Bipartisanship is So Dead Its Body Isnt Even Rotting

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[... a copy of an email sent to a friend of mine, a strong supporter of bipartisanship ...]

I wrote a many page email to try and create a narrative to explain my point of view. But it was long winded and tiresome. Here is the short more direct version. One party no longer subscribes to tit for tat as you put it. Their constituents have successfully created a party whose strategy is "I get everything; you get nothing". Nothing but total victory is acceptable to them, when you lose you scream bloody murder, when you win its because you were right. Negotiating with the enemy is just a way to run out the clock and fuck them so that they get nothing and you get everything. The hope is that you can sucker the stupid morons, the Democrats, into doing it over and over again. Charlie Brown and the Football. As part of this, the laws are bullshit for other people. When you do something its the right thing to do. If they do anything to oppose you its because they are left wing radicals who want to destroy america. So, it is the right thing to do to destroy the judiciary. It is the right thing to do to strangle black people on the street. It is the right thing to do. Statistically speaking, at the national level at least, this is the policy of the Republican party and there are no other Republicans. They are all Devon Nunes. Every once in a while you get a shill like Collins who pretends to want to do the right thing, but she never does, its just a tactic to make the stupid Democrats waste time before they get fucked again. Ha ha ha! We fucked you! The constitution exists as a way to fuck freedom and steal elections. Everyone knows that. As Matt Gaentz (sp?) says, this is how the game is played, stop complaining. When the other party is in power you fuck the country as hard as possible so that people will get mad at them and reelect you to continue your looting.

Therefore as far as I am concerned, we stop complaining and we start fighting. Term limits, End the filibuster. Pack the court. If we own the senate, then goddamn it, own the senate. Remove citizens united. Restore the fairness doctrine. Put the motherfuckers in jail where they can learn moral improvement and become better people. Game theory has proven time and again that you cant compromise with people of bad faith. There is no point in discussing racial equality with Nazis. There is no point in discussing it with Republicans, either. The good old days of the bipartisan approach to the US Government is so dead the body isnt even rotting anymore. Now its just a matter of whether we live in a right-wing authoritarian and racist society or we dont. Some of us are tired of being treated like garbage, we intend to fight back. Lets see if the constitution actually has any value or if it is the joke people think it is like the high-sounding constitutions of your other, shithole countries. Enforce the law on the criminals of the previous administration. Use the power we earned to pass the legislation necessary. We have two years. Bernie Sanders, my favorite democratic socialist jew from brooklyn, has warned the Democratic party that it is time to deliver results. If not, people will be real mad and the Democrats can kiss winning an election goodbye.

I say this for your own good!

Four Bad Things in One Day

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Let me tell you what happened today.

1. The senate republicans voted against a trial for trump on procedural grounds, and while they lost it indicates there is no chance of a trial on its merits. For a second time the Republicans vote entirely on political grounds and show zero integrity.

2. Manchen (D-WVA) indicates he will not vote to get rid of the filibuster under any circumstances. Without Manchen the Democrats will lose every vote in the Senate, and with the filibuster, most bills will not even get to a vote.

3. A Trump appointed judge in Texas put a hold on the temporary block that Biden put in place on deportations. The judiciary has been destroyed and even if we passed bills the Trump judiciary would just block them.

4. The Russians, who put Trump in power, loved the insurrection and so they are now hosting Parler so the nutty boy right can plan more deaths.

I propose that given the Republicans are traitors, the judiciary is fucked, that the Democrats do not control the senate and with the right now having a secure comm channel, that the situation is about as bad as it can be.

Oh Columbia! Oh!

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Though they may defecate in the hallways of your sacred justice and put their perjuring attack dogs on your most supreme court, they do not realize that without a legitimate process the opinions and judgments from this perverted court mean nothing and have no power to command.  

 

The American People will rise up and defend you.  They will defend the will of the majority against this minority of pernicious conspirators!

 

We are coming, Columbia!  We will defend you! 

Explaining Twitter's Ban of Trump

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A friend of mine, Seth Haberman, is concerned about the free speech issues of Twitter banning Trump, who is an obvious criminal and murderer, from Twitter.  This was my response.

I suppose I should be pleased that people are trying to think about, and take seriously, such issues as freedom of speech, but I suggest you are overthinking it. Twitter supported a right wing criminal, bully and compulsive liar as long as they could, doing exactly what the Right told them to do. Then, when Trump gave that ridiculous speech and the rioters attacked the capitol, I suspect that Twitter's attorneys told their client to run for cover. Their position was and is legally weak, and the corporate sponsors knew that there was going to be a backlash from their users, from their advertisers, from voters, and from Congress. Twitter waited to the last possible moment that they plausibly could, I think they deserve credit for that. I am not sure what the final straw was, perhaps the guy in the horns, or the policeman who was murdered with the fire extinguisher to the head, or the MAGA folks defecating in the hallways of Congress, or maybe because a big part of their user base was hopping mad? Or maybe, like deVos, it was nothing of the sort, they just waited to the last minute to jump ship, at this point it is every person for themselves as they try to dodge the inevitable criminal indictments and civil lawsuits. I think it is nice that you and Merkel are concerned about the bigger first amendment issues, but I wouldnt worry, the right wing supreme court will keep things as they are. This decision was a pure CYA and had very little to do with ethics or free speech. That is and will continue to be just a superficial cover for the usual maneuvering for power and money.

Explaining Amazon's Action About Parler

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Amazon removed Parler from their cloud after the riots on Jan 6, 2020, thus putting Parler offline, at least temporarily.  Well, it was a good move, but before people think that Amazon is therefore a company of character, lets review some background here.  This is a good example of why the riot changes everything. 

 

The fact is that Parler was wildly egregious about "violent content" before the riot. But also of course Amazon did nothing whatsoever to restrain their behavior and the riot was significantly promoted and planned on that social network. Amazon wanted the money and they did not want to be accused by the right wing traitors of persecuting the right, part of the mythology of right victimization, even though they are not only not victimized, they are given extraordinary and extralegal protection they do not deserve. But now that the right attack on democracy and the us government legitimacy has been made explicit, Amazon has to act or become both liable for anything else that happens but also has to face the wrath of the shareholders. In other words, this is not an act of principle, or even of a company obeying its own guidelines, it was a craven move of corporate executives to avoid criticism of their bad corporate governance.

 

 

Cassandra Speaks

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I watched Fox News spew editorial garbage fueling the politics of resentment of the right, and yet there is no way to demand equal time to point out the nearly insane hypocrisy and even stupidity of what they were saying. I watched Putin, that KGB homicidal maniac, talking about the failure of our government. I watched Trump spend an hour on national television lying about how the election was a fraud and incite his followers to attack Congress and illegally keep him in power. And yet Trump is still in power with control of the weaponry that could destroy the world in 30 minutes. This situation was coming for years and I have been like Cassandra crying in the wilderness for all the good I have done.

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Did you notice that the internal security forces in Nashville had never heard what is arguably one of the more famous pop songs of a previous generation? Did you notice the police did not seem to understand or mention one possible reason for the song, which is at least plausibly as a motivational aid (think "Ride of the Valkyries").

And go down town.
Things will be great when you're
Down town.
No finer place for sure,
Down town.
Everything's waiting for you.

We have further information that Warner was a seeker of truth about the Lizard Conspiracy to control civilization.  This makes more sense now.

Signs in Santa Barbara December 21 2020

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Signs from my neighborhood in Santa Barbara Dec 21 2020.

... and in context ...

Abominations of the Week December 20 2020

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Too much bullshit in this world, we have to aggregate.  Wired magazine runs an article that says that an attack on the US by Russia is not an attack because ... wait for it ... espionage.  Stupid.  Republicans are attacking Jill Biden because she has a Dr prefix for her name but isnt an M.D.  Wow, are all republicans stupid.  Yes, republicans are stupid.  Facebook blocked me again but for good reason, I say Republicans should be shot, and they should be.  

 

I plan to leave this country, I am not interested in being here anymore.

 

 

How we Finance Education and the American Dream

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Dear [REDACTED]

You were the kind person to explain the reality of what an educational loan is when I was confused and the information finally got through the layers of self-deception and for that matter, the layers of belief that I was programmed to have. And the core of that belief was: if you want to go to school, there will be a way to pay for it. This of course is not true. What I want to talk about here is what this policy, this system of educational finance, implies about our country and its fundamental mythology.

There is a school of public policy that believes that we can build better systems for our people by understanding how the world works, how we serve justice, how we decide to tax or not tax, how we elect representatives, how we decide to subsidize certain industries, how we feed our people and look to see empirically and theoretically what impact those policies have. It is implicit to this philosophy that ultimately we can distinguish between better or worse policies even though we may not be wise enough to predict the implications up front. The law of unintended consequences continues to screw up our best laid plans. Its complicated out there in the real world. When things go bad sometimes it is because people are being evil, but usually they are just wrong. Or the context changed. Or maybe people were not thinking it through. I have a favorite example and it involves the fairness of our elections. Every Southerner is familiar with various schemes to disenfranchise people of color and people who are poor. We have been doing it for a long time and we are good at it. One way we do this is to finance the election infrastructure by county, not by state. Well its not a surprise to learn that some counties are richer than others and that furthermore wealth is correlated with race. Furthermore, it turns out that some of the election systems are not as robust and have a higher percentage of either a misfire when a voter accidentally does not vote for their chosen candidate or when a ballot must be thrown out for technical reasons. And so it turns out that in a close election, this may be all you need to rig the game. That is the implication of the hanging chad, those chads did not hang at random. Those chads were associated with the cheaper and older voting systems in those predominantly black and poorer counties.

But my point is not about who won that election, or how that system came to be, my point is that we can not be blind to the implications of our system of financing election infrastructure, not after 2000. As a Southerner I was really annoyed. Fix the goddamn voting machines, I thought to myself. I am tired of hearing about it. Yes it will cost a little money, deal with it. How we chose to finance that part of our system of government turns out to have implications that are important. We may not be able to end racism or feed the hungry but at least in this case we can make our elections just a little more fair. We should do it.

How we pay for education in this country is a non trivial part of who has access to education and also to who has access to elite education. Because, in case you had not noticed, America is incredibly elitist. Its not that there arent a few exceptions who through merit or luck can transcend their origins, it can and does happen. But the odds are not great. I laugh when I hear that a justice is an "originalist" because I am from Virginia and in Virginia elections were always for the several hundred families, all intermarried, who were the equivalent of landed gentry, plus a few merchants and bankers and craftsmen if they were well liked. I am very fond of Virginia on a number of different levels and I am proud to be from there. The first rule of an elite who has power is to see to it that they maintain power for their class and set. Not everyone realizes that one reason the military is so important to a Southerner is because it is a recognized way to improve your lot in life, to pay for an education, to have a career if you were not born with one. In 21st century America things are different than they were in 18th century Chesapeake. Now you may need a Doctor of Philosophy just to have a good middle class life. And you may need to be a member of certain clubs to run for office even though there is nothing on paper that says you have to belong.

If the American dream is contingent on who can get an advanced degree, then how we pay for it is crucial. The only people who can get loans are people who dont need one is a fundamental philosophy of every loan officer. This is not a level playing field. I am disappointed, one more time, in the harsh reality of America so different from its promise.

Thank you again for your patience and your good will.