I own up to the fact that I live in a, mostly, media-free bunker. I haven’t had a television capable of receiving broadcast channels 25 years. I subscribe to only one streaming service (Netflix) and I only listen to—and support—public radio stations. I use multiple ad-blocking programs on my computer. I regularly read on newspaper online—The Guardian—and I have a short list journalist—like Sam Allard—whom I read daily or weekly.

All of that means that I don’t see political advertising, especially like the political advertising examined in Sam Wolfson’s Five of the most bigoted and divisive political ads from the 2018 midterms for The Guardian. The ads are fearmongering at its worst and made me feel as if I was watching trailers for horror movies. Wolfson writes:

With the midterm elections looming , a number of adverts are using inflammatory tactics to paint political opponents as unsafe or untrustworthy. There have been attempts to link ethnic minority candidates to Islamic terrorism or gangsta rap culture, as well as an effort to portray Democrats as threatening a return to lynchings.

The ads are mostly funded by Super Pacs which can raise unlimited amounts of money to run political advertising. Pacs are not allowed to coordinate with the candidates they’re asking people to vote for, meaning they are able to run inflammatory advertising while candidates can plausibly deny any responsibility. [Emphasis mine, JH]

The Congressional Leadership Fund, which is closely associated with Paul Ryan, has a particular reputation for running what critics see as sometimes race-baiting attack ads and has already raised nearly $100m for the 2018 election cycle.

Other controversial ads have been funded by the National Republican Campaign Committee which is the official campaigning arm of the Republican party.

I watched several of the ads featured in Wolfson’s piece and they’re flat out disgusting. I mentioned the vile Democrats will start lynching black folks again ad from Black Americans for the President’s Agenda before, but there’s a good reason that Wolfson leads with this ad.

I understand why William Shakespeare put the words The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers into Dick the Butcher’s mouth: Dick is a criminal. I feel something of the same way about anyone in public relations, advertising or marketing because they have no allegiance to truth except when truth might serve their clients. My position is grounded in the first day of my journalism ethics class at Ohio University when the professor asked for a show of hands to determine what programs each student was in. When he came to the advertising and public relations students he told them:

You don’t belong in the journalism school because what you’re learning to do has no relation to journalism. You should be in the business college. What we’re going to learn here has nothing to do with what you’re going to be paid for in the future.

Clearly the professor, a former newspaper journalist, had nothing but contempt for those students. As a journalists, he had spent a career dealing with the people they wanted to become. They were anti-journalists. Even when they hide behind the we-have-a-positive-story-to-tell-excuse, they’re lying.

Consumer protection laws provide some cover for the people they try to exploit, but we have no such protections when faced with political lies and manipulations. Many people thought that Lee Atwater’s Willie Horton ad for Republican presidential candidate George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988 was a low point. Atwater wasn’t even close.

War Of The Wolf by Bernard Cornwell. Chapter 9 begins:

At Bebbanburg, the sea kept up its ceaseless beat and the wind brought the smell of salt with the sea bird’s cries.

Confederate monuments, mostly commissioned and positioned not to honor war heroes but to to intimidate civil rights activists, are a hot button now and the depiction of generals Robert Edward Lee and Thomas Jonathan Jackson riding with Jefferson Finis Davis, president of the Confederate States Of American,is the largest such monument. Begun in 1964 and completed in 1972, the bas-relief’s history has never been hidden.

Georgians are embroiled in a gubernatorial race deliberately focused on the gender and ancestry of two candidates: the white male Republican Brian Kemp and black female Democrat Stacy Abrams. For her part, Abrams has bigger fish to fry. Shah writes:

Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate in Georgia, who is running in a hotly contested race to try to shift the long-time red state blue–and become the nation’s first black female governor in the process–has previously criticised the monument.

After the Charlottesville violence at the Unite the Right rally last August, Abrams condemned the carving in a series of tweets.

“Confederate monuments belong in museums where we can study and reflect on that terrible history, not in places of honor across our state,” she wrote. “[T]he visible image of Stone Mountain’s edifice remains a blight on our state and should be removed.”

But the politics of the issue are difficult–not least because you can’t easily take down a sculpture carved into side of a mountain–and more recently Abrams has said that although she stands by her position, dealing with the monument is not top of her list of priorities.

We don’t need to, nor should we, attempt to pull a hood over these memorials to slavery and white supremacy. We need context and education that destroy the myths.

Act II, Act III and Blackface is Racist, Megyn.

Ralph Nader has had enough already from the Democratic Party and wants to see candidates with backbones stand up fro the people they want to represent.

Once such candidate is Jamie Raskin, running for reëlection to the House of Representatives from Maryland’s 8th district. Nader, in Congressman Jamie Raskin–Vote For a Raise, Expose the GOP, Win the Elections, writes:

Decades ago, prominent political analyst Kevin Phillips said that the Republicans go for the jugular while the Democrats go for the capillaries. Today’s national Democratic Party makes Phillips observation seem overly generous.

With the polls tightening for November’s Congressional elections and Trump’s weak approval rating inching up to 47 percent, there is a sense of déjà vu. Why should we be surprised? Look at the sorry list of national Democratic derelictions: they utterly failed to landslide the Republicans in the 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016 elections for Congressional supremacy. Worse, the Republicans landslided the Democrats taking most state legislatures, governors and all three branches of the Federal government.

The current Republican Party is the worst in history. It is filled with cruel, vicious, corrupt Wall Street toadies, war-mongering wasters, and promoters of immunity Continue Reading »

War Of The Wolf by Bernard Cornwell. Chapter 8 begins:

“If we crush Sköll,” Sigtryggr told me in the morning, “we must have peace with Edward.

My favorite line—time mark 7:01—from Adelman on President Trump and rebranding:

[President Trump] changed three commas, and a parenthesis and a semi-colon; and then gave [the North America Free Trade Agreement] another name and then reissued it again.

I did a spit take at the 14:27 time mark where Adelman says that there “are about six, seven” nations with nuclear weapons. By my count there are nine: The United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and, the newest member of the club, North Korea. Host Joshua Johnson did not call Adelman out on the mistake.

…there are significant differences between Warren’s and Sanders’ approaches to politics and what their respective victories would mean in a country desperately in need of change.

To understate things, Sanders’ background is unusual. He was trained in the dying remnants of the Socialist party and cut his political teeth in trade union and civil rights organizing. His lifelong lesson? The rich were not morally confused but rather have a vested interest in the exploitation of others. Power would have to be taken from them by force.

Sanders’ message from his early days in third-party politics to today has been remarkably consistent. Back in the early 1970s he denounced “the world of Richard Nixon, and the millionaires and billionaires whom he represents”. Even back then he was reminding audiences: “This is the world of the 2% of the population that owns more than one-third of the personally held wealth in America.”

Warren’s career started as an academic, teaching at law schools and establishing herself as an expert on bankruptcy and consumer protection. Believing that markets fundamentally worked, but the rules of the game needed to be fairer, Warren was a registered Republican until 1995.

In the six years since she won her Senate seat, Warren has established herself as a credible, progressive Democrat. But her background hints at the difference between her more wonkish approach – seeking to construct better policy but not an alternative politics – and the class-struggle, worker-centric approach of Sanders. Not surprisingly, Warren has been keen to assure business interests that she believes that “strong, healthy markets are the key to a strong healthy America” and that she “is a capitalist”.

Warren does have significant support among the Netroots Nation crowd, but it’s telling that she also appears to be getting traction among prominent Democratic party policy types: Anita Dunn, Brian Fallon, John Podesta, Neera Tanden and Matt Yglesias, among others, have had positive things to say about her in the media lately. Sanders–an outsider without ties to many prominent in the liberal politics during the Obama years–gets no such love.

—450,000 jobs; 500,000 jobs, 600,000 jobs, over a million jobs, the largest order ever made…

Our president continues to channel—or perhaps he inspired—Jon Lovitz…

War Of The Wolf by Bernard Cornwell. Chapter 7 begins:

Osferth was not invited to Tamweorthin.

Then, I read this news came this morning—Euclid to Rehire Officer Michael Amiott, Infamous (Twice Over) For Violently Beating Black Men by Sam Allard—of a flip we wish we couldn’t believe. Allard writes:

After an arbitrator’s ruling Monday, the city of Euclid will rehire police officer Michael Amiott, who was fired last year after a video of him violently beating a black man during a traffic stop went viral.

Amiott was also featured on the Serial podcast this year. The episode recounted what Scene and others had reported on in 2017: another violent beating of a black man. Serial reported how Amiott and another officer waylaid Emirius Spencer in his own apartment building with no provocation, and went on to lie about details of the incident under oath, in coordination with the prosecutor and the judge, to insulate themselves from punishment.

Yes, Breathing While Black is now a thing…

SF Giants Co-Owner Disavows Racist Congressional Ad Featuring Black Women

#SayHerName: Florida Police Viciously Beat 14-Year-Old Black Girl for ‘Resisting Arrest’

Undeniable Proof America Is Still Racist AF

White Man Verbally Assaults Older Black Woman on Flight, Calls Her an ‘Ugly Black Bastard,’ Airline Does Nothing

The Disrespect: GOP Street Artist Replaces Michael Myers With Maxine Waters on a Halloween Billboard

3 White Women Harassed a Black Gardener for More than a Year. He Got Hit With Stalking Charges

Soccer While Black: #GolfCartGail Calls Cops on Father Cheering on Son at Soccer Game

NBC, What Is You Doing? The Today Show Airs a White Supremacist Infomercial

This Is the Police Interaction Video Texas Students Must Watch to Graduate High School

Police ‘Activists’ Protest Black Woman Who Made Comments About Police Implicit Bias

White Woman Who Blocked Black Neighbor From Entering Apartment Building Speaks Out

Georgia Police Chief Defends Arrest of 12-Year-Old Selling Mixtapes at the Mall

Morehouse Grad Who Died After Being Arrested, Tased by California Police Officers, Was Unarmed, Had Mental Health Issues

Previously…

Night Hawks by Charles Johnson, found in Night Hawks: Stories and which begins:

Playwright August Wilson and I always met at 7:00 P.M. at the Broadway Bar and Grill, which is just a short walk from him many-roomed home on Capitol Hill in Seattle.

The warrior who approached us did look like King Alfred, though that King of Wessex had died years before the youngest of my warriors was ever born.

Life is complicated and when we attempt to simplify what happens around us we risk serious injury, to ourselves and to our societies. Yet, we continue to tinker—or in the post-Vonnegut age’s terminology: lifehack—with little understanding of what fates we antagonize. I don’t suggest that we not experiment, that is how progress happens, but that we, in the parlance of all exercise books, talk to your doctor before you start an exercise program.

I have just read Bill Keough’s thesis about violence in American humor, which deals with Twain, Bierce, Lardner and me. It’s a beauty, although I am quite an anti-climax. but he says that all of us have found ourselves trapped in box canyons with our jokes, with no notions of how the human condition might be improved. And several critics of my work have said I give the illusion of knowing of how things might be revised without being able to describe the revisions. In short, I am, like many failed pieces of serious music, all gestures, unkept promises, with no stirring resolutions to come. Conventional resolutions in humorless books, incidentally, consist of the acceptance of some option which the society has offered for quite some time: a meaningful death, the kicking of addiction, the uncritical acceptance of some religion, becoming a hermit, returning to a person one has loved all along, and so on. On tending the sick, or helping the poor, or shooting the person who seems most responsible for all the misery.

When I thought I was going to become a biologist of some kind, and in fact studied bacteriology, I wanted to cure diseases, and my heroes were Pasteur and the like. I was going to find out what made people sick. I had no gift for real science, however, and after the Second World War went into pseudo-science, all talk and few measurements, which is to say anthropology. And one enchanting suggestive thing I learned (attitude I assumed), was that culture was as separate from the brain as a Model T Ford, and could be tinkered with. It was an easy jump from there to believing, as I do, that a culture can contain fatal poisons which can be identified: respect for firearms, for example, or the belief that no male is really a man until he has had a physical showdown of some kind, or that women can’t possibly understand the really important things which are going on, and so on. What could be simpler, or perhaps, more simple minded?

—to Jerome Klinkowitz on 26 April 1987, p. 318

I imagine that in 2018, Vonnegut would be snatching himself bald.

Found in my electronic chapbook under KURT VONNEGUT: LETTERS…

The Night Belongs To Phoenix Jones by Charles Johnson, found in Night Hawks: Stories and which begins:

I have a secret to share about one of Seattle’s super-heroes.

I think the last Super Bowl I watched was sometime in the mid-’90s—I was there for the food and beer, not the game—and I couldn’t care less about football (does Cleveland even still have a team?), but I have written much about Colin Kaepernick and Rodney Axson) so when I read Judge’s piece I was well pleased. She writes:

Remember a few weeks back when they announced that the headlining act at Super Bowl LIII was going to be Maroon 5 and everyone was like “why would Maroon 5 be the performing act at the Super Bowl in the blackest city in the country?”

Well, maybe it’s because the act that the National Football League and CBS really wanted turned them down.

A source told US Weekly “The NFL and CBS really wanted Rihanna to be next year’s performer in Atlanta. They offered it to her, but she said no because of the kneeling controversy. She doesn’t agree with the NFL’s stance.”

This, of course, refers to the silent, kneeling protest former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began doing during the 2016 football season.

The fight continues.

My plan had been to ride south, and, once out of sight of the road, turn east toward distant Eoferwic.

Actually we know a lot as Harriot sets Crockett straight.

SC: Ok, fine, fuck it. Brian Kemp is the El Chapo of voter suppression. Now there are reports noting that Georgia officials are using some bogus GOP rule that allows people to be removed from voter rolls if they have not voted in previous elections.

And in Georgia, some 107,000 people have all been purged.

Here’s how The Hill explains it.

An APM Reports analysis found the voters were removed under the state’s “use it or lose it” law, which starts a process for removing people from voter rolls if they fail to vote, respond to a notice or make contact with election officials over a three-year period.

After that three-year span, those who don’t vote or make contact with authorities in two elections can be purged from the voter rolls under the Georgia law.

Such laws, generally enacted by GOP governments, have been growing more common, with at least nine states now having them, according to APM Reports.

MH: Well I hate to tell you this, Stephen, but we really don’t know that. That number you keep quoting by APM only relates to the known number of voters who were purged. It doesn’t count all the other people who might not be able to vote.

The story just gets worse and worse. The devil didn’t go down to Georgia, he took up residency.

You must listen to the audio and pay special attention to the name of the organization at the end.

Judge concludes:

I have an announcement to make.

White people won’t save you, no matter how many times you vote for them.

That is not a slight; it’s a fact. We as a people have been sold out by this nation’s political systems since the beginning of time. Why should it be any different now?

President Donald John Trump is doing exactly what I thought (and hoped) we would do: yanking back the bandage over the festering wounds of American politics so that we can flood the damaged areas with sunlight and begin healing.

The financial markets held on—although those watching could see the cliff— until the final months of President George W. Bush’s presidency. President Donald John Trump’s worst nightmare is that President Barack Hussein Obama wasn’t successful enough in sufficiently healing the damage to give him the same cushion that President Bush got from President William Jefferson Clinton and that he won’t last until 2020.

I’ve been a longtime fan and subscriber—yes Sue, I am renewing—to Cleveland Heights own Funny Times, a bit of publication genius launched shortly after I moved to Ohio’s Northcoast. One of favorite feature is News Of The Weird (created by Chuck Shepherd back in 1988).

Reading my Funny Times this morning I came across this:

Mystery Solved On Jan. 25, 71-year-old Alan J. Abrahamson of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, went for his regular pre-dawn walk to Starbucks. What happened on the way stumped police investigators until March, reported The Washington Post, and on July 13 they made their findings public. Images from a surveillance camera show Abrahamson walking out of his community at 5:35 a.m. and about a half-hour later, the sound of a gunshot is heard. Just before 7 a.m., a dog found Abrahamson’s body, lying near a walking path. Police found no weapon, no signs of a struggle; he still had his wallet and phone. Investigators initially worked the case as a homicide, but as they dug deeper into the man’s computer searches and purchases over the past nine years, a theory developed: Abrahamson had tied a gun to a weather balloon filled with helium, shot himself, and then the gun drifted away to parts unknown. A thin line of blood on Abrahamson’s sweatshirt indicated to police that “something with the approximate width of a string passed through the blood on the outside of the shirt,” the final report says. As for the balloon, investigators said it would likely have ascended to about 100,000 feet and exploded somewhere north of the Bahamas in the Atlantic Ocean. —The Washington Post, 7/15/2018.

I have to wonder at what point Mr. Abrahamson read Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1922 story The Problem of Thor Bridge and went, “hmmm.”

Am I the only one who hears Jon Lovitz in their head as they read the unfolding lies coming from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman?

First, there was: It never happened.
Second, ther was: Jamal Khashoggi left through a back door.
Third, there was: We don’t know where he went.
Fourth, there was: Khashoggi was killed by rogue killers.
Fifth, there was: Khashoggi was accidentally killed during an interrogation.
Sixth, there was: Khashoggi died in a choke hold delivered during a fist fight.
Seventh, there is: who the feck knows what they’ll come up with next.

None of this explains why Khashoggi’s body was dismembered and spirited out of the embassy to we do not know where, or why—and this is the big question for me—didn’t he go the embassy in Washington D.C.?

The whipping boys, however, have been fired and/or arrested. Kevin Sullivan, Loveday Morris and Tamer El-Ghobashy, reporting in Saudi Arabia fires 5 top officials, arrests 18 Saudis, saying Khashoggi was killed in fight at consulate for The Washington Post, write:

The Saudi government acknowledged early Saturday that journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, saying he died during a fistfight, but the new account may do little to ease international demands for the kingdom to be held accountable.

The announcement, which came in a tweet from the Saudi Foreign Ministry, said that an initial investigation by the government’s general prosecutor found that the Saudi journalist had been in discussions with people inside the consulate when a quarrel broke out and escalated to a fatal fistfight.

The Saudi government said it fired five top officials and arrested 18 other Saudis as a result of the initial investigation. Those fired included Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s adviser Saud al-Qahtani and deputy intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri.

The announcement marks the first time that Saudi officials have acknowledged that Khashoggi was killed inside the consulate. Ever since he disappeared on Oct. 2 while visiting the mission, Saudi officials have repeatedly said that he left the consulate alive and that they had no information on his whereabouts or fate. He had gone to the consulate to obtain a document he needed for his upcoming marriage.

The Saudi statement comes as the kingdom is facing unprecedented political and economic pressure to disclose what happened to Khashoggi, a critic of the government and a contributing columnist to The Washington Post. But it is unclear whether the Saudi explanation—which clashes with details provided by Turkish investigators and makes no mention of the crown prince—will be enough to satisfy foreign leaders, global business executives and U.S. lawmakers pressing for the perpetrators to be brought to justice.

This last, the question of what, if anything, happens to the prince, is other sandal.

4189 by Charles Johnson and Steven Barnes, found in Night Hawks: Stories and which begins:

We shed the bulky, vanilla-colored coveralls worn on the Möbius line.

This is the passage that took my breath away:

“Why?” I asked. “Why here? Why now?

“There is a last time for everything.” Her answer made sense. Everything made sense.

This is the Faustian conundrum. If we know that there is no last time, that there is an eternity of what ever we are experiencing, then there is no texture, no chaos. There is only the vanilla.

The gods are not kind to us, any more than children are kind to their toys.

The most oft asked question of writers (on writing) by non-writers is: Where do you get your ideas from? I have yet to know a writer who did not have more ideas bouncing around inside their skull than they could write in a hundred lifetimes. So much so that one form of writer’s block is akin to the centipede unable to move because they can’t think which leg to move first.

This is, I think, what Vonnegut is writing about here:

Saul Stenberg said to me that the painter Ingres was hobbled by too much talent. You are hobbled by too much to write about. You help me understand why novelists are such avoiders of adventure. Real life could swamp them easily. So not living is a sacrifice we make.

—to Donald Fiene on 15 November 1985, p. 309

Some people marvel that Emily Dickinson was able to write so much confined to her bed in Amherst, Massachusetts. I see nothing extraordinary there; I would marvel if she had not written her nearly 1,800 poems

Found in my electronic chapbook under KURT VONNEGUT: LETTERS…