I won’t go into long details about the career since then. (I was particularly obtuse and didn’t fully commit to writing as a profession until the winter of 1975, but that’s another story.)

But my career begins sitting on the grass of the Brown-Lupton Student Center.

On the lower left, or the Northwest corner. There were none of those nasty chiggers that we non-native Texans only found out about the hard way. It was a lovely warm autumn afternoon in the sun.

I was seated with my then-girlfriend, her roommate Linda from Albany near Abilene, Texas, Lexi, from Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Wendy from Puerto Rico — Wendy was blessed or cursed with a sunny personality and large breasts — and Wendy’s boyfriend du jour.

Minus the frog fountain

He was of middling height, slim, but not skinny, and he had walked onto the TCU freshman basketball team and made the team. Today, I’d say that he looked like a Spanish soccer player: That build about 6-foot tall. I cannot remember his name.

From when postcard companies didn’t bother copyrighting

I do remember a few random falling leaves. There were several trees in that area, heading up to Jarvis Hall or down to Colby Hall. The Frog Fountain had already had one incidence of someone dumping colored RIT dye and dish soap into it once in the semester, but there were no giant purple bubbles present that day.

The Frog Fountain (installed 1969 upgraded 2007) today

He had just learned that TCU had cancelled the Freshman program: “not enough prospects,” read the press release.

There was much talk about how unfair this all was and finally someone said, someone needs to write a letter to the paper.

And the conversation turned to me: “Hart’s in honors English. HE could write it!”

I still remember the strangeness of that moment, because I wasn’t talking! They were making the decision WITHOUT me.

In the face of unanimous public opinion, I agreed.

And so I began the process I still follow to this very day:

I researched the question and forgot about it. I “composted” it and a couple of days later, the “egg timer” in my brain went off and I sat down and wrote the letter.

At that time, I refused to use either the typewriter my mother sent me to college with, nor to use cursive (pushing a rope to us left-handers — unless you want to write crab-handed) and I wrote it (and subsequent letters) in my printed version of small caps.

It wasn’t until I realized that I was going to be a writer as  a profession in the winter of 1975 that I learned how to type.

The TCU DAILY SKIFF was then, in its 72nd year of publishing*, as TCU was in its hundredth year of existence. Among its first editors was one Colby Dixon Hall, of whom my girlfriend’s dormitory was named.**

* [September 1902 to October 1973.]

** [Technically it is/was Colby Hall Dormitory, but everyone just calls it Colby Hall, instead of Hall Dorm, which is kind of redundant.]

However, at the time, it was in Rogers Hall, the FURTHEST hall on campus, and it took me a couple of days to get around to slipping it through the mail slot on the Daily Skiff’s door. Longer than it took to compose.

Volume 1 no. 2. — Vol 1 No 1 seems to have been lost.

But I remember getting up and pulling a copy from the bin next to Reed Hall on my way across University Drive for the obligatory 9 AM 3 hours of religion course.

I opened the paper, and staring back at me, for the first time,  were my own words.

Later that day, everybody was happy to see it, but the Freshman basketball program was already cancelled and a week later, Wendy was onto a new boyfriend with a new sport.

JV* basketball’s
last bounce

* [“JV” means “Junior Varsity” at this Univarsity (sic).]

Editor:
  I am deeply sorry that TCU will have no JV basketball team this year. It really is a shame that the people who went out weren’t good enough for the coach.
  As a young impressionable lad, I was told that the idea of athletics was to allow people to participate in organized competition, with capable coaching. However, as a disillusioned young man, I find that this is not so. It was the same “winning is everything” attitude that caused a Watergate to happen. It was this same perverted attitude that would not allow the United States to pull out of Vietnam.
  Why can’t this coach allow a few interested players to have some fun, see some scenic beauty (like the Dallas Turnpike) and enjoy playing basketball?
  Is it too much to ask that sport again become fun?
  I wish that [TCU Head Basketball Coach] Johnny Swaim would think about that. Sports was never meant to be “an effete corps of impudent snobs, who characterize themselves as” sportsmen.

Hart Williams*
Freshman

* [NOTE: I had a different name at that time, but no need in confusing you further.]

There it is, in all of its grandiloquent glory.

This fellow died around 1977

A sign of the times, the other, longer letter was entitled “The Press and Mr. Agnew.” (Penned by a senior, it did NOT take the press’ side.) I was a sort of refutation to it. An excerpt:

Needless to say, the press did not take kindly to this criticism and they soon began their rampage of revenge. A revenge which culminated in Agnew’s resignation two weeks ago. For no matter what Agnew said in court, or anywhere else for that matter, he was not to be believed. And the press was particularly overzealous in bringing all the unproven “facts” before the American people. The Vice President didn’t stand a chance….

Sound familiar? Could have been written today. (All going back to Nixon’s 1962 California gubernatorial concession: “ … just think how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore. Because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.“)

In one slice of one page, TCU in a nutshell.

Anyway, he’s a bit of the culture of that moment.

According to who you read this was the same week or day that Steve Miller’s “The Joker” album was released, along with the made-up word, “Pompatus.”

And Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters was released October 26. [More here]

And Quadrophenia was released on the 26th.

The Who’s “Quadrophenia” — a rock opera composed by guitarist Pete Townshend is turning 50 years old this week.

The 17-song double album, released Oct. 26, 1973  …

The Who’s Quadrophenia

An ad in that issue of the paper

At any event, I kept writing letters, for my own reasons, and I am still writing. Fifty years later.

But I do always remember that I was ASKED to write, TO PROTEST AN INJUSTICE.

That was the seed of my writing career, not some deep vanity related to recognition.

And that’s my origin story.

It might have happened sooner, but I was detoured.

Here’s a little side story: I DID once try to write a short story, at home, my senior year in high school. I wrote long hand in a spiral-bound red notebook I’d purchased at GIBSON’S in Santa Fe. I didn’t know what to do with it, but I felt an urge to do it. So I began.

It was about a prisoner escaping from a Siberian gulag. It would be about his return to basic survival mode, and eventually escaping across the Bering strait to Alaska and freedom.

Funny thing to remember fifty years and then some later.

I came home one afternoon from Santa Fe High and my mother was holding that notebook up and shrieking: “IS THIS ABOUT ME? IS THIS ABOUT ME?!??”

“No, mom,” I said. “It’s not.”  (I wondered what kind of sickness was in her mind that first she’d go through my PERSONAL PAPERS and second that she’d instantly assume that they were about HER.)

I asked for my notebook back and she grudgingly handed it to me.

It wasn’t a thick spiral-bound, and I tore it in half, easily. Then I put it in the trash.

She looked at me with a strange mixture of horror and suspicion.

I didn’t say a word. She had broken something sacred between us and it would never return.

But I never attempted to write anything on my own in that house again.  Just like a cat who, having been forced through a small cat door, will NEVER use it again in its life, I put the red notebook into the trash and never thought of it again, until I was asked to write a letter to the student paper at TCU.

Fair Use: Small version for
illustrative purposes only

In 1987, Louis L’Amour wrote that story as Last of the Breed. It was much better than I’d have written.

An ad in that issue of the paper

The next day, my girlfriend and I, who would become my first wife, would not go to TCU stadium to watch the Frogs at the beginning of their infamous 0-22 streak. They would lose to the Tennessee Volunteers at Neyland Stadium 39-7.

Or: 7-39

Given the choice between football and writing, at TCU, I like to think I made the right choice.

Johnny Swaim and TCU basketball team didn’t fare much better. He was fired, and the few games I saw, it was apparent that the SouthWest Conference had no clue as to how the game was played. It was … terrible.

It is strange to me that, after all this time, the only thing that seems to remain of the old TCU is the Frog Fountain from 1969 (replaced in 2007). Four lotus flowers to remind them of education and us of impermanence.

Frog Fountain with the old Amon G. Carter Stadium
and Daniel-Meyer Coliseum — UNT Libraries Special Collections.

As for the letter? It seemed a bit sophomoric, yes. But then, I was only a freshman.

Courage.

I wrote these two connected posts on 14 NOVEMBER 2009 and  29 December 2005, respectively.

Playing Lunar Catch Up

14 NOVEMBER 2009 · 5:36 PM

Or is that “catsup”?

NASA found significant and meaningful amounts of water on the moon in the “bombing” of the South Pole a couple months back.

Navy: South Polar ice marked in blue

OK, the Huffington Post guy kind of got it:

Most Valuable Real Estate in the Solar System

Huffington Post (blog)

Today’s announcement by NASA of significant water on the south pole of the Moon is scientifically critical, economically astounding and extremely important …

Revealing water in significant quantities on the Moon could truly be a turning point in space exploration. Who will set up the first water mining plants? Given low-cost availability of water, hydrogen and oxygen, what type of off-Earth economies and exploration will this enable? The question is not too dissimilar to those questions asked when oil was discovered buried deep under the Earth or under the oceans. We eventually designed the technology to mine and extract this precious resource. It’s what we do as humans and entrepreneurs.

The south pole of the Moon has another very important attribute in addition to water, namely the existence of small mountain peaks that are constantly in sunlight, 28 days out of the Lunar cycle and referred to as the “peaks of eternal light.” These peaks which are in the plane of the ecliptic (the plane that the Earth rotates around the sun) will allow for constant illumination of solar panels and heating of the spacecraft. The reason this is important is because the temperature on the Moon plummets from +100 degrees Centigrade to -150 degrees Centigrade as the Moon rotates into and out of direct sunlight…

Groovy. Glad to see that SOMEBODY finally caught up with me. Bill Nye (the science guy, and not the founder of the Laramie Daily Boomerang and nationally known humorist of the XIXth Cent.) sure as hell didn’t on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show Friday.

not the science guy

Here’s what I wrote on this blog on December 29, 2005:

… The new space race is on. Just remember: a base at the south pole of the moon* will be the “Rock of Gibraltar” of the solar system for several centuries to come. Whoever gets a base there first will have a huge strategic advantage over the other nations of Sol-3.

(* The moon is a navel orange: the navel is always in darkness, with frozen water, seemingly, both making a permanent base of any sort a MUCH easier proposition. Trust me, metal fatigue issues given the moon’s temperature differential between “night” and “day” are an engineering nightmare. As regards the South Lunar Pole: this astonishing finding was made by the Navy’s Clementine mapping satellite in spring 1994, nearly 25 years after the moon landing. Think about it: the SINGLE most prominent feature on the moon wasn’t known for three decades after we started littering its surface with spacecraft. For more information, see: https://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/Clementine/ and, you can find the Clementine image of the “navel” at the South Lunar Pole at: https://www.solarviews.com/browse/moon/clmsouth.jpg and, see its “mother’ page at https://www.solarviews.com/cap/moon/clmsouth.htm )

If we get there first, I’m sure we can give it a snazzy name, like, say, Reagan Base, or, maybe Space Base Eagle Freedom. I dunno.

Courage.

Posted by: harto / 12/29/2005 02:21:00 AM

The moon is a navel orange (US Naval photo)

You might want to read the entire 2005 entry (scroll down past Mark Williams of KFBK, who I wrote about last week  “MSNBC Gets Astroturfed Again « November 4, 2009” and on November 25,  and 26, 2008, “Moving America Bass-ackwards” and “Thanking Sarah Palin“). The astronomical blog post is still out ahead of the conceptual thinking and policy, seemingly.

That’s what I get for having been trained by science fiction writers, I guess.

In the next week or so, I’ll tell you about even MORE thrilling things about the future! Meantime, I salute NASA and the Huffington Post for catching up.

Last weekend, the fire curtain descended across American polity.

A safety curtain (or fire curtain in America) is a passive fire protection feature used in large proscenium theatres.   (Wikipedia)

The inhabitants of GOP-World were on one side, and the rest of us are on the other. There is no middle ground.

How we came to this sad state of affairs is a story in itself, and was the subject of this blog from 2006 until 2014, when I realized that there was no way to stop what was coming. That’s when I retired from day to day blogging:

… the blog started as an attempt to keep us from heading down the road to civil war. Then when I came back earlier this year, it was an attempt to prepare people for that civil war, and, now that even that has passed, it is foolish for me to let the enemy know what I’m thinking.

… For ten solid years, this blog outpaced and outperformed the entire mainstream media, and obscure story after obscure story advanced from my ‘crazy’ blog to the front pages.

… I was among the first on the beat to warn you about the newly “Republican” Kochs, about the State Policy Network, and about SPN’s setup and use of international “think tanks” to deny climate change, as in the phony “Climategate” scandal.

… I covered (pre-blog) the fake Hopi con artists scamming money from credulous whities around the globe. Covered the skinheads of Oregon. The home-schooling phenomenon’s roots in neo-Confederate thought. The secret dominionist enclaves whose ring the Romneys, the Cheneys, the Santorums, the Bushes, and any other GOP hopeful must kiss.

… It is symptomatic that TWICE in the 24 hours prior to the election, I had to lock horns with Lost Cause assholes DEFENDING the Confederacy and the Confederate flag … out of NOWHERE — not on a Lost Cause site, a GOP site or anything like that. Just Republican Confederate trolls, unwilling to allow anyone to diss the Confederacy for any reason whatsoever.

Which OUGHT to tell us something important: the party of Lincoln is now in the hands of the secessionists, who have taken it over in all but spelling. The Confederate ideology now rules, and suppression of the colored vote is a priority. Fortunately, the spelling alone keeps morons and fools loyal to a Party whose very soul has been corrupted and perverted into the opposite of its founding principles….

Excerpts from “The End of the Trail,” November 5, 2014

Over the weekend a Rubicon was crossed, as the GOP withdrew into its self-created eggshell reality and we have two entirely competing narratives:

• The Biden Administration and Joe Biden are the most corrupt political figures in history [after months of framing and fake news by the trillion dollar right wing media machine]
• Donald Trump has been indicted for Crimes [Endless legal experts]

But, make no mistake, the narrative has split irrevocably between the Neo-Confederates and the rest of us.

The Rubicon is crossed, and political violence is inevitable and soon to be increasing.

Sixteen years ago, on July 10, 2007, I was taken to task by Sean Hannity and Fox News for writing this:

WHEN they manage to inevitably push their litany of hatespeak into actual bloodletting, and full-blown civil war (for there is no other place that this hatred of American against American can go), well … [emphasis added]

You can read the rest of the manly men of Fox soaking their panties in fear here.

I could go into long analyses and exegeses regarding how we got here, where we are and what to do now. But as I said, the Rubicon is crossed. The dominoes are falling and you’ve been clearly warned.

Newt and Rush convinced the Confederate Party to HATE the opposition, rather than merely disagreeing with them, and now, here we are.

So, I’ll skip the descriptives. If you don’t mind. I told you so back in 1994.

If I might take a moment to give you my advice, it is this:

Do not buy a gun. This is no time to engage in provocative action.

Carry a chamois.

When the civil war reaches you, there will be plenty of guns available on the streets.

You can use the chamois to wipe the blood off the weapon of your choice.

This is the advice I’ve been giving privately. Now I give it publicly.

Good luck.

First flag of Secession: Savannah, GA, November 8th, 1860

Courage.

Strange how we keep coming back around to the same weird places in history. This is from the Monday, July 6, 1863 edition of The Richmond Daily Dispatch — one of the most influential Southern papers of the Civil War.

Monday morning…July 6, 1863.

The battle of Gettysburg
It is difficult to say, from the accounts which we publish to-day, (all Yankee, of course) what portion, or whether all of our army was engaged. We presume, however, that it was only a portion, as the main body is supposed not to be in the immediate neighborhood of Gettysburg.

It is evident to us, at any rate, that our troops have grinned a great victory. The Philadelphia Inquirer cannot conceal the fact, although it lies with an order and an earnestness that deserved better success. We are told, in the first place, that “our troops”–to wit, the Yankee troops — maintained their position in Gettysburg, in spite of the most obstinate attempts on the part of the rebels to capture it. A paragraph or two lower, we are told that at the “end of the battle” the rebel cavalry made a dash through the town, capturing all the sick and wounded, stores, &c. Now, dashing through a town, which the enemy has held during a severe battle, to ordinary comprehensions, certainly means that the town was carried and left in the rear by the victorious party in their pursuit of a flying enemy. Again, we are told that the “rebels” were triumphantly beaten back. But a little farther on we discover that towards the close of the action these same “rebels” made an attack upon one of the enemy’s flanks, and that he fell back a mile, fighting valiantly, of course, as Yankees always do–on paper.–Lastly, the Yankees say the affair is “indecisive,” which is proof enough that they have been badly beaten.

As you can see,. they didn’t exactly get the Battle of Gettysburg right, but then, they were writing for THEIR audience. Here’s the other one:

Monday morning…July 6, 1863.
Vicksburg fallen — a Trick.
The Yankee., of in facing a little extra spirit into their soldiers, hit upon the expedient of reviving the old story that Vicksburg had fallen! How to do it was the question. There was some reluctance among the liars to venture forth with that stale falsehood. In this strait the story was ingeniously palmed off upon “a Captain of Marines!” They knew the marines would swallow it, and by reprinting the story it might help on a little the excitement in the army. In starting the report they profited by the old adage–“tell it to the marines, the sailors know better.” The following is the dispatch:

Reported capture of Vicksburg.
Philadelphia, July 3.
—The Inquirer has the following posted on their bulletin board:

“A dispatch from Washington has just been received at the Navy Yard, and read to the workmen, that Vicksburg has surrendered.

Vicksburg DID in fact, surrender on that 4th of July, AND the Union Army were the only ones on the field in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on the same 4th.

Some call it the greatest 4th of July in American history. The Civil War was, in many senses, over, much like WWII in the Pacific was over following the Battle of Midway. No one knew it yet.

Here’s a couple of local “color” stories to remind you what a bunch of degenerates stood for slavery:

Arrested
— John B. Allen was arrested on Saturday last for firing a pistol at a negro in 14th street. Mr. Allen gave as a reason for his conduct that the servant was very insolent to him. He will appear before the Mayor this morning.

The Dispatch doubles down on Gettysburg, explaining in great detail the idiocy of the Army of the Potomac:

Can any one doubt, after this, that when the Yankees say an affair is indecisive, they are in fact badly whipped?

But if they are not whipped, why do they shout so vociferously for reinforcements?

The Baltimore American tells us that up to Thursday they had captured 6,000 prisoners. but it accounts for only 800, although General Schenck announces that 1,500 more were to come on. On Thursday there was no general battle, but heavy skirmishing, in which 5,000 prisoners, making 11,000 in all, were captured. The gallant Dutchmen who distinguished themselves by running so at Chancellorsville, it seems, demolished Longstreet ‘s corps and captured a thousand prisoners. These lies are for gross even for Yankee credulity.

The fact seems to be that a division of the army has kept the whole Yankee force at bay two days, and that Gen. Lee is rapidly concentrating in the neighborhood of Gettysburg In a few days we expect to hear that Meade ‘s army has been defeated, and probably annihilated.

Exit Hooker.

“Fighting Joe ” has disappeared at last. He has gone the way of all Yankee Generals.– He brings up the rear of that illustrious procession,– Scott , McDowell , McClellan , Pope, Burnside ,–last and least, Hooker . The grim shades of the departed rise to welcome him to the infernal pit,–the Young Napoleon, probably in the advance, greeting Hooker with an iron grip of salutation, and a significant smile, suggestive of Congress committees, and bubble reputations built up by bluster and blowing, and burst at the cannon’s month.

Poor, dead Commanders in Chief of Doodledom,–there they lie all in a row,–six green graves, and greener occupants, festering in the winding sheet of their dead reputations. Tread lightly on their ashes, Major-General Meade , successor of Hooker , and, instead of imitating their vain glorious and hollow ways, bend thine ear with humility amongst the long grass that covers their creases, and–

Hark from the tombs a doleful sound, Thinned ears attend the cry; Then living man, come view the ground Where thou must shortly lie

The court has taken no interest in the massive corruption scandal brewing around it, but, worse, a HUGE number of cases remain unresolved.  26 cases have been resolved, but 36 cases remain. We have never seen anything like this.

And given SCOTUS’ penchant for destroying the fabric of American society, this has to be troubling.

May 25: SCOTUS Guts clean water protections.

 Supreme Court Limits E.P.A.’s Power to Address Water Pollution
Adam Liptak / New York Times —  The justices ruled that discharges into some wetlands are not covered by the Clean Water Act.  —  Reporting from Washington  —  The Supreme Court on Thursday curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority …

So: 35 cases for SCOTUS to fundamentally transform American life as we know it.

The Roger Taney Court now has a serious challenger for crappiest SCOTUS of all time.

Thus far this century they have thrown one presidential election, gutted dark money provisions in campaign finance, wrecked affirmative action and racial gerrymandering provisions of the Voting Rights Act, misinterpreted the Second Amendment to make all guns available to everyone.

Overturned Roe. v. Wade and a thousand other depredations of what we considered our rights.

Sadly, like the proverbial frog boiling in the water, we don’t notice the incremental rise in temperature.

If and when civil war arrives, the Roberts Court will have more than a cameo role in its genesis.

Oh, and Clarence Thomas continues to be shielded from any meaningful oversight, as he takes literally millions of dollars of free gifts from his benefactor, who told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he didn’t feel any need to testify on the subject in a snotty, oligarchic “Let Them East Cake” letter last week.

So, if you have any civil rights, you might want to exercise them in the next couple of weeks, because they may not exist by the end of June.

Courage.

We were both National Merit Scholars in the same year, along with Bill Gates. It’s our 50th high school reunion. We both graduated between the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes when Secretariat won the Triple Crown. I went into writing, you went into law. So, please take some advice from a contemporary:

This ain’t gonna get better. It’s going to metastasize.

Everyone but a partisan Republican knows that a Supreme Court Justice accepting a half-million dollar vacation from a party with issues before the court is wrong. Prima facie.

Quid pro quo doesn’t matter. It has the appearance of corruption and Caesar’s wife must be BEYOND reproach.

These are foundational and fundamental ethics.

They go back to Rome and Greece. There is nothing new about them. There is nothing difficult about them. But evidently the frog has been in the heating water so long that he doesn’t know that he’s boiling.

The Supreme Court is in deep ethical trouble with the American people. You mentioned this long before the latest scandals arrived in April of this year. Now, it gets geometrically worse every day.

Your inaction is fatal … to you, your reputation and to the Court. I don’t like to watch someone making a fundamental mistake that will color every aspect of their lives, before and after the fact. You are on the verge of making that mistake.

The Senate can’t help you. Even if they could, they won’t.

Rather than acknowledging that there is a problem, you sent an arrogant and somewhat clueless letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and then, I guess, chivvied and harassed your fellow justices to signing a mea NOT culpa letter that was absurd on the face of it.

Something is wrong, and pretending that it ISN’T is the quickest way to eternal ignominy.

You, as Chief Justice, need to do something to stanch the bleeding as your Court spills whatever remaining credibility it has remaining. The tourniquet of demanding that Justice Thomas resign and save the country a long battle, and preserving his pension may be enough. That might do it. There is probably more, but every day that goes forward, each Justice is imperiled, including, as it turns out, yourself.

No rationalization can make this go away. No imperious attitude and casual pooh-poohing of credible allegations will stop this. By the time this reaches your desk, it will be exponentially worse than it was when I sat down to write this.

You’re a smart guy. You know you’re not bulletproof (metaphorically).

But these are fundamental ethical issues. No one at the West Point, Annapolis or Colorado Springs military academies would have any long cogitation on what’s going down. They would know that they were required by the Code to report the infractions. How much more should Supreme Court Justices know about fundamental ethics?

If you need counseling, your priest can probably help you.

But rather than ignoring the mess, you need to clean it up as rapidly as possible, just like it were a nuclear accident.

The blame, either way, is going to fall on you, and if you care about your legacy, etc. you’d better pay attention. Thus far, your attitude has seemed to the American people as “Let them eat cake.”

Again, as your contemporary, I can only say: you need to stop digging, realize that you’re in a hole and do something decisive about it. Long deliberations are your enemy here. The very credibility of the Court is at stake.

I don’t know whether you will consider any of this. You may just blow it off. But I can promise you this: when the brown stuff hits the rotating blades, please don’t pretend that you weren’t warned.

That’s the whole purpose of this letter. Wake up before it’s too late, if it isn’t already.

Your entire life’s work is on the line. Don’t make a tragic mistake here.

Hesitation would be fatal.

Don’t let hubris wreck the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Courage.

The statue that inspired Keats’ “Ozymandias”

Platformer reports …

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking? “This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

[…] Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart … [and] found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well.

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)

This is eerily reminiscent of another such display, as recorded by Herodotus. Persian Emperor Xerxes was engaging in the second invasion of Greece …

During the time Xerxes and his huge army were marching from Sardes to Abydos, then an important harbor on the Hellespont, two bridges were built from there to the opposite side near Sestos over a distance of seven stadia (some 1,300 m or 1,400 yd), but were destroyed by a storm before the army arrived. Xerxes was enraged and had those responsible for building the bridges beheaded. He is then said to have thrown fetters into the strait, given it three hundred whiplashes, and branded it with red-hot irons as the soldiers shouted at the water.

For many millennia, this has been considered a classic case of hubris.

As they say, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

              AI illustration by Hart Williams ©2023

Assuming that Platformer is correct, we now have the equivalent of a senescent old man with Parkinson’s disease driving a bus. Metaphorically.

Time will tell.

Courage.

 Cross-posted at the Moderate Voice.

Or, allegedly said. Various sites claim that this is a misattribution of

“The cleverest trick used in propaganda against Germany during the war was to accuse Germany of what our enemies themselves were doing,” which Goebbels said at a 1934 Nuremberg rally.

All of which is to say, that even toxic and/or homicidal mendacity covers itself with more mendacity. Case in point, TownHall‘s Kurt Schlichter in his Goebbelseque essay (and multiple book plug),

Are We Looking At Another Civil War?
Kurt Schlichter / Townhall

Consider the logic of the left and it’s no wonder that many people are considering the unspeakable – whether America will devolve into actual violent conflict.  But I dare speak about it at length in my brand-new book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America …

The parallels to Goebbels’ questionable quote are so striking as to actually embrace “identical.”

Here is what Mr. Schlichter writes with his poisoned pen:

The logic of the left accepts political violence. A few years ago, one of its acolytes tried to wipe out the congressional Republican caucus on a softball field;

This is known as “extreme cherry picking.”

last month, another member of the MSNBCNN target demo tried to off Justice Kavanaugh for somewhat limiting the ability of progressives to conveniently kill babies.*

Note the fake connection of MSNBC and CNN as the “same.”

Even the reaction to the recent molestation of the famously beer-ophilic jurist as he nibbled on a rib-eye at Morton’s in DC was indicative – this personal confrontation was celebrated by the left instead of decried.

As Pete Buttigieg noted yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Kavenaugh never heard the protesters, never saw the protestors and was never threatened by the protesters. As Mayor Peter ALSO noted, his partner had stated that Kavenaugh has a right to exist in safety, but has NO right to stifle the First Amendment protests of those of whom he has disenfranchised. (That’s for NEXT year’s SCOTUS to revoke).

*NOTE:  The alleged assassin has pled NOT guilty to the charge, is on psychological medication and may well be “unhinged.” Either way, if the presumption of the law is “guilty until proven innocent” then Schlichter has a small point of guilt by association. Otherwise, he’s distorting reality to fit in with his frankly repulsive views. Read more here:

Man pleads not guilty to trying to kill Justice Kavanaugh
The judge set a tentative trial date for Aug. 23.

You see? I’m barely halfway through the first couple of paragraphs and the lying has already topped Empire State Building levels when stacked up.

Accuse the other side of that which you yourself are guilty.

How many people have been gunned down, driven into and otherwise harmed by RIGHT WING extremists in the same period? Go no further than the Texas Trump fan’s Uvalde, Texas slaughter. Or Buffalo, New York. Or …. on and on and on. Any of which is certainly equal to the cherry-picked anecdotes of our book pusher.

The point is that our TownHall scrivener has begun his thesis with horrifically bad evidence, which he either KNOWS is propagandistic nonsense, or cynically expects his readers to  believe, having been inured to logic, facts and reason by thirty-six years of GOPaganda: painting the Democrats and Progressives as “the other,” as fundamentally “immoral,” and now, as homicidally intent on destroying the US of A.

But what would a civil conflict look like if, heaven forbid, it ever came to pass again? The potential for a low-grade leftist insurgency may be the most likely scenario if it were to happen, but there is also the threat of a more substantial conflict involving paramilitary (i.e., groups of armed civilians) and even traditional military forces – right up to actual maneuver combat between blue forces that are primarily urban and red forces that are primarily rural with suburban territory mixed or contested.

If this military pseudo-science wasn’t bad enough, Schlichter QUOTES himself, pretending to be General Patton or somesuch:

My new book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America examines this in detail as a cautionary example, and puts it this way:

“[T]he blues face a real challenge. They will have those massively over-extended logistical lines. It’s nice to hold cities, but if you do not also hold all the rural territory between the cities, as well as the routes to the places where you are getting your food and fuel (and holding those is a big question in itself), then you have a real problem. The stuff that keeps cities alive has to pass through Indian country, and even assuming you could convince civilian truckers to make that passage, the blue states would still have to devote a massive proportion of their forces to defending those routes. Even a small-scale campaign against those supply lines could cause chaos in the cities. Imagine the madness as soft urban professionals, unused to privation and largely disarmed, find themselves both starving and subject to the will of the strong and merciless. It’s The Road Warrior, and there is no Mad Max coming to save you.  [SIC – as in no ending quote]

Schlichter understands logistics as well as he understands rational, factual debate, which is to say, not at all.

Here is his diagnosis of the 1960s followed by his suggestion for the 2020s:

In the late-sixties/early-seventies, there was an urban leftist insurgency by groups like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers that resulted in hundreds of bombings and many killings. It was dealt with as a law enforcement matter, but in a distinctly militaristic way. The Los Angeles Police Department famously annihilated most of the Symbionese Liberation Army – whose battle cry was “DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT!” – in a blazing firefight in South Central that was broadcast on national TV.

Seriously? Using the “Symbionese Liberation Army” as emblematic of anything is the historical equivalent of illiteracy. As several have noted, the SLA breaks virtually all behavior patterns for “resistance” groups, but perhaps in Schlichter’s view, at least they are Black.

And then, a few paragraphs down, this IDIOCY — and its implicit rejection by the same source!

Keep in mind that a civil conflict that spins beyond a law enforcement operation is certain to involve paramilitary forces – bands of civilians with their own private weapons while living their best Second Amendment lives by fighting against what they see as tyranny. That has happened before, and as a result we don’t drive on the left and have generally good teeth.

But we should not be glib about it.

Too late. Glibness has passed into incoherency. But DO go on, Mr. Self-Righteous:

But don’t insult our intelligence by referencing the minor fracas that was J6. If that was an insurrection, you would have seen some armed insurrecting instead of selfie-snapping. If red America wanted to start something, they would have brought along their ARs like progressive James Hodgkinson did.

So, while the chance of civil conflict is low, violence is not only possible but it has been used by the left as a means of making political change in America in the past. And the evidence is that the left remains ideologically open to using violence in the future to achieve its goals.

Right. The January 6 insurrection was nothing, but one mentally questionable individual and one outlier group from the Sixties is fair game as evidence. What has Mr. Schlichter been smoking, and more importantly, where can we get some? (It must be  some KILLER weed.)

Oh, and don’t forget historical false equivalency:

The Civil War that followed four score and change years later was sparked by Democrats angry over the Republican demand that they stopped treating human beings inhumanly – a theme that continues to this day.

This is historical, logical, and purest Goebbelsian nonsense. Taking the right to choose from half of Americans over half a century was Republicans’ treating human beings “humanely”? Seriously?

It is obvious that Schlichter KNOWS he has spouted nonsense, as he attempts to inoculate himself from the fair criticisms of anyone who reads this noxious swill:

Leftist critics and their fellow travelers at garbage outlets like The Bulwark will no doubt lie and claim that I am somehow advocating what I am warning against – sadly, this kind of bad faith refusal to engage and debate honestly has become all too common today and itself promotes conflict by eliminating the possibility of resolving disputes through reason. It leaves the exercise of raw power as the only means to solve problems, a situation common in much of the rest of the world. But we must look the monster of political violence in its eyes if we hope to defeat it. The way to bring America back to greatness need not be force. We have the Constitution, and it gives us the answers to all our questions…. [emphasis added]

Nope, Kurt. you are thinking of the Fundamentalist bible.

The Constitution is not and never has been the prescription for solving all US problems, else there would be no amendments, no SCOTUS and certainly no need for Congress. this is even more ridiculous than the OTHER brain-dead reasoning of this walking coma victim.

And yes, Kurt, you ARE advocating what you ware warning against, muddled though your prose be, and muddied as its thinking.

Finally, this mess concludes with a long advertisement for other brain-dead offerings from our GOPagandist. Even dead Goebbels would be embarrassed by the sheer amateurishness of this wrong-headed screed.

Coming Thursday: “Is It Time for a National Divorce?”

Which he decried earlier! “My book is not giddy over the threat of conflict – instead, it is a warning that comes from both my personal history and what I saw overseas.”

Conservatives Must Stand Together and Fight. Join Townhall VIP. And Check Out Last Week’s Stream of Kurtiousness, It’s Painfully Obvious Biden Is Not Fit to Carry On. And my podcast, Unredacted.

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What a terrible ad! Indeed then entire column is his advertisement for his seemingly lousy book on questionable logistics and even more questionable tactics in a war that he says shouldn’t happen but gleefully embraces.

What has happened to our society that someone so clearly unworthy of  serious attention can turn into a virtual multinational conglomerate of Right wing nonsense and absurdity?

The Right is on the verge of a civil war, and, if anything, the Left is far behind in the rhetoric of revolution AND the acquisition of weapons FOR said war. To pretend otherwise is to pretend, period.

And, as with Goebbels propaganda, GOPaganda is literally toxic to human life.

Courage.

NOTE: Evidently, I dealt with Schlichter’s civil war nonsense before in 2018:

MARCH 12, 2018 · 3:09 PM
Townhall Columnist hilariously suggests that GOPs will win next Civil War

Why? Because if you’ve been paying attention to facts, you won’t need much in the way of evidence. If, however, you are inured to facts, and watch FOX News to upgrade and strengthen your prejudices, what on Earth are you doing here? [Shoo! Decent people don’t need to see you.]

Here’s the premise: Every decision made in the last term (and many of the prior terms) are what is termed in law as “the poisoned fruit of the poisoned tree.“

SCOTUS Justices ‘Prayed With’ Her — Then Cited Her Bosses to End Roe

Rolling Stone  —  The court’s majority cited a legal brief that her group filed while overturning Roe v. Wade  —  At an evangelical victory party in front of the Supreme Court to celebrate the downfall of Roe v. Wade last week … In other words: Sitting Supreme Court justices have prayed together with evangelical leaders whose bosses were bringing cases and arguments before the high court. [emphasis added]

As Susan Collins learned, the new “justices” were there for one reason only, to advance their religious agenda.

But it goes deeper than that.

Beginning on December 12, 2000, when SCOTUS improperly and unlawfully handed the White House to George W. Bush — who STILL managed to lose, despite the nationwide, well-documented and indisputable suppression of votes — the legitimacy of our Supreme Court has been, increasingly, questionable.

Roberts and Alito were the falsely installed via a fraudulent election. Like Al Gore, we Democrats bit the bullet and “accepted” the results, even as any knowledge of voter fraud was expunged from media.

Indeed, the Right Wing (via the Koch and John Fund) even wrote a book that kicked off the phony “voter fraud” debates that the liars of Right Wing media have run with for the past two decades!

John Fund signing at Eric O’Keefe’s 2009 Sammie Awards in Chicago

But there wasn’t any. It was a false fact, as are most “facts” in Rightie world these days, having led to the “epistemological crisis” I wrote about long before it became fodder for national pundits to dip their toes into.

• The Thick Plottens
• Under Pressure, or, Notes from a disabled submarine at crush depth
• The Obligatory Weekend ‘Think’ Piece
• I have a draft from 2017/03/07, Back To Birtherism which begins to get into the mechanics of our epistemological crisis. I might even publish it. But here’s a salient section:

i. The epistemological crisis
As in, what do you do when two halves of a country can’t agree on what’s REAL and what’s imaginary, and one side ACTIVELY manufactures “facts”? That’s the thesis of what I’ll dissect with the “Humping the Corpse of a Dead Soldier for Political Gain” section below….

And we are already seeing the signs of Trumpism (which is, in essence, pure Freudian id –Doctor Morbius’ “monsters from the id” from Forbidden Planet) in the sudden upsurge in Antisemitism. More to come. But this is the spreading cancer that is beginning to poison the body politic. Get ready to see a lot more.

This is now the epistemological crisis to those who can brook no dissent, take no blame, and — remember? — are constitutionally incapable of apologizing, barely even able to mouth the words: what is our reality to be today? And, on another level, we have violence that erupted at the “spontaneous” pro-Trump rallies this weekend….

Lincoln: Once a great president, now a FOX photo op (WH Photo)

Using fake facts, fake elections and even, as Mitch McConnell barefacedly did appointing Gorsich AND Barrett, straight up double dealing, the legitimacy of the Supreme Court was destroyed by cheating and double-dealing*. You can’t get justice by cheating any more than you can guarantee virginity by f*cking.

[* Constitutional “advise and consent“; NOT making up the rules to get your way.]

This Supreme Court is illegitimate and therefore its attempt to steal our rights is ALSO illegitimate.

Period.

It is only by our consent and our willingness to “not rock the boat” that we accept their monstrous depredations. Hell, the rollback of Roe vs. Wade itself was an illegitimate use of the court’s power, only acceptable because another higher court couldn’t see it for the legal, logical and religious abomination that it turned out to be.

No. These are barbarians aping judicial appointees by the use of black robes and nothing else.

And I DO NOT CONSENT.

Governance, states the Declaration, derives from the consent of the governed.

I DO NOT CONSENT.

To continue to pretend that this is legitimate and we should go along to get along is merely to refuse to apprehend tyranny. It IS tyranny.

They crossed the Rubicon and will pay the price. But I do not consent to their illegal actions. Nor do I believe that any redress in our current form of government will help. They’ve destroyed it at every level since Reagan.

Barbarians sacking Rome

The clear will of the majority isn’t taken into account at all, and the GOPs now rule by fiat and lies.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security

~ The Declaration of Independence

Well, the absolute despotism of our current GOPs and our current SCOTUS leads to only one conclusion: there is no rule of law until we can safely establish a new one, that TAKES MAJORITIES INTO ACCOUNT.

Until then, there is only one recourse: resistance.

I promise to remain non-violent as long as they do.

But I DO NOT CONSENT. This SCOTUS is illegitimate and rules via lies and cheating and cannot, therefore, be called a court at all.

Sorry Righties. You decided in 1986 that, rather than disagree on policy, you would hate us and our beliefs and overcome by any and all means possible, legal and illegal.

And now there is no way back.

We used to be a great nation. What happened?

I do not consent. Be warned.

Courage.

And, as noted in the dissent, there was NO COMPELLING reason to do it. The five right-wing ideologues did it because they COULD do it. (So much for the ‘limited decisions” that have characterized the modern era — if they ask for a stone, give them a quarry; if they ask for a fish, give them the ocean.)

Because each and every justice involved was hand-picked for this very reason.

There is a very good article on the dark money behind this (which was facilitated by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling — making anonymous donations to attack Hillary Clinton legal) over at The Lever, which I consider authoritative, since I have covered much of the same ground and organizations in my investigations over the years. Here’s the core:

The co-chairman of the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyers group in Washington, Leo is best known for serving as President Donald Trump’s top judicial adviser. Leo helped select Trump’s Supreme Court picks while simultaneously leading a dark money network that boosted their confirmations with TV ads and contributions to conservative groups that promoted the judges.

Leo’s dark money network has also funded Republican state attorneys general and conservative nonprofits that are backing and even directly arguing some of the most contentious cases before the high court right now.

It is with these cases that the Supreme Court has ended federal protections for abortion rights, dismantled the high court precedent requiring police officers to inform people of their rights to remain silent and to an attorney when they’re being detained, struck down blue-state restrictions on carrying concealed firearms, and handed conservative state lawmakers more power to chip away at Americans’ voting rights.

The number of rich donors? Two.

You have to wonder what the Supreme Court is actually up to. Guns for everybody on Thursday, the first ever denial of a commonly accepted right in Supreme Court history on Friday — for which there was no compelling reason, other than the pique and annoyance of our three unlettered Trump justices and our three unlettered Bush the Smarter/Bush the Dumber justices.

All hand-picked to deceive Susan Collins, who is currently crying crocodile tears about the whole thing that she enabled SEVERAL TIMES.

(Ever notice how Susan Collins always knows what the right thing to do is, and then never does it?)

Seems like they want us to tear ourselves apart in a civil war paid for by shadowy oligarchs.

Certainly a bloodbath is all but inevitable. Women and their allies can still buy AR-15s after this new “gun law” passed — essentially under the radar. And after decades of clinic firebombings and bombings, one can’t really cry too hard if Catholic and Evangelical churches start to reap their own fiery karma in all of this. One side has been out of control and the other side restrained and decent. Now that motivation has flipped on its head.

Worse, June 24, 2022 — a dark day in America history — may be remembered less as the day that “abortion” was ended in the United States, and more as the date that abortion became retroactive in the USA.

You bully anyone long enough and their mild temper becomes enraged aggrievance. 

I don’t think it will take long.

The Supreme Court has managed to divide our country as radically as when they passed Dred Scott and upheld the Runaway Slaves Act. Those caused the first civil war.

From Hell, Justice Roger Taney must be pleased. And his bunkmate, Wild Bill Rehnquist, even more so.

I’m so sorry for you America. Your fate is not a happy one … for a long time to come.

The dark night of the American soul is upon us.

… For all of us, in our time on this Court, that has never been more true than today. In overruling Roe and Casey, this Court betrays its guiding principles.

With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent.

~ Breyer, Kagan, Sotomayor in dissent.

[Emphasis added]

Courage.