Gosh, this has been a busy week of late nights and paperwork and search committees and trying to catch up with my backlog as the semester winds down to a close. And then I realized…I forgot something. Something something something I’d been planning to attend on Monday. D’oh!

I completely missed Dinesh D’Souza’s visit to our campus. I’d noted it, and there are great big posters everywhere of his gormless goony face, but still — on the appointed day and hour, I had so little interest in the event that I didn’t even remember it enough to tell myself I was too busy to waste an hour on it.

I wondered how it went, but when I asked around, no one else had attended either, or remembered that it was going to happen. We just didn’t care. I’m sure the UMM College Republicans were disappointed, too. Where was antifa? Where were the shrill mobs of feminists and progressives and radical leftist students and old hippies?

So I thought I’d look in on the UMM College Republican web page. Surely they’d have a report on the talk by their hero, brought in to antagonize a liberal campus. They’ve got nothin’. Well, not exactly nothing: they mention their victimhood at length (someone let the air out of one of their tires; probably a black op. One of their members found a used condom thrown at their door…which sounds like an icky college student prank, but you never know where the tentacles of George Soros will strike), and talk about the party they threw for the graduating president of the club, who was given a “Most Hated Person at UMM” award. I felt bad for them. I don’t even know who they are. If it would be validating, I might be willing to muster a vague feeling of pity, but sorry, not hating.

They had photos of the party. They are very sad.

So their big event of the semester with a nationally known speaker was kind of a pathetic bust. They’ve got like four people at their graduation party. I guess I am feeling that vague pity after all.

If I knew who they were, maybe I’d raise a fist and say “Comrade! Workers of the world, unite!” as I passed them in the hall, just so they’d feel like their life goals had meaning.

I guess this is the forlorn, empty fate of conservatives, eventually. I don’t think Trump has helped their brand.

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Oh. I checked the facebook page for the event. Even sadder.

I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Capone was a murder and thief, an amoral gangster — and the law was unable to bring him down for the truly evil things he did, but could jail him for the lesser crime of tax evasion. It was a useful tactic for ending a criminal regime, but two things are bothersome: that we were inadequate to the task of stopping a murderer, and isn’t it revealing that the more easily prosecutable crime in a capitalist was society was a crime against property?

It just seems like we’re constantly pussy-footing around the gross corruption of the Trump regime, and have dispatched people like Mueller to investigate and find some little hook, a violation of campaign finance law, perhaps, or lesser offense that, because of the ways our laws work, are easier to nail him on. That seems like a bad precedent to me. The man is openly incompetent and dangerous, and we pin our hopes for getting him out of office on a badly filed form, or a personal peccadillo, and we can’t remove him for being terrible at his job? Something is wrong here.

Case in point: Scott Pruitt.

It is ironic and pathetic and dangerous how the media, the Democratic party leadership and too many liberals are now focusing everyone’s attention on Scott Pruitt’s expenses and petty scandals to discredit him. When we look at who Scott Pruitt really is, and what he’s really done, we can see that going after him this way is like catching a naked mass murderer right in the act and then charging him with indecent exposure. It is hugely dangerous because it mis-directs people away from the immense real danger represented by Pruitt.

It’s the same thing! The man is ragingly bad at what ought to be his job.

Pruitt is a Hard Core Christian Fascist Playing a Key Role at the Core of the Trump/Pence regime.

For years Pruitt has been one of the most prominent right-wing attack dogs against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) when (during previous administrations before Trump/Pence) it was still in the main carrying out its stated mission of protecting the environment using science and scientific principles to monitor and assess the health of the environment.

He has been an open unapologetic lobbyist for energy firms for many years.

But more than this, Pruitt is a Christian fascist. He sits on the board of directors of the Southern Seminary, one of the largest seminaries in the world and the largest of the denomination’s (Southern Baptists) six seminaries. He is one of the main sponsors of the weekly cabinet-level biblical study group along with: Vice President Mike Pence, HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, CIA Director (and now Secretary of State designate) Mike Pompeo and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.

This study group is run by Ralph Drollinger an infamous far-right extremist pastor who was disavowed by his own church for his bigoted ideology. His group also has similar study groups in the U.S. House and Senate and in 43 State assemblies. In a September 2015 interview, Drollinger described his mission as creating a “factory” to mass-produce politicians like Michele Bachmann, who is on the Capitol Ministries board. “She thinks Biblically,” Drollinger said. “She doesn’t need a whole lot of time to figure out how to vote because she sees the world through a scriptural lens. We need more men and women like her in office.” Drollinger has praised the new (Trump/Pence) administration for its power to “change the course of America in ways that are biblical.”

Yet none of that is indictable. We can have a radical religious bigot placed outside of his qualifications in a high position with the specific purpose of destroying the office under his charge, and nothing can be done. But hey, maybe he filed an inappropriate expense report! Maybe he spent too much on office furniture!

It’s too much to hope that failing to meet the obligations and trust expected of a political servant might be grounds for dismissal. That’s all I ask — not that they go to jail (although they should) or be hung from a lamppost or be water-boarded at Gitmo by our pro-torture government, but that they be dismissed from the jobs they cannot do. And that maybe our vetting process for high office involve less about ideology and more about basic competence.

Senator Tammy Duckworth had a baby, and Orrin Hatch stuck his foot (his own foot, not the baby’s) into his mouth. I’m not surprised that the Salt Lake Tribune took notice.

Sen. Orrin Hatch said this week he was fine allowing babies on the Senate floor, but then he asked a follow-up question of his own.

What, he mused, would happen “if there are 10 babies on the floor of the Senate?”

It seems to me that that would mean either a) there were a lot more women senators, or b) a lot more senatorial men were taking their paternal duties seriously. Both sound like good outcomes.

Leave it to a Minnesotan to make the nicest comment, though.

“We could only wish we had 10 babies on the floor,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., told The AP. “That would be a delight.”

I had to choke back a comment about how there were far more than 10 Republicans already on the floor.

Lynna is your curator. How are you all holding up, America?

(Previous thread)

The month before the 2016 election, when Trump said this?

On Syria’s civil war, Trump said Clinton could drag the United States into a world war with a more aggressive posture toward resolving the conflict.

Those were the days, when people would seriously argue that we couldn’t vote for Hillary because she was a warmonger.

Today, of course…U.S. launches missile strikes in Syria.

Someone is psychic, I don’t know who.

The operation capped nearly a week of debate in which Pentagon leaders voiced concerns that an attack could pull the United States into Syria’s civil war and trigger a dangerous conflict with Assad ally Russia — without necessarily halting chemical attacks.

The California legislature is considering a comprehensive net neutrality bill, which the big corporations like AT&T really hate. I’d like to see it become law for you all, because that would mean us little people in flyover country who don’t have any significance at all could then point to you as a shining example.

We need you to contact your representatives and tell them to get off their butts and do the right thing, and ignore those well-heeled lobbyists who are waving money at them.

Contact:

Ben Hueso (Chair) | 916–651–4040 | @BenHueso
Robert Hertzberg | 916–651–4018 | @SenateHertzberg
Steve Bradford | 916–651–4035 | @SteveBradford
Henry Stern | 916–651–4027 | @HenrySternCA
Jerry Hill | 916–651–4013

Tell them to support SB 822 to restore net neutrality.

We look at the world now and wonder how the alt-right could possibly have any popularity at all — such odious ideas, such terrible ignorant people. But the seeds were planted a long time ago. I was just reading Starship Stormtroopers, a 1977 essay by Michael Moorcock, in which he looks back on recent issues in science fiction, colored by the experience of the Vietnam War and the protests against it. I remember that time, and what I think of are the hippies, and campus radicals, and revolutionary music, and peace and love and rejecting bourgeois capitalism. And now I wonder how did that generation grow up to populate the worst, most corrupt, most destructive government in our history?

The answer is right there in that culture of the 60s-70s. We just didn’t notice the contradictions imbedded in it, which Moorcock points out in the context of the popular SF readings of the day.

There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them — a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants — a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence — a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn’t disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkein or Richard Adams. All this visionary fiction seems to me to have a great deal in common. Utopian fiction has been predominantly reactionary in one form or another (as well as being predominantly dull) since it began. Most of it warns the world of ‘decadence’ in its contemporaries and the alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping — not to say simple-minded. A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune.

Ouch. I read all of those authors, but at least I can say I came to detest them, with the exception of Lovecraft, which I’ve always read as hilariously badly written dystopian kitsch. But otherwise, I agree — even Tolkien, who has become even more popular today thanks to that series of wildly successful movies, created a wierdly asexual, regressive, pastoral universe where old traditional values, like aristocracy and kingship, were revered. Moorcock also hammers on that.

The interesting thing was that at the time many of the pro-US-involvement writers were (and by and large still are) the most popular sf writers in the English-speaking world, let alone Japan, the Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, where a good many sf readers think of themselves as radicals. One or two of these writers (British as well as American) are dear friends of mine who are personally kindly and courageous people of considerable integrity — but their political statements (if not always, by any means, their actions) are stomach-turning! Most people have to be judged by their actions rather than their remarks, which are often surprisingly at odds. Writers, when they are writing, can only be judged on the substance of their work. The majority of the sf writers most popular with radicals are by and large crypto-fascists to a man and woman! There is Lovecraft, the misogynic racist; there is Heinlein, the authoritarian militarist; there is Ayn Rand, the rabid opponent of trade unionism and the left, who, like many a reactionary before her, sees the problems of the world as a failure by capitalists to assume the responsibilities of ‘good leadership’; there is Tolkein and that group of middle-class Christian fantasists who constantly sing the praises of bourgeois virtues and whose villains are thinly disguised working class agitators — fear of the Mob permeates their rural romances. To all these and more the working class is a mindless beast which must be controlled or it will savage the world (i.e. bourgeois security) — the answer is always leadership, ‘decency’, paternalism (Heinlein in particularly strong on this), Christian values…

Leading to the present day, where that paternalism is worshipped, and yelling about decency and Christian values is a mask over the most atrocious corruption.

At least his characterization of John Campbell is vastly entertaining, if horrifying.

Indeed, it’s often been shown that sf supplied a lot of the vocabulary and atmosphere for American military and space technology (a ‘Waldo’ handling machine is a name taken straight from a Heinlein story). Astounding became full of crew-cut wisecracking, cigar-chewing, competent guys (like Campbell’s image of himself). But Campbell and his writers (and they considered themselves something of a unified team) were not producing Westerns. They claimed to be producing a fiction of ideas. These competent guys were suggesting how the world should be run. By the early fifties Astounding had turned by almost anyone’s standard into a crypto-fascist deeply philistine magazine pretending to intellectualism and offering idealistic kids an ‘alternative’ that was, of course, no alternative at all. Through the fifties Campbell used his whole magazine as propaganda for the ideas he promoted in his editorials. His writers, by and large, were enthusiastic. Those who were not fell away from him, disturbed by his increasingly messianic disposition (Alfred Bester gives a good account of this). Over the years Campbell promoted the mystical, quasi-scientific Scientology (first proposed by one of his regular writers L. Ron Hubbard and aired for the first time in Astounding as ‘Dianetics: The New Science of the Mind’), a perpetual motion machine known as the ‘Dean Drive’, a series of plans to ensure that the highways weren’t ‘abused’, and dozens of other half-baked notions, all in the context of cold-war thinking. He also, when faced with the Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went on to proposing that there were ‘natural’ slaves who were unhappy if freed. I sat on a panel with him in 1965, as he pointed out that the worker bee when unable to work dies of misery, that the moujiks when freed went to their masters and begged to be enslaved again, that the ideals of the anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of self-interest and that the blacks were ‘against’ emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in ‘leaderless’ riots in the suburbs of Los Angeles! I was speechless (actually I said four words in all — ‘science-fiction’ — ‘psychology’ — Jesus Christ!’- before I collapsed), leaving John Brunner to perform a cool demolition of Campbell’s arguments, which left the editor calling on God in support of his views — an experience rather more intense for me than watching Doctor Strangelove at the cinema.

Now I’m left feeling like nothing ever changes.

It’s official: Paul Ryan won’t be running for re-election. He’s the 39th Republican to announce a retirement from office this year. It’s almost as if they know something.

He stated his two major accomplishments:

Ryan had long championed overhauling the tax code, a goal accomplished with the passage last year of the sweeping GOP tax bill.

“That’s something I’ve been working on my entire adult life,” Ryan said at his news conference.

He cited tax reform and rebuilding the military as his two biggest achievements and said he wants to accomplish more before stepping down.

What? He’s proud of a tax reform that’s a bonanza for the filthy rich and increases our debt?

Someone tell me when our military was weak and needed strengthening, because right now all I see is expensive overkill. So Ryan helped make that worse?

I think it’s more like he’s done all the damage he can do, and he’s getting out to enjoy his ill-gotten gains.

Paul Waldman, specifically. He outright says that Trump is a crook.

One remarkable thing about the 2016 election is the way Trump’s business career was given such a superficial examination by the media as a whole. Again and again, some crazy story or unusual aspect of his financial life would be the topic of one or two investigative stories, but those stories wouldn’t get picked up by other outlets.

Making this more problematic, Trump isn’t someone who played close to the line a time or two, or once did a shady deal. He may well be the single most corrupt major business figure in the United States of America. He ran scams like Trump University to con struggling people out of their money. He lent his name to pyramid schemes. He bankrupted casinos and still somehow made millions while others were left holding the bag. He refused to pay vendors. He exploited foreign workers. He used illegal labor. He discriminated against African American renters. He violated Federal Trade Commission rules on stock purchases. He did business with the mob and with Eastern European kleptocrats. His properties became the go-to vehicle for Russian oligarchs and mobsters to launder their money.

So it was no accident that when he ran for president, the people who joined him in his quest were also a collection of grifters, liars, and crooks — people such as Paul Manafort. Those were the kind of operators Trump has attracted all his life. Honest, upright people with a deep respect for the law don’t go to work for Donald Trump.

That is remarkable. All throughout the election campaign, those horrible little stories about Trump’s sleazy business practices would trickle out — we all saw them — and then the press would shrug and move on to something else (Hillary’s emails!). Any one of those things would have scuttled an ordinary candidate: heck, Howard Dean made a loud yell and boom, it was all anyone talked about and it killed his presidential run. Trump wouldn’t even release his tax returns, which should have had everyone deeply suspicious.

We don’t just have a corrupt president, we have a corrupt media.