"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
The true story of one of the greatest literary trials of the
twentieth century, pitting James Joyce's novel against the might of the
United States government.
Based on the case files, and haunted by the voices of Ulysses, this
dramatisation tells the story of the decade-long battle to publish
Ulysses in America, culminating in the legendary Woolsey Judgement of
1933.
Please note that the play contains explicit language from the start.
Cast & Production Credits
Killian Scott (Sam Coleman & Bennett Cerf)
Janet Moran (Molly Bloom)
Jonathan White (The Voice of Time & Leopold Bloom)
Stephen Hogan (Morris Ernst)
Morgan C. Jones (Judge John Munro Woolsey)
Helen Norton (The Voice of Ulysses)
I enjoyed this one a lot more thanI expected to, I'd reccomend the podcast tab to get to the recording where you'll find semi-dramatized readings of allthe Dubliners stories.
Update: I'll let the great Shirley Chisholm answer for me, "We wanted to end the silly
censorship which kept Joyce's Ulysses in a brown paper wrapper. But we
have ended up with a pornographic culture and a society that no longer
blushes."
Shirley Chisholm, one of the founders of The National Organization for Women
We also got a country in which people can lie with impunity and in which the biggest fattest fans of "free speech" in which they can lie and spread hate are the Republican-fascists, the neo-Nazis, the white supremacists and skin-heads and antisemites and the porn industry. Oh, and idiot lefties who are their total and complete suckers. I liked the play and even liked Ulysses, though it's over-rated but things went totally to hell after that. But, then, I like a good brawl, now and again.
IT IS MY INTENTION TO CONTINUE with the four lecture-sermon-Q&A sessions the wonderful Walter Brueggemann gave on Jeremiah but I've learned two things in the process of going through them so far, A. they are far more complex than most of the things I go through here, B. I shouldn't attempt to go through a complex religious topic during growing season because I don't have time to do it justice, though I'm going to slog through these now that I've started. Of course, if you have the time you could listen to them, do background reading - I'd love to have the time and money to go through all of the books he recommends - and come up with your own conclusions. That's one of my main goals, to encourage people to do that.
But even being worn out from garden work doesn't keep me from getting into brawls- much more convenient to do that online instead of at a bar. I've been having one with what I believe is a Brit materialist who didn't like a comment about psychology I posted on one of Sabine Hossenfelder's videos. It quickly became apparent that the psych guy wanted to assert materialist ideology with the typical claims about our minds being the product of physical structures in our brains to which I posed my as yet not even touched challenges to that, as I said in my response to him:
Ah, what you're doing isn't science, it's promoting the ideology of materialism. Which is not uncommon among psychologists and in allied alleged-sciences. What you do is pretend that psychologists come up with valid scientific studies to support your ideology. I went through an experiment for more than a year, asking your fellow materialist ideologues if it is true that an idea is an epiphenomenon of a physical structure in the brain, that must mean that for any given idea there is a unique structure that will produce that idea and not another idea. If that is the case, how does the brain a. know that it needs to make such a structure before the idea is present in the brain, b. how the brain knows what it needs to know to be the basis of that idea before the physical structure to produce that idea has been made in the brain, c. how does it know HOW to make that structure before that structure is present to produce that idea in the brain, d. once it has made some structure as a representation of that idea how does it know it has made the right structure to produce that idea, especially as a different idea would have just been made by it. YOUR PROPOSED MECHANISM MUST WORK WITHIN THE LIMITS OF YOUR IDEOLOGICAL CLAIM AND MUST MATCH THE NEAR INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE OF US HAVING IDEAS THAT ARE QUITE ACCURATE, something that happens literally hundreds of times before we have been awake for a couple of hours in the morning and all day long. I got ridiculous non answers such as "DNA" (which doesn't work due to time, not to mention then "DNA" would have to do all the things the brain can't do or "natural selection" which would have had to been prescient for literally every novel idea that no human being has ever had before and have near omniscience in being able to do all of those things I listed. Materialism is an ideology that is the most decadent inf human history because it must debunk the mind that holds it and it ends up being able to have the quality of truth only if it is false.
Which to long time readers here will know I've pointed out over and over again never to have an atheist-materialist answer in the five years since I first started making that challenge. I have yet to have them get past the first hurdle.
This time I did expand the problem by pointing out that every step of the problem contained discrete ideas within it that would, as well, have to have ideas constructed by the brain in order for those ideas to be entertained and settled, for example, the brain would have both had to have an idea it didn't have a structure for present in it and it would also have to have the idea of the structure it had to make to BE that idea and the idea that it needed to make that structure to be that idea all of which would, themselves generate a series of component ideas. The concept of a structure is, itself, a composite of separable concepts and making the structure would involve other components, such as what materials would have to be assembled to make that structure. For any atheist who thinks they can do the other typical thing of saying the structure is like a computer program or routine, that doesn't do much but change the kind of thing needing to be made which is, itself, made of non-interchangeable component concepts arranged in a specific order. Whether it's made up out of molecules or "numbers" doesn't do a thing to the the materialists' brain started on doing what, by their own claims, would have to be done in the absence of any ideas to guide the brain.
Anyway, that got me to thinking about the basis of modern materialism in scientism which inevitably gets you back to mathematics because science, from the start of modern science was an attempt to find durable truths about the physical world that had the same absolute nature and absolutely solid foundation that mathematics was believed to have reliably found something which the pseudo-sciences regularly fail to do (my remark was an answer to a slam against the hardly precise science of nutrition as opposed to the totally unreliable science of psychology - S. H. was talking about the replication crisis with a psychologist). And it is also something that even the most successful sciences have failed to find. Much of Hossenfelder's Youtube channel discusses the lapses in even the best established theories of physics. And, of course, despite what was believed about mathematics in the 16th and 17th centuries when the ideological basis of modern science was being formed, the 20th century revealed that that conception of mathematics was seriously wrong, mathematics, itself had serious gaps in its logical foundation, as was famously proven by Kurt Godel and supported by others.
I was looking for things I could listen to while doing garden work and downloaded the audio from this Numberphile video which has a good, simple explanation of the problem.
It would be interesting to know why any modern physicist or cosmologist claiming to be on the trail of a Theory of Everything would believe it was possible under their subsidiary study if there was every reason to believe nothing like that is possible for mathematics. I think one of the problems is that they pretend that all of that isn't based, ultimately, on a hardly mathematical or scientific action of belief which has nothing much to do with formal proof. It could be that formal proof and absolute completeness, the kind of absolute and eternal reliability that was attributed to mathematics is a kind of illusion which, when insisted on to the extent which an ideological holding of scientism becomes a delusion, itself one of the more blatant self-contradictions which is, notwithstanding, the controlling ideology among most modern people of the educated class.
If you want a good example of that, it comes right at the end of the video in which the film-maker inserts, out of nowhere, a slam against religion which I think is a. them inserting the required ideology of the Brit academic class because, b. they sense that they have just loosened the foundation of their ideology which is all important to that effort, even more so than logicality and any sense of open-minded consideration.
Update: I should have noted that the bald guy in the video is Marcus de Sautoy, the successor of Richard Dawkins in the Simonyi Chair For The Public [alleged] Understanding of Science, who claimed that his focus would be more on understanding science and less on slamming religion, I would think you'd have to do a statistical analysis to find out the extent to which his frequent mocking of religion in his public presentations supports that or not. What he said, inserted at the end of that video is, actually, of relevance to the entirety of this post, especially seeing where I started out with it:
To think that you know, I think it's still interesting to explore the things which might always transcend our knowledge, and of course religion just gives these things far too many properties they should never have but I think I think that rather abstract idea of the unknown is still quite an intriguing one.
Elsewhere he defines religion in terms of an atheist god of the gaps framing, in which religion depends on what isn't known, a definition both ignorant of the history and literature of religion and quite convenient to his atheist-materialist-scientistic ideology. I think, though, he stumbled on one of the greatest differences between what math and science do and what religions do. As I found out in my difficulties of dealing with Brueggemann on Jeremiah, the subject matter of the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition is enormous, complex, difficult and contains many unknowns that science and math simply don't bother to consider, especially science narrowing its focus so it can come up with presumably durable and reliable statements about a narrow range of things that its methods are able to deal with. Religion must deal with a far wider range of human life and experience in a far broader context than the mere physical matter involved. As I pointed out, when it tries to shoe horn a larger range of human experience and life into its tiny confines, it has to lie to do that.
It is a real life irony that Charles Simonyi, the financier of the Oxford Chair for the Public Understanding of Science which, I believe, he more or less controls as to who gets to "sit" in it, was a large donor to both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns of the most anti-science of all recent or perhaps all U.S. presidents, Donald Trump. He certainly wasn't in favor of the U.S. Voters having a very deep understanding of science in his choice in those elections. Materialism, both the high-academic kind and the vulgar, Trumpian style are really not different, in the end.
Update: So, not even a Mop Heads tribute band but a tribute band playing covers by an inferior folk-rock band doing Dylan material. Classy, with a capitol K.
Update 2: It's hy-lar-i-ous that the "genre" was of such originality that its first official hit was The Byrds copying what Bob Dylan had already done with Tamborine Man, they didn't even do the most interesting verses of it. "Folk rock" is largely tedious pre-hippy easy-listening music.
I love to piss off the guy who has lied about me most days for the last decade. It's so easy to get him in a swivet or to give him a cis-sy fit. Hey, Mr. Numb-o-rine man, throw a fit for me.
MUCH AS I'D LOVE to research another one of the many areas in which atheist popular and even allegedly more high-brow lore is full of lies, once told, forever cited on the authority of the liar, I've got to take advantage of the weather and get into my garden. I don't need to provide another, fresh example just now. I could mention things like the frequently read or heard citation of the Code of Hammurabi or the Analects of Confucius as non or even pre-religious codes of "ethics," which a simple reading of the texts would show was a lie because both of them claim their authority is given to them from the gods or from heaven. In the course of fact checking new-atheists in the 00s and after, one of the things I've concluded is they don't much read and almost never fact check when they like something which is said and then repeated. I have also come to believe not so much that atheists lie more than other people do but that a propensity to lie may indicate the liar doesn't believe there is a durable moral obligation to tell the truth that has consequences for the. I think many an alleged Christian who is addicted to lying is actually a functional atheist in that they don't really believe there is a moral breach with consequences if they lie. I'd include most of the Republican-fascist caucuses in the Congress and on the Supreme Court in that regard.
For more examples as found in atheist popular literature, there is the clipping for distortion of James Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance, various lies told about what Thomas Jefferson said about religion, especially the totally fictitious letters to Thomas Paine Conway Moncure invented or got duped over which contradict every letter he wrote on the subject which are extant and verified that I've consulted on the topic. The claims that Mozart was an atheist rebel who left the church and who was denied the Sacraments at his death and thrown into a pauper's grave without a funeral mass. Virtually every time I've looked into the claims of that sort made by atheists, I've found that they were either outright lies or based on some of the sloppiest and most careless of citation and research I've ever witnessed but which is held to be gospel truth by so many with college credentials. And there's a lot more that has been posted here that could be linked to.
As I said, I don't think atheism is necessarily accompanied by a propensity to lie, I've certainly cited a large number of atheist scholars and writers who I believe are very honest, careful and reliable and I've pointed out that many professed religious believers, especially those who are called Christians, who lie with an abandon that would match the worst atheists I've ever seen. In that case they have to violate some of the most basic and important moral positions held by the Jewish, Christian, Islamic tradition and virtually every other religious tradition I have any familiarity with. A liar's profession of faith is likely a lie told for an ulterior motive, perhaps that fact would add to the depravity of the liar and the immorality of the lie they told. I seem to recall something like that being identified as being included in the somewhat mysterious statement of Jesus that sinning against the Holy Spirit would not be forgiven. But I'd want to research the issue and give full citations if I were to pursue that.
Everybody's talking about heaven ain't going to heaven, is a far easier to understand expression of it. I think that's worth thinking about.
IN THE BEGINNING of his second lecture on Jeremiah, Brueggemann gave a quick summary of his first lecture which is so good because it points to things that you might have missed in the first one, it did for me. In the course of that short summary he said:
One way to understand Jeremiah's vocation to pluck up and tear down and plant and to build and then I showed you four other texts where that same set of verbs is used in a variety of ways to help give shape to the book of Deuteronomy. And then I suggested that the pluck up and tear down is to walk Jerusalem into the loss of 587 and to plant and to build is to walk Jerusalem out of 587. And the hard thing about plucking up and tearing down is that Jeremiah had to do that in a society of denial that didn't want to know they were walking into that abyss and planting and building is very hard because this was a society in despair and they did not believe anything could happen.
He certainly could be talking about the United States in the first few months of the Biden administration, following on the abyss of Trump, if you want an example of the denial, you can find that on the would be hard-left among the likes of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi,* both in denials of what happened in walking into the abyss and who reject the Democrats trying to plant and build our way out of it. The drama over the Senate, the filibuster, the fate of voting and democracy are, I think, a good example of the kind of thing he says Jeremiah faced in his time. Dissatisfaction with the possible as set against the imagined perfection of the left I am a part of is a major problem for making progress.
Now this really is the structure of most of the Prophetic Books so you will find particularly in the three big books of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, they're all organized this way even though they don't use this kind of language . . . and then I think I said at the end that pattern and see the four verbs that way this is really retold in the life of Jesus so this (walking into the abyss) becomes crucifixion and this (walking out of it) becomes resurrection. And, obviously, the shapers of the Jesus narrative knew all this very well.
Listening to this part of it, I was, of course, nervous because it is the kind of analysis that plays into the hands of the mockers and deniers, the debunkers and the historical revisionists (really all history is revision, so the term is redundant) who want to deny that Jesus was a real person and everything from the 18th century atheists down to the ones who used to take out personal ads in The Nation to hawk their "proof" that Jesus was fictional. But that is dishonest because every piece of history, biography, journalism, even careful reportage has a structure placed on it to make it both comprehensible to the person telling the story and to render it comprehensible in a more general context than a theatrical narrative at its most superficial settles for.
The people who witnessed the vocation of Jesus, the three years or so he was a public figure, his ministry, his prophecy, his death and, as they also report, the experience of him, resurrected, would certainly have reached into the most significant literature of their culture, all of them being Jews, it would be the books of the Scriptures they knew, as I found out in doing background reading for this series, likely, for a lot of them, the versions of those books in the Greek translation of the Septuagint. The same can be said in other cultures where other events and lives were given a structure in the telling in terms familiar to those people, whether through the Hindu tradition, various Chinese and Buddhist traditions, through the Homeric literature in Greece and Rome and in other, less known to us but entirely familiar to the class that wrote things down in Egypt and those cultures which used cuneiform writing.
If you're going to reject that practice, you'd better give up ever looking into any ancient literature because that kind of practice is all over the place. And it's certainly true that if you want to avoid it, you're going to have to give up more recent stuff, too.
As I indicated yesterday, 20th century atheists used their previous literature, recycling themes and tropes and legends and lies in their literary production, too. The hagiogrpaphic nonsense on TV, in movies and as seen dancing and rapping on Broadway does the same only I don't think that historical accuracy is the goal, selling tickets and perpetuating self-serving myths are.
In the end, the reason that someone is speaking is important to understanding what they are saying. Jeremiah, in interpreting what he saw going on in front of him advocated the egalitarian justice of the Law of Moses and attributed the disaster he saw coming and experienced as a consequence of inequality and injustice. It is clear that Jesus intended in his ministry to fulfill that Law and to bring its egalitarian justice into being. That same intention, as an often counter-productive and ultimately impotent secular aspiration, vestiges of post-Christian culture, may inform some of the perpetuated myths of our own time, certainly in the current example I've singled out for repeated condemnation, Hamilton, though in the case of Hamilton, the reality of who he really was and what he really did is of ongoing and anti-egalitarian in its unjust consequences in a way that is consequential and so must be set straight, so many college-credentialed idiots in denial and then promoting discouragement buy it. We're not going to walk out of the abyss we're in until we face that. And I don't mean just that the musical is dishonest crap. It's a really dangerous set of myths.
* I am hesitant to put Matt Taibbi who has done some important and respectable work in the same category as Glenn Greenwald, whose accomplishments given in the piece linked to, are exaggerated, in my opinion. I won't go into that here, though.
WALTER
BRUGGEMANN BEGINShis second lesson on Jeremiah with a longer prayer
that lays out the topic of plucking up and tearing down as a reality. Brueggemann
does good prayers so I've done my best to transcribe it, though there
were two places I really couldn't hear what he said so I've filled in
what I think he said, I haven't marked those.
You have yet the whole world in Your hands, that we do not doubt. You are saturated with mercy, compassion, goodness and generosity, That we do not doubt.
We are, nonetheless, haunted by the witness that You are a God with a ferocious will who will not be mocked.
We are vexed by the awareness that when You are mocked You pluck up and tear down.
So we ponder about Your ferocious will, Your being mocked and Your plucking up and tearing down, and we wonder in what ways we have mocked You and the ways You do your ferocious work.
We watch and wonder if You pluck up, we notice the ways in which our world is being plucked up by the roots.
Our institutions on which we have relied and certitudes that no longer seem to hold, our entitlements that we can't any longer protect, our growth economy that we can no longer cause to grow.
We wonder and watch if You tear down we notice the ways there is a tearing down among us, our security systems our social infrastructure that makes life possible, our solidity in church for which we can hardly pay anymore.
And then we remember that in ancient days You plucked up Your people out of the land You tore down Your Messiah on that dread Friday, You put your people into free-fall twice, more than twice, many more times than twice, with brutality and fear and greed and loss of neighborliness and injustice.
We are vexed and haunted by what we know of You and so we pause now to think about old texts, to think about present circumstance.
We ask You to pluck up our systems of greed and anxiety to tear down old walls of fear and exclusion to begin anew filled with Easter dance We find ourselves on that Saturday of plucking up and tearing down, we notice and we wonder and if it is not too soon, we hope. Amen
It is one of the common ways of mocking the Bible and religion in general to mock some given instance when a natural disaster is used as an example of consequences for immoral behavior. That is easily done in some instances when some preacher or would-be holy man or seer does it. Using natural disasters in arguments does have its uses, though. Bertrand Russell, I think in his History of Western Philosophy used the 1755 Lisbon, Portugal Earthquake in a similar way to mock Leibniz's philosophy often mocked because he made an argument that we lived in the best possible world of the kind of world we lived in - it's actually a more complex argument than the shorthand would lead you to believe. Leibniz was a far smarter guy than Bertrand Russell was, and he might have been one of his smarter critics. Voltaire was not. I think one of the reasons Leibniz was is so mocked is that it has religious content that has been objected to by many, though not all, of those who rejected the argument. Russell was merely copying a long line of similar ideological use of it probably following the superficiality of Voltaire whose popular non-argument against it isn't in the form of a philosophical refutation but in a short novel that used only mockery, of a low kind. Though there is a legitimate argument to be made that both Voltaire and Russell rely on a cartoonish distortion of what Leibniz said on the topic should count for more in its favor as an argument. But that's not something I've got time to research to argue out. No doubt what Brueggemann says here would be mocked similarly.
There are a whole range of consequences that come from our actions, from the most obvious and certain, those whose effects are obvious from their antecedents a car crash with death coming from drunken driving, those which are certain but are not nearly as obvious, humans burning fossil fuels and global warming, and those which are both more subtle and less obvious, such as the relationship between economic injustice and drought. When you want to cite those more remote examples, you're risking both mockery and being wrong about it. Pat Robertson claiming that a hurricane was the result of Disney World allowing gay couples to go there for "Gay Days" was just begging someone to note that the next one to hit South Carolina was his fault. He did, briefly, take global warming more seriously, I am under the impression he suppressed that due to the politics of Republican collusion with oil billionaires but perhaps I do him an injustice. If someone can point out his ongoing opposition to the accelerating environmental injustice - which is already back here biting human beings, the most vulnerable first - let me know.
In global warming we face an issue where what would certainly have seemed as remote as human evil, injustice causing an earth quake to those mockers is something that science, some of the most important science being done, for all its perhaps inexactitude, in the history of human culture. It has the potential to uproot all of us and is certainly uprooting many species, not to mention all of those things which Brueggemann lists in his prayer. I don't see that the "enlightenment" culture of Voltaire or even the scientistic materialism of Russell has any better explanation of why we should, individually, as countries and as a species take responsibility for what we are doing and changing it. I think seeing this as one of the most exigent choices we are presented in the same way that the prophet, Jeremiah preached, as the other Hebrew prophets preached, both in changing our behavior and facing what is upon us now and what is to come will prove to make better sense of it than the ridicule of Voltaire and the sarcasm of Russell.
One of the things that I wonder is what human beings are that God would allow us to force this catastrophe on ourselves. The evils that we have unleashed are embedded deeply into the structure of the universe, the basic physics that are the vehicle of delivering the consequential warming our transgression of the limits of tolerable consumption has brought about. Why would God allow us to destroy so many species? Knowingly. And that is a question I have no answer for anymore than one of the smartest men in the history of Western philosophy could solve a more general consideration of the questions forced by human evil and the evils of our experience. But I know atheism has even less of an explanation of it and no reason to care about it except how it impinges on us, personally. Russell couldn't use his materialism to come up with an explanation of his anti-nuclear activities or pacifism. I don't think Voltaire would have been that fussed, to tell you the truth.
UH, HUH, sure you were going to make an Ariadne Auf Naxos joke before I mentioned it. An opera that famously parodies the vulgar side of opera fit right in with you complaining when I pointed out the vulgar side of opera. I really believe that you had it on the tip of your tongue. Or, rather, a Buggs Bunny reference.
AS EVERYONE KNOWS it is the subtle and understated art, the shunning of spectacular display, both visually and aurally, the fidelity to the artistic vision of the poet and composer, the serious and sober professionalism of the performers, the singers, the cast, the musicians and, most of all the conductor, the studied and complete unwillingness of the set designers and costumers and cosmeticians to draw attention away from the artistic core of the work, and, most of all, the utter sophistication and seriousness of the audience, their total unwillingness to intrude on the artistic presentation that has rendered the world of opera absolutely bullet-proof to broad parody and mockery.
As the great soprano Birgit Nilsson said when asked if the masses of flowing red hair on the head of that other great soprano, Joan Sutherland, were real, "I don't know, I haven't pulled it yet."
I'll bet you thought the Three Tenors tour was the height of high art, didn't you.
AS ONE GAY MAN who hates musicals, I have to ask that. With the fewest of exceptions, it's 3rd rate music at service to 9th rate books and productions that are generally a vulgar parody of opera. Which doesn't need any lessons in vulgarity from even more popular entertainment. Just about the only music from musicals that's any good does better outside of the play than in it. The only song from West Side Story I can tolerate is "Something's Coming" though I heard Sondheim said the only song from it he considered good was The Jet's Song. He'd know, he was the most competent of the guys involved with that thing.
Instead of reviving that stupid musical, a bunch of upper-middle-class and richer white gay men drooling over Puerto Rican and Italian rough trade gang members, I'd much rather see someone adapt Titus Andronicus to comment on the Trump era, if for nothing more than I'd like to see Don jr. and Eric baked into a pie and served to Trump and their mother, it wouldn't work with Melania because she'd probably down it without her frozen models' face cracking. Bet she'd take a second bite after she found out. She would make a good Queen of the Goths, I mean, her blood Christmas decor would be a killer set motif. And Trump and his Queen get killed in the end. Brutally. I could watch that. But who to fit into the Titus role? James Comey? Too sanctimonious. Mattis? Clearly the concept needs work. It could make a fun game, who's who for Trump Us Un Donny Us, or something. If you like that kind of thing. If you make it a stupid musical you don't have to fit everyone into the plot, everything in musicals is simplified and dumbed down, anyway.
I do think the extreme decadence of that, often considered the worst play in that corpus, is more relevant to our situation today than that stupid post-war R&J adaptation. I'd hire Randy Rainbow to write the lyrics. I'd be really careful about who you got to do the music and book. Look at what a mess they made with Candide. Titus isn't as bad a play as Pericles which I don't think should be included, that thing is a piece of shit.
Update: Simps isn't just post-literate, he's post-illiterate.
SUCH A STUPID ACCUSATION made by someone who doesn't believe in the sacrament and doesn't have the slightest clue what it means. It almost makes me nostalgically recall the day when one of Duncan's rump at what used to be a moderately weak force in 00s politics accused me of being a Fenian, probably to the confusion of just about every low to mid-mid-brow, TV educated, college-credentialed person who read it at Duncan's self-identified "brain trust." They really call themselves that. It was about the same time that the same Brit-atheist carnivore who advocated the eating of horse meat accused me, an animal-rights vegetarian since I was a teenager, of sharing in the guilt of the equine-assassination of the race horse Shergar decades earlier. I don't even approve or horse racing since so many animals get killed by that industry on a routine basis to no crocodile tears shed by anyone. Such were the late 00s at that place. Scratch a Brit-atheist you'll find an Orange-man, like the Klan, some of the worst of those are women. For the record, I'm opposed to all secret socieites, that leading to lies and deceit is just the start of that. Including the IRA, the Knights of Columbus (fascist clowns only dangerous) and the goddamned Orange Order. From what I've seen the quality of the dissidents at Duncan's has diminished to the point where they've turned on each other out of stupidity and boredom. I doubt anything that complex as a form of mendacity is used there now. Simps is simple as he annoys them. I warned him about a year ago he'd turn as boring as Uncle Milty had by 1960 as he ended up doing an early Saturday night bowling show that didn't run long. Comedy ages and then just becomes annoying if you don't change it.
The USCCB doesn't have the power to deny Joe Biden Communion, that power resides mostly in his own Bishop in Washington and he said he wouldn't do that or the Pope who warned the bishops against doing what they're doing. But when did atheist bigots ever let accuracy get in the way of a bit of bigotry, ignorantly and stupidly deployed? The USCCB can get stuffed as far as I'm concerned. I haven't checked to find out if the vote on writing the policy has been made public to see if the local bishop here supported it or not, I'm not even aware of what the Bishop in Portland is named these days, to tell you the truth. A huge percentage of its membership have thoroughly discredited themselves, the JPII Benedict XVI minions of mediocrity in service to neo-fascist billionaires and multi-millionaires.
It does remind me that I'd intended after Covid was under control, if it ever is, to try to get people to start an intentional Eucharistic community here. It takes a community to do that, not an individual, I certainly wouldn't want non-Catholics to be excluded. I'm Catholic Plus, I don't feel any need of the approval of the USCCB.
I doubt the one who made the accusation understood any of that. Well, maybe the bit about eating horse meat. If the NYT Sunday features section had a recipe they'd probably go shopping for some so they could brag about it to their fellow "brain trusters" - they really do call it that.
