what has this accomplished?

well? what has it accomplished? does it illustrate donny as venal, corrupt, criminal, and amoral? probably, despite what his faithful say about it being a political exercise and not a legal one...then again, what else would they say? "he's guilty"? perhaps in private they would but he's their amoral felon and a public admission of guilt is imposible in light of the myth...so they will martyr him and use it to harden attitudes...i can see a number of groups that see trump as a vehicle to thier ends... republicans in congress...always rooting around for a fund-raising angle ( not that the whores on the other side of the aisle aren't greedy bastards...a whore is a whore and every politican in the country is a whore for votes an money ) sense an outraged base as an unmilked cash cow...white nationalists ( or racists in the non-cancel culture let's not wound anyone's feelings parlance ) would surely like to use the trumpist avowed intention to deport millions of "illegals" as a smoke screen for broader ethnic cleansing ( or genocide as they used to call it )...donny let them out from under the rock as "useful fools"...theocratic fundmantalists who want to impose thier beliefs on the great sinful multitudes, a multitude who find them a nuisance at best and, more often, self-righteous hypocrites hiding behind a bogus teleology, and take any sort of medical decison out of women's hands and keep us all on a moral path that leaves them in control...something like the authoritarian clavinists of mid-18th century scotland say...and then there's wealth which wants to expand the current national policy of debt creation until as much of the population as possible is reduced to debt penury and only able to service the interest on a principal that can never be paid off...capital is extractive and consequentialist ( i am working on a detailed description of a system i call extractive consequentialism )...it's what you have, not how you got it that matters and the narcissitic, amoral donny trump is a fine illustration of that...he's guilty of all that and more, however that does not matter...a conviction only highlights his convictions...and the campaign grinds on...blaming evryone but the responsible party...welcome to presidential politics...a choice between one dancing on the edge of dementia and an entitled thirteen year old with no self control who should be institutionalized for the greater good...the late empire is seizing up with entropy.

a redefiniton of belonging ( that whole "huddled masses" business was always a lie )

"...that is shall be lawful for the president of the united states at any time during the continuance of this act, to order all such aliens as he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the united states, or shall have reasonable grounds to suspect are concerned in any treasonable or secret machinations against the government thereof to depart out of the territory of the united states...and if any alien so removed out of the united states by the president shall voluntarily return thereto, unless by permission of the president of the united states, such alien on conviction thereof, shall be imprisoned so long as, in the opinion of the president, the public safety may require."the alien and sedition act of 1798 section 1._________________________________an act aimed mostly at french and irish immigrants since they were both usually catholic and likely to support thomas jefferson and the democratic-republicans in the upcoming preisdential election this places the president ( namely john adams ) in a position of arbitrary power over who belonged and who did not ( "he shall judge"..."in the opinion of the president"...and define "reasonable grounds as well as explaining why it nullifies the precept of habeas corpus )...that this violates the constitution is obvious...in the "virginia resolution" james madison ( a "founder" central to the creation of the constitution who, presumably, knew what he meant as he helped to frame it ) said there was a need to "...protest against the palpable and alarming infractions of the constitution, in the two late cases of the 'alien and sedition acts' ( and we will be getting to the "sedition" part in another post )passed at the last session of congress, the first of which exercises a power no where delegated to the federal government, and which by uniting legislative and judicial powers to those of the executive, subverts the general principles of free government..."...one senses, depending on the outcome of the next presidential election...that there is a forthcoming redefinition of "belonging" since don trump maintians he intends to deport between 15 and 20 million "illegal aliens" and that he is prepared to utilize the military ( in his words "the national guard" ) and military bases to do so...some of his acolytes have suggested creating "detention camps" as an alternative and that phraseology is dangerously close to "concentration camp" as well as some of the phraseology don has used to describe the intended deportees as "poisoning the blood of our country" which is a step away from the term "vermin"...this may not be fascism however it is definitely unconstitutional ( at least in madison's vision of the document ) and authoritarian...and, to paraphrase kurt vonnegut, once that barbed wire goes up do you suppose it will ever come down? not while there are "internal enemies " ( and they will materialize...authoritarians need enemies...ask nixon ) who may, in a misguided and soft-hearted fashion, disagree with these measures...legislative sleight of hand has been used to before to rationalize an authoritarian president...everything old could be new again...we will be getting to how this may be construed as "sedition" in another post.

light?

"a light unto the nations" david ben-gurion___________________________ for the most part i try to be tolerant...that i fail in this in regard to politicians and those of wealth ( fungible originators of oppression ) proves the partiality of my tolerance...we all have biases and , like everyone else, i believe mine to be warranted...i may be mistaken...i can question myself and i can change how i view things...stasis is death...and even if i find politicians and those of wealth reprehensible i do not recall ever advocating violence against them...people have a right to live unmolested if they are not molesting others...to be tolerated for what they are and what they believe...only actions should be the basis for accountability...and humans act and react...often violently...and who is acting in self defense and who is spreading belief by the sword is a thorny question to resolve...infinitely regressible with no real first cause in sight...that the proto-israelis were willing to engage in terrorism ( we can start with the king david hotel bombing and go from there ) would likely be disputed ( possibly violently ) by some...again, a thorny question, given the experience of the european jews in the past century...what i am willing to say about the current situation in the middle east is that british imperial thinking is another central issue in the israeli-palestinian conflict and, despite the moral high ground staked out by the israelis and the hegemons here in the late empire, the israelis ( much like the u.s. military viz. viet nam ) would seem to have learned all the worng lessons from the above mentioned experiences of european jewry...there is no moral high ground here for anyone and universities suppressing freedom of speech when that speech ( and those protests ) substantively threaten to undermine the hegemons' worldview here in this country is not much of anything new ( viet nam again )...some light we have shining here

my eclipse

the sun dimmed and the ambient temperature dropped about four degrees...

my dog barked for about twenty minutes and then she quieted down

a disoriented fly landed on my jeans...

birdlife vanished from my yard...

the house sparrows hunkered down in the gorse...

then the birds came back...so did the sun...

dominoes

"the characteristic idea of philosophical pragmatism is that efficacy in practical application, the issue of 'which works out more effectively', somehow provides a standard for the determiantion of truth in the case of satements, right in the case of actions, and value in the case of appraisals." oxford companion to philosophy______"if those theories work satisfactorily they will be true" "truth happens to an idea, it becomes true, is made true by events" "the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good." william james"pragmatism.______________bill james and john dewey took pierce's pragmatism and made it an uttterly subjective judgement concluding that whatever helped you to achieve an aim...what dewey called "goals-in-view" was "good"...a situational ethic that could bend with events unbound by any objective standard..the preeminent american philosophy that has infiltrated the economic system and certainly foreign policy..."no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests"...in the post world war II environment george kennan proposed a policy of "containment" of the spread of communism which led to the truman doctrine and harry publicly unveiling the "domino theory" in support of his aim to supply aid to the greek government during its civil war...eisenhower dusted the concept off to support aid for the french in indochina and after the french collapse as grounds for a growing committment from the first of november 1955 to the twenty-ninth of march 1973 at the cost of 58,220 u.s. lives...the south fell in 1975, the communists won...the rest of southeast asia did not ( withh the notable and horrific exception of cambodia )...and now? the "retail giant" where i engage in what passes for work these days gets its nike clothing from...

in cartons manufactured in what would seem to be...

ho chi minh city...american pragmatism in action.

you will be surveilled

we live in a culture ( or, perhaps, a better description would be society...difficult to think of this as a culture ) of surveillance...there is the state...which can be fairly lax in its surveillance ( for now anyway ) depending on who you are, where you live, and what sort of vehicle you drive...and then there is corporate surveillance which is a good deal more thoroughgoing...think of the advertisers that track you on line or through the apps on your phone ( one reason i have a stupid flip phone and a faraday bag ) or the cameras that watch you when you walk into a bank or a store or a restaurant or on the streets…corporations are nearly as greedy for information as they are for cash and they display no scruples about collecting it…i was talking to a co-worker today about their new vehicle and how it is monitoring their driving behavior…they said they had already disabled the mechanism that tells them when they have crossed the center line ( it doesn’t tell them, however, does it forget or still record that? )…and they were deeply unhappy about the fact that when they look down the vehicle tells them to keep their eyes on the road…or tells them they need to take a break from driving…and if the vehicle knows this and is telling them this who else is it informing? the manufacturer? the police? an insurance company…certainly my vehicle is recording how fast I am going at any given time and the police can access that if there is an accident…why not tell the corporate world at large what your driving habits, routes, and destinations are…it might be time to start walking or get my hands on an old shwinn ( no electric bikes please…they seem untrustworthy as well )…might be time to turn this infernal machine off as well.

the junk mail that offended the censors at facebook

i posted this...

on my facebook page with some coomentary concerning the reaction the gibbering baboons in the state legislature might have about a marijuana retailer in a neighboring state ( where private use is legaized ) sending junk mail flyers into a state where it is not, inviting me to order on line and wander across the border to indulge ( while warning me it is illegal to operate a motor vehicle while under the influence of marijuana...right..it is leagl in two bordering states and one percieves motorists from both stoned as could be...as well as the illegally indulgent from this state...one should approach this realistically and ignore the retailer covering their legal ass )...the social engineers at facebook and their assorted minions took offense at this post and promptly removed it which, in turn, elicited a response from me in which i termed them "fascist pigs" who are, perhaps, somewhat trepidatious from a recent pranging by the doctrinaire conspiracy theorists in congress and so overly sensitive to controversy...there are limits to freedom of speech one supposes however i was not yelling "fire" in a crowded theater...i was commenting, admittedly a bit sarcastically/caustically on both the state legislature and on facebook itself...one questions whether this merited censure or if facebook has simply become an arbiter of culture ( or, rather, the consumerism that passes for a culture here )...as it stands they have declared me offensive and told me to shut the fuck up...

in the words of the late doctor, "fuck these people"