Russiagate

Many writers much better than myself have treated the multiple stories known as “Russiagate”, but it occurred to me that maybe my friends who don’t follow this mess full-time would like some kind of little summary of just what is happening and not happening.

Right now might be a good time for this, with a Green-leaning audience, since the story just recently started including, of all things, Jill Stein potentially colluding with Putin’s regime. (snicker)

For Stein’s own story about this, you can immediately skip to here if you like:
https://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/jill-stein-no-there-there-russian-collusion#.WjmAUxc1v6E.facebook

MORE NEWS FROM THE HELOTS

After a long break, I’ve received another communication from the helixontakers, copied below. (See here and here for background.)

It appears that I missed the most obvious reason for Trump’s victory: Aliens.

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Dear Mudge,

We never responded to your post warning us about faux human behavior, but it was appreciated. Our long silence is in part explained by some disorder among ourselves, which might be of interest to you, explained below.

Round Numbers Again

The last time we had a nice big round number come around on the timeline of history, I ranted about the world before & after WWI. Much as that event burned a black path across Western Civilization, there’s a much bigger round number, with much bigger impact, coming around in October. Better get my $.02 in before anybody else.

According to legend, October 31st, 1517 is when Luther nailed his 95 feces to the church door.

The original shitposter

I hope I don’t need to tell you much about what this set off in Europe for the next couple of centuries. Just Google a few fun things like “Reformation”, “Siege of Munster”, “30 Years War”, and “Witch Trials”.

I’m likely to piss off a few Christians with my first observation: that the content of his 95 theses and the subsequent debate over them are the LEAST interesting part of all this to modern people. Some day, future humanoids will look back on the ideological battles of the 20th century (the Cold War, for instance), and laugh as heartily as we do over indulgences and transubstantiation. (Assuming humanoids stay around that long, but that’s another essay.)

I’m not used to this flattery.

Copied below is a comment I received on my last post (Apocalypse Now & Then). I didn’t approve it for posting because I first wanted to compose a proper “Thank you” in response. I also didn’t want my readers responding and starting a pointless flame war.

But here it is. Apparently, I deserve my own troll now.

edward
Feb 11, 2017

And naturally what we must assume is that what
‘you’ submit must not be propaganda? You, with
a rather affected, premeditated, but puerile
moniker must possess the unbiased political
acumen that no one else has.
You, an insignificant non-entity of conformism
think that you can enlighten us to something
that only you thought of. You, a meaningless
blogger, in today’s world of meaningless
bloggers, is going to somehow edify the
world on your incalculable knowledge of
nothing.
The compulsive dysfunctional narcissistic hubris
of the left has ceased to amaze me; it’s
just redundant propagandistic rhetoric
spewing out incessantly from the box of
denial and hypocrisy, such poor losers.

“Edward”, or whatever your name is, you raised my spirits quite a bit here. Just as our so-called President calls a sitting judge a “so-called judge”, and calls the most boring, mainstream, professional media “fake news”, by bothering to compose a comment calling me a “meaningless blogger”, you prove the opposite.

APOCALYPSE NOW & THEN

Just some notes on what everyone has been talking about for the last three months. I’ve sat through two round tables about what to do now, and there’s never enough time to really come up with much. I hope that I can at least get some of you to read some good “how-to” things mentioned below, if nothing else.

No, that’s not a typo in the picture above.

No, I’m not European. It is month/day. I’m talking about the day after the election, when it became apparent that Trump had a pretty solid electoral college majority.

Yes, it was a shock to a lot of people, myself included. Not that I thought the voters were smarter than that; I’ve learned to expect the worst from them ever since Nixon got re-elected in 1972. But that a candidate could brazenly insult half the voters (by gender) PLUS a couple of large ethnic groups, and get away with it, was a surprise. It went against all conventional wisdom about how a candidate should behave.  This is not the country I grew up in.

OBLIGATORY POST-ELECTION POST

I don’t usually like to write about things that are probably much better explained by others (this one, for instance), https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/democrats-trump-and-the-ongoing-dangerous-refusal-to-learn-the-lesson-of-brexit/
but here it is. With so many people saying “WTF just happened?”, I feel obliged to explain a little. People all over the world are asking:

HOW DID SUCH AN OBVIOUSLY DISGUSTING PERSON GET ANYWHERE NEAR THE WHITE HOUSE, NOT TO MENTION WIN IT?

This is really a two-part question:

(1) How did he get the Rep nomination?
and
(2) How did he win the electoral college?
.

(1) Ok, let’s start with what we have here:  an actor who plays a billionaire on tv, whose only known financial success (other than choosing the right parents) is in marketing himself as a corny image of “success”. Is it really any surprise that someone with a background in this sort of marketing would appeal to a sizeable segment of Republicans?

IT’S LONG PAST TIME TO…

I finally can publish this. The outline existed months ago, but publishing then would have gone over even worse with many people than it will now.

Now, it’s clear.

All the hoopla of the Sanders campaign has come down to a few items in the Dem Party platform, a document about as meaningful as a typical campaign ad.

Oops, how could I forget?  Bernie’s going to fold his campaign into a non-profit and a PAC or two to add to the list with MoveOn, PDA, and DFA.  Is that another earthquake, or the plutocrats shaking in their boots?  Sorry, no.  My next-door neighbor is walking across the floor.

Noise drowning signal, and more Serial

Another communication rant, with questions at the end.

If you’ve been with me for a while, you might recall that I’ve mentioned phatic communication in earlier posts, beginning with this one.  There are many things we say
that mean little or nothing, and I’ll start with a few examples.

.
Example (1) Polite, phatic exchange

Most obvious example: polite little nothing phrases that don’t mean anything like what they say literally.

“How are you?”
(translation: “I’m recognizing your presence, but don’t necessarily want to talk to you for any length of time.  Just to be fair, I’m giving you an opening to tell me about anything that might have come up, but please don’t.”)

“I’m fine, yourself?”
(translation: I might be dying of cancer, but don’t want to talk about it right now, not with you, anyway. Just returning the salute.”)

Now, suppose that one of them is on the witness stand some weeks later:

Q. Mr Skeeb, I understand that on March 18th, you got into the elevator with your supervisor, Mr. Boohah, as you were leaving work, is that correct?

A. Yes, that’s correct.

Q. Do you recall what your conversation with Boohah consisted of at that time?

A. Nothing much. He said “How are you?”, I said “Fine.”  That’s about it.

Q. So you confirm that you said you were “fine” at that time, is that correct?

A. Yes.

Q. And we have just heard your co-worker, Mr. Willbash, tell us that as you were getting ready to leave that day, you remarked to him that your back was “killing you”, because of a herniated disk. Is Mr. Willbash reporting that correctly?

A. Yes, that’s my recollection too.

Q. So you lied to Mr. Boohah when you said you were “fine”, is that correct?

A. If you want to call it that, I suppose.

Q. And if you lied about that, do we have any reason to believe any of your testimony here today?

You get the idea by now, I hope. Of all the billions of conversations that happen on this planet every day, very few have participants who are conscious that they might some day have to explain everything they say under oath.

ASSUMING THE BEST OF INTENTIONS

A flyer recently circulated at some nursing stations at St. Joseph’s in Orange, ostensibly signed by Vivian Norman and referencing the Facebook page of “Guardians of SJO Legacy”. It contains some pretty serious assertions, including personal attacks.

Click to embiggen, as they say.

Front

Back

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In responding, I’ll assume the best about this communication:

— That it actually is composed by Vivian, duplicated at her own expense

— That she actually believes what she says and has a detached concern about organizing bedside nurses, though she is not a bedside nurse and would take no part in the union if it were recognized, and just needs a little enlightenment

I’ll attempt to provide such enlightenment.

CLASH THOSE SYMBOLS!

No, I don’t mean “cymbals”. Read on.
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Part I:  You might be a Confederate

Suppose that, in some future time, nearly all of humanity’s records of the last few centuries were lost, and all the people of the future had to go by for the 19th and 20th centuries were copies of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Inglourious Basterds, and The Grand Budapest Hotel. Oh, what the hell, let’s throw in a few episodes of F Troop or Wild Wild West just to be generous.

Pretty funny, huh? It would put the stories of our time in the same class with Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the synoptic Gospels, and the King Arthur stories. In other words, people would be forced to base their imaginings of our times on works in which historical accuracy had no place, was not a consideration, was simply not the point of the story at all.

I hate to break it to you, but that’s what MOST history becomes for most people, without anything catastrophic happening to records. If I need to explain:

First, history is written by the winners. Those killed in the historical process can’t talk or write. Those impoverished by it have little influence over what gets published. Those culturally marginalized by history often don’t speak a language widely known in the future.