StephenKMackSD's Blog

Recall Mr. Zuckerberg’s triumphant ‘Listening Tour’ ?

Headline: Mark Zuckerberg says extent of opioid crisis was biggest surprise of US tour

Sub-headline: Speaking about his 30-state tour that sparked rumors of a presidential run, the Facebook CEO added: ‘We have a responsibility to remain optimistic’

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/10/mark-zuckerberg-opioid-crisis-facebook-america-tour

During which the line of ass-kissers was long, when he lectured that the ‘Opioid Crisis’and ‘a responsibility to remain optimistic’ were his primary concerns. This in the wake of the election of Trump, in 2016, clearly demonstrates that Zuckerberg was politically out of touch and out of his league. Not to speak of his subsequent appointment of ‘Lean In’ corporate hack Sheryl Sandberg to CEO of Facebook. Here is Sandberg celebrated in the pages of Forbes in 2013:

Headline: 10 Things Sheryl Sandberg Gets Exactly Right In ‘Lean In’

https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/03/04/10-things-sheryl-sandberg-gets-exactly-right-in-lean-in/#35b80fea7ada

The headline writers/editors have gotten carried away and misrepresent Mr. Rachman’s essay, by the way of the  headline and sub-headline

Headline:Facebook is the world’s most powerful adolescent

Sub-headline: And like many teenagers, it needs to be set some rules

Mr. Rachman’s accusation:

Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg was once reluctant to acknowledge the company’s political power — initially rejecting the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the 2016 election as “crazy”. This attitude may have been naive or disingenuous, but it was certainly not sustainable.

The Guardian published this in November 2016:

Headline: Facebook’s failure: did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected?

Sub-headline: The company is being accused of abdicating its responsibility to clamp down on fake news stories and counter the echo chamber that defined this election

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/10/facebook-fake-news-election-conspiracy-theories

All The Free Marketer’s suddenly lose their cherished faith in that ‘Market’ as the ultimate test of viability? Should the reader take the object lesson from the New York Times’ publication of the pro-war propaganda, confected by Judy Miller and Scooter Libby, as an object lesson in reliance of the standards of journalism as practiced by Corporate Media?

Or this proclamation of Zuckerberg’s ‘brilliance’ or just call him a undergrad looking for and ‘rating’ ‘hot women’!:

At 35 years old, Mr Zuckerberg has proved himself to be a brilliant engineer and businessman.

The self-proclaimed ‘Internet Geniuses‘ need to be reminded, in the starkest terms, that they owe their very existence to the U.S. Government. And its invention of the internet! That they used and use to conduct their ‘Revolution in Communication’ . And that they must compelled to follow one of the foundational freedoms of Free Speech guaranteed in the US Constitution. The corporate control of the internet has zero legitimacy, it is a Public Utility, not the playground of the aforementioned Geniuses, and their Corporatist ambitions. An Internet Bill of Rights is radical idea whose time is long overdue!

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/2a1adec2-f3e0-11e9-b018-3ef8794b17c6

That Mr. Stephens thinks that his opinion matters on the vexing question of a Nobel Prize being awarded to Handke: he ignores the fact that the two most famous/infamous philosophers of the 20th Century, Sartre, a Nobel Prize winner, & Heidegger ( The Black Notebooks, a record of his idée fixe of the Jewish World Conspiracy) are still read, studied, and written about.
Mr. Stephens is an American provincial, but also a committed ideologue, that is, he is the natural inheritor of an etiolated Straussian philosophical mendacity. Strauss re-wrote the philosophical tradition, not as an act of explication, but an act of ideological vandalism! Mr. Stephens is another member of the New York Times’ staff of ersatz public moralists, whose hectoring signals what is acceptable, as defined by the measure of the only thing that matters, the cultivation of  bourgeois political respectability.

Philosophical Apprentice

Headline:Harold Bloom’s lessons for left and right

Sub-headline: The late American scholar reminds us that not all opinions are equal

Is it Mr. Ganesh’s argument that there is a commonality between Harold Bloom , Allen Bloom and Saul Bellow other that their Jewishness? That being the rescue of  the Western Canon as their common project?  Allen Bloom’s hysterical anti-student manifesto , The Closing of the American Mind,  published in 1987, whose star players were narcissistic, not to speak of rock and roll addled students, for which Bellow wrote its introduction. And subsequently wrote his final novel, a roman a clef  of Allen Bloom’s  life  ‘Ravelstein‘. For the reader who might be interested Robert L. Stone collected a series of answers to Allen Bloom’s book titled Essays on the Closing of the American Mind in 1989. I have ‘Closing’ and ‘Essays’ on my desk, the breakfast table.

It was a child of migrants from the Pale of Settlement who stuck up for the western canon. It was another descendant of foreigners, Allan Bloom, no relation, who made a similar case with The Closing of the American Mind seven years earlier. Saul Bellow, a Russo-Canadian, could never cram enough canonical references into his novels, either.

Just where might the regular reader put Mr. Ganesh’s enthusiasm for the late Tom Wolfe’s scribblings ? Even though his last, ‘The Kingdom Of Speech’, is his ideologically fueled attack on Chomsky and Darwin. See Jerry A. Coyne’s review of ‘Kingdom’:

Headline: His white suit unsullied by research, Tom Wolfe tries to take down Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/his-white-suit-unsullied-by-research-tom-wolfe-tries-to-take-down-charles-darwin/2016/08/31/8ee6d4ee-4936-11e6-90a8-fb84201e0645_story.html

If  the reader of American writing can name Hemingway as a ‘Field and Stream’ writer, might that reader name Wolfe to be an example of the now dead ‘New Journalism‘, and his doorstop novels as its literary twin?

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/124e889e-eff2-11e9-ad1e-4367d8281195

Headline: The surprising rebound of Bernie Sanders

Sub-headline: The senator could harm Elizabeth Warren’s chances of grabbing the Democratic nomination

More of the same horse-race coverage of the debate from Mr. Luce, except for some back handed and maladroitly handled comments aimed at Anti-Capitalist Sanders:

…

The Washington Post revealed that Mr Sanders had also picked up the endorsement of the Democratic party’s youngest star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If the 30-year-old Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s contrasting youth does not inject energy into the senator from Vermont’s campaign, the grassroots popularity of the congresswoman from New York will surely help.

…

There doesn’t seem to be a paucity of ‘energy’ in Sanders campaign , except for  his period of recuperation from his heart attack, Mr. Luce won’t let go of this, as the next paragraph demonstrates. Luce ought to know that Eisenhower had a massive heart attack in 1955, and went on to win the 1956 election. Some of us were alive in those years, and recall it with no prompting!  The Anti-Capitalist candidate needs to be stopped, and the operatives of the Corporate Press, Mr. Luce being one, are here to perform that  task!

…

The left field is less crowded. But the dynamics are similar. It is very hard to imagine that Mr Sanders could become the Democratic nominee. The odds are stacked against elderly socialist heart patients. But he is strong enough to make life difficult for Ms Warren. Having come close to depriving Hillary Clinton of the nomination in 2016, and wounding her in the process, Mr Sanders is threatening to make Ms Warren’s journey just as hard.

The real high point of the evening was Tulsi Gabbard calling out both CNN and The New York Times:

Headline: Tulsi Gabbard Calls Out CNN And New York Times At Debate Hosted By CNN And New York Times       

During the fourth Democratic debate on Tuesday night, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii attacked both CNN and the New York Times, calling them “completely despicable” for how they have covered her and other veterans.

Gabbard was initially discussing foreign policy and how the mainstream media praised the dictatorship of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey. She then pivoted, calling out mainstream media outlets that often attack her for holding isolationist views.

New York Times and CNN have also smeared veterans like myself for calling for an end to this regime change war. Just two days ago the New York Times put out an article saying that I’m a Russian asset and an Assad apologist and all these different smears. This morning a CNN commentator said on national television that I’m an asset of Russia. Completely despicable.

…

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/15/tulsi-gabbard-calls-out-cnn-and-new-york-times-at-debate-hosted-by-cnn-and-new-york-times/

Mr. Luce knows the Party Line by heart, as he is one of its many authors, and ex-temporizers on its themes. Warren is the anointed candidate, who has professed her Capitalist Faith and has paid her obedience to the Zionist State. And above all to the Clinton Coterie which holds the levers of power in the party. The first Super Tuesday will be March 3, 2020.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/6dbc4dbc-ef73-11e9-ad1e-4367d8281195

Niall Ferguson’s column, of October 13, 2019, offered some rather cynical, not to speak of self-congratulatory speculations on the Warren candidacy, at the good grey Times:

Headline: Elizabeth Warren: the worse, the better for Donald Trump’s female foe

Sub-headline: The Massachusetts senator could win in 2020 if she surges and the economy stutters

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/elizabeth-warren-the-worse-the-better-for-donald-trumps-female-foe-c8k8htwt3

Lauren Fedor of The Financial Times and Mr. Ferguson rely on the RealClearPoltics polling data. But predictably for Corporate Media, Sanders is simply mentioned in Fedor’s essay as raising $25.3m to Warrens $24.6m: yet Warren is considered ‘the front runner’ via polling data. Ferguson however ignores the money raised by Sanders, as he hits full rhetorical gallop, from his aerie at the Hoover Institution.

Note too that  ‘Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who was press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign’ and ‘Stephanie Cutter, a Democratic strategist who served as deputy campaign manager for Barack Obama’s 2012’ are integral parts of  The Democratic Party i.e. New Democratic loyalist, as is ‘Mary Anne Marsh, a Boston-based Democratic strategist’ . 

After Warren’s profession of faith in Capitalist Theology, and Sanders denial of any such faith , the Corporate Media  has now anointed a candidate that the Party can rally around, long before the first primary. That offers more of the same Neo-Liberalism, in the drag of ‘Progressivism’! Again, Sanders is rendered insignificant, by a media that simply ignores him, not just hoping he will go away, but by rendering him invisible. Or just call it Preemptive Stalinist Erasure?

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/b6f4e026-eba3-11e9-85f4-d00e5018f061

Headline: The EU needs to be a power project

Sub-headline: The emerging world order will increasingly be The emerging world order will increasingly be shaped by might, rather than law

The advocate/apologist for The Post-War Liberal Order, Mr. Rachman, and its rhetorical cognates, shares, not only with Guy Verhofstadt, but with incoming foreign affairs chief  of the EU Josep Borrell, as reported by Yahoo News, via The Telegraph newspaper, but signals a bellicosity, usually reserved for the context of the nation state, now writ large for the setting of the European Super State.

Headline: Incoming EU foreign affairs chief declares Brussels needs more troops and must be ready to intervene

https://news.yahoo.com/incoming-eu-foreign-affairs-chief-153231029.html?soc_src=community&soc_trk=tw

In a bellicosity, that reflects/refracts a belief in the usable myth of  Russian revanchism, forgetting the promises made to Gorbachev:  that finds the reader, with a verifiable historical memory within the  power project advocated by Mr. Rachman, that is familiar political territory: the signatories to the Statement of Principals of the American Project for a New American Century of 1997. Look at the signatories who were the architects of ‘The War on Terror’!

Dick Cheney, I. Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld , Paul Wolfowitz

http://www.rrojasdatabank.info/pfpc/PNAC—statement%20of%20principles.pdf

The appetite for war is a danger, that now threatens the coal and steel cartel of Monnet, that metastasized into a Super State.  Whose members rarely meet the standards set by its own Eurocrats. Add a standing army to the list of burdens that this state faces, that is if NATO will willingly surrender its claim as the protector of Europe? The American Conservatives will, perhaps, find this ‘defense independence’ an agreeable evolution?  The ‘Liberals’ , the New Democrats and their  R2P fellow travelers, will find the loss of their European purchase, vexing, if not a betrayal of their raison d’etre?

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/ff92106c-e8e0-11e9-85f4-d00e5018f061

Instead of reading full time political hysteric Andy Divine on the Trump Impeachment, under this headline and sub-headline:

The first paragraph defines to political territory of Andy’s comment:

Remember that sultry July day during the 2016 campaign when Donald Trump went in front of the television cameras and asked the Russian government to intervene in the looming presidential election on his behalf? “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails [by Hillary Clinton] that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” We now know, thanks to the Mueller report, that Moscow responded by hacking Hillary Clinton’s server that very day. We also know that the Mueller report itself concluded, after exhaustive examination, that there was no prosecutable evidence of a “conspiracy” between Trump and the Russian government to influence the 2016 election. Yet we saw one in broad daylight.

…

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/andrew-sullivan-trump-wants-to-be-impeached-so-do-it-now.html

Read the far more literate ,while still being well within the Conservative coterie, Niall Ferguson, at the good grey Sunday Times, on another pressing topic the Rise of China. Note that China became the sweatshop of choice of Western computer and cellphone manufacturers. In sum, Capitalists underwrote the rise of the Chinese, that is now the enemy of the Western Liberal Tradition!

What defines Mr. Ferguson as the readable, even more ‘clubbable’ in the parlance favored by Isaiah Berlin, and his yearning to be a literary critic, or at the least to frame his propaganda in more highfalutin terms, that the rhetorically flatfooted Andy. In which he employs- Mr. Ferguson speaks for himself:

…

But maybe a more interesting answer can be found in Liu Cixin’s astonishing 2008 sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem, which I read for the first time last week. The “problem” of the title is introduced to the reader — and to the nanotechnology scientist Wang Miao, one of the central characters — as a virtual reality game set in a strange, distant world with three suns rather than the familiar one. The mutually perturbing gravitational attractions of the three suns prevent this planet from settling into a predictable orbit with regular days, nights and seasons. It has occasional “stable eras”, during which civilisation can advance, but with minimal warning these give way to “chaotic eras” of intense heat or cold that render the planet uninhabitable.

…

Working backward look to Mr. Ferguson’s September 22, 2019 essay that was framed by both Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s ‘We’ as the singular distopian novel.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/science-fiction-has-become-dystopian-fact-mtbc5ss9x

His essay of September 8 2019 featured :

Friedrich Schiller, Robert Burns, James Hogg among others

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/its-a-bad-week-when-bojos-bro-jo-goes-dc7t79dgv

From September 1, 2019 he quotes from ‘Beyond the Fringe’

The challenge of millenarianism — as Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore pointed out in my favourite sketch from Beyond the Fringe — is what to do when the end of the world fails to happen.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/adapt-and-well-defy-greta-thunbergs-expectations-zccbnxskw

In his August 25 2019 essay he quotes from ‘Rebel without a Cause’

‘Hey, Toreador! . . . We head for the edge, and the first man who jumps is a chicken. All right?” In Rebel without a Cause, Jim (James Dean) and Buzz (Corey Allen) play the most famous game of chicken in Hollywood history, driving their jalopies at full speed towards a Californian cliff. At the last minute, Jim jumps. Buzz, his sleeve caught on the door handle, plunges to his death.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/from-trumps-trade-wars-to-brazils-fires-the-world-is-on-the-brink-nvq6ds90w

His essay of August 11 2019, ‘Seven Days in May’, both the book of Charles W Bailey and Fletcher Knebel, first published in 1962, and Movie of 1964.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/seven-days-in-august-tell-us-were-not-rome-cmfz29cf7

At the least, Ferguson offers a more sophisticated frame for Conservative propagandizing, in distinction to Andy Divine’s – what to call it ? but his usual hysterical screech about a politician that he helped to birth, Trump. Respectable bourgeois capitalism, and its politicians, have enabled both Trump’s populism and its European variants,and  the rise of the dynamic economic engine of China.

Political Cynic

Mr. Luce repeats ‘The Party Line’ on the Trump impeachment. The ‘as if ‘ that Mr. Luce operates under is that his readers don’t go elsewhere for ‘news’ and information.

On the vexing question of the change of the rules governing whisteblowers, see this from The Federalist, which has escaped Luce’s attention, and or does not meet with his ideological requirements?

Headline: Intel Community Secretly Gutted Requirement Of First-Hand Whistleblower Knowledge

Sub-headline:Federal records show that the intelligence community secretly revised the formal whistleblower complaint form in August 2019 to eliminate the requirement of direct, first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/27/intel-community-secretly-gutted-requirement-of-first-hand-whistleblower-knowledge/

Or this from zerohedgefund.com:

Headline:“I Am With Mueller”: Newly Released Rosenstein Emails Reveal Crusade To Investigate Trump

“I am with Mueller. He shares my views. Duty Calls.  Sometimes the moment chooses us.” –Rod Rosenstein, one day before Mueller was appointed as special counsel

New emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit reveal the details surrounding communications between Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller in the days leading up to the former FBI Director’s appointment as special counsel in the Russia probe. Mueller would go on to assemble a team comprising “13 Angry Democrats” as Trump called them, due to their obvious animus towards the president.

…

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/i-am-mueller-newly-released-rosenstein-emails-reveal-crusade-stop-trump

Or this from 2014 from nakedcapitalism.com:

Headline: From 2014: R. Hunter Biden Should Declare Who Really Owns His New Ukrainian Employer, Burisma Holdings

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/from-2014-r-hunter-biden-should-declare-who-really-owns-his-new-ukrainian-employer-burisma-holdings.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Add to the above:

Headline: The Untold Story of the Trump-Ukraine ‘Scandal’: The Routine Corruption of US Foreign Policy

Sub-headline: The impeachment offensive against Donald Trump is another symptom of a partisan disease that ignores an even greater malignancy, writes Joe Lauria.

The most crucial aspects of the Trump-Ukraine “scandal,” which has led to impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, are not being told, even by Republicans.

Trump was very likely motivated by politics if he indeed withheld military aid to Ukraine in exchange for Kiev launching an investigation into Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden, though the transcript of the call released by the White House between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelinsky does not make certain such a quid-pro-quo.

But what’s not being talked about in the mainstream is the context of this story, which shows that, politics aside, Biden should indeed be investigated in both Ukraine and in the United States.

We know from the leaked, early 2014 telephone conversation between Victoria Nuland, then assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, that then Vice President Biden played a role in “midwifing” the U.S.-backed overthrow of an elected Ukrainian government soon after that conversation.

That’s the biggest crime in this story that isn’t being told. The illegal overthrow of a sovereign government.

As booty from the coup, the sitting vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, soon got a seat on the board of Ukraine’s biggest gas producer, Burisma Holdings. This can only be seen as a transparently neocolonial maneuver to take over a country and install one’s own people. But Biden’s son wasn’t the only one.

…

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/09/26/what-isnt-mentioned-about-the-trump-ukraine-scandal-the-routine-corruption-of-us-foreign-policy/

There is in this collection ample clues that there is a concerted effort to impeach Trump from within, by branches of the American National Security State: the political alliance between  Clapper/Brennan/Clinton whose Russiagate collapsed, has now been replaced by another dull-witted ruse, confected by the same culprits. With the added bonus that the Ukraine Scandal will render Biden’s candidacy null, making way for Hillary Clone Warren.

Mr. Luce repeats the carefully laundered Party Line, reminding this American reader of Arlen Specter’s ‘Single Bullet Theory’ that turned the Law of Physics into an irrelevance, as the in-order-too of maintaining the lie that Oswald was the ‘Lone Assassin’ ! And the CIA’s use of ‘Conspiracy Theorists’ as the enemy of State Sponsored Truth. While the Church Committee in the 70’s found that there was more than one assassin.

On the question of the deference that the Mueller Investigation paid to the CrowdStrike ‘investigation’ of the Clinton servers and computers constitutes incompetence, or the careful exercise of ideological conformity.

The political present, in regards to the Trump impeachment, and its many political tributaries is highly complex, indeed its is a thicket of political motives, machinations not to mention mendacity: I offer some snapshots of and commentary about this political present.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/ef0e41f2-e58e-11e9-b112-9624ec9edc59

______________________________________________________________

JOHN KIRIAKOU: What was this CIA Officer Thinking?

Mr. Rachman having been born in 1963 has no actual memory of Malcolm X, yet some of his readers do possess that memory. Could the fact that Rachman spent part of his childhood in apartheid South Africa have any bearing on his mention of Malcolm X? As a touchstone of ‘ends justify means’ mentality, that plays a part in his latest essay? The political ghost of Malcolm X is strong political medicine, of a kind!

Once you have asserted that the end justifies the means, then any tactic is logically permissible. It is telling that “by any means necessary” was a slogan originally adopted politically by Malcolm X, the African-American activist of the 1960s, who was frustrated by the non-violent methods of the civil rights movement.

Mr. Rachman’s latest polemic in favor of ‘Liberalism’ and against the ‘Populist Menace’, and  its  two villains Trump and Johnson – Mr. Rachman hasn’t read Liberalism, A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo published by Verso? Populism is a long American Tradition: William Jennings Bryan, Teddy Roosevelt (Bull Moose) , Huey Long, Father Coughlin , Benjamin Spock, George Wallace, Ross Perot.

In his search for villains Mr. Rachman ignores the fact that Liberalism capitulated to Neo-Liberalism long ago: New Labour and the New Democrats! These two political hybrids were the midwives of Trump and Johnson!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/a8cc15d8-e35a-11e9-9743-db5a370481bc

@-jswift @StephenKMackSD

Thank you for your comment. “State of the Union” is one of Capra’s better movies, as opposed to his usual American Kitsch. Its one of my favorites, its political realism is one of its charms, seeing Hepburn playing Hepburn is always like viewing a one of a kind personality in action- she is fascinating to watch! She thinks so too! She’s an America Yankee Aristocrat. But a young Angela Lansbury, as the conniving political adviser, seducer, to Spencer Tracy almost steals the show! Kudos for using  “State” to frame your insightful, not to speak of  devastating comment.

‘Incessant rants about populism just reveal an unlimited ignorance of history.’ 

Best regards,

StephenKMackSD