from the horse's mouth

Occasionally i like to read nonfiction books which add to my awareness that American 'justice' is rotten to the core. I'm reading one such book now: THE TRIALS OF WALTER OGROD and just came across something so juicy i'd like to share it with u. This is from p.183-184 which quotes extensively from a 1986 training video tape shown to young prosecutors in Philadelphia to train them in the process of 'voir dire' or jury selection. I'm editing it a little for the sake of brevity and clarity.

"the case law says that the object of getting a jury is to get - i had to look this up because i didn't know this was the purpose of a jury - a 'competent, fair, and impartial jury'...  Well, that's ridiculous. You're not going to get that...  And if any one of u think u're going to be some noble civil libertarian and try to get (fair) jurors, that's ridiculous. U'll lose and be out of office...  The only way u're going to do your best is to get jurors that are as unfair and more likely to convict than anyone in that room."

"The ideal juror from the Commonwealth's standpoint ...  would be willing to hang his own mother...  take solid, well-dressed citizens from strong families, people who read simple books instead of Karl Marx. Never take a lawyer or a law student, never take a social worker, don't take a teacher, they're too liberal, unless maybe it's a white teacher from a mostly black school who is fed up with black teenagers. Never take Quakers, they need too much evidence. Blacks from low income areas are less likely to convict, so u don't want "those people" on your jury; it may look like u're being racist, but u're just being realistic..."

"most of all, keep smart people off the jury... Smart people will analyze the hell out of your case...  They hold u to a higher standard...  They take those words 'reasonable doubt' and they actually try to think about them. You want people to come in there and say, 'Yep, she said he did it, he did it'".

who could ever love u?

the title of this is the title of mary trump's newly published book, a memoir about her own dysfunctional upbringing and lasting sense of social isolation and alienation from family, topics which highly resonate with me. other than that it wasn't a particularly noteworthy work. it did reinforce the message of her first book about the dysfunctional trump family with much focus on the patriarch fred trump, her paternal grandfather, a 'sociopath without normal human emotions' who she blames for destroying her father's life and having a great influence on her narcisistic uncle donald, ex and possible future president of the u.s..

an interesting and unexpected facet of the book was the revealing portrait of her mother as a largely detached, uncaring parent overwhelmed by her own sense of having been shafted by life and battling chronic depression. mary relates how as a child suffering from severe asthma attacks that often came late at night, leaving her gasping for air, she would go to her mother for help, who instead of taking her immediately to a nearby hospital would tell her to get in bed with her and then go back to sleep or feign going back to sleep, leaving mary to suffer until morning came (this was after her parents had divorced and her hapless alcoholic dad was no longer around to be of help). she also related late in the book how her mother continued to make her feel unworthy of attention/love long after she became an adult, by continuously interrupting her in conversation and claiming to be unable to hear her although she stated that her hearing aid otherwise worked perfectly well. this strongly reminded me of my own relationship with my father, who always gave me the impression that anything i said to him went in one ear and immediately out the other.

the last strong takeaway i have from this book was another passage towards the end when she states that watching her awful uncle donald get elected POTUS  was like a hallucination, it was so hard to believe. my response to that would be, no, it's not a hallucination, it's a symptom of living in a dystopian world!

ho hum, another day, another israeli war crime using american supplied arms

 just about every day since the most recent israeli war began last october, there's been news reports of israel murdering scores of palestinian civilians in gaza, where they live and die like sitting ducks who have no where to flee to escape this insane violence. today was no different, just as the reporting of it on american tv news was no different. it's reported with absolutely no sense of outrage, no sense that this bombing of defenseless civilians is an outrageous atrocity. apparently palestinian lives aren't worthy of such outrage from america's 'independent' media. otoh, whenever  there's a 'terrorist attack' by some palestinian who's rightfully fed-up with what israel has been doing to his people, perhaps a suicide bombing that kills one or 2 or a few israelis, it's reported much differently. this ongoing disparity in reporting this deadly violence is sickening, just as is the ongoing steadfast american government support in terms of supplying free military aid and political cover to the war criminal israeli regime. as is the american sheeple's apparent indifference or lack of awareness to this disparity. if the american sheeple had any brains and compassion they might just perceive it and demand an end to it by refusing to continue to support the zionist political parties that enable it. however i'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen and u shouldn't either. i don't recall who it was that said or wrote something to the effect that it's impossible to over estimate the stupidity or gullibility of the public, but they were certainly right!

low self esteem

 “Most people with low self-esteem have earned it.”

― George Carlin, Napalm & Silly Putty

there's probably some truth to that quote.

i didn't sleep very well last night. plagued by unsettling dreams, mostly now forgotten except for their tenor/theme, which dealt with my social isolation and my sense that this is a curse from which there seems to be no escape. loneliness with women in particular, due to my lack of confidence with those to whom i'm physically attracted. this probably stems from having an unloving mother who let me know in no uncertain terms as a young child that she hated sex and men. my parents marriage was deeply troubled; my mother seemed to hate her home life, which made me think as i got older that she probably only got married and stayed married out of convenience, as it gave her free room and board, freedom from having to earn a living, free money to go out and drink and smoke in bars, which she did every day as i got older, neglecting her family. (my father too seemed to have very little interest in my sister and i.)  i often wonder now how differently my life may have been had i come from a happy home with attentive nurturing as a child.

particularly as i've gotten older i've been plagued by such dreams occasionally. by contrast, i recall only one time a dream with a theme of 'doom' for our planet. it seems in retrospect it may have been a prophetic dream, as in it i was in a city flooded by sea water with very tall skyscrapers (manhattan?). that dream didn't upset me like the ones in which i feel cursed to be lonely do, just as when i'm awake, i'm much more perturbed by my personal problems than by the awareness that civilization is destroying the ecosphere.

which brings us back to the carlin quote above. maybe if i wasn't so selfish, maybe if i cared more about the tragedy of planetary doom and less about my own relatively petty personal travails, i wouldn't be trapped in this prison of isolation. maybe in this sense i deserve this curse of isolation and low self esteem.

at least there's a cool song / music video about having no self esteem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GVMRLeaVs

Left gatekeepers

 Barrie Zwicker hasn't got back to me. This may be due to his age;  he'll turn 90 in a few months. As far as i can tell, he hasn't put out any new work or made any public internet posts for several years.

Tonite i'm pondering the case of Robert Scheer, a 'radical' Lefty journalist and author. I've read a fair amount of his writing, mostly in Playboy magazine years ago, and been a great admirer. 

His position on 9/11 is odd. It reminds me of Noam Chomsky's. Zwicker in his book had a whole chapter on Chomsky's puzzling dismissive rejection of the JFK  assassination and 9/11 'conspiracy theories' that these events involved high level governmental involvement and cover-up of the truth. Likewise Scheer only goes so far as to say that the government could and should have prevented the attacks from happening, leaving open the question whether this was because of incompetence or deliberate conspiracy.

It's nigh impossible to believe that sheeple as smart as Chomsky and Scheer could fall for the official lies or narratives of these events, which leads me to think that like Chomsky, Scheer must be a Left gatekeeper. That is, someone who accumulates much respect and credibility among Left 'radicals' but for whatever reason refuses to explore or acknowledge the deepest darkest aspects/secrets of the establishment, thus misleading many of their admirers by dissuading them from doing so themselves.

 I have an email address for Scheer and thought of writing him about this for a moment. He's just a year younger than Zwicker, but unlike Zwick, is still publishing work. However, it would probably/ almost certainly would be a waste of time, as I doubt if he would admit to either being an actual government agent, or merely being savvy enough to understand the boundaries he can't cross if he wishes to avoid the dirty attacks and smears (smear scheer!) one must expect if one is both prominent and the sort of truly radical critic who obliterates the boundaries of acceptable criticism of said establishment.

dear barrie

 (reverting to my usual lazy casual practice of no / few CAPS)

i sent an email earlier today to barrie zwicker, whose book TOWERS OF DECEPTION has provided material to quote and comment on for the past few days here. it included a link to this blog, so maybe he'll read this. thus the title of this post.

i'm addressing u because i have no readers or close confidantes. indeed there are few sheeple (explanation for my use of 'sheeple' here, along with some 9/11 related talk):

https://dystopiananddoomed.blogspot.com/2019/09/911-2019-some-last-words.html

picking up where we left off, there's no one  i know who i can relate to very well. as i wrote in a recent entry to this blog, i relate to the protagonist in the very short science fiction story EIGHT O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING. i've awakened and everyone else is still hypnotized or indoctrinated. i can't believe how dumbed down, dogmatic, puritanical, indoctrinated america is, can't believe how stupidcrazy american politics are, or how the mass media is exactly as u described it in your book as i quoted in my previous post. it's feeding the public daily booster shots of idiocy, ignorance, lies and propaganda.

this has become painfully obvious and disturbing to me. it's truly dystopian, orwellian, hellish. i love to learn so i read a lot to sate my curiosity and thirst for knowledge, but now it seems the more i learn the more alienated, frustrated, alarmed, frightened, and hopeless i'm becoming.

as an adult i've always been oddly viscerally alienated, including often from myself. in conforming i tend to lose my identity, thus the self alienation. and as bernays said in his famous quote (broadly paraphrasing) "for a 'democracy' to work, public opinion must be molded to conform to whatever the rulers want", and beyond relatively superficial ways one may be different, conforming to artificial laws and peer pressure is a requirement in this dystopia if one wishes to be 'free' from incarceration, condemnation, and being shunned, especially by authoritarian followers, fascists, and dogma addicts.

for many years i've suppressed this publicly for the most part, only expressing my true thoughts and feelings in this blog and to a handful of local progressives, of whom it seems the vast majority if not all of them have not engaged with, supported, or empathized much. because of this, i've pretty much been reduced to writing posts nobody reads, in a vain hope that somehow, some day, someone will, and i won't be so alone. then, maybe others will too.

i'm under no illusions that the world can be saved or the masses awakened to the harsh knowledge a very few now share. this blog isn't about salvation; it's about alleviation of isolation and commiseration. as the old saying goes, 'misery loves company'. or as billy joel sang in PIANO MAN, 'sharing a drink called loneliness is better than drinking alone'.

the function of mass media

Barrie Zwicker's excellently written TOWERS OF DECEPTION is chock full of quotable quotes. It's a shame such reading material isn't more popular. Here's one more from near the end of the book, on p. 351:

"The current system of the rich getting obscenely richer while while more and more people starve, and diminishing resources are squandered on armaments is unsustainable. This very unsustainability contributes to the world being in it's current multi-dimensional crisis. It's most important dimension by far is the environmental one. We're destroying the Earth's life support systems; of that there is abundant evidence. There are also growing economic crisis, building like earthquake pressures. Millions are shielded from awareness of our precarious situation by the mass media, which function to anesthetize, distract, confuse, and mislead on most major issues most of the time."