StephenKMackSD's Blog

What is ‘the lesser of two evils’ ? Trump and Trumpism, in the wake of the collapse of the Neo-Liberalism backed by the New Democrats and the Republicans? The denial of responsibility of these two utterly corrupt Parties led directly to Trump!
Or an utterly corrupt FBI,  the American Stasi, that has framed and suborned to perjury, just one of the many glaring instances, the Rosenberg case, or the Crime Lab scandal:

The article notes that the admissions from the FBI and Department of Justice “confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques—like hair and bite-mark comparisons—that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/csi-is-a-lie/390897/

Read the whole essay by Conor Friedersdorf for the breathtaking scope of this betrayal, not just miscarriage of justice  -while careerist hack Mueller stood by and did nothing. This case finally decided in 2015. How many people were executed on the mythic status of FBI Science ? Justice delayed is Justice denied!

The record of FBI crimes is voluminous, but the zeal to defend McCabe, as victim of the political sociopath Trump is what? Why would anyone with even the vaguest awareness of the history of the FBI,  be blinded by the presentation of the FBI, and its officers/minions as enjoying the status of victim/hero! It is more apologetics for an utterly corrupt and murdering American National Security State. And a Jurisprudence, that slavishly does the bidding of this phalanx of lies and rationalizations, in the FISA kangaroo court. Too strong? Not strong enough!

Political Observer

 

 

Mr. Chait,

Here’s the bad news on Conor Lamb:

‘Meantime, Democrat Conor Lamb, the apparent winner in that race, had an Israel moment in the race. It was exposed that he had written in 2002 of an Israeli attack on Gaza– which killed a woman in her 40s and a 14-year-old boy: “If this latest attack is not terrorism, I don’t know what is.” Lamb was then 17 and a student at the University of Pennsylvania; but the Free Beacon later reported that he worked hard to privately assure Jewish supporters about his stance on Israel, and even said he had no memory of writing those words. Here’s why he did so: because newby Democrats get their policy positions from AIPAC.’

http://mondoweiss.net/2018/03/someone-elevation-neoconservative/

Or can all this fit under the rubric of ‘youthful indiscretion’ ? Since all New Democrats must pay obeisance to AIPAC, Mr. Lamb might be called before a Tribunal of AIPAC Patriarchs, to confess his ‘deviationism‘. And testify to his ‘re-education’ in light of his political victory. To express it in Maoist terms!

Political Observer

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/democrats-can-run-the-connor-lamb-strategy-over-and-over.html#comments

 

As reported in The Financial Times:

…

Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, formally nominated Mr Smolii this January after having previously considered other candidates. Nearly a year of political horse-trading delayed the appointment of a new governor. Support for Mr Smolii’s candidacy swelled in recent months, not least because the central bank under his leadership demonstrated independence and bold adherence to anti-inflation targeting in adopting a series of unpopular rate rises.

…

Look to the notion of a  ‘bold adherence to anti-inflation targeting’ as the maladroit  apologetic for Austerity , not to speak of the twin notion of ‘anti-corruption’. The quoted  comment by Timothy Ash ’emerging markets strategist’ or in plain English Vulture Capitalist, is telling!

…

“[Mr Smolii] has performed admirably in the job . . . indeed, I think the NBU is currently a reform beacon, where other reforms seem to be lagging,” Timothy Ash, emerging markets strategist at Bluebay Asset Management, wrote in a note.

…

The reader also must note that the comments section for this ‘news item’ is not enabled. Never a surprise, as the editors of this ‘newspaper’ fear more than anything the withering contempt of their regular readership!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/13488b5c-2850-11e8-b27e-cc62a39d57a0

John Stoehr adopts the chatty and dismissive style of so much political writing done for the Popular Press! He and Tomasky are as one in the use of this vulgar rhetorical gambit. And their shared distaste for the heretical New Dealer Sen. Sanders, as New Democratic supporters of Mrs. Clinton.  Stoehr scolds the Democrats for not endorsing New Democrat Feinstein, who he pictures as not perfect, but a part of the bulwark against Trump and Trumpism, the NRA and other ‘political evils’!

Such is this writer’s desperation, he even quotes from the Saul Alinsky’s classic ‘Rules for Radical’ as an antidote against what Mr. Stoehr considers to be an excess of ‘political purity‘, on the part of Democrats who unlike Sen. Feinstein haven’t gotten their ‘hands dirty’ with actual politics. The voice of the Party Hack is heard! The fact that the New Democrats were part of a political class, that were and are the Midwives of Trump: whose Free Market Ideology produced economic/political catastrophe, that has yet to produce the Self-correcting Market as the fulfillment of its theology, is beyond the ken of Mr. Stoehr. Or more likely this is about self-exculpation!

Yet what he leaves out is Sen. Feinstein’s impeccable Neo-Liberal credentials, and her support for the crimes, not just the predations of the American National Security State, and its War on Terror. But not to forget her demonstrable  ‘courage’ on Torture Report, that she ‘valiantly crusaded’ for! If she had chosen to act on her dissatisfaction, she could have simply taken what she had, fragments and or whole sections of the actual ‘Report’, and gone on the Senate floor, and read it into the record without fear of legal action. The members of the House and Senate enjoy immunity from prosecution for their comments on the floor of their respective houses of Congress.

But Sen. Feinstein is a member of long standing of the ‘Boys Club’, and its due deference to each other, that is the hallmark of the Feinstein’s attention to that actual imperative: she would have never taken such a radical step, that would have taken her outside the area of Senate good citizenship! This makes Sen. Feinstein the perfect candidate according to the imperatives presented by Mr. Stoehr!

Old Socialist

https://www.thedailybeast.com/democrats-have-reasons-for-dumping-dianne-feinsteinbut-none-of-them-are-good?ref=scroll?ref=wrap

 

The new casus belli for a war with Russia, and its Putin The Terrible, will be the ‘highly likely’ ? The fading political career and ‘leadership’ of Mrs. May will be rescued by launching a Trident? Or its equivalent as itemized by loyalist Mr. Rachman? Mrs. May’s pronouncement of the weak dogma of ‘highly likely’ is almost comparable to the political naif Colin Powell’s UN address? Without the fanfare, that was the nadir of his career and established in the public mind his utter gullibility! The battlefield and the world of politics requires an Eisenhower ?
The New Cold War advances by the self-delusions, better yet lies, constructed by a political class across Europe and America. Whose political necrophilia is fueled by a Neo-Conservative coterie of Porcine Spartans like Wm. Kristol and Robert Kagan financed by Sheldon Adelson and Paul Singer. But beware, this ‘War’ against Russia will at the same historical moment require a ‘Second Front’ against Iran!

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/0ff58722-2623-11e8-b27e-cc62a39d57a0

Austerity is the rallying cry for an utterly catastrophic collection of Free Market dogmas! But it also acts as the slow poison to what remains of the Welfare State. The collapse of 2008 and the ensuing triumph of the 1% and the immiseration of the 99%, has produced Mr. Corbyn: in sum, ‘The Rebellion Against the Elites’ as it was named by the FT.

The rise of Corbyn and his re-invigoration of Labour is the political inevitability that now faces the Thatcherites, and its twin deities The Iron Lady, Hayek heavily inflected by the poison of Oakeshottian contempt, for the political ambitions of a lower order of beings: the Labour Party under Corbyn!

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/014a1754-2526-11e8-b27e-cc62a39d57a0

To The Financial Times editors :

Your unstinting advocacy of the Neo-Liberal swindle, from The Iron Lady & Reagan to the dismal present of Macri & Macron, and its ignominious collapse and consequent immiseration of the 99%, again announces the watershed of the catastrophic nature of that economic romanticism ! More hand-wringing about The Rebellion Against the Elites, rhetorically transmogrified into the latest iteration of  FT Speak as the Populist Menace!

Almost Marx

 

Read these paragraphs and know the true nature of Dr Pangloss’ political/moral quietism! If not his political usefulness, to the apologists for the predations of The American National Security State. He is the anti-intellectual intellectual!

‘Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves “progressive” really hate progress. It’s not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you: most pundits, critics, and their bien-pensant readers use computers rather than quills and inkwells, and they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia rather than without it. It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class—the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition.

An entire lexicon of abuse has grown up to express their scorn. If you think knowledge can help solve problems, then you have a “blind faith” and a “quasi-religious belief” in the “outmoded superstition” and “false promise” of the “myth” of the “onward march” of “inevitable progress.” You are a “cheerleader” for “vulgar American can-doism” with the “rah-rah” spirit of “boardroom ideology,” “Silicon Valley,” and the “Chamber of Commerce.” You are a practitioner of “Whig history,” a “naïve optimist,” a “Pollyanna,” and of course a “Pangloss,” a modern-day version of the philosopher in Voltaire’s Candide who asserts that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

Professor Pangloss, as it happens, is what we would now call a pessimist. A modern optimist believes that the world can be much, much better than it is today. Voltaire was satirizing not the Enlightenment hope for progress but its opposite, the religious rationalization for suffering called theodicy, according to which God had no choice but to allow epidemics and massacres because a world without them is metaphysically impossible.

https://lithub.com/the-world-might-not-be-as-disastrous-we-think-it-is/

Our reading of Voltaire’s  Dr. Pangloss is wrong, or so pronounces his contemporary incarnation. But more to the point of Pinker’s unbridled ‘optimism’, See Chomsky Responds to Steven Pinker on Violence:

See also Pinker, as a self -described Hobbesian , in reply to Chomsky as  Anarcho-Syndicalist romantic , as opposed to his own pragmatism, awash in man’s natural acquisitiveness, selfishness. Is the human being in a ‘State of Nature’ self-seeking or a co-operative collaborator?  If that isn’t overstating Pinker’s economically framed argument. The evolution of the family family and the tribe are examples of what? Noam Chomsky’s Misreading of Human Nature:

There is much more to consider in Dr. Pinker’s essay, my comments can serve as a beginning, to address the rampant anti-intellectualism of his polemic. His quietism is of the most pernicious and dangerous kind!

American Writer

 

 

 

I have removed my essay of March 3, 2018 because of my own inexcusable lack of attention, to the responsibilities that being a writer means. The title was: ‘Peter Van Buren vs Andrew Sullivan on ‘Russiagate’ and its ersatz hero Robert Mueller. Political Cynic comments (Revised)’ My apologies to Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Van Buren, and to my readers: mea culpa!! StephenKMackSD

The reader marvels at Andy Divine’s latest essay , after some introductory remarks, a commentary on a ‘deeper American story’ that segues into this description of America’s Opioid Crisis:

The scale and darkness of this phenomenon is a sign of a civilization in a more acute crisis than we knew, a nation overwhelmed by a warp-speed, postindustrial world, a culture yearning to give up, indifferent to life and death, enraptured by withdrawal and nothingness. America, having pioneered the modern way of life, is now in the midst of trying to escape it.

Mr. Divine briefly mentions ‘the economic stress the country is enduring’ as the briefest description of the Crash of 2008, and ensuing Depression that is still with us in 2018. That  Crisis has led, ten years later, to an endemic cultural,existential, political despair about the present and the future. The corporation that is the capitalist model of our present and future is Jeff Bezos’ new Sweat Shop called Amazon. Mr. Divine avoids, at all costs, his advocacy and apologetics for the revelation of The Free Market, that has ended in catastrophe. He avoids the obvious reasons for the Opioid Crisis, except for ‘our own collapse in morality and self-control’ , this merde an integral part of the Neo-Conservative obsession with ‘Decadence’! The moral, political melodrama is framed :

The scale and darkness of this phenomenon is a sign of a civilization in a more acute crisis than we knew, a nation overwhelmed by a warp-speed, postindustrial world, a culture yearning to give up, indifferent to life and death, enraptured by withdrawal and nothingness. America, having pioneered the modern way of life, is now in the midst of trying to escape it.

Mr. Divine then asks the burning question: How does an opioid make you feel? He then spends six paragraphs explaining to the reader how the user feels, and names some of the celebrated users  ‘ including the poets Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Baudelaire, and the novelist Walter Scott including the poets Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Baudelaire, and the novelist Walter Scott — were as infused with opium as the late Beatles were with LSD.’ That Opoids and Hallucinogens are two distinct kinds of drugs is of no concern to this writer.

This followed by a potted history of The Poppy in American life, and other pressing matters like this about Neo-Conservative Daniel Bell:

It’s been several decades since Daniel Bell wrote The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, but his insights have proven prescient. Ever-more-powerful market forces actually undermine the foundations of social stability, wreaking havoc on tradition, religion, and robust civil associations, destroying what conservatives value the most. They create a less human world. They make us less happy. They generate pain.

Or this ‘if’ on Marx, that Bret Stephens found to be eminently quotable:

If Marx posited that religion is the opiate of the people, then we have reached a new, more clarifying moment in the history of the West: Opiates are now the religion of the people. A verse by the poet William Brewer sums up this new world:

Where once was faith,

there are sirens: red lights spinning

door to door, a record twenty-four

in one day, all the bodies

at the morgue filled with light.

Not to be missed is Mr. Divine’s last compellingly readable paragraph, in which he dons the Prophet’s Robe, imagine the scene, starring Charlton Heston, in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 Hollywood blockbuster Biblical kitsch ‘The Ten Commandments’:

We have seen this story before — in America and elsewhere.
The allure of opiates’ joys are filling a hole in the human heart and soul today as they have since the dawn of civilization. But this time, the drugs are not merely laced with danger and addiction. In a way never experienced by humanity before, the pharmaceutically sophisticated and ever more intense bastard children of the sturdy little flower bring mass death in their wake. This time, they are agents of an eternal and enveloping darkness. And there is a long, long path ahead, and many more bodies to count, before we will see any light.

Political Observer

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/americas-opioid-epidemic.html