PS TO LAST POST (ANOTHER GREAT QUOTE FROM THE SAME BOOK)

"Law serves power."  —Carl Oglesby (from Containment and Change)

AN OLD FAVORITE QUOTE (THAT IS STILL RELEVANT, IF NOT MORE SO)

"Neither America nor the Western tradition which America has brought to maturity will be rightly understood until one understands that free enterprise is ultimately a political theory, that it bases itself on an ethical premise of conflict, and that its virtue system appropriately confers esteem and privilege not upon the humane (although humanity is not precluded) but upon the willful and relentless—the powerful."  —Carl Oglesby (from Containment and Change, a 1967 book that had a major impact on my ongoing radicalization at the time)

TIME

Yesterday was my oldest son Miles's birthday. Here he is in a double shot of us in our Manhattan pad back in the 1970s when it was just him and me living together, and then him a few years ago on a winter day in The Berkshires where he lives now.

MUSICAL INTERLUDE

When THE LAST WALTZ came out I had been somehow underrating Joni Mitchell for years and not appreciating her presence and charisma. For whatever reason I couldn't even see why people found her attractive. So her performance wasn't even near my favorite from that documentary/concert film.

Then about a decade after it my daughter away at college in Vermont when I visited made me sit down facing her record player and speakers and she put on Joni's LP BLUE and made me listen to the whole thing and I got it, her unique musical genius. But I still found her unattractive.

Then another two decades later I had a brain operation which changed some of my thinking and taste, including finding myself falling in love with women on film whom I'd previously had no attraction whosoever to, like Meryl Streep, Annette Benning, Mitzi Gaynor....and it turns out: Joni Mitchell.

So I now find this clip from THE LAST WALTZ not only my favorite, but every time I see it I fall in love with Joni Mitchell all over again. Life. What a trip.

LATE NIGHT MINI-MINII MILD RANT

I wish it was only ironic that rightwing fundamentalist Christians implied or outright stated that Obama was the antiChrist, despite him obviously exemplifying what Christians supposedly hold as their standards.

Yet no one has suggested that Trump, who has hardly any, if any, of those Christian characteristics but instead embodies much of what the anti-Christ would supposedly have, no one is calling Trump the antiChrist, though he certainly might be...

QUOTE FOR THIS WEEK

YEP