The video says that it uses George Orwell's own radio play adaptation of his book from 1947, that alone requires me to post this.
Alas, no cast or other information is listed.
Saturday, September 4, 2021
Saturday Night Radio Drama - George Orwell - Animal Farm
I'm Not Holding Back
THE ANTI-AMERICAN Covid-19 terrorist Joe Rogan has Covid-19.
Good, I hope he's one of the ones it kills so he can't get other people killed with his pro-Covid propaganda. At the very least I hope he dies of the Ivermectin he's reportedly using. He would be one of the deserving victims of it.
Fussy Knickers Hate Mail
LETTING ME KNOW that my occasional non-standard speling annoys you to the point it does is certainly not giving me an incentive to stop using non-standard speling. It's like when I use BCE or BC, CE or AD, I try to use the one I'll annoy the people I want to annoy on different occasions.
I have to wonder why it is that orthographic fussbudgets don't have a seizure with the differences between Brit spelling and the American spelling, American and Canadian rules, etc. Not that I'd discourage you from having a hurtin' due to that, if you were smart enough to notice. I am entirely unbothered by the most unorthodox speling of the English language, as I've told you before. Your insults do nothing but make me feel gratified and smug. I'm not stupid enough to have it bother me.
If it were not as much bother as it would be to do it, I'd go with the version of speling that cuts out al superfluous double leters and silent e's, all of those igh and ight and other abominations idiot Brits made into the standard speling because they were to stupid to learn type seting, leaving that to imported Dutch printers. No doubt they thot it would be les expensive than training their underclas to do the work to import people who didn't know the language. Or maybe they didn't want that many literate English plebs around. Just like they're finding now that those meat heads have left the EU and have shortages of underpaid foren labor. The English ruling clas have always ben short sited scum. Our white colar clas is as stupid in copying them. Snobery makes people stupid, especialy those with colege credentials.
The Backlash Against The Anti-Vaxx-Anti-Mask etc. Minority Should Drive Them Into A Corner By Themselves So They Can Be The Ones Who Die Of Their Selfishness
THE ANTI-VAXX-ANTI-MASK media and social disease media liars don't only murder those who are gullible and suceptible to their lies, they kill those of us who were responsible too.
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — A 35-year-old woman at the center of a KOIN 6 News story on Thursday night died early Friday morning, her fiancé Tyler Birkes confirmed.
Tyler said Heather Greeley died early Friday morning at Providence St. Vincent after being treated for COVID-19.
The couple had been fully vaccinated for months and the thought of getting sick with COVID seemed far-fetched, Tyler said. But Heather did indeed contract the virus, then Tyler became sick with it. He said they both felt like they had bad colds for the first week but then Heather started going downhill.
“She had trouble breathing one night, looked at me and said ‘I need
to go to the ER’ and I said ‘alright let’s go,'” Tyler recalled. . .
A couple of days later, Tyler took his fiancée back to the hospital.
“She couldn’t breathe at all and it was really scary,” he said. “I put her in my truck and I was about 100 miles an hour down 217. I got her in there, she was sitting in the wheelchair and they were admitting her and I rubbed her shoulders and I kissed her on the top of her head and told her I loved her and that’s the last time I saw her.”
Tyler said he last spoke to Heather two-and-a-half weeks ago, just before the hospital put her on a ventilator.
“It was really hard for her to talk but I told her ‘I love you very much’ and she was like ‘you know I’m going to be out of her in a couple days, it’s fine,'” he said.
ECMO treatment may have helped Heather, but she was on a waiting list. All three of Providence’s were in use. ECMO is a last resort treatment that pumps and oxygenates a patient’s blood outside the body, allowing the heart and lungs to rest.
He hopes her story will encourage people to think about others.
“I get it, people don’t want to get a vaccination or whatever and that’s their God-given American right. It is plain and simple. What’s not okay is the selfishness and not thinking about others,” said Tyler. “Everybody thinks this disease isn’t real — it’s absolutely real and it’s in-discriminatory, it doesn’t care who you are, and it will choose who it wants to choose. Heather did everything right, she did everything she was supposed to do and is now suffering because people didn’t do their part.”
Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Mark Zuckerberg, Sharyl Sandberg, and the elected scum like Rand Paul Noem, Desantis, Abbott, Sununu (in NH, who is putting one of my loved ones at risk right now) . . . are guilty of all of the Covid deaths, but so are the ones whose name you don't know who go along with them.
We need to make it generally understood that the anti-vaxx-anti-maskers in the general population are as guilty as their celebrities and media enablers, the time for being sweetly reasonable to all of them on the basis of their freedom to get people in large numbers killed should have been over during the first wave of this.
The college crowds who are about to lead to shut downs at even Northern colleges and universities because they are too irresponsible to not party like it was 2018 should all be expelled from college because they're too young for it. To hell with all of them.
Friday, September 3, 2021
If The Fugitive Womb Act Is Legal Why Not This Too?
THE STATE OF THE LAW being what it has been proven to be, I'm wondering why someone can't bring a Texas Taliban lawsuit against men who knock-up women who then want an abortion. If anyone is to blame for there being these abortions, it's the men who get things started. I would think there are lots of women who might want to collect that bounty considering how the Supreme Court and the Texas state government has left things.
If the men who cause unwanted pregnancy were the targets of this, it would be ended immediately.
Just When You Figured You Had Hit Rock Bottom On How Immoral And Degenerate Lawyers And The Law Can Possibly Be
Gun company Remington has subpoenaed the report cards, attendance records, and disciplinary records of five kindergarten and first grade students murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, according to new court filings in a civil lawsuit filed against the company.
“In mid-July, the defense served a subpoena on the Newtown Public School District seeking: ‘Any and all educational records in your possession including but not limited to, application and admission paperwork, attendance records, transcripts, report cards, disciplinary records, correspondence and any and all other educational information and records pertaining to’ each of the five first-graders whose Estates are plaintiffs in this case,” according to the motion filed today that sought to protect the victims’ families from further subpoenas. “There is no conceivable way that these [records] will assist Remington in its defense, and the plaintiffs do not understand why Remington would invade the families’ privacy with such a request. Nonetheless, this personal and private information has been produced to Remington.”
In addition, Remington subpoenaed employment records of four teachers who were killed in the shooting, in which a total of 20 children and six adults died. Some of the parents of the Sandy Hook victims have been suing the weapons manufacturer since 2014, alleging that the gun manufacturer advertised its line of semi-automatic weapons to civilians. Remington previously responded to a discovery request for its internal company communications by producing more than 18,000 unsorted files containing memes, cartoons, and ice bucket challenge videos.
"We have no explanation for why Remington subpoenaed the Newtown Public School District to obtain the kindergarten and first grade academic, attendance and disciplinary records of these five school children,” Josh Koskoff, one of the lawyers representing the Sandy Hook parents, told Motherboard. “The records cannot possibly excuse Remington’s egregious marketing conduct, or be of any assistance in estimating the catastrophic damages in this case. The only relevant part of their attendance records is that they were at their desks on December 14, 2012.”
Remington’s lawyers did not immediately return Motherboard’s request for comment.
The lawyers and their law firms' names should be part of the public's knowledge of this. They should be burned as the total and complete scum they have shown themselves to be. If the "the law" allows this, it is worse than the whore house I accused it of being the other day.
The Lid Is Blown Off Of The Facism Of The Republican Supreme Court And The Inadequacy Of Our Anti-Democratic Constitution
THE SUPREME COURT UNDER REPUBLICAN-FASCISM has blown the lid off of the danger that has always been contained in its powers, both under the Constitution and through it assuming powers to itself that are nowhere in the Constitution. We have lived with that for the past two centuries because those powers have, until now, when they are used against a majority, exercised against minorities.
That danger was no secret to Black People and other People of Color, it has been with the briefest of interval during the Warren Court and its aftermath, among the chief tools of their depersonalization, disempowerment, discrimination for the entirety of American history. It was somewhat less true for White Women before now but with the move by the Republican-fascist majority on the court now, it has just given states the ownership of even White Women's' bodies over to abortion bounty hunters, now in Texas, soon in Florida and other states under Republican-fascist control - no doubt when the voter suppression decisions and non-decisions of this fascist majority on the Court come through, cemented into place through the destruction of democracy.
If you think that is overblown, what they have done is to generalize a situation that under the government of Communist China under its one-child-per-family period was assigned to specific government spies and busy bodies under state supervision, generally older women who were to look for women who had a child who appeared to be pregnant again to force them to have an abortion. Only, this being capitalist America, that opportunity to get paid to pry into the most intimate decisions of a woman about what goes on inside her own body is put out to contract, in effect, so anyone anywhere could make a living off of suing those who help her to obtain an abortion.
I don't recall who it was I heard make a comparison to the industry of re-enslaving escaped slaves for profit but I think it is an apt comparison. That was something that previous Supreme Courts allowed as permitted under the Constitution of the United States. I doubt those parts of it they used have been repealed, nor do I think it would much matter because the majority on the Court as it is, just makes it up, anything they can pretend justifies what they do goes AND THE STUPID CONSTITUTION HAS LITTLE REAL OR PRACTICAL MEASURES THAT CAN KEEP THE COURT FROM DOING THAT. The impeachment "power" of the Constitution to remove even a Brett Kavanaugh who lied his teeth off to get on the court will prove to be nonexistent in reality. Without making this corrupt majority into an impotent minority by expanding the court will, also, prove to be a pipe dream.
That is what the majority on the Supreme Court did, that is what they have proven to be willing to do, short a complete reaction by The Voters by sweeping Republican-fascists out of the Congress, the House and the stinking corrupt Senate - and that Senate being willing to do what is needed, the whole thing is exposed as what it has always been for People of Color, for other members of minority groups, the enemy of those whose most basic rights can be denied by a fascist minority, which is what the Republican Party is in 2021.
The Court has to be cut down to size because it has been, other than for the rarest and briefest of intervals been the enemy of democracy and the bulwark of privilege against democracy and even the general good. The dangers in changing the Constitution are real but the dangers of keeping things as they are are as real, as real as the Roberts Court destroying the Voting Rights Act, something that Roberts was as involved in even as he realized his Republican-fascist colleagues went farther than is politically safe for their overall agenda. That is he didn't go along with them THIS TIME.
Thursday, September 2, 2021
Feed The Backlash Against The Anti-Vaxx Republican-fascists
They are more dangerous to Americans than Al Qaeda, ISIS etc. put together. They have killed many, many times more Americans than terrorists did on 9-11 THEY ARE THE ENEMIES OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TRYING TO GET AS MANY OF US KILLED AS POSSIBLE FOR POLITICAL POWER.
They must be crushed, first by making it impossible for them to be given any benefit of any idiotic doubt - which should be called what it is, quisling cowardace by the "free press" and the idiot-social-media companies. Facebook is a major part of it, they should be declared an enemy organization and terrorist group.
Really. THAT'S Your Idea Of A Test Of True Lefty Purity - non-Hate Mail
I DID LOOK AT YOUR LINK AND the Once Up And Coming Leftie Blogger Duncan Black did, in fact, whine about those who said they wanted abortion to be "safe, legal and rare" because that didn't pass his lefty-purity test by admitting that having an abortion was hardly something you'd choose to need. Not that I'm all that impressed with the libertarian slacker's "leftism." As if the position that abortion should remain safe and legal were some kind of compromise with those who want it illegal and so deadly.
I wonder if Duncan would like major, not without pain, expense or hardly pleasant, very potentially life altering surgical interventions of specifically men's bodies to be safe, legal and frequent?
HOW ABOUT SPECIFICALLY FOR HIS MALE BODY? Of if the aged boy-man had even considered the actual meaning of having an abortion for women who decided they need to have one.
I know from looking at the comments on what I was shown that the asses of Eschaton seem to largely see it only in terms of women being available to men for sex, presumably sex that would lead to a man impregnating a women who may, then, have to decide to have an abortion. The narcissism of the males of Eschaton would seem to be capacious enough to include that as a "leftist" position. As to the women there? I note one who noted that it's far better not to need abortion services than to need them. Not everyone there is a narcissistic ass.
I would wish that for Duncan Black and his boys that a major and inconvenient result of irresponsible sex would be safe, legal and rare but if they figure abortion is no biggie, maybe I won't bother. Happy STD or prostate trouble, Duncan.
I would expect that many women in Texas in the coming weeks, months, years, etc. would hope that men would exercise responsibility so as not to force them to consider unsafe, illegal and probably all too common and potentially deadly abortion as their only choice.
The Government Takeover Of Women's Bodies Is A Product of Anti-Democratic Lefties and Those Idiots On "The Left" Who They Gulled Into Getting Us Here
ALL OF THOSE GREEN PARTY, "third party," anti Al Gore, anti-John Kerry, anti-Hillary Clinton people who said "you can't blackmail me over the Supreme Court" to vote to keep the Republican-fascists from winning the presidency OR A SENATE SEAT now have what they voted for, whether or not they admitted it, the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The Roberts Court, put into office by George W Bush, who the Greens helped put and keep in office and Donald Trump have allowed Republican-fascists on the state level the power to control women's rights over their ownership of their own bodies because the Republican-fascist majority of 6 Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court have declared a federal season on the killing of women's ownership of their bodies.
In my state, Maine, the Democrats and Independents and "moderate" Republicans who declared for years that Susan Collins isn't like those other Republicans and ate the Maine media lies about that, got what they voted for, too. And before she retired Olympia Snowe - whose "moderate" Republicanism encompassed her support for the paleo-Trumpist Paul LePage on the basis that her first husband Peter Snowe had been his mentor when he was merely a young crypto-fascist who I doubt developed in a much different way from where he was already pointed. Republicans by 1973 were already going with American fascism, the "Southern Strategy" of Goldwater and Nixon. There is no more vicious racism than that in my state, especially as concentrated in the Maine Republican Party, especially in the 2nd District of my state.
Women who voted for Republicans or convinced people to vote for Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004 or Jill Stein in 2016, or any other non-Democrat have gotten what they voted for as they preened in their purity (or Republican-fascist collusion) and, of course, they got it for all other women too. And I do mean collusion, the Green Party has gotten money from Republican-fascists to run spoilers to put Republicans in office, this is a Green Party victory.
And now that the Republican-fascists have, as lawyers like Ari Melber and others have pointed out the Supreme Court has, by their manipulation of this said that states are not bound by "settled Supreme Court" law, who knows what is the last word in Republican-fascist legislatures and governors pushing that barrier back? The reestablishment of Jim Crow de facto slavery? I wouldn't put it past the Roberts Court, Roberts being openly hostile to the voting and civil rights of Black People and other People of Color. Clarence Thomas in his psychopathic hatred of People of Color would certainly not side with the three remaining liberals, I doubt Amy Coney Barrett would, despite the race of her adopted sons who she, no doubt, believes she can provide with a level of privilege unavailable to almost all others. That is if she cares about it, which I wouldn't bet on.
This is a bitter day when a lot of scumbags on the "left" the Green Party, Ralph Nader, Jill Stein, "left" have reaped what they have sown since 2000 and before. And we are all going to have to eat the poison harvest.
The play-left will never learn but, as Joe Biden is proving, the only real American left is that found in those Democratic candidates who can win an election. That left is the farthest left that can win office and make law and appoint Judges and "justices." All else is Republican-fascist enablement.
Wednesday, September 1, 2021
I Was Told This Week No One Listens To Carla Bley's Music Here are a lot of first rate musicians apparently not listening to it from March of this year
Recorded remotely from locations around the world, Arturo O’Farrill and the mighty Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra are continuing their Sunday night Birdland residency in an online setting. Please join us every Sunday at 8:30pm ET.
This week, we are paying tribute to the groundbreaking composer Carla Bley – and presenting the virtual world premiere of a new Bley composition, “Blue Palestine,” that was commissioned specifically for Arturo O’Farrill and the ALJO.
In addition, we have guest appearances by Karen Mantler, Renee Manning and Patricia Brennan, and a special archival segment featuring Carla Bley herself, which was originally shown as part of ALJA’s “Notes For Votes” campaign, back in October 2020. All of this accompanied by live chat and commentary from Arturo and the ALJO musicians.
The Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra are: Arturo O’Farrill – Piano & Musical Director; Saxes: Roman Filiu, Adison Evans, Ivan Renta, Jasper Dutz, Larry Bustamante Trumpets: Seneca Black, Adam O'Farrill, Bryan Davis, Rachel Therrien, Walter Cano; Trombones: Rafi Malkiel, Mariel Bildsten, Abdulrahman Amer, Earl McIntyre Rhythm: Vince Cherico – Drums Bam Rodriguez – Bass Carlos “Carly” Maldonado – Percussion Keisel Jimenez – Congas Guest Artists Karen Mantler – Vocals Renee Manning – Vocals Patricia Brennan – Vibraphone Zack O'Farrill – Drums
Hate Mail
IF JACK LEVINE'S great condemnation of modernism hadn't already been there, I'd put this as the motto of this blog.
sandpaper against the culture of narcissism
Yes, I think that says what I hope this is why I keep doing this. If a narcissist hates what I do here it's certainly not going to convince me to stop it.
This Liar Is Allowed To Lawyer - The Law Isn't An Ass It's A Brothel Not To Mention "The Free Press" They Whore In
Not to single out Sidney Powell, all of the lawyers and liars of FOX are as deserving of what she finally got in this kind of grilling but the obsessive publicity hound asked for what she got.
That any of these people still have the ability to act as lawyers is an indictment of the entire legal profession and the judiciary that permits them to do what they've done.
"I've been waiting twenty years for a president to do that speech today" - President Biden Is The First President To Tell The Truth About The Bush II Wars
Jon Soltz has more credibility in is little finger than the entire DC-NYC, TV and radio and ink on paper pundit class to say what he said about President Biden courageously and finally ending the futile loss of life that started in the pundit class-scribbling class promoted Bush II era wars and the Obama era surge that then Vice-President Biden wisely opposed at the time.
It should never be forgotten that these wars, like the Bush I Gulf war, the American Vietnam war were promoted and supported by the writing-talking classes. The fact that the media in this country is not owned by The People but by the rich has to figure in why they do things like that continually, getting the American military involved in being sent to do what they want them to do but which they can't do.
I am expecting to see disgraced former general David Petraeus to continue to use this to promote either his position within the pundit racket or, perhaps, to run for office. And he's not the only upper-level military figure-pundit who I expect to attack President Biden for telling the truth and making his policy on the basis of the truth. Petraeus was a major figure in selling Obama the surge. And he's got his like in the academic-scribbling class who are the ones the media has called on INSTEAD OF THOSE WHO WERE RIGHT ABOUT THE DISASTER THIS WAS FROM THE BEGINNING.
Why They Love To Hate On God - "part of the nature of religion is that it delivers a message that is like sandpaper against the culture of narcissism"
IF LIKE ME YOU HAD NOT heard this, I'm very grateful to Michael Sean Winters linking to the Reverend Lillian Daniel on the boring "spiritual but not religous" crowd. He linked to it in response to that story about the "Humanist" (read "atheist") Chaplain at Whor . . ., uh, Harvard I wrote about the other day.
Harvard University, once the intellectual bulwark of Calvinism, has named its first atheist as chief chaplain, Greg Epstein. According to this profile in The New York Times, the choice reflects the fact "dozens of students whom Mr. Epstein mentors have found a source of meaning in the school's organization of humanists, atheists and agnostics, reflecting a broader trend of young people across the United States who increasingly identify as spiritual but religiously nonaffiliated."
Yuck. I am with the Rev. Lillian Daniel of the First Congregational Church in Glen Ellyn who told Loretto Sr. Maureen Fiedler what she thought of the "spiritual but not religious" crowd. Daniel said, "On airplanes, I dread the conversation with the person who finds out I am a minister and wants to use the flight time to explain to me that he is 'spiritual but not religious.' Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn't interest me." I couldn't agree more, but listen to the whole 2012 interview: Daniel is incisive and hilarious.
I'd never heard the nine-year-old piece and, though it was disappointingly short, it was to the point and the point was sharp and merciless. And it was funny. I agree with everything in it, especially her points that
a. their inevitable claim that they find their g-d in nature, as if those who are in churches don't, as if the entirety of scripture doesn't, literally from the beginning of it in Genesis till the end in John the Divine look to nature for God, the creature of nature.
b. find old, ancient, religious traditions and churches "boooorrring" with all of the many, varied, at times conflicting and deeply thought and felt and challenged and (sometimes) resolved thinking and reflections on lived human experience on such things. They find that enormous range of human reporting "booorrrrring!" but find their make-it-yourself substitute, springing from their very own forehead like some bogus Athena as a mirror of their ego to be utterly fascinating.
DANIEL: Often some shallow combination of exercise and caffeine, coffee shops as spiritual community, hikes as pilgrimages, The New York Times as sacred text, and sunsets—don’t ever forget the sunsets. These people are always informing you that they find God in the sunsets. Well, excuse me, as if people who go to church didn’t see God in a sunset. You know, my take is that any idiot can find God in the sunset. What is remarkable is finding God in the context of flawed human community, and a tradition bigger than you are with people who may not reflect God back to you in your own image.
Part of the nature of religion, so much beat up on in our society, part of the nature of religion is that it delivers a message that is like sandpaper against the culture of narcissism. It is not all about you and, no, you cannot make it up. The beauty of a long tradition is that it is bigger than anything we can do by ourselves.
c. literally everything else she says.
That quote is taken from an old PBS report on Daniels and what she has had to say on the topic that is worth reading, in lieu of a transcript of the radio piece.
That quote sums up so much of why the culture of modernism, the "enlightenment" hates religion so much, why they must attribute all kinds of evils to it that are more accurately and more importantly attributed to other things like the desire to accumulate and concentrate wealth and power - the ultimate motive of the many sins of organized religion as well as the secular world. If they can blame the source of the message that the ultimate reason for life and living is not selfishness, they can get on with their narcissistic pleasure without any trouble. It's not as if the entirely secular evil doers are going to be much inconvenienced by it. Which also accounts for the counterproductive to impotent results of the materialist-atheist-scientistic "left."
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Hate Mail - I Have No Interest In Going Back To Being Only Roman Catholic
THE OFTEN CALLED HERETICAL generally considered ex-RC priest, John Dominic Crossan once said that for him to say he wasn't still a Catholic - though he held some deeply heterodox views from those of the official Roman Catholic Church - made about as much sense as saying he was no longer Irish. I understood what he meant, the influence of Catholic Christianity runs deep, deeper than mere belief. I have come to realize that for many Protestants their identification with the tradition they were raised in or adopted as adults can have as profoundly enduring a presence even after they have "left the church."
I never was excommunicated and if some bishop had done that to me I don't think I'd pay it any mind. There are some bishops that would bother me about more than others, some I'd be delighted to be excommunicated by because I have no respect for their Christianity or their "Catholicism." I don't think Benedict XVI doing it would bother me at all, though I don't think he much cared about what mere lay people did as long as it didn't impinge on the hierarchy that is what he really cared about. Or Women who were academic theologians, he and the JPII-BXVI crop of bishops had a thing about Women who did theology. But Catholicism doesn't belong to the bishops or even the popes, it doesn't even belong to a majority of Catholics, I don't know who it belongs to or what, exactly it is. Considering how many people it resides in I don't know how you could figure that out. I could say the same thing about what science is, though officially it is whatever scientists say it is at any given time these days anyone with a Facebook account or a position on Republican-fascist media seems to get lots of people believing being a scientist is not a requirement to get to do that.*
I'm still Catholic but I'm Catholic Plus any number of other influences over the years, Protestant, Orthodox Christian, a bit of the Syrian-Indian influence, even. Add to that Jewish, Buddhist, Islamic, and a number of other religious traditions that are not "monotheistic" at least until you get beneath the surface. Rupert Sheldrake talking about the Christian Ashram in India where he lived pointed out that during mass they read from the Hindu scriptures as well as the Jewish-Christian scriptures. Asking the priest who started it how he could do that in Christian worship he answered that it was a Catholic Mass, "catholic" meaning universal you were keeping with the spirit of it by including content, I guess, instead of excluding it.
Mentioning Nostra Aetate in the post about the Chief Rabbi getting into a swivet over Pope Francis riffing off of Paul, it is just such an inclusive document noting that other religions have legitimate content to them and that it deserved the respect of Catholics, even as that document held that Catholicism was, in some ways superior - it was a huge step forward against the widespread Catholic superstition that outside of the Catholic Church there was no salvation. I don't know the extent to which that was ever really an official holding of the RC Church but lots of people believed it - and could they ever be annoying.
No. I expect if I ever have the chance of attending a Mass said by a Roman Catholic Woman Priest and if it got reported to the bishop I might be eligible for being "excommunicated" but I don't think that would ever stop me from doing it. John Dominic Crossan has, in fact, co-presided at such a mass, though I don't know what the consequences in that line were for him. The ordination of the RCWPs is as valid as that of any orthodox RC bishop, in line of apostolic succession - as they insist. It wouldn't bother me at all, I'd just keep on as I am wherever that takes me.
* The "free press" is going to get us all killed due to the enlightenment superstition that it, an artificial, human made entity, has rights such as natural creatures do, and the right to get hundreds of thousands, millions of people killed with complete freedom to do so and with complete impunity in perpetuity with the evidence that they are getting people killed being glaringly obvious and that that's a good thing because Jemmy Madison and Tommy Jefferson said so three centuries ago. The Catholic Church is faster to see its mistakes, at times, than the enlightenment. As I'll say again soon.
Monday, August 30, 2021
Looking Back At This Yesterday, Being In The Thick Of Moving Today, One Eye On The Terrible Storm - I'm going to post this again
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
How Can A 48 Year Old "Humanist" Work At Harvard in 2015 Without Having Been Exposed To These Ideas?
SO, Ta-Nehisi Coates, with a new and very well received book, and, probably more to the point, appearing on The Daily Show, is the flavor of the month, it would seem. I had read some of his things in the Atlantic and was as impressed with his writing ability as everyone else but the recent explosion in his fame has left me rather puzzled. I have not read his book, though I might well read it.
Like some others who read Greg Epstein's praise for Coates on the basis of his atheism at Salon, I'm rather astonished that it took Coates writing in his book and in the Atlantic so very recently to open the eyes of so many white people to the issues he covers. Especially those white folk who study and work at a major intellectual institution such as Harvard, like Epstein. Didn't they ever read other black writers of whom there have been scores and hundreds talking about these issues, some with the same insights Coates writes about decades ago, some more than a century ago? Many of those writers were available to me living in a rural backwater in the north years before Epstein was born, I read some of them when I was in high school more than a half a century ago. Since Epstein is an ordained Rabbi* as well as an atheist chaplain at Harvard, who studied at major universities, I wonder how he could have apparently missed the entire range of Black liberation theology and the earlier writings of such ubiquitously known figures as The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. and the myriad of other black writers who have addressed the same issues that Coates writes about, leaving it to him to primarily give the same ideas an update in his own writing style. It isn't that Coates is a more insightful writer than those older and previous writers, he's merely a younger one with a more currently fashionable framing.
What he says about black lives mattering was being said in the late 19th century and through the 20th century by black writers such as Ida B. Wells and Walter Francis White, it was exposed all during the anti-lynching campaign, even to a wider audience. And black writers have never stopped writing about that and against the many murders of people for being black, certainly including summary executions by the police of entirely innocent people as well as people who were murdered by the police for things white people would have done without any police action being taken. What Coates says about that is far less profound than what James Cone has said about it during the same period and far less useful in both providing strategies of coping and of making improvements. As I noted the other day, some of Coates' statements are far more likely to lead to an impotent despair than they are real progress in real lives. Black lives are lives in reality, not merely things to be thought about by intellectuals and the causal readers of Atlantic articles and books. They mattered before the recent coverage of police shootings and the gun-lynchings of thugs like George Zimmerman who are let off by the police and the system caught the attention of the current white would-be-intelligentsia.
What Coates says about the issue of reparations, as well, has been talked about and discussed in massive detail beginning in the period of Reconstruction and onward to today. It's telling that in his much talked about and important article he begins by citing The Bible, Deuteronomy 15:12-15, which provides a Biblical case that God demands that compensation be paid to slaves who have been held in the far less absolute form of bondage that is allowed under Mosaic Law, which was paid in some cases by people who gave up holding slaves under the influence of The Bible and who took the commandment to pay compensation seriously. I read his article and don't recall seeing any comparable argument made for compensation on the basis of materialism or atheism.
I am finding it harder to take Coates as more than a very talented writer who has worked on what other, previous writers have said and presenting their thoughts and insights while ignoring that those ideas can't be generated or given any kind of moral or political force by his general framing of atheism. Which was done in the past too, it was what the Marxists here in the United States did for the entire period of the Soviet Union, supporting atheist, Communist regimes there and in other countries, conveniently ignoring that their overarching atheism was impotent to even mount a critique of capitalism with all of its baggage of racism, exploitation of workers, inequality and injustice while the religion they despised could give an absolute reason those were wrong. They also did so here, in the West, while ignoring that everything they slammed the governments here for allowing or addressing ineffectively in the period when baby steps of progress were being made was happening universally in the Soviet Union, in China, in the occupied countries in Eastern Europe and in smaller, some of them even more brutal atheist paradises such as North Korea and Pol Pot's Cambodia. I do remember even some of the most ardent voices on the left, some of whom were otherwise admirable, defending Pol Pot in the early part of his insanely homicidal regime. The Chinese government which was held up as some kind of paragon by the lunatics of Progressive Labor, who were influential in the destruction of an effective left in the late 60s and early 70s, never have had much trouble getting along with the worst of their type.
Marx didn't, as far as I can recall reading, ever address the impossibility of finding rights in materialism, workers rights, included. He presented things as if his imaginary forces of history were actual material objects, the movements of which could be charted to determine their eventual destination. Where he, somehow, expected they would rest in the best of all possible worlds. In the meantime, the Soviet Union, China and other industrial atheist paradises were founded on generalized slavery, the workers being maintained for greater efficiency of production, not because they were the possessors of rights granted them by their Creator, who didn't figure into their system. And in China, today, we see that materialism is a fungible ideology, as its "Communism" has been transformed into a Victorian capitalism on uppers. It has no higher ideal than the creation and concentration of money.
But Coates is a writer of the post-Marxist popular atheist period, an atheism that is more compatible with the American establishment. His career as a writer is interesting for that reason as well as for his very real talent.
The extent to which Coates turns into a media phenomenon is likely a good gauge for the phenomenon that a religious writer will be taken less seriously by the mainstream media, that being determined by the extent to which they are a religious and a liberal at the same time. It is certainly de rigeur to be an atheist in large parts of the intelligentsia, a token appearance of a religious figure, here and there, allowable as convenient. I have wondered at the tolerance of religious expression among minority figures in such venues as a marker of the more general condescension of the white media for minorities and their cultures. Such minority voices appearing in the media restricted to addressing issues of minority interest. I wonder if the extent to which anti-religion will give those such as Neil Degrasse Tyson wider access for addressing other issues will develop into a trend in the way that anti-leftism and criticism of black people by black conservatives has flourished in the media. There would seem to be a full employment policy for such commentators as far more informed voices are banned from being heard except in the rarest of instances. The same can be said of religious conservatives, religious liberals being another class disappeared by the media.
Atheism fully deserves the kind of critique that is popular among the scribbling classes when religion is the topic and its not going to get one even as its contradictions and hypocrisies flourish and its mythology promoted in the media. Liberalism needs for atheism to get a full critique because of its basic incompatibility with the foundations and goals of genuine liberalism.
I would love to ask Coates where in materialism, in science, in atheism and atheist exposition of human minds and lives he finds anything to make a moral obligation to respect the rights he writes about, from the obligation to pay reparations for the work of black slaves and those held in de facto slavery during the post-emancipation period up to and including the rights of full equality. I can tell him where those reside in Christianity, he, himself points to one of the main ones in citing Deuteronomy. If he read the great Black Liberation theologians and the Latin American and Asian Liberation theologians, he would find more than I could tell him. And those rest on the bedrock of The Bible, which rests on a belief in the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob and the belief that all people are made in the image of God and are equally endowed by God with inalienable rights. He won't find anything comparable in atheism.
* It is bizarre that someone who entirely rejects God and the entire basis of The Law can be considered Jewish while someone who converts to Christianity from Judaism, who believes in the same God and the Jewish tradition apparently isn't to be considered as Jewish anymore. I have yet to read an explanation of that and would welcome one that makes sense of the matter.
Sunday, August 29, 2021
He's got about 700,000 More Deserving Recepients Of My Sympathy In Line Before He Gets It - And His Family Too, Unless They Told Him He Was Scum Before This
A conservative radio host from Florida who criticised coronavirus vaccination efforts – and called himself “Mr Anti-Vax” – before contracting Covid-19 himself has died, his station said on Saturday.
A statement said: “It’s with great sadness that WNDB and Southern Stone Communications announce the passing of Marc Bernier, who informed and entertained listeners on WNDB for over 30 years. We kindly ask that privacy is given to Marc’s family during this time of grief.”
When Bernier was hospitalised with Covid-19, three weeks ago, WNDB operations manager Mark McKinney told local media: “If you’ve listened to his show, you’ve heard him talk about how anti-vaccine he is on the air.”
In December, Bernier told one guest: “I’m not taking it … Are you kidding me? Mr Anti-Vax? Jeepers.”
The Volusia county sheriff, Mike Chitwood, said the station told him Bernier, 65, died on Saturday night.
The ones in the media who discouraged innocent people from being vaccinated and wearing masks, especially the ones agitating the idiot Trumper-Republican-fascists to try to get school children killed by anti-vaxx-mask etc. can all fuck of and die and go to hell as far as I'm concerned. And that's the mildest version of how I feel about them.
Whorevard In The News
THE SIMPLE ONE taunts me about the atheist "Humanist" Chaplain of Harvard (you don't know how much I always want to spell that the way I say it, "Whorevard") being made head chaplain there.
A. It never surprises me when Whor. . . uh, Harvard does something dumb to get into the news.
B. I kind of like the idea that one of my online friends has, that they figured someone in his line probably doesn't have much to do so he can do the paperwork and go to the meetings.
C. What I said about the schmuck here, and also here.
That place and all other "educational institutions" that service the rich elite should have a prohibitive tax placed on it so as to drive down the friggin' obscene and always growing endowment to fund the public schools and colleges and community colleges of Massachusetts. It would also keep them from engulfing poor neighborhoods and destroying them.
I wonder where in his "Humanism" Greg Epstein could find the moral basis for doing that. I can tell you where I can find it in the Jewish-Christian tradition. Harvard is a whore house, only those whores aren't the ones who will get into heaven before the Scribes and the Pharisees, they are the whores of the ultra-rich who can go to hell with them as far as I'm concerned.
It Will Be Interesting To See How This Plays Out
NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER has a piece in it that, if I'd been more alert to the news than I have been this last two weeks, I'd have seen it coming because I read an article at NRC about the homily that started the trouble.
Israel's Chief Rabbinate has written a letter to Pope Francis conveying its “distress” at comments he made suggesting Jewish law, as written in the Torah, is obsolete.
The letter, first reported on by Reuters, was sent by Rabbi Rasson Arousi, chair of the Commission of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel for Dialogue with the Holy See. Arousi was referring to a homily Francis made during a general audience on Aug. 11.
In that homily, or sermon, the pope reflected on the Apostle Paul's views in the New Testament that the Torah does not give life.
Speaking of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, the pope said: "It does not offer the fulfillment of the promise because it is not capable of being able to fulfill it ... Those who seek life need to look to the promise and to its fulfillment in Christ."
That statement comes close to supersessionism, also called replacement theology— the belief that the Christian faith has replaced or supplanted Judaism, a view the Catholic Church repudiated. In a 1965 landmark Vatican declaration, Nostra Aetate, the church established a new rapport between Jews and Catholics.
"In his homily, the pope presents the Christian faith as not just superseding the Torah; but asserts that the latter no longer gives life, implying that Jewish religious practice in the present era is rendered obsolete," Arousi wrote in the letter.
"This is in effect part and parcel of the 'teaching of contempt' towards Jews and Judaism that we had thought had been fully repudiated by the Church," he wrote.
I'm certain that Pope Francis was not repudiating Nostra Aetate, one of the most important documents in the history of the Catholic Church but that he was accepting the reading of Paul which pretty much says what the Chief Rabbi is protesting. Or does it?
I would start by saying that the Catholic liturgy, now, announces that The Law (of Moses) gives life because it is full of readings from The Law and the Prophets and the Psalms, etc. that say that, the Catholic liturgy may have more of that claim made in it than happens in many Synagogues if for no other reason than there are readings at all of the daily masses and the other liturgical texts that are supposed to be read any number of times a day contain the same texts from the Jewish scriptures. I would continue by pointing out that the same Paul who said those troublesome things in some of his most important texts, such as Romans, said that he was a Jew, a Pharissee, one of those who is "zealous for The Law" so what he said cannot be taken as meaning exactly what it seems to in a "common sense" reading of it.
I think one of the more erudite Protestant readings of that which I've read that says Paul was talking about Roman Law, is worth considering but I really don't buy it. I'd like it to be the case because it papers over a huge problem caused by that "common sense" reading of it. Though in all of these things I am certainly willing to consider the claims made, especially on the basis of who makes it. Who Pope Francis has shown himself to be certainly counts as an important part in thinking about what he said. I would contrast him in that regard with the controversy that Benedict XVI caused when he stereotyped Islam as an inherently violent religion. I had a far harder time not believing he meant that at face value based on who he was.
Just what "The Law" is is a problem. Is it the common sense meaning of the words on the page? If that's true it literally leads to death because it, in so many places, gives that as the sentence for all kinds of things. Though as Marilynne Robinson said, it is doubtful that that sentence was ever much enforced. That can be contrasted to the Commandments of Jesus which do not instruct people to kill other people - that must be pointed out as well. But I doubt any of it was to be taken literally as American "strict-constructionists" "originalists" and other aliases fascist-gangster legal scholarship, proclaim law must be or it is meaningless. I believe that because in the very scriptures Jewish and Christian, the claim is that a deeper meaning lies behind those, "The Law" which is to be "written on the hearts" of the faithful.
Even the words on the page are only significant in so far as they have meaning in the minds and IN THE ACTIONS of human beings, if not all flesh. Jesus said that "the law" kills but the spirit gives life. I certainly would think that's clearly true of any law, that it has meaning, reality only in so far as it is made real in the minds and acts of those for whom The Law is given. And that meaning is certainly not uniform in the minds and lives, certainly not in the words said about The Law. The great Jewish practice of disputing the meaning of The Law is one of its glories and, like all such human articulation of The Law or any laws, it is fraught with danger and peril, sometimes to human life itself.
I am certain that the level of the Rabbinate that the Chief Rabbi inhabits must deal with all kinds of evil claims about, evil interpretations of The Law, some of those destructive of life as in some of the more evil of pseudo-religious cults. That is certainly an instance of "The Law" leading to death. There are several cults, some which are nothing more than mind-control cults under a corrupt "rabbi" or even a dynasty of such absolute monarchs (whenever you read that word, it means "gangster") which are certainly known to use The Law to destroy life, to enslave and oppress. That's one of the dangers in codifying legal codes, as soon as a lawyer sees the text they start trying to figure out ways to use it to such ends, the history of human law that ignores that universal use of such legal codes is itself a tool of such gangsterism.
The Spirit being what makes The Law into something that gives life is as true of The Law in Judaism as it is in Christianity. It's certainly true for Catholic law which can be used for the utmost evil as many a canon lawyer has used it for, including many within the Vatican and holding high Church offices. The recently ill and reportedly recovering Raymond Burke is someone I've condemned for that, I could name dozens, many dozens of others who, as well, embody the warnings of Paul against that kind of law that kills. Pope Francis is one of their chief targets these days, I'm sure some of them seeing this unfortunate sermon will be rubbing their dirty palms together thinking how they can use it.
I'm sure an explanation will be given, I would wait till we read it to judge what Pope Francis meant. If it furthers the discussion of how any written legal code can be used to kill without the inspiration of The Spirit, it will be worthwhile, if it just papers over the dispute, it will be a wasted opportunity. If the entire history of such disputes among religions were conducted in the spirit of a rigorous attempt to find The Spirit behind The Law, it would be a lot less seedy than it is.
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Anthony McCarthy
1 hour ago