Why political leaders who fail, go to jail

Twinkies

The Automobile

Insufficiency

Inevitablility

Family Conflict

Arson

Dead Bodies

Florence Nightengale

Pasternak

Dicken's portrait of Fagin in Oliver Twist

Did Aleksander Solzhinetsyn actually benefit from going to prison for criticizing Josef Stalin?

Petr Leschenko

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gspt_3RnwU

Toxic masculinity

The Manosphere

The Tito letter to Stalin

The Veto

Donald Trump is bragging about the immense power of the Presidential veto, now that his party has suffered one of the half dozen or so worst midterm electoral debacles in US history, losing both House and Senate by large margins, and giving Democrats comfortable majorities in both, to do with as they wish. It should be emphasized that Trump's bark tends to be worse than his bite. Trump is a talker, a salesman, and, although salesman are indeed capable of action, they often don't have much taste for it, or much facility with acting truly effectively. The great veto Presidents, who largely governed by veto, like FDR, and Grover Cleaveland, were immensely popular. They were not sitting at 62% disapproval rates, they did not have multiple felony convictions, they had not been impeached twice already, and almost convicted the second time. Donald Trump has tended to avoid the veto, because he well knows that once Democrats get enough Republicans to override vetoes, they might as well save themselves the trouble, and cut to the chase, removing Trump from office, since the American people would applaud them for doing just that! In any case, now that Texas has been flipped blue, with a Democrat Governor, Senator, and State Assembly, Trump must realize that he has no conservative base of size and substance left in the entire country. He must also realize that although he can issue blanket pardons for members of his immediate family at the federal level, there are so many important Democrat controlled states now, and so few important Republican ones, that it would be rather easy to find state charges of a variety of types that could be applied to his wife and children, and he cannot protect them. So, really, despite, or perhaps because of all the talk of the power of Presidential vetoes, I suspect Trump is just talking big, as usual, in hopes this will intimidate and frighten off his many, many enemies by this time. Or, if Trump actually is serious, and does decide to veto popular legislation put forward by the Democrats, to help the vast majority of the American people, I think he will find that this doesn't work out at all well, for him and his entire family. We all remember that Queen Marie Anoinette used to be known as "Madame Veto" during the period of the French Revolution. But, not for very long, at all. And, we all know what happened to Marie Antoinette, don't we? #veto #uspresident #uspresidents #usconstitution #uselections #donaldtrump #trump #texas #texaspolitics #uspolitics #politics #salesmen #fdr #grovercleaveland #barrontrump #melaniatrump #ivankatrump #frenchhistory #revolutions

Sponges

Was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mentally ill?

Sherlock Holmes was formulated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as virtually a God of Reason, a kind of contemporary Athena or Apollo. And, indeed, he is almost worshipped as such, to this very day! So much so, that Conan Doyle himself repeatedly tried to kill him off, but had no alternative but to keep writing the lucrative Sherlock Holmes stories if he wanted to maintain his luxurious lifestyle, no one was terribly interested in his other books. Conan Doyle was raised a staunch Catholic, but was forced to reject conventional religion by his medical training, which simply was inconsistent with these principles. Instead, he turned to "reason", as his new God and religion. Now, why might reason have been so appealing to him? Could it have had anything to do with the fact that his father spent the last 12 years of his life in lunatic asylums, hmmmmmmm? So, while Conan Doyle may indeed have been very uncomfortable for much of his life with the acclaim and devotion accorded to his creation, Sherlock Holmes, he probably could not possibly have created such an appealing and believeable God, unless to some extent the concept actually did fill some needs of his own at a fundamental level. A need for control, a fear of ending up like his father, a fear of descending into chaos, madness, destruction and death. And, we can certainly see this in his brilliant and disturbing early "ghost" story, "The Captain of the Pole Star". This work is certainly derived largely from Conan Doyle's own personal experiences, as a ship's physician on an arctic whaling ship. They obviously were not entirely pleasant ones! What makes this a particularly disturbing and believable "ghost" story, is that there's nothing in it that couldn't well have happened, and probably had happened, on many such voyages. Whether there is actually a ghost there, or not, is entirely indeterminate, and ambiguous. Whether the captain is killed by the ghost, or simply commits suicide on the ice, is also unclear. The captain's entire past is totally indeterminate, where he came from, who his lost love was, or exactly what happened to her, although we know she had a terrible violent death. Did the captain kill her, is that why he's constantly on the move, and his past is so murky? No answers are provided. It is a very disturbing story, indeed! And, with the constant threat of mutiny and death in the background, it is the precise opposite of the glorious imperial world order of reason and justice that the British were so proud of, the world Adolf Hitler had so much fun ridiculing in his rather brilliant speeches. And, yet, then, we have the serene the invincible God of Reason, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. And, it's creator, now running from the God he created, particularly after the disasters of WWI, descending into spiritualism, worshipping fascist Mussolini, writing his last Sherlock Holmes novel "The Valley of Fear", set in America, as a massive deflection from the incredible catastrophe of the Western Front of WWI. A novel of clear fascist implications, as the "troublemakers and slackers" have taken over the valley, and must be put in their place by force, by the God of Reason, and his surrogates, by Sherlock Holmes. Now it is profoundly ironic, or perhaps merely profoundly inevitable that The Valley of Fear inspired communist writer Dashell Hammett to write "Red Harvest", a novel of supreme nihilism, in which rather than order being restored to the corrupt town, the Pinkerton Op merely assists all sides to utterly destroy each other. I don't know, Red Harvest was written in 1929, Conan Doyle dropped dead of a heart attack in 1930. Do you think it's possible that reading about, or hearing about Red Harvest killed Conan Doyle? It's possible, you know. In any case, Red Harvest, inspired by The Valley of Fear, inspired the nihilistic samaurai films in Japan, with Toshiro Mifune, and those inspired the nihilistic Spaghetti Westerns, with Clint Eastwood. Somehow, inspiring so much nihilism with communist implications was not, I think, quite what Conan Doyle had in mind. It would certainly have disgusted and horrified him. Of course, by the end of his life Conan Doyle was so much absorbed in his spiritualist and fascist fantasies of supreme order, that he might have died happily convinced of being united with his wife and children in some fascist Victorian afterlife. In any case, his own children never had children of their own, their father had certainly scared them off from that! So, like the Captain of the Pole Star, his line was ended when he died, a prisoner of his own fantasies, and his own need for an established and irrevocable order to things. #sherlockholmes #arthurconandoyle #englishliterature #englishhistory #britishhistory #dectectivestories #psychology #psychiatry #psychoanalysis #spiritualism #fascism #mussolini #mentalillness #wwi #metaphysics #detectives #adolfhitler #hitler #classicinema #classicfilms #classicmovies #clinteastwood

How much of a mess did Albert Einstein make of things?

The Extreme Right -- Property vs. People.

The Jameson Raid

Self interest

Fascism in popular American music

Fred Astaire as propagandist

Opposition Thinkers

Corporate Capitalist Machines

Till Eulenspiegel

Health Care as Control Strategy

The Road Less Travelled