Ben Weber - Dolmen, An Elegy

 

Direct link to the video

Louisville Orchestra

Robert Whitney, conductor 

The October light here reminded me of this piece.  I've never heard a piece of Ben Weber's music that I didn't like. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - David Zane Mairowitz - Williwaw

 Williwaw

The story of naturalist Georg Steller, who sailed on Bering's disastrous 1741 expedition from Siberia to Alaska. Bering and many of the sailors died from scurvy after their ship was marooned for nine months. Steller discovered a number of new animal species, but was unable to take any of his specimens back to Russia.

Director:.........Jeremy Mortimer

Steller:........Adam Godley
Vitus Bering:..........Ewan Hooper
Lt Waxell:.........Bruce Purchase
Master Khitrov:........Gerard McDermott
Brigitte:.........Laura Martin-Simpson

Afternoon Play: Williwaw
Fri 2nd May 2003, 14:15 on BBC Radio 4 FM

Georg Wilhelm Steller (10 March 1709 – 14 November 1746) was a German botanist, zoologist, physician and explorer, who worked in Russia and is considered a pioneer of Alaskan natural history.

Georg Steller described a number of animals and plants, some of which bear his name, either in the common name or scientific.

Williwaw is - a sudden violent gust of cold land air common along mountainous coasts of high latitudes. 

I really like the radio plays by David Zane Mairowitz though I haven't heard nearly enough of them.  Unfortunately the link to RTE's production of his excellent James's Story that I posted before is now dead.  I hope I can find another link to it someday.   Here's one I haven't posted before. 

I'm 100% Against That Kind Of Union

DECERTIFY THE CHICAGO POLICE UNION, fire officers who refuse the order to reveal their vaccination status.  It would probably do more to de-Nazify the police there than anything else you could do.  Investigate the leaders of the union for collusion with other dangers to the public health and safety.  Prosecute them when they break the law.

Police unions that tell their members to do such irresponsible and stupid things like not to be vaccinated against the current leading cause of death on the job among their members  should be dissolved.   Police unions are  too often Republican-fascist front groups that are a threat to public safety, protecting criminals among their membership and driving down the good of the work that they are hired to do.

Failure To Hold Trump's Mobsters To Justice Should Lead To Merrick Garland's Firing

On the appeals court, Garland has been a moderate liberal, with a definite pro-prosecution bent in criminal cases. Indeed, his views in the area of criminal law are considerably more conservative than those of the man he would replace, Justice Antonin Scalia.

Nina Totenberg and Carrie Johnson

THE RECENT REPORTING that Attorney General Merrick Garland is fretting that sending to jail the violent, white-supremacist, opponents of American democracy who attacked the Capitol, injuring more than a hundred police officers killing at least one as they were struggling heroically to protect the Congress and others, trying to stop the antiquated Rube Goldberg machinery of putting the winner of the presidential election into office, etc.  the ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES! sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution and to administer law is afraid that WHITE THUGS AND GANGSTERS will be more radicalized than they demonstrated they already are BY ATTACKING THE CENTER OF GOVERNMENT TO PREVENT IT FROM COMPLETEING ONE OF ITS CENTRAL ACTS IN ELECTED DEMOCRACY  if he does his job proves he was always the wrong person for the job he holds and the job as a member of the Supreme Court he was nominated to but failed to get on due to the Republican-fascists holding the the goddamned Senate.  

In light of that quote at the top of this post, I would love to know more as to how his past cases as a prosecutor and judge, especially the Oklahoma Bombing case fit in with his reported reluctance to go after the people who attacked the Capitol.  Did he lose his nerve somewhere along the way?  Did his subordinates have to deal with his reluctance to prosecute before?

If he fails to act against Steve Bannon as soon as the House sends a criminal referral to the Department of Justice President Biden should ask him for his resignation because he has already proven he is not up to the job of holding white racists and fascists to the same and currently unequal justice that People of Color and others are held to routinely and because he has proven he is not up to the job of defending the Constitution or administering the rule of law. 

I had my doubts about the wisdom of Barack Obama in his acquiescent observance to the courtly habits of the legal establishment he, no doubt, learned at Harvard Law and elsewhere.   The same place Garland learned about what nice lawyers do and, perhaps, who to go easy on as you don't on others.  That was only one of many disappointments I had with Obama.  There was little to nothing in his career in public office that led me to believe he had a devotion to true economic and social equality and equal justice under law. He was a prep-Ivy kind of guy, to the core.

It is about a year since I learned the hard lessons of listening to the hearings of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees into the Trump crimes of trying to shake down the Ukranian government to get them to lie about Joe Biden so as to influence the election.   How it was the diplomats - who I can assure you I was not inclined to hold in high regard - and the military officers who were the ones to stand up and risk their careers and lives and how it was the legal class, the lawyers who consistently covered their asses and the truth of what really happened, feigning a pose of "fairness" "evenhandedness" "carefulness" to give the benefit of any ridiculously extended doubt in in all of the ways that self-protecting courtiers might be imagined to do.   I can add, as longtime readers of what I wrote would know, that watching the behavior of that granitic empty suit's, Robert Mueller's, behavior in regard to his buddy,  William Barr, had prepared me for that last disillusionment with the culture of the legal system.

It is one of the biggest problems I have with the administration of law in the United States that it is a grotesquely unequal from the fact that the rich can hire lawyers aplenty and use the clunky mechanisms of the courts and process to get away with anything they can, more than not.  The poor, the destitute, the merely not rich cannot do that.  Added on top of the fact that in the United States People of Color,  members of unfavored groups,  those who are not violent, insurrectionist facists on behalf of a would-be dictator, can expect a Merrick Garland to be a precisian enforcer of law and even an administer of injustice that should remove anyone unwilling to go after the January 6 mob from any position in the so-called Department of Justice. 

Democratic Presidents have an unfortunate history in their selections of Attorneys General, Obama, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, . . . have all had rather bad ones who frequently demonstrated their devotion to the settled and unequal order or who were just not up to the job.  There must be better candidates than get nominated and confirmed,  I'd look outside of the graduates of Harvard and the other factories of the enablers of privilege, though that's no guarantee either.

Dusan Bogdanovic - Hong Kong Ricercars

 

Direct Link To The Video

Yurika Takayama, Piano, Natalia Natalia Lipnitskaya, Guitar.   Commissioned by Alvaro Pierri and The Hong Kong Piano International Competition. Audio: Samuel Albert; Video : Yan Sterckx Recorded in 2021, Studio de Haute école de musique of Geneva. 

Orrin Evans Quartet @ The Jazz Standard - Slife

 

 Direct link to the video

 

Orrin Evans Quartet -  

Kurt Rosenwinkle on guitar, 

Orrin Evans on piano, 

Luques Curtis bass, 

Mark Whitfield, Jr. on drums.

I Don't Think What She Was Doing Was In Any Way Different From A Gunman Shooting At Other People

IF SOMEONE IS GOING TO DIE from Covid-19 I would rather have it be someone like anti-vaxx-anti-mask Trumpoid psychopathVeronica Wolski dying than some innocent child or adult who was not spreading lies, encouraging other people to risk themselves for their own selfish satisfaction.  

I can't say I'm glad she's dead but I can say I'm glad she can't get other people killed, she was a clear and present danger to anyone who believed her. 

And that goes for all of them. 

No, That Holding Of Conventional College-Credentialed Wisdom Is A Blatant Lie - "Social Darwinism" IS Darwinism And It Has Been From The Beginning Of It - Hate Mail

HAVING GOTTEN FAR INTO THE HISTORY OF DARWINISM through its primary documentation, from its inception to its use today as a result of my online brawls, several things that are the common received wisdom of the college-credentialed class are blatant post-WWII, post the revelation of what eugenics led to under the Nazis fabrications that literally no one I have found in more than a decade of searching from before WWII ever claimed, that Darwin and Darwinism, natural selection had nothing to do with eugenics,

-  "active eugenics", involuntary and coerced sterilization of people to murder

- or the "passive" form of letting the poor, the ill, the weak, the merely "unfavored" by those with power and money (assumed to be the product of and acting out some atavistic force of "nature") die for want of the resources to live a decent life for themselves AND THEIR CHILDREN.  Darwin especially hated the thought that such children would live to adulthood.

That was such an obvious lie that the definitive proof against that ubiquitous lie among the educated post-WWII population was to be found in the words of the inventors of eugenics, Francis Galton, W.R. Gregg, Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Schallmeyer who all founded their assertions of some pretty extreme eugenics on Darwin's theory of natural selection, (Haeckel early calling for the active murder of those he classified as "lesser" beings) and on Charles Darwin's endorsement of the very texts and allegations made by all of the above except Schallmeyer who came up in the generation after Darwin died.  Darwin explicitly endorsed the claim that the deaths of those he deemed "less favored" people and entire races would lead to the "improvement" of the human species in the survivors who, he hinted, were to do the killing if "passive eugenics" didn't get the job done. 

He, himself, removed any doubt, proved the lie that the putative inventor of "Social Darwinism" the putrid Brit philosopher Herbert Spencer was the foul polluter of Darwinism in the 5th edition Charlies Darwin made of his magnum opus, On The Origin of Species By explicitly saying that when he used the term "Natural Selection" he meant exactly the same thing that Herbert Spencer meant when he said "Survival of the Fittest."   He said at that time he was urged to make that clear by his co-inventor of natural selection, who would eventually turn anti-eugenics, A. R. Wallace.   I have given that proof here a number of times, linking to the pro-Darwin website that posts the image of the pages of the 5th edition that proves he said that along with a somewhat more easily resolved text transcription of it.  There is no honest argument to be made that "Social Darwinism" is not exactly what Darwin meant when he said "Natural Selection" because Darwin removed any doubt whatsoever on that point, himself.

His most notable followers among scientists in his and the next several generations, not a few of them his direct descendants, were pretty much all eugenicists, some of them actually collaborating with Nazi eugenicists, some such as the English elite style "socialist" Karl Pearson handing Nazi eugenicists arguments that Polish  and Russian Jews who lived in Western Europe were a danger to the nations and societies they were in in the decade before the Nazis started murdering exactly those same people, his scientific assertions entirely founded on Darwinism, natural selection.   I have documented that here, exhaustively.  In doing that I have found that even many of the creationist critics of Darwin have, if anything, underestimated the connection between English language Darwinism and Nazi eugenics and genocide. 

And that characteristic of Darwinism was noted from the start of it by at least one person, someone who knew Darwin and his wife quite well, the sadly little remembered early feminist, Lesbian radical Frances Cobbe who correctly and accurately predicted that natural selection would lead to moral catastrophe and atrocity, a history which was fully realized in not only the Nazi eugenics but in the preceding American eugenics and the same in places such as Canada, someone who Darwin brushed off with sexist condescension in his scientific publications, even as he endorsed the depravity of exactly that kind of moral depravity in Ernst Haeckel and the assertions of Francis Galton and W. R. Greg as scientific truth.  

I know that this will not be the last time I find it necessary to repeat this because we live in an age of lies, conventional lies and the absence of any truly believed in consequential sin of lying.   Quite often the political and ideological character that a person takes is not based so much in their deviation from or devotion to the truth but to which conventional lies are preferred by the person who holds and asserts them.  I have come to the conclusion that that is directly related to the secularism that has pushed such notions as morality out of lives of so many people in the way that, formerly, vulgar materialism pushed out notions of doing for the least among us being what we did for God from consideration when it came to slaves or those who could be killed and robbed of their lands and resources.   The problem with Christians has always been, not that they believed too much in the Gospel of Jesus, the Epistles of Paul and James but that they didn't believe enough in them and acted accordingly.  

This is an answer to the typical whining that happens when I diss Darwin.  Part of a never-ending series.

Old Eyes

BOWING TO THE INEVITABLE HAVING LONG SINCE ARRIVED, I have started using an old, larger, flat-screen TV as a computer monitor because too many words were getting cut in my editing on the small screen without me seeing it.   If it leads to better editing, catching needed changes in subject predicate agreement, when I need to change prepositions, when a vitally needed verb in a sentence is accidentally cut. . .   

I was going to say "we'll see" but I suppose that depends on me seeing, I am sure you have.  Some days I think I might go to a dark screen format but I was warned against radical changes in design once.  Changing to using a text editor with dark mode instead of the word processor helped a lot, when I remembered to use it. 

Hate having to have the thing cluttering up the place but it sure makes reading books on the screen easier.  I'm so excited about that I feel like doing a series.  Once the garden is done for the year.

Orrin Evans Trio - Autumn Leaves

 

Orrin Evans, piano

Vincent Archer, bass

Obed Calvaire, drums 

I love how you have to really listen for the standard in the improvisation when Orrin Evans is playing it.   Good for the attention.

Shatners In Space - Someone Asks What I Think Of It

GET BACK TO ME when he's in a sequel to Incubus.   I saw the Murdoch Mystery he played Mark Twain in,  it was ridiculous.  Other than that I don't think I've paid much attention to what he's doing.

I always said his pronunciation wasn't that bad, I got the feeling he understood what he was saying.  

Somewhat Dangerous Children Of The Privileged Class - A Quick Look Behind The Temple Of Satan

HAVING HAD A SLEEPLESS NIGHT last night, I looked farther into The Satanic Temple and was not that surprised to find out that one of the influences on its founders was one of the more putrid books of the last years of the 19th century, Might Makes Right, a Darwinian-white supremacist, proto-Nazi, male-supremacist tract written in opposition to morality and the good will that is essential to egalitarian democracy.  His general thinking is a mish mosh of junk, the kind of typical watered down junk that instructed pop and not a little of the allegedly higher brow atheism of the entire 20th century and into this one.   I wasn't that surprised because I had read that the atheist Satanists were really big on assertions of "individualism" a word I have come to distrust because it so often hides selfish, egocentric, conformists.  Most of the "individualism" I've seen can be boiled down to those and, oddly, a rather limited range of consumerist and hedonistic short-term goals.   Sort of like the stunts mounted by The Satanic Temple. 

The American left, any left, really, that takes this kind of pop-Darwinist-Nietzschean-materialist-amoralist-bullshit, the rebellion of the eternal toddlers against not getting their own way or even consistently knowing what that is seriously, on the basis of some notion of "fairness" to them in their amoral stupidity, is stupid.  Their rebellion is bound to be counter-productive as their philosophical basis is bull shit, their discipline non-existent, their goals, inevitably being the opposite of equality, economic and social justice.  If you want to see that, here's from the interview linked to above, by the republisher of Might Makes Right and the guy who is most often presented as the major figure in the Satanic Temple, Lucien Greaves (one of a number of aliases he uses).

And, yes, we are adding to LaVey. LaVey is an excellent jumping-off point, but his work was a product of its time, and it’s appropriate to recontexualize it to today’s reality. LaVey was active during a time in which, for decades, the United States was on a dysfunctional spiral of increasing violence. As a result, LaVey’s rhetoric tended toward Social Darwinistic Police State politics. Since 1995, violence in the United States—and, in fact, the world over—has been in decline, and we’re now in a position to evaluate what’s working for us, and where we went wrong previously. Certainly, a strong and effective police presence is a contributing factor, but we also find that autocratic governments breed social violence. We also find that Social Darwinism, interpreted in brutal, strictly self-interested terms, is counter-productive, and based on a simplistic misinterpretation of evolutionary theory. We do better when we work in groups, where altruism and compassion are rewarded. We are social animals. That said, however, I believe in a system that runs meritocratically. Also, revenge is a natural impulse, without which justice would never be served. We should do our best to mitigate the pain of those who are suffering, whoever they are—but also be diligent to punish the misdeeds of those who behave unjustly to those around them.

NOTE that great big "however" ALWAYS LOOK FOR THE "HOWEVER" EVEN WHEN IT ISN'T THERE because with these guys mouthing the requisite mitigations of their essential sameness with the kind of gangsterism that really runs politics and almost all establishments.   I would look at Greaves and the republisher-interevewer Shane Bugbee to wonder what in their CVs would lead anyone to assign them to the kind of "merit" that he's calling for.  I looked and they both seemed like rather stupid slackers to me.  

You always get that with what is essentially a recapitulation of  Darwin, Nietzsche, a few other enemies of equality and morality from the enlightenment that so quickly decayed into romantic era decadence.   Not without a lot of attention getting let's pretend.  I doubt it's got much durability to it, with the number of broken links I ran into, it doesn't look like they can even keep their URLs current. 

The title.  I think the biggest danger they pose is to the real, religious left that is either a contradiction of the "meritocratic" elitism, the Darwinist inequality and, ultimately, the materialistic amorality of such brats or it is nothing.   That left too often gets wrapped in in some meat-headed attempt to be fair to them and provide them with some kind of misguided fairness.  The idea that all ideas merit us wasting our credibility, our very limited resources, our very limited time, etc. on their stunts has cost us an enormous price and, worse, those whose equality, economic and social justice depend on us not getting side tracked by a cheap carny side-show riffing off of junk such as this is and always has been.

In Time For Halloween Satanists Get Had By Small Town Coucil Whine That Their Priciples Cost Them A Bundle On Their Ugly Stunt Prop

WHILE I WOULD TEND to be on the side of a group that opposes any governmental entity getting involved in what might imply the establishment of any religion - religion would eventually come out the worse for it - I had to chuckle when I read about this on Hemant's "friendly"hate blog, of all places, when I found out the quite small town of Belle Plaine (population 7,090) got the better of the publicity-seeking atheists of The Satanic Temple by giving them what they claimed to have wanted.  Here's a non-whiny description of what happened:

The battle began about four years ago after a monument was installed at Veterans Memorial Park depicting a soldier's silhouette kneeling by a fallen comrade's cross-shaped grave marker. The monument garnered complaints for its religious overtones.

The city then took the memorial down, but new protests prompted Belle Plaine  to create a free-speech area in the park and put it back up. The Satanic Temple commissioned a monument of a black cube with pentagram inscriptions and an upturned helmet on the top to be displayed as a counterpoint.

It was to be the first Satanic Temple monument on public property in the country, but Belle Plaine leaders canceled the free-speech zone — a "limited public forum" — after repeated protests by religious groups and free speech advocates and revoked the temple's permit. The statue of the soldier, who some called "Joe," came down.

The Satanic Temple sued the city in 2019, asserting that its rights were violated by the city revocation of the permit. Temple officials said they had paid to have the monument built and that its value was about $35,000.

The temple, which has chapters around the world and one in Minnesota, says its members don't actually worship Satan but advocate for a distinct separation of church and state.

In August 2020, a federal court dismissed nine of the 10 counts in the Satanic Temple's suit, including several alleging free speech and free exercise of religion violations. The lawsuit's remaining count alleged that the city broke a promise when it revoked the permit.

The "promissory estoppel" claim required the temple to prove that the city made a "clear and definite promise" to the Satanic Temple, that the city intended the temple to rely on the promise, that the temple did so with negative results and that the promise must be kept to "prevent an injustice."

The judge found that Belle Plaine made a promise but said the temple didn't rely on it because the group had contacted an artist to make the monument before receiving a permit.

Belle Plaine fulfilled its promise, the judge said, since the city never promised to reimburse the temple and the temple received ample donations to fund the monument. The temple didn't make a "compelling case" that its reputation was hurt or that the monument isn't fulfilling its purpose because it's not displayed in Belle Plaine, the judgment said.

Since the temple wasn't financially hurt and there was no loss of reputation, enforcing the promise isn't necessary, according to the order.

The judge also agreed with the city's request to penalize the temple for filing a second lawsuit that echoed claims that already had been dismissed in the first case.

The judge ruled that the temple should pay the city's legal fees for the second suit, which was dismissed, as a penalty. The legal fees still are being determined.

And now the atheist-Satanists (apparently these particular ones are from Massachusetts, not even in the same state as Belle Plaine) are whining that it cost them money to mount their publicity stunt and that they're not getting their way.  Which is funny because they got their way, or what they claimed was their way.  It's kind of funny, considering that they are also whining that the judge noted they are an anti-religious outfit, which they are, while whining that they're a religious outfit.  

That was especially gratifying to me because if there's one thing atheists hate in my experience it is when someone points out that atheism is a religious ideology.  They really whine when someone points out that they're always creating gods in the way I pointed out just the other day, material gods not unlike the old European pagan gods, demiurges, etc. only they deny that's what they're doing as they shove those gods into gaps into the current holdings of science, not infrequently to prevent things like the improbability of our intelligent-life-containing universe leading people to believing in God as a rational conclusion.  Of course the issue at the heart of the Satanic Temple's whining is that most popular of all atheist gods (and not with a few others) Mammon, money, the almighty Doll-ah! 

I'll leave it to you to go follow the atheist whining on this. One of the funniest things is the way they're whining about the judge who issued the decision, Wilhelmina Wright, an Obama appointee who was supported in her appointment by both Senator Amy Klobuchar and the great Senator Al Franken. The idiot geniuses of Hemant's blog community seem to believe she's a right-wing Republican.

I'll give you this much of Hemant's whiny post on it:

Rather than have a Satanic monument go up, they promised to remove the Christian monument.

That was all well and good in regards to the First Amendment.  But that didn't mean all the problems were resolved because The Satanic Temple now has this giant black expensive steel monument sitting in a facility.  They commissioned it with the intention of putting it up in the park, but that was no longer going to happen because city officials shut down the public forum.

So what were they supposed to do with it?

Hey, maybe they can get the Center For Inquiry to display it on one of their properties, or the Freedom From Religion Foundation heads would put it on their lawn or something (assuming they've got one).  Maybe one of the richer atheists would like it in their collection.  If the idiots paid $35,000 on the prop for their publicity stunt - reportedly funded through donations - it must be worth that much to one of their faithless faithful.  

I guess it didn't occur to the big-brains (atheists are always telling us how much smarter they are) at the atheist outfit that if it were put on public property in the park that a religious group could have sued for it violating the separation of church and state and the idiots would still have the thing on their hands with removal costs thrown in, besides.   They should have gone through court before paying for the hideous prop.  I'd have hired a better artist, that thing is plug ugly.

Update:  The Satanic Temple's use of a town that size to mount one of its publicity legal cases is not an insignificant thing for a town council to have to deal with.  Especially when they're an out-of-state, tax-exempt outfit and the town would have to pay legal costs out of local taxes.   I would bet that they'd rather have been shut of the entire thing but they also have to contend with what locals want, even if what they want is bound to lead to this kind of headache.  

This isn't an important issue for the real left, fighting over stupid stuff like this while Republican-fascists are using the idiocy over things like this to destroy democracy and prevent equality is more important than placating whiny atheists and others.  The left should get shut of them and their counter-productive obsession.

Maybe I'll Limit Negative Musical Comments To One A Month After This, There's so much good music that never gets exposure

REALLY IT WAS 50 YEARS AGO?  Having so recently gotten into a silly brawl over pop music, I really don't want to get into why I loathed Jesus Christ Superstar on first being involuntarily exposed to it and have hated every note its creator put to paper ever since.  If I could remove any memory of it from my mind I would in a second, retaining only the memory of having hated it to steer me away from it in the future. 

It has had no influence on my religious thinking, whatsoever and none on my musical development, either. 

Rachel Maddow, Charles Pierce And The Rest Won't Tell You But I Will - The Forbideen Logical Conclusion - Hate Mail

CONSIDER HOW MANY TIMES in the past four years of this crisis in American democracy you have heard the mention of the weaponization of lies.  

I would bet that you, as I have heard people from MSNBC, other cable and broadcast venues talk about how the tsunami of lies spread by Republican-fascists, Trumpists, the fascist entities surrounding Steve Bannon and flowing from the various AT&T and other corporate enabled and encouraged lie machines constantly.  Talking about how the "post-truth" world that they, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tic-Toc etc. has not only endangered American democracy at its roots but has led to the anti-vaxx, anti-mask Covid denial that is literally killing hundreds of thousands of us and which has spread from the United States elsewhere in the world, Canada, Britain, etc. to kill there, too.  And how much of American fascist lies are hooked in with other gangster efforts in Hungary, in Brazil, and most of all in Putin's crime mob dictated Russia.  

And now ask yourself how many times and where you have heard that related to the Supreme Court rulings that have freed the media from consequences for carrying even the most extravagant of lies told by  Trump and his fascists lied about to gain power, who the Republican-fascists lie about and to gull the vulnerable into going along with them against their political opponents who, by and large, do not control the media and never have despite the lie that the American media is a liberal entity.   

That is the logical connection which is never made, not allowed to be mentioned, for all of the alleged and supposed freedom of the press, freedom of speech, that glaring and obvious logical connect between the regime of lies which has brought us from the high-point of American democracy to where we are wondering if the next election ratfucked more effectively by Republican-fascists in 2021 than Nixon and his thug, G. Gordon Liddy ever dreamed they could do in their wildest imaginings will be the final nail in the coffin of American Democracy and with it, possibly Democracy anywhere it had any hope of existing.

OUR TICKET TO FASCISM WAS BOUGHT WITH THE FREEDOM GRANTED TO THE MEDIA TO LIE BY A PSEUDO-LIBERAL COURT IN THE MID-1960S THROUGH THEIR ABSURD READING OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT.   That was further aided with Republican-fascists on the court reading the Second Amendment so as to arm their fascist legions.   In the chronology of the march towards fascism it was the Warren Court that stupidly led us to the second, without their rulings allowing the media to lie with impunity we would likely never have gotten courts that would allow the arming of fascists and the criminally insane using the stupidly written Second Amendment, a provision that was put there to make state slave patrols safe from federal oversight. 

Those lies that they admit are leading us here with come right through the American media, the old fashioned kind and the new social-disease media online.   We take the chance of regulating it to force the lies out of it or we lose democracy and, with that, any pretense of freedom of the press or freedom of speech, especially that which will have the alleged benefits that were supposed to come with the privileges given to the corporate media in the First Amendment of good government of, by and for THE PEOPLE.   Lies can corrupt that at its most basic level by corrupting The People on who it all depends.  Or at least enough of them to destroy it. 

Just A Little Musical Detour

 Direct link to the youtube

THIS SHOWED UP in the sidebar when I was looking at a Youtube, I listened to it and it was the best and most honest critique of the claims of using "just intonation" in music that I've ever seen.   Tuning and temperament was a huge issue in my brief period of thinking I wanted to go into musicology, being interested in the late medieval, early renaissance music at that  time.  While I knew enough math to understand that my ears weren't deceiving me and that the claims made about the use of so-called pure intervals was impossible to apply to the music in discussion, it was the sheer nastiness of the various factions and the neurotic claims of reproducing anything like "the authentic performance practice" for most of that music that drove me to concentrate on music from the 20th century.  I have never regretted that decision.

A lot of nonsense still gets said about "pure intervals" - Lou Harrison's writings on the topic are a real mixed bag, not to mention others who are even more out of line with reality.  Some of the composers who make "pure intervals" and the various micro-tuning intervals you have to deal with when you start down that never-ending road have produced interesting music, I'm certainly not opposed to that at all - though lots of it is pretty boring.  But the imposition of that on music of the past as a means of bullying people is ahistorical.  The point in the video that says that there is no historical evidence that they tried much to impose just intonation on musical performance, there is no vocabulary for it or notation for it in the voluminous literature is probably the best one I've ever read or heard in the discussion.

I'm in the process of collaborating with one of my oldest musical friends on some didactic materials, I was hesitating over a point of which tuning to use - he wanted to just go with equal temper and be done with the question, I was worried about that leading to criticism.   I will call him today and tell him that he was right, the critics be damned.   I think that's one of the things that was most damaging to me in my university years, listening to the critics, damn them and their ridiculous pretenses all.