Saturday Night Radio Drama - Jeff Green - Spaxter

 

Spaxter 

Spaxter is a cyberpunk comedy that stars Green as the title character, a sci-fi Raymond Chandler gumshoe fitted with a hi-tech head implant (“the meld”) conveying telepathic capabilities, who goes up against a super-villain who has styled himself as an Egyptian god, has purchased and refitted the Great Pyramid at Giza, and is using adapted meld technology to steal the creative essence from the world's great minds in order to fuel his ascendance to true deity status.

Cast

Jeff_Green: Spaxter
John Koensgen: Graft
Shelley Hartman: Louella
Rick Jones: Osiris
Catherine Anka: Mae Westar
John Tarswell: Newsbyte
Robert Bockstael: Ahkenaton

This is not the kind of stuff I usually post, it's a response to someone daring me to post more sci-fi.  I wouldn't exactly call it sci-fi, it's more experimental comedy.   Kind of surprised to see that it has Robert Bockstael in it, always thought he was an underappreciated actor.

If you are curious, there's also a Spaxter novel you can read from Jeff Green's fun website that has a lot of stuff from him.

And if you like Spaxter, there's also 

 

Spaxterback  

More Thinking About The Superstition Of "State Rights"

IT MIGHT BE A  useful exercise to go over one of the better thought out arguments about rights, where they come from, what those are and the relationship between rights which inhere to living, natural beings, in this case People, and the state, governments, the artificial entities which People form for their own purposes into which future generations just happen to be born, like it or not.  That argument was made in the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, the thing which declared the state that would become the United States of America.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--

I am certain that Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman and Livingston would like to have credited "nature" with endowing "all men" with equality and "certain unalienable Rights" they were good enough at reasoning to know that there is nothing in nature they could credibly assert does that.  Nor do I think it's possible to articulate a claim that such rights are real except as an endowment from God.

I will note that in their argument they place among the self-evident axioms on which the freedom they assert is founded, they found it necessary to place equality before rights.  No one would have any reason to find any assertion of such rights credible on an unequal basis, not for any good purpose.  This was at the most idealistic phase of the founding of the United States, when they were trying to appeal to the largest number of people so they had to give everyone a stake in it.  While they almost as soon as they obtained power for themselves pulled the rug out from under equality, that is the unpaid promissory note that The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. called for payment on and which has yet to be honored.  Without that equality, nothing else that follows is anything anyone needs to accept, including the rights of the privileged to form a state that would serve their purposes.

I would further note that it is on the basis of these individual, endowed rights that their argument for forming a new state rests, claiming that only through the "just consent of the governed" does any state obtain or retain legitimacy.  The state does not have the rights, the People have those.  As they continue:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --

Remember, this is a reasoned argument for throwing off the old state which claimed to rule by right, law, custom, etc. and forming a new state that never existed before it was formed. If states have rights, then there would be no rights for the new state, any such "right" would belong to the existing state.  The same would be true of any place where a new state is declared or formed.   You have to believe in magic to believe that any real entity to be that "right" could magically inhere to a new state, that it would have to come into being with that new state.   Which would be to deny the reality of rights as a real thing.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. 

This is a very good argument that the only legitimacy that a government has is to serve The People and to serve their rights but to mistake that legitimacy for a "state right" starts out by being absurd and, as in Nazi Germany,  the USSR, etc. inevitably puts the "state rights" over those of The People.  It think that's happened long enough and often enough that it would be as close as one of the social sciences can come to making a scientific law, that whenever People widely believe that artificial entities, states, corporations, organizations, syndicates, ideological or religious sects have rights that that superstition will be destructive of real Peoples' lives and real Peoples' real rights.  It has happened in the United States when "states rights" were used to enslave, oppress, murder and steal from minorities and even majorities living under corrupt state governments.  Absurdly, though the slave holding Confederacy asserted the "rights" of individual states, it forbade any state in that abominable state to abolish slavery sometime in the future.   Once you go down that road moral integrity goes first but intellectual integrity will have to soon follow it into oblivion.  

The argument, taken to its logical destination and the goal of the signatories of the Declaration, based on those antecedent arguments the logical conclusion is that, far from the state having rights, they can be thrown over and abolished entirely.  You have to wonder where the "state's rights" go when that happens, and if they are destroyed in the process, they couldn't possibly have been real to start with.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

When states were embodied in the person of a monarch, many of whom, around the world, have claimed to rule by divine right, it was easy to see the folly of the claim that such a state has rights to do what it does or even to stay in existence.  One of the wisest and most self-evident of truths as to the folly of that kind of state, maybe the first in the history of the human species, is contained in the First Book of Samuel, the warning God tells Samuel to give to The Children of Israel, when they ask him to anoint their first king for them:

¹⁰ Samuel told the people who were asking him for a king everything that the Lord had said to him. ¹¹ “This is how your king will treat you,” Samuel explained. “He will make soldiers of your sons; some of them will serve in his war chariots, others in his cavalry, and others will run before his chariots. ¹² He will make some of them officers in charge of a thousand men, and others in charge of fifty men. Your sons will have to plow his fields, harvest his crops, and make his weapons and the equipment for his chariots. ¹³ Your daughters will have to make perfumes for him and work as his cooks and his bakers. ¹⁴ He will take your best fields, vineyards, and olive groves, and give them to his officials. ¹⁵ He will take a tenth of your grain and of your grapes for his court officers and other officials. ¹⁶ He will take your servants and your best cattle^[a] and donkeys, and make them work for him. ¹⁷ He will take a tenth of your flocks. And you yourselves will become his slaves. ¹⁸ When that time comes, you will complain bitterly because of your king, whom you yourselves chose, but the Lord will not listen to your complaints.”

¹⁹ The people paid no attention to Samuel, but said, “No! We want a king, ²⁰ so that we will be like other nations, with our own king to rule us and to lead us out to war and to fight our battles.” ²¹ Samuel listened to everything they said and then went and told it to the Lord. ²² The Lord answered, “Do what they want and give them a king.” Then Samuel told all the men of Israel to go back home.

So many things could be pointed out in that, the first is that, though slavery under the Mosaic Law was far less terrible and enduring than slavery in the American South, it was still a moral failing, perhaps the origin of the Children of Israel's troubles that led to them wanting a king who would, as warned, enslave them.  

The second is that despite the warning FROM GOD THROUGH HIS PROPHET SAMUEL, God honors the right of The People to make that decision for themselves, something I doubt any of the classical gods would do to anyone they care about.   Just as God leaves it to us to reap what we sow in choosing  liars, crooks, gangsters and thugs [CELEBRITIES!]in our elections. Just as the series of rotten kings and the disasters they brought was as a result of their right to choose, our rotten governments, especially in "red states" is a result of our immoral exercise of our rights.   It's not as if we didn't get a warning.  Jesus, in his parable that I've discussed here recently, told the rich man that the destitute, disempowered man, Lazaraus would rest with Father Abraham but he and his brothers got The Law of Moses to warn them, that was the warning they got.  Maybe we should take that as filtered through 1 Samuel 8 because I think it's more apt for today.  

I'd trust that a lot more than I'd trust anything that has ever come out of the Supreme Court, even in its best and all to brief period of lesser depravity.  Even a lot of the "rights" rulings made by the Warren Court led to the depravity that we have now because they endowed lies and the liars who tell them with "rights" of "free speech" because of "The First Amendment" and that right is getting us mowed down by Covid now.   God gave The People the right to make a bad choice, no where in the Bible do I see any place where it makes lying a right, our courts have done that on the basis of secular rationalism. 

We fucked it up by our ill considered blather about "rights" Just as Samuel warned, God isn't going to fix it for us.  He gave us the right to do that, ourselves.  God didn't endow a king with a right to rule, God didn't make the state, it has no right to exist as would be proven when later prophets comment on the catastrophic late stage of the kings in that line and their ultimate dissolution along with the nation of Israel due to injustice and a corrupt, unjust state.  That prophetic tradition is a glory that no other tradition I'm aware of has.

Nelson Veras/Kevin Glasgow/Asaf Sirkis - Solar

 

 

Nelson Veras - guitar

Kevin Glasgow - bass

Asaf Sirkis - drums

Orrin Evans Quartet - featuring Chelsea Baratz on Bobby Watson's "Faith in Action"

 

 

I can't see who the bass and drum players are and they aren't listed so I won't risk getting them wrong.

Hate Mail - Simps Never Answers Questions He Dissembles When He Doesn't Just Mumble Like A Demented Duffer

 "Denying Israel's historical right to exist . . . "

I'd ask the numbnutz to explain what an "historical right to exit" means but I know from long experience he won't answer it because that's a phrase he heard come out of some propagandist's mouth on TV or on the radio or maybe in person and liked the sound of it without considering that if history confers "rights" onto states then it would certainly have conferred one on the Third Reich, the Soviet Regime, the Hoxha regime in Albania, the Apartheid regime in South Africa, the Pol Pot regime, the Kim regime in North Korea, the American states which formed the Confederacy, etc. I hold that none of those gangster regimes had a "right to exist" and that, for example, when the United States Army destroyed the Confederate government it was doing a great thing, my parents and millions of others destroying the Third Reich was a great thing, too. 

I have pointed out to him that if "history" gives rights to nations, he should get his pasty white ass off of New York which should be given back to the ones it was stolen from, he should get his ass back to Europe. 

I've answered that years ago. 

Rights inhere to living beings by the choice of God, they do not inhere to states, corporations, organizations, the media and other entirely artificial, human made entities.  I would include religious denominations in that list of artificial, human made entities which the Roberts Republican-fascist court is giving ersatz "rights" in order to allow them to discriminate against real human beings in exactly the same way an earlier court gave porn corporations the "right" to torture and kill animals for the perverted pleasure of perverts.   The idea that the "church" of any self-appointed "pastor" or mind-washer or cargo-cult "prosperity gospel" Mammonist has natural rights that are superior to the rights of individuals to not be discriminated against for housing, employment, public accommodations, etc, is pernicious and, in the conception of "rights" that phrase promotes, true. 

I think it's false.  

Update:  It is one of the things that I learned from going online and being exposed to the unfiltered, unedited thinking of so many college credentialed snobs that few of them can think coherently, few of them are accomplished readers, certainly fewer accomplished readers of expository texts, disciplined enough to form coherent, intellectually honest arguments.  And that atheists telling the truth is somewhat more of a sometimes thing than it is for people who believe that telling lies and bearing false witness is a consequential sin.  Simps was one of the principle exhibits demonstrating that but he wasn't the only one.  If he'd never chosen to get involved with me I wouldn't have bothered to engage him in conversation.  

He proves in the comment he's too intellectually feeble to have this conversation so there's no point in continuing, it would make me feel like I was one of those assholes on the playground who made fun of the retarded kid.  I was brought up not to be those guys.  He can't get away from that playground.  

Update 2: "does (God) have a last name?" I'd say that that sounds like a joke he stole from a 1960s standup routine, a very routine routine but that would ignore the truth that literally everything he says is something he stole from a 1960s routine routine. He is incapable of original thought, a consequence of watching too much TV. 

Who is this "history" that confers rights on artificial entities? Does history have a last name?   It is a certainty that history is a human invention, the product of human imagination and documents and artifacts of human origin.  Who gave Mr. History the ability to bestow rights?  And did that entity have the right to bestow that right. 

To say that artificial entities such as states have rights makes no more sense than to ask if the pattern of paint which is this picture has a right to freedom of speech.  

  

 

So, as always, the smart-alackry of the college credentialed fails to get to the starting post.   

Moses got the answer to what God's name was, Exodus 3:14. which is a more interesting idea than I've ever heard come from any atheist at the Eschaton "Brain Trust" (they really do call themselves that). 

EB3 - INDO

 

Robin - trombone, electric trombone, perc. pads 

Orrin Evans - Keyboards, Keyboard bass 

Kenwood Dennard - drums, keyboard bass

Ashli Babbitt Got What She Knew Better Than Most That She Was Asking For

THE 1-6 TERRORIST who was shot when she was part of a mob trying to enter the House Chamber got exactly what she had every reason to know she was asking for by doing it.  She had been a member of the security forces in the Air Force, she of all of those thugs and goons, knew what a police officer whose job it was to hold that line would do to someone who came through it.  

She asked to get shot, she got shot, she died, she deserved what she got, as a result of that lives of innocent, intended victims of her mob were certainly saved.  

That such a criminal is the center of a fascist-gangster cult who is trying to use her totally justified killing to rally more fascist violence isn't any surprise, nor is it a surprise that the god-father of Trumpist Republican-fascism, the dictator of Russia, Putin, is using the dead thug that way is only proof of just how bad things became under the "free speech" regime of the Rehnquist and Roberts courts who paved the way for this with their permission of foreign as well as domestic gangsters to corrupt our politics using "the First Amendment" language to do so.

William Rehnquist was a minority voter suppresisonist when he was nominated to the Court, he having a record of doing that in Arizona, it was no shock when he worked to corrupt our elections on behalf of Republican-fascism, John Roberts furthered that along with the other Republican-fascists who opened up our politics to 19th century levels of corruption and even worse as they ignored the warnings that Citizens United would, in fact, make our elections vulnerable to foreign as well as domestic billionaire gangsters and thugs. 

The entire thing, from the low-level, tattooed, brain-dead thugs who stormed the capitol, their controllers in the Proud-Boys (why hasn't the terrorist racist Gavin McInnis been deported yet?) and Oath Keepers and other men whose response to ED is violent anger, up to the perfumed, well manicured law school and Supreme Court level is one thing all together.  The enablers of the Ashli Babbitt cult and, in fact, of that mob have as much guilt as she did.  It's no wonder they're hiding behind her name and image, coward boys that they are.  

If there is another attack on the Capitol or any state Capitols next week, I hope the police are as ready to meet it with the level of force justified.  I would not fault any of them for doing so.  I have less faith in the judges and "justices" doing their job in response, especially considering how permissive some of them have been to these terrorists. 

Ashli Babbitt died as a violent criminal, that's what she was.  If anything that someone like her and the other veterans and even in-service members of the military AND POLICE FORCES could take part in that proves, it is that the de-Nazification of the military and police is long, long, long overdue.

Horse Worm Rogan Is Threatening To Sue CNN, I Read

THINKING ABOUT JOE ROGAN (not something one should expect will be hard to do) I wondered if maybe his ilk is a result of the "topical humor" of the Lenny Bruce period.  And that led me to think more about the dangerously important role that show biz plays in our politics.    The idea that big mouth idiots like Rogan know anything about anything is a remarkable consequence of mass media.  I didn't pay much attention to Rogan before, suspecting that people who knew what they were talking about knew more than someone whose big mouth and lower key shock jockery was his only means of achieving something like fame.   The guy is a fucking low grade entertainer whose big mouth is his one and only means of getting it, outrageous bull shit is his stock and trade, pandering to whatever idiotic "populist" line of Republican-fascist bull shit he figures will be popular with his audience is his MO.

The upper end of such "topical" entertainment, what Samantha Bee and Seth Myers and Stephen Colbert do is not the same thing though it may have had a similar origin.  Though I think they're more out of Jack Paar than the what shock jockery came from.   I think none of them would try to pass themselves off as someone you should believe on the basis of who they are, none of them would pass themselves off as the expert, something right-wing snake oil peddlers inevitably do.

I'm kind of hoping that the loud-mouth asshole, horse-wormer guzzler does sue CNN as he's threatening and that CNN's lawyers clean his clock.  I hope lots of people start calling him Horse Worm Rogan like the late and missed Bartcop - a real shocker who Rogan could never hope to match in ourageous cleverness and who had entirely more responsibility than the likes of Rogan - called the radio loud-mouth right-wing asshole the late and unlamented Paul Harvey "Horse fucker" when Harvey used the "people are saying" standard of late 20th century "journalism" to slander Democrats.   

The doctor who prescribed Ivermectin to him for Covid should be booted from the profession.  Just at a time when doctors and nurses, orderlies, paramedics, cleaners, have given us all reason to hold those professions in the highest esteem (and as so many media celebrities have given us every reason to despise them) such doctors as who hand out prescriptions for unsafe and unproven drugs for off-list uses on the basis of pandering to bull shit swallowers remind us that there are plenty of irresponsible assholes licensed to practice that profession.  

One Word For It - Hate Maine Mail

 Bourgeois. 

Though I'd rather just post another piece to upset the pattern of his furnished soul. 

Orrin Evans Trio Featuring Joanna Pascale - Witchcraft  

Joanna Pascale, vocals 

Orrin Evans, piano 

Matthew Parrish, bass 

Mark Whitfield Jr., drums

Update:  I looked at your link to Duncan's.  I do have to wonder why Duncan is content to have Simels do that at his blog, use it to slander people who never otherwise would be mentioned on his blog, when Simels never uses his pop-music nostalgia blog to do that.   You'd think that boy Duncan might feel a little bit used by Simps because of that, not that he seems to much care what his piddling cash cow operation is used for.  He allows the regulars to provide just about all the content, including Simp's slander.  If the Supreme Court hadn't disallowed it, I would expect there are lots of people who could sue Duncan on that basis.

Simps makes the accusation of "antisemitism" all the time, he's like old Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, etc. who accuse even other Jews, even holocaust survivors and their children of being "antisemites".   It is regularly used against people who treat Israel not with special treatment but like it's a country as deserving of criticism as any other country is, I've criticized the recent attempt to codify the meaning of the word (a word invented by an anti-Christian, atheist,  antisemite to give his hatred a sciency cachet) so as to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel.  I will never, ever hold back in my criticism of any country when I would never hold back on making the same criticism of my own country.  I certainly wouldn't when the country has a powerful military backed by the government of my own country.  Especially when they have used it so recklessly.

I have certainly praised more, given more positive citations of, positive and extensive quotation of, posted music composed by and played by more Jewish people than Simels has ever posted on his blog, though his blog has been in existence longer than mine has.   

I'd point out that it's a rather odd antisemtism that holds that the entire positive basis of modern egalitarian democracy is a product of the Jewish religious tradition and that, as recently as last Monday, that the Mosaic economics is far, far better, far more just (the reason that it's better) and the only real basis for modern economic justice, especially as it reaches modern life through the Jews, Jesus, Paul, James, etc.  But, as mentioned, they routinely accuse Jews of antisemtism these days and they get away with that.

If that's antisemitism then the word actually has no meaning.  I suggested that the, it would seem, self-appointed committee who are trying to define the word should, instead, scrap it and come up with terms to distinguish among the totally different things that its used for today.  The one that comprises a dishonest accuastion against non-antisemites could just be called a libel, because that's what it is.  Which would reach a level of irony.  You would think that after the 20th century there would be a need to distinguish between the scientific-racist desire to murder all Jews from the perhaps mistaken idea that their souls needed "saving."  Or that the evolutionary-psychological antisemtism of Kevin MacDonald and John Hartung (which was fully accepted by other scientists as science, until it became inconvenient to) would be equated with the condemnation of that, something I've also repeatedly done.

Simps has a problem whenever I post Black musicians, it seems.  He's had as bad things to say when I've posted  number of Jewish composers too, one who I knew and loved, Arthur Berger, especially, for some reason.  He seems to have a bad reaction to people with middle-European names, as well.   I looked at his front page this morning, it looked pretty lily white, Anglo-Saxon-centric among the garbage nostalgia and C-list pop that he posts there.   I do suspect that a lot of the old goats who go into the nostalgia stuff never much really cared about the music, it was all about them, in the end.  About when they were young and could still get laid and didn't have a bald spot.

Orrin Evans Quartet- How High The Moon

 

 

Orrin Evans, piano 

Warren Wolf, vibraphone 

Buster Williams, bass 

Clarence Penn, drums

 

Orrin Evans Quartet Featuring Immanuel Wilkins- Firm Roots

 

Immanuel Wilkins, saxophone 

Orrin Evans, piano 

Alex Claffy, bass 

Mark Whitfield, drums

Someone Asks How I Use A Five Dollar Computer

SOMEONE ASKS ME how I use Raspberry Pi for word processing and music editing.   I use a very simple text editor (free)* and Libreoffice (free) for word processing on a five-dollar Raspberry Pi Zero ($5 US, 10 if you get a Pi Zero W with wi-fi capacity) with a Raspberry Pi keyboard and mouse (they are inexpensive and very good).   I use a Pi 3B+ (about $35) with both Audacity and MuseScore (both free and surprisingly good)**for doing music.  

While some are reliving their past and largely imaginary glory, I'm getting ready for perhaps going back to ingloriously teaching, hopefully full time, by writing exercises and ear training MP3s for my future students, and my own, personal work which will probably die with me.  I compose because it pleases me to, I'm not under any illusions that an audience for it is around.  That's one of the more satisfying things about composing for a computer, I can simulate something approximating the sound of an ensemble which there is every reason to believe would never play one of my pieces.  

I believe both of those programs will run on a $5 Pi but I haven't tried it yet.  I would like to install my old far simpler but entirely adequate to my purposes Windows based audio-editor on a Pi Zero using Wine but haven't tried that yet.  

While I'm always on the look out for a usable junker (a 32 bit one at the moment) I'll never buy anything but single-board computers in the future.  I was tempted to buy a Raspberry Pi 400 ($70, though I'd get the full kit for about $100)  but will probably opt for buying a naked Pi 4 (or maybe 5 by the time I get round to needing one)*** and plugging peripherals into it because I hate all-in-one things, something I won't be able to fix is bound to happen to one of those.  If I needed a new keyboard I'd rather just plug one in.  Though if anyone is thinking of it, those look mighty tempting.

* I don't have FeatherPad, my favorite multi-language text editor on a Pi, though it would seem I could using Snapcraft (haven't tried that yet).  I like Featherpad because it has a good dark screen mode and dictionaries for all of the language I'd ever consider using.  Though other text editors have the same features.  

I like using a text editor for writing because when I copy and paste into another program it doesn't impose a lot of formatting that will need to be undone. 

**  On Windows I was an early and confirmed Finale user.  I would still like to use it, especially for the built in collection of sound samples and hope to learn how to meld the two.  I'm not much of a geek except what I need to do at the time.  I was never impressed with Sibelius software as any kind of an improvement on Finale.  

***  You'll want to get some good heat sinks for it, so I understand, probably the ones that cost less than ten dollars will be fine if you don't shut it up in a closed case but I don't have any direct experience with them.

The Media Is On The Side Of The Facists Because They Won't Tell The Inconvenient Truth That AOC Isn't An Anti-Democratic Thug - The Media Bias Nobody is Talking About | Robert Reich

 

Belaboring The Obfuscist

THERE ARE OTHER WAYS but one of the surest ways to know someone is full of crap is when they make recourse to the buzz-words of psychoanalysis and Freudian pseudo-science in general.   Freud was not the first person who proved that the idea of doing science around human minds is an open invitation from everything from violations of basic scientific methods to unintentional fraud to intentional fraud to self-serving lying to blatant lying - AND YOU COULD GET THE LEGAL-JUDICIAL SYSTEM TO ALLOW YOU TO NOT ONLY GET AWAY WITH IT AS "SCIENCE" BUT TO DESTROY PEOPLES' LIVES WITH JUDICIAL APPROVAL.  Judges so often look to such professionals to make their lives easier, their work hours shorter and their ability to do terrible things to people permitted.   Does "James Grigson" ring a bell?

The accusation of "projection" is one of the funniest ones because there is literally nothing that anyone can say which someone cannot dismiss using that idea.  I suspect someone said to Sigmund 'you're full of shit" though perhaps more politely and Sigmund, the total fraud that he was, turned it around and came up with a term to pathologize someone seeing him for the fraud he was.   It is certainly easy to see how useful that concept would be to any pseudo-scientist allegedly probing the invisible, unobservable, unmeasurable mysteries of the human mind. 

What the old mountebank did was come up with a way, as science, to say "I know you are but what am I," something you may have heard someone say in second or third grade but by the time they were nine they probably had outgrown such tactics.

The real pathology involved in resorting to the word includes someone who has been accurately assessed being given an intellectually respectablized line to dismiss accurate criticism.  Thus it enables any jerk to dismiss any accurate critique.  It's pretty funny when a professional "critic" makes resort to it. 

Freud was, of course, superseded by other pseudo-scientists whose pseudo-science is science by the rule that whatever anyone can get scientists to let them call "science" is doing science no matter what a load of bull shit it is, and, there being a financial and so professional interest in a lot of overpaid mountebanks and other such dishonest interests (including judicial and legal ones, to go along with the academic ones) Freudianism, fraud that it is, is still with us and will likely live out most if not all of this century, too.  It should have died in the 1890s and when the old liar started publishing his crap.  

It's a holiday here in the U.States.  My experience is there's not much use in writing much on holidays, hardly the peak time for people reading blogs.  I hoping he hates the neologisms.  I hope he has a snit fit. 

Update:  I got my wish.  

Carla Bley - Andy Sheppard - Steve Swallow - Life Goes On - Reminds Me Of What Late Summer Is Like

 

The Bible For Normal People - Episode 177: Obery M. Hendricks, Jr. - Social Justice & the Radical Gospel

 

 

Moses gave a day of rest in seven free of commerce and transaction, a year of Jubilee every fifty,  enlightenment materialism gives one Monday in September.   From what I can see online, the "white evangelicals" hate this book.  I don't agree with everything he says, but it's worth listening to.

To Hold Fussy In A Snit For The Next Week

DOROTHY B. HUGHES (best known for In A Lonely Place) is an author I've long intended to give the complete reading treatment but haven't because her books are rare in libraries, if they had them they got discarded for lack of readership before they became of feminist interest and of book collectors (I hope they're reading those books)  and even the used ones are too expensive for me to buy all of them.   

What little I've managed to get hold of is certainly superior to Theodore Chandler or Daschiell Hammett, which indicates that crap often sells better than the better stuff.   When they made her best known novel into a movie and a period radio drama, they changed the story to demote the two successful sleuths who were women to elevate the role of the males in the story, probably has a lot to do with why she was less of a commercial success as she was a superior writer.   

Commerce which can peddle civet shit coffee as a gourmet item and gull idiots into buying water that in most places in the US they could get of more reliable quality for free out of the tap, generating enormous mountains of plastic waste for "ecological reasons" is what moves popular consumption, nothing to do with quality.  The entire pop music industry as well as Hollywood is geared to push shit and drive down quality.  The pop kulcha criticism, review and, heaven help us, "studies" racket does the same, with increasingly bigger vocabularies toward the less up-market academic wanna-bees.  They've made bullshit of the "humanities" too.

Update:  No, he's turning to a stereotype of a schoolmarm so I'll add "Fussy Knickers" to the list of names for him. So funny, a fussy old man reconditioning his youthful garage band crap and rock criticism columns so the future can forget them, anyway.   But if he wants to provide me with the opportunity to point it out, it would be cruel of me to not take it on a holiday weekend.   I'll bet he was always a suck-up to adults, people with authority over others and celebrities, how he got into the line he got into. 

Update 2:  Fussy Knickers is the one who's always telling other people he's a great writer and just a brilliant thinker when he can't even accurately report what I've said in one of my shorter posts.  As ol' Bertie Russell said, stupid men can't tell you what smarter men said because a. they don't understand what was said and b. they inevitably translate it into something they're capable of thinking.  Stupy wasn't born stupid, he was made that way by TV, Hollywood and pop music.   Of course, he could have chosen a different path but he took the path of least hard substance. 

Hate Mail - I'm limiting it to once a week as an experiment

FUSSY KNICKERS as a self imagined outlaw rock-n-roll scribbler, blue-stocking hipster, iconoclast of the standard established order.

Who knew that my violation of standard spelling would expose so much ironic juxtaposition of alleged opposites within one elderly tweenager. 

That's one of the things about the white, affluent class "rebellion" of the 1960s rocker set, they really weren't anything like a rebellion against the established order, they were just being brats who didn't like anything expected of them or the requirement that they grow up.  They were mostly a bunch of snobs, too. 

There were real rebels, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Catholic and Protestant left, anyone who was working for egalitarian economic justice.  Rock and roll?  The most commercial music ever made?  Huh! 

Update:  Fussy Knickers invokes "Sturgeon's Law" one of those dumb "laws" that are adopted and become common non-knowledge and are imagined to really mean something.  In that case it was the otherwise hardly known sci-fi scribbler who was whining that sci-fi didn't get no respect.   His claim that 90% of everything is "crap" was created in defense of the 10% of sci-fi that was supposed to be worthwhile.   I think my estimate for the pop music that isn't crap is probably a better estimate for sci-fi, too.  You can judge if Theodore Sturgeon made the worthwhile stuff by reading what is generally given as his major opus, Baby Is Three.  I'll bet that considerably fewer than than 1% of those who cite his "law" have any idea who he was or ever read anything he wrote.   

There are writers who write four or a half dozen masterpieces, almost none who write more than that, most of the "major writers" of any generation have reputations that don't survive them by much.   Some produce one great work. I've tried to read the complete published work of a number of authors, I have never gotten far with someone who specialized in sci-fi or detective fiction.  The second rate quickly comes up and then the even worse.  

I think one of the problems with "science fiction" is the same for sword and sorcery crap, the resort to make believe allows second-raters to take too many easy ways out.  Something like that is true for the sword and sandal and bodice ripper categories in which a vague sense of imagined pasts suffices, letting the authors to impose ridiculous anachronistic mind-sets and situations on a past where those never existed.  The results are pretty uniformly shit. 

Now Fussy can have another little snit and I'll wait another week to answer him.

False Prophet For Profit - No One Who Knew Anything About Me Would Think I'd Have Anything Good To Say About Kanye

UNTIL HE STARTED USING POLITICS as a personal PR vehicle, I don't believe I had ever heard of Kanye West.  I've since heard a little of his "music" which was the shit I'd suspected it would be, 99.9998 percent of pop stuff is shit.   And I've read enough of his bio (spoiled faculty brat from hell grown to total piece of crap) to conclude he's is anything but a Christian.  He is a 100% all-in devotee of Mammon.

He and the entire fascist entity he is a minstrel of is the antichrist, part of what made me reconsider the Book of Revelation, a book I've often wished they'd left out of the New Testament canon.  His music is "christian music" in the same sense that the whore houses of the late (may he be in purgatory for a long time) Sheldon Adelson were an aspect of Orthodox Judaism or the sexual abuse of the various American Buddhist cults are an expression of Buddhism. 

Kayne is the whore of Babylon, but he's not the only one.   Jesus warned of false prophets and gave the method of testing people who claimed to be authentic, judge them by their acts, what they produce, how they live, how they treat the least among us.   There is a Book of Revelations worth of false prophecy around today, I'd say anything that has pop kulcha, money making as a major aspect of it is guaranteed to be part of the antichrist.