Yes. That Lee. Robert E. How do you react when you hear that name? Does your opinion of me change, simply because I mentioned him?

I’m tired of the arguments surrounding the Confederate generals and the whole damn Civil War, for that matter.

If you were conceived because your parents both got drunk one night and did it, “unprotected”, does that make your life any less worthy of being, of existing? Maybe this whole country is an existential accident, like the unplanned pregnancy I mentioned. Does that make America any less worthy of existing? Countries are like people. They die. Imperial China died. Imperial Russia died. The Soviet Union died. Slaveholding America died.

But we can’t change how we came into being. Here we are. Ignorance of the past won’t make it go away. Self-hatred and shame won’t change the facts of history, or make the lives of the dead any different.

Anyway. Robert E. Lee was born 214 years ago. Happy Birthday, General.

My eyes hurt. Lack of sleep, unfulfilled sleep. Time spent wondering, drinking coffee, eating because maybe that will momentarily quell the churning in my gut.

I watch passenger trains go places, riding the life support that is Amtrak. I dream I’m on a train headed to where there are no politicians or thieves or plague. I imagine a dream domain like the Sixties but without LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, or Charles Manson. It’s my sodding dream, after all.

But I need to sleep, beside a lover, who cares not a whit for television or pandemic or politics. I yearn for a lover without reservation or second thoughts, who appreciates the magic of menopause, and the luxurious necessity of lube.

I don’t want to have sell her on fucking. She will want the product as much as I need it. Maybe sanity will fill the space that tears now fill.

The internet and social media has created an exponential increase in our access to information.

One type of information is the knowledge we don’t need to know or is none of our business to know. First among these is what other people think of us. Makes no difference what other people think. As a general rule, other people hate you. Simply because, you are NOT them.

I got into a micturating contest with a blogger and was accused of being a troll. Oh well, I’m a troll. At least I paid my child support, back in the day.

My whiteness and privilege are problems for some people.

Note to my readers.

I am an old white man.

I guess that’s a problem.

https://wp.me/pYA4j-eMs

John-Henry Westen has an excellent Catholic and pro-life website Life Site News. Here he interviews Pam Acker, MS, a former vaccine researcher who fills us in the use of aborted fetal tissue used in vaccine development.

It is all the more sinister when we consider that COVID-19 is a manmade virus. This is one of those issues where people of “good will” are on both sides of the question.

There is a lot of stuff I don’t want to think about any longer tonight.

It isn’t unusal for me to awaken at 3:00 AM or thereabouts. J is at work and I miss her. When she is home, more than likely she is in bed, sleeping or watching television.

So right now, I’m listening to Nina Simone, trying to go back to sleep.

8:30 AM.

I slept. I’m still in bed. I hope to sleep a little more.

Yesterday. I went to Daily Mass at 530 at St Benedict. This was the second time I had attended Mass since the COVID-19 precautions were implemented. The Mass definitely restored my ability to appreciate the transitory nature of all the turmoil that has plagued our country in recent months.

Maybe I will just take a nap later.

Peace, y’all.

To clear the mind.

Rather than trying to make sense of the ongoing absurdities of The Trump Era, I will defer to historians, who through the filter of time, (and access to all the archival materials) will render a more objective and complete assessment. Hopefully I will live another thirty years and have enough marbles to read and understand it.

Whether Trump gets thrown out tomorrow, his term expires next Wednesday, or space aliens kidnap him for a specimen tonight, his days are numbered as POTUS. Thank God. Democrats, your dream of four years has come true. The stage will be all yours.

The Myth of Trump will endure. I mean that in the classical sense of the word myth. Politics and governance got a little complicated, and for four years, characters took the stage. This wasn’t Homer, or Cervantes, or Shakespeare, however. It was real life. And now we must look somewhere else for our drama and our dreams.

La Belle et La Bête (Beauty And The Beast) is Jean Cocteau’s masterpiece. The special effects, camera work, makeup, editing, were decades ahead of their time. Today computer-generated effects would do the heavy lifting. But the film isn’t about the special effects, rather it is the same love story told for centuries, that we children love. It is beautifully acted by Josette Day and Jean Marais.

What is surreal? The last four years have been a dream, some say a nightmare, but in Cocteau’s surreal story, we know that love and beauty triumph without editorializing or ambiguity. The ugly who pose as beautiful are reflected for what they really are. Ambiguity is the curse to those of us who are awake.

We have finished the political page-turner, we bought at the airport newstand four years ago It had a surprise ending, to be sure. We can spend the next four years watching the argument about who has the movie rights to the story. Do not doubt me.

Soon another fairy tale begins, or rather a graphic novel. This is what we now call comic books, elevated to literary genre. We need makeup for the heroes and villains. But first we have to decide who the characters will be.

Will we have an ambitious Queen, deprived of the throne, who longs still for the power? Will we have two Duchesses, presiding over each chamber of Congress, dreaming of power greater than The King? What will one duchess do, now that plotting is unnecessary? Will others plot against The King? Will he continue as the decrepit shell of the man he once was? Who will be the shadowy presence looming in the background? Or will there be two, three shadows? Perhaps this is a Javanese shadow play, with gamelan music accompanying it, but the shadow figures are the true forms.

All that is left is theatre, because that is all that we really love.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, reverberations were felt the world over. Here in the U S of A, a series of roundups, of dubious legality, detained various leftists, and deported as many as could be legally deported. Emma Goldman was deported to Russia. You may remember that from the Warren Beatty film Reds. These were the “Red Raids” of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, in the administration. Of Democratic President Thomas Woodrow Wilson. A chap by the name of J. Edgar Hoover got his start at this time, along with the FBI.

How well did that work? Folk heroes like Goldman, Eugene V. Debs, and “Big Bill” Heyward were created. It quelled the “Red Scare” for a few years, but it did very little to thwart the growth of Communist movements in the United States. The Communists were back in business and visible again by the 1930’s.

And, as if to further bolster the hypothesis that draconian responses are ineffectual in thwarting political movements, the McCarthy era actions of blacklists and exposing actual Communists (like Alger Hiss) did little to quell Marxist influence in our culture. After a decent interval, those blacklisted found work again, people like Dalton Trumbo, Jules Dassin.

The 1960’s and 70’s saw a resurgence of Marxist teaching in universities. There was the Free Speech Movement at UC- Berkeley. Columbia University had its own unrest centered on campus expansion into a minority neighbourhood,

Then The Frankfurt School and “critical theory” gripped Liberal Arts teaching.And we now have race theory, gender theory, queer theory. (Remember theories are theories, they can be disproven.) And what is known as ” Cancel Culture” has, all of a sudden, flowered, like a dandelion in a cow chip.

What did Cancel Culture, and the recent Twitter, Facebook, Google and Amazon bans and deplatformings learn from A. Mitchell Palmer’s deportation of Emma Goldman, or the McCarthy Era blacklisting? Apparently NOTHING. President Trump and his allies have gone from annoyances to martyrs in the span of a news cycle.

Real smart, Jack Dorsey, Zuck (Mark Zuckerberg). Real Smart.

“Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Rahm Emmanuel, former Democratic campaign advisor (William J. Clinton), White House Chief of Staff (Barack Obama) and Mayor of Chicago.

27 February 1933 is the day that Germany’s Reichstag, Capitol Building, burned. To this day, the exact perpetrators are unknown. The recently appointed German Chancellor (head of government) used the fire as a pretext to suspend civil liberties. That Chancellor was a guy by the name of Adolf Hitler, an illegal immigrant to Getmany from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Since I don’t know of anyone who supports or endorses the riot, I can conclude that the big tech social media companies’ responses are draconian. Couple that with the increasing capability of artificial intelligence to perform surveillance and censorship, and,, well, we have the makings of a dandy way to limit and restrict free speech. The censoring is performed by private sector social media companies, who claim to be neutral forums for free expression. The companies are acting contrary to the principles of a neutral forum, declaring opinions and positions with which they disagree as hate speech, their dubious justification for censorship. That’s not creepy, is it?

The Capitol Hill riot has been the justification for deleting not only President Trump’s but Lt. Gen Mike Flynn’s and defence attorney Sidney Powell’s Twitter© accounts. Sen Josh Hawley had a book deal cancelled by Simon and Schuster (a CBS affiliate). Hawley’s transgression was exercising a challenge to the electoral votes of a state. This right to challenge is outlined in the U.S. Constitution. It has been exercised in the past by such people as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.. One can easily conclude that this was an act of censorship. Facebook© suspended Brandon Stracha and The Walk Away© Campaign’s Facebook© page. Stracha’s page deals with individuals who have become disillusioned with The Democratic Party and “walked away.”

Time travel eighty eight years, and we see that the Reichstag Fire was an excuse to suspend civil liberties, just as the riot was a pretext to censor Conservative thought on social media. Free speech has been stifled. That Big Tech gave big money to the Democrats made these moves all that more unsettling.

When the major legacy communications and media companies, overlooked, ignored, and generally derided claims of voter fraud in the battleground states, claims with strong supporting evidence, there was even more reason to suspect that the election was rigged. Biden is entering his Presidency, not with a cloud over his legitimacy, but a cyclone.

Artificial Intelligence can advance the goals of the surveillance state. And we give the tech companies the right to sell data regarding our activity, e.g. purchases, sites visited, blog entries, to interested third parties, like the federal government. The government can conduct domestic surveillance via a third party and deny it is even taking place.

This situation stopped being about President Trump on 4 November. That was when the evidence of alleged voter and electoral fraud began appearing and became a threat to our freedom. The allegations have not been vetted in any court. Courts have dismissed the claims not on the merit of the claims made, but on procedural grounds, i.e. lack of standing.

And so, before even attaining the power of the Executive Branch, the Democrats in the Legislative Branch are rushing Trump supporters (all 74+million) to judgement along with President Trump. Their media allies report the Democrats’ accusations, unvetted. Trump supporters can be dismissed as “bigots”, and thus denied their rights to free expression in public forums, like social media platforms.

“It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Barack H. Obama, then a Senator, campaign speech 14 April, 2008.

So perhaps Obama’s bitter clingers, quite easily, morphed into Trump supporters, because Trump spoke to their concerns. Now some Trump supporters, a few thousand out of 74 million, stormed the Capitol. Perhaps agent provocateurs, posing as Trump supporters, possibly mixed in with them, possibly inciting them to violence, if not just criminal trespass.

But 74 million people have been stigmatized, as Trump supporters have been since 2015, and the social media companies are denying conservatives their rights in a grand display of prejudice. The actions of a few are the pretext to deprive the many of their rights. It keeps happening. Berlin 1933, Washington 2021.

Do we really expect human nature to change?

Nothing

Matters

Any

Longer.