November 16, 2014

Had stopped monitoring Libertarians, just caught up a bit, & got an earworm of "The Inquisition"

At the height of our collective outrage here over Coup 2000, I was consuming all the cable yakkers apace and posting the wingnut outrages in chunks of paraphrases to the point that Bartcop said once, "Are you like the Rude Pundit or something?" This has dwindled for me especially during Campaign '12 when I even dropped Tweety and the Morning Schmo entirely. About the only wingnuts I could tolerate in chunks were LIMBOsevic and O'LOOFAH because it's more fun to pin down their propaganda gimmicks, with HANNITY and the rest who do mostly parroting being unwatch/unlistenable. Libertarians have been sort of off limits to me because of their being all over the place, like I like MAHER (mostly) and liked how Ron PAUL skewered the Iraq Attack.

So in The ROOSEVELTS I was intrigued that T.R. flipped the "limited government" to mean that gov't has a role in anything not specifically prohibited, and lately I've been bothered that the idealist hero of my adolescence, WILSON, is now mainly cited for being a racist which had escaped me when I read a 7 volumes biography of him back when. So I googled "Wilson racist" to wise up and unexpectedly got into a chain of Libertarian YouTubes mostly with the Faux employee Andrew NAPOLITANO. I had not seen him in years and was startled at how radically wingnut he is, not only shredding T.R. and WILSON, but LINCOLN.

This led back to Ron PAUL, with the same lines about LINCOLN's "criminality" and then to BecKKK, with all of these nuts using almost the same words. Then it seemed that they were sprouting off from somebody named Stefan MOLYNEUX, whose Wiki says is Irish raised in Canada, and the YouTubes on him were a total repetition of what those other ones were repeating, looking like they were all deriving their yakking off of this MOLYNEUX, who started off as a software-something, with allegations of being a cult dude advocating breaking off children from parents, which reinforces my previous impression that the younger generation of computer techies are seduced somehow by Libertarianism, like a dorm game of If-I-Ruled-the-World.

When I had had enough, I got this earworm going of Mel BROOKS' song "The Inquisition" from History of the World Part I, not for rational relationship of the content but for the contagious madness of mobs like The Inquisition and Libertarianism.

*********QUOTE****

http://www.leoslyrics.com/mel-brooks/the-inquisition-lyrics/#7Ajbci1EQRCkMoT9.99
The Inquisition Lyrics
Artist: Mel Brooks Lyrics
Album: Miscellaneous Album Lyrics

The Inquisition (What show)
The Inquisition (Here we go)
We know you’re wishing that we’d go away
But the Inquisition’s here and it’s here to stay

********UNQUOTE*****

November 12, 2014

Here 'tis. Underwhelming?!1

The highlighted paragraph is what had stuck in my mind these years. My memory was not of the desert, but, probably from preceding chapters, of dank, depressing delays in transportation, misery of populace and environment. This has an actually comedic angle of the driver and the cranky traveler surrounding the (less bleak than I remembered) paragraph. The traveler's griping about being abandoned by the driver made me LOL.

********QUOTE*****

[font size=5]The Pillars of Hercules
A grand Tour of the Mediterranean[/font]

by Paul THEROUX

G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Copyright 1995 by Cape Cod Scriveners Company

(from Chapter: ) “The 7:20 Express to Latakia” pp 429, 430-431

(p. 429) Nothing held me in Tartus. Wishing to see the great Crusader castle known variously as the Krac de Chevaliers and Qal’at al-Hisn, I made a deal with a taxi driver named Abdallah, who said he would take me there and then on to Homs, where I could get a bus or a train to Damascus.

“Lebanon!” he cried out after twenty minutes or so, gesturing towards the dark hills to the south. ….

(p. 430) Just before the darkness fell the engine faltered and Abdallah cursed, and the car replied, coughing one-syllable complaints, and then we were stuck.

“Okay, okay,” Abdallah said. To prove he was confident he took my picture and he screamed into the wind.

His high spirits unconvincing. It was an electrical fault, he said. He waved to a passing car and said he would be right back. Then he was sped into the failing light, and dusk fell. I sat in the car, tuning my shortwave radio -- news of the Israelis shelling southern Lebanon and blockading the fishing ports. Every so often a large truck went by, and the thud of its slipstream hit Abdallah’s car and shook it, and me.

[FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Cold and unsettled at the edge of this desert, feeling thwarted, this enforced isolation filled my mind with memories of injustice -- put-downs, misunderstandings, unresolved disputes, abusive remarks, rudeness, arguments I had lost, humiliations. Some of these instances went back many years. For a reason I could not explain, I thought of everything that had ever gone wrong in my life. I kept telling myself, “So what?” and “Never mind,” but it was no good. I could not stop the flow of unpleasant instances, and I was tormented.[/FONT]

From time to time, I laughed to think I was so removed mentally from Syria, but then I concluded that being in the middle of this desert had something to do with it. It was pitch dark and silent except for when the occasional trucks thundered by. I supposed that I was fearful and disgusted; I disliked the desert, I had been abandoned by Abdallah in this howling wilderness, where there was darkness and no water.

A pair of oncoming headlights wobbled off the road. Abdallah got out and approached the car laughing, carrying a gas can. Saying it was an electrical fault had been a face-saver.

It was late. Returning the gas can to the town of Deir Atiyeh, he stopped the car and I told him I was bailing out. There ensued a great whinging argument, as he pleaded, berated, complained and demanded more money than what we had agreed on. I bought you oranges! he howled. I thought: I hate this nagging man. Then I said: Do I care? I gave him what he wanted and swore at him, and afterwards realized that the whole incident irritated me because I had been planning to tip him the very amount he had demanded. ....

********UNQUOTE*****

October 26, 2014

Since you civilly asked me to explain, I will.

I am a Generalist. Frankly, rehearsing "Constitutional" scholarship is way out of my world view, since I regard the Constitution as something that, not only provided means for improving it, but which really has much room for improvement. We've all played "If I were king of the world..." and made lists of what we would do to make things perfect so we don't have to do that here.

Where I'm coming from, Part I, is that, perhaps from my basic (very basic) Liberal Arts education of "1984" and such I settled into a moderately paranoid expectation of modern society, assuming over the past few decades that there are cameras everywhere, that credit and debit cards and cell phones and cash registers and internet Cookies and advertisers are tracking every single thing we do, such that the SNOWDEN-GREENWALD "revelations" were not even a ripple to me.

Where I'm coming from, Part II, is that Worldly Sophisticated Nations have been spying on one another, including on their allies and their own populations, forever. Think, "Israel spying on CLINTON-LEWINSKY." So again, SNOWDEN-GREENWALD "revelations" are *zip* to me.

Where I'm coming from, Part III, is what Poster #1 said, about breaking the law and then absconding. I grew up with our parental generation telling us that "loose lips sink ships." And in my four years in the military, I was rock hard in believing that I took an oath, silly me. I am more cynical now, but Whistle-blowing does not mean to me absconding, and of all places to the arms of Pooty-Poot PU-TEEN.

Where I'm coming from, Part IV, which is in this entire SNOWDEN-GREENWALD saga for me, is that I don't idol-worship other humans (FDR-Eleanor are as close as I get). And I pride myself on my Bullshit Detector. And in the entire saga, FOR ME, it has ALWAYS been about my Bullshit Detector going off on them, for their self-aggrandizement, their showboating, their putting their own personal interests FIRST. It has ALWAYS, *for me* been ABOUT THEM. This post is as close as I have ever come throughout this saga of discussing "NSA". All my other posts have been about THEM and on reacting to the "authoritarian" name-calling.

We've really DONE this discussion before, ad nauseam. I suppose that if somebody continues the personal attacks I will be rankled enough to respond, but I really see no point to it.

July 31, 2014

The (my) Democratic agenda

Wingnuts are so shallow, they frequently accuse me of being an Obama-IDOLATOR or a Hillary-IDOLATOR or a Wendy-TX-IDOLATOR or whoever the current human frontispiece is.

No, I don’t CARE about OBAMA or Hillary or McGOVERN.

ON EDIT: Note about McGOVERN:: In my life span, there have been Dem nominees from all wings of the Dem coalition, from the ultra Left to the Southern Conservative, and after the primaries are over, I support whoever the nominee is. I wish I had kept my letter to McGOVERN during his primary, where I said I vastly admired him on a personal basis but that he had NO chance to beat NIXON and beating NIXON was all that mattered, such that I wished he would withdraw and let anybody who had a better chance to beat NIXON run. Whether he or his staff, whether his signature or auto-pen, I got a brief letter saying, “Thank you, I think I have a good chance to win and I hope you will support me.” I wish I had kept the letter. Of course I voted for him, as with DUKAKIS and the rest.


I care about the Dem AGENDA: Civil rights, social Justice, civil liberties, investment in human potential.


O.K., I’ll admit to a bit of idolatry: W. WILSON, FDR, Eleanor, TRUMAN, LBJ, Lady Bird.

Other than that, there’s this: