Dershowitz cited this professor for his defense. The professor says he's...
Straight outta the third century...in the shadow of Epstein. They taunt us to remember, not to forget, that jetplane-load of innocent Canadians; whose foul murder, silently permitted by us, was the price we paid for the (really, when you think about it, every bit as foul) murder of an Iranian Kurdish general: Equivalent atrocities, you see--Gregory of Tours would have understood. Think Komodo Dragons de HauteCrèche....
One of the things you'll notice about girls, with contemptuous annoyance, perhaps, if you're a gay man--or with kindly forbearance, maybe, if you're a straight man--is how much girls want to be boys, and how bitterly they resent the fact that they're not. Of course there are also boys that want to be girls, but never with anything like the determined rancor of a girl trying, and failing, to skip a stone across a pond.
Michael Moore On 2020 Presidential Race | The Last Word | MSNBC
It does seem that Bernie Sanders will be constrained, by Decree of the Weird Sisters, and by National Consensus (focused through the Internet), to choose a woman for a running-mate. Damn. I'd have chosen, rather, either Buttigieg or Yang as Vice-President.
But how quickly all this is going! It appears that sometimes the heedless impetuosity of a Xerxes, or the fascist vacuity of a Trump, is the counter-intuitive preliminary of immense, beneficent change in the social order.
Bullshit based on fairly recent research; whereof the negative bias--as negative as it dare be--is palpable: fascist, anti-"marijuana" propaganda. Not that I give a damn, but ¿Who's paying for this?
There's no one else. I've got that same little hitch in my mental get-along with Sanders that I've had with all presidents, except Jimmy Carter: There's something preposterous about the clearing of the field that leaves him the only man standing. And, to change the simile, like the pea under my royal mattress which will not let me rest, is the saurian monstrousness of Sanders' imploded and self-destructed rivals for the presidency: Hillary (Ça va sans dire--What a Gorgon!)--the Bushes, the Bidens, and the Zoo of semi-sensate Idiots currently inhabiting the White House. It hardly seems likely that the Bar can have been set so abyssmally low by accident. So I do believe in Intelligent Design after a fashion: Insofar as I can't deny the evidence of Un-Intelligent Design. What kind of Beast murders innocent people--reflexively, off-handedly--as a normal act of statecraft?
The Physical and Psychic Realization of Cannabis/Human Symbiosis
Suppose--just suppose--we took seriously the twin factors of, the apparently spontaneous, but absolute nonetheless popular embrace of legal cannabis of the past couple of decades, and the absolute necessity, that we have grown aware of in the meantime, of doing something--everything we possibly can--about reversing global warming and minimizing our carbon-footprint: And that we replace--our wood-pulp based paper, cotton fiber, petroleum derived fuels and plastics, maize-based animal bedding and fodder, and industrial concrete--with hemp and its many derivatives...Suppose, so to say, that we planted hemp from sea to sea, in every place that we now grow cotton, softwoods and maize; and that our paper, clothes, and houses were made to last, while our plastics became biodegradable, instead of eternal pollutants...And, of course, all the while that we were getting very, very stoned...
This is it: The point at which centrality and national character is arrived at--this oddly (for a disparate country) arbitrative, focal megalopolis (Chicago), decides whatever is American-to-the-core: The "hog butcher to the world" ordains (it's partly metaphysical, partly actual) that legal cannabis is essential to American Existence. Well--all right and so be it--but how was this thing decided? There's something about the inherently corrupt politics of the half beautiful and half ugly city that appalls me...and (somehow, hysterically) amuses me. I'm recognizing family here, but family that embarrasses the hell out of me, and that I had maybe too comfortably forgotten about.
The reason for which is, basically, geography; roots. My Roots, so to say, predisposing me to a certain dismissive moral laziness, are in a particular, western corner of topsoil in southeastern Washington (State) that did not get washed away by the many Missoula Floods of up to 15,000 years ago--the Palouse. Which, for a rather small geographical location, has vast vistas of rolling grassland, now planted mostly to wheat, of anciently wind-blown loess. Good country for the use that the local Native Americans, the Nez Perce, put it to, of raising horses--specifically the elegant and intelligent, child-friendly "Appaloosa" horse. The things we native Palouseans don't believe in are legion; and we are a good part of the basic reason for Washington (State)'s having the largest number of atheists, per capita, of any state in the union, followed (by a percent or two) by the godless populace of Oregon.
Anyway, IMO, the reason for the perhaps lazy, unbelieving character of us Northwesterners has to do--not with any Quarrel with God, such as primitives suppose--but rather with the utter benignity of our land and climate. We don't fear God, at all, in any sense, because we are not threatened, nor even seriously discommoded, by anything in our environment. The horrors of humidity wafted out of the Gulf of Mexico and terrors of hurricanes and tornadoes are not even thought of among us. Our winters are mild, and our summers sheer "Mediterranean" delight. The thing that occurred to me, indifferently, as a representative child of the Pacific Northwest, for example, when I came to learn of it, about the Stoning of Stephen, and Saul/Paul's bad conscience on account of it, was: howunnecessary. Pretty much, in philosophical and ethical terms, what I felt socially and musically at my initial exposure to 'Pagliacci.' Jesus. ¿Don't these people have lives?
There is joy here, and mystery. The fact is, American bison are good to eat. In my own experience of bison-burger, I would rate it with venison, Chinook salmon, Dungeness crab and pâté de foie gras, as being, obviously, when you taste it, what God intends that you should eat--like how the Japanese, I understand, feel about pink sea bream. God's goodness. Which is a difficult place for a vegetarian and a conscious practitioner of ahimsa to be in. And the bison do not make it easy for us, being quirky beasts, dangerous and full of likeable (rather than loveable) and respect-worthy character--whom to kill and eat more offends our conscience than doing the same to sweet, lovely but after all rather douchey cows.
My man. Can't remember his name--like Lee Camp--preposterous name for the one most like the voice inside my head that I think of as me. Cody something. I would never call myself Cody. Or Lee.
I'm required to announce, by the fact that it happened, that my father recommended Louisa May Alcott's 'Little Women' to me when I was eleven years old,
admonishing me not to be put off by the gender of the title, "because it's more about human beings than just about girls." And thus admonished, I read it and quite liked it. It may have been the last non-misogynist thing I ever did, but I did it, and I did it at the instance of my father, whom I otherwise considered rather an idiot.
The panicked loins of a couple of nice young people who'd just heard that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and were scared to death--although, really, if they had thought about it, they'd have known that, in their particular situation, they had nothing to be scared of. My grandfather, after all, was the head of the the local draft board, and he had hired my father, his son-in-law, to work on his wheat ranch (as we call large wheat farms in the Far West) as an Essential Worker. Cushy. Likewise--and I recall being aware of this at the moment of my conception--my paternal grandfather had never in his life hit an animal, or a child, in anger; and, what is important here, had forbidden his sons, and his sons-in-law, to do so either. It was, I knew, for me, the perfect place to be born and to spend my early childhood.
Anyway, M. Trudeau (Justin) now has a very disagreeable task before him: Not to say, really, what it is about international politics as they now stand, that makes the murder of seven score innocent (Are there any other kind?) Canadians, a mild, acceptable stand-down in international confrontations. What if, Justin, you told the truth?
I wish to hell that I had profited from the occasions that I have had to learn the Russian language, which, I believe, is destined to be the Greek (what Greek was in the First Millennium) of the Third Millennium...
Putin, I think, has got it right. The West is due for a Carthaginian extinction in the next thousand years, while China, after a little nap, will go into orbit. They (the Chinese) might be the ones who, in endeavoring to suppress it, will invent Universal Encryption, thus ensuring that Fully Participatory Democracy is a Meritocracy.
Love this. Most especially love the long quotes from William Bradley (who is a very good writer)--though I admit I'm smitten, too, with John Winthrop's Christian Charity as as good a name as any for Fully Participatory Democracy (via Internet Voting).
So, when I hear of the High Suicide Rates among our Troops, who've returned from the Genocidal Wars in Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan,
I say, "Good. It shows that they did have a conscience, after all."
And I'm sorry that they have trusted and believed in, as they were taught, the vile and cruel ideology of their native country; which, insofar as they have been faithful to it, has led to the perpetration of enormous, wanton, despicable crimes against innocents.
Christianity seems to offer some hope of Divine Forgiveness--more, certainly, than I would--to the U.S. helicopter-gunship crew of whom I have seen a video, in their sickeningly fleet and agile death-ship, methodically hunting down and shooting each and every single boy (about ten of them, from seven to twelve years of age) of a wood-gathering party, who were trying to take shelter behind a tall tree...in bloody Afghanistan. I hope that those brave helicopter-gunship-ghouls do kill themselves--and go on to eternal tortures in the hereafter.
Killing people summarily, with no pretense, even, of fair trial or due process--and especially when the killing is done by agents of the state--is a HEINOUS, ABOMINABLE CRIME. Capisc'? Wanna hear it again?
Why would those who vaunt themselves the "killers" Of an Iranian general not have shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet full of Canadians?
¿Haven't you got used to the fact that, in just about all such doubtful cases, where the evidence of a heartless, brutal crime is tardily adduced and thin, the CIA are invariably the ones who've done it (i.e., murdered a lot of innocent people)? That's a statistic, not a theory.
John Iadarola maybe does eat too much sugar, but he's witty and he's smart, and damn-it-all nice, if one dude may say this of another dude. What that means is that, he being liberal (I accept no bad senses of this word) and unashamed, what you see of him is exactly what there is. Nice indeed.
Green and Purple Stars, and Pink--such as they would appear to Humans to be--
Do in fact exist, though they are rare. You just have to look for them. Which serious astronomers, who don't like to be bothered with the constraints and peculiarities of human color-vision, are seldom willing to do. When we ask such conscientious professionals for example, please, to lift their attention from Epicycles and the hypothetical profundities of Dark Matter and Black Holes, and to set the search-parameters of one of their dazzlingly many varieties of telescopes to "Binary Stars, Amethyst/Emerald," such as we are all dying to catch a glimpse of, they reply that to focus on so narrow a color spectrum would be a waste of their valuable telescope's time, and would, essentially, provide too little data to make the observation worthwhile. Really, that's what they're saying. And they also say, dismissively of Pink the color, "Pink isn't a color," which is true, but which proves that they don't know how to look for things that humans want to see, and, perhaps, that they have no souls.
Prince Charles Disowns Harry! Meghan Markle Worried About Keeping Her Ro...
I did, in fact, tell y'all that this, or something like this, was going to happen--way back when, in discussing his then upcoming marriage to Diana in a television interview, Charles revealed (to me, at least) that he was gay. It then became evident that Diana was dumber than a box of rocks, bulimic, and randier than a female mink. Disaster loomed. But you would think that a little bit of the icky-awful scandal, later on, might have been averted by Charles' disowning Harry before his (Harry's) appalling (even for a stupid bastard) wedding to the pert, ridiculous negress.
Whose Out of Africa video documentary (and I don't think the continental reference was unintentional, pert creature that she is)--along with her complicitous, and visibly totally whupped, husband and his totally unnecessary row with the tabloids--all seemed to coincide, jarringly, with Prince Charles's own recent BBC-ing of throneship-validating video epics, qualifying himself as the successful Prince Regent of Cornwall and Gardener-Master of Highgrove: Solemnly, dynastically necessary stuff--in the not too distant future the man intends to be King...And here come Harry and Meghan...and Andrew (Randy Andy) and his drove of cows--porky wives, fat daughters, tarts. ¡Ya nosé! They say that the disowned duke and duchess of Sussex lost Frogmore and three or four million pounds (Stirling), which the Queen had been about to lend them and took back. One disgraceful tabloid reported that Harry accused Charles of having murdered his (Harry's) mother--which I believe is substantially the truth. God knows he had every right to, and must have wanted to. Had I been Prince Charles, seriously, I'd have poisoned Princess Diana as soon as it became evident--fairly early on actually--that she was too stupid and too libidinous to be at all controlled; she was, as they say, off the rails, or on Musth, and had, like a rogue animal, to be put down. Puh-leeze do not tell us that she was loved.We knew that.
You'll remember the first days of the (yet ongoing) Reduction of Iraq, when, besides the wanton murder of civilians, and the general destruction of the oldest artifacts of civilization on the planet, there were so many outrages against innocent humanity and plain human decency committed by our troops, that it'd be impossible now to enumerate them all. Still, one obscenely criminal act lingers in my mind, possibly worse than our seemingly insatiable taste for raping and torturing children in front of their parents (Had you forgot Abu Ghraib?): Early on, while Baghdad was still being "subdued," you'll recall, one of our precious troops--a male person, as I believe we now say, of color--who hastened to the Zoo and shot the tigers in their cages. Not that it matters, of course, but, in my parlance, that particular, colored, Tiger-shooting U.S. Soldier (troop) was a Negro. I refuse to call him anything else--Fuck you very much, if you think I mayn't call him that. I might even say that he was a Nigger.
Why the U.S. military targeted Qassam Soleimani -- and how Iran might react
Damned lies. The "pre-emptive" murder of General Qassam Soleimani was not made less heinous, or less abominable, by its being perpetrated by the President of the United States of America. The official arrogance which fails to own the wanton criminality of such an act puts every citizen of the United States in peril of dire and horrific retribution.
Trump Starting Iran War, Assassinates Iranian Leader
These are extra-legal times. I advise my fellow hyper-progressive conspiracy theorists, and activists, to dissimulate, dissociate, yes, and disappear (had to say it) behind/within the layered bureaucracy of the distribution of tax revenues, and the particular, material security exigencies of a cash-only economy. This madman, and the madmen who are with him, must be stopped. As I regard the open, passive, senile dementia and vacant idiocy in our great leader's face, I wonder what Jean Baudrillard would have said, about hyper-real, non-existent public events--with real weapons, and real victims.
Breaking: Airport bombing sparks US-Iran proxy war (full show)
Is this it? It is when, hour after hour, day after day, more and more of the mercenary idiots that America has posted around the world as "troops"--occupation forces--will be sniped out, one by one, few by few, by the enraged populaces whom we have up till now held in subjection, despoiling, tormenting, and murdering them.
To the question "What have you done?" I have prepared an answer: three or four--maybe five or six--Perfect Songs (honestly, kids, actual songs), composed by, and written out by, me. Their being songs, in answer to the question of what, at best, I might do, both in their manner of composition and in their subject matter, is, and is intended to be, reflective of my personal moral, ethical and esthetic philosophy; while at the same time, of course, being perfect songs. The problem with them is that they were written before my life was half over, and, other than to garner college degrees--which I have done--they have left me nothing to say in the latter half of my life.
My songs are in fact my musical settings, not of my own but of other peoples' poetry. In a sense they have written themselves. My purpose, apart from my own satisfaction, is to render their verses intelligible; and, being an American Transcendentalist, I strive for nothing less than their perfect comprehension, by those most critically demanding of music-listeners, French children--and yes, by their parents and grandparents. These kids are to be scared by my song about the wolf, and to feel just a little bit sorry for the greedy shepherdess in her song.
"Do we Date the Same Types of People, over and over?"
Jesus. "Date"? What "Types" of People are there? Do we fuck them? Are "we" girls or boys? Gay or straight? Do you really think gay marriage is a good idea? Then perhaps I don't.
In the past couple of years, I have dined, more than I should have, and/but deliciously, at a Vietnamese family-style Pho restaurant just down the block. In that time, I have graduated from Summer Rolls to Garden Rolls (tofu instead of shrimp and pork), and come generally to appreciate the spicier sorts of curry and rice dishes. The Pho noodle soup remains beyond reproach, but I am still not persuaded that I cannot detect in their beloved fish sauce, garum that it be, the lingering putrescence of rotten fish. I suppose that's 'cause I'm White (but not Italian), and I detest anchovies (from which fish sauce is mostly made).
I burn hot. I tend to exhaust people in conversation, like Margaret Fuller did Carlyle. Which leaves me (but apparently not Margaret) always wishing I'd shut up sooner. I have quite a few friends and not many enemies, but I'm very proud of the few I do have. There is consensus among my friends about me, which is how I know to write about myself. What my enemies think of me I have no idea. That, of course, could be dangerous.
The list of interests and favorites is absurdly partial and half-assed, particularly as to music and books. It's the stupid format of the blog itself, as given, that, of course, I color outside the lines and burst the seams of.
