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Call It by Its Name...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 28, 2020 at 5:00am

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Image Source: New York Times, excerpt below

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Fascism, Human Rights

Turning Point: China removes presidential term limits.

First we see the face. The face of America’s Donald Trump, or Hungary’s Viktor Orban, or Russia’s Vladimir Putin, or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the face of men who wish to transform democracies into personality cults.

The face is the oldest mark of leadership, the mark that works for clan or tribe. If we see only the face, we are not thinking about policies or politics; instead, we are accepting the new regime and its rules. However, a democracy is about the people, not a single mythicized person.

People need truth, which a cult of personality destroys. Theories of democracy, from the ancient Greeks through the Enlightenment to today, take for granted that the world around us yields to understanding. We pursue the facts alongside our fellow citizens. But in a cult of personality, truth is replaced by belief, and we believe what the leader wishes us to believe. The face replaces the mind.

The transition from democracy to personality cult begins with a leader who is willing to lie all the time, in order to discredit the truth as such. The transition is complete when people can no longer distinguish between truth and feeling.

The Cowardly Face of Authoritarianism, Yale Historian Timothy Snyder, New York Times

Yesterday, a demagogue spoke to a former political party that for the first time in its history, doesn’t have a platform.

Remove “R” and “D.” What are national conventions, other than platforms, or means, to lay out the vision of the standard-bearer for the country, and thus the party itself? To give a compelling reason to vote for a party’s vision, or colloquially, “what’s in it for me?” The chaos candidate who became the chaos president foamed at the mouth at a super spreader event breaking the Hatch Act on the White House lawn made no improvement – in FOUR YEARS – on my observations years ago, posted September 1, 2016: Party of Apocalypse.

Excerpt:

The first night of the RNC convention could have been a success with the noted exception of Melania Trump lifting whole cloth parts of now First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech to the DNC convention in 2008. An out-of-work journalist was the first to catch and tweet it (a sad indictment of the employed journalists ACTUALLY at the RNC convention) [1]. The last night of the RNC was like “The Dark Knight Returns”: the world was essentially a shit show like Gotham, and Batman screamed for 75 minutes incoherent, semi-form, hand-tossed Word Salad anointing himself Bruce-Wayne-Almighty-Cheetos-Jesus savior of the planet by the strength of his will alone (no cool gadgets – just a Galaxy Smart Phone and a twitter handle he misspells as he jacks off on almost daily). The Bat’s bravery was previously demonstrated during his selfless sacrificed Vietnam five deferments to let others more worthy die in his place.

My coworkers on the first night’s events had statements like: “that is not plagiarism” (it was); or “what she said (Mrs. Trump) in her speech most people say in one form or another every day!” 38 hours later: a phantom ghostwriter emerged – Meredith Melver, who apparently conveniently works for a man that’s on record imitating his own publicist. [2] The name sounds suspicious enough with the possibility of two plagiarisms vis-à-vis Mrs. Trump and his educational ventures. Trump Institute and University lifted content whole cloth [3]. There are suspicions like his publicist, Ms. Melver may have been a convenient creation, but it seems she’s legit [4]. But more importantly, the Meredith mea culpa was enough for my coworker Trumpism fans. Never mind Mrs. Trump had previously revealed to Matt Lauer of NBC she had “written it all herself.” They pivoted to the next talking point with the ease of any group studied by Leon Festinger.

Don’t know this guy? He studied an apocalyptic UFO cult in the 1950s – a precursor to the Heaven’s Gate Cult of the 1990s. They were ABSOLUTELY sure the world would end and had a date. The faithful sold all their worldly goods and waited for the apocalypse…and waited…and waited… Some of the former faithful felt discouraged and left. Others felt their “vibrations” had saved the Earth from destruction. [5] Simple Psychology defines it thus: “Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. This produces a feeling of discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance, etc. “For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition). “Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance).”</em>

This is a full-blown cult of personality.

A cult of personality or cult of the leader,^[1] arises when a country’s regime – or, more rarely, an individual – uses the techniques of mass media, propaganda, the big lie, spectacle, the arts, patriotism, and government-organized demonstrations and rallies to create an idealized, heroic, and worshipful image of a leader, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. A cult of personality is similar to apotheosis, except that it is established by modern social engineering techniques, usually by the state or the party in one-party states and dominant-party states. It is often seen in totalitarian or authoritarian countries.

The term came to prominence in 1956, in Nikita Khrushchev‘s secret speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, given on the final day of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the speech, Khrushchev, who was the First Secretary of the Communist Party – in effect, the leader of the country – criticized the lionization and idealization of Joseph Stalin, and by implication, his Communist contemporary Mao Zedong, as being contrary to Marxist doctrine. The speech was later made public and was part of the “de-Stalinization” process in the Soviet Union. Wikipedia

Making political speeches from the White House lawn is as illegal as making political speeches as Secretary of State from Jerusalem. They are violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits such actions. If this treatment of The Constitution like toilet paper is going on in plain sight, what happens when American becomes a failed state?

WHICH Amendment will matter, or be reinforced? Forget birthright citizenship: you are citizen if the KING says you’re a citizen. Forget voting rights for African Americans, or women, or their autonomy over their own bodies. Mashing up George Carlin and Margaret Atwood, I can see a dystopian scenario where women become “broodmares of the state” for people screaming about “white genocide,” doing much meth and little coitus. I can think a party, afraid of losing political power to demographics, could easily make the case the 2nd Amendment restricted to citizens with a LACKING preponderance of Melanin. In Putin’s Russia, there is no such thing as a 2nd Amendment, or a preponderance of Melanin, for that matter.

My “Party of Apocalypse” essay has, unfortunately, aged well.

Entropy and Existence...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 21, 2020 at 5:00am

5 Ways To Safeguard Yourself After Divorcing a Narcissist , Weinberger Divorce and Family Law Group

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

Entropy as Time's Arrow: "One of the ideas involved in the concept of entropy is that nature tends from order to disorder in isolated systems." Hyperphysics

The Senate Intelligence Committees' bipartisan report confirming Russian interference in the 2016 election, and that Putin's puppet; his coterie lied in official testimony to Congress and the Mueller Report should be a damning indictment to a criminal enterprise masquerading as a political party with a doofus, bizarro mob boss at its helm. You should download both documents and READ them.

Crimes-in-progress is being confessed to on camera and in real-time. You likely think a guilty person wouldn't confess to a crime he's committing, but a brazen criminal unburdened by guilt or a conscious would, and say you shouldn't believe your "lying eyes," or "fake news." Jeb Bush said, "he was a chaos candidate, and he'll be a chaos president." Orange Satan asked African Americans "what the hell do you have to lose?" That hypothesis, as said at the end of a proof, has clearly been shown - healthcare during a pandemic, jobs, the post office: QED.

As a nation and a world, we are all in an abusive relationship with someone that has no real relationship with facts, data, or reality. We're being gaslighted by a narcissist, whose puppeteer is a KGB agent. His ascension was by design. Trigger warning for what follows:

11 Warning Signs of Gaslighting, Stephanie A. Sarkis Ph.D.

1. They tell blatant lies.	President Trump has made more than 20,000 false or misleading claims
2. They deny they ever said something, even though you have proof.	'Do you regret all your lying?' White House reporter's question startles Trump
3. They use what is near and dear to you as ammunition.	What Makes Some Narcissists Mean, Competitive, and Jealous
4. They wear you down over time.	From the Spouse of a Narcissist: Here’s What You Need to Know
5. Their actions do not match their words.	A Narcissist’s actions or intent NEVER match up with their words.
6. They throw in positive reinforcement to confuse you.	Trump's pardon may be undermining Anthony's wishes, historians say
7. They know confusion weakens people.	Dissociation And Confabulation In Narcissistic Disorders
8. They project.	The Projector in Chief
9. They try to align people against you.	Top Tips for Surviving Your Divorce With a Narcissist
10. They tell you or others that you are crazy.	Why Relationships with Gaslighters or Narcissists Can Be So Painful
11. They tell you everyone else is a liar.	The Narcissist and His Lies: How They're Different

Your succinct guide to malignant narcissism

A lot of the links above are about interpersonal relationships with women and their narcissistic partners. The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements gained significant steam after the "American Carnage" speech at his pitifully-attended inauguration, which turned out to be both projection and promise.

As a country and world, we are all in a wearing, abusive relationship with the current occupant/Russian asset in the Oval Office. It is not hyperbole or hubris to state this election is not just for the "soul of America," but for the very existence of the species.

Whoever is in the next administration in America will have an impact on policies regarding climate change (this is still a thing). Concerning the deregulation of the fossil fuel industry during our current dystopian nightmare, under a second term (or, a lifetime according to Orange Satan), it can only exacerbate a precarious situation, magical thinking may create rainbows, and conspiracy theories make you feel smart, but neither has ever solved a problem relying on a knowledge and appreciation of The Scientific Method. Can you see QAnon in Starfleet? Do you want these people piloting your starship?

The following are excerpts from my previous blog post two years ago this month, The Mendacity of Dopes...:

“Putin’s thesis is that the American constitution is an experiment that will fail if it is challenged in the right way from within,” Mitchell continued. “Putin wants to break apart the American republic not by influencing an election or two, but by systematically inflaming the fault lines within our society. Accepting this fact is absolutely essential for developing a long-term response to the problem.” The problem Mitchell was describing has a kind of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose quality to it as far as Putin is concerned: Not only has the Russian leader tried to exploit political polarization over issues like race and guns, his attempts to do so have themselves become deeply divisive—to the point where even Trump’s advisers frequently find themselves at odds with the man they serve.

Part of Mitchell’s argument—which might be viewed favorably by a president who has taken particular umbrage at the notion that Putin sought to help him defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race—was that the Russian government isn't necessarily interested in supporting a specific politician, party, or ideology. Instead, it simply wants to sow chaos in the United States to advance its own goals, which it sees as threatened by America’s preeminent position in the world. Mitchell cited the revelations on Tuesday that suspected Russian government hackers have been targeting conservative U.S. think tanks and promoting “fringe voices” on both the left and the right on social media sites like Facebook.

Uri Friedman, The Atlantic: Even Trump’s Own Adviser Is Warning About ‘Politicizing’ the Threat From Russia. But the danger he sees is already here.

This is the metastasis of "The Southern Strategy" a rancid, racist tactic that was birthed on the heels of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. It was and is a desperate bid for power. It predates itself as the definition of "white" changed from excluding everyone except "Nordic stock" Europeans (the English, mostly) to eventually including the previously excluded: Italians, Jews [and ironically] Russians all had tiny quotas. The resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and the nascent eugenics movement in the United States fueled and influenced immigration policy in the earlier part of the last century. Admittedly, despite its reprehensible aims, it worked remarkably well for quite a while.

A president with decidedly African features, he and his wife both educated at Ivy League schools and a pitch-perfect family did not personify the fictional "Huxtables" before the fall of Mr. Cosby to their many detractors. The continual reminder that the country is becoming browner only ignited more fear and resolve to fight a demographic shift not in their favor of continual predominance circa 2042 - 2045. Their resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue transmitted a well-worn, white supremacist trope regarding farmland in South Africa (it's returning the farmland to their original, African owners), but he needs a distraction since his former campaign manager and former personal lawyer were both found guilty on a total of 16 felony counts in a matter of minutes. Their visceral reaction to them was an existential crisis, a call to arms; a "white genocide," ironically feared by the descendants of those that caused it well before the "Trail of Tears" for Native Americans. It caused Roger Ailes to see the power of televised propaganda and cater to an audience that was well past facts post the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and the rise of listening to Rush Limbaugh on AM Talk Radio and his "ditto head" clones; well past reasoned discourse before Twitter came online. What facts can be revealed are rebuffed by an avalanche of lies, there are no "gotchas" for a party that with the help of Karl Rove started "creating their own realities" a long time ago. A sizable chunk of the electorate has been in this "post-truth" Twilight Zone for decades.

Added: The NY Times reported Aleksei Navalny Hospitalized in Russia in Suspected Poisoning.

This is what the “end of the American experiment” would look like. Foreign nations would pick our leaders. If republicans can visit Moscow July 4, 2018, before the midterm elections, what would prevent democrats from visiting Beijing summer of 2022? Could we protest in the streets, or dissent from the state on systemic racism during a pandemic without getting tear-gassed, flash bombed, rubber bullets shot at our heads, or kidnapped in unmarked cars? Would we see poisonings, or people spontaneously “falling off buildings?” Would AG Bill Barr rescue the rule of law? Would VOTING matter?

That’s the essence of the somber warning President Obama gave Wednesday night, and this is an example of what a sham democracy would be like. Democracies that fail do so slowly – behind the scenes – the rapid fall only seems quick when it’s all over. Russia, like Iraq under Saddam Hussein has “elections,” but they’re fraudulent shows at gunpoint for a despot, thus ensuring high participation numbers in both totalitarian states. NO ONE represents the Russian people. They are ruled by a junta, led by a criminal sociopath. We are barely represented here. We have the nightmare choices of a marginally functional party and a dystopian, dysfunctional one led by a psychopath.

The bedrock of democracy, “an informed citizenry” would cease to exist: we would put in earbuds to jam out, or binge-watch streaming video and “mind our own business.”

Engaged citizens protesting racism during a pandemic looks like anarchy to tyranny.

Fearful, self-centered citizens are what authoritarian regimes crave and need: apathy.

All they needed was a useful idiot avatar, and a master spy to push the republic over the precipice. Ironically, if successful, the 2nd Amendment along with all others in a theoretical fall of our republic would become meaningless as in Russia, there is no right to bear arms that "former Americans" would recognize or appreciate. The imagined confiscation by government "jackbooted thugs" may be under the flag of a foreign power that duped the gullible:

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

For the sake of all liberal democracies and humanity on the PLANET, they...MUST...fail.

Pig Slop...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 14, 2020 at 5:00am

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A fan-made cover for George Orwell's novel. "Animal Farm" is one of Orwell's most well-known works and gained unlikely popularity with Ukrainian refugees. (Photo from Flickr user Ben Templesmith.) PRI.org

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

Farmers feed their pigs slop, a messy, wet mix of various leftovers—and when they do, they can say they slop the pigs. A derogatory way to talk about food that doesn't look very tasty is to call it to slop. And you can call sticky, overly sentimental music, writing, or film slop as well. Source: Vocabulary.com

When President Obama used an executive order for deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA), that was considered constitutional overreach and tyranny from the executive branch. That was likely the executive at the time and the children in question are both brown. This was due to the GOP-dominated Congress not passing a DREAMS Act for those same children's path to citizenship. Immigration reform used to be a thing with republicans: Saint Ronald Reagan made a whole bunch of illegal immigrants citizens, and that might have contributed to the high numbers his republican successor, George W. Bush enjoyed for his 2004 reelection. That compassionate conservatism advantage has been dwindling ever since, at least until our current moment of discontent.

Ben Sasse called Orange Satan's executive orders unconstitutional slop, which it is. His clap back to the middle school mean-girl tweetstorm from Mango Mussolini is an admittance: "I don't need you to get reelected, you need me." He like a lot of other Republican senators had their constitutional duty to remove a criminal from office. They are the beneficiaries of Jim Crow, the Southern Strategy, Voter Purging, and Suppression. They shirked it because they are criminals themselves. Conditional integrity is still cowardice.

HuffPost senior White House correspondent S.V. Dáte asked the president during Thursday’s coronavirus task force briefing if, after 3½ years, “do you regret at all the lying you’ve done to the American people? All the dishonesties?”

“That who has done?” Trump replied.

“You have done,” said Dáte, who wrote at length about Trump’s “Ministry of Untruth” earlier this year.

Trump paused and then moved on to the next question.

In his report, Dáte noted that Trump’s stream of falsehoods across nearly every topic and in any setting is corroding America’s democracy as it normalizes lies coming from the nation’s highest office.

Trump's Response When Asked If He Regrets All The Lies He's Told America: None, Josephine Harvey, HuffPost

We have a view of history that fascism doesn't need competency. Hitler was quite literally a shit show, and the mythology of Nazi efficiency is...just that.

It's poignant that Senator Kamala Harris is African Diaspora through her Jamaican father and Indian Diaspora through her mother - both immigrants who met in Oakland, California where she and her sister were born as American citizens. Both marched and shouted for Civil Rights for all its citizens, especially their daughters, as civil rights have never had a hue, simply for and of humans. America, India, Germany have had and have caste systems that assign portions of humanity to either the apex of the pyramid where all riches are siphoned to or the base where all the weight of society crushes pariahs beneath it. She's a woman that self-identifies with black culture through her HBCU - Howard University and her Sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. She married another human that happens to be of European descent. She is above all, an earthling, and Oakland isn't a crater on Mars. Her fraternity brother, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr - found himself in an inflection of revelation.

Caste (Oprah's Book Club): The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabelle Wilkerson

In 1935, Nazi Germany passed two radically discriminatory pieces of legislation: the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. Together, these were known as the Nuremberg Laws, and they laid the legal groundwork for the persecution of Jewish people during the Holocaust and World War II.

When the Nazis set out to legally disenfranchise and discriminate against Jewish citizens, they weren’t just coming up with ideas out of thin air. They closely studied the laws of another country. According to James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler’s American Model, that country was the United States.

“America in the early 20th century was the leading racist jurisdiction in the world,” says Whitman, who is a professor at Yale Law School. “Nazi lawyers, as a result, were interested in, looked very closely at, [and] were ultimately influenced by American race law.”

In particular, Nazis admired the Jim Crow-era laws that discriminated against black Americans and segregated them from white Americans, and they debated whether to introduce similar segregation in Germany.

Yet they ultimately decided that it wouldn’t go far enough.

How the Nazis Were Inspired by Jim Crow, Becky Little, History.com

Fascism, like its cousin racism, doesn't need rationality over "us" and "them." It allows one group to dominate another without guilt, or blame for the consequences. It allows you to long for mythological glory times where Germany and America were "great again."

Fascism in Germany or America just needed enablers, and frankly, intellectuals that underestimate how a cornered animal - hog, rodent or narcissist - is its most dangerous and cunning when it figures it's going to die in prison and has nothing - other than its freedom - to lose.

Occam's Razor and Scorched Earth...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 7, 2020 at 9:55am

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

As Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder was a strong advocate of the Nord Stream pipeline project, which aims to supply Russian gas directly to Germany, thereby bypassing transit countries.

At the time of the German parliamentary election, according to Rick Noak of The Washington Post:

In 2005, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s friend Schroeder hastily signed the deal just as he was departing the office from which he had been voted out days earlier. Within weeks, he started to oversee the project implementation himself, leading the Nord Stream AG’s shareholder committee.

Wikipedia: Gerhard_Schröder-Relationship_with_Gazprom_and_Rosneft

Occam’s razor, also spelled Ockham’s razor, also called law of economy or law of parsimony, principle stated by the Scholastic philosopher William of Ockham (1285–1347/49) that pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” The principle gives precedence to simplicity: of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. The principle is also expressed as “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” Source: Britannica online

Occam's razor: Orange Satan spoke two consecutive days to Grand Pooh-Bah Putin; 16 or more private conversations last year (in the current Coronavirus apocalypse, we'll refer to that as the "before times"). He's managed to without fail insult every [former] ally we've had since the end of the Second World War, but not even a nickname for Vlad the Impaler of democracies. What he says in those conversations that like his salary, we're paying is apparently none of our business. We can't see his grades, SAT scores, or his taxes. Al Capone wasn't too keen about the idea of revealing his taxes either, and that ultimately is what landed him in prison. A guy who had "Joey No Socks" at his New Year's bash after Pooh-Bah gifted him the 2016 election and planet is probably a crook. The producers and showrunners of "The Apprentice" was in on the joke, as well as most residents of New York City. He's not a businessman, except of the Keystone Cop variety, every decision is a pratfall and every pronouncement word salad. Case-in-point: you're reading this during a pandemic. His lack of talent in his 74 years of wasting oxygen and producing flatulence at wee tweet hours has been covered by white male privilege, his father, the Mafia, Russian money laundering, and republicans that never once believed their own shtick. Enter Bizarro Capone with a dead Propecia ferret on his head yelling manically "he can fix it."

The "empty vessel" model was introduced by Reagan: as he deteriorated, others like William Barr worked the marionette strings from the shadows as Ronnie "aw shucks" himself into B-movie legend. Mind you, "nature abhors a vacuum," but Donnie just "isn't there." He doesn't say "aw shucks": he might say "oh, fuck," or "oh, I'M fucked."

Nixon - Roger "rat fuck" Stone's back tattoo totem - was unscrupulous, but he was competent: Affirmative Action and the Environmental Protection Agency just two of his accomplishments, other than the whole Watergate Plumber's thing. Simultaneously insulting a landmark and a culture by saying "yo-Semite" ("yo-sim-e-T," idiot!) isn't the "stable genius" his twisted mind and cognitively dissonant followers believes himself to be.

EIGHT republican "patriot" senators were in Moscow on July 4, 2018, months before the midterms. That's strange for patriots (Tom Clancy is confused in the hereafter), especially on the nation's birthday. Probably totally innocent. Good luck with the 2nd Amendment, over there: it doesn't exist.

The Republican Party is shrinking. The Southern Strategy was great for Nixon in 1968, and cool for Reagan in the 80's nostalgic "Back to the Future" decade, when Lee Atwater resurrected the ghoulish grog in "welfare queens", "young bucks", and Willie Horton when Pappy ran in '88, which actually means something to white supremacists. 52 years into the future, any milk left on the shelf that long would be rancid, if not mummified.

So, what do you do when your shtick is shit, your base is melting by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and you just can't win legitimate elections anymore? Domestically, that takes the form of a faux war on faux voter fraud, voter purges and voter suppression of the groups that probably won't vote for endless tax cuts for the 1%, genteel racism and not-so-subtle sexism and homophobia. Internationally, you might "get a little help" from your Russian friends, and make sure they can still help.

Jill Stein, Gary "Aleppo" Johnson, and for God's sake, red hat KANYE are not going to BE president!

And, what if you lose and you don't accept it? A lunatic currently has the nuclear codes and twitchy Twitter fingers.

It's 87 days to the election (yesterday was 88).

It's 165 days to the inauguration of the NEXT president.

Tomorrow is after that.

Gaming This Out...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 31, 2020 at 8:41pm

Because of the recent changes in my previous platform, I am discontinuing https://www.physics4thecool.blogspot.com and continuing on WordPress and BSFS. What follows is the post I meant for Blogger. I will miss it.

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

The current first Tuesday of November came into law in the year 1845, when America was an agrarian society, and it took a day’s travel to get to one’s polling place to exercise the franchise. It was also 15 years before the Civil War that ripped the country apart pitting north against south, industrialists against plantation slavery owners. It was a time when my people were considered 3/5th of a person, and the conception of John Robert Lewis and Barack Hussein Obama never would have entered the mostly white male property owner's thinking.

Orange Satan doesn’t have the power to alter the date of the November 3rd election. His tweet came 16 minutes into the speech above. It was also minutes from the GDP dipping 32.9%, lower than it’s ever dipped in history. The Coronavirus has defied all happy talk, magical thinking and vindictive revenge porn, seeing the initial infection hot spots were in blue states. I probably would have wanted to talk about something else as well.

But, what if it’s something far more sinister entirely? He will sincerely try to steal or cast doubt in the election. He will use Russia, China, Iran; the Abominable Snowman, because “playing by the rules” is something his spoiled brat ass never had to do. He will behave like a cornered rat, he’ll do anything to survive, not excluding refusing to leave the Oval Office. We should have contingency plans for a protracted, dramatic, televised brawl: worthy of reality TV. He’s preparing to do what he does best: tie it up in court to wear down his opponents – the American people – to just quit. “Peaceful transition” means prison time for him, and until January 20, 2021, Mango Mussolini has the nuclear codes.

The hallmark of American Democracy was always the “peaceful transition of power.” This assumed everyone played by the same rules, abide by the same reality, and generally of good character, thinking of the country far above anything they could achieve for themselves. We’re obviously not there now. Orange Satan is the personification of fear: fear of the future and the inevitable change in demographics the passage of time brings. It was the core of right wing AM talk radio that evolved to the airwaves and a certain network owned by an Aussie and Saudi prince (so “American”), spewing nightly feces that amounts to mental propaganda and bullshit.

In yesterday’s final lauding of John Robert Lewis by three presidents that didn’t need foreign help and could actually string coherent sentences together, each took their subtle and not-so-subtle swipes at the current Manchurian Puppet. The Civil Rights Movement only looked at the founding documents of this republic, and asked the simple question: are we Americans? After 400 years, and serving this country in every war since Crispus Attucks first died for the American Revolution, the compound interest from “40 acres and a mule” is astronomical, but the wounds of daily racial hatred; the perpetual knee-on-neck of the body politic is exhausting. 400 years to George Floyd is literally, the “patience of Job” on steroids.

The United States is a democracy because of black people.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Now, that’s the “noble” part.

Peruse down a little further in the document: “He (ahem: King George of England) has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” That part wasn’t covered in the Broadway Musical, “Hamilton.”

Reference: U.S. History: Declaration of Independence

Frederick Douglass said: “Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” As Joy Reid of MSNBC eluded, we read it. We decided we wanted it. People like Crispus Attucks, Frederick Douglass, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and John Robert Lewis struggled and died for it, and their progeny have decided we WANT it.

The United States is nominally a Christian nation because of black people.

The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. Leviticus 19:34

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. Matthew 25:35

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Hebrews 13:2

We are the 400-year strangers and angels among you, that you hang, shoot, and strangle all day long.

We are either human or not. We are either fully Americans or not.

This is either a democracy, or it’s a modern American Bund.

Or:

“Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life, I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

“When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.” John Robert Lewis, the Angel that was among us, New York Times

Biff, Galileo and Gaslighting...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on May 15, 2020 at 5:00am

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

On April 12, 1633, chief inquisitor Father Vincenzo Maculani da Firenzuola, appointed by Pope Urban VIII, begins the inquisition of physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. Galileo was ordered to turn himself in to the Holy Office to begin trial for holding the belief that the Earth revolves around the Sun, which was deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. Standard practice demanded that the accused be imprisoned and secluded during the trial.

This was the second time that Galileo was in the hot seat for refusing to accept Church orthodoxy that the Earth was the immovable center of the universe: In 1616, he had been forbidden from holding or defending his beliefs. In the 1633 interrogation, Galileo denied that he “held” belief in the Copernican view but continued to write about the issue and evidence as a means of “discussion” rather than belief. The Church had decided the idea that the Sun moved around the Earth was an absolute fact of scripture that could not be disputed, despite the fact that scientists had known for centuries that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

Galileo is convicted of heresy, History.com

Authoritarians have a long history of defying science and reality. No one questions now that the Earth isn't the center of the solar system and our understanding of the universe has expanded since Galileo confirmed Copernican Heliocentric Theory. Modern authoritarians resort to pathological lying.

I've discussed Biff's proclivities here and here before. The video above is homage to him without invoking his hideous visage.

You look scared, Donald.

You should be.

A pandemic is problematic for you.

You can’t gaslight a pandemic.

You can’t bully it into compliance.

You can’t lie to it and hope it won’t run a fact check.

You can’t pay for its silence or promise immunity.

You can’t threaten its reelection bid if it breaks ranks.

You can’t fire it when it dissents from your ramblings.

You can’t impugn its character with baseless attacks.

You can’t fool it with talk about God.

You can’t bury it with FoxNews fluff pieces.

You can’t drown it in nationalism.

You can’t dismiss it with cries of fake news.

You can’t pardon it after it completes its assaults.

You can’t give it a demeaning nickname and hope to deflate it.

You can’t rage-Tweet it into exhaustion.

You Can’t Gaslight a Pandemic, Donald, John Pavlovitz, Stuff That Needs To Be Said

By golly, Biff damned sure is trying!

I wrote this on Facebook, May 8th:

He’s wrecked the economy like 1 of his casinos.

He sucks as a moral leader, or comforter-in-chief.

Expect Biff to go full Brown People-Chinese-Mexican-Muslim racist, because, why not?

May 8th was Friday. He managed to fulfill my predictions by Monday.

Like all authoritarians, fascists, Nazis and racists: facts don't matter. What matters is emotion, what a certain thing makes "the base" feel. Most of them, like Biff feel threatened by changing demographics. Fascists take advantage of disasters and chaos, as rampant confusion consolidates their power, and a pandemic is made-to-order. For his bewildered, gun-toting herd, it's like the last gasp of Archie Bunker. They're worried about 2042. I'm worried about Dr. Bright's ominous prediction of this being our "darkest winter." I'm worried about the Forbes article four years ago that capitalism MUST change, or humanity will starve itself to death eight years later in 2050. The so-called white majority becoming numerical minorities will be short-lived, and moot:

Corporate capitalism is committed to the relentless pursuit of growth, even if it ravages the planet and threatens human health.

We need to build a new system: one that will balance economic growth with sustainability and human flourishing.

Unless It Changes, Capitalism Will Starve Humanity By 2050, Drew Hansen, Forbes, 2016

In one of a number of revolts against colonial rule, in a corner of what is now Tanzania, the Maji Maji Rebellion sought to drive out German colonialists. The rebels were partly incited by a spirit medium who claimed to be possessed by a snake spirit and to have a “war medicine” that would turn German bullets into water. In one of the saddest and most surreal episodes in anti-colonial history, thousands of Africans who put their faith in this magic perished before German machine guns.

It has been axiomatic in anthropology since Bronislaw Malinowski’s seminal work in the early 20th century that people turn to magic when they feel powerless. Soldiers, for example, may repeatedly practice mastery of their weapons, but they know there is still a strong element of chance in whether they live or die in combat, and so they also pray, wear talismans, and develop superstitions about weapons, clothes, or routines that bring luck. In this spirit, the Maji Maji rebels—outgunned but unwilling to tolerate German occupation—put their faith in magic water, as well as their own martial skills, as they rose up.

COVID-19 and the Turn to Magical Thinking, Hugh Gusterson, Sapiens.org

I don't think it will matter what hue of human is in the numerical majority. This pandemic screams at us that capitalism as we practice it is out of balance with the globe we live on. This pandemic roars at us that all the magical-thinking-whistling-past-the-graveyard in the world won't will it away, nor will opening up too soon and assume callously only "brown people" will die. As much as I love Star Trek as nerd mythology, I'm not expecting a leap in physics, discovering warp drive, and leaving the planet for exciting Alpha Centauri tours. In 2050, I pretty much expect to be either 88, or ashes. I just didn't expect the rest of the world to be ashed with me.

It is, in a dark sense, a brute force way to end inequality, forever.

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth," Matthew 5:5.

I guess that doesn't necessarily have to mean Homo Sapiens.

Ghoulish...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 24, 2020 at 5:00am

Image Source: Pinterest

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights, Politics, Women's Rights

Ref: Leadership of Ghouls...October 26, 2018

Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.
But wherefore let we then our faithful friends,
Th' associates and copartners of our loss
Lye thus astonisht on th' oblivious Pool,
And call them not to share with us their part
In this unhappy Mansion, or once more
With rallied Arms to try what may be yet
Regaind in Heav'n, or what more lost in Hell?

John Milton, "Paradise Lost," Book I, Lines 221-270

Blankets to First Nation peoples.

Colonial weaponizing of smallpox against Native Americans was first reported by 19th-century historian Francis Parkman, who came across correspondence in which Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander in chief of the British forces in North America in the early 1760s, had discussed its use with Col. Henry Bouquet, a subordinate on the western frontier during the French and Indian War.

Early American historian Elizabeth Fenn of the University of Colorado Boulder lays out her theory on what happened in her 2000 article in the Journal of American History. In the late spring of 1763, Delaware, Shawnee and Mingo warriors, inspired by Ottawa war leader Pontiac, laid siege to Fort Pitt, an outpost at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers in present-day downtown Pittsburgh.

The fort’s commander, Capt. Simeon Ecuyer, reported in a June 16 message to his superior, Philadelphia-based Col. Henry Bouquet, that the situation was dire, with local traders and colonists taking refuge inside the fort’s walls. Ecuyer wasn’t just afraid of his Native American adversaries. The fort’s hospital had patients with smallpox, and Ecuyer feared the disease might overwhelm the population inside the fort’s cramped confines.

Bouquet, in turn, passed along the news about the smallpox inside Fort Pitt to his own superior, Amherst, in a June 23 letter. In Amherst’s July 7 response, he cold-bloodedly saw an opportunity in the disease outbreak. “Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them.”

Historian Philip Ranlet of Hunter College and author of a 2000 article on the smallpox blanket incident in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, also casts doubt. “There is no evidence that the scheme worked,” Ranlet says. “The infection on the blankets was apparently old, so no one could catch smallpox from the blankets. Besides, the Indians just had smallpox—the smallpox that reached Fort Pitt had come from Indians—and anyone susceptible to smallpox had already had it.”

The most important indication that the scheme was a bust, Ranlet says, “is that Trent would have bragged in his journal if the scheme had worked. He is silent as to what happened.”

Even if it didn’t work, British officers’ willingness to contemplate using smallpox against the Indians was a sign of their callousness. “Even for that time period, it violated civilized notions of war,” says Kelton, who notes that disease “kills indiscriminately—it would kill women and children, not just warriors.”

Did Colonists Give Infected Blankets to Native Americans as Biological Warfare?
History.com

It is ghoulish:

- To attempt infection of peoples whose land you robbed from them.

- To offer blue states accept bankruptcy versus getting a bailout like the "too big to fail businesses and banks."

- To refuse W.H.O testing that would help flatten the curve in an obtuse effort to win re-election.

- For 26 million people to file unemployment in the richest country in the world.

- For the richest country in the world to be so bereft in the face of a pandemic.

- For its executive to be such a braying buffoon at propaganda "press" briefings where nothing is learned or useful.

- To try gaslighting a pandemic and suggest humans essentially ingest Lysol into their systems, guaranteeing this will kill them faster.

More particularly: we barely flinched when we snatched children from their parents; we barely blinked when we put those children in cages. We in Orwellian fashion wouldn't bring ourselves to call them what they really are: concentration camps, now a hot oven for the novel Coronavirus. It's better than Auschwitz or Dachau ovens and kind of "green." That too, is ghoulish.

Cannibalism is the act or practice of species eating the flesh or internal organs of their kind. In the story, scenes of ghouls eating ghouls and humans eating humans pass regularly as the narrative continues.[1][2]

Strictly speaking, one-eyed ghouls always have to cannibalize since they are forced to eat human or ghoul meat. In their case, however, only eating ghoul meat is typically treated as cannibalism.

Ghoul meat tastes disgusting to ghouls, but in contrast to other non-human nutrition, they are able to digest it. Continued cannibalization may trigger a mutation in Rc cells, resulting in turning them into kakujas.

Ref: Tokyo Ghoul: Cannibalism

Ultimately, the ghoul is like the pacman emoji in arcade video games: it gobbles until the energy balls are consumed. Ouruboros or cannibalistic ghoul, it consumes its own tail. The fictional monster then resorts to cannibalism - like polar bears impacted by climate change - when all resources and options are exhausted. Pacman and polar bear then wink out of existence.

Conservative columnist Max Boot famously coined the phrase "gang of Putin" in a Washington Post piece last year.

I prefer "ghoulish ossiferous party." You now know ghoul, and ossiferous relates to "sucking the flesh off bones." Both however, are apropos and fitting.

Protocols...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 10, 2020 at 5:00am

Will Smith as U.S. Army virologist Lt. Col. Robert Neville in the movie, "I Am Legend."

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Elections, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

Plot: "In 2009, a genetically re-engineered measles virus, originally created as a cure for cancer, turns lethal. The virus kills 90% (5.4 billion out of 6 billion) of the world's population and turns 9.8% (588 million) into vampiric, cannibalistic mutants called Darkseekers, who are extremely vulnerable to sunlight. The remaining 0.2% (12 million) of the population are immune to the virus and are the prey of the mutant Darkseekers.

Three years after the outbreak, U.S. Army virologist Lt. Col. Robert Neville lives an isolated life in the deserted ruins of Manhattan, unsure if any other uninfected humans are left.

Neville's daily routine includes experimenting on infected rats to find a cure for the virus, searching for food and supplies, and waiting each day for any immune humans who might respond to his continuous recorded radio broadcasts, which instruct them to meet him at midday at the South Street Seaport.

Flashbacks reveal that his wife and daughter died in a helicopter accident during the chaotic evacuation of Manhattan, as the military enforced a quarantine of the island in 2009. Neville stayed behind on the island with other military personnel." (Wikipedia)

I worked in cleanrooms in the semiconductor industry, the most stringent being Class 1. The old criteria meant 0.5 microns of particles per cubic feet of air. (The newest guidelines were adopted in 2001, metric and still pretty stringent.) Each employee passed through air showers to push off any particulates from their clothing. Smokers are encouraged not to indulge, and cologne is prohibited - smoke and scent are particles. We then put our street garb in a locker, putting on green hosptial gowns and fab shoes that never left the site. Then we donned clean room gowns - "bunny suits" - before going into the alien, hepa-filtered environment, protecting it from any hair, skin, sweat or dirt we could shed that would inhibit the functionality of integrated circuits. I tried to drink as little water as possible before going on the floor. Going to the bathroom, or lunch was a pain.

I have developed a unique protocol for assaulting what used to be trivial things like: getting the mail, mowing the lawn - grass grows as rains falls during pandemics - or, going to the grocers for (what's left of) supplies.

1. I fashion a mask from my father's handkerchiefs and rubber bands per the CDC guidelines.

2. I use cloth/rubber work gloves for mowing as the rubber is tactile enough for me to operate equipment and pay for items at the grocery store.

3. After I enter the house, I immediately put all clothing - including my gloves - in the washer. I proceed to the shower.

It is a ritual of the dish panned and dry skinned. I call it my "I Am Legend" protocols.

I am approximately 45 minutes from the hospital that I was born in. I am in the city I earned an undergraduate in Engineering Physics and a Masters in Nanoengineering. I feel like each day outside my door, I enter an alien landscape. Shopping is now foraging for food at several department stores. The shelves are emptying as the undocumented workers that pick our food are also impacted by this virus. We're going to start seeing shortages. Perhaps I need to look at hunting. Thankfully, there are no Darkseekers.

Now, as many other STEM graduate researchers are doing, I'm continuing Ph.D. studies online. No one knows what this is supposed to look like, since before the entire planet became as hostile as Mars, it was done in-person for the most part.

Wisconsin showed the depth of depravity in the "gang of Putin" from the Supreme Courts at both federal and state levels and its extensively word-salad challenged faux mob head: they'd rather kill us than allow people to vote. It's almost a public admittance that they know they have no ideas to convince a majority of the electorate to vote for. They're reduced to deplorables, fascists, homophobes, racists, rubes, Sambos, sexists, tax cheaters, wife beaters and zombies. NO ONE with a sane grasp of reality - whether voting during a pandemic or by mail - would consciously vote for four more years of this shit. "Planet of the Apes" had intelligent, evolved primates. This is more like "Conquest of the Stupid People." We apparently didn't have to wait 500 years to get to "Idiocracy." Speaking of which, someone wants to open the economy prematurely to save his own ass, since he's supposedly a "stable genius" and wolf-of-Wall-Street business wizard after six bankruptcies. He just didn't tell you, the land he's wizard of is Oz.

He hits the nine signs of a sociopath lotto, and the only thing that lowers my systolic and diastolic blood pressure is avoiding those Joseph Goebbels' styled Ministry of Untruth press briefings. They're absolute useless, word-salad garbage.

He won Wisconsin in 2016. Their citizens showed the resolve we've GOT to have to repel Russian meddling and voter suppression: we've literally got to crawl over glass to save this republic, otherwise, I'm pretty sure we'll no longer have one. The inverse of federal republics is fascist dictatorships. That's only fun for fascists and death cult members.

Will Smith is an actor. "I Am Legend" is a movie, for which he likely received a fat 20 million dollar check. Just about that many people filed for unemployment. He's made a lot of movies since then, and barring we burrow underground, he'll probably make a few more before he retires to that big mansion in Calabasas, California.

The suddenly unemployed are still waiting for theirs.

Caveats, Rainbows and Compassionate Capitalism...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 3, 2020 at 5:00am

New York Times - Where Americans Didn't Stay at Home Even as the Virus Spread

James Glanz, Benedict Carey, Josh Holder, Derek Watkins, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Rick Rojas and Lauren Leatherby

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

Only a fascist like William Barr would try to suspend habeas corpus during a global pandemic, as are other strongmen across the globe are using the crisis to seize more dictatorial power over their citizens. Only a sociopath puts in an emergency order through the secret service for ...golf carts. Democracy - that fleeting experiment in rationality, and with it: life on Earth hangs in the balance.

While political leaders have locked their borders, scientists have been shattering theirs, creating a global collaboration unlike any in history. Never before, researchers say, have so many experts in so many countries focused simultaneously on a single topic and with such urgency. Nearly all other research has ground to a halt.

Normal imperatives like academic credit have been set aside. Online repositories make studies available months ahead of journals. Researchers have identified and shared hundreds of viral genome sequences. More than 200 clinical trials have been launched, bringing together hospitals and laboratories around the globe.

“I never hear scientists — true scientists, good quality scientists — speak in terms of nationality,” said Dr. Francesco Perrone, who is leading a coronavirus clinical trial in Italy. “My nation, your nation. My language, your language. My geographic location, your geographic location. This is something that is really distant from true top-level scientists.”

Covid-19 Changed How the World Does Science, Together
Matt Apuzzo and David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times

Yes, China and its stupid strongman leader held precious data and allowed the Coronavirus to spread before this cooperation born of survival was established. Calling it "Wuhan" or "Chinese" is as problem-solving as ascribing radical terrorism to a religion. The Klan burns large crosses, and historically, hung and castrated African Americans. They and other white supremacist groups are yet still not classed as terrorists, domestic or otherwise.

*****

A true STEM education should increase students’ understanding of how things work and improve their use of technologies. STEM education should also introduce more engineering during precollege education. Engineering is directly involved in problem solving and innovation, two themes with high priorities on every nation’s agenda…. the creation of high-quality, integrated instruction and materials, as well as the placement of problems associated with grand challenges of society at the center of study. (p. 996).

Whereas there have been initiatives for integrated STEM education in a number of developed countries including South Korea, the mechanisms of integration for STEM disciplines and instructional approaches are largely under theorized (National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council, 2014). Given the limited research, instructional design for integrated STEM can be informed by the literature on problem-based learning (PBL). In a number of reviews on integrated STEM programs, researchers found that integrated STEM programs commonly utilize real-world complex problems as instructional contexts in which students apply knowledge and practices from multiple disciplines (Banks & Barlex, 2014; Kelley & Knowles, 2016; Lynn, Moore, Johnson, & Roehrig, 2016; National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council, 2014). PBL is a well-researched and widely accepted student-centered instructional approach in which students are given an ill-structured real-world problem to investigate viable solutions for by applying knowledge and skills from various sources (Hmelo-Silver, 2004; Savery, 2006). PBL helps students develop knowledge involved in problem solving and cognitive skills such as critical and analytical thinking. Additional characteristics of PBL such as working in collaborative groups and engaging in self-directed learning lead to learning outcomes such as communication competency and motivation to learn. This approach was succinctly summarized in Hmelo-Silver (2004).

In PBL, student learning centers on a complex problem that does not have a single correct answer. Students work in collaborative groups to identify what they need to learn in order to solve a problem. They engage in self-directed learning (SDL) and then apply their new knowledge to the problem and reflect on what they learned and the effectiveness of the strategies employed.… The goals of PBL include helping students develop 1) flexible knowledge, 2) effective problem-solving skills, 3) SDL skills, 4) effective collaboration skills, and 5) intrinsic motivation. (p.235).

A review of the effect of integrated STEM or STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) education in South Korea

Nam-Hwa Kang, Asia-Pacific Science Education

South Korea is the model the planet needs to pursue. It has a deep respect for STEM, STEAM and has pursued it relentlessly. Such preparation encourages quick reaction to problems and creative solutions. It's shown in drive-through testing. It has NEVER been demonstrated in creationism, "intelligent design" and other magical thinking.

The mapping of the virus spread globally correlates with our frequency in the states. The south and Midwestern states are astonishingly red, and a few of their correlating governors obtuse. This is somewhat simplistic and deceptive, as the northern states have more mass transit, and thus a subway can also carry a novel virus just as easily as an SUV or pickup truck. New York shows no movement, but has the highest infection rates, which globally correlates to where travel and world trade (and humans) meet frequently. A nationwide shutdown would "flatten the curve." Sadly, I'm finding more that "United States" is aspirational, a suggestion and oxymoron.

President George W. Bush coined the term "compassionate conservatism," (Vyse - New Republic) which looks now to have the lift of a lead balloon. What we need instead is a compassionate capitalism. Slavery - the foundation of American capitalism - was far from anything compassionate. It is not compassionate to give sweetheart deals to your son-in-law and his brother's company during a pandemic. It is not compassionate to have governors bidding on the same life-saving equipment like they're in an auction on eBay. It is not compassionate (or, competent) that the Governor of Georgia, literally miles from the Center for Disease Control didn't know asymptomatic persons could transmit the virus. It is not compassionate to house children in cages at the border (after ripping them from their parents, as in slavery). Like the New Republic article above alludes, compassion has given way to callousness, an IDGAF with red caps replacing Klan robes and middle fingers replacing gold crosses. Cruelty and so-called white grievance is the obvious, particular point. It is a primitive instinct, racist, xenophobic and steeped in superstition; a sacrifice to Moloch on cremation pyres of (don't) care. It is a recipe for extinction, and for the gun rights advocates with thousands of rounds of ammo - your strategy is only as good as your last bullet when food supplies run out. Constitutional gun rights alone do not make civil societies: civil societies with functional governments make constitutional gun rights possible. That's not "making America great again": it is the recipe for a failed state.

Cooperation, or extinction. I will say this (sadly) to my last breath.

*****

“China isn’t the problem. Lack of diversification is the problem,” says Belinda Archibong, an assistant professor of economics at Barnard College in New York. In Africa, “lack of regional, intra-Africa trade is the problem.”

That’s a long-standing discussion within the continent. “Maybe this crisis is going to force us to trade more amongst ourselves,” says Blandina Kilama, an economist and senior researcher at Research on Poverty Alleviation, a Tanzanian think tank.

In the U.S., John Melin is an eyewitness to the virtues of trade. Brown & Haley, the candy company where he is president and chief operating officer, has seen a rising share of its Almond Roca sales coming from overseas.

China is a big source of that demand, which helps keep the firm’s 175 employees near Tacoma, Washington, employed. Mr. Melin and his team are working hard to keep the sales flowing and to pin down some alternative suppliers for packaging.

“Part of the health of our country and our high standard of living comes from the fact that people fly on Boeing airplanes around the world, and people buy iPhones around the world, and people admire the values and institutions of the United States,” he says. That integration with the world “brings more good than bad.”

In Germany, Yorck Otto similarly sees globalization as here to stay, and probably for the better.

“No, this wheel cannot be turned back,” says Dr. Otto, president of a business association representing small and medium-sized companies.

“The global supply chain will continue to get better and better every day. This globalization will be refined, and hopefully it will be also covered under new humanitarian laws and regulations so that the world can be a little bit better through globalization,” he says. “I’m not a great fan of kids sitting in Bolivia digging into soil to get materials to make batteries, for example.”

Why COVID-19 is likely to change globalization, not reverse it, The Christian Science Monitor
WHY WE WROTE THIS
Can the world’s fabric be undone? Some nationalists point to the coronavirus as a reason to seal borders and bring manufacturing home. But business experts say the benefits of trade are undiminished.

This piece was reported by Patrik Jonsson in Savannah, Georgia; Nick Squires in Rome; Ryan Lenora Brown in Johannesburg; and Lenora Chu in Berlin. It was written by Mr. Trumbull.

Zombies Would be Better...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on March 30, 2020 at 5:00am

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Fascism, Human Rights

In dystopian novels and movies, zombies are easy to spot. They're also slow and not very smart.

They're typically not orange and self-admittedly, whiners.

The obligatory press briefing is a ritual I wish the media would give up, totally.

Analysis of what he says is on the major cable networks: CNN, Fox, MSNBC. More people watch local networks because they "trust" them. Any president's message preempts local programming, and thus there's no time or functionality lending to analysis. He gets to spew BS to his cult unfiltered.

He turns it into gaslighting.

Gaslighting is a tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality. It works much better than you may think. Anyone is susceptible to gaslighting, and it is a common technique of abusers, dictators, narcissists, and cult leaders.

In my book Gaslighting: Recognize Manipulative and Emotionally Abusive People - and Break Free I detail how gaslighters typically use the following techniques:

1. They tell blatant lies.
2. They deny they ever said something, even though you have proof.
3. They use what is near and dear to you as ammunition.
4. They wear you down over time.
5. Their actions do not match their words.
6. They throw in positive reinforcement to confuse you.
7. They know confusion weakens people.
8. They project.
9. They try to align people against you.
10. They tell you or others that you are crazy.
11. They tell you everyone else is a liar.

11 Warning Signs of Gaslighting
Stephanie A. Sarkis Ph.D., Psychology Today

Malignant Narcissism

I want to explore with you the darker side of narcissistic personality disorder, where aggression, antisocial behaviors, and suspiciousness are as prominent as their poor sense of self, fragility, and egocentricity. (Below is a video clip that explores the symptoms of malignant narcissism.)

A person with malignant narcissism has the potential to destroy families, communities, nations, and work environments. This condition reflects a hybrid or blending of narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders. Psychologist Eric Fromm termed the disorder in 1964. Psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg later delineated the symptoms of the condition and presented it as an intermediary between narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders.

Why is the behavior of malignant narcissism often considered dangerous?

Individuals with this profile can form connections with others. However, they process information in ways that can hurt society in general, but also the people who love or depend on them. Family, co-workers, employees, and others in their lives often have to walk on eggshells to appease a fragile ego and minimize the occurrence of their unstable, impulsive, or aggressive behaviors.

They lash out or humiliate others for infractions of even the most frivolous nature (for example, you gave an opinion that differed from theirs; you demonstrated confidence, and it made them look bad; you told a joke that involved poking fun at them).

For some, their grandiosity and protection of their fragile "true self" can be at such extreme levels that they will lie and give the impression that simply because they say it, that makes it reality. Many will become angered if their lies are challenged with truth or facts. Of course, this can create problems for the people close to them, as this pattern of behavior can easily veer into gaslighting.

Malignant narcissism is a blend of two disorders that pose problems interpersonally for their victims — narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders. It is not uncommon for others to feel anxious, intimidated by, and fearful of people with this condition. The combination of poor empathy coupled with aggression, hypersensitivity, and suspiciousness can bring pain to others.

How to Tell You're Dealing with a Malignant Narcissist
Rhonda Freeman Ph.D., Psychology Today

All respect to the Walking Dead: zombies only exist in theatrical presentations. Like Gremlins, there are rules to deal with them. In fictional realms, warp drive and transporters exist, Bifrost is an Einstein-Rosen Bridge and every crisis can be solved in less than an hour, minus commercial breaks without worrying the zombies have the nuclear codes.

Good old undead, regular zombies: way easier, with rules.

Lethal Stupidity...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on March 26, 2020 at 5:00am

Image source: Reddit

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Fascism, Human Rights

“Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.” Thomas Gray's poem “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (1742)

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." George Orwell, "1984" (1949)

Fascists are obviously dumb as hell.

The city of Greensboro is under a shelter-in-place order until April 16. I'm heartened some republican governors are bucking Tweet Dweeb and following the science. It's ironic to think in 1863, Abraham Lincoln founded the National Academy of Science DURING the Civil War. Republicans used to be rather right-brained dominant before donning tinfoil hats.

“Last night we talked about the governor of Mississippi, announcing that there would not be a statewide stay-at-home order in his state either because he said ‘Mississippi is not China,” said Maddow. “But today … the governor of Mississippi today did something brand new. He issued his own executive order that overrides and overturns any actions that have been taken by cities and towns in his state, even as he is refusing to act statewide.”

Rachel Maddow blasts Mississippi governor for banning cities from coronavirus business closures, Matthew Chapman, Raw Story

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick of Texas and Glenn-ever-the-dry-drunk Beck thinks grandparents shouldn't even wait for euthanasia from the lasers of "Logan's Run": they should happily throw themselves into the arms of Moloch for the sake of their real god: Mammon. Ron DeSantis is not wearing the governor's chair well since morphing into a "mini-me" version of his orange god. Headlines calling your decisions during a pandemic "dumbest s---" probably doesn't play well in re-election commercials.

Since both I believe are grandparents, I welcome and look forward to their sacrifice. As a new grandparent of eleven months now, I think I'll pass.

This is the danger of repealing The Fairness Doctrine and allowing one side to frame opinion as fact, or facts as unknowable. It allowed an entire political party - post Watergate - to in the words of Karl Rove, "create their own reality." It gave rise to right wing talk radio and its malcontents, and eventually an entire "news" channel whose license isn't journalistic: but entertainment, like their parent company. They know it is wrong on some level, but know the efficacy of shouting opponents down and wearing down by gaslighting. Without fail, like any other story they propped up and repeated, the pivot from calling Coronavirus "fake news" to taking it seriously wasn't met with protests from supporters, because cults don't question authority. It creates "Ministries of Truth," Fox being the first, pumping out fiction that endangers their own median aged 65-year-old audience. A republic runs on debate of actual facts based on reality, not Ayn Rand notions of the "morality of democratic capitalism," which sounds innocent until you inspect the entire quote:

"Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism." –Paul Ryan, praising the anti-democratic Ayn Rand, who once said, "Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom." The inspiration for a large amount of "ideas" from the gang of Putin was dead broke at the end of her life REQUIRING Social Security before her passing. 1,168 pages of Gordon Gecko worship is a lot to plod through, which I doubt that those who cite her have read completely or understood fully. The basic gist of her works are tooled into talking points and a deification of the market that extends into the current day and this crisis of lethal stupidity that may invariably get a lot of people killed. I know the need to "get back to normal," but think of our last normal day: 9/10/01. Before that, we walked from the ticket counter to boarding where families waved goodbye to their loved ones. A shoe and underwear bomber has us putting our shoes in tubs and being full body scanned. I'm sure my parents wished for "normal" after December 7, 1941.

I hope we start thinking of healthcare as a human right and not a privilege of the well-heeled. That we take a look at income inequality - created by policies that benefit the few on top and we STOP separating into primitive, warring tribes on the mythology of our biological warpaint: we are ONE human species and every one of us is from the continent of Africa. To survive this outbreak, we need to behave as one tribe, one race: the human race, or Moloch's altar will be full of babies and grandparents.

Every time we get a republican president, we go closer to the precipice. We look into the abyss and suddenly get our senses back and place the ship of state right after economic downturns from the cult-reflex of "trickle down economics" (disavowed, mind you by David Stockman).

We have an unhealthy co-dependency. We exist on a political seesaw going from boom to bust; order to chaos. We reflexively change political parties every eight years ...EVERY eight years with the few one-term exceptions that for the sake of that cliff I hope we can replicate November 3, 2020.

Else, inertia with a little momentum push will tilt our luck as a republic over into the darkness, and a virus waiting survivors at landfall.

Gigs and Pandemics...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on March 13, 2020 at 5:52am

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights, Politics

Center for Disease Control: Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)

I am admittedly drained by circumstances outside of my control and workload.

Pursuing a Ph.D. in practically ANYTHING is exhausting enough. Papers are assigned. No time is allotted to complete any assigned task. There's the research proposal. There's lab work if you're in a STEM field and writing...LOTS of writing.

It's been a week. The Stock Market ate my retirement. To quote a classmate, "the world is on fire, and I'm watching it burn." I feel like I've entered a near four-year dystopian nightmare that I cannot wake from. He's done this much damage...in a week.

Next week: all seventeen North Carolina colleges and universities will go to virtual classes. A lot of lecture is interpretive art: professors tend to "riff," not that they don't know their subjects, but at certain levels, they're not going to spoon feed you. You HAVE to attend classes, you must rewrite notes, read the text and memorize every detail preparing for quizzes or exams.

It's going to be interesting trying to do this online. We're online for an indefinite time.

March madness has ended abruptly due to Coronavirus.

The NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball have suspended seasons. Might as well look for the possible cancellation the Olympics this summer. What about football in the fall? Coronavirus will lull in the hotter spring and summer months, but being here it will likely rage back-to-form as the seasons change.

The market dropped 10% - about what it did in 1987 during that recession, but it was never driven by a narcissistic, incompetent boob either high on Adderall, cocaine or an aggressive, infectious virus.

The origin of tips is an acronym: "to insure promptitude" (old English). It was a term the aristocracy used for servants, particularly in restaurants.

Most of our restaurant servers are in the visible gig economy, and make LESS than the minimum wage of $7.25/hour. They make about $2 per hour and the rest in tips, which to make it worth it, means 20% and busing a lot of tables, laborious, backbreaking work with no vacation, overtime or paid sick days.

It also means if you're sick, you can't work and therefore you can't pay your bills, or you know: eat. Maybe, you muscle through it with daytime cold medicine - a lot of it and cough drops. Maybe you blow your nose ferociously between waiting tables and hope no one notices while you infect them.

Lamar Alexander objected to two weeks of paid sick leave, which isn't even as generous as other countries, nor that of his colleagues. Somehow we lost paid sick leave and it left with a whimper. I had six weeks in the nineties working at Motorola and AMD. You used it when you needed it; it rolled over to the next year. Now, American companies have employees take vacation, thus penalizing the employee for something out of their control. You CAN take unpaid sick leave if you run out of vacation. It sounds like the upper levels never get sick, or at their levels probably have the sick leave they've stolen from everyone else.

Paid sick leave allows us to "flatten the curve": people can stay home, not infect others and pay their bills. Companies get healthy employees back that won't get others sick, or shutdown their businesses. It relieves the strain on the medical system, that is about to get slammed if nothing changes.

Grad students are studying to be professionals, and they like their instructors can telecommute...gig professionals cannot.

"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Grover Norquist

Norquist had a tax pledge:

I, ______, pledge to the taxpayers of the ______ district of the state of ______ and to the American people that I will: One, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses; and Two, to oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates

The taxpayers Grover and the criminal-element-masquerading-as-a-political-party is honoring are at a little higher pay grade than the rest of us. Decades of not paying for shit resulted in crumbling infrastructure the "invisible hand" of the market never repaired, it resulted in drowning the baby in the bathwater by cutting essential services like disaster preparedness for pandemics out of spite for your predecessor.

It's really dogma and cult-like in their slavish devotion to this creed. "Cutting to grow" the economy has never and I repeat: NEVER trickled down to anyone! Instead of Reaganomics, it should correctly be called "Laffernomics." It's a con job that's been siphoning funds up the ladder into the canopy of the 1% for four decades now. When the 99% ask questions, they push conspiracy theories and racist tropes so we can tear at each other. It's worked for them since the Civil War, and ensured their hegemony. Their oligarchy is more blatant now, and we're exhausted by their relentless propaganda.

The gig economy is the result of globalization and moving manufacturing via trade agreements overseas. It looks good on paper and saves a lot of money for companies. Sadly, the factory off-shored moves support jobs out of a nation, state, and municipality: plumbers, painters, janitors and cooks; nurses and daycare workers for on-site offered care. People who tried college, or knew they weren't "college material" (whatever that means), but could make a decent living and raise a family in jobs of worth and dignity. China, Korea (the masters of drive-by testing) and Taiwan will recover from Coronavirus: after quarantine of their populations - they'll just turn on the factories that used to be here. Their plumbers, painters, janitors and cooks will report for duty.

Having gig economies means Uber drivers trying to make a buck will unwittingly spread the virus to every customer they pick up, the waiter will breath on the restaurant client; the usher at church will pass it with the collection plate and Eucharist sacraments.

Humans work by cooperation and collective activity. Everything from sporting events to Broadway shows, worship services, weddings and funerals will have to be rethought. People will start ordering groceries online. As schools close, children already dependent on at least one meal there will be driven into food insecurity and the nation into developing world status. We will be further atomized and stratified, further isolated from one another. How exactly under such circumstances can we vote this nightmare out? I often wonder if this chaos is ineptitude, or nefarious.

"United States" is already oxymoron and an inside joke to authoritarian dictators.

I'll take off Monday, but the blog should go up at its usual time. My commute to school has suddenly been reduced.

The Unthinkable...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on February 14, 2020 at 7:51am

Define Fascism - Seth Tobocman, The Nation

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

1. Don’t obey in advance
2. Defend institutions
3. Beware the one-party state
4. Take responsibility for the face of the world
5. Remember professional ethics
6. Be wary of paramilitaries
7. Be reflective if you must be armed
8. Stand out
9. Be kind to our language
10. Believe in truth
11. Investigate
12. Make eye contact and small talk
13. Practice corporeal politics
14. Establish a private life
15. Contribute to good causes
16. Learn from peers in other countries
17. Listen for dangerous words
18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives
19. Be a patriot
20. Be as courageous as you can

The above is from the book "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century," by Yale Historian Timothy Snyder. Also by the author: "The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America."

From the post "Inevitability, Sports Metaphors and Republics..." March 17, 2017:

Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny warns that republics are not "automatic" nor are they inevitable. It requires a buy-in from the governed, a fundamental knowledge of the mechanism of republics and the citizen's responsibilities in keeping them going. One simple aspect is voting; the other is holding our elected officials accountable for their actions towards their constituency, not their donors or the donor class. That alludes to other forms of government that have the labels: autocracy, authoritarianism, corporatism, kleptocracy, oligarchy, totalitarianism that are the basis of very haunting dystopian novels of hopeless futures, Orwell's "boot stamping on a human face forever." Our lethargy in this country and overseas is due to the near instantaneous access to information, resulting in a citizenry in western nations that would "rather not think about it," or in the spirit of Sinclair Lewis, "It Can't Happen Here." In his prescient essay in 2004, Chris Hedges begs to differ *:

* The movement seeks the imprint of law and science. It must discredit the rational disciplines that are the pillars of the Enlightenment to abolish the liberal polity of the Enlightenment. This corruption of science and law is vital in promoting the doctrine. Creationism, or “intelligent design,” like Eugenics for the Nazis, must be introduced into the mainstream as a valid scientific discipline to destroy the discipline of science itself. This is why the Christian Right is working to bring test cases to ensure that school textbooks include “intelligent design” and condemn gay marriage.

The drive by the Christian Right to include crackpot theories in scientific or legal debate is part of the campaign to destroy dispassionate and honest intellectual inquiry. Facts become interchangeable with opinions. An understanding of reality is not to be based on the elaborate gathering of facts and evidence. The ideology alone is true. Facts that get in the way of the ideology can be altered. Lies, in this worldview, become true. Hannah Arendt called this effort “nihilistic relativism” although a better phrase might be collective insanity.

*****

Among the Founding Fathers’ chief goals was to do away with a government where the king was above the law and had absolute power over the lives of his subjects. In our system, the President, like every other citizen, is meant to be subject to the law. The Founding Fathers were explicit about that intention when they debated the shape the new government they were creating would take. And that quintessentially American view that no man is above the law has been the case up until the presidency of Donald Trump.

The rule-of-law approach to government means not only that a President must himself be accountable, but also that he cannot be permitted to create special rules that he can use to benefit his friends or punish his enemies. Trump’s most recent efforts to manipulate the criminal justice system in this regard are like a four-star fire alarm that should summon the entire country, not just half of it, to put out the fire. This is not a partisan matter – whether a President is a Democrat, a Republican or affiliated with any other ideology, he or she cannot be permitted to turn the criminal justice system into a political weapon.

If Trump Is Allowed to Turn the Justice Department Into a Political Weapon, No One Is Safe
Joyce Vance, TIME

*****

We are here because of "The Gipper," Ronald Reagan, who stole money from Social Security to pay for tax cuts for the 1% that made it insolvent. The B movie president was followed by proto reality television "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" leading to "The Apprentice" and the poor acting and business management skills of a grifter that squandered all the money his father every gave him and lost money on a casino - the first time in history.

We are here because to Anglo Americans, the unthinkable was the election and re-election of Barack Obama. He represented to them the existential threat of being numerical minorities circa 2042, even though many will not live to see it (if, as I now have my doubts, humanity is still here).

We suffered eight years of madness about tan suits, Grey Poupon mustard, open outrage at the First Lady Michelle's bare arms - and speculation she was transgender - along with Obama being a secret Muslim, gay communist socialist Martian hellbent on gay marrying their grandchildren, fighting in-their-minds, "hoax" climate change and making them eat veggie burgers. Naked first ladies in filmed girl-on-girl sexual positions and prodigiously pathological lying Russian puppets is apparently, white evangelically fine now; "family values" is now for suckers.

We are here because this country's original sin - slavery and the Apartheid Jim Crow - was an obvious target to exploit with the infrastructure of AM Talk Radio and the Internet that democratized obfuscation in the likes of Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and the alt-wrong; Storm Front and digitized Klansmen in robes or polo shirts with Tiki torches by a Russian power that used it as a Trojan Horse and Achilles Heel.

We are here. What are YOU going to do about it?

This election on November 3, 2020 is consequential. Our federal republic can die as TS Eliot opined "with a whimper."

His winning would be nightmarish, but more frightening is a loss that sparks random violence from armed paramilitaries on which Orange Satan pours gasoline on a pyre. Rising from the ashes like a limp phoenix, he would "declare victory" over the ash heap and no-go zones that would be our former republic.

If there is a twenty-first addendum to Dr. Snyder's points, be prepared to fight post November 3, 2020 if he loses. Michael Cohen, knowing his old boss knew the "peaceful transition of power" would be anathema to the faux billionaire real estate confidence man.

“Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.”

― John Milton, Paradise Lost

Rule of Law...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on February 12, 2020 at 4:55am

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

What is the Rule of Law?

The rule of law is a set of principles, or ideals, for ensuring an orderly and just society. Many countries throughout the world strive to uphold the rule of law where no one is above the law, everyone is treated equally under the law, everyone is held accountable to the same laws, there are clear and fair processes for enforcing laws, there is an independent judiciary, and human rights are guaranteed for all.

Source: American Bar Association, Public Education: Rule of Law

*****

WASHINGTON — The U.S. attorney who had presided over an inconclusive criminal investigation into former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe was abruptly removed from the job last month in one of several recent moves by Attorney General William Barr to take control of legal matters of personal interest to President Donald Trump, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

A person familiar with the matter confirmed to NBC News that Trump has rescinded the nomination of Jessie Liu, who had been the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., for a job as an undersecretary at the Treasury Department.

Liu also supervised the case against Trump associate Roger Stone. On Tuesday, all four line prosecutors withdrew from the case — and one quit the Justice Department altogether — after Barr and his top aides intervened to reverse a stiff sentencing recommendation of up to nine years in prison that the line prosecutors had filed with the court Monday. (Liu left before the sentencing recommendation was made.)

Barr takes control of legal matters of interest to Trump, including Stone sentencing
Carol E. Lee, Ken Dilanian and Peter Alexander, NBCNEWS

*****

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is demanding that Attorney General William Barr testify publicly over the Justice Department's decision to reduce the recommended sentence for Trump associate Roger Stone.

Harris is asking Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to call Barr before the panel, of which she is a member.

"I request that you immediately schedule a hearing for Attorney General William Barr to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee so that the committee and the American people can understand the Justice Department’s decision to overrule its career prosecutors in this case," Harris wrote in a letter to Graham.

Harris demands Barr testify over Roger Stone sentence recommendation
Jordain Carney, The Hill

News flash (and all due respect to Senator Harris): he won't.

He, along with Wilbur Ross ignored subpoenas sent by the House of Representatives due to the coming census regarding this administration's plans to dispute citizenship, translation: negate brown people.

The policies of the United States regarding immigration has a history of blatant racism. The rule of law has always been dubiously applied differential to its black and brown citizens.

What STOPS our government from extrajudicial killings? Where is the breaking mechanism for it? Surely not in the senate. Will we see a violation of Posse Comitatus?

The Posse Comitatus Act is a United States federal law (18 U.S.C. § 1385, original at 20 Stat. 152) signed on June 18, 1878, by President Rutherford B. Hayes. The purpose of the act – in concert with the Insurrection Act of 1807 – is to limit the powers of the federal government in using federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States. It was passed as an amendment to an army appropriation bill following the end of Reconstruction and was updated in 1956 and 1981.

The act specifically applies only to the United States Army and, as amended in 1956, the United States Air Force. Although the act does not explicitly mention the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps, the Department of the Navy has prescribed regulations that are generally construed to give the act force with respect to those services as well. The act does not prevent the Army National Guard or the Air National Guard under state authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within its home state or in an adjacent state if invited by that state's governor. The United States Coast Guard, which operates under the Department of Homeland Security, is not covered by the Posse Comitatus Act either, primarily because although the Coast Guard is an armed service, it also has both a maritime law enforcement mission and a federal regulatory agency mission.

The title of the act comes from the legal concept of posse comitatus, the authority under which a county sheriff, or other law officer, conscripts any able-bodied person to assist in keeping the peace. Wikipedia/Posse_Comitatus_Act

There is just enough wiggle room for a demagogic despot and a subservient lackey as head of the DOJ; the courts stacked with lifetime federal judges the ABA deems unqualified, it is the recipe for a slow coup, a descent from democracy to despotism; from federal republic to fascism.

I'm sure the Nazis on the way to exterminating six million Jews, tested the waters with the first 24.

What do you do when the threat to your own continued existence...is your own "government"? The "gang of Putin" actively purge voters in Georgia. They make it difficult for (currently) numerical minorities to vote. They ignore laws and statutes they know they're guilty of violating. They're shameless and like Orange Satan, unchecked.

The U.S. Constitution is officially toilet paper.

We're in the fight of our lives.

The Last Republican...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on February 7, 2020 at 5:00am

Mitt Romney on the Senate floor, image source: Axios

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

A criminal was acquitted Wednesday. A trial was held for the first time in the history of the republic with no witnesses and no evidence examined. It was a shame, and a sham.

Perhaps democracy died Wednesday. It died in the Wiemar Republic for a time once Chancellor Hitler made himself Fuhrer, and overthrew their constitution. Post this kangaroo court, we are a banana republic that just crowned the mad court jester, king.

There were profiles in courage on the democratic side.

Doug Jones was a Civil Rights lawyer that won a hard fought and decades-long case against the terrorists that bombed the 16 Street Baptist Church, and killed four little black girls. It happened on my mother's birthday when I was a year and a month old: September 15, 1963. He won against Roy Moore, accused of pedophilia and creepy behavior around malls. Roy is running again in the Republican primaries, as is Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III who wants his old job back. He was the first senator to back Orange Satan and one of the first he turned on when he recused himself in the Mueller investigation. Doug could have acquitted a criminal, but then that wouldn't have made sense pursuing justice decades denied.

Kyrsten Sinema just won her seat and now has to defend it in the traditionally red state of Arizona. "Sinema began her political career as an activist for the Green Party before joining the Arizona Democratic Party in 2004. In the 2012 elections, she was elected to the United States House of Representatives, becoming the first openly bisexual person elected to Congress and the second openly LGBT woman elected to Congress. After her election to Congress, she shifted toward the political center, joining the conservative Democratic Blue Dog Coalition and the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and amassing a "reliably moderate-Democratic" voting record.

Sinema won the 2018 United States Senate election in Arizona to replace retiring Senator Jeff Flake, defeating Republican nominee Martha McSally. She became Arizona's senior senator immediately upon taking office. Sinema is the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Arizona." Wikipedia She could have joined McSally in demeaning the fourth estate. The easy thing to do was vote to acquit, "convert" to the Republican Party and pick up the devil's blessings. She chose The Constitution over a criminal and her comfort.

Jon Tester is known for his missing fingers, a childhood accident with a meat grinder. He's in a red state that both supported the orange shit stain, and could turn on him. His fidelity is to the rule of law, and that no one is above it.

Joe Mansion is the epitome of a "blue dog democrat." He voted for Kavenaugh after the Christine Ford testimony, reminiscent of the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas hearing except for the yelling, beer references and histrionics. He faces the possibility of defeat in a very red state. He chose not to fear.

History has indeed taught us that when it comes to the instincts that drive us, fear has no rival. As the lead House impeachment manager, Representative Adam Schiff, has noted, Robert Kennedy spoke of how “moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle.”

Playing on that fear, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, sought a quick impeachment trial for President Trump with as little attention to it as possible. Reporters, who usually roam the Capitol freely, have been cordoned off like cattle in select areas. Mr. McConnell ordered limited camera views in the Senate chamber so only presenters — not absent senators — could be spotted.

And barely a peep from Republican lawmakers.

One journalist remarked to me, “How in the world can these senators walk around here upright when they have no backbone?”

Fear has a way of bending us.

In Private, Republicans Admit They Acquitted Trump Out of Fear

Sherrod Brown, Democratic Senator from Ohio

Haltingly, emotionally one lone republican voted what his party no longer has or condones: his conscience.

I am not a fan of Mitt Romney.

His strong belief in his faith I don't share. There are verses in Mormon scripture disparaging to African Americans in their "war on heaven," giving incarnation to valiant angels in the cosmic conflict as "light-shinned babies"; those of lesser valor as dark-skinned. They have since disavowed those beliefs.

As the candidate of the Republican Party in 2012, he was as dissembling as any other republican. He lied in the first debate with President Obama, a precursor to the rampant obfuscation and assault on truth we're subjected to daily. He was not triumphant in their second debate, the president regaining his footing, but Obama's dismissal of Russia as an existential threat will be researched by American historians...provided we still have a republic based on facts, reality and principle. Romney lost, and was as startled as his wife was because of the hardened-from-facts bubble that is conservative media, or as Karl Rove opined, a "created reality."

Perhaps his halting was the effervescence of bursting through that bubble; his emotion penance for a party and a world he had some part in creating.

The Latter Day Saints, according to Rushton's version, would "go to the Rocky Mountains and... be a great and mighty people," associated in the prophecy's figurative language, with one of the biblical four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation.

Smith's supposed original statement predicts that the US Constitution will one day "hang like a thread" but be saved by Latter-day Saints. The embellished version portrays it to be "by the efforts of the White Horse."

Source: Wikipedia/White_Horse_Prophecy

Perhaps Senator Romney knows this prophecy. Perhaps he believes he embodies it. Perhaps he does not in either case.

He did behave Wednesday in the well of the world's former most deliberative body, as a man feeling the weight of history and his moment in it.

Despite all of my misgivings to him, we did witness the political passing, post the mortal transition of John McCain...of the last republican.

Full Transcript: Mitt Romney’s Speech Announcing Vote to Convict Trump

New York Times, February 5, 2020

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.”

― Franklin D. Roosevelt

Naked Oligarchy...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 31, 2020 at 5:00am

Image Source: Extra News Feed link below

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

"The Emperor's New Clothes" (Danish: Kejserens nye klæder) is a short tale written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, about two weavers who promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that they say is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent – while in reality, they make no clothes at all, making everyone believe the clothes are invisible to them. When the emperor parades before his subjects in his new "clothes", no one dares to say that they do not see any suit of clothes on him for fear that they will be seen as stupid. Finally a child cries out, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!" The tale has been translated into over 100 languages. Wikipedia

The Real Story Behind the Story

For social psychologists, the story is a textbook example of pluralistic ignorance, a social phenomenon in which “no one believes, but everyone believes that everyone else believes” (Krech and Crutchfield, 1948). Where pluralistic ignorance occurs, great mischief often follows. Jens Ulrik Hansen elaborates: “pluralistic ignorance is the phenomenon where a group of people shares a false belief about the beliefs, norms, actions or thoughts of the other group members.” This sort of thing happens all the time, and most people follow at least some rules and norms not because they believe in and approve of them, but because everyone else seems to.

"Pluralistic ignorance is a social phenomenon in which “no one believes, but everyone believes that everyone else believes."

The Emperor’s New Clothes: Trump, The Media and the Problems of Pluralistic Ignorance, Christopher Burgess, Extra News Feed

Joni Ernst gave away the game on Joe Biden and Iowa. Ken Starr acts like he's never impeached a president for a blow job, credulously arguing that collaboration with a foreign power isn't as bad as extramarital fellatio. Alan-defender-of-pedophiles-Dershowitz is essentially arguing the Nixon "if it's the president, it's not illegal" defense while getting #Dershbag to impressively trend on Twitter. The wring-our-hands constitutional stewards during black emperor president can't sit on their asses longer than an a few hours before making airplanes, crossword puzzles or playing with fidget toys.

Be that as it may, Oligarchy is here. The political structures of the republic are still operative but increasingly ineffective at stopping Oligarchy from its purpose, which is to suck all resources toward the top.

The U.S. Oligarchy can't be described with classifications such as upper, middle, and lower class. Oligarchy divides society (with amazing success!) into rigid strata or tiers.

Top Tier is the "highest degree of authority ... free from control." A Paul Simon lyric defined them: "a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires." The operative word is "loose." Conspiracy theorists derail when they imagine tightly disciplined cabals. To think the Top Tier acts in concert is to underestimate how viciously and constantly its components compete among themselves. An oligarchy is more like a clan: They argue with each other but unite against the Other – that "other," in this case, being everyone else.

Letters at 3AM: 'O' Is for Oligarchy, Michael Ventura, The Austin Chronicle, April 9, 2010

This was a prescient article I read in the print version of the Austin Chronicle when I was living in the city at the time. It printed over several weeks and had me coming back to the cafe to digest it along with coffee. The tiers it described below the Top Tier are well-compensated professionals (six figure and above incomes), skilled services (skills that cannot be outsourced); the unskilled tier and beneath the unskilled tier: "spare parts" - a natural place for the homeless and mentally ill.

There is a lament for a golden era of the Founding Fathers. Justice Antonin Scalia was a described "strict constructionist," meaning "a judge to apply the text only as it is written. Once the court has a clear meaning of the text, no further investigation is required. Judges—in this view—should avoid drawing inferences from a statute or constitution and focus only on the text itself." (Wikipedia) He apparently did not use that as self-description, it was merely applied to him by those who saw advantage in ascribing it to him. The reason Moscow Mitch held his seat after his demise from Merrick Garland - and was prepared to continue it if Hillary Clinton had become president - was because of this archaic view. The Constitution as it was originally written ascribed the mathematics of "three-fifths a human" to the kidnapped African Diaspora, which directly relates to the equally archaic electoral college.

In a sense, our republic was designed for oligarchs. In a "strict constructionist" view of the original documents, only propertied white men would be given the "audacity of [the] vote":

The right of suffrage is a fundamental Article in Republican Constitutions. The regulation of it is, at the same time, a task of peculiar delicacy. Allow the right [to vote] exclusively to property [owners], and the rights of persons may be oppressed... . Extend it equally to all, and the rights of property [owners] ...may be overruled by a majority without property....

Library of Congress: The Founders and the Vote

Excluded from the franchise: the African Diaspora ("property," along with the real estate of plantations), First Nation Peoples, Women; non-English speaking peoples.

For all the poetic waxing on our "founding documents," this sounds an awful lot like oligarchy.

So, the descendants of these crimped dick constructionists are hankering for "the good old days" when men were WHITE Anglo Saxon Protestant Cisgenger (WASP-C) men, they were the only ones that could vote and everyone else was an asterisk.

What about Clarence Thomas? Yeah, about Clarence long-dong Thomas...

In Stowe’s 1852 book, the character of Sambo was one of the slave overseers that work for the cruel slave owner, Simon Legree. Uncle Tom, a god-fearing slave with a compassionate heart, was tormented and beaten to death by Sambo, who regretted his act even as Tom forgave him as he was dying. Although Stowe had higher aims with her book, the depiction of Black characters as matronly and subservient further added to stereotypes that persist today.

Little Known Black History Fact: Sambo, D. L. Chandler, Black America Web, 1/11/17

Long-dong. Sambo. Use the right epithets. He can continue taking naps. He's useless, and knows he can't come back to the family BBQ.

So, as this wholesale siphoning goes on, the "vast sucking sound" is as effective as it's always been since the late billionaire Ross Perot coined the phrase (and like Joni, kind of revealed the game).

94% of American voters supported universal background checks, according to a Quinnipiac University Polling Institute poll with a margin of error of +/- 3.4%. Wikipedia

In fact, according to a Public Policy Polling survey, 83 percent of gun owners support expanded background checks on sales of all firearms, including 72 percent of all NRA members.

The Vast Majority of Americans Support Universal Background Checks. Why Doesn’t Congress? Victor Agbafe, Harvard Political Review

The latest Quinnipiac University poll, released earlier today, shows that a large majority—75 percent—of voters think the Senate should allow witness testimony in the ongoing impeachment trial. Respondents appeared to have answered along party lines, with 49 percent of self-identified Republicans, 95 percent of Democrats and 75 percent of independents saying there should be witnesses.

'75% of Americans' Trends After Poll Shows Majority of Americans Want To Hear Witnesses At Trump Impeachment Trial

Christina Zhao, Newsweek

A democratic republic would respond to such data; an oligarchy with a lower tier of a well-compensated professional class responding to wealthy donors would not, and adamantly so.

If we actually want a functioning democratic republic, we better act like it.

It may take some door knocking. It may take some cold calling for candidates, your representatives and senators. If they're part of the "gang of Putin," it will take calling multiple times. It may take some posting signs in your yards that open you sadly to assault by Neanderthals prone to violence against sunshine - "woke" tweets and "on fleek" Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat updates don't count. If voting wasn't that important, Staci Abrams wouldn't have a fight in Georgia. Adam Schiff and the House managers didn't convince a single, made up mind in the 53-47 crowd, but hopefully it did in the jury that matters: 331,002,651, and counting. They won't all vote. Some of them have never voted. The cult members won't be talked off the island, but this republic needs voters that are alert and see through the lies. Democracy is messy and hard to maintain, which is why authoritarianism and fascism raises its ugly head from time to time. This is existential because this might be the LAST time, with no recovery, or global Marshall Plan on the horizon. It's going to be up to "us."

Finally a child cries out, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!"

What if the naked emperor and his sycophant senator pachyderms DON'T CARE?

"We are the ones that we have been waiting for." by then candidate Barack Obama, but it has other sources.

#FIGHT for the future.

Facts, Fascism and Fascists...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 24, 2020 at 5:00am

Image Source: Truth Dig link below

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, have begun to dismantle the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They are creating a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and shutting out all those they define as the enemy. This movement, veering closer and closer to traditional fascism, seeks to force a recalcitrant world to submit before an imperial America. It champions the eradication of social deviants, beginning with homosexuals, and moving on to immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims and those they dismiss as “nominal Christians” — meaning Christians who do not embrace their perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible. Those who defy the mass movement are condemned as posing a threat to the health and hygiene of the country and the family. All will be purged.

The followers of deviant faiths, from Judaism to Islam, must be converted or repressed. The deviant media, the deviant public schools, the deviant entertainment industry, the deviant secular humanist government and judiciary and the deviant churches will be reformed or closed. There will be a relentless promotion of Christian “values,” already under way on Christian radio and television and in Christian schools, as information and facts are replaced with overt forms of indoctrination. The march toward this terrifying dystopia has begun. It is taking place on the streets of Arizona, on cable news channels, at tea party rallies, in the Texas public schools, among militia members and within a Republican Party that is being hijacked by this lunatic fringe.

The Christian Fascists Are Growing Stronger, Chris Hedges, Truth Dig

There has been high praise for the House Impeachment Managers: Representatives Jerrold Nadler, Val Demings, Zoe Lofgren, Sylvia Garcia, Jason Crow, Hakeem Jeffries; especially its leader, Adam Schiff. My fraternity brother, House Manager Hakeem Jeffries probably accomplished the first hip hop Biggie Smalls' mic drop rebuttal in impeachment history. I'm sure it completely went over Jay Sekulow's head.

Sadly, facts don't matter to fascists.

Belief in pseudoscience extended across the Nazi high command, from the Führer's search for 'death rays' to Goebbels reading Nostradamus in bed.

This is a dense and scholarly book about one of the pulpiest subjects of the past 70 years - the relationship between the Nazi party and the occult, which has been much debated across popular culture both in fiction (Captain America: Civil War, Hellboy, Wolfenstein, the Indiana Jones series, Iron Sky, The Keep and countless others) and in innumerable schlocky works of pseudoscience with runes and swastikas on the covers.

As it turns out, though, even this sober, academic treatment of the topic reveals stranger-than-fiction truths on every page.

Here are a few of them. In the 1930s, Hitler made extensive notes on a book called Magic: Theory, History, Practice and underlined passages such as "He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world". In 1934, the year after he was appointed chancellor of Germany, he hired a dowser to go over the Reich Chancellery in search of "death rays" that might damage staff in the building. He and Himmler held frequent conversations about "the World Empire of Atlantis, which fell victim to the catastrophe of the moons falling to Earth" and about a discredited pseudoscience called Welteislehre, or World Ice Theory, which taught that the cosmos was made of ice and which they saw as a "Germanic" counterbalance to the "Jewish" theory of relativity.

Hitler's obsession with the occult, Tim Martin, July 30, 2017, Independent.ie

Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, Eric Kurlander, Amazon.com

It seems Captain America: the First Avenger and Marvel got it right.

When you're modern fascists, you stretch, move; work on crossword puzzles and paper airplanes in the senate chamber even under threat of imprisonment. Must be nice, Mr. Paul. But this is a guy who's ophthalmology certification is from the National Ophthalmology Board, which sounds all well and good until you realize it's a board HE founded. It also apparently dissolves like bicarbonate in vinegar when convenient.

Eugenics and mythology were the Nazis' obsessions; "intelligent design" and end-time eschatology appears the obsession of our current crop of sociopaths.

Even though the House Impeachment Managers have been witty, erudite, thorough; brilliant with video and PowerPoint presentations that would make Nancy Duarte, the author of Slide:ology proud, to quote Thomas Paine: “To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.” Ms. Duarte's most famous student is Vice President Al Gore and his Nobel Prize climate presentation that became the Oscar-winning documentary: "An Inconvenient Truth."

But when you're fascists, any truth is the enemy. That's why your Putin sock puppet can get rid of environmental laws that affect streams and wetlands. That's why climate change is STILL a Chinese hoax after signing some cockeyed trade agreement that probably will make us all miss TPP. Your AG Bill Barr/Roy Cohn chases conspiracy theories across the globe that makes our allies think we've lost our collective minds. 16,000+ and counting lies from "dear leader" is literal Manna from Heaven to the sachet swastika set, fact checkers be damned. Down is up. Left is right. White is black; it's always a new moon and the sun shines darkness.

53 - 47: So far, 53 out of 100 senators of the same party with an obvious bias against reality are awaiting their moment to acquit a criminal, because their own party is a complicit criminal enterprise. 53 - 47 senators voted against election security; 53 - 47 senators agree with voter ID, voter suppression and Russia interfering with the fundamental right of a republic to pick its OWN leaders. For 53 - 47, evidence doesn't matter. Witnesses don't matter. FACTS don't matter: because to them, democracy doesn't matter. Only POWER matters. 53 - 47 need to prove they're not fascists.

53-47: this number should be hung around 53 red necks. They should pay a political price and lose their positions and majority. November 3, 2020 is the date we end this fascist takeover. #Vote, or your republic is permanently lost.

Lies are to fascists like slop is for hogs: a mixture of mud, corn husks and rancid pig shit, filth only comfortable to hogs.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

“Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.”

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

― George Orwell, Animal Farm

Drug Deals and Bullshit...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 17, 2020 at 5:00am

Image Source: Philosophy Talk, "Is There a Case for Bullshit?" by Serena Wong

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, “we have no theory.”

Frankfurt, one of the world’s most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.

Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner’s capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt

Well, he used it in a rally. They finally embodied it in a president* that's clearly fatter than when he started "executive time" or something, because golfing on the government dime isn't burning any calories, nor are his prodigious tweeting bowel movements.

*Putin-installed puppet

Level 1 Bullshit Artists

Pilgrims coming for "religious freedom." Winthrop's "shining city on a hill" was a shit pile of lies. His utopia looked like proto "Handmaid's Tale." Dude didn't even like Quakers. WHO doesn't like Quakers? You damned near died your first winter, in some cases resorting to cannibalism, systematically slaughtered the First Nation Peoples who GOT you through that winter and masked the genocide in the false memory of Thanksgiving propagated as propaganda to introduce Black Friday and the holiday binge buying season where everybody's broke in January. Happy capitalism. Socialism is evil. Ask Denmark.

Level 2 Bullshit Artists

Slavery. When you saw the road was rough with thorns and thistles; the First Nation peoples had bows, arrows and occasionally guns showing you how pissed they were when you tried to genocide them, you and Great Britain went to the continent of Africa, payed off some douche chieftains that wanted to get rid of rivals and use uncompensated labor to make yourselves rich beyond Solomon's dreams. Your government documents state your reason to secede was about slavery and your revulsion of black people, so don't bullshit me, you or anyone else. You balk at reparations because it's like pulling the thread of your favorite suit, watching the entire structure unravel. I get why you're nostalgic over the "peculiar institution." Bullshit artists are lazy. See "executive time."

Level 3 Bullshit Artists

I call bullshit on the revered "Founding Fathers." Your papered-over Tea Party in Boston Harbor wasn't a noble act of rebellion: you were COLONISTS. You didn't hitchhike to America! Britain paid your cruise ship tickets on the Mayflower. You essentially saw a way NOT to pay your taxes. (Your descendants created lawyers, loopholes and offshore bank accounts for that now.) "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal"...except black men, black women, their children and descendants; white women didn't vote until 1920. African Americans didn't get the Voting Rights Act until 1965, and THAT has to be periodically reauthorized! It barely passed this last time, like republicans might want to vote slavery back in.

Level 4 Bullshit Artists

The Fairness Doctrine: "In the Radio Act of 1927, Congress dictated that the FCC (and its predecessor, the Federal Radio Commission) should only issue broadcast licenses when doing so serves the public interest. In 1949, the FCC interpreted this more strictly to mean that licensees should include discussions of matters of public importance in their broadcasts, and that they should do so in a fair manner. It issued “In the Matter of Editorializing by Broadcast Licensees,” which announced the Fairness Doctrine, and began enforcing it."

Everything you need to know about the Fairness Doctrine in one post, Dylan Matthews, Washington Post

It's after the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, right wing AM talk radio and Rush Limbaugh became the darling of the trucker set and the foundation of the echo chamber that would eventually become Roger Ailes Fox "News," 4Chann, 8Chann, Infowars and QAnon. Read the above underline statement, and ask yourself if they do.

Level 5 Bullshit Artists

The Fox News Channel (FNC) is an American basic cable and satellite news television channel that was founded by media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 1996. Roger Ailes appointed himself as permanent CEO of the news operation in 2001 & was created as a Republican-centered alternative to CNN. In January 2002, the ratings of the channel surpassed top-rated CNN to become the #1 news cable channel. They fell in March 2002, but since then the network has maintained its #1 cable rating (as of 2019) with increasing viewership and international access. Wikipedia

Ailes was a staffer in the Nixon administration, and of course thought any republican president should be allowed to get away with grand theft from the Watergate building. Too bad he had those tapes that did him in. He should have had Twitter, and misspelled, or spelled covfefe.

Level 6 Bullshit Artists

The entire Russian government has resigned just hours after President Vladimir Putin proposed sweeping changes to the country’s constitution, according to reports. The TASS news agency, which is owned by the Russian government, reported Wednesday morning that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and his ministers submitted their resignations to Putin. The agency said Putin thanked Medvedev for his work and said the outgoing prime minister would be installed as deputy of the presidential security council. Medvedev said he resigned to give Putin space to carry out the changes he wants to make to the constitution.

The Entire Russian Government Has Resigned, Jamie Ross, The Daily Beast

Wow! I guess "he alone will fix it" by decree+ like an emperor, or in the case of Russia: a Czar. Now I see where his comb-over toupee Neanderthal got it from. It sounds like he's making what's left of their constitution into toilet paper just like his Orange Satan puppet. He did this as his American pet's impeachment hearings got underway. You don't have to commit a crime to get impeached, but it's awkward as the Government Accounting Office announces you're guilty of a crime.

+"So let it be written, so let it be done" Yul Brynner as Pharaoh in The Ten Commandments, in a slew of Hollywood cultural appropriation.

Level 7 Bullshit Artists

Seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth, source: Wikipedia

Evangelicals aren't a religious body anymore: they're a political party with zero values. Somehow, the once "family values" party fell in line behind a heathen that exemplifies ALL seven deadly sins turned racism into a winning strategy for the moment. He's impeached forever - the third president* in U.S. history, the first in the 21st century and with the Lev Parnas What App drop, he apparently thinks Quid Pro Quo is a healthy bowel movement for septuagenarians.

The Southern Strategy is subject to the thermodynamics of Entropy just like any other moldy philosophy. John Bolton called the plot against Marie Yovanovitch that may have threatened her life a drug deal, but he's teetering between breaking another bombshell in a shitload of bombshells or depressing the sales of his future book by waiting too long. Any information that could remove the orange tweeting thing from the nuclear button is useless if he gets a second term, or if we're all glowing in the dark.

By the way Orange Satan: a shit load of lies doesn't make them true. It's just all bullshit.

*Putin-installed puppet

Kleptocracy, Kakistocracy and Show Running Apocalypse...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 10, 2020 at 5:00am

Kompromat: Donald Trump at a Miss Universe party in Moscow in 2013. What he might have done in a hotel room there is nobody’s business except, perhaps, his wife’s. Photograph: Stoyan Vassev/Reuters, Irish Times

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

The Apprentice was first aired in 2004, and presented Trump as the ultra-successful real estate deal-maker who would choose from a cast of candidates competing for a job in the Trump Organization. Trump's catch phrase on the show was, "You're fired," which he would deliver pointing at that week's unsuccessful candidate.

Editor Jonathan Braun told the publication that Trump would fire contestants on the show on a whim, forcing editors to "reverse engineer" programs to make Trump's decisions seem coherent.

Production staff described how their job was to elevate Trump's image, whose star had fallen since his 1980s heyday of fame.

"Most of us knew he was a fake," Braun, who worked on six series of the show, told The New Yorker. "He had just gone through I don't know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king."

Working with Trump 'Was Like Making the Court Jester the King' says 'Apprentice' Producer, Tom Porter, Newsweek

In his address, the president threatened to invoke severe sanctions against Iran, but seemed amenable to deescalating the burgeoning military aggression. Still, the nine-minute address was packed with the president’s standard potpourri of falsehoods, lies, and bouts of incoherence. But the most striking aspect of his speech had less to do with what he said than how he said it. Which is to say, Trump was slurring and snorting through an address that was ostensibly designed to calm a nation on the brink of war.

Trump has never been a particularly graceful public speaker, but his mush-mouth sounded especially pronounced this morning. There was heaviness to his speech, as if he was struggling to talk through cottonmouth. He also had difficulty with the letter S, which he couldn’t pronounce without a drawn out hiss, as if he were a snake. One of the more flagrant examples entails the president mangling the pronunciation of “tolerated” while condemning terrorism.

Donald Trump Slurs and Snorts Through Speech About Iranian Missile Strike, Maggie Serota, SPIN

The briefing by his laughable national security team, supposedly justifying the killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani Wednesday raised more questions than it answered. Senator Mike Lee sounded livid. Rand Paul also seemed willing to seize back the Article I powers congress has abdicated since 9/11. John Bolton saying he would testify in an impeachment trial sent the current president* and republican-led senate in a panic to conclude quickly the only trial in America or in HISTORY - without called witnesses. Russia hacked the RNC like they hacked the DNC, but did not release it, meaning they HAVE it in other words, kompromat, used to manipulate them.

WASHINGTON -- Newly released documents show Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani was in contact with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in the months before the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine was abruptly recalled.

The State Department released the documents Friday to the group American Oversight in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. They show that Pompeo talked with Giuliani on March 26 and March 29.

Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, said the documents reveal “a clear paper trail from Rudy Giuliani to the Oval Office to Secretary Pompeo to facilitate Giuliani’s smear campaign against a U.S. ambassador.”

Last week, former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch told House impeachment investigators she felt “kneecapped” by a “smear campaign” Giuliani led against her. She was withdrawn from her post in Ukraine in May.

The documents released Friday also include a report, that appears with Trump hotel stationery, that appears to summarize a Jan. 23 interview with a former Ukrainian prosecutor general, Victor Shokin. The summary says Giuliani and two business associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were present.

New documents show contacts between Giuliani and Pompeo, The Associated Press

The instinct of this president* is to be a crook. He was so Dr. Flunk-en-stein he's blocked any public access to his grades at Fordham University in New York and Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. It's so bad, he apparently didn't know colleges and universities CAN'T release that information without his permission. It's so bad he doesn't want us to see his grades at his military academy high school. Michael Cohen threatened the institutions - mob lawyer gangster-style - to protect his former client's demonstrably fragile ego (Mike's in jail for him now).

We're out of the The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) for the same reasons: racism and jealousy. He tore it up because "the black guy who teased him at the White House Correspondence Dinner" did it. The announcement of Bin Laden's death comically preempted his precious reality show, the ONE place he could pretend to be successful instead of the failure even he knew he was. How DARE his enemy!

He needs his name on NAFTA 2.0 because of his malignant narcissism. He took Orly Taitz cockeyed, Quixotic crusade and rode the bigotry former Dixiecrats cum republicans cum Tea Party cum his cult following who were quite clear they loathed having an African American president and the immigration and demographics changes he represented. Along with help from Vladimir Putin and the antiquated electoral college, he slumped to the Oval Office, a position he'd never thought of, never prepared for and is not qualified for, despite his braggadocio regarding his "big brain."

“Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” I remember his emphasis and inflection — it went like this: “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” Kelley told me this after Trump had become a celebrity, but long before he was considered a political figure. Kelley often referred to Trump’s arrogance when he told the story that Trump came to Wharton thinking he already knew everything.

This has relevance now because as recently as this week, President Trump challenged the Secretary of State of the United States to an IQ contest. This came within two days after NBC reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the President a “moron” or a "f**king moron." The president has frequently bragged that he was a great student at a great school (Wharton). Thus, the public is entitled to a contrary view from somebody who was there (Dr. Kelley), and I faithfully report it here.

Bill Kelley was one smart cookie. His textbook was standard in his time in the then-new field of “marketing intelligence” and the necessity of using computers and databases to manage it. (See onlinelibrary.wiley.com which credits Bill for coining the quoted phrase.)

Former Wharton Professor: ‘Trump Was the Dumbest G*ddamn Student I Ever Had’

Frank DiPrima, DailyKos, AlterNET

He is both poster child of the SAT cheating scandal and the abysmal mythology of "white supremacy." He has proven the Alt-Wrong, Noodle Nazis, Klu-less Kleptocratic Kakistocracy to be the impotent impostors they've always been, frightened they have to compete for positions of the future; reaching for a past that never existed. They want white picket fences, white women at home: barefoot, submitted and perpetually pregnant to increase their stock of fascists. They want black people on the back of buses, Hispanics/Latinos back in Mexico, LGBT back in the closet; big oil and coal unfettered regardless of environmental consequences. They need fear to rule over others to bandage the failures they can't accept in themselves, and their pathetic lives.

And they have anointed an orange, satanic savior, a lens through which they focus their racist angst through.

Sadly, for The Apocalypse, there is no second season.

*Putin-installed puppet: a new definition for PIP, which he wouldn't follow anyway.

Malignant Solipsism...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 3, 2020 at 5:00am

Echo gazes at Narcissus while he longingly peers at his own reflection. J.W. Waterhouse, 1903. Public domain.

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

One day while hunting, Narcissus comes across an untouched, glassy spring. He is drawn to its beauty and lies down to take a drink, but what he sees in the still water enchants him. He is in love with what he sees and is inflamed by the features of the vision: the hair, his eyes, porcelain skin, and rosy cheeks. Attempts to kiss and hold the reflection are in vain, and Narcissus is only frustrated by the teasing reactions of the image. When Narcissus winks, the image winks back, when Narcissus waves, the image waves, and when he cries tears, he sees that the image also cries. Narcissus cannot understand why he cannot reach what he so desperately desires.

The tormented boy agonizes over his unrequited love. He cannot leave the spring and is trapped in his frozen gaze at his reflection, pining away for the boy in the water who rejects all advances. Then Narcissus realizes that the image is his, but it’s too late, as he has already fallen tragically in love with himself. Knowing that he can never have what he desires, his body withers away in despair. When Narcissus says “Goodbye” to the reflection, Echo’s voice says “Goodbye.” At that moment, Narcissus dies while peering into the spring. Historic Mysteries

*****

The Camp of the Saints (French: Le Camp des Saints) is a 1973 French dystopian fiction novel by Catholic author and explorer Jean Raspail. A speculative fictional account, it depicts the destruction of Western civilization through Third World mass immigration to France and the West. Almost forty years after its initial publication, the novel returned to the bestseller list in 2011. Wikipedia/The_Camp_of_the_Saints

The Turner Diaries is a 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce, published under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald.[1] The Turner Diaries depicts a violent revolution in the United States which leads to the overthrow of the federal government, nuclear war, and, ultimately, a race war leading to the systematic extermination of non-whites.[2][3] All groups opposed by the novel's protagonist, Earl Turner, including Jews, non-whites, "liberal actors" and politicians, are exterminated. Wikipedia/The_Turner_Diaries

The Turner Diaries may sound familiar if you recall the Oklahoma City Bombing. Timothy McVeigh had a copy of it in the pickup truck he was discovered in. An army veteran skilled in explosive ordinance disposal (E.O.D.), fashioning a bomb of fertilizer and fuel was a matter of course.

The Jewish white nationalist (pxymoron) Steven Miller recommended The Camp of the Saints in several revealed emails to Brietbart. Mr. Miller - a second generation descendant of Jewish refugees from the Nazi pogroms in WWII Poland - and the author of our kiddie concentration camps efficiently "disappearing" and outright killing brown children (24 that we know of).

“Clear direction from POTUS to continue to hold.”

This is what Michael Duffey, associate director of national security programs at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), told Elaine McCusker, the acting Pentagon comptroller, in an Aug. 30 email, which has only been made available in redacted form until now. It is one of many documents the Trump administration is trying to keep from the public, despite congressional oversight efforts and court orders in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation.

Earlier in the day on Aug. 30, President Donald Trump met with Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to discuss the president’s hold on $391 million in military assistance for Ukraine. Inside the Trump administration, panic was reaching fever pitch about the president’s funding hold, which had stretched on for two months. Days earlier, POLITICO had broken the story and questions were starting to pile up. U.S. defense contractors were worried about delayed contracts and officials in Kyiv and lawmakers on Capitol Hill wanted to know what on earth was going on. While Trump’s national security team thought withholding the money went against U.S. national security interests, Trump still wouldn’t budge.

Thanks to the testimony of several Trump administration officials, we now know what Trump was waiting on: a commitment from Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.

Kate Brennan
Just Security: Exclusive Unredacted Ukraine Documents Reveal Extent of Pentagon's Legal Concerns

Holding onto the Articles of Impeachment may have been suggested by Professor Lawrence Tribe, but it is by far a masterclass in government dexterity by Speaker Pelosi, who did predict Orange Satan would self-impeach, which he does with every twitchy tweet from the loo.

However, at the voluminous avalanche of lies, he's starting to affect the notions of truth and reality:

Democracy requires that we honor the culture of words. The very idea of democracy is based on the hope that fellow citizens can reason together and find a system for adjudicating differences and solving problems—all of which assumes there is a shared commitment to the integrity of our public words. If you believe words can ennoble, you must also believe they can debase. If they can elevate the human spirit, they can also pull it down. And when words are weaponized by our political leaders and used to paint all opponents as inherently evil, stupid, or weak, then democracy’s foundations are put in peril. Which brings us to the dismal, demoralizing Donald Trump era.

The debasement of words has reached a zenith with the coming of America’s 45th president, who dominates discourse in this country in ways perhaps no other president ever has. And if we hope to repair the damage that’s been done, we need to understand what it is about Trump’s misuse of words that is pernicious and dangerous.

The least problematic part is the sheer banality of Donald Trump’s words. During his presidency, Trump has uttered no beautiful and memorable phrases. His inaugural address, which is a speech normally meant to inspire the citizenry, is remembered, if at all, for the phrase American carnage and Trump’s description of a dystopian nation, broken and shattered. More worrisome is that many of Trump’s utterances are an incoherent word salad. If you read the transcript of many of his interviews and extemporaneous speeches, you often find that Trump is not only unable to lay out a coherent argument; at times he’s unable to string together sentences that parse.

The banality and weaponization of Trump’s words are bad enough, but the greatest cause for concern is his nonstop, dawn-to-midnight assault on facts, truth, reality. That places Trump in a sinister category all his own.

Many politicians are guilty of not telling the full truth of events. A significant number shade the truth from time to time. A few fall into the category of consistent, outright liars. But only very few—and only the most dangerous—are committed to destroying the very idea of truth itself. That is what we have in Donald Trump, along with many of his aides and courtiers. We saw it at the dawn of the Trump presidency, when he insisted—and sent out his press secretary to insist—that the crowd size at his inauguration was larger than that of Barack Obama’s, despite photographic evidence to the contrary. And that behavior has continued virtually every day since.

Trump’s Sinister Assault on Truth: The president appears committed to destroying the very idea of facts.
Peter Wehner, The Atlantic

*****

Democracy depends on a shared set of facts that can be debated in discussed either in a court, on a congressional floor or near a coffee machine at work. It's affable and seeks a happy medium: no one gets everything they desire, but it does require compromise.

Fascism is nothing at all like that. Like George Orwell's famous novel, "1984," fascism requires and demands power for its own sake. It wants what it wants for the sake of wanting. History has no meaning to it at all. Logic and reason have no appeal or sway in people who traffic in "alternative facts" or its Karl Rove precursor: "created realities." Sunshine Fascism...April 12, 2019

*****

At the direction of the President, the U.S. military has taken decisive defensive action to protect U.S. personnel abroad by killing Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.

General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region. General Soleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more. He had orchestrated attacks on coalition bases in Iraq over the last several months - including the attack on December 27th - culminating in the death and wounding of additional American and Iraqi personnel. General Soleimani also approved the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that took place this week.

Top Iranian general killed in US airstrike in Baghdad, Pentagon confirms
Amanda Macias, Joanna Tan, CNBC

At the direction of a president that has lied over 15,000 times since bizarre inauguration, replete with rain ignored and carnage commentary. At the direction of a president that has used racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia like a hobbyist would use a socket set. "Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region" means those plans likely didn't die: they have been inherited by a motivated deputy now promoted. There will be reprisals and escalations in the Near East that will be...biblical. Secretary Clinton's AMER-EXIT to Belfast is telling and foreboding.

We're at the direction of a president who many psychological professionals view as a malignant narcissist and devotee of solipsism. No reality is real external to his own disturbed mind. No history has existed save the history he makes in 140 characters. No truth is real except the banal "truthiness" of the moment. His cult minions follow such disturbed mental gymnastics blindly without critique. There is no overarching policy or plan for anything, nor will there ever be, like 140 misspelled characters and retweeted conspiracy theories. It's to change the narrative from impeachment, real-world consequences be damned.

There is a cult industry pre and post the Internet speculating the identity of "the man of sin"; "the son of lawlessness."

- Prophesy enthusiasts postulated Napoleon and Hitler cum Nostradamus, with one consonant rearrangement: Hister, because as with all conspiracy theories, humans look for patterns and invent them whether they're real or not. Saddam Hussein was thrown in for good measure.

- Ronald Wilson Reagan was the evil one because each letter of his names numbered "6."

- Mikhail Gorbachev was him due to his birthmark on his forehead.

- George W. Bush had a website and a book, likely from his membership in Skull and Bones.

- Barack Hussein Obama had that, misappropriated scripture and myriad conspiracy theories from his inauguration forward.

My pet name for the 45th president is mostly tongue-in-cheek. However, his following is cheering for Armageddon, and the actions last night have brought us closer to that. There will be a response here, or abroad. The earth does not need humans that draw up treaties and break them with Iranians or Native Americans.

The enamor for "end times" has no definition other than "the world coming to an end." The Earth is 40,075.017 km in circumference, 510,072,000 km² surface area, 1.08321 × 10¹² km³ volume, 5.97237 × 10²⁴ kg mass; 5.514 g/cm³. Evolutionary biologists put oxygen-generating photosynthesis some 2.4 billion years ago, evidenced by rust. Humans evolved in Africa 200,000 years ago, migrated away where ultraviolet light wasn't so direct and thus lightened, then defined that natural process as evidence of "superiority." Australia is on fire in their driest summer in the southern hemisphere, fueled by climate change and apathy from science and climate deniers. T.S. Elliot summarized our exit in "The Hollow Men": "This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not with a bag, but a whimper." The whimper might be fires, floods and weather we cannot contain, let alone control.

Prior to our entrance on this terrestrial soil, the earth traveled in space around the sun 365.25 days per year more or less without witnesses, scribe, historian, artist or scientist to count 4.5 billion years. The earth does not need us: we need it.

The 2019 Doomsday Clock by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists claimed two minutes to midnight.

The 2020 Doomsday Clock in this third decade of the 21st century will at least be informative once published.

fascism (110)

Call It by Its Name...

Entropy and Existence...

Pig Slop...

Occam's Razor and Scorched Earth...

Gaming This Out...

Biff, Galileo and Gaslighting...

Ghoulish...

Protocols...

Caveats, Rainbows and Compassionate Capitalism...

Zombies Would be Better...

Lethal Stupidity...

Gigs and Pandemics...

The Unthinkable...

Rule of Law...

The Last Republican...

Naked Oligarchy...

Facts, Fascism and Fascists...

Drug Deals and Bullshit...

Kleptocracy, Kakistocracy and Show Running Apocalypse...

Malignant Solipsism...

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