Feeding the Inner Radical

This is how I feed the beast inside of me.  BTW, I love olives and tomatoes.


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Guilty as Charged

While endless debate has been unleashed with the most recent indictment returned by the grand jury empaneled by Special Counsel Mueller, most of it is but more tea leaves to be read as so much wishful partisan cheer for Putin… or jeer for Trump.

Watching journalists and fans, alike, weigh in, with expert certainty, on matters of complex litigation and sophisticated criminal procedure, as if a mere cotton candy purchase may pass time with sweetened fancy,  however,  it provides little informed answer by way of what a “case” is, or is not, and where it may ultimately lead.--SLC

We are all, every one of us, indictable.

But, if that’s the case, than why would Mueller waste time and money compiling a 37-page document alleging all-manner of nefarious conduct when he knew for certain that the alleged perpetrators would never be prosecuted? Why?

Isn’t is because the indictments are not really a vehicle for criminal prosecution, but a vehicle for political grandstanding? Isn’t that the real purpose of the indictments, to add another layer of dirt to the mountain of unreliable, uncorroborated, unproven allegations of Russian meddling. Mueller is not acting in his capacity as Special Counsel, he is acting in his role of deep state hatchet-man whose job is to gather scalps by any means necessary.--MW

Because we're all guilty of fraternizing with Russians--at least I am, for many moons ago I spoke to a Russian bartender in a dive bar on the east side.  We didn't specifically talk politics, but that's not the point.  The point is that she could have been a fraud, or worse, a Russian national intent on corrupting my very existence.

She was, in short, without me knowing it, an existential threat.

There I was then, a tipsy dupe.

Has Bill Moyers recovered his good sense?

This young woman gets it.


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In Meddling We Trust

By the end of World War II, the United States had become a serial meddler in the affairs of the nations of the world, friend and foe alike.

American intelligence services took particular aim at Third World and Western countries with large Communist Parties, and at countries on the other side of what used to be called “the Iron Curtain.”

Meddling there took some doing before the implosion of the Soviet Union.  It still does in China and North Korea, and in countries with strong states, like Iran, that resist American domination.  However, our intelligence services are well resourced and determined.

They are also inept. Therefore, their machinations fail as often as not.--AL

The great Andrew Levine spells it out for the lazy-minded.

A weekend's worth of goodness.

Bonus track.


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Diaper Dandies, Indeed

Players from more than 20 Division I men's basketball programs have been identified as possibly breaking NCAA rules through violations that were uncovered by the FBI's investigation into corruption in the sport, according to documents published by Yahoo! Sports.--ESPN

Big surprise here.  Not!

A novel fix (no, not that fix), which the greedheads in the NCAA won't consider.

The billion-dollars college sports empire is merely a tentacle of the corruption overall in the U.S.


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God Made Him Do It

Billy Graham was a preacher man equally intent on saving souls and soliciting financial support for his ministry. His success at the former is not subject to proof and his success at the latter is unrivaled. He preached to millions on every ice-free continent and led many to his chosen messiah.--CB

Another American shyster is dead.  Finally.  Like evangelicals everywhere, many whom he bred, he became a false prophet entangled in politics and greed.

In that regard he was indeed a leader of the pack, a Kissinger-like character for the mindless.


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One NRA Stooge Among Many

Oregon is a liberal state controlled for the most part by Democrats.  Queen Hillary carried Oregon easily in the 2016 presidential election, and the numbers would suggest that the majority of Oregonians loathe Trump, who knew he couldn't carry the state.  I don't think he even appeared here to campaign.

The exception to the Dems' rule is the 2nd Congressional District, a mainly rural swath of real estate that pretty much covers the barren, empty spaces east of the Cascades.  A few medium sized cities scattered in the district may appear to have a liberal lean, but overall it is reliably conservative and Republican.

Rep. Greg Walden has held his congressional seat in the 2nd for 10 sessions, or 20 years. He is Oregon's lone Republican rep.

In his career he has claimed over $37,000 from the NRA.  His people, the ranchers and farmers from the district, understandably want to keep their weapons, but supposing some of his folk have AR-15s, one would be remiss to not question whether they need that particular weapon to hunt and to scare off coyotes.

But Walden's silence on the gun issue is telling.  He doesn't have the balls to come out against the sale of the AR-15 semi-automatic, a weapon made to kill human beings and nothing else.  By its looks and performance, it is a military-grade weapon.  The Las Vegas killer easily converted his into a fully automatic machine gun.

Congress lacks gonads, and Walden is just another "prayers and thoughts" pol.

Like pot in the feverish mind of Jeff Sessions, the AR-15 ought to be illegal to own.  But Congress, its members' wallets stuffed with NRA money, can't see past the cash.

Blood money.

Walden is one of the NRA's guys, garnering a 91 percent approval rating from the lobby.

Mass murder doesn't concern the corrupt cabal that is Congress.  Holding office, like Walden for 20 or more years, does.

Walden is up for re-election in the '18 mid-terms.  Would be nice if rural Oregon could see/feel the difference between hunting deer and terrorizing human beings with a one-purpose gun, especially children.


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Rise Up

Among growing calls for gun control legislation, students who survived the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School continue to deliver some of the most powerful statements in the wake of the tragedy, and on Sunday a group of them declared that "now is the time for us to stand up" and announced plans for a march in Washington, D.C.--AG

"This is about us creating a badge of shame for any politicians who are accepting money from the NRA and using us as collateral."

Powerful words and hope for the future.

Right on


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You're in Danger!

If you buy this I'll sell you a shit emulsifier for your kitchen so you'll have something stupidly nutritious to drink every morning before you head off to work for a meager wage and empire.

This is not merely propaganda, but "hearts and minds" bullshit.

You have been psychologically warned, your seeds of discontent have been sown by Russia.  America has been absolved of any possible self-destructive tendencies.

From now on you will "like" everything your country tells you, or you will be a "useful idiot" of the Kremlin.

Dissent is officially and unfortunately on its last legs in the U.S.


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Must Read

The grizzled Afghan army captain, who jointly commanded the outpost with me, ordered the captured deserter stripped naked, dressed in a white gown, and forced to crawl back and forth on his belly through the coarse gravel interior of the base. All the while, the captain trailed him, alternately whacking the prone crawler with a wooden stick and forcefully kicking him in the genitals. Jordan, Alex (another lieutenant) and I watched for far too long. I knew, heck, I could feel, what everyone was thinking: “Is Danny going to put a stop to this?” I didn’t—not soon enough, anyway. When the captain and I finally talked about the incident, he was apoplectic. How dare I, a 28-year-old American, question the way he, a 50-year-old veteran of 30 years of war, disciplined his own men. Through an interpreter, he told me it was “the Afghan way.”--Maj.DS

Another excellent piece by this Afghanistan War veteran. I'm surprised his superior officers let him publish this stuff.


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Hysteria

The same can be said about Allen’s movies, whatever the truth may be about his alleged misdeeds. It is no secret that Allen finds young women attractive; his current wife was not yet 20 when he started an affair with her. She was also the adopted daughter of Allen’s partner at the time. One of Allen’s best known and most successful films, “Manhattan,” released in 1979, when he was in his forties, featured a relationship between a middle-aged man (Allen) and a young girl, played by Mariel Hemingway, who was 16 at the time of filming.

These relationships were unconventional. Some might find them creepy. But this is not the same as molesting a child. Nor is there anything in “Manhattan,” or any other film by Allen, that reveals any interest in assaulting young children. This would be the case even if everything alleged against the director were true.

Again, morality is not irrelevant. It is hard to imagine admiring art that espouses child abuse, racial hatred, or torture (even though this seems to get people much less agitated than sexual content). But just as we should not condemn a work of art because of the artist’s private behavior, we should also be careful about applying norms of social respectability to artistic expression. Some art is meant to provoke, transgress, and push boundaries. People can do things in works of imagination that they would never do in life.--IB

The times they are a-changin' into an hysterical anti-intellectualism. I find it sickening.  Woody Allen, for example, is a rare goddamn national treasure, and the moralists would love to destroy him--liberals and conservatives alike, for different reasons, but with the same effect.

This is a well-reasoned article, rare in itself in an age of new, heightened repression.  It is not a coincidence that our present government in the U.S. is such a comatose and fraudulent disaster.


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It's Time

It's well past time.

And here's why.

Rall: How to cut loose.


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RIP, John Thomas (1951-2018)

In high school John pitched for South Salem and worshiped the New York Yankees before heading off to college in Ashland, where our first encounter was on the Administration Building lawn when he quarterbacked a pickup football game and I tried to block for him on the line and somehow caught him in the eye with an elbow.  As eye injuries go, it was pretty bad.

He went back to his room in Forest Hall and I later knocked on his door to apologize and Bob opened the door and I thought for a second that he was John and I said something, awkwardly confused, as Bob opened the door wider and I saw John lying on his bed face down nursing his injured eye. I said, "man I'm sorry," and he sort of grunted acknowledgement and I walked back to my room feeling bad that I'd hurt the guy.

Later, we became roommates in Forest when Bob moved into another room. John and Bob became my peer mentors in music, literature, politics and carousing, and there was, in my case, little time to study as I learned how to smoke pot for the first time and protest the Vietnam War.

John and Bob both laughed when I used "them" for "those" in conversation and once responded to a prof's question about why I was in his Psychology 101 class by answering in all sincerity that I wanted to know what "makes people tick."  How was I supposed to know that I sounded like a hick to them?

John smoked cigarettes (a habit he would later quit when he took up long-distance running) on his bed in our college dorm room and read sociology and Vonnegut and crushed math problems that made my head spin because math wasn't my thing. He loved John Brodie and the 49ers and told Bob that Brodie was a better quarterback than Roman Gabriel, whom Bob preferred because Gabriel played for the Rams, Bob's team, and I made my case for Joe Namath and the Jets and we watched football on Sundays and drank beer all the time if we could get our hands on a case, and the truth is I couldn't stop laughing when I was around the twins because they were seriously funny guys whose sense of the absurd and general irreverence about everything made everyone around them laugh.

I had no discipline as a student and nearly flunked out by the end of third term and so I didn't return to Ashland for a second year, knowing I'd miss the brothers.  But fortunately they went home to Salem for the summer and John always had an old runner that he'd drive down to Albany where I was living and pick me up to cruise up to Portland with them or up to Salem to hit the record stores and drive around for the hell of it. When Woodstock came out that summer we smoked so much pot that I was freaking out and in awe of the musicians and music on the big screen, and that was how I discovered John had learned Country Joe's "Fixin' to Die Rag" well enough to lead a sing along during a kegger at Emigrant Lake during my first and final spring session at Southern Oregon College.  John had kicked it off and everybody at the party except me seemed to know the lyrics by heart and the singing was raucous and loud and echoed through the hills surrounding the lake and I thought, damn, I'm gonna miss this place, this school, "them" times.

But we watched Woodstock and had fun that entire summer, 1970. There's so much more I could write about.  Perhaps I will in time, in the future.

I still write Bob on occasion and  have published numerous of his photos at my blog, and I know John was a good photographer as well, and I learned a few years back that John and Bob had both taken up biking with a passion, and I knew they both liked heading into the hills to ride.

That's what John was doing when he died, riding hard, staying in shape, seeking thrills where he could find them on a trail atop a mountain. It was a great scheme, a beautiful thing to do, and I'm just goddamn sorry it ended like it did, with a crash on a trail that looks pretty innocent in photos, except for the dip in the middle that John had flown over many times before--that is before Monday, Feb 5, when it happened. Despite wearing a helmet, John died of a blunt force injury to his head.

John was a good man, a good businessman, a loving husband to his wife of many years, Lori. A great brother to his sister Colleen.  He was Bob's best friend.  He was my friend, and I feel terrible.

Rest in peace, John Edward Thomas, Jr. I loved you, man.


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Where?

Democrats are not happy, sensing that their partnership with the clandestine services to eject Trump by non-electoral means is losing steam by the day. After almost two years, the predicate offense---that Trump and the Russians colluded in hacking the Democrats---has not been proven, or even convincingly presented. By now, the media-CIA-Democrat version of "resistance" is hoping that Trump will somehow self-destruct through some act or statement that is beyond the pale---except that nobody knows where "beyond" is.--GF

Nobody knows.


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What If?

What would the Dems do if they got their sweep? No one knows.

Would they impeach Trump? They’re not saying.

Would they repeal the Trump tax law? Probably not (but they should say they would).

Would Democrats push for a higher minimum wage? A national abortion-rights bill? Cutting back NSA surveillance? Bringing back troops from Afghanistan and Iraq? Closing Gitmo? Probably none of the above — so why would left-of-center voters get excited about more of the same?

Democrats aren’t promising anything. Voters may take them at their word — and let the Republicans keep on keeping on.--TR


The saddest story ever told.



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Philly Wins!

There was one car turned on its side on Walnut Street in the center of the action. There were also some bottles thrown in the area and one police officer said a fan was arrested for climbing a street pole without clothes.--JR ESPN

It was quite an interesting contest, and also I should warn you; it was very violent.



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noissucnoC

Just in time for the Stupor Bowl, wherein anyone can feel concussed without getting up off the sofa for another beer and plate of wings.


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