So, today the big news is that, once again, the SCOTUS Hhas failed to come to the aid of Donald Trump in his quest to establish the supremacy of the Chief Executive. Although he has now returned to ordinary citizen status, the Congressional request to examine his tax returns from when he as President is not, I would argue. prompted by frivolous interest or personal animus, but by the Congressional assertion of legislative jurisdiction, similar to the SCOTUS interest in asserting judicial autonomy.
Continue reading
Publicity Seeking
The problem of publicity seeking, doing things for show, is that the “rewards” of success and failure are about the same and failure is both easier and more certain. So, we have the World Cup Games of soccer in Qatar, much as we hadthe winter Olympics in Sochi. The world was not long impressed.
Continue reading
Libs
The Roman Catholic Church is the bastion of male hegemony. There are too many RCs on the SCOTUS.
Continue reading
Insufferable
What makes U.S. culture insufferable? Commercialism and the personality fetish.
Mutual admiration vs. mutual absolution
Admiration and absolution are binaries whose results are much the same–bonding, a process thatis very important to males. The need to form attachments is, ofcourse, critical to the establishment of societies.
Continue reading
Behind the Times
In 2022 we are getting an analysis of economic events in 1997 and 2008. There is an irony in the fact that economic experts are always behind the times. Just think, in 1997 the sum of $100 Billion was needed to stabilize a whole country. 25 years later people buying lottery tickets spend that much in a year. The inabulity to perceive currency as a figment of the imagination persists. Why? In part because a host of people do nothing but play with money. Have we learned from crypto that currency is imaginary and its usefulness depends entirely on the probity of the users? Probably not. Just think, $44 Billion easted on a chatter site without any material consequence.
Continue reading
The Prosecution of the President
On the designation of Jack Smith.
Continue reading
Glad
I am feeling glad that I do not have the impulse or urge to control the behavior of other people. How much time is wasted on coercion. Coercion, of course, is not the same as restraint. Restraining unwelcome or bad behavior is worth while.
What’s the matter with SCOTUS?
The SCOTUS is supposed to ride herd on the POTUS and Congress. Instead, it got arrogated to serve the interests of corporate and financial enterprise, even as those were relied on to control the people, who govern, indirectly. Government by the people was never accepted by the elected and appointed bureaucracy. The concept as tolerated as long as “the people” was an exclusive body made up mostly for males.
Continue reading
Noam Chomsky, still speaking
Chomsky gave up on linguistics because he discovered that language could not be broken down into syllables of sound that would have universal meaning, as economists had done in reducing material transactions to numerical values. Economics and linguistics are both referred to as social science, wrongly because neither is predictive and repeatable. Social systems are, like the weather, dynamic–infinitely variable, regardless of how much humans want things to stay the same.
“Student activism” is mostly a topic because the legislators of the civil rights era expected no change in the educational system where “in loco parentis” still reigned. That is, they expected the electorate to remain largely apathetic and follow the direction of the family’s head. Single mothers were decried.
Continue reading