The Chrysalis

Scotus is scared

In case you didn't notice, far-right conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is whining about the fact that the Democratic Congress might "shut off the lights" at the Supreme Court, if it doesn't like their decisions, which compromises their "judicial independence". In other words, Justice Alito is running a bit scared these days. Now, of course, AI would frame this as a "strategic" decision to speak out, rather than a sign of fear. However, it is certainly a sign of fear, and not fear of being fired. The US Constitution makes it quite clear that it is impossible to fire Supreme Court Justices and Federal Justices, and they must continue to be paid, for life. The US Constitution saw this as being all that was required to maintain their judicial independence. However, there is now a factor that is coming more and more into play, that very much bears on the mind of SCOTUS justices. Security. Fear of assassination. So much so that a full quarter of a billion dollars is now being spent on overwhelming round the clock security for all nine SCOTUS justices, everywhere they go. And, it is Congress that pays for this, and authorizes the bill for this. And Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is very well aware just how hostile the Democratic Party -- which now has overwhelming control of both Houses of Congress, and the vast majority of the US population in the US States -- is to most of his own decisions, and those of his other far right conservative colleagues on the court, which is now controlled 6 to 3 by far right conservatives. Now of course, Chief Justice Samuel Alito does not want to say "Hey, look guys, I am scared to death! I think most Americans hate me so much now, that they would laugh hysterically and congratulate the killer if someone gunned me down, really! And, I think the Democratic Congress might actually intentionally enable such an assassination by claiming 'Hey, Sam, sorry, we just can't quite afford any security for you this year, so sorry, so sad.'" And, of course AI would say "I cannot engage in anything supporting violence or political assassination" if you simply pointed out this obvious fact! Nevertheless, that is the current situation, quite precisely. Now, of course, the far right conservative justices on the US Supreme Court are quite tough cookies, all six of them. But, they are not bulletproof. And, they certainly do know that. Sure, they're all pretty old, but, they are not suicidal. So, Justice Samuel Alito does have a valid point, that the literal and justifiable fear of political assassination could be used as an implicit threat that the Democratic Congress might quite possibly hold over SCOTUS from time to time now, simply through their power of the purse. This is, quite obviously, not a situation that the founding fathers had ever anticipated. It simply would never have occurred to them that the US Congress would have to approve a significant portion of the US budget annually simply to protect the senior judges of the nation from the visceral hatred of the citizens they were supposedly serving! Or, that the US Congress might think that, perhaps, they shouldn't do it! #scotus #supremecourt #samuelalito #usconstitution #uslaw #law #ushistory #history #philosophyofhistory #ussupremecourt #security #politicalassassination #humor #funny #satire #ai #foundingfathers #usfoundingfathers #uscongress #democrats #conservatives #usbudget

Entrapment

Women exploiting men

Forgetfulness

The sea tides of political change

Why Russian film is so interesting

When did sex become a crime?

Impeachment

Impeachment is a commonly approved means of removing dangerously incompetent Presidents from office, by means of a supermajority in the associated political legislatures of democratic governments from around the world. It is rarely employed, but is much more frequently threatened, in cases in which Presidents are deemed troublesome, incompetent or acting questionably from a legal point of view. While much emphasis is normally placed on the President having committed "high crimes and misdemeanors" while in office, we all know that virtually everything Presidents do, at all times, can be deemed a "high crime and misdemeanor", and is, quite frequently, by a substantial percentage of the population of any nation on the planet. We also all know that, basically, the law is just a means for the rich and powerful to codify and rationalize anything and everything they want to do anyway. Which is why I say quite specifically, that "impeachment is a commonly approved means of removing dangerously incompetent Presidents from office", rather than using the ridiculous term "high crimes and misdemeanors", which is merely disinformation and propaganda. This point is illustrated very nicely by the case of President Richard Nixon, who rather narrowly escaped impeachment, removal and prison, by agreeing to formally resign from office in 1974. While enormous emphasis is placed by historians on the botched Watergate breakin -- a totally unnecessary illegal effort to gain inside information on the Democratic Party -- which Richard Nixon authorized simply because of his arrogance and extreme paranoia, in fact this was entirely a specious pretext for the troubles Nixon ultimately had. Richard Nixon was forced to resign in 1974 not because of Watergate, but because he was destroying the United States of America! Nixon had made such a mess of things in just one year in his second term, after achieving an extraordinary electoral mandate of 49 of 50 states despite Democrats whining about the Watergate breakin, that people were literally frightened that there would be nothing left of the US if he were allowed to finish his term of office. In just one year, he had moved the nation from peace and prosperity, to clearly losing the Vietnam War, a drop in the stock market of a full third of its total value, gas rationing, and 11% annual inflation rates. People were terrified! So, really, the issue currently, is whether Donald Trump is making as much of a mess of things as Richard Nixon was, or not, in determining whether the US Congress will choose to actually remove him from office, using the mechanism of impeachment. There are very good reasons why politicians do not like using the impeachment mechanism very much. They are afraid of being impeached themselves, of course! Any and all judges, at all levels, any executive cabinet official or senior executive official, any President or governor, can be impeached, at the whim of the legislature. It also requires a very high degree of consendus, a super-majority to perform an impeachment. It is significant that in the mid-1960's, the Democrats actually had 68 Senate seats in the US Congress, they could have, entirely without Republican assistance, impeached any and all federal judges, at all levels, any and all cabinet and senior executive officials. They never even attempted to impeach a single one. It could be argued, that with only a couple years to go, Donald Trump cannot really do that much more damage. It could be argued that, although there are economic, military and political problems, they really aren't as bad as under Richard Nixon. However, on the whole, Americans are also not nearly as prosperous now as they were under Richard Nixon. Homelessness, and fear of homelessness is epidemic. It was almost unknown half a century ago. It is now quite common for people to spend three quarters of their income just to afford basic housing, with little left over for food and other necessities. Even the upper middle class seem to need the ubiquitous "food banks" now, at least from time to time. The American dream seems to have died, and has become the American nightmare, as Americans struggle to survive, and stay off the streets. These issues decrease the tolerance of Americans for their politicians, and may force some action. I think the real issue, is whether Donald Trump "plays ball" with the Democrats. The Republicans are very frightened now, because of the drubbing they took in the midterm elections. The Democrats know they have to produce results, help Americans, or they may face a similar fate. So, if Donald Trump agrees to raise taxes on corporations, and this money is used to subsidize average Americans, the Democrats will leave him alone. Otherwise, if Donald Trump gets in their way, he is likely to be removed as a dangerous obstacle, and imprisoned by the friends of the Democrats. Of course, the Democrats may simply do nothing, as they usually do. They may pay a price for that. Or not. However, Americans are angry and desperate now, it might not be wise for their politicians to cross them. #law #uslaw #usconstitution #uscongress #uspolitics #usgovernment #richardnixon #donaldtrump #watergate #revisionism #revisionisthistory #historicalrevisionism #history #ushistory #politicalscience #politics #geopolitics #economics #americandream #homelessness #homeless #foodbanks #uselections #taxes #taxation

Do we really need a military

Pharmatceuticals

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