Green Eagle

Well, as it is getting closer to the time when the Electoral College will, in overwhelming likelihood, put its seal of approval on the travesty of Trump's accession to the White House, I thought it would do well to see what the founding fathers really thought about this institution.  For that purpose, I'll turn to Federalist Paper no. 68, where the musical man of the hour, Alexander Hamilton, explains on behalf of himself and his fellow authors of the Constitution, what it actually means, as opposed to the ludicrous nonsense that is peddled far and wide, in largely successful attempts to bend the Constitution to whatever suits the right's purpose at the moment. I want to say before getting to the point, that I continue to be surprised at the contortions that people will engage in to justify finding whatever they want in the intent of the founding fathers (as if that were so important anyway) while their actual words lay close at hand, and are available instantaneously onl...

From the Tampa Bay Times , this edifying story: "A man was arrested in Pasco County on charges he held a woman against her will for more than three months after she came from Texas to study a group he founded that purports to help reunite children with their parents... Davis, 48, is a sovereign citizen" But of course he is.  In case you were wondering, here he is:  As you know, I like to keep an eye on Sovereign Citizens, as their many acts of violence in the last couple of decades marks them as a pool of very dangerous right wing maniacs.  Well, I've kept my eye on this one long enough.  Judging from his picture, he is just about as short of a functional brain as most of these people are.  Well, at least this one will be in prison for the duration of the Trump administration. A spokesman for the group had this to say:  "(Group member Thomas) Nelson said members of the group don't call themselves sovereign citizens because they disagree with ...

This news in the New York Times this morning: "A federal judge ruled on Monday that Dylann S. Roof, who was charged in the massacre of nine black worshipers at a Charleston, S.C., church in 2015, can represent himself in his federal death-penalty trial. The judge, Richard M. Gergel of Federal District Court in Charleston, called the request by Mr. Roof, 22, “strategically unwise,” but allowed him to have a lawyer present as backup. “I do find defendant has the personal capacity to self-representation,” Judge Gergel said, according to The Post & Courier. He added, “It is a decision you have the right to make. ” In other news, a judge has ruled that it is perfectly legal to perform brain surgery on yourself, probably citing the excellent results of such conduct in the case of one Dr. Ben Carson. Anyway, we are going to be looking for any sort of entertainment in the coming year or two, and this holds the potential to provide plenty.  I mean, who wouldn't want a ...

You stupid sons of bitches: "President-elect Donald Trump's proposals would modestly cut income taxes for most middle-class Americans. But for nearly 8 million families — including a majority of single-parent households — the opposite would occur: They'd pay more. Most married couples with three or more children would also pay higher taxes, an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found. And while middle-class families as a whole would receive tax cuts of about 2 percent, they'd be dwarfed by the windfalls averaging 13.5 percent for America's richest 1 percent." You will be lucky to get $200 a year out of that two percent cut.  A wonderful reward for selling the country out to a Russian spy.  I hope you will be happy with the results of giving into your hatred and greed.

Let me bring your attention to this piece in the Washington Post , outlining the massive effect that lyinog propaganda, channeled through Russia, and willingly circulated by both the Trump campaign, and (far more dangerously) the mainstream press in our country, and abetted by openly subversive behavior by the head of the FBI, were responsible for Donald Trump's victory.  Please take a moment to read it. Republicans, after Obama's election, have refused to recognize him as their President, despite the fact that there was not a single reason to say that, except that he was black and they were racists.  Now, however, it is being portrayed as a sin to fail to capitulate and accept Trump as our leader, despite the clear fact that he would have never have been elected without his collaboration with the spy service and propaganda apparatus of a hostile, dictator-led foreign country; i.e. his treason.  There is no reason why any decent American should recognize Trump as Pre...

I'm still bored to death with Donald Trump and his crooked circus, but I do want to comment on one thing that I am sort of half watching:  Does it turn out that Trump really is the crazy neo-Nazi right wing hater that he appeared during the campaign, or will it turn out that he is just one more Republican tool of the rich, who succeeded once again into conning the rubes into putting him in a position where he could savage their lives once again? Look at his appointments:  an EPA administrator who is a tool of the Kochs who has consistently denied the existence of global warming; a Secretary of Education who has made it her lifelong task to destroy public education and turn schools into profit centers for large corporations, a National Security Advisor who hates Muslims with every fiber of his being and is constantly agitating for wars against them, and on and on.  And look what signature campaign issues he is backing away from: the wall, prosecuting Hillary, mass deport...

It is a very minor, negligible story in the news today, that the President Elect of the United States agreed to pay $25 million dollars to "settle" fraud charges against himself, thereby admitting their truth, since no one can be stupid enough to come to any other conclusion in this case. Hillary having done something with her e-mails, which eluded millions of dollars of Republican "investigations" designed to find anything wrong that she did, on the other hand, was subjected to literally thousands of stories in the mainstream press about this utterly bogus issue.  Take a look at this little chart, from Media Matters: Those other columns in the bar graphs, includes any consideration of Trump's long record of criminality, and his connections with a foreign spy agency.  But no, all of that was of nearly no importance compared to what every single member of the press knew was an utterly meaningless fake scandal. This is why we now must face a would-be dict...

I'm pretty sure she's wrong about the ape in heels thing, but at least these photos prove that you can put lipstick on a pig.

U. S. Constitution, article II, section 1: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress..." We are never going to do away with the Electoral College, because it benefits Republicans too much for them ever to allow that.  In fact, we are never going to see it change, for the same reason, but here is a sample of how unfair things are now:  Wyoming, a terminally Republican State, gets one elector for every 195,000 people.  Alaska gets one elector for every 246,000 people; North Dakota gets one for every 252,000. At the other end of the spectrum, California, a strongly blue State, gets one elector for every 711,000 people; New York one for every 683,000. I know that most of you are aware that the electoral college system favors small States that are largely Republican, but I bet you are surprised at ho...

From the New York Post: "The universe is set to be destroyed in a “big rip” that will suck the whole of reality into a dreadful nightmarish vortex of nothingness." See- the United States is just a step ahead of the pack.

When I was at Cambridge, I had the opportunity to attend a course of lectures by the eminent architectural and cultural historian, Dalibor Vesely, described on Wikipedia as "one of the most outstanding architectural teachers of the late twentieth century."  These lectures, which attracted a large audience outside the Architecture department, had a tremendous effect on my thinking about intellectual history in the Victorian and modern periods, and I want to try to replicate here a small part of his thinking about that period, which came to be dominant in Cambridge intellectual life from the early eighties on. It is important, as Veseley suggested, to understand the immense optimism of the Victorian era.  The nineteenth century saw the industrial revolution, which massively increased the output of goods and food, making famine a distant thing for many.  We saw the development of vaccines, which offered the very real prospect of seeing many of the maladies which had plague...

Think I will be spending the next little while on some more constructive activity than writing blog posts: Seriously, I have always tried to devote my writing to saying something that not everyone else is saying, and there is nothing like that to say about what happened yesterday. As I have stated, I am not as upset by this as a lot of people.  It has been my firm belief, as stated here before, that the Republican party was determined to give oligarchic dictatorship a try, and whether or not they won this time, they would have kept at it, with the vast resources of money and evil which they have to muster.  If it hadn't happened this time, it would have happened in four or eight years, and probably with someone with the self-control to bring about their fascist golden age far more efficiently than Trump ever could.  Honestly, I'm not so young any more, and I'm sort of glad that it happened when I still have the energy to do whatever I can about it. And one final th...

Well, I am not going to moan about what happened today, but I want to place some blame. The main blame for this belongs to the Democrats. The Democrats who let Ronald Reagan commit treason by cutting a deal with the Iranian Mullahs to hold on to the hostages until after his election, at which point the Democrats just shut their mouths and took it. The Ronald Reagan who committed treason again, when he gave 2,000 missiles to those same Iranian Mullahs, for which the Democrats allowed him and all of his people to escape any consequences at all. George W. Bush, who was not elected, but placed in the White House by corruption in the Supreme Court, and by the criminal acts of his own brother, and who was accepted as the legitimate President by the Democrats, leading to a near depression, and a three trillion dollar war. George Bush and Dick Cheney, who committed one of the worst war crimes since World War II, by invading an innocent country and killing a million civilians, who aga...

The battle against ISIS to capture Mosul seems to have vanished from the news lately, probably because portraying it as a gigantic humiliation for Obama required more lying than even Donald Trump is capable of, but let's not forget that the world continues to exist outside of Hillary's E-mails. Here is a Google Earth image of Mosul: It is easy to see on this image the urbanized area of Mosul in the bottom left quarter of the photo.  I have marked in pink the three areas where fighting appears to be going on at the moment, Ba'ashiqua, Bazwaia and Khazna Tappa.  As you can see, these represent the main built up areas to the east of Mosul.  Fighting is particularly strong right now in Ba'ashiqua, where ISIS is resorting to various forms of poison gas, car bombs and other disgusting tactics to put off their inevitable defeat.  There are thought to be no more than 100 ISIS soldiers left in Ba'ashiquah, but they must be eliminated there and in the other built up area...

Yeah, yeah, I know, not nice to gloat, but here is something I wrote in June, at a period when the press was pretending to cover the Presidential race fairly: "I must warn people of a phenomenon that I have observed for numerous elections now, but which I have never seen mentioned by a single other person, left or right.  It has been customary for the press to have a brief period before the conventions when they make a feint of presenting some kind of modestly honest coverage of the candidates, before shifting back to their unrelenting support of the Republican, no matter what an incompetent, lying con man he clearly is.  This is done so that, in later years, this can be cited as some sort of proof that the press was even-handed.  In fact, this period represents the point at which committed, politically involved people have virtually all made their choices, and politically uninvolved, low information voters are still tuned out.  It is a safe time to pretend to be...

I guess it is completely inconsequential compared to, say, the fact that Hillary once sent some e-mails, but we learned this weekend that the woman who was suing Donald Trump for having raped her when she was thirteen years old, has dropped her case because of the death threats she has received. Welcome to the Greatest Country On Earth!

Rudy Giuliani, a few days ago: " there’s a revolution going on inside the FBI and it’s now at a boiling point.” That would be, in more honest terms, a coup, or treason.  Either would apply.  Funny how so many people that are nearly having strokes every day of the year over Hillary e-mails, not one of which they can cite, don't seem to care about this- the FBI working in concert with a foreign enemy to install a would be dictator who is under their thumb, an will sell the country out in a second. This is so preposterous that nobody would ever think of trying to sell a movie script based on it.  But it's real, and hardly anyone thinks it isn't okay to run the country this way.

I insist that you take the time to read an article by Paul Waldman in the Washington Post, which you can find here. The Washington Post has always been the epicenter of both-siderism, and long gave employment to its grand emperor, David Broder.  I guess things are changing since Jeff Bezos bought the paper a few years ago, but I never thought I would read truth like this in the mainstream press.  Honestly, it sounds like something Driftglass, Infidel or I would have written.  I'm so stunned to see things spelled out this honestly that I just don't know what to say.  PLEASE read this article- it is virtually the most important thing I have seen in the mainstream press in years.  I don't even want to quote excerpts from it; you need to see the whole thing.  Please take my advice- you will be so glad you did.

That would be tomorrow, when I believe it is very likely that the Republicans will release one last blast of fake Wikileaks/FBI lies.  This represents perfect timing- long enough for the mainstream press to collaborate in spreading their garbage far and wide, and not anywhere near enough time for the Democrats to respond with the truth. We may very well be about to see an election that should not even be close, stolen by a cabal composed of the treasonous Republican party, the FBI, the mainstream press, and the Russian dictatorship.  I never thought it could be this bad, but then I really, stupidly believed that the danger of Trump as President would make at least part of the press temper their perpetual promotion of the party of their owners.  Well, I was wrong.  The Press has been worse than ever this time around, the FBI has been revealed as full of treacherous criminals, Russia has openly worked to manipulate stupid American voters who were primed with hatred b...

From Chris Cilizza at the Washington Post.  No, I won't link to this garbage, but I will link to the Daily Kos story where I saw this: "The FBI has long been an iconic institution in American life. From Elliot Ness to Clarice Starling, the image of the FBI — unflappable, smart and relentlessly fair — has been sterling." Eliot Ness was never an agent of the FBI.  He worked for the prohibition branch of the Treasury Department, and later for the States of Illinois and Ohio. And do you remember Clarice Starling?  Yeah, here she is: Clarice Starling, AKA Jodie Foster.  She's the "FBI agent" in Silence of the Lambs. Well, that's what Chris came up with to illustrate the sterling qualities of the FBI:  A guy who was never in the FBI, and a character in a movie. You might as well cite Chewbacca to prove how noble Wookies are.  And for this sort of writing, Chris gets a platform at one of the nation's most important newspapers, and one hell o...

Time to stop letting the Republicans lie, smear, and corrupt the top levels of the American government to get their way, in a country that is overwhelmingly against what they really propose to do. Nobody ever listens to people like me, but if I were running Hillary's campaign, this is what I would spend every penny I have left on: I mean, it's true, isn't it?  It's just that gutless Democrats are just so afraid of having Republicans scream at them, that they go along with the lies, instead.  This is, in fact, what the entire campaign should have been about, because what could be a bigger issue than the fact that a candidate backed with billions of dollars of corrupt campaign money is a total tool of a foreign dictator, favoring his desires at every step, regardless of how colossally destructive they would be to our own country. Oh well, it's probably too late to tell the truth now, as if they even would.

I know someone named Jim Savage.  Jim has run programs for addicts and others in recovery for many years, and he has taken the time to write down what he sees going on with Trump and his people.  I guess we all have wondered how presumably sane people can get on board this hateful train, but for the rest of us it is just the speculation of amateurs. I just want to say that this is the first time in the over 4300 posts here at Green Eagle that I have posted something written by someone else, but when we have a chance to hear from someone who knows what the rest of us are just guessing about, I think it is certainly likely to be more valuable than one more rant from Green Eagle. _____________________________________________________________________ Election 2016: The Elephant In The Room Jim Savage, Dallas Texas October 31, 2016 I’m becoming painfully aware of the fact that every time I turn on the radio or TV and hear Donald Trump’s voice I am in a sense—I know my...

Today's FBI news: First of all, ten or twelve years after the fact, and a week before the election, Comey today decided that it was vital to release right now, a massive number of FBI documents about an investigation into the Clinton Foundation, which, incidentally found nothing wrong in anything they did. And on the other hand,in the face of a very well sourced article from David Korn at Mother Jones, revealing highly disturbing connections between Donald Trump and the Russians, the FBI has declared that it would be just too unfair to release what it knows about that. So: we just have to have irrelevant information about a dead pseudo-scandal crammed down our throats, but the very real possibility that Donald Trump is a tool of the Russians is just too unimportant to be discussed now, and can wait for some future generation or something. It would take deep stupidity at this point for anyone to continue believing that Comey is just an honest person caught between bad cho...