Steve Simels is too lazy and stupid to learn anything he hadn't absorbed in his tiny little puddle of ignorance sixty years ago.  And there was plenty of stupid in the greater-lesser NYC area for him to absorb back then.  And he's too undisciplined to maintain a resolve to quit Duncan Black's puddle of mutual congratulations and ignorance once and for all.   That he's spouting the same old lies about me to his fellow addicts to ignorance there is exactly what I predicted here months back. 

He is proof of Bertrand Russell's contention that stupid people won't do anything but misrepresent things that smarter people say because they can't understand what's said so they translate it into things they can understand.  When you put that on top of the willingness to lie and bear false witness, too common among those who profess to believe its a sin to commit those lies but rampant among those who are materialists who don't believe in sin, you get someone like Simps.   

I proved both the motive of the Nazis mass murders in their belief in natural selection any number of times, as I did the scientific racism and of Charles Darwin and advocacy of the deaths of those he deemed unfit, his immediate support of and enthusiasm for not only the eugenics of Francis Galton but his even greater support for the proto-Nazism of Ernst Haeckel and his actual advocacy of Anglo-Saxons, Britains and other North-Western Europeans displacing (that means killing) people who lived in other lands, Australia, Africa, the Americas, etc. in exactly the same terms that the Nazis used for their conquest and genocides in Eastern Europe.  I showed that the contemporary Darwinists, includings Karl Pearson gave their Nazi colleagues pseudo-scientific arguments that the Jews of Poland and Russia were a biological hazard to the Germanic people which the Nazis quoted in their scientific advocacy of first their removal and then their genocide.  I showed how Leondard Darwin, up to the very months before WWII started praised the Nazi's eugenics laws linking them explicitly to his own father's thinking.   

 And those were only some of the many things I proved linking the Nazis to Darwinism, something that no one until the end of WWII and the revelation of the extent of the Nazis murder industry denied was the case, that Nazi "racial hygiene" was a thoroughly conventional aspect of Darwin's natural selection.  Something which William Jennings Bryan more or less predicted would be a consequence of a belief in natural selection, Darwinism, in his undelivered summary at the Scopes trial as the atheist materialist jerk Clarence Darrow, who knew far less about Darwinism ignored that aspect of it.  

Only the "brain trust" of Eschaton (they really do call themselves that) are too stupid to read the primary documentation that proves that was the Nazis motive in their mass murders.  Nor do they have the morality to figure they should find out what's true and what isn't, they don't care about that as long as their prejudices are supported.  I did, actually, change my opinion about this when I did the research that proved a case I was disinclined by preference to believe in.  That's the difference between someone who believes the truth is important and someone who believes there really is no such thing as the truth.  When I started out at Duncan's, I was rather stupid about the play-left, I figured their stupidity was not a product of a deeper problem caused by their amorality, now I see that it's all one problem that starts with not caring about the truth.

No shock that the ADD addled world's oldest tween is back at Duncan's.   He can't stick with anything, a lifetime of too much TV does that to you.  Participating on Duncan's blog, too, apparently.  

 

Get back to me when he starts lying about me there.  I have no doubt he will, he can't stick with not doing that, either.

Johnny Mercer Henry Mancini - Moon River

 After I posted that radio play that used the name of the song I realize I was going to have it going through my head over and over again till I did something about it.

I've posted this version of it before,  the lyricist Johnny Mercer who was rare in that he was also a very fine singer and the composer, Henry Mancini doing a demo of the song that they wrote for Audry Hepburn to sing in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. 

I used to say that Audry Hepburn's non-singer singing of it was the best version till I heard Johnny Mercer sing it. Knocks ol' Blue Eye's crooning of it out of the water.   I prefer a singer to sing words as if they meant something.  Mercer knew how to do that, so many didn't.

I didn't know anyone was still looking at this

I'd guess there is no subject about which more bullshit has been written than the alleged power of comedy to bring down tyrants, to expose frauds, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.  History proves it has no such power anymore than any other kind of light writing does.  It's bullshit. Anyone who pretends to believe that is either lying or stupid enough to buy it without thinking about it.  There was no more biting comedy than that which went up against the Nazis and, guess what, the Nazis won without any problem.  They harnessed it to their own ends. 

I'll Let Hugh Dillon Say It For Me

Ah, two weeks without anyone telling me what Stupy's doing.  Just one telling me what he didn't do and I didn't much care.   Will this be the last time I mention him?   Can I finally say it?

The beauteous Hugh Dillon when he had hair.  Not that he's bad now, either.   Ah, to be 40 again.  

Here he is an an off-beat short film.  Not a bad actor, either. 

When White People Lecture Other People On What Isn't Racist Or Racialized

 

My last friend who frequents Eschaton tells me that Duncan didn't rouse his lazy ass to ban Simps, Simps left when he was critisized for being such an example of old, white, male, middle-class privilege that he didn't acknowledge the inherent racism of the old Ernie Kovacs Nairobi Trio sketch WHICH IS BLATANTLY AND OBVIOUSLY PRESENTING AN OLDER, WIDELY USED RACIST SHOW BIZ STEREOTYPE OF BLACK MUSICIANS AS APES THAT GOES BACK BEFORE JAZZ AND INTO THE MINSTREL PERIOD and, indeed, well back into white, European racism.  

It's so thoroughly embedded by racism into the thinking of, not only white people but in human culture that it even appears, unplanned and unconsidered in the algorithms that computer scientists come up with.

Back in 2015, software engineer Jacky Alciné pointed out that the image recognition algorithms in Google Photos were classifying his black friends as “gorillas.” Google said it was “appalled” at the mistake, apologized to Alciné, and promised to fix the problem. But, as a new report from Wired shows, nearly three years on and Google hasn’t really fixed anything. The company has simply blocked its image recognition algorithms from identifying gorillas altogether — preferring, presumably, to limit the service rather than risk another miscategorization.

Wired says it performed a number of tests on Google Photos’ algorithm, uploading tens of thousands of pictures of various primates to the service. Baboons, gibbons, and marmosets were all correctly identified, but gorillas and chimpanzees were not. The publication also found that Google had restricted its AI recognition in other racial categories. Searching for “black man” or “black woman,” for example, only returned pictures of people in black and white, sorted by gender but not race.

I don't think there's much of a question that Ernie Kovacs may well have imbibed the same thing, perhaps unwittingly the images of racism so deeply embedded in American as well as European culture,  when he heard the piece of crap song "Solfeggio" and immediately linked it to a parody of a racist music-box image of Black musicians as Gorillas, it is even less of a surprise when his wife and the other all-white members of his company (and, according to Simps in our earlier go round on it, the white Jack Lemmon)* didn't see any problems with it.  I wish I could find out if there were any contemporary Black people who commented on it because I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have any problem seeing it for what it was at the time.  

And, really, calling it the "Nairobi Trio" is rather a dead giveaway of the racist nature of it. 

It is rather presumptuous for a white guy to declare that a bunch of white show-biz guys in one of the most racist periods of reaction against the great Civil Rights Movement, dressing up and personifying a very old, racist stereotype taken directly from the past and their very present, present were not, in fact, doing what they were obviously doing.  I'm glad to live in a time when, especially younger people fed up with that long history are no longer willing to just skip over that and to call it what it is, no longer impressed with the admitted though very much exaggerated genius of Ernie Kovacs and those who participated in it with him.  

Oddly, enough, one of the most interesting confirmations of the racism of using ape and, specifically gorilla images that has been ubiquitious was the Brit-American use of exactly the same images used against Black People against the Irish in the 19th and very early 20th century.  But that ended, though the same bias is certainly present in Brit comedy and attitudes today . I wouldn't expect that most Irish Americans would worry about that kind of bigotry regaining its former ubiquity though note what David Pilgrim, a Black sociologist who started the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia has to say about how his assumptions of the diminution of racism even a few years ago has been proved to be wrong by the racist rise of Trump and the Republican-fascist part. 

I saw several images in his collection that are reflected in the Nairobi Trio skit. 

*  You can hear Edie Adams talk about how not only Lemmon but Milton Berle and Tony Curtis put on the gorilla suits to participate in it all without seeing any problem in impersonating a well-practiced racist stereotype.  I'd like to know if any Black People ever worked for Kovacs and his team, I strongly doubt it.  If any did I'd love to hear them on this topic. 

Too Funny, Too Stupid To Not Announce

REALLY?  Simps got dumped by Duncan over a stupid picture of a puppet?  After all of these years after he was documented to be attacking Duncan's regulars with sock-puppet names - something I caught him doing to me back when Digby still had comments - I wondered if that incident wasn't what made her realize that for a writer as good as she is, maintaining comment threads is a liability.  

Geesh, let no one say that Duncan is much bothered by anything  like consistency or integrity.  To drop Simps over that when he could have dropped him for being a lying, libeling, backstabbing creep with Duncan's complete knowledge and sponsorship all these years is pretty stupid, even for that rapidly aging slacker.   I thank God every morning that I didn't go to a prep school or Ivy, the state universities I went to didn't damage my character the way that those typically do.

"Are you missing Simps?"

No. I am also not missing knowing what lies he's telling about me at Duncan Black's blog.  A complete break, only thing to do when it's necessary.  It's like taking a good shower when you're dirty.  

I have blocked all domains associated with Simps and all of his known sock-puppet names.  He can lie his head off - as he will certainly do - without me being aware of it.   

Simps mocked my late father who was permanently disabled in the fight against the Nazis and their allies.   I can tolerate his lies about me and have used them as a diversion and as an entree into studying the degeneracy of the secular play-left, the degeneration of education and the intellectual value of a college degree and associated depravities but that was the definitive breaking point.  I would repeat what Joseph Welch asked of Joe McCarthy, the coup de gras of his similar but far more prominent public life is confirmed,  he has no decency, no honesty, no character.

That type is a dime a thousand, there are more interesting examples to use as a jumping off point, some who will try to address facts.  Ones who at least read on more than a Trumpian level.  Simps never, ever addresses facts, he just repeats the Hollywood-TV-low to mid-brow scribbling class lies.  That is clearly OK with his type of play-lefty, the kind that Eschaton has provided a typical example of, one of the reasons they're counterproductive to a more decent future.  I've moved on from that. 

OK,  Steve Simels has mocked my father disabled fighting the Nazis.  He's cut off.  Permanently.  

steve simelsJuly 24, 2020 at 1:09 PM
Let me be even blunter

Impossible, you're as blunt as a straight line with no ends.  

Gee, Simps, Didn't You Tell Me "Ill Bet" Was Trumpian Weasel Words?

The Thought CriminalApril 7, 2018 at 6:13 PM

steve simelsApril 7, 2018 at 5:13 PM

"I read such shocked lamentations histrionically made, declaring that it was proof that there is no God, when the etimable Irwin Corey died at the age of 102 last year. I wonder what kind of joke Corey would have gotten out of such a display. "

I'll bet you do. Given that you don't get most jokes generally, and probably never got ANY of Corey's.

Replies

1. 
   The Thought CriminalApril 7, 2018 at 6:13 PM

   Gee, Simps, didn't you tell me "I'll bet" was Trumpian weasel words?
   
   I know the joke of you and the Eschatots going on histrionically over the very aged, you know, dying of old age.
   
   I listened to the video of his funeral which was just full of praying for his soul. It was touching.

Posing In A Time Of Plague

It's pretty funny for Simps to puff out his scrawny little chest and tap it with his fists and wheeze his threats about the terrible hurtin' he lay on me if I set foot in NYC when, years ago,  I told him I had no interest in visiting it again.   For a start, everyone I knew there is dead and I'd have to pay to stay in a hotel.  For getting on with it, other than seeing a few pictures in a few museums there,  meh.   Not to mention I'm not going past the border with New Hampshire until Covid has been suppressed.  

A local politician told me that the state government has been begging the Canadian government to lift the travel ban because the tourism industry here in Maine is suffering enormously, Old Orchard Beach is really suffering,  Canadians, especially from Quebec having been one of their greatest sources of trade.  The Canadians are not eager to have their people coming to the developed country with the worst record of spreading the disease.  I'm not even crossing the border into New Hampshire to go shopping because, though it has been relatively lightly stricken, going anywhere you don't have to is unwise these days. 

As for Simps warning me he won't come back because I pissed him off by pointing out what a whopper of a lie he told in a way that even he had absolutely nothing he could come back with BECAUSE EVERY WORD I SAID WAS NOT ONLY TRUE IT IS FULLY DOCUMENTED IN PUBLIC COURT RECORDS, THE RECORDS OF SENATE HEARINGS,  HISTORY AND EVEN THE "DOCUMENTARIES" THAT ARE THE ONLY SOURCE OF "HISTORY" THAT THE LIKES OF SIMPS EVER HAS LOOKED AT. 

Brain Diseased Brain Trust

No one has pointed out a thing I said that was untrue, no one has pointed out exactly what was supposed to be "antisemetic" about it.  The Eschaton "brain trust" - they really do, unironically call themselves that - check about as many facts as Trump does. 

All I did was point out that contrary to what was claimed, in the Army-McCarthy hearings, SOMETHING THAT SIMPS MADE HIS CLAIMS ABOUT!, not only was the scumbag Senator from Wisconson (That's Joe McCarthy for the Eschatots who wouldn't know that) had hired Roy Cohn to be his chief-counsel and he hired G. David Schine to work for him too.   It's pretty much near entirely impossible to accuse him of antisemitism, especially when, as mentioned, he was a board member of a Jewish McCarthyite group.

As to what I said about the possibility that McCarthy may have been gay along with Cohn and very likely the rich-Harvard boy Schine (they, unusually, shared a private office and expenses - Schine was quite wealthy) and they were widely rumored to be having an affair while working for McCarthy.

As to what I said about the danger of McCarthy coming on to you:

Was McCarthy himself gay?  There were certainly widespread rumors to that effect, despite the hard-drinking bachelor senator’s propensity for pawing women at parties.  Drew Pearson, the syndicated columnist, who despised McCarthy, kept a file on the subject.  In his diary entry of January 14, 1952, Pearson makes mention of a letter that a young Army lieutenant had written to Senator William Benton of Connecticut claiming that McCarthy had engaged in an act of sodomy with him after picking him up in a bar.  But when the FBI interviewed the lieutenant, he denied everything, claiming that his letter had been planted by “another homo who was jealous.”  None of Pearson’s information ever reached print, at a time when newspapers were far less inclined to publish information about private lives of high officials than they are today.

            One newspaper publisher had no such compunction, however.  He was Hank Greenspun, the publisher of the Las Vega Sun.  A former press agent for a Las Vegas gambling house, Greenspun was a passionate McCarthy-hater.  He had his reasons: McCarthy had once referred to Greenspun’s newspaper as “the local Daily Worker” and charged erroneously that Greenspun was an army deserter and ex-convict.  In an October 25, 1952 article in the Sun, Greenspun minced no word.  “Joe McCarthy is a bachelor of 43 years,” he noted.  “He seldom dates girls and if he does he laughingly describes it as window dressing.  It is common talk among homosexuals in Milwaukee who rendezvous at the White Horse Inn that Senator Joe McCarthy often engaged in homosexual activities.  The persons in Nevada who listened to McCarthy’s radio talk thought he had the queerest laugh.  He has.  He is.”  In another article, Greenspun wrote, “The Young Republicans held a state convention in Wausua, Wis., at which Sen. McCarthy was an honored guest.  During the convention, McCarthy spent the night with William McMahon, formerly an official of the Milwaukee County Young Republicans, in a Eausua hotel room, at which time, McCarthy and McMahon engaged in illicit acts with each other.”  It was widely believed that Greenspun’s “information” came from Drew Pearson’s files  McCarthy contemplated suing Greenspun but never did so.

            All the evidence about McCarthy’s alleged sexual proclivities remains circumstantial.  Thomas C. Reeves, author of the most extensive biography of McCarthy, states flatly that the senator wasn’t gay.  But McCarthy was clearly discomfited by the accusations.  In September 1953, at the age of forty-five the Wisconsin senator married Jean Kerr, a member of his staff.  But even marriage didn’t entirely dispel the talk.

Looks like a beard to me. 

As to whether or not he was part of a threesome with Cohn and Schine, I don't know.  Here's more from the chapter of the book where that last passage came from,  "The Age of McCarthy," from Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History form 1869 to the Present.

In 1953, Cohn prevailed over Robert F. Kennedy to become the McCarthy investigatory committee’s chief counsel.  Cohn brought along his friend and night-clubbing companion, G. David Schine, as “Chief Consultant” to the committee.  Within a few months, the two young men were running the show.  Heir to a hotel fortune, the twenty-six-year-old Schine was “a good-looking young man in the sallow, sleekly coiffed, and somnolent-eyed style that one used to associate with male orchestra singers,” writes Richard H. Rovere.  In fact, at one time he had been a press agent for the Vaughn Monroe orchestra and had published two or three ballads of his own, on of which was called “Please Say Yes or It’s Goodbye.”  As an undergraduate at Harvard, Schine was known for living in a high style that featured an exquisitely furnished room, a valet, and a large black convertible equipped with a two-way telephone.  Schine’s anti-Communist credentials rested on a six-page pamphlet called “Definition of Communism,” which along with the Gideon Bible, was placed in every room of the Schine hotel chain.

            Cohn and Schine were “a study in contrasts,” notes David M. Oshinsky in his book A Conspiracy So Immense.  “Cohn was short, dark, intense, and abrasive; Schine was tall, fair, frivolous, and complacent.”  According to some observers, it was Schine who was the dominant influence.  Despite Cohn’s intellectual brilliance, Schine was fond of humiliating Cohn in front of strangers and acting as if Cohn was his inferior.

            In April 1953, Cohn and Schine set off for Europe, ostensibly to investigate U.S.-run libraries to make sure that no left-wing literature was hiding out on their shelves.  The trip was a fiasco that turned up nothing, infuriated virtually every American embassy in Western Europe, and turned the two investigators into laughing-stocks.  (In one incident, Schine supposedly chased Cohn through a hotel lobby, swatting him over the head with a magazine.)  Upon their arrival at a particular hotel, Cohn and Schine would ask for adjoining rooms but insist on separate accommodations, explaining, “You see, we don’t work for the State Department!”  The joke seems to have been primarily for the benefit of a retinue of journalists who recorded their every move; hotel reservations clerks in Rome or Vienna were unlikely to have heard very much about accusations that the U.S. State Department was a haven for homosexuals.

            Nicholas von Hoffman, one of Cohn’s biographers, reports that people who saw Cohen and Schine close up doubted that they were lovers or that Schine was gay.  People who observed them at a distance assumed they were just two playboys.  Cohn, in private conversation with friends, denied any intimate involvement with Schine.  In any event, Cohn was deep in the closet.  He was dating women and spending more time at the Stork Club than in Washington’s gay bars.  For years, he would deny that he was gay, telling journalist Ken Auletta in an interview in the 1970s, “Anyone who knows me and knows anything about the way I function . . . would have an awfully hard time reconciling, ah, ah, reconciling, that with ah, ah, any kind of homosexuality.  Every facet of my personality, of my, ah, aggressiveness, of my toughness, of everything along those lines, is just totally, I suppose, incompatible, with anything like that.”  As Hoffman notes, Cohn’s “embarrassed, thick-tongued denial of his sexuality” took place at a time when even high-school students had come to realize that most gay men were anything but “limp-wristed, lavender lads.”  Cohn’s view of what constituted a gay man remained mired in stereotypical notions of the fifties.  At the time of his well-publicized death from AIDS in 1986, newspapers did not hesitate to write about his homosexuality.

            During Cohn’s eighteen-month period of service to Senator McCarthy, the young counsel apparently had no compunction about using allegations of other people’s homosexuality to destroy them.  Whether this was an effort to hide his own homosexuality through cruelty to others, or an expression of gay self-hatred, or his own defiant pride in his own toughness and aggressiveness, or some combination of all three, is anyone’s guess.  The first case concerned Samuel Reber, the Acting High Commissioner in Germany.  Cohn was convinced that Reber had deliberately trapped him and Schine into a news conference at a stop in Bonn during their European junket, in order to make them look ridiculous.  According to von Hoffman’s sources, the McCarthy people had dug up a story about a homosexual relationship that Reber had supposedly been involved in as an undergraduate at Harvard years before.  They threatened Reber with its revelation.  Reber resigned from the State Department.

            Then there was the case of Senator Lester Hunt, a Wyoming Democrat.  An opponent of McCarthy, Hunt was up for reelection the following November to a Senate that was split down the middle between Democrats and Republicans.  Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, a friend and political ally of Cohn, had a talk with Hunt.  Unless Hunt withdrew from the race for reelection in November, Bridges reportedly told him, everyone in Wyoming would find out that Hunt’s son had been arrested the previous October for soliciting a D.C. plainclothes policeman for “lewd and immoral purposes.”  Hunt withdrew from the race.  Eleven days later, he shot himself to death in his Senate office.

You see, unlike the jackass who inspired this who claimed to be a scholar of the topic,  I have, actually, read a bit on it. 

Yeah, Right

steve simelsJuly 21, 2020 at 4:46 PM

Six words.

Righteous indignation.

Eat shit.

We’re done.

Ah, if only.   Think I'll let Dionne Warwick say it.

Update:  I stopped interacting with that wacked out math teacher when she insisted on airing her family linen right down to the smallest of the smalls on Eschaton.  Nothing she thinks about me could possibly be of the slightest interest to me.  I mean.  She has yet to correct Simps' idiotic errors in the most elementary topics of algebra which she certainly knows he's wrong about.  Stupid bint. 

A List Of The "Non-Facts" That Simps Says He Won't Read*

steve simelsJuly 21, 2020 at 2:34 PM

"STILL NOT A SINGLE REFUTATION OF A SINGLE THING I SAID"

Not a single thing you said was accurate or sane.

You don't refute monstrous anti-Semtitic nonsense.

Go fuck yourself, you lying sack of shit

This is too ridiculous to not post as a separate post.

"Not a single thing you said was accurate or sane."

FACT:  Roy Cohn was Senator Joe McCarthy's chief counsel during the Army–McCarthy hearings in 1954.

FACT: Roy Cohn was, before then hired by Irving Saypol to work under him in the Southern District of New York where he became infamous as a commie hunter, most known for the prosecution of the Rosenbergs getting them executed for espionage.  Saypol recommended him to Senator McCarthy.

FACT:  G David Schine was named as an unpaid assistant by Joe McCarthy working with and under Roy Cohn.

FACT:  When McCarthy and Cohn, during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 started to go after a jr member of  Joseph Welch's law firm for alleged communist links, Welch made a comment about "pixies" which was clearly intended as a warning that he would out Cohn and Schine, possibly McCarthy, if they didn't drop it and it was known by most of those in the hearing room he was alluding to the widely known sex affair between Cohn and Schine

FACT I DIDN'T MENTION:  Roy Cohn, while he was working under Saypol, Cohn was a board member of the American Jewish League Against Communism.

FACT:  Irving Saypol was the one who prosecuted Mariam Moskowitz when the dumb dolly lied on behalf of her adulterous boyfriend to shield him from being exposed as involved in Stalinist espionage, she did it because she was ashamed of admitting she was having an affair with a married man.  Then she tried to be exonerated even though she was guilty by her own admission for a crime that Mike Flynn also committed, lying to the FBI.

Simps' original idiocy presented the McCarthy red-hunt as something targeting Jews when so many of those on his side in it INCLUDING HIS OWN HAND-CHOSEN STAFF WERE JEWS PROSECUTING AND PERSECUTING ANY JEWS WHO WERE THEIR TARGET.  I could mention other mythologized heroes of the play-left, including Robert Kennedy who also was neck deep in it.  Simps just lurves him some Bobby.  I once had to point out to him when he claimed the prosecution of his hero, cheap porn peddler Ralph Ginzburg was prosecuted because he was Jewish that his hero, Bobby Kennedy was the Attorney General who signed off on the prosecution of the smut king.  I wish I could say that Simps had one of the more profound resistances to an urge to fact check historical assertions and beliefs, but, alas, he's just typical of the way too common type. 

Typically, it being Simps, he couldn't give a thimble of spit for anyone else who was their target.  I only have sympathy for the ones who were not guilty of crimes to any extent and to a far lesser extent non-criminal communists.  Communists in the aftermath of the exposure of the crimes against humanity of the Soviets and the countries they occupied in the wake of WWII, after the exposure of the Stalin show-trials, the planned starvation-genocide of Ukrainians, the slaughters in Poland, etc. etc. etc. Not to mention the new Chinese Communist state, are the moral equivalent of Nazis.  They're all of them the same kind of thing the American and Western right wing are, gangsters.   Marxism is the most pretentious kind of promotion of gangsterism in modern history, if you don't want to mention Darwinism, the inspiration of the Nazis and many putrid varieties of fascists. 

What I did is violate the mythology of a segment of post-war pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-academic, scribbling class lore which was a total and complete load of lies.  Simps being a college-credentialed, play-lefty movie and TV formed simp believes it as a learned mythology.   In order to believe it, you have to deny the above and many other hard facts. 

*  He's lying about that too, of course. 

I guess Stupy forgot about Senator Joe McCarthy's right-hand man Roy Cohn and Cohn's fuck-buddy, an "unpaid consultant" on McCarthy's staff massive asshole rich-Harvard boy, G. David Schine.   About the only thing someone was in danger of from Joe McCarthy while being Jewish might be getting asked for a date. 

Well, He Thinks William Borroughs and Henry Miller Were Geniuses So What Did You Expect?

Had a few minutes so I decided to document the guy Simps so ignorantly nominated as the ultimate kew-el white guy, Chet Baker.  This article is hardly encyclopedic in listing the drug induced train wreck that Baker was but it's accurate and enough to be going on with. 

Much of Baker’s life after 1958 is spent chasing the next high and doing almost anything to get it, from selling his trumpet to stealing drugs, money and prescriptions to using his many girlfriends and wives to run drugs for him, often at great risk to their own safety. Gavin renders the contours of Baker’s descent in prose as stark and austere as one of Baker’s own songs. Here’s Gavin’s description of the night when Baker forced his girlfriend Sandy Jones to shoot up with high grade heroin and left her alone in a comatose state:

Starting with his mother, Baker’s feelings about women had always been violently ambivalent: he needed them, yet he hated them for it. Jones became his latest victim. Years later she recounted the time “Chet tried to kill me.” In fact, it happened twice, although she never understood why. One day he came to the apartment with “a whole out fit of the darkest stuff in the world.” He shoved her into the bathroom, cooked up the dope, tied her arm, and plunged in a needle. “I got weak in the knees,” she said. “A couple of days later I came to.” She learned that Baker had walked out, leaving her on the floor – “blue, blue, blue.”

Chet Baker is a repellent figure, too coarse and pathological to be considered tragic. He was the ultimate nihilist. As a doper, he makes Keith Richards look like a novice. He seems to have had little curiosity about his condition, and even less empathy for the dozens of other lives he helped to wreck, including those of his children. When his son Dean was hit by a truck and seriously injured, Baker didn’t even call to check on his condition. Still Gavin’s account is strangely sympathetic. Baker lived moment to moment, fix to fix, gig to gig.  And yet he was able, even in a heroin haze, to play some of the most unforgettable melodies in jazz, tunes that continue to haunt the mind long after his death.

And if that wasn't enough, there's more:

Though one of Baker’s lovers exalted his talent for cunnilingus (he was a trumpet player, after all), Baker’s sexual technique drifted far from traditional notions of romantic love. He had no interest in foreplay, didn’t like to kiss and basically wanted to have missionary position sex as quickly and harshly as possible.  The sensual experience of being next to Baker also lacked a certain erotic appeal.  Hygiene didn’t come high on Baker’s list of priorities. He didn’t like to bathe, wash his hair or brush his teeth—when he had teeth. He rarely changed his clothes or washed them. By the mid-1960s, he walked around in sandals, because his feet were swollen from repeated injections, his untrimmed toenails curling like a Chinese empress. Nearly all of Baker’s long-time lovers became heroin addicts, after they encountered Chet.


Baker was a beater. He would berate and slap and punch his wives and girlfriends, often in public. His wife Carol was repeatedly seen sporting a pair of black eyes. He tried to strangle his longtime girlfriend Ruth Young with a telephone cord and later broke into her apartment, looted the place and sold her grand piano to pay for drugs.

Yeah, a real dream beau, the picture of kew-el.  

I doubt Stupy knows any of this, he like most middle-brow non-jazz listeners knows "My Funny Valentine" and the young Chet's biggest hits most of all the hit with non-jazz fans, "Chet Sings" from the early years of his recording career which is a better demonstration of the consequences of Housman's athlete not dying young but lingering on into a degenerate early adulthood and middle age.  Baker didn't die too soon at the age of 58, he died way too late. I say that noting how many of his many girlfriends and wives he beat up, cheated, robbed, got addicted to drugs, etc.  The world would have been better off if he'd done what he finally did before he took so many down with him.  Oh, yeah, and his crooning on that, probably his most famous disc, read about that at the end of the article.  

Also read the accurate description of Baker's crappy musicianship.  I would suspect that his drug use was partly if not muchly due to his insecurity because he knew he was a very limited musician.  Some musicians had said the same thing contributed to the alcoholic downfall of that far better candidate for coolness in a white Jazz man, Bix Beiderbeck.  I once wished I could have gone back and taught the poor guy how to read music and to have encouraged him to stop drinking, though that second one is a hell of a lot harder.  Beiderbeck was a true genius, Baker wasn't. As you can read in the rest of the article.

I do think you should note what drugs did to a true musical wonder, Charlie Parker and how even his advocacy for the young Chet Baker was a symptom of the tragic degeneration of that genius as drugs took him down.  It didn't make much of an impression on Baker.   He was many things, cool wasn't one of them. 

Simps is always telling me he's the only person who reads this stuff, maybe he's right.  Why would I bother to edit for him?   All of what I write here comes pretty much in the form of automatic typing, except when I have to look up something for accuracy sake.  He's not worth careful editing.  If I keep the Simp busy looking for typos and misspellings he's not busily lying about something of marginal importance.  Though, now that I think of it, his time spent here isn't time spent annoying the regular buffalo butts at Duncan's.  Maybe I'm too kind to them.

Tell Do Do

It would be nice if I could find the take-down of William Safire's and Edwin Newman's language meter-maid bullshit that Jim Sleeper wrote sometime in the 80s or 90s,  exposing the fraud of pseudo-grammarians and stylists that arose in that fecund pile of horseshit that generates such bullshit to impress the mid-brow and slightly higher and lower who are too lazy to actually learn about grammar and writing, the NYC area media.  

But the paper copy of The Nation that appeared in is long gone into the recycling stream and they don't appear to care to share their long archive with the non-paying public.  Unlike the "paper of record" (they really do call it that) the Nation probably really can't afford it.   

As I recall he quoted Safire and one of his old-fogy media figure admirers whooping it up over someone using the word "moot" as a verb.  Sleeper looked it up in the Oxford Dictionary and found, if memory serves, it was first used as a verb in English well back into the medieval period, proving only one thing, you can write shit in the august Great Gray Drab, the NY Times without the minimal amount of fact checking.  As I recall, and my recall is usually rather accurate, Sleeper noted that Safire of the New York Times may have gained the record by declaring "to moot" a distasteful neologism, when it may have been the oldest word to be declared one in the history of such popular  amateur pedantic language scolding. 

It would also be nice if I could track down where the idiotic practice of declaring that any common locution you choose on any occasion is "a tell," the indefinite term then being used to mean whatever the stylish liar chooses it to mean.  I've had "I believe," "I suspect,"  "I would guess,"  and many other common locutions declared to expose a number of uncomplimentary things about me by an avid follower of the Safire style of pseudo-authority as read in that shit-rag he wrote for and other such venues of New Yorkian pseudo-lazy-assed erudition.  Perhaps (one of the words declared to be such a "tell") I may get around to looking it up and seeing if I can figure out the source of that load of horseshit.  It is a sure bet that it came from one of those phonies inspired by the like of Strunk-White, probably the origin of most of the current crop of such frauds.  I don't think that Strunk-White being a book of few pages and words being today's such oracle of mid-brow authority is unrelated to it being an easy read and an even easier skim.  Ours is not an age of careful scholarship on that level of popularity, though out best scholars are, actually, probably some of the best and most careful in history. 

If it were not too hot to bother and too thankless a task,  I'd go search the archive of Power-Pop the blog the idiot maintains or that of his host Duncan Black to find out what such terms declared to be "tells" that they have used.   I'm sure they've used some of them.   While it might be hard to figure out what kind of deception they might occur in - it's a safe bet that much of what Simps says is dishonest, as that is pretty much his only consistent stylistic inclination. If Duncan has used them it's probably out of his typical laziness.  Duncan isn't dishonest, he's lazy.  Simps is.

*  I don't remember but I think Sleeper also wrote the hilarious review of Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings.  I recall after posting a long passage in which what I assume was supposed to be the female lead waxes hysterical in a sort of combination Henry Miller-Anias Nin way about anal sex for a whole paragraph the reviewer said, "Molly Bloom she ain't."  It was one of the few times I laughed out loud for a sustained period while reading a book review.  

I suppose it would have been clearer if I'd typed it out "New York Cidiot" which means someone exhibiting  the common mental debility so prominent in those living in the more affluent and controlling population of New York City who mistakenly believe themselves to be the height of cosmpoloitan sophistication when they are among the most narrowly ignorant, not only of life in the wider world but even that which lives a few streets away from them within the city.  Alas, Simps is only typical of the type.   I suppose it could be used for other such people who are so daddled with the reputation of the large city they live in, probably about one per country is the limit for that,  I doubt those who live in LA or Chicago who occupy the same niche are unaware of life outside of their city to the same extent. 

Maybe I Should Keep It Up As An Undeserved Kindness To The Coot

Simps will never admit it but he taunts me because my response is the only kind of intellectual stimulation he has ever had.  He's used to talking to his fellow maintainers of the common-received-"wisdom" and their counterpart in the alleged other-side of the discourse of the unintelligentsia, the unlightenment.   He's never had the experience of talking with someone who is part of none of that who makes sure that before he says something on an important subject, that he knows what he's talking about.  It would be like someone who never had gado-gado before tasting it for the first time.  Only I suspect if it hadn't been written up in the Times supplement he'd figure it wasn't kollege-kredentialed- kew-el to approve of tasting it.  

Me, I think a good part of the fucking mess we are in as a country flows right out of the New York Times feuilleton sections and their like in other venues of lower-mid-brow kulcha.  The tempot in a tin-pot over Bari Weiss isn't even mildly interesting outside of that.  That piece of shit has no moral center, she is exactly the kind of shit that floats to the top in it. The greater world doesn't give a shit about it.  Simps doesn't even rate that. 

Stupy gets so little chance to use his vestiges of mental capacity that this might be the last thing that keeps him from degenerating into full-blown dementia.   He's not that far from it.  As I said,  I was not feeling well so I figured I should have a bit of fun with his continued taunting.  None of it much troubles me.  I mean, at first when he lied about me being an antisemite it was a bit of a concern because I know his fellow mid-brows would believe that kind of thing without ever checking to see if it were true - Duncan couldn't care less that he promotes slanders and libels and lies - but then I realized they are a pretty pathetic rump of what that place used to be so it wasn't worth being concerned with that.  The only thing important about that is its dishonest use damages the force of the accusation of antisemtism just when that is most needed.  

He couldn't tell the difference between an axiom and his asshole. 

Update: Oh, Simps isn't so much of a geezer as he is a coot. 

I posted WE INSIST!  to make two points,  A.  comedy is not as substantial as other kinds of content and so you should expect it to wear faster, B. even something as great as Max Roach's work, unless it is subjected to the art of jazz in its continued life can get old.  If Reiner and Brooks hadn't changed The Two Thousand Year Old Man from the flash-frozen version of it that became a komedy-klassic, it would have been killed by fixing it on disc.  The disc that my not owning or being able to quote like your girlfriend's obnoxious asshole little brother can do an entire George Carlin disc (I'm talking about a real person) was used to mean I knew nothing about comedy.   I guess you'd have to be like that little asshole in order to believe that.

And to those you can add C. an intelligent listener will limit the number of times they listen to a great recording so it doesn't turn into mental wall paper for them.

Oh, yeah, the biggest reason for posting WE INSIST! is because it's great art with substance to it and not everyone has heard it. 

Straight Guys With Daddy Issues In Denial

I've updated this because idiots who skim instead of read usually don't see what they choose not to see. 

WHO USES DADDY ISSUES?
Daddy issues is primarily used of women in colloquial speech and writing, both online and off, and mainly in the context of romance, dating, and sex.

Its connotation varies by context. When used by women of themselves, daddy issues can be earnest, used by women to explain recurrent behaviors in relationships, or humorous, used in lighthearted self-deprecation of those issues. When used by men of women, it can be dismissive or even misogynistic, diminishing undesirable traits in women. Dating advice websites for men, for example, may advise a man not to date a girl with daddy issues. In LGBTQ communities, daddy issues can be used in the context of a man in a relationship with an older man. . . 

Given the negative connotation of daddy issues, psychologists generally label relationship challenges with fathers as a father complex, among other terms.

Dictionary.com

I'm not so polite.   Daddy issues denied are daddy issues relayed.  Anyone who is older than Duncan who calls him "Dad" or treats him as some kind of in loco parentis has got daddy issues and they are definitely loco.  

What If They Gave A Fight And No One Noticed?

Couldn't get through that link of Simps and  Freki going at it over the meaning of "rock 'n roll" .   Whenever I read Simps on music the drifting attention span makes me wonder if that's what his version of dementia is like.  Then I realize he's always been like that. 

It may have amused me five years back or so to see Simps fighting with the Babes of Baby Blue but that was five years ago. Obama was president, things weren't going to hell quite as obviously.

Update:  I looked around a bit at the wreckage that used to be the up-and-coming blog.  I still see the regulars and, I'd imagine, Duncan PhD econ. Brown (a minor Ivy) still don't get the American system of government.  The "Democratic establishment" can't do a goddamned thing with the Senate in Republican-fascist hands and the Supreme Court as well.  To blame them for inaction means someone didn't know as much as a moron who watched those Saturday Morning info-spots about how a bill becomes law in the United States back in the 70s.  I heard one once, it was right if probably not that effective.  Still, the college-credentialed geezers and slackers of the "Brain Trust" (they really do call it that,  I'm not making it up) don't get it.  Not even their PhD'd bizarrely younger father-figure.   I don't even want to speculate about their daddy issues that lead them to look on a younger codger that way. 

Yeah, I know, it's The Sorrow And The Pity all over again.

Simps is posing and eating up the scenery because in a hastily thrown off comment made in the heat of the day,  I mixed up Ernie Kovacs death with, no doubt, some other show biz guy who died about the same time of a heart attack from eating your typical affluent American male diet of the early post-war years and smoking the cigars that Kovacs' wife peddled.  I wonder which show biz figure I'm mixing up his untimely death with.  But not very hard. 

If I did that whenever Simps gets a detail wrong I'd have torn out all my hair in melodramatic acting style.  Hey, maybe that's why Simps wears that stupid looking Groucho beret!  Anything for attention,  hey, Simps?  

Ernie Kovacs was an innovative comic actor and rather brilliant at coming up with sight gags based on TV and movie technology in the early years of TV.  But if he just kept repeating the same old stuff over and over again - Simps got upset when I pointed out that once the novelty wears off something that is funny the first time it ceases to be funny - he'd have become the kind of hack that so many successful comedians have become.   His death at the age of 42 may have ended what would have continued to be brilliant or it could have saved him from the typical later career of a comedian, going out of fashion due to a lack of innovation.  Being funny is hard work, so that leaves Simps out, right there.

I would never accuse Simps of stealing his material from the best.  He steals it from the ones who stole it from the best after the best were done with it.  He knows it once worked and is respectfully mounted in the imaginary museum of jokes which means it's a dead specimen of what once was alive, mounted for display and  to be treated with that thing most deadly to comedy, veneration.  

Edie Adams had a hand in that with her late husband's material, the gal knew how to buy it up and market it, she's probably most responsible for why those who never were alive to see Ernie Kovacs on live TV even heard of him.   But as they wear out his stuff, it's not funny anymore. Kovacs would have known that, or he'd have stopped being funny. 

Update:  This reminds me of a story the director Jonathan Miller once told of a production of The Merchant of Venice in which they got the just brilliant idea of hiring two actors from the Yiddish theater to play Shylock and Tubal.  The story goes that those two actors whose theater practiced a high degree of improvisation were driven nuts by having to give only the same set lines over and over on stage and one night in the infamous conspiracy scene where Shylock tells his friend his plans for revenge Tubal started out in accented dialect, "So, Shylock, I hear your daughter ran off and married a gentile.  What?  She couldn't find some nice Yiddischer boy to marry?" and they went on with an improvised comedy schtick for 20 minutes that had the audience howling with laughter.  According to Miller, they were told in notes not to do it again.  

Apparently Simps lost out on that tradition that understands that. Happens when you value status above art, as is so typical of the mid-brow New Yorker, the kind of person who the great comic actor Margaret Dumont parodied with such brilliant comic timing.  But, then, even Groucho apparently didn't appreciate her work as she set him up so well.  I thought she was great. 

Update 2:  Oh, and in case anyone is worried about it,  Unlike some, I've got a full head of very thick, very wavy silver gray hair.  I've never had to cover a bald spot up with a hat and would never wear a stupid looking beret. 

Canned Scrambled Eggs An Even Stupider Idea Than Canned Water

Attention getting is mostly what Eschaton blog is, after its very brief glory days that ended c. 2005.   I realized that when I started noticing how often the geezers vied for attention by bragging about what they ate for lunch or dinner AS IF ANYONE IN THE WORLD CARED.  Someone reminds me today that they're still doing it, some numbnutz going on about how great his Reuben with Russian dressing is.  Hope he still thinks so when the angel of the coronary comes a callin'. 

Simps does the same thing with what movie and theater audiences he sat in, what movies he's watched on TV, what album he bought.  As if sitting in a friggin' audience was a major artistic accomplishment.   

See Below:  Simps trying to call me out because he figured I never owned a friggin' COMEDY ALBUM!  The most lame of lame media for the dissemination and rapid wearing out of a comedy gag, a disc of it.   As I've said elsewhere, that's the equivalent of putting scrambled eggs in a can AND MR MEDIA, HIMSELF THINKS ITS SOME KIND OF A FRIGGIN' STATUS SYMBOL TO HAVE ONE!  

Ennio Morricone.  Nah, not interested in movie composers, the only kind that Simps thinks are worth anything.  I don't think I've ever heard any stand-alone concert music by him and the movies almost inevitably and invariably suck.   The funny thing is, Simps' audience at Eschtaton never heard his name till Simps put on his mourning drag and went through his attention-getting act he does whenever a 91-year-old minor celebrity with a Hollywood tie in trips and unsurprisingly dies.  It had nothing to do with that movie hackoser, it had to do with Simps getting attention. 

Simps and Trump are alike re truth telling, 
As well in their ranting and yelling,
They both come from Queens,
And they both act like tweens 
And oddly alike re repelling. 

Simps, Eschatots, You Don't Have Even Enough Substance To Retain Interest As An Antiquity

I'm ready to get past your same-old, same-old.  I already knew that the past-it geezers who constitute the rump of the old Eschaton blog community, which reached pretty much its high point around 2005, are a bunch of bored, jaded, lazy buffalo butts.  I don't need to keep dealing with that.  

You've long since gotten old.   Duncan can't even retain an interest in producing material there.  He's as repetitious as you are.  A middle-aged geezer, himself. 

Simps, this is a lot less diverting than I thought it would be.  I might discontinue it again unless you come up with something new.  I'll give you by Wednesday to do it or I'm moving on.  

The few who are a bit more than that have already reached the occasional drop-in stage at Eschaton.  They'll drop it more and more as they move on, too.  Then it will just be you and Grandmere and those BBs who consider you a pest.  

Look, Simps, A Joke To Steal

Simps, Eschatots, assorted "friends" of Simps," I'm taking the long 4th weekend off starting today.  

Why are you here?  Shouldn't you be practicing your Kegels?  Better get to those.  If geezers don't use it, you lose it.  

"He's Made Enough Fun" - I'm Told That I Couldn't Possibly Have Understood Carl Reiner You Know Who Said It

This is why he was Carl Reiner and no one else is. 

LG: What would the 2,000-Year-Old Man have to say now?

CR: We say it. He says it. We look at all the idiots in Congress. They can’t get things done. And the Republicans are just dumber than ever. Or they’re not dumb, they’re smart for themselves.They’re rich people who want to get richer. That’s the thing that drives me absolutely crazy. The rich people think they need more money. They don’t.They won’t pay their proper share. There’s no arguing that. But that doesn’t even come up because they won’t discuss it. It’s maddening. The rich people are getting richer and richer. They don’t do anything with it and they keep saying if you tax this money, they’ll destroy jobs.They never made jobs; they kept their money. It’s just terrible.

LG: How does the 2,000-Year-Old Man make that funny?

RC: He doesn’t. The 2,000-Year-Old Man is on vacation. He’s made enough fun.

Simps combines a very, very low form of an already low-grade pop-historical knowledge of the Nazis and the Shoah with his fully typical and entirely parochial bigotry to bear on questions of why the Nazis murdered almost certainly more than six-million Jews for being Jews.  I have come to believe the "six million" figure is too low as well as others often repeated.  

The Nazis didn't think the Jews were not "white" that wasn't how they classified people on a Darwinian scale of fitness.  They certainly didn't classify the Slavic people who they fully intended to exterminate - except for a fixed number to be kept as slaves - as "non-white" they classified them as "non-Aryan."  That was the criterion they used to draw up their list of people to be murdered from the face of the Earth, a scale of fitness which Stupy's cartoon heroic, imaginary Darwin fully believed in, himself, if in a decidedly English instead of German flavor of that poison.  He fully endorsed the first German exposition of that in Darwinian terms by the proto-Nazi Ernst Haeckel in his The History of Creation.  He had a different list of who was to go from the ones the Nazis wrote up but he had one. I have no doubt that in the fullness of time, had they prevailed, they would have been constantly looking for new lists of people to murder.  Certainly in Europe where the obviously white population would have been killed for not being linked to "Aryans".   I suspect the Celts would have been one such group in later murders,  Darwin would have certainly included the Irish in such a list of the biologically degraded, though, oddly, he didn't include the Celts in Scotland.  Britain had already proved they were more than ready to kill off millions in Ireland before Hitler was born. 

I've dealt with this exhaustively in posts Simels has combed to look for stuff he can make hay with, though he's clearly learned nothing from it.  I would guess he's never looked up the voluminous documentation I provided, with links and long passages of quotes.  The non-Jewish list of those to be exterminated - Hitler explicitly told the German officers who invaded Poland to murder every Pole, men, women and child - don't matter to him.  Neither does a more complex history told in German and biological terms, not in terms of American pop-historical ones.  But if you want to understand why the Nazis did what they did, that's what you've got to deal with, them and the science that was informing them. 

I Will Revise: Florence Foster Jenkins Is The Patron Saint Of Simp's Kind Of Bullshit Garage Band Delusion

If any of Duncan Black's Eschatots are reading this I hope they remember this the next time Stupy is bragging about how well his digitally enhanced, vanity-recorded garage band tapes are doing on the bullshit popularity listings on the obscure websites that narrow-cast them to an audience who aren't listening as they play online.  

Weinstock's recollection of Madame Jenkins's visits to the Melotone studio made their way into the liner notes of the long-playing compilation on 33 rpm released swiftly after Florence's death.  "Rehearsals, the niceties of volume and pitch, considerations of acoustics - all were thrust aside by her with ease and authority.  The technicians never ceased to be amazed by her capacity for circumventing the numerous problems and difficulties peculiar to recording.  She simply sang; the disc was recorded."  She also told a story which illustrated the artiste's unshakable self-belief.  It featured cameos for two of the great sopranos from the olden age of opera - Frieda Hempel, the diva of Leipzig who was a favorite of the Kaiser, and Luisa Tetrazzini, the Florentine prima donna renowned as 'the queen of staccato'.  Lady Florence reported to the studio that, at a recent soiree of one of her friends, all of them music lovers, [they] listened attentively to recordings of the Magic Flute aria by Tetrazzini, Hempel and the redoubtable Jenkins.  Unanimity of opinion, Mme Jenkins informed us with modest hesitancy, was that the latter recording was without a doubt the most outstanding of the three.'

[Her accompanist, Cosmo] McMoon told a similar story of Florence putting records on the Victrola when she hosted in the Seymour Hotel. Her guests were asked to compare her with the great coloratura soprano Amelita Galli-Curci who was a hugely popular recording artist.  "She would put on The Bell Song" by herself and Galli-Curci, and then she would hand little ballots out and you were supposed to vote which one was the best.  Of course they all voted for her, and one woman once voted for Galli-Curci so Madame said, "How could you mistake that?  My tones are so much fuller than that!"  So she really didn't hear the atrocious pitches in these things.  She used to sit delightedly and listen for hours to her recordings."

Florence Foster Jenkins 
by Nicholas Martin and Jasper Rees  

I can well imagine one of her parties being a bit more entertaining than a few hours at Eschaton, with a lot less vanity being displayed at La Jenkins' Salon.   I doubt she ever asked people to buy stuff at Amazon for her.