Media – RAnt(hony)-ings

It’s 6:00 AM Again

For as long as the press has existed, it has been shambling and imperfect and improvisational. At our best we get things right on average, and incrementally, with a lot of getting things wrong along the way. Most of us in this business do our imperfect best. But any hope of doing better depends on the ability to learn. Soon the clock will show 6:00 a.m. once more; the alarm will start blaring “I Got You Babe” another time. This day, we can do better.
theatlantic.com

I made the Groundhog Day comparison more than a year ago.

Not Bedazzled. GroundHog Day.

May 13th of 2018, to be precise. Practicing due diligence I should also note that Stonekettle proposed Bedazzled as the film that embodied America under Trump, and it’s inability to cope with the onslaught of abuse and bullshit that Trump’s America embodies. More broadly, he was making the point that you vote for the other guy if the guy that is currently leading the country is so bad at his job that even a vacant office would probably do a better job than he is doing. That seeking power for power’s sake should be a category of exclusion for political office.

The media that James Fallows at The Atlantic is lambasting is simply a part of Trump’s America. Everyone is running around virtually clueless about what is news these days because the firehose of bullshit from the White House never gives them a chance to look up and notice that they are about to drown in bullshit. The media have been trained over years of servicing the metric of who is paying attention? and how many people are paying attention? Trained to produce the click-baitiest headlines and content that they can improvise, and to go where the will-o-the-wisp of viral scandals takes them.

Doing so under the leadership of a creature like President Trump is to follow the Judas goat into the slaughterhouse. unless you want to be killed, following the judas goat or the bellwether is a pretty stupid thing to do. The people who point to their opponents and call them sheeple might have a point if they weren’t so dedicatedly heading down their own road to slaughter. Newspapers and television stations, as well as news websites, should make a point not to follow the trends, not to film where all the eyes are pointed, if they want to survive the dystopian hell we find ourselves in today. It is the news outlets that tell you true things that you don’t already know that are really generating news. The rest of the pack are nothing more than ambulance chasers.

There should be no articles in the media that contain the words Donald Trump Says at this late date in the game. Donald Trump says a lot of things, almost all of them bullshit. Repeating what he says, even listening to what he says, is a waste of time. I know, I know, the media have to keep track of that stuff, and I think that the heroes over at the Washington Post should get the congressional medal of honor for cataloging Trump’s lies. The guys who tape the presidential documents back together for the archive should join them in getting a medal. But the majority of Americans do not care what the bastard says from minute to minute. Trust me. We don’t need to know once he isn’t in office anymore.

Today’s political news can be boiled down to two major points. Some variant of these two headlines should be on every paper, television station and website in the United States. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, ad nauseum until election day. Which two headlines?

200,000 Dead Americans

The first one should be a running tally of the number of COVID dead in the United States and an underscoring of just how many tens of thousands of deaths could have been avoided had President Trump simply done the job that he took an oath to do. This should be hammered home, again, and again, and again until Trump’s approval numbers start to flag.

The other headline should be variants of this one,

OHM GDP Shrinkage

Stories that detail exactly how fucking bad the economy is for the average American. Stories about people losing their homes. Stories about people who are starving. Stories about people who haven’t got a pot to piss in because of President Trump, but they mysteriously will still vote for him this year because they think that Satanists (AKA, Democrats) are having sex with and eating children, and that Joe Biden will initiate the race war that will deliver the United States to the brown-skinned people who really aren’t Americans.

The third viable political headline? Rachel Maddow 9/15/2020

The #MAGA: Qanon Fantasies are just an extension of the Satanic panic of the 90’s. There is no there there. The nitpicking about the politics of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden is nothing more than sour grapes. America wants to return to the Obama years, back when we could go to a movie theater and watch a movie in a crowd and laugh and not worrying about dying in two weeks from a virus you picked up there. The years when the vast majority of Americans could actually afford to go to the theater, or a restaurant or just be able to buy food. America longs for the Obama years and so picked Joe Biden as the nominee to run against the butcher of brown children. The plague-carrying chef that just can’t stop himself from baking his shit into every meal he serves up. Against that backdrop, Joe Biden is a bright spring morning. The kind of day you used to wake up to and be thankful to be alive.

Anyone who votes for Donald Trump and are themselves not wealthy con artists is a fool. Donald Trump is the president of con artists, the kind of con artists that run evangelical churches all across America. Those are his people. His Stormtrumpers.

Stormtrumpers are so afraid of socialism that they will conspire with socialist dictators in order to stop the Democrats from creating American socialism. Never mind that they can’t define what socialism is, they know they are afraid of it and they won’t vote for someone who labels themselves a socialist (this is why Bernie Sanders is not the Democratic nominee. -ed.) Rudy, how far you have fallen. Russia, China and the rest of the enemies of American-styled liberal democracies are working as hard as they can to make sure Trump wins re-election. They want the United States to come apart at the seams. They, like the proud boys they sponsor, want the boogaloo get started. They want us fighting each other and not noticing them as they crack down on their own populations.

We cannot allow this to happen. We have to put our backs to the wheel and get this country back on the road before the zombie hordes catch up to the bus we are traveling in. If we are overrun, then nothing stands between average people and the criminal element that Donald Trump empowers. Vladimir Putin is the poster child for these criminal enterprises, and he hopes to lead a world-wide organization of mobsters that will continue to live amidst wealth while the common people starve. Then we will have the future that George Orwell predicted, just a few short decades after 1984. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping would love to be able to indoctrinate their subject peoples to believe whatever silly thing they decree. Xi Jinping is already do it to the Uyghurs.

We need to redefine what politics is in this country. We cannot afford to have half of the country sitting on their hands when it comes time to pick leaders. To paraphrase a podcaster that I listened to recently, “Politics is not a marriage. Politics is public transportation.“ Candidates are just the transportation that you take to get closer to your political goals. You don’t have to spend your entire life with that person, picking up after them, washing their laundry, reminding them where they left their phone and their keys. You just have to acknowledge that they make the right noises and that they have historically acted in a fashion that confirms that the noises they make a generally truthful, and then you vote for the candidate and hope they don’t embarrass or betray you before they leave office.

…if your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be working so damned hard to keep you from exercising it. Get your ass to the polls, no matter what.
stonekettle.com

It’s been three years now. In order to get a sense of the history of what OHM means, I will link a few crucial posts. I wrote The Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) when it became clear that the Republicans were going to nominate Donald Trump. I wrote The GOP Cuddles Up To the NSDAP when the GOP refused to ostracize the OHM for his dangerously xenophobic populism. I wrote Caveat Emptor on the day Trump lied with his hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the US constitution. I wrote Bullshit is Bullshit on the day I stopped even trying to catalogue the blatant disregard of the truth by the OHM. It mystifies me why people still listen to him, and why the OHM still holds the office of the president. #MAGA means Misguided Appallingly Gullible Americans. Anyone who believes differently is a MAGA themselves, otherwise known as a Stormtrumper, h/t to Berkeley Breathed.

Remembering Tom Petty

I am very nearly without words today. It takes great effort to even think in words. Melodies and harmonies are all that are running through my head. I cried when we lost George Harrison. Despaired when Prince died too young. But those are just the wounds that spring to mind because they are contextual. Revived because of proximity.

Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and others,While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Tom Petty was more than a musician to me. Tom Petty described my soul to me, and he didn’t just do it once. He did it over and over again through the course of my life, the course of his career. I identified with his music in ways I simply cannot describe.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – Even the Losers

He died doing what he wanted to do, ending a tour in support of his latest album. He went quickly and without suffering. Most of us want to be that lucky when it comes our time to go.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – Breakdown

I could post tracks all day long, and I did post tracks all day long on the day I learned of his death. I read about it not too long after getting up that day, but his death wasn’t officially confirmed until later.

Petty’s final show was last week, performing three sold-out shows at the Hollywood Bowl to conclude their 40th anniversary tour, CBS News reports.
He told Rolling Stone that he thought this would be the group’s last tour together.
“It’s very likely we’ll keep playing, but will we take on 50 shows in one tour? I don’t think so. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was thinking this might be the last big one. We’re all on the backside of our sixties. I have a granddaughter now I’d like to see as much as I can. I don’t want to spend my life on the road. This tour will take me away for four months. With a little kid, that’s a lot of time.”
Tom Petty obituary in The Independent

It was the day after the horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas. One more mass shooting in a near-infinite string of tragedies that, quite frankly, I refuse to pay attention to anymore. If anyone cared we’d actually talk about gun control in a way that might be productive. But we can’t and we don’t and so, like September 11th being my dad’s birthday, I didn’t and won’t post about another mass shooting that won’t change anything. Jim has it right. We are Bang, Bang Crazy.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – You Don’t Know How It Feels

So instead I will mourn the death of a man whose work I cherished above most others of his caliber. He lived a full life and died early. Not as early as many who had the kind of talent he had, but he also didn’t live as long as the rare few do. I’ll miss him. We all will miss him and the music he might have gone on to make.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – Time to Move On

Berkeley Breathed’s *Bloom County, October 3rd, 2017*

A Facebook friend and fellow fan challenged other fans to quick, give me your favorite Tom Petty lyrics. Rather than give her my favorite (which is Breakdown above) I posted the lyrics that I went to the point of actually signing up to edit that day, Learning To Fly. I signed up so as to get the correct stanza structure for the song set down properly on Lyrically. Someone had just pasted content from another website (probably) and/or didn’t understand how poetry is written and why. But that is how much I thought this was the song to remember him by on that day.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – Learning to Fly

It has now been about two weeks since the day he died, but I’m back dating this article to the day, the day, because I really don’t care if anyone reads this or not. I finished watching the documentary Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down A Dream a few days ago. Watching it brought back some memories that I really wanted to put down in this post.

Stevie Nicks – Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around (with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers)

His album, Hard Promises came out the year I graduated. I remember going to the Hastings record store next to the Safeway I was courtesy clerking at in 1980 and buying that cassette (vinyl was and is the purview of music collectors with money. Something I’ve never had any of) and subsequently Damn the Torpedoes. I remember not being willing to buy the first album because of the cheesy cover art, which says a lot about the importance of graphic design. The title of You’re Gonna Get it I deemed too juvenile, like Fair Warning, Van Halen’s fourth album.

If you’re poor fighting is the norm. You fight to get everything, all the time. When your stepfather is abusive, conflict is a foregone conclusion. Using the phrases of the abuser you’re gonna get it is descend to their level. I always tried to be more than that, more than the abuser was in their petty little mind. So violence was to be avoided, not encouraged. If violence is inevitable you make sure you emerge the victor, you don’t worry about methods beyond their capacity to produce desired outcomes. Hit them from behind, above, with a blunt object and keep swinging until the target stops moving. Easier to do than thinking.

Tom Petty knew how to fight and proved it repeatedly. Proved it by filing for bankruptcy to get control of his music back, winning the first case against a record company, leading the way for others who had signed usurious record contracts to also get control of their music back. His lawsuit altered the face of the music business, leading the way towards the music industry of today which exists to serve artists and not the other way around.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – Mary Jane’s Last Dance The hit that almost wasn’t.

After completing his Southern Accents tour, he was one of the best-selling artists in music history. So what does he do next? He and the Heartbreakers agree to go on the road, touring with Bob Dylan as his backing band. Who else has progressed from headlining his own shows to being the backing band for another artist? Has anyone else ever done that? After a few more albums and more success, they joined Johnny Cash’s studio back up band.

“What they call country today is like bad rock groups with a fiddle”
Tom Petty

The Traveling Wilburys – The End of the Line

Roy Orbison. George Harrison. Now Tom Petty. We’re running out of Wilburys.

If It Bleeds, It Leads. Same as It Ever Was

For the last year and a half the media have fawned all over His Electoral Highness, The Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) They can’t stop talking about him. They can’t be kept from giving him airtime to talk about himself. Aside from the OHM himself, his biggest fans are the media who think that what this lame duck of a leader says means anything at all. Because of the media’s fawning, I have been forced to spend the last two years ignoring everything the OHM can be heard saying with their generous gift of free airtime. I ignore everything he says because listening to him is what he wants us to do. I ignore him because attempting to make sense of what he says makes me feel ill. I ignore him because listening to him demonstrably makes you dumber; the media being a prime example of people made stupid by the sound of the OHM’s voice.

The media’s free gift of airtime helped give him the momentum to take the electoral college if not the popular vote; and now they ask, why is America so divided? If anyone should know the answer to this question it should be the media, but I wouldn’t look to them to give you a truthful answer. Division is what they want. It sells. Conflict and violence always lead the news. The division they are trying to illustrate here is largely a matter of perception. The division is almost entirely of the media’s making, their policy of going with taglines that hype the separation, the division, the conflict,

CBS Sunday Morning – A polarized America – Mar 26, 2017

There’s nothing new about simmering hostility between a President and the press. As Richard Nixon once stated, “The President should treat the press just as fairly as the press treats him.”
In March of 1974, the Nixon presidency was lurching toward destruction by Watergate, and there was an ongoing tension between the President and the CBS White House correspondent:
President Nixon: “Are you running for something?”
Dan Rather: “No, sir, Mr. President, are you?”
Norm Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was then, and remains now, a student of our political system and our media:
“We would watch network news shows and we would sit there and we would have basically a common set of facts that would emerge from them,” he said. “As we’ve moved to the new media world, the more you’ve got this cacophony of voices, the more you cut through it by, basically, shock value. And that’s why people now are driven not by their own attachment to their own parties; they’re driven by a hatred for those on the other side.”
CBS News, The great divide: Politics in the Age of Trump

Much like Nixon ushered in the end of the Republican party that elected him, the OHM signals the ultimate end of Reaganism and Reaganomics. There will be no possibility of doubt remaining as to the bankruptcy of Reagan’s policies by the time the OHM is drummed out of office; policies which have held sway since Reagan was president. The question the media should be asking is, will the Democrats find themselves and their new direction, or will they waste their resurgence as they did with the Carter years? Let me unpack these observations for you.

The eight years of Clinton were not liberal years. The most damning thing to be said about Clinton is that he was and is Republican lite, conservative-ish. He ended welfare in the US because the conservatives demanded that he do it. Because it was something that Reagan promised and compromising with Reagan Democrats was how Bill Clinton got into office. Over and over again he proved that he wasn’t liberal in any real sense of the word. He was a conservative from the old Southern wing of Democratic conservatives who just happened to have married well. Without Hillary’s influence I am convinced he would have been even harder on the poor, even more militaristic than he was. Weirdly, I doubt that would have kept Republicans from manufacturing a scandal in their attempts to remove him.

Barack Obama was pretty close to liberal but still enacted conservative policies because conservative policies were the only ones that the conservatives in the congress he was saddled with would vaguely go for. Obamacare was and is Romneycare. That is why Romney had such a hard time dissing the ACA, because it was his idea offered by a Democratic president and he knew it. Obama was the deporter-in-Chief because, again, that is what conservatives wanted him to do. He was tough on immigration because he hoped it would win points with the other side of the aisle. Only in his last two years did he realize that Republicans would never work with him and so he spent those years ruling by executive order. The Republicans didn’t refuse to work for him because he was black if we are to take them at their word. they didn’t refuse because he was liberal because his policies prove otherwise. They refused to work with him because he was a Democrat.

The sin that Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are all guilty of is the sin of being members of the Democratic party. If they had been Republicans they would have been deemed typical centrists willing to make deals in order to get the government’s work done. It is deal making that the new conservatives hate. They are convinced that there is a true conservative ideology and all they have to do is adhere to it. Never mind that no two conservatives can agree on what conservatism is aside from prosperity gospel Jesus, a completely different kind of Jesus than that socialist hippy Jesus of the seventies. That is religion masquerading as ideology which is all conservatism has left to appeal to, the shadow of religion that Reagan rode to power on.

None of this has anything to do with real ideology beyond the ghost of Reagan that even Reaganite priests can’t quote because Reagan was more liberal than the country is now. The ghost of Reagan and his trickle-down Reaganomics is why the tax rates on the wealthiest people in the US remain low. Anyone making more than a million dollars a year should be taxed at the confiscatory rate of 99% just as the progressive tax rates did during the post-war era. During the times when the middle class grew and the poor were not quite so desperate. Back when Jesus was a socialist hippy. They should be taxed at this extreme rate because they don’t spend more when they have more, so it benefits society not one bit to allow them to keep their incredible wealth.

The subject of monetary policy is too lengthy to get into here, but in the end upper income tax rates were lowered because the increased wealth was supposed to generate more benefits for the rest of us, and the reality we live in has demonstrably proven that the opposite is true. Ergo, some form of income cap has to be reinstituted. Either a scale requiring all boats be raised when the wealthy get paid more, or confiscatory taxes on pay greater than the scale would dictate.

So here we are at the tail-end of the Reagan era, just waiting for the Reagan Democrats to bleep their last heartbeat on the heart monitor they are strapped to before we can get on with progress. It has to be those people because they are the only ones left watching TV, getting their news from TV and from radio. Those are the people who went out and voted for Trump, his core base of stormtrumpers. Those are the people who in their political ignorance voted Republican not realizing that Republicans and conservatives ran everything in the country aside from the presidency already. Politically ignorant people who don’t understand that the president’s job isn’t to fix the country, that is the job of the congress. A job the congress is supposed to achieve through legislation and funding and programs to keep the myriad systems this country depends on, running.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, conservatives have swallowed the anarchist notion that government doesn’t work. Republicans have echoed this falsehood because their base believes it, never questioning why they want to elect people to do jobs that they believe don’t need to be done. So it falls to the Democrats to make proposals for government that will work. It falls to them to prove that the poor can get a fair shake in this new America, that the wealthy don’t always get their way. Falls to the Democrats to propose the kinds of changes that populists on both sides of the aisle wanted and would get behind, because the Republicans and conservatives are too scared of socialism to even go someplace where government just might work. If the Democrats can do this, it will be the end of the Republicans for at least a generation.

What I don’t understand is how the media can’t see this happening? Why do they see fractiousness and faction rather than seeing what is really going on? The politically informed vs. the politically ignorant that gave us the current administration? Why can’t they see that they are the OHM’s biggest fans? Perhaps they can’t see it because they too are caught in a previous age. The age of the gatekeeper and the top-down administrator. The feudal society of corporate America, what is fast becoming a corporate globalism. The history of dictators and their five year plans that never worked out. They are soon to be as irrelevant as the Reagan Democrats who will be cashing their last Social Security checks soon. Checking out as movers and shakers and are left behind as the world starts dancing to a different beat.

The media and Reagan Democrats will be as baffled by the next election as they were by the last one, because they think the narrative is one they set, and not one that we the people decide.

Several facebook status posts lead to this post. Here was one.

The Fourth Estate

Trump, Clinton Voters Divided in Their Main Source for Election News

According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of Trump voters got their news about the election from Fox News (in distant second place was CNN at 8 percent, and the rest mainly from social media).
Clinton voters got 18 percent of their political news from CNN, 9 percent from MSNBC, 5 percent from the New York Times, and only 3 percent from Fox (the rest from an assortment of networks, local news, radio, and social media).
Fox News – especially Trump surrogate Sean Hannity – delivered a steady stream of pro-Trump infomercials. If America still has the “fairness rule” that used to require media to be truly fair and balanced, Fox would be out of business.
What do you think?
Robert Reich, January 19, 2017

I think we need to destroy political machines wherever they are, whatever they are. Political machines are a barrier to democracy because they supplant the will of the people for their agendas, which the leadership of the machine thinks is important.

News reporting should simply be held to a truthful/useful standard (which FOX would also fail) because any other standard introduces a bias that is unnecessary. There are not just two sides to political arguments and this is true across the board. It is long past time we started dismantling the machines that have grown up around the framework that was established with the constitution; machines that no longer serve the purpose they were established for. Machines like party primaries. Party-favoriting rules in legislatures. Party-backed campaigns.

There are new ways and new machines that we need to build so that we can introduce the vast majority of the US population to actual governmental involvement. The old machines are only going to get in the way.

Journalism needs to be governed by a professional organization empowered to police their ranks in much the same way that the AMA licenses Doctors, the AIA governs the practice of Architecture. State bars govern the practice of law. This has been my opinion for a very, very long time. There is no organization which can establish truth standards in reporting that organizations can be held to if they want to qualify as legitimate news outlets, and there really needs to be. This has never been clearer in history than it is right now.

How journalists go about governing themselves is a question I’d like to see journalists discuss. What will work? What won’t work? What kind of standards would they be able to establish and enforce? Should be an interesting discussion.

Facebook status created on the blog.

Can’t Do a Western Top Ten Either

David Gerrold requested a quick list of Westerns the other day. I immediately fired off a quick list of ten films that fit the bill in random order;

Silverado, Two Mules for Sister Sarah, The Outlaw Josey Wales, True Grit, The Sons of Katie Elder, Unforgiven, McClintock, Dances With Wolves, Tombstone (with Kurt Russell), The Cowboys, Young Guns, 3:10 to Yuma which was the last western I watched.

But as you can see, I can’t count.

Not only can I not count, but I left off at least a dozen films that I know are better than the ones I put on it. I know that, because I read back through the hundreds of posts and kicked myself for not putting them on the list.

For starters, I’ve been doing a Netflix Clint Eastwood retrospective. Not exhaustive, just felt like I wanted to see some of his films I enjoyed back in the 70’s and 80’s and hadn’t seen since. The son wanted to watch Dirty Harry, so we’ve made our way through all five of them and now we’re about to start the spaghetti westerns. His middle work, the westerns that followed Sergio Leone’s films, those I’m just going to add to the home library, which is why I kicked myself for not including Pale Rider or High Plains Drifter, just to name the next two films I’m planning on buying.

But that’s just to name what is going on in my head right now.

I completely forgot I watched The Hateful Eight quite recently, and that is damn annoying because it was such an excellent tribute to the vanishing art of super 70 wide screen films. It was good too. Not as good as 3:10 to Yuma which I own and did remember. Not even as good as Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s previous film. I’ve seen all of Quentin Tarantino’s work, it is all worth watching if just for the experience. There is a reverence for the art of filmmaking in his films that you can’t find anywhere else.

I also forgot The Revenant along with the 60’s original Man in the Wilderness (h/t to Jim Wright) both based on the true story of Hugh Glass, and if you don’t know that name, you have some really interesting reading to do over the next few hours.

But again, that is just scratching the surface. Reading back through the other comments reminded me of Little Big Man which I haven’t see recently but remember fondly. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a mainstay of my childhood that held up well the last time I watched it. Many mentions of Shane. I hate to admit to the cardinal sin of never having watched Shane, but I guess I can always atone for it by watching it soon. So I will.

I just barely scratched the surface of the impact that John Wayne had on my young life. I literally didn’t even have to think to name three films of his that I rated top ten. I could have done all ten as John Wayne films and still had some left over. I remembered True Grit because I saw the remake recently. Really can’t watch the John Wayne version without watching the unofficial sequel Rooster Cogburn. Really can’t watch McClintock without watching its unofficial sequel Big Jake. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance had the most mentions, but I think The Shootist is the most memorable of all his films because he was already dying of cancer when he made it.

High Noon had the most mentions of any film (rough count) but truthfully I didn’t find it that memorable. I mean, I’ve seen it. I don’t recall anything about it. I don’t think I’m a Gary Cooper fan, to tell you the truth. I remember more about the movie tribute to the TV series Maverick than I do about that film. Both the series and the film are worth watching just for the experience, but then I grew up watching The Rockford Files so go figure.

For the many people who recommended Magnificent Seven (or the more recent remake that is on my list to see) I suggest you watch the original. No, not the 60’s American film which was so popular they made a sequel and a series. No, I’m talking about Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa. I’ve seen three or four of his films and I have not been disappointed by any of them. Fair warning, be prepared to read subtitles.

Finally I suggest Cowboys & Aliens because, why not? You have cowboys and they are fighting aliens. What could you possibly hate about this film? Just joking, save your criticism, I’m well aware of its failings having seen it four or five times. It is one of the Wife’s favorite films, and it really is quite good once you’ve seen it a few times. This from the guy whose favorite episode of recent Doctor who featured Cowboys & Aliens, just different ones. Episode title A Town Called Mercy. Give it a try.

Weirdest film I’ve run across in reply to David Gerrold’s hive mind query? Well, weirdest film that could be called a western anyway? Zachariah. Just watch the trailer. If you can that is. I couldn’t, but I’m going to try to watch the film.

So as you can see, I can’t do just ten, and I’ll be kicking myself for forgetting something that just has to be part of this list the minute I hit the publish button. Such is my life.

The WSJ Becomes the National Enquirer

These kinds of reliability issues are why Rupert Murdoch should be divested of all interest in any media corporation. He is a propagandist and not interested in the truth.

This article at Snopes documents that the covers are both real. The Wall Street Journal claims that they represent two different editions from the same day. It is a convenient argument on their part which really doesn’t explain the completely different headline in the later edition.

I don’t need the substance of the image text to be true to prove that Murdoch is a propagandist. The headlines by themselves, both of which are real, is enough. Journalism should be a profession like doctors and lawyers. Journalism standards should be measured objectively. Those in the profession including the owners of these media platforms, should be held to those standards and barred from publishing if they violate those standards.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) was all set to roll out a pivot for Trump early in the day. The early Wall Street Journal headline reflects the conservative/Republican plan agreed to with the Trump campaign. When Trump failed to pivot and the RNC bailed on their pivot plans, the second Wall Street Journal headline emerges. This explanation, which covers all the facts in evidence, makes Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal propagandists for the RNC. Nothing more, nothing less. They are now at the same level of credibility as the National Enquirer. Congratulations Rupert Murdoch on destroying one of the longest running papers in the United States.

Facebook status and revised comments backdated to the blog. Sadly, the destruction of the independent media in the US has continued unabated.

Journalism? General Education, That is the Problem

A comment on Robert Reich’s status went a bit long.

Trump is a manifestation of poor education in the US exacting its price on the US and the world. The chickens have come home to roost. The wide-spread, wrong-headed notion that a strong leader is the way to get the change you want in a complex system, has manifested in the personages of Trump and Sanders, the demagogic “outsiders” who are believed by the uninformed to be capable of effecting change on a system by themselves.

While Sanders elected alone would fail just as Obama failed to live up to the dreams of the people who voted for him in 2008, Trump is quite capable of wrecking the system all by himself if he is elected.

It is much easier to destroy than it is to create.

At this point in this election all that is left to hope for is that the Democrats can pull out a win. It would be nice to think that they could gain a sweeping victory that would bring in enough progressives to alter the system in a positive way. It would be nice to hand the Republicans such a crushing defeat that they are forced to re-invent themselves into a opposition party that doesn’t deny science and embrace religion as its starting point. The Bernie or busters are going to make that possibility as remote as they can, unfortunately.

The Bernie or busters are not interested in reforming the system any more than the Tea Party Trump supporters are. They want to re-invent it, which is just one step more than simply destroying it. They tell themselves they’ll be happy with a Trump presidency because at least the status quo will end. Both the Trump supporters and the Bernie or busters don’t really understand the kind of misery bringing down the US system will create. I’m becoming afraid we might just find out how deep that well of misery is.

The fix for this is so much more than just reporting. Being able to predict what the population will go for in an election is beyond the capacity of polling and reporting when the citizenry is so woefully uninformed as to vote for a demonstrable liar like Trump is. That is not even scratching the surface of the problem. First you have to educate the voting public on just how blind this faith in a strong leader is. The journalists who inform us on politics cannot be held responsible for the failure of the education system in the US to actually educate the population to the dangers of dictatorship. As college educated people the reporters of course discarded the idea that the average American would fall prey to a demagogue like Trump. It’s obvious he’s lying and has no clue what he’s talking about. Why would anyone take this orange hate-monkey seriously?

…Unless of course you believe that a strong leader is what we need, in spite of the obvious fact that a system as complex as the US government cannot possibly be run by one person. Then all bets are off and the people who want a guy who pretends to have all the answers have control of the mechanisms of statecraft through the selection of the next head of state.

We’ve been so busy propping up dictators in other countries that we’ve forgotten we might be subject to one ourselves. That fate is now just the flip of a coin away.

The Strange World of TV News

Robert Reich is one of the highlight of my Facebook experience. I look for his posts in my feed to inform me about what is really going on politically from a left-sided vantage point. He rarely fails to get my political brain turning over. Sunday he posted this status:

I’ve just come from ABC’s “This Week,” where Newt Gingrich, Matthew Dowd, Donna Brazile, and I went from talking about “American Pharoah”’s Triple Crown win to the Republican and Democratic primaries. In other words, it was all about horse races. The media seems to have no other way to address American politics than to ask who’s ahead and who's behind, rather than what the candidates stand for and what America needs.
Seven months until the first primaries, and 17 until Election Day, we have plenty of time for a national debate about the nation’s real challenges. Yet every Republican candidate is repeating the same platitudes (strengthen the military, lower taxes, and promote religious values) the GOP has been spewing for 35 years. Scott Walker leads the pack in Iowa, but on the basis of, what? Fighting unions, defunding Planned Parenthood, making it harder for students and low-income people to vote, blocking abortions after 20 weeks even in cases of rape or incest, and threatening a constitutional amendment allowing states to decide on same-sex marriage. Oh, and he rides a Harley. He’s a brainless knee-jerk conservative whom the media is celebrating because he happens to be up in Iowa, whose Republican caucuses haven’t predicted anything in years.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are discussing real issues. She wants to create a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and expand Obama’s executive order on immigration, roll back Republican state laws designed to suppress the votes of the poor, automatically register citizens to vote when they turn 18, demilitarize the police, and get rid of mandatory prison sentences. Bernie Sanders wants to bust up the biggest Wall Street banks, make higher education free, and strengthen safety nets. But as long as the media remains fixated on the political horse race, America isn’t going to be debating any of this. Horse-race reportage allows the Republicans to get away with their racism, homophobia, anti-worker economics, and total dearth of ideas, while burying the important initiatives Democrats are proposing.
So what's the answer? — Facebook

TV news? It’s come a long way from the days when I used to watch it with my parents every night. We never missed the 10 o’clock news. Dan Rather. David Brinkley. The giant himself, Walter Cronkite. Most people watched television news at least on a daily basis, especially if you didn’t take time to read a daily paper. You couldn’t consider yourself well informed without reading at least one paper a day.

Today the newspaper industry has either moved online, or fallen by the wayside. TV news, the baseline for an informed society through most of my life, has become a pre-digested wasteland of oatmeal reporting on one end of the spectrum, and a haven for the craziest of right-wing political views on the other. You could still watch the nightly news if you wanted to, but why bother? Most of the events that will be reported on during that half-hour broadcast are old news by the time the TV reports on them.

But I am a news junkie, have been one all my life. I don’t feel like I’ve finished my day unless I’ve had a dose of the day’s events summarized for me. So I need news, and a steady stream of it works best. Since I spend large sections of my day with a laptop, that’s generally not a problem. Still, I like my news to sometimes be delivered in a video format. I am constantly two-screening as the saying goes; writing or gaming on one screen, watching something on another one.

I watched MSNBC daily for more than a year (probably more like three years) I started watching back when Dylan Ratigan was brought on. The TV would be on and tuned to MSNBC from mid-afternoon through most of the evening shows, pretty much every weekday. During that time I felt more informed, but spent large segments of my day trapped watching repetitive news items. As the hosts of the afternoon and evening programming changed, with Ratigan famously flaming out (a moment I’m glad I got to see live) Cenk Uygur being added and then hastily removed, the inclusion of Al Sharpton’s hour-long program (which inexplicably remains on MSNBC despite his lack of journalistic competence) Chris Matthews’ maddening insistence on reporting politics as if it was a horse race (echoing Reich’s comments) rather than something real, I found my interests waning.

For the last few months I’ve moved away from watching any television news and getting my news almost exclusively from the internet. The news programming on television feels disconnected from the reality of living in the US today; All In with Chris Hayes & The Rachel Maddow Show being the few exceptions to this observation (and a shout out to MHP on weekend mornings for being worth getting up for) but not worth the time to record and watch daily.

The only TV news I still reliably take the time to watch is faux news (as opposed to FOX news which is fake but treated as real) The Daily Show and The Nightly Show (which replaced The Colbert Report earlier this year) studies have shown not only that most young people get their TV news from these shows, but that people who watch these shows are more informed than people who watch real TV news. Which is a sad state of affairs if you think that TV news is important and relevant.

The solution to this problem is to move with the times. As other commenters noted on the status, television news is a largely dying industry. They influence smaller and smaller segments of the population. The Young Turks gets more eyeballs than television news, and other internet sites do even better than they do at communicating news through text articles; the way humans have consumed news since the invention of the printing press.

When you look at the problem from a modern perspective, people are more connected than they have been in decades to the events around them. This fact doesn’t reliably translate into actual influence of events, doesn’t sway the actions of the political leaders, probably because of the corrupting influence of money in politics. The solution is to target the sources of corruption and get them closed off through legislative action in the states. It can be done, but it won’t be a short process.

The End of Alternative Currency?

Years ago, I set up a Google alert for Liberty Dollar (and NORFED. Norfed was the name of the company that started Liberty Dollar Silver) because I wanted to keep track of what was being said about the currency in the mainstream media. Not a lot, until recently.

A week ago today, I got a note from Bernard Von Nothaus, founder of the Liberty Dollar, stating that he had been convicted of various crimes relating to the creation and running of the silver barter currency, and was appealing the conviction.

Dear Liberty Dollar Supporters,
I sincerely regret to inform you that I was found guilty on all four counts regarding the Liberty Dollar in less than an hour on Friday, March 18. The only explanation is that a strong, anti-liberty person took control of a weak-willed jury and pushed the verdict through in record time in spite of well worded Jury Instructions. A government forfeiture hearing immediately followed the conviction. PLEASE NOTE: Your property is at risk so please continue to read these emails and take action so the government does not steal your property. An appeal is planned but that will take years. More news to follow. An unofficial, but most interesting account of the trial is available via Heather’s blog at:
http://www.liberty4free.com/Liberty%20D … 0Trial.htm
God help you and our country as American descends into a hellish hyperinflationary future without the benefits of the Liberty Dollar.
I am very sorry our efforts to return America to value failed.
Thank you so much for your support.
Bernard von NotHaus
Monetary Architect

Ever since then I’ve gotten a slew of articles. Got notice for one in Mother Jones referring to Bernard as a Pot Priest. I think that was the funniest I’ve seen. The scariest I’ve seen was this one.

Here’s a novel of an expansion of the federal government’s use of the word “terrorism,” from the triumphant statement of a North Carolina U.S. Attorney, Anne Tompkins, who just won a conviction against a man who minted his own currency:
“Attempts to undermine the legitimate currency of this country are simply a unique form of domestic terrorism,” U.S. Attorney Tompkins said in announcing the verdict.
“While these forms of anti-government activities do not involve violence, they are every bit as insidious and represent a clear and present danger to the economic stability of this country,” she added. “We are determined to meet these threats through infiltration, disruption and dismantling of organizations which seek to challenge the legitimacy of our democratic form of government.”
The convict, Bernard Von NotHaus, who runs the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve and Internal Revenue Code, and now faces 15 years in prison.
Politico – U.S. Attorney calls currency minting ‘terrorism’

Minting barterable rounds, rather than commemorative rounds, is a terrorist act? Oh really? What do you call a US currency that contravenes all US law relating to the value of our currency? If you doubt the veracity of this claim, simply reference the wiki on the subject. The constitution specifies that gold and silver are legal tender. Where is the amendment changing this? How is bartering with gold and silver not in the realm of constitutional behavior, but using a visa card funded with digital federal money based on nothing is constitutional?

I get it, the guys with guns say it’s so, so it is. It’s a lot like tax law. Still, I’d really like an explanation beyond the “because I said so” that bad parents offer up as an excuse to their children.

I stopped participating in the LD community when the Feds declared the practice illegal. I traded a good number of rounds for goods and services over the years prior to that. Any merchant that came to me and wanted deposit-able federal dollars (the banks refused to take gold and silver and insisted on fake money. Riddle me that one) I gladly traded them paper for silver. To this day, I search my change for the increasingly rare pre-80’s piece of federal money that has silver content in it, so that I can set it aside to get its real value assayed. I’d still take real silver and gold over fake paper, anyday.

…and I wonder at governments that accuse honest businessmen of fraud, while conducting a fraud on their own.

If you had Liberty Dollars in the warehouse, your property is about to be forfeited.

URGENT ACTION: Bad News for your Property!
Dear Liberty Dollar Supporters:
Thank you, thank you, thank you for the 100s of replies. The two most common words re my conviction were “sorry” and “sad.” I wholeheartedly agree and am sorry I can’t reply to every email. URGENT we have no time to lose to protect your property from gov theft!
Please do NOT let the government steal your property!!!
I have just learned that the government will aggressively defend against any claims once the judge decides on April 4th whether or not the property in whole or in part is subject to forfeiture. This means that the government may steal your property i.e. the silver that backs the paper or digital Liberty Dollar Warehouse Receipts ‘without just compensation’ i.e. fair market value! Please stand up for your Fifth Amendment!
URGENT ACTION IS REQUIRED IMMEDIATELY!!!
Unless you are identified as an “interested party” on the official record prior to the April 4th Forfeiture Hearing on Monday morning, you may not have standing with the court to redeem your Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts or the gov process may be so encumbered that the government prevails and steals your property.
You do not have to identify the total value of your paper or digital Warehouse Receipts that you are holding to qualify as an “Interested Party.” So, even if you are holding just one $1 Liberty Dollar silver certificate, you are qualified as an “Interested Party” and encouraged to register – IMMEDIATELY.
Registering is easy, fast and free: Simply email the statement below to Assistant US Attorney Thomas R. Ascik <thomas.ascik@usdoj.gov>, the government attorney who is trying to steal your property. And send a CC to me <Bernard@LibertyDollar.org> and I will send all the emails to the attorney who will represent you after you sign an attorney/client agreement. Your CC to me is very important! Please do NOT forget to CC me so you will be on the list to have your property or its fair market value returned to you.
EMAIL THE STATEMENT BELOW to Thomas Ascik with a CC to me. Be sure to include your name and address:
I hereby certify that I am the bearer of Liberty Dollar warehouse receipt(s) and an interested party in any forfeiture action regarding my property. I demand the return of my property or its fair market value in a timely manner and to be informed with sufficient time to reply to any and all actions until my property is returned.
INCLUDE YOUR NAME AND ADDRESS
Please note that you will need to sign an attorney/client agreement and agree to pay a contingency fee prior to any legal services. NO FEE is required at this time.
But that may not be enough! If you are holding a serious amount of paper or digital Warehouse Receipts, I strongly encourage you to attend this Forfeiture Hearing on April 4, 2011 at the Federal Courthouse, 200 W Broad St. in Statesville, NC. I know the time is short, the distance is great and the cost is dear; but that is the best suggestion I can make at this time for anyone with a serious amount of paper or digital Warehouse Receipts. If you do appear, you will be called as a witness and officially recognized as an interested party in the court record.
NOTICE: There is a small chance that the Hearing may be continued (postponed) so please email me for the latest info for the Hearing.
Please do NOT let the government steal your property!! At the very least, email Thomas Ascik and send a CC to me to protect your silver. Stand up for your property and continue to be a part of the Liberty Dollar effort by demanding the gov return your silver or its fair market value.
Now Anybody can be a “Unique Terrorist” Please read this open letter to America calling for your cry out about my conviction.
Click HERE for a list of recent articles regarding the BVNH conviction.
Please get your article published and contribute to this public outcry or encourage someone to do so.

The US government has gone after all the alternate currencies that I ever heard of, and they’ve been successful in shutting them all down. The only remaining e-Metal investment firm that I know of is Goldmoney.com, and they wisely got themselves associated with British banking interests as soon they saw that the US government was taking an interest in e-Metal alternative currencies.

Liberty Dollars isn’t the only group working out asset return strategies with the government. e-Gold is also in that process; a process that is now entering it’s third year. So don’t hold your breath on getting your money back, let alone soon.

Douglas Jackson, the founder and director of the online payment service e-Gold and its parent company Gold & Silver Reserve, has ended a two-and-a-half-year battle with the Justice Department and pleaded guilty to charges pertaining to money laundering and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. He faces up to 20 years in prison on the money-laundering charge and up to 5 years in prison on the licensing charge.
wired.com

Ultimately, criminal abuse of e-gold reached the point where the US Department of Justice intervened, bringing criminal charges against e-gold Ltd., Gold & Silver Reserve., Inc., (the Operator of e-gold and also of the online exchange service OmniPay), myself, and the other directors for violations of 18 USC 1960 [Operation of an unlicensed Money Transmitting Business] and 18 USC 1956 [Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering]. The criminal case has been resolved. The resolution of the criminal case however provides for a second chance, an opportunity to address the flaws embedded in the e-gold system and to transform the “e-gold Operation” into the institutions I, the other directors, and our longsuffering employees and contractors have always envisioned, one that serves to advance the material welfare of mankind.
blog.e-gold.com

August 19, 2015

Despite the 2011 conviction of Liberty Dollar creator Bernard von NotHaus on charges related to the manufacture and distribution of Liberty Dollars, U.S. District Court Judge Richard L. Voorhees ruled in late 2014 that seized property not deemed as contraband should be returned pursuant to ownership claims.
Von NotHaus, who faced 22 years in prison for his 2011 conviction, was sentenced Dec. 2, 2014, by Judge Voorhees to three years of probation and six months under house arrest.
coinworld.com

DownsizeDC Manifesto

Why I bother spending time and energy supporting DownsizeDC:

Invest your time and money to change minds directly, and you will gain the world. The votes may even follow. But be under no illusions, the votes will merely follow, they will never lead. Electoral success will be the last thing that happens in the process of change, not the first. Grasp this fact, or you will groan forever in futile effort and constant despair.
This is our manifesto
DownsizeDC, Manifesto

Something I’ve pointed out to many people over the years.

To change minds you have to convince others to modify their philosophy. Philosophy dictates how you see your world, and the philosophy of the average American is Altruism, which is the same philosophy that Marx derived Socialism from. Most Americans are susceptible to socialist promises (like government run single payer health care) because they come clothed in Altruist ideals; but they are socialist all the same, mandatory group solutions to individual problems.

If we hope to regain our freedom, if we hope to avoid being drug deeper into a socialist nightmare, we have to convince others that their philosophy is flawed, that their views need to be revised. Like the recent events in Britain; the British government has decided to no longer talk about a “war on terror.”

So I threw in my two cents when I wrote my congresscritters about not being afraid and ending the War on Terror on our side of the pond:

Immediately following the attacks on 9/11 I was ready to take the fight to the Saudis, ready to volunteer to fight, because it was quickly apparent that Saudis formed the majority of the terrorists who attacked our country.

The President, in his folly, decided to declare war on a tactic, instead of declaring war on a government or a people. In that instant, the chance for a meaningful end to the events of 9/11 was taken from us.

A war on a tactic cannot be won, Just as a war on a substance or market (drugs) can’t be won. Anyone, including members of our own government, can employ this tactic; thusly creating a never ending stream of enemies we must fight in order to engage in a war on terror.

Fifty or 100 years makes no difference, it is a war without end from the perspective of victory; and we will bankrupt or ourselves long before we reach the 50 year mark.

End the War on Terror (End the Drug War while you’re at it) before it ends us.

Will it change any minds? I doubt it. But it’s much more likely to change minds than doing nothing at all, or wasting a vote on a mainstream candidate.