I detest Trump, but once the man came along, the press stopped even pretending to be objective, just as the alphabet agencies and prosecutors stopped even pretending to be acting in the interests of justice, instead seeking any pretext to stop Trump.
Trump evidently was a sure loser the DNC thought and when he won the curtains came down about a lot of things--esp. the kabuki of primary elections and the lack of journalistic integrity. That is probably his main contribution.
There is no longer any right or left. Just us and them, and “them” have all the levers of power over us (whom they think of as the Great Unwashed). But our long walk through the desert may be coming to an end as people start to chafe at their chains. Don’t pillory me for being an optimist.
"Take a Bow, Columbia Journalism Review: The venerable watchdog publication breaks legacy media ranks with a massive rebuke of Trump-Russia coverage. Interview with the report's dogged author, Jeff Gerth" interviewed by Matt Taibbi at Racket News.
I witnessed a friend losing many "friends" because she refused to simply accept the Russiagate narrative. One of the most vocal of those was a prep school, Harvard educated woman. I guess all the money spent on her education is not paying off, is it. The same person also used the Russiagate narrative to say that Bernie benefited from it - never mind that Bernie wasn't the nominee. The whole thing was, and is, absurd. I bet this Harvard educated woman still believes the election was stolen.
But what bugs me is that, in the context of Russia preventing Hillary from becoming president, I haven't seen anyone address the fact that Hillary did win the popular vote and if there is anything threatening our "democracy", let's start with the electoral college. And if she failed to win delegates, that's not a matter of interference, but a matter of bad campaigning. I thing it is so simple and all the discussion, while enlightening, is not really necessary.
Quite right, no electoral college please. We want a democracy. But in this case, Ratpublican Trump or DemonRat Hillary doesn't make any difference: neither of them cares for the people.
Bad calculating, too. HRC lost to BO in 2008 because FL moved up its primary and FL and MI did something wrong and the DNC decided that she did not get those primary votes.
The tribal near-monopoly ownership/control of the media is the cause of the loss of trust in the media: NYTmes, Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, PBS and C-Span. That also explains the hysteria when a non-tribal member took over Twitter.
Yes, as Mark Twain would say: if you don't read the press, you are uninformed but if you read it, your are misinformed. I'm sure we are now in a worse situation with the take-over of corporate news.
I hope you do a segment on the asbury revival I’ve just become aware of. From what I see it’s been non political so far but there’s a billion loopty loops before that train hits the stations. Curious to hear about some historical context of revivals and comparison and contrast. And what revivals have historically influenced politically. What the positive potentials and negative potentials are in your opinion. Also in our hyper socially fractured nation, when these people go home i can imagine it leaving many people with a demand for more of that spiritual ecstasy which could be preyed upon. I know very very little about revivals but I think this is potentially the first in the 21st century.
I don't know history but a work of fiction immersed me into a revival. If you have not read Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis (our first Nobel laureate in literature) I believe it will fit your interest in understanding the age of revivals, since Mr. Lewis researched deeply in the subject before writing his novel. And those church's matters never change.
Whether revivals in past had political tones from the get go or were the collapsed into actionable politics along the line, and what might be extrapolated to now
I just unsubscribed to drinking with Historians. I was banned for a century for commenting and speaking the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That is America's dilema.
The truth is painful.
There is no politics in the USA it is all religion.
There are no compromises in religion that is why the Civil War continues.
There is no such thing as a Missouri Compromise when people worship false idols.
Without truth there can not be reconciliation. We told that to my brother Francis when he visited but he could not understand my peoples. In Quebec Jesus is our brother not a false idol.
Bill 21 is our ten commandments.
Religion, gender and race are all BULLSHIT, lies and distortion. We teach Darwin and live as Jesus instructed.
True, no compromises. I suppose that is why our dearest dying former president wrote:
"A fundamentalist can't bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality." Jimmy Carter
Thank you for the link. I didn't know about that incident. Here, in America he did the same heroic deed much later in one of our plants. He is a brilliant nuclear engineer with great compassion, too good to be understood in our political environment. He knew sciences and installed solar panels while he resided in the white house. The first thing his successor, the entertainer, did when he moved in was to take them off. Sadly, Mr. Carter is in his house now waiting to be visited by the angel of death at any moment.
The American constitution was written in English not legalese. English is not a language of law. Why do lawyers interpret the constitution they can't speak English it is not their tongue? It is not their culture. It is not their metaphysics.
Scalia knew enough to consult Dr Johnson's dictionary of the English Language to pervert the constitution.
Dr Johnson was an arrogant, greedy self centered egoist Boswell wrote a great biography.
Johnson was the founder of modern conservative doublethink. How sad to go out with a whimper not a bang. We are all hollow men.
I don't drink with historians . I smoke cannabis which Canadas's Department of Health recommends for people my age it slows the progression and may even arrest the development of senility. I know alcohol and cocaine are America's favourite drugs of choice because religion is the opium of the masses. I am alive because even the smell of alcohol makes me sick. I could never afford cocaine and when I lived for a decade in Southside Chicago ghetto nobody ever offered me crack I was too Caucasian looking to trust.
Wandering Arameans are mongrels we like to have sex and make love not war.
I am the same age as Israel and it is National Socialist just like the USA under Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Wilson Reagan. Orwell tells the story in his essay on Nationalism.
Image result for why Jefferson wrote the life and morals of Jesus of Nazareth
In two volumes, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth and The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson edited out biblical passages he considered over-the-top or that offended his Enlightenment-era sense of reason.
They say I am autistic that somehow it is my perception that is not normal. Voltaire said perception is real in its consequences but I am a man of many words and what Voltaire meant was perception is reality or is reality perception.
Mark Twain told me about Russia and Putin long before Putin was born. Twain understood Russia and its autocrats and he even spoke Russian. He sent his spies Tom , Huck and Jim up in a spy balloon to spy on Russia, Africa and America and wrote about it it in Tom Sawyer Abroad. Mark wrote about baseball , apple pie and motherhood. He was a journalist's journalist. Mark's writings were so dark even Diogenes' Lamp couldn't penetrate the darkness.
I found this analysis of Twain's Russia devastating. How could an American Academic get Twain so wrong?
Twain was vastly superior intellectually to Shakespeare he invented Ametrican which is a very complex code requiring my genius in linguistics and abstract mathematics. but it was Newton who said we are standing on the shoulders of giants. It was Woodrow Wilson's Creel who created the department of truth and Newspeak. Orwell just reported it.
Woodrow Wilson called himself an intellectual. He believed Eugenics was science not religion. Wilson called himself a democrat but he was a National Socialist before World War One began. Orwell told me.
Voltaire was a Deist. He understood Kabbalah. Perception is reality.
The linguistic philosopher and troubled self loathing father of modern American conservatism Dr Samuel Johnson called the Kabbalists of Vilnius the wisest of the wise in his Dictionary of the Language 1755. It is my favourite dictionary it gives context from people who loved words.
The Gaon of Vilna was father to the European enlightenment. They fled the Basque Country in 1492 when Isabelle and the holy Romans declared war on wisdom and truth and found refuge in Vilnius Lithuania till the Czars declared war on wisdom and enlightenment.
My father taught me the story. He grew up in a town near Krakow where his family found refuge when the Empires of Christendom declared war on sanity.
There is no magic in the Universe God lives by the same rules as men. There is no design; change is the only law. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Orthodox Judaism is Pagan nonsense. I love people and hate nonsense
There is no magic in Kabbalah. No yellow strings, no hocus pocus, no kosher pig rinds or gelatin, no strollers in sacred areas. Bullshit helps flowers grow but doesn't bring us closer to God that was Einstein's quest.
Of course I am autistic and just learning to write and Autisme Montreal says I am Popeye and I ar'm what I ar'm.
Government by falsified promises, by lies, by treachery, and by the butcher-knife, for the aggrandizement of a single family of drones and its idle and vicious kin has been borne quite long enough in Russia, I should think. And it is to be hoped that the roused nation, now rising in its strength, will presently put an end to it and set up the republic in its place. Some of us, even the white-headed, may live to see the blessed day when tsars and grand dukes will be as scarce there as I trust they are in heaven.
- letter to Nicholas Tchaykowsky (alternately spelled Tchaykoffsky), 1906 reprinted in Mark Twain, a Biography also in Washington Post, 30 March 1906
It is difficult to explain. I don't believe in magic or miracle I don't to believe I was given eyes and ears and nerves and receptors I don't need to imagine. I don't understand wanting to be Peter Pan or Superman. My wife is much wiser than I am; she knows of my charm and charisma and still can't understand my fear of the cacophony of the crowds. We all want to be Marcus Aurelius but it is easier to rule over the multitude than to serve it and I know my passions.
I was married on groundhog day before the movie.
We had been together for quite a journey but on groundhog the journey was just beginning.
Mark Twain Speak to me . Ben Franklin and George Orwell but my poets are Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen and my Saint is Kinky Friedman and he still lives. Today my wife needed a break from all the information and this arrived in the mail she loves Kinky's writing
and I loved his poetry and song on youtube I was a young man way back then. I listened on vinyl.
When I was Greta's Age they said I was lazy. She is my Joan of Arc. Mark Twain wrote the Novel. It turned my wife on to Twain. I gave her Twain to read last year. She gave up on her computer and she loves to read. She is a PhD and had won a scholarship to the University of Chicago when it had a faculty of Education and believed in education not business as usual. Fortunately with my wife's reading obsession we can afford the books but she won't let me buy her a kindle she likes the paper and we are running out of shelf space and our local library is world famous and can't handle anymore books. They say you can't shake a tree without a poet or philosopher falling out. It is a strange place I live in. I lived in Chicago ghetto for over a decade and a Dene Village in the SubArctic and a remote farming community and I am an autistic Jew from Montreal. I spent years wandering from St John's to British Columbia and I am just learning to write.
Here in Quebec Bill21 delegitimized religion. Quebec is a secular humanist liberal democracy. In Quebec gender, race and religion are fantasy and we believe we own gravity.
In Quebec gravity runs our society and we own gravity. Gravity run our aluminum smelters whose excess heat grows your orchids in our greenhouses.
We said we will try to eliminate fossil fuel burning by 2030 and we believe in sustainable agriculture. Our farmer are rich and our bankers are paid by the hour.
My sister is visiting her friends in Florida but they never go near the beach. They say it is a monument to our insanity. The gated community has two pools and security guards so the inmates don't shoot each other.
My sister was born during a winter blizzard and 82 degrees F on her birthday told her it was a good to visit friends.😢
I detest Trump, but once the man came along, the press stopped even pretending to be objective, just as the alphabet agencies and prosecutors stopped even pretending to be acting in the interests of justice, instead seeking any pretext to stop Trump.
Trump evidently was a sure loser the DNC thought and when he won the curtains came down about a lot of things--esp. the kabuki of primary elections and the lack of journalistic integrity. That is probably his main contribution.
There is no longer any right or left. Just us and them, and “them” have all the levers of power over us (whom they think of as the Great Unwashed). But our long walk through the desert may be coming to an end as people start to chafe at their chains. Don’t pillory me for being an optimist.
No pillorying from me -- I'd like to be an optimist too. It's difficult.
Another good interview:
"Take a Bow, Columbia Journalism Review: The venerable watchdog publication breaks legacy media ranks with a massive rebuke of Trump-Russia coverage. Interview with the report's dogged author, Jeff Gerth" interviewed by Matt Taibbi at Racket News.
https://www.racket.news/p/take-a-bow-columbia-journalism-review
A good way to support Mr. Gerth's investigative work is to read the articles.
Here are the citations:
Gerth, Jeff (January 30, 2023). "The press versus the president, part one". Columbia Journalism Review.
Gerth, Jeff (January 30, 2023). "The press versus the president, part two". Columbia Journalism Review.
Gerth, Jeff (January 30, 2023). "The press versus the president, part three". Columbia Journalism Review.
Gerth, Jeff (January 30, 2023). "The press versus the president, part four". Columbia Journalism Review.
https://www.cjr.org/author/jeff-gerth
I witnessed a friend losing many "friends" because she refused to simply accept the Russiagate narrative. One of the most vocal of those was a prep school, Harvard educated woman. I guess all the money spent on her education is not paying off, is it. The same person also used the Russiagate narrative to say that Bernie benefited from it - never mind that Bernie wasn't the nominee. The whole thing was, and is, absurd. I bet this Harvard educated woman still believes the election was stolen.
But what bugs me is that, in the context of Russia preventing Hillary from becoming president, I haven't seen anyone address the fact that Hillary did win the popular vote and if there is anything threatening our "democracy", let's start with the electoral college. And if she failed to win delegates, that's not a matter of interference, but a matter of bad campaigning. I thing it is so simple and all the discussion, while enlightening, is not really necessary.
Quite right, no electoral college please. We want a democracy. But in this case, Ratpublican Trump or DemonRat Hillary doesn't make any difference: neither of them cares for the people.
Bad calculating, too. HRC lost to BO in 2008 because FL moved up its primary and FL and MI did something wrong and the DNC decided that she did not get those primary votes.
The tribal near-monopoly ownership/control of the media is the cause of the loss of trust in the media: NYTmes, Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, PBS and C-Span. That also explains the hysteria when a non-tribal member took over Twitter.
Yes, as Mark Twain would say: if you don't read the press, you are uninformed but if you read it, your are misinformed. I'm sure we are now in a worse situation with the take-over of corporate news.
I read Gerth's articles when they were published and it was nice to hear a little more context from him.
I hope you do a segment on the asbury revival I’ve just become aware of. From what I see it’s been non political so far but there’s a billion loopty loops before that train hits the stations. Curious to hear about some historical context of revivals and comparison and contrast. And what revivals have historically influenced politically. What the positive potentials and negative potentials are in your opinion. Also in our hyper socially fractured nation, when these people go home i can imagine it leaving many people with a demand for more of that spiritual ecstasy which could be preyed upon. I know very very little about revivals but I think this is potentially the first in the 21st century.
????? Etc
Here is a good book:
John B. Boles. The Great Revival Beginnings of the Bible Belt. Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
Thanks so much Kathleen!
I don't know history but a work of fiction immersed me into a revival. If you have not read Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis (our first Nobel laureate in literature) I believe it will fit your interest in understanding the age of revivals, since Mr. Lewis researched deeply in the subject before writing his novel. And those church's matters never change.
Whether revivals in past had political tones from the get go or were the collapsed into actionable politics along the line, and what might be extrapolated to now
I just unsubscribed to drinking with Historians. I was banned for a century for commenting and speaking the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That is America's dilema.
The truth is painful.
There is no politics in the USA it is all religion.
There are no compromises in religion that is why the Civil War continues.
There is no such thing as a Missouri Compromise when people worship false idols.
Without truth there can not be reconciliation. We told that to my brother Francis when he visited but he could not understand my peoples. In Quebec Jesus is our brother not a false idol.
Bill 21 is our ten commandments.
Religion, gender and race are all BULLSHIT, lies and distortion. We teach Darwin and live as Jesus instructed.
True, no compromises. I suppose that is why our dearest dying former president wrote:
"A fundamentalist can't bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality." Jimmy Carter
Thank you for sharing my reality.
It is lonely but I was lucky I found enough people who understand.
He is my President. He told the truth he is a Socratic replaced by a liar and sophist and we have inherited the wind.
He understood Iran in
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/chalk-river-nuclear-accident-1.6293574
December of 1952.
He has lived the good life.
He understands Marcus Aurelius a wise and noble leader serves; he does not rule.
America hates JESUS.
The Romans always crucify Truthtellers.
Jesus was a loser.
He died upon a cross.
between two thieves
Thank you for the link. I didn't know about that incident. Here, in America he did the same heroic deed much later in one of our plants. He is a brilliant nuclear engineer with great compassion, too good to be understood in our political environment. He knew sciences and installed solar panels while he resided in the white house. The first thing his successor, the entertainer, did when he moved in was to take them off. Sadly, Mr. Carter is in his house now waiting to be visited by the angel of death at any moment.
The American constitution was written in English not legalese. English is not a language of law. Why do lawyers interpret the constitution they can't speak English it is not their tongue? It is not their culture. It is not their metaphysics.
Scalia knew enough to consult Dr Johnson's dictionary of the English Language to pervert the constitution.
Dr Johnson was an arrogant, greedy self centered egoist Boswell wrote a great biography.
Johnson was the founder of modern conservative doublethink. How sad to go out with a whimper not a bang. We are all hollow men.
I don't drink with historians . I smoke cannabis which Canadas's Department of Health recommends for people my age it slows the progression and may even arrest the development of senility. I know alcohol and cocaine are America's favourite drugs of choice because religion is the opium of the masses. I am alive because even the smell of alcohol makes me sick. I could never afford cocaine and when I lived for a decade in Southside Chicago ghetto nobody ever offered me crack I was too Caucasian looking to trust.
Wandering Arameans are mongrels we like to have sex and make love not war.
I am the same age as Israel and it is National Socialist just like the USA under Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Wilson Reagan. Orwell tells the story in his essay on Nationalism.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/notes-on-nationalism/
https://books.smithsonianmag.com/jeffersonbible
Why did Thomas Jefferson rewrite the Bible?
Image result for why Jefferson wrote the life and morals of Jesus of Nazareth
In two volumes, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth and The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson edited out biblical passages he considered over-the-top or that offended his Enlightenment-era sense of reason.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/why-thomas-jefferson-created-his-own-bible-180975716/
Jefferson was an evolutionary botanist.
He bred better food for his people. He designed better peas and flowers.
Jefferson's America died of ignorance not malice.
My spy just returned from Trump country she told me what I already knew, the people are kind and generous they just believe a whole lot of nonsense.
At 5 AM yesterday I watched Putin spew his venom for two hours on BBC and all the while the Patriarch reassured the audience God was on their side.
You heard about cannabis it was the incense they burned in the holy places.
https://www.haaretz.com/life/2022-05-05/ty-article-magazine/.premium/jews-and-joints-how-the-people-of-the-book-came-to-love-marijuana/00000180-9e4b-dba7-a5e9-de4fd11c0000
They say I am autistic that somehow it is my perception that is not normal. Voltaire said perception is real in its consequences but I am a man of many words and what Voltaire meant was perception is reality or is reality perception.
Mark Twain told me about Russia and Putin long before Putin was born. Twain understood Russia and its autocrats and he even spoke Russian. He sent his spies Tom , Huck and Jim up in a spy balloon to spy on Russia, Africa and America and wrote about it it in Tom Sawyer Abroad. Mark wrote about baseball , apple pie and motherhood. He was a journalist's journalist. Mark's writings were so dark even Diogenes' Lamp couldn't penetrate the darkness.
I found this analysis of Twain's Russia devastating. How could an American Academic get Twain so wrong?
Twain was vastly superior intellectually to Shakespeare he invented Ametrican which is a very complex code requiring my genius in linguistics and abstract mathematics. but it was Newton who said we are standing on the shoulders of giants. It was Woodrow Wilson's Creel who created the department of truth and Newspeak. Orwell just reported it.
Woodrow Wilson called himself an intellectual. He believed Eugenics was science not religion. Wilson called himself a democrat but he was a National Socialist before World War One began. Orwell told me.
Voltaire was a Deist. He understood Kabbalah. Perception is reality.
The linguistic philosopher and troubled self loathing father of modern American conservatism Dr Samuel Johnson called the Kabbalists of Vilnius the wisest of the wise in his Dictionary of the Language 1755. It is my favourite dictionary it gives context from people who loved words.
The Gaon of Vilna was father to the European enlightenment. They fled the Basque Country in 1492 when Isabelle and the holy Romans declared war on wisdom and truth and found refuge in Vilnius Lithuania till the Czars declared war on wisdom and enlightenment.
My father taught me the story. He grew up in a town near Krakow where his family found refuge when the Empires of Christendom declared war on sanity.
There is no magic in the Universe God lives by the same rules as men. There is no design; change is the only law. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Orthodox Judaism is Pagan nonsense. I love people and hate nonsense
There is no magic in Kabbalah. No yellow strings, no hocus pocus, no kosher pig rinds or gelatin, no strollers in sacred areas. Bullshit helps flowers grow but doesn't bring us closer to God that was Einstein's quest.
Of course I am autistic and just learning to write and Autisme Montreal says I am Popeye and I ar'm what I ar'm.
What did Twain mean when he wrote
Government by falsified promises, by lies, by treachery, and by the butcher-knife, for the aggrandizement of a single family of drones and its idle and vicious kin has been borne quite long enough in Russia, I should think. And it is to be hoped that the roused nation, now rising in its strength, will presently put an end to it and set up the republic in its place. Some of us, even the white-headed, may live to see the blessed day when tsars and grand dukes will be as scarce there as I trust they are in heaven.
- letter to Nicholas Tchaykowsky (alternately spelled Tchaykoffsky), 1906 reprinted in Mark Twain, a Biography also in Washington Post, 30 March 1906
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Sawyer_Abroad
Hitchcock appeared in his movies. It is not difficult to figure out Tom Sawyer wasn't a fiction or a Disney.
Neither are Jim and Huck Twain's empathy is prodigious. Autism they say is all about empathy.
Here in Quebec Greta has replaced Joan of Arc.
Here in U.S too. I love youngsters in action trying to save the planet from the wreckage the older generation created.
https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2019-greta-thunberg/
It is difficult to explain. I don't believe in magic or miracle I don't to believe I was given eyes and ears and nerves and receptors I don't need to imagine. I don't understand wanting to be Peter Pan or Superman. My wife is much wiser than I am; she knows of my charm and charisma and still can't understand my fear of the cacophony of the crowds. We all want to be Marcus Aurelius but it is easier to rule over the multitude than to serve it and I know my passions.
I was married on groundhog day before the movie.
We had been together for quite a journey but on groundhog the journey was just beginning.
Mark Twain Speak to me . Ben Franklin and George Orwell but my poets are Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen and my Saint is Kinky Friedman and he still lives. Today my wife needed a break from all the information and this arrived in the mail she loves Kinky's writing
and I loved his poetry and song on youtube I was a young man way back then. I listened on vinyl.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56745.Kinky_Friedman_s_Guide_to_Texas_Etiquette
When I was Greta's Age they said I was lazy. She is my Joan of Arc. Mark Twain wrote the Novel. It turned my wife on to Twain. I gave her Twain to read last year. She gave up on her computer and she loves to read. She is a PhD and had won a scholarship to the University of Chicago when it had a faculty of Education and believed in education not business as usual. Fortunately with my wife's reading obsession we can afford the books but she won't let me buy her a kindle she likes the paper and we are running out of shelf space and our local library is world famous and can't handle anymore books. They say you can't shake a tree without a poet or philosopher falling out. It is a strange place I live in. I lived in Chicago ghetto for over a decade and a Dene Village in the SubArctic and a remote farming community and I am an autistic Jew from Montreal. I spent years wandering from St John's to British Columbia and I am just learning to write.
Here in Quebec Bill21 delegitimized religion. Quebec is a secular humanist liberal democracy. In Quebec gender, race and religion are fantasy and we believe we own gravity.
In Quebec gravity runs our society and we own gravity. Gravity run our aluminum smelters whose excess heat grows your orchids in our greenhouses.
We said we will try to eliminate fossil fuel burning by 2030 and we believe in sustainable agriculture. Our farmer are rich and our bankers are paid by the hour.
My sister is visiting her friends in Florida but they never go near the beach. They say it is a monument to our insanity. The gated community has two pools and security guards so the inmates don't shoot each other.
My sister was born during a winter blizzard and 82 degrees F on her birthday told her it was a good to visit friends.😢
Yup. And I fell for it hook, line and sinker.
What a mess then, oggi and probably domani.