Saturday Night Radio Drama Second Show - Margaret Miller - Nothing And No One Go To The Moon

 

Nothing And No One Go To The Moon

Gerry is in his 60s, married for a second time to Clara and father to Rachel who is 30.  He lost his first wife Nuala and 5 year old son Mark in 1985 in a plane crash and has never got over their loss.  His daughter Rachel (by his first marriage) who was a baby at the time of her mother's death was subsequently reared by her maternal grandmother.     After the death of her grandmother Rachel finds an old tape recorder with her mother and brothers' voices recorded on it and is only then she becomes completely aware of the life she had and lost before she even realised she had it.
As father and daughter work through their pain the cosmic distance that has been separating them finally seems to be closing in.

Written by Margaret Miller

Rachel was played by Aileen Mythen
Ian Lloyd Anderson played Karl                     
Gerry was Owen Roe
Helen Norton played Clara
Nuala was played by Amelia Crowley
Mark was Luke Kilmurray
 

Sound Supervision was by Mark McGrath
 

Directed by Gorretti Slavin
 

The Series producer of Radio Drama is Kevin Reynolds

THE RETURN OF Saturday Night Radio Drama - Jenney Eclair - Little Lifetimes

 

Little Lifetimes 

 

The great Imelda Staunton delivers the monologue.

It's very short but I'm still looking for something else to post later.   Been atypically not in the mood for drama since the election but I'm getting over it.  

I'm also using a different Linux distro with a rare browser that doesn't let me see my usual sanserif font so I don't know if it's displaying on other browsers.  Those kinds of things upset some people, the ones who troll me, anyway. 

According To The Supreme Court Idiology In Service To Political Power Swamps Morality As Well As Science Not To Mention Fresh Experience Of Consequences

Haven't had time yet to look at all of what Neil Gorsuch and the other Republican-fascists in the majority on the putrid, disastrous Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo and Agudath Israel v. Cuomo decision said but I have been looking into the background of the outfits that brought the case.  

The Archdiocese of Brooklyn and its allies such as the putrid Cardinal Timothy Dolan can little stand to lose many parish priests to the disease, the average age of your typical priest is well past the age of retirement, the age cohort most likely to die or suffer permanent serious consequences of contracting Covid-19.   I'll be really frank and saying that this is a bunch of corrupt clerics politicizing this issue to promote Republican-fascism - Dolan explicitly endorsed Trump getting a second term - even as they and their colleagues have a decades long history of trying to get judicial immunity from prosecution in the sex abuse scandal.

Agudath Israel entered the case because it was the anti-scientific behavior of concentrations of extreme Orthodox communities holding super-spreader events, creating hot-spots in the largest city in the country last spring that led to Governor Cuomo doing the moral and responsible thing, putting restrictions on such events.  I have to say that even though my opinion of the Heredi cults of Orthodoxy was already rather low (with some exceptions) this has brought it to levels I'd previously reserved for as-seen-on-TV pentacostalism, fascist-Protestant sects and Catholic neo-integralism.  

One of the victims of that Orthodox super-spreader events was the late Rabbi Yaakov Perlow who shortly before contracting the disease, which would kill him, said that Jewish law required them to take medical advice seriously, whether it was in regard to a single sick person or on the highest of high holy days.  

"We cannot behave the way we did last week or two weeks ago. We're told that the halakha is that we must listen to doctors, whether it's about a sick person or Yom Kippur"

But he's dead and it's clear the politicians and lawyers figured they'd make this into a Supreme Court case worthy of the worst of Trump's or Republican-fascist governors'.  

In the mean time, seeing atheist assholes trying to turn this into a "Freedom From Religion" opportunity "Tax the churches", etc. all over the comment threads are about as helpful as the asshole lawyers and politicians and political hacks in the Brooklyn Diocese or the Heredi cults  are to public health.   

The Supreme Court should take full heat for the consequences of this ruling, it should result in the forced overturn of the tyranny of 5 conservative legal hacks over the entire rest of government and honesty.  Amy Coney Barrett's putting the totally extra-Constitutional Marbury decision out of reach for revisiting may be something that her colleagues on courts might agree with, it's nothing that the branches of government which are elected and so, to some extent, answerable to The People need to put beyond rejection with fuller knowledge of its consequences becoming apparent.

Those quotes from the ruling I have read are a style book for writing dishonest sophistry of the kind that has seriously deadly consequences.  That does, though, point to how such ideologically motivated religious orientations hold nothing as too sacred or important to not try to turn it into a weapon in promoting their unstated ideologies.  Ideology is what the "enlightenment" swapped out for religion.   It's ironic how deeply it took that it even swamps morality in religious sects and cults.

Darwinism In Recent Respectable Newspaper Scribblege Brought To My Attention

In the November 15th  NYT Review of an early book about the current pandemic by one David Quamman from earlier this month ended with the bizarre statement

"It is still too early to know" Christakis [the author of the book] writes how the Covid-19 virus might mutate. It is indeed early, and many more books will offer to help us understand the pandemic. But "Apollo's Arrow" is a good start. Another volume, a useful addition to the same shelf, was published in 1859, "On the Origin of Species." Infectious disease is all about evolution. If you don't believe in that you may as well not hold your breath for rescue by modern medicine. And there will always be another virus going around.

What Christakis is quoted as saying isn't bizarre, we have no idea which if any of a myriad of possible assumptions now floating around might be a prediction of how the virus will mutate, which variants will become prevalent, which might become a stable form for which human beings and other living creatures might develop some measure of biological resistance or immunity, etc. To expect there will be one possible storyline that this will follow is probably more evidence of the limits of human culture to encompass even a relatively limited issue in the natural world than it does the naive belief that nature will accommodate our limits by limiting the actual course of events.  

What is bizarre is, of course, the idea that the first edition of "On the Origin of Species" would have anything much to tell us about the evolution of viruses which, of course, Darwin knew nothing about. My suspicion is that Quamman, like most of those who invoke Darwin's most famous book, has not actually read it, it is like most pious evocations of "The Bible" as imagined by someone who has made little time for it in their reading and study. 

 Considering the difficulty with which the 1930s "neo-Darwinian synthesis"  temporarily pasted the real substance of On The Origin of Species, the ideology of natural selection to the then very new and, by today's standards, quite naive conception of genes and genetic inheritance, it is likely to have less to tell us in this regard than Darwin's rough contemporary, Louis Pasteur who theorized them and who, I seem to recall, lived into the period when they were actually confirmed to exist. Darwin was dead for ten years by then. When the path of those two eminent men of science, if you want to call Darwinism that, crossed, neither seems to have made much of an effort to encounter the other that I've been able to find.  

 

As to the evolution of viruses happening in accord with natural selection, I doubt that very, very much. I suspect assertions about that are probably more of the construction of an analogy than an accurate and full description of how that happens.  But, then, I think natural selection is an ideology that says more about the economic, social and legal privilege of the man and men who invented and spread the idea and made it the enforced ideology of first biology, then all of respectably educated culture.

It is especially ironic for Darwin to be invoked in this pandemic considering the foremost use of him has been in the idiotic, old fashioned Darwinian idea that letting the virus kill off millions would have the jolly good benefit of making the survivors "more fit" with a nifty new, totally presumed, at this point, immunity to the disease. Scott Atlas and the meat-heads who formulated the Swedish government's policy on the diseaase is directly attributable to what Darwin claimed about natural selection, the work of the virologists and epidemiologists who are trying to stop the disease and limit the death count are working against the gale of ignorance that is founded in the ideology of natural selection.

Looking him up, Quamman is an English lit guy with an academic specialization in Faulkner who has branched out to writing about science on a popular level. I'm not familiar with his writing but it's clear he latched onto the Darwin gravy train like they all seem to these days. Too bad he, as they, don't bother much to actually read him and the legacy of his theory which isn't "evolution" but an alleged mechanism of death through which evolution happens. The irony is that the most demonstrable effect of Darwinism on the course of evolution is in those who Darwinian programs of death have cut off from the future, both through the actual eugenic sterilization of people and the many times more murdered by genocidal "scientific" regimes and, with supreme irony in this case, through the resistance to such things as universal vaccinations. Leonard Darwin who with far more justification and authority than a late 20th, early 21st century scribbler like Quammen could ever muster, fully believed his eugenics work was a continuation of his father's work. Among his proposals and life long concerns was that vaccination to prevent infectious diseases was a long-term disaster for the "fitness" of the human species. When his, thankfully, abortive attempt at a political career was in the campaign phase, he campaigned against universal small pox vaccination as keeping the unfit alive so they could have children.  Even as he was praising the Nazi eugenics programs in the late 1930s, he praised those in Nazi Germany and their immediate Darwinist predecessors like Wilhelm Schallmeyer were concerned about the dysgenic effects of medical care being available to the human species.  I have yet to find a contemporary advocate for or authority in Darwinian natural selection who vocally and publicly or even in published correspondence disagreed with him about the Darwinian character of any of that. 

 

Scott Atlas is the Darwinian side of this pandemic, not the virologists and epidemiologists who are trying to stop it and save lives.  There is nothing Darwinist in the race to find vaccines to stop the disease, there is nothing "natural" about it, it is entirely a product of human artifice, it is not in any way a natural selection, it is the effort of human intent and human choice and its goal is the opposite of that proposed engine of evolution which Darwin invented and successfully marketed.  I think Darwinism has more in common with Ford's automobile or modern propaganda than it does that effort.  And it was marketed most successfully to the respectable and college credentialed such as write reviews for the New York Review of Books.  It narrows the focus it doesn't take the full range of reality into account. 

Update:  The NYT times print shop putting out what it does, I read the on-paper review through a Fresnel lens, the resolution isn't good enough for me to always see an "e" instead of an "a".  If I misspelled the guys name and it matters to anyone, sorry.  I read a lot of things through the thing, including online, sometimes. It's the best I've got until things get so bad I have to project things on the wall in the dark.  Which is coming.

Artificial Intelligence Isn't

Yes,  I do know the difference between "lexicon" and "lectionary" automatic spell check doesn't, apparently.  I corrected it once but didn't see that it had reverted, the reason I put that quip in to start with.  

I've got no problem owning my own mistakes but I'm not going to take the blame for a machine's or an algorithm's.  

Safe In Their Alabaster Chambers The Supreme Court Wants You To Die For The "First Amendment"

The moral degeneracy of large numbers of the bishops and cardinals appointed during the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI are on full display in the New York case for allowing immoral, political hacks such as Timothy Dolan and the episcopal crew in Brooklyn who sued to have the right to conduct super-spreader events like that which has turned their congregations and those of numerous right-wing Protestant and Orthodox Jewish ones into death cults.

That Neil Gorsuch wrote the decision allowing this, after being fully informed as to the public health disaster it will be is fully to be expected from the guy who said a trucking company had the right to expect one of its employees to freeze to death to keep his job. He is the son of the degenerate and criminal who headed Reagan's proto-Trumpian attack at the EPA, Ann Gorsuch, moral degeneracy runs generations deep in his family.

As the estimable Charles Pierce has pointed out, the fascist five on the Supreme Court, including the recent unqualified "justice" put there by the Republican-fascists, Amy Coney Barrett, proved their ruling "on behalf of religious freedom" - look for that ass covering to be frequently resorted to on this court - was less in touch with both public health science and morality than what is encouraged by Good Pope Francis. I will point out that these "justices" protected not only by the physical plant and staff of the Supreme Court BUT ALSO BY THEIR RECENT PRACTICE OF CONDUCTING SESSIONS BY VIDEO are absolute hypocrites in this. They will permit for thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions to be irresponsibly, ammorally exposed to serious communicable illness and death what they, for themselves, would never accept.

The moral degeneracy of the American legal system has no better proof than this court's conduct, its rulings and the abysmal pantomime of the confirmation of its last three members. It was a farce before that as the likes of Alito and Roberts lied all during their confirmation, something every single informed person listening to it knew, not to mention Clarence Thomas's perjury when his propensity to sexually harrass women who worked under him was exposed. It is a moral atrocity that no one should tolerate continuing as it has. When it comes to the Supreme Court, we may as well be in 1933 if not 1858, I suspect that earlier date will become ever more relevant as this court continues to repeal the 20th and 19th century on the basis of "originalism". As I said, maybe we should provide the "originalists" with 18th century medical care, they obviously choose to have the country die under a regime before a knowledge of how viral diseases are spread was known. 

 

The Supreme Court should never be able to make such decisions except, possibly, on a unanimous basis.  The tyranny of five right-wing, scientifically ignorant legal hacks has to come to an end. 

Why I Am Not A UU With A Prelude About Advent

Making plans for doing an Advent series I was tempted to go back to the one I attempted and botched for reasons of illness and politics last year based on Walter Brueggemann's Gift and Task, a fine book of commentary on a Protestant lexicon LECTIONARY for "year 2" of their liturgical cycle, if I have the terminology right. It was written for the year 2017 and, aside from the peculiarities of the misfit between the liturgical and civil calendars, more or less matches the church year that begins on Sunday.

But I decided to go with a multi-denominational Advent this year, one based partly in Catholic resources, the commentary on the readings for Sundays and partly on Protestant sources. I'm no longer satisfied with only one denomination, good things having been said in so many of them. I should have started before Thanksgiving as one of the resources I'll be using does. Fr. Scott Lewis a Toronto based scholar, whose excellent online comments on the Catholic Sunday liturgy is posted a week ahead which gives you a whole week to read the readings and think about them. For beginners like myself, we might get more from a go-slower approach. I hope to, as well be using the excellent commentaries of the late Sr. Verna Holyhead from her commentary on the Year B lectionary, Welcoming The Word in Year B.

At least that's the plan. I will post other online resources from the United Church of Christ and the Episcopal Church and others, as I look around.

 

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

Not related, in looking around I came across an old article, Why “Unitarian Universalism” is Dying by David Loehr. an interesting and rather devastating criticism of Unitarian-Universalism that I think has things that mainstream American liberalism could learn something from.  As Loehr ministered a UU congregation I might have called it an internal critique but Loehr disclaims Unitarian Universalism, calling himself a "religious liberal".  He was also a member of the "Jesus Seminar".  

While I very much encourage people to read his essay because he raises many excellent points,  I don't agree with everything said in it about liberalism.  For a start I reject the assumption that the tradition that comes down to us from late 18th century secularism, scientism, etc. is the same thing as the far more radical though often intersecting tradition that was an outgrowth of Christian social thought out of a much earlier and much more explicitly Scriptural inspiration which has been in line with much we consider "liberal" since the early centuries of Christianity and, before, in Christianities older sibling, the Mosaic faith. I think to mistake the two is not only to get it wrong but it also leads to getting more wrong. The "enlightenment" tradition was already counter-productive for the struggle for social-justice by the end of the 18th century, the most appaling features of the United States Constitution, placed there by rational people, devotees of secular scientism, many of them early American Unitarians. It continues to sap the life out of the far more consequential and productive religious struggle for equality and the sustainence of life.

I don't share Loehr's belief in the impossibility of rational, informed people to believe that there is a divinely sourced aspect of life as we experience it because that is how it really is. There is the flavor in that which discounts the fact that many, even some of the most accomplished mathematicians and scientists, have been able to both say the times tables and to pray, despite what people believe Clarence Darrow claimed. Certainly you could contrast the failure of, for example, the Catholic Church to peter out the way that Loher bemoans the, probably, by now, decimation of the Unitarian Universalist sect. I doubt there has been any Unitarian who has been a greater and more exigent intellectual than the thoroughly up-to-date, informed intellectuals such as Hans Kung and Karl Rahner, I've read more of the trinity of those 19th century UU thinkers Loher rightly mentions, Channing, Emerson and Parker that I'll bet most UUs have and none of them could hold an intellectual candle to many modern Christian, Jewish, Islamic intellectuals. That as, for example, The Catholic Church fully participates in rational thought and the promotion of learning, scholastic, academic, scientific, etc.  - it's servicing of elite education is, in fact, one of the most scandalous things about it just now. But the article is very full of hard questions and points to consider.

One of his points around the issue of abortion is something I had been thinking of writing about at length, I do think his points are some that need to be addressed. Though that I have to use the masculine pronoun to describe either of us points to the fact that as males, we can hardly be thought to have the primary right to consider the issue. THAT WOMEN ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO CAN BECOME PREGNANT AND DEAL WITH THE ISSUE OF BEARING A CHILD TO TERM MEANS THAT THEY,NOT MEN, HAVE THE PRIMARY CREDIBILITY TO ADDRESS THAT ISSUE. Which is why I'm reluctant to talk about it more than I do.  That inescapable quality of its appurtenance to women and not to men is not a negotiable or dismissible part of the issue.

This passage is a good example of both the good and the bad sides of the article:

Good social critics —both conservative and liberal ones —have written about the narcissism of the biases reflected in the Seven Principles/Banalities/Dwarfs. But you will seldom hear them from UU pulpits, and never read them in the movement’s guardian of orthodoxy, the UU World. Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, Jonathan Rauch, Jim Sleeper, Christina Hoff Sommers, Camille Paglia and Todd Gitlin come quickly to mind as among the many authors who wrote widely-read critiques of the racism, sexism and narcissism of the liberal culture.

First, the "Seven Principles" are the often given banal set of "principles" that was meant to give the UU sect something, something, perhaps anything to stand for while studiously avoiding any "supernatural" commitment. As Loher notes they are indistinguishable from vague platitudes of conventional mid-20th century secular liberalism. I would note that they're something that "moderates" wouldn't have much trouble with,which is to say that there is little in them that would fuel something like the Civil Rights movement or a successful abolition struggle. I think they could never fuel much of anything because to be credible and effective you need more than a vague feeling of niceness to make a real committment to the difficult, hard and dangerous means to really change the universal habit of human selfishness in a better direction. The utopian political ideologies of the secular, scientistic type prove that an attempt to do that out of scientific assertion produces genocide and doesn't really change anything.

I do think his criticism of the attractiveness of seeing Black people who are subject to racism as hapless victims instead of survivors is one that white men must also take a secondary role in discussing. But I think his list is rather a disaster. There were plenty of religious critics of that condescending, disgusting and disempowering attitude whose criticism was more apt and effective, as exigent internal criticism can often be. And the subsequent reviving of extreme and widespread racism and sexism under the political movement that Sowell, Steel, Sommers etc. have been associated with is even more discrediting of their ideas. Loher may not realize it but the list he gives is as much a part of the secular, scientistic tradition that accounts for the moribundity of the UU movement as secular, scientistic flowing from the liberalism of the 18th century type. 

 

I utterly reject any assertion that Camille Paglia belongs on any such list.  I have no idea why he put her on it except that she's a foolish cultures concept of what an intellectual is, and modernism has produced one of the stupidest excuses for a serious intellectual scene in the history of human culture.

There has been plenty of such internal criticism, certainly in overtly theistic and scriptural liberalism, I don't think anyone is more exigent a critic of that kind than the Black Liberation theologians, other liberation theologians, Feminist theologians, etc. Walter Brueggemann's critique of mainstream Christian liberalism is extensive and unflinching.  That the devotees of respectable niceness is unaware of that doesn't surprise me and if the  UUs of Austin are anything like those I've known in Northern New England, that's what it is.  When the minor and, I expect, about spent movement of atheists' playing church started I wondered why they didn't just go to the UU church, it was pretty much the same thing.  What that most effective critic of Unitarians, Garrison Keillor noted as "the church of the brunch" was a replacement for religion that was ever going to do anything. 

I could go on.  I do think David Loher's criticism of American secular, scientistic, moderny liberalism has much to ponder, I think he'd have done better to consider the internal criticism of Christian religion as perhaps the more effective and proper criticism of it because a lot of it is the same problem.   But, then, that started as soon as the Children of Israel started back sliding early in Exodus. 

In Praise Of Moderation On Thanksgiving

Watching my old pirate disc of The Star-crossed Romance of Josephine Cosnowski I find that you can even have watched that one too many times.  Don't think I need to see his Christmas Story again.

 

Even something as funny as the work of Jean Shepherd gets old.  If you haven't over indulged, you can find pirates of it on YouTube. The one I checked out before this didn't exactly have the synchronization right.  Don't go full screen.

 

Still, it's better than watching a football game. That never much changes.  I'd rather watch a business meeting. And I don't want to watch one.

Geri Allen - Dark Prince: Two Performances

 

Geri Allen, piano Vernon Reid, electric guitar

Buster Williams, bass

Lenny White, drum

Geri Allen, piano

Ralph Armstrong, Bass

Ralph Penland, Drums

Rita Reys - Cole Porter's It's Alright With Me

 

 

1961, I know it's Pim Jacobs playing piano, I don't know who the others are. 

 

Update: Something quite different from 1963.

 

After You've Gone - Rita Reys & Dutch Swing College Band

 

 

Thanksgiving weekend in the States, my experience is that few people are reading blogs but I will keep going on a reduced schedule.   I promised more music would be posted, it got crowded out by politics. 

In accepting a pardon Michael Flynn is pleading guilty one more time.   The House should lose no time in sending him a subpoena as soon as Trump is out of office.

Part Of A Plan - Convincing A Winning Margin Of Our Present Opponents While Realizing We Are Probably Not Going To Get A Majority Of Them With Us

I have always held that there are people who are fully corrupt Republican-fascists and without some dramatic conversion experience that we don't have the power to bring to them, they are not those we can or should waste our time trying to convince. Those with guns should be disarmed, those who have the weapons far more deadly to democracy of a TV or radio network, a highly promoted internet presence should be disarmed, too, my favorite weapon to do that with is enabling those they lie about to sue them into the flames of hell, my second favorite one is removing their license to broadcast or cabloid-cast.

I think there are many of them, millions, maybe tens of millions that our best hope is in giving them the honest feeling that they are better than being a member of the Trump cult of being a greedy, racist, hate-filled, resentful Republican-fascist. There are certainly a lot of those who are deluded and corrupted with the encouragement to give in to their baser desires, the kind of thing that TV and the movies and hate-talk media are so good at, enslaving people with their worst weaknesses.

If the left really, sincerely let people know that instead of rejoicing in their degradation we had confidence that they could be better, many of them might realize we want what is good for them. That isn't something you're going to get by making fun of them, of pumping yourself up by feeling better than them, of trying to make them feel small and stupid. There are those who are stupid but more who are greedy and selfish and who love to do what works for them so much better than it works for the left, feel better than other people and we won't reach them.

By the way, there is a reason that that works so much for them than for the left, it is the substance of the Republican-fascist ethos that inequality favors them whereas an egalitarian democratic ethos cannot be sustained on the love of that kind of hierarchy of worthiness.

We are not going to convince all of the tens of millions who voted for Trump that we want what is good for them, at best we can convince a winning margin of them that we want what's good for them. I think some of those who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but who then voted Republican after that were put off by Obama's clear love of alleged meritocratic hierarchy. And his weakening the things that would have helped the middle and underclass in the recovery, in his desire to be called "bi-partisan" by the media, of having Republicans like him and to please quislings like Joe Lieberman didn't help at all. Rahm Emanuel was an early warning signal that he was going to throw his own base of support under that bus.  The extent to which Nancy Pelosi was the one who, to some extent, was able to pull us from the worst consequences of Obama's bad choices in those first two years will probably always be underestimated.

I am hoping that Joe Biden who is far less of an habitual elitist than Barack Obama can cure some of that and we will see if he does. I'm hoping that his appointments of figures from the Obama years are of those who had more of an egalitarian commitment than many of Obama's appointees did. I'm still hoping he appoints an education secretary who is a product of public education instead of another Ivy Leaguer-private school product. While there are those who went to the Ivies who can break out of it, they've had their day, just look at how many of the Trump criminals were their classmates.

We need a winning margin and that is not going to be found anywhere else except in convincing those who didn't vote to vote with us and those who were duped into voting against their own interests that Democrats will try to do what's better for them. But there is no way which we can trade off equal justice, under the law AND IN THE ECONOMY for that. They either sign onto equality or they won't ever be reliable partners in securing and defending egalitarian democracy and a decent, sustainable life. We're all in this together or we are going to all go down together.

One thing we have to do is get rid of the Electoral College, the anti-democratic Senate structure, those things that the fascists have constructed the unitary executive theory and those things which have empowered lies to be the most effective weapon against democracy. We have to make it clear that the goddamned Supreme Court does not get to make corporations persons, that artificial entities like corporations do not have rights and they don't get to radically alter the protection of freedom of speech by making billionaires have billions of times more "speech" than those without money. Buckley v. Valeo has the name of one of the premier fascist families of the mid-20th century attached to it for a reason. That's who benefited from it.  Lots of counter-productive mid-20th century "liberalism" and even more of that "leftism" was as counterproductive as could be.  We've got to junk that, too.

More Hate - "How Dare You"

You don't have to take my word for it, here's what a document from the National Archives noted as to who, exactly, it was who was allowed to vote for the First Congress along with the First President and those who elected the legislative bodies which ratified the Constitution and who adopted the Bill of Rights in the First Congress.

At the time of the first Presidential election in 1789, only 6 percent of the population–white, male property owners–was eligible to vote. 

 

The adoption of the Bill of Rights as it was badly written by the First Congress was hardly a matter of metaphysical legitimacy, nothing that any government that prevents the majority of its citizens to vote can have such legitimacy, it cannot get that from the habit of its substance being asserted to have such legitimacy.  And, as I will never stop pointing out, the recent Supreme Courts in their gutting of the democratic reform of the Voting Rights Act as certainly as that led by Roger B. Taney has used the language of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to thwart the legitimate will of The People on anything like an equal basis. 

In his great study of the framing of the Constitution from an economic analysis, the 20th century historian Charles Beard noted that far from being the expressed will of even those white, male, adult, propertied land-owners considered to be eligible citizens voted on the matter.  Starting with the decision to call the Second Congress, the wrote the Constitution, to call them to write such a document or what it was to be like was not ever put to anything like a vote of those the "founders" decided they wanted to govern [see the chapters dealing with the ratification process].  The delegates to the Convention were not generally the product of anything like a popular vote and the ratification of the document was, if anything, a determined effort by the landed aristocracy to push it through against all possible objections by an informed public.   

That is a matter of historical fact, the expansion of the vote to include anything like "universal suffrage" of white male citizens of the United States didn't come until much later as states gradually, very gradually in some cases, expanded the franchise to even all white male citizens. Some states, at the same time EXCLUDED, BY LAW, FREE BLACK MALE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES AND RETAINED THE EXCLUSION OF ALL WOMEN. 

 

In every way, every extension of just the legal definition of who got to vote was more legitimate than the original Constitution was at the time of its adoption because nothing like a majority of We The People was either permitted or enabled to express their consent to it.  

So if you accept the principle that the only legitimate government is one that has the due consent of those who are governed, the U.S. Constitution, as an 18th century relic which has not fundamentally, even now, been amended to full equality and a full protection of the most sacred act of government, a vote which will both be counted and made to count, the original Constitution and even as it stands now falls entirely short of that. The fact that Trump's bumbling lawyers are trying to reproduce what the Bush family lawyers were able to do in 2000 and that the process doesn't reject that out of hand shows how dangerous it really is. If Trump and McConnell had succeeded in staffing the courts with neo-fascist Republican goons they'd have succeeded by law as what their efforts may do in fact, thwart the will of the decided majority in the election we just had and which has yet to conclude.

That we retain the dangerous relic of allowing a lame duck president to wreck as much as he can to leave the person who beat him in the election to deal with it is just another thing that the worship of the "founders" and the deification of the Constitution not only permits but, now that it's been done, will quickly become the norm for the worst people in our politics. The thing doesn't work to produce egalitarian democracy, it is a minefield to prevent even the conception of democracy which the white, male property-owning class of the 1780s feared would thwart their pursuit of wealth and power. The struggle to expand the franchise was violent and bloody and cost enormous amounts for The People in general and the results are anything from secure, as the Roberts Court and Rehnquist Court showed when they attacked the voting rights of Black People, etc. in their gutting of the Voting Rights Act on the basis of that Constitution. Making it a thing above criticism and of mindless reverence is dangerous. 

 

That's how I dare to say what I did. 

Hate Mail - Fuck The First Amendment That Opened Us Up To The Domination of Putin

Now that I've had coffee and looked at the comments, what do you think the chances are that Donald Trump ever heard of the Open Skies Treaty or the two specialized planes that were used to keep an eye on the Putin regime's military activities as an early warning of their moving on the countries that border Russia?

I think it is virtually a certainty that if you gave him a Hollywood dreamed up "truth serum" and forced Donald Trump to tell you everything he knew about the Open Skies Treaty or the two planes that his regime ordered destroyed to make compliance with our obligations under that treaty impossible, he would be unable to tell you anything about it because like everything else done under him, he's too lazy to have learned about it.

What Trump's regime is doing, as described by Rachel Maddow is certainly being directed by Putin's regime, as so many things that Trump's regime has done, there is no other conceivable motive for that being done. And either Trump is doing Putin's bidding knowingly - which I don't believe for the reason given above - or those who are part of his regime are knowingly doing it with the greatest likelihood that they know they are doing what Putin wants them to do on the general principle that they know Trump is his agent and that what that petulant, truculent 75 year old baby-man would instruct them to do if he knew what his sponsor wants is exactly what they did. I would include the recent James Comey figure of Mark Esper in that, seeing that he knowingly was a part of the early stages of making sure that a likely Biden administration would want to honor not only the treaty obligations Trump was illegally pulling out of but that that extremely important activity could not be easily resumed.  If I were in the Biden DoJ, I'd get Esper on record as to why he did what he did and at whose bidding he did it. He just might want to save his own ass.

When the Roberts court was opening up our elections under Citizens United, they were warned that they were opening the American government up to the direct influence of foreign powers, governments, but they chose to interpret the dangerously general First Amendment in order to leave us vulnerable to that influence as earlier courts had left us at the mercy of domestic and as corrupt billionaires and millionaires - Putin being just a more successful gangster of the kind who such rich people typically are. There is a direct line from the language of the First Amendment to the gutting of clean-elections laws WHICH WERE ADOPTED BY BOTH DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS STARTING AFTER THE CORRUPTION OF NIXON IN WATERGATE WAS EXPOSED AS A FACT and Trump's regime, not only Trump but those who he and Republican-fascists in the McConnell Senate have put into positions where they could do these things and, after some of the same species of law-breaking by Trump was fully exposed and proved, kept them there to do exactly what they are doing now.

It all comes back to the desire of corrupt "justices" on the Supreme Court to enable their party to win elections through lying and to steal elections through the manipulation of the Electoral College, softening up the country by having the mass media feed a susceptible percentage of the electorate complete lies such as those repeated by Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliani, Sydney (or "Sidney" wish they'd make up their minds which it is) Powell and the rest of those who should be disbarred if not indicted.

It really all does come back to the permission given by the Supreme Court for the mass media to lie with impunity and that is a direct consequence of the inadequate language of the First Amendment of the Constitution adopted in the far, far from democratically elected First Congress. The more I've looked into the actual record of how the Constitution was written, ratified and the early years under it, the seedier and more anti-democratic it obviously was. There is no more metaphysical legtimacy to it than any currently rigged election in the most benighted place in the country today. And thanks in no small part to the Rehnquist and Roberts courts, there are more of those today than there were when the Voting Rights Act was in actual operation.

THAT is how we have a presidency which is being run by the dictator of Russia as a Republican administration. Our Supreme Court knowingly, under warning that that's what they were doing, opened up to that corruption. 

 

That Bill of Rights as well as much of the rest of the anti-democratic Constitution written by some entirely sleazy characters (slave owners are uniformly that) is dangerous to a modern democracy,  it shouldn't be an object of reverence, it should be replaced by one that not only protects but promotes egalitarian democracy and its protection from its active and way too successful enemies.  I'm for knocking the fucking founders off of their plinths along with the Confederates.  It will have to be done sooner or later if this democracy thing is to long endure and not perish from the Earth.

Think Of This When You Hear "The Founding Fathers Intended . . ." - Your 18th Century Constitution On Full Display

 

Have The Courage To Admit What Will Have To Be Done To Protect Us From the Murdochs, The Limbaughs and the Trumps They Of The Fascist Media Bring To Power

 

 

You'll notice that every example that Chris Hayes gives for the source of the lies that he gives the dangerously polite name to is the same, electronic media, FOX, Limbaugh, the Murdoch operations, and most tellingly, a monster created by TV and the mass media, Trump.

In the face of him seeing the problem clearly he declares at the end of this very good presentation of the source of the real and present danger to egalitarian democracy, the idea of representative and elective democracy and life on Earth, itself, he says he doesn't know that solution to what it is that created this disaster in the English speaking world - it's hardly confined to English speakers but we are among the worst of the worst, Russians at least have the excuse for never having had anything like a democracy of that kind.

Well, the obvious solution is to make it a capital crime for media corporations to lie, something that will get their licenses to broadcast or be distributed electronically pulled, permanently and those responsible banned from ever having anything to do with a media company ever again. As even Hayes notes, this is a matter of life and death, not irrationally suspected of being a matter of the extinction of the human species, certainly, as we are seeing in the United States producing a climbing number of deaths, already rapidly climbing to at least a half a million killed by Trumpery, FOX, the Republican-fascist party and the lies they have spread to the susceptible population.

This isn't a matter of us eternally answering the dishonest question that is designed to shut down consideration "where's the evidence," which when answered only generates the claim that the evidence is bogus or inconclusive. The thing that the tobacco lawyers relied on to cover up the known fact that tobacco is a deadly, addictive substance. The evidence is all around us and grows in verification ever more and yet that dishonest lawyer-liar tactic and the fear of being blackballed or silenced by the conventional "first amendment" absolutist conformity will always keep us, the side that accepts fact, the truth, the findings of legitimate science, the product of rigorous consideration of those, stooped in a pose of impotent indecision.

The dangers of acting on behalf of the truth that allows us to have the potential of freedom and doing to others what we would have them do unto us that allows freedom to exist as a common good instead of a malignant libertarianism, the dangers that we may fail are real. But not trying is a guarantee of us suffering what failing to act with due consideration and courage is a guarantee to produce at least as bad and likely much worse. This is as much a lack of courage as it is a lack of the respect for the truth of those susceptible to the Republican-fascist, Murdochian swindle that those who believe in democracy have suffered. And some of the worst of those setting us up have been alleged members of the left, especially those with an ideological attraction to anti-democratic ideologies and the idiotic idea that the truth is not knowable. Like most of the intellectual poses of that kind, it is a self-impeaching stand because it has to pretend to be an exception to its general principle. We've been suckers for it for too long.