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Mixing the messaging - 24 June 2018

“I really don’t care,” said Melania Drumpf: “Do you?”  And media and government pundits are asking what she meant, as though the message wasn’t plain on the back of her jacket on TV, as she was boarding an aircraft to fly to see what Dirtbag Drumpf has done to thousands of children.  And, as though she hadn’t said she didn’t care, Dirtbag Drumpf said she was only asking the “fake news media” whether they cared.

But many media and government pundits are fake.  Melania Drumpf is an immigrant who made her way to the United States by capitalizing on what the Me Too movement is protesting, and her daughter-in-law Ivanka is capitalizing on the misery of people who can’t flee the horrors of Central America, by manufacturing luxury clothing in sweatshops there.  But media and government pundits talk as though they’re his victims.

They’re as much a part of his swamp as Hypocrite Huckabee’s daughter Sycophant Sanders, or Secessionist Sessions and Callous Kirstjen, or Pruitt and Carson.  And, while media and government pundits often say that Pandering Pence and Coddling Kelly are trying to keep Dirtbag Drumpf in control, they collude with him at least as much as do the others.  Fake news mainly distracts from the problem by emulating them.

 

Desperation and disparation - 23 June 2018

A pundit referring to bullying said we’re in a different world now than we were forty years ago.  Between fifty and sixty year ago, I passed through high school with bullies physically beating other kids, and kids no one called bullies told less resourceful kids that they had cooties.  Kids routinely beat or ostracized kids who didn’t dress in the current fashion or didn’t play sports because they couldn’t pay for sports equipment.

Most of the bullies in that world were “jocks.”  And another pundit said that the girl to whom that pundit was referring was “a quiet girl and a cheerleader,” and another “news story” during that broadcast was of parents brawling on a ball diamond, because of a call in the “youth softball game” their brawl disrupted.  And cheering isn’t quiet.

And the “anchor” reporting the story of the quiet cheerleader said bullies told her to kill herself.  One question is where they heard of such a thing, and another question is where the girl heard of complying, if not from “news.”  Suicide wasn’t in my world.

 

Relationships and differences - 22 June 2018

A prominently influential mental health professional, to argue that what Dirtbag Drumpf has done to children along the Rio Grande is child abuse, said that evidence indicates that such trauma causes long term changes in brain chemistry.  Common sense says it’s child abuse, and common sense also says that memory is what makes it long term, whether or not the trauma causes changes in brain chemistry, because remembering it will cause the same feelings, and the children won’t forget it.  And, like Dirtbag Drumpf, she ignored the long term social effects.  Desperation can make people desperados.

Dirtbag Drumpf is saying that the parents of the children he’s abused are criminals, while what he’s done to the children might drive anyone to crime, as racism has driven many African Americans to crime.  “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived,” says a “juvenile delinquent” to a police officer, in the musical “comedy” West Side Story.  And that title implies bigotry, between east and west or north and south, anywhere.

“Publish or perish” is an axiom of academic survival.  That mental health professional was promoting her academic fame and fortune as Dirtbag Drumpf is promoting his political fame and fortune.  And both are obscuring the obvious.

 

Bottom feeding from the top - 21 June 2018

What Dirtbag Drumpf and his swamp have done to children from south of our border is nothing new to public policy in the United States.  It rises from the thinking that has us imposing what we call sanctions on the people of other countries, as though that will deter people like Dirtbag Drumpf from doing what they do, as though it doesn’t give them more incentive to do it.  Conscienceless jerks will take their cut from anyone.

The operant word is “conscienceless.”  To People like Killer Kim and Player Putin and Dirtrbag Drumpf, public policy is whatever they can do to serve their separate selves, and so sanctions can deter them only if their people have nothing more to lose.  The argument for sanctions is essentially that they’ll shame shameless people.

What Dirtbag Drumpf hopes to gain from his public policy is votes from people who admire how he’s gains by his lack of conscience.  He gropes for votes to keep the commercial power of our Presidency.  He’s both a sadist and a thief.

 

What we’re teaching our children - 20 June 2018

Pundits are saying that Dirtbag Drumpf should push Mexicans to accept more immigrants from further south.  That’s a recommendation to push those desperate emigrants from the firepan into the fire.  Mexicans have the problems other Central Americans have.

And evangelist Franklin Graham is now saying Dirtbag Drumpf shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing to children.  Graham pushed his Bible Belt evangelicals to push that conscienceless creep into the White house.  And now he’s trying to dodge responsibility.

*And Dirtbag Drumpf’s evangelical Press Secretary is trying to pass the buck from herself and his evangelical Attorney General to his more secular but at least as conscienceless and callous Secretary of Homeland Security.

 

Suffering the children - 19 June 2018

All Dirtbag Drumpf says or does is a lie.  The artifice of his dealing, or negotiating or campaigning, is spewing varieties of hogwash to see which varieties people swallow and then spewing more of those varieties.  Note, regarding his wall, that history has proven, from the Great Wall of China to the wall now failing to divide “the promised land,” that walls don’t provide border security.  But he’s saying that not having his wall excuses his no compassion policy he calls a no tolerance policy and could stop with a telephone call.  And he’s saying that Obama’s policies are laws requiring his policies.

Sunday Morning, for more than a half hour, the American Broadcasting Company aired Bigot Bannon demonstrating Ditbag Drumpf’s propaganda method.  He said that he’s Roman Catholic but that the Pope’s decrying Dirtrbag Drumpf’s policy against children is because the Pope isn’t “infallible” regarding “public policy.”   And he said that he’s “proud of the deplorables” and that what Dirtbag Drumpf does isn’t lying but delivering “a vernacular that connects with people.”

And Jonathon Karl, the ABC “anchor” interviewing him, grinned through the interview as though no one would swallow that hogwash.  And, after the interview, pundits on what ABC calls its This Week roundtable spewed their particular varieties of hogwash.  But one correctly said that neither Republicans nor Democrats are providing solutions.

 

Sticks and stones - 18 June 2018

A daughter of a Baptist preacher who was Governor of Arkansas is now the principal spokesperson for the President of the United States.  The President keeps on the wall of the office we the people of the United States have given him for his job a portrait of the President who told the Governor of Georgia to ignore our Supreme Court to send people indigenous to this continent on the Trail of Tears.   The Trail of Tears was our government’s killing thousands of them, by forcing them to leave their homeland at one end of what we now call the Bible Belt and travel beyond its other end, Arkansas.

That Baptist former Bible Belt Governor also said that “owning guns is a God-given right,” and the guy that President appointed to head our Department of Justice was a Senator from Alabama, between Georgia and Arkansas in the Bible Belt.  And, to justify separating desperate children from their desperate parents, he quoted the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus telling Christians in Rome to obey Roman law because God ordained it.  Saul, after he changed his name to Paul and founded the Roman Catholic Church, also ordered slaves to obey the people enslaving them and women to obey their husbands.

And the problem is neither Republican nor Democratic, since Jefferson Davis and Andrew Jackson and that Georgia Governor were Democrats, and you can be sure that Secessionist Sessions both knows and condones that the Bible Belt states were most of the confederation of slavery states.  And you can be sure that neither the Dirtbag Drumpf family nor the Bible Belt evangelists understand how loving one’s neighbor is like loving God.  Recognizing universal unity and realizing universal love are reciprocal causes.

 

For the love of Christ - 17 June 2018

Why, if Jesus believed that he was the Christ and that God directed the crucifixion, would he ask God why he forsook him on the cross?  And why, if Christians believe that believing Jesus is the Christ shall give them eternal life in paradise, do they mourn at funerals of people they call Christians?  And why, if Christ preached turning the other cheek, do evangelicals say that owning firearms is a “God-given right?

Of course the answer to those questions, and other questions of why the Gospels say Christ contradicted himself and why people calling themselves Christians have no problem with those contradictions, is that the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus created the Christian church despite any reports of Jesus warning his disciples against the doctrine of the Pharisees!

Of course, Since Paul’s epistles indicate that the writing of the Gospels was at least eleven years after he created the Christian church at least three years after the crucifixion, the answer to the question of why he didn’t omit the passages contradicting his doctrine may be that he didn’t understand them.

 

Defining infinite divinity - 16 June 2018

Hindu scripture is metaphorical.  It treats every apparently separate thing as thought it’s divine.  And the reason it does that is that the fundamental premise of Hinduism is that everything is God.  And that most Buddhist scripture isn’t as metaphorical as most Hindu scripture is the main difference between Buddhism and Hinduism.  The fundamental premise of both is universal unity, the understanding that everything is divine because everything is God, because God is everything.

Yoga and Nirvana are effectually the same process, yoga being a Sanskrit word for union that Hindus use to refer to realizing the unity of the universe, while “nirvana” is a Sanskrit word for extinguishing that Buddhists use to refer to extinguishing the illusion of differences.  But the fundamental premise of Judaism and Christianity is that the God of Abraham is separate and superior.  And they say he’s jealous.

Buddhism grew from Hinduism as Christianity grew from Judaism, and so Buddhism and Hinduism are monistic while Christianity and Judaism are dualistic, while all four of those religions are monotheistic.

 

The suicide market - 15 June 2018

My first anxiety attack was the night of the afternoon I saw the film Angela’s Ashes.  Waiting to sleep, I thought of the loneliness of Angela’s husband, after he left his family because his drunkenness had kept him from keeping a job.  He and Angela and their children loved one another, but he left them and their country to permit them to request welfare, because he was too proud to accept it.  But the question, in regard to the nature/nurture controversy, is why quitting drinking alcohol stopped my anxiety attacks after a film about alcohol started them.  I think everything relates to everything.

During that and subsequent anxiety attacks, I tried to distract myself from the feeling and loneliness, and each ended in less than a quarter of an hour.  But, before it ended, I felt the loneliness in all my considerations of everything, but psychiatrists say that proves that the problem is nature and not nurture, and so they prescribe drugs.  And psychologists say they can talk us out of it.  And either only adds to the despair.

So, apparently, they don’t suffer from the despair.  And another relationship is between the despair and drug dealers’ TV advertisements telling we’ll die if we don’t buy their drugs.  And, to sell those pushers that advertising, media pundits help them.

 

Dearness of leading - 14 June 2018

Dirtbag Drumpf ran on a promise to shake things up.  We need that, and he’s doing it, but he’s doing nothing to determine how the dust will settle, and both Democrats and Republicans are doing all they can to assure that it settles where it was, by such as complaining about his ignoring precedents, history, etc.  The only way to reform such partisanship is to produce a “level playing field” by eliminating the “electoral college.”

And a typical pundit said of Dirtbag Drumpf’s shaking hands with Killer Kim that he was creating a “level playing field.”  That and everything else he’s done has only shaken up the norms, and the lack of integrity of both of those nutcases leaves unpredictable any result of that handshake, and so it goes.  That requires clear purposes and level heads.

And Dirtbag Drumpf said both that our troops need more training and that we shouldn’t spend money on the military exercises he called war game, and he said we can see the nice beaches of North Korea when Koreans shoot cannons, into the ocean.

 

Chickens and eggs - 13 June 2018

The basic premise of Hinduism and Buddhism, while the basic tenet of Daoism is universal acceptance, is that realizing the unity of the universe and extinguishing the illusion of differences is infinite bliss.  And all that makes sense to me, while the bigotry of Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to me to be suicidal murderous insanity, but I’ve had a problem with recognizing that universal unity.  For years, I’ve awakened occasionally from claustrophobic dreams to fear that realizing universal unity may be realizing universal loneliness, and that accordingly it may be infinite despair.

And two recent events have reminded me of that problem.  Reports of the suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain suggest that loneliness drove them to despair. Spade had recently separated from her husband, and Bourdain had recently complained of feeling lonely in his travels, to surroundings both unpleasant and pleasant.  And those events reminded me that I’ve suffered neither the dreams nor the despair since I quit drinking beer.  Yet I simultaneously diminished my extroversion.

So next I thought of Bourdain’s tattoos, and of all those “successful” and “popular” people dying on drugs, and of that CNN mental health professional saying that “suicide is a brain problem.”  The problem may be that their loneliness drove them to drugs and that the drugs in turn drove them to feeling lonely despite the popularity they’d achieve.  And next I thought of those kids killing other kids and themselves in their schools.

 

Tripping up the triple crown - 12 June 2018

Here’s a story.  Some guys paid a half-million dollars for a horse other people said was worth a million.  Employees of those guys advised paying a famous horse trainer to train the horse, and they accepted that advice and also hired a famous jockey, to ride the horse in races.

The trainer said the jockey knew what to do, and the jockey said the horse knew what to do, and the horse won the world’s three most famous horse races.  But, while the horse’s name is Justify, the owners received the trophies and most of the other winnings.  Yet we’ll forget them long before we forget the horse.

The last of those three races has run every year for a century and a half.  And across from its grandstand is a row of signposts with the names of the thirteen horses who have won all three races.   Define “fame” and “fortune,” and ask what’s justifiable, and define “justice.”

 

Killing and dying - 11 June 2018

On CNN Friday, responding to the death of Anthony Bourdain, a mental health professional said that suicide is a “brain problem.”  Probability is that, if you ask any two psychiatrists or psychologists or sociologists or philosophers any question regarding what they say is the science in which they’re experts, they’ll give you two different answers.  Names for that disagreement are “the nature/nurture controversy” and “the mind/body problem,” and the fact that circumstances outside one’s head change brain chemistry suggests that the answer is both, not the bigotry of one against the other.

Consider the fact that suicide rates have increased about thirty percent in the eighteen years of this millennium.  Most of those eighteen years are the years of the war on terror, the years of the escalation of terrorism since some Arabs protested Israeli terrorism by terrorizing people of the United States by killing about three thousand of them while killing themselves.  And consider the despair of seeing that on TV every day.

Because psychiatrists can prescribe drugs while psychologist can’t, psychiatrists take the nature/body side while psychologists take the nurture/mind side, and so goes the sociological tragedy of the philosophy of bigotry.

 

Shooting one’s foot - 10 June 2018

One problem with ridding our government of Dirtbag Drumpf is that media and government pundits ostensibly favoring that misrepresent what he says.  Doing that supports his assertions of “fake news,” and it angers and accordingly “energizes” his “base,” besides misleading the rest of us.  An example is CNN “anchors” saying that he said that the “summit” with Killer Kim doesn’t require preparation.  What he said was that he’s already extensively prepared.  Such groping hangs us with his rope.

And other recent misrepresentation is pundits saying that Joker Giuliani speaks for Dirtbag Drumpf.  Giuliani pandered for a position in his cabinet, and now he’s undercutting Dirtbag Drumpf’s credibility, perhaps to avenge the rejection.  And, effectually, that’s Giuliani helping Dirtbag Drumpf hang himself with his rope.

The bottom line is that those pundits are effectually colluding with Dirtbag Drumpf.

 

Alienation - 9 June 2018

The debate over whether Dirbag Drumpf is asinine, by distracting our attention from the problems his asininity is exacerbating, is doing the job he’s trying to do.  One of those problems is what we call immigration reform, and another is what we call the war on terror, and another is the opioid epidemic.  And we’re paying more attention to Dirtbag Drumpf’s dealings with Killer Kim and Player Putin than we pay to the chaos they cause.

His deprecating Mueller is only part of that distraction.  And Mueller’s way of presiding over his investigation, doing the job despite Dirbag Drumpf’s tweets and other distractions, should be a model for Dirtbag Drumpf’s presiding over the government of the United States.  He’s not noisily yapping nonsense against Dirtbag Drumpf.

And Dirtbag Drumpf’s pardons are only another such tactic.  His noisily yapping nonsense exacerbates problems by inuring us to them.  His motive for the pardons is to inure us to the possibility of his pardoning himself when Mueller nails him.

 

Not knowing in what trouble one is - 8 June 2018

Consider the relationship between fake financial news and fake political news.  When the Dow rises or falls a few hundred points in a day, different “news anchors” tell us that different political news caused it and ignore that it ordinarily flips or flops the next day, in the opposite direction.  And we the people ordinarily also ignore that as we also ignore the side effects that drug companies announce on TV to legally push their drugs.

Mass media “news” is a “reality show.”  That is, it’s about as real as TV “commercials,” and Joker Giuliani’s jeering and smirking indicates that he knows that and thinks that we the people deserve the hogwash we swallow, because we’re suckers.  His snickering while telling the truth about Dirtbag Drumpf has harmed neither of them.

Consider the relationship between Republicans’ ignoring that Dirtbag Drumpf’s “protectionism” is more “progressive” than “conservative” and Democrats’ accepting Partisan Pelosi’s advising against impeaching him.

 

Role model rules - 7 June 2018

Now media and government pundits are saying Bubba Bill should “call” Monica Lewinski and apologize.  If I were Monica Lewinski, I wouldn’t answer the telephone, if I knew that creep was the caller.  And one of them also said he should apologize again to Heehaw Hillary.  Heehaw Hillary helped him victimize other women.  Such is how Dirtbag Drumpf is President.

And those partisan pundits are still blowing off the questions of who killed Norma Jean and who killed Mary Jo Kopechne.  They keep calling Camelot Kennedy courageous, and they voted Teddy into our Senate and kept him there nearly a half century, all the way through Bubba Bill’s Presidency.  And such is why “reality shows” are popular. 

Bubba Bill survived impeachment for the same reason we the people elected Dirtbag Drumpf.  And the reason Partisan Pelosi is advising the Democratic Party not to try to impeach Dirtbag Drumpf is that she knows that.  We need to impeach the two-party system.

 

Violence and veracity - 6 June 2018

The main motive for 9/11 was that we the democracy of the United States religiously support the Israelis’ murderous landgrab, and the main reasons we do that are that most of us are Christians and that Judaism dominates our mass media, and the reason Christians support it is that they’re Pharisees.  The reasons they’re Pharisees, ignoring that the Gospels say that Jesus warned his disciples against the doctrine of the Pharisees, is that Paul was a Pharisee and that he and not Jesus founded Christianity.  And, otherwise, Rosanne Barr and Bob Iger are on opposite sides.

Two of the Evangels were Paul’s apostles and not Jesus’ disciples.  And one of them wrote the Book of Acts, and Paul’s epistles mention but three of Jesus’ disciples, and Jesus rebuked one of them for lack of faith and the other two for arrogance.  And CNN’s “anchors” and “correspondents” Wolf Blitzer, Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, Gloria Borgia, Barbara Starr, and Jeffrey Toobin are Jewish, and John King “converted” to Judaism to marry Bash.  And MSNBC’s daily “anchor” tag team, from Andrea Mitchell to Chuck Todd to Rachel Maddow, is Jewish.  And gun nut evangelicals dominate Fox News.

And Dirtbag Drumpf’s daughter Ivanka and her husband are Jewish, and his moving our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has sent the possibility of peace in that land back to what it was before the Camp David Accords, which Menachem Begin violated as soon as he and Sadat and Carter signed them forty years ago this September.  But much of the problem may be how few people calling themselves Christians have read the Bible or pay substantial attention to any news media.  Note what the fifteenth chapter of the second book of Kings says of the Judaic king Menahem.

 

Actuality - 5 June 2018

My trip to New Orleans for its tricentennial and that altercation at one of Albion’s two pubs were just in time.  I don’t imagine New Orleans will have another tricentennial, and I’ve never imagined an especially edifying conversation at either of Albion’s pubs, and those were the last two of my motives for drinking beer.  And, the week after those two events, I began the third draft of my book summarizing the definitive scriptures of the six most popular religions.  Alcohol, whatever it may do for spontaneity, disrupts continuity of reasoning.  So I decided to reason my way out of drinking beer.

People who imagine that they know me may doubt the possibility of that after my drinking it through generations.  But that would require their not understanding that what I imagine to be my life suggest to me that everything is a figment of everyone’s imagination. or not understanding that that I’m a Hindu Buddhist Daoist believing in Jesus but not in the apostles partly because a reason I believe in Jesus is that the Gospels say he said that belief makes anything possible, or that I was a sickly kid through most of the first decade of my life but haven’t been sick since I decided to stop being sick.  And that last is but one of the many hardly imaginable wonders of my life.

So I’m imagining that, if I don’t the win the Nobel prize from dynamite for writing that book, I may win the noble prize for imagination.  That is, I’m hoping that, by imagining that I’ve written and published it, I may imagine that the world doesn’t have people killing one another all over earth in the name of God, that we imagine ourselves out of that murderous bigotry, as I imagined myself out of my childhood sickness.  My thought with my demand, when I angrily believed my way out of crying myself to sleep when I was nine years old, was that it just wasn’t just.

 

Antisocial information processing - 4 June 2018

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked the third Joe Kennedy whether Democrats should compete against incumbent Democrats in California primary elections.  She told him that, because incumbent Democrats have a stronger chance of winning general elections, that would hurt the Democratic Party’s chances of diminishing Dirtbag Drumpf’s Congressional support.  Kennedy’s a scion of Massachusetts Camelot Kennedy hypocrisy, and the Democrats delivered our Presidency to Dirtbag Drumpf by proffering more of the same, and Mitchell is promoting doing that again.

We need the Democrats to drain their swamp as much as we need the Republicans to drain theirs.  Dirtbag Drumpf is swamping the Whitehouse with snakes, and now he’s heading toward draining prisons of such snakes, and Republicans are slithering with him.  But Democrats are doing all they can to assure that their swamp stagnates.

We’ve made insider trading unlawful commercially while we preserve it politically.

 

Slinging our freedom of speech - 3 June 2018

Ridiculing Rosanne is Jewish, and so is the Disney Chairman who fired her, but she’s saying that peoples’ reaction to her grotesquely racist tweet is “white people lynching a Jew.”  Judaism’s claim that God preferred the descendants of Israel to all other people, and promised to help them kill all other inhabitants of land from the Euphrates to the Nile for their land, makes it the only religion of the six most popular religions to be inherently racist.  Christianity is racist only by the implication of its including Judaic scripture in the Bible, and Islam is racist only by the implication of the Qur’an’s saying that it confirms the Torah, and the other three preach universal acceptance.

People saying they’re Christian or Muslim are murderous, but that’s from their not reading their scriptures or from their saying they don’t mean what they say, or from their deliberately lying.  Examples are ISIS calling itself an Islamic caliphate and Popes commanding the Crusades, despite the Qur’an’s forbidding any killing other than in defense against persecution and the Gospels’ commanding turning the other cheek, and an extreme example is beheading.  And Judaism is at the root of it all.

The Qur’an doesn’t mention beheading, but about eighty beheadings are in the Judaic part of the Bible, and one is by David.  And Sunday School teachers don’t tell people that the Bible says that David beheaded Goliath with Goliath’s sword after knocking him onto his face with a stone.  And Ayatollahs don’t denounce ISIS beheading.

 

Ambiance and Ambien - 2 June 2018

"Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj," tweeted Ridiculing Rosanne.  She was referring to an advisor of the first African American President of the United States, a woman who’s a baby of the first African American to receive accreditation to be an architect and the first African American to enroll at MIT.  ABC fired Ridiculing Rosanne and dumped her Disney show, but ABC spokespersons are also saying that the original purpose for airing the show was to air the problems of “lower middle class Americans,” as though Dirtbag Drumpf’s “base” is most lower middle class Americans.

Come on down, and ask why Trivial Tom Creep Cruise monkeyed around and up and down on Soap Oprah’s sofa in response to her asking him how he felt about his impending "marriage" that lasted fewer than six years, and note that Ridiculing Rosanne is Jewish and that Dirtbag Drumpf’s most influential fan is Yahoo Netanyahu, and ask what exactly is “American exceptionalism,” in the “manifest destiny” of “promised land.” 

And consider the word “class.”  A pundit responded to that tweet by saying that both Ridiculing Rosanne and Dirtbag Drumpf are “classless.”  And we the people of the United States normally use the word “class” as though it refers to superiority.

 

How are humans not animals? - 1 June 2018

The Chinese words “yin” and “yang” originally referred to the shady and sunny sides of a mountain.  And, because the sun shines on different parts of a mountain at different times, they originally were a metaphor for harmony and unity.  But, because of the bigotry inherent to humanity, they’re now a metaphor for polarity, from Beijing to New York City, all over earth.

And humans represent yin as black and female and weak and evil and represent yang as white and male and strong and good.  And that perversion of the metaphor also spills into racism, while actuality is that the skin of ever human is a shade or tint of brown, not black or white.  We humans work hard at being bigots.

And that’s despite us humans’ claim that our ability to reason makes us superior to the “dumb animals.”  And the origin of the English word “negro” is a Latin world with the meaning of the English word “black”.  And all life of any genus is “of color.”



Praying and preying - 31 May 2018

On Memorial Day, at Arlington National Cemetery, Dirtbag Drumpf literally upstaged the United States Navy Sea Chanters, by standing in front of them while singing our national anthem as they sang it, as our former Marine Corps general Secretary of Defense stood silent.  Note that, before Arlington National Cemetery was a cemetery, it was a plantation Robert E. Lee’s wife owned and operated by slave labor, and note that Dirtbag Drumpf also mispronounced the Hispanic name of Ray Chavez, the oldest surviving veteran of Pearl Harbor.  All of that indicates Dirtbag Drumpf’s notion of greatness.

Of course he didn’t mention John McCain there.  But, before announcing that Chavez was there, he announced that Bob Dole was there.  Our media and government pundits talk of “messaging,” but those “anchoring” airing all that for Fox News ignored those messages, and such is bipartisan.

We need to demand to know why Pelosi is pushing against impeaching Dirtbag Drumpf.

 

Reasoning and rationing - 30 May 2018

Afred Nobel invented dynamite, and his family was Swedish and Russian and made its fortune from oil in Azerbaijan before the Soviets confiscated their assets, but Alfred willed his fortune from armaments to the foundation that awards the Nobel Peace Prize.

And now Dirtbag Drumpf’s bellicose “base” is saying he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for talking to Killer Kim while destroying the prospects for peace in the land the Israelites murderously grabbed.

That the Nobel family was Jewish may help him “win.”

 

Reality and recognition - 29 May 2018

Pundits who decry Dirtbag Drumpf’s bigotry against immigration of Mexicans are now saying that his “negotiations” with Killer Kim is a “Mexican standoff.”  We the people of the United States claim that the genocidal landgrab that expanded the borders of the United States “from sea to shining sea” was our “manifest destiny.”  “Evangelicals,” ignoring that the evangels said that Jesus said that entering the kingdom of God requires becoming as a child, say people who disagree with them are “childish.”

Dirtbag Drumpf said “we all play games,” and people who say they’re against Dirtbag Drumpf are emulating him by saying that what he says is “spy gate” is “lie gate,” and so goes the game.  It’s the populist political game of blowing smoke that has us celebrating and enjoying and buying the “message” that “team spirit” isn’t group bigotry.  And only arrogant liars play that grotesque game.

The reason Killer Kim and Maniac Maduro released to Dirtbag Drumpf United States citizens they’d imprisoned is that undermining our democracy by keeping us from firing Dirtbag Drumpf is in their interest.

 

Making the gradient - 28 May 2018

Billy the Kid hung out in a saloon that was also a brothel in a goldmining boomtown, and the sheriff of that county killed Billy the Kid for killing what the law there called “regulators,” people helping a dry good monopoly rob ranchers there.  Now the town that then was a boomtown is a ghost town, and the only saloon in it was a lawyer’s office in the time of Billy the Kid, but humanity hasn’t changed much.  Compare Lew Wallace, the Governor of New Mexico who wrote Ben Hur and promised to pardon Billy the Kid but didn’t, to Dirtbag Drumpf.  And think of Harvey Weinstein.  Think of Nero.

Think of how the glory was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome disintegrated, and compare Dirtbag Drumpf to Harvey Weinstein, and think of entertainment.  Think of Miss Universe pageants and casting couches and “reality shows” and entertainment.  And think of why we call TV advertising commercials.

And ask why media pundits are decrying Dirtbag Drumpf for doing what they do.

 

Insanity and synecdoche - 27 May 2018

CNN’s Jive Jake Turkey Tapper asked whether, now that Dirtbag Drumpf and Killer Kim have indefinitely postponed their “summit,” they might return to being “belligerent and bellicose.”   And another CNN pundit, as though the leader of a nation or its government is the people of a country, said that Dirtbag Drumpf should know better than to “deal” with “someone like North Korea.”  Apparently, Tapper doesn’t know that belligerence is bellicosity, and that other pundit doesn’t know that North Korea is a country with 25 million people and not a democracy.

The problem with the relationship between Dirtbag Drumpf and Killer Kim isn’t that they’re talking with one another.  The problem is that both are bellicose, and the problem with that is the potential effect of it on the 325 million people of the United States, besides the 25 million people of North Korea.  But Dirtbag Drumpf’s “sanctions” only increase the poverty of the 25 million people Killer Kim is starving.

Killer Kim isn’t completely crazy.  He correctly called Pandering Pence a political dummy.  And, like Player Putin, he’s outplaying Dirbag Drumpf’s artless dealing.

 

Mental health and Mrs. Little - 26 May 2018

Now “news” is that African American children are killing themselves at twice the rate of European Americans, and pundits are saying that the reason is that African Americans don’t talk about that, because they’re ashamed of it.  Essentially that’s an assertion that the source of suicide statistics isn’t police or hospitals but the friends and families and neighbors of the people who do it.  That’s absurd besides ignoring the actual reasons.

The reasons are the same as the reason Palestinians are killing themselves.  It’s a result of the despair of living among neighbors who essentially deny one’s right to exist.  Note that police called the murder of the father of Malcolm X a suicide, and that “social services” incarcerated his mother in a “mental health hospital,” when she complained.

Ignoring that is the same as ignoring the effect of our “manifest destiny” on the people indigenous to this continent and the effect of the Israelis’ landgrab on the Palestinians.

 

Missions and misanthropy - 25 May 2018

Pogo Possum, when he said that we have met the enemy and that he is we, was referring to our trashing our physical environment.  But humanity is self-destructive and hypocritical in every way it decries, from “conservatives” killing criminals while preaching redemption, to “progressives” decrying that while preaching abortion.  And our media and government pundits mainly take sides in that murderously absurd hypocrisy.

One example is calling MS-13 animals.  Humans are mammals while denying that they’re animals, and no dumb animal would behave as MS-13 does or as Killer Kim does, or as Dirtbag Drumpf does.  No species on earth kills more of its own species than do we humans while saying “humanitarian” is a synonym for “compassion.”

Republican Louisiana Senator John Kennedy supports most of what Dirtbag Drumpf does but complained that all the punditry concerning whether or not he “colluded with Russia” is “sucking oxygen” from other “issues.”

 

 

Afghanistan without kings or communists or theology:


Books and a screenplay by
Billy Lee Harman
Angels, Ashes, Dust
   and


Kim - a 1901 novel

Were all on Earth claiming or denying any sectarian religion to set aside their bigotry long enough to read this book carefully, they'd lead the rest of us to understand and enjoy one another, and stop waging war.

 

Dunkirk - a 2017 film

This film portrays the horrors of war.  And it closes with a soldier who has survived Dunkirk reading Churchill’s saying in a newspaper that might shall restore the British Empire.  That’s like people in the Bible Belt saying “the south shall rise again,” like Churchill and Truman compensating for the holocaust by pushing the United Nations to make Irgun, a Zionist organization both had designated terrorist, for murdering noncombatants, the government of Israel.  It’s like Truman murdering a hundred thousand Japanese civilians after their government had lost the war.  It’s the base of Dirtbag Drumpf’s efforts to “make America great again.”

 

The Red Tent - a 1997 novel

This is a beautiful book, a song from the spirit of bold-faced truth, selah.

 

Philomena - a 2013 film

A danger of this wonderfully accurate presentation is that other poor people might regard the heroine’s continuing loyalty to the Church as promoting such.  Saul of Tarsus suckered Jesus’ disciples into perverting Jesus’ ideals into the mammon mongering and power grubbing we now call Christianity.  And that perversion intimidated that poor woman and keeps intimidating countless others into paying to burn candles in fear for God’s eternal goodness to goodness.

 

Oranges and Sunshine - a 2011 film

This is a love story.  British and Australian government conspired to kidnap about 130,000 children and ship them from Britain to Australia for agricultural and sexual slavery.  This movie depicts the heroic efforts of one loving woman standing against all odds to return those children to whatever remained of what they’d loved.

What we the people of the United States call Jacksonian democracy was President Andrew Jackson’s telling the Governor of Georgia to ignore the United States Supreme Court’s support for the unalienable rights of the natives of the eastern side of this continent and kidnap many thousands of them and send them to the western side of this continent.

Decades after kidnapping the children, the British and Australian governments apologized to the children they’d kidnapped and enslaved and raped, but the United States government has never apologized to the thousands of men and women and children they kidnapped and killed by what reasonable people call the trail of tears.

 

Wrong is Right - a 1982 film

Every politician or soldier, every media executive or producer, every news media anchor or reporter, every sexist or racist or nationalist or Republican voter or Democrat voter, every Yankees fan or Red Socks fan and every other bigot picking one side against all other sides, for no reason other than putting his or her interests above all others’, without regard to history or common decency or other facts, should see this presentation and go back to school.

 

Modern Times a 1936 Film

Suddenly we live in a time long past the political issues of this film.  We have risen from all that to a complacency that has us calling communication tweeting and sexual companionship hooking up.  Such is how Greece and Rome fell.

 

Catch a Fire - a 2006 film

This film implies that white communists fronted Nelson Mandela and that he was sexually promiscuous, more than forty years after J. Edgar Hoover used the same approach against the junior Martin Luther King, and less than three years before Dirty Harry implied that a white soccer player saved South Africa.

 

Nixon - a 1995 film

This film begins with the correct caveat that it isn't the whole truth and may wholly misrepresent any truth, and the next screen quotes the evangel Matthew quoting Jesus, implying that Nixon sold his soul.  CNN calls Oliver Stone a controversial director, after his wife has turned the American Broadcasting Company's evening news into an all Advil Oprah drug opera, like Stone's movies.

Whether or not Nixon told his mother to think of him as her faithful dog, a fact Stone tries to soap or drug is that Nixon ended Johnson's insane war.  History allows no excuse for either Nixon's hubris or stones.  Or Hirohito's or Truman's or Kennedy's or Hoover's.

History allows no excuse for Hitler or Netanyahu.  Democracy needs objective reporting from ABC to Hollywood.  Stone is at least as contra-factual as Nixon.

 

Avatar - a 2009 film

The weirdest thing about this film is that nearly every mass media critic said its point was commercial technological superiority.  The point fair watchers find from this film is that technology should serve democracy, not superiority or demagoguery, not alienation.  Families risk death to flee Mexico to pick fruit for the free and legally republican citizens of the United States.

And, instead of welcoming them, the people too lazy to do such work create laws to keep them out.  They say that those people who can't afford immigration lawyers should not be allowed to attend their tea party.  They call fruit pickers drug dealers to get them out of their faces.

America, the land illegal immigrants stole from its natives, allows a population that sucks up to advertizing that it should be all Advil, while calling people not on Face Book degenerate.

 

Network - a 1976 film

Netflix, a generation after this film appeared, bills it as a prediction.  What it is is a fact of human life, recognizing that Jewish gold and Arabic black gold are no different in their effect on the ecumenical economy, the power of abstraction to make humans value hubris more than their lives.  It sold Archie Bunker and Tide as it sells Oprah Winfrey and Tylenol.

 

The Devil's Arithmetic - a 1999 film

The Israelis should remember the holocaust when they do what they're doing to the Palestinians.  Arithmetic is that the Israelis keep building settlements while the United States tells them to stop building but never to dismantle.  The "com" in compassion means with, and so compassion is a two way street and not a path of vengeance, and the Palestinians are more Semitic than the Israelis and neither German nor Egyptian.  Nothing is more holy than home, and God made the land three religions call holy the homeland of  people of many religions, long before crusades or jihads or the unprovoked Jericho slaughter.  And the land of the free calls the Israeli theocracy, Irgun terrorizing Fatah, democracy.

 

The Celestine Prophecy - a 1993 novel and a 2006 film

The novel is one of the few books whose promise bore out so poorly from its beginning that I couldn’t finish reading it.  And the film was more inane, beginning with someone saying he was a history teacher responding to someone saying he was an archeologist saying that the early church had buried the title prophecy in the 6th century A.D., by suggesting that Franciscans might have done it.  Francis began his life in the 12th century A.D.

The title prophecy says that the present millennium shall begin with people’s recognizing the violence that has pervaded history and stopping it.  Instead, the new millennium has begun with the historical inaccuracy of the Da Vinci Code making it the most selling novel of the first decade of this millennium.  But maybe we can take hope from that.

The prosperity of the last decade of the second millennium after Christ caused the recession of the first decade of the third millennium after Christ.  We hope that that might force teachers and students and everyone else to work for all living for awhile.

 

 

The Ten Commandments a 1966 film

This film begins with its producer saying its basis is scripture and historical documents and that Moses’ accomplishment was to free people from slavery   Next, the film misquotes the Torah and says Pharaoh’s daughter named him Moses because she drew him from water.  “Moses” is from Egyptian for “son”.

Dan Brown admits The Da Vinci Code to be fiction and still has nothing on Cecil B. DeMille for hogwash misrepresenting the Bible and history, and so we have to ask why this film raised no Roman Catholic outrage.  We’re thinking that maybe it’s sexism, since nearly no female character in it shows any purpose other than to fawn over men to give them sons or suck.  But the next question, after how the Motion Picture Association of America ignores its violence to rate it G, is why no Judaic outrage.  We’re thinking the Chosen might still be choosing the golden calf over the Ten Commandments, with help called Christian. 

The Bible says  the Israelites did to the Midianites, the people it says took Moses in and gave him their king’s daughter, worse than what Egypt did to them and worse than what the Nazis did to the Jews.  Maybe Israel let the film slide because it glosses over that and what Israel keeps trying to do to the Palestinians.

 

On the Trail of the Assassins - a 1978 book

The author, Jim Garrison, Orleans Parish District Attorney, the only person to prosecute anyone for the assassination of J. F. K., is as crazy as Ann Coulter and the persons he accuses, if he wrote the book.  The book falls apart in many ways incidental to Garrison's hubris or paranoia.

One way is by its inclusion of the terms “false sponsor” and “sheep-dipping”.  The people Garrison tracked must have been sheep-dipped false sponsors, as he must have been on the other side of the coin his book flips like dice.  The people he accuses range from the CIA to Johnny Carson, as though that huge body of people could have kept such complicity from the huge body of people with whom they associate, and so on to all of Earth.

Another way is in its assignment of motive, a factor essential to any prosecution in court.  Garrison would have us believe that hundreds of people in a dozen government agencies conspired against Kennedy on the basis of their belief that he was going to prevent the war in Vietnam.  Besides the question of why anyone wouldn’t like that, a fact is that Kennedy sent more troops to Vietnam than Eisenhower had.  We suspect a more obvious motive for that assassination, far beyond New Orleans.

Kennedy killed those people at the Bay of Pigs, by changing the original CIA plan and refusing to accept responsibility.  Kennedy changed United States relations with the Soviet Union from checkers to the verge of nuclear destruction of all life.  So, a few genuinely concerned persons at top levels of the Soviet and United States governments killed him to prevent that destruction.  The false sponsors must have been after the fact.   

I have no doubt that the assassination was a conspiracy, as we agree that Oswald couldn’t have done all the shooting.  But the human resources management of the deed must have been more constrained, leaving the smoke and mirrors the book sells to people as crazy as Garrison.

 

Idocracy - a 2005 film

This film predicts a future when people try to grow crops with Gatorade, where the hero saves the world by watering the crops.  In the present, people calling themselves environmentalist are trying to save the world by putting corn into gas tanks, while people around the world are starving.

That hero's name is Not Sure, while in this day and age people claiming to be smart say they're not sure, when truth they know is that they simply don't know.  Those people are the people who say we should do something for the people of Darfur while saying we shouldn't have done anything for the people of Iraq.  They are people like Mitt Romney and John Kerry, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Those people are the people who put criminals above persons, who haven't had a chance to choose life better than crime and say their choice is compassionate, liberal.  As this film indicates, those people are already taking their world into the dust this film predicts.

 

 

Across the Universe a 2006 Film

The Beatles are a microcosm.  Kids sing about holding hands until they acquire power, and then they let go of their friends’ hands and their own minds, for what Solomon called vanity.  Like Greece and Rome, the United States were a world power before they alienated their kids in Birmingham and Vietnam, and those children turned their nation into an escape from everything.

The Beatles said they named themselves for the Beatitudes, before they turned to drugs, or after they rode them, to compromise, for fame.  Now, Lennon is dead, and McCartney is white bread, and the First World is all Advil.  Now, Lenin is dead, while Liverpool and the Irish suffer.  Viva Las Vegas, the ways of the world.

Irish and Iraqi suffer for no reason beyond the I in their names, as Israel suffers for no reason more than that humans prefer bigotry and drugs to the Ten Commandments, from the diamond minors in South Africa to the diamond merchants in New York, to you inactivists.

 

The Cotton Club - a 1984 film

My favorite lines in that film are from a white couple entering the club.  The white man says, “At least they don’t let niggers in here!”  The white woman asks, “They don’t let them into their own club?”

So Richard Gere gets billing over Gregory Hynes, two decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and now two more decades have passed, making more than forty years.  Bootleggers like the Kennedy’s owned Harlem in the roaring twenties, and now the Clintons have moved in!  How long, O Lord?

Now we’re engaged in a great civil war, to see whether Obama can run the Clintons out of Harlem, and the Whitehouse.  Cotton is white, while pickers are black, and now black has another fight to pick.

 

The Order of the Phoenix - a 2007 film

Harry Potter answered a question most of us think impossible.  The way to world peace is through the understanding that is friendship.

Nearly everyone claiming a religion claims it as a superstition, although every founder of every remaining major religion argued mainly one point, the sharing essential to prosperity, loving one’s neighbor.

Terror isn’t Islamic, as it isn’t Mosaic or Christian.  Terror comes from such as Crusades and Jihads.  Terror is in what Joshua did and in what Osama Bin Laden is doing and in what Hitler did and in what Israel is doing.  It's in what every bigot does, and it won’t stop until all of us stop trying to blame it on Moses or Muhammad or Jesus, on everyone but ourselves. 

It won’t stop until we stop making excuses to covet our neighbors’ land, until we stop perverting the teachings of the founders of our religions from the Rishi’s to Muhammad, into ignorance of them.

Only then shall we have something worth fighting for, and stop fighting.  The essential weapon for peace is not secret.  It’s plain.

 

The Last Hangman a 2005 film

Tolstoi said, in War and Peace, that the cause of the Napoleonic Wars was the first French corporal.  This film says the same, that the cause of killing is rationalizing some excuse for it, be it vengeance or following orders, or supporting one’s country, or one’s family, or oneself.  This film also says that we’re all in that craziness together, but it does not loudly enough say that, were each of us to refuse, it would all stop.  Snail darters would die of their own accord, and they and all else could rest in peace.  That Pierrepoint fellow was not the last hangman.

 

Meditation XVII - a 1623 sermon

John Donne, not Jack Kennedy or Ernest Hemingway, said this:  "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

 

The Wind that Shakes the Barley - a 2006 film

This film shows that Ireland and Iraq are similar far beyond the fact that the names of both countries begin with "Ir" when written in the Roman alphabet.  Ireland means anger land, and anger dominates both countries.  And so does greed.

When an Irishman told us that the strife between Catholics and Protestants in his country has nothing to do with religion, we didn't understand.  This film explains.

And neither is the strife between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq religious, and nor is Israel.

 

Eight Men Out a 1988 film

Consider the operant steps in this plot.  A team conspires to throw the World Series because its members think they’re underpaid.  Late in the series they decided not to throw the series because the bookies aren’t paying them.  None of them considers his family’s welfare until a thug for the bookies threatens to kill one’s wife.  A judge a salary offer before accepting responsibility for correcting all that.  A kid asks one of the players to say the mess ain’t so about baseball.  Joe, it was so in all professional sports then, and it’s so now.

 

Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid a 2006 book

Although Mr. Carter writes from the point of view and with the tone of his claim to Christianity, sometimes uses words and phrases particular to popular expression of persons calling themselves Christians, and occasionally points out facts particular to such persons, this book is nearly all factual.  That is, rather than expressing opinions, it mostly points out circumstances and events verifiable through public records.  Yet, it has a reputation for being controversial.

Of course the reason is that few people bother to differentiate between facts and opinions, because most people are as opinionated and biased as some say Jimmy Carter is, and few people bother to research public facts, much less see for themselves, as Mr. Carter has.  In fact, if the book has any shortcoming, it’s that Mr. Carter doesn’t succinctly point out the most significant facts defining the situation.

Those facts are: that Israelites or Israelis have been oppressing Philistines or Palestinians since the battle of Jericho, an onslaught with no provocation whatsoever; that Israelis have killed far more people and broken far more promises than Palestinians have; and that the 1967 Israeli state was not one nation until 1949.

Moreover, if that former head of government of the United States of America were to carry religious metaphors in defense of the United States of America, he might have pointed out how David defeated Goliath’s superior physical size.

Now, Israel has nuclear weapons and air superiority through military aid from first world nations, as European nations took superior weapon technology on the Crusades.

So, now, Islam is continuing Saladin's jihad, against the world whose trade center is now Wall Street.

All a president needs to do to stop the terror is be fair.

Smart is truth, beauty.

 

The Sound of Music - a 1965 film

This film, set at the beginning of World War II, screened at the beginning of the United States presidency's escalation of Truman's advisory mission in Vietnam into a full scale war Nixon would would end.

Three years earlier, West Side Story screened, asking the same questions.  One film is about nations, while the other is about gangs while the only difference is scale, while presidents have ignored the politics of both.

Both films, in retrospect, should cause us to ask why they didn't change humanity's prospects.  That is, we should ask why we care more now about American Idols than about the ordinary people of Iraq or Darfur.

Both films have iconic weaknesses.  In one, a poor nun saves a family of aristocrats, and the other's title suggests that west is better than east.  But the two share an eminently importantly iconic question.

How do you solve a problem like Maria?

The Time of Your Life - a 1948 film

This film set the theme for the best of Hollywood since.  We had a problem with its epitaph, when the bar owner took the sign out of the window inviting folks in to be themselves and tore it in two, saying that enough is enough.  But then we remembered that integrity is always exactly enough and shouldn't need a reminder!  What's your dream?

 

Shinea 1996 film

Nothing is more important than music.  Nothing is more important than the harmony of inspiration.  This film says that.

The horror of the holocaust lives on, from the horror of the captivity.  This film tries to deliver a lesson to the Germans and the Egyptians, and the Israelis, all of us.  The holy land is hardly holy, despite how the sun shines on Karn Hattin.  Why don't Christians visit the Mount of Beatitudes?

In the sixties, when the great society sent millions of Americans to kill Vietnamese doing nothing but trying to live their lives as best they could, a popular song borrowed a melody from Rachminov s second piano concerto and assigned it the lyrics “When I was young, I never needed anyone.  Making love was just for fun.  Those days are done.”

Rachmaninov’s third piano concert is more difficult to play than his second while his second, played more in the film, is more sweet.  And popular music is more sweet now, in the war on terror that has made Bethlehem a combat zone.  How is Christ's birthplace in the shadow of death?

Astrology, psychology, stars and butterflies, what life comes down to is common sense.  This film is quite lovely.

 

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond - a 1931 poem

A Harvard poet wrote that poem between the two world wars, between his imprisonment in France for driving an ambulance and German imprisonment of France for nothing.

Films we find near to that poem are The Painted Veil and The Tiger and the Snow.  Both films show what love between two people should be, as they show what love is.

Imagine Nero walking the Great Wall, if you wish such as that.  We all must remember that our enormous room is a small roe's chest.  Otherwise we cannot love.

 

 

Paradise Road - a 1997 film

"Oh, my dear, that's one to tell your grand children. . . .  Don't worry:  I love God, even though I sometimes don't know what he's doing. . . .  Love is like a flame; it burns and is visible to all. . . .  None of us will ever leave Sumatra. . . . Amen."

 

Bound for Glorya 1943 autobiography

This book is exactly an autobiography.  Other works in that genre try to explain the effect of the life in question on others’ lives.  This book tells succinctly how Woody Guthrie grew to produce his effect.  Woody and his story are works of dynamic integrity.  We need to listen, closely.

Woody Guthrie was communist, in the sense that we all should share God's bounty.  He was not a Marxist or a Leninist or a Stalinist.  Nor was he a Washingtonist or a Jeffersonist.

Nor was he an Amerigo Vespugian or a Paulist or any other kind of excuse for a name.

 

Reflections of a Cold Warrior and From the Shadows 1996 memoires

Both authors were at the top level of the Central Intelligence Agency.  One planned the U2 project and the operation Kennedy turned into the debacle at Bay of Pigs.  The other, recruited into the agency from college during the Johnson administration, worked his way up to directing the agency during the first Bush administration.  But the first declines to blame Kennedy for the mess he made, and the second hardly mentions the former Director of Central Intelligence who appointed him to that position while President, making both books smoke screens for coversion.  But any competent CIA analyst could synthesize truth from the details.

 

Jude the Obscure - an 1895 novel

"Because we are too many."

 

Babel - a 2006 film

With great technical and aesthetic prowess, this film shows how cheap and cowardly and stupid humans have become, the abstraction of the word “humanitarian”.  Many of its details and time lines don’t work together, but neither do many humans attend much to what’s in their faces, rationalizing private greed against public concern.  Journalists and politicians and doctors and lawyers keep trying to take advantage of the weakness of humans trying to be as suicidal, self-destructive, as they are.  One of the twelve tasks of Hercules was to kill the Titan Antaeus, the difficulty being that Antaeus regained his strength whenever he was down to Earth.  The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences keeps proving itself Herculean.  But most important are our children.  Note the dedication.

 

The Milagro Beanfield War a 1988 film

This was a Sundance production.  It’s set in New Mexico, the state of the united ones whose flag represents the sun.  Its theme is the power of the people, and it shows how humans can unite for the best of their life and love, against the power of humans who unite for smaller selves.

But it waves a rabbit dead to excuse firing to frighten humans.  Beans contain as much protein as animal meat, leaving killing cattle less practical than killing trees for golfing.  Humans eat like pigs, but we work harder at it.

This film promotes considering the lilies of the field, while it promotes eating sparrows.   It does not pass through the eye of the needle.  But it helps.

 

Hollywood Ending a 2002 film

In this film, Woody Allen closes his career by admitting the cause of his success, that he has catered to hypochondriacs, people who seek only pity.  Aristotle pointed out the technical difficulties of the staging of his time, and the French called those limitations an ideal and adhered to that absurdity long after Shakespeare freed the rest of us, and long after Eisenstein offered us Shakespeare’s best wishes, and now their pride is in ennui.  Cinema, at its best, goes straight to our hearts by opening our eyes, not by giving us more weak excuses.  In this film, Allen admits he has nothing on Eastwood.  And cinema is still beginning.  To show, to move.  Just see.

 

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter a 1940 novel

Richard Wright said that Ms. McCullers accepted blacks.  More recently, linguists have called the non-white grammar and diction of blacks the “negro non-standard dialect”.  African Americans no longer wish to be called Negroes, and Ms. McCullers did not accurately represent their dialect.  But she did faithfully represent the lonely hearts of the down and out!  Can Mick ever rediscover her music?

 

The Last Samurai - a 2003 film

What’s the difference between a protagonist and an antagonist?  This film is a story of redemption, a story of love for the best and worst of us.  If one can divorce oneself from merchandising and violence, this film is beautiful.   In its beginning, the protagonist is a soldier who failed to die in battle, a person dead of his past and living without future.  In the end, his horse’s head is above his, as he bows to “the peace all of us seek and few of us ever find.”

 

Sister of the Road - a 1937 novel

This is another beautiful book. The man who wrote it must have been in love. Maybe a little as Mark Twain must have been to write Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.

 

War and Peace an 1869 novel

Tolstoy, while fathering thirteen children with a woman he married when she was half his age, is mostly about his love for her.  The last hundred-some pages of the book he wrote while she bore most of them try to justify the book otherwise, as an essay on war regardless of peace.  And, maybe so, he died leaving his wife, the mother of his children, to justify his thinking.  Many of us live and die that way.  We ignore our life.

 

"Nothing on Earth is worse than bigotry,
and bigotry cannot survive without hypocrisy."

Dust

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