Yeah, Yeah, Big Deal. What Do You Want Me To Say?

Tell tale Tit,
Your tongue will be slit, 
And every dog in town, 
Will have a little bit. 

On Reading About Steve Bannon's Testimony At The Roger Stone Trial

One of the consequences of witnessing the Soviet Union pass through a brief, very brief, dalliance with democracy to  the resurgence of the (former) Communist crime gang during the disaster of the Yeltsen period which saw the rotted Soviet state break up only to see Russia return to (post) Communist gangster rule under Putin and his chosen lackies and fellow gangsters has been facing up to the enormous damage that was done to the American left by those who were enamored of the gangster-Communist regime as it proved to be the moral equivalent of Nazism and as it duped a huge part of the American left, running their dupes to their benefit and our disastrous discrediting. 

That is continuing in the play left,  The Young Turks, Majority Report, In These Times, The Nation, etc. and idiotically enough in their adoration of  one of Putin's more cynical and disgusting assets,  Julian Assange and the likes of Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, etc.  

ANYONE WHO IS HOLDING A TORCH FOR ANY OF THEM IS CONTINUING THE VILE TRADITION OF THE AMERICAN PLAY-LEFT OF BEING THE PATSIES AND DUPES OF BILLIONAIRE OLIGARCH GANGSTERS IN RUSSIA AND, AS WE ARE LEARNING FROM THE TESTIMONY OF THE LIKES OF STEVE BANNON AT THE ROGER STONE TRIAL, OF THE VILEST OF OUR DOMESTIC BILLIONAIRE GANGSTER CLASS.  

One thing is clear in this the American play-left is the cheapest and stupidest of prostitutes in that about all you have to do to use them is to make noises that appeal to their. 

a. reflexive (generally snobbish) anti-Americanism, 
b. appeal to their romantic and pathological faith in Marxism, anarchism, and what is tragically called "socialism," 
c. sell the suckers of the play-left a victimization story that appeals to their idiotic romanticism.

The American play-left are idiots who don't seem to be capable of learning anything even with the hardest lessons that history and consequences can provide.  They never, ever, ever learn a fucking thing, they are congenital suckers of the kind their red-diapered parents and their old commie grandparents were, both actual and imaginary ancestry included.   They don't ever even understand the history of communism, anarchism, etc. they are not terribly bright, which is why they never learn anything.   

Another reason they never learn anything is that almost all of them, to a person, are comfortably middle or upper class and the worst consequences of their enabling billionaire gangster rule here is suffered by other people who they really, genuinely don't care about as compared to their idiotic romantic fantasies.  

I will never have to stop writing about this because they are a continual curse on the real left, the left that does learn things and does face reality and never bought into those elitist anti-American ideologies.   If there is one thing we know, it's that a permanent majority of Americans have seen Communism in action and, bad as it can get here, it's never been as bad as under Communism.   That is a permanent fact of American politics which anyone who wants to change things here will have to work from.   The play-left never will.  We have to dump them. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Rhys Adrian - Passing Through

Passing Through 

Pat sits behind his newspaper at the same table in the same corner of the same pub every evening. He is a railwayman and functions like a clock. He talks to no one and no one talks to him. Then, one evening, a stranger enters into conversation with him and the pattern is broken forever.

Richard: Hugh Burden
Patrick: Harry Towb
Beth: Diana Bishop
Directed by John Tydeman

Update On The Linux-Single Board Experiment

Thought I'd give an update on my experiment of going Linux based - single board computer.   The bad news - good news is that I've had to buy a whole bunch of micro-usb, micro SD card paraphernalia the good news is that with everything I've had to buy, the singleboard computers, a 7" screen (which I need a Fresnel lens to read) the chords, adapters and connectors, the SD cards (interestingly one of the most expensive parts of it) etc.  the cost is still a fraction of even what an in-good-shape used laptop would cost.  

After trying the always frustrating experience of downloading and unzipping and accessing zipped and a torrent file, I went with the easier route of buying SD cards pre-loaded with NOOBS and Raspbian, the operating systems from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, I bought several of those and the cost is a fraction of what it would cost to buy Windows or Mac OS.   I have not started experimenting with using other operating systems,  I'm going to start trying to get one of them loaded with Puppy Linux - very small,  I'm hooping to use the junky looking 2 GB SD card I got sent with the small digital recorder I bought a while back to see if that works.  And just to remind you, the $100 Zoom HIn recorder does more than the old reel to reels that I used fifty-years back. 

One thing, I had ordered a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ for $35 and was fascinated with the idea of using a $5 Pi Zero for word processing and a $10 Pi Zero W as a cheap web-radio so I ordered one of each.  They sent me two of the $5 ones instead of the $10.   When I pointed out their mistake and asked how to send back the extra board, they told me to just keep it for my troubles - I'm loving the Raspberry Pi company, my first experience with a customer friendly computer company.   After that I looked at the specifications of the free computer and realized it had more power and capability than the first PC I bought for a thousand dollars.   When I pointed that out to my sister she said I still had to buy a screen and a keyboard,  which I also had to buy when I bought that dinosaur.  The monochrome monitor I bought then cost more than I've put into this project so far - all three of those boards cost as much as I had to pay to dispose of the thing at the transfer station. 

ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR WORK that's the habit I got out of using computers with large internal discs but which you more or less have to practice with these computers.  Always keep a backup SD card with a clean version of the operating system, too.  The Pi 3 B+ is bootable from a flash drive, so I'm told, that's something I'll be trying.  

You're going to want to buy a USB hub for plugging in multiple USBs -  one with a micro usb to plug it in to the board and either an adapter or another hub with a full size USB if you use one of the larger Pi boards.  The official plug-in Rapsberry Pi keyboard will work as a hub, as well.   

I haven't tried to use a TV as a screen, not owning one.  I may buy one only for use as a monitor, I'm kind of shocked at how cheap those have gotten.  I'll update on that.  

All in all I am very happy with my decision, only thought I'd thought it out so I didn't have to keep going to the American Raspberry Pi Shop to order more stuff.   I could probably find the equivalent locally but I've found dealing with them to be very pleasant as compared to dealing with other online venues.  I don't do terribly sophisticated things on my computer as it is, I think most people don't, so even a cheap laptop is going to have way, way more junk on it than I'll ever use.  For me this has the potential to replace the computers I've bought with small, more environmentally friendly computers which, if they bite the dust, will not have to be disposed of with all of the connections, hardware and other things that have to be junked when your laptop gets fried.  And I'm having to learn things.  I hope that wards off senility.   It beats crosswords and solitaire.  

Update:  Oh, yeah, and about solitaire.  I got flack from what I said about checkers the other day, mocking me for noting that it can be played at a very high level, probably from someone who I could beat the pants off of in the game.  I would like to know how many of the idiots who snark about checkers does the totally brain dead  activity of playing solitaire and why that shouldn't be the real metaphor for a tic-tac-toe level of simple mindedness.  I don't know who it is who comes up with these idiotic metaphors that gain currency among the college-credentialed idiocracy that runs our pop culture but they are really stupid.  

As I said, I stopped playing it on my computer because, while it was fun and stimulating, it took time away from more important and, so, interesting things.  I'd much rather read another chapter of a non-fiction book than play a game of checkers.  I'd much rather go looking for another paper by Paul Finkelman 

Aaron Copland - Concerto for Clarinet String Orchestra, with Harp and Piano

Anthony McGill, Clarinet, 
Soloists of the New York Philharmonic 
Jaap van Zweden, conductor

I don't know of anyone who plays clarinet better than Anthony McGill.  

The Posthumous Power Of PR On College-Credentialed Kulcha Vulchas

Telfer:  And so this new-fangled stuff, and these dandified people, are to push us, and such as us, from our stools!

Mrs. Telfer:  Yes, James, just as some other new fashion will, in course of time, push them from their stools.

Arthur W. Pinero: Trelawny Of The Wells 

Pinero was a real big deal in his time, raise your hands how many of you ever heard of anything of his but, remotely possibly, this play?  

Literary scenes make believe the people they push during their lifetimes are literary gods, only to have them pass from the scene as soon as they're dead or shortly after or while they're still alive.  Vidal drank himself into a really hideous dementia for his last ten years or so, prey to the schemes of Harvard to get hold of his money and stunning even those who stood by him with his snobbish cruelty.  Few if any bothered with his books that last decade, the occasional essay here and there referenced, perhaps.  Other than the essays (which when fact checked turn out to be unreliable) and his blue crap, no one reads him anymore.  The "historical" novels are probably more full of crap than the essays.  He could be cruelly funny but there was never much more to him than that. 

They are such stuff as PR campaigns and book tours are made of.  No one knows who's going to stand the test of time, especially now when post-literacy is the norm for even those with college credentials.

It's kind of funny how slacker kulcha vulchas who are fast on following those ersatz gods to their grave hold onto their rotted and desiccated reputations like monkeys tortured by sadists in the name of pseudo-science  grab onto chicken wire and terry cloth.  

Update:  I never once said anything bad about Joseph Heller.   Life is too short to spend it trying to refute every lie, they just keep telling more.  They even tell the refuted ones.  If I could sue to shut them up I would, but the ACLU and Supreme Court have made that impossible.  Not interested in following it up.  Heller's a good writer but other than Catch-22, how often is he read?  

Molly! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

'merica hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient 'merican dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; . . . 

Dear old Wordsworth. 

I've been trying to cheer myself up watching old videos of Molly Ivins  It works but it makes me wish she'd lived long enough to see the entire United States turn into the Texas Legislature, as interpreted by her.  

Though I think she was way too optimistic about the dangers of a media free to lie and promote depravity, she is sorely missed.   If she found Ivana a bit much to take about thirty years back, imagine what she'd do with her former Donald and her brood.  

On The Latest From Trump's Anonymous Bean Spiller And Bloomberg Filing In Alabama

Pardon me if my first response to the news that the anonymous Trump regime insider who is spilling the beans, first, more than a year ago in a NYT op ed and now in a book that is being given, in excerpts, to media who can be guaranteed to report it is not gratitude and admiration.  The experts say that the writer joined up with the regime in support of its policies, no doubt the billionaire bonanza tax bill and other massive corruption made law, or maybe it was the Trump-Mitch effort to stuff the federal judiciary with fascists and, with some of them overt neo-Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, LGBT bashers. . . .

Exactly what else would anyone find in the Trump regime to support,to have joined on to it to do?   What act of decency, of democratic ideals, of equal justice have emanated from the Trump regime for this person to have signed on to facilitate and which one were they expecting was going to arise, like a lotus blossom, out of the foetid shit show that is Donald Trump and his cast of gangsters and their thugs?

The Republicans who declared themselves never-Trumpers aren't different in type from the ones like this anonymous insider who is doing who knows what bidding of this retarded, degenerate, sociopath that the Republican establishment accepted and supported and put into the presidency and who keep him there knowing that he has betrayed everything the office of the president is supposed to do and be and all of their own patriotic slogans and claims.   And Trump is hardly the only one.  His innovation, on the heals of the Republican Supreme Court handing him that ability through Citizens United, is to work with foreign billionaire gangsters as the Republican political and legal class has with domestic billionaire gangsters.   That was going on throughout the Bush II, Bush I, Regan and Nixon years.   The difference is that they weren't floridly insane and mentally deficient in the way Trump is. 

I have expressed my disgust with the adulation heaped on James Comey and Robert Muller and the lesser level heaped on the likes of Rod Rosenstein who are all of the same type as this anonymous latter day convert to anti-Trump.  Their problem isn't so much of substance as it is with style and extent.   This is an expression of a style of American conservatism that was rather overtly fascist from the start, it was certainly not an expression of equal justice under law, of government of, by and, least of all, for The People, it was certainly not in favor of the kind of egalitarian democracy that turns out to be the only kind deserving of the name.  They are the servants of money, the servants of wealth, the class that all of them were either born into or wanted a part of or worked toward advancing through.  

I'm especially disgusted with the figures in the media who hold up these people, the apparatchicks of billionaire gangsters as admirable and especially when I hear their Democratic colleagues who have gone to the same schools, had the same experiences with, who have been work or even social buddies with them carrying the same honey from the same honey wagon.  

On the same news I heard about that,  I heard that Michael Bloomberg is apparently thinking of getting in the presidential race, no doubt because he and, reportedly, his fellow NYC based billioniaire gangster pals are afraid Elizabeth Warren could become president.   No doubt he and they would prefer another Trump, or Bush or Reagan or Nixon to make them even more pathologically rich to having someone who would make the banks stop being crooks.  And if that's not enough, Eric Holder is reportedly thinking of doing the same where he would, no doubt, do as much to protect the billionaire gangsters as he did when he was Obama's Attorney General.   

There is more than a touch of the Talleyrand to them, the cynical, hypocritical climber and holder on through the evils of the late French monarchy, the revolution (he sat it out in England) only to come back to join up with the successive post-revolutionary regimes, the one Napoleon aptly described as "shit in a silk stocking".  That's who our elite class in politics and the law and, especially the billionaire gangsters who run them are.  I don't know who I loathe more but I'm finding I have it in me to loathe all of them.   Including those who pose as democrats. 

I'm for Elizabeth Warren, someone who might be elected and who will know her success depends on doing what Democratic voters will vote for her to do.   She's no Obama. 

Saving Egalitarian Democracy And The People And World It Serves From Neo-Fascism, Several Points Of View

Sr. Teresa Forcades is a very important thinker and public intellectual of whom I was totally unaware two weeks ago.  Apparently in Europe and among women religious Catholics, she was already well known but old white men are always the last to catch on.   As well as being a Benedictine Sr. she is a fully qualified medical doctor, having studied at the University of Barcelona before finishing her medical training at the University of Buffalo in New York.  Then she obtained a masters degree in theology at Harvard before returning to Barcelona where she obained a doctorate in public health and the her doctorate in theology from the School of Theology of Catalonia.  No slouch. 

And she's clearly taken the time amidst her practice and study  to think about the primary topic of my modest efforts, the possibility and requirements and prerequisites for having a real, egalitarian democracy.  

I've come up with a list of prerequisites for that possibility, sufficient and accurate information being widely distributed to The People and for what is commonly called The Golden Rule to take root in a sufficient number of people, an effective majority in strong enough form for it to be done even in those occasions where it would not be to their personal advantage or, perhaps especially, their personal preferences.  I have stressed the experience which is being had in, perhaps its most blatant and undeniable form in the billionare oligarchs concerted efforts to prevent equality and democracy, the dissemination of lies, through the broadcast media and, in their latest scheme to do that, through the havesting and use of personal data people have been gulled into giving up to Facebook, Youtube and other internet businesses.   Anyone who underestimates their abilities to destroy democracy, depending on such idiotic slogans as "more speech" in the face of this last decade may as well be in it on the side of the billionaires because if "more speech" was going to do it, we would have a golden age of egalitarian democracy instead of resurgent fascism and neo-Nazism throughout the West that bought into that libertarian crap in the post-WWII ear.  

Here is part 1 of a talk Sr. Forscades gave in Ireland, addressing some of the basic issues of egalitarian democracy in 2015, in the context of the economic collapses in Spain, Ireland, Iceland and elsewhere and the "austerity" being imposed, not on the banks which had caused the collapse, but on the least among them.  You will certainly remember how popular that was with the members of the "free press" who felt that kind of bracing facing the consequences that is always so much easier for those who face it vicariously by assigning the consequences to people a lot poorer than themselves.*  

Here is my quick and dirty transcription of some of the main points she made.

. . .  So, the European Union, [is] a democracy. Before in the introduction, that was named.  A democracy meaning three things for me.  We, I think, have a tendency or have had a tendency lately to reduce democracy something that it's only - my, according to my understanding - it's only an essential but not sufficient and necessary but not [a] sufficient element of democracy, that is voting.

I don't understand democracy without voting and voting meaning a moment where each person has the possibility to think and to decide and to do that in secrecy and to do that with all the warranties that will be processed fairly.  That is clear to me,  right?  Without that I don't understand democracy.

But that is not enough.  When the Indignados movement and another so-called Wall-Street Movement, and the people that were taking the street, mostly young people - and the squares and camping there to say that we need a radical change, were saying, at least in Spain, "they do not represent us."  They call it "democracy" and it is not.  Maybe older people, especially in Spain, that we had the dictatorship not so long ago, thought these people, these young people don't know what they are talking about.  We have been in a dictatorship and what we have now is, of course, it's a democracy.  They have partial reason but I don't think they have all the reason.  I think the Indignados had all the reason.  This is not a democracy. We call it democracy and it is not.  It is not the rule of the people, and it . . . Two things, we need two things besides voting to have a democracy.

One thing needs to happen before voting and one thing needs to happen after voting.   And if you don't have this thing before and this thing after, the voting is a farce.  "Farce" this really is right, farce, right?   A mockery, right? 

OK, what is . . . what needs to happen before voting?  Well, it's quite obvious, before voting you need to have a deliberation.  You need to have space where all the different options can be heard.  You need to have a space with plurality and with enough time.  [It] cannot be from today to tomorrow and then voting.  That's what happened in the Congress in the United States when they had to vote the bail-out of the banks, they had 24 hours and a document of 600 pages.  And this unfortunately happens at other levels of our so-called democracy.   This cannot be handled like that this deliberate,  deliberative moment, it's essential for democracy.  I actually think it's the most important of all three, all of them are important but this one is the one that shows of our democracy, when you come together with other people you listen to other perspectives, you open up to other perspectives, not only your interests and you just ponder the thing critically then you get to think about it, to discuss, to confront, to oppose and this builds up what we call a human community.  And this builds up a sense of common purpose and builds up a common purpose.  I don't mean unique, right, plural, differentiated with all different kinds of accents and diversity but we are working and building something that it cannot be assumed is there.  That's democracy, democracy, it's good that we have to build together and the deliberative process is very important.   If, for example, I'm . . .  somebody tells me, "well we have a vaccine that is 100% effective, 100% sure, do you want that vaccine?   Then I am supposed to exert, to exercise my sovereign of saying "yes" or "no".   What am I going to say,  "yesm give it [to] me twice"  If I just take the information as it comes, so it's obvious that that's very important.

But there is another one.  Even if you have the deliberative process as it should be and you have the voting without manipulation, as it should be, that's still to my understanding not democracy because we need something to happen after the voting.  And that is revocatory?   Is that English word?  "Revocatory"?  [Audience response]  What?  Recall?  Recall is to recall.   So that means that you have thought out and discussed with everybody and, perfect.  You have voted in privacy and freedom.  But maybe you've made a mistake?  And you realize a bit later.  So, do you have to wait four years to just be able . . . or five or six, depending?   Who's to say what is it written in Spain the president that we have now in Catalonia but also in the country, they came to the election with a program,  they were saying  they would do all [of the] following things.  They were voted [in] and the next day they started undoing all that they said they would do.  And most people say,  oh, yeah, that's what they do today, in Spain.  Right, the people answered like this.  Again this is something that points directly to the problem that the Indignados were pointing to.  This cannot be allowed.  How can we just assume this is the way it works?   You just promised some things to get elected, and when you get elected you don't do them.   You might be thinking, some of you, wait a minute, we have the motion of censure,  is that English?  Like in Parliament, right.  But that's the problem, that's also what the Indignados were showing.  We cannot have only representative democracy because [in] representative democracy you can have a motion of censure in the Parliament but in the Parliament you are getting there through political parties through campaigns that are being financed by the same big powers that are vested interests, that have invested interest.  In Spain all the main political parties [do].  I don't know, in Ireland.  In Spain all the big political parties have huge debts to the banks. . .

Under our flawed and corrupt Constitution, as interpreted by recent Supreme Courts, the deliberative prerequisite of democracy is corrupted through the mass media and the manipulation of information by billionaire gangsters and their hirelings and the post-election recall, the quaint notion of "impeachment" which has never been fulfilled for the removal of even the most criminal of elected kings-for-four-years, is clearly insufficient for the purpose.  

Anyone who thinks rescuing  egalitarian democracy from the billionaire oligarch gangsters is going to be done by tweaking our institutions and laws is deluded.  It is going to take some very basic and earth shaking change.  It is going to have to include honesty and good will in strong enough form that it becomes effective in an effective majority who will often have to act for the common good and with justice when they don't want to, when they would not choose to in the absence of a stronger force that impels them to act against their own "enligthened" self-interest.   I have lost any of my naive faith that that could be based on feelings and notions and habits, I think it requires that that majority really believe and feel that they are required to by no one less than their Creator, to put it in Jeffersonian language.  He clearly either never had or lost that feeling as he became more sciency in his thinking, his entire life depended on the enslavement of scores and hundreds of people who he didn't treat as he would have had them treat him.  None of the slaveowning founders nor the Supreme Court "Justice" slaveowners are reliable in that regard.  All of their words and deeds need to be understood with the enormity of that fact foremost in the deliberations. 

*  British social theory is traditionally based in that, as, Phil, that admirable commentator on British politics has discovered, they're talking about killing the poor there, again and blaming their deaths by cruel Tory incompetence and criminality on their victims.   

I will, again, point to Marilynne Robinson's great essay, Mother Country as one fo the best studies of the cold blooded violence of traditional British, English, for the most part, economic and social theory in this regard.  The college-credentialed and scribbling and babbling classes in American have been highly influenced by them, the secular "left" as well as the overtly fascist right.  You can also read her wonderful essay on the topic of austerity, it goes with Sr. Forscades talk, very well.  

I'm sick.  I hope to post tomorrow.  The friggin' time change isn't helping either.  I hate Daylight Savings Time.  I never found the chickens and goats, the cabbages and tomatoes cared what time it was.  Seems like a dumb idea they thought up in some comfy room as a boon to the farmers without thinking to ask them.  

“What is the problem with feminism in our Church?” by Sister Teresa Forcades

Thinking About Sr. Forscades' Insight

The idea of Sr.Teresa Forscades that unlike "modernity," which she defines as the dominant intellectual framing that first started towards hegemony in the renaissance, Christianity had sanctity as the goal of human beings instead of ever higher forms of human reasoning, has stuck in my mind since I first read about it at Mary Bridget Meehan's blog.   Especially this sentence, "Modernity began with the exclusion of women,"  who, she notes, were, for the largest part of the modern period, even up to the 20th century and to an extent, today are excluded from a university education.  Though women have made great strides in entering many fields, notably not so successful in those most emblematic of such modernism, the STEM departments, they are not the only group of people for whom who modernism has not been such a great deal.  

What interested me most is that under the Christian assumption that Sr. Forscades* the great issue that leads to the elite and sciency to deny that people are equal on the basis of biological difference, disappears, for the most part.  If you measure equality from the standard of holiness instead of in intellectual (actually material**) success, then it is far less problematic to hold that all people are created equal by God.  That erases the basis of political inequality as held by such men (almost always it's affluent, white, men) who are held in such esteem even as they despised People of Color, Women, other nationalities, etc.  I will admit that those things existed and exist within the churches - Sisters Forscades and Chittister were speaking at the Women's Ordination Conference, after all - but if you start by holding sanctity as the goal of life instead of material or intellectual position then you're a lot more likely to abandon that evil.  The egalitarianism that is inherent to that framing, like the ideal of any framing, is still more of a potential than it is a reality.  But that is far more true for a framing that holds intellectual and, especially, material attainment as the most worthy goal because no matter what you do by way of schooling, those things are not going to be equally distributed among people. 

I have said a number of times that one of the turning points of my life was, while thinking about Henry Kissinger - I seem to recall it was in the context of his post-government career selling guns in Africa, I realized there were hundreds, thousands, . . . of smart people the world would probably be better off without, there are no good people I could say that about.  

Trying to find the ideals of egalitarian democracy in materialism and in intellectual manipulations on behalf of that is guaranteed to fail.  It will always work the other way.  

*  Who has had what would conventionally be seen as a top-rate education,  Harvard for the love of Mike!   I think she is unusually unimpressed with her credentials.  The more I read about her and hear her (her English is extremely good) the more impressed I am. 

** The extent to which the Ivy and Might As Well be Ivys have proven to be intellectual brothels, and how the far from intellectually endowed rich and famous have used them erases the distinction between the two.  Oxford and Cambridge and other elite universities and the jr. levels of those, the elite preps (Catholic no less than any others) display a similar blending of the intellectual and the material.

I haven't thought it out very far but I wonder if that has something to do with the deep suspicion that St. Francis had about educational distinction and discouraged its elevation in the early years of his order.  His radical sanctity, based not in material possessions but in poverty and service to the least among us was something that the powerful members of the hierarchy moved, even during his lifetime, to destroy.   It is something that in the next generation led to the interesting fact that the great philosopher William of Ockham had to take it on the lam because as a devotee of the strict observance Franciscans, he was on the outs with the rich and famous in the degenerate papal court of John XXII.   It's a long, long time since I have read any of him but I seem to recall that a lot of Ockham's political ideas, formulated in defense of the original Rule of Francis, anticipate a good deal of democratic political theory.   The basis of that was in defense of refusal to own property as part of Franciscan sanctity.   I seem to recall part of that was an early form of the separation of church and state, but it also contained a limit of the rights of earthly power to rule.   Maybe I'll get around to reviewing that. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Garry Lyons - Distant Whispers

Distant Whispers 

1971: A 14 year old boy is raped and murdered. Young DC Christine Proctor works on the unsolved case, which destroys the career of Detective Superintendent Doug Crowley.

2001: A 14 year old boy is abducted but managers to escape. A man is arrested and it transpires that he was a key suspect in the 1971 case.

Detective Superintendent Christine Proctor sees an opportunity to charge the man for the 1971 murder, and calls on Doug Crowley, now 82 and dying from cancer for help.

But inadvertently, Christine brings to the fore a secret that has lain hidden for decades.

Christine: Denise Black Doug: Paul Copley Harmeet: Emil Marwa Timothy: Matthew Beard Ronald: Duggie Brown Audio analyst: Kate Williamson Directed by Nadia Molinari

On All Souls Day

My Dreams, My Works, 
Must Wait Till After Hell

I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can give me any word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep my eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Correction

I inadvertently inflated my checkers competence yesterday,  I'm more a mid to high-mid-level player, if I'm rusty a mid level player.   And I'm rusty.  

Don't want to sound like a braggart. 

Checks And Balances Is An Illusion At This Point

It's a minor pet peeve of mine but as someone who, a while back, became addicted to playing checkers with a very good computer checkers program and who progressed to what would be considered a mid-high level player, when I hear someone imply that it's a simple minded game - always people who I suspect ignorantly hold chess in the awe its PR encourages people to believe about it - it irritates me.  Checkers is far from a simple minded game played at the highest levels and it is, I think, a far better analogy to what is involved with politics than chess.  

I removed the checkers game from my computer.  It was too addictive, took up too much time and it taught me everything I needed to get from it. 

I have given up trying to guess what Nancy Pelosi and those closest to her are planning in terms of the impeachment of Donald Trump, they're way ahead of me and I wasn't one of the idiots who was whining and crying for the past two years when she, sensibly, was keeping her powder dry and under cold storage.  I think she knows that unless the polls make Republicans in the Senate terrified for their majority and their own electability and, so, vote to remove Trump, putting the about as compromised Pence in his place, the impeachment is not going to end with Trump being removed.  

The soft edges of that, as personified in the putrid, stinking scumbag Susan Collins, only one of the recent title holders, The Shame of Maine, will hold firm.  My sister had on Maine TV when I went to see her last night and the Republican fascists are already putting out lying campaign style ads to gull the very gullible in Maine to put the slag back in for another term.  But she's definitely feeling the heat for her voting for the billionaire tax giveaway on the empty promises of Moscow Mitch and Trump, Putin's bitch #1 and her vote to put the sexually assaulting perjurer, Kvanaugh on the Supreme Court.  But if the skank thought she could get that by voting to remove Trump, she'd throw him under the bus as fast as he will anyone else.  She's thrown her constiuents under it to block a farther right-wing primary opponent, even though there was little reason to do that and to get whatever else she figures she can from it.   She's not different in type from Trump, just where she is on the board. 

American politics isn't chess, the pieces aren't that varied, their moves are not that different, it all depends on forcing them to move to do what you want them to do.  It's even true of the Supreme Court.  Roberts must know that if he does anything to show his partisan hand in this, he will blow the one thing the Court depends on, the unthinking piety that has been cultivated for that brothel in the media, in popular entertainment - where it substitutes for a religious hierarchy- and more generally.   It's always been a sham, they're as political and self-interested as the Republicans in the Senate and the House and Trump.  If he and Mitch Putin's Bitch work together to thwart the removal of Trump too blatantly, he will have discredited the court.  I'm not sure I would hold that as a bad thing if people stopped being dupes for that totally non-democratic branch of the government.  I think saving egalitarian democracy will, actually, require that the powers of the court and lots of its past precedent be discredited and overthrown.  Much of the worst of it has come about as a direct consequence of them creating a privilege to lie, falsely called "free speech" they extended it through, first making money speech, then giving corporations a privilege to lie to maximize profits and the power of their servants (when you read "corporations" in this context, you could as well say "crime gangs") and then further opening up American elections to the influence of billionaires domestic and even foreign through further "free speech" rulings.  

Our 18th century Constitution, if it can't get rid of someone as blatantly, as floridly, as self-revealed a criminal as Trump, then it and many of the assumptions we had about it has failed, catastrophically, absolutely, entirely and dangerously.  If Trump is not removed, especially if he is reinstalled as he was BY THE FUCKING, GODDAMNED CONSTITUTION THROUGH THE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC ELECTORAL COLLEGE,  retaining faith in the Constitution is a lazy, immoral act of rolling over for fascism.   

I've Been Called Out On A Family Issue - Here's An Interesting Piece From 95 Years Ago By Karel Capek

Why I am not a Communist
(December 2, 1924 in the Pritomnost (Presence) magazine)

This question appeared out of the blue among a group of people who were normally inclined to do anything else rather than to busy themselves with politics. It is certain that nobody among the present would raise the question "why I am not an Agrarian", or "why I am not a Social Democrat". To be no Agrarian, by itself, signifies no definite view or life belief; however, to be no communist means to be a non-communist; to be no communist is not a simple negation but rather a certain credo.

For me personally the question brings relief, since I have been under great need, not to start polemics with Communism, but rather to defend myself in my own eyes for not being a communist and why I cannot be one. It would be easier for me if I were one. I would live thinking that I contribute in a most intrepid way to the redemption of the world; I would think that I stand on the side of the poor against the rich, on the side of those in hunger against bags of money; I would know what to think about this and that, what to hate, what to ignore. Instead, I am like a naked man in a thorny bush: with my hands bare, not covered by any doctrine, feeling my impotence with respect to helping the world and often not knowing how to protect my conscience: If my heart is on the side of the poor, why the heck am I not a communist?
Because I am on the side of the poor.

      *

I have seen poverty so painful and undescribable that it has made bitter to me everything I am. Wherever I have ever been I ran from palaces and museums to see the life of the poor, in the humiliating role of a helpless spectator. It is not enough to see and it is not enough to sympathize; I should live their life, but I am afraid of death. This biting, inhuman poverty is not borne on the heraldry of any party; as for these terrible slums with neither a nail to hang oneself nor a dirty rag to lay on, communism tries to reach them with its cry from a careful distance: the social order is to blame; in two years, in twenty years, the flag of the Revolution will unfold, and then --

What, in two years, in twenty years? Are you capable to admit so indifferently that one should live like that even two more winter months, two more weeks, two more days? Bourgeoisie that cannot or does not want to help here is a stranger to me; but equally strange to me is Communism that, instead of help, brings the flag of the Revolution. The final word of Communism is to rule, not to save; its gigantic slogan is power [moc], not help [pomoc]. As Communism sees them, poverty, hunger, unemployment are not unbearable pain and shame but rather a welcome reservoir of dark powers, fermenting by lots of anger and resistance. "The social order is to blame." No, rather all of us are to blame, whether we stand over human poverty with hands in our pockets or the flags of the Revolution in our hands.
Poor people are no class, they are precisely the declassed, excluded and unorganized ones; they will never dwell on the steps to the throne, whoever sits on it. The hungry ones do not want to rule but to eat; with regard to poverty it is indifferent who rules; the only thing that matters is how we, human beings, feel. Poverty is neither institution nor a class, it is a disaster; looking for an appeal to immediate humane help, I find only the cold doctrine of class rule. I cannot be a communist because its morality is not the morality of help. Because it preaches abolition of the social order [rad] and not abolition of the social crime [zlorad] that is poverty. Because if it wants to help the poor at all, it does so conditionally: first we have to rule and then (perhaps) it will be your turn. Unfortunately, not even this conditional salvation is guaranteed by the writ.

      *

Poor people are not a mass. A thousand workers can help one worker in his struggle for existence; but a thousand poor people cannot help one poor to get even a piece of bread. A poor, hungry, helpless person is absolutely isolated. His life is a history for itself, incompatible with others; it is an individual case because it is a disaster, though it is similar to other cases like a rag to a rag. Turn the society whichever side up, the poor will fall to the bottom again, most often joined by others. I am not a scratch of an aristocrat but I do not believe in the value of masses. After all, nobody, I hope, maintains seriously that masses will rule; they are just a material instrument to attain certain goals; they are simply political material in a much harder and more ruthless sense than the party-members of other colors are. It is necessary to press people into a kind of shape so that they become a mass material; it is necessary to give them a uniform made out of certain cloth or certain ideas; unfortunately, one can seldom take the uniform made of ideas off after eighteen months. I would begin to respect communism deeply if it came to the worker and told him honestly: "There´s something I ask of you but I do not promise you anything; I ask that you be an item, a unit, a material for me, just as you are an item and material in the factory; you will obey and remain silent, just as you obey and remain silent in the factory. As a reward, you will one day, when everything changes, remain what you are; you will fare worse or better, whether this or the other I cannot guarantee; the order of the world will be neither more generous nor kinder to you, but it will be juster." - I think that most workers would quite hesitate to accept this offer - and yet it would be supremely honest, and who knows whether for highly moral reasons it might not be more acceptable than all offers presented so far.
To feed poor people with promises is to rob them. Perhaps life is easier for them when you paint fat geese on the willow for them; but in practical respets, today just like one hundred years ago the sparrow in one´s fist is better than a pigeon on the roof of the government building and a fire in one´s oven is better than the red cock on the rafters of palaces which are, moreover, much less numerous here than what would think a person who is being forced to accept class consciousness instead of one´s own eyes - since, apart from a few exceptions, we are, as to life standards, a not very well-off nation, a fact one usually fails to mention. Usually one says that the poor have nothing to risk; but on the contrary, whatever happens the poor are those who risk the most because if they lose something they lose the last bit of bread; with the poor´s bread one should not experiment. No revolution will be realized on the backs of a small number of people, on the contrary - it will be on the backs of the highest number of people; whether it is war or currency crisis or anything else it is the poor who bear the earliest and heaviest consequences; quite simply, there are no limits and no bottom to poverty. The most rotten thing in the world is not the roof of the rich but the roof of the poor; shake the world and then look and see who it is that has remained in the rubble.
So what is to be done? As for me, I do not take much consolation in the word "evolution"; I think that poverty is the only thing in the world that does not evolve but rather just grows chaotically. But it is not acceptable to postpone the issue of the poor until the establishment of some future order; if they are to be helped at all, one has to start right away. It is open to doubt, however, whether the world of today still possesses sufficient moral means for that task; communism says it does not; well, it is just this refusal in which we differ. I do not mean to say that there are enough perfectly just people in this social Sodoma; but in each of us Sodomites there is a bit of the just and I believe that after some sustained effort and some substantial waving of hands we could agree on quite decent justice. Communism says, however, that an agreement is excluded; apparently it doubts the human value of most people as such, but of that thing I will treat later. The present-day society did not tumble down when it brought about some or other protection of the unemployed, aged and sick; I am not saying that it is enough but the important thing for both the poor and me is that that much has been possible to do today, on the spot, without irritated waiting for the glorious moment when the flag of the Revolution will unfold.
To believe that the issue of the poor is the task of the present and not of the upcoming order means, however, to be no communist. To believe that a piece of bread and fire in the oven today is more important than Revolution in twenty years is the sign of a very non-communist temper.

      *

The strangest and least human element of communism is its weird gloominess. The worse the better; if a biker hits a deaf granny it is a proof of the rottenness of the present order; if a worker sticks his finger in between the wheels of the machine, it is not the wheels that will mash his poor finger but rather the bourgeois, and will do so with bloodthirsty pleasure. Hearts of all people who for some or other personal reasons are no communists are beastly and repulsive like an ulcer; there is not one smittereen of good in the entire present order; whatever is is bad.
In a ballad of his, [the communist poet] Jiri Wolker says: "In your deepest heart, you poor, I can see hatred." It is a horrible word but the curious thing is that it is completely improper. At the bottom of poor people´s hearts there is rather an amazing and beautiful gaiety. The worker by the machine will crack a joke with much more enjoyment than the factory-owner or the director; construction workers at the site have more fun than the building-master or the landlord, and if there is a person singing in a household then it is definitely more often the maid wiping the floor than her mistress. The so-called proletarian is naturally inclined to an almost joyful and infantile conception of life; the communist pessimism and melancholy hatred are artificially pumped into him, and through unclean pipes. This import of desperate gloom is called "the education of masses towards revolutionarism" or "strengthening of class consciousness". The poor, having so little, are being bereft even of their primitive joy of life; that is the first payment for a future, better world.
The climate of communism is ghastly and inhuman; there is no middle temperature between the freezing bourgeoisie and the revolutionary fire; there is nothing to which a proletarian could dedicate himself with pleasure and undisturbed. The world contains no lunch or dinner; it is either the mouldy bread of the poor or the gorging of the overlords. There is no love, for there is either the perversity of the rich or the proletarian conceiving of children. The bourgeois inhales his own rottenness, the worker his consumption; thus, somehow, the air has disappeared. I do not know whether journalists and writers have persuaded themselves to believe this absurd image of the world or whether they consciously lie; I only know that a naive and inexperienced person, such as the proletarian usually is, lives in a terribly distorted world which really is not worth anything else for him than to be undone and uprooted. But since such a world is just a fiction, it would be very timely to undo and uproot this ghostly fiction, for instance by some revolutionary deed; in that case, I am enthusiastically supportive. There is no doubt that in our tearful valley there is far too much undescribable disaster, excess of suffering, not quite enough well-being and very little joy; as far as I am concerned, I do not think I am inclined to depict the world in too rosy colors but whenever I come across the inhuman negativity and tragic of communism I feel like shouting in an appalled protest that it is not true and that in spite of everything it does not look like this. I have met very few people who would not deserve a crumble of salvation for an onion; very few of those onto whom the Lord, being just a little sober and generous, could spit fire and sulphur. The world contains much more narrow-mindedness than real vice; but there is still sympathy and trust, friendliness and goodwill enough so that one cannot break the stick over the world of humans. I do not believe in perfection of either present or future humankind; the world will become a paradise neither by persuasion nor by revolution, not even by annihilation of the human race. But if we could somehow gather all the good that is, after all, hidden in each of us sinful human beings, then, I believe, one could build on this a world kinder yet than the one so far. Maybe you will say that it is just a simpleton´s philanthropy; well yes, I do belong to those idiots who love human beings because they are human.
It is very easy to say that, for instance, the forest is black; but no tree in that forest is black, rather it is red and green, because it is simply a pine or a fir. It is very easy to say that the society is bad; but go and find some essentially evil people there. Try to judge the world for a moment without brutal generalizations; after a while, there won´t be a grain left of your principles. One premise of communism is an artificial or intended ignorance of the world. If someone says they hate Germans I would like to tell them to go and live among them; in a month´s time I would ask them whether they hate their German landlady, whether they feel like cutting the throat of their Germanic radish-seller or strangling the Teutonic granny who sells them their matches. One of the least moral gifts of human mind is the gift of generalization; instead of summarizing our experiences, it simply strives to supplant them. In communist papers you cannot read anything else about the world but that it is worth nothing through and through; anyone for whom opinionatedness does not represent the peak of knowledge won´t think this quite sufficient.
Hatred, ignorance, essential distrust - this is the psychical world of communism; a medical diagnosis would say that it is pathological negativism. If one becomes a mass, one is perhaps more easily accessible to this infection; but in private life, it is not sufficient. Stand for a moment next to a beggar at the corner of the street; try to notice who are the pedestrians that most likely spin out the penny from their pockets; in seven cases out of ten they are people who live themselves on the border of poverty; the remaining three cases are women. In all probability, a communist would deduce out of this fact that the bourgeois has a hardened heart; but I deduce something more beautiful, namely that the proletarian has usually a soft heart and is substantially inclined to kindness, love, and dedication. Communism with its class hatred and resentment wants to make this person a canaille; the poor does not deserve such a humiliation.

      *

The world of today does not need hatred but rather good will, readiness to help, consensus and co-operation; it needs a kinder moral climate; I think that with a bit of simple love and sincerity one could perform wonders. I defend the present world not because it is the world of the rich but because it is also the world of the poor and then also of those in the middle, of those who nowadays, ground between the mill-stones of capital and class proletariat, maintain and save, with more or less success, the largest part of human values. I do not really know those proverbial upper ten thousand, thus I cannot judge them; but I have judged the class which is called bourgeoisie in such a way that it has brought me the indiction of dirty pessimism. I say it so that it gives me more right to defend, to a degree, those to whose failures and crimes I am certainly not blind. Proletariat cannot substitute this class but it can enter it. Despite all programmatic swindles there is no proletarian culture; nowadays there is on the whole no folk culture either, no aristocratic culture, no religious culture; all that is left of cultural values depends on the middle class, the so-called "intelligentsia". If only proletariat claimed its share in this tradition, if only it said: Okay, I will take over the present world and manage it with all the values that are in it - then perhaps we could shake hands and give it a try; however, if communism pushes forth by immediately refusing, as useless camp, everything that is called the bourgeois culture, then goodbye and farewell; then everyone with a bit of responsibility starts to take into account how much would go wasted.

      *

I have already said that real poverty is no institution but a disaster. You can reverse all orders but you will not prevent human beings from strokes of bad luck, from sickness, from the suffering of hunger and cold, from the need of a helpful hand. Do whatever you like, disaster presents human beings with a moral, not a social task. The language of communism is hard; it does not talk of the values of sympathy, willingness, help and human solidarity; it says with self-confidence that it is not sentimental. But this lack of sentimentality is the worst thing for me, since I am just as sentimental as any maid, as any fool, as any decent person is; only rogues and demagogues are not sentimental. Apart from sentimental reasons you will not hand a glass of water to your neighbor; rational motives will not even bring you to help and raise a person who has slipped.

      *

Then, there is the issue of violence. I am no spinster to make the sign of the cross whenever I hear the word "violence"; I admit that sometimes I would quite enjoy beating up a person who produces a series of wrong reasons or lies; unfortunately it is impossible because either I am too weak to beat them or they are too weak to defend themselves. As you can see, I am not exactly a bully; but if the bourgeoisie started to shout that they go hang the proletarians then I would certainly get up and run to help those who are being hanged. A decent person cannot side with the one who threatens; whoever calls for shooting and hanging disrupts human society not by social revolution but by offending natural and simple honesty.
People call me a "relativist" due to the singular and apparently rather heavy intellectual crime that I try to understand everything; I spend my time with all doctrines and all literatures including negro tales and I discover with a mystical joy that with a bit of patience and simplicity one can reach some agreement with all people, whatever their skin or faith. It seems there is some common human logic and a reservoire of shared human values, such as love, humour, enjoying good food, optimism and many other things without which one cannot live. And then I am sometimes gripped by horror that I cannot reach agreement with communism. I understand its ideals but I cannot understand its method. Sometimes I feel as if I spoke a strange language and its thought was subjected to different laws. If one nation believes that people should tolerate each other and another nation believes that people should eat each other, then this difference is quite pictoresque but not absolutely essential; but if communism believes that to hang and shoot people is, under certain circumstances, no more of a serious matter than to kill cockroaches, it is something that I cannot understand though I am being told it in Czech; I have a terrible feeling of chaos and a real anxiety that this way we will never agree.
I believe till this very day that there are certain moral and rational chuttels by means of which one human being recognizes another. The method of communism is a broadly established attempt at international miscommunication; it is an attempt to shatter the human world to pieces that do not belong to each other and have nothing to say to each other. Whatever is good for one side cannot and must not be good for the other side; as if people on both sides were not physiologically and morally identical. Send the most orthodox communist to handle me; if he does not knock me down on the spot then I hope I will reach personal agreement with him on many things - as long, however, as these do not concern communism. But communism principially disagrees with the others even in points that do not concern communism; talk with communism about the function of the spleen and it will tell you that this is bourgeois science; similarly there is bourgeois poetry, bourgeois romanticism, bourgeois humanism and so on. The firmness of conviction that you find in communists in every detail is almost superhuman: not that the conviction were that exalting, rather that they do not get fed up by it at the end. Or perhaps it is no firmness of conviction but rather some ritual prescription or, after all, a craft.
But what I especially regret are exactly proletarians who are thus cut off from the rest of the educated world without getting any other substitute than the attractive prospects of the pleasures of the Revolution. Communism shuts down a cordon between them and the world; and it is you, communist intellectuals, who stand with colorfully painted shields between them and all that is ready for them as the share for newcomers. But there is still a place for the doves of peace - if not in your midst then above your heads, or directly from above.

      *

I feel lighter after having said at least so much, though it is not all; I feel like after having confessed. I do not stand in any herd and my argument with communism is not an argument of principles but rather of personal conscience. And if I could argue with others´ conscience and not with principles I believe it would not be impossible at least to understand each other - and that, by itself, would be a lot.

translated and provided by: Martin Pokorny

I am indebetted to Martin Pokorny for the translation, this is an amazingly insightful document that, if I'd read it fifty years ago, would have saved me a lot of the time I wasted reading and listening to Marxists, who, in the United States, have drawn the American left into a worse than futile cul-de-sac and which, in the online play-lefty Youtube-Patreon-Podcast version of that, is bringing the delusion into another generation of enabling Republican-fascists.

Ken Cuccinelli The Piece Of Garbage Who Tried To Deport Children Who Would Die As A Result Is A Graduate Of An Elite Jesuit School

This fine speciemen of gangster sadist is a product of another of the DC area elite Jesuit preps,  Gonzaga College High School, one of the oldest such prep schools in the country.  They apparently are proud enough of him that he appears an a couple of lists of their eminent products that I saw online. 

Gonzaga is named for St. Aloysius Gonzaga, an aristocrat who was inspired to join the Jesuits.   His aristocratic family, apart from, or so I read, his mother, were dead set against him joining the Jesuits who, in the late 16th century were hardly the aristocratic elite they have become associated with through running schools like the one named for him.  He would have had to renounce the fortune he was due to inherit, as the oldest son in his family, and would be cut off from the kind of power that a secular priest who, as a member of a rich and prominent late renaissance family, would have risen in the hierarchy and become even richer and more powerful in the corruption that was the Italian renaissance.  

As it was, he became a Jesuit.    

AND THE REASON I'M GOING INTO HIS BIOGRAPHY IN RELATION TO KEN CUCCINELLI TRYING TO GAIN FAVOR WITH THE REPUBLICAN FASCIST TRUMP REGIME,  St. Aloysius Gonzaga went to work in the squalor of the hospitals, caring for people with terrible and contagious diseases.  A lot of Jesuits and other members of religious orders who cared for the sick caught what they had and a lot of them died terrible deaths.  He disobeyed orders that he leave the hospital - not a light thing for a Jesuit to do, back then - and eventually he died of an illness he caught from one of the people he was caring for.   

And, today, this amoral, scumbag who is a graduate of an elite Catholic prep school named for him, is currying favor and power and advancement by deporting children who he knows will die if they are not kept in the richest country on Earth - some of them coming here for the purpose of developing treatments for the rare conditions and diseases they have. 

In another irony, the details of Aloysius Gonazga's career towards sainthood has made many consider him the patron saint of those who care for AIDS patients, Cuccinelli has built his career largely on him using his power to attack LGBTQ people.   I would look into his public pronouncements to see how the scumbag used the AIDS issue but I don't have the time to just now.

Gonzaga College High School should revoke it's credentials they gave, starting Ken Cuccinelli on his career as a fascist sadist in service to Republican fascism.

I Want A Full Investigation of the Murdoch Family For Ties To Putin Oligarcy Mobsters

I remember a while back someone sent me a comment assuring me that FOX would turn around as soon as Lachlan got control from his Aussie-Brit smut-king daddy.   He assured me he knew that because he'd worked for Lachlan.  Well, wrong as usual.  Lachlan is a smut-king's sonny boy, like Trump is a real estate gangsters son.  I remember Susan Sarandon assuring us he'd be better than Hillary.    Hollywood makes everyone stupid, eventually.

American democracy can't survive the Murdoch style of 24-7 lying and slandering.  We can laugh about their audience but their audience defeated Obama in 2010 and put Trump in the White House.   

I Might As Well Make The Last Stupid Mail Post As Controversial As Possible

Having a few minutes to consider the question as to whether or not I am going to be saddled with Kanye West's proclaimed Christianity - to which I'll say, the little I looked into it, it's anti-Christianity, Mammonism pretending to be Christianity - I did the same thing my detractors do, I went to Wikipedia to find out who is to blame for him.   I wouldn't suggest depending on the Wikipedia article which I have ever confidence is a creation of some hack in Kayne West's employ, it's definitely a load of boss-aggrandizing bull shit.  

Why would anyone who has read anything I wrote think I'd have anything in common with this mentally ill egomanical asshole?   I have an especially strong hatred for that kind of pop crap, too.

I also read this article from the Daily Beast, and this one.  From what I know of the asshole and his proclaimed religiosity, it is right. 

From what I can see from his upbringing, he looks like the faculty brat from hell grown into a monster.   I saw a few faculty brats in my day but a lot of them outgrew it.   He turned it from a temporary condition of immaturity into a full blown pathology.  I can't deny that I think his mother, the English prof. dying as a complication from entirely elective and very ill considered cosmetic surgery is both pathetic and oddly resonant with her son's epic egomania and the self-hatred that he obviously shares with Clarence Thomas [from what I have read of CT's bio, I blame his grandfather for spoiling him].   I wonder if the image industry will eventually consume West, too.  

His profession of Christianity, like William Barr's, like Tim Busch's like Ross Douchebag's, like . . . all servants of Mammon,  is a sham.     That he follows the prince of liars, the servant of Mammon Donald Trump is all that anyone needs to know about the impossibility of his Christianity being authentic.  Jesus, himself, disqualified someone like him from being his follower.

Not going to bother with this bull shit any more. 

Oh, may as well add: