Hot Saturday Night Radio Drama - Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe - Cordially Invited To Meet Death

Cordially Invited To Meet Death 

Hot as hell.  Really busy in the garden today harvest, next week I expect to be making pickles and putting up tomato sauce.  So I haven't had much time to look for new radio dramas.   

I figure it's always time to listen to one of these excellent CBC adaptations of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe made in 1982.  As long as you don't re listen too often. 

Mavor Moore, Nero Wolfe

Don Francks, Archie Goodwin

Cec Linder, Inspector Cramer 

Frank Perry, Fritz

Barbara Hamilton, Beth Huddleston

Terry Tweed, Janet Nichols

Mim Daragon, Maryella Tims

Ken James, Daniel Huddleston

Tom Harvey,  Dr. Brady

Allan Portus, Larry Huddleston

The Trump-Barr storm troopers should be disbanded, investigated, when appropriate they should be prosecuted and imprisoned.  So should anyone who had authority over them right up to Barr and Trump.  This is blatant fascism in America.  

Seven Myths about Religion: Rupert Sheldrake and Jonas Atlas

Following His Hypocritical Oath - Yeah, That Sounds About Right For A FOX-Forbes Expert

Can anyone tell me where I can verify this claim made in an Amazon review of  a screed by FOX, NY Post, Forbes "medical expert" Dr. Marc Siegel, it was on Amazon, reviewing a book he wrote in 2006 pooh-poohing the possibility of what we're living through right now ever happening, even as the piece of crap with two letters after his name is doing his act and being cited by the Commander In Crap. 

1.0 out of 5 stars hypocrite
Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2009
This man claimed that the people who have been following this and other flus were fear mongers. This week while his child was at a camp that cost 10,000 dollars a child there was a outbreak of the H1N1. He panicked and went against the CDC's advice and prescribed tamiflu for all 350 campers and staff. He had to justify to the CDC why he did it. Not all the children were sick, not even his own child. Just the fact that they might have been exposed sent him into a panic. Instead of using that tamiflu for people that were really ill, it went to a bunch of rich kids. Marc Siegel is the poster child for "do as I say, not as I do".

Karen, Please Just Wear A Mask

If the common superstition that comedy was a powerful way to make change were true, we'd have won a long time ago.  But it is very funny and funny is good. 

Believing In Things We Like When We Like Where That Leads

Had to turn off the comments again, the porn bot came back worse than before when I tried to put them up.  I'll turn them on again in about a week to see if that works.   I will try word verification if that doesn't work or something else.  Must keep up with my hate mail. 

Before I turned it off I found a piece of snark from an atheist jerk who recited two common atheist snarks, a. I only believed in God because I liked the idea and b. that I should believe in atheism because "science gave you the computer you use." In effect, the argument is that science gives us things we want, science gives us things we like, it makes life easier and more fun. 

So, he's arguing that I should be an atheist because the idiot equates atheism with science and science with engineering and engineering was his cargo-cult mentality, perhaps ignorant of the fact that every major figure in the founding of modern science was not only a religious believer, they were professed Christians, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, etc. and that many eminent scientists up to and including the present time have been Christians, believing Jews, Muslims, etc.   

But even more so, he's saying I should believe in atheism for the same reason he says I shouldn't believe in God, because it works to give me things I like.  

Which is actually the level of intellectual discourse which is held to be perfectly respectable when the end is atheism and is held to be illegitimate when the end is God.   

I've gone over other things that you can logically get with atheism, in the materialism and the scientism which completes the intellectual trinity that almost all of modern atheism fully believes in, things like a total absence of significance to our minds, our thoughts, the near impossibility of our materially based minds stumbling blindly on something like the truth - as I noted recently, the current coolest physicist on Youtube and religious rejecter, Sabine Hossenfelder, pointed out that science cannot give us either the truth of a view of "reality".   

And it certainly can't produce a morality which would make believing in God for the most base of childish desires any more wrong than rejecting God for the most rigorous of intellectual arguments.   If you want arguments against believing in a convenient, selfishly self-interested, facile and selfishly believed in God, you will probably find about your most secure bases for that in the in the Bible.  Over and over again, when the Children of Israel figure they've got God all figured out, on their side in worldly matters, God makes it clear that God is not figured out or on anyone's side in particular.  

And the same is certainly true of the Christian part of it in which Jesus, presented as closest to God of all certainly didn't get a very easy time of it.  It's interesting in Acts and the Epistles,  none of the earliest believers in God as explained by Jesus seems to have tried to rig things to get rich and have a good life with all the available conveniences.   

There are far more adult and intellectually honest reasons to believe in God and to believe in Christianity - as well as other human articulations of the experience of belief than the utilitarian, desire-based ones.  Though that isn't to say those are invalid of even disreputable.   I think if we could go back and understand and comprehend why any of us believes anything, from the testimony of our own eyes and ears, to the abstraction of grouping things and ownership that are the presumable origins of mathematics, to further analyses of those experiences and abstraction THE VERY SUBSTANCE OF SCIENCE AND THE BASIS FOR ITS METHOD they all started in wanting to believe all of it.  To denigrate that is, very possibly, I'd say likely, to denigrate the origins of science as well as religious belief.  Only it's honestly admitted when it's religion and it's denied when it's science. 

There is another bit of atheist double speak that says religion is a pathological entity which causes us to fear and be anxious for our welfare, that, especially, Christianity is a "death cult" a "cult of eternal pain," "dismal" "a horrible alternative to those lovely pagan religions it unfairly suppressed and ended"*  Which is certainly the opposite of the idea that we believe in it because we like it.  There are certainly things in scripture I don't like, not least of all is the mainstream understanding regarding things such as slavery, the assigned roles of women, adult, consenting same-sex, sex (as understood by straight people) and things like capital punishments.  

Science as given in the materialist, atheist imagination and claims, on the other hand, telling us that when we die we rot in the ground, are no more, that our loved ones who die just rot, that there is no good or evil, that our minds and lives are no more significant than iron oxidizing or rocks falling and bumping into each other, the whole range of terrible Darwinian cruelties - that to accept these terrors and horrors is a virtuous and manly (it's always presented as manly) thing to face bravely, that dark and awful view of reality is considered admirable. 

I certainly didn't like the doctrine of eternal damnation as taught by the pre-Vatican II Catholicism I first experienced, especially in the most pathological versions of that as are found in Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin and their line.   I now know that that last one is most likely based in quite bad Latin translations from the Greek and the line of the transmission of those malicious mutations in Western academic theology and doctrine - Calvin was able to read Greek, his ability to read the Greek words that indicate that punishment is meant to reconcile sinners by giving up their sin even as he was so emotionally attached to the misreading that he gave it its most terrible claims.  As David Bentley Hart said, if you believe that the God of Calvinist predestinarianism is the one taught by Jesus, disbelieving it is totally justifiable. 

And in that scheme of predestinarian belief, no one in this life could be sure that ulitmately cruel, evil god had not for no other reason than god willed it, decided a mostly good person was bound for eternal suffering.   

There was every reason for someone to reject that on the basis that they didn't like it, and many a religion hater did, in fact, come from that background.  Which, it is odd, then becomes a virtue, of believing what you want to believe, to believe in no-god than in that God taught to you in your Calvinist or Jansenist, etc. childhood.  Which, if the believer merely opted for a belief in God as really presented in the Scriptures without the late-classical fall-of-empire gloom and its mutation in the Western medieval period, a God of universal reconciliation and salvation - the other predestination to salvation - BECAUSE YOU LIKE THAT VIEW OF REALITY, that what is a virtuous action for the atheist is presented as an unforgivable weakness and vice when the result is a belief in a good God. 

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Paul, the best documented of that generation, certainly doesn't seem to have led the rest of his life to that end.  He must have often felt ill at ease as a Pharisee, one zealous for The Law, as he had to shed his most cherished habits and ways that were comfortable to him, a comfort that, according to Acts, led him before his conversion to kill and oppress the members of this new movement of Jews who he clearly felt enraged by.   Traces of that remain in his authentic letters which show that he was deeply uneasy about sexual and gender roles - and I don't think it was entirely for the important reason to keep the distinction between his movement and the ubiquitous pagan cultures they lived in and the terrible evils of things like the sexual abuse of children and women and slaves that was commonly practiced in them.  Though I certainly think Paul would have had that motive as it is explicitly implied throughout the entire Scripture and the Gospel. 

I think Paul is a far more fascinating figure than I'd ever realized before because he is so brilliant a thinker and so passionate and so honest in revealing the interaction between deep religious experience and our oh-so-human minds and lives. Just when you find him completely spot on, he says something that clashes with your own comfortable thinking.   He reminds me of Joe Biden in that ability to suddenly do that.  The key to my noticing that was in that talk by Elizabeth A. Johnson in which she talked about feminist hermenutics specifically noting that even as Paul said that women should be silent in the church (which would have been home churches) HE was the one who documented women leaders in the movement, very likely as presiders at what were developing into liturgy-euchariestic meals, his own trusted colleagues in ministry who he asked other, non-Pauline communities to accept as speaking on his behalf, answering their questions about his very letters that are what we now base our understanding of his ministry in.  If he could do both - he must have realized the inconsistency, he was too smart not to have - he certainly could have other kinds of short-comings and discrepancies in his thought.  As Johnson pointed out when he told the Women of Corinth to keep silent in church, a. he must have known they were not keeping silent or he wouldn't have bothered to mention it, b. we don't know what the Women of Corinth, so instructed, did.   It's quite possible they, probably some of them members of the movement before Paul was, ignored that. When Paul sent his letters, they were just letters.  They didn't become Scripture till after that. 

*  Atheists mostly having a pretty stupid, ahistorical, undocumented and clearly wrong view of the dismal, pessimistic, human-sacrificing, etc. classical pagan religions, a product of Renaissance and later romanticism, not in a real understanding of what those slave-based societies were like.  Pagan societies were no bed of roses, no matter how those renaissance artists painted it, how those 18th and 19th century meat-heads romanticized it as a tool to attack Christianity which they hated for its inconvenient egalitarianism that deprived them of enjoying the things their money and social position, Trumplike, made them feel entitled to. 

GEE, ANTHONY FAUCI! - A Randy Rainbow Song Parody

"Dear Donald, you're satanic
You should have stayed in Queens,"

I loved Randy before, after that line I love him five times as much. 

Update:  I have no idea how that link got changed, weird things going on in Blogger this week.  I've changed it back to Randy's channel. 

On The Passing of Michael Brooks

Michael Brooks is someone who could do everything from thrill me when I agreed with him to enrage me when I thought his Bernie or Buster stuff earlier this year was the final straw.   And he could make me laugh out loud, his Jordan Peterson and other imitations were quite spot on and very funny.  

He died yesterday of a "sudden medical condition" at the age of 37.   37 is too  young to die.   I'm very sorry that I was feeling on the outs with him since the spring, though I would occasionally listen to him on Youtube.   I wish he'd lived.  It's particularly sad for an old man to see young people die before them.  It's something you see too often by the time you're my age.  Now I'll never get to hear what he says when Kissinger kicks the bucket. 

At least I suspect he was pleasantly surprised to find that his materialism was wrong.   I hope he enjoys the afterlife. 

We Have To Force The Changes That Will Protect Democracy Or We Will See Another Trump Within Twenty Years

After Trump, if extensive and serious changes are not made to to the Constitution banning his full range of crimes, up to and including the deployment of secret police without any known authority snatching people off of the street in the style of dictators around the world, the next Trump will repeat it and go farther.  

When the American media, when lawyers, when politicians use the phrase "Constitutional crisis" they mean some decorous lawyerly thing that will be  solved by reinstituting the habits of the past.   That is entirely dangerous lazy and stupid nonsense,  mere restoration to the past will only get us back to what produced Trump, it guarantees that they'll do it again, learing how to do it more effectively through the Trump years.  We have no choice but to tear out what made Trump's corrupt election possible and, more so, what has kept the criminal Trump regime in place for four years.   The Trump regime exposes every gaping flaw in the Constitution, flaws that are golden opportunities for the very same people who put him in power to do it again and again as long as those mechanisms are in place. 

That Trump is still in office with the huge range of crimes he is known to have committed, even what should be called "presidential treason" of acting as the agent of a foreign dictator is all the proof a rational person would need that our Constitution's long-standing flaws and dangers have been made operational by intent, with the help of lawyers and judges and alleged law-men and nothing short of drastic change to the Constitution as well as host of new laws will crush this danger from ever being resorted to by a future criminal, Republican-fascist president. 

It is also vitally necessary that the legal movements that promote actual fascism through a reading of the obviously dangerously written presidential powers sections of the Constitution be fully exposed as the fascist movement that it so obviously is.  That extends from the sewers of billionaire funded organizations and "societies" around Washington to the legal faculties that have hatched propaganda for the effort of making the United States a nation of one-man rule, not laws. 

The Trumpstapo, Barrstapo agents among "Homeland Security" the Federal  Marshals,  etc. have to be exposed and named and, when possible prosecuted.  They must not only be fired, the ones who have abducted people from the street,beaten and teargassed have to be prosecuted and imprisoned with a lifetime ban on any police work and they should have long periods of supervision on release with a ban on associating with fascist organizations.  

The "never Trump" faction of the Republican Party have got to repudiate all of that because it was within their former party that all of this incubated, through the Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and II years and within the Republican members of the Supreme Court starting with Rehnquist.  This is a Republican Party effort and if they don't a. admit that and b.repudiate it entirely,  I don't trust them.   I have certainly repudiated the worst of what the left has nurtured and permitted in in the past, it's time for all of us to do the same with ALL anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic factions on all sides.  

I have annoyed some people by discounting the actual ideological pretensions of anti-democratic ideologues, noting that Nazis and Stalinists,  fascists and communists and Marxist "socialists" are all anti-democratic and they share at each level of depravity more than enough with their alleged counterpart on the other alleged end of the alleged linear graph of political identity to admit that those similarities make them all the same kind of thing.  Anyone who figures it's OK for "our sons of bitches" to kill and oppress because their ideas of what to do with the economy are more to our liking should be kicked out of the effort to finally adopt egalitarian democracy.   

It's simple, either you are an egalitarian democrat or you are a gangster, a thug as exemplified in the unmarked fascist police that are abducting people from American streets.   And, if these changes aren't made, much, much worse, perhaps as soon as next year if the Republican-fascists corrupt this election as they did in 2000, 2004 and 2016.  

Our Eyes and Appetites And Our Strongest Weaknesses Are What Lead Us Into Slavery

Like the entertainment media that absorbs the attention span of most Americans and which is the substitute of everything from education to moral formation - through that same media - Republican-fascism has flourished by appealing to our most destructive weaknesses, appetites and moral defects.   That is what Trump and his his henchmen are doing now,  William Barr, certainly, an old hand at facilitating that for the Bush crime family starting with George H.W. and then his son during the Bush II regime.  

Trump is making one of the balder appeals to racism right now, to white privilege, white fear of People of Color but his only follows on to a stream of that back through the Bushes, Reagan, Nixon all of whom used it and prospered by doing that, along with the neo-Confederate nihilists, Newt Gingrich being the central figure in that on the state level and in the legislative branch, but many others as well.  And they have certainly been helped in that by the media, not only the right wing media of FOX and Sinclair but in the op-ed sections of the print media from lowest to the New York Times and Washington Post, not to mention those more influential but largely ignored parts of the media,  "features" and entertainment.   That the two central figures in that Republican fascism,  Reagan and Trump, as well as not a few of those in Congress, including Pence, come from that area of the media is no coincidence at all, it is a rationally expected phenomenon of how the media participates in producing fascism and other varietal flavors of gangster governance.  That the media are so comfortable with producing as well as promoting them is exactly the same phenomenon as their making their money from advertising and entertainment programming that appeals to our worst defects.  

In the present crises, environmental, medical, economic, etc. we are meeting head on a problem with the concept of freedom and liberty and rights in a morally nihilistic world, one which has, in fact, been brought to a wider world through the entertainment industry, a popularization of the elite form of nihilism that became popular in academia much earlier through the ideology of materialism and the promotion of anti-religious atheism.  

I will break into this to answer the, no doubt, thought of point that Trumpian nihilism is OK with the "evangelicals" and the kind of Catholics who get their religious formation through the putrid EWTN and its like by by pointing out that that those are a part of the same thing and have nothing to do with the morality advocated in the Bible, as is proved, beyond question, by their championing of today's Herod on steroids, our Pharaoh on amphetamines,  Trump.  They are, as mentioned, largely a TV and media fed entity, they, a somewhat calmer and sedate form of the variety show-game-show "prosperity gospel" come on, appealing to the same moral failures and weaknesses with an added silk screen of religious imagery on top.

The freedom of libertarianism is freedom for those who have money and power at the expense of not only the freedom of those they exploit and destroy, but their very lives,too.  And our system does not make that distinction between that kind of freedom and that which leads to equality and democracy on anything like an effective basis. The laws, the Constitution, the legal system, the legal profession, the articulation of "freedom, liberty and rights" in the media mostly favor that libertarian view of those things when those two meanings of each of those words mean exactly different things.  Either those mean limited freedom so as to produce a better life for everyone or they mean complete freedom limited to those who have power and money and misery for everyone else. 

And most of all, the biggest chumps of the whole thing are the college credentialed ersatz left that they can depend on to champion their "right" their "freedom" their "liberty" to keep on doing that even in the face of what it has gotten us in the last forty years and right on down through the disastrous at-least-for-now worst of that in Trump.  If the white "evangelicals" are chumps who sell out their claimed faith for it, the "civil libertarians" the "freedom of speech-press" lovers of liberty - SEEING ITS DISASTER IN THE WORST IN THE WORLD COVID-19 PANDEMIC RESPONSE IN THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD - can't see that they as much as FOX or Sinclair, Facebook and Twitter, Murdoch and Putin brought us here.  Not least of which those lefties in the media who live off of advertising pandering to our strongest weaknesses and worst inclinations which is the real freedom that the media wants to protect.  They are as invested in it as the Trumps and others who hope to appeal to the worst in us to win just as they have been doing since the colonial period.  

John Lewis Should Be Even More Missed

John Lewis passing on happened the same day I was told that my last friend who had vivid memories of before the Great Depression had died.   It never seems to become routine, to suddenly have a world with people whose lives we are used to expecting be entirely missing them.   Waking up this morning to a world in which I know that my friend and I will never talk together again was like waking up into a much different world. We seldom let a week go by without talking to each other in person and on the phone for almost half of my life. Now that's not going to happen anymore.

And that thought led to thinking that the same is true in a world without someone like John Lewis. 

John Lewis was and is someone who should have been even more mourned because he should have been a far more familiar figure to far more people.  Instead he was semi-disappeared by the white-operated media in plain sight.

That kind of human moral witness  and courage and persistence in the face of setbacks that John Lewis not only showed but lived has not been in abundant supply in those put on TV chat shows.   I would guess that John Lewis was not called upon even one in a hundred times to go on the Sunday morning talk shows as compared to Lindsay Graham, Susan Collins or others whose lives were dedicated to the opposite of what John Lewis's live was given to.   I will guarantee you that people and shows that will lavish temporary praise on the memory of John Lewis had his absolute opposite,Donald Trump on far more often to spew his vulgar, racist mendacity than they ever had the great example of morality with the slight speech impediment on. I mention that as an example of the things that disqualify even the most important voices from being heard, especially when it's someone like John Lewis.  I would bet that most of the more active racists like Jeff Sessions got more invitations to spout their poison on the very same shows that will, today, maybe tomorrow recite hypocritical pieties on his name. In life the American media is in the habit of shutting down such voices just like Mitch McConnell shut down Elizabeth Warren reading the words of Coretta Scott King.  I don't think that American TV will ever be much more than a venue that does that,  not while it's a business.  

I don't doubt that there are those like John Lewis in the Black Lives Matter protests, the anti-fascist protests, the protests against police crime but I doubt we're going to be made aware of them and so they will not have the same impact that John Lewis did.   If the talk shows this morning and the next few days wanted to back up their empty praise for him, they would have those people on to do it by renewal of the campaign for what he spent his life doing.  Anything else is just talk. Cheap talk.