Saturday Night Radio Drama - Little Miss HIggins - My Heart Is A Train

 My Heart Is A Train 

 

Little Miss Higgins is a blues woman from Saskatchewan.  Bet  you didn't expect to read that sentence today.  I've liked her music since first hearing her online about four or five years back.   She spent some of her time during Covid doing this audio drama, more of a reading than the things I usually post.  It heavily relies on her musical recordings, it's a good introduction to her music. It's got more drinking in it than I can usually tolerate these days.   Unfortunately one of the things I came across said she's decided not to do any new music recording because it's so hard for working musicians to make enough to live on from recordings due e to digital music distribution, leading lots of good but non-famous depending more on performing - Covid has really hit good but not famous musicians hard. 

I liked this and hope she continues doing it.  It was an interesting account of current train travel without some of the romantic cliches you'll find on those train shows they used to have on PBS.  Wonder if they still have those on but not enough to look.

If The Department of Justice Does Not Bring Charges Against Jeffrey Clark, Mark Meadows And The Others Behind The Attempted Assassination Of Democracy They Are Setting The Stage For It Working Next Time

 

If the Department of Justice fails to investigate and expose the lawyer-liars and the scum like Meadows and bring them to justice then it's up to the House and Senate committees to expose them, prosecute them and imprison them.  They along with the Federalist-fascist Society, the Heritage Foundation and other billionaire gangster cover operations who they are part of will try again and not in the extended future.

Jeffrey Clark is just one of a long list of lawyer-liars who should also be disbarred everywhere in the United States and never allowed to act as a lawyer again, his credentials from Georgetown Law School should be withdrawn - that ability for elite institutions and others to be shamed into removing the credentials they granted from such scum is something that should also be made a regular punishment for what he and others did.  If they won't the pretenses that they are in the business of doing anything other than getting paid to grant credentials should be trashed for the lie it is.

Yeah, What I Said Is The Sorrow And The Pity All Over Again, Ain't It

I'M ALL FOR SCRAPPING the stupid slogan "writing is a craft" because it makes about as much sense  as to assert "talking is a craft,"  so as to try to shut someone up when you don't like what they say but have no arguments to make against it.  I've read it written and heard it said by some pretty unimpressive writers who had nothing worth reading or hearing no matter what rules they hew to,  I say it that way noting that by using the word "hew" some total idiot might, possibly, in rather stupid assertion, believe I'm advocating they do so with an axe or other heavy chopping implement.  That is about as probable as what I was accused of doing.  "Writing is a craft" isn't a very crafty cliche of Strukian lower-mid-brow erudition because it is meaningless.  Though I wouldn't pretend to not understand what it really means, "I got nothin'."  

"Writing is a craft" is something that conceited asses say to discourage people from writing and anything that discourages anyone from writing is anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic. If everyone wrote every day and honestly read what they wrote, I think we'd all be a lot better off because there are few ways to more effectively find out what's wrong with your thinking.

Write what you want to, read what you wrote, edit it if you think of a way you might get your point across better - if that's what you want.   If someone complains that your writing doesn't match their conception of piss elegance tell them to blow it out their ass.  But only if that's what you want to say.

Update:  Anyone who believes anyone except someone too stupid to read it in the first place would believe "Every time I read more about this pandemic the more I am afraid that this is going to change everything for good," means I am afraid it was going to change things for the better is too stupid to be giving critical advice about writing.  Anyone who believes anyone who is that stupid is to be believed in their criticism is an even more credulous sucker who willingly gives people reason to believe they might just BE that stupid.  Apparently there are such people at Duncan Black's "brain trust" (yes, they really have called themselves that unironically).  

Don't worry, this has about run its course, I've got to get out in the garden, it's just it rained here yesterday and I've been waiting for the greenery to dry off.

Update The Last:  I know from long experience with the idiots of Duncan Black's "brain trust" (which is something they do call themselves) that it's not going to teach them anything but here is the first definition of the English idiom "for good" at the Idioms section of the Free Online Dictionary:

for good
1. Permanently; indefinitely; forever. After she found out about his latest relapse with drugs, she decided it was best to leave him for good. He got locked up again—this time for good.

I include it, not because they're especially skilled at the 4th grade level of dictionary skills or mind being so slow but to rub their noses in it, for the satisfaction, not because I suspect it will teach them anything, they're ineducable.

I'm Beginning To Think It's Not So Much Senectitude It's Senectitween

I AM BEING tempted by a series of very stupid arguments into continuing to answer lame and stupid assertions that are easily brushed aside.  The one this morning based on an assertion that using homonyms and synonyms in current use in common, everyday English means I'm a bad writer.  Though I doubt the idiot is smart enough to understand that's what I'm being accused of.  It's the kind of baseless crap that pop-prescriptive grammar and writing would be moral codes are made of.  The assertion is that someone reading a sentence I wrote would mistake the common phrase "for good" meaning permanently to mean that I was asserting that Covid-19 is a good thing.  While someone who has spent their eternal adolescence peddling pop culture and their senescence at Eschaton might do that - though I doubt even they are that stupid - when I write something I assume the readers are reasonably intelligent adults or children who could master such distinctions.

No, too easy, it would have been callow and stupid if it came out of a 12-year-old or some pseudo-intellectual such as those who did that crap in the 1970s (William Safire, Edwin Newman) or earlier when that dolt, E. B. White revived and updated his idiot Cornell writing teacher's incompetent list of self contradicting demands.  The chance to link to that article again is the major reason I'm writing this.

My old cat is more sly and cunning and clever when she figures I'm not giving her the attention she wants.  

If I listed the synonyms and homonyms used by those dolts and their buddies, it would probably fill the entire screen.  I'll bet most of them skate right  past them without ever thinking twice about the other meanings (not to mention pronunciations) of them.   But, then Strunk and White said stuff that was only slightly less stupid and such idiots believe them to be experts on the topic of fine writing.  For the record, I have always thought E. B. White's supposed skill as a writer was based on him and his buddies peddling him as the such.  Kind of like how Benny Shapiro and Stephen Fry are successfully peddled as intellectuals and skilled debaters among the stupid.  It's all advertising, peddling crap to the susceptible. 

 

Update:  "Boris Badenov"  formerly known as, and the idiot called himself this, "Skeptic Tank" is just pissed off because the one or two times he tried to argue with me I kicked his ass.  He's an idiot post-literate with a STEM degree (I suspect in some quasi-science surrounding computers) who thinks Eschaton is some kind of athenæum.  

Update 2:   Anyone who believes anyone except someone too stupid to read it in the first place would believe "Every time I read more about this pandemic the more I am afraid that this is going to change everything for good," means I am afraid it was going to change things for the better is too stupid to be giving critical advice about writing.  Anyone who believes anyone who is that stupid is to be believed in their criticism is an even more credulous sucker who willingly gives people reason to believe they might just BE that stupid.  Apparently there are such people at Duncan Black's "brain trust" (yes, they really have called themselves that unironically).  

Don't worry, this has about run its course, I've got to get out in the garden, it's just it rained here yesterday and I've been waiting for the greenery to dry off.

We Change Or We Die And The 18th Century Concepts Sold As Undying Scientific Laws Are Among The Things That Need Changing The Most

EVERY TIME I READ MORE ABOUT this pandemic the more I am afraid that this is going to change everything for good.   I am also afraid that our system of government is entirely inadequate to avoid a far worse disaster that is not only likely but which is being encouraged under, through and by Republican-fascist gaming of the Constitutional system and the culture of the law which has grown up under it.   One of the most depressing thing is the way that the Governor of Arkansas is relying on the entirely unreliable courts to overturn the politically expedient ban on mask requirements passed by the Arkansas legislature which he signed into law.

The entire structure of the government, under state constitutions and the U. S. Constitution, especially the court system is playing chicken with the lives of countless school children in the weeks before schools reopen there AND, MARK MY WORDS, THE JUDGES AND "JUSTICES" ON THE COURTS WILL TAKE THEIR OWN SWEET TIME SECURE IN THEIR WELL UPHOLSTERED CHAMBERS PROTECTED IN WAYS THAT THOSE SCHOOL CHILDREN, THEIR FAMILIES, INCLUDING YOUNGER CHILDREN ARE NOT. 

I doubt that with the best will in the world and the best intention the Biden administration is going to be able to save us from a far worse disaster than a great infrastructure bill, the one which isn't near being passed, will save us from.  

Even more depressing is the point that the World Health Organization has made in arguing against booster shots in affluent countries while the majority of the world has not had access to any vaccines citing the opportunity for new and deadlier, perhaps vaccine overriding variants to arise.   The arguments for booster shots in the United States and other affluent countries where many people, such as myself, have had a full first-round vaccination provide an opportunity for those to arise in us - thanks in no small part to the Republican-fascist campaign to spread the virus among the unvaccinated and unmasked - make as much sense.  Nothing short of a world-wide campaign to develop and distribute the vaccine is going to work to slow or halt the spread of new variants and I don't foresee that happening - maybe this is God telling us it's time to practice universal justice or we'll die together due to our injustice.  The role that "justice" has played in this in the United States is the opposite of irony, it's an indictment of our concept of justice and its absence in practice. 

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

If this doesn't end up killing us, I am certain of one thing, this is going to make it clear that the 18th century "enlightenment" assumptions that are well represented by the criminal irresponsibility flowing from the likes of Ron Desantis, presenting it as a choice between aiding the virus to kill millions of us or "freedom" are wrong.  They are wrong because those 18th century aristocratic concepts are fatally flawed and modern life with its larger population and world travel prove it is wrong in the most disastrous way.

This is the test of that conception of limitless freedom outside of moral responsibility and it is now certain that that leads to death.   It's not as if that hasn't been presaged in recent times, the heady sexual freedom that gay men championed in the 1970s led to us losing enormous numbers of our friends and loved ones to HIV-AIDS.  It was presaged in the libertarian view of alcohol and drug use which has led to addiction and death, it was presaged in the ACLU led effort to allow prescription drug companies to advertise on TV and the radio which aided the Sackler family in their efforts to market opioids.   That was only one of the examples of ACLU attempts to aid addiction and death, they also helped the liquor industry and were in the process of aiding the tobacco industry - the state AG lawsuits and settlement with big tobacco short circuting the campaign to promote "smokers rights" to harm and kill the rest of us with their "right to smoke" polluting our air.  Unfortunately we cannot depend on such extra-judicial salvation in all of these instances.   More about that later.  More about all of this later, if there is time for it.

Listen to the language, listen to the slogans and buzz words and touch-phrases in which the FOX, Murdoch, Republican-fascist campaign to get millions killed with Covid-19 is sold to the suckers who will ask for the vaccine only as it's too late to save their lives.  It is the language of freedom and liberty and individual rights it is not the language of moral responsibility.  It is the language taught to us by the civil liberties industry, movie and TV civics and all other presentations of freedom absent the responsibility to act morally.

Expose The Federalist Society For The Seditious Conspiracy It Is Make Its Members Unconfirmable, Unelectable

IT IS WAY PAST TIME that the Federalist Society, its leadership, its membership be investigated and exposed as a seditious conspiracy to destroy American democracy.  Now that the man who should be being perp-walked in leg irons for crimes against the most basic foundation of legitimate government, the election of it by The People, has been confirmed as a long time member of that criminal conspiracy it's certainly time for the appropriate committees of the Congress as well as the Department of Justice, appropriate state counterparts of those to open an investigation of it.  In all of the decades long investigations of various domestic Communist, anarchist and socialist parties one thing was obvious from the start, there was absolutely no way that they were ever going to control official power in the United States, the Federalist Society with which so many of those enabling the attempted putsch against legitimate government here are members or affiliated,  fills a majority of the Supreme Court and has a number of its agents in the Congress and in Republican-fascist administrations going back to the time when that gang of billionaire gangster backed thugs with soft,well-manicured hands was founded. 

Nothing short of making it as impossible for someone with an association with that or other such groups involved in sedition against elected, democratic, egalitarian governance to be elected in any but the most abnormally fascistic of localities in the United States is going to suffice to protect us from them, once enabled, they, with the financing of fascist billionaires, will be back using their connections on courts, in Congress, in agencies to try to do it again, learning from what didn't work for them before.  If Democrats don't overcome the ACLU style reluctance to protect democracy from its demonstrated enemies they will be back, I wouldn't be surprised if next time the Republican-fascists in the Senate don't make Jeffrey Clark the confirmed AG as they did the demonstrably fascistic William Barr and the equally fascistic Jefferson Sessions.  

We should call on Sheldon Whitehouse - the revelator of the most complete corruption of the billionaire bought Supreme Court, other Senators and members of the House to begin the investigation of the Federalist Society, its founders, its members, its backers AND ALL OTHER GROUPS WITH WHICH THEY ARE ASSOCIATED and they should demand access to documents and records NOT TOLERATING ANY OBSTRUCTION FROM THE COURTS FILLED WITH SELF-INTERESTED MEMBERS AND ASSOCIATES OF THAT SEDITIOUS CLUB OF GANGSTERS.  They should construct or rent sufficient detention quarters for those they have to detain when they refuse to comply with Congressional subpoenas, they have the power to do that.  They should encourage the Biden administration to open its own investigations into this and other such groups through the Department of Justice, though I have a lot less faith in that agency, including the FBI than I do the Congress, elected by The People. 

What Joan Said

 

Trump Wanted Jeffrey Rosen To Be His FOX, His NY Post, His Paid-For NYT Ad

LISTENING TO CHRIS HAYES talking about how the Repulbican-fascist party is doing what Trump told his acting AG to do, just put something "out there" and he and the Republicans in the Congress would overturn the election with it has become a serious problem, it was nice to hear a journalist talking about it but he needs to go farther back. 

That isn't something Trump invented, the media invented it when they were given the permission to carry lies by the Supreme Court.  For decades I heard the "it's being said" transmission of lies on NPR, on PBS, on network news, in "opinion journalism" as all of them, freed from anything like a commitment to carry the truth adopted the standards of the tabloids.   If they want to know where the idiot savant Trump (his one talent being conning the susceptible) and Republican-fascists learned it, they learned it from media, from journalists, from news program speaking heads, from cabloid 24-7 air fillers.  And it all started with the permission given to them by the Warren and later courts based on "the First Amendment."  

Trump was merely asking the acting AG, Jeffrey Rosen to do what Bush II, Bush I, Reagan. . . going back to Richard Nixon regularly had the press doing, putting lies and innuendo out there for the benefit of Republicans, going back to the period when they weren't all fascists.  The habit of having the media do that, especially broadcast media, has been setting us up since at least 1964 on the allegedly respectable media the way the tabloids have always done it for them.  He was asking him to be his FOX or NY Post or his paid-for NYT ad* calling for the execution of innocent black kids.  It should never be forgotten that the NYT published that ad as it did the one that led to it getting the original permission to publish lies with impunity from the Warren Court, a permission to lie that is universally celebrated by journalists, I've yet to hear a major one say that that decision has been a disaster for democracy.

There are a number of needed revisions to the Bill of Rights and other amendments, protecting individuals and the media when they tell the truth AND NOT WHEN THEY LIE is among the most serious of those.  That's right up there with making it plain that there is no personal or private right to amass military sized arsenals and ownership of what are effectively military assault weapons.  

It must be possible for individuals to punish the media for lying about them and for democracy to protect itself from media lies that intentionally and unintentionally undermine and attack democracy.  Our media are the main transmitters of the poison that Trump used as it was when it was Gingrich doing the same thing.  

* It wasn't only the old gray slag that took his money and published his racist screed, he put it in a number of papers.  Not to be fair because there is no such thing as being fair to the publishers of murderous, racist, lying slander but to tell the truth of it. 

Andrew Cuomo Would Resign Now If The Good Of The State And Country Meant Something To Him His Brother Not So Fast

THE 1970S ERA TALK-SHOW SHRINK encouragement for casual touching, feeling, kissing and the creation of the idiocy that having a sense of personal, bodily privacy was mentally unhygenic provides Andrew Cuomo with his indefensible defense  against his pattern of sexual harassment.  It should end.  The extent to which Covid-19 has led to a decrease in that kind of promiscuous touching, I hope it doesn't come back in if the virus is ever suppressed.  People should keep their mouths and hands off or other people unless they are in an ongoing intimate, mutually consenting and egalitarian relationship.  I can't think of anything that would be more hygenic than people again having a sense of personal dignity that is violated by that crap.

Cuomo should resign from the governorship and from politics.  His career was built on the reputation of his father,  Mario Cuomo and Mario Cuomo's influence in Democratic politics while he was alive.  The son burned through the good-will his father may have built up pretty fast through his arrogance and ruthlessness and Trumpian meanness.  From what I've read and seen of him, his attractions to the voters of New York mystify me almost as much as the patience with his father's perennial, non-committal teasing to run for president.   Though his son is not alone in having ridden into high office on the power of his family name and no other qualification.  There are relatives of politicians who prove to be good politicians but you can't count on that being a guarantee, we should all grow up and treat would-be dynasty builders with skepticism.  

Andrew Cuomo should resign and face the civil suits and, maybe, criminal trials that await him over that and his handling of Covid, his staying in office will cement his legacy as a selfish jerk.   

I am proud of Democratic politicians in New York and elsewhere, especially Joe Biden over their calls for him to resign.   It's rare for a president to call for the resignation of a politician who has been an ally and, maybe, kind of a friend, especially the governor of his own party in a major state whose electoral votes put him in office.  I can't recall a Republican president doing something like that though I'd like to have my memory refreshed if such happened within living memory.   

Cuomo's brother, having had a role in giving his brother political advice in this matter should not continue as a "journalist" at CNN.   But if what he did, involving himself as a political advisor while allegedly practicing journalism requires a resignation there'll be scores and hundreds of vacant jobs, I'd guess most of them such "journalist" collaborators with Republican-fascists, Rupert Murdoch's empire of right-wing "journalism" would be pretty much emptied.  The politician, being a public servant,  should resign as a matter of course, Chris Cuomo should do so only if the other political hack "journalists" are forced to do the same.  The media is a whore house where Republicans get to be totally corrupt so why shouldn't others? 

Lead Sheet Us Into Temptation

I HAVE PRINTED OUT the musically incompetent hate mail to pin it on my bulletin board so I can smile in satisfaction when seeing it again.   Imagine, not being able to count a measure in 2/2 filled with eight eighth notes.  I don't know which that should get them, a failing grade in first semester solfege and dictation or in sub-primary number work.   Maybe no one cared enough to point out he's got two hands to count on after he runs out of fingers on one of them.

UPDATE:  Warning, the following will be tedious for non-musicians.

I looked at the lead sheet as published by Virtual Sheet Music, online.  It's how I knew it was notated in 2/2, from there the rest of it was just a matter of listening and counting.  The eight "o"s that are sung in a chorus on the recorded version of it aren't notated, there's just a tied-over half note on the word "Nor-man" followed by a half rest.  In Sue Thompson's singing of it all eight "o"s are part of a simply banal melodic pattern of eighth notes filling that measure as recorded. 

Jeesh!  I'm going to print out the continuing whining that only further proves his musical incompetence in even the most simple-minded pop music.  Apparently he doesn't understand what lyrics are and that in songs lyrics, apart from the relatively rare spoken ones, are generally sung on pitches, within rhythm. 

I said "Blackbird" was OK, there's no pleasing you jerks.  It's  OK for what it is, it's not an undying masterpiece, at least not unless it gets revived through improvisation by really good improvisers.  I wouldn't listen to most jazz standards if they weren't treated that way, the notated and original form of them, especially the ones written for shows, don't stand up to repeated hearing.  They weren't built for that like Beethoven Bach or Schoenberg is.

I Was Only In It For The Funny

YOU KNOW IF I had dissed the early 1960s pop song "Norman" (o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o) I'd have gotten hate mail claiming that Sue Thompson was a genius for the ages and that "Sad Movies Always Make Me Cry" proved it.

Now stop asking me why I loved to trigger that kind of idiot by making fun of the mop heads or I'll give you another deadly earworm,

Update:  I actually did find the occasional song by Paul McCartney to be OK, Blackbird, for example and I was rather fond of George Harrison.  As an ensemble and the for the most part, them apart from it, not so much.  

John perhaps least of all, most overrated of them, biggest jerk. I was just baiting the idiot troll for a lot of it, though "Imagine" is the stupidest "anthem" in the history of cheap, shoddy pop "anthems."  Stupid, hypocritical words, stupider "melody" entirely banal harmony and rhythm.  As someone said about the movie Moment By Moment, Quaalude time in la la land.   And still those who intone it can't "sing" it in tune or time.  It's the anthem of the tone deaf and affluent contentedness. 

That's my final word on the topic.

The Blame You Seek To Assign May Turn Out To Be Your Own

THE COMMUNIST CHINESE GOVERNMENT only has itself to blame for the widespread skepticism about the origin of the Covid-19 virus, the Repulbican-fascist fed theory that it didn't arise spontaneously in the cruel wet-markets with a covid virus from bats going through pangolins kept to be slaughtered to feed the appetites of the wealthy who wanted to eat such poor creatures, and that isn't just something that is done in China but around the world.  

It is a fact that some of the deadliest pandemics in human history have an origin in animals kept or hunted for meat, though keeping them in close confinement, tended by people who then become a part of the development and chain of transmission for novel viruses, I'd guess, is most responsible.  I make no apologies for pointing that out and will continue every time this is the topic for discussion.

Somehow, I can't see meat producing Republican-fascists being at all eager to regulate that industry here, which is, as it is anywhere, a ticking time bomb which is all but totally guaranteed to produce other pandemic diseases.  I wonder if maybe there is a political-economic motive in the Republican-fascist desire to steer attention from the meat industry as the source of this, one, viral pandemic.  I certainly don't trust them anymore than I trust the Communist Chinese government to be honest and above board.

But, as I started, the Chinese government with its paranoid habits of secrecy and non-disclosure has certainly given the Republican-fascists a lot of what they've used to blame them for human creation of the virus.  If they had been totally open to world-wide investigation from the start,  innocence of that accusation, if innocence it is, could have been discovered.

But if that theory is right then it's an indictment of the scientists and administrators who carry out that kind of research so irresponsibly.  I was talking to a biology teacher a while back and he told me about a Soviet-era lab deep inside the Soviet Union where a scientist loved to create novel viruses of enormously deadly potential just out of what he called "intellectual curiosity."  He being kept by the Communist government and allowed to pursue his hobby with an eye towards possible military application in the same way the North Korean government pursued nuclear weapons.  And I'm sure that depraved hobbyist of "pure research"  would have his counterparts in many countries, including the United States.  

I remember getting into several blog brawls on science themed blogs about the stupidity of locating high security bio-hazard labs in population centers, especially one that was to be placed in South Boston so as to be convenient to so many of the area's universities.   I remember asking one obviously insider commentator if grad students would be working there, she said yes.  Grad students would be exactly where I'd expect accidental infection and transmission to the outside world to happen, yet they are not the only possible source for that.  Grad students, no matter how smart they may be, are mostly immature kids who have spent too much time in school and not enough in reality to be trusted with such grave responsibility.  Neither are many seasoned scientists.

Perhaps the Republican-fascists in the Congress should be careful about getting what they wished for.  If a government lab in Communist China, one of the most tightly controlling governments in the world, could have an accident unleashing this pandemic from the controlled conditions in a high-security laboratory then it's a gurantee that it can happen here or anywhere where such labs, government run OR IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR operate.  

You can take your pick, either the meat industry or the scientists who do this kind of research and those who fund and motivate their work are to blame for this.  And neither of those are exclusively Chinese or "other" in origin but are the same world-round.  I remember when the putrid Sam Harris proposed his little thought experiment of preemptive bombing of "Muslim countries" to prevent them using, in their putrid phrase the "Isl*mic bomb" on us, "killing tens of millions in a day" I proposed, instead, demanding that all of the scientists with the knowledge of producing atomic and nuclear weapons be killed, instead, since they were the source of the danger.  The very same people who, as an intellectual exercise (yeah, right) proposed killing tens of millions of totally innnocent people reacted in horror at the prospect of killing the people who were guilty of producing those weapons that were the origin of their depraved proposal.   

While I'm not necessarily advocating first killing all the scientists, if they're going to insist on producing such horrors, they are a danger to all of us.  The same with the meat industry.  If the swine farmers and poultry farmers and cattle men are going to produce other pandemic diseases, they're as responsible as the scientists who they want to blame this pandemic on - somehow, I suppose, absolving Trump and the likes of the governors of Texas, Florida and South Dakota from their role in its massive spread.

The Tough Guy Prosecutor Of Mobsters (it was really his staff) And Media Championed Mayor Of A Crack Down On Lawlessness (read On People of Color) As Crybaby Brat

I DON'T THINK IT'S THE FACT THAT I come from a very large family, originally having nine siblings, but while listening to Rudy Giuliani's self-pitying interview in which he threatens those who are going to prosecute him with retribution "in heaven" a phase I heard someone outside of my family use came to me, "he's acting like an only child."   So I looked it up like I look up to see if someone I suspect is a prep-Ivy-Ivy equivalent product and, sure enough, Rudy was an only child, obviously the spoiled kind of only brat.  I know that there are only children who are and grow up to be wonderfully unself-centered people but there's also the "only child" type, not all of them only children.  Look at Donald Trump. 

Giuliani is, by the way, a Catholic school (Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School) -private college (Manhattan College)-private law school (New York University School Of Law) product.  I think they should be acknowledged as having credentialed the garbage they enable.

My parents, neither of them only children, never said that kind of thing about only children, they were the kind of people who were opposed to stereotyping on moral grounds, I suppose stereotyping being a guarantee of bearing false witness against the many who wouldn't fit the stereotype of their assigned group.  Fairness is a huge component of morality, something that doesn't seem to much figure to Rudy and his ilk.  Come to think of it, I never remember my older siblings or younger ones say something like that, either. 

Still, it's kind of funny that hearing his 77 year old whiny ass crybaby treat that God's going to avenge him against those who are doing what Rudy did as a prosecutor, which made that phrase come to me and it turns out to be accurate.   If Rudy wants to whine about that he only has himself to blame for that too.   Though I'll bet he'd blame his mother.

Who Needs Horror Stories When There's The News - Lambda Variant of COVID-19 Might Be Resistant to Vaccines

AS THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS are endangering us all by volunteering to be incubators of new and, in some cases, worse variants of Covid-19, the Lambda variant first recorded in Peru may be able to overcome vaccine antibodies. 

Investigators in Chile conclude that the lambda COVID-19 variant is not only more infectious than standard SARS-CoV-2, but could also possibly shrug off vaccines. The first case in the United States has been spotted at Houston Methodist Hospital.

A COVID-19 variant that proves to be resistant to vaccines keeps medical experts, public health officials, and health care professionals—including infection preventionists—on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic up at nights. There’s no reason to sound the alarm yet, but there may—just may—perhaps be reason to think that there’s a chance that the alarm may have to be sounded at some point about the lambda COVID-19 mutation, or C.37.

A preprint study by investigators in Chile suggests that the mutation, which first surfaced in Peru about a year ago and is highly infectious, may also be able to evade vaccine antibodies.

“Our results indicate that mutations present in the spike protein of the lambda variant of interest confer increased infectivity and immune escape from neutralizing antibodies elicited by CoronaVac,” the study states. CoronaVac is a vaccine manufactured by a Chinese company and that’s used in Peru. The study continues: “These data reinforce the idea that massive vaccination campaigns in countries with high SARS-CoV-2 circulation must be accompanied by strict genomic surveillance allowing the identification of new isolates carrying spike mutations and immunology studies aimed to determine the impact of these mutations in immune escape and vaccines breakthrough.”

Peru has the highest COVID-19 death rate of any country in the world, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center: about 600 for every 100,000 people infected with COVID-19. That’s about twice the amount of Hungary, the country with the next highest COVID-19 death rate. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that the lambda variant has been the COVID carrier in about 81% of infections in Peru since April. The WHO declared the lambda variant a variant of interest last month. The lambda variant has spread to about 30 other countries in the world, including the United Kingdom.

I have little hope that people will adapt to reality as fast as the virus is, apparently the virus is smarter than some of us, including, I will bet, the Supreme Court.  If we don't give up the spoiled toddler libertarianism that currently rules us, we're in for an even worse hell ride than we've been on. 

You Don't Have To Be A Fundy To Find What's To Love In Leviticus, In Fact A Lot Of Them Can't Find It

POINTING OUT THE RADICAL SOCIAL JUSTICE of the Book of Leviticus yesterday seems to have anticipated an article about The Leviticus Fund posted at the Global Sister's Report this morning.  It's an example of how the economic justice of the Mosaic Books is alive and informing means of making that real in life, today.

"It's faith capital," said Greg Maher, executive director of the fund, which is based in Tarrytown, New York, and takes its name from the call for economic justice in the Book of Leviticus.

It also shows the strength of pulling together resources, Jeffries said. "We can do much more together than we can do alone."

'We can do much more together than we can do alone.'

—Mercy Sr. Rosemary Jeffries

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As one of the nation's first community development financial institutions, or CDFIs (see sidebar), the fund has financed projects including housing, community health work, education and, more recently, access to food in communities with food deserts.

Leviticus' investment model is similar to purchasing certificates of deposit at a fixed interest rate for a specified amount of time. The investment, in turn, allows Leviticus to lend money to groups like The Bridge.

But now, Leviticus is further strengthening its work through a recently announced Legacy Fund — a pool of capital based on donations, not investments. Pooling their support into donations are seven original fund investors. Six are sister congregations: the Dominican Sisters of Sparkill, New York; Franciscan Sisters of Peace; Good Shepherd Sisters; Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary; Sisters of St. Dominic of Blauvelt, New York; Ursuline Sisters of the Roman Union.

Money from the Legacy Fund, permanently restricted for lending, will be lent and repaid to support future projects, said Colleen Ryan, Leviticus' resource development officer.

It's a far cry from using the holiness code for priests with its severe penalties for this or that sexual act or wearing polyester cotton mix that are the sum total of so many peoples' view of Leviticus.  The non-reading, non-thinking, "proof-texting" use of it.  

Busy day.  I may get around to writing something later but I wanted to share this with you.

Hate Mail

ALONG WITH THE RIDICULOUS REQUIREMENTS of total accuracy for the Bible, the demand that it be literally true and accurate in the sense of modern history and science, neither of which existed for the centuries during which it was composed, edited and compiled, there is an absurd insistence that religion has a totalitarian hold on the minds of its adherents which it most certainly never has had except in the fewest of cases.

I have pointed out how in my personal experience of anti-LGBTQ violence,  intimidation, invective and discrimination, all of which I've experienced, the very language of those who committed those showed that they certainly didn't take the "second commandment" to heart.   I can't remember every instance of that but I'm sure the two instances of actual violence I experienced included "God" and "Jesus Christ" featured  in one or the other.   Clearly the Golden Rule was no where in evidence nor other teachings of Jesus.  

The same is seldom true of men who attack women, those attacks generally violating even more of the commandments and moral teachings of the Bible, it is impossible to believe that religion is a major motivation in that - as if men who are totally irreligious have a lower incidence of misogynistic attacks against women and sexual assaults up to and including the perpetual lynching campaign against women which is so common that it is not even imagined in such terms even as it fulfills the requirement for being the worst campaign of sustained, intimidating violence in history, in all places and against all women, Women of Color, White Women, Poor Women, Destitute Women, relatively privileged Women. 

The idea that religion is to blame for all of that is unrealistic.  It is notable that even the strongest prohibitions of Western religion, all of those having to do with sex outside of marriage, are not nearly universally effective in controlling the behavior of even the most officially fanatical of those who profess to believe Jesus was literally God and spoke with the authority of God.  If they did then, universally they would hold that remarriage after divorce was literally adultery - though I have seldom encountered a sexual dictator who was against anything they wanted to do, themselves.  It's far easier to be a precisian adherent of the scripture when it's someone else's behavior you propose to monitor. 

I have certainly not noticed any great influence of religion on most people except as setting an outer limit of what they will do to satisfy their desires and likes.  The Republican-fascists who profess to be such big fat supporters of religion are among the biggest fattest haters of religion, especially such Christians as propose the radical egalitarian justice that is the center of Christianity as it is of its parent, Judaism and its cousin, Islam.  

Like the things we are supposed to learn in school, the actual power of religion on peoples' lives is too weak to account for the evils that they do, give or take an extreme example of heretical fanatical sects.  The greatest influence on peoples behavior is their economic self-interest, the second greatest certainly the entertainment media they consume, TV and other commercials, peoples family and class interests.   Religion, which a minority of Americans "observe" even an hour a week in church could not possibly compete with those, mandatory education can't compete with it and they have students for many more hours a year than the churches do. 

Why do they blame religion for things that are obviously not taught in the Scriptures, indeed many of those things they are blamed for things not contained in the Scriptures or the official teachings of the Churches?  I'd guess because it's about the easiest of targets in post-WWII America, the absurd feeling of transgression for dissing religion as so many idiots online feel is totally anachronistic.  I think it was the sarcastic atheist Alexander Cockburn who pointed out that it was more of an act of bravery to profess a belief in Christianity than to diss  it.  Especially in the scribbling, babbling classes.  I don't know about bravery but you'll get attacked for being religious more certainly than for being an atheist a-hole.  

It's also cowardly like the attacks of the middle-class and even working poor on the destitute instead of the real enemy of those People, the ruling class.   It's a rather stupid waste of effort for the left except in so far as the supposed figure of religion is also an active supporter of Republican-fascism or other powerful gangsters.  It's more one of those lifestyle issues that the play left really cares more about than establishing equality and economic justice and a democratic commonwealth.  It's as déclassé as eating unfashionable food or wearing unfashionable clothes or speaking Esperanto.  It's a lifestyle thing for the play left, the secular left and the libertarian-liberals.  

P.S. It occurs to me while going through this for editing, the first thing I ever wrote on my first blog was against the media requirement never placed on conservatives or moderates or centrists,  that liberals (real ones, especially) MUST get everything 100% right all the time or they are as useless as it was asserted to me that the Bible must be.  I think in so far as real liberalism is all about equality, economic and social justice and democracy under that overarching moral framing that the two demands are not unrelated.  I remember, it was being fed up with hearing Scott Simon do that on NPR that morning that led me to do what I'd been toying with for a while and start posting things on the blog I'd put up but was too inhibited to.  I got over that pretty fast.

The Complete Radicalism Of The Jewish Monotheistic Tradition Isn't Ideological It Is In The Stuff Of Life, Itself

THE IDEOLOGIES OF THE VARIOUS components of the current resurgence of neo-fascism-neo-Nazism aren't the center of that thing, it is the billionaires and millionaires, in the United States, Britain, Russia and elsewhere who are financing it and their psychotic mania for concentrating wealth and, so, power for themselves which are behind it.   The racism, the bigotry, the misogyny, the LGBTQ hatred, etc. are the levers they use to mobilize other species of psychotics (and lots of the billionaires and millionaires share their psychoses) to serve their real ends, to destroy egalitarian democracy and the commonwealth that is one of the oldest and deepest strains of the Jewish monotheistic tradition. 

That is how the former KGB communist Putin and his lackeys, most of whom were part of the Soviet elite or their brats, are so easily amassing some of the greatest fortunes through theft  and are in thick with their fellow thieves, the billionaires and millionaires of the capitalist West.  They were never really different except that they had to pretend to having some kind of intention of egalitarianism even as the Communists inevitably rose up an elite of their own as The People were given a few crumbs to starve on as they were terrorized into slavery.  That is hardly an advance on the goals of western capitalists, especially as they gave up the pretense of any kind of devotion to Christian egalitarianism and, eventually, even pretending they believed it.  The slave-power here never intended to follow it, even as they professed it.

Yesterday's Catholic liturgy held one of the central pillars of that egalitarianism which is, in my experience, found nowhere except in religion, from the much misunderstood, misused book of Leviticus:

Then, on the tenth day of the seventh month, let the trumpet resound;
on this, the Day of Atonement, the trumpet blast shall re-echo
throughout your land.
This fiftieth year you shall make sacred
by proclaiming liberty in the land for all its inhabitants.
It shall be a jubilee for you,
when every one of you shall return to his own property,
every one to his own family estate.
In this fiftieth year, your year of jubilee,
you shall not sow, nor shall you reap the aftergrowth
or pick the grapes from the untrimmed vines.
Since this is the jubilee, which shall be sacred for you,
you may not eat of its produce,
except as taken directly from the field.

“In this year of jubilee, then,
every one of you shall return to his own property.
Therefore, when you sell any land to your neighbor
or buy any from him, do not deal unfairly.
On the basis of the number of years since the last jubilee
shall you purchase the land from your neighbor;
and so also, on the basis of the number of years for crops,
shall he sell it to you.
When the years are many, the price shall be so much the more;
when the years are few, the price shall be so much the less.
For it is really the number of crops that he sells you.
Do not deal unfairly, then; but stand in fear of your God.
I, the LORD, am your God.”

It's no wonder that the Black People enslaved in the United States talked about "the year of Jubilee" so often, the time of "liberty for all the inhabitants of the land,"  a time of restoration of rights, a time when all sold property would be returned to the families which had sold it - clearly this law intends that to be understood, always as leasing not what the Anglo-American legal system with its endless amassing and concentration of wealth and, so, inequality defines it to be. 

I will point out that elsewhere in The Law it defines the food left in the field, the source of wealth, as being the rightful property of the destitute, the orphan, the widow and the alien dwelling there.  As a recent convert from vegetarianism to veganism, if you may not eat of its produce,except as taken directly from the field, that could mean that the text implies that they weren't supposed to eat animal products, though I'm sure that would be seen as too radical by a lot of people.  Though it defines the sacred year of Jubilee through what it said. 

The Law of Moses is nothing less than a legal system to ensure a far more radical equality as being the will of God, meaning to establish that equality more strongly than any secular, materialistic legal system ever has.   It does not outlaw the ownership of property but defines it in such a way as a right of all that any financial scheme cannot override, I would go so far as to say that under that Law the concept of ownership of shares in a corporation past the point of a just return on an investment is unjust and illegal.   Capitalism is absolutely a contradiction of that law, though any socialism which would abolish ownership in favor of the state owning everything is, as well, wrong.  Again, in the former Soviet Union, we can see how state ownership easily became private plunder by those conveniently former "communists" as they gave up a pretense of their formerly professed faith.  There have been socialists who advocated something like that though they were swamped by the Marxist-materialist and anti-democratic ideology which, in real life, is just a different flavor of violent, oppressive gangsterism.  

One of the greatest things that was done in Vatican II, building on, of all Popes, Pius XII's reform of having the scripture readings in the vernacular (as the priest quiet mumbled them in Latin), greatly expanded the readings from the Hebrew scriptures, perhaps the reason that around the world Catholics got to hear that mightily subversive text announced as the Word of God.  I doubt that many of the trad-catholics would really have liked people to take it to heart as such.   I doubt that any defined group of scientistic materialists heard any such radicalism expounded as that any time in the past year.   I'm sure the many libertarians in organized atheism would despise that notion as would any strict Darwinsts who are, after all, the descendants of Thomas Malthus, the depraved Anglican pastor who wanted a large part of his "flock" to be thrown out and starved to death. 

The modern Biblical scholars who attribute the texts we have of the First Testament to the Jerusalem elite make you wonder at how much they would have liked what they, nevertheless, felt was the Word of God strongly enough to preserve it, if in their falling away from egalitarianism to the injustice of the Solomon and post Solomon period, they felt compelled to retain the Sinai tradition even when it condemned their privilege, for which you can read "injustice" injustice being a component of all privilege.   I don't know the answer to that but it's one of the things I thought about when I heard it read while listening to the mass.   I find that hearing the Scripture often leaves me just a little more radical than I had been before I heard it.