Saturday Night Radio Drama - Eugene O'Brien - Heaven

 Heaven 

A radio version of Fishamble's hit stage show starring Janet Moran and Andrew Bennett, directed by Jim Culleton. The multi award-winning Heaven is set in the Irish midlands, during the weekend of a local wedding. Mairead and Mal are struggling to keep their marriage together. Perhaps attending a wedding will help, or it might raise questions that are difficult to answer. First commissioned and produced on stage by Fishamble: The New Play Company.

Writer: Eugene O'Brien

Cast:

Andrew Bennett (Mal)

Janet Moran (Mairead)

Director: Jim Culleton

Composer: Carl Kennedy

Sound: Tommy O'Sullivan

Producer for RTÉ: Kevin Brew

Series Producer, Drama On One: Kevin Reynolds

Head of Drama, RTÉ: David Crean

First TX 8pm, Sept 7 2025

"It first glance such fears seem virtually unfounded, but there is an erie modernity to these antifederalist concerns"

THE MAN WHO MAY BE our finest living historian on these topics,  the Constitutional scholar and historian Paul Finkelman,  in his 1984 review of "The Complete Antifederalist" listed some of the things the antifederalists predicted would be possible under the proposed Constitution which, in fact, turned out to be very true.  I'm going to give you a good part of that passage asking you to see what is glaringly obvious,  most of what he noted had already happened under the Constitution WITHOUT THE SUPREME COURT OR ANYONE ELSE STOPPING IT has been repeated under Trump.  BUT NOW WITH SUPREME COURT APPROVAL.   The Roberts Court has made what would have seemed a few years ago to be a wild warning by that hot-headed revolutionary   Patrick Henry the law of the land through their six-three amending of the Constitution.   

I will note that I have copied this with the computer and that's asking for problems of line justification.  I'll try to fix that but I can't promise to catch all of it. 

How might the Constitution "totally destroy the liberties" of America? Some antifederalists feared the presidency, a position that combined the responsibilities of the nation's civil executive with those of commander-in-chief of the Army, while allowing for unlimited terms in office. Patrick Henry looked at the Constitution and did not see the "beautiful features"  that James Madison saw. Henry told the Virginia ratifying convention, "when I come to examine these features, Sir, they appear to me horridly frightful: Among other deformities, it has an awful squinting; it squints towards monarchy .. . Your President may easily become King .... "

Others worried about the Senate whose members would serve long terms without any check on them by the people. Many antifederalists predicted that the Senate would become an aristocracy. Because the Senate possessed executive and judicial, as well as legislative, roles, that body seemed especially dangerous. Henry warned, "Your Senate is so imperfectly constructed that your dearest rights may be sacrificed by what may be a small minority; and a very small minority may continue forever unchangeably this Government, athough horridly defective." 

Even the House of Representatives was too remote for some antifederalists. In their view, that body consisted of too few members for it to be truly representative of the people. 

It first glance such fears seem virtually unfounded, but there is an erie modernity to these antifederalist concerns. Is the modern imperial presidency any different from the one the antifederalists feared? Even the War Powers Act  has not prevented an American president from sending troops to Lebanon and Grenada. Without such a law, a secret war in Cambodia and Laos was fought for many years. And the imperial presidency has not been confined to foreign affairs. With a single order, Franklin Roosevelt incarcerated nearly 100,000 American citizens for three and a half years.  As the antifederalists might have predicted,even the Supreme Court lacked both the moral authority and the moral sensitivity to object.  The use of federal troops to suppress strikes in the nineteenth century and veterans protesting the depression during the 1932 Bonus March are yet other examples of what the antifederalists feared. If there are few such instances of this type of behavior in our nation's early history, it may be because the fears of the antifederalists remained alive until the Civil War. If there are more instances in recent years, it may be because a less well-read and less historically aware America has forgotten the warnings of antifederalists.

If you don't get an eerie feeling noticing the repeating, beyond rhyming, of history with the past eight months under Trump,  you are as stupid as the majority of the Roberts Court and the Republican-fascist majority in the Senate.    The same review by the same reviewer 41 years later could fill paragraphs, with little doubt including the crimes of Bush II and the Rehnquist Court's Bush v Gore decision.   Such things are coming far more often and in far more extreme forms as we go on in the Constitutional order. 

Anyone who has read much of what I've written might notice that I have always stressed the importance of equality as THE absolute foundation of legitimate democratic government,  leaving the far more widely noted matter of liberty in the background.   That's not because I don't value that thing which the antifederalists as well as the federalists were always harping on,  "liberty" but because, as the Constution has allowed all of those evils listed in that very partial list made by Paul Finkelman,  it has given "liberty" out in the most grotesquely unequal way,  over-complete liberty to rich, white men over the most basic rights of Black People, other People of Color, Women, Children,  WORKERS.  Note that what Trump is doing with federal troops now was done UNDER THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER to keep workers from organizing in the past, most of whom were poor, white men and women.    That was among the greatest evils of the Constitution, that it was founded and continues to promote inequality favoring the very same small minority which the framers favored.   Any time in our history when  partial progress towards equality and against the original reading of the Constitution was made,  in abolishing slavery through the civil war,  the Supreme Court can be counted on to knock it back if not down entirely as the Roberts Court is doing in nullifying the Voting Rights and  Civil Rights Acts.    That is the role that the Court has played AGAINST LAWS DULY ADOPTED BY THOSE SUBJECT TO THE VOTE, over and over again in our history.    That is why I have noted that the Supreme Court has been, since at least 1803 when it gave itself the Marbury power to do that,  MAKING THE PREDICTIONS OF "BRUTUS" THE LAW OF THE LAND.   

Now that the Roberts Court is outdoing the Taney Court, the Court of Plessey v Ferguson, the Courts that totally distorted the 14th Amendment out of any sense of its original meaning,  it's time to face the fact that no hard won progress towards equality or even rational government is going to be safe while the Supreme Court as it stands now retains its ability to do what was warned about in Brutus 15.

I will point out that the extreme rightists in the Roberts Court majority know that they cannot depend on what they want being had and secured through democracy,  maybe not even through the gerrrymandered, rigged-election Congress holding up through the various financial crises, recessions and depressions that have brought Democrats into the majority there, so they want the presidency to have the very powers of a king which the antifederalists warned it would always have a tendency to be.  It is one of the things that has been noted that third-world countries which followed a presidential system instead of a parliamentary system had a greater chance of becoming dictatorships.  I think it is worth considering that it was the antifederalists who predicted such a tendency,  not the federalists who won through the most dubious of means*. 

I'll call your attention to this part of Brutus 15 that I'll focus on more later. 

The power of this court is in many cases superior to that of the legislature. I have showed, in a former paper, that this court will be authorized to decide upon the meaning of the constitution, and that, not only according to the natural and obvious meaning of the words, but also according to the spirit and intention of it. In the exercise of this power they will not be subordinate to, but above the legislature. For all the departments of this government will receive their powers, so far as they are expressed in the constitution, from the people immediately, who are the source of power. The legislature can only exercise such powers as are given them by the constitution, they cannot assume any of the rights annexed to the judicial, for this plain reason, that the same authority which vested the legislature with their powers, vested the judicial with theirs — both are derived from the same source, both therefore are equally valid, and the judicial hold their powers independently of the legislature, as the legislature do of the judicial. — The supreme court then have a right, independent of the legislature, to give a construction to the constitution and every part of it, and there is no power provided in this system to correct their construction or do it away. If, therefore, the legislature pass any laws, inconsistent with the sense the judges put upon the constitution, they will declare it void; and therefore in this respect their power is superior to that of the legislature. In England the judges are not only subject to have their decisions set aside by the house of lords, for error, but in cases where they give an explanation to the laws or constitution of the country, contrary to the sense of the parliament, though the parliament will not set aside the judgment of the court, yet, they have authority, by a new law, to explain a former one, and by this means to prevent a reception of such decisions. But no such power is in the legislature. The judges are supreme — and no law, explanatory of the constitution, will be binding on them.

*  Read the review by Finkelman for only some of the examples of the rigging of the ratification process by the federalists.   Here's one that should remind you of recent events by the Republican-fascists in that most emblematic of "liberty loving" states,  Texas.

The third procedural issue, like the first, centered on the legality of the process. Storing asserts that the argument that the Convention lacked legal power to write a new Constitution "became less pertinent every day simply because the Constitution was in fact before the people."'  The process of ratification emerged as an even more dangerous factor, however. In Pennsylvania, for example, the state assembly voted to call a ratification convention before the Congress (meeting in New York at the time) had even transmitted the Constitution to the states.

On the penultimate day of the session, the pro-Constitution "Republicans, enjoying a temporary majority in the Assembly, pressed for immediate action.''50 Those opposed to the Constitution argued that a decision on when and how to choose delegates to a ratifying convention should be postponed until after the election of the new legislature set for the following month. The antifederalists advocated delay on the grounds that the Constitution was not officially before the assembly, and that the people of the state deserved the opportunity to read the proposed Constitution and vote for or against assembly members on the basis of that document. When the temporary federalist majority rejected these arguments, the antifederalist members of the assembly boycotted the last session in order to prevent a quorum. The next day, a mob forced two of the assemblymen back to the chamber in order to establish a quorum, and the call for a convention was approved. 

If this behavior on the part of the federalists reflected the tenor of politics to be expected under the new Constitution, it is understandable that many people feared an impending end to liberty.

The process of ratification of the Constitution was hardly less crooked in many of the other states,  Massachusetts - of which my state was then a part - was very much in line with the kind of vote rigging that Trump and the Republican-fascists want to make the law of the land right now. 

Consider Brutus 15 In Relation To The Republican-fascist Controlled Roberts Court

I DON'T KNOW if it has always been fashionable to cite "The Federalist Papers," those propaganda letters published under pseudonyms to sell the Constitution to a not altogether trusting country but it is one of those poses struck at least as often if not most often by those who want to assert some really awful idea of the Constitution as those who want to assert something good.  I don't know if my general skepticism of what I've come to think of as the "founders fetish" started with that but it certainly contributed to it.   I have never seen anyone make an honest argument as to why their understanding of things was to be given more weight than our understanding of things now that we have lived under the Constitution with all of its glaring evils - slavey, anti-egalitariaism, interpretations of it that are anti-democracy - as those have developed for more than two centuries.  The cult of the Constitution is an absurd worship of the work of often clearly corrupt men who inserted their own self-interest into the document over that of We the People who have had to live under what they gave us and those hard decades and centuries of experience which those guys in the late 18th century never had. 

Right now the Constitution is beyond crisis, with both the failure of the Republican-fascists in the Senate to remove Trump when he mounted an insurrection against the Constitutional order and the Roberts Court majority aided in preventing the judicial system holding him account for his crimes AND CREATED THE PRESIDENCY THEY HAD EVERY REASON TO BELIEVE THAT CRIMINAL WOULD REGAIN INTO A MONARCHY,  the Constitution has failed, utterly.   Far from the reassurances and anodyne claims of the Federalists and the other founders, many of the worst fears of the Antifederalists have come to pass and there is every reason to believe other of their warnings will prove to be far more realistic than those things we are taught in conventional civics are guaranteed by the Constitution.   I think in no place is this more true than in the Antifederalist letter of "Brutus 15" warning about the Supreme Court.  In some ways his fears were some of the first realized as the Marshall Court usurped exactly those powers to absolutely determine what the Constitution said, thus giving the Supreme Court the power to nullify laws adopted under the Constitution and to distort and at times entirely change the meaning of parts of the Constitution, itself - the history of the 14th Amendment at the hands of dishonest and corrupt Courts alone proves that case.  

I will note that in a lot of the commentary on the warnings of the Antifederalists will make light of many of those on the basis of past restraints when the Courts and even politicians valued their reputations and place in history, though it's clear that today's love of money and power over all controls all of that.  That was true in the past, as well, but, ironically, among those on the Court who make so much of a pose of their respecting of religion, it's clear they have no such moral inhibitions when they can claim the Constitution gives them leave to do the most clearly morally reprehensible things.   They know that the Republican-fascists in the Senate will protect them from, for example, having the clear financial bribery and payoffs to Alito and Thomas not to mention the Roberts Family and, with the terms of her book deal with its absurdly high and certainly never to be recouped advance, Coney-Barrett.  And those whited sepulchers in black robes are the worst Court in our history.  That doesn't mean that still worse might not be coming, as soon as the coming term as they openly insert themselves into the mid-term elections on the side of Republican-fascism as they did in Bush v Gore.   When you know you face no consequences, your free hand in just making it up as you go has no restraint as you will eventually feel no shame as you get used to just making it up. 

Here is what Brutus noted and predicted.  

28 February 1788

I said in my last number, that the supreme court under this constitution would be exalted above all other power in the government, and subject to no control. The business of this paper will be to illustrate this, and to show the danger that will result from it. I question whether the world ever saw, in any period of it, a court of justice invested with such immense powers, and yet placed in a situation so little responsible. Certain it is, that in England, and in the several states, where we have been taught to believe, the courts of law are put upon the most prudent establishment, they are on a very different footing.

The judges in England, it is true, hold their offices during their good behavior, but then their determinations are subject to correction by the house of lords; and their power is by no means so extensive as that of the proposed supreme court of the union. — I believe they in no instance assume the authority to set aside an act of parliament under the idea that it is inconsistent with their constitution.They consider themselves bound to decide according to the existing laws of the land, and never undertake to control them by adjudging that they are inconsistent with the constitution — much less are they vested with the power of giving an equitable construction to the constitution.

[The idea that the members of the U.S. Supreme Court hold thier offices during their good behavior, is a quaint and cynical joke after more than two centuries of the complete inability and unwillingness of the Congress to remove even those who have been as corrupt as could be.   Whether that is the one and only real attempt to exercise the - we now know mythical - impeachment power when a truly bad "justice" Salmon Chase wasn't any more removed by it than Donald Trump was when his blatant criminality included mounting an insurrection to overturn the very basis of legitimate government.  I'm expecting to spend some more time with this number of the unjustly ignored Anti-federalist Papers which contain some of the most important evidence that we are seeing exactly many and potentially all of the defects in the Constitution they noted being made manifest in the Roberts Court.    As, in fact, they were made manifest in most of the worst rulings of the Supreme Court starting with the Dred Scott decision.  In looking up the Anti-Federalists I've seen a lot of cases in which some of the warnings such as were given in this number of them that the Court could, in effect, nullify state government, are said to be unrealistic or over-reaching in some way.   That pooh-poohing of that worry is either one of two things, dishonest or ignorant.   The fact is that it was in the second use of the Court usurped Marbury power, the Dred Scott decision,  the first time a Court dared to impose that in a significant way nullified the power of state governments to outlaw slavery within the free states.   Anyone who believes that the Roberts Court feels in any way bound to not do the same thing as it suits them and their purposes might be one or the other, dishonest or ignorant but given what we're seeing from them virtually every week, in session or out, means only an idiot could believe they feel any kind of restraint.   I think those things which this particular Anti-federalist warned about are worth taking a lot more seriously than what the pious, conventionally minded expounder of civics or history would have said was within the bounds of reality even two years ago.]

The judges in England are under the control of the legislature, for they are bound to determine according to the laws passed by them. But the judges under this constitution will control the legislature, for the supreme court are authorized in the last resort, to determine what is the extent of the powers of the Congress; they are to give the constitution an explanation, and there is no power above them to set aside their judgment. The framers of this constitution appear to have followed that of the British, in rendering the judges independent, by granting them their offices during good behavior, without following the constitution of England, in instituting a tribunal in which their errors may be corrected; and without adverting to this, that the judicial under this system have a power which is above the legislative, and which indeed transcends any power before given to a judicial by any free government under heaven.

I do not object to the judges holding their commissions during good behavior. I suppose it a proper provision provided they were made properly responsible. But I say, this system has followed the English government in this, while it has departed from almost every other principle of their jurisprudence, under the idea, of rendering the judges independent — which, in the British constitution, means no more than that they hold their places during good behavior, and have fixed salaries — they have made the judges independent, in the fullest sense of the word. There is no power above them, to control any of their decisions. There is no authority that can remove them, and they cannot be controlled by the laws of the legislature. In short, they are independent of the people, of the legislature, and of every power under heaven. Men placed in this situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself. Before I proceed to illustrate the truth of these assertions, I beg liberty to make one remark — Though in my opinion the judges ought to hold their offices during good behavior, yet I think it is clear, that the reasons in favor of this establishment of the judges in England, do by no means apply to this country.

The great reason assigned, why the judges in Britain ought to be commissioned during good behavior, is this, that they may be placed in a situation, not to be influenced by the crown, to give such decisions, as would tend to increase its powers and prerogatives. While the judges held their places at the will and pleasure of the king, on whom they depended not only for their offices, but also for their salaries, they were subject to every undue influence. If the crown wished to carry a favorite point, to accomplish which the aid of the courts of law was necessary, the pleasure of the king would be signified to the judges. And it required the spirit of a martyr, for the judges to determine contrary to the king’s will. — They were absolutely dependent upon him both for their offices and livings. The king, holding his office during life, and transmitting it to his posterity as an inheritance, has much stronger inducements to increase the prerogatives of his office than those who hold their offices for stated periods, or even for life. Hence the English nation gained a great point, in favor of liberty. When they obtained the appointment of the judges, during good behavior, they got from the crown a concession, which deprived it of one of the most powerful engines with which it might enlarge the boundaries of the royal prerogative and encroach on the liberties of the people. But these reasons do not apply to this country, we have no hereditary monarch; those who appoint the judges do not hold their offices for life, nor do they descend to their children. The same arguments, therefore, which will conclude in favor of the tenor of the judge’s offices for good behavior, lose a considerable part of their weight when applied to the state and condition of America. But much less can it be shown, that the nature of our government requires that the courts should be placed beyond all account more independent, so much so as to be above control.

[ We have a situation today in which the Roberts Court majority has turned this on its head by JUDICIALLY PUTTING A CROWN ON THE HEAD OF THE WORST AMERICAN PRESIDENT IN OUR HISTORY,  DONALD TRUMP - a crown which the Constitution didn't put there and which will be rejected only by the best of those who are elected to the presidency as its powers are gleefully asserted and exercised by the very worst of American politicians and "reality TV" figures who are pushed by the most corrupt party and the billionaires and millionaires who dominate propaganda - as also permitted and tacitly encouraged by this and previous Supreme Courts.   The motives of the Roberts Court and the law-school theorists who dreamed up the unitary executive claims about the Constitution are clear THEY KNOW THAT THEY WON'T GET WHAT THEY WANT THROUGH EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY AND THEY PREFER A DICTATOR OF THEIR PARTY TO DEMOCRACY OF ANY KIND.   The liar-lawyers trained at the Ivys used to feel like they had to come up with some kind of a contorted reasoning out of past Court lore and assertion but the six Republican-fascists dominating the Court have given up that pretense.]  

I have said that the judges under this system will be independent in the strict sense of the word: To prove this I will show — That there is no power above them that can control their decisions, or correct their errors. There is no authority that can remove them from office for any errors or want of capacity, or lower their salaries, and in many cases their power is superior to that of the legislature.

1st. There is no power above them that can correct their errors or control their decisions — The adjudications of this court are final and irreversible, for there is no court above them to which appeals can lie, either in error or on the merits. — In this respect it differs from the courts in England, for there the house of lords is the highest court, to whom appeals, in error, are carried from the highest of the courts of law.

2d. They cannot be removed from office or suffer a diminution of their salaries, for any error in judgment or want of capacity.

It is expressly declared by the constitution, — “That they shall at stated times receive a compensation for their services which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.”

The only clause in the constitution which provides for the removal of the judges from office, is that which declares, that “the president, vice-president, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office, on impeachment for, and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” By this paragraph, civil officers, in which the judges are included, are removable only for crimes. Treason and bribery are named, and the rest are included under the general terms of high crimes and misdemeanors. — Errors in judgment, or want of capacity to discharge the duties of the office, can never be supposed to be included in these words, high crimes and misdemeanors. A man may mistake a case in giving judgment, or manifest that he is incompetent to the discharge of the duties of a judge, and yet give no evidence of corruption or want of integrity. To support the charge, it will be necessary to give in evidence some facts that will show, that the judges committed the error from wicked and corrupt motives.

[The removal by impeachment of the most blatantly corrupt Supreme Court "justice" like that of the most blatantly criminal president - and we have both Trump I and Bush II as examples of those within fresh living memory - is a Constitutional fiction.   Since it constituted the last hope of those who believed that it would prevent the dangers that such as Robert Yates saw in the Constitution - dangers which became clear as soon as the first instance of a "justice" committing impeachable acts NOT being removed from office, Salmon Chase - every evil predicted by the Antifederalists not happening has depended entirely on a sense of those on the court that they might go too far.   With the refusal of the Republican-fascists under Mitch McConnell refusing to impeach Trump, not only the first time but also the second time WHEN IT WAS DUE TO HIS ATTEMPTED PUTSCH AGAINST THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER the Roberts Court has no reason to believe that anything they do will lever be too far.  That failure to remove Trump will go down as THE fatal failure of the Constitution and everything the Roberts Court did after that, including making Trump II president as the legal system didn't hold him to the account that McConnell gave as the safety switch didn't work, flows directly from that failure of the Constitution.] 

NOTE:  I will be commenting on this more but I'm going to give you the rest of it without comment for now. 

3d. The power of this court is in many cases superior to that of the legislature. I have showed, in a former paper, that this court will be authorized to decide upon the meaning of the constitution, and that, not only according to the natural and obvious meaning of the words, but also according to the spirit and intention of it. In the exercise of this power they will not be subordinate to, but above the legislature. For all the departments of this government will receive their powers, so far as they are expressed in the constitution, from the people immediately, who are the source of power. The legislature can only exercise such powers as are given them by the constitution, they cannot assume any of the rights annexed to the judicial, for this plain reason, that the same authority which vested the legislature with their powers, vested the judicial with theirs — both are derived from the same source, both therefore are equally valid, and the judicial hold their powers independently of the legislature, as the legislature do of the judicial. — The supreme court then have a right, independent of the legislature, to give a construction to the constitution and every part of it, and there is no power provided in this system to correct their construction or do it away. If, therefore, the legislature pass any laws, inconsistent with the sense the judges put upon the constitution, they will declare it void; and therefore in this respect their power is superior to that of the legislature. In England the judges are not only subject to have their decisions set aside by the house of lords, for error, but in cases where they give an explanation to the laws or constitution of the country, contrary to the sense of the parliament, though the parliament will not set aside the judgment of the court, yet, they have authority, by a new law, to explain a former one, and by this means to prevent a reception of such decisions. But no such power is in the legislature. The judges are supreme — and no law, explanatory of the constitution, will be binding on them.

From the preceding remarks, which have been made on the judicial powers proposed in this system, the policy of it may be fully developed.

I have, in the course of my observation on this constitution, affirmed and endeavored to show, that it was calculated to abolish entirely the state governments, and to melt down the states into one entire government, for every purpose as well internal and local, as external and national. In this opinion the opposers of the system have generally agreed — and this has been uniformly denied by its advocates in public. Some individuals, indeed, among them, will confess, that it has this tendency, and scruple not to say, it is what they wish; and I will venture to predict, without the spirit of prophecy, that if it is adopted without amendments, or some such precautions as will ensure amendments immediately after its adoption, that the same gentlemen who have employed their talents and abilities with such success to influence the public mind to adopt this plan, will employ the same to persuade the people, that it will be for their good to abolish the state governments as useless and burdensome.

Perhaps nothing could have been better conceived to facilitate the abolition of the state governments than the constitution of the judicial. They will be able to extend the limits of the general government gradually, and by insensible degrees, and to accommodate themselves to the temper of the people. Their decisions on the meaning of the constitution will commonly take place in cases which arise between individuals, with which the public will not be generally acquainted; one adjudication will form a precedent to the next, and this to a following one. These cases will immediately affect individuals only; so that a series of determinations will probably take place before even the people will be informed of them. In the mean time all the art and address of those who wish for the change will be employed to make converts to their opinion. The people will be told, that their state officers, and state legislatures are a burden and expense without affording any solid advantage, for that all the laws passed by them, might be equally well made by the general legislature. If to those who will be interested in the change, be added, those who will be under their influence, and such who will submit to almost any change of government, which they can be persuaded to believe will ease them of taxes, it is easy to see, the party who will favor the abolition of the state governments would be far from being inconsiderable. — In this situation, the general legislature, might pass one law after another, extending the general and abridging the state jurisdictions, and to sanction their proceedings would have a course of decisions of the judicial to whom the constitution has committed the power of explaining the constitution. — If the states remonstrated, the constitutional mode of deciding upon the validity of the law, is with the supreme court, and neither people, nor state legislatures, nor the general legislature can remove them or reverse their decrees.

Had the construction of the constitution been left with the legislature, they would have explained it at their peril; if they exceed their powers, or sought to find, in the spirit of the constitution, more than was expressed in the letter, the people from whom they derived their power could remove them, and do themselves right; and indeed I can see no other remedy that the people can have against their rulers for encroachments of this nature. A constitution is a compact of a people with their rulers; if the rulers break the compact, the people have a right and ought to remove them and do themselves justice; but in order to enable them to do this with the greater facility, those whom the people choose at stated periods, should have the power in the last resort to determine the sense of the compact; if they determine contrary to the understanding of the people, an appeal will lie to the people at the period when the rulers are to be elected, and they will have it in their power to remedy the evil; but when this power is lodged in the hands of men independent of the people, and of their representatives, and who are not, constitutionally, accountable for their opinions, no way is left to control them but with a high hand and an outstretched arm.

Brutus

The White Supremacist Is Always Trying To Go Off Topic With The Usual Republican-fascist Tropes

 “Slander?” You wouldn’t even post the fact that Margaret Sanger was an ardent eugenicist.

What I wouldn't do is let you bring entirely irrelevant right-wing talking points into a discussion of something else.   If there's one thing that the city politician in question has never, ever been accused of it is that intellectual crime so very adjacent to your emotional ideological side.   As a progressive Jew he's probably as repulsed by it as I am. 

But I don't believe in letting opportunities given by my enemies going to waste so let me point out what I've posted here in the past.

If you did what I suggested you do,  search the archives of what I've posted you'd see I have posted about her eugenics in a far more serious context, her nearness to those who advocated state murder of entire classes of People.  

Unfortunate, but also there, are Perkins' letters from and to Margaret Sanger, from the period in which she was active in eugenics, unfortunately associating birth control during that period, with eugenics and implications of racism.  Birth control activism in the modern period certainly has left that association, promoting personal choice on the basis of individual autonomy, especially that of women.  It would be a disaster to fall for the attempt to turn Margaret Sanger into a millstone for the right to birth control as Darwin has become for today's evolutionary science.  Both should be left to the dead past.

That's me, in a post I posted twice, according to my archive search.  Here's a passage I quoted and cited:

Grant’s views were widely shared among a hard core of leading eugenicists such as the biologist and American eugenics organizer Charles Davenport and Lothrop Stoddard, the Boston Brahmin political scientist and leading anti­Bolshevik who labeled the Jew as “the cause of world unrest.” Many such ideas also enjoyed support among many liberals, such as the government chemist and Pure Food and Drug Act pioneer Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, and civil rights lawyer Clarence Darrow, who said it was just to “chloroform unfit children . . .

[Note:  In my too early morning writing and editing gave the wrong link,  here's the right one. I'll leave the wrong one above in because it reinforces a point I made here this morning.]

A third mention of her was merely a reference to her prosecution for distributing birth control information, to condemn Charles Darwin's advocacy of eugenics.   If there's one theme I've gone into in detail, it is to condemn eugenics. 

To support that interpretation, I noted his letter to Charles Bradlaugh, the most famous British atheist of the time, saying if Darwin went to court to testify, as Bradlaugh requested him to, in the case brought against Bradlaugh and Annie Besant for distributing information on birth control, he would testify for the prosecution.  Darwin sounded not much different from those who prosecuted Margaret Sanger for essentially the same crime.  So much for Darwin as the champion of women's emancipation and self-determination.  Not to mention 21st century notions of liberalism.

I wrote that as well. 

I believe you should have known this while you were trolling me under a different name while mostly keeping your white supremacist inclinations more in check.   If I were like you I'd accuse you of opposition to the use of birth control, though I don't know what you think about that so I haven't done that.   It wouldn't surprise me if I found out you supported some forms of EUGENICS OF THE KIND THAT THE TRUMP REGIME IS CARRYING OUT RIGHT NOW WITH THE SUPPORT OF THE REPUBLICAN-FASCIST CAUCUS IN THE CONGRESS AND THE FASCIST ROBERTS COURT IS ALLOWING RIGHT NOW.   Both the kind of eugenics through negligence and allowing People to starve to death, die of untreated illness, anti-vaccination (shades of Darwin) and exclusion from the country by racist policy (which I am certain you support).    I suspect you would support the reimposition of the 1924 racist anti-immigration act that would, ironically enough, have kept the family of your soul-mate Steven Miller out of the country.  I have every confidence you and the Temu Goebbles share that in common. 

The White Supremacist Who Trolls Me Reacting To My Morning Post

 brings up a gay Democratic politician who holds a city office WHO HAS NEVER BEEN ACCUSED OF PEDOPHILE SEXUAL ABUSE - so of course I will not post his slander.   I could give him a long, long list of Republican-fascists who have been credibly accused of child rape and molestation as well as those who have been prosecuted and convicted of everything from child rape to having pedo-porn.    

Of course Donald Trump has been credibly accused.  You know,  Jeffrey Epstein's best friend for a number of years,  whose first wife was pals with Epstein's fellow child molester and groomer, Ghislaine Maxwell.   One of the young women who was groomed by Ghislaine Maxwell said the first Mrs. Trump was with Maxwell when she first tried to entice her to get involved with Maxwell's and Epstein's child peddling operation.   She said Maxwell gave her a piece of junk jewelry that Ivana was peddling on the Home Shopping Network - she said it was such junk she threw it away.   And Trump and his lawyers are the ones negotiating Maxwell lying about Trump being innocent in exchange for putting her in Club Fed and, no doubt,  will get the pedophile rapist, abductor and peddler a pardon.  It was Trump's former Labor Secretary who gave Epstein the sweetheart deal,  his AG whose daddy gave him his first opportunity at that elite prep school,  Trump who used to be the only other man at parties full of, otherwise, teenage girls.   Clearly the current policy of the Republican Party is to enable him doing that because that's exactly what they're doing. 

I've told you before that I don't post slander and libel against third parties.   As for Nambla, I searched for a list of Democrats who were involved with that and I can't find any accusations.   I couldn't find anyone in the short list of named supporters I assembled from online sources who was even a member of the party at one time.   Tell me who you're accusing?    You're really not very good at coming up with flack.   Try searching my blog to see what I've said about that bunch in the past.  

Update:  Simps must have a guilty conscience

You frickin'  idiot,  I did that so People would know THAT I DIDN'T MEAN YOU WHEN I SAID "THE WHITE SUPREMACIST WHO TROLLS ME."    I think you've got a definite bias for white-bread pop musicians over Black artists which may be merely bad taste but I wouldn't accuse you of white supremacy.    Maybe what Norman Finkelstein calls "Jewish supremacy" but it's really not my call to make on that>  Definitely NYC area supremacy, which, by the way, is hardly the same thing.   I've know lots of gentiles from the lesser greater NYC area who are as chauvinistic about that piddling distinction as you are.  

So, here, for any Eschaton eejits who may have looked at that post (yeah, right, the Eschatots bothering to find out what someone actually said,  they don't even bother with what someone actually said two comments away from their whinging and whining about it)  I did not intend to imply that Simps was a white supremacist,  though I will state that he's a semi-literate-post-literate idiot and habitual liar.   If I believed in the same current Darwinian fundamentalist superstition that he does I might say "congenital" but I doubt such character defects are inherited,  they're learned. 

Update 2:  The white supremacist wants to slander the politician in question over a law he proposed that sought to regularize the legal status between vaginal sex and oral and anal sex.   The Republican-fascist, white supremacist, typical of his kind wants to turn that into some kind of promotion of gay sex.  What he doesn't seem to realize is that most of the anal and oral sex that happens in the world happens between male and females,  by any kind of survey evidence in the matter.     The politician he targets didn't try to lower the age of consent for sexual activity - the presumably majority straight legislative body did that in the original law lower than I'd think it should be set, all he asked is that it be regularized for other forms of sex.   If the white supremacist wants to object to that law without the slander against a named politician WHO HAS NEVER BEEN ACCUSED OF ANY KIND OF SUPPORT FOR PEDOPHILE SEXUAL ABUSE except by him,  I might agree to discuss it with him.   

The White Supremacist (Not Simps) Who Trolls Me

 is still whining that I "don't understand football."  

But he still hasn't said what I said about it is inaccurate.   

Like there's something more than meets the eye about football that requires an effort to understand it.   If there were more to it,  it wouldn't be a popular entertainment.   I suppose if it were a few years ago he'd be accusing me of not "understanding" Friends or Sex In The City.    Actually,  Simps has accused me of not understanding "Animal House" and any number of other brainless American entertainments so they're matched on that.  Simps gets worked up when I diss American football, too,  but, like I said, that's more of a daddy thing for him. 

Admit it, you like watching zaftig guys in spandex groping and slamming each other.  You enjoy watching the second most homoerotic sport there is,  right after wrestling.   I suspect that you're not the straight guy you like to think you are.   And, like TV addled Americans, you like it slow enough so you can follow it.  If I wanted to watch fat guys talking about and doing nothing consequential I'd go watch Republicans at some chain diner.  The action is faster there. 

I'm Not Dropping It This Time - I'll keep posting this a couple of times a week or more as the next as brought to you by the Roberts Court and Republican-fascists mass murder of school children happens

 IF YOU DON'T SUPPORT GUN CONTROL IN 2025 YOU ARE IN FAVOR OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS. PERIOD.  

Sent To Me - Real Civics Under Republican-fascism

  Update:  Here's one I found on my own

Carla Bley Band - Can’t Get My Motor to Start , Live at Livehouse Nacht, 1980

Can't get my motor to start

Can't get my motor to start

Can't get my motor to start

Can't get my motor to start

Can't you get it to go?

Is your battery low?

No, I really don't think so

Try pullin out on the choke

Try lookin' under the hood

Try pullin out on the choke

Try lookin' under the hood

Lookin under the hood

Never did any good

The choke must be broke

Try beatin' down with your feet

Looks like she's startin' to crank

Let's take the gasoline out

Try puttin' beer in the tank

Bring the beer over here

'Cause I need it to steer

Try pullin out all the wires

Try stuffin' cheese in the cracks

Try dynamitin' the tank

Smash all the glass with an ax

Do you have any grease?

Pour it over the seats

What did you do to my car?

What did you do to my car?

What did you do to my car?

What did you do to my car?

Well we took it apart

But we can't make it start

We wanna go for a ride

Let's push it over the hill

We wanna go for a ride

Let's push it over the hill

Better not get inside

'Cause she's startin' to slide

I remember hearing this one on the radio as her band performed it in Boston,  I think around this same time.   As I remember she was writing a number of satirical songs making fun of punk rock.   I didn't expect punk junk to last long but it's been about fifty years of the celebration of stupidity.  

But I Won't Lie To You About That

AS KEITH OLBERMANN  points out it is Trump and his boiler room of con jobbers who have been feeding the speculation that he's about to kick the bucket.   The "I want to get to heaven" FUCKING FUNDRAISING E-MAILS!!!  are all the cover anyone speculating that the obese old degenerate is about to die needs to make those speculations.   And on top of that there was the totally fake golfing trip with no footage of him except his fat-ass in a golf cart - and how do we know that obscure image wasn't of a body-double?  To sink to the Republican-fascist influencer level of shit.  

I can't say it as well as Olbermann does so I'd recommend listening to him before I react to this story. 

I once caused a minor stir on a liberalish blog by saying that if every Nazi spontaneously turned blue and died it wouldn't upset me.   I'd just read some accounts of them murdering Jews and Poles and Roma and other totally innocent, unarmed civilians.  And the actual day I made that comment Nazis were still entirely unacceptable by both of the two major parties in the United States - thanks to Trump Nazism is mainstream and fully represented on two of the three big cabloids in the US.   

I will admit that I will not shed a tear when Trump does die, though I may shed quite a few when the social-disease that currently goes by the name of J.D. Vance takes over for him.   As I've said so far fewer than a half a dozen times considering what the Roberts' Court has done for the stupidest, most criminal, most vulgar and ignorant clown of a Unitary Executive, made such by the Roberts Court, imagine what they'll do for J. D. Vance.    And that's not what the American free press will do for him, falling all over themselves to genuflect to the putrid tool of Thiel declaring a 3 and a half year honeymoon before they do their best to get him elected in 28.   At least Trump will be dead, which is probably the closest he will ever come to committing an act of virtue - not unlike Benedict XVI's resigning from the papacy, the only both important and decent thing he did as pope.  

There is nothing wrong in hoping for the removal by natural causes of an evil person who is actively doing evil unimpeded by the degenerate legal system and unopposed by the degenerate free press.   I have never been sentimental about the fact that we will all die and that it's a good thing for an evil person to die to remove them from harming People and other Living Things.    Trump is the most evil of American presidents,  George W. Bush was likely the second most evil one and the list of others is a long one.   There are remarkably few American presidents who were and have been anything like a moral human being.   Even the most moral of them did questionable things,  Jimmy Carter did some of those,  LBJ,  FDR,  Kennedy, Lincoln,  I'm rapidly running out of names for that list.   

I will admit that I would have been among those who rejoiced at the death of Roger B. Taney - the previous worst Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, eclipsed by the even greater darkness that is John Roberts - he was a thoroughly evil man in a dangerously powerful public office.   I would have celebrated the death of Hitler if I had been born yet and conscious of his existence.    I'd not have shed a tear to hear of the executions of the Nazis and members of the Japanese Imperial Government and been in favor of holding the emperor of Japan responsible for what he did in the many, many Nazi level crimes he OKed in Asia and elsewhere.   I would have been in favor of that if it had been done any time during my lifetime as he was PRed into a quaint old granddad with a science hobby.   Though by that time he had no actual power, unlike Trump right now.  

My question for the media is why you didn't have a fraction of the condemnation for those who called for, by implication or explicitly, the murder of Kamala Harris as she was campaigning for president - INCLUDING THOSE WITHIN THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN INCLUDING TRUMP, HIMSELF.    They were calling for assassination, not for her to die of natural causes her own self-indulgence.   Name one of this Trump isn't a life-long practitioner of, pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth, literally the Seven Deadly Sins.   If he finally, in his senectitude finally succumbs to them,  well all I can say is I'm now in favor of what I was not, an age limit on all federal office holders and I'd put it at 70 for the presidency and 75 for members of Congress.   And it wasn't Trump who made me convinced of that it was Ruth Bader Ginsburg and she wasn't senile and corrupt, just fallibly unable to admit she needed to retire so a Democrat could have named her replacement.  I have the feeling that's more common among lawyers than among normal human beings.   In truth,  I was convinced of the need of a term limit for Supreme Court decades before then so she would have been term-limited out well, well before she died in office. 

If Trump stepped down from power he would enter into the realm of those who I will merely not be upset about when their vile life is finally over, as I felt when Reagan or Nixon died.  While he holds the power he uses to kill and maim and harm and destroy he makes the end of that a worthy desideratum.   The entire American media will lie to you about that, the entire political establishment will,  but I won't lie to you about that. 

Didn't Intend To Post This Till I Saw The Video

I HAPPENED ACROSS this 2011 video from the Canadian Fifth Estate program newly posted on Youtube.  It's about an aspiring serial killer who tried to kill one person he lured to a garage he rented through an online dating app, only to have the guy escape but who then killed another man he lured there the same way a week later.  

He was led to try to live out his his fantasy through his obsession with the cable-TV series Dexter.   Luckily for everyone except his victims,  the man he murdered had done what the first one hadn't, he'd shared the details of his anticipated blind date with friends, including the directions he'd been given to the location of their meeting, at that same garage.   As one of the detectives who solved the case said,  if the victim hadn't done that they likely wouldn't have caught him as quickly as they did.  No doubt he'd have been encouraged to try to live out the cable-TV fantasy of becoming a successful serial killer.   

Watching it reminded me of this piece I wrote almost nineteen years ago.  I know I said that the last rerun was the other day but we've still got one more day before Labor day so I'm going to repost that piece.   No one has yet addressed what I brought up then, which concentrated on the lurid and putrid cable TV "true crime" series that lovingly went over the details of how horrific crimes were committed and how the police caught the killers - no doubt instructing the would-be murderers hiding in the audience share how they might do it and get away with it.   I doubt any writer, director or producer of such entertainment much bothered to wonder about the instructional nature of their videos,  and if they didn't you can be sure that the executives putting it on didn't care about that.   No doubt they'd be happy to have those look at it as a how-to show up in the numbers they could show the advertisers.    If someone sued them I'm sure the "civil liberties" lawyers and the scumbags on the Supreme Court would say that all of that was beside the point due to the First Amendment.   I know their moves and know that they're all goddamned liars and frauds. *

Note:  I was still using a pseudonym online back then.  

Saturday, October 07, 2006

The Murderers Hiding In The Audience Share

Posted by olvlzl

In the news coverage of the murders of the school girls in Pennsylvania there was talk about the similarities between the actions of the murderer and those of the man who took hostages and murdered a school girl in Colorado the week before. One report I heard went into quite a lot of detail about the similarities, a lot more detail than could have been useful to their audience. They’ve got to fill those 24 hours with something. I guess. But, considering what they were saying about copy-cat crime, you would think that it might have occurred to them that a particular segment of their audience might have found their descriptions very useful. I wonder why none of them seemed to think it was possible that some murderer of the near or distant future might have found their information quite instructive.

What is the use of crime reporting? It shouldn’t be useful for the trial, that’s certainly not the role of reporters but of police and prosecutors. Nancy Grace might be confused about that but real reporters shouldn’t be. Ideally jurors wouldn’t have heard any news reporting that could prejudice their decision about the evidence presented in trial. The right to a fair trial, both for the accused and the public, is clearly more important than whatever right the casual observer has to know most of the details as soon as possible.

There is some public interest served in reporting some facts of these crimes. The public needs to know that crimes are being committed and the nature of those crimes especially if the criminal is still at large. But there is a level of detail that goes past what is needed and risks becoming prurient or even dangerous.

Most people can listen to the sordid details and speculations generated by the cabloids with only their character damaged but pretending they are the only ones who could be listening is willful ignorance. The old justification for allowing pornography was true, most people who consume it don’t imitate it. But a study of the effects on the general population wouldn’t show much that was useful. It is the people who do commit horrible crimes who need to be studied. Where did they get the ideas for their crimes, especially those that don’t seem to be original ideas. What is the copy-cat effect of the crime shows on TV?

Is there a significant effect? Are there people susceptible to imitating the crimes spelled out in such loving detail on A&E and Discovery? On the cabloid news stations? And if there is an effect proven beyond a preponderance of the evidence what use should be made of that fact? I don’t know.

But since they are the ones who are always talking about copy-cat murderers don’t they have a responsibility to take that into account when they are structuring their dramatic recitations of these crimes? They certainly do write the shows for dramatic effect, to follow a saleable narrative. Can they make them profitable and responsible at the same time? Maybe they need to look for a good model of responsible reporting. They won’t find much of that on American TV outside of Bill Moyers.

*  Anticipating the "First Amendmenty" types response to this I looked to see if there had been other admirers of Dexter who had killed and found this list at Wikipedia, with links.  Notice that the case in the video is among those listed. 

Association with real crimes

Several comparisons and connections to the TV show and its protagonist have been drawn during criminal prosecutions. In 2009, 17-year-old Andrew Conley said the show inspired him to strangle his ten-year-old brother.[46] In an affidavit filed in Ohio County court, in Indiana, police said Conley confessed that he "watches a show called Dexter on Showtime, about a serial killer, and he stated, 'I feel just like him.'"[47]

In Spain, on July 25, 2009, a man and his girlfriend killed his brother and pregnant partner. The man owned the complete Dexter series DVD collection and the methods used to avoid leaving blood traces were inspired by the show.[48]

On November 4, 2010, in Sweden, a 21-year-old woman known as Dexter-mördaren ("The Dexter killer") or Dexter-kvinnan ("The Dexter woman") killed her 49-year-old father by stabbing him in the heart.[49] During questioning, the woman compared herself to Dexter Morgan, and a picture of the character would appear on her phone when her father called her. In July 2011, she was sentenced to seven years in prison.[50]

In Norway, Shamrez Khan hired Håvard Nyfløt to kill Faiza Ashraf. Nyfløt claimed that Dexter inspired him, and he wanted to kill Khan in front of Faiza, similar to the television series, to "stop evil".[51]

Association was established between Mark Twitchell, of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, during his first-degree murder trial, and the character of Dexter Morgan. After weeks of testimony and gruesome evidence presented in court, Twitchell was found guilty of the planned and deliberate murder of 38-year-old Johnny Altinger on April 12, 2011.[52]

British teenager Steven Miles, 17, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on October 2, 2014, for stabbing and dismembering his girlfriend Elizabeth Rose Thomas, 17, in Oxted, Surrey. Police discovered Thomas' body on January 24, 2014, and determined the cause of death to be a stab wound to the back. Miles was arrested on suspicion of murder. Miles pled guilty to the crime on September 9. According to Surrey Police, Miles had dismembered Thomas' body following her death, wrapping up limbs in plastic wrap, and had attempted to clean up the crime scene before he was found by a family member. Miles had been reported to be obsessed with the television series Dexter. Miles reportedly had an alter ego named Ed, whom Miles claims made him carry out the murder.[53][54][55]

On January 11, 2022, in New Orleans, Louisiana, 34-year-old Benjamin Beale was arrested after police discovered a decapitated body inside a freezer in a painted bus.[56] The body was confirmed, over a week later, to be that of Julia Dardar, a missing mother of two children.[57] Investigators soon discovered a Dexter profile painting with guns and knives.[58]

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Chloé Hung - Three Women Of Swatow

 

Three Women Of Swatow

When Mother accidentally kills her husband, three generations of women must come together to solve a bloody situation. This darkly comedic play takes a look at the legacy of abuse, the power of family, and how to prevent the resurrection of a headless chicken.

This play has an interesting history,  it was all set to be given a theatrical production when Covid closed the theater,  the CBC's PlayMe gave it a "cleaned up" production apparently with the playwright's approval which is what this is.  

It's pretty darkly humorous.  Maybe it's even more so for a vegan after being a vegetarian for more than half a century. 

America, Are You Really OK With Letting Them Get Your Children Killed For Their Profit?

IF YOU DON'T SUPPORT GUN CONTROL IN 2025 YOU ARE IN FAVOR OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS. PERIOD.  And it is clear that the majority on the Supreme Court do favor school shootings, all of the Republican-fascist party does in both federal and state governments.   If they didn't favor them they'd have done something effective to stop them and they haven't even gone through the fucking motions of doing that, they've floated the slogans made for them to float by the gun industry. 

It's been twenty-six years and counting since the Columbine school shooting and every year has more of them, going from high schools and college level to elementary and kindergartens.  The Republican-fascists have not only done nothing, the Supreme Court under Republican-fascist majorities have made things far worse.

They are joined by a few rural Democrats and Independents.  

They clearly are in favor of school shootings over doing anything to stop school shootings.  That is the truth that the goddamned American free-press doesn't tell because it's been a useful tool to gull low-information voters and gun nutter yahoos, the kind who see the TV drama way of tidy, audience satisfying endings with some actor playing a courageous guy with a gun ending things and they figure that's how things happen in real life.   The media clearly favors school shootings instead of something to be done about it because the Republican-fascist party keeps them from having to pay taxes on their seven, eight, and more incomes.

Well, I'm not going to lie about that because children keep getting killed in the United States under the law as it is and is allowed to stay now.  That law made far worse than before the Heller Decision  - May Scalia be burning in hell as I write this - under the most corrupt Chief Justice in the history of the corrupt Supreme Court,  John Roberts.  

America's financial elite, the Northern financial elite as well as the slave power, have corrupted this country since the start.  Mass media and certainly the legal racket are in on that now.   They have always gotten lots of us killed and maimed,  that's a good part of the real as opposed to phony-mythologized history of this country.  I'm not lying about that anymore and I will make it my business to tell that forbidden truth continually as long as the status quo stands.  

America, they're killing your children,  are you really OK with that?   You seem to be, so far. 

Kurt Rosenwinkel & Gerald Clayton

 

00:00 Pensativa

12:46 Openhanded Reach

Two of the best living musicians.  

CARLA BLEY Band - I´m A Mineralist , Live at Livehouse Nacht, 1980

 

Carla Bley was writing some of the best music and also some of the funniest songs written in the 20th and early 21st centuries.  And what a great band she put together for that tour. 

I'm Told I "Don't Understand' American Football

WHAT IN MY description of the glacial pace of an American football game wasn't an actual description of how it is played?  Leaving aside, for a second, the violence,  there is the interminable delays as a bunch of referees decide what just happened (often with screaming fits by players and coaches which figure into the lengths of such delays),  the players huddling to talk about what they're going to do, which takes time,  both sides lining up and waiting for the bashing into each other to start,  the twenty to thirty seconds that they actually "play" the game,  often a false start as a referee notes someone broke the rules even before they resumed, etc.    

I understand that in a typical game of three or more hours less than a twenty minutes of it is actually playing the game.   Here's a description I found online in less than twenty seconds:

The NFL’s popularity is all the more remarkable when you inspect the fare it has to offer each week on television. An average professional football game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, but if you tally up the time when the ball is actually in play, the action amounts to a mere 11 minutes.

It's a sport for the attention deficient, the TV addled, the drunk, the not too bright, etc.  And that's before you get to the murder and mayhem and intentional brain injury.   I will, for this post at least, not go far into the clear homoerotic elements of American football and the fact that many if not most of those straight guys who get all warm and obsessed with it are in denial that that's what they're watching.  I remember about two decades ago pointing that out on one of the liberalish blogs I frequented and one of the guys there said that I had to stop because he was about to puke, clearly realizing that I'd just forced him to face what he watched it for.  

AND I'M ENTIRELY JUSTIFIED TO CALL THAT BRAIN INJURY INTENTIONAL BECAUSE ANYTHING YOU DO KNOWING THE CONSEQUENCES OF DOING IT INCLUDE SERIOUS BRAIN INJURY IN ALMOST ALL OF THE PLAYERS MEANS THAT THAT BRAIN INJURY IS INTENTIONALLY CAUSED.   It's exactly the same case with the epidemic of school shootings in relation to the American Supreme Court, the Congress, the president, state governments, local governments DOING NOT A SINGLE THING TO ACTUALLY PREVENT THOSE SCHOOL SHOOTING BY BANNING THE GUNS AND THE GUN OWNERSHIP THAT IS THE INTRINSIC ASPECT OF THAT SHOOTING THAT CAN BE CONTROLLED AS MOST MORE CIVILIZED COUNTRIES HAVE PROVEN BY THEIR OWN LAWS AND THE RESULTANT RELATIVE RARITY OF SUCH MASS MURDERS IN THOSE COUNTRIES.   THEY APPROVE OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS.  IF THEY DIDN'T THEY'D DO WHAT WOULD STOP THEM AND THEY WON'T.   And you do, too. 

I don't know if anyone has speculated or researched the possibility that Little Bobby Kennedy may have suffered early head trauma from his families' famous football games but, along with his history of drug use and the general debility that being a life long liar-lawyer causes,  it might help explain not only his derangement but, also, why he's such a total asshole now. 

I mention that because you might want to copy this paper The First Concussion Crisis: Head Injury and Evidence in Early American Football to see not only has the deadly effects of American football been known of since the early years when the rich boys at the elite universities and colleges were inventing the putrid game,  but that it has been being covered up by the American elite for that entire time, too.   You might want to copy it, as I have, before Little Bobby takes down the NIH because its publications may impact his future earning potential when he goes back to ambulance chasing at his ambulance chasing law firm.  Knowing most people don't follow up on links to papers,  I'll give you the abstract:

In the early 21st century, sports concussion has become a prominent public health problem, popularly labeled “The Concussion Crisis.” Football-related concussion contributes much of the epidemiological burden and inspires much of the public awareness. Though often cast as a recent phenomenon, the crisis in fact began more than a century ago, as concussions were identified among footballers in the game’s first decades. This early concussion crisis subsided—allowing the problem to proliferate—because work was done by football’s supporters to reshape public acceptance of risk. They appealed to an American culture that permitted violence, shifted attention to reforms addressing more visible injuries, and legitimized football within morally reputable institutions. Meanwhile, changing demands on the medical profession made practitioners reluctant to take a definitive stance. Drawing on scientific journals, public newspapers, and personal letters of players and coaches, this history of the early crisis raises critical questions about solutions being negotiated at present.

Of that note these sentences:

This early concussion crisis subsided—allowing the problem to proliferate—because work was done by football’s supporters to reshape public acceptance of risk. They appealed to an American culture that permitted violence, shifted attention to reforms addressing more visible injuries, and legitimized football within morally reputable institutions. 

I have frequently commented on the emetic character of the pure, 100% high fructose corn syrup sentimentalism and pseudo-morality that surrounds American football.  It's one of the foremost monuments of complete PR bullshit that we have. he role that a sales job was behind that denial of the actual character and consequences of American football, appealing to the worst of American's and, human beings, actually, character flaws was a big part in peddling the violent, vulgar, corrupt game as something of transcendent moral value.    It's 100% a PR con job.   I will state that the fact that America's Catholic colleges and universities adopted it and made it one of the foremost public faces of some of its most eminent schools speaks to the moral corruption that was endemic in the institutional Church during that period and persisting until today.   That such institutions as Notre Dame University wouldn't dare drop football because they know there would be a revolt by the paying alumni that would seriously impact their endowment is an exposure of that continued moral corruption right there in the very heart of the institutional Church. 

And I have not commented much on the actual character of many if not most players of American football, their rates of involvement in crimes,  rape among the most obvious of those, but also violence,  intimidation, threatening, violent tantrums, property destruction, . . .  It seemed to me even back when I was in high school that the 100% white-male football team were about the only organized gang of thugs in town.   While some of them were OK, most of them were complete assholes.   Assholes who in many of the cases I know from living in the same town I grew up in, became sleazy businessmen and not infrequently spouse battering assholes who frequently became quite obese.   That's the kind of "character" that football builds in a majority of the cases I've observed. 

So,  "V,"  as you can see,  I do understand American football.   Just not what you saps who bought the PR and deny why you want to watch big-ass guys in spandex grappling and slamming each other to the ground, crouching in unmistakable gay-porn poses - and that's not to mention the explicitly and unacknowledged sexual vocabulary of football commentary - would claim as "an understanding" of the game.   I seem to understand it a lot better than you do, or, indeed, most of its fans other than some gay men who are honest as to why they watch it.    I think they're morally depraved, too, by the way, but because of the violence, not because they acknowledge the sexual content of it.   I generally don't much talk to them, at least not during the football season.   Football is bad for gay men's character.  

CARLA BLEY Band - Wrong Key Donkey , Live at Livehouse Nacht, 1980

CARLA BLEY Band - Wrong Key Donkey , Live at Livehouse Nacht, Koln, Germany, 1980

Featuring:

Carla Bley - organ, piano

Michael Mantler - trumpet

Carlos Ward - reeds

Gary Valente - trombone

Vincent Chancey - french horn

Gary Windo - reeds

Earl McIntyre - tuba, bass trombone

Steve Swallow - bass

Arturo O'Farrill - piano, organ

D. Sharpe - drums

I'm Sure Susan Collins Is Concerned As J.D. Vance Pretends To Pray About It But

IF YOU DON'T 

SUPPORT

GUN CONTROL 

IN 2025

 

YOU ARE IN FAVOR 

OF

SCHOOL SHOOTINGS.

PERIOD.