Saturday Night Radio Drama - Stephen Jones - Adapting

Adapting

 

Starring Seána Kerslake and Stephen Jones 

When a writer receives a commission during lock-down, he struggles to come up with the right idea. Pandemic stories seem too big and important for him to be the one to tell. 

In between her Joe Wicks class and Zoom Quizzes his partner reminds him that they have their online film club that night and that the movie is,  'Adaptation'. Two Nicholas Cages’ for the price of one. Maybe this will prove the inspiration he needs.... 

Sound Supervision Ciarán Cullen 

Directed by Gorretti Slavin 

I know I've been leaning heavily on RTÉ this last month but it's so nice to have current plays that are so topical to post. I'll post this good old play from the sadly gone radio drama department of the CBC.

Alf Silver - Clean Sweep: Birds Eye View 

Birds Eye View   

 

I'll give the credits later, if I have time. I hate not posting the credits. 

How Can Eugenics Be "Pseudo-Science" When Its Main Supporters Were Never Kicked Out Of Science And Those Living Are Still There

I did not want to get back into the habit of responding to hate comments that I won't post but you brought up one of the most dishonest aspects of natural selection, Darwinism, that I don't recall addressing.

The claim that eugenics is "pseudo-science" lets science and the scientists upon whose common agreement science exists off the hook, far too easily.

The scientists who accepted eugenics starts, by its official inventor, Francis Galton's testimony with Charles Darwin, the iconic scientist and idol of it who endorsed Galton's and Haeckels and Gregg's, etc eugenic claims, Thomas Huxley, his main lieutenant in the Darwin Wars, and a long, long, long list of eminent scientists who were never driven out of the profession and were and are still esteemed in science. Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, Karl Pearson, Alfred Ploetz, . . . . Linus Pauling, William Shockley, right up to the last generation, figures such as Francis Crick, James Watson, the entire field of evolutionary psychology who regularly perform a little verbal dance around the issue even as their writing is the most widespread manifestation of Darwinist eugenics and those such as that formerly idolized figure of popular scientism, Richard Dawkins, who was more explicit in bemoaning that Nazism had discredited eugenics.

Science exists nowhere except in the minds of scientists, scientists whose scientific credibility and credentials rely on their acceptance by those same scientists, what gets called "science" in any generation is what science is, that is as true for science which is retained as well as science which is either dropped or discredited. Only in the case of eugenics, so discredited in the post-WWII period as the crimes of the Nazis forced facing just what those scientists and their teachers had said had to logically lead to, as can be seen in both the quasi-eugenics claims and those such as those of Francis Crick who lobbied his scientific colleagues privately to rehabilitate the scientific racism of the scientists Arthur Jensen, the kind of behind the privacy screen of private lobbying that is apparently far more extensive when the issue is eugenics. The same kind of science which the Harvard scientist Richard Herrnstein joined up with the political hack Charles Murray to reintroduce directly into American politics and the legal profession through their book The Bell Curve. And, as I pointed out, through both the forced, coerced eugenic sterilization of Women of Color under detention by ICE and through the scientific hackery of Dr. Scott Atlas and Richard Epstein which is so influential in killing us off through the "passive eugenics" of "herd immunity."

No, until science definitively and by a clear and effective and enduring majority reject eugenics and the guarantee of its perpetuation, the theory of natural selection, they wear it, it's clearly not "pseudo-science" if it can be part of the understanding of science of Oxford University's emeritus chair for "The Public Understanding of Science" and the science faculties of equally prestigious university science departments. 

 

If it were up to me, I'd make it a lot easier for them by science getting shut of psychology, sociology, anthropology and a host of other obviously deficient areas of academic activity called "science".  I'd definitely make sure that such associated pretenders as economics get kicked out of the club.   But, then, I'd get rid of the theory of natural selection altogether.  If you want to see why, read what I wrote on that topic years ago.  But I'm not a scientist, I don't get a vote on that.  If scientists want to get shut of eugenics, its up to them.  But no one should let them off the hook for all of the reasons above and some I haven't mentioned.  

 

If eugenics is "pseudo-science" then Darwin and his disciples were guilty of practicing pseudo-science.  Address that and maybe, maybe, if you keep it polite I'll post your comment. 

RBG And Why This Makes Changing Everything Even More Important

The chances were, when the Electoral College imposed Donald Trump on the country that Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be replaced by him or the combination of billionaires who control him or the fascists such as William Barr and if she had looked at the calendar or listened to her body, she would have known that better than anyone. No doubt she was a very good Supreme Court justice right up till the end, no doubt Barack Obama would have replaced her with someone who at least started out to her right - Obama always went with safe choices, though in the case of Justice Sotomayor, I'm not sure they were always to RBG's right. But, now, we see the consequence of someone getting on the court and mistaking their role in the larger history of the country and the world. She, I am sorry to conclude, saw herself as indespensible when she was merely a human being who time and the human condition will dispose of and there was never any guarantee that she would outlive the next Republican-fascist regime. Which should be a lesson to any liberal appointed to any court as they reach the limits of human life expectancy. I am afraid that I will always blame her for not leaving during Obama's term.

But the disaster that we now have with her death will haunt us for decades due to the position the Supreme Court took for itself, extra-Constitutionally, and the stupidity of the fabled founders in making a judicial appointment a life-long one subject only to the impossible conditions required to remove even a Trump or, as I'm certain we will find out a Kavanaugh, from the court once their asses have been put on the bench. A Senate voters of sixty-seven votes is required to remove even a perjuring, lying and sexually assaulting "justice" from the Court and there is no chance that Republicans will vote even a proven felon of their party from the Court - they didn't remove Trump and he committed what by any rational - though not Constitutional - definition is treason against American democracy.

The only recourse to having seven to three decisions pitching us ever backward into an even more violent Jim Crow, gilded-age or, I wouldn't be surprised, pre-Civil War America is for a Democrat, if he is lucky enough to get a Democratic President to appoint enough "justices" to drive the fascist majority into the minority. Which is ridiculous but the dangers of allowing fascism to stand is even more ridiculous for any real, traditional American style of liberal or genuine leftist to tolerate.

The defects in our Constitution are coming to harvest all at once, those which are actually there and those put there by the Court, the explicitly anti-democratically constituted body in the government, and such things as Department of "Justice" lawyers writing memos empowering presidents with impunity to prosecution for even the most serious of crimes. It is a glaring fact that the habits and traditions and practices and the Constitution itself has proven itself to not be capable of protecting egalitarian democracy from the concerted efforts of determined gangsters, which is what those who hold all anti-egalitarian, all anti-democratic positions and ideologies are, no different in kind from a mob that shakes down a neigborhood in a protection racket or who run drugs and prostitution and who steal and, yes, kill for the profit of the gangsters. That is what we are up against, that is what the Republicans on the Supreme Court are, they are mob lawyers, the most powerful and accomplished advocats for criminals there are.

We can't tolerate this anymore, they are attacking the elections openly and effectively. We can't depend on John Roberts' odd, unexpected and against character 5-4s against his fascist colleagues - rulings and votes to cover for his ultimate goal of installing his gangster bosses in power for good. Now even if he wants to cover his own ass, he's got enough, right now, without another one of them on the bench to force their will. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't openly try to rig the election for Trump and, more so, the Republican-fascists down the ballot.

The only safe course for us is to reject those powers the Court has given itself, starting with Marbury v. Madison, a claim of Supreme Court power which has increasingly been used by the Supreme Court to expand its powers, occasionally for the good but it's been a hell of a long time since Earl Warren was making landmarks in overturning Jim Crow, those have generally and increasingly gone the other way as the critics of that self-given power were predicting more than a hundred twenty years ago. The first thing is to stop with the stupid genuflection and drop the phony aura of sanctity surrounding the Court and the Constitution and, most of all the "founders". This is going to take a long term cultural change, lying about it on strange and video isn't going to help one bit. 

 

And getting back to the chances of RBG outlasting a Trump regime, if a president Biden or Harris takes the emergency route of increasing the size of the court, the reason of appointing judges with a knowledge of mathematics and science that would allow at least some of them to make reasoned choices on topics which require those, those are skills and knowledge which is dangerously lacking on today's courts.  And it isn't just the most arrogant of fascists on the court who pretend that isn't a dangerous problem.   I don't think she really appreciated the probabilities of that or she would have acted differently.  I do respect her but her legacy will always contain this as well as her rulings.

I'm Not Falling For One Of Roy's Coy Ploys

Looking back at some of those old posts linked to in those archives, looking at the obvious faults introduced by spell-check, I'm glad I went to using a primitive, simple text editor for writing these things.  I doubt I'll use my word-processing program for much other than to convert text files to PDF.   Word processing went a step too far in making it easier.

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I went back and read Alan "Roy"* Dershowitz's basis for suing CNN and would have to go back and listen to the entire program he bases his claim in, matching it to the actual video documenting the "Senate trial" (yeah, right) of the Trump impeachment, especially the timing of what he claimed was defamatory and when what was asked and answered.  I'll be curious to see if it stands up or if a judge throws it out.  If they do, I hope CNN asks for costs, and I'm the opposite of a fan of CNN.   

His claim that Adam Schiff's understanding of what he said that CNN is alleged to have distorted is accurate is something I'd have to see proved in detail, including Adam Schiff's elucidation of it.   Schiff I trust completely,  "Roy" Dershowitz, not at all.

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I hope to get back to the Brueggemann tomorrow.  It's tomato drying time, one of the few crops that did well in the hellishly dry summer we're having.  I've never been more discouraged about a garden, though it's not my worst year.

It's Been A While Since I Answered My Hate Mail - I've Done The Research, I Know The Topic

Longtime readers of this blog will be the opposite of surprised at what I said about natural selection being the basis of every form of eugenic depravity, be it the involuntary sterilization of Women of Color in the Republican-for-profit ICE-DHS prisons in Georgia and, I have every confidence we will find, elsewhere to Scott Atlas's Hoover Institute- Richard Epstein's "Darwinian Economics" promotion of "herd immunity" which is a. a totally unproven theory based in the very badly documented and double-speaking assumptions of natural selection b. casually, even breezily assumes that for it to be the means selected to deal with a pandemic, that millions will have to die for the promised benefit to the survivors.   

That is an idea that Darwin inserted directly into the heart of, first, evolutionary biology and from there and with the active ideological intent and self-intrest of Darwinists,* the entirety of biology.  And from there into the very faulty public understanding of science and even into the ever daffier regions of modern materialist philosophy,  Daniel Dennett would impose it on the entirety of the universe, even when such an imposition is made totally illogical through the lack of a biological physical basis for it.   It is not an idea that you have to believe in to accept the truth of evolution, though why that rather interesting though hardly vital issue has come to hold such a stranglehold on the emotions of those in favor of and against it when we are facing climate change, environmental devestation, the rise of dictatorship over egalitarian democracy is a far more important question.  

*  R. A. Fischer was financially and morally supported by Leonard Darwin as he invented the "modern synthesis" pasting together the hardly very advanced 1930s conceptions of genetics with a radically modified, though still extremely dangerous conception of natural selection.  That his own scientific racism was supported by Darwinism certainly wouldn't have predisposed him to look hard at the validity of the theory.  Every single time I looked deeply into, especially, the pre-WWII literature of Darwinism I found there was absoulutely no denial that eugenics is a logical conclusion of a belief in natural selection, including the eugenics that the Nazis made the law of Germany.  Leonard Darwin had complained bitterly that until the Nazis "turned things in a better direction" (his words in a revelatory 1939 article) they would not institute eugenic laws, including forced sterilization and other measures that led directly to the industrial machine of death that so many genteel Darwinists, especially in American and Britain, advocated starting in the late 19th century, well before Nazism came into being.  

Darwinism, natural selection, as long as it is orthodoxy within science and in the public imagination - put there by ideological science and its vulgar popular versions - is going to lead to people being discriminated against, being coerced or forced to be sterilized, and killed, either by passive irresponsibility as in Sweden, the United States and elsewhere where this latest "herd immunity" fantasy became public policy or by the most extreme form, mass murder.   That has been its logical conclusion from the early 1860s as Darwin's closest colleagues, friends and relations, from Thomas Huxley gleefully anticipating the violent genocide of American Black People as they no longer had, in his ignorant assessment, economic utility to the (in his racist mind) "superior" whites, to Darwin's cousin Francis Galton formally founding the science of eugenics to his own son George Darwin, with his support, writing an article in an influential magazine calling for legislation to legally, involuntarily and permanently dissolve marriages of those who, according to Victorian concepts of psychology, were mentally ill.   All of that was done with Darwin's knowledge and support based on his theory of natural selection which, after all, in the fifth and sixth editions of On The Origin of Species, at the encouragement and with the support of his co-inventor of natural selection,  he said it was exactly identical to Herbert Spencer's Survival of the Fittest. 

 

For anyone who is interested in reading some of my research into that,  I have posted two, hardly up-to-date indexes of posts on the topic,  this one covering a lot of what I've found out about the relationship between natural selection and eugenics and scientific racism and mass murder up to WWII, this one covering recent and current domestic American fascist and neo-Nazi citation of natural selection and Charles Darwin.  I have since then written extensively on the topic of the Nazi use of natural selection and the cooperative collaboration of American and British scientists, Charles Davenport, Karl Pearson, in not only providing their own Darwinist establishments with what was identical to Nazi racism and eugenics, WHICH WAS WIDELY ACCEPTED WITHIN CONVENTIONAL SCIENCE AS VALID SCIENCE, but which the Nazis, themselves cited as their reasons for the policies they instituted, including their infamous mass murders.  Karl Pearson the British Socialist and a deeply respected geneticist was one of the most overt in providing British bigots and, also, Nazi eugenics with a view of Jews from Poland and Russia as being a danger to the "Aryan" or British population.   He used the race science of exactly the same German Darwinists in constructing an anti-semetic paper cited by the Nazis.  

If anyone thinks that kind of thing has gone away with the end of WWII, they should search my archieves for the American evolutionary psychologists Kevin MacDonald and John Hartung whose as antsemetic science was as acceptable within academic science and science publication up to MacDonald testifying for the Holocaust denier David Irving, exposing his scientific racism to a wider public, as Karl Pearson's was in the 1920s.  It was positively cited as valid science by the ultra-Darwinist Richard Dawkins even after that.  Darwinian science didn't seem to have any problem with it up till then. 

Worth Reading And Very On Topic For The Brueggemann Posts

I was going to post a link to RMJ's post It's Money That Matters? yesterday but  got involved in a time-sensitive project.  Going back to look at it this morning, in addition to the fine post there is a comment by the estimable rustypickup with an answer from RMJ and a further comment that add to the already worthwhile content.  So I'm posting that link this morning, encouraging you to read it.

On Barr Being A Member Of Opus Dei

Seeing Lawrence Tribe is accusing William Barr of being a member of Opus Dei, the Catholic extreme right organization,  I had to see if it were true.  I found that even Opus Dei doesn't want to be associated with William Barr, it released a press release last year that said:

Our normal policy is not to identify members (or non-members) of the Prelature, but rather to leave it to each individual to make known this information. Nevertheless, because there have been recent news accounts referring to the U.S. Attorney General, William Barr, as a member of Opus Dei, we would like to clarify that Mr. Barr is not a member of Opus Dei nor has he ever been one.

Now, considering who has been a member of the organization,  especially its founder, it's pretty stunning that they don't want to claim Barr.  And, don't get me wrong, I detest that John Paul II advanced cult.   It's just that even they don't want Barr, apparently.

Of course, I don't believe Barr believes anything much except in an absolute monarch-president, as long as that president is a Republican-fascist.  His every word is a lie, his every act is anti-Christian. 

How About We Consider Trump And His Cult The Warning Of Allowing The Mass Media To Lie About Politics

 

I had to wonder if these were real Trump cultists or actors when I saw this but apparently they are real Trump voters who can listen to even these obviously insane fake Trump videos and they're still behind him.  That anyone had to wonder if they might be real is disturbing enough, finding out they are not being as shocking as it should be is even worse.  We're getting accustomed to this level of insanity being the winning margin for Republican-fascism.

That even some of them admit what they're hearing is crazy, they still support him.

One thing you know is that these are people who get thier minds fed by what they see on TV, what they hear on hate-talk radio, what they get from fascist news feeds on computers, through Facebook, Twitter, etc.  This is a media created phenomenon.  It was created by the intention of the Murdoch media, by Sinclair, by the Trump supporting media, with the full participation of billionaire gangsters and thugs, domestic as well as Putin and whatever other gangsters in power I had to wonder if these were real Trump cultists or actors when I saw this but apparently they are real Trump voters who can listen to even these obviously insane fake Trump videos and they're still behind him.  That anyone had to wonder if they might be real is disturbing enough, finding out they are not being as shocking as it should be is even worse.  We're getting accustomed to this level of insanity being the winning margin for Republican-fascism.

I don't know if this is God giving us a little warning of what that regime of lies will lead to but that's what it is.  Imagine if Trump weren't an insane baby-man, imagine if he were one of his craftier gang of goons who was even more skilled at leading a cult like this.  

We change that Supreme Court-ACLU dogma or we will suffer the consequences that, ironically, are exactly the same ones that the ACLU self-promotional propaganda warned would result from things like a Jimmy Carter, a Ted Kennedy, a Hillary Clinton, an Elizabeth Warren being able to punish the media for spreading lies about them.  Or a Barack Obama, the danger of an FCC to pull the license of any broadcaster for doing what has become commonplace in our media since Reagan finished that part of the Warren Court "free speech" agenda by pretty much getting rid of the requirement that the broadcast mass media serve the common good and not lie for the benefit of its owners and its advertisers.   

I am afraid that the Trump regime is only the last notice given if we don't make that change.  I am afraid that it will happen faster than slower, they're getting better at it than they were in 1968, no one ever believed they could sell the country a Trump back then.  I don't think they even really believed they could sell a Reagan or a George W. Bush.

Natural Selection Is The Basis of Trump's "Herd Immunity" Even His "White Evangelical" Supporters Are Darwinists In That

For anyone who doubts what I said about how dangerous the likely pseudo-scientific mixture of Malthusian economics with the biological study of evolution which is natural selection, though she didn't use the word in any of her program last night, every single thing that Rachel Maddow brought up as policy from the Trump regime is either directly attributable to the thought of Charles Darwin, as stated in his own words, or is an indirect reflection of his supposedly scientific use of the depraved class-based theory of Thomas Malthus and giving it a far more dangerous form taken as credible and enforced orthodoxy within science.   That is as true of the "herd immunity" mentality put into the coo-coo clock mind of Donald Trump by FOX as it was the involuntary, eugenic sterilization of women reported at for-profit ICE prisons in Georgia.  

Nothing in what has been revealed about the depravity of the Trump regime's "herd mentality" policy is a surprise to me, almost twelve years ago I wrote this, setting off a firestorm of denunciation on the secular left who responded:

Darwin used a metaphor to describe the unchecked breeding of the “weaker members” of the human species and the bad results it would have for future generations. He said:

"Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

He introduced the idea that it was stupid to allow certain people to have children after lamenting that they would survive to child bearing age. By comparing people to farm animals in this context he was clearly lamenting that people wouldn’t be treated like animals in a commercial breeding operation.

Let me stop here to ask, isn’t that outrageous enough in itself? Not even animals in the wild, but comparing human beings to animals in a commercial breeding operation? Where else have we seen that idea not only posed by carried out?

Darwin’s Defender didn’t seem to realize that animals selected as not to be bred are not kept as pets on a farm but are marked for early slaughter. I’ll point out that this is entirely in keeping with the earlier part of the paragraph where Darwin laments that human beings will survive long enough to breed.

The mechanism to prevent this happening in the human population, the one he approves of, the one he heartily approves of among the ‘savages’ is through the deaths of the “weaker members”. That the gentleman's son, Charles Darwin, would leave the culling to the 'savages' signifies absolutely nothing.

By the time Darwin wrote The Descent of Man, where the passage comes from, he was a very experienced writer who was used to having his language dissected by both those hostile to science and by scientists. To think he didn’t mean what he wrote is the kind of double-talk you get from idol worshipers, ironically, it is tantamount to saying he was ga-ga when he wrote it. I think he knew what he was writing and that it is clear he knew what happens to animals on the farm, he cited exactly the practices of commercial animal breeding in his work and would have known about its enormous usefulness to his great idea, which isn’t evolution but natural selection. The subsequent and dishonest assertion of his humanity does nothing to dissuade me that he knew the horrible conclusions that had to come from believing what he had just written.

For anyone who further doubts that Charles Darwin introduced the idea that letting millions of people die from infectious disease was salubrious, increasing the health of the survivors, they could only maintain that by not reading him, especially in The Descent of Man in which he said just that.

It is often claimed that the ass-cover that Darwin provided himself, even as he maintained that depraved position as hard science is enough to excuse his central role in producing exactly the proto-Nazi style depravity that is FOX-Hoover Institute style public policy in the Federal Government as I type this but the surest evidence that those who knew Charles Darwin best understood they were to take his dire warnings seriously as they ignored his fig leaf cover for his shame is seen in the abortive political carreer of his own son,  Leonard Darwin who ran in opposition to universal vaccination against small pox on explicitly eugenic terms as he would go on to head the British Eugenics Socieity, only one of at least four of C. Darwin's children and many later Darwin descendants active in promoting eugenics,  maintaining that in doing so he was carrying on his father's work, saying to his fellow Eugenicist, Karl Pearson, that he was certain his father would have wanted him to do his best in promoting eugenics.

The entire scientific superstition of eugenics is directly attributed to Charles Darwin by its official inventor, Leonard Darwin's predecessor as the head of the British Eugenics Society,  Francis Galton who published Charles Darwin's letter supporting his earliest eugenics writings, as, indeed, Charles Darwin cited those and even more extreme eugenics "science" from the fabric merchant turned scientist, W.R. Greg and the direct link to Nazi biological theory,  Ernest Haeckel.  Nazi biological theory, the basis of not only their own forced sterilization policy, eugenic mass murders - not a little of which was not in gas chambers or through firing squad but through allowing conditions where disease killed huge numbers - was done with the scientific guarantee that the physical health and intellectual status of the survivors would be superior.  And their own literature proves that the theory of natural selection was the basis of that.

When you hear people wonder where Scott Atlas, where Richard Epstein, two of the mainstays of Trumpian "herd mentality" come from, I'm afraid the answer to that is they come from a conventional understanding of Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection, which, in turn, comes from his own twist (and it is quite a twist) on the depraved, British class-system codification equations of Thomas Malthus.   

As long as natural selection is believed to be credible, as long as it is the enforced framing through which not only evolution but things such as public health policy are talked about and imagined, people are going to die from it.   

The irony that so many "white evangelicals" for whom the name "Darwin" is anathema are thoroughly true believing Darwinists through Trump and FOX and the Murdoch style of "free press" is striking.  Though no more ironic than their claims of "christianity" which they thoroughly reject except for the words and the trappings.  They are thoroughly materialistic in that.  They swallowed the lies of the Prince of Liars through Murdoch's porn-financed media company. 

Gee, Dersh, Sue Me While You're At It

Being unwilling to stand second to anyone in my disdain for Alan Dershowitz, it seems he wasn't getting enough attention for himself because I notice he's filed a $300,000,000 defamation suit against CNN because he figures they'd edited a video of him disgracing himself during the Trump impeachment trial earlier this year.

I hope CNN wins, or at least mops the floor with the Dersh-rag who can stand second in no one in disgracing himself. If I were the judge I'd require him to say exactly what the "disgrace" he figures is worth three hundred million consists of. I suspect some rich people who used to include him on their guest lists on the Vinyard dropped him like you would if you picked up a dog turd thinking it was something else. And it's not because I like CNN, I don't but they did't go looking for the opportunity to be part of Dershowitz's self-promotion publicity lawsuit. 

 

I'm almost tempted to go looking for old Dershowitz quotes about free speech-press to see what he's said in the past on that topic. I suspect that he might have to do a bit of fancy mouth-work to square things he said then and things he's claiming now. 

 

Harvard should have dumped him like the cheap suit he is.

How To Keep From Being Trapped In The Block Universe And The Cost Of That Freedom and Hope

I am leaving out a paragraph here, for anyone who might be following in the print book, which I hope anyone reading this informal study of the book has gotten and is reading for themselves.

It may be that I have schematized matters too much, but I believe that schematizaion is evident in the text itself. The emergence of royal reality could have gone either way, and the tradition holds out a hope for faithful royal reality, even as late as Josiah. In fact it did not turn out that way, and that indeed presents a major problem for biblical faith. Royal reality rode roughshod over Moses' vision. The gift of freedom was taken over by the yearning for order. The human agenda of justice was utilized for security. The God of freedom and justice was coopted for an eternal now. And in place of passion comes satiation.

I believe that the possibility of passion is a primary prophetic agenda and that it is precisely what the royal consciousness means to eradicate. We do not need to review the literature of passion but only to make reference to Soelle, Moltmann, Weisel, and especially Heschel.* Passion as the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die, and to feel is the enemy of imperial reality. Imperial economics is designed to keep people satiated so that they do not notice. Its politics is intended to block out the cries of the denied ones. Its religion is to be an opiate so that no one discerns misery alive in the heart of God. Pharaoh, the passive king in the block universe, in the land without revolution or change or history or promise or hope, is the model king for a world that never changes from generation to generation. The same fixed, closed universe is what every king yearns for - even Solomon in all his splendor.

In some of his more recent talks, Brueggemann talks about the twin temptations of nostalgia and forgetfulness, which are combined without regard to the irony of it in the undermining and debasement of not only the religious tradition of Christian (mostly in this context) but also in other religion but, generally, in our politics, "our" being that of the collective human population.

In the United States this nostalgia and forgetting is mostly created, instructed, lied into the minds of Americans through the media, the movies, TV shows, hate-talk and other radio narrative, which denies the hard reality of our own history and our own experience as it recreates a false, phony past for us to yearn for but which like all golden ages, was never what it was. The myths of the rugged-individual - OF WHICH THERE IS NO REGION, NO STATE, NO AREA WHICH IS NOT, IN ITS OWN MIND, FILLED WITH THE GRAVES OF SUCH MYTHOLOGICAL MEN (AND IT'S EITHER MEN OR WOMEN WHO ACT ACCORDING TO THE TRADITIONAL MASCULINE ROLE) is ubiquitious in that collectively believed in lie. That is the thing yearned for, especially, by white racists and those who Trump hopes to gull into voting for him out of fear for them losing what he has done more than anyone else to take from most of them.

Retrospectively, the "eternal now," the "world that never changes from generation to generation," the "fixed, closed universe," must have felt quite like the modern-industrial-scientific world we live in. In fact, I think the yearning for the eternal order that science is mistaken to provide for us, an imaginary universe of order according to human imagination in which there are unchanging laws, unchanging orders, an unchanging, fixed set of physical interactions, physical causation that was set into motion by the big bang, is the form of that which is ubiquitious, not only among the official champions of science but also in the fundamentalists who, like it or not, and so many of them don't, share in that same view of reality even as they don't like the present scientific consensus on what science shows is happening around us.

That is to say, you might not be either the great big opponent or supporter of what you believe you are. Donald Trump's fixed order is the vulgar form of that even as the materialist ideologues of contemporary scientism is the somewhat less vulgar form of it. So is a lot of what is mistaken as Christian religion.

I mentioned the theology of ends and its relation to the theology of creation and have to admit that that has become a big influence on me, now. The universe that was created is not static, it does not stay in a steady state, life doesn't stay the same it changes - whether it develops into something better or more complex or whatever is a trap of replacing human definitions for just seeing what it is - the human weakness to yearn for changelessness to insist on the security of what we know and are comfortable with and love is futile in view of the changing of the universe. That change is presented in the popular imagination, not a little of that based in a sensationalistic, comic book reading of the last book of the New Testament canon, as catastrophic but an older tradition of reading scripture sees it as not a catastrophe after which most of humanity is sent either to hell or obliterated into the completion of the creation of the universe in which there is universal reconciliation of us and our world of known experience with the Creator. One of the consequences of accepting that belief is to see any desire for a fixed, closed universe as wrong, even sacrilegious. We, ourselves, are not to stay the same as we are, either in this life or as we take up a new form after death. To want to is as wrong as insisting on a child not growing up and to stop being the same person they were when they were three or four. The same is true for human socieities, nations, the world. And it doesn't matter whether or not we like that or accept it, it's going to happen anyway. That would be unbearabe or even acceptable without faith that God intends an outcome that is better than what we could imagine. Or, at least, that's how I feel about it. It doesn't mean accepting "fate" this isn't a matter of fatalism, how people choose to act is as much a part of it as geological events and other movements of matter.

Justice in human terms is never a fixed matter of things, there is always, always some kind of change involved. The giving and receiving of needed charity, the payment of workers the wages they are worthy of (here's a clue, that is based on what is needed for life, not based on hours worked) the generous giving to strangers. And there will never be a schedule of regular rates at which those happen, there will never be total and full accord as to what is right, what should be done. There will always be give and take and push and shove and misunderstandings. But there is always the potential for understanding, agreement and acceptance and forgiving. And what comes after is not going to be just what came before. The only safe thing to do is to do it with that passion the "readiness to care, to suffer, to die, and to feel," without which you will be as much a puppet of the gangsters who have power as the suckers who go to Trump's rallies and contract and spread Covid-19, the disease spreaders who went to that Sanford, Maine "Baptist" "church," the suckers who will vote for the "Peoples' Party" or not vote as seen on Facebook and the Twitter feed of has-been celebrities and today's disposable play-lefty hero.

*I will, this time give you Walter Brueggemann's footnote because perhaps you, as I, have not read the works he is signaling in that list:

See: Dorothee Soell, Suffering (Philadelpia: Fortress Press, 1975), Moltmann, The Experiment Hope; E Weisel in various works; and Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

the primary vision becomes the well-being and enhancement of the king per se and not the role of advocate for the marginal

Second, this period obviously features the emergence of messianism, that is, the presentation of the Davidic king not only as an important historical accident but also as a necessary agent of God's ultimate purposes. Positively, the David king is understood as an advocate for the marginal ones and so potentially figures as an agent of the Mosaic vision. Negatively and more realistically, as the king takes on increasing significance and power and is assigned an enduring role in the purposes of God, the primary vision becomes the well-being and enhancement of the king per se and not the role of advocate for the marginal. The meaning of kingship could have gone in either direction, but in practice it became not an office of advocacy for the powerless but an agent of greater exploitation by the powerful. Prophetic consciousness thereby is put on notice against every historical agent that assigns to itself enduring, even ontological, significance.

I am going to only give you this paragraph today because I am pressed for time and because it's more than enough to expand into a huge study of the danger of attributing divine commission to human kings and how things go to hell when the king starts either believing that, himself, or, more realistically, using the presumed belief in it on the part of the population to his own ends. That is, I have ever confidence far more of a presence in human history and far more danger. A monarch or despot or even honestly elected president who believes they are to be God's agent in the world at least has something bigger than himself to live up to and to be answerable to. Their danger might be real but it knows bounds. A monarch who cynically and opportunistically uses such a dangerous cultural belief and who pretends to believe it will not be restrained by any form of conventional morality or, even more so, the kind of morality that is exemplified in the Mosaic vision, so vilified in such ignorance, with such bigotry and with such self-interested dismissal in modernism. The scientific regimes of the 20th century, uniform in being led by the kind of person who doesn't believe they are answerable to God or morality, have been marked by their stupendously huge death tolls, matched or even exceeded by only a few ancient figures such as Genghis Kahn, his army and his descendants. I don't know how his body count figures into his religious profession of faith. I wonder if anyone ever questioned that within his own culture, though generally if you do question something like that, you might not live to ask it twice. Trump aspires to make that the law here.

It is one of the troubling aspects of the New Testament that Jesus was so identified with the Davidic kingship in it when he plainly rejected such an association with a kingdom of this world. I never could understand that though this tradition within the culture helps to understand how those troubling aspects might not have been so noticed. Even from what I recall getting from the stories of the Kings of Israel from the "children's bible" I read as a young child, those guys were anything but convincingly moral. 

 

It has to be wondered that, as in creation theology, there may have been an older strain of messianic theology that was turned to this use by the royal establishment in the period when the scriptures were written down, codified and organized, the ones who did that certainly had a sense of what inclinations to bend it into were likely to end up with them in a better place than would be found in the experiences of the class that the romanticized view of that would claim the king advocates for.  I wonder if there may not have been such an earlier, non-imperial concept of a messiah.  

I'm thinking of making some basic format changes, going with white lettering on a black background, going dark-mode, as it were.    I've found it so much easier to read that than black on white, that I think I'm going to go that route.  I'm also thinking of going with large text, though that will require scrolling which, well, most of my posts do anyway.

If anyone has any serious objections or suggestions, post it in the comments.  I'll consider any that are given before making the change.

New Blogger's Got Some Problems In It

 Let me use this space to point out to whoever is in charge of "New Blogger" that it automatically enters empty, unused, unwanted "Unedited Drafts" into the dashboard of Blogger every time I go out of the dashboard.  I don't know who was in charge of this "improvement" to Blogger but it's got a number of really bad features.  The last one was a lot better and, if I recall, the one before that was better than that one, too.  I can get used to it but that trend isn't promising.

As The Death Toll Of Covid-19 Reaches Two-Hundred Thousand In The United States, As The West Burns, As Police Murder People Of Color

Donald Trump is a radical materialist, Republicanism is a radically materialistic ideology, people don't matter, except for the materialist, himself and a few other people they care about. It's not the only form of that pathology in the United States, it's encouraged by the media - who, now that it has taken hold are, in some cases, horrified by what they've wrought - it is obviously the functional pathology of about two fifths of the country. They are dangerous, they have to be contained or they vote us -WITH THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF THE MEDIA- into a Trump, a Bush II, a Reagan, a Nixon. Forcing the media to tell the truth and not carry lies is the only way to fight it. No matter what the language of the First Amendment says, that 18th century formulation is dangerous because it led us into Trump.

The comforting and credulous faith that our system will right itself through myths like presidential impeachment by a wise and responsible Senate convicting even this, among the most criminal presidents of any country in modern history, are just that, faith in things that are not and never will be there to save us. When an effective margin of people can be sold lies through the media to vote in someone as degenerate as a Trump, it is a Constitutional crisis of the kind that those asses in the national media are always warning may happen, with such dire posturing and with such little import. THIS ISN'T THAT THE NICEITIES OF THE IMAGINARY BALANCE BETWEEN THE BRANCHES IS A BIT OFF, THE ENTIRE TREE WAS ROTTED OUT AT THE TRUNK WITH WIDESPREAD MEDIA LIES. THE VERY ELECTION THAT IS THE ONLY LEGITIMIZING FORCE IN ANY POLITICAL SYSTEM HAS BEEN CORRUPTED WITH MEDIA SPREAD LIES.

This is a biblical facing of consequences for the rejection of morality. And it couldn't become any more biblical in what is happening to us, right now, as a result of people buying the long term lies of the media. plague, drought, fires, the uprising against the police murder of Black People, the reaction of the people who have accepted and cherished the lies. There is no source of human telling of human experience and the documentation of the last resort of what will save us, the morality and radical egalitarianism and facing of the consequences of the despoliation of nature and the acceptance of the hardest of truths than what Brueggemann goes through in The Prophetic Imagination, based on the prophetic texts and the historical books that document the serial failures of the Children of Israel in their history.

The American Constitution started out as a corrupt, Solomonic document, written for the benefit of the slave owning class (Madison, Washington, Jefferson, . . . , the class of financiers that Hamilton and the likes of John Jay belonged to, the sharp lawyers who may have had some qualms about that but who were not sufficiently opposed to it or numerous among the "founders" to get protections against them built into it (John Adams). Its worst modern surviving features put there for the protection of the privileges of the slave owning and aristocratic class, the Electoral College, the anti-democratic Senate. Even making it an elected instead of appointed body wasn't enough to make it safe for us. Then there are the badly written sections on presidential powers, the disastrously poetic Bill of Rights. The history of that botched effort in the first Congress is an epic in itself, the real character of Madison's reluctant adoption of it is damning of him as it is the language that the Supreme Court has used to damage and prevent real democracy, should be more known. If you don't take that criticism of the Bill of Rights seriously, read Trump's thug dictator to the CDC, Michael Caputo encouraging Trump's cultists to load their guns LITERALLY and get ready to keep that degenerate in office! Guns the Supreme Court has used the language of the Bill of Rights to put in their hands even as they have shot up school after school, churches, concerts, etc.

The language of the Constitution is what the fascists on the Supreme Court, the Rehnquists, the Roberts, the rest of the overt fascists, the pudding-headed "liberals" who gave the media the power to lie with impunity, who gave advertisers and pornographers decades to prepare us for the biggest liar and admitted sexual assaulter and accused rapist being installed as president - EVEN AS HE LOST THE ELECTION. Those words will always be there until they are changed and no future Supreme Court can either maliciously or stupidly interpret them to have the same effect because, believe me, lawyers are like rats that learn a maze, once they've found a path, they don't ever really forget it, perhaps as an individual, not as a population. The same words will be used the same ways and for the same reason until they are changed. Whatever dangers that MAY arise in that attempt, and those dangers are real BECAUSE OF THOSE JUDICIAL INTERPRETATIONS OF THE PRESENT CONSTITUTION, the dangers we face because of that are here and now.

It's The New Green

"Peoples' Party," yeah, right.  I wonder what the average income of the members of this "Peoples' Party" is.  I'll bet the Hollywood celeb membership of it isn't the only thing that puts it closer to the 1% than the 90%.  

Democrats in state government should get rid of these spoilers by tightening ballot access to only real parties and real candidates.  I know the idiots following the "liberal" line in Maine made ballot access for candidates and questions absurdly easy, which has benefited mostly Republicans and big money.  The stuff that is easily sold as a slogan "it's only fair" "all I want to do is level the playing field," seems to so often end up that way.   Maine would never have had Paul LePage, Trump before Trump, if ballot access had been more of a challenge.  

Peoples' Party 2020 and beyond is the Green Party redux.   I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't Republican money behind it.  Or Putin money, as if there's any difference. 

Anyone who calls for a "third party" is rightly suspected of carrying water for them, from now on. 

If pigs brayed, I'd think Trump mis-heard someone describing his public speaking.  But, city-boy that he is, maybe he thinks pigs bray.

I, as a person without entity, am essentially a collection of fragments that do not fit very well together. So that’s OK.

It has been noticed that my approach to The Prophetic Imagination is not exactly unified, except in that I am relating the study by Walter Brueggemann to our contemporary world, our degenerating liberal democracy - as opposed to egalitarian democracy, which we have not achieved or much even aspired to - and the disasters in, especially the English speaking peoples and others who seem as hell bent on Pharonic-fascist-Stalinist gangster governance here and now in the modern, scientific, capitalist world.

In that I can cite words of Walter Brueggemann, certainly one of today's greatest scholars of the Jewish prophetic writings and tradition, from an interview he gave in late fall 2011 to Krista Tippett:

Ms. Tippett:  If I asked you this way: In terms of your image of God, are there metaphors that have spoken to you across time or that speak to you now that didn’t before? Are there metaphors that have come to you in your life as a human being and in your study as a scholar and your work as a preacher to be more and more meaningful?

Mr. Brueggemann:  I think they basically arise out of my continuing to look at the text. It depends on what text I’m looking at. Obviously, that is then related to what’s going on in my life that day. For example, if I take the phrase — and I can’t even remember where it is — “Let me be the apple of your eye.” That’s a very strange phrase, but what that pictures is a God who’s a big eye that looks at you caringly, treasuring you. What I imagine from that — it’s like being a little kid that’s lost in a department store, and you finally go around the corner, and there’s your mother looking at you, and you’re safe again. So I want to have God look at me that way.

I don’t want to construct the whole theology out of that phrase, but that’s enough for that day, and I’ll be given another phrase, another day like that. So that’s kind of how my mind works. It doesn’t yield a doctrinal package. It just yields a bunch of fragments that are not easily fit together. But the reason that works for me is that I am aware that I, as a person without entity, am essentially a collection of fragments that do not fit very well together. So that’s OK.

If that's OK for this foremost scholar of the literature, not only in an academic sense but in someone who really, truly believes and sees the need and necessity for presenting it as a means of understanding the terrible world we live in and a way to live.  Read or listen to the rest of the interview, I could have produced a dozen pieces on different things he says in it, I don't feel too bad about this approach I'm using.

I'll leave you with one more snip from the transcript.

Ms. Tippett: You’re naming something when you call the prophets poets. You’re naming qualities of this text, this Bible that people think they know so well, but in fact and partly because of the way these things were translated and transmitted, I don’t think I grew up realizing how much of the Bible is poetry. The reason that also matters — and that’s true of the Hebrew Bible in particular — and also this realization, which is very simple but not brought home very often, is that this was the text of Jesus. This was his scripture.

Mr. Brueggemann: That’s right. He obviously knew it so well. But even in the more liberal theological tradition that I was raised, we only talked about the prophets as moral teachers, and there was no attention to the artistic, aesthetic quality of how they did that. But it is the only way in which you can think outside of the box. Otherwise, even liberal passion for justice just becomes another ideology, and it does not have transformative power. That’s what’s extraordinary about the poetry, that it’s so elusive that it refuses to be reduced to a formula. I think that’s a great temptation among liberals who care about justice — is to reduce it to a formula.

That's what I've found in this study of where American liberalism lost its way, where the "left" started out on a path that would lead to nowhere good. And don't get me started on conservatives and the right.  Liberalism should have avoided becoming an -ism.   I've lost faith in ideologies ever leading anywhere good.  They become more about means of identification with a club than an aid to doing justice, of practicing love.   That's how so much of "liberalism" and "leftism" became associated with consumer products of a higher end, "lifestyle" choices, educational status than they did with the very things the American liberal tradition either is about, equality, providing the destitute, the poor, the working poor with a decent life, care for the environment and our fellow sentient creatures, or it's just another -ism.