Reader, see this excerpt, although Freud has passed into utter irrelevance, this might offer some clues to the inner life of Musk, and his unslacable need for the World’s attention and veneration!
‘The Madman in the White House Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow’ Wilson Patrick Weil
Politico Playbook reported Tuesday that when Mayor-elect Eric Adams flew to Puerto Rico for a New York Democratic Party confab this month, he and his longtime partner, Tracey Collins, hitched a ride on the plane of cryptocurrency billionaire Brock Pierce, who has been advising Adams on “all things crypto.”
Adams had said he paid his own way to Puerto Rico, remarking that the trip was “my dollar, my dime, and my time.” But while a spokesperson told Playbook that Adams paid for a seat on the private flight via a travel agent and flew commercial on the return trip, his team did not produce receipts.
The next mayor has already said he wants to get paid in Bitcoin temporarily, though how that might work is a complicated question. And he’s been hanging around with some of the titans of the crypto world — and perhaps not the most savory of them.
Is Eric Adams trying to demonstrate his credentials as a Neo-Liberal Hipster with his saying that ‘he wants to get paid in Bitcoin temporarily’. @realaxelfoley, in the rest of his essay points to the ‘character’ of Brock Pierce:
Elder millennials may remember Pierce for his roles in the Mighty Ducks movies and First Kid. But these days he is a leading Bitcoin entrepreneur and evangelist who makes his home in San Juan and has wanted to turn Puerto Rico into a “Burning Man Utopia,” as Playbook notes. He has also been accused of child sexual abuse — allegations he denies — and once lived in the house where director Bryan Singer allegedly abused underage boys. Pierce ran for president last year and is considering a Senate run in Vermont next year.
Associations with possibly shady characters? Opacity around expenses and travel? You can expect a lot more of both over the next four years.
Is Mr. Adams just an aspirant to the mantle of ‘Mike’ Bloomberg, without the billions? The Reader might recall Bret Stephens’ fawning essay, by way of Mr. Stephens gushing over Adams’ new gold earing, on July 20, 2021, in The New York Times:
Headline: Eric Adams Is Going to Save New York
Eric Adams arrives for lunch alone, no entourage or media handler. He shows me his new earring — “the first thing,” he says, that Joe Biden “asked to see” when the two met recently to discuss gun violence. He orders a tomato salad with oil on the side, the abstemious diet of the all-but-crowned king of New York.
For some progressives, the prospect of Adams as mayor (he still has to defeat Republican opponent Curtis Sliwa in November) is a nightmare. He’s been a thorn in the side of every institution he’s ever been part of.
He’s a former cop who crusaded against police brutality, a leading Democrat who was once a registered Republican, a machine politician who casts himself as a foe of city bureaucracy, a self-described progressive who’s friendly to charter schools and real estate developers and, most recently, a champion of law-and-order who refutes the idea that a Black leader must also be on the left.
For the rest of big-city America, not to mention the Democratic Party that usually runs it, he’s a godsend.
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The City Journal, the propaganda arm of The Manhattan Institute, home to ‘Broken Windows Policing’, the precursor to ‘Stop and Frisk’, published this on June 7, 2021:
Headline: Is Eric Adams New York’s Best Mayoral Hope?
Sub-headline: Cops, in particular, are wary of the supposed law-and-order candidate.
Here is a paragraph that seeks to present an apologetic for the nefarious removal of Judge Shira Scheindlin from the ‘Stop and Frisk’ case.
U.S. district judge Shira Scheindlin had a low threshold for crediting anti-NYPD evidence, however. Her opinion, declaring the department guilty of unconstitutional conduct, cited Adams’s testimony to support her finding that NYPD top brass approved of racial profiling. Scheindlin referred to Adams’s testimony again in accusing Kelly of suggesting “that it is permissible to stop racially defined groups just to instill fear in them.”
That argued ‘low threshold for crediting anti-NYPD evidence’ does not explain the why of Scheindlin’s removal. But seeks to mask the ‘perceived sympathy’ of the judge, for the victims of ‘Stop and Frisk’. Which renders her removal seem exactly what it is/was, the product of political expedience. This was/is about the Bloomberg EGO! Here is a selection, from an essay by Dan Wise, in the January 8, 2014 issue of The Nation:
Headline: Removing the Judge Who Ruled ‘Stop and Frisk’ Unconstitutional Is a Blow to Justice
Sub-headline: An appeals court’s unprecedented removal of Shira Scheindlin has sent a chilling message to other federal judges.
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Should the panel’s removal order remain on the books, it would set a terrible precedent. The court’s removal of Scheindlin even before it decided the appeal was very likely unprecedented. Moreover, the ruling was so marred by departures from customary practices as to raise questions about the panel’s neutrality.
In a sign of undue haste at a court known for its attention to detail, the unsigned ruling contained a glaring error, which the three judges were forced to correct two weeks later. Further, the panel removed Scheindlin even though the city never sought her removal in the case; the panel then faulted her for taking a step the city had not objected to six years earlier—and it did so in a manner that precluded her from defending herself from the suggestion that she had been unethical.
Research by University of Virginia Law School professor Toby Heytens, soon to be published in the Stanford Law Review, underscores the aberrant nature of the panel’s removal order. Heytens found that appeals court replacements of trial judges have been highly unusual. More important, he did not find a single case issued by any of the nation’s thirteen federal circuit courts in which removal was required before an appeal had been decided on the merits.
Headline: Departing Judge Offers Blunt Defense of Ruling in Stop-and-Frisk Case
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The attacks on Judge Scheindlin only intensified after a federal appeals panel stayed her ruling, criticized her actions in the case and removed her from continuing to oversee it.
But last week, as Judge Scheindlin prepared to step down after nearly 22 years as a federal district judge in Manhattan, she offered her first extensive interviews about the case and her tenure, with a particularly blunt response to the criticism.
She would never forget, she said, seeing a front-page photograph in a newspaper the day after she released her ruling, showing Mr. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, as she put it, “looking like two angry white men.”
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The attacks on Judge Scheindlin only intensified after a federal appeals panel stayed her ruling, criticized her actions in the case and removed her from continuing to oversee it.
But last week, as Judge Scheindlin prepared to step down after nearly 22 years as a federal district judge in Manhattan, she offered her first extensive interviews about the case and her tenure, with a particularly blunt response to the criticism.
She would never forget, she said, seeing a front-page photograph in a newspaper the day after she released her ruling, showing Mr. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, as she put it, “looking like two angry white men.” …
What Mr. Adams misses, in his comments regarding what he paid, or didn’t pay is that he needs to be above reproach. Present the receipts!
The opening paragraphs of Mr. Stephens diatribe open with ‘American Jews were aware’ that become a momentary leitmotif ‘we were aware’ though that ‘we’ is so rhetorically inflated, as to be applicable to the ‘many’ lost in his diatribe…
‘American Jews were aware’ & ‘We were aware’ repeated seven times before Stephens resort to subtitles:
Awakenings
In a brief 809 words Stephen’s maps part of the political & moral trajectory of his diatribe, and it’s Cast of Characters, and the appearance of underlined texts and links alone as references. The Victimhood Narrative takes shape:
After Oct. 7, it became personal. It was in the neighborhoods in which we lived, the professions and institutions in which we worked, the colleagues we worked alongside, the peers with whom we socialized, the group chats to which we belonged, the causes to which we donated, the high schools and universities our kids attended. The call was coming from inside the house.
It happened in innumerable ways, large and small.
Editor: a brief collection of those characters, actors salvaged from this section: the very notion that Labor Organizer, and the author of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, has anything in common with Stephens is not just disingenuous, but self-serving! And Harvey Milk was Gay! The Victimhood Deck is shuffled:
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Few minorities have been more conspicuously attached to progressive causes than American Jews: Samuel Gompers and labor unionism; Betty Friedan and feminism; Harvey Milk and gay rights; Abraham Joshua Heschel and civil rights; Robert Bernstein and human rights. A proud history, but whatever we poured of ourselves into the pain and struggle of others was not returned in our days of grief. Nor should we expect much understanding: In an era that stresses sensitivity to every microaggression against nearly any minority, macroaggressions against Jews who happen to believe that Israel has a right to exist are not only permitted but demanded.
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Editor: ‘a Manichaean view on the left’ : in sum the ‘Left’ is not, nor will never be ‘one of us’ The Tribe! Then what of Marx, Henri Bergson, Jacques Derrida? Stephen’s possible quip, ‘Who are they’ ?
It won’t end because anti-Zionism has a self-righteous fervor that will attract followers and inspire militancy. It won’t end because politics in America are moving toward forms of illiberalism — conspiracy thinking and nativism on the right, a Manichaean view on the left that the world is neatly divided between the oppressors and the oppressed — that are congenial to classic antisemitism. And it won’t end because most Jews will not forsake what it means to be Jewish so that we may be more acceptable to those who despise us.
Editor: The Reader now confronts the sub-topic of ‘Illusions’.
Illusions
Editor: 876 words and more of those sentence fragments attached dangling in paragraphs, I will post the most – this is propaganda the more hyperbolic the better, in ‘Stephen’s World’
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There was the illusion that a secure Jewish community would remain so.
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…Abe Foxman, who was then the director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a 2014 news release. “The falling number of incidents targeting Jews is another indication of just how far we have come in finding full acceptance in society.”
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But now we had arrived. We were Jerry Seinfeld and Cher Horowitz from “Clueless” and Adam Sandler crooning his “Hanukkah Song” on “Saturday Night Live.” We were Alan Greenspan, the celebrated maestro of central banking, and Rick Levin, the first Jewish president of Yale, and Nora Ephron, the country’s most beloved screenwriter, and Steven Spielberg, the most acclaimed director.
I desperately want to believe that what’s happened since last year on college campuses won’t go far beyond the quads; that Joe Biden won’t be the last Democratic president to also be a sincere Zionist; that the Republican Party will snap out of the populism and nativism into which Trump has sunk it, which invariably produces antisemitism; that Black America won’t turn sharply against the Jews; that America’s exhaustion with being the world’s de facto policeman won’t lead it to forsake small countries faced with aggressive totalitarian neighbors; that Greene and Rashida Tlaib will never hold leadership positions in their parties; that young Americans drawn to anti-Israel politics will rethink their radicalism as they grow older; that envy won’t replace admiration as the way average Americans view personal and communal success; that an America that exists somewhere between Morningside Heights in Manhattan and Berkeley, Calif., still hasn’t lost its moral decency and common sense.
I want to believe all this. I’m just finding it harder than ever to do
Reckonings
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Editor: ‘Ancestral Knowledge’ is another way of excusing the ongoing Genocide in Gaza, and the attacks on Lebanon, a potential attack on Iran, and WWIII?
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Oct. 7 and the worldwide reaction to it began the jarring process of restoring that ancestral knowledge. Most of us still don’t quite know what to do with it.
Do we carry on more or less as before, on the Solomonic view that this too shall pass? Do we go on offense by withholding donations to the institutions that have harmed us or suing them or calling for congressional hearings or taking out Super Bowl ads to raise alarms about antisemitism? Do we reach out to communities (within and without the Jewish world) from whom we feel alienated so that they may hear from us, and vice versa? Do we invest more heavily in Jewish education, so that more Jewish parents can have good options for an affordable Jewish day school and more 18-year-olds can have meaningful gap years in Israel?
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Editor: I’ll end my comment here, predicated on the utter ignorance of Stephen’s knowing anything other that what he experienced: except by a selfless act of reimagining one’s self as ‘other’!
To have been born a Jew is the single most fortunate thing that ever happened to me. It is a priceless moral, spiritual, intellectual and emotional inheritance from my ancestors, some of whom were slaughtered for it. It’s a precious bequest to my children, who will find different ways to make it their own. It is therefore worth the time it takes to explore and worth the cost — including, tragically, the cost in bigotry and violence — it so often extracts.
Editor: Mr. Stephens is a propagandist! And ignorant of Emmanuel Levinas, in this case, or like so many that cultivate ignorance, in the name of political advancement, simple opportunism, or constricting usable propaganda: that mimics the trapping of thought, without it’s underlying commitment to veracity, intellectual honesty and transparency!
Mr. Kaplan makes no secret that he is a Neo-Conservative, as his impressive resume, as presented by Eurasia Group, makes utterly clear, and the sub-headline of his latest screed .His resume , below, simply confirms his status as a Propaganda Operative, of the once ascendent ‘Post-War Liberal Order’, under many and varied descriptors, that is now mired in the ever expanding Zionist Pogroms, with the active complicity of The American National Security State.
As a senior advisor at Eurasia Group, Robert D. Kaplan advises investors and top executives on political risks in countries around the world. Kaplan is the bestselling author of 18 books on foreign affairs and travel and a prolific essayist for numerous publications. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”
In the 1980s, Kaplan was the first US writer to warn in print about a future war in the Balkans. And in the 1990s, his article “The Coming Anarchy,” arguing that population growth, ethnic and sectarian strife, disease, urbanization, and resource depletion are undermining the political fabric of the planet, was hotly debated in foreign-language translations around the world. Other positions held by Kaplan have included senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington; chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor; consultant to the US Army’s Special Forces Regiment, the Air Force, and the Marines; and member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board.
He has lectured for military war colleges, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, major universities, and global business forums. He has briefed kings, presidents, secretaries of state, and defense secretaries, and reported from more than 100 countries. Kaplan, a graduate of the University of Connecticut, was given the Distinguished Alumni Award by his alma mater. He received the Benjamin Franklin Public Service Award by the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.
Editor: The first paragraph of his essay is a quick sketch of the end of the Cold War and the failures Gorbachev:
The Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union ended dramatically not because of a military conflict or international crisis, but because of internal domestic politics: Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms inside the Soviet Union led not to rejuvenation but to the dismantling of the communist system itself, and that, as we know, changed the world.
Editor: The self-serving Historical Pastiche of the above paragraph, compared to the two sources presented below, offer a more Historically relevant, and cogent analysis of the the Gorbachev Reforms, its Political Actors and its actual Historians!
Editor: I will just highlight some of the the vapid propaganda of Mr. Kaplan.
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The postmodern Middle East may experience a similar fate. The military conflict between Israel and Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other Arabs can have lulls and ceasefires, but ultimately cannot truly end until there is change inside Iran. This historical process has only quickened because of the current war in Lebanon, which pits Israel against Iran’s most militarily powerful proxy force, Hezbollah.
The assassination of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September, followed by Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon, further undermines Iran, whose decades-long project in Lebanon may be turning to ashes. The regional war just ahead of us will ultimately focus on Iran itself and its military-security complex. Iranian territory will be less and less off-limits.
Its clerical regime, in power since 1979, defines the region’s era to an extent much greater than evenBenjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, himself a historical life-force who will echo for far longer than the unmemorable mediocrities that now govern Europe and the US. But it is Iran, a country of 88.5 million and an ancient cluster of Persian civilisation (rather than many Arab countries, which are merely vague geographical expressions), that holds the key to the current regional war. Energy-rich Iran provides the money, the military training, the brilliant tactics and the dynamic ideology of revolutionary nihilism (which combines a radical Islam with an anti-Semitic fascism) that has allowed Hamas and Hezbollah to become what they are today. The older Arab-Israeli conflict over historical Palestine was a conventional contest over states and territory. But the introduction of clerical Iran has given the struggle a tiers-mondiste quality, further infused with a millenarian religious call for the annihilation of an entire people.
It is Iran that struck Israel on 7 October 2023, an event so dramatic and so bestial that it will be remembered like 9/11: a date so infamous that it becomes a concept. Of course, Iran did not do the murdering, the raping and the hostage-taking in southern Israel. Hamas and its operatives and supporters did that. Iranian leaders may not even have known about the exact timing of the event, or may even have been uncomfortable with its scope. But their long, total support of Hamas means their strategic fingerprints are all over the attack. Had Iran a different regime, there would likely have been no 7 October – no matter the anger and suffering of the Palestinians.
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This is 1342 words of Zionist Propaganda, just posting the most egregious examples of Kaplans Zionist Fascists Apologetics:
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Thus, with America being less helpful, they needed Israel as almost a corporate acquisition to aid them in their struggle with Iran in this new age of cyber warfare.
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On 7 October 2023 Sinwar’s forces launched an attack reminiscent of the Holocaust, which Sinwar knew, having learned Hebrew in an Israeli prison and understanding the mind of his enemy, would elicit an Israeli military response of such devastating proportions that it would be impossible for MBS and his fellow sheikhs to believe they could ignore their own streets, which were quietly baying for retribution against the Israelis.
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A simultaneous regional war in Lebanon and the Red Sea has been ignited as a result of the scale of the Israeli military response.
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On 7 October, that arrogance, in part, resulted in too much reliance on technology, allowing young people to congregate at a music festival protected by electronic surveillance rather than by soldiers.
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The Israeli military and intelligence services may be resourceful, but Israel’s entrepreneurial economy simply cannot sustain an Armageddon for too long. Nor are territorial concessions by Israel necessarily the answer: Gaza was a de facto independent state for two decades, with no Israeli troops or settlers.
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Many once made the mistake of thinking the shah’s system was eternal; one should not repeat the error. The collapse of the shah was a world-historical event; the collapse of Tehran’s clerical system might be too.
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Israel’s recent strikes against Hezbollah, in addition to creating the conditions for the return of 60,000 Israeli civilians to northern Israel, carries the benefit of preparing the battle space for an eventual Israeli strike on Iran.
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Editor: Self-Congratulation dominates this exercise in unapologetic Zionist Propaganda, ended in a toxic evocation of History in the lower case. What might that ‘furious’ mean except the chaos of battle, by a man, writer, pundit with no experience of what War is and means!
That’s where we are at this juncture: a year on, the 7 October attack has unleashed a chain of events that previous decades combined did not do. The pace of history is now furious.
It’s impossible for Bret Stephens to face the unpalatable reality that The West’s proxy’s Kermit Roosevelt & Anglo-Iranian Oil Company overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, and placed the Shah in power. SAVAK (Organization of National Security and Information was the instrument of oppression and murder, Stephens ‘self-willed forgetting’ is nurtured in the Neo-Con lie, in a Tradition of Lies!
The Stage was set for ‘The Iranian Revolution’ of 1978–1979. Reader factor in the American Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as two key factors in the nurturing of ‘Islamic Radicalism’ : which is about throwing off the yoke of oppression by those ‘Radicals’, as they impinge on the Colonial Imaginations of the hallowed Post-War Liberal Order, that is in a continuing state of collapse.
Mr. Stephens is a Zionist Partisan, and not quite yet a Double-Agent. It takes patience to read through this would-be bill of attainder in a mere 815 words. The why and how of this metastasizing rebellion, of the former subjects of that Colonial Mentality, fails to register with Mr. Stephens, though it cannot surprise! I’ll provide a selection of his diatribe, with the hope that The Reader, of her own initiative, will read the complete essay?
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I thought of Nasrallah’s words on Tuesday while watching images of Iranian ballistic missiles raining down on Israel, fortunately causing only slight damage, thanks mainly to Israeli and American air defenses.
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But a prime goal for Iran’s nuclear ambitions is plainly in sight, especially if it receives technical help from its new best friends in Russia, China and North Korea.
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As I write, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, is promising consequences for Iran’s attacks, though it isn’t yet clear what they might be.
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Iran presents an utterly intolerable threat not only to Israel but also to the United States and whatever remains of the liberal international order we’re supposed to lead.
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Editor: with each paragraph Mr. Stephens political hysteria leaps from the page!
There needs to be a direct and unmistakable American response. Iran currently produces many of its missiles at the Isfahan missile complex. At a minimum, Biden should order it destroyed, as a direct and proportionate response to its aggressions. There is a uranium enrichment site near Isfahan, too.
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We can’t simply go on trying to thwart Iran by defensive means only — fighting not to win but merely not to lose.
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Notice that the Iranians began asking for the nuclear negotiations they spurned for the past three years only once they started to fear that Trump might return to office. Bully regimes respond to the stick.
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Notice that the Iranians began asking for the nuclear negotiations they spurned for the past three years only once they started to fear that Trump might return to office. Bully regimes respond to the stick.
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That’s a point Americans have chosen to ignore in recent years, and not to our benefit. As Israelis consider their response to Iran’s missile outrage this week, they know they have no such luxury.
Editor: As the Zionist Faschist State continues it’s Genocide in Gaza, the Theatre of War continues its toxic expansion. While Bret Stephens continues his War Mongering from the comfort of his office! At the least The Reader can look to the bellicose Joe Alsop, who was in Asia and Korea during these Wars/Conflicts as a possible …
Here is my commentary on Mr. Bromwich’s American Breakdown in 2018 in The London Review of Books :
The ‘insights’ of david.bromwich@yale.edu : a collection of quotes and commentary on his London Review of Books essay ‘American Breakdown’. Part One? By Political Observer (Revised)
Mr. Bromwich manages to avoid the current political hysteria ,or simply to mute it, therefore making it more palatable to the reader, than the Corporate Media hysterics.He even manages to shame these political actors, yet at the same moment to exercise a kind of restrained iteration of the current Party Line.
Much of the damage to US politics over the last two years has been done by the anti-Trump media themselves, with their mood of perpetual panic and their lack of imagination. But the uncanny gift of Trump is an infectious vulgarity, and with it comes the power to make his enemies act with nearly as little self-restraint as he does.
Mr. Bromwich’s Bill of Attainder includes Trump’s appointment of Scott Pruitt to the EPA, and his successor Andrew Wheeler both products of an utterly corrupt American Corporatism. Next in order of consideration is Iran, and the Wars of Empire: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, all fully endorsed by the New Democrats, led by ‘tougher than any man in the room’ Mrs. Clinton. An utter inconvenience to Mr. Bromwich’s reserved indictment.
But the patient, indeed, doubtful reader of this writer’s judgement is taken aback by this deviation from the Party Line:
Russia remains the obsessional concern. Not wanting to restart the Cold War might seem one of the few good ideas attributable to Trump, no matter how he came by it, but the pride of the Democrats is invested in pushing him towards renewed conflict: stiffer sanctions, cyber implants, enhanced deployments and joint military exercises with Nato – nothing (it is said) should be ‘off the table’. American commentators lack even a minimal awareness of the circumstances of the eastward push of Nato after 1990. President George H.W. Bush, in return for a united Germany, had promised that Nato would expand ‘not one inch eastward’; and the evacuation of this pledge in the years that followed, under Clinton, the younger Bush and Obama, has rightly been considered a betrayal by every Russian leader from Gorbachev to Putin.
History intrudes itself into a subject not mentioned, but the constant sub-text of the Anti-Trump coterie’s agitprop : The New Cold War fomented by Mrs. Clinton, her minions, and the perpetually bloodthirsty Neo-Conservatives, who have a continuing political romance with her jingoism, expressed by the notion of her ‘toughness’. History is again utterly inconvenient, Mr. Bromwich should be congratulated for this moment of clarifying honesty. A long quote from the virtuous martyred American political saint Lincoln adds more historical depth.
Next in order of appearance are political hysterics Senator Joe McCarthy and Congressman Adam Schiff. Then to Patrick Buchanan and his :
‘Many Putin actions we condemn were reactions to what we did. Russia annexed Crimea bloodlessly. But did not the US bomb Serbia for 78 days to force Belgrade to surrender her cradle province of Kosovo? How was that more moral than what Putin did in Crimea?’
By this quotation from Mr. Buchanan, identifies Mr. Bromwich as an Apostate to the current New Cold War Mythology!
Next in line are considerations of the Republican Party’s ‘collaboration’ with Trump and the utterly preposterous , but self-congratulatory notion of the ‘Resistance’. Recall the quote from Goya: ‘The sleep of reason brings forth monsters’ !
Mr. Bromwich then opines that:
Police, for the most part, haven’t yet shown a pro-Trump disposition, and Democrats should want to keep things that way. Among officers of law enforcement at all levels, Trump’s role as an instigator of popular disorders is the strongest point against him.
The years 2016 and 2017 have escaped the political memory of Mr. Bromwich, in which 2600, mostly black people, were murdered by police in America, without one conviction in a court of law. The Police have already rendered a verdict. The ‘Broken Widows Policy’ of the Manhattan Institute, has evolved into a siege mentality- the domestic corollary of the War on Terror. A bourgeois pundit like Mr. Bromwich dare not go that far in his Apostasy.
The first part of Mr. Bromwich’s ends with the ‘Democrats’ and the feckless dullard Comey, playing a new role as FBI Hero, straight out of the manufactured lore of movies,radio and television propaganda, spanning generations. The scandal of the FBI Crime Laboratory remains unmentioned in Mr. Bromwich commentary:
See John F. Kelly author of Tainting Evidence : Behind the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab on C-Span address here of July 10, 1998:
I had better now make my position clear to avoid a misunderstanding. In April and May, and earlier for that matter, I would have supported a campus teach-in, or better, a campus-originated march on the White House or the Pentagon to demand an immediate Israeli cessation of bombing and to press for the negotiation of a ceasefire, under threat of withdrawal of American support. It took a very few days, however, for the protests to face in an altogether different direction: what began as an anti-war protest had turned anti-Israel, without regard to peace or war, and it seemed clear that, for some people, the Palestinian flag had taken on a new meaning, including the erasure of Israel from the map.
It had become unclear anyway—in strictly political terms—by what logic the universities were the most effectual staging ground for a protest. Yet the encampments, the slogans they chanted, and the symbols they asked to be known by, all seemed a natural expression of the politics that has come in the public mind to represent the universities.
The long-term consequences of the specialization of campus politics have been unhappy for American society generally. Political complexity of mind is rare among students, but the same students will go on to be full-time citizens. Some of the fault is traceable to university administrators: their political position-taking, after recent elections and supreme court decisions and certain shocking local or national events, has seemed to define the boundaries of polite opinion. Such public statements are now being pulled back, with recent moves toward “institutional neutrality,” and that is a good thing. The idea that universities, as if they were a person, should carve out an official stance on social and political issues of the day is a recent innovation; it has had a fair trial and been found useful mainly as an instrument of social control and conformity—neither of which qualifies as an educational value.
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Two telling political/moral questions present themselves in Mr. Bromwich’ s long essay: that he is ‘The Voice of Reason’ and that somehow Jewish Students are not subject to the ‘Call of Tribalism’, or that Jewish Vagilities didn’t attacked UCLA student with impunity!
Mr. Bromwich is a ‘Liberal’, this political creature long, left behind in an American Politics dominated by New Democrats, Republicans, Neo-Conservatives , all held together by AIPAC money!
A wrong lesson has been learned from an airbrushed memory of the 1960s. The antiwar protests of that time may have begun in college teach-ins, but they went on to organized marches in big cities. Disrupting the universities became part of the program only in a later and decadent phase; and even as the narrowest of tactics, it never made sense. The truth is that “shut-it-down” campus protests were the path of least resistance, the method closest to home, but they pushed against the necessary ethic of a university because they involved an element of coercion.
The implication for the present moment is clear. On no account should students or their faculty supporters be allowed to prevent the speech or disrupt the intellectual work of any member of a university. If students opt out of attending classes, or otherwise fail to satisfy academic expectations, the normal penalties should apply. Meanwhile, of course, the right to dissent has as natural a home in a university as it does in a free society more broadly.
Lets hear from that original ‘60’s’ Radical Mario Savio: I watched this on the ‘Evening News’ of the time!
“When we turn in on ourselves, we lose,” Sunak told activists in a low-key address on the first day of the party’s annual conference in Birmingham. “We must end the division and the backbiting and squabbling,” he added.
“Whoever wins the contest, give them your backing.”
“We must always remember what unites us, rather than obsessing about where we might differ,”
Sunak attacked Starmer’s “cruel” decision to withdraw winter fuel payments from most pensioners and lampooned the prime minister’s acceptance of free clothes and glasses from the Labour peer Lord Alli.
The Tory leader said: “Socialists always run out of other people’s money, something Lord Alli is finding out the hard way,” he said. Sunak added: “You don’t need designer glasses to see the shine is coming off Keir Starmer already.”
In a reminder of one of the worst scandals that beset the final weeks of Sunak’s premiership, Sky News reported on Sunday that his key lieutenant Oliver Dowden, former deputy prime minister, has been interviewed in the official investigation into betting on the date of the general election.
An investigation was launched in June when Craig Williams, Sunak’s closest parliamentary aide, and another Tory candidate were placed under investigation for allegedly placing bets on the date of the election, prompting the Conservative party to eventually withdrew support from them just days before the poll. A Labour candidate was also suspended over placing bets on whether he would lose his seat.
Dowden spoke to police officers involved in the Gambling Commission probe earlier this summer to help their inquiries as part of their investigation into other figures, it was reported.
An ally of Dowden said he was never and is not under any sort of investigation by the Gambling Commission.
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Editor: The Reader need only look at the scandals of the Tory Party as evidence of a double standard, or that both New Labour and the Tories are equally corrupt and even malfeasant!
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The Guardian:
Headline: Moderation out and madness to the fore in the Tories’ Birmingham echo chamber
Sub-headline: With the leadership contenders vying to out-crazy each other, it was Boris – well it would be, wouldn’t it – who outdid them all
Editor: John Crace’s virtue is that he writes as a satirist, in sum his cut and trust are part of his tellingly alive satire, that points to the bad, and or miserable playacting, of those who wield power. The opening shot off the bough:
See it from the point of view of the Fearless Four. You’ve already seen off the mighty challenge of Priti Patel and Mel Stride, latter-day Tory titans both, so now you’re through to the Birmingham eliminator.
You’ve disappeared through the wormhole into the mephitic swamp where any intelligent life comes to die. Where only the clinically deranged and terminally deluded are to be found. Where the sanest voice is Michael Fabricant’s rug pleading with its owner to be allowed to go home. Welcome to the Tory party conference.
But this is your big moment. Four days when the Tory party has nothing better to do than to turn its gaze in on itself. Four days when you can take centre stage. When your narcissism can go unchecked. You’ve been dreaming about this for weeks. People actually pretending to be interested in what you have to say.
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It’s been said by Boris Johnson in the serialisation of his almost entirely fictional memoir. The one that is written so badly it could have been done by ChatGPT. As ever, Boris has done the least amount of work possible and still he outshines those he has left behind. When it comes to attention-seeking sociopathy, he has no equal.
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Which has left the Fearless Four in something of a quandary. They are boxed in. Nowhere to go. Their madness will only look half-arsed. Too tame for Tories given new hope by the thought of starting a third world war fuelled by Covid dreams.
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But whether the Tories like it or not, Honest Bob is the clear favourite to win the leadership contest. And he was the first out of the blocks on the Sunday morning media round.
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At least the Tories have Kemi Badenoch. Having implied that immigrants should be banned from entry to the UK for not liking Israel, KemiKazi went for broke by insisting that all women who had babies were basically spongers. Only getting pregnant to hoover up maternity pay.
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The best news for the Fearless Four is that all this took place inside an echo chamber. Compared with previous years, the conference is a ghost town. The security is to keep people inside the compound, not to stop the unwanted coming in.
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It was hardly a truth and reconciliation committee. More a coming together of the weak and the fallen, trying to console themselves that the public still loved them really. It’s not you, it’s me. The Tories haven’t quite grasped that no one gives a toss what Penny Mordaunt and Daniel Hannan have to say any more. If they ever did.
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It seems the Conservatives have a way to go before the collective synapses interact. The biggest queue of the day was for Rishi Sunak. Here for one day, only to show slides of his summer hols in California. Says it all, really.
I hope that my selections from Mr. Crace’s essay, and my reductivist vignettes, have or will lead the reader to explore his singular talent!
Political Observer provides two Le Monde commentaries.
Editor: I will not pretend that I have done nothing more that provide the links, to these two Le Monde Opinion commentaries. The Reader need only look at the compelling evidence that Macron is mendacious, incompetent and politically toxic. The fictional ‘Jupiterian Politics’ that once Public Relations salvo, has de-volved into a permanent political fracturing ?
Political Reporter on Barnier’s conservatism, that ’tilts to the right’ : is a well established fact?
Headline: French PM Barnier’s still-to-be-approved government tilts to the right
Sub-headline: Michel Barnier handed President Macron his cabinet line-up on Thursday. According to the prime minister’s office, the government will be officially appointed before Sunday.
These initial elements show that Barnier has drawn on the former majority and on the right to make his selection. While the prime minister claims to be representing a “break” with the previous government, his team’s profile bears a striking resemblance to the previous one, being essentially made up of Macronists and LR elected representatives. This composition confirms the right-wing direction of Macron’s administration. The only difference with previous governments since his 2017 election is that this time, the alliance between the presidential camp and the right is fully asserted.
The absence of figures from the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) alliance, for the moment, contributes to the impression of imbalance in the new team, even though the NFP came out on top in the second round of legislative elections. “In France, under Macron, it’s all the losers of the last elections who are going to make up the government,” denounced Manuel Bompard on X. The top official in the radical left La France Insoumise party then called for demonstrations on September 21, “everywhere in France against the biggest scam of the Fifth Republic.”
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Have @gatinois4 & @alexandrepedro willfully forgotten this from The Telegraph of September 9, 2021?
Headline: Michel Barnier demands return of France’s ‘sovereignty’ from European courts
Sub-headline: Former EU negotiator accused of hypocrisy by Brexiteers after attack on European Court of Justice
Michel Barnier said that France had to regain the sovereignty it has lost to European courts on Thursday and called for a referendum on a ban on non-EU immigration.
The former Brexit negotiator and EU commissioner was accused of hypocrisy because his comments appeared to contradict many of the positions he took when he was helming talks with the UK.
During the Brexit negotiations, Mr Barnier, who is running to be French president for the centre-Right Republicains party, called for the European Court of Justice to continue to hold sway in the UK and insisted it remained the sole and supreme arbiter of EU law.
He also secured British commitments that the UK would remain part of the European Court of Human Rights, which is not an EU institution, in return for cooperation on extradition after Brexit.
Mr Barnier said at a rally, “We must regain our legal sovereignty so that we are no longer subject to the rulings of the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights.”
“We will propose a referendum in September on the issue of immigration,” he said, referring to his earlier call for a halt on non-EU immigration into France for five years.
Freedom of movement, which is open to EU nationals in the bloc, would continue under his proposal, which would stop all non-EU residency permit requests for three to five years except asylum seekers and students.
Mr Barnier later tweeted a clarification saying that France should not break entirely free of the European courts but only have a “constituional shield” on matters to do with non-EU immigration.
“This is ironic in the extreme. Barnier preaching the merits of national sovereignty to curb the over-powerful EU and European Court of Human Rights,” tweeted Simon Clarke, the Tory MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland.
Nigel Farage, the former Brexit Party leader, told the Telegraph Mr Barnier was the “biggest hypocrite ever born” for co-opting eurosceptic arguments after working for the EU for so long.
Mr Barnier also took aim at the Franco-German relationship at the heart of EU policy making. He said that the relationship was unbalanced by a dominant Berlin and France needed to reassert itself.
Ursula von der Leyen, the woman chosen ahead of Mr Barnier to be European Commission president, is German.
Mr Barnier stands little chance of being elected ahead of either the pro-EU incumbent Emmanuel Macron or the eurosceptic, anti-migrant National Rally’s Marine Le Pen in the presidential election next year.
After many years working for the European Commission in Brussels, his profile is not as high as his rivals and his Republicains have not recovered from their mauling at the last presidential elections.
Since announcing he would run for the presidency, Mr Barnier has made a pitch for votes from people who feel disenfranchised by globalisation.
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