Category: Personal/Misc.

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冬至大如年 (Dōngzhì dà rú nián)– In China, “the winter solstice is as big as the new year.”

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 21st, 2022

www.zeppscommentaries.online

www.zeppjamiesonfiction.com

www.thebigweasel.wordpress.com

Back about 500 BCE, some 250 years before Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth using nothing more than two sticks planted about 250 miles apart, a Chinese savant named Zhougfong, using nothing more than a stick in the sand, calculated Earth’s axial tilt and concluded that for the phenomenon to work, the Earth had to be a globe circling the sun at a rakish angle of 23.44 degrees. By measuring the angle of the sun at local noon each day over a year, he determined that the solstices fell six months apart on the dates we now know as December 20-22 and June 20-22. The equinoxes fell exactly halfway through the solstices, and the days and nights were equal, and the shadow of his stick ended exactly halfway through the shadows cast on the solstices.

While Chinese farmers had already doubtlessly noted the variations in the length of the day, the positions of sunrise and sunset, and the angle of the sun at noon, Zhougfong was the first known to carefully measure it and reason out the implications.

China, then as now, was a land of great seasonal variation, and the Solstices indicated the onset of deep winter and blazing hot summer. So, as with many similar places on Earth, the occasion of the Winter Solstice, the date on which the days stopped getting shorter, was marked with special celebrations and songs.

In China, the Winter Solstice is known as Dōngzhì, which can mean “Winter’s extreme” or “Winter is coming.” The Chinese take on Solstice is a bit different from most other cultures. Most note it as the date when the days begin getting longer, the sun is higher in the sky, and spring is coming. The Chinese, however, see it as the onset of the great cold and desolation of winter, something to be endured in order to anticipate spring.

Solstice marks the beginning of “The Nines of Winter.” A folk song (Shujiu) describes those stages of winter in a way that anyone from the northern lands would instantly relate to:

1st nine days, 2nd nine days, don’t take hands out of your pockets;

3rd nine days, 4th nine days, you can walk on ice;

5th nine days, 6th nine days, willows at the river’s edge start to sprout;

7th nine days, ice dissolves and water flows in the river;

8th nine days, wild geese fly back to northern areas;

9th nine days and the following days, farm cattle start to work in the field.

Despite the comparatively negative view of the Solstice, traditional Chinese belief maintains the theme of optimism that is shared throughout the West. Yin and Yang is an important concept and one strongly linked to the reversal of the decline to greater darkness. Yin energy is believed to be at its most powerful winter solstice day. But after that, as the daytime becomes longer, Yang’s energy increases, a positive influence.

While not an official holiday, it is nonetheless celebrated throughout China. It’s a time for friends and family to gather for traditional dinners of lamb dumplings and tangyuan, and is sometimes referred to as “Chinese Thanksgiving Day.” There’s more than a bit of similarity between Dōngzhì and Thanksgiving: both started as holidays celebrating the harvest. By the time of Eratosthenes, the Chinese Emperor mandated food sacrifices to show respect to the heavens and the ancestors. There was a widely held belief in the day that lamb dumplings could cure frostbite. While the science might be a bit problematic, I would be happy to tell someone my toes were a bit numb if I could get some fresh hot lamb dumplings out of it. Perhaps that’s how that notion started.

But China is a big country with wildly varying climates, and where frostbite isn’t a serious public health threat, tangyuan is popular—a rice ball leavened with sesame, red bean paste, and sweets. A China travel guide explains, “wonton is very popular in Suzhou; while mutton soup is must-eat festival food in Western and Northern China. Roasted Duck is the favorite food for People in Guangdong Province, and Jiangsu Duck, or Gingerbread Duck is popular in Xiamen.” Hmmm. Gingerbread duck. Yum.

But the theme is the same throughout China: gratitude, gatherings, respect for ancestors and elders, and quiet feasts as they hunker down for winter.

Counting the Nines is an act of hope, and by the seventh nine, the first clear signs of spring and rebirth emerge. Even the pragmatism of having to bear through the winter is leavened by that ever-rebirthing sign of humanity, hope.

Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

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Musk Rat Love — Elon’s Reign at Twitter is like a Marx Brothers Movie

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 18th 2022

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Well, Elon finally did something popular. He posted a tweet this afternoon, a poll, the sole question in which was, “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.”

At last glance, with some 9 million votes cast, he was trailing badly, with Yes getting 58% of the vote. Now, it’s anybody’s guess as to whether that’s an actual legitimate count, and if Musk plans on honoring the results or not. He discarded one vote he lost badly on, blaming the overwhelming majority of votes on bots.

In any event, his aim isn’t to restore order in the wake of the chaos he has created. He wrote, “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.” Hmm. Has anyone thought of asking Jack Dorsey? Oh, wait. The former Twitter CEO is running a rival social media known as Nostr. He is professing puzzlement at Musk’s antics, but in private he has to be laughing his ass off, to coin an internet phrase.

Mind you, in just the last 24 hours, Musk banned accounts that promoted or even linked to rival social media sites. He wrote, “we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.” One interesting omission there: TikTok. They are the Yellow Peril Panic of the week in right wing circles, and it’s strange that Musk didn’t pander to them.

The EU wasn’t amused by all this, even if the rest of us were. Per Brad Reed at Raw Story: Éric Freyssinet, the deputy director of France’s Cyberspace Gendarmerie Command, warned Twitter CEO Elon Musk that his company could lose protections against both civil and criminal legal liabilities if it really enforces this policy.

“Any attempt to remove my tweets that link to my other social media accounts, not violating any law, would actually make Twitter an editorial media, and no longer a social media platform, with civil and criminal liability for *any* illegal content therein,” he explained.

Oh, dear. Just Kanye West’s posts about Jews would qualify as illegal content under EU rules. Hate speech is against the law in that civilized corner of the world. Even in the US, editorial media—papers, cable news networks and so forth, steer clear of libelous and/or defamatory content, or like some of the less disreputable outfits that dabbled in it last year, they could face ruinous lawsuits of, oh, say, $1.6 billion. I’m sure you can think of a few examples, and none of them sound very happy about those suits right now.

After that, Musk jaunted off to Qatar to watch the final of the World Cup, aka the Merde! Bowl. He got photographed with Jared Kushner and Qatari leaders, which brought to mind Mos Eisley spaceport from Star Wars. You know the one. “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” The only thing missing was The Former Guy.

Imagine you get a call tomorrow morning from some clerk at Twitter headquarters. “Musk just walked out! It’s bedlam! It’s chaos!” You might ask what Musk walking out had to do with the bedlam and chaos, since it’s a bit like saying the traffic light just turned red and that’s why there’s a full moon. The clerk, sobbing convulsively, screams “Save us, Obi-Wan! You’re our only hope.” (Yeah, I know, you start with one quote from that damn movie and it metastasizes…).

OK, snow’s ploughed, gifts are under the tree, wife just left you for a television repairman. You say, what the fuck? Demand an iron clad contract that says you get a few million for three months work no matter what, put on a firefighter’s gear, and wade in.

What would you do first?

I would do an instant reset. Undo every change that Musk made that still survived his mercurial moods. Invite every employee that Musk canned or forced out back, at the same pay, and with a promise for a fat bonus if at the end of your three month period, they had managed to right the ship. Bring back the voluntary council that Musk just canned earlier this week and tell them to get cracking on rules that were consistent and, even more importantly, able to be applied consistently. Hate speech, disinformation, doxxing and defamatory attacks would once again result in suspension.

Reset to last known version that worked. And then carefully build from there. If you have to move slowly and cautiously, so be it. We’ve seen what brash and impulsive rule looks like. It looks like the Qatari mens’ soccer team.

Musk should help to further degrade the cult-like faith people have that those who are rich and famous must therefore be wise and capable of strong leadership. Gawd knows America has no shortage of overprivileged libertarian cnuts that show, if anything that the exact opposite is true. Billionaires are not your buddy, and don’t care about your interests and needs. In fact, they’re sure that if they had, they wouldn’t be billionaires in the first place. Stop worshipping them.

In the meantime, keep watching Twitter. It’s the best Marx Brothers movie they’ve made in 75 years.

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The Stump of Trump — Has he finally self-destructed?

The Stump of Trump

Has he finally self-destructed?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 4th 2022

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Going back to the days of Reagan, we’ve talked about politicians who had a kind of a magic Teflon(TM) shield that protected them, no matter how corrupt, dim-witted or objectionable their actions might be. Democrats attributed this magic to Reagan, Gingrich and both Bushes. Republicans declared it gleamed over the horrors of Obama and the Clintons. In most cases rather than magic, it was just a matter of political inertia combined with a rather dim public that couldn’t really be bothered with the goings-on of government. In the case of the Clintons, they were blessed with getting absolute morons for detractors.

But Donald Trump broke the mold when it came to Teflon(TM) magic. It’s impossible to count the number of events and actions he took that would have driven him from public view and into well-deserved obscurity and contempt. From his “grab them by the pussy” and “some of them are rapists” debut up to his stunning string of rebukes from the courts and from reality, he should have been consigned to a vague lingering foulness on the public mind, a fart in the collective elevator.

Indeed, his supporters had to develop iron-strength shells of denial, disbelief and malevolence of the sort one associates with members of particularly nasty cults that end in mass suicide. It’s normal for followers of any given politician to encounter those who question their intelligence and judgment, but Trump supporters were at such odds with the rest of society that they found their character, sanity and patriotism were open to question, and more and more often, people weren’t listening to their rationalization.

The movement (and it is now a cult movement) reacted defensively by becoming ever more extreme, more violent, more hateful. Most of mass gun shootings in America this year were committed by Trump supporters, often in openly political actions of pure hatred.

Trump himself, now under enormous pressure from all sides, followed and encouraged this same path of psychological crises, leading to a sort of ultimate breakdown.

A psychologist would have no trouble recognizing the mental route Trump is following. He was a child of privilege and believed, with good reason, that he was above the petty laws of the land. With wealth and power he could easily crush those who stood against him in any way, even just honest contractors expecting to be paid for their work. His lawyers could manipulate the law and the courts to ensure that any suit or complaint brought against him could linger for decades unresolved, and proving an unendurable financial burden to those who opposed him.

He is also a narcissist, smug in his belief that he is the only real person in the world and the rest of us just spear carriers arrayed about him for his own personal use, manipulation and gratification. We are wraiths to him, little more than characters in a high-end video game.

But now that is all crashing down. The legal threats, some deferred for decades, have all become very real and very immediate. Actions he assumed he would never be held to account for may result in prison time within a year. He has been forced to confront the fact that his political power has slipped greatly, and the pack of skulking, cowardly dogs that propped him up through two impeachments and endless scandals are deserting and even turning on him. There is blood in the water, and it is his blood.

If he had enough power, he would be extraordinarily dangerous right now. His back is to the wall, and he must lash out.

Fortunately for us, much of that power is gone, residing only in the most craven members of the party, and the vicious and racist trash that have come to dominate the MAGA movement.

But lash out he will. He attacked the wife of the Special Counsel sent to bedevil him. He attacked the wife of his erstwhile ally, the Senate Minority Leader—a racist attack, at that. He applauded the attack on the husband of the House speaker. (See a pattern here? When he can’t quite work up the nerve to attack individuals, he goes after members of their families. He is what Stephen King would characterize as “a Low Man.”)

The latest events would be hilarious if the intent behind them weren’t so grotesque. His meeting with the troubled Klanye West (also an individual in psychological crisis) and the despicable Nick Fuentes (an open holocaust denier, and West subsequently went on to praise Hitler) was incredibly over the top even by the tawdry standards of Trump. He then followed it with his usual lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him with the demand “for the termination of all our rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

Even Republicans found his assertion that the Constitution itself should be terminated for his personal benefit to be too much, and recognized that the greater danger now lay in supporting Trump rather than standing up to him.

Don’t mistake the Republican refutation of Trump for courage; it isn’t. It’s just self-preservation by people who have little to justify their existence to begin with. But it is happening, and with it, the last tattered remains of Trump’s power. He has finally destroyed himself.

Expect wilder and more insane outbursts from him. Except more and more shrugs from his once-avid supporters. MAGA will vanish in much the same way that Nazis vanished in Germany in 1945.

And the wheels of justice will grind him to dust.

He’s finally going down.

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Last Election? — Or jumping off place?

Last Election?

Or jumping off place?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 5th 2023

zeppscommentaries.online

Trump has been teasing his cult that he will announce if he’s running for President in 2024 or not on November 14th. That happens to be the day he has to comply with the January 6th Committee’s subpoena to appear, but I don’t think that is it. For one thing, the committee gave him an extra week.

No, the main thinking is that it’s his time after the mid-term elections. His entire strategy for the next two years rests on whether the GOP win the House and Senate or not.

If the Democrats keep the House, he might want to rile up his base whether he complies or not. Being morally bereft, they’ll be fine with it either way. He’ll be pushing the ‘stolen election’ narrative and hoping to foment a revolution.

What happens if the Republicans take Congress?

He might see that happen. Fivethirtyeight.com is one of the few outfits not interested in blowing smoke up the asses of one side or the other, but even then, a lot of the polls they use have become increasingly suspect, partly from political influence, and partly from an out-of-date methodology (many voters, particularly younger ones, don’t even HAVE landlines, and because of the huge numbers of spam and scam calls we all get, anyone with caller ID tends to not answer calls from unfamiliar numbers). And this year, pollsters are ignoring the elephant in the room, and not asking about abortion.

And because “common sense” says that incumbent presidents lose seats in the midterm election, and the supposition that inflation hurts the party in power, so pollsters are uncritically saying it looks like a Republican election, with gains in the House and Senate. Add the factors of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and voter intimidation that the GOP is engaging in, and a Republican win seems likely. Certainly Donald must think so. But then, he didn’t expect to lose power in 2021, either.

If the Republicans do take the House and Senate, he will certainly announce that he’s running for President.

He can quit worrying about his legal problems. First thing the House will do is shut down the Congressional investigation. And they will launch endless “investigations” of the Department of Justice that should completely hogtie Merrick Garland. State cases will face increasingly hostile courts as suborned judges blindly rule in favor of Trump, going to any ludicrous length they can to protect him. We’ve already seen quite a bit of that. Sammy, Slappy, and the Three Trump Stooges will be Trump’s refuge from then on.

The House will revert to the kangaroo court hearings that were the mainstay of the GOP House Rule going back to the Newt Gingrich years, only this group are even crazier and nastier.

MAGA followers, emboldened, will intimidate and harass all dissenting opinion. I wouldn’t rule out pogroms and a Kristallnacht or two. Targets will be blacks, Hispanics, anyone suspected of “sexual deviancy,” Moslems (including Sikhs, Amish, and anyone who “looks like an Arab”), and Jews “who don’t support Israel.”

Then Donald can run without any impediment from the law or popular sentiment.

Nor will he have to worry about losing the election. If the GOP control the methods of counting the votes and determining who will be permitted to vote, it won’t matter if the voters hate Donald or not. He will get elected, just the same way Stalin and Xi and other autocrats got elected. Republicans know they can’t win an honest election; they make sure they can’t lose a dishonest one.

The GOP have promised to do away with Social Security and Medicare, and will go after workers’ rights, civil rights, environmental protections, and anything that might annoy or inconvenience a major corporation.

Voters will be too busy fighting to survive to care about fighting the government, and will be hit with a wave of propaganda about how the new misery that makes up their lives is a result of the failed “great experiment” that imposed liberalism and godlessness on the citizenry. They just won’t mention that that experiment began in 1789.

Personally, I fully expect to end up in the camps if the Republicans win this time. I’m a blasphemer, you see, a liberal, an intellectual, and a socialist. Why, with a record like that I don’t even have to be guilty of any crime, but no worries: courts in the land of Trump will be happy to secure convictions for the greater good of the party.

Think I’m exaggerating? Boy, I sure would like to think so. But I’ve read history, you see. I know how this sort of thing goes, and I don’t for an instant believe Americans are immune. There’s a reason the French and the Germans are watching events here with a mixture of horror and disgust. They’ve been down that road. They know all about having a Strong Leader to Make the Country Great Again in the Name of God. The leader won’t be strong; he’ll be brittle and cruel. The country won’t be great again; you’ll just get propaganda telling you it will become great only when enemies both inside and out have been eliminated, and they are the reason there is no food or services. And as usual, God will be silent, but every vicious opportunistic jackass in the country will be willing to speak up on his behalf—and amazingly, it turns out God hates anyone who so much as doubts Trump.

Can’t happen here? Folks, it very nearly has. We’re only one step away. And we might take that step Tuesday.

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Big Liars tell Big Lies — Refuting a string of whoppers

Big Liars tell Big Lies

Refuting a string of whoppers

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 25th 2022

zeppscommentaries.online

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

(Goebbels) 

The OSS psychological profile of Hitler described his use of the big lie:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Even though he hasn’t officially declared for President, Trump released an unabashed campaign ad the other day. It’s worth noting that I was shown the ad by an indignant Trump supporter who showed that Facebook declared that the ad had “sensitive content” and “may show violent or graphic content.” and had to be clicked in order to view. Facebook has absurd censorship policies, and they were just as stupid here: the ad is not violent or graphic.

While like all things Trump, it was long-winded (almost four minutes) and self-serving, compared to his multi-hour harangues of the sort that dictators seem to delight in, it did put his top twenty (actually, only nineteen here) lies and mistruths in one easy-to-discuss spot. So lets discuss it.

“We are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation.”

People have been saying that about the United States dating back to the 18th century. Trump is hoping that his followers will think this is a new development that only started in 2021. Yes, the country is in trouble, but he and his cult following are the biggest single threat now.

“We are a nation that has the highest inflation in over 40 years.”

Yup, and it’s a world-wide phenomenon. Indeed, the US has the lowest inflation rate of nearly all developed nations. Some, like Germany, are nearly double the rate afflicting the US. No Republican has offered a solution to this, while Biden has worked to release oil reserves and undercut corporate gouging on oil prices.

“The stock market just finished the worst first-half of the year in more than five decades.”

Carefully phased, since the second half of 2019 saw a far bigger decline. Incidentally, despite being generally bearish this year, the Dow is STILL above the peak it reached under Trump.

“We are a nation that has the highest energy costs in its history.”

True, but that’s the fault of Putin, the Saudis, and oil companies. The big three had net profits of over $110 billion in the second quarter, nearly double what they made in the same quarter the year before.

“We are no longer energy independent or energy dominant, which we were just two short years ago.”

On fossil fuels, the US is energy-even so far as imports and exports go. On alternate energy sources, we enjoy a clear surplus. The only thing we are dependent on is the charity and good faith of multinational oil companies, which means we are trying to live on a soap bubble.

“We are a nation that is begging Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for oil.”

Saudi Arabia cut production in a bald-faced attempt to manipulate the American election. They want corporate fascists running America, because they know that they will work hard to keep Americans dependent on oil, the world’s biggest suicide pact. Biden did sound out an agreement with Venezuela, but you can’t have your cake and eat it: either Biden should be looking to lower oil prices, or shut the fuck up.

“We are a nation that surrendered in Afghanistan leaving behind dead soldiers, American citizens, and $85 billion of the finest military equipment in the world.”

Trump unilaterally issued a treaty that would have pulled all US troops out within a month. The Pentagon, utterly appalled, managed to get it reworked to the bug-out date was moved to March 2021. That was still far too soon, with predicable results. Trump certainly could predict them; he created them by ordering the release of 10,000 Taliban members the US had in prison in Afghanistan the week before he announced the unilateral pull-out.

“We are a nation that allowed Russia to devastate a country, Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands of people and it will only get worse.”

I invite anyone to explain how Trump would have stood up to Putin on anything. I wonder how much confidential military information on Ukraine were in those stolen documents that Trump left office with, and how many of them got passed along to his buddy Putin.

“We are a nation that has weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never before”

Well, law enforcement is supposed to catch law breakers. Deal with it Donald. But you can scare your supporters by pointing out that if Republican criminals aren’t safe, than no criminal is safe.

“We are a nation that no longer has a free and fair press. Fake news is about all you get.”

See Goebbels quote above.

“We are a nation where free speech is not allowed…”

Well, I suppose he did have to pay in advance for that ad. It’s pretty bloody silly to tell an audience of millions that your voice is being repressed.

“We are a nation where crime is rampant like never before…”

The crime rate did go up between 2019 and 2020, the latest year we have statistics for. It’s still 40% below the crime rate in 1990, which in turn was far below that of 1975. By the way, who was President in 2020?

“We are a nation where the economy is collapsing…”

No, Trump. Your criminal business empire is collapsing. Capitalism may implode, but Republicans will be one of the main reasons for that, allowing an unprecedented concentration of wealth that exceeds the Gilded Age of the 1920s, or the decade leading up to the French revolution.

“We are a nation where more people died of COVID in 2021 than in 2020…”

New virus variants—Delta and Omicron—were responsible for that. The death rate has been sharply declining (about 250/day now compared to up to 4,000/day early in 2021) but here’s an interesting stat: the majority of those dying from COVID are registered Republicans, who only make up 29% of the population.

.”We are a nation where that is allowing Iran to build a massive nuclear weapon and China to use the trillions and trillions of dollars it has taken from the United States to build a military to rival our own…”

There’s no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, although thanks to Trump unilaterally ending the nuclear agreement between Iran and the West, there’s no mechanism to prevent them now beyond their own distaste for such weapons, which are considered fatwa—an affront to Allah. And while China has a formidable military, the “Trillions and Trillions of dollars” weren’t taken from the US: the corporations gave that money to China for cheap labor and lax health and safety standards. Trump himself has added billions to the Chinese treasury, including much of the rubbish he sells to his gullible followers at his endless rallies.

“We are a nation that over the past two years is no longer respected or listened to all around the world…”

Does that one even need a response? I’ll just note that Trump was not invited to the Queen’s funeral. Biden was. Trump was hurt. He wanted to sit on the Queen’s coffin so everyone would be looking at him.

“We are a nation that is hostile to liberty and freedom and faith…”

Americans are hostile to the notion that only a small portion of the population is entitled to liberty, freedom and religious choice. Those rights are for EVERYONE, not just white Republicans.

“We are a nation whose economy is floundering and stores are not stocked and whose deliveries are not coming and whose educational system is ranked at the bottom of everyone else…”

The US educational system is in trouble, under unceasing attacks from fascists and zealots on the far right. The LAST thing Trump and his people want is an educated populace.

“We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke.”

No, Trump. You are the joke. A very bad joke.

“We are Americans and Americans kneel to god and god alone.”

My only response to that is “Fuck you and whatever trash religion you pretend to observe.” Free Americans kneel to nobody against their will. The Constitution’s main promise is that no church can avail itself of state power to further its ends.

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The U.S. and the Holocaust — Ken Burns’ most important work

The U.S. and the Holocaust

Ken Burns’ most important work

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 8, 2022

zeppscommentaries.online

Over the past 30+ years, Ken Burns has established himself as America’s premier documentarian. His signature style (vivid voiceovers describing an amazing array of images and videos from the people and times described) combined with meticulous proofing and great curation has created a national film library of inestimable value.

His most recent, The U.S. and the Holocaust, is unequivocally his most important. The three-part six-hour production focuses on the rise of Nazism in Germany, the war years themselves, and the searing, bloody wreckage Hitler and his ghouls left behind.

The focus is on the role of America during the years 1932-1945: what was known about Hitler’s extermination of millions, Jews being the greatest number, what America tried to do about it, what was actually done about it, what could have been done about it, and how we responded as the horrors of the camps were made visceral and undeniable.

A lot of people are going to take that as America-bashing, but Burns makes it crystal clear right from the outset that, poor as the American response was to Hitler and his crimes, it was the best from amongst what later came to be known as the Allied Nations.

Burns doesn’t try to justify the poor response, but he breaks it down into its constituent parts, and explains why the response was so poor.

Some of it was economic pressure brought to bear by Germany, which then was much more powerful than the United States. One of the most striking examples was Hollywood, which bowed to German warnings that “unsuitable” movies that disparaged the German government would be banned in Germany and as a result, no movie mentioned Hitler’s treatment of the Jews until after war had been declared. And yes, Burns mentions (although not by name) that some of the major Hollywood figures behind this were, themselves, Jewish. Similarly, a lot of papers downplayed the growing persecutions in Germany, although the source of pressure was domestic; papers had readers who didn’t want a bunch of immigrants polluting their culture and stealing their jobs. They didn’t want war. And they didn’t care about Jews.

Propaganda played a role, as well. Tailored for American consumption, the tales woven featured a beleaguered nation fighting a depression and inflation and being undercut by domestic enemies and vilified by the vengeful victors of the Great War. People were willing to accept that some excesses could be excused in the name of national self-defense.

America has always had a powerful fascist movement, one supported and financed by the richest segment of America, the industrialists (the polite word for plutocrats) and filled out by the dispossessed, the frustrated, the ignorant and the hateful. They coalesced in massive numbers around the America First Committee, the face of which was aviation hero Charles Lindbergh. He became the face of American isolationism, saying at one point that the sinister figures “pressing this country toward war;” [were] “the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration” Unlike many of the openly antisemitic people in his following, Lindbergh had a modicum of decency, saying “It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany.” Unfortunately, he went on to say, “But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.”

Hitler had one tactic that worked with the west as well as with his own people: he played on the decent but often misguided will of people to disbelieve in true horrors, to expect better of people. Even with ample evidence, few people guessed within a magnitude the true scale of Hitler’s atrocities.

Once the war was joined, allied opportunities to save millions from Hitler’s depredations were limited. Roosevelt and Churchill surmised (correctly in my opinion) that the only way to stop Hitler would be through the utter destruction of the Third Reich. The existence (if not the horrific scale) of the death camps in Poland was known to the allies after D-Day, when it became physically possible to bomb the camps, but “precision bombing,” a fiction today, was a complete fantasy back then, when only about 20% of the bombs landed within a mile of their intended target. And to paraphrase a later murderous folly, it wasn’t possible to bomb the prisoners in order to save them.

Burns pulls no punches, and the six hours are grim and horrific. But it’s very important, and every adult and child over the age of 10 should see it. There’s a reason Nazis and white nationalists are so disgusting and so widely hated.

While it’s important to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, especially with so many scumbags trying to pretend it never happened, one of the most disturbing elements is the eerie parallels to the present day. There are murderous right wing monsters on the loose (yes, I’ll include Donald Trump by name) and there are plutocrats willing to fund and defend such monsters in the belief they can control them once in power. There are jackbooted street thugs threatening teachers, poll workers, school boards and any other element of a functioning democracy, trying to tear democracy down with lies and fear. There are churches, including the Catholic Church, willing to ride a rising tide of human sewage to power. And there is the race-baiting. The main targets are Muslims and immigrants, but Jews, intellectuals, leftists and the disabled are on the list of people today’s fascists think America would be better off without.

The parallels are obvious in the first episode, but Burns deftly lets them present themselves, unremarked upon. He makes the similarities between brownshirts and MAGA, and the world-wide rise of fascism more obvious in the third and final episodes.

He isn’t wrong. He isn’t exaggerating. Take his warning to heart.

Now available free for streaming at https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/us-and-the-holocaust/

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Power Around the Dragon — Hollywood brings them out, doesn’t it?

Power Around the Dragon

Hollywood brings them out, doesn’t it?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 18th, 2022

zeppscommentaries.online

I could be writing about Trump’s possible (likely) treason, and the increasingly vicious tactics of his brownshirt followers. I could discuss Ukraine’s resurgence against the Russians. That would cheer most folk up. I could talk about the looming catastrophe in the UK, where they named as prime minister someone who physically and ideologically looks like the discards from Margaret Thatcher’s embalming. Hell, I could even talk about how the Dodgers might win 113 games this year, but how they had an unfair advantage because they play in the same division as the San Francisco Giants.

Instead, I’m going to talk about two sort-of competing television extravaganzas, and the flat-out weird response some of the viewers have had.

They’re both prequels, one to Game of Thrones (GoT) and the other to the Lord of the Rings (LotR). Both have massive budgets and a plethora of special effects. HBO’s House of the Dragon (HotD) features everyone’s favorite family of firebugs, the Targaryens. It stars Paddy Considine, Matt Smith, and Rhys Ifans. Amazon has Rings of Power (RoP), with a mostly British cast, and the story takes place over thousands of years long before LotR. For the TV series, thousands of years is compressed to several dozen years, meaning a few corners got cut.

Four episodes in, I think RoP is the better of the two, but that’s not saying much. Remember how GoT sagged and stumbled in the final two seasons? HotD seems to be following that sad legacy, only without the memorable characters still alive in the final years of GoT. So far, none of the characters (except Matt Smith, who should have stayed a Doctor) are particularly memorable, and even Smith sees the wheels come off his role in a painfully awkward and utterly unnecessary sex scene with the princess, his teenage cousin (Ew…) For some reason, this grim encounter makes the now-retired-virgin princess decide to rape the captain of the guard. I don’t see things looking up from there. The dialogue is strained and wooden, to the point where it reminded me less of GoT and more of Star Wars’ second trilogy. Honestly, they could add Jar-Jar Binks and it would be an improvement. RoP has better acting and dialogue, but feels horribly crowded, as if they were trying to compress the entire Harry Potter series into one 24 page comic book.

So as you might imagine, I’m not writing in the role of a fan-boy outraged by attacks on my precious.

While I enjoy the spectacle of the series, which is where most of the budget went instead of good writers, the spectacle of the fen is even wilder, but lower budget and much less enjoyable.

Fans are howling in outrage because of the shows’ casting choices. Some of the actors aren’t white, or of pure European culture, or woke. This includes Elves, Trolls, Dwarves, Harfoots (Harfeet?) who were the pre-production run of Hobbits before they found New Zealand and settled down, along with Lannisters, Targaryens, Crab people, and the Snakes.

I can almost see the objection when it comes to the Targaryens, who all sport Johnny and Edger Winters’ style platinum-blonde hair. Mind you, none of the actors have that hair color in real life; they all either dye or sport wigs. Yes, even Daenerys. That doesn’t bother the dumb mouth breathers; they don’t care about the hair color. It’s the color of the skin that has them biting rocks and screaming incoherently whilst flinging their shit through the bars.

Anyone who thinks members of a royal family are all the same color don’t know much about history, European history in particular. The only reason the royal families have full sets of DNA at all is because politics required outmarriages to foreign potentates, including North Africa, Egypt, Turkey, and other locales. At least one of Henry VIII’s wives had skin darker than that of Mohammad Ali. The powerful families in George RR Martin’s universe aren’t any better behaved than royals in real life, and you can bet there’s all sorts of dotted lines and the occasional virgin birth cluttering up the royal genealogy. And swans. Lots of swans. So it’s utterly unremarkable that there should be a certain amount of variety.

As for elves, hobbits, faeries, etc: Listen, you shambling idiots. They are IMAGINARY. They don’t really exist. They have physical characteristics, of course. Dwarves are short and built like brick shithouses. Elves have those ear thingees. Harfeet have big hairy feet. Faeries have wings. Cardassians have vulvae in the middle of their foreheads. But rarely, if ever, is skin color or accent mentioned. Which means the show runners have free latitude to pick the best actor, as opposed to the best white actor.

Racism is silly on the face of it, since there really is no such thing as human races. Tolkien lived in an era when it was believed races had certain defining characteristics (blacks were of inferior intelligence, Japanese industrious, whites dumb bastards who vote for people like Trump) and it may or may not have informed the characteristics of the races with which he populated Middle Earth. But those races weren’t human—they were all imaginary. Even more imaginary than the traits bigots of the time attributed to others. Japan has hundreds of fables about the lazy farmer, or an indolent son, or a layabout wife, to demolish the notion that all Japanese were hard-working and driven. Sometimes the lazy character was the hero in the story!

The other big objection is that Tolkien based Middle Earth on “European culture.” It’s even been suggested that Mordor was modeled on Nazi Germany.

OK, good point.

European culture is real, you know. Anyone who has traveled to Europe knows that the Norwegians and the Italians are identical. Same appearance, same language, same culture, same religion. You can’t tell one from the other. Likewise the Flemish and the Turks. Identical, right down to the shoelaces.

Obviously, European culture is as real as dwarves, orcs, dragons or intelligence in Trump world.

So my message to the crowd screaming about how “woke” the shows are is this: Grow up, you idiots. It’s fantasy, just as your views on race and culture are fantasy, only much less obnoxious and self-serving. Find something better to worry about, such as why nobody wants to sleep with you.

 

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EIIR — Nobility that didn’t need a crown

EIIR

Nobility that didn’t need a crown

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 8th, 2022

www.zeppscommentaries.online

It’s going to be strange. Elizabeth was monarch since before I was born. As a kid, she seemed to be everywhere: her image peered over every classroom. Her face was on every coin and bill. Her insignia initials, EIIR, Elizabeth 2 Regina were on the stamps (as was she) and the cap of my dad’s naval uniform.

She oversaw the most tumultuous period of all of Britain’s history. Since 1066, England has seen periods of more violence, of more tragedy (the 17th century alone) but never a 70 year period of more change. During that convulsive and often strange and challenging time, she managed to be the soul of an entire nation. It was a fantastically difficult role, and she was often beset on all sides, but right to her final day, she carried out her duties and was, in the strongest sense of the word, a true trouper.

She grew up not expecting to be Queen. She was the eldest daughter of the second son of George V, and seemed to be just another spear-carrier royal, close enough to the throne that she would appear at various official functions such as royal weddings or Epsom Downs, but far enough out of the limelight that she could, if she wished, shop for herself at her local grocers’.

That changed in 1936, when she was 9. Her grandfather died, and her uncle Albert became King Edward VIII. But Edward wanted to marry an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, and the nation found it unacceptable that the monarch and head of the state church would marry a twice-divorced Yank. While not widely known at the time, England dodged a bullet: Uncle Albert was a big admirer of Adolf Hitler and when he married Simpson in 1937, they took their honeymoon in Nazi Germany.

His brother, now George VI proved to be a very different sort of royal. Far from being a Nazi sympathizer, he was second only to Winston Churchill in stiffening British resolve against the mad dictator.

At the age of ten, Elizabeth was suddenly the heir to the throne. It wasn’t supposed to happen, and what’s more, it happened during one of the darkest moments in British history, an existential threat to end the United Kingdom. Elizabeth was doubtlessly very high on Hitler’s list of planned executions once he held London.

At the age of 14, Princess Elizabeth addressed the nation for the first time over the BBC. It became clear instantly that she had inherited her father’s courage and resolve, and her piping but lucid teenage voice galvanized the nation. It was 1940, and many believed England was doomed.

During the war she worked full-time as a mechanic in the Royal Army motor pool. This was an era before the notion of ‘photo ops’; she really did work as a mechanic, and the overalls and oil-and-grease stains were real, and legitimately earned. She exemplified the spirit of “we’re all in this together” that raised British spirits.

Hitler was defeated, and the greatest period of change in British history began. The once mighty British Empire was now the British Commonwealth, and major possessions—America, Canada, Australia, and most recently India—had declared independence. It was a shell of its former self, and in the first dozen years of Elizabeth’s reign, nearly all of the remaining colonies left. The map of the world, once dominated by the characteristic pink tones of the Empire, was changed beyond recognition.

My parents bought a television set—nearly a month’s salary—just so they could watch Elizabeth’s coronation two years after it happened, on an 11 inch black and white screen. It was one of the very first things broadcast in Canada, and while I don’t remember that, I remember the TV set.

Since she ascended, England saw the discovery of DNA, the four minute mile fell, the ITV was formed, the first nuclear power plant was built, the death penalty was abolished, homosexuality was decriminalized, abortion was legalized, and the Concorde became the first supersonic commercial jet. That was just in the first 15 years of her reign. In 1971 the very money changed, going from pounds, shillings and pence to the 100 pence to the pound we have today. The continuity, of course, was her visage on the reverse of every coin struck.

Elizabeth was the face of Britain during the Troubles, andwhen the UK joined the Common Market (later the European Union). National Health was thoroughly ingrained in the culture, and England led in such developments as in vitro fertilization. Charles married Diana, one of the most jubilant and popular moments in all of England’s history. The Chunnel was an item of trust, removing the barrier the Channel always posed to thwart European depredations. Dolly was born and Diana died. The millennium happened.

In 2002 Elizabeth’s younger sister, Margaret, died as did her mother, the much-beloved “Queen Mum”. Scotland decided to Remain, but the UK voted to Leave, the disastrous ‘Brexit’ vote.

Then came the pandemic, and the near-total collapse of the British economy.

Throughout it all, she was the one constant. Her image on the money was updated every 12 years or so to allow for the passage of the years, but she was always there, and her voice was a part of every British Christmas.

To give you some idea of the length, if not the breadth of her reign, her first Prime Minister, Winston S. Churchill, was born in 1874. Her nineteenth and final PM was Liz Truss, born in 1975.

She was one of the few monarchs in history to voluntarily relinquish some of the royal powers, allowing England to escape some of the shackles of the dead past.

She was subjected to attacks on all sides, particular the trashy tabloid press. It would have destroyed a weaker person.

I’m a republican, ideologically opposed to monarchies and monarchs. But I always had love and respect for her, not because of the jewelry, but because of who she was.

And I admit, even as I am very dubious about King Charles III, I’ll be intensely curious to see what next year’s coins look like in Canada and the UK. I’ve never seen that face change before.

She was far better than the system that produced her.

To quote what she told the world in 1940, 82 years ago:

Before I finish I can truthfully say to you all that we children at home are full of cheerfulness and courage. We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our own share of the danger and sadness of war.

We know, everyone of us, that in the end all will be well; for God will care for us and give us victory and peace. And when peace comes, remember it will be for us, the children of today, to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place.

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Zealotry Aborted — Kansas shows America not ready for religious fascism

Zealotry Aborted

Kansas shows America not ready for religious fascism

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 5th 2022

The only thing about the Kansas vote to reaffirm the state Supreme Court upholding the right to abortion that surprised me was the amount it won by: 59-41. I figured it would pass, but I wasn’t expecting the blowout margin.

Poll after poll has shown that the usurpation of the Constitution by the zealots on the federal Supreme Court is wildly unpopular, and free states are hustling to encode abortion rights if needed, and vowing to provide such rights to enslaved women in the zealot states. That’s why Kansas wasn’t a surprise so far as the result went. Abortion, and separation of church and state, cross partisan lines. It’s one thing to say that Kansas is one of the reddest states in the union; but not all Republicans march in lockstep with the preachers and demagogues that dominate that beleaguered party. And independents in particular will break ranks when it comes to maintaining rights and freedoms.

Kansas all but invented the term “prairie populism.” Often deeply religious, and conservative, but also strong-willed and independent. They may like and respect their Sunday preacher just fine, but they aren’t about to let him dictate how they should vote, or what rights the church can take away that the Constitution promises.

Kansas is one of the most heavily propagandized states in America, with all radio and much television devoted to reactionary Protestant broadcasting, or the endless lies and undermining of freedom that stems from hate radio. I figured that there were maybe 5% of the voters there brainwashed enough to cut off their own noses to “own the libs.” Well, it’s happened before. Look at the obviously incompetent, unfit, and inept trolls in Congress who got there despite having nothing—nothing at all—to offer other than snark and clownish defiance.

I’m happy to see that I was wrong, by about 7% of Kansas’ population. I figured abortion rights would win, but I was expecting a 52-48 margin. That it went the way it did is cause for considerable optimism.

One phenomenon that may have underlay the result was the open, gleeful, and acquisitive viciousness and cruelty that the zealots and the fascists of the GOP displayed. A few days after the Supreme Court (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Comey Barrett) decided to kick the rights of hundreds of millions of people under the nearest Bible, a nightmare scenario emerged, of a ten year old rape victim who had to travel to a neighboring state for an abortion. Any reasonable or rational people would look at that situation and consider making the new law less strident, more humane. There is no situation in which any government, no matter how god-burdened, should force a ten-year-old to give birth to her rapist’s baby.

The Washington Times is one of the shabbier exercises in propaganda journalism given birth by a different set of Zealots, the Moonies, although they dumped the rag a few years back, but it’s still a rag. That exercise in dysfunctional journalism cast doubt on the story, writing, “If there was a 10-year-old girl out there who had been impregnated, certainly there’d be a criminal investigation into her rape.

“But Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said this week that there was “not a whisper” of evidence to back up the story. ‘The bottom line is it is a crime if you’re a mandated reporter to fail to report. It’s also the fact that in Ohio the rape of a 10-year-old means life in prison,’Mr. Yost said on Fox News.” Yost either had no idea what he was talking about and didn’t bother to fact check first, or he was flat-out lying. The rape and rapist had been reported, and he is awaiting trial. But that didn’t stop zealots from sending death threats meant for the girl for the crime of getting raped and being a political embarrassment to them.

And then there’s the lies. Several “justices” on the Supreme Court lied, blatantly and with malice, declaring before the Senate and while under oath that Roe Vs. Wade was “established law” and they would respect stare decisis, which is the legal notion that precedent should determine legal decision making in a case involving similar facts. They lied, and got appointed under fraudulent circumstances.

All the anti-abortion crowd who said they just wanted to limit abortion, and didn’t want to interfere with contraception or a woman’s right to private medical counsel immediately started passing pre-written laws contradicting those stances. Some states are even trying to make it illegal to go to another state for an abortion, or even protest against the law.

Religious zealots believe that they have to be cruel in god’s name either because a) god is cruel, or b) god is kind, but wants to test his followers by making them be cruel. Zealots also believe that it’s ok to lie to “unbelievers” (everyone else) in the name of god. The zealots and corrupt toadies on the Supreme Court have unleashed this miasma of humanity loose on the land, and hideous stories of repression, cruelty, and oppression are emerging every where.

It’s how theocracies—all theocracies—work. The starry-eyed idiots who declare that life would be perfect if we put [god, allah, jesus] in charge miss an important fact: god isn’t running the show. It never has. It doesn’t exist. What a theocracy is is a group of politicians who find god to be the perfect figleaf for their own corruption and viciousness. God is the trump card that ends debate. You end up with The Church running the country, and it’s accountable only to an imaginary doormat that says whatever it is The Church wants it to say and says so on its behalf. It’s the ultimate scam, the Saudi Arabia, the 14th century Europe, and Cromwell’s England. The lowest misery of history, repeated over and over.

Kansas voters may or may not have figured that out. But a significant number of them realize that these people, these zealots, are not to be trusted, and allowed to run loose, will destroy America and everyone in her.

The naked face of religious and fascist zealotry has been exposed. People who wanted to believe are turning away.

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“Not flag or fail” — No time to lose hope

“Not flag or fail”

No time to lose hope

July 4th 2022

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

I wasn’t going to fly the US flag today. Even said so several times in posts around the web. But George Takei changed my mind. He wrote on Twitter,

 

George Takei

@GeorgeTakei

·If you have trouble celebrating July 4th, I can sympathize. For years, we did so within internment camp barbed wire fencing, guns pointed in at us. We honored the promise of America even as it was broken to us every day. But still, we kept faith. And a brighter day finally came.

I wrote in response, “I wasn’t going to fly the flag today. But you just changed my mind. Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.”

Takei, of course, is the author of the autobiographical graphic novel, ‘They Called Us Enemy’ (They Called Us Enemy by George Takei Co-written with Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott and illustrated by Harmony Becker. Top Shelf Productions 2019, 204 pages) which recounts the arrest and internment of his family in 1942 for the crime of looking Japanese in public. They spent the better part of four years in American internment camps including the most desolate and remote corner of California, perhaps two hours drive from where I live.

Takei’s father had left Japan decades before at the age of 12. Nobody else in his family had so much as set foot in Japan, and none felt any loyalty to Emperor Hirohito. But westerners were fearful, cowardly and paranoid, driven by transitory panic. Governor Earl Warren summed up social attitudes when he said, “We have no reports of spying, or sabotage, or fifth column activities by Japanese Americans, and that is ominous, because the Japanese are inscrutable.”

It’s the sort of thinking you associate with zealots and extremists, and Warren normally was neither—quite the opposite, in fact. But the moral and social panics that afflict societies on a regular basis cause reasonable people to utter madness.

As I read Takei’s story, I was struck by the dignity and patriotism of the internees. They only resisted against one demand by the government, that they sign a loyalty oath and a pledge to serve if called upon. The reason for the resistance was NOT that they were unwilling to serve their country (and the vast majority of internees were native-born Americans or naturalized citizens) but the insulting demand that they renounce Emperor Hirohito.

Takei explained it in this passage: “Takei, then adolescent and judgmental, responded to a remark the elder Takei made that ‘…of all the forms of government that we have, American democracy is still the best.’ with ‘Daddy, how can you say that? After all you went through, losing everything you and mama worked for?’ His father replied, ‘Roosevelt pulled us out of the Depression and he did great things. But he was also a fallible human being, and he made a disastrous mistake that affected us calamitously. But despite all that, our democracy is still the best in the world because it is a people’s democracy.’”

Every December, I write a piece dealing in some way with the winter solstice. The theme, always, is that of hope. My tag line on those essays is “Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.” If I am to be true to that promise, then I have to have hope myself, now more than ever. I owe it to George Takei. I owe it to my readers. I owe it to myself. And I owe it to what America stands for.

Yes, there are bigots and fools and religious zealots in positions of power, and they are demonstrating the deep and abiding threat to freedom and sanity that they always have. The GOP, fascist billionaires and corrupt churches egg on a moral and social panic to their own selfish and vicious ends. Many are the same sort of people who build internment camps and worse. Many are good people made temporarily insane by the transitory gusts of rage and fear, like Earl Warren was during the war. (Warren went on to codify many of the same rights the zealots of the Supreme Court are trying to take away now).

So the flag is out front this morning. It’s not a typical Fourth of July morning: it’s cool, and raining, and probably won’t get very warm today. Usually it’s hot and sunny. But then, it wasn’t going to be a typical Independence Day anyway. Storm clouds aren’t always meteorological.

We will defeat the zealots and the fascists and the haters, and drive them back under their rocks. Our own panic and fear will evolve into resolve, and we will fight the monsters of the right and take back what is ours by Constitutional right. They will not prevail. They have Trump; we have Takei. We will win.

Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

 

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