Ben Weber - Symphony on Poems of William Blake, Op. 33

1. O Autumn, Laden with Fruit

2. Never Seek to Tell Thy Love

3.  Mad Song

4.  O Thou with Dewy Locks

Warren Galjour, baritone
Leopold Stokowski orchestra
Leopold Stokowski, conductor

I don't know if this is the only performance this piece ever had but it's a wonderful piece that should be performed.  This is a far from perfect recording, the balances between the instruments and voice aren't the best but it's the best you're likely to hear of it.

Update:  This is from an article by one of Ben Weber's few students, the composer Roger Tréfousse THE STRANGE LIFE OF BEN WEBER.

A very vivid memory of studying with Ben is of the times when we would listen to music together. He would play a recording and we would listen through with the score. As the music proceeded, he’d make the occasional comment; pointing out a detail of structure, harmony, or orchestral technique. One of the first pieces of his own that he played for me was his Symphony on Poems of William Blake. He liked that it got quite wild in the Mad Song, and was pleased with the way the small forces he had chosen created such a big sound. Of particular interest to me was the way that he’d used a single cello to successfully create the sound of a full string section.

The Blake Symphony is one of Ben’s most powerful works, and we listened to it in the fabulous recording conducted by Leopold Stokowski, with his Symphony Orchestra and baritone soloist Warren Galjour. When we’d finished listening, Ben reminisced about the craziness surrounding the sessions for that RCA Victor recording. Stokowski, for some unknown reason, had become very angry with Galjour. So, when a comment needed to be made, Stokie, as Ben called the famous conductor, would turn to Ben and say, “Would you please tell Mr. Galjour such and such, because Mr. Stokowski is not speaking to Mr. Galjour.” As I listened to Ben’s story, the contrast between now and then was a bit haunting. Here I was, sitting in that cramped and dusty apartment with the creator of this phenomenal piece of music, now someone who barely ever left his rooms—and many days probably didn’t even get out of bed—hearing him tell tales about working with the legendary Leopold Stokowski.

That's from back in the day when major labels like RCA put out recordings of largely ignored American composers.  I might have my criticisms of Stokowski, whose musical sins were many, but he did champion new music.

I had thought that the American Composer's Alliance might hold the score to this piece but it doesn't seem to be among the scores that Ben Weber or those near to him placed with them.

Aaron Copland - Piano Sonata

I

II

III

Hilde Somer, piano

This might be my favorite recording of this piece.  Hilde Somer who died way too young was one of the finest interpreters of 20th century repertoire there was.  Her clarity was a mix of intellectual brilliance, great technique and analytical precision but always in service to the intentions of the music.  I didn't know this was out on CD.   The recording also has the Violin Sonata with Carroll Glenn playing violin.  I recall reading that Copland, himself, coached them on that piece I believe he remarked on a bell like tone they'd found in the piece that he didn't realize he'd put there.   I can't imagine he didn't also coach Hilde Somer on the Piano Sonata, too.

What Will Get Your Comment Sent To The Spam File

I will remind people who try to post comments here that I don't generally post attacks on people other than myself, though I might make an exception when I know the person being attacked has lied on another blog about the person responding to them.  

You want to get your comment posted, insult or attack me and I might post it, especially if you expose yourself as a douchebag in the comment.  Don't attack other people in your comment. 

My spam file is full of comments that fail that test. 

The Lives of Millions of Americans The Health Insurance of Many More Millions Depends On Three Senate Republicans Because The Rest of The Party Is An Enemy Of The People

The latest last chance effort for Republicans to kill many more Americans than were killed in 9-11, the Graham-Cassidy destruction of the Affordable Care Act takes the popular Republican Route of "sending it back to the state" where Republicans in state legislatures would have the power to kill what Graham-Cassidy doesn't do outright and giving state governments the incentive to do that by giving them less money than the ACA does.

I'm not going to go into the depravity of the bill except to say that it is everything bad in the last attempt that failed, dramatically on the vote of John McCain and adds to that.  Among other things it rewards the worst states which, like my own under Republican governance, didn't expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, something the incredibly awful and cruel Republican Paul LePage and the "moderate" Republicans who controlled the legislature and who still prevent expansion over the veto of the lame duck LePage.   Maine doesn't deserve such a "reward"for the depravity and cruelty of our Republicans and neither do Texas or South Carolina or other states who have consistently done the wrong thing.

It is, yet again, dependent on there being three Republican Senators who will not do what the large majority of Republican Senators are willing to do, destroy the health insurance of tens of millions of Americans, risk that of many more as the chaos in the insurance market drives up costs for even those who can get insurance and allows insurance companies to pressure state legislatures into allowing them to discriminate against those with existing conditions and expensive diseases and disabilities.  It will damage Medicaid which, in most places, in most cases, is the sole lifeline to people with disabilities and elderly people in nursing homes.

That Republicans are doing this in order to give enormous tax breaks to the richest people in the country, against the opposition of most people in the country shows the extent to which that party is one of the most anti-American forces in the country, today.  If this passes they deserve to reap the whirl wind, unfortunately they will avoid doing that and the Republican in the Supreme Court are giving them support.   Under the recent decision to allow Republican drawn gerrymandered districts they are making it absolutely clear that they don't want there to be a fair vote anywhere.  It is clear that they are as bad as the worst of the Senate.  From now on plain honesty demands that they be presented as the political thugs and enemies of the American People because that is what they are.

Before Moving On To The Latest Republican-fascist Atrocity - The Claim That Darwin Had Nothing To Do With Eugenics Is False, Eugenics Is Inseparable from Natural Selection

Uh, no, there is absolutely no rational question to be raised about it, eugenics is a thing that was invented in the 1860s-80s, invented by Francis Galton and published in a series of articles and books and he was absolutely explicit that eugenics was motivated by his reading of On the Origin of Species, something he said any number of times, most finally in his autobiography written not long before his death.  He not only noted its inspiration in his cousin, Charles Darwin's thinking but that his cousin endorsed his earliest eugenic writings, articles and the book Hereditary Genius, in a letter to him endorsing the idea.  Darwin confirmed that later by citing those articles and that book numerous times to support his own eugenic contentions in The Descent of Man.  He cited them as science to support his own scientific contentions, presenting Galton's eugenics as having the reliability of science.  He also gave tacit and behind the scenes support for eugenics articles written by George Darwin, his own son, when they were criticized by St. George Mivart.  In his letter endorsing Hereditary Genius, he mentioned that George Darwin had read it before he did and that he had recommended it to his father, Charles Darwin.

Furthermore, Darwin's son Leonard Darwin, the successor to Francis Galton in heading the major eugenics effort in Britain, said several times over a number of decades that he was continuing his father's work in his eugenics efforts and, as mentioned, as late as April, 1939, in the Eugenics Review, he noted that Wilhelm Schallmeyer, sometimes considered the founder of eugenics in Germany, had said it was his independent reading of On the Origin of Species which inspired his own eugenics even before he had read Francis Galton on the topic.  Alfred Ploetz, the other contender for that dubious honor and, eventually, a Nazi, as well, was explicit in attributing his eugenics to his reading of Charles Darwin and Darwin's foremost German colleague at the University of Jena, Ernst Haeckel.   Haeckel's extension of Darwinism through such entities as his Monist League has been called proto-Nazism by both Stephen Jay Gould and Daniel Gasman and, if you read his books, including those endorsed by Darwin and cited positively as authoritative science in The Descent of Man, any honest and informed person would have to conclude that it is, in fact, proto-Nazism.

Whenever anyone is talking about eugenics they are talking about an aspect of Darwinism which Darwin, himself, endorsed during his lifetime and which was never denied by anyone before the end of World War II who I have ever found.  I challenged people more than five years ago to produce anyone who knew Charles Darwin who distanced him from eugenics and no one has ever produced such a witness to exonerate him from that association.  If they did manage to find someone they would be hard pressed to make the case considering at least three of his sons, his cousin and others who knew him all attested to his approval of eugenics as a logical extension of his theory of natural selection.  Just as he made the association between natural selection and Spencerian Social Darwinism, himself, in the fifth and sixth editions of On the Origin of Species.

I've written on all of those things before, look in my archive, I gave exhaustive documentation of what I said.   And I'll keep on saying it as long as the lie it refutes is told.

Why Trump is Always (Always!) the Victim

More Response To More Hate

I am delighted to hear that you uphold the doctrine of the Modification of Species, and defend my views. The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.

Charles Darwin, letter to William Thierry Preyer, March 31, 1868



This part of your imposing investigations being free from arbitrary opinions (which it is impossible to avoid in any treatise on the origin of mankind) is sure, I think, to extend and to confirm Darwinism in the scientific world. Besides Jena there is no University in Germany where your theory is so openly confessed and publicly taught by so many professors. Häckel, Gegenbaur, Dohrn, Strasburger, W. Müller, myself: we are true Darwinians, in our lectures and writings

William Preyer,  letter to C. Darwin  April 27, 1871

Try an experiment, google "University of Jena hotbed of Nazi ideology" and see how many times the words come up.

As to the current,  apparently blog-based myth that the Nazis banned Darwinism, that is totally contradicted by the fact that most of Ernst Haeckel's works - including those which Darwin, himself, said represented his thinking, most notably Die Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte  - were still being published in Nazi Germany right up to the end of the Nazi period.  Such eminent Nazi academics as Karl Astel, the Darwinist geneticist and rector at the University of Jena - just about all of the biologists, anthropologists, etc. in Germany who held their positions all during the Nazi period were Darwinists - was one of the founders of the Ernst Haeckel Society during the war, in 1941.  He and the co-founder of the society, Gerhard Heberer (both a conventional Darwinian biologist and an SS officer)  invited high placed Nazis to be honorary members of it.  One of those, Nazi Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, wrote to Martin Bormann and Alfred Rosenberg to get their approval, which they gave.

That myth is a blatant lie which depends on the obscurity, in English, of the disproof of it but that barrier is going to be less useful to telling those are translated and publicized in English.  It also depends on the ignorance of historical and text-based scholarship by people who, somehow, get college credentials without ever learning how those work.  And, surprisingly, not all of them seem to come from the STEM subjects.  Though those who should know better might just be telling convenient lies.

More Ignorant Hate Over Berlin Diary

When we left off, yesterday, I'd pointed out that the book which was thrown at me, William Shirer's Berlin Diary, his diary kept from his experiences as a foreign correspondent in Europe, especially Germany, in the years of the rise of the Nazis up to the beginning of World War II in 1939 and the United States' involvement in that war too many months later.

As the point was the relation of Darwinism to the mass murders of the Nazis, though specifically, in the comments of the guy who trolls me with an obsession that has turned into a near daily attack on my character, the Holocaust, I'd noted that his own, chosen authority, Berlin Diary, a far from complete view of things, as it ends in 1941, Shirer noted what Germans thought were the motives of the Nazis.  You can see that at the Update in yesterday's post.  I could have made my case even more strongly by noting that Simel's own, alleged authority on the matter SAID THAT HE FOUND THE EUGENIC - THAT IS THE DARWINIAN - MOTIVE THE MOST PROBABLE.

The first motive is obviously absurd, since the death 
of 100,000 persons will not save much food for a nation 
of 80,000,000. Besides, there is no acute food shortage 
in Germany. The second motive is possible, though I 
doubt it. Poison gases may have been used in putting 
these unfortunates out of the way, but if so, the experi- 
mentation was only incidental. Many Germans I have 
talked to think that some new gas which disfigures the 
body has been used, and that this is the reason why the 
remains of the victims have been cremated. But I can 
get no real evidence of this. 

The third motive seems most likely to me. For years 
a group of radical Nazi sociologists who were instru- 
mental in putting through the Reich's sterilization laws 
have pressed for a national policy of eliminating the 
mentally unfit. They say they have disciples among 
many sociologists in other lands, and perhaps they have. 
Paragraph two of the form letter sent the relatives 
plainly bears the stamp of this sociological thinking: 
" In view of the nature of his serious, incurable ailment, 
his death, which saved him from a lifelong institutional 
sojourn, is to be regarded merely as a release." 

Some suggest a fourth motive. They say the Nazis 
calculate that for every three or four institutional cases, 
there must be one healthy German to look after them. 
This takes several thousand good Germans away from 
more profitable employment. If the insane are killed 
off, it is further argued by the Nazis, there will be 
plenty of hospital space for the war wounded should the 
war be prolonged and large casualties occur. 
It's a Nazi, messy business.

Far from me criticizing William Shirer's book for not noting the Darwinian connection to the murders of the Third Reich, he said he found that attributed motive the most probable of the three he said his German friends and acquaintances put forward as what led to the trial run for the Holocaust, the T-4 program.   

That policy was one that had its roots so far in Darwinism that it is found in the very book by Ernst Haeckel which Darwin endorsed in the highest of terms, Haeckel's German language elucidation of Darwinism, The History of Creation, which Darwin, himself, said was such a good representation of his thinking that if he'd known Haeckel was writing it, he wouldn't have bothered writing his own, second major book on the subject, The Descent of Man, in which Darwin, as well, endorses the idea that killing off those deemed unfit is salubrious for the surviving murderers and their descendants.  

I could also point out that the fourth motive was identical to that given by the next generation of Darwinists, such as H. G. Wells and those influenced by Darwinism, such as George Bernard Shaw whose Fabian speeches calling for mass gassing of the unfit was not entirely outside of the general line of Fabian and British thinking, a more efficient means of harrying the poor, the lame, the halt, the merely unfortunate out of an inconvenient existence. 

“A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.”

The comfort that English speaking people take in the absurd idea that Nazism is a strictly German language phenomenon is a lie,  Nazism, including the idea that mass murder was the way of nature and of a salubrious character, leading to both the biological advance of the survivors, the murderers and justified in some depraved form of economic utilitarianism was rampant among English speaking intellectuals at exactly the same time, finding its most popular form in Darwinism. If these people will insist on forcing me to note the depraved things their heros have said, things that put their thinking in the same line with that of such people as Himmler and Rudolf Hoess, that's not my fault.

Last night someone sent me a link to a Rawstory piece about some guy in Oklahoma who dressed up in a mock up of a Klan costume to protest "evolution" as being to blame for scientific racism and genocide - at least that's what I could gather from the piece, the guy's protest wasn't the most pellucid of messages.  The snarky presentation and the comments mocked the guy for his ignorance and superstition but, if I'd wanted to get into it, I'd have had to tell them that that guy was more accurate than they, in their college credentialed arrogance.  And I could give them chapter and verse of Darwin's own writing and that of his closest colleagues, supporting the idea of genocide against named groups, including Black People was not only beneficial but a biological imperative and a certainty.   If by "evolution" the guy had meant natural selection, that would be Darwinism, he was far more accurate than they were.   But his error, mistaking "evolution" for natural selection, that would be Darwinism, is common enough and something often, very often, made by even professional evolutionary biologists.  It's quite common among the latter day Darwinists who believe he unlocked the one, true mechanism of evolution.  Quaint as that idea should have become, by now. 

Hate Mail

Simps claimed that I slammed Berlin Diary for not blaming the Holocaust on Darwin?   I thought he was still pretending to have read the book.  The Holocaust hadn't happened when that book was written, though, as I had to point out to the moron before, Shirer did note that the genocide against the disabled had started by then and he talked about it.  If he'd really read the book instead of skimming parts of it and pretending he had, he'd have known that.  If he didn't before he certainly should have after I answered his previous misrepresentations of it.  And Shirer was hardly a major scholar of the Holocaust and what led to it.  He wasn't even a major scholar of the Third Reich, he was a journalist. Depending on him as an expert on the issue in 2017 doesn't even make it to the stage where I'd call someone a tyro, it makes them an ignorant idiot. 

The Eschaton commentariat are pretty stupid the ones who take Simps seriously, anyway.  

Update:  Oh, and from the book Stupy claims to have read, Berlin Diary, talking about those murders.


X, a German, told me yesterday that relatives are rushing to get their kin out of private asylums and out of the clutches of the authorities. He says the Gestapo is doing to death persons who are merely suffering temporary derangement or just plain nervous breakdown.  

What is still unclear to me is the motive for these murders.  Germans themselves advance three:
1. That they are being carried out to save food.

2. That they are done for the purpose of experimenting with new poison gases and death rays. 


3. That they are simply the result of the extreme Nazis deciding to carry out their eugenic and sociological ideas. 

Eugenics was a direct result, in both Britain and Germany of Darwin's theory of natural selection,  the inventor of the idea, Francis Galton and the people who are "credited" with beginning eugenics in Germany, Alfred Ploetz and Wilhelm Schallmeyer all attributed their eugenics to their study of Darwin.  I don't know if William Shirer knew that but it is irrefutable that all of them attributed their eugenics to Darwinism.  As I've pointed out any number of timesbefore, Darwin's own son, Leonard Darwin, attributed German, that would be Nazi eugenics to his father's influence as late as April 1939.  I'll point that out as many times as it takes to refute the lie that that isn't a fact. 

Trump, Russia, and the Facebook Factor

Dusan Bogdanovic - Sonata 2 - Now with the score

Jérémy Peret, Guitar

I've posted this recording of this sonata before but someone put it up with the score.  I love it when they do that, it's easier to hear more when you have the notes there, for some reason.  The penciled in analyses are helpful, too.

They Ignored Too Much To Write Their Articles - Neither Coates Nor Packer Considered Enough To Defeat Trumpism and Republican-fascism In The Future

I haven't been following the dispute between Ta-Nehisi Coates and George Packer very closely, though I had read Coates essay about the predominance of white racism over blue-collar class in the election of Donald Trump and how a concentration on blue-collar white resentment downplays the role of racism in Trump's election.  Of course Ta-Nehisi Coates is right, that racism is the predominant feature of this past election as it has been in Republican politics for decades.  It is the tool which Republicans have used to sucker poor whites into voting for people who make law and policy that is worse for them than Democratic policy all along.  It has been one of the main tools of American aristocrats to divide those they use and exploit since the colonial period, the American equivalent of the British class system which exploits racial identity as a tool to divide and conquer in a more racially diverse population.  That tactic couldn't work if poor white people weren't all too willing, in large numbers, to get played to weaken them against the economic interests they have in common with poor black people so as to benefit the aristocrats who exploit that self-assumed weakness.

None of that would work if a large percent, a majority of poor white people weren't disabled by their racism and that wouldn't persist to be the case, today, if they weren't encouraged in that racism by the media, movies, TV*, the internet, which encourage that racism.  I think that's among the most important things about this.

I read both Coates and Packer's response to Coates and noticed several things, they agree on a lot more than they disagree and both of them seem to ignore that none of the groups in question are uniform.  A large minority of all of the white income groups that Coates correctly noted voted for Trump, voted against him.  Obviously those people who voted against Trump were not persuaded by his appeals to racism.  There were people who voted for Trump who had voted for Barack Obama, what is up with that would seem to be an important consideration. especially if how they were appealed to in voting FOR Barack Obama could be repeated in future elections.  The difference between those who will never vote for a Barack Obama and those who can be won over by someone is the difference between who holds power and who doesn't.

The temptation among English speaking intellectuals to turn a majority of a group in some survey into a monolithic characterization of the entire group, ignoring that the very numbers they depend on don't say that would seem to be irresistible.  None of it is as easy as that, none of it is as easily turned into aphoristic, universal statements that look strong on the page but which aren't much use in producing political success.   A thin margin of white voters who voted the other way, white women, for example, of those who had voted for Barack Obama once or even twice but who either stayed home or voted for Trump, that kind of thing can make all the difference in an election.  And that's what we are talking about, who gets elected and who doesn't and why.

And I'm also struck at how little Hillary Clinton,  Donald Trump's opponent in the election figures in this discussion, her gender, her having been the object of a quarter of a century of lies and attacks from every establishment institution from the New York Times down to FOX, Sinclaire and the bottom of the septic tank entities such as are funded by the Kochs and the Mercers, and, as important to how she was not elected, The Nation and other allegedly lefty media, the Greens and, yes, the Bernie Sanders campaign, none of which I think can be easily or honestly characterized as either racist nor subject the the same character of economic aggrievement that is the subject of Packer's original piece.

Those were not negligible factors in how Donald Trump won.

Neither are the Constitutional features such as the Electoral College put in place by 18th century slave owners to enhance the power of racists in their time and which have not ever been removed even as their empowerment of racism and the economic elite worked just as was intended.   That those are deemed to be inviolate as they have worked to undermine and overturn progress against racism and inequality, certainly in every election in which the Electoral College was decisive putting Rutherford Hayes,  George W. Bush and now Donald Trump in the presidency** is a serious problem which is ever deferred to an ever fading later.

I don't find anything in general to disagree with in either Coates or Packer, though both of them have the same bad habits that lead them to over generalize.  I do think that Coates' point about the overwhelming role racism played as a tool of Trumpery, especially in so far as it was and has been the major tool of the wealthy to sucker poor whites into voting against their interest is likely the key to a larger understanding of how Trump got the presidency.  But I think that understanding is of secondary importance in how to change that and in doing that noting how Hillary Clinton was not able to do what Barack Obama did twice is of greater practical importance.  Did sexism play an even greater role in putting Trump in office?  I have no idea.  Would a woman who had not been subjected to a quarter of a century of character assassination by the New York Times and mainstream media have made this discussion never happen?  I don't think either Coates or Packer have included enough information in their articles to come to a useful understanding of these issues.  Maybe that can't be done but it should certainly be tried.

*  I read that last night's Emmy awards demonstrated that TV is far more "effortlessly diverse" than the Oscars repeatedly show that the movie industry is not.  I haven't thought much about that since I don't consume much of either, these days.  When I did pay attention to American TV it had gone from a very brief period when producers, directors and writers made a conscious effort to present positive images of black people peaking in the early 1970s to, as the backlash against that took over and, especially starting in the Reagan era, racial paranoia and fear became the predominant image presented.  I don't know the extent to which that may have changed in the past decade and more.

** Not to mention seriously weakening the one mildly anti-inequality president who managed to eke out becoming a president through it, John Quincy Adams.  At least one biographer I remember, pointed out that it was his experience of that election and his troubled one term-presidency was what radicalized him into becoming the great champion of abolition in his congressional career.  He'd been lukewarm about the issue before that, though, like his father, something of an opponent of slavery.

Bela Bartok - 27 Choruses for Womens or Childrens Voices Book 1

Spring

Don't Leave Me Here

Spell

Schola Hungarica ·
László Dobszay, conductor

I love this collection and think I'll post it book by book.  Unfortunately, I can't find an English translation online.  Bartok composed the music for folk poetry, the melodies are his.  He lamented that the difficulty of the texts for most non-Hungarians doomed the music to be relatively obscure, though he considered these some of his most important works. They sound quite rich for works that are all in two and three part textures.  

Johannes Brahms - 3 Intermezzi, Op. 117

Radu Lupu, piano

Score

Yeah, I Pretty Much Hate Harvard And The 37 Billion Dollar Pimps Who Run It - Hate Mail

I do have to say it is hilarious to me how many bold, iconoclastic, "free thinking" would be lefties go full Margaret Dumont if you call Harvard a whore house.  Or the other ivies or may-as-well-be-ivies, though not as much as when you note it's a lot more of a 37 billion dollar establishment knocking shop than a good to humanity.  Today Charles Pierce notes that in addition to canning probably the fourth least criminal candidates of that Kennedy School fellowship program while keeping the real thugs at the Kennedy School, Harvard's administration has the distinction of rejecting the recommendation of not one but two doctoral programs that they admit Michelle Jones as a PhD candidate because she is also a just released ex-convict, having served twenty years for murdering her 4 year old son while still a teenager.  Among those who support her academic career is the woman who successfully prosecuted her for that crime and who argued for the harshest sentence for her.  Diane Marger Moore said:

“Look, as a mother, I thought it was just an awful crime... But what Harvard did is highly inappropriate: I’m the prosecutor, not them. Michelle Jones served her time, and she served a long time, exactly what she deserved. A sentence is a sentence.”

While she was in prison, Michelle Jones made a vow to her son and herself that she would redeem her life and she did it by first educating herself in an inadequate prison library and then through earning a degree and making herself into what is, apparently, a fine historian whose work is valued by other historians, even, obviously, some of those at Harvard.  But, on finding out that she was on the verge of being accepted into either the History or American Studies PhD program, a couple of the profs there got the fantods and wrote to the friggin Dean and President of Whorevard and sandbagged her acceptance.  One of the excuses was they suspected she wouldn't be able to take the pressure at dear old Harvard, where she'd be subjected to those who believe they are, and these are their words, not mine, "the elite of the elite".  I've known a lot of Harvard products over the years, believe me, lots of them don't live up to that self-regarding phrase.  As I mentioned, one of them was the "Dumbest fucking guy"  Douglas Feith.  George W. Bush is another.  So is Jared Kushner.  

I mean, if the Great Gray Drab of the New York Times can see this as the disgusting cowardice that it is - one of the reasons they sandbagged Ms. Jones is because they were afraid of the right-wing media mocking them - it's really bad.  They deserve as much heat as they can get for all of these things.  If I ran the place, I'd get rid of the goddamned Kennedy School, altogether.  It's pretty vile.

I wish Ms. Jones all the luck in the world in her PhD program at New York University, I hope she produces valuable and widely read and influential history for decades to come, always telling the truth and always digging for deeper meanings behind them.  Congratulations to her department at New York University on getting such a promising candidate, I hope she does you proud.  For some reason this reminds me of how a few weeks back, after looking at a university anthology of then current poets, my guess was that Gwendolyn Brooks was probably read more than the much more lauded poets in it.  I mean, other than Ars Poetica as found in such anthologies, does anyone in the world read Archibald Macleish (Yale-Harvard) today?   I'm sure she (Wilson Junior College) will be for a long, long time.