Wire Train

That video above is Bob Dylan and Joan Baez at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, singing one of my favorite songs of his, “With God On Our Side” (which hadn’t been released yet). Down at the bottom is a cover by Wire Train, one of the bands on my old indie label, 415 Records. Great version— and this clip has all the lyrics shown plainly on the screen. Trump should have watched it before he went down to Miami on Friday to rally evangelical voters.

Bloomberg is running in 3 super-Tuesday states so far: Alabama Arkansas and Tennessee but his campaign always says he hasn't decided if he's running for president or not yet. Sounds crazy to me but... he's also spending $100,000,000 on digital ads in battleground states the way you or I might spent $100.

Unscientific Twitter poll makes a point without body language analysisI ran a little twitter poll on Friday and I was surprised that so many respondents sawbthe possibilities inherent in political polling the same way I did.

Like Hitler, about a third of Germans had been born into Catholism in the 1930s. (Hitler himself had already found a different god by then.) As the Nazis came to power they recognized the Church as an enemy. They banned the Catholic-aligned Centre Party in 1933 and although the Reichskonkordat treaty with the Vatican that year guaranteed religious freedom for Catholics, the Nazis confiscated Church property and closed down Church schools and youth organisations and banned the Catholic press.

What do Randy Bryce, Amy McGrath, MJ Hegar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all have in common? Well, if you hit the links, you'll probably know what I'm talking about. None of those are expensive 30 second TV spots. No one ever heard of any of the candidates before those videos launched them onto the public consciousness.

For society, the sexual harassment scandals should be about two things:1- mending the patriarchal environment we live in to change, over the long-term, the way men think they are entitled to behave2- (a corollary)- dealing very harshly with instances of men using power relationships to prey on people dependent on them for careersI used to be an astrologer. I studied it in Amsterdam, took it very seriously.

Take religion or leave it. Some people get a lot of comfort from it. My problem has never been with religion per se; it's always been with armed religion. If God's on your side... well, anything goes. Right from the days of the Bible you had permission-- even a duty to-- butcher women and children... as long as you're doing God's work. The conquistadors enslaved and wiped out most of the population of what's now known as Latin America, in the name of Jesus. You know what those beheadings by ISIS are all about? Right, God's will. Religions and weapons... always bad. Never good.