NOTICE TO READERS

This is my “retired” blog.

From 2004 to 2014, I blogged (long-form, since I started out writing for magazines) nearly every day.

And was featured in Salon, Crooks and Liars, The Moderate Voice, The Democratic Daily, BlueOregon, The (Eugene, Ore.) Register Guard, The (Portland) Oregonian, the Eugene Weekly, The Omaha World Herald, on the local AirAmerica affiliate KOPT and on PBS. (See sidebar for PBS interview). Etcetera.*

[* As in there are more, but I don’t spend a lot of time cultivating my C.V.]

Since 2014, I have blogged infrequently and occasionally, but when I do, I post here.

Courage.

—Hart Williams

Elon Musk Whips The Hellespont

The statue that inspired Keats’ “Ozymandias”

Platformer reports …

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking? “This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

[…] Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart … [and] found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well.

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)

GOPaganda and the Civil War

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, famously said: “Accuse the other side of that which you yourself are guilty.”

Or, allegedly said. Various sites claim that this is a misattribution of

“The cleverest trick used in propaganda against Germany during the war was to accuse Germany of what our enemies themselves were doing,” which Goebbels said at a 1934 Nuremberg rally.

All of which is to say, that even toxic and/or homicidal mendacity covers itself with more mendacity. Case in point, TownHall‘s Kurt Schlichter in his Goebbelseque essay (and multiple book plug),

Are We Looking At Another Civil War?
Kurt Schlichter / Townhall

Consider the logic of the left and it’s no wonder that many people are considering the unspeakable – whether America will devolve into actual violent conflict.  But I dare speak about it at length in my brand-new book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America …

The parallels to Goebbels’ questionable quote are so striking as to actually embrace “identical.”

You Don’t Have To Worry About SCOTUS

This is going to be one of my shorter posts.

Why? Because if you’ve been paying attention to facts, you won’t need much in the way of evidence. If, however, you are inured to facts, and watch FOX News to upgrade and strengthen your prejudices, what on Earth are you doing here? [Shoo! Decent people don’t need to see you.]

Here’s the premise: Every decision made in the last term (and many of the prior terms) are what is termed in law as “the poisoned fruit of the poisoned tree.”

Roe, Roe, Roe Your Wade

The day we’d dreaded was coming — was this one.  This was the day that in the ideology of ivory tower “conservatives” imaginary babies trumped actual women — whose lives were in peril in so many ways.

And, as noted in the dissent, there was NO COMPELLING reason to do it. The five right-wing ideologues did it because they COULD do it. (So much for the ‘limited decisions” that have characterized the modern era — if they ask for a stone, give them a quarry; if they ask for a fish, give them the ocean.)

Because each and every justice involved was hand-picked for this very reason.

The Non-Enemy of the People Strikes Again

Here’s the article, which came out last night:

How Biden sparked a global uproar with nine ad-libbed words about Putin|

By declaring that the Russian leader ‘cannot remain in power,’ the U.S. president seemed to suggest a drastic change in U.S. policy — prompting a scramble by White House officials
Washington Post
By Tyler Pager  and Matt Viser
Yesterday at 7:25 p.m. EDT

I read said article. I also got up this morning and listened to the “sober” CNN reporter asking a member o the Ukrainian Parliament about it.

“This has caused a huge amount of contr0versy back in Washington,” quoth the Non-Enemy of the People.

Yeah. I watched the speech in Poland. And I watched the Washington press decide, in the middle of an existential crisis for Ukraine, and for Poland and for NATO, decide, out of the blue, to play “gotcha” in the midst of a  world crisis.

Flushing the Legal Commode

Haberman book: Flushed papers found clogging Trump WH toilet
Mike Allen / Axios

—  While President Trump was in office, staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper, Maggie Haberman scoops in her forthcoming book, “Confidence Man.”
The existence of documents officially labeled as classified in the trove — which has not previously been reported — raises new questions about why the materials were taken out of the White House….

The whole records thing is getting the attention that it is due. Politically and policy-wise, there is a bit of US Code that could stabilize the politics of America without a great investment in long prosecutions. I will quote the relevant portions, and then I will quote the entire citation:

The New Stochastic Terrorists

Trump, Elder’s campaign falsely claimed fraud before California votes were counted — a growing GOP tactic
By Elise Viebeck and Tom Hamburger
Washington Post

SAN FRANCISCO — Former president Donald Trump’s false voter fraud claims found new life in California’s biggest election this year.

The top Republican seeking to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) in Tuesday’s recall declined before the election to say whether he could accept the results. A website affiliated with his campaign invites visitors to “sign a petition to stop the fraud of the California recall election.” And a previous version of the site — published before the election took place — blamed voter fraud for Newsom being “reinstated” as governor.

There is no evidence for these claims, which have nonetheless been amplified repeatedly this week by former president Donald Trump. But their arrival in the country’s largest blue state offered proof of their currency within the Republican Party, where some leaders have increasingly sought to undermine public confidence in Democratic victories by baselessly alleging that elections are vulnerable to manipulation.

TFG’s denialism was a planned tactic from long before the election of 2020.

If you doubt that, consider Larry Elder’s pre-election claims that the election was/is rigged. And recall that, at the beginning of his “run” for California Recall Governor, he said that the2020 election was fair and square — until Trumpanzees started flinging poo and he then recanted.

I am writing this presuming that the election turns out as expected. Because the threat is REAL, no matter the outcome.

Death By Willful Ignorance

Madness is in the news again:

 One person stabbed as COVID anti-vaxxers and counterdemonstrators clash in front of L.A. City Hall
Los Angeles Times

An anti-vaccine rally at Los Angeles City Hall turned violent on Saturday, with one person stabbed and a reporter claiming he was assaulted, according to police and protesters on the scene…

War of the Worlds 1953 lobby card – PUBLIC DOMAIN

There is a moment from the 1953 George Pal movie version of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds that remains indelibly etched in my memory:

The Martians have kicked our Terran ass quite thoroughly. Even the Flying Wing dropping an atomic bomb on them has had no effect. The city is panicked, but the scientists have one last ditch chance: they have a blood sample; they will move their laboratory and personnel to the Rocky Mountains to research ANY kind of weapon that can harm the Martians.

And then the yowling mob …

I Told You So When No One Would Listen

A feast of crow for our national media. Shame. Shame.

Not all press inspirations are angelic in nature.

This is what I wrote on St. Patrick’s Day, this year”: [“Narrative News as (well-intentioned but dangerous) Propaganda”]

Eight murders in Atlanta neatly fell into the (politically correct) narrative. Alas, it quickly appeared that a DIFFERENT narrative was in evidence, and no one seems to want to talk about that.

Worse, guest after guest on cable news has explicitly rejected the “sex addiction” narrative so as to pursue the “anti-Asian bias” narrative.

WTF people?

The truth is the truth and the facts are the facts unless you are locked in a fundamentalist worldview/mindset in which facts are only meaningful if their cherry-picking advances a pre-existing narrative.

Yes, mindless racism against Asian-Americans (discounting Indians, who, like Egyptians, look wrong to fit their respective continental stereotypes) is bad and wrong.

But so is the American HATRED of sex and sexuality. (Ask Larry Flynt, who was paralyzed by such a screwloose. He’s dead, so you’ll need a medium or a Ouija board).)

But this didn’t fit the narrative of beating our breasts and putting on sackcloth and ashes over anti-Asian racism. Nope. The corpses were humped in furtherance of political ends, and that always ends badly. So, today:

Afghanistan – The End of the Tar Baby Story

h/t dvorasnell

American Soldiers FOB Baylough – Dept of Defense photo

At the end of the day — as we always should have known — we’d be gone and the Taliban would still be in Afghanistan.

U.S. Leaves Its Last Afghan Base, Effectively Ending Operations

Thomas Gibbons-Neff / New York Times

July 2, 2021Updated 9:33 a.m. ET
KABUL, Afghanistan — American troops and their Western allies have departed Bagram, Afghanistan’s largest air base, officials said on Friday, turning over to the Afghan government the sprawling outpost from which the United States waged war for nearly two decades.

With little fanfare and no public ceremony, American troops left the base on Thursday night, U.S. and Afghan officials said. The closure effectively means that major U.S. military operations in Afghanistan are all but over.…

I wrote this many years ago: