Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

October 25, 1924: 100 years later of elections here & abroad, history appears to rhyme it's ugly head quite often. The Zinoviev Letter was published in the Daily Mail four days before the 1924 United Kingdom general election which humiliated the first ever British Labour government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, when its political opponents used it to create a "Red Scare" in the media. Labour blamed the Letter for its defeat, insisting there had been a right-wing establishment conspiracy, and many in the Labour Party have never forgotten it.

In the letter, Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Soviet Communist International (Comintern), urged his British comrades to infiltrate and to gain power over the Labour Party.


The letter was widely taken to be authentic upon publication and for some time afterwards, but many historians now agree it was a forgery. British historian A. J. P. Taylor argued that the letter's most important impact was on the mindset of Labourites, who for years afterwards blamed foul play for their defeat, thereby misunderstanding the political forces at work and postponing what Taylor regarded as necessary reforms in the Labour Party.

The letter predicted that the Labour government's attempted normalisation of Britain's diplomatic and economic relations with the Soviet Union would not only profit the latter but also stir the British proletariat to revolutionary action and allow Soviet influence throughout the British Empire to widen. One particularly damaging section of this letter read:

    A settlement of relations between the two countries will assist in the revolutionising of the international and British proletariat not less than a successful rising in any of the working districts of England, as the establishment of close contact between the British and Russian proletariat, the exchange of delegations and workers, etc., will make it possible for us to extend and develop the propaganda of ideas of Leninism in England and the Colonies.

In 2017, the British government claimed that it had "lost" a file on the Zinoviev letter scandal. The government added that they were unable to determine whether copies of the original material had been made.

In 2018, former Chief Historian of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Gillian Bennett published her book The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies.


October 25, 1941: Helen Reddy was born in Melbourne, Australia. During her heyday, in the 1970s, she had 15 singles in the Top 40 of the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, and 3 #1 hits: I am Woman (1972) her signature tune, Delta Dawn, and Angie Baby.





October 25, 1978: Queen Elizabeth II opened the Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool. The Foundation Stone had been laid by King Edward VII in July 1904, at a grand open-air service. The building was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who also designed the iconic red telephone box.


It is the largest cathedral and religious building in Britain, and the eighth largest church in the world. It is the longest cathedral in the world with a total external length of  including the Lady Chapel (dedicated to the Blessed Virgin), is 619 ft (189 m), its internal length is 494 ft (150 m).


October 25, 1983: An invasion happened...




More than half of the world population lives within the Valeriepieris circle.



In 2015, Singaporean professor Danny Quah—with the aid of an intern named Ken Teoh—verified Myers's original claim, as well as presenting a new, considerably smaller circle centered on the township of Mong Khet in Myanmar, with a radius of 3,300 kilometers (2,050 mi). In fact, Quah claimed this circle to be the smallest one possible, having been produced from more rigorous calculations and updated data, as well as being a proper circle on the Earth's surface.

Noteworthy – not by design but as outcome – is that Japan is mostly excluded from my circle; it is entirely included in Ken’s.

Image text scrapped from Quah's 2015 lecture, entitled “Using Mathematics: Making Big Economics Visible to the Human Eye” from PDF slides (Archived copy)


I guess the WaPo slunk finally went dark...


Democracy Dies in Darkness

WaPo owner Jeff Bezos picked his new publisher/CEO Will Lewis in part because of his pedigree in dealing with conservative power centers:

- Lewis was editor of  conservative Telegraph in UK
- He was publisher of Murdoch's WSJ
- He was a consultant to Conservative PM Boris Johnson

Here's Publisher/CEO Will Lewis's explanation to readers:

The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.

As our Editorial Board wrote in 1960:

“The Washington Post has not ‘endorsed’ either candidate in the presidential campaign. That is in our tradition and accords with our action in five of the last six elections. The unusual circumstances of the 1952 election led us to make an exception when we endorsed General Eisenhower prior to the nominating conventions and reiterated our endorsement during the campaign. In the light of hindsight we retain the view that the arguments for his nomination and election were compelling. But hindsight also has convinced us that it might have been wiser for an independent newspaper in the Nation's Capital to have avoided formal endorsement.”

The Editorial Board made two other points — ahead of an election that John F. Kennedy won — that will resonate with readers today:

“The election of 1960 is certainly as important as any held in this century. This newspaper is in no sense noncommittal about the challenges that face the country. As our readers will be aware, we have attempted to make clear in editorials our conviction that most of the time one of the two candidates has shown a deeper understanding of the issues and a larger capacity for leadership.”

However, it concluded:

“We nevertheless adhere to our tradition of non-endorsement in this presidential election. We have said and will continue to say, as reasonably and candidly as we know how, what we believe about the emerging issues of the campaign. We have sought to arrive at our opinions as fairly as possible, with the guidance of our own principles of independence but free of commitment to any party or candidate.”

And again in 1972, the Editorial Board posed, and then answered this critical question ahead of an election which President Richard M. Nixon won: “In talking about the choice of a President of the United States, what is a newspaper’s proper role? … Our own answer is that we are, as our masthead proclaims, an independent newspaper, and that with one exception (our support of President Eisenhower in 1952), it has not been our tradition to bestow formal endorsement upon presidential candidates. We can think of no reason to depart from that tradition this year.”

That was strong reasoning, but in 1976 for understandable reasons at the time, we changed this long-standing policy and endorsed Jimmy Carter as president. But we had it right before that, and this is what we are going back to.

We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable. We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects. We also see it as a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions — whom to vote for as the next president.

Our job at The Washington Post is to provide through the newsroom nonpartisan news for all Americans, and thought-provoking, reported views from our opinion team to help our readers make up their own minds.

Most of all, our job as the newspaper of the capital city of the most important country in the world is to be independent.

And that is what we are and will be.

The Washington Post

Let the chorus of screeching begin.



The Op-ed has a firestorm of over 23,000 comments. A great many scorned Lefties saying they have cancelled their subscription. LOL. Legacy media has been on their deathbed for quite awhile. It will be funny if their slogan, "Democracy Dies in Darkness" finally comes true. Perhaps reality has caught up with WaPo and they don't want to go down with the sinking ship named USS Kamala. The LA Times paper is also bowing out. Will the NY Times be next. Then again this election could be a repeat of 2020. Although, it does 'feel' like this may be a signal that the old pendulum is about to swing the other way but that opinion contains a lot of speculative noise between the legacy talking heads, bullhorns & social media hypernormalisation.



Amazingly, one half of the uni-party blatantly installed a nominee who has never received a single vote in any national selection process. Where I came from, we will call that pleurisy, not "DEmockRuhSea".

On the other half of the side, they have this billionaire, whose favorite song is "Ding Fries Are Done" who lives in an ivory tower and flies around in a private jet telling some of everyone he’s a man of the Peepul, while dodging bullets and lawfare from the other half of the side, and being blamed for everything the DEmockRATS are doing.

Voice of Yoda: "Confused are you not? You will be. You will be."

So, the DEmockRATS, who spend a whole lot of some of their time telling almost everyone who won’t listen how much they hate "conspiracy theories" are spreading this conspiralcy theory about Kamala (she’s on record pronunciating it KAmala, kaMAla and kamaLA, so takes your choice) Harris futzing up the count and certification of the Electoral Votes in January. Guess they forgot that they spent an inordinate amount of some of their time stripping the Vice President of any power to do that after the last horse race.


Even more fun, the DEmockRATS have spent most of the nearly past four years telling most everyone that the US selections are the safest, most inclusive, most trustworthy, most secure, most airtight, most sustainable, most hermetically sealed, most infallible, most equitable, most Divinely Inspired in the known Universe, and anyone who disagrees gets thrown in jail. Guess they won’t be able to disagree with the forthcoming results, right?

Right?

Anyhue, I don’t have much excitement about the voting part. American selections have always been a pup-n-pony show. Nosirree, what I'm waiting for is the aftermath. THAT, my friends, is going to be the show of the century! If you think the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the sackcloth and ashes, the pink-is-the-new-purple outrage after the 2016 selection was fun, this here roller coaster is higher, steeper and faster, and there’s no harness belt nor safety lap bar!

Do you think the DEmockRATS are just going to hang their heads, realizing that they are just a bunch of lyin’, cheatin’ ne’er-do-wells who painted themselves into a corner, and just slink away into oblivion, leaving dirty footprints in all that fresh floor paint? Har, I say! Har har! And another "har" just to make it evenly divisible by 2.

Will anything change or just more Möbius loop?

Who knows? I will enjoy watching Elon Musk try to streamline the bureaucracy, and RFK Jr. try to tame the FDA, EPA, CDC and NIH.

Assuming a Trump win, my concern is that the sociopath technocrats will sneak in under the Administration and take full control. As we all know, Trump is surrounded by techno-nerd vipers, parasites, and charlatans.

Today’s docuflick for make the US political system great again is The War Room (1993). This well-produced documentary follows the antics of James Carville and George Snuffaluffagus Stephanopoulos as they manipulate public opinion in the their successful effort to make Bill Clinton seem like a viable presidential aspirant.


Vote for Jack...


Jack the Chacma baboon


Oof, a little over the top. Better have a shot or two or three.




Choice words for the Week-end...