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It’s a funny old world

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

According to Mark Zuckerberg, a logo with the word “sex” in it is too too offensive, and must be taken down, with the perpetrator banned for 30 days. On the other hand, holocaust denial is regrettable, but won’t be removed, because, after all, they’re not “ intentionally getting it wrong”.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, July 20, 2018

Now for something completely different. This is going around, but I thought I’d pass it along for anyone who hasn’t already seen it. This guy is brilliant.

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Quotes of the day

Friday, July 20, 2018

I just finished reading a new translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, which I last read, in a different translation, back in my ultra-hippie days. For those unfamiliar with the story line, it takes place on a battlefield. The two main characters are Arjuna, a warrior, and Krishna, his charioteer, who, it turns out, is actually an avatar of Vishnu. Arjuna gets cold feet about fighting, primarily because it appears the war is of the civil variety, and he is likely to be killing his close relatives. Krishna gives him a religion lesson, reveals himself in all his glory, and explains, basically, why it is okay, even mandatory, for Arjuna to fight, so long as his heart is pure. That last sentence is a gross simplification and distortion, but it’s not my intent to expound on a religious text.

Krishna calls Arjuna various names at various times, including Partha, which I’m telling you only because that name appears in the quotes below. 

In one chapter, Krishna explains the difference between those born with a divine inheritance(meaning they may surmount the endless cycle of rebirth and reach the Hindu heaven) and those born with the demonic inheritance(meaning they’re nasty people doomed to endless rebirths). By their attributes may you know them, and I thought I’d pass along a few verses describing the demonic type, because they brought to someone to mind. Whoever can guess who I’m referring to gets a lifetime subscription to CTBlue.

Fraudulence, arrogance, narcissism,
Anger, coarseness, ignorance,
Belong to someone, Partha,
Born with a demonic inheritance

…
Demonic people don’t know
What to do, what not to do,
Or purity, or proper conduct
No finding any truth in them!

…

Trapped and roped by a hundred hopes,
Devout in lust and rage,
Intending to enjoy their lusts, they strive
To stockpile wealth illegally

”This is how much I profited today,
And this, the chariot I have in mind,
And this, and this as well, is mine,
And more wealth in the future!

…

”How rich I am, how well-born!
Who else is like me?
I’ll sacrifice, I’ll donate, I’ll rejoice!”
So they say, by ignorance deluded.

…

Self absorbed and stubborn,
Full of wealth and pride and drunkenness,
Their sacrifice, though called a sacrifice
Is mere hypocrisy without the rite rules

They cling to egotism, force,
Insolence, lust and anger.

The stuff I’ve skipped is equally applicable to the person I’m thinking of, but would require some exegesis I’m not prepared to supply.

So, this particular person, a genius maybe, has, according to Vishnu, undergone an endless cycle of rebirths, each time emerging from a demonic womb, each time as an extremely horrible person. I prefer to stick to my devout atheism, because if Krishna is right, we’ll never get rid of the guy.

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Treason this week, forgotten next week

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

The reaction to Trump’s press conference with Putin was so negative that even the folks at Fox joined in the initial wave of disgust, though over the course of the next few days they’ll surely come around. Still, it is not every day that a former director of the CIA accuses a sitting President of treason. In fact, there has never been such a day until now.

I won’t point out what would have happened had Obama declared that he trusted Putin more than his own intelligence agencies, except to say that the Republicans would have run hard on it, would have made liberal use of the word “traitor”, and would have tarred every Democrat as a fellow traveler. I will, however, point out that the Democrats will do no such thing, as it would be oh so impolite. It has been pointed out ( on Twitter, if nowhere else) that Kavanaugh could be derailed if but two Republicans refused to vote on his nomination until the Russian questions were cleared up. Those two would also provide a safe harbor for the chicken shit red state Democratic Senators operating under the delusion that voting for Kavanaugh will somehow endear them to the Foxaholics in their states. A little pressure toward that end, and a drumbeat about Trump and his puppet master would be a perfect ingredient to add into the mix of issues the Democrats should be pushing in the fall. Repetition works, especially when it’s based on facts. It works, even when it isn’t. That’s why the genius is where he is today. But this shameful event will be down the memory hole in, by my estimate, a week. That’s a long time by modern day standards, but it needn’t disappear at all if only the Democrats would keep that memory alive.

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Little Trumpie on his best behavior

Sunday, July 15, 2018

We were away for the weekend, so it was not until a few hours ago that I say this article in the New London Day about Trump’s visit to England. On line, the story is titled, appropriately, Protests, diplomatic backflips mark Trump’s visit to England. But I saw it first in the printed newspaper, where the title reads, weirdly, Trump on his best behavior in visit to England.

I think I’ve remarked before that the person who composes the headlines at The Dayoften gives things a right wing slant, but it looks a little like he or she has a colleague on the web side that doesn’t see things the same way.

Anyway, I was struck by the printed headline for a couple of reasons. First of all, I had kept up with the news enough to know that Trump managed to piss off about 99% of the people of Great Britain. In that, perhaps, he did something somewhat constructive, in that the English, the Scots, and the Welsh found common cause. I mean the man even found a way to be rude to the queen of England, and not in her capacity as the queen, but simply as a human being. So, in other words, I knew the headline was false from start to finish.

I was also a bit mystified. Was the headline writer being serious, or was he or she being artfully sarcastic?

The only reason one would point out that someone was on their “best behavior” would be because one has reason to expect bad behavior, something we really shouldn’t expect from the person holding the office the genius now holds. The article actually does use the phrase, but it appears to be a satiric use and, as a title, it hardly accurately summarizes the contents, the web version being far more accurate. So, there was the possibility that the intent was satiric.

On the other hand, the intent might have been to actually put a favorable spin on the story. After all, lots of people only read headlines and initial paragraphs, and you have to get to the second paragraph and beyond in this story to realize the magnitude of the disaster that was the genius’s visit to England. But if it was intended to be favorable to Trump, why use verbiage that would reflect well on a four year old, but not on a grown man?

This mystery may never be solved. It is a mystery we would never have needed to solve when Obama was president. I’ll even go so far as to say that there has never been a president whose “behavior” needed to be rated in this fashion. 

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Lies and the Lying Liars that tell them

Thursday, July 12, 2018

It looks like the loathsome former wrestling coach and now Congress critter Jim Jordan’s attempts to deny knowledge of sexual abuse by a team doctor, Dr. Strauss, are falling apart, and even his attempt to use the “locker room talk” defense is probably not going to stand up. 

Jordan was an assistant coach, and the head coach recently defended him, claiming no one knew anything about the doctor’s proclivity to, for example, handle certain body parts during team weigh ins. (And why was a doctor conducting weigh ins anyway, inquiring minds want to know). But it seems the head coach, Russ Hellickson, forgot that he was already on tape admitting that everyone knew about the problem.

On the tape, Hellickson said that many of the wrestlers were “uncomfortable” with Dr. Strauss’s behavior and that he had confronted Strauss about it. There was Strauss’s lingering in the showers with wrestlers and fondling them during weigh-ins.

Jordan tried to draw a distinction between “conversations in a locker room” and formal complaints, but that dog wouldn’t hunt, even on Fox.

But Jordan probably need not worry. So far, I’ve heard not a single Republican call for his resignation. In fact, as Josh Marshal observes, it has become an occupational requirement for House Republicans to insist Jordan is not lying, even though they all know that he is:

…Along with the nine other wrestlers who’ve come forward, Russ Hellickson’s admission makes it certain to anyone who is willing to open their eyes that Rep. Jim Jordan is lying about what he knew and heard more than two decades ago. Yet just yesterday, amidst all this evidence, Paul Ryan was compelled to make what amounts to a public and unbreakable statement of confidence in Jordan’s integrity. This came after numerous other members of the House GOP caucus came forward to express Manchurian Candidate-like testimonies about Jordan’s honesty and integrity. To get a sense of the drumbeat that was created to force Ryan to make this kind of fulsome pledge of confidence in Jordan’s integrity, watch this exchange from Wednesday night with Fox Business News’ Lou Dobbs.

Good example here of the Manchurian Candidate like hold Jordan has on Fox/GOP. Dobbs: “I just cldnt believe that Ryan would persist in refusing to acknowledge the man’s integrity and a service and finally todaySpeaker Ryan steps up on his behalf to acknowledge who Jim Jordan is.” pic.twitter.com/t5hO0JVgEH

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 12, 2018

Dobbs couldn’t “believe that Ryan would persist so long in refusing to acknowledge the man’s integrity” and glad that finally “Speaker Ryan steps up in his behalf and acknowledges who Jim Jordan is.” (emphasis added)

All sorts of crazy things get said on Fox News and its sister station. But this was significant both because of the surreal expressions of disbelief that Ryan would withhold a sort of pledge of loyalty to Jordan and also because it was part of a general climate which is leading virtually every Republican in the House to state categorically that Jim Jordan cannot be lying and is somehow singular in his integrity despite the fact that everyone can see that his denials are increasingly absurd.

Nor is there much chance he’ll lose his reelection bid in his heavily gerrymandered district. Meanwhile, Al Franken languishes in retirement due to what was clearly a joke by which the “victim” was only retroactively offended, done in by another Democrat, almost surely to get him out of the way as a possible presidential contender.

Because, in the end, despite being the party of “family values” and that good old time religion, when it comes right down to it, it’s always okay if you’re a Republican.

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There’s something happening here

Sunday, July 8, 2018

This is bad enough:

A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly.

Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.

Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.

American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.

When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.

The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.

But this is even worse:

Other countries backed off as well, because they too were threatened. But a funny thing happened. The genius’s puppet master stepped up and did the right thing for the first time in his life:

In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.

The article never alludes to our current government’s subservience to the Russian bear. Given the genius’s history, some sort of comment on that score might have been appropriate. It’s all well and good that the Russian dominance of our government resulted in the right thing being done this time, but we all know that’s an outlier. It really may be the case that NATO’s days are numbered.

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The genius is seriously ill

Sunday, July 8, 2018

According to reliable sources, the genius (stable, he says) actually said this as he free associated in front of his fans:

 

In my last years in legal practice I took a number of appeals to federal court on behalf of mentally ill people wrongly denied Social Security disability benefits by the administrative law judges here in Connecticut. When I wrote my brief, I would commonly highlight evidence which demonstrated beyond doubt, at least in my mind, that the person in question had a serious problem This quote would have been manna from heaven.

Lest there actually be any genius fans who read this blog, who might argue that the quote was taken out of context, my reply would be simple: there is no context in which this would make the least amount of sense. I’ll admit that it’s possible to strain and come up with some speculation about the point the genius was trying to make, but, getting back to my old clients, the things they said or did made sense to them too, but they were still ill. All I can say is that it’s a good thing for disability claimants that there’s only one president at a time, because if the job existed in greater numbers, given the genius’s performance, the vocational experts would start testifying that people with extreme forms of mental illness might not be able to do anything else, but they could always be president of the United States.

Once again, the genius has done something that would be weeks to month long fodder with the pundits had any other president, particularly a Democrat, ever said it. Even Bush, had he said something similara would have never heard the end of it. I mean, “Mission Accomplished” looks pretty mild compared to this. This performance is being forgotten as I type these words.

This man is seriously mentally ill. It’s about time that fact entered the national discourse.

Update: The words of the genius, set to some of Sir Elton’s music:

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Friday Night Music

Friday, July 6, 2018

Here’s one from the one hit wonder vault. At least I think they only had this one hit.

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Rant of the Day

Friday, July 6, 2018

Today in my mail (of the snail variety) I got a missive from Elizabeth Warren, asking me to donate money to the DCCC. It went right to the trash, but let me say a word about this.

The DCCC has done its best to squash any local candidate who comes from what might be called the progressive wing of the Democratic Party (defined, roughly, as anyone who holds the same beliefs as a typical 1960s Democrat). See, here, for example. This is the wing of the Party to which Senator Warren belongs, so it is rather mystifying that she would lend her name to the DCCC. Apparently, that organization feels no qualms about raising money from us, while stiffing us at every turn. It’s what the Republicans thought what they could do with their base, so, if there is any justice, we’ll take the same revenge on our party as the racist yahoos took on theirs, the difference being that we’re actually interested in doing things that help people.

Senator Warren may be unaware of the DCCC’s hostility to the Democratic base, but if she is unaware, then shame on her. If she is aware, then even more shame on her.

Perhaps this has something to do with presidential ambitions. For my own part, fondly do I hope, fervently do I pray (not really, I don’t believe in God) that we will not have a Bernie, an Elizabeth, or a Joe to contend with in 2020. We really don’t need a septuagenarian leading the charge against the addle brained, senile septuagenarian we already have, regardless of his or her progressive bona fides (or, in Joe’s case, their almost complete absence). While I’m at it, scratch the loathsome chameleon Kristin off the list too.

After the 2012 election, I predicted (I have witnesses to this) that the Republicans would nominate a base satisfying whackjob in 2016 instead of the “moderate” they always managed to sneak by the racists and yahoos in the past. I wish I could predict that the Democrats would nominate someone in 2020 that would appeal to their base, but that’s a long shot. The thing is, the stuff our progressive candidates stand for are widely popular, and properly run, a campaign by one of them could win. But odds are good that the party elders (and I do mean elders) will circle the wagons and impose someone on us who stands for nothing other than not being Donald Trump.

End of rant.

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