"...a tainted, meanly obsequious age"

and objectivity ( if it exisits...we could debate ) has fled...i have said elsewhere that the new york indictment is a tempest in a tea pot and will likely amount to nothing in the way of deterring donny's 2024 run at imperial power...you'd think a federal indicment on mishandling of sensitive and secret documents might have more impact...then again...

the judge in the case is a trump appointee...and if she intends to hold this trial in florida i cannot see where it would be possible to find jurors who were not predisposed to have a verdict in mind ( on either side of the guilty/not guilty divide...divisions everywhere )...donny is a deeply divisive charater...actually most politicians are because they want to present a false image of difference in outlook and agenda...when the reality is they are pretty much in agreement with one another on most issues...or, at least, far closer in opinion that they would like the polity to realize...and, once again, a conviction in either of these cases would not prevent him seeking office or holding it if elected...likely all any of this is going to do is harden attitudes...his base will vote trump just to eveince their visceral dislike ( if not hatred ) of anyone who dislikes donny...just another political "fuck you"...and when did this beocme so overt? i probably said "fuck nixon" and, in fact, have said "fuck these people" about policians as a class repeatedly...i have never flown a "fuck biden" ( or a fuck anybody flag for that matter ) outside my house...well..there never has been a sense of objectivity in american politics...

the 1800 presidential election was well before my time, however, what i have read and what i can scrounge up in the way of primary documents tells me that the division was as deep and as virulent then as it is now...so...where are we? sliding into yet another vile political season where political rallies will keep emotion in place as the prevailing mechanism for political decision-making ( one presumes that , were she stil with us, leni riefenstahl would have more work than she could handle ) and anyone who doesn't agree with your political vision is pure evil and should be disenfranchised ( at the very least ) because they cannot see how righteous your faction is...welcome to politics in the late empire...you'd think it couldn't get much uglier...it's early yet though...no doubt surprises await both sides as the divsions widen...

"the new class"

Terrorist- noun & adjective. A person who uses violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims. Oxford English Dicionary____________ "an eye for an eye" andy biggs, repuublican representative from arizona___________________________________ "i have a message tonight for merrick garland and jack smith and joe biden and the guys back there in the fake news media, you should listen up as well, this one is for you. If you want to get to president trump you are going to have to go through me , and you are going to have to go through 75 million americans just like me. and i am going to tell you , most of us are card carrying memebers of the n.r.a....that's not a threat, it's a public service announcement." kari lake, failed republican arizona gubenatorial aspirant________________ no keri, that is a definite threat...and so congress and the republican party become terrorist organizations ( with the full approval of the "sinners in the hands of an angry god" set andy was pandering to ) utilizing both implied and explicit threats of violence in defence of donny and their vision of what the country should be...and what might that look like? like any authoritatian state you might look into...an arrogant and doctinare elite bloating itself on wealth extorted from the mass of the polity in return for their shouldering of the onerous burdens of power with a middling group of "politically reliable" cadres to do the clerical work...and another strata of politically motivated denouncers fingering their neighbors lack of orthodoxy for a cut of their neighbor's goods ( a useful mechanism for keeping the masses at war with themselves...diverting their energy and initiative away from questioning why things are the way they are...a stasi state where distrust undermines dissent...and, no doubt, the majority of any confiscated property will be absorbed by "the state" which is, of course, that doctrinaire elite )...a thomas more like utopia where all behaviors are public ( surveiled ) and no private loyalties are sanctioned and where your facial fetures should be set in orwell's "expression of quiet optimism" just to be sure no one becomes suspicious...so is this rhetoric or are 75 million people just like keri ready to act ( and where does that leave the other 259,859,856 remainder of the country's population? )...some are, no doubt, they already have...how many is an open question and where does the comandant of the marine corps stand on all this? i have no idea...i would wager keri probbaly does not either even if she would not admit it ( she won't admit she lost an election so why would she be any less in denial about a lack of knowledge about the motivations of the polity at large? )...if it is rhetoric it is intended to unsettle ( and recall tacitus, "men's minds, once unsettled, are prepared to believe anything." don't let them confuse you ) the opposition and self-reassure the trumpists...if it is a call to action it could be actionable...whatever it is it is set in purely trumpist vocabulary...i have been compiling a list of words and phrases utterly debased by all this rhetoric just so i know who is who.

someone giving away the playbook?

everything old is new again...

"The Nazi members of the Reichstag conducted themselves as a storm troop unit. Whenever representatives of the government or the democratic parties spoke, the Nazi members marched out in a body in studied contempt of the speaker, or entered in a body to interrupt the speaker, thus making it physically impossible for the Reichstag President to maintain order. In the case of speakers of opposition parties, the Nazi members constantly interrupted, often resorting to lengthy and spurious parliamentary maneuvers, with the result that the schedule of the session was thrown out of order." from "means used by the nazi conspirators in gaining contol of the german state" university of south florida_______________________________________________________________________clearly desantis is remiss in allowing a state university to give away the playbook like this...he should be more careful about what he lets floridian intellectuals get up to...that said, am i accusing the staunch public servants of the house freedom caucus of being nazis? probably not...i would say they are doctrinaire ideolouges concerned only in having things entirely their way with a decidedly authoritarian premise and they have stolen a page out of the totlalitarian handbook so carefully crafted over the centuries and honed to a sharp edge in the previous one...they may be out of touch with any number of the polity...then again they do not care about the polity or their needs/interests...they care about being in control and, without doubt, taking everything they can in the way of wealth from those the clearly consider the "lesser kind"...rapcious rule-crazy control freaks...have i said "fuck these people" today?

somewhat diminished exposure

being aged and working part time at "a retail giant" ( which is not sounding quite so "giant" per the last earnings report...however that is just an economists "tool" and so may be disregarded as an "external"...irrelevant to what this is about ) just to keep moving provides a few things besides pin money...observation for instance...coming from indistrial manufacturing i was suffering from a severe case of culture shock in the beginning...this has abated and been replaced, for the most part, by stunned disbelief at how tremendously inefficient and wasteful retail is...no fucking wonder they are in trouble...additionally it has been an education in the ways of manipulation they use to render the discretionary into the necessary...they will jump on any bandwagon if it could possibly mean even a few hundredths of a precentage point in market share gain...so they celebrate a lot of "months" and this month is LGBQT+ month if i am not mistaken ( and let me disclaim here that this is in no way an indictment or criticism of anyone's orientation...we are what we are...we may not understand...we need to live and let live...and that extends well beyond orientation ) and retailers are avidly persuing that market share...however...

when we compare the signage from last june...

with what i found today ( and the month is not over quite yet...this could change...i am wagering it will not ) we can clearly see the message, while still clear, is considerably muted...

one could be forgiven for surmising that the bud light blowback has tempered the vision of the admen and made executives nervoulsy leery of too explicit a disply of market niche pursuit...we will look around..we are not sanguine about finding anything quite as eyecatching as last year's graphics