Being busy with moving I have decided to take time off from looking for new radio plays this month, though if I come across any, I will post them. So I'm going to post some of my favorites from those I've already posted. I had intended to start with Gordon Pengilly's Seeing In The Dark, one of the best radio plays I've ever heard, but it has been removed from Archive.org where I found it. But this one is still up and I liked it almost as much.
THE PSYCHO-FASCIST COVID-19 CONSPIRACY LIE SPREADING lie network Newsmax, was founded by Christopher Ruddy who is a product of, yes, you guessed it, another Catholic boy's prep school, Chaminade High School in Mineola, NY. and the Catholic St. Johns University, though in this case the religious orders to blame for credentialing him are the Marinists and Vincentians, not the usual Jesuits. You have to wonder if they believe he is an upright example of the kind of Christian morality they claim to exist to propagate. I include that in founding that abomination that should be totally suppressed, he tapped into the fascist-billionaire loot of Richard Mellon Scaife, a prep-Ivy product who you can't blame on the teaching orders.
The elite Catholic prep schools, colleges and universities have, I think, earned a reputation of producing the current wave of fascist oligarchs and their servants. I would hold they should be investigated on that as much as the Catholic hierarchy should for the sex abuse scandals. I'm thoroughly disgusted that they continue in this even with the enormous role of dishonor they had a role in credentialing. And in the meantime the Catholic schools which used to help educate working-class and poor children is dying. The elite schools should be closed, their properties sold or rented and the proceeds sent to support that part of Catholic education.
And, you guessed it, Christopher Ruddy is thick in the neo-fascist Latin Mass cult, as well (I won't link to him). Thank God Pope Francis is trying to end that, though I think it's way too late.
Update:
Apparently though he is a product of the Deerfield Academy, Yale (which kicked him out for drinking) and then Trump's minor-Ivy alma mater, The University of Pennsylvania, Richard Mellon Scaife (who was not Catholic) IS TO BE BLAMED on the Catholic school system which he never attended. At least that's what I find in my to be trashed file just under the deadline.
I don't think Scaife was a believer in the Jewish God Christianity and especially the post-Vatican II Catholic Church, believes in. He was a thoroughly devoted and complete servant of Mammon, seeing religion as nothing more than a tool to impose billionaire oligarchy on humanity. That the Catholic-Mammonists like Ruddy are the servants of the servants of Mammon is only one way to encapsule what I said in this post. "Catholic Mammonist" is a good name for the real religious belief of the Latin mass advocates, "traditional Catholics" and other neo-integralists. They don't care if they don't understand the words because those words aren't about what they really worship.
The idiot either means that or he believes I was, in a post that thoroughly trashed elite Catholic preps and universities for turning out a distressingly large percentage of the current crop of neo-fascists REALLY means I was absolving the elite Catholic schools for exactly that, the idiot doesn't seem to get the distinction, which would have surprised me before I went online and found the Eschaton and other play-lefty commenting communities.
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SOMEONE ASKED ME YESTERDAY if I knew how long the Black Death lasted, I knew it had lasted a number of years but I had to look it up, figures vary slightly but from 1347 to 1352, a year or two on either or both ends probably a safer guess. We've been in this pandemic for a year and a half. While the two illnesses are quite different, the plague being a bacterial disease spread by fleas and Covid-19 being an air-borne virus, I'm not sure which would be the more dangerous. If Covid-19 lasted five or seven years and if it generates variants that are more transmissible and deadly, with world travel and the larger population of human beings, I doubt anyone can guess what's in store with any accuracy. I think one thing is certain, it is likely that this is far from over and will be far worse than it is now, and it is too bad now to tolerate the anti-vaxx-anti-mask antics of Republican-fascists here or the Conservative-fascists in Britan or their like in Canada or anywhere else in the world to be allowed to make it even worse than it could be.
By the way, one of the things I looked at and am still going over is this fascinating article from The Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health, the official journal of the Australasian Military Medicine Association.
Walter Brueggemann's idea that what the Prophets in the Bible warn against is the human population, individually and as a nation, going past "non-transgressible limits" past which the rules of the universe, the Creation of God, will permit tolerable human life within. I don't know enough about the actual life of 14th century Eurasians and Africans - the populations who suffered the Black Death - to know what limits may have been violated leading to that plague were. But it's clear that the violation of the truth in the permission and protection of mass media spread lies is playing a huge role in this pandemic as it has in other, modern, fairly well documented pandemics. As very well may be the cruelty to animals that the meat industry has as an intrinsic feature of its origin.
If you thought I was being hyperbolic in either of those things I said yesterday, I wasn't. We know where the annual flu pandemics come from, we know where the worst one in relatively recent times came from, we know the role that lies, politically and economically motivated lies had in worsening those.
If, as the best guess of researchers seems to be as of now, Covid-19 arose in the notoriously cruel wet markets where exotic and rare animals were kept for slaughter to thrill the appitites of affluent people, that meat market was as relevant to this pandemic as swine farming was for the Influenza of a century ago. That pandemic had its own political uses, its own anti-masking cult of death, one which was, in part, responsible for the far worse second wave of it. So lies, as well, have had a major and historical part in previous pandemics.
Yet our legal system sees no need to do something about lies even as those get hundreds of thousands, going into a million, of us killed. Lies amplified immediately on FOX and other fascist media and on the fascist channels on online media, so much worse than the newspaper syndicate-word of mouth transmission of the anti-mask mania of a century back. I don't know if the early movie industry played a role in it (send me links, PLEASE!) or telegraph but other electric media wouldn't have since those didn't exist yet.
Our notions of freedom of the press and freedom of speech, absent a requirement that those do not tell lies that will get hundreds of thousands, millions killed is an idiotic "enlightenment" stupidity that our decidedly "enlightenment" benighted age refuses to learn from.
That is with even the large majority of the population, today, being literate, being hooked into "information" networks and even having the benefits of the best science in the history of our species. The refusal to acknowledge that we have transgressed the limits of the tolerability of lies even as we are seeing the results in preventable deaths, in terrible pain and hardship shows that there is nothing more benighted than the idea that you can escape the reality of moral obligation and not suffer the consequences.
I have recently pointed out that what the Prophets perceived as the consequences of sin could, in many cases, be seen as them perceiving the transgression of the Law of God, as expressed through the way the universe is set up. If that is true it is among the most impressive feats of insight in the history of our species among those iron-age (not "bronze age") peoples. For someone who believes that God created the world it is to be expected that the so-called "laws of nature" would be in line with the Law of God. I don't think that the idea that such transgressions of moral law will have real consequences in physically lived life is anywhere near as silly or farfetched or superstitious as the idea that a human society, a nation, its legal system can get away with lying at all levels at any magnitude and not have catastrophic results. Nor that a limitless level of cruelty and killing of animals is something human beings can manage and not suffer consequences forever. I look at the history of the well-documented pandemics of the modern period and the idea that those are knowably an aspect of them is rather blindingly obvious, no matter how difficult that may be to articulate in a pseudo-scientific form. Science, clearly, could not encompass that insight because it, by choice and design, cannot contain the moral concepts necessary to hold it.
I have to say, one thing I've learned in this is what a bunch of fucking crybabies a large number of Americans are. Whining and bawling like babies ABOUT WEARING A FRIGGIN' MASK! Jeesh, imagine if they had to really face a hardship. The American cult of "freedom" without responsibility has turned us into a nation of whiny brats. Such is the legacy of the cult of Madisonian "rights" and movie epics about the "wild west" and other such "outlaws" who work in makeup and costumes.
THAT POST I DID about the mathematical demonstration (maybe it might rise to the level of proof) that almost all people with European heritage have the 8th century emperor (gangster king) Charlemagne as an ancestor is something I've looked into more and I'm convinced it is almost a certainty based on the number of direct ancestors we would have at that distance in time back and the absolute number of Europeans alive at the time. We know that he left many, many children, legitimate and otherwise who, as well had children who had children.
Based on that I had to conclude that the entire concept of ethnicity as a biological classification was bogus. There were certainly many more people who had children in any stated ethnic category known to have been around at the time than any one person and, so, if Charlemagne is in our family line, so must at least some of the members of virtually every other ethnic group alive at the time. I took that to mean that every single Nazi had Jews in their family line, every European Jew certainly had what would now be called "antisemites" in their lineage, even every Brit would have Irish in their background and every Irish person should suspect that even they are a little bit English. Assuming that, whatever race they may be assigned, the Brits, Irish, Jews and Nazis all had at least partial European heritage dating back that far. Hard as all of those may be to take for the bigots among those various groups, they aren't the pure stock they love to imagine themselves as being. We are all mutts. That probably saved most of us some serious genetic trouble along the way.
I felt enormously freed from the burden of considering ethnicity as being anything but an imaginary categorization founded on ignorance of mathematics and probability, the fever dream of nationalists, ethnic chauvinists and the like turned into a parody of science, only fully believed in by scientists who are the only people who get to determine what science is at any given time. Though I was brought up to believe that everyone is equal so maybe someone brought up on ethnic chauvinism might not feel unburdened. For which I thank my liberal Irish Catholic parents.
Going back farther, of course, we all came from Africa and, no doubt, one original small group of pre-human ancestors. That only makes the idea of ethnicity even stupider.
Someday I might go into how Anthropology as a field had a chance to get past some of its worst aspects in and around the once dominant figure of Franz Boas and how the Darwinists derided him and swamped his more idealistic school of it after his death. Not that there weren't major problems with Boas for all of his numerous virtues - anthropology will never be science, it is, at best, a collection of competing and sometimes combating lores, generally told by frequently condescending outsiders with a hatchet to grind. You cannot study something like human cultures using science, though you can use some of those careful methods of study of which the so-called "scientific method" is supposed to be a specialized example. No one can look from the outside or the inside of a community and come to that level of understanding about it, divorced from pre-existing attitudes and judgements and ulterior motives to get real data and measurements. The idea that that could be done was ridiculous faith based in materialism. One of the stupider ones.
Ethnicity is an imaginary entity, I think if human beings have a future it will have to be scrapped. It gets too many people killed and oppressed.
MY OLD PRACTICE of making resolutions on the first of any month - you make enough resolutions one's bound to stick sometime - may be revived on August first. You will only be able to tell by the absence of mentioning the person most obsessed with me in the world, Simps. If he never appears in mention here, you'll know I've successfully resolved to get shut of him, useful as he's been as a model of what's wrong with the American left.
But I've got just under two days to go as he rages again that if The Bible is not literally true and fully the "word of God" then it has the same status as a Marvel comic book. Which is obviously not true. I would not be skeptical that he might have made it through a Marvel Comic I'm sure he's never read a page of The Bible.
I could just repeat my point about the fact that the Abolitionist movement, the Civil Rights movement, much of the successful attempt to reform life in many places and over time found their moral framing and articulation from The Bible. Marvel Comics, I'd love someone to try to argue it's produced much of anything except dumb movies that are an evidence that movies prevent people who go through puberty from growing up. That's the basis of contemporary atheism.
Note: There may be a disruption in my writing this month as I am moving in with a relative to take care of them. Moving even with as little as I've got to move sucks. . . . up a lot of time.
WHILE VIROLOGY AND EPIDEMIOLOGY have made huge advances even during some of our lifetimes, producing far better, far safer vaccines much faster, none of that is anything like science understanding all issues necessary to determine and produce essential vaccines, treatments, public recommendations and policies and laws. It is stupid to think that's anything like a guarantee.
The movie view of science being omnipotent and omniscient (no wonder so many movie and TV addicts figure on it as a substitute for God) the fact is it isn't anywhere near that, no, not even if we might need it to be or no matter how we cling onto that idea. If you hold that idea science is bound to lead to disappointment and scientists and science fan-boys who present it as such are setting up the public to be serially disappointed and, so, to become as cynical, jaded and unrealistically dishonest about science as the self-believing smart set are about God. And to have that cynical and jaded view of science manipulated by con men, gangsters and media liars - many of whom couldn't care less about the truth but game the situation to benefit their careers. You wanna bet that those moral cesspools Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson believe any of what they say and were not among the first to get the vaccine for themselves as it became available? We know for a fact their boss, Rupert Murdoch did, arriving to get his fetid old carcass vaccinated with a retinue in a fleet of Land Rovers early on.
There was never any guarantee that the best that science could do in trying to contain and prevent the Corvid-19 pandemic would work 100% or 68% or even come up with a permanent fix for what is almost certainly a casually human-caused viral pandemic that we now know might alter human life and society for good. It may well be outside of the power of science to do what is needed in time, especially as the virus itself changes and forces human life and society into new and far less enjoyable patterns. If this one Delta strain of the virus can do that, there is no reason to believe that another one won't be worse, perhaps overcoming the vaccines so far developed even more so than this one has proven capable of doing. Especially in the petri dish that the unvaccinated here and elsewhere have been.
Among the many things this pandemic is forcing us to face is that media such as FOX, such as the myriad of billionaire gangster lie pushers cannot be allowed to lie with the abandon our inadequate and dangerous current interpretation of "free press" doctrine permits. This resurgence is, for now, rightly called a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" but it is far more a pandemic of those who bought Republican-fascist lies as peddled by Murdoch and multi-billionaire financed media on behalf of that gangster class, here, in Britain, in Russia, etc. Their lies have the potential to get millions if not billions killed and that is simply not going to be sustainable as such viruses take hold of the enormous human population few of whom are entirely isolated from contact with such viruses.
And that's just the start of it. Large indoor gatherings could well be a thing of the past if the worst that is imaginable about this pandemic is even partly true. Unmasked public appearance could be a thing of the past if that's the case, the normal pre-Covid-19 world could be something that is unsustainable in large part now. Office buildings, in-person schooling, religious services, live concerts, etc. there is no guarantee that those can be a permanent part of human society and life.
If, as all indications seem to indicate, this is yet another human pandemic of horrific potential that came from the meat industry, that's something that may be unsustainable in today's world. The mass holding of animals to be slaughtered for human consumption, especially in the cruel ways that is done in such markets as the one this is suspected of having given rise to, may prove to be fatal to the human population. I have mentioned here before listening to Matthew Meselson, the eminent micro-biologist, specialist in such matters as chemical and biological weapons, etc. on the CBC program As It Happens and him shocking the interviewer when he said that it was not impossible for such a disease as the "bird flu" or other such livestock-human originating viruses to come up with one that could wipe out the human population. If a virus with that potential arose it would require the most sweeping of changes to prevent our extinction and, as such viruses are given the chance to rise ever more from human practices and human population growth, I'd guess that potential is ever more likely to happen. And there have been pandemics which have a fraction of that potential which have forced huge changes in human life and habits. The Black Death which wiped out about a third of the human species forced huge changes including, so I recently read, the invention of quarantine.
And I don't see much in the way of conversion to veganism over this.
This ain't nearly over, there's no guarantee that even the best that the best we've got will be able to save us, not even with their best and most heroic efforts - and those are certainly failing due to our idiotic refusal to admit that the mass media cannot be permitted to lie with impunity on behalf of gangsters and fascists - yet we call that "freedom" and "democracy". If we are too stupid as a species to see the problem with that must be fixed and right now, maybe we're too stupid as a species to have even the best of us save us from ourselves and our lazy, stupid, selfish weakness.
WONDERFUL, BEYOND WORLD CLASS CLASSY SIMONE BILES who is taking heat even as she did the most unselfish thing I've seen an Olympic athlete do in my recollection, passing up a chance for personal glory to help her team mates, is taking heat from the white-racist-American-fascist gangster media. If we know one thing other than that she may be the greatest gymnast in history - her list of firsts assures that - she will now have the status in history as the Jesse Owens of this century, the American right playing the Adolf Hitler role in the story. And unlike them, she's young enough and mature enough and fine enough that she may well go onto higher heights in the field she occupies now or some other one she may yet enter.
American Republican-fascism, our billionaire gangster media are the basest of villains, that's their role now and for the future. Someone should knock a few of them to their knees for how they've tried to destroy her. They would never have done it if she had been white and everyone knows that. The goddamned Federalist Magazine can go to hell.
John Roberts' claim that racism is over should be something he wears in ridicule for the rest of history, too. He's one of theirs, so are the rest of the Republican-fascists on the Court.
SIMPS WHO IS AGAIN IN TIME OUT maybe permanently, this time, equates the Bible with classical Greek and Norse mythology, dismissing the very thing which allowed the Jewish People to continue in diaspora as a coherent group as mere "folk lore". Which, considering his first resort in disagreement is to attribute "antisemitism" to everyone he doesn't like and the many perhaps most he finds he can't argue with because he's spent his lifetime with his ears and eyes stuck to pop culture and commercial entertainment, is stupid.
The Jewish tradition, especially as interpreted in the Christian tradition in the past century produced the great Civil Rights movement - all you have to do is listen to the speeches, listen to the songs of that movement to hear that, Though you'd have to have read enough of it, especially the Mosaic books to get that.
The Norse tradition, especially as interpreted by Wagner and would-be scientific romantic era anthropology and linguistics, the romantic era would-be scientific study of folk lore, produced Nazism.
By their fruits you will know them, someone said. And science often determines the nature of things unseen from the visible effects of them which are observable. Seems to demonstrate a significant effect that can be judged for the truth and so goodness of it, one leading to freedom, the other to genocidal oppression.
UPDATE: I'll bet Darwin's defender believes he's got me this time. He's the Elmer Fudd of polemic discourse.
It is as indisputable that the genocidal policy of the Nazis is a direct result of Darwinism as other aspects are a result of the influence of Norse mythology under the phony presentation of that by Wagner as well as romantic era German anthropology and folklore. Darwin's theory of natural selection was easily mixed with that poison, I've proved that over and over again here (search for "natural selection" in the search window to the left). I've demonstrated that in the primary documentary record left by the Darwinists and the Nazis and, by the way, the current neo-Nazi movement.
I have never denied one more thing though I've never gone into it far, that the very same romantic era anthropology, linguistics and folklore produced Darwinism - if you doubt that look with a critical eye at the things cited by Darwin to support his claims and also those of his major German supporter and promoter, Ernst Haeckel. I know that somewhere I pointed out that much of their "scientific evidence" was nothing more than folk lore. In the beginning it was that level of gossipy junk being used to support the Brit ruling class anthropology and economic folk lore of Thomas Malthus, irrationally applying his claims to the entirety of nature and, along the way, of arguing against everything that is moral and decent in human culture. Again, look at my citation of the primary documentary record as left by Darwin, Haeckel, etc. and the Nazis and Anglo-American neo-Nazism right now.
UPDATE 2: It occurs to me, reading this to correct it, that any scientific assertion of human inequality will inevitably be used to support the rule of gangsters and that as long as science is in the hands of an aristocracy of some kind, it will be looking to support that inequality. If something as inherently egalitarian as the Jewish moral tradition - the Christian moral tradition being a part of that tradition - can be corrupted by aristocratic, gangster gaming, the by-choice amorality of science will render it even more vulnerable to that use by an elite that can sway it that way. I'm pretty confident I'd find the evidence of that but it's just a theory that I just came up with. But I'd never claim it to be true without finding the supporting evidence after subjecting it to testing by contradictory evidence. I do respect the method of careful, responsible scholarship, of which the scientific method is supposed to be a subscriber. But we're all only human in the end.
LISTENING TO THE RATIONAL discourse of Dr. Fauci on the confusion about the change back to recommending masking he makes complete sense on the basis of science and the experience of epidemiologists but it never took into account that a very large percentage of people aren't going to understand any of that. What they hear is that the most respected and most respectable authority in the United States on this is "flip-flopping" and they are not going to understand the reality that this was already built into what the CDC was doing when it recommended relaxed requirements for those who are fully vaccinated.
This reminds me of the previous epidemic of HIV-AIDS surrounding safe sex and, especially, after the first effective treatments for the effects of having the virus came in and the need for practicing safer sex was announced to be over by scum like Andrew Sullivan. Conservatives are always one of the soft spots in public health and in many other things which require maturity and self-restraint and unselfish behavior. Though there are many in the center and on the "left" who can match them in that. Those in the media are the most dangerous of that soft spot in this pandemic.
I hope that the CDC and the Biden administration understand that you can't go back and forth on something like this because no matter how well you explain it, you're going to lose those who won't understand or don't want to take the bother to understand or who may understand but want to game things for their own, selfish purposes. The explanation that Dr Fauci and his colleagues give need to do more than be technically correct and scientifically and logically sound, they have to take into full account all of those things from inability to understand to full understanding by those who want to game things for the most vile of purposes, like all of the Murdoch minions who have been vaccinated but encourage other people to be paranoid about the vaccine and stupidly macho in their refusal to take public health advice and even requirements seriously. And at this point it's pretty much everyone who works in that building protected by the FOX-Murdoch vaccine passport.
Note: I knew watching the footage of the attempted putsch of January 6 and listening to the testimony would really get to me and it did. I'm not ready to write about it, anything I added would be totally inadequate compared to the testimony of the four police officers who started the hearing and the video evidence that was presented. I'm overwhelmed by that.
IN ONE OF THE STUPIDER COMMENTS sent to my spam file the claim that since The Bible is not the infallible, literal historical or scientific record of the whole truth it is "usless" in total, which is a useful claim only in so far as if that's you're standard nothing stands, including history, science, mathematics, etc. Nothing is an infallible, literal, historical, scientific record of the whole truth, such a thing is not held by human beings, it is certainly not told by human beings - the sole source of all of our articulated record of everything. Not in total.
Considering the guy who rendered that judgement on The Bible is addicted to the, in total, lies as told by the entertainment industry, an angry defender of Broadway period-costumed bullshit and pseudo-history as told in the shallowed sound stages and editing rooms of Hollywood from my criticism, his demand placed on that one collection of writings, The Bible, shows that it is held to a standard which nothing else is required to follow, one of the most commonly found ersatz principles of the college credentialed class, from the stupidest Freshman up to the highest reaches of elite faculty - perhaps excluding those whose actual professional expertise is in the actual subject matter, taking denominational denial of reality in some cases into account. Fundamentalists being as dishonest about that as Darwinist fundamentalists are on the topic of natural selection being the total explanation of everything up to and including everything. really, everything (Daniel Dennett being one of the hardest cases in that regard).
One thing is clear from the accusation that I claimed that all of the "old testament and new testament" were historically accurate, that the person making the accusation knows nothing about the Book itself, which contains not only internal disagreements but also direct contradictions. For example, in Mark 10, Jesus noted that due to the "hardness of heart" among people, Moses wrote a law that was in contradiction to what the Law of God is in allowing divorce and remarriage, that what Moses, himself, taught was wrong. And that's not one of the minor prophets but the greatest of all the Hebrew prophets, the Bible, itself says that. The Hebrew Scriptures contain a large amount of internal disagreement and criticism. It isn't possible to read the texts carefully and not notice such things in it, certainly written originally and certainly retained through the centuries of copying and transmission by people who were intimately aware of those disagreements and discrepancies.
It is remarkable how that kind of thing, taken as a virtue when it is claimed as part of the scientific method or the practice of the historian is used as a weapon against The Bible and religion in general. It is remarkable because, as pointed out here yesterday and before by, among others quoted here, the eminent Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann have pointed out that The Bible, itself, makes no claims of the sort the accusation carries. It never claims that it's going to make things crystal clear, it never claims it's going to be internally consistent in the text, it never claims that it is going to get everything right, it never claims that it's going to make things easy and tidy. It never claims it's going to be any of those things the naive view of science or history claim for those no matter how unwelcomed those claims should be by any scientist or historian of any discernment. It's the kind of claim that an ass in the scribbling industry, the entertainment industry habitually makes believing they are showing how clever they are. It is a mainstay of the bizarre modern college-credentialed audience-pleasing innovation in which a comedy act can consist of a shallow, nasty, derisive atheist sermon preached to those who love to believe they're in the know but who could probably not carry out a multiplication of two digit numbers without a calculator. I'm talkin' to you kew-el kids sitting on the school house steps for going on fifty-years or more.
ONE OF THE MOST TELLING stupidities of the college credentialed play-lefty atheist is that they don't know that biblical fundamentalism is a fairly modern PROTESTANT idea which Catholics of any knowledge or discernment don't hold with. Stupy accused me of believing that, quote, "The old and new testaments are clearly accurate historical documents." He's so stupid in such a typically stupid way. They don't even try to be stupid in new and interesting ways. Here are a few things I've said here, leaving out the many quotes from many different authors pointing out that the Bible is not modern history, neither is it science.
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I'll give you points two and three of the points he stresses because they are useful to an understanding of why trying to read and understand the Books of the Bible as if they were modern history or science or even a "proof" of something is to boldly go futilely where so many others have gone before.
The Thought Criminal Saturday, February 10, 2018
In the point from the story of Jonah, there is a real chance to see how a superficial, "literal" reading of these books, a reading of them as if they are books of history or science in the way we're taught to read everything in this materialistic-scientistic, industrial-mechanistic culture, we don't begin to understand the texts, why they were written, the reason they were written as they were instead of as a modern historical-scientific discourse instead of a book to assert these radical claims about the radically good character of the GOD they were teaching.
Monday, January 15, 2018
The Bible is not a pure urtext edition showing exactly what God dictated to Moses and a series of other Jewish verbatim shorthand takers, it is a collection containing some very inspired text written by human beings with enormous insights but also with the complete human capacity to get things wrong or to have less than truthful intentions in what they are doing. Some of it, such as the texts establishing the temple, I strongly suspect were inspired by a priest caste looking to enrich themselves, as, perhaps, the later Prophets may have also suspected. And it was not written in a time when the standards of history and science asserted in the 19th and 20th centuries were even known, standards which we, today, often breach instead of observe. As my recent antagonist in this matter did in regard to both science and the history and recent events in science.
Monday, October 28, 2013
By a process of rational deduction, not by appeal to Scripture itself, the Protestant fundamentalist concludes that Scripture is infallible (inerrant) and is the exclusive source of divine revelation.
I say "by a process of rational deduction" because the Bible itself nowhere says that it is infallible or inerrant. One has to deduce the principle of inerrancy rationally from the principle of inspiration.
One also has to determines by process of reasoning, not by appeal to Scripture itself, which books are inspired and which are not, which are canonical (ik.e., part of the official "list") and which are uncanonical.
There is no place in the entire Bible where it tells -us how 'we know. which books belong in the Bible and which do not.
Neither is there any place in the entire Bible where it says that everything written in the Bible is unfailingly accurate, in every historical detail.
Friday, May 8, 2015
Atheists are typically so, so stupid and so predictably stupid.
HAVING THE LAST PERSON I KNOW who was in the military during WWII die has brought back something I warned of early in my time blogging in regard to the Holocaust, I warned that as that generation passed from life that the terrible lessons they learned would recede as a cultural, political and legal influence in the future. Someday soon the last person who witnessed the evidence of the crimes of the Nazis and fascists, the Imperial Japanese military (and, yes, Stalin) will have died and the direct witness and experience of those enormous crimes of the modern, 20th century would be scientific dictators won't be here to add to that direct witness testimony which, as well, will pass from influence. The last person who saw the death camps will die and they will not vote for whoever is going to run things in the future.
Realizing that in the period of neo-Nazi, neo-fascist ascendacy under the patronage of the billionaire and multi-millionaire gangster class has made the death of my old friend especially chilling.
The witness of history is, of course, there, though it, as well, is of insufficent influence. If there is another thing I've learned in the period since started writing stuff online it is that history, like religion, has been swamped by the lies of the movies, TV, badly written and everything from badly researched to not researched at all fiction. Though I doubt books are nearly as damaging to the lessons of history as plays that lie about history and, worst of all, broadcast-cabloid-Hollywood movies and TV shows. A short list of things I've had to point out were wildly inaccurate yet commonly believed to be history here include:
The Crucible,
Inherit the Wind,
The Pony Express ("westerns" are another dangerously politically potent genre of lies),
virtually every movie or TV show made about and around Darwinism, the American Civil War. The same about the American Revolution, the framing of the Constitution (probably the most dangerous of all in an American context), the same about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution (both sides lie about that one) the Crusades, the Tudor dynasty, the Spartacus rebellion (if you can call the exclusively Roman aristocratic accounts of that, the only evidence we had that it happened, history).
I don't think any time I've fact checked a movie or TV show or "historical" novel for this blog or the consequences of widespread misidentification of those as historical reality, the show biz, entertainment side of things has shown itself to be nothing but a Trumpian lie - which is not surprising considering what forms his and his followers' imaginations of the significant and the insignificant past.
It was ever so about history, the pious, often regional mythology that gets taught in school about history is often not much better than the movies or TV or, heaven help us, the even worse record of most of the internet presentation of the such. And all such books are written by people with college-credentials in history or related topics who certainly know that they are telling lies. And those lies are politically and legally potent and ever dangerous.
It was another person of the WWII generation who first told me that during my first, Freshman history class in high school, a nice guy who must have found it really frustrating to try to knock a sense of history into the minds of a bunch of adolescent dolts. About the first thing he said was that someone once said that history was an agreed to lie, which was, I think, to point out that even the best and most honest of historical writing was the conscious selection of available information and the unfortunate practice of filling in missing content with interpretation that was only as honest and unbiased as the person doing the history. The farther back you go, the less primary evidence there is, the more of that kind of stuff. I don't think he, unlike some of my other history teachers, ever recommended that we watch a movie as if it would teach us something about history. He was, himself, about the opposite of show biz. He was tall and balding and homely with a dull monotone voice that tended to give the effect of droning even when what he was saying was compelling. If he had one fault it was that, trying to be a good teacher, he believed that psychology could tell him something about that. What would have made him more effective was vocal coaching, something I wouldn't know at the time because I had to get some bad vocal coaching to learn what good coaching could do for you.
These are just some ideas that came to me thinking about my last friend who was a witness to WWII and a reminder that he wasn't that much older than my cohort.
Kurt Rosenwinkel - Guitar
Joshua Redman - Tenor
Brad Mehldau - Piano
Larry Grenadier - Bass
Jeff Ballard - Drums
Of course I'm impressed with all the players but Brad Mehldau's solo on this really impressed me a lot.
My last WWII generation friend just died last night, so I'm not going to write anything today.
hick
noun
\ ˈhik
\
Definition of hick
(Entry 1 of 2)
: an unsophisticated provincial person
hick
adjective
Definition of hick (Entry 2 of 2)
: unsophisticated, provincial
That's the Merriam Webster online entry for "hick" by which it should be obvious to anyone with an experience of the residents of the greater lesser NYC area that the place is chock full of hicks. There is no one more provincial than a lesser-greater NYC person who holds the rest of the world in contempt. Even at its worst I don't think Boston declared the Hub City or, even more so Concord MA c. 1850 had so many vainglorious navel gazers as the would-be hipsters in NYC.
As for who is less sophisticated, have you read his blog? Power Pop? I'd link but I don't link to the real bottom of the heap stuff.
FOR YOUR REFERENCE, the reason I call them The Mop Heads is because that is among the things they were called that when they first gained fame but more so because in the cartoon strip, when Michael Doonesbury's younger brother was mocking his older brother for not knowing the current scene, he said he kept up, that he'd gone to hear Wings. As I recall, when he says that his younger brother smiles and condescendingly says, "Oh, yeah, the smart mop head." To which Michael says, that was John and complained about his brother not needing to be so condescending. I have a near perfect memory of comic strips that I liked at the time.
And because it gets under the skin of the schmuck who trolls and lies about me and is such a perfect example of a play-lefty douche bag of the early 60 generation still spouting all of the common-received-false bits of "wisdom" from that period.
It's kind of funny that a geezer the same age as Trump who so recently gushed over an almost 60 year old record from The Byrds and admits to having been driven by nostalgic emotions to breaking down sobbing at a song from the Rubber Soul era mop heads (or was it Revolver, it's not important enough for me to have noticed) accuses me of being stuck in the past when I regularly post stuff from musicians half their age and almost never post standards. I'd bet if you assigned a guess at ages based on what we post on our blogs, you'd get him as a geezer living in the 1960s era past and would mistake me for someone younger. And speaking of schmucks. Remember, Simp's is the one who angrily denied that the reason Milton Berle's performance career receded till his last show was him being the MC of a lame early Saturday night bowling show in 1960 was because he didn't keep refreshing his act with new material, probably arrogantly figuring he didn't have to do that because he'd already hit the big time. The lower the substance to show biz material, the higher the need for constantly refreshing it or the people who heard it get bored with it and move on. Same with music. Truth might be eternal (eternity not having yet happened in human experience, who knows?) but fiction and misconception get old too and always let you down in the end.
Trolling gets boring too. That is unless you put it to use.
Update: "Why do you like radio drama and hate movies?"
I thought about this one before, it's because radio drama, even more so audio drama, now, is very inexpensive to make, far easier to do a professional job with than the movies that you're more apt to get new and different material, closer to the intention of the writer, the actors and the director. It's what Rod Serling said he loved about the time he was a radio drama writer and why when he went to TV he had a harder time keeping it good and fresh. Too much money at stake, the more pressure there is to make it predictable and commercial. The two plays I posted Saturday were probably not something that would have any success as a move or even TV show (there's a reason that Serling's TV stuff is still, at times, fresh whereas most TV from that era smells like an old trunk kept in a damp basement. Movies age faster than an old newspaper, if the newspaper was any good to start with.
You'll notice that I don't often post "golden age" radio drama, not necessarily because it's all old and moldy but because it tends to be predictable and . . . venerable. I try to post things you probably didn't have any exposure to by writers I'd never heard of, that's what I look for when I'm looking for something to listen to. And things with good actors and writers, though some of those legendary writers are better in legend than their stuff turns out to be when heard again. A lot of Arch Oboler's stuff, much of it was consciously innovative at the time, strikes me as period while that of Norman Corwin tends to stay fresh longer. Corwin was a better writer. Oboler's legendary horror stuff doesn't interest me, the news is plenty horrifying without make believe.
I hate about 98% of the movies because they are a major venue of selfishness, ego-centrism, lies and racist, misogynistic greed. And they're so friggin' boring. Hollywood is ground zero for the revival of American fascism, there and wherever FOX is located. Rupert Murdoch bought a Hollywood studio when he wanted to do for American fascism what he'd done for it in Australia and Britland. And the Reagan administration let the porn-merchant, fascist liar in to do it to benefit Republican-fascism. I fucking hate Hollywood for the role it's played in this.
Update: The world's oldest tween from Teaneck apparently doesn't understand what I said about Murdoch, an eminently exculdable porn merchant of the kind that Reagan's AG would have railed against if he hadn't wanted him here to promote fascism as he had in Australia and Britland before he did the same here. Here is a short and bitter, contemporaneous explanation from the LA Times:
Murdoch Becomes U.S. Citizen, Can Buy TV Network
L.A. Times Archives
Sep. 4, 1985 12 AM PT
United Press International
NEW YORK —
Rupert Murdoch, Australian-born publishing magnate, became a U.S. citizen today, removing an obstacle to his acquisition of a network of independent American television stations.
Murdoch, 54, has been living in the United States since 1973. He was joined in the courtroom ceremony by 185 other aliens.
By becoming an American citizen, Murdoch gave up his Australian citizenship since neither government recognizes dual citizenship.
Murdoch recently purchased 50% of 20th Century Fox Film Corp. and plans to purchase Metromedia, the nation’s largest group of independent television stations, including KTTV in Los Angeles. Under federal regulations an alien may not own more than 20% of a broadcast license.
Murdoch publishing crap on paper wouldn't have been able to do what he did here with TV. It was his goal to destroy egalitarian democracy here as he had rendered it ineffective everywhere he could. The self-retarded Teanecker is so ga-ga over the shit Murdoch makes his money from, his entertainment shit, that he can't stand anyone to point out it's all part of the same fascist package.
And Simps believes he's so in the know when it comes to media because, you know, he worked for an ad flyer.
