DocZOnline

THE-LIGHT-AT-THE-END-OF-THE-TUNNEL PROGRESS REPORT
My apartment is nearing full DocZ-ready habitation. Two more bookcases are due from IKEA today, and my trusty faz-tudo (factotum/handyperson) will be here tomorrow morning to assemble them. They will house my mystery books and film books/screenplays collections. This gallery is what my residence-in-progress looks like now.

If anyone is tempted to take weasels like Chris Christie and Nikki Haley seriously when they criticize the Trumpster, look at their reaction to the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court barring Trump from being on the primary election ballot because he had incited an insurrection. According to the post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, section 3: “No person shall…hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath…as an officer of the United States…to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
That is the law. I do not wish to debate the parameters of its applicability. I wish only to stress that when the Colorado Court made its decision, the Republican Party as a whole, all candidates and office holders, alike and in lockstep, circled their wagons and protested the decision as partisan judicial overreach and weaponized judicial activism.
Such a charge is chillingly laughable from the party that used partisan judicial overreach and that nuclear-weaponized judicial activism (using Machiavellian means to fill the US Supreme Court with right-wing hacks, crooks, and zealots) in order to deprive women of their equality and autonomy, to disenfranchise voters with new versions of Jim Crow legislation, and to unleash the dogs of racism and xenophobia anew on the land.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAYt6dpCgOI
{I shall translate the Yiddish for anyone who cannot figure out the gist of it, but the key line is "Los em gehen" / "Let them go." }
{PS: The true reason that the GOP pols are railing against this decision is that they know that every legally justified action against the Trumpster merely increases his support from the GOP: they are all craven opportunists and circumstantial political chameleons.}

Indian chief scene from Blazing Saddles The Indian chief scene from Blazing Saddles. Further support for the argument that some American Indian tribes may have descended from the 10 lost tribes of ...

ALERT
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Robert Zaslavsky

PROGRESS REPORT
The bookcases in the sala (main room) are nearly complete, the left housing my Shakespeare collection, the right housing (for now) a mixture of reference works, art theory and history, and some odds and ends there only temporarily. Atop these bookcases are (from left to right) a sexagenarian globe of the earth, a mini-Colosseum (with towering legionnaire, behind which is a Greek museum copy of an ancient jar), a bust of Shakespeare/a cardboard model of the Globe Theatre (that I constructed many years ago: it suffered some minor damage in the transatlantic crossing but still stands grandly, and Yoda continues to stand guard over it), the 2000 year old man’s national (cave) anthem button, Cordelia’s childhood robot constructed from my empty matchboxes from the days when I was in thrall to the sot w**d (the old name for to***co), and a tin of Shakespearean insult quotation Band-Aids.
My wall gallery continues to grow, with my Babylon 5 action figure collection in place, abutting a Greek saucer, transitioning to my western icons grouping. [Other Bab 5 memorabilia are freestanding and not yet in place.]
I am awaiting help to move heavy book cartons (too heavy for me because of my forthcoming minor abdominal surgery), so that I can place the other bookcases where they are meant to reside, empty the remaining cartons, and finally categorize and shelve the bulk of my library.

The resignation of Elizabeth Magill as President of the University of Pennsylvania, follows hard upon the mindlessly hysterical reaction to her attempt and the attempt of her colleagues (Claudine Gay, President of Harvard, and Sally Kornbluth, President of M.I.T) to be balanced and reasoned rather than rash and irrational in their responses to a deliberately inflammatory interrogation by Republican Congressperson Elise Stefanik, a born-again Trumpian, who asked the college Presidents the question of whether students’ calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools' codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment and should merit punishment.
The fact that this played out like a high-class cat fight should not obscure the noxious mix of Israelolatry, misogyny, and anti-intellectual-neutrality that infects our political universe of discourse (blatantly in the Republican Party entirely and subterraneanly in segments of the Democratic Party).
Too many of our legislators and citizens are blindered by slogans about statements whose intent is at least equivocal and at best merely rhetorical, i.e., they catch a quotation on the internet, more-often-than-not misattributed and decontextualized, and they react in a knee-jerk fashion without ever performing reasonable verification procedures to ensure that they are not acting out of ignorance and prejudice.
I wonder why the questioner did not ask whether students who called for the genocide of Palestinians would violate their schools' codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment and should merit punishment. Or even more broadly, whether students who called for the genocide of any ethnic or cultural group or subgroup should be punished. The bias of another person, even when it agrees with one’s own bias, is still bias.
[PS: I wonder whether Congressperson Stefanik would deem the following statement deserving of punishment: "We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country."]