Saturday Night Radio Drama - Denise Mina- The Dead Hour

The Dead Hour by Denise Mina and adapted by Chris Dolan was broadcast on 9th October 2009.

Glasgow, 1984 - Cub reporter "Paddy" Meehan follows the police to a domestic dispute in which a female lawyer has been beaten up. 
Her partner at the house slips £50 into Paddy's hand and shuts the door. 
Next day the lawyer is found murdered.

Cast:
Paddy: Amy Manson
Billy: Stevie Hannan
Neilson: Simon Donaldson
Trisha: Cara Kelly
Gourlay: Laurie Ventry
Sean: Paul Thomas Hickey
JT: Finlay McLean
Kate: Patricia Kavanagh
Sullivan: Andrew Clark
Burns: Grant O'Rourke
Ramage: Mark McDonnell

Director: Bruce Young

Another adaptation, but a superior one.  It's based on a novel which I haven't read but it's well done on its own terms.

I've got lingering symptoms of what's going around.  Low energy for a while I'd guess.

William Bolcom - 3 Dance Portraits: No. 1, The Dead Moth Tango

Ursula Oppens, piano

I posted a different recording of these a few years back, it's good to hear another performance from such a fine artist.

No. 2, Knock-Stück

No. 3, Abbacadabra

I'm Officially Over Bernie Sanders And His Possee Of Grifters

OK, I know it's the AP but with this:

Sanders’ loyalists expect him to launch a second campaign in the coming weeks, and his network of die-hard supporters is hosting hundreds of events across the nation this weekend encouraging him to run.

I am officially over Bernie Sanders, I've even removed his name from the sidebar of my blog as someone I respect.

Bernie Sanders joined the Democratic Party, briefly, so he could run for the Democratic nomination for President in 2016, then he left the party.  A second nomination fight for the nomination of a party he is not a member of makes him a troll and a carpetbagger.  If he had remained in the Democratic Party after his last run, I wouldn't make that accusation but now he's a troll and carpetbagger using the Democratic Party for a stunt run out of ego and the desire for him and his money-making staff and his cult of adoring cultists to further their own ends.  I would argue that he is too old to be a credible candidate, I would make the same case against Joe Biden. 

What, after the disaster of Trump being put in the office with the help of his fans, Bernie imagines  he's going to get out of it except more attention for himself, at his age, I couldn't possibly guess.  Maybe my ego isn't big enough to get it.  I suspect there are those around him who expect to make money out of, what this time would be merely a stunt run, ginning up the same anger that his last run did to no good purpose.

THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE NEEDS TO ADOPT A RULE THAT DISQUALIFIES ANYONE WHO WAS NOT A DECLARED MEMBER OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY  FOR AT LEAST TWO PRESIDENTIAL CYCLES, EIGHT YEARS FROM THE DATE OF THE ELECTION, FROM BEING A CANDIDATE FOR THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION.  DELEGATES FOR SUCH CANDIDATES SHOULD BE DENIED SEATING AT THE CONVENTION.

BETTER YET, IN ADDITION, WOULD BE FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY TO ENTIRELY CONTROL ITS OWN NOMINATIONS PROCESS, HOLDING A NATION-WIDE PRIMARY WITH MAIL-IN BALLOTS SENT ONLY TO PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN MEMBERS OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY SINCE THEIR 18TH BIRTHDAY OR FOR TWO YEARS.  THE BALLOTS SHOULD BE PAPER, MARKED BY HAND AND TABULATED BY AN INDEPENDENT AUDITING FIRM HIRED BY THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WITH FULL TRANSPARENCY. 

Hate Mail

"I know quite a lot of traditionalist Catholics who hate the current Pope [Francis] largely because of his perverse desire to be a Christian."

David Bentley Hart 

Don't count my comment about what I think will happen if Pope Francis fails to open up the Catholic priesthood to people who are married as opposing him.  I think he's still got the potential to be one of the best of the modern Popes.  The abysmal quality of his opponents (Vignano, Burke, etc.*), many of whom are among those most responsible for dragging the Catholic church into its present crisis, are an indication of his potential greatness.  His pastoral letters are some of the best I've read. 

* See: BALTIMORE — The most important takeaway from the U.S. bishops' plenary meeting this week in Baltimore is that they as a group remain determined to resist the pastoral impulse and approach to which Pope Francis is calling the church. Just as it took Pope John Paul II years to take the conference in a more conservative direction, it will take the bishops who champion Francis a few more years before they have the votes to take the conference in a new direction.

This was seen most obviously in their precedent-breaking decision to select Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, as chair of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities over Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich. At the coffee break after the vote, one bishop said, "This was like electing Donald Trump. Naumann will say things that will embarrass all of us."

Yet, the bishops voted for him, not Cupich, knowing they would be sending a clear message to Francis.

And, also. 

Too many were selected as bishops because they have been promoted by a powerful patron. For example, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo became a cardinal because he had Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re as his patron, as did Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. Such patronage explains why DiNardo, whose incompetence in his dealings with Rome have been recently revealed, became a cardinal. The large number of mediocre bishops produced by the Re and Sodano networks will stalk the church for years.

Hearing Trump Whining About The House Freshmen Class Made Me Think Paul Lynde Sang It Better

I didn't remember how much of it fit Trump, the bottle blonde daughter, telling his son he didn't value him.  Uncanny.

American Democracy Is About To Die On The Say So of FOX, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh

The Republican Party has certainly already indicated that they are a fascist party in the first two years of the Trump regime, they are about to prove it absolutely as he starts to assume dictatorial power in a declaration of "national emergency" where it's obvious none exists.  Hitler had them start a fire in the Reichstag, under American Constitutional government it apparently doesn't even take that, it takes FOX and Rush Limbaugh to say mean things about Republicans being pussies if they don't violate the Constitution to do it.

This is how far American democracy has degenerated under the present cultural milieu created by the mass media, the mass media has, in fact been the engine of demolition of American democracy.   It exacerbated the racism already there through the movies and TV, it denigrated traditional American liberalism, it targeted specific individuals whenever they seemed capable of challenging the ever more fascistic Republicans on a national and often on a state level.  This is how far American democracy has degenerated since the Sullivan Decision of the Supreme Court in 1964 started us down this slide with an ill reasoned decision that could have merely told the New York Times to issue a correction and suggest a lower court could have told them to pay the court costs of the plaintiff in the lawsuit.  Instead, justices addicted to issuing landmarks issued the stupidest one given out by the Warren Court.  American fascism succeeded under a regime that empowers lies in the mass media.

Even if there are some Republicans horrified enough by the prospect of the baby-man tyrant issuing a phony emergency declaration to get his way, their leadership,  Mitch McConnell, the others in charge in the Senate and the House Republican caucus are as degenerate as Trump, as ruled by FOX and Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, as afraid that the fascist media will say mean things about them and get their devoted cult of listeners to vote them out of power.  Well, in office, their own cowardice and lack of character has disempowered them as much as it has the baby-man dictator.

Republicans looking for the destruction of the American Constitutional system as an off-ramp for the Trump shutdown instead of them voting to reopen government by a veto-proof margin shows that they already have given Trump that victory among Republicans.  If the Republican-corrupted courts go along with this, American democracy is dead, killed by the First Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court.  I don't know if this kind of thing would exactly match any of the predicted disasters of rule by court which the radical lawyer Louis Boudin predicted in the 1930s but it certainly fits as a disaster brought about by the idiocy of judicial governance.  If the Supreme Court goes along with this instead of stopping it,  a radical change in its status and its power will be necessary if democracy is ever to reemerge.  If the Warren Court brought disaster by folly, the Republican-fascists from the Federalist-fascist Society can be expected do worse by intent.

Dusan Bogdanovic - A Fairytale with Variations

Dusan Bogdanovic, guitar

Wheels and Walls

We now know what it would be like 

to have a mentally defective 

president.   

And yet the Constitutional system 

hasn't relieved us of him. 

Ibid

Ibid 

Blah, blah, blah - The End of Spam

During yesterday's sick day - the reason I didn't post - I went back and emptied out the Spam file of this blog, I don't know how many thousands of rejected attempted posts that was, I'd guess at least 10,000, most of them from self-identified lefties of one kind or another, but I did get it emptied.   I went back and read some of them and my posts some of them were attached to.  It was mildly interesting to see how often I've answered questions from right wingers and pseudo-lefties and how similar they are when you go to the bother of fact-checking and critiquing them.  The secular (you can almost always safely read that "atheist") pseudo-left has way more in common with the vulgar materialist based right than they'd ever want to know.  In fact I used to not know it, myself.

One of the things you will hear such atheists trumpet is that the internet has made the triumph of atheism inevitable.  Well, that's not my experience.  When I started out online I was a fairly wishy-washy, semi-agnostic lefty who had bought into the lines about the character of the atheist left which was a product of generations of secondary writers, journalists, opinion scribblers, academics, doing a massive cover-up on the actual character of Marxists and anarchists, of people like Bertrand Russell and the other materialist pantheon which, for me, reading them in more than the clipped and cleansed snatches available outside of a university library were what I knew of such thinking.   I mean, if you took the atheist saint Emma Goldman on the basis of what she was quoted as saying you would never guess she was an elitist snob who disdained the very working class she claimed to represent, she wasn't especially interested in womens' suffrage - she was a friggin' anarchist, she wasn't interested in anything which would improve womens' lives if it involved something as realistic as voting.  At bottom she was an amoralist who loved the exciting and degenerate violence of "propaganda of the deed," someone who read Nietzsche and loved him as much as any depraved proto-Nazi of her time did because he destroyed morality. She was, in a word, a self-indulgent asshole who never did a thing that benefited anyone but those who used her to discredit the real left.  As I found out, in her old age, in the 1930s, as she watched the rise of fascism and Nazism, she plaintively asked people if she'd wasted her life on anarchism, something that only a total idiot wouldn't have figured out about fifteen minutes into thinking about anarchism.   And she was far from the only one.

Virtually every atheist hero I had seen touted in the lefty media, in academic scribbling, especially when it got to the tertiary and more remote regions from the primary sources turned out to either be jerks or to have feet of clay or, in many an instance, not to have been the atheists or opponents of Christianity the atheist establishment claimed they were.  Lots of those "atheists" who atheist non-profits list and clip were not atheists at all and said they weren't.  Though you've got to read them to know that because atheists have no inhibition about lying about such things.

Having enormously more abundant primary documentation available in free, easily searched online form, from places like Archive.org, from Project Gutenberg, in often more truncated versions from Googlebooks, even that is more than you got from the filters of the atheist propaganda of the print era,  has been an enormous education in what the actual character of the atheist - so-called "secular" sector is.  I can directly attribute my early and now complete skepticism as to the reformative power of cultural secularism to reading the primary documentation available online.  That and having to face the complete and utter failure of the secular legal regime which the Supreme Court put into place during the 20th century has driven me way, way farther to the left than reading lefty propaganda ever did.  I mean, I don't think I'd have ever really realized that one modestly leftish bill which become law and improves lives is entirely more radical than the fevered dreams of the Nation, Progressive magazine, In These Times play lefties if I hadn't been so thoroughly disillusioned by reading the Great Thinkers of the officially secular left online and been so disgusted at what they really said and thought.

I have decided to stop sending stuff to the Spam file, it gets deleted.  I'm tired of answering the same lines over and over again.  They never learn, they don't want to.

Update:  Oooh, I just deleted one, it was fun.

I Don't Have Any Problem Answering "The Question Of Evil" When It's Raised By An Atheist

I did answer "the question of evil" in the form of raping children as it was raised to me by an anti-religious, anti-Christian atheist.  Christianity has the ability to define the rape of children as a serious evil - the words of Jesus in Luke 17:2 and Matthew 18:6 have been used, to my knowledge, to define the sexual - and other - abuse of children as a very serious sin, what I grew up knowing as a mortal sin.  The infamous, scandalous situation in the Catholic Church is a situation in which priests, bishops, cardinals, even Popes have either committed such sins or have for administrative exigencies and other, equally disgusting reasons, covered up the sins of priests and bishops, they are violating clearly stated, clearly set down moral stands that they, themselves have accepted and promulgated.   But at least those are contained within Catholicism.  The same can be said of virtually all churches calling themselves "Christian," those which don't forbid the sexual abuse of children are considered heretical sects.

Atheism not only contains nothing that can tell someone who wants to sexually abuse children why it is absolutely forbidden, its substance, in the matter of holdings of morality is only good for leading people to deny the existence of durable moral truths that are knowable to be moral truths.  There is no clear atheist holding that it is wrong to rape children or anyone none that an atheist would have the slightest problem in denying applied to them or even existed.  

I looked around the internet yesterday.  Though, apparently,  the Tumblr platform is engaged in an effort to expel the images of overt and announced child rape, sex tourists who film and want to share their vacation rape of Thai and other children, sadistic sexual abuse, fascistic bondage, overt white supremacy and misogyny and overt sexualized Nazism* but apparently those who want to post those photographic and video images and gifs have opened up new internet platforms for which children are raped or through the rapists who film their rape of children share those images with their colleagues in child rape.  It's still there, I looked, it is right there for law enforcement to go after, secular law enforcement - that is if the Courts haven't, tacitly, given their permission to it under those only virtues widely held by such secularists, "free speech - free press" which under American secular culture are the only virtues, against which all other holdings of morality must bend and break and fall and fold. 

Since so many of the great fans of that regime of "free speech absolutism", so many of the champions of the "civil liberties" industry, lawyers, scholars, journalists, scribblers who have been the exact and overtenablers of this situation have been atheists, where is the atheist opposition to all of that?   I've got pretty good hearing and I don't hear it, I looked for it and I didn't find it. 

Oddly, you never hear anything about that in the media, corporate or lefty.  The corporate media is all in on anything they can make money from, the scribbling class, largely, is mostly in favor of their privilege to scribble or print whatever they want to.  You never hear that much discussed on lefty blogs there isn't even much of it talked about among conservatives.  The cult of "The First Amendment" the slightly more genteel form of what the cult of "The Second Amendment" is has destroyed any effective suppression of the commercial packaging of child rape.  It has become just another "form of expression" under what was,  in fact, a framing constructed by atheists, many of whom have an expressed hostility to Christianity.  That was the background of what I wrote the other day.  We're so used to it, thanks in no small part to the self-interested media, that we don't notice its role in this. 

The question of evil, when raised by an atheist, couldn't possibly have an easier answer, atheism can't identify something as evil, Christianity can and does.  Christians who do evil aren't acting as Christians, they are in every context I can think of in violation of the Gospel and the teachings of the Second Testament when they do it.  THEY ARE VIOLATING ABSOLUTELY NO MORAL HOLDING OF ATHEISM, they are being perfectly proper atheists in doing it, they are being thoroughly bad Christians.   Atheism enables immorality, it contains no inhibitions to it.  Christianity may not be entirely successful in inhibiting immorality but it's more successful than atheism for that purpose. 

--------------------

I am convinced that unless Pope Francis ends priestly celibacy the sexual abuse scandal and the conditions that caused it will not end.  Having enough priests to remove the temptation of retaining those who should be kicked out and referred for prosecution because it would decimate the number of those ordained is one of the reasons bishops and cardinals made what was terrible so much worse.  If he doesn't do that this spring, I don't think the terrible scandal will end and the Catholic Church's credibility will not be rebuilt. 

The fascist establishment within the Catholic Church is what is keeping that from happening, the establishment which is comprised of everything from actual fascists, billionaires and other, less prosperous gangsters,  neo-medievalist lovers of the Latin liturgy, lunatic romantics for French and other monarchies of the remote past and others of marginal sanity.   

The question for Pope Francis and others who want to stop the sexual abuse that lies at the bottom of the scandal is if they will, finally,  take Luke and Matthew as being more serious than avoiding the schism that the billionaire gangsters will finance and which has figures in the right wing of the College of Cardinals and among bishops who already openly oppose Pope Francis.  I don't think that schism is avoidable, it's only a question of whether those who have created the conditions that led to this scandal go or the ones who are scandalized by it leave.  Taking into account the part that the celibate priesthood has played in the creation of the scandal is unavoidable in preventing it.  That's more a question of numbers than it is in even men of loose morals and mental problems being those willing to become priests.  

*  It's in no way astonishing that porn promotes those, it is all about the oppression of women, children, and men who are presented as objects for the use of, in almost every single case, men who are both able and willing to harm and destroy them.   I think the legalistic formula that makes something they can call "consent" the one and only moral condition that makes all of that OK is part of the same effort that has given permission to child rapists to show the images of raping children that they love.  We are no better than the degenerate Romans and others who did the exact same thing, the thing that was mostly suppressed when Christianity rose in Europe, though that force in patriarchal culture has always been, at best, suppressed.  

In Fairness To Seth

I should have pointed out on that Seth Myers video I posted this morning, at about 7:38, after he posts Trump calling minority leader Kevin McCarthy "Steve" Seth says:

Now, now.  In fairness to Trump, if you forget an old white guy's name you've got a decent chance if you throw out a "Steve". 


Yeah, I'd agree with that. 

I've Answered "The Question Of Evil" Over And Over Again. Atheism Contains No Way To Identify Something As Evil

“. . . [Nietzsche] had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was--above all, for its devotion to an ethics of compassion--rather than allow himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity’s history had been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual neurosis. He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form, such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy.”

David Bentley Hart

Last year, while I was going through the great Swiss theologian Hans Küng's book Does God Exist for the first time* I was tempted to do a long series on only the very long 4th section of the book in which he discussed the emergence of romantic era philosophy, itself a development out of "enlightenment" thinking, into its farthest logical consequences in Nietzsche's nihilism, but it would have been impossible to do Küng's comprehensive brilliance justice in even a series of blog posts.  There are also, especially for an English language audience, too many secondary figures in Continental, especially German thought of the time to make sense of much of it.  I've hardly gone through it to the extent of even adequate familiarity.   I doubt I will in my lifetime.

The encounters in the long essay, of the young Nietzsche with a range of thinkers,  Schopenhauer, F. A. Lange, David Friedrich Strauss, Darwin, Haeckel, etc. his close friendship with Wagner which was smashed definitively when Wagner wrote Parsifal - Nietzsche was scandalized by its quite medieval Christian subject matter - and his subsequent push past all of it to admit the logical result of atheism and materialism documenting what David Bentley Hart wrote more than two decades later.

And Nietzsche didn't just stop with that logical conclusion in moral nihilism that is inevitable when atheism is the basis of thinking, he admitted that without the moral content which is contained in the Christianity (and other religion) things won't stand at an innocuous amorality, it will become might makes right, a Hobbesian struggle of all against all** in which the strongest and most unrestrained will, in fact, rise to the top where the most able of them will impose their desires and will on those they can.  Hobbes, Mandeville, . . . many other thinkers in the line of those who reject religion, who reject Christianity and who, for whatever reason, bring that to a state of logical integrity will end up accepting, if not joyously approving the violent, aristocratic enslavement of most people by those who can and will do that.  Though I think those who praise Nietzsche for his rejection of Strauss's style of bourgeois rejection of the results of their atheism overlook that he, himself, couldn't face the inevitable result of his own nihilism.  He imagined Supermen who would have lives of art appreciation along with their amoral ruthlessness.  That was a delusion, I don't think that Nietzsche was enough of an observer of art that he realized that what would degenerate wouldn't stop at morality and intellectual distinction, even science but would also dissolve art into a market-driven drivel which the Superman class he correctly predicted would rule the world would be indifferent to except on a basis of fashion.

Donald Trump,  Vladimir Putin, other epic vulgarians of the ruthless billionaire oligarchy are what comes from the rejection of God, of The Gospel, of The Law, of the Prophets and their equivalent in other religious traditions.  Trump Tower, Putin's pleasure palace, in which, perhaps, a few pieces of art might collect as status symbols for the vulgarian Supermen is the real result of nihilism.

To answer the claim, Atheism dissolves everything, including all intellectual holdings, including all holdings of morality, it replaces only what someone figures they can't get away with in its place.  And, so often, especially when there is a difference in power between two people, there isn't any prospect of there being a consequence for the powerful***.  It can't even, in the end, come up with a holding that raping children is wrong.   In Europe it took Christianity to introduce the idea that the sexual enslavement of children was wrong.  It was ubiquitous before then.
Any atheist who opposes the rape of children has to leave atheism to hold that moral stand.  It is intrinsic to Judaism and Christianity.

*  The more comprehensive habits of German language scholarship ensures that if you've read one of his books only once, you haven't really read it.

** That Nietzsche had Hobbes and other thinkers from earlier centuries to support that point shows that the rejection of religion, especially in the context of European-Western thinking, Christianity, the pattern is for violent, ruthless amorality to rise as a tacitly stated virtue seems irresistible.  It is only by those who refuse to carry things to their logical conclusion that that is deniable.


***  Look how long it took only one of Woody Allen's teenage girlfriends in the 1970s to drop a dime on him.

Hate Mail

Same answer as yesterday.

If We Don't Wake Up To One Baby-Man Rule Tomorrow Don't Believe The PR BS That "The System Worked"

OK, it's funny, it's absurd.  But now that we've had our laugh consider how dangerous this is.

Trump started out as a corrupt, decadent, mentally deficient, lazy, fraudulent spoiled rich brat who was made president by an amoral Republican party that started out opposing him but as soon as the goons who vote Republican gave him the nomination, any who remained in the Republican Party genuflected to him - NEEDLESS TO SAY, THE AMERICAN FREE PRESS GENUFLECTED, THEY ALWAYS DO WHEN IT'S A REPUBLICAN -  and the entire Republican controlled Senate and House and, it's increasingly obvious, the Republican controlled Supreme Court are not doing a thing to effectively oppose his insanity.  And, they should never be allowed to distance themselves from their role in this, the mass media that created Donald Trump as a public figure,  the New York City media that used him for entertainment value, the publishing industry that capitalized off of his media celebrity to present him, fraudulently, as a business genius, and as a strong and fascistic tycoon who expressed his genius by firing people - all according to script.

This isn't funny.  The Trump regime has been a full evaluation of mental competence, not only for Trump and the Republican Party but for the United States.  The good news on that is that a majority of Americans didn't vote for Trump, he didn't win the popular vote and his support has never approached fifty-percent in any polls except the ones which are overt Republican propaganda operations anyway.  The bad news is that even that fact, under the United States Constitution has not been enough to remove Donald Trump and the criminals in his regime from office.  There is no evidence that the Constitution, the law, the force of democratic elections are going to remove him and his goon squad from office.  If you want one of the bigger evidences of how decadent modern culture is from within that criminal gang,  Ben Carson is still installed at HUD.*

If, in the coming days, you hear some idiot in the DC-NYC-Atlanta TV-radio media congratulate us on "the system working" to remove this danger, you will know that that's just another symptom of how seriously dangerous things are because the media telling those kinds of soothing lies are a huge part of why we are in such trouble and why even if all of them were removed, it's going to happen again.  We saw how the system imposing Bush II on us did not right things to the extent that it kept us from having the far worse Trump regime imposed on us a mere eight years after the implosion of 2008.  It didn't keep us from having the Bush II regime imposed on us by the corrupt Supreme Court fiat in 2000.  This system, the US Constitution and the culture of our media are a continuing danger to us.   The media keeps us from really addressing those dangers, it keeps us from really avoiding a downward plummet, one which we have been on since Nixon was elected in 1968.   So many institutions are corrupted by it, by the culture of decadence and cynicism that even if we temporarily avoid the worst under Trump, it's just a matter of time before at least as bad results from it.  I mean, did anyone really believe we could get to this point the day after the election of 2008?  Did you ever really believe you would arrive at this day in which we are wondering if Trump is about to declare, in effect, rule by presidential decree AND WE ARE NOT CERTAIN IF THE SUPREME COURT WILL STOP HIM?  AND WE ARE CERTAIN THAT THE REPUBLICAN SENATE WONT? 


*  It's terrifying that someone with his level of mental debility and sluggishness was once allowed to perform surgery on people.  I don't think, after Dr. Carson's public life that "It's not brain surgery" will ever have the same meaning.  I mean, if he could do it?

Joe Biden Running For President Would Be A Disaster

For all of the reasons that the estimable Charles Pierce gives, Joe Biden running for president in 2020 is a terrible idea.  He has, twice, been proven to be a terrible presidential candidate, is gaff prone, not mentioned by Pierce was one of the stupidest things I've ever known a Democratic candidate to do, cribbing a speech from Neil Kinnock,  head of the British Labour Party at the time, and his record in, especially the Senate was even worse.

Joe Biden is polling as the most popular possible Democratic candidate right now because he was Barack Obama's Vice President but we've run vice presidents before,  Hubert Humprey,  Fritz Mondale, Al Gore.  All of whom benefitted from name recognition but which didn't result in them becoming president.  I will admit that in the case of Gore, he had it stolen from him but that's neither here nor there.

Charles Pierce is also right that, though Biden is very popular with the Sunday Talk Show, 24-7 babblers and the money guys, he is greatly past his sell-by date with the Democratic Party which just injected quarts and quarts of new blood into the party.  If you'll forgive me getting Biblical,  new wine in old skins is a guaranteed disaster, we have that on the highest of authority. 

Pierce notes that though Hillary Clinton* has had more success as a presidential candidate, twice, than Biden did, she's being told to retire as Biden is being promoted.  That he's an old white man while she's a younger old white woman is certainly relevant to why that is.

I don't want to see any of the candidates over 70 run, though they are in my own age cohort.  And I don't just mean the ones who, like Sanders, is only a Democrat when it suits his purpose.  Our time in THAT office has passed, I'm hoping one of the results of the Trump disaster will be that it turns off the voters on geezers as president.  While a rare few can hold major office in the legislative branch such as Nancy Pelosi, I've watched Joe Biden for his entire career in public office, on his best stretch of it, he was no Nancy Pelosi.   His most prominent leadership role was when he presided over the Senate Judiciary Committee and it was awful to behold.  Pierce points out that he was the one who failed to support Anita Hill and the other woman who was prepared to testify that Clarence Thomas was a serial sexual harrasser.  Biden chickened out then, he would never stand up to Republicans and the Republican media.  He would be the worst of Bill Clinton without his campaign skills.  If there's another thing I don't want it's another weak man as a Democratic President.

*  Sorry about posting this hours ago without specifying who I was talking about here.  Editing, sometimes it works.

Chuck Hoskin jr. Owes Elizabeth Warren An Apology

Since a comment was posted here which contains an often told and recent lie about Elizabeth Warren, that she claimed membership in the Cherokee Nation, a lie aided by Chuck Hoskins jr. misrepresenting what she has said, here is what she has actually said about that.

"I won't sit quietly for [President Donald Trump's] racism, so I took a test,  But DNA & family history has nothing to do with tribal affiliation or citizenship, which is determined only—only—by Tribal Nations. I respect the distinction, & don't list myself as Native in the Senate."

The opportunistic campaign of using racism and misogyny against Elizabeth Warren, as it would any Democratic Woman or man they can mount this kind of campaign against is obviously an organized and planned strategy among Republicans and their legions of trolls online and their water carriers in the media.  It certainly doesn't help when people like Chuck Hoskin misrepresented what she said in a way that aids that effort.  Since he's a Democratic politician as well as a politician within one branch of the Cherokees, he should repair the damage that his statement has done.  I don't know about the internal politics of the entity he represents but his misstatement is hardly the last word on that subject.

Warren was clearly trying to put the question of her Native American heritage to rest, but in doing so, she may have opened up new lines of attack that Trump and other critics can use. The president and Republicans have focused much more on Warren’s claims of Native American heritage than on her sweeping policy proposals to clean up corruption in Washington, lower the cost of housing, and hold corporations more accountable.

By taking the test, Warren angered at least one prominent tribe. Rather than settling the speculation by responding to Trump’s challenge, she prompted an entirely new argument about whether she should have taken the test at all, and opened up fears that she had hobbled her presidential campaign before it even got off the ground.

The National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center — an organization raising awareness about violence toward Native American women and families, and the charity Warren requested Trump donate $1 million to as part of his bet about her DNA test — came to the senator’s defense this fall.

“We appreciate Senator Warren’s push to bring awareness to violence against American Indian and Alaska Native women and families, who all too often are invisible to most Americans,” the center said in a statement. “As marginalized communities, we often struggle to bring tribal interests to the center of the debate.”

Also voicing support for Warren’s decision was the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians — one of three federally recognized Cherokee tribes (the Cherokee Nation is another).

“Senator Elizabeth Warren does not claim to be a citizen of any tribal nation, and she is not a citizen of the Eastern Band,” said Eastern Band Principal Chief Richard Sneed in a statement to Business Insider. “Like many other Americans, she has a family story of Cherokee and Delaware ancestry and evidence of Native ancestry.”

Sneed said he believes Warren has shown respect for Cherokee tribal sovereignty, and “has not used her family story or evidence of Native ancestry to gain employment or other advantage.”

Chuck Hoskin  jr. should both correct the record and act to mitigate the use he is to Republicans attacking Elizabeth Warren.   As to whether or not anyone should take a DNA test, IT'S HER DNA, SHE'S GOT EVERY RIGHT TO HAVE IT TESTED IF SHE WANTS TO.  She's got as much right to use it to find evidence to confirm her families oral history as anyone does to confirm their own family history.  She hasn't applied to become a member of any sovereign nation and Hoskin's tacit claim that she had has been a big help to the racists who are actively attacking the rights of all Native American nations and groups.  Hoskin is a politician, he should understand what he did.  If he doesn't he should find out because it was stupid and counterproductive. 

I have not quoted what Hoskin said because I will not further such false "memes" by repeating them.  

Hate Mail

No further comment.

The Danger To Evolutionary Science And All Of Us From The Pseudo-Scientific Use Of The Word "Evolution"

I have an note to myself on my desk which I found about a week back.  It's undated but I clean off my desk once a month so I know it was from December.  It's a reminder that I should research examples of casual dropping of the word "evolution" in the media, as in the phrase "evolution made" something or "the reason for that is 'evolution' " and trying to find out if there is any, even the slightest evidence in rigorous science that the said something has been traced to evidence of evolution having a hand in producing it.  I strongly suspect it was a note I wrote to myself after hearing NPR's Shankar Vedantam - the "Hidden Brain" guy who, typically of those who spout off pseudo-scientifically about minds and behavior, will use the word "evolution" as a sort of magic charm to come up with a simulation of an explanation when not only is there no explanation for what they're expounding on, quite often the scientific evidence for the existence of some of the phenomena being so "explained" is non-existent and even for those that exist, my guess is that there is no valid scientific evidence that explains their existence within evolution.  That is if you take the claimed methods of science seriously, something which, alas, many who teach "science" and even science at major universities don't seem to.

I mentioned that to one of my relatives, someone who had a career and an education in biology - for the record Vedantam, typical of so many American "science reporters" has a minimal education in science, he's got an electronics engineering degree and a masters in "journalism".   My relative became notably uneasy when I criticized the misuse of the word "evolution" in contexts in which there is no science to support the contention.   He made a joke that I sounded like a "flat-earther" which is interesting in that it would seem to be the response any such questioning of even the most outlandish use of the word "evolution" as a materialist-secularist magic charm.   He knows that I believe in evolution, we've talked about evolutionary topics often enough, it was just my criticism of the abuse of the word by pseudo-scientists of the behavioral kind that gave him the willies.
Lost in that was the fact that I was trying to uphold the integrity of science against the popularization of words in ways that damaged their meaning. 

It was reading a criticism of Jordan Peterson's idiotic diet advice - literally an all beef diet, with a little salt, something he got from his huckster daughter who charges people $120 an hour as an expert consultant*, that reminded me that I was going to research this use of the word "evolution" to see just how much damage had been done to its scientific integrity by its greatest fans. 

It was also being reminded that Jordan Peterson is considered an expert in "evolutionary psychology" which I think is just neo-eugenics repackaged to promote racism and sexism and class inequality since the last quarter of the last century.   Being someone who took more notice than many at how E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology morphed rather fast into "evolutionary psychology" mostly, from what I saw, on the basis of escaping the criticisms of Wilson's work and avoiding most of the actual business of observation in nature for making up stories,  I think they called their bull-shit stream of psychology "evolutionary" in order to take advantage of the magical character that word has with the college credentialed crowd.  Lots of "evolution" even going back to the earliest years consists of such story telling, honest evolutionary biologists will admit that, though I think it's generally not evolution that they're making the stories up about but natural selection, which is not the same thing.

Remember to ask yourself, the next time you hear someone like Vedantham explain something as a product of "evolution" whether or not there is the slightest evidence in scientific observation that that is "where it came from".  And while you're at it, take a hard look at any such "science" used to explain it or even to prove the phenomena they're explaining exists.   "Science" accepted on the same basis as the kind of lore that the Peterson-meathead diet is based in is not science.  Scientists should be the first ones to protect the integrity of their field, but they almost never will.

*Ms Peterson is offering consultations for $120 an hour. If that seems expensive, well, simply read the testimonials she has collected to assure you that it is money well spent. Do not stop to consider if the plural of anecdote is evidence.

Meeting criticism of her lack of qualifications, Ms Peterson says, “I’m not going to go to a school run by either the pharmaceutical companies or the food companies to learn about how eating grain is healthy.” Contemporary nutritional science is not, of course, infallible or immutable, but unlike Peterson’s beef and vodka diet, it has been arrived at over many decades through longitudinal and quantitative studies. There are schisms within the discourse – for example, over the risks of saturated fat. But such schisms are best addressed through systematic reviews of research and further peer-reviewed investigation.

Ms Peterson’s blog cherrypicks studies to support her beliefs, while treating robust scientific literature and consensus on nutrition with the kind of scorn for the scientific method that I ordinarily associate with anti-vaxxers, raw-food-cures-cancer advocates, or the eminently disturbing bleach enemas for autistic children crowd.

While I'd agree with Rupert Sheldrake that nutrition is not our most successful branch of biology, it's a lot better than this kind of bull shit which daddy Peterson is peddling.  I wonder if she got her notions of science from him.

Making Democrats, Democratic Women, Democratic Women of Color Responsible For Trump's Tantrum And Mitch's Malfeasance

As I'm typing this I am listening to NPR's Steve Inskeep doing a soft-hit interview with Democratic strategist Margie Omero.    He's doing the typical media thing of turning monumental irresponsibility of Republicans,  Trump, Mitch McConnell in the shut down into a Democratic problem, even though Democrats in the only part of government they control, half of the legislative, have already voted, repeatedly to reopen the government.  He's also bringing up Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the focus of a right-wing hate campaign of the kind that they have mounted against Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren.   Now they are including Rashida Talib whose one profane statement will, certainly be talked about for as long as she's before the public and probably after. 

Have I mentioned that NPR should be fuck off and die?

The corporate media had a problem while Democrats were entirely out of power, how to make them responsible for the inability of Republicans to do anything responsible and reasonable?   Now that they have one house of Congress under the control of Democrats, better, with Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, they can go back to their old and well practiced habit of making Democrats and, especially Democratic Women, and best of all, Democratic Women of Color responsible for the disgusting and obscene behavior of old, white, racist Republican men who hold control in the rest of the government. 

The idiots on the alleged left part of the "free speech - free press" industry have always had it wrong, the American media, even the "left" of it is not liberal, not in the real meaning of the word in the United States, it is, left to right, in the hands of people who oppose egalitarian democracy, either overtly or by force of their content, Steve Inskeep is typical though hardly isolated in doing that.  It is the effect of just about everything they do.  As I've pointed out time after time, the secular-leftist media does the same thing from another direction. 

The American media, with very few exceptions, is not the friend of egalitarian democracy.  It should have its ability to lie and distort taken from it by making its privileges contingent on telling the truth instead of lying and distorting.  NPR should fuck off and die.

Reges Tharsis - For Epiphany

The kings of Tharsis and the islands shall offer presents: the kings of the Arabians and of Saba shall bring gifts. And all the people of the Earth will serve him.

William Byrd

Pomerium 

Alexander Blachley, conductor

Gaston Litaize

You might hear the Gregorian Melody in Litaize's organ piece.

Shove Jordan Peterson Back Over The Canadian Border And Seal It Against Him

Listening to this Canadian crackpot talk about rape is one of the most incredibly bizarre things I've heard yet this year. 

There are a few other professional fields where someone could get away with being as fricken loony as Jordan Peterson is and no one would consider firing him except psychology.   That such a nutcase and intellectual phony holds a faculty position at a major North American university shows that the entire field is bullshit.  It should be as big a scandal as when the idiots in evo-psy all of a sudden noticed that the flaming anti-semite Kevin Macdonald was publishing science that wouldn't have been out of place in Germany in the late 1930s but, of course, it being psychology it isn't. 

Democrats Have To Defeat Misogynistic Republican Vilification Campaigns Even When "Democrats" Mount Them

The use of racism by the scumbag-Republican Matt Gaetz, (scumbag-Republican FL) against Elizabeth Warren is just the latest in what is an obvious and organized effort by Republican-fascists to use misogyny and racism against potential Democratic presidential nominees.   Since the likes of Gaetz swim in the bottom regions of the cesspool that is the Republican Party under Trumpism - they're all pretty much bottom feeders - it is mainstream Republican politics when he does it.

This has been such a long standing and obvious effort that it is certain planned and planned to become effective.  A big part of that effectiveness is the American media which can be counted on to not only carry Republican-fascist use of racism and misogyny, they will adopt it as part of their "people are saying" narration.  The effect of that isn't planned to be on rational people who are informed, it is planned to have an effect on an effective margin of voters who are not informed and will vote on their ill-informed emotions, the kind who knew  they didn't like Hillary Clinton but, when asked, couldn't tell you why.   I can tell them why, the American media from the New York Times, NPR, The Nation, In These Times, . . . . and all the way down to the fascist and neo-Nazi sewer was telling them for three decades to not like her.

The American "free press" is a willing participant in these things and it will be as the Republican-fascists attack Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and any other Democratic woman they can mount an attack on.   And the lefty media participates in that as much as any other.

The misogyny on the lefty blogs and websites in the nominations during 2008 was more than matched by that during the nominations of 2016, it is ongoing on comment threads of lefty media such as Majority Report.   We now know some of it was rampant in the Sanders campaign,  Bernie Sanders has admitted that and apologized for it, though at the time it was certainly known within the upper reaches of his staff I suspect including his wife and campaign manager,  so I can't believe he didn't know about it at the time.

American media doesn't deal in developed ideas, it peddles labels, so we need an effective term for this Republican-fascist tactic of vague vilification.  Something specific to it.  I'm not good with making up such terms but if it's going to be fought one will have to be used.  Democrats have to study and plan an effective series of strategies that will expose that for what it is and they will have to adopt a solid line of opposition to that practice.  Given the non-Democrat Sanders campaign and its fan boys and gals in 2016 and what I think was probably a far less intrinsic part of Obama's 2008 campaign, the first thing to do is to make opposing misogyny and racism a requirement of ALL of those who are trying to run a campaign against Democratic women, even during the nominations process.   If we can't eliminate it among our own campaigns how can we hope to defeat the Republican-fascists doing it?

NOTE:  Democrats should insist that the DNC adopt a rule that no one who has not been a registered Democrat for at least two presidential cycles is eligible for the Democratic nomination for president.   There is no reason for the Democratic Party to remain vulnerable to the likes of Bernie Sanders or, in the upcoming election, Michael Bloomberg who didn't see fit to BE DEMOCRATS except when they figure they can benefit from declaring they are, temporarily, Democrats.