that's as delicious, The Honorable Maxine Waters proving she's ten times times ten times smarter than Steve Mnuchin
Democrats have to demand that Mueller come in and testify and they'll have to insist that he answer questions. I don't know if allowing Barr to lie to them is part of a larger strategy, I hope it is and I hope they call him on it. If they don't find some way to punish that scumbag it will only enable the next one. No more impunity for criminals like him.
Update: Remember yesterday when I linked to the Honorable Glenda Jackson addressing the idea of honoring Margaret Thatcher, something I love to watch once or twice a year, here's one that's as delicious, The Honorable Maxine Waters proving she's ten times times ten times smarter than Steve Mnuchin
Is It Algorithms All The Way Down? Announcement Of The First Image Of A Black Hole
This is the best quick and simple explanation I've found of what scientists have produced, it comes from Nature. I'm impressed, though since it's a product of, among other things, algorithms created to come up with an image of something believed to be there due to some theories of cosmology (some of them, as well influenced by algorithms based on other theories, I'd guess) can this image be considered to be anything but a product of human imagination? It makes you wonder how secure the confirmations of theories that the video anticipates being arrived at using this image will be. It's not exactly a photograph taken from life.
Still, it makes me wonder how Lawrence Krauss is taking it, considering that before he decided to take the old golden parachute out of science into atheist invective, he was pushing skepticism of the existence of black holes. I'm sure algorithms might have figured in his work supporting that, unevidenced theories certainly did, the lack of evidence of black holes was something he used to make his arguments.
Lord knows what the next big thing in cosmology will be.
Mueller Needs To Come Forward In Public Now Or His Reputation Should Be Considered A Fraud
Last week I pointed out that the Robert Mueller who so many have put their hopes in is reported to have been a close buddy of William Barr, the man who obstructing justice in withholding the Mueller Report and the underlying evidence. I read how "the Muellers and the Barrs" are close friends who socialized frequently. That was, I assume after Barr acted as a pillar in the cover-up of crimes in the Bush I administration, drafting Bush I's ass-covering pardons of criminals, some of them admitted criminals, one of them the convicted criminal who is working for the Trump regime and who, after his pardon, lied about serious matters to Congress.
Clearly Robert Mueller's sense of smell enables him to be buddies with the likes of William Barr, which is one of the reasons I have always been a lot more skeptical of his investigation than many others. I would be skeptical of anyone who could remain a Republican after the Nixon-Reagan-Bush I - Bush II and now Trump regime crimes, especially someone who is a several times sworn law man. When some Republican like Mueller is held up as a man of the highest principles, any honest and reasonable person has to wonder how a man like that could remain within such a totally corrupt institution. One of those things is nothing like the other.
After Barr's disgusting testimony before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, his declaration that he is going to obstruct to protect the most criminal of all these criminal regimes, AFTER SAYING THAT MUELLER COULD LEAK HIS OWN REPORT DIRECTLY TO THE CONGRESS BUT HE WASN'T GOING TO RELEASE IT AND CLAIMING THAT MUELLER IS WORKING WITH HIM IN HIS OBSTRUCTION, Robert Mueller should be judged by his continued scrupulosity in being a good old boy, someone who follows the letter of the law and rules as he is claimed to be participating in the assassination of its spirit. And that's not even getting into his absolutely disgusting and dishonest spewing of words over him trying to throw tens of millions of people out of the healthcare system.
If Mueller doesn't publicly call for the release of his report to the Congress along with the supporting evidence and the grand jury material, Robert Mueller should be considered yet another in the long line of Republicans who have disgraced themselves on behalf of Trump, other Republican criminals and the most criminal party in the history of the country. Even late 19th century corruption in the Republican Party had a balancing rump of honorable men in office. That's not the case now. Mueller's honor will either be exercised in opposition to Barr's obstruction of justice or it will be proven to be a false front.
Update: "He's a Vietnam vet." So is my brother-in-law whose skeleton is disintegrating due to Agent Orange exposure, if he was covering up for William Barr I'd be asking the same questions about him.
Clearly Robert Mueller's sense of smell enables him to be buddies with the likes of William Barr, which is one of the reasons I have always been a lot more skeptical of his investigation than many others. I would be skeptical of anyone who could remain a Republican after the Nixon-Reagan-Bush I - Bush II and now Trump regime crimes, especially someone who is a several times sworn law man. When some Republican like Mueller is held up as a man of the highest principles, any honest and reasonable person has to wonder how a man like that could remain within such a totally corrupt institution. One of those things is nothing like the other.
After Barr's disgusting testimony before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, his declaration that he is going to obstruct to protect the most criminal of all these criminal regimes, AFTER SAYING THAT MUELLER COULD LEAK HIS OWN REPORT DIRECTLY TO THE CONGRESS BUT HE WASN'T GOING TO RELEASE IT AND CLAIMING THAT MUELLER IS WORKING WITH HIM IN HIS OBSTRUCTION, Robert Mueller should be judged by his continued scrupulosity in being a good old boy, someone who follows the letter of the law and rules as he is claimed to be participating in the assassination of its spirit. And that's not even getting into his absolutely disgusting and dishonest spewing of words over him trying to throw tens of millions of people out of the healthcare system.
If Mueller doesn't publicly call for the release of his report to the Congress along with the supporting evidence and the grand jury material, Robert Mueller should be considered yet another in the long line of Republicans who have disgraced themselves on behalf of Trump, other Republican criminals and the most criminal party in the history of the country. Even late 19th century corruption in the Republican Party had a balancing rump of honorable men in office. That's not the case now. Mueller's honor will either be exercised in opposition to Barr's obstruction of justice or it will be proven to be a false front.
Update: "He's a Vietnam vet." So is my brother-in-law whose skeleton is disintegrating due to Agent Orange exposure, if he was covering up for William Barr I'd be asking the same questions about him.
On Bernie Promising To Release His Tax Filings And Why The Democratic Party Doesn't Need To Wait For The Next Election To Change Things
Bernie Sanders has announced that, at long last, he is going to release his tax returns for the past 10 years next Monday and good on him. Even if it's a bit late. All of the Women in the race have done it, even some of the men have. Now let's see the rest of the candidates do the same.
The elections reform package that the Democrats in the House voted for as their first bill after they regained control, I seem to recall, had release of a presidential candidates' tax records as a requirement.
But the Democratic Party doesn't have to wait for the far from certain situation in which a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President passes such a measure into law. It could, NOW make the release of ten years of tax information six months or a year before the first primaries are held a requirement for being a Democratic candidate for President. It should be a good thing to point to, Democrats being open about that, Republicans not being open about it.
I have to wonder if Nader would have done what he did if such a rule had been in place, especially if it covered other aspects of financial activity. I remember reading about a myriad of mysterious corporations he and his siblings were in the habit of forming.
And I'd throw in anyone who wants to be considered for Vice-President, the last thing a Democratic nominee would need would be for dodgy stuff in the tax filings of their VP pick to come out mere months before the election.
I would make that only one of a number of things that Democrats could do in re-branding us as the party of honesty as opposed to Republican corruption. I'm sure there are other requirements that could be put on those who want the nomination of Democrats.
One of those is that those asking for the Democratic nomination actually having been Democrats for as long as those tax records they release go back. There is no reason for someone who has not been a Democrat to be able to expect to waltz into it with little chance of getting the nomination and winning the election but splitting or otherwise damaging the party.
Likewise, no state that allows non-Democrats to vote in caucuses (which should be abolished) or primaries should have their delegates should seated at the convention. There is no reason for people who aren't members of the party to have a role in selecting the party's nominees.
The Democratic Party should conduct its own registered-Democrats ONLY by-mail primaries in states that insist on open primaries and the fraud of same-day party declaration, something I saw some Greens do in 2016 to screw with the Democratic Party, something Bernie Sanders bragged about doing in the 1980s.
If Bernie Sanders had stayed a member of the Democratic Party after his 2016 run, if he had not already taken out papers to run for the Senate in 2024 AS AN INDEPENDENT, I wouldn't even mention his name in regard to this. But he's done that.
Democrats have every reason to get those who want their nomination to go on record promising their support to the candidate who has the support of the majority of the members of the Democratic Party. To honor the choice of the Voters in the party. That's something we don't have to wait for the DNC to change, any Democrat can get a candidate on record with that promise so there will be no question of a real ratfucker to do what Nader did, what some members of Sanders' campaign did, what the Bernie bros, most of whom were never real members of the Democratic Party are still trying.
The elections reform package that the Democrats in the House voted for as their first bill after they regained control, I seem to recall, had release of a presidential candidates' tax records as a requirement.
But the Democratic Party doesn't have to wait for the far from certain situation in which a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President passes such a measure into law. It could, NOW make the release of ten years of tax information six months or a year before the first primaries are held a requirement for being a Democratic candidate for President. It should be a good thing to point to, Democrats being open about that, Republicans not being open about it.
I have to wonder if Nader would have done what he did if such a rule had been in place, especially if it covered other aspects of financial activity. I remember reading about a myriad of mysterious corporations he and his siblings were in the habit of forming.
And I'd throw in anyone who wants to be considered for Vice-President, the last thing a Democratic nominee would need would be for dodgy stuff in the tax filings of their VP pick to come out mere months before the election.
I would make that only one of a number of things that Democrats could do in re-branding us as the party of honesty as opposed to Republican corruption. I'm sure there are other requirements that could be put on those who want the nomination of Democrats.
One of those is that those asking for the Democratic nomination actually having been Democrats for as long as those tax records they release go back. There is no reason for someone who has not been a Democrat to be able to expect to waltz into it with little chance of getting the nomination and winning the election but splitting or otherwise damaging the party.
Likewise, no state that allows non-Democrats to vote in caucuses (which should be abolished) or primaries should have their delegates should seated at the convention. There is no reason for people who aren't members of the party to have a role in selecting the party's nominees.
The Democratic Party should conduct its own registered-Democrats ONLY by-mail primaries in states that insist on open primaries and the fraud of same-day party declaration, something I saw some Greens do in 2016 to screw with the Democratic Party, something Bernie Sanders bragged about doing in the 1980s.
If Bernie Sanders had stayed a member of the Democratic Party after his 2016 run, if he had not already taken out papers to run for the Senate in 2024 AS AN INDEPENDENT, I wouldn't even mention his name in regard to this. But he's done that.
Democrats have every reason to get those who want their nomination to go on record promising their support to the candidate who has the support of the majority of the members of the Democratic Party. To honor the choice of the Voters in the party. That's something we don't have to wait for the DNC to change, any Democrat can get a candidate on record with that promise so there will be no question of a real ratfucker to do what Nader did, what some members of Sanders' campaign did, what the Bernie bros, most of whom were never real members of the Democratic Party are still trying.
But That's Not How It Turned Out, We Can Stop Pretending
There is no reason to lie about it, Israel has chosen an apartheid government that will steal the occupied territories in an Israeli Lebensraum program and become that kind of racist, fascist state, a potential that a number of Jewish intellectuals warned against in 1948 as Israel had just formed. Their fears are fulfilled in the election, that was the case even if the overtly fascist Netanyahu didn't win, his main opposition, the Blue and White party had a platform not much different from the fascists'. If those small differences were enough would seem to be a moot point.
Reading about the results of this election, I thought about a piece I wrote almost thirteen years ago during one of the many brutal military campaigns that Israel was conducting with the support of the Bush II regime, especially this section:
Today the United States has no credibility as an honest broker in the Middle East. Some past presidents had more. After Iraq and now the Bush regime’s role this past month in Lebanon it has none. It has none because it clearly and solidly has favored one side, Israel and the Bush regime appears increasingly likely to have done so for ends not necessarily in Israel’s interest. There is little rational reason for Israelis or Arabs to trust Bush.
I am beyond caring if there was a reason for supporting one side or the other in any particular action in the past. If someone can tell us a way to go back and change what happened in the past it might be worth thinking about, but there isn’t one. Bringing it up is a stalling tactic, a way for cheap politicians and others to curry favor by appealing to grievances and the desire for revenge. It’s the present we can deal with and the invasion of Lebanon was dumb assed and I believe, as one of my regular readers put it so well, the Olmert government didn’t have a clue it was going to go like this. The facts now are what will have to be dealt with, not what was believed a month ago.
As we began, no one side is going to disappear but many individual people are being killed as you read this. My entire interest in this is to have as many Israelis, Palestinians, and others in the area, live to be old and to die in bed of natural causes surrounded by their intact families and their friends. It is in that spirit that I am going to say the unspeakable and voice some, though far from all, of my deepest fears.
As the generation of the Second World War and it’s children pass on there is a strong danger that the Holocaust will fade from consciousness and it’s lessons will fade from peoples’ thoughts. Huge numbers of dead when viewed in the inverted telescope of history look smaller than they were close up. Our claim on the attention of the future will compete with the entire past and will be, I’m afraid, far less compelling than their present. We will not be there to press the case. The best we can do is leave a written record of what we have known. We can’t guarantee that the future won’t repeat the evils of the past.
As time goes on, as more recent piles of bodies and other horrors block them from view, even the Holocaust will fade in its meaning to those who are not part of the groups that were murdered. The relatively forgotten Armenian genocide is one example of this and the mass graves of those murdered in Central America by terrorists funded by the Reagan administration are entirely faded from the collective, active memory of the United States. The innocent Druz, slaughtered by the USS. New Jersey in retaliation for the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon never got into Americans minds having been effectively blocked out. Even where distance is not a factor, the memory of the thousands lynched here, in the United States itself, is always in danger of slipping from the attention of white people.
I am posting a anxious warning based on what I am hearing. Israelis should dump the neo-cons who are bringing them to disaster. Those idiots, from their comfortable perches in the American establishment are going to get a lot more Israelis and others killed. Let’s face another reality, a lot of them, Gentiles and Jews alike, are pretty unsavory characters who market themselves as “supporters of Israel”. Some seem to have made a very nice living for themselves based on this. Would peace be as profitable for them?
Their alliance with fundamentalist “christians” should be all the evidence you need of their stupidity if not duplicity. End timers have only two uses for Jews, especially Israelis. Jews are either to be converted to “christianity”, perhaps by force eventually, or they are extras waiting to die in their pre-enactment battle fantasies based on the Book of Revelations. As the events around Lebanon this month show, the fundamentalist ghouls can hardly wait for the real slaughter to begin. Their script calls for Israelis to die in the millions.
Failing the fundamentalists’ favorite wish, Americans of future times will grow weary of supporting Israel if it is engaged in endless wars, endless conflicts and, especially, if idiocy on the level of this war in Lebanon continues. A constantly attacked Israel will become increasingly militarized and isolated and paranoid. With that will come the destruction of democracy. A nationalistic, perhaps theocratic and despotic Israel is certainly nothing that the vast, vast majority of Israelis or Americans want to see. If someone can convince me that isn’t where it is headed I’d really really like to believe otherwise.
I would say almost all of those things today, I believed that a majority of Israelis then didn't want to see what has undeniably developed, headed into my worst fears. Also, under Trump, with his idiot and corrupt son-in-law officially in charge of a campaign of theft and grift they slapped the label "Middle-East-Peace" onto , the United States has absolutely no credibility, even less than the Bush II regime had. Palestinians have absolutely no reason to believe the Israeli government and a majority of its population support apartheid and occupation. I read somewhere that only 18 seats were won by those who favor a two-state solution in yesterday's election. No one has any reason to pretend Israel is anything like what it claims to be anymore than they had a reason to believe the United States was an egalitarian democracy before 1965 or after the Supreme Court destroyed that brief interval of at least legal equality.
The Middle East, Israel, Palestine, etc. are headed for disaster, soon. Israel will, I predict, soon give up any pretense of being a liberal democracy, the kind of thing that it was sold for all of my youth in the PR campaign as voiced in the sweetly reasoning, accented words of Abba Eban. I don't know, maybe Eban really believed in what he was saying, I always thought he did. I know lots of people in the United States and elsewhere wanted to believe it. I certainly wanted to believe it, you can still hear echos of that fervent hope in what I wrote thirteen years ago. But it isn't how things turned out, is it. It's what the group of Jewish intellectuals who warned about the previous generation of Israeli fascists, it's what they feared that has come true.
The United States should not support any apartheid, fascist country. Though, under its renewed and developing apartheid fascism, it will. Lots of people will die.
Reading about the results of this election, I thought about a piece I wrote almost thirteen years ago during one of the many brutal military campaigns that Israel was conducting with the support of the Bush II regime, especially this section:
Today the United States has no credibility as an honest broker in the Middle East. Some past presidents had more. After Iraq and now the Bush regime’s role this past month in Lebanon it has none. It has none because it clearly and solidly has favored one side, Israel and the Bush regime appears increasingly likely to have done so for ends not necessarily in Israel’s interest. There is little rational reason for Israelis or Arabs to trust Bush.
I am beyond caring if there was a reason for supporting one side or the other in any particular action in the past. If someone can tell us a way to go back and change what happened in the past it might be worth thinking about, but there isn’t one. Bringing it up is a stalling tactic, a way for cheap politicians and others to curry favor by appealing to grievances and the desire for revenge. It’s the present we can deal with and the invasion of Lebanon was dumb assed and I believe, as one of my regular readers put it so well, the Olmert government didn’t have a clue it was going to go like this. The facts now are what will have to be dealt with, not what was believed a month ago.
As we began, no one side is going to disappear but many individual people are being killed as you read this. My entire interest in this is to have as many Israelis, Palestinians, and others in the area, live to be old and to die in bed of natural causes surrounded by their intact families and their friends. It is in that spirit that I am going to say the unspeakable and voice some, though far from all, of my deepest fears.
As the generation of the Second World War and it’s children pass on there is a strong danger that the Holocaust will fade from consciousness and it’s lessons will fade from peoples’ thoughts. Huge numbers of dead when viewed in the inverted telescope of history look smaller than they were close up. Our claim on the attention of the future will compete with the entire past and will be, I’m afraid, far less compelling than their present. We will not be there to press the case. The best we can do is leave a written record of what we have known. We can’t guarantee that the future won’t repeat the evils of the past.
As time goes on, as more recent piles of bodies and other horrors block them from view, even the Holocaust will fade in its meaning to those who are not part of the groups that were murdered. The relatively forgotten Armenian genocide is one example of this and the mass graves of those murdered in Central America by terrorists funded by the Reagan administration are entirely faded from the collective, active memory of the United States. The innocent Druz, slaughtered by the USS. New Jersey in retaliation for the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon never got into Americans minds having been effectively blocked out. Even where distance is not a factor, the memory of the thousands lynched here, in the United States itself, is always in danger of slipping from the attention of white people.
I am posting a anxious warning based on what I am hearing. Israelis should dump the neo-cons who are bringing them to disaster. Those idiots, from their comfortable perches in the American establishment are going to get a lot more Israelis and others killed. Let’s face another reality, a lot of them, Gentiles and Jews alike, are pretty unsavory characters who market themselves as “supporters of Israel”. Some seem to have made a very nice living for themselves based on this. Would peace be as profitable for them?
Their alliance with fundamentalist “christians” should be all the evidence you need of their stupidity if not duplicity. End timers have only two uses for Jews, especially Israelis. Jews are either to be converted to “christianity”, perhaps by force eventually, or they are extras waiting to die in their pre-enactment battle fantasies based on the Book of Revelations. As the events around Lebanon this month show, the fundamentalist ghouls can hardly wait for the real slaughter to begin. Their script calls for Israelis to die in the millions.
Failing the fundamentalists’ favorite wish, Americans of future times will grow weary of supporting Israel if it is engaged in endless wars, endless conflicts and, especially, if idiocy on the level of this war in Lebanon continues. A constantly attacked Israel will become increasingly militarized and isolated and paranoid. With that will come the destruction of democracy. A nationalistic, perhaps theocratic and despotic Israel is certainly nothing that the vast, vast majority of Israelis or Americans want to see. If someone can convince me that isn’t where it is headed I’d really really like to believe otherwise.
I would say almost all of those things today, I believed that a majority of Israelis then didn't want to see what has undeniably developed, headed into my worst fears. Also, under Trump, with his idiot and corrupt son-in-law officially in charge of a campaign of theft and grift they slapped the label "Middle-East-Peace" onto , the United States has absolutely no credibility, even less than the Bush II regime had. Palestinians have absolutely no reason to believe the Israeli government and a majority of its population support apartheid and occupation. I read somewhere that only 18 seats were won by those who favor a two-state solution in yesterday's election. No one has any reason to pretend Israel is anything like what it claims to be anymore than they had a reason to believe the United States was an egalitarian democracy before 1965 or after the Supreme Court destroyed that brief interval of at least legal equality.
The Middle East, Israel, Palestine, etc. are headed for disaster, soon. Israel will, I predict, soon give up any pretense of being a liberal democracy, the kind of thing that it was sold for all of my youth in the PR campaign as voiced in the sweetly reasoning, accented words of Abba Eban. I don't know, maybe Eban really believed in what he was saying, I always thought he did. I know lots of people in the United States and elsewhere wanted to believe it. I certainly wanted to believe it, you can still hear echos of that fervent hope in what I wrote thirteen years ago. But it isn't how things turned out, is it. It's what the group of Jewish intellectuals who warned about the previous generation of Israeli fascists, it's what they feared that has come true.
The United States should not support any apartheid, fascist country. Though, under its renewed and developing apartheid fascism, it will. Lots of people will die.
Tuesday, April 9, 2019
Stupid Mail - I'll Leave The Typos In Since They Obviously Annoy You
I'm certainly not going to be inhibited by someone making fun of auto-correct problems on this blog. I think it was the great Carla Bley who said she'd compose a piece for someone on the spot, "mistakes and all". I'd rather take the chance of saying something with typos and editing and spelling errors than to say nothing like he and his sponsor do. Saying nothing might get your site more hits but it won't get anyone who reads what you don't write. The somewhat less than great but still fun Lou Harrison said, "I'd rather chance a choice than choose a chance." Only they don't even choose a chance, they choose slacking, saying nothing.
Update: And I sure as hell am not going to let what someone who is so clearly a non-musician snarks about music bother me. I'd point out how stupid that crack was only I don't think they've got the knowledge to understand that.
Update 2: The "stream of consciousness" you accuse me of strikes me as preferable to the stagnant puddle you've chosen for your home base.
Update: And I sure as hell am not going to let what someone who is so clearly a non-musician snarks about music bother me. I'd point out how stupid that crack was only I don't think they've got the knowledge to understand that.
Update 2: The "stream of consciousness" you accuse me of strikes me as preferable to the stagnant puddle you've chosen for your home base.
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