9 XI 2023: Crimson Tide to drown inmate

Headline on CNN: Alabama sets date for execution of a death row inmate by nitrogen gas, a method never used in any state. Alabama has repeatedly screwed up its attempts to execute prisoners by lethal injection. The victim of the last botched execution, Kenneth Eugene Smith, requested to be executed with nitrogen gas. This is, as Smith’s lawyer described it, “an experimental, never-before-used method” for execution.

The article on CNN reports that according to the Death Penalty Information Center “Death by nitrogen hypoxia deprives the brain and body of oxygen,” and this is assumed to be a more humane, or, rather, a more reliable technique for execution. So Alabama, usually the most backward of former Confederate states, is now leading the way.

8 XI 2023: Same old shit

Politico reports: Sarah Huckabee Sanders to endorse Trump in debate counterprogramming. Y’all remember Sarah. She used to be Trump’s humorless mouthpiece and is now governor of Arkansas, one of our antebellum states. Of course she remains as resolutely deluded and mendacious as any veteran of Team Trump. Gov. Sarah’s endorsement will boost Trump’s standing where it needs no boosting, but will increase the alienation of anyone who has any memory of her bare-faced lies.

05 XI 2023: Confused antisemitism

In an interview that is reported in yesterday’s Politico Mr. Doug Emhoff comments upon the current upsurge of antisemitism in America, and there he makes the following point: 

The tenor of some of the protests over Israel’s response to the Hamas’ attacks that killed 1,400 have shocked him, he said. He believes Americans are dispensing with distinctions between being critical of Israeli politics and Jewish people. “There seems to be a conflation of not being able to separate the actions of the Israeli government and Jewish people and taking out feelings that they have about the actions of the Israeli government on all Jews, irrespective of how those Jews may also feel about the actions of the Israeli government.”

I think that Mr. Emhoff is right. Many who are angry about the behavior of the Israeli regime thoughtlessly lump non-Israeli Jews as well as leftist Israelis together with the coalition of neo-fascists and religious reactionaries in the Israeli government that is so relentlessly bombing Gaza.

However, I would suggest that the conflation of which Mr. Emhoff complains is among very many unreflective Americans quite predictable. The majority of American Jews are supporters, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, of the state of Israel. Consider this report from the Pew Research Center: 

Israel, the world’s only Jewish-majority country, is a subject of special concern to many Jews in the United States. Caring about Israel is “essential” to what being Jewish means to 45% of U.S. Jewish adults, and an additional 37% say it is “important, but not essential,”‘ according to a new Pew Research Center survey that was fielded from Nov. 19, 2019, to June 3, 2020 – well before the latest surge of violence in the region. Just 16% of U.S. Jewish adults say that caring about Israel is “not important” to their Jewish identity.

This conflation of Jews in America with Jews in Israel and with the Israeli state is fostered by the Israeli government that relies on the American Jewish community for political and financial support. It is fostered also by Israel’s strenuously anti-American enemies. It is fostered as well by the many Americans who have become armed “settlers” on the West Bank. The The Times of Israel and other sources say: “Approximately 60,000 US Jews, out of the 170,000 in Israel, live in West Bank, study shows.”

These factors combine to incline very many in the U.S. to identify American Jews with the Israeli state, and turn the closer-to-home American Jews into the objects of naive, popular hostility: “If you can’t be with the ones you hate, hate the ones you’re with.”

I would make the additional point that some of the anonymous antisemitic outrages that are reported in the U.S. may not flow from the perpetrators’ specific hate for Jews, but from their generalized hate that focuses on whoever is in the news. The Trump years have shown that the number of not institutionalized insane in the United States, like the number of crypto-criminals, is far greater than we once supposed.

1 XI 2023: Is Josh Hawley still beating his wife?

Our Senior [sic] Senator, Josh Hawley, gave another performance of virtuoso sleaze in his recent questioning of Secretary Mayorkas. Using the logic best suited to his audience, he asked the Secretary if the deranged anti-Israeli posting of a single Homeland Security employee indicates an anti-Israeli bias through the entire Agency. It was almost like asking if the dog-whistle anti-semitism and racism of Trump and his followers in Congress means that all Trumpists are bigots. 

Hawley is frenetically ambitious and is counting on Trumpism to advance his career. So he never misses an opportunity to enhance the deception of those who are already deceived. 

28 X 2023: Media should gag him

A headline in today’s Politico begins: “Trump lashes out ….” Is Trump lashing out really newsworthy? If an old man’s peevishness is news, I may one day be famous. Unfortunately, report of this pseudo-news is additional evidence that the media is chiefly responsible for the perpetuation of Trump.

16 X 2023: How do you stop a motor-mouth?

Politico reports the so-called gag-order that Judge Chutkan has imposed on the traitor Donald Trump. My only complaint is that the gag-order is not more comprehensive.

John Lauro, Trump’s lawyer and second self, acted out, pleaded: “What does somebody do in the face of oppression in a system that now approaches totalitarianism … ?” Of course, it is approaching totalitarianism in large part due to Donald Trump.

Politico also reports “Today really isn’t about gagging me. … It’s an attempt to gag the American people,” Trump wrote, before asking for “a contribution of any amount.”

So Trump is a suffering stand-in for the entire American people, and has been reduced to the point of having to beg for money. I guess the fees he is supposed to pay his vast team of lawyers is swallowing up the money he has stolen over the years.

But just wait and see how little effect the gag-order has. Trump has zero self-restraint and myriad grievances, so he will be driven to keep talking, and when he starts talking, no one, including Trump himself, knows what is going to come out.

14 X 2023: Holy War???

That little cameleon Lindsey Graham is calling Israel’s “punishment” of Hamas a “Holy War.”

I don’t know precisely what he could mean, if he means anything at all specific. In any case, if we look back at the history of “Holy Wars” from the slaughter of the Canaanites onwards,  we see that “Holy War” means a politically advantageous genocide, or virtual genocide, carried out in obedience to what is claimed to be the will of God. 

It seems that, ruthlessly selfish though we are, there are levels of depravity beneath which we cannot sink unless we pretend that “God wills it,” “Gott mit uns,” etc.

 The very concept of a Holy War, a divinely sanctioned war, is blasphemous.

12 X 2023: Both sides are terrorists

It is being said generally that Hamas’ latest assault on Israel was a terrorist attack. Hamas is a pretend army. They do not represent the Palestinian people. They are indubitably stupid terrorists who are doing someone else’s work while drunk on violence and murder 

At the same time, Israel is now practicing its own brand of terrorism, a war of bombs and rockets against civilians and their homes, like the V2 rockets and the carpet-bombing of WW II. 

Both sides are responsible. Both sides should be ashamed of themselves.

If Israel and its foes were to give up their enmity, the entire political scene in the Middle East would change dramatically, and many would lose their influence and be out of a job. I have to wonder whether the mad lust for revenge of both sides rages on because it is continually stimulated by those who benefit from perennial hatred and violence.

30 IX 2023: Many forms of bankruptcy.

The Primatial See of the United States, the Archdiocese of Baltimore, has filed for bankruptcy just in the nick of time to avoid financial responsibility its history of abuse and cover-up that cries to heaven: 150 criminal priests who were given protection and continuing opportunity by church authorities, and 600 victims, victims of priests and church authorities alike. Yes, the church authorities are also to blame, for their long-standing disdain for truth, zeal for coverup, and shirking of their sacred duty to correct and protect.

And why are so many dioceses talking “poor mouth”? Why are parishes being closed? Not enough money, not enough priests, we are told. But why is there not enough money and not enough priests? Does the record of the American hierarchy encourage the faithful to trust them with their money, let alone anything more valuable than money? Is life in a priesthood that is subjected to the American bishops likely to attract the idealistic and prudent?

11 IX 2023: Let us alone (in our ignorance and poverty)

The Great State of Alabama, as George Wallace used to call it, is in rebellion against the Federal judiciary. The Republican legislators are insisting vigorously on their right to jerrymander and deprive black citizens of an effective vote. They along with Republican legislatures of other the states of the old Confederacy are among the most vociferous in asserting their rights (or, to approximate their pronunciations, their raats!).

I have been looking at a ranking of states according to real per capita personal income and guess which are the bottom ten: Oklahoma, Arkansas, Arizona, West Virginia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Idaho, Louisiana, Alabama, and, last and least, Mississippi.

We have here states of the Old South and the South’s Western colonies. These fools, as they cling desperately to the “old ways” and the old white supremacy are, as they say, circling the bowl.