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Trump in the Garden — Lice on Ice

Trump in the Garden

Lice on Ice

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 28th 2024

Well, that whatever-the-hell-that-was at Madison Square Garden last night boiled everything down to just two possibilities: either Donald Trump completely lost the election, or America completely lost its mind.

I thought that comparing the Trump MSG rally to the 1939 German-American Bund rally was a bit over the top. Yes, I’ve been saying for some time that Trump and his followers are fascists with disturbing amounts of Nazi influence, but I figured that this would be their single biggest audience draw since the convention, and with barely a week left until election day.

And yes, it is unfair to compare the Trump movement to the German-American Bund. The Bund were far more restrained, diplomatic and less bigoted and vile.

The tone was set early, when comedian-in-waiting Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” So what’s the difference between a Puerto Rican and our Tony? Tony sank.

It wasn’t even the low point. It just set the general tone. The other speakers were the same B-listers that have worked so hard to keep audiences entertained while waiting for the always-hours-late Donald Trump: Hulk Hogan, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, Don Junior and Rudy Giuliani. They all spewed their usual blend of bigotry and lowest-common-denominator demagoguery.

Junior claimed Trump was reclaiming his title of King of New York, which is kind of like the Chicago White Sox claiming they’ll be facing the Dodgers in this year’s World Series. Even before this debacle, Trump couldn’t get 20% of the vote in New York City. They hate him, and have for many years, and for many reasons.

I checked always-dependable Faux News for their take. They had one headline, “Trump supporters outside Madison Square Garden say deep blue New York is in play” (In their world, the Dodgers are playing the Toronto Maple Leafs) with a blurb about how “exhilarated” they were about the rally. I couldn’t help but note that that was from BEFORE the rally. I’m guessing that the ones that made it to the end of that marathon event were feeling…well, deflated.

I’m sure if you want to watch it for yourself, it’s all over You Tube by now. It’s only six hours long, and the Trump speech by itself is only an hour and twenty minutes. If it helps, think of it as cinematic history. No, not Leni Riefenstahl; I was thinking more of the role Alex played in “A Clockwork Orange,” when his eyes were taped open and he was forced to watch disgusting and vile acts of violence and depravity for hours on end while experiencing acute nausea.

Indeed, Trump’s rally makes for a good Ludovico technique of aversion therapy; watching that Trumpenorgy will give you a deep aversion to fascism, nazism, and hopefully ignorance and stupidity. Bit of a shame you won’t be able to watch a Rangers game ever again, though. Well, Alex had to give up Beethoven; the Rangers are no great loss.

The rally should have finished the Trump campaign off. If it didn’t, then it finished America off. The two cannot coexist. If there’s anyone out there who is doing the Olive Oyl bit and can’t decide between Trump and Harris, go to YouTube and watch the rally. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Seriously, if you haven’t made up your mind, watch that rally. If you STILL can’t decide, then maybe voting isn’t for you and you should go back to dithering for three hours each evening over what color socks you should wear in the morning.

Trump is ramping up the bile and nastiness at a time when he should be petting kittens and expressing approval of apple pie and baseball. Maybe kiss a few babies, only watch where you put those lips.

Instead, he’s showing America as the worst that it can be. If there is a floating island of garbage in America, then it took up residence in Madison Square Garden last night. And that island of garbage is sinking rapidly.

Last week I estimated Harris would win by ten million votes nationwide.

After last night’s spectacle, make that twelve million. A lot of people who watched that aren’t going to vote for Trump now.

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AI in the Trenches — Generative vs Creative

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 2nd, 2024

Peter Cawdron is one of the most prolific writers around. Since 2011, he’s written 27 novels with the common theme of First Contact, and with two exceptions, all are stand-alone works, each with its own world, cast of characters, and aliens. Quite often the premise is based on the outline of a science fiction classic (“Ghosts,” the exploration of a seemingly dormant extrastellar object, borrows the premise from Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama” but, like all of Cawdron’s novels, is a wholly original take.) He also has at least 12 other novels, plus several compilations of short fiction, and has edited several anthologies. By any metric, it’s an extraordinarily prodigious output. In a review of his next-to-latest offering, “The Artifact” I remarked that he made Stephen King look like George RR Martin.

You might think that with a production load like that, Cawdron is just another by-the-numbers potboiler hack. You couldn’t be more wrong.

His latest is a novel that gives a nod to “Anatomy of Courage: The Classic WWI Study of the Psychological Effects of War” written by Winston S. Churchill’s personal doctor, Sir Charles Watson, Lord Moran. Cawdron’s novel depicts the brutality, ugliness and futility of trench warfare. I’ll be reviewing it on zeppjamiesonfiction.com later this week for anyone interested. Like his previous half-dozen books, this one is superior.

Cawdron always has an afterword to his novels which is worth reading. He’ll discuss the scientific theory underlying that particular story, explain how it was influenced by a classic work of hard SF, and discuss the political and social elements. He’ll often assert a personal note about his own thoughts and feelings as he wrote the story. They make for engaging sequelae.

In his “Anatomy of Courage,” he noted that based on the quality of his past half dozen novels, all written in a year, some people were gossiping online that he was using AI – artificial intelligence – to write the books, that he couldn’t have possibly done all that quality work by himself.

Well, it’s the internet. People talk shit. But any self-respecting writer would be at the very least irritated by that. Cawdron noted that he had written several really good books in an amazingly short time, and with most people I would take his umbrage as a humblebrag. (“Please don’t hate me because I’m beautiful”). But he HAS done exactly that. He does go on to explain the recent boost in his output, but that’s his story to tell, and if you want to know it, then buy the book. It’s on Amazon and Goodreads.

The allegations are utter crap, and I’ll tell you why I’m convinced of that.

I’ve written a lot in my time. Two novels, a couple of dozen short stories, about 1500 eclectic columns, and about 300 reviews. Writing the novels in particular gives me a certain insight into the writing process of another writer. I’m pretty good, I think, at spotting moments where, usually in the first draft, a writer is struck by a stray thought, leans back, considers, and then with a grin, starts writing or revising. First drafts tend to have a lot of those. (There’s a dictum: write the first draft for yourself, the second for your readers, and hope what remains survives the copy editors.)

I’ll give you an example of how it works. Your character, and let’s risk a lawsuit from Neal Stephenson and call him “Hiro Protagonist,” is standing in a park. What kind of park? Well, a city park. Does it have grass? Trees? A lake? Is there a breeze? Does the sun shine, turning ripples into a disco ball? Are there kids playing? Two old farts playing chess in a pagoda? What else?

Well, pigeons. Don’t most parks have pigeons?

I have a picture my dad took of me when I was seven. I was standing in Trafalgar Square in London, attired in my prep school uniform, and I have my right arm out in front of me, bent at the elbow. On my forearm is a big, well fed pigeon who is eyeing a piece of bread in my left hand with proprietary interest. The expression on my face (“He’s rather … large … isn’t he?”) is a mixture of fascination and intimidation. Presumably I gave the bird the bread without losing any fingers and we both flew away peacefully.

That infuses a vision of what a couple of pigeons are doing in my park. They’re squabbling over a bit of popcorn.

That process leads to a throwaway line in the story. “Near the end of the bench, a pair of pigeons had a lively debate over a kernel of popcorn. The larger one flicked his head lightning fast and flew off with his meal, leaving the other to squall in frustration and give Hiro an appealing, appraising glance.”

That little bit of color is something no AI can manage. Tell an AI to write a scene about a man standing in a park waiting for someone, and the AI might mention the park bench, the trees, the grass, maybe something about the other people. Depends how good at plagiarism it is.

But that bit about the pigeons is something no AI can do. It might mention pigeons if it’s exceptionally well trained, but that little drama about the popcorn, the slight hint of aggression and menace between the birds, that comes from a human mind sharing a human experience.

If you write a lot, you come to be very familiar with that process, and you learn to spot it in the writings of others, especially those whose writing you want to learn from. Cawdron’s books, backed by meticulous research, affinity for solid detail and depending from a vivid imagination, are replete with such.

AI can do a lot, for better or for worse, but the deterministic chaos of the human mind, with its emotion, volition, confusion and empathy, cannot be duplicated in code. AI might be good enough to confuse a casual reader, but it will rarely fool a constant reader, let alone a writer who can guess what went into seemingly unimportant passages that provide color and tone and humanity to a story, making a decent story great.

They may make AIs generative. But they can’t make them mimic human creativity.

It won’t hurt to learn to look for the trade secrets behind the words. You’ll appreciate the works of someone like Cawdron more, and it will make you a bit better, intellectually and in the ability to discern what is human…and what is not.

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History Warns Us — But what do we hear?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson
September 30th, 2023
www.zeppscommentaries.online

In 2017 there was a pitch-black dark comedy called The Death of Stalin. A scalpel-sharp political satire, it pasquinaded the utter madness and viciousness that accompanies the decline of all authoritarian governments. It was the age of Stalin at its ultimate. The metronome in the background was the sound of people who were guilty of being accused of anything or nothing being dragged into interrogation cells and shot. At the higher levels of power, the arena of government management, both legal and extralegal, played out like a kindergarten recess where all the children are armed with AR-15s and grenades. With people like Steve Buscemi and Michael Palin it’s side-splittingly funny from the comfort of your living room and if you don’t think too hard about the reality of what you are watching. You can stream a free and legal version of the film at Tubi.
Anyone with even an ordinary understanding of history is going to feel a bit of disquiet while watching the movie. You see, while it’s clearly a parody, it isn’t an exaggeration. While the end of the Stalin era was marked by spasmodic and insane viciousness, the entire era of Stalin was one of persecution, genocide, blind obedience to mad authority, wholesale wasting of lives, and willful blindness by the millions who witnessed all this and said nothing.
But it’s not unique to Stalinism. Quite the opposite. It is a set-in-stone feature of all authoritarian regimes. All of them. No exceptions. All authoritarian structures have the cruelty and insanity that was so evident during the reign of Stalin. It doesn’t matter if they are theocracies, absolute monarchies, fascist or dictatorship, or political or social movements that keep leadership unaccountable to the followers and citizenry. They all become corrupt, brutal, insensate, and intolerant of any dissent of any kind. No exceptions.
The reason is that the coin of such realms is money and power. Nothing else. And those drawn to serve in such regimes are the very worst people for such positions. They are people who value money and power and nothing else. The power struggles are inevitable, and rapidly become no-holds-barred destructive frenzies on incurring court favor and amassing an ever-greater unassailable authority.
Quite often such regimes are “A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” as Winston Churchill famously described the machinations of the Kremlin during the Stalin era. The only times we get a look at their inner workings are during their ascendancy, and when they collapse. Hitler ran for office in the 1920s and wrote a book in prison that made no effort to hide his plans for genocide and war. That Nazism devolved into utter lunacy in short order came as no real surprise to historians, who have an endless parade of tyrants and movements and churches they could compare the Nazi regime to. A good correlation to Death of Stalin would be Downfall (Der Untergang) 2004 film by Oliver Hirschbiegel. Source of thousands of “Hitler Finds Out” memes, the movie detailed the final days of the Nazi regime. Again, available to watch for free on Tubi. Not intended as a comedy, but eerily similar, because the pathology of the social phenomenon is essentially identical.
Stalin, while in his role of “Lenin’s left foot” wrote in Marxism and the National Question this summation: “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” You don’t have to squint very hard to see the bones of “Ein Volk. Ein Reich. Ein Fuhrer” behind that thought. The {collective, state, church} above all, accountable only to itself.
Authoritarians usually make no real secret of what they are or what their plans are for you. But they wrap the malice in conspiracy theories and claims that you are the victim of enemies, real and imagined, inside or outside your nation. Most Americans are familiar with the hatred Republicans spit at single moms for daring to ask for help raising their kids, and blandly ignore the trillions stolen by the plutocratic class.
Accountability is the key element. It always has been. Freedom and social progress began only when leaders and prelates and governments had to become accountable for their actions. In the west, it began in 1215, when the King was forced to adopt the Magna Carta, making him responsive to the nobility. It culminated in 1789 with the Constitution, which set out to make the government the design of the people, and very deliberately worked to keep religious entities and the aristocracy out of power. It had mixed results, but it enabled Americans to largely avoid the madness and brutality of autocracy for 200 years. It was an ongoing process, of course. In the beginning, less than 10% of the population actually had rights.
It leaves Americans unprepared for the rise of an authoritarian movement, and even with a half-century of warning signs, most don’t recognize the GOP, hagridden with fascists, plutocrats, dominionists and libertarians, for the extreme danger that it is. Many believe that they lie for you, cheat for you, steal for you, kill for you, to protect your freedoms. It isn’t even intentional dishonesty on their part, usually. It’s willful blindness, denialism carried to an extreme. There are people who earnestly believe Donald Trump is being crucified for us. Most supporters blandly ignore the embrace of racism, deliberate cruelty, and outright Nazism, and parrot the propaganda about how the GOP is conservative, patriotic, and beholden to God.
When you watch the destructive nihilism of Republicans trashing the economy deliberately in a vain effort to pass cruel and draconian laws, or seeking to imprison women for the crime of not wanting to be pregnant, or staging the farcical and inane kangaroo court like the “Biden Impeachment hearings” remember Hitler and Stalin and many others, who made it crystal clear what they were, and what they would become if they seized power. The GOP want to be the Fourth Reich, the new Soviet State.
Denialism stretches to insane lengths. I began by discussing Russia in the throes of the death of Stalin. I’ll return there, only not as seen through the lens of a satire, but from a very grim reality, one described by a master eyewitness of that era, Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. The acclaimed novelist was, like millions of other Soviet citizenry, incarcerated in Stalin’s vast Gulag prison system (the book itself is part one of “The Gulag Archipelago”). He was there doing a ten-year stretch for “Anti-Soviet Agitation.” The so-called ASA laws allowed the state to imprison anyone for pretty much anything, or nothing at all. One of his cellmates was a peasant, learning to write. He had been taught to sign his name, and, proud of this new accomplishment, signed it wherever he could put pen to paper. One of the papers he used was the daily Pravda, and he signed his name across a picture of Stalin that happened to be there. His party block captain noticed. Ten years, ASA.
Solzhenitsyn was in prison with thousands of others that day in 1953 when news of Stalin’s death was broadcast. These were people whose lives had been destroyed, usually unfairly and often capriciously, and all knew people who had been ground to death under the wheels of the Soviet state. Many had seen the unbelievable carnage that ensued when Stalin attempted to stop the German army behind walls of bloody splintered bones that had been the pride of the Soviet Union. Millions more perished because of the mad agricultural polices of Lysenkoism.
You might think the prisoners all erupted in joy over the death of the man who had ruined their lives and murdered so many of their family and friends. But no! They wept! They wailed! They mourned the loss of this despot as if their own fathers had died (and in many cases, Stalin had caused the deaths of their own fathers!). There was an orgy of unfeigned and unstaged grief, totally genuine. Stalin was the state. He was the father figure. He was the kindly ruler who sometimes had to do hard things for the sake of his people. His victims wept, not for themselves and their loved ones, but for their loss of Stalin.
In the GOP, we find history has repeated itself. These people are showing us what they are, and anyone with any knowledge of history knows what they will do. Without restraint, and without limits, seeing cruelty as strength and freedom as a threat to their authority. Their coin is the frightfulness of madness, the inexorability of blind authority. They want to crush you. They will crush you, and they will work hard to persuade you to praise them as they do so.
Watch the Republicans, and see them for the horrible danger they are.

* * *

The Libertarian Party, and its fascist leaders, are one of the main reasons madness has taken over the Republican party and threatens to destroy all of us. Thom Hartmann, the renowned columnist, has a pair of deeply insightful pieces on the rise of this evil empire.

How Libertarianism is a poison that’s crept into America

And

As Republicans begin phony ‘impeachment hearings’ Democrats are ignoring real crimes

 

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Barbie — Guise and Dolls

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 4th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

They’ve been making movies that are created for the sole purpose of flogging toys to kids for years, of course, and even if you don’t find the manipulation and exploitation of kids and their parents vulgar, most of them were pretty dire, since the budget went for special effects, and not for acting or writing.

And the last thing I wanted to see was a movie about fricken’ Barbie. As a retired male, I’m not exactly Mattel’s target demographic. Honest, I stopped playing with dolls when I was 55 as part of my probation. And I’m allergic to pink.

But the inevitable howls from the usual suspects on the right wing were, as usual, amusing. This crowd leads their mindless followers from one contrived social crisis to the next, whether it’s a black cartoon mermaid, litter boxes in school bathrooms, a President eating Grey Poupon mustard, or Bugs Bunny in drag. These ‘crises’ are usually stupid, pointless, and brainless, but then, they have a specific target audience.

But I noticed a more frantic tone this time. It wasn’t the usual crap about “plus size” Barbie, or gay Ken, or any of the other tired social tropes/bogeymen that the fascist right use to keep their herd frightened and docile. Ben Stein was so far over the top in his raving condemnation of the movie that I wondered if Barbie was the only girl who let him pull down her pants in high school and he still felt betrayed.

And it went on well beyond the usual puppet show shelf-life. The Barbie howls even drowned out the National Labor Relations Board ruling that any company caught interfering in any way with attempts to organize a union would automatically become a union shop immediately, no election needed. Yes, that was a landmark decision that will change the face of working conditions in America.

That should have sent them into paroxysms of red-baiting, but they were too busy pink-baiting (yes, that sounded pretty awful in my head as I wrote it, too) to notice.

Obviously, I was going to have to watch this movie to see what the fuss was about. Something was going on here.

My wife and I watched it. I never had a sister so I never experienced the joy of blowing up one of the dolls with firecrackers or feeding one to the dog. But my wife did, and I figured that as a long-time Barbie saboteur, she could lend moral support.

Barbieville is filled with hundreds of Barbies, who all live in a perfect matriarchy where everything is pink and life is perfect, and nobody ever cries or feels hurt or angry. There are hundreds of Kens, as well, and they are there to admire the Barbies. It’s a bit like the town in The Truman Show.

But one day, the lead character, Stereotypical Barbie, starts encountering problems. For one thing, her heels, which are always four inches higher than her toes, drop to the same level. Frightened, she consults with Weird Barbie, who tells her someone is playing too hard with her in Reality (our world) and she will have to go there and solve the problem.

Ken stows away in her convertible to reality, and in the course of trying to find the problem, Ken is contaminated with toxic masculinity. (The scene in which this first happens is when Barbie is at Santa Monica beach, and rebuffs a construction worker trying to hit on her by giving him a level stare and saying, “I don’t have a vagina.” That was a genuinely jaw-dropping moment.

They return to Barbieville unaware that they’ve been contaminated. Ken had stolen some books from the library in Santa Monica, and soon starts preaching a “Yo Bro” philosophy. He feels that he has a place at the table and should be respected. However, this leads to male bonding stuff ranging from bullying and abuse to giant trucks and for some reason, horses. Soon, the Kens plot to overthrow the Barbies.

The Barbies are confused and malleable at first, but a couple of Earthers, a tweener and her mum, start teaching the Barbies about empowerment and individual autonomy. Slowly, they learn to resist.

We watched this with growing amazement, and about an hour in, my wife said, “You know, this reminds me a lot of Pleasantville.”

Bingo.

Pleasantville was written, co-produced, and directed by Gary Ross. It stared Tobey Maguire, Jeff Daniels, Joan Allen, William H. Macy, J. T. Walsh, and Reese Witherspoon, with Don Knotts, Paul Walker, Marley Shelton and Jane Kaczmarek in supporting roles.

In that movie, a couple of 1990s teens, brother and sister, are sent to a world based on a 1950s sitcom called Pleasantville. It’s the idyllic suburban life that TV liked to portray in such shows as Dobie Gillis, Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, or Leave it to Beaver. All the lawns were perfect and had white picket fences, the school teams never lost (indeed, the basketball team never missed a shot), and the wives were always immaculately coiffed and dressed and served breakfasts of sausage, pancakes, eggs, and ham that amounted to about 4,000 calories a plate, a cardiovascular feast of doom. Except nobody ever got sick in Pleasantville. The high school boys dreamed of going steady with “the right girl” and their highest ambition was to “pin” a girl and allow her to wear their letterman jackets. And the girls wanted to be pinned and wear the jackets.

Being a 1950s sitcom world, everything is in black and white, what we call greyscale now. There was no color.

Our 1990s sister noticed the boys right away, with avid interest. But she wasn’t interested in lapels or silly coats: she just wanted to get the boys into the back seat of their convertibles and bang the hell out of them. Despite the alarmed protest of her bother about the effect this might have on the inhabitants, she does so.

And something does happen to the boys: they start seeing in color, and become colored themselves. The girl tells her sitcom mother about masturbation, and the next day, Mom shows up with pink cheeks.

The colorization spreads, and the town authorities finally notice and Take Action, at which point the movie takes a very dark turn.

At that point, Pleasantville becomes a thing of beauty, a fantastic and marvelous film that packs a huge emotional wallop and is deeply inspiring. It truly is one of the finest movies ever made.

Barbie doesn’t have the multilayered nuance and complexity of Pleasantville, and nor does it build to as stunning a climax. But it will inspire millions of people who watch it, because it carries the same profound truths about personal awareness and autonomy, awareness of beauty, of others, of life, and the same drive toward individual freedom and liberty. It is a resounding shout in the blanket of a rise in fascism.

It is, in a word, “woke.”

Thus, the screams from the right. And thus the cheers, and hope, it gives millions who watch it.

Don’t dismiss it as a movie about little girls’ dolls. It’s much, much more than that.

Directed by Greta Gerwig

Written by Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach

Based on Barbie by Mattel

Produced by David Heyman, Margot Robbie, Tom Ackerley, Robbie Brenner

Starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Kate McKinnon, Issa Rae, Rhea Perlman, Will Ferrell

Cinematography Rodrigo Prieto

Edited by Nick Houy

Music by Mark Ronson & Andrew Wyatt

Production companies Heyday Films, LuckyChap Entertainment, NB/GG Pictures, Mattel Films

Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures

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Organic prayers: a review of The God Committee

The God Committee

The God Committee

Directed by Austin Stark

Written by Austin Stark

Produced by Molly Conners, Amanda Bowers, Jonathan Rubenstein, Ari Pinchot, Jane Oster, Bingo Gubelmann, & Benji Kohn

Starring

• Kelsey Grammer

• Julia Stiles

• Janeane Garofalo

• Dan Hedaya

• Colman Domingo

Cinematography Matt Sakatani Roe

Edited by Alan Canant

Music by The Newton Brothers

Production companies

• Crystal City Entertainment

• Paper Street Films

• Phiphen Pictures

• Plain Jane Pictures

• KGB Films

The main story line is this: a young man is killed in an auto accident, and he is an organ donor. A major hospital in New York City finds that his heart is a match for three patients on their list. None of the three are ideal: one is a 55 year old man who weighs 335 pounds; another is an elderly woman who is entirely unsure if she wants a transplant, and the third a younger man with a history of drug use and a prediliction toward irresponsible and even violent behavior. The committee has 45 minutes to decide who will get the heart. The third prospect’s father is a very rich and powerful man who puts a person on the committee to inform them that no matter what they decide, he will consider a $25 million grant.

There are several subplots that flesh out and explain the motives and behavior of the various characters.

The film gets a bit too dramatic in places, but the issues and dilemmas are all quite real, and the ways in which the various characters respond are both compelling and entirely credible.

Kelsey Grammer, who I tend to associate with comedy and light entertainment, is formidable in this as a remote and austere senior physician. Julia Stiles, his ex wife, is equally compelling. The acting is solid, the dialog is solid, and the medical issues are informed and plausible.

People put off by gore will find the operation sequences upsetting, but the movie is well worth the 93 minutes invested in it.

Now on Netflix.

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The Smoking Gun — Trump spends an hour lying, wheedling and threatening—on tape.

The Smoking Gun

Trump spends an hour lying, wheedling and threatening—on tape.

January 3rd, 2021

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger must have felt as surreal as a Dali painting listening to Donald Trump telling him he needed to rustle up 11,780 votes so he could reverse the results of the vote in Georgia. I suspect that Trump has made quite a few similar calls to officials in at least six other states, in a grim effort to steal the 2020 election. But this time, the Secretary—or someone in his office—recorded the call, a high fidelity sound quality that left absolutely no doubt about who said what. A full hour of it.

The phone call wasn’t just unethical—it was illegal, a state and federal felony that by itself could get Trump twenty years in jail.

People old enough to remember old [Expletive Deleted] remember that the tapes were redacted and the sound quality was poor enough that there was honest debate over who said what, and the only “smoking gun” was that the tapes showed he lied about being involved in the cover up of the Watergate hotel. It was years before we learned that Nixon knew of the break-in before it happened, or the full extent of the cover up. Had the full story been known, perhaps Gerald Ford might have refused to pardon Nixon, or been impeached for doing so. As it was, it did immense damage to the spirit of the nation, which had prided itself that no politician was above the law.

Even worse, it taught Republicans that not only does crime pay, but that so long as they have a weak and corrupt guy in the White House, they are above and beyond the law. The latest spate of get-out-of-jail free pardons by Trump are just the latest round of abuses by strutting and grinning fascists in the GOP. This may be the worst; they include four individuals whose burned and charred corpses ought to hanging from a bridge across the Euphrates. They are blatant efforts to obstruct justice; the pardons try to keep the people who made up the most corrupt administration in American history out of prison—including Trump himself.

The weirdest part of the extremely strange call was Trump’s demand that Raffensperger “find” 11,780 votes, baldly explaining that the specific number of “found votes” would make him the winner of Georgia by one vote. That violates 52 U.S. Code § 20511. Just for the record, here is that provision in federal law:

A person, including an election official, who in any election for Federal office—

(1) knowingly and willfully intimidates, threatens, or coerces, or attempts to intimidate, threaten, or coerce, any person for—

(A) registering to vote, or voting, or attempting to register or vote;

(B) urging or aiding any person to register to vote, to vote, or to attempt to register or vote; or

(C) exercising any right under this chapter; or

(2) knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process, by—

(A) the procurement or submission of voter registration applications that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held; or

(B) the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held,

shall be fined in accordance with title 18 (which fines shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury, miscellaneous receipts (pursuant to section 3302 of title 31), notwithstanding any other law), or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

The tape reveals a prima facie violation of that law. It also violates state law. And we can be pretty certain that Trump made similar calls to the Secretaries of States in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, desperately leaning on people to keep him in office and out of prison.

With only seventeen days left in his term, there simply isn’t time to impeach and convict him, even if the weak, criminal, strutting treasonous cowards that make up much of the GOP were willing to do so. But after the election, his actions yesterday can be added to the pile of criminal prosecutions he will face, no matter how many criminals he pardons. (If you accept a pardon, you are acknowledging that you did, in fact, commit criminal acts.)

Biden has promised he will not pardon Trump. It’s possible that Trump may resign the morning of the 21st so Pence can be a half-day President with the sole purpose of pardoning Trump, but Pence’s problem is there is nobody to pardon him, and he will face charges of obstruction of justice at the very least. A first-year law student could win a case of corrupt intent—normally nearly impossible to prove—in this particular case.

Republicans have no courage or self-respect. Let’s hope, for the sake of the country, that the rest of America does, and ends this corrupt cabal once and for all.

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The Burning Man – Trump’s 42 days in the desert

October 10th 2020

The real polls are shifting, and the shift is enough that I’m starting to feel reasonably secure that the Republican fascists may not be able to steal this election. I figure that what with the gerrymandering (both built-in with the Electoral College or created by corrupt state legislatures), the powerful propaganda arm, the sabotage of mail-in voting and further sabotage of in person voting, the Dems would need about an 8 point lead in the polls to actually win over the fascists.

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com, the most accurate of the aggregate pollsters, had Biden’s lead over Trump rock steady between 5.5 points and 7.5 points for three months following the end of primary season. Normally, that would be an unassailable lead, but the extent of Republican malfeasance made it, at best, too close to call.

At the beginning of the GOP convention, it was at a seven point lead. The Democrats had run a extremely well-crafted four-day infomercial, and the GOP was going for a semi-live show with small audiences rather than the virtual effort by the Dems. Manly men don’t fear the reaper, even if at the time it had already killed some 170,000 Americans. The polls, I reasoned, would have to be above five points for Biden to for him have any chance at all to make up the three more points needed to overcome Republican cheating and lying. And given how entrenched both sides appeared to be, that would take a miracle.

But a week after the convention, the polls hadn’t budged. Seven points. The American public, which largely avoided the four day Donald Trump Show, was unimpressed by all the screaming and lying the GOP put on.

I watched, and during the show I tried pretending to think like an average Republican voter. China and Iran wanted war with us. Russia was our friend, and we could deal with North Korea as equals. The deficit didn’t matter, and Trump was good for the economy. Trump was a godly man who just happened to be a genius at business negotiations. Dems wanted to take everyone’s guns and tax us all to death. Liberals really did sell children as sex slaves in the basement of pizza joints…well, ok. Not even Republican voters believed that one. But they did believe that Hunter Biden was up to no good, abusing his father’s connections, but Don Jr, Eric and Ivanka weren’t.

Even trying to wear that mind set, I found the show unconvincing. From a more sane perspective, the show was an orgy of loud lunacy.

I was pleased, but I misinterpreted that unwavering result. I assumed it meant the body politic had become utterly intransigent, and nothing was going to change anyone’s mind. Anyone who still supported Trump at that point either dismissed or accepted the utter chaos, incompetence and dishonestly of his administration. Hell, the First Lady could tear up the Rose Garden, or get taped saying “Fuck Christmas” and it wouldn’t change anything, right? Well, funny story…

The turning point came an eternity ago—September 20th. That’s when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Yeah, just three weeks ago. Hard to believe, isn’t it?

Her death horrified liberal Americans. What followed horrified most other people. Trump and McConnell, in a massive fireworks burst of hypocrisy and willingness to commit a massive power grab, immediately nominated a replacement for Ginsburg. Not just another tiresome and in all likelihood corrupt neoliberal hack like his first two; this time he picked a god-struck woman whose closest literary cognate is the mad Ignatius J. Reilly from Confederacy of Dunces. The cult she is a member of apparently formed the basis of the cult that destroyed America and enslaved women in Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale. Her position is so extreme it overcame America’s reluctance to attack Christians on the basis of religion.

The willingness of the Republicans to set aside legislation desperately needed to keep thousands of people alive, fed and in shelters in order to ram though the nomination of this viciously unsuitable woman dismayed a large majority of voters—including Republicans, who uneasily remember the Republican stance of no nominations during a presidential campaign that the Republicans used to ignore the nomination of Merrick Garland in Obama’s final year. It was such rank hypocrisy that even the shills at Fox News had trouble selling it, pretending instead that the Garland nomination never happened.

Then the presidential debate showed the world that Trump was a braying, vacuous bully with no answers but lots of empty demagoguery.

Then he got sick. Under just about any other circumstances, a sick leader would have gotten a sympathy bounce in the polls. But his attitude had been so reckless and foolhardy, and so damaging to the country, that most people thought he brought it on himself. People were appalled at the sight of him recklessly endangering the lives of others around him in his mad drive to show that this disease that has killed 215,000 people in his own country is no big deal and can be safely ignored.

There were a dozen other self-immolations. Dissing the troops. Attacking Gold Star families. And finally, becoming totally unhinged and largely incoherent.

So yeah, suddenly, Trump has managed to fall to 10.1 points behind Biden. It seemed impossible three weeks ago, but Biden now seems to be beyond the point where Republicans can steal it.

But remember. This all happened in three weeks. That’s an eternity in politics. We still have three more weeks to go before the election.

Don’t relax.

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Poor, Brave Trump! – The fearless folly of the Donald

October 3rd, 2020

Trump got squeezed into one of his poor-fitting suits and sat in front of a US and Presidential flag that utterly failed to conceal that he was in a hospital room and made a four minute video for the nation. This normally would be a very good thing, since a sick president leaves the entire country unnerved and in need of a calming voice. Such reassurances are usually…staged. Some never existed: the country may have felt reassured at the story that as he was being wheeled into the OR after being shot, Reagan gave the doctors a cheery thumbs-up, but much later we learned that was strictly PR bullshit.

Trump looked better than some of the more dire stories had it but the makeup and his seated position couldn’t quite hide the fact that he wasn’t 100%.

Characteristically, he took the opportunity to praise his heroism and courage:

“But I had no choice because I just didn’t want to stay in the White House. I was given that alternative. Stay in the White House, lock yourself in, don’t ever leave, don’t even go to the Oval Office, just stay upstairs and enjoy it, don’t see people, don’t talk to people and just be done with it and I can’t do that. I had to be out front and – this is America, this is the United States, this is the greatest country in the world, this is the most powerful country in the world. I can’t be locked up in a room upstairs and totally safe and just say: ‘Hey, whatever happens happens.’ I can’t do that. We have to confront problems. As a leader you have to confront problems. There’s never been a great leader that would have done that.”

Mind you, Mister “Whatever happens happens, I can’t do that” said of the same disease just two weeks ago, “It is what it is.” Stoicism is an easy way to cover up moral and mental bankruptcy. Trump is trying to pretend he was out, ignoring the danger, doing the people’s business and fulfilling his duties as president.

In reality, he’s still the same indolent buffoon he’s always been, going out only to play his indeterminable games of golf and hold his super-spreader rallies, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk to fill his mindless need for adulation. Even then, at a recent rally in a display of what passes for humor with Trump, he told his audience that he wasn’t taking any risk—he was ‘way up on his dais, well away from the people he privately calls ‘disgusting.’ All those braying morons, going home to infect friends, family, associates, because Trump felt personally safe. He must have been really tickled pink over that.

He expressed gratitude for all non-American leaders who wished him well. Some, like Boris Johnson, were undoubtedly sincere. Kim Yong Un was probably fairly pro forma. His country isn’t allowed to admit that COVID-19 exists. Trump didn’t want to admit Joe Biden and the Democrats exist, either, and so ignored their well wishes.

Then there’s Putin, and Russia. They have a radio show called 60 Minutes that resembles the American television show of that name much the way OAN resembles Walter Cronkite. The Russian version had its own unique take on it, per the Daily Beast:

Discussing Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis, Evgeny Popov, the host of Russian state media news talk show 60 Minutes, said, ‘Our candidate got sick.’ His co-host Olga Skabeeva reminded the viewers that Trump is in a high-risk group, due to being elderly and overweight. Referring to former Vice President Joe Biden, Popov added, ‘The other one may get sick too.’”

Davis said commentary also included condolences to the president who was taken to Walter Reed Hospital late Friday, and that Popov and Skabeeva also commented that the Democrats were “celebrating” Trump’s health woes, only to have reporter Denis Davydov in the U.S. point out that “Trump’s Twitter mentions are filled with messages of support,” to which Popov shot back, “Those are just the Russian bots.”

Ha ha ha. Very droll, comrade. ‘Russian bots.’ Must mock foolish Americaner intelligence. After show, we get drunk, go in alley way and urinate on pussy cats, no? After all, there is full Moon!

Trump’s opaque and dishonest reign has made Kremlin watchers out of all of us, where we all feverishly scan minutiae in hopes of determining what few morsels of truth may exist in the White House sewage. Now that he’s ill and even possibly critically ill, the versions regarding what’s going on are a deep and wide river. It’s safe to assume 90% of it is utter nonsense, and 9/10ths of the rest exaggerations of reality.

Three Republican Senators have tested positive over the past few days, raising the interesting prospect that for the next month or so, the Senate may actually have Democrats in control. At least two of the Senators sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will be having what the GOP jokingly refers to as “hearings” on Amy Barrett next week. Maybe. At least one reputable source opines that some or all of the Republican Senators may fake claims of having the disease in order to avoid voting on her, since it’s obvious to one and all that she is a poison pill that will destroy the GOP. At least five Republican Senators who had reasonable leads just two months ago in November’s races have seen their leads dwindle to ties and even losses. They have to be feeling desperate right now. Their leader’s bad habit of making them all swim in a Petri dish in order to pretend the pandemic isn’t a problem may actually take them off the hot seat and even possibly save their careers.

Republicans have suddenly rediscovered compassion and empathy in the past day, but I have my great big “fuck you” potato gun ready for any that try pulling that crap on me. It’s manipulative bullshit, and I’m not going to play that game.

Meanwhile, keep an eye on the news. We live in interesting times.

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Trump Must Go — Insane President crosses the line

Trump Must Go

Insane President crosses the line

September 24th, 2020


Brian Karem: “Will you commit to make sure there’s a peaceful transferral of power after the election?”

Trump “We’re going to have to see what happens, you know that. I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.”

Karem:“I understand that, but people are rioting. Do you commit to make sure that there’s a peaceful transferral of power?”

Trump: “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know it. And you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else.”

The only decent thing Trump could do after a statement like that is to resign his office. No President has ever said those sort of things, that no matter how the vote went, he would be staying. Not Madison during the War of 1812. Not Lincoln during the Civil War. Not Hoover during the economic crisis of 1932. Not FDR during the second world war. Not Nixon. No president has ever effectively said, “Fuck how the vote goes; I’m staying.”

Trump has been signaling for months that he would lie, cheat, steal, even stage a coup to stay in power. He knows that once out of office, his only realistic future is prison. He may even suspect that after years of lies, vilification and murderous disregard for the lives of Americans, nobody outside of his worshipful cult is interested in cutting him any slack. He might argue he made too many enemies; the fact is that he simply betrayed and hurt too many people.

We’ve watched him subvert the entire governmental apparatus, filling hundreds of positions with servile and corrupt lackeys. He has even trashed the integrity of the CDC rather than have any authority admit that due mostly to his cruel incompetence, the US still has a raging pandemic that is likely to kill another two hundred thousand people in America before the spring arrives. The GOP was on a steep downward moral and ethical trajectory before Trump ran for office, but now it is nothing but a pathetic collection of hypocrites, apparatchiks, cowards, traitors and brownshirts. The best of Trump supporters are blank-eyed cultists. The worst are pure filth, the sort of people who enabled Hitler in the 1930s.

An electrifying article the day before in the Atlantic detailed a scheme the White House was contemplating to have the republican-held assemblies in such states that go blue in November simply select their own cadre of electors so the state would vote for Trump in the electoral college, regardless of public vote. It’s not clear as to whether this subverts the Constitution or not, but it was a clear move to override the will of the people.

The best thing Trump could do right now is resign, and throw himself on the mercy of the public. He won’t do that, of course. Even to save his life he won’t do it, because his entire pampered, wastrel life was spent simply bullying and lying his way through every crime and breach of decent behavior he ever committed. He even robbed and cheated the people who helped him commit those crimes and transgressions.

That should be a warning to his supporters (a warning vividly made by Michael Cohen his book, “Disloyal”). If you think supporting Trump after all he’s done will protect you and put you in positions of power afterward, remember what happened to the brownshirts in Hitler’s Germany. Trump won’t respect you, he won’t protect you, he will betray you. He doesn’t appreciate you, and he won’t trust you. After all, by supporting him and making him emperor, you’ve already betrayed your country once. You’re weak links. You need to be voted off the island.

And he would be right. If you support Trump now, you support a traitor, and whether you believe it or not, you are betraying your country. Trump knows that, and doesn’t mind taking advantage of you now so he can discard you like a used condom later.

As for Trump himself, we know he won’t resign. If he manages to destroy the election (and he’s doing everything he can to destroy a fair and full election, including destroying the post office and brainwashing people into thinking America is incapable of an honest vote count) then the American people will have to come for him, and dig him out of the White House like a rat from its hole. If he rejects the election results, don’t wait for inauguration day: take him out of office and throw him in prison right way.

Trump, pampered and isolated his entire life, has no idea what he is fucking with. When the people decide enough is enough, no force can stand in their way.

Yes, that’s a coup. But it’s a counter-coup, a coup FOR America. You aren’t overthrowing a legitimate president.

You’re taking out vicious, malicious trash. You are saving America.

Trump must go. It’s either him or us.

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The Notorious — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The Notorious

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

September 20th 2020

1933 was the deepest moment of the Great Depression. FDR told the American people they had nothing to fear but fear itself, and while it gave the people some resolve, it was nonetheless one of the most frightening times in US history.

It was also a time when, despite Reconstruction, most African-Americans found it difficult if not impossible to vote, own property, or enter most places of business. Restaurants sometimes had signs, “We Don’t Serve Jews” and of course Jews were banned from most country clubs and golf courses. Other visibly ethic people endured discrimination ranging from stereotypal jokes to treatment as poor as that afforded blacks and Jews.

Women had only won the right to vote a dozen years before, but could not have their own credit, own property in some states, and were effectively banned from most professions. While nursing and teaching are anything but menial, they were seen as being menial enough for women to perform such tasks.

In addition to being female and Jewish and born in 1933, RBG had a fourth strike against her: she was diminutive. I doubt she ever weighed more than 100 pounds.

Beating a lot of odds, she grew up to be a lawyer. And her first legal act as such was to write a brief in a tiny Idaho estate case, wherein the parents of a deceased teen wrangled over who should be executor. Idaho law said that a male should be executor in wills, and the mother disagreed. Ginsburg’s brief carried the day, and helped strike down the “males-only” rule in Idaho estate law. Courts had never invalidated a sex-based law like that one before. Indeed, less than 100 years earlier, the Court had banned women from even being lawyers, ruling that “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.”

Yes, Dorothy, that is why we have separation of church and state. It reduces the idiocy factor.

Ginsburg herself was fond of saying she rode on the shoulders of giants. The metaphor, often attributed to Isaac Newton, actually came from Bernard de Chatres in the 12th century.

For Ginsburg, it was particularly apt, because she brought her love of fairness, justice and equality to the legal profession just at the time when a tidal wave of change was sweeping the country. Civil rights expanded, destroying the walls of segregation and Jim Crow, and sweeping outward to eliminate thousands of rules and laws that held women down, or worse, “protected them.” In the beginning of the 60’s, the Supreme Court upheld a law barring women from jury duty, arguing that they were “the center of the home and family life” and simultaneously too frail to be subject to the horrors of the criminal life.

Her first case argued before the SC, Frontiero v. Richardson. Spouses of female soldiers—then still quite a rarity—had to prove they were dependent on the income of said soldiers in order to qualify for the same benefits that spouses of male soldiers received without question.

Her most influential and consequential brief came in 1976, Craig v. Boren, a case about different drinking ages for men and women which led to the Supreme Court setting rigid criteria for determining the constitutionality of cases where the law varied based on gender. Ginsberg was no ideologue for women: she cheerfully took up the gauntlet to fight laws that discriminated against men, as well. Her’s wasn’t a battle of the sexes; it was a battle for fairness.

Her entire legal career was devoted to that tenet, and spanned hundreds of cases, both in the Supreme Court and in the lower courts. Her love of law and passion for justice was so formidable that

Bill Clinton, upon nominating her for the court, compared her to Thurgood Marshall. It was a comparison notably missing from descriptions of the man who actually replaced Marshall on the Court.

As her health declined, her courage and determination, already legendary in legal circles, became known to the public, and this tiny and seemingly frail little old lady was seen as a wall against the rise of fascism in America. Nobody would have blamed her if she had laid down the mantle five years before, but she understood the thinking of the American right—who thought of her as a “fast-talking Jew from New York” all too well. She understood that she stood to be replaced by a snarling bible-beater who would hold equal rights in withering contempt. She fought far beyond what could be reasonably expected of anyone in holding that off.

She may have won this last, final battle. Her dying wish was that her replacement be named by the President taking office in January, a reasonable request given the “no SC nominations during an election year” history that the Republicans hold so dear. Trump wants another Bill Barr on the Court. Biden will select an actual lover of the Constitution. She may have survived long enough to make it impossible for enough Republicans to replace her with fascist trash. For her, it wasn’t partisanship or even ideology; it was love of justice, and the fairness of the law.

She stood on the shoulders of giants, and did them proud, moving forward.

Now we must stand on her frail, tiny shoulders, and move forward, and make her proud.

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