StephenKMackSD's Blog

Editor: Reader recall that the Zionist Cadre of the Ellisons, Bari Weiss, Safra Catz, Bill Ackman, Jan Koum and Shari Redstone ? Musk is just another aspirant i.e. ‘Member of this Toxic Cadre’?

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Jan 20, 2026

Headline: Musk, With a $10 Million Donation, Signals He’s Back for the Midterms

Sub-headline: Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, backed Nate Morris, a Republican businessman, in the primary race to succeed Senator Mitch McConnell in Kentucky.

Elon Musk has donated $10 million to help a Republican businessman in the party’s primary race to succeed Senator Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, in a sign that Mr. Musk, the world’s richest person, may be looking to play an influential role in the midterm elections.

The donation was described by a person briefed on the transaction, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the exchange.

The money went to a group supporting Nate Morris, who is locked in one of this year’s most competitive Republican primary races for Senate. Until now, Mr. Morris, a founder of a waste and recycling company, had been largely self-funding his campaign against Representative Andy Barr of Kentucky and Daniel Cameron, a former state attorney general.

The donation, earlier reported by Axios, is Mr. Musk’s largest disclosed contribution of the 2026 midterm cycle — and it is notable because of his turbulent last year in Republican politics.

After spending hundreds of millions of dollars to elect President Trump in 2024, Mr. Musk led the charge to cut the size of the federal government and served as an influential White House adviser. After a spectacular midyear fallout with Mr. Trump, the tech billionaire had harsh words for the Republican Party and made vague threats about starting a third party. But since last fall, he has worked to repair his relationship with Mr. Trump and has inched back toward the Republican fold.

This cycle, Mr. Musk has funded his own super PAC along with those tied to House and Senate Republican leadership.

Mr. Morris, a friend of Vice President JD Vance’s, is harshly critical of the Republican Party’s old establishment wing, which Mr. McConnell helped lead. Mr. Morris and Mr. Musk spoke recently about the candidate’s opposition to Mr. McConnell, the person briefed on the donation said.

Since at least 2023, Mr. Musk had called for Mr. McConnell to step down as the leader of Senate Republicans. The senator, in his 80s and facing health problems, made a widely expected announcement in 2025 that he would not run for re-election.

Mr. Morris appears to be something of an underdog, with Mr. Cameron leading in the relatively limited polling of the race. The primary election is on May 19.

Editor: With McConnell in the last stages of senility, Musk is more that willing to own a Republican, to establish himself as a ‘King Maker’, what might go wrong?

Newspaper Reader.

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Jan 18, 2026

( Re-Posted from July 31, 2021 by stephenkmacksd)

Colin Burrow’s essay on Empson’s ‘Some Versions of the Pastoral’ and ‘The Structures of Complex Words’ was unexpected in its lack of reverence for Empson. Having read Michael Wood’s ‘On Empson’ as my introduction to this writer: this led me to read ‘7 Types of Ambiguity’ ,and to my surprise I found it to be enjoyable reading. These two books led me to C.C. Norris’s ‘William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism’.

The title of Burrow’s essay is The Terrifying Vrooom , a surprising metaphor steeped in the mechanistic , but revelatory none the less. I had highlighted, in my print copy, some of the more telling, not to speak of revelatory, portions of Burrow’s essay:

…

Those flashes of strategic vagueness are vital elements in Empson’s style. They encourage his readers to believe that literary texts can take them beyond the limits of their own perceptions, and that, although generating lists of variant senses is one aspect of reading, jumping across a void is what it’s really all about. Empson described his own practice when he said Pope’s Essay in Criticism implied ‘that all a critic can do is to suggest a hierarchy with inadequate language; that to do it so well with such very inadequate language is to offer a kind of diagram of how it must always be done’. This can certainly generate frustrations, since he was quite capable of creating an interminable taxonomy of interpretative possibilities and then throwing it up in the air as inadequate in a way that would drive a philosopher nuts. He could even do that with entire books. The Structure of Complex Words (1951) concludes with the sentence: ‘All I should claim for this chapter is that it gives a sort of final canter round the field’ – as though he is no more than a stable lad giving the horses a spin. But he was among other things a master of the critical blur. As he put it in an essay on Paradise Lost, ‘it is a delicate piece of brushwork such as seems blurred until you step back.’

…

Double plots, in which one group of people were thematically connected with another in a subplot, were also ‘pastoral’, because a plot that’s echoed in a subplot implicitly suggests that different social groups replicate or parody aspects of one another. The concern in metaphysical poetry with relationships between the ‘one and the many’ was ‘pastoral’ too, according to Empson, since here a single instance could stand for a range of examples and so bring the complexity of the whole into the single simple thing.

…

Plurality was the key concept in his critical thinking, and it was a kind of plurality that allowed for a range of different voices and attitudes to exist within a single society, a single text, a single mind, or a single word. ‘Once you break into the godlike unity of the appreciator you find a microcosm of which the theatre is the macrocosm,’ he wrote. ‘The mind is complex and ill-connected like an audience, and it is surprising in the one case as the other that a sort of unity can be produced by a play.’

…

That is, in Some Versions of Pastoral Empson managed to develop the linguistic concerns of Seven Types of Ambiguity into a social vision, in which a single text could register the shifting and multiple attitudes not just of one mind but of an entire age.
Empson’s own mind was complex and ill-connected, and contained many different voices: the poet, the patrician mathematician, the joker, the shocker, the drinker, the social critic, as well as the seraph of vagueness. At one point in his essay on Donne he offers a kind of parody mathematical definition of how Donne treats a single person or thing as an embodiment of a wider whole: ‘This member of the class is the whole class, or its defining property: this man has a magical importance to all men.’ He goes on to relate this use of the representative figure to his own concept of pastoral: ‘If you choose an important member the result is heroic; if you choose an unimportant one it is pastoral.’ That’s the Empson of Some Versions of Pastoral in a nutshell. You have the terrifying vrooom as his foot goes to the floor and your mind can’t quite keep up with where it’s being pulled, and then, perhaps, a slight sense that some kind of magic (or is it trickery?) has happened. And it probably has: the master of ambiguity uses ‘class’ here in a mathematical sense (of a particular category of entities) but with overtones of the social sense (of distinct social groups).

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n14/colin-burrow/the-terrifying-vrooom

On the vexing question of Derrida for Empson :

British literary critics who wore the label ‘Empsonian’ with pride tended to follow their master in disliking the overtly theoretical forms that criticism took in the later 1970s and 1980s. In the lectures I went to in Cambridge in the 1980s by Ricks and some of his most brilliant pupils, Empsonising (maybe another one for the OED) was the establishment alternative to what we were taught to think of as the French disease of structuralism. Empson himself was no fan of Derrida, whom he referred to as ‘Nerrida’ in a letter. The principled reason for his hostility to structuralism and post-structuralism was his conviction that the meaning of words is both social and personal: words mean what they mean because this person is using this word in this way to or about this other person, and because this word has this particular history which may or may not complicate how this particular person uses it. That root interest in how people speak to people prejudiced Empson against any depersonalised account of language as a system. It also led to such work as Using Biography (1984), which starts from the sensible belief that people write in the way they do because of the experiences they have had, before travelling from there far into the realms of biographical fantasy.

…

After reading ‘The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968’ and the essays of Richard Rorty, like this Stanford essay titled ‘Richard Rorty: An appreciation of Jacques Derrida’, and his other essay on Derrida: there seems to me a very real propinquity, between Empson’s project, and Derrida’s, no matter the distance between these writers, and their utterly different world views and literary/philosophical traditions.

Philosophical Apprentice

Queer Atheist offers Karl Barth and Hans Kung to the reader as revelatory of what possbility might be?

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Jan 18, 2026

Opinion

The ‘Safe, Legal, Rare’ Illusion

By Ross Douthat

Feb. 18, 2012

And both Democrats and Republicans generally agree that the country would be better off with fewer pregnant teenagers, fewer unwanted children, fewer absent fathers, fewer out-of-wedlock births.

Where cultural liberals and social conservatives differ is on the means that will achieve these ends. The liberal vision tends to emphasize access to contraception as the surest path to stable families, wanted children and low abortion rates. The more direct control that women have over when and whether sex makes babies, liberals argue, the less likely they’ll be to get pregnant at the wrong time and with the wrong partner — and the less likely they’ll be to even consider having an abortion. (Slate’s Will Saletan has memorably termed this “the pro-life case for Planned Parenthood.”)

The conservative narrative, by contrast, argues that it’s more important to promote chastity, monogamy and fidelity than to worry about whether there’s a prophylactic in every bedroom drawer or bathroom cabinet. To the extent that contraceptive use has a significant role in the conservative vision (and obviously there’s some Catholic-Protestant disagreement), it’s in the context of already stable, already committed relationships. Monogamy, not chemicals or latex, is the main line of defense against unwanted pregnancies.

…

Opinion

More Babies, Please

By Ross Douthat

Dec. 1, 2012

…

Government’s power over fertility rates is limited, but not nonexistent. America has no real family policy to speak of at the moment, and the evidence from countries like Sweden and France suggests that reducing the ever-rising cost of having kids can help fertility rates rebound. Whether this means a more family-friendly tax code, a push for more flexible work hours, or an effort to reduce the cost of college, there’s clearly room for creative policy to make some difference.

More broadly, a more secure economic foundation beneath working-class Americans would presumably help promote childbearing as well. Stable families are crucial to prosperity and mobility, but the reverse is also true, and policies that made it easier to climb the economic ladder would make it easier to raise a family as well.

Editor: Note the primary problem as presented by Douthat is couched in the long dead Ultramontane Chatter of another time and place, and held aloft by decadence? Do Karl Barth and Hans Kung of November 3, 2004 offer the reader what is utterly absent from Douthat’s New York Times chatter?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/scottish-journal-of-theology/article/abs/justification-barth-trent-and-kung/DC302C1F5D33297E6925A321DFB400CE

Beneath these policy debates, though, lie cultural forces that no legislator can really hope to change. The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made.

Queer Atheist.

Newspaper Reader shares with The Reader.

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Jan 17, 2026

Paul Singer’s Lament: the Bond Market is broken, 2 replies

Posted on August 20, 2016 by stephenkmacksd

1)

I have yet to read Robin Wigglesworth’s essay/news report, but I have read Mr. Edward. N. Littwak’s essay Hidden Costs at the Times Literary Supplement, August 19,2016 A review of The Panama Papers, that for it’s cast of characters, that includes Mr. Singer as a seeker after the his pound of flesh, President Macri of Argentina, and Cristina de Kirchner as clients of Mossack Fonseka. What was Argentina’s Neo-Liberal White Knight Mercri doing business where embezzler de Kirchner also did business? The Argentine Melodrama never ends, but there are more names of the politically respectable bourgeois politicians, and other civic actors…

Stayed tuned,

StephenKMackSD

2)

Poor Mr. Singer! The goose that laid the golden egg is kaput? Mr. Singer and his ilk produce nothing. He is not like the notorious Henry Ford, who at the least, paid his workers enough to buy the cars they produced on the assembly line! Ford produced a product that people bought, and provided jobs that enabled generations of Americans to purchase a home, to save for retirement, and put their children through school and even college. No matter Mr. Ford’s egregious beliefs, he did something that Mr. Singer and his investors cannot do, provide those jobs that built America and got us through two World Wars.

But times are now tough for the Vultures, as Capitalism, in it’s Neo-Liberal iteration, has collapsed, and what is on offer from the Elites, that the dread Populists are rebelling against, is the Utopianism of the TTP and the TTIP. Yet we as readers can see that this class of Capitalists relies on the ever shrinking detritus of a system mired in it’s own collapse. The Panama Papers demonstrates that both the Capitalists and their apologists in the Press, in Politics and Academia are wholly corrupt, or put bluntly, just on the take. So Mr. Singer’s dire warnings about an Economic ‘brokenness’ of the Bond Market: while we in America witness daily, the Sideshow of Clinton vs. Trump i.e. of two utterly loathsome self-seeking egoists vying to rule the ‘West’ garnished by the usual ‘the lesser of two evils’ bunk is just more bad news. Mr. Singer who makes Henry Ford look like a paragon of Capitalist Virtue, bemoans his lot: quelle dommage! In the vision of Ayn Rand the world is dived into producers and drones, so one might ask, what category does Mr. Singer fit into? Or to frame it in a way utterly antithetical to Rand, what tangible good does he produce? to frame it a language alien to the ‘Objectivism’ of Rand. The notion of ‘Objectivism’ being a stand in for greed. Perhaps we can turn to Hayek for the comforting news that the Market is the only really viable form of knowledge?

StephenKMackSD

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a21fec8a-6574-11e6-a08a-c7ac04ef00aa.html#ft-article-comments

Newspaper Reader on the Coup That Failed ?

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Jan 17, 2026

Horror in Iran

Editor: Never fear that The Economist under Beddoes has even surpassed that team of War Mongers Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait of ‘The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America’ of May 31, 2005 that metaticised into:

At least 37m people made refugees by US ‘war on terror’

At least 37 million people have been displaced by the US “war on terror”, a new study has concluded. The details are contained in a damning report even as western nations continue to grapple with the influx of refugees from war-torn countries.

Creating Refugees: Displacement Caused by the United States’ Post-9/11 Wars was produced by Brown University’s Costs of War Project. It points out that the number of refugees “exceeds those displaced by every war since 1900, except World War Two.”

Highlighting the devastating impact of the now two-decade long “war on terror” the study concluded that 37 million refugees is a “very conservative estimate” and that the real figure could be as high as 59 million.

While the report accounts for the number of people, mostly civilians, displaced from countries targeted by the US in its “war on terror”, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and the Philippines, Middle East countries make up the highest number of refugees. With 9.2 million displaced in Iraq, the 2003 US invasion of the Arab state is seen as the main catalyst for the refugee crises.

“Since the George W. Bush administration launched a ‘global war on terror’ following Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the US military has waged war continuously for almost two decades,” said the report. It added that US forces have fought in as many as 24 countries in that time.

…

Editor : Beddoes cadre of would be ‘Democrats’ within Iran :

…

At less risk, America could help end the communications blackout imposed by the regime, by smuggling Starlink kits into Iran. One sign this matters is that security forces are hunting for those already in the country. The White House is also giving tacit support to an exiled opposition figure, Reza Pahlavi, the former crown prince, who fled from Iran when the shah was toppled in 1979. From a safe distance in Maryland he, too, has been urging protesters to rise up to bring democracy. In the absence of organised opposition inside Iran, perhaps the country could restore some form of monarchy, (see our interview with Mr Pahlavi).

However, just to run through the options shows how hard it will be for American action to succeed. If Mr Trump orders strikes, Iran is armed with a formidable battery of short- and long-range missiles that could hit back across the Middle East, leading to an unpredictable escalation—which is why countries there are warning against an American attack. A decapitation from the air would require exquisite intelligence against an adversary who is forewarned. Even with the ayatollah gone, a Caracas-style deal with the Revolutionary Guards is unlikely to create lasting stability, because grieving Iranians will yearn for vengeance against generals with so much fresh blood on their hands.

The new way of the world

The stakes are extraordinarily high. With Mr Trump in office, old certainties in geopolitics are melting away. His concern will never be to respect international law, nor to foster a club of liberal democracies. But, even as Iran is abandoned by its allies, China and Russia, he is readier than any recent American president to bring about big changes if he believes they will enhance America’s influence and his own prestige. Each intervention is a test of what sort of world that will create.

Once every popular uprising seemed to herald the birth of a new democracy. Alas, after the failures of the Arab spring, it is no longer easy to imagine that Iran’s path could be so simple. The hope nonetheless is that, in time, the collapse of the regime will favour Iran’s courageous people, who have proved once again that they are their country’s greatest blessing.

Editor : The final paragraphs of this essay wallow in a wan pastich of Anglicanism, for want of a better descriptor!

Newspaper Reader.

Newspaper Reader urges the reader to further her expoloration of this newpapers attachments: to Pax Americana & fear and loating of Trump/Trumpism: while employing Zionist War Mongers/Fellow travlers

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jan 16, 2026

Newspaper Reader.

Editor: Note the presence of Zionist Fellow Traveler Larry Ellison on the Front Page!

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jan 15, 2026

Bill and Hillary Clinton refused on Tuesday to testify in the House’s Jeffrey Epstein investigation, escalating a monthslong battle with its Republican leader, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, who quickly said he would take steps to hold them in contempt of Congress.

“Every person has to decide when they have seen or had enough and are ready to fight for this country, its principles and its people, no matter the consequences,” the Clintons wrote in a lengthy letter to Mr. Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, which was obtained by The New York Times. “For us, now is that time.”

Read the Clintons’ Personal Letter to Comer

Bill and Hillary Clinton wrote a lengthy letter to Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the Oversight Committee, refusing to testify in Congress.

Read Document 4 pages

Mr. Comer’s relentless efforts to force them to testify reflect his overall approach to his panel’s Epstein inquiry. He has sought to deflect focus from President Trump’s ties to the convicted sex offender and his administration’s decision to close its investigation into the matter without releasing key information. Instead, he has worked to shift the spotlight onto prominent Democrats who once associated with Mr. Epstein and his longtime companion Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Jeffrey Epstein visited the White House 17 times while Bill Clinton was president,” Mr. Comer said on Tuesday, speaking to reporters after holding Mr. Clinton’s scheduled deposition with a chair left empty to call attention to the former president’s absence. He added: “No one’s accusing Bill Clinton of anything, any wrongdoing. We just have questions.”

Mr. Comer has repeatedly threatened to hold the Clintons in contempt if they failed to appear for live depositions behind closed doors, typically a first step in referring someone to the Justice Department for prosecution. He had set a deadline of Tuesday for Mr. Clinton to appear, and Wednesday for Mrs. Clinton.

But hours before the deadline, the Clintons made clear that they had no intention of presenting themselves on Capitol Hill to be questioned by Mr. Comer and members of his committee. They did so by submitting an eight-page legal letter laying out why they considered the subpoenas “invalid and legally unenforceable,” then followed up with a scorching missive that they signed jointly, promising to fight Mr. Comer on the issue for as long as it took.

…

Editor:The Clinton Victimhood:

Mr. Comer’s insistence over months that the Clintons appear, the lawyers said, “brings us toward a protracted and unnecessary legal confrontation.”

Citing specific case law about congressional subpoenas and constitutional precedents, the lawyers wrote that the subpoenas were nothing more than “an effort to publicly harass and embarrass President and Secretary Clinton and an impermissible usurpation of executive law enforcement authority.”

The committee’s attempt to compel the Clintons to testify in person ran afoul of limitations on Congress’ investigative power that have been outlined in cases before the Supreme Court, the lawyers said.

And they noted that the Supreme Court had stated in the past that there must be a “nexus” between the investigations’ legislative aims and the witnesses from whom information was sought. Mr. Comer had not established why the Clintons’ appearance would be relevant, they said.

The lawyers encouraged Mr. Comer to “de-escalate this dispute.”

Newspaper Reader.

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Jan 15, 2026

Neswpaper Reader

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Jan 14, 2026

Reader look at the picture of Beddoes that predomintes her latest War Mongering Propaganda!

Where does Iran go from here?

Zanny Minton Beddoes

Editor-in-chief

Two months ago I asked readers of this newsletter whether they thought Iran’s regime would survive the next five years. The results showed a near dead heat: 38% of voters thought the Islamic Republic would endure, 39% thought it wouldn’t and the remainder weren’t sure. Given the scale of the protests in recent weeks, the horrific violence of the crackdown in the past few days and the possibility of American intervention, I’d like to hear if our subscribers’ predictions have changed—please cast a fresh vote in our poll. How will it all end? That’s what I want to explore in tomorrow’s Insider show.

Iran has been shrouded by a state-imposed digital blackout since January 8th, making it difficult to accurately assess the scale of the protests and the brutality of the authorities’ response. But the information that has emerged—often via Iranians’ patchy access to illegal Starlink terminals—suggests that thousands have died so far. Washington DC, where I have been this week, is full of speculation about how and when Donald Trump might intervene. He has promised on Truth Social that “help is on its way”. It is hard to see how military force can directly help those demonstrating on the streets. Striking installations of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, for instance, is unlikely to paralyse the regime. Large-scale attacks could cause significant casualties. Nonetheless, if I were a betting person, I’d wager that Mr Trump will do something.

To help make sense of what has happened so far—and what might come next—I’ve invited two of our Middle East correspondents, Nick Pelham and Gregg Carlstrom, and Adam Roberts, our new foreign editor, to take part in tomorrow’s Insider show. They’ll join Edward Carr, my co-host and deputy editor, as we consider Iran’s path forward. Nick and Adam visited Tehran only two months ago and I want to ask them if they had an inkling then that this sort of unrest was brewing and how it compares with the protests of 2022 and 2009. Nick has been reporting on Iran for 25 years and has many contacts there. I’m keen to know if he’s managed to reach them and, if so, what he’s heard about the situation on the ground. While in Washington this week, Nick and I took the opportunity to talk to Reza Pahlavi, the former crown prince of Iran and son of the last shah, so we’ll also be hearing from him during the show. Some protesters have been calling for the return of Mr Pahlavi, who reportedly met with Steve Witkoff last weekend, but is he really a credible alternative to the ayatollahs? I’ll be asking the panel to weigh in.

My colleagues and I will also assess the likelihood and prudence of foreign involvement in Iran. What would a Trumpian intervention look like? Perhaps an attempt to repeat a Venezuela-style raid? Perhaps a back-room deal is being cooked up with some elements of the regime? Mr Trump will be attending the World Economic Forum in Davos next week, making a big speech in front of the business world’s elite. I can imagine how he would relish the opportunity to show off American power once again.

I’ll wrap up tomorrow’s show by asking my colleagues what they expect to see happen now. The situation in Iran is highly uncertain, but what are the possible scenarios? Is a democratic transition still a pipe dream? Are there figures within the regime who could bring about change? My team will be answering these questions and yours too. Please tell us what you want to know via the Q&A feature on the episode page and, once you’ve watched the show, please write to me with your thoughts at insider@economist.com. See you tomorrow.

Scott Ritter & Allies offer alternatives to Beddoes War Mongering !

Scott Ritter: Iran’s Missiles will DESTROY US Bases & Israel if Trump Attacks

Newspaper Reader

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Jan 13, 2026

Graphic detail | After the strike

Headline: Venezuelans believe Donald Trump has offered them a better future

Sub-headline: An exclusive poll for The Economist also reveals an overwhelming desire for democracy

SEEN FROM Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, the small hours of January 3rd were terrifying. Bombs fell, helicopters and planes roared overhead and confusion reigned. By dawn perhaps 100 people were dead and Nicolás Maduro, the country’s authoritarian leader since 2013, had been seized by American special forces. Yet shock and fear quickly gave way to something else: happiness. According to exclusive polling for The Economist by Premise, a research firm based in Virginia, Venezuelans inside the country are pretty pleased with the dramatic turn of events, even if their vision for its future differs from that of President Donald Trump.

The survey offers one of the first glimpses of Venezuelans’ reaction to the snatching of Mr Maduro. Conducted via mobile app, it asked 600 Venezuelan residents their views on the raid, their expectations for the future and their opinions of various figures. The results are weighted by age and sex to reflect the national population.

Editor : The Reader needs only read the highlited paragraph to view this wan attempt at providing ‘data’, Conducted via mobile app as somehow indictive of the reality of what Venezuelans actually think? Maduro abduction by American Thugs is heaverly garnished with more ‘data’, see the attached … what to name it but Propganda?

Editor: this is a Propganda Behemoth created by 600 respondents …