Hitler Is Hitler!

In response to a post criticizing Trump's desire to publish a weekly report on crimes by illegals, which pointed out that the Nazis did this with a special publication called "the criminal jew" I responded:

The point is valid, this is a disgusting act. However, we should always remember that comparing Trump to Hitler is a big mistake. Remember those old SAT questions? "Hitler is to Trump as Himmler is to __________."

The answer is Chief Wiggum. Himmler was the nerdy looking, but extremely effective , commander of the SS and the Gestapo, two of the most feared organizations in the history of the world.
Chief Wiggum is… Chief Wiggum.

Point to Hitler for hate, but laugh at the Trumpsters.

At Least They Didn't Call It A Hairball

One of the great scientific mysteries that fascinated me throughout childhood and early adulthood was the endless attempts to determine what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. It was utterly fascinating and I followed the efforts and the new theories eagerly. Today I find the problem with black holes almost as fascinating. If you press an astrophysicist on the subject, he will admit that any time we start talking about infinities such as infinitely dense, infinitely hot, infinitely small it's an admission we don't know what we're talking about and that physics has broken down. (Note: this also applies to the big bang theory.)

Here's the new theory (new to me anyway) which solves a great many of the black hole problems, and it's based on string theory! Which in my book, makes it a double winner.
W
I am really stuck, though, on this issue of; if Alice reaches the black hole her strings are reproduced. I don't get it.

https://www.wired.com/2015/06/fuzzball-fix-black-hole-paradox/

Light Poetry From A Loving Heart

Katie
My Katie
The girl of the bird
With the beautiful eye
Black glossy wings
A flashing of blue
Rushing of joy
For me and for you

Andrew
My Drew
My little boy blue
The cow's in the meadow
The sheep's in the corn
My love still here
And never foresworn

Rebecca
My Becca
My Beccachan you
For your precious art
Your sketched and you drew
Mine was my family
It's all that I do

Joshua
My Josh
Player of horns
Come break down the walls
Tear down the thorns
Be what you say

Sauce For The Goose...

In response to an article in which liberals defended their mildly violent protest in which they prevented a Trump supporter from speaking at their university lead me to respond:
The problem with freedom of speech is that it means freedom of speech for the people whose speech you despise. I support freedom of speech, not its suppression.

My friend M toughtfully responded:
Me too Jim. But this is indeed a tough call... and I believe it's the second time he's cancelled a speech because of protestors; if not him it was someone like him. So who's in the right? He had the right of free speech, but so did the protestors...
So trump threatens to pull federal funding from the school?! It certainly was not the school's fault! trump is all powerful, or so he thinks...

I agreed with her point, but added:
Let me go to extreme focus, meaning let's look at it much more extreme but somewhat similar case so as to throw light on this one. It is reported that at one point after a meeting with "Bomber" Harris, who planned the terror bombings of German cities in retaliation for similar attacks by the Nazis, Churchill asked him, "Are we beasts?"

My answer is, yes, you were beasts. It was wrong for the Nazis to do it and it was wrong for us to do it.

There was actually a plan pushed by some in Washington that after World War II Germans be limited to a smaller number of calories than required for human health. The point being that half starved Germans can't start another world war. Decency ruled the day, so the Germans are among our best allies today. The horrific war crime committed by the French and British after World War I in which they deliberately continued to starve Germans after the Armistice is little known now, but was one of the most important bases for the rise of Hitler and the start of World War II.

We are in not in a fake culture war but a real war for fact, science, reality, and common decency. I don't want us to use that as an excuse to abandon the moral high ground.

The Greatest Story Ever Screwed

I finally overcame my anticipatory revulsion and watched the new version of Disney's The Jungle Book. I have concluded that while the movie is not the hideous train wreck that the animated version was, it's still pretty bad. It is obvious that no one connected with either movie has ever actually read even a single one of the original Mowgli stories.They just gave the general concept the Disney treatment. If you are a work of literature and receive the Disney treatment, you can expect to follow a process similar to ancient Egyptian mummification. First they gut you. Then they scoop your brains out through your nose. Then they wrap you up in bandages and soak you in a bath of ooey gooey, sugar sweet clichés, throw in a few wild chase scenes, add a couple of adorable but mischievous animals, and you're done.

How bad do I find it? Well let's say Disney decided to do a New Testament spectacular. It would go something like this:

Walt Disney presents The Greatest Story Ever Told:

God the Father falls in love with that hot babe, the Holy Spirit. She's bad, but she has a heart of gold. She gives birth to a son, whom they call Jesus. Unfortunately, there's a war in Heaven at the moment and, what with heaven being bombed, all the children have to be evacuated to the countryside, that is, Earth.

Jesus gets sent to the Virgin Mary, wife of Joseph because he's too old to have kids and this lets them have a family.

But the great prophet, John the Baptist, is jealous. He fears this new Jesus will take over the number one spot. He can't let that happen. This is especially sad because John the Baptist is a follower of Moses. Moses set all the Jews in Egypt free and now wanders around the desert singing "The Bear Necessities" and teaching the people of Israel that they don't need to be slaves to material things, they can just be free and wander around eating bugs, honey, and manna. He especially likes locusts and wild honey. His greatest student, John the Baptist, still likes locusts and wild honey, but now he also craves power. (Moses, happily wandering the desert while eating bugs between two slices of mana coated with honey sandwiches, plays no further part in the movie.)

Hearing about Jesus, John decides to "baptize" the infant "accidentally" drowning him and making himself safe.

This is made easy for him because he is married to Salome, daughter of kindly King Herod. Evil John the Baptist convinces kindly king Herod that Jesus is trying to replace Herod, not John.

Hearing that Harod is out to get their child (they now regard Jesus as their own son) The Holy Family leaves his birthplace in a manger, taking along that adorable but mischievous little lamb and the dove up in the rafters, which is also very adorable.

They settle in Egypt for a while, which is ruled by the mighty pharaoh who uses his Royal cartouche to surf the waters of the Nile. He's a really laid-back dude and sounds like a Californian surfer.

I think you get the picture now. This is what Disney does to great literature. I know I'm very much in the minority, but most Disney movies really stink.

Sent from my iPhone

Quotes

Kellyanne Conway: "Do you always want to go by what comes out of his mouth rather than look at what's in his heart?"

Jesus (Mark 17): "18But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these things defile a man. 19For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and slander. 20These are what defile a man, but eating with unwashed hands does not defile him.”

Obviously fundamentalist evangelical right wing Christians will listen to the Prophetess rather than that other guy, who is apparently a member of the mainstream media.

The Really, Really, Big Lie

What we're missing is that the big lie, maybe the biggest of all the lies, is that the mainstream media are on Hillary's side. The reality is that they are so desperate to prove that they are fair and balanced and so afraid of the conservatives attacking them that they present lies that they know are lies as if they were possibly true.

As I've said before, if Germany had our news media back in the days when Hitler was trying to get into power, they would have reported endlessly on the evil of Jews and the need to exterminate them. They wouldn't have said they were evil and should be exterminated, but they wouldn't have said that it was nonsense either.

They would have just spread the lies and then presented both sides in a debate -- in a balanced manner. "Our first guest is Julius Streicher, followed by Rabbi Hertzmann."

When one side is willing to sell any bizarre lie no matter how foolish and finds that it's believed while the other side tries to least stick generally to the truth and the news media can't tell the difference between the two (or more accurately won't tell the difference between the two), abandon all hope you who enter here.

Note: As you know Fox admitted it lied about Hillary being indicted. It didn't take but A few minutes before conservatives began accusing FOXNews of having been bought off by the Clintons. Yes, that's right. They actually accused FOXNews of being on the Clinton's side. We have entered a world of utter madness, at least, on the conservative side.

News today is about making money. The non right wing news is like the Democrats have been for so long, afraid of offending the right wing wing lying news.

My prediction is that if this election is close it will make the Republican Party more extreme than ever. They will tell themselves' "if only we been a little bit crazier we would have won."

If it's a big loss for Trump, there is a chance that they might begin to mend their ways. But remember, many of them, like the whole Breitbart hate monger machine, are true believers and won't change no matter what.

If Trump wins, this nation may be in the biggest trouble it's ever been in. The Brits were never willing to put out the massive levels of force, blood, and treasure that was necessary to subdue us, as long as we held out they would eventually give up. Hitler and Tojo really didn't have a chance against us. Eventually we would have used the atomic bomb on Berlin, if that's what it had taken. The danger of the Cold War was more nuclear war than anything else. And OK, that would've been a disaster for the whole human race, but we weren't in any serious danger of being conquered, just our entire species becoming extinct.

I'm not the first to point out that the real danger to America is an internal, voter supported coup. I'm also not the first to point out that would be largely religious coup. (And with the military becoming more and more fundamentalist evangelical it's possible that we might not even need voter support.)

Bill Marr recently described the Republican Party's efforts in recent decades as a slow moving coup. I prefer "slow-motion coup" but he makes an excellent point.

America's place as the most democratic nation in the world has long been degrading. We're about number 21 on at least one respected list. Democracy is dying in America. I've said it before, we're turning into a kleptocracy. That is the fault of the Democrats as much as the Republicans.

Republicans are refusing to fill any Supreme Court justices unless their candidate wins the election, an absolute repudiation of the rule of law, of democracy, and of the Constitution. So even if Hillary wins, our nation could be crumbling before our very eyes.

The only reason I have hope is the millennial generation. They are not perfect, but they sure have a lot of very sound basic ideas and they can tell the difference between Internet lies and reality. After all, they grew up with the Internet. I trust our grandchildren. Whatever happens I believe they will save the world and the United States.