Answer To Whining That I Blasphemed Against The Constitution

WE ARE IN THE INCREDIBLE position for what is alleged to be a republic and far more so a deputed democracy that we are seriously contemplating the possibility that the stupidest to start with and now clearly senile-demented Trump could, on his own, not only get us into the Israeli war on Iran but,  AND THIS IS SERIOUSLY UNDER DISCUSSION,  dropping nuclear weapons on Iran ON HIS OWN WHIM.   And everything with Trump is done on a whim.   I lie when I call that "incredible" because under our petrified presidential system, it isn't unbelievable,  it is a fact in the realm of the all too possible. 

That any government of any kind could be the rational focus of such expectations completely demolishes the legitimacy of such a government and the system of Constitution and laws that bring such governance into existence.  And our Constitution, under the manipulation of the Supreme Court starting in 1803 with the Marbury v Madison usurpation of power by that Court has brought us here.   I maintain that it is clear that that power was never contained in the Constitution but the Constitution AS IT REALLY IS is what is allowed to happen continuously under it.   Ours has allowed that to be the law of the land for more than two and a quarter centuries without any correction so that and the entire corpus of corrupt judicial law making it has led to*  IS WHAT OUR CONSTITUTION REALLY, TRULY IS.  

That original violation of Adams' theory of "balance powers" has since metastasized into the many and varied  abandonment to legislative powers by the Congress to the Executive, as that used to be and now, with the modern Rehnquist-Roberts Courts and, especially,  Republican then Republican-fascist granting of absolute power to Republican-fascist presidents THAT IS WHAT OUR CONSTITUTION REALLY, TRULY IS IN REALITY INSTEAD OF CONSTITUTIONAL "SCHOLARSHIP" AND THE MORE POPULAR FOLKLORE OF OUR PHONY, MYTHICAL OFFICIAL "CIVICS."   

I have meant to try to research the original skepticism of the anti-federalists as the Constitutional Convention's - you don't know how hard it is for me to resist John Quincy Adams' adjective for it at this point - Constitution which I know contained serious skepticism about the "separation of powers" theory that was set forth in it.   I very much suspect that a lot could be learned about how much of the fraud it has turned out to be in real life was pointed out before its rigged adoption was achieved - not, by the way, without intentional vote suppression in some states - just as I learned a lot about the objections to the original Marbury power grab by the Supreme Court in the wake of its first serious use to issue the Dred Scott decision - rejection of that power by Abraham Lincoln alone should have been the occasion for the Congress to decisively reject it. 

Our Constitution has always been held in place by what is well characterized as masking tape and chewing gum.   It has never worked as it's supposedly would for People of Color, certainly not for Native Americans, African Americans as it was never intended to work until the Civil War and later Amendments to fix that were passed.   It has never worked well for working People without means.   Its not working for Women has been reasserted by the Roberts Court in the Dobbs decision that makes every Woman's body subject to control as de jure slavery did.   It has not worked for many others.  It has worked for affluent, straight, white men, especially those with old money.   The task of the Republican-fascists and, especially those on the Roberts Court and many a lower Court AND AS TAUGHT IN VIRTUALLY EVERY LAW SCHOOL COURSE is to make sure it continues as it has.   Much as I might like some of the Democratic "Constitutional Scholars" in and out of public office,  they are willing dupes of that centuries long effort unless they are honest about how truly dangerous our Constitution, both as written and as distorted by Supreme Court lore (what the literature of its decisions is) and as it is distorted whenever the opponents of egalitarian democracy hold the unbalanced power of power under it.   I have yet to hear one of them admit to that. 

Remember this if Trump, single-handed, on his whim AS EVERY DECISION HE MAKES IS ON HIS WHIM AND NOTHING IS STOPPING HIM, LEAST OF ALL THE GODDAMNED SUPREME COURT,  and especially if he does use nuclear weapons as Truman did.  If he gives Putin that excuse,  you can be sure Putin will do so in Ukraine and very likely in other countries, those which were once part of the Soviet empire and others.    I think the Chinese Communists might have more discipline in their dictators but I don't think you can count on that once Trump does it.   As I said,  I am morally and practically opposed to military coups but if that's what it takes to stop Trump from doing that,  I pray for the generals and others who would keep him from doing it.  

*  The Supreme Court invention of what is a clearly false and anti-democratic abomination "corporate person hood" which has stood for 139 years as of just over a month ago,  something relied upon by later Courts in such abominations as Buckely v Valeo and Citizens United.   It was clearly not in the Constitution as it was written by that time but it is part of it AS IT REALLY, TRULY IS NOW.    That our Constitutional system has not gotten rid of it is proof that the goddamned thing is dangerous and will be until it is drastically altered,  I'd hope getting rid of the goddamned presidential system once and for all time. 

Notes From A Rough And Busy Week

I POSTED A ROUGH DRAFT of the major piece I put up yesterday,  something I'd tried to stop doing a couple of years back but felt I had to because of the urgency of the hour.   I've gone back and corrected at least some of it.  I should know better than to do that when I'm breaking some of the biggest taboos,  violating the taboo on telling the truth about Israel and Zionism and the crimes of the Israelis and Zionists and the American fascists who make common cause with them but when the Israeli government is trying to get Trump to drop big ones if not THE BIG ONE on a country perhaps setting off WWIII what that will be taken as an opportunity to lie about what I said by the "Israel right or wrong" crowd is of no importance, at all.   I know you can't keep a career in American journalism if you tell the truth about Israel and Zionism - or American fascism, for that matter -  so you don't mention those or lie about that so you can tell the truth about other things in your journalistic career,   but I don't have one of those to worry about.    So I'll speak the thought crimes others won't. 

I was surprised as well as a bit sad to read that the great pianist Alfred Brendel died yesterday, though he retired so long ago that I hadn't thought of him much in the last years.   He was 94.   Reading his obituaries online,  I hadn't ever known the extent to which he was self-taught, probably more so than any major classical musician of our time has been.  Considering he stopped taking formal lessons in his teen years,  his ability to resist devolving into the kind of willful, neurotic, self-generated habits and mannerisms that defined the career of someone most similar to that career description,  to my knowledge,  Glenn Gould, his intellectual honesty and self-discipline and modesty must have been even more extraordinary than I'd thought during his playing career.    

I remember his interview with Dick Cavett for the subtle warmth and humor he demonstrated but most of all for his response to a question about "modern music" perhaps even specifically the widespread hostility for the music of the greatest European composer of the 20th century,  Arnold Schoenberg,  Brendel said that the reason people didn't like it wasn't because it was cold and "mathematical" as they would have said but because, on the contrary, it was among the most emotionally fraught music ever composed.   As I recall he mentioned the Op. 11, Three Pieces for piano and the short monodrama Op. 17 Erwartung, which I still think was one of the more important insights into the music of Schoenberg I've ever heard.  

I've become pretty well convinced that the research into the early 19th century use of the metronome by Wim Winters and his colleagues is correct - a truly revolutionary concept which I may get into someday - so much of Brendel's recordings of Beethoven and other composers contain a number of movements that probably don't represent their intentions nearly as well as I'd once felt they were.  Though I'd have to go through any given recording of it with the score to judge that.   I can say, with some confidence, that Brendel at least tried to do that with the knowledge he had during his career far better than most do.  I would wonder what Brendel may have thought or said about that research though I suspect he would have waited to read the book Winters and his colleagues have been working on to make a definitive version of their case before he said anything about it.   I have to say that having listened to Winters and looking at the contemporaneous sources he and his colleagues cite and listening to their performances as I have access to,  I'm convinced they are right.   Which means my entire conception of that repertoire has been wrong.  I can say that hearing and playing Moazart at the tempos they advocate has greatly elevated my regard of his music, it gains in gravity what is lost when it is played too fast,  the real genius of his music evaporates faster than that of Beethoven's or Schubert's or Bach's, for that matter.  

In the same interview of Brendel by Cavett, he talked about Liszt and played - as I recall it was the piece about St. Francis preaching to the birds - in a way that enormously altered my regard of Liszt's music for the better.   I'd been kind of allergic to Liszt's music before that but he cured me of it.  Though I think Liszt is mostly ill served by performances of his music,  Brendel got me past that.  

Fact checking myself to give an answer to Simps on the last RFK post

CAME ACROSS an anecdote I told while I was trying to educate him on why his claim that Queens was the most ethnically diverse entity on Earth was clearly false because even if that dubious claim were true, it would only make New York City an even more diverse entity.   I'll retell it here for those who think I commit that greatest of moderny American sins of having no sense of humor. 

I'll tell you a funny story about that book.  It was back at a family party, I think it was the Labor Day one, when I was taking care of my two youngest nieces, after school.  They were constantly asking me to read them the Harry Potter books.  I ended up reading all of them to them, some of them several times.   

Anyway, sitting at the long table at the party among our very old mother, a brother's almost as old mother-in-law, several of my siblings, one of those nieces was badgering me to read one of  the Harry Potter books and I was getting kind of tired of it so among the chattering and babbling around the table, I said,  How about I read you another book, 

Which one? she demanded,

Oh, I don't know, how about "Sets, Relations and Functions."  A joke between us because I'd proposed that one among several other math titles on my shelf other times she was demanding I read Harry Potter to her.  Math not being her favorite subject.  

But the joke was on me that time because I quickly found out if you don't pronounce that particular title, very clearly in mixed company, it can be easily misconstrued.

UPDATE:  Found this before I closed out the search window on that, too.

Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Simps and Trump are alike re truth telling, 

As well in their ranting and yelling,

They both come from Queens,

And they both act like tweens 

And oddly alike re repelling.  

Maybe I should go back to answering him in limericks again. 

Update 2:  It's kind of shocking to find out that I seem to understand the most basic of set theory better than a long-time physics teacher at the Chicago Lab School,  though you do have to understand he's been hanging out at Duncan's Daycare for Elderly Boomers and that's bound to lead to stupification.    You can count DD as one who I used to have some respect for but don't have much for, anymore. 

The Issue Is Imperialist Fascism, It Is Everywhere And Opposing That Isn't Racism, It's It's Opposite

THE ISRAELI VOTERS have kept Netanyahu in power and that is with election after elections that they could have gotten rid of him.   It is one of the sometimes effective safeguards of a parliamentary system that that can happen, though Israel as Britain shows, that's no guarantee.   While there is a minority in Israel who oppose the aggressive fascists they have been a minority who have not elected a government in about thirty three years and, arguably, the real opponents of Israeli imperialism have never, once elected a government in the history of that country.   I will note that the American presidential system is far more dangerous and inflexible and our politics has shown that even more so now than used to be.  I mean, American elected Trump II after it experienced the Trump I that the Electoral College imposed on us.  But more of that in a minute. 

It was one of the early covers-ups for the current genocide and expulsion against Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and around the area, blaming Gazans and Palestinians for having, long ago, voted for bad government.  But those bad governments have kept Palestinians from voting them out of office far more effectively than the non-egalitarian, putative ethno-democracy of Israel have controlled the politics of that country.  In many cases those who oppose fascism in Israel have left the country as they must realize nothing like egalitarian democracy is going to happen there.  I can certainly understand why anyone with a chance to leave that disaster leaving it,  I admire those who tell the truth of the matter, whether they have left or whether they remain Israelis - often working outside of it.   I have said the United States should have given Jews who wanted to leave Europe the chance to come here instead of having the Zionists imperialist project getting set up.   It would certainly have been better than what has happened in the past seventy six years.   I think that it would probably have lessened the amount of antisemitism in the world and would certainly have saved the United States from its catastrophic involvement with the Zionist state, benefiting everyone,  Palestinians, Arabs, Iranians, Jews, Americans and numerous other People who have been disastrously impacted by the situation that has developed in the region, including Africa.   Zionism was the last major European imperialist scheme after Mussolini's and Hitler's,  it has gone from the Labour government's more modest imperialist intentions to the psychotic-fascism's big dreams of who knows how much territory and how many Palestinians, Arabs and Iranians dead and under the regional hegemony of Israel backed up by the United States, primarily but the West which has its own intentions in the area.   I think the theory that when the worst of the Western gangsters with power saw what Israel did in the Six-Day War,  it saw its potential to be a basis of imposing their will on a region rich with oil and other resources as well as major shipping lanes and as a base for expanding their control.   Of course, the Israeli fascists have been calling most of the shots since they took over from Labour with the man that many Jewish skeptics of Israel were warning about since the 1940s taking power,  Menachem Begin.   With that the old-fashioned Western lefty support of socialist Zionism began to decay, though, especially among the more ignorant mid-brow and lower on the left,  the old habits of thought are maintained though there is no real-life reality - such as was always largely imaginary and symbolic - to support that naive faith.   The media, especially the entertainment division has kept those idiots gulled my entire lifetime. 

But I'm an American who opposes the American part in this, watching the United States brought into another Israeli fascist and neo-con inspired catastrophe in the that part of Asia which has the potential to make what was already bad in all those places mentioned above, far, far worse.   That it is largely to keep two utterly corrupt and old men in power, Netanyahu in Israel and Trump in the United States is not a complete surprise.   If Israeli politics has been bad American politics has been worse.   We had had some progress towards the legitimate governance of egalitarian democracy here in the 1930s and 1960s which, ironically, foundered in the late 60s with those kinds of catastrophic foreign entanglements during his term in office made things during the Biden administration.  The same corrupt American and Western interests (the like of the Murdochs are about as American as Musk and Theill) that used Israel as a tool for its ends, has successfully rigged the media and legal establishment to make sure nothing like egalitarian democracy ever happens here.  The Israel project is a major but only small part of that.   But it is one that in the past quarter of a century has involved the United States in the overthrow of the Iraqi government and many smaller projects that have corrupted us even farther and which has cost us as People and as a country and I do blame not only the governments of Israel but the Israeli voters who have kept those fascists and imperialists in power.   I blame them as much as the American voters who have kept us under increasingly fascist regimes as they've been planning since the early 1970s with remarkable success.  

One of the few things to keep me from total despair is the increasing activity of Jewish Antizionists,  whether religious or those many who are my fellow egalitarian democrats.     I saw last weekend's First Jewish Anti-Zionist Convention held in the same city where the first Zionist Convention was held to be a small glimmer of light.   The blackmail of those who have used false accusations of "antisemitism" as part of its American and Western plan to further the worst of Zionist fascism may be showing signs of crumbling.   The point made by not a few of the Antizionists, that the Zionists in Israel,  the West in general and most of all the United States have allied themselves with some of the most overt haters of Jews is certainly something that is true.  It's being noted that one of the biggest fans of the U.S getting involved with Netanyahu's second call for us to fight a major war on HIS behalf is coming from the antisemitic,  Mammonist pseudo-Christian, ordained Southern Baptist Mike Huckabee.  No doubt he'd hightail it out of Israel to save his ass before the shit really hit the fan, watching from the sidelines as he anticipated that his his Kristian Komic Koncept of the Book of Revelation was about to unfold.   I would not be surprised if sometime in the near future that red-heffer con job didn't announce they had their cow and they sacrificed the poor creature on the Temple Mount blowing things to shit - though, of course, that being a Western pseudo-Kristian financed millionaire-billionaire con job, they might want to milk it if Bibi's latest war went badly.   

Among the things I resent about this whole thing is the part it played in corrupting American minds and politics.  Among those things I resent is how it has fanned antisemitism here.  As I've noted it was reading the Argentinian-Israeli journalist Jacobo Timmerman pointing out that since World War II the largest part of antisemitism was inspired by the crimes committed by Israel,  if the Zionist project had been abandoned instead of implemented,  I think it's entirely likely that there would be far, far less antisemitism and antisemitic violence today.   The Israel project is hardly a large part of the American fascists' operations or those fascists in Europe and elsewhere,  the techbro fascists and their like are the major part of that but it has played a part in the corrupting of our politics.   I think the Israeli genocide in Gaza played a major part in the reinstallation of Trump II and I think the Israeli fascist government made it abundantly clear that they wanted Trump because they knew they could manipulate him into giving them everything they want,  we're about to see him give them another Iraqi style regime-change war which may well make the Iraqi one that Bush II gave him look like just the prelude to it.   I think Americans have got to have an honest and anti-racist discussion about Israel and the catastrophe it has been.   I listened to a major Democratic politician yesterday sounding the same "Israel right or wrong" slogans that dragged Joe Biden into the worst thing he ever did,  supporting the Israeli fascist genocide in Gaza.   We can't let that corrupt and rigged definition of "antisemitism" stop us from having that discussion on anti-racist, honest terms BECAUSE THE ALTERNATIVE WILL EVENTUALLY BE AN ANTISEMITIC BACKLASH WHEN THE ISRAEL INSPIRED AMERICAN WARS BRING A REACTION WHICH WILL REACH THAT TIPPING POINT.  The fever dreams of the most insane of the Zionists want more anti-Jewish violence in other places because they think it will force Jews to go to Israel.   I know that because a lot of them,  including Netanyahu have said as much.    On that 'll take my cues from the informed Jewish Antizionists,  they've been making the most sense to me.    And I will equally take my cues from the informed Palestinian opposition to zionism,  listening to Palestinians is not an optional thing,  not if you want to avoid a distorted, racist,  intellectually imperialist concept of things. 

What's most important in this isn't how I feel about it, it's what gets People killed, maimed, displaced, oppressed and the certain enraged reaction it will cause.   That's most true for People in those places and countries most directly involved.  But it plays not a small part in the corruption of governments and powerful institutions and entities around the world.  Barring the American military successfully stopping Trump,  we're about to embark on a complete catastrophe which could involve nuclear weapons being used for the first time since Truman dropped the second one at the end of WWII.  No one can possibly predict or control what's going to happen then.  I certainly wouldn't favor a military coup here - I certainly don't trust any non-democratic governance - but I fear what Trump is about to do even more.  

Hey, hey RFK How many kids did you kill today?

 

Thanks to Brian Tyler Cohen for posting this short.   I can't keep up with the flood of criminal degeneracy that flows from RFK jr. and I'm glad he's one of those on the case. 

The First Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress Happened This Past Weekend

YOU WON'T HEAR about it in the American media.   Just about every part of the Western media has covered up the most public genocide in history.    Here's a sample of the information that was part of it from Katie Halper's podcast:  Jews Speak Out: Israel’s Genocide “Worse Than Nazis”

In case you want to know, here are the notes at Youtube:

Before this weekend's Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress, I spoke with three of its organizers about Israel's decades-long "democratic" genocide in Palestine and the Israelis who keep voting to support it. Thank you to Ronnie, Dalia, Haim and everyone who was able to participate in, attend or watch the Congress! 

00:00 What's happening right now in Palestine

02:27 How does the genocide in Gaza compare to the Holocaust?

05:43 Netanyahu is representative of Israeli society - "the vast majority support genocide"

08:05 Resistance in the West is "still not good enough"

11:14 "The idea that criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic is anti-Semitic in itself" - Katie

Dalia Sarig is co-founder of the initiative ‘Not in our Name’ founded by Jews in Vienna and candidate on the GAZA list. 

Haim Bresheeth Zabnner was Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of East London and then a Professorial Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).He is Filmmaker, photographer, film studies scholar, and historian. His films include “A State of Danger,” a documentary on the first Palestinian Intifada. His books include "An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Force Made a Nation." Haim is the son of two Holocaust survivors and was raised in Israel. He is a member of Holocaust survivors and Descendents Against the Genocide and a founding  member of Jewish Network for Palestine. On November 4, Haim was arrested over a speech he gave at a pro Palestine demonstration outside the residence of Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely in north London.

Ronnie Barkan is an Israeli activist, a conscientious objector and co-founder of Boycott from Within – a group of conscientious Israelis who support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. He represented the Popular Struggle Coordination Committees at the European Parliament in Brussels, where he challenged EU institutional complicity in Israeli violations.

Brahms - 7 Fantasien - Mieczysław Horszowski

 

I recently had an occasion to listen to the Brahms Cello Sonatas played by Pablo Casals and Mieczysław Horszowski and was reminded how great a pianist he was.   Also how very different their playing was from younger performers.  Casals was 21 when Brahms died and already a very active musician, the extent to which he was familiar with those who played as Brahms intended,  I don't know but it sounded quite convincing.  Horsozwski was about five then.    

I'm just,  just getting back to playing a little after my accident last winter.   I am taking come comfort in remembering how old he was while he was still playing extremely well.  He lived to be a hundred and taught his last lesson a few days before he died.  Which, unless I win the lottery I might be doing, too.    Here he was in 1958 in a live performance.   This live performance of the Opus 116 pieces is extremely deep and good. 

Fifty Gay Retablos: Gay Mexicans thank the saints for blessings

 

THIS MIND EXPANDING  video by Hugh Hagius in which LGBTQ+ Mexicans going back decades painting retablos for the saints intervening to help them in their lives which the official Catholic Church certainly wouldn't ever believe the saints would help them with.   I have to say that as being Irish Catholic praying to my patron saint to help me find a good, faithful partner never once occurred to me.   Maybe I should pray for a rich one whose dental insurance would cover me. 

I always love retablos but now I love them even more.  Don't miss the website where he found them. But I'll warn you that my computer gave me a "not secure" warning when I tried it.  

I Wish That My Beloved

JACK LEVINE was alive to paint the Kim Jong  Trump parade flop.   If not him then the great Herblock to draw it.   I can't think of another artist who could do it as well and truthfully. 

I think Trump doing his Kim Jong Un salute TO SOLDIERS DRESSED UP TO LOOK LIKE VIETNAM ERA SOLDIERS,  you know, the ones who went to Vietnam while his daddy paid a quack to get him out o the draft for a war Donnie and Fred supported, would be one of the emblematic moments of the thing.  

UPDATE:  History Repeating Itself 

Here's Herblock on the news media's treatment of Trump. 

The Fascists Have Started Assassinating Democrats

THIS IS WHAT Republican-fascist politics is about,  this is why the Supreme Court has allowed Republicans to amass arsenals so they can use guns when they lose elections.   This is hardly an isolated phenomenon,  this is the tip of Republican-fascist politics. 

An LGBTQ+ Pride-month Post - I Confess

THAT WHEN I saw the great journalist and prophetic witness against fascism,  Masha Gessen was clearly  transitioning,  my immediate reaction was that it was unfortunate because it would be used by the fascists to discredit Gessen and a voice that has been strong and to actively discredit ideas that we need.   

Sensing, immediately that there was something wrong with that reaction I soon realized that it was a part of exactly what her prophesy and testimony and mine were opposing.  Masha Guessen gets to decide her life, not my sense of utility or even helpfulness to the cause.  My reaction was one that instrumentalized a Person, a life that didn't belong to me but belongs to Gessen.   There is no way that it was just or egalitarian or democratic,  though it is certainly how most of us think about other People.  It was a serious violation of doing to others what I'd have done to me. 

I have to admit that I don't understand what leads Transpeople to some of the decisions they make, especially around the somewhat dangerous practice of taking hormones or the somewhat less risky submission to what may be legally considered elective surgery.   Of course, from their point of view it may not be nearly as elective as it would be for me or some right-wing, cis-gendered straight Person.   No one else is qualified to make that determination,  It's their life, their mind, THEIR BODY, their future.  It's not only none of my business,  my ideas about that are entirely unimportant and irrelevant from any legitimate consideration in the matter.  

Either we take the "T" in LGBTQ+ for everything it includes or we are hypocrites.   When you hear someone whining about it, objecting to someone deciding to answer to "pronouns" other than him or her, he or she, what they're doing is akin to the fascists who have nationalized Womens' bodies, who want to control the sex lives of People other than themselves,  to define the identities of People of Color and others to suit themselves and their lazy objectification and instrumentalization of other People,  it is to practice a fascist view of the lives of others in ways the fascist would never accept for themselves,  it is to do to others what we would never want done to us.   The Golden Rule is the foundation of legitimate government and a decent society, no matter how inconvenient it is to us or to others.   The problem with fascists is that they don't want others to do to them as they want to do because they don't want to do that to other People.    For the Golden Rule to work, it has to be reciprocal.   We don't have control of the other side of it but we'd better practice our part of it if we want any chance of it working, at all. 

If Democrats Take The House They Need To Expel Mike Johnson

THAT LYING, GAYDAR sounding, sanctimonious Southern Baptist, lawyer-liar has called for a member of Congress to be punished FOR DOING NOT ONLY HIS JOB BUT THE SPECIFIC FUNCTION OF HIS POSITION IN THE SENATE.   Democrats should make the rule that that is grounds for expulsion of a member of the House.   

And I mean it when I say "Southern Baptist" because that pro-slavery originated, pseudo-Christian denomination is a bulwark of America's indigenous form of fascism,  far more so than you can argue that America's Catholic Church is,  despite the fact that the "trad catholic" cult within Catholicism is another bulwark of American fascism.   I'm done being polite and dainty and pretending about that.   I am done pretending that the Southern states,  much of the mid-west and Rocky Mountain states will ever tolerate egalitarian democracy.   I'm decades past pretending the fascist American free press is anything other than a bulwark of American fascism,  the alleged news and even more so the more widely watched - by miles - "entertainment" divisions.

All of the old assumptions of how America worked were fully in place when this all happened,  pretending that those old assumptions, restored, will result in legitimate egalitarian democracy is a delusion common to conventional Democratic politicians,  a large percentage of them part of the profession that pretends that as a professional obligation,  lawyers,  and the supposedly responsible academics and journalists.   Doing the same old thing,  going "high when they go low" has brought us here.   Pretending that things just right themselves when there's an "even playing field" is a psychotic delusion.   

Eschew Nostalgia The Refuge Of The Lazy And Egotistical

THINKING BACK to the blogs I enjoyed reading in the early years,  it made me think of the ones I didn't enjoy much and that, inevitably, led me to wonder if PZ Myers is still doing it.   I wondered what the guy who owed his fame and, well, maybe fortune, to he atheist fad of the 00's had thrown in the towel,  maybe my pointing out the immense improbability and ulitmately, unbelievability  of one of his biggest publicity stunts, his "Great Desecration" hoax had convinced him to give that kind of thing up.

Well,  I traced him back to where I stopped paying attention to him, at the ridiculously named "Free Thought Blogs"  where many if not all of the bloggers will tell you that free thought is impossible due to us being a product of material causation and, so even if they admit we have thoughts - and not a few of those guys deny even that -  those are as predetermined as John Calvin thought the final disposition of our souls were due to double-predestination.   It is funny how the materialist-atheist-scientistic types who deny the possibility of free thought are called "free thinkers."   Guess they get called that by the unthinking, including themselves.  

I started reading his recent posts but, while we may agree on some politics and even on some of the more absurd aspects of pseudo-Christianity,  it was just the same old crap I read back when he was one of Epstein's and Maxwell's protogees.  

One thing, since he is a professional teacher of biology, struck me as monumentally stupid was the headline: 

All eugenicists are incompetent geneticists.

which has to be one of the stupidest headlines on  a college teacher's musings I've ever read  outside of teacher of composition declarations about using the passive voice in writing.    

Starting with the first generation of post Mendel geneticists, virtually every one of the most famous of them was a eugenicist.  Galton, Pearson,  Fisher, Huxley, Haldane,  Watson, Crick, . . .  any geneticists who have bought into the neo-eugenics of Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology,  . . .  There have been geneticists who weren't eugenicists but they tended to not be the public face of that specialty, were often attacked and damaged by their conventional colleagues and,  my guess, is that they are a relatively small minority in that field.   Academics, including scientists, are mostly cowardly careerists, when it comes down to basic facts.    I can't imagine a biology teacher who was aware of the real history of their topic wouldn't know that.    I have to wonder what he's teaching his students.   That is, unless he's holding that all those famous geneticist-eugenicists were incompetent geneticists,  in which case that field has got really deep problems.   I mean other than that modern genetics and physiology have overturned much of the still reigning dogma of it.  

One of the things I discovered during the new-atheist fad was that even the academics among them were prone to saying flat-out false things,  I got into a lot of brawls with them when they lied about things that were easily disproven,  the quote by Jurgen Habermas quote about the importance of Jewish and Christian morality for modern egalitarian democracy,  "Orac's" pseudo-errudition that "only creationists use the word "Darwinist,"  the fact that we can actually know nothing about the first organism to have lived on Earth because there is absolutely no physical evidence of what it was like or how it arose from non-living matter, etc.   I've written about all of those with links - unfortunately some of them no longer work, but I always checked them at the time I posted them. 

Well, that's enough of going down memory lane.   I don't mind doing that with pop music once a week on Maine Public Classical,  though I generally get off before they get to 1965 when the music generally mostly sucked.   But nostalgia is mostly a lazy form of self-indulgence.  It's one of the things they do at the ExLax and Geritol set at baby blue.   Simps is always posting old pictures of himself,  something I've spared People here,  though I did post him in his stupid Groucho beret once, to make a point. 

Yet Again Someone Asks. You know, when I blew off way too much time

at his blog I used to feel some sympathy for Duncan who, back then, tried to write substantial posts.  I often praised his posts on infrastructure.   I tried to encourage him to write on things he clearly had some interest in, interest enough to make an effort.    I figured it wasn't entirely his fault that the, then, very large and diverse commenting community there spent most of its time on lazy-assed bullshit.   As time passed, one after another of the adults among the commentators there stopped coming.   Tena,  NTodd,  Phila, so many others stopped commenting there.   I left for a long time during the 2008 primary season because I was disgusted by the slanders of the Obama bros against Hillary Clinton -  I pointed out that it was necessary for which ever Democrat got the nomination to be elected because we were, then, on the cusp of fascism, what with the appointments of Roberts and Alito by Bush II.  I don't remember if some dolt there was still telling me that "the first one to say 'fascist' loses" or was still horrified by by impiety towards the Supreme Court, the ACLU and the First as well as the Second Amendments.  

I went back briefly around 2012, had some more brawls with the same liars and idiots I'd had brawls with there, before.  Duncan banned me because I made fun of his announcement that he thought the "boring, stupid, puerile, pointless, inflamed sphincter of a movie"(my description back then) by "one of America's biggest professional assholes" (said that back then, too) Penn Jillette,  "The Aristocrats" was brilliant one night just about 13 years ago, to the day.   But as I recall,  I had announced earlier on the same comment thread that I was pretty much done with Eschaton because it had just gotten too stupid and counterproductive.   I'm not proud of that only because I should have done so a half dozen years earlier.  A handful of those I like still wasted their time there,  Hecate, Gromit, Derbes, . . . so I wanted to see what they were saying.   It wasn't worth it. 

Since then the only reason I paid attention to it has been because someone told me Simps was lying about things I'd said there.  I quickly realized no one there ever bothered to see if he was telling the truth, the only time I recall any of them came was back when I kept posing the questions that definitively debunk the "brain-only" materialist model of the mind,  I think it was back in 2015 - maybe I'll post those unanswerable questions again.  The crew at Baby Blue these days wouldn't even realize that was a definitive refutation of their house ideology.   They tend to be rather stupid and easily distractable and entirely unproductive. 

Israel Is Trying To Draw The United States Into Another Disastrous Middle Eastern War This Time With Iran

It has been trying to do that ever since at least Bush II.   

America has to stop getting into the Israeli government's shit shows.   Howard Zinn put it as mildly as it can be put,  Israel was a big mistake. 

Jeffrey Sachs Lays It Out: The United States Is The Major Impediment To Stopping The Genocide Against Palestinians

 

Woke Up This Morning Thinking Of Walter Brueggemann And This Piece Came To Mind

 

William Bolcom - Gospel Prelude 12:  Free Fantasia on O, Zion Haste And How Firm A Foundation 

Gregory Hand, Organ 

Maybe I'll post all of them over the next week or so.  I do admire the Protestant musical tradition at its best and I love the musical culture of church organists.   If I had it to do over again I'd have majored in organ and taken a church job,  in the 60s and early 70s that wasn't a job I'd have felt secure in, certainly not in a Catholic church,  priests and bishops are notoriously cheapskates when it comes to paying for music.  

William Bolcom is the greatest American composer of my lifetime.   

Tell Me This Man Wouldn't Have Been Swept Up By The ICEstapo If He Looked Like This Today

 

Trump And His Goons Create Terror Then The Media Helps Him Turn The Reaction Against It To His Dictatorial Advantage

TRUMP CREATED THE CONDITIONS that led to the, at first, relatively small reaction to one of his ICEstapo terror raids in Los Angeles.  For most People who aren't subjected to the conditions of those most vulnerable to that terror,  they have no idea how rapidly the routine reporting of immigrants has turned into part of that terror campaign. 

Just six months ago, an appointment to check in with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would have seemed routine — go in, make sure the federal authorities have your information, receive a date to return and do it again in a year or so. 

Not anymore.

On this spring day, a 40-year-old woman approached the ICE check-in with trepidation. The woman, who asked that her name not be used for fear of government retaliation, thought it was likely she would be detained and deported.

She wasn't. 

But the ICE appointment itself now sends terror through immigrant families, many who have fled violent gangs and other conditions in Latin America. Many families  came to the United States to live simple lives, remain here legally, closely follow orders from the government, and yet live with the fear that any interaction with ICE could mean the family is separated.

The Trump administration is moving aggressively to remove immigrants across the country. Although it's not everyone's experience, for some, routine check-ins with ICE are turning into ambushes where they are taken into custody and swiftly removed from the United States, according to NCR interviews, immigration groups, members of Congress and media reports. 

Trumps thugs, under the criminals such as Homan and Noem, have been terrorizing everyone from the youngest children - some of them here for life saving medical treatment - to adults of all ages, arresting people in exactly the way some of them fled,  being kidnapped off the street by masked, armed men and dragged into unmarked vehicles and removed to one of Trump's buddies for-profit prisons in Lousiana or elsewhere, maybe thousands of miles from home without any legal representation,  sent to torture prisons in foreign countries - not unlike what the Bush II regime did though on a much larger scale and targeting far more People.   I remind Americans of that because this and the Supreme Court butchery of what we still cynically call the "Constitution" has been in the works through a number of Republican administrations and Supreme Court terms.  

The resistance to that terror by ICE and "Homeland Security" (you just knew that name was chosen by Bush II to normalize fascist terminology) in Los Angeles produced less disruption and violent reaction than a city gets when its home team wins a major game,  as Olbermann pointed out the other day, but Trump's brains,  Miller, most likely, saw it as an opportunity for him to get back at the Los Angels Latino Community for that date refusal in his teen years (Afrikaners needn't worry,  you're white so the racist little pinhead won't target you) and to try to whip it up into another opportunity for the Roberts Court to give Trump even more dictatorial powers - as I said his Reichstag Fire - KNOWING FULL, WELL THAT THE CORPORATE MEDIA IS ALL-IN ON THAT.   

We are a lot farther down the road to fascism than anyone still wants to believe,  we've been a lot farther down that road than anyone wanted to believe for the past quarter of a century and more - led there by the media,  Hollywood created Trump the powerful dictatorial CEO who turned thumbs up or down on the likes of Meat Loaf and then sold him to the racists who were pissed off at Dems for electing a Black Man as president, then nominating a Woman and then, after Joe Biden, a Black Woman, as president.   It was entertainment media that did the most to get us here,  though the infotanement division, the "news" division did its part, as if that's in any way not just part of the same thing. 

I don't know if we'll ever get back to the idea of a democracy but I do know one thing,  if we don't change the most basic parts of our Constitutional order which have brought us here, we will just see it all happen again.   I remember back in the late 1960s and early 70s, many a liberal and even many lefties and certainly moderates, thought that what should have been understood as our long term and powerful form of indigenous fascism, white supremacy, was down for the count and wouldn't get up again.  That was always a stupid notion, largely by white, affluent People who were never targets of American apartheid in any serious way.   Though white workers faced its ally in the other major power holders here,  the super rich,  they reliably focused on those even beneath them in the economic and political ranking.   That major fact of our history is little seen even though white supremacy has, in fact, always ruled a large number of American states and,  I would argue, has, in fact, had the power in just about all of them for most of our history.   I can't name one in which People of Color have not, for long periods, been held in legal second class or lower status and, even when legal discrimination has not been in place, then it was through social ostracism and institutional racism as practiced so notably by employers and lending institutions.   And the free press, the media, has been among the worst in enabling and maintaining that.   The fear and loathing of Latinos was a nightly feature of CNN as spewed by Lou Dobbs, year after year, as, in fact, fear and loathing of Palestinians has been,  "Arabs" to remind you of how the Bush II regime played the same media prepared racism so as to enhance its own power.   

Going back to a status quo which got you into a disaster is a particular lunacy of our Constitutional system.   Relying on the words and sayings of "the founders,"  "the framers" who, as must always be pointed out were aristocratic slave-holders and finaciers AND THOSE WHO HELD POOR WHITES IN WAGE-SLAVERY,  while ignoring the experience of living under the oppression and inequality made possible by Courts imposing those words on us in perpetuity is only a guarantee of getting you more of what you have gotten under it.   The words we live under have to change if you want to get shut of the oppression and inequality that the Supreme Court can always be certain to return us to NO MATTER HOW OFTEN THAT RAREST OF THINGS HAPPENS, THE CONGRESS WITH OR WITHOUT THE EXECUTIVE, TRIES TO MAKE OUR ELECTIONS HONEST OR TO MAKE THE UNITED STATES AN EGALITARIAN, AND SO, GENUINELY LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENT.    The Court has consistently abolished or twisted not only the regular and duly adopted law to turn things back to their favored unequal status quo for the privilege of those already privileged BUT ALSO TO ABOLISH THOSE PARTS OF THE CONSTITUTION THAT DON'T SERVICE THAT PRIVILEGE.     The Roberts Court, the faith stupidly put in such granite false front as Robert Mueller,  the willful idiocy of all those MSNBC style lawyers assuring us that the courts and Court would restrain Trump, and the history of serving that same corruption while posing as a force for progress by the lawyers of the ACLU have convinced me that the professional practices and motives of that profession are almost a guarantee that the end result will be in service of even the overtly violent and fascist status quo,  certainly those who have the most money because, as a number of lawyers I know told me,  they're taught and learn to always go for the deepest pockets.   

I don't trust any of them anymore, certainly not those who are always reassuring us that just getting back to the intentions of the founders and framers are going to get us somewhere doing that in the past has not gotten us yet.   Certainly not those who maintain we are to suffer this forever because of what they wrote centuries ago.   I suspect many a white person, such as myself, is going to be learning that before this is over.    I suspect most People of Color already understand something like that now.   You wonder why any Woman, whose body was put under the ownership of state legislatures in even the most white-supremacist-fascist states doesn't realize it most directly.  Maybe they're so used to terror that it feels normal to them.  Media indoctrination is certainly part of that, too. 

Northampton—“Lesbianville, USA”—Faces Protest, Fear, and Flying Eggs at Its First Pride

 

In 1982, Jane Fleishman was part of a small group of queer activists who organized the first-ever LGBTQIA+ Pride march in Northampton, Massachusetts—long before the city became known as a queer haven. An underground movement, the organizers met in living rooms, planned for months, and marched through fear and hostility, including facing anti-gay protestors who were throwing eggs at them. Their goal wasn’t assimilation but liberation—a fight rooted in solidarity with broader social justice movements. Though only a few dozen people showed up that cloudy day, their courage helped spark a tradition that now draws tens of thousands each year, proving that collective queer resistance can grow into lasting change.

I'm From Driftwood is another good LGBTQ+ Youtube channel that tells stories you don't get to hear very often if ever.   

Never been much on parades, myself.  While Pride Marches isn't my thing,  I'm glad that they're held for those who like them.   I'm always interested in hearing these kinds of stories from People who have other lives than the one I choose to lead.